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[Apr. 25th, 2007|04:39 pm]
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If extraordinary things do happen, they seem to happen over the centuries to personalities who can be relied upon to incorporate the events into interpretations that range from merely erroneous to patently absurd, obsessionally distorted, or dependent on so many category mistakes that skeptics are fully justified in suspecting whether the events ever happened at all. The extent to which those to whom they happen appear to be neurologically damaged is certainly grounds for suspicion, even when the individuals in question do their best to bracket (to use the old-fashioned phenomenological term) the conclusions to which they know themselves most likely to jump. (I have written before about why, as Robert Ornstein put it in his popularizations of a generation ago, evolution has made the mind prone to jump to conclusions.)
Since writing this post originally, I have encountered the Chronicle of Higher Education review by David P. Barash of the various new books looking for evoutionary explanations for religion in general, offering increasingly farfetched hypotheses for why so many practices that run counter to evolutionary fitness have survived in the gene pool when they ought not to have: see http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=w4r1q7lrr4rkng6hmkzv96zbmg3rg2db. This is one case in which biologists have not even got to the point reached by nineteenth century philosophy.)
Jeffrey Kripal has managed, as I wrote earlier, to undercut his own methodological questions about borderline phenomena by insistently queering his investigations, and perhaps also to undercut his contributions to queer theory (a scholarly discipline I seldom think about) by mingling them so insistently with queries about the further reaches of the relationship between the body and the world. The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion starts off with a query regarding the sexuality of Jesus that would get Kripal into as much trouble with Christians as his studies of Hindu practice have gotten him into with Hindus, if the Christians in question ever bothered to read the chapter. The chapter could probably be demolished by historians of late antiquity, and I wish Peter Brown could be wheedled into reviewing it. Sexuality being another of those phenomena on the cusp between sociology and psychology (but then, what aspect of human existence isn’t?), Kripal has probably imposed contemporary preoccupations on ancient textual evidence as much as the theologians have in any given century, even though he has studied Greek philology to support his argument.
In any case he has already made it likely that none but the truly determined will get to the chapter in which he suggests that the extraordinary events of religion and folklore ought to be examined with at least the possibility that something extraordinary happened that was interpreted extravagantly, rather than made up whole cloth or based on grossly overdetermined reactions to ordinary events. Unfortunately, those to whom this thought has occurred in past decades have been, as I’ve noted, complete lunatics who have pretty well undermined the credibility of the hypothesis for responsible scholars. This may explain why, as Kripal says, the only piece of writing to which he has been pointed that asserts the value of such an approach is an essay on folklore written in 1937 by Mircea Eliade, who wrote it in Romanian and never returned to such an assertion in his vast postwar oeuvre. And at the time, Eliade was regarded primarily as a polymathic novelist, so the suggestion went nowhere.
But it came round again in different form at California’s famed Esalen Institute, and Kripal has just published (only months after his much shorter reflection on the practice of religious studies as a transgressively gnostic discipline) a fairly massive history of Esalen from its formative days to the present. Here again, we have the problem of phenomena that have attracted their share of fanatics and crackpots; the difference being, insofar as I can see from the few passages I’ve dipped into thus far, that Kripal does a decent job of detecting the few valid premises from which too many thinkers skittered off into la-la land. This is in sharp contrast with The Serpent’s Gift, which also contains such an extraordinary display of shucking and jiving about the fantasy mutants of the X-Men comic books (almost a parody of the punnery that afflicts cultural studies) that once again the exasperated reader is likely to miss the incredibly sober and critically nuanced conclusion. But then, Kripal openly calls his essays “creative misreadings,” meaning to move from scandal and reductionism to at least the prospect of mystery and marvel.
Even so could Michael Murphy move between Sufism and the self-transcendence of the well-aimed golf swing, or otherwise seem to be shucking and jiving in directions that ensured that no one with the least bit of self-respect would take Esalen seriously. (Hot tubs, anyone?)
Perhaps the frequently thematized religious phenomenon of the clown and the transgressive trickster (the topic on which William Doty has written so insightfully) is the only acceptable guise in which such reflections can be expressed.
Unless, of course, they are encoded in multi-layered novels that are themselves both ways of having and not-having, ways of saying that of course this is not true, but what if something like it turned out to be true anyway. (I allude to the old Soviet joke, which is actually an observation of the inexpugnable religiosity of Russian-language clichés: “God be praised, there is no God, but God forbid, what if God should exist anyway?”) |
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| Comments: |
Esalen fascinates me. I will have to investigate his book. | |
joculum
