Supplanting the supernatural with the ultranatural

David Tacey is Emeritus Professor of Literature at La Trobe University. The point that Tacey makes in Beyond Literal Belief: Religion as Metaphor is correct: insistence on the historical accuracy of biblical texts is a barrier to faith. Belief cannot be equated with faith. Indeed, relying on evidence for belief does not put us in the way of the Spirit. Thus:

Literalism kills spirit because it takes the mythic forms as fact, failing to see that such forms cannot encompass the spirit of God, which is beyond form.

Assent to the articles of faith may be a way of reminding us about the faith but assent, belief, does not come close to being transformed by faith.

Tacey is also correct, in my opinion, in his refusal to countenance the existence of the supernatural. His statement: "The spiritual is ultra-natural, not supernatural." rings true. Thus he concludes that descriptions of biblical miracles are means of conveying the ultra-natural.

Tacey argues that Scripture must be read poetically or metaphorically and he gives good examples of mostly New Testament texts where this is obviously the case. For example, the appearance of Jesus after his death on the road to Emmaus in the gospel of Luke (24:13-35) is obviously a story about His presence in the Church as teacher and in the breaking of the bread in the celebration of the Eucharist. The logic of it is that it is very unlikely to be both an historical account and a conscious metaphor. He emphasises the role of the imagination in understanding such texts.

Once the imagination is functioning, we don't need the miracles to be literally true, because as soon as we perceive their meaning they have performed their function.

Tacey says some sensible thing about idolatry from a psychological point of view. He rightly, in my opinion, sees that one of the most dangerous idolatries for Christians is the making of Jesus into an idol. The result of this can be a crippling of the psyche because the self is smothered, as it is in all idolatry. This is one of the evils of religion.

However, the weaknesses of the book are many and fatal. We find a tirade against literalists, theologians and the Church that are overemphasised. For example we find the following:

The bible was written in a code language that few have cracked, a symbolic register that was systematically misinterpreted.

This is an example of many such sweeping statements that condemn the Church and its theologians. Whether he does so in order to make his case seem more dramatic or he is ignorant of contemporary biblical and theological scholarship I will let the reader decide. There are many sweeping claims that the church has been wrong about the bible and that theologians have supported literalist exegesis. The dividing point for Tacey seems to be between individual thinkers and the councils of the Church:

The early church fathers were not literalists and had a sophisticated understanding of symbol. The theologian Origen (185-254) said scripture was symbol, and its words and stories merely the outward "images of divine things." While the early Church councils moved in a literal direction, intellectuals in the early church were philosophically minded and did not counsel literalism.

This is a completely unjustifiable statement. We might note that the ultimate achievement of the councils of the early church was the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. In doing so it had to ignore various verses in the New Testament that would have suggested a subordinate Christology and a disabled doctrine. A literalist reading of Scripture could not have arrived at the doctrine that is the crowning glory of Christian theology in whose name we worship each and every Sunday.

It is obvious that Tacey has a problem with theologians and doctrine. He states that "The narratives (biblical) were written as vision but misread as doctrine." This is a misreading of how doctrine is formulated by the Church. It is not just read off from narrative but an ongoing process of thought about how God is reflected in Scripture. Without doctrine the Scriptures would be opaque, we would have no consistent framework in which they could be read and no structure to produce competent liturgies for worship.

Tacey constructs a polarity between theologians and their doctrine and poets and thinkers who, in his opinion, are our only reliable guide to the world of the spirit. In the absence of argument this looks like prejudice. According to him doctrine is purely political, used to subordinate the masses and increase the power of the Church. With his prejudice against doctrine, Tacey can offer us little of the Christian tradition. He cannot explain key terms such as 'Spirit" nor explain how the Church is formed by it. He removes so much of the tradition that there is very little left.

There are many barriers to Tacey reaching a workable Christian theology. With his insistence that historical fact is of no avail when it comes to faith he also rejects the power of historical event. This power is not reducible to evidence for belief, as when miracles are used as evidence that Jesus was the Son of God, it is the power that events hold within themselves. It is the fruit of all historical consciousness. For Tacey "the historical personage of Jesus is secondary to his "true" nature as archetype."

In the absence of the power of historical event, Jesus is reduced to an example of living a life of the spirit. Admittedly, the passion narratives are embellished accounts of events using mostly Old Testament tropes. The use of psalm 22 is a prime example. But something important happened in the trial and death of Jesus that marked the world forever. Tacey is right that that event is interpreted dramatically and metaphorically, but we cannot do away with the event itself. If we do, we disengage faith from lived human history, we are liable to fly off into spiritual fantasy.

Which is what happens in the book with the help of Carl Jung. For Jung, the spirit exists in the soul of every individual: it has only to be awakened. This conception harks back to the Socratic/Platonic notion of innate ideas that God has placed all knowledge in the soul and that learning is the process of uncovering, or bringing to consciousness what is already present. In Jungian psychology it is the divine that has to be discovered or awakened. Thus the fullness of life, the growth and development of the psyche is a potential already contained in the mind and accessible through introspection, the example of Jesus and depth psychology.

This runs counter to the contemporary understanding of the mind, courtesy of John Locke, that the mind is a clean slate. The projection of the divine, whatever that is, onto the human mind, looks very much like wishful thinking and is in danger of becoming an idol in itself. Such an idea is gratifying because original sin, a very unpopular but misunderstood idea, is done away with. We are, in the end left on our own because we are complete, we contain divinity. There can be not Other to confront us.

Even Christ is not Other because He is assumed into the self in the form of implanted divinity. What is pivotal is not the historical Christ who was crucified and rose but "the Christ within us." Everything exists in the self. Instead of a breaking with self-obsession, that is central to the gospel, we are invited to dwell only in the self and to find all divinity in the self. This must be an invitation to narcissism.

Tacey is struggling with the age old problems of how the Son and the Spirit relate. By positing Spirit in the soul of everyone, even the creation, he can only connect it to Christ as exemplar:

He (Christ) is not a god to be worshipped. He is a holy man who becomes a symbol of what we must do: balance our human and divine selves, find an equilibrium between them, live the mortal ego and the divine