The God Of Science
In his remarkably original, oddly-moving book, The Gospel According to the Son, Norman Mailer shows what Christ might have been like had he been a man — and not a God. Or rather had he been something less than the sublimely elevated, eventually immaculate figure to which the various dueling misconceptions of the historical Jesus gave rise. Never one to shy from a challenge, Mailer boldly invites the reader to follow him as he dares to go where no one has gone before: to inhabit, in minimally fictitious terms, the mind and heart of the historical Jesus.
So radical is this approach that one hardly knows what to make of it. It therefore helps considerably if you are fortunate enough (as I was) to have previously read Mailer’s subsequent book, On God, An Uncommon Conversation (with Michael Lennon). For in this later book, in hindsight it becomes apparent that Mailer has invented his own theology of God and the Devil, of the provenance of good and evil, that is much closer to reincarnation than to Christianity. What is more, he seems to believe that both the divine, emanating from God, and the Devil, working through man’s agency, can on occasion interact with real events. Thus, he stated in perhaps the last televised interview before his death (which I saw by chance) that he believed the Devil had a literal hand in the creation (meaning the biological conception) of a creature who would come to be called Adolph Hitler: “That is the only plausible explanation.”
So similarly, and with the benefit of hindsight, it seemed that Mailer actually believed that the historical Jesus was both man and (when the need arose) the carrier (or channeler) of the divine. In short, Mailer has it both ways. On the one hand he appears to be presenting a shrewdly secular account of how a simple, religious carpenter came to believe he had a special relationship to God (as the Son) that would become wildly overblown by credulous disciples. In such a context, we hear how five loaves of bread, which Jesus breaks up into 500 tiny pieces of food, would come in later accounts to be literally 500 loaves of bread, magically called forth by divine command.
On the other hand, at various critical junctures, Mailer implies that Jesus does indeed perform actual healing miracles: Lazarus, dead and putrid-smelling for three days is made to literally rise and be once again live and whole. While Jesus himself, three days after his crucifixion, will gloriously and triumphantly rise from his sepulcher to walk the earth for 40 days.
Finally, in a surreal coda, we have Jesus transcending time, seeing his life not only through his own eyes but through the eyes and distortions of the future Gospel writers. Although the effect of such novelistic ambiguity is undeniably spooky, it also seems to be the product of Mailer cannily hedging his bets. For, it is clear — from On God, An Uncommon Conversation — that Mailer believes in, welcomes and even relishes the interventions, when necessary, of his own uniquely conceived God. And is anyone really surprised that this God (like Mailer himself) is a highly interactive, hands-on Being?
In addition to such refreshingly creative theological twists, what is most impressive from a novelistic standpoint is the quiet, compelling majesty of the Jesus figure. Once again Mailer does not shy away from, but will provocatively emphasize Jesus’ combative side especially when appropriate, i.e., violently driving the moneychangers out of the Temple. Such a Jesus is alternately passionate, tormented, unfulfilled, ruminative, in conflict, truculent, a dreamer, ambitious and, of course, creative. By typically embedding each of his most memorable sayings in a layered, surprisingly plausible back story, Mailer succeeds in making Jesus an even more charismatic and magical figure than in the Bible! Although appearing considerably less than a God (Mailer’s obvious intention), this Jesus comes across as somehow more humanly and believably divine. So, while the Gospels can over and over again say that Jesus was both God and man, it is Mailer who shows, if only on a fictional plane, how a real man might actually come to believe this.
Although he explicitly condemns the church that sprang up in the name of Christ — claiming it egregiously misrepresented his views — it is clear that Mailer loves this fictionalized Son of Man. It is a short step from this to gaining an insight into Mailer’s incorrigible self-aggrandizing presentation of himself. Once the reader appreciates just how closely the author identifies with Jesus, the pieces of the novel — that puzzled (and irritated) so many eminent reviewers — fall into place. Mailer has his eye on nothing less than revealing — at least fictionally — the origins of the divine. While he does not consider himself even remotely saint-like — in times past he has gone out of his way to portray himself as “God’s clown” — he tends to view himself on his good days as someone (like Jesus) possessed of a “great soul.” Someone whose eye is always on the big picture and who is imbued with an insatiable, transcendent yearning to be in tune with his special identity.
