C4CC(11): The beginning of wisdom (1)
I am working in my doctoral research on matters relating to this (the ‘via negativa’ and McGilchrist). In my ever-so-humble opinion it’s the failure to understand this point - basically an institutional incapacity to pray - that lies behind the collapse of the Western church. Hey ho, more on that another time :)
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The first and greatest commandment addressed to the faithful is the prohibition on idolatry:
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6)
“Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 19)
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.” (Matthew 22.37)
If we fail to keep this commandment, we fail in our duty as Christians. It is therefore utterly essential for Christians to have a proper understanding of what it means. The truth is that everyone worships something, everyone has a hierarchy of values – it is impossible to be human and not have a sense of some things being more important that others. This is the sense in which it is true that everyone has a religion – as Bob Dylan sang, “You’ve gotta serve somebody.” What does it mean in practice to worship the living God? What is the character of the living God that Christians worship? Answering those questions is the burden of this Chapter.
Idolatry occurs when we make something more important than it really is. Contemporary theologians employ an expression, “making the penultimate, ultimate”, which comes from a mid twentieth-century theologian called Paul Tillich. Making something which is penultimate, ultimate, making something which is important, but not the most important, into the most important thing – this is what idolatry is. The language of idolatry is a way of describing how we get our priorities wrong.
For the faithful, God is the single most important thing in life. Moreover, if God is at the centre then everything else falls into its proper place. This is not an insight restricted to Christianity, or even restricted to the other monotheisms like Judaism and Islam. The beginning of the Tao Te Ching says, “The tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” If it can be named or described it is not the ultimate. Anything which we can specify in words, anything that we can point to, is not the ultimate. We cannot capture God. God always eludes us. Our brains cannot capture Him.
One abstract rule for this is: “God is never the member of a class.” We can think of a class of objects, a class of things which are green, a class of things which are wonderful, a class of things which exist. God is never the member of a class. So, in strict terms, God does not exist. We have got a very good idea of what it means to exist: we have myriad objects within the universe as examples. However, God is not an object within the universe. God’s existence underlies everything else, but to say strictly, philosophically speaking, that God exists is to go beyond what we can say. This is very important: God is always beyond us.
A different way of putting this is to say: only the holy can see truly, it is only the saints who can see the world clearly. In so far as our hearts are set on God then we see the truth. If we don’t have our hearts set on God and God alone then our vision of the world is more or less distorted because it means that we have our priorities wrong. Again, this is not a new insight, as Jesus put it: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
There are various ways in which an idolatry can form. Monolatry is when you worship one thing, that is, give highest value to it, and that one thing then becomes the most important thing in your world, with everything else shifting around it. You might be an absolutely dedicated football fan and you have to go to every match that your team plays. You might be obsessive about a television serial and insist on watching every episode no matter what else is happening. Once you have grasped what this is you can see it everywhere (the golden calf is a wonderful image for this). For most people, it is not as clear and you have polytheism – many gods. It might be: my family has this much importance, my work has this much importance, my friendships have this much importance, my pleasures in life, this has this much importance and there is nothing beyond them. This is where most people live, navigating between different competing interests, muddling along, but without anything which integrates those interests, puts them all in their proper place and allows them to flourish fully. Another option is chaos. This is the position that Phineas Gage ends up in. They are driven by the momentary impulse; it becomes a matter of biology (rather like the dogs in 'Up' whenever a squirrel is mentioned). Where the value system is severely distorted, it is often described using the language of addiction – an example is a heroin addict, where the wider richness of life gets drained out and all that the junkie can do is think about their next fix. They gear their life around getting the money to get their next high. That is a very good image of what idolatry is. It doesn’t have to be a physical addiction; it can be a mental addiction as well.
An important further truth about idols is that idols give what they promise. If an idol is worshipped, the idol will grant the worshippers’ requests. Heroin does give a tremendous high – it gives what it promises – but it takes away life in exchange. Mammon, the god of money or wealth (an idol which Jesus talks about which is still very prevalent in our society) will provide wealth if it is worshipped devotedly. The price is that you will lose your life in the process – for what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but forfeit his soul?