It is interesting to contrast Mailer’s highly subjective view of the historical Jesus with that of the radically skeptical, brilliant evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. In his wonderful little book, Leap of Faith — which determinedly sets out to demystify and deconstruct all paranormal claims — he has a strikingly original speculation on the origin of Jesus’ obvious sense of divine mission. Jesus, he boldly speculates, from early on was considered a special child — as often happened in those supercharged, magic-believing times — a special child who gradually but deeply came to believe in his own specialness. Based on his own detailed studies of contemporary psychics who truly came to think they possessed magical powers (but always on certain occasions and under highly selective circumstances) Humphrey wonders if Jesus came to be an increasingly confident conjurer of magic tricks who finally became mesmerized by his own powers.
The God of Sociologists
Norman Mailer’s amazingly creative but wildly subjective portrait of the historical Jesus stands at one end of a continuum of religious beliefs. At the other end is Elaine Howard Ecklund’s new book, Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think. As befits a book which at bottom is sociological study — showing how heterogeneous, how ethnically, politically and culturally multi-layered the belief system can be — the book is imbued with a scholar’s mindset and aimed at an academic audience. There are facts and data, and analysis of facts and data galore. There is a huge pool of surveyed subjects — nearly 1,700 scientists — 275 of whom were carefully interviewed. There are in-depth portraits of “ten representative men and women working in the natural and social sciences at top American research universities.” Clearly the book is meant to be a breakthrough systematic study of what scientists actually “think and feel about religion.”
To her credit, Elaine Howard Ecklund is forthright about her agenda. She wishes to introduce complexity to what too often she sees as a polarizing debate between militant atheists and defensively overreacting fundamentalists. She does not downplay the fact that support for data collection came primarily from the John Templeton Foundation, the premier institute in America for fostering the rapprochement between science and religion.
In the service of her ideological bias the author presents a dazzling panoramic view of shifting patterns of belief and practice.
We encounter scientists who sound like believers and believers who sound like scientists. We learn about spiritual atheists, scientists who practice a kind of individual spirituality rooted in science and which has no need for God; boundary pioneers, religious scientists who publicly seek to build bridges between science and religion (e.g., Francis Collins, the unembarrassed born-again Christian who was simultaneously the administrative architect of the historic human genome project), all of whom are sustained in their beliefs and practices by plausibility structures, communities of like-minded others who provide a reassuring social identity.
If I had to classify the author, I would say she is a spiritually inclined social scientist of unknown religious affiliation filtering her world view through the purifying lens of academia. From the point of view of the dynamic unconscious, her book is noteworthy inasmuch as it aspires to a rigorous rationality (that does not exist in the real world). Like most sociologists she replaces the unconscious with behavior. Ideas, especially, are seen as embedded in social practices. The internal is either minimized or ignored. As behavioral pluralists they tend to situate dynamic conflicts externally, environmentally — as a clash of incongruent social behaviors, practices and belief systems.
Social scientists, such as Elaine Howard Ecklund, come across as being coolly a-theoretic: in place of the psyche, the mind, we have black boxes, waiting to be filled with, above all, data. This is the picture of the traditional scientist — regardless of his or her religious preferences — as the unwavering, ever-questioning skeptic. Someone who, howsoever invested in a particular worldview, is always ready — should the tide of empirical evidence go against him or her — to give it up. Who can give it up because, after all, it is so much easier to let go of an abstract belief system than, for example, a deeply rooted human attachment.
But what about emotion? What happens when feeling and subjectivity, passion and love enter the picture, when the scientist, as Freud famously put it — instead of merely flirting — is “married to his ideas”?
Gerald Alper, author of:
God And Therapy
What we believe when no one is watching
(the following is an excerpt from my recent book, “The Elephant In The Room”)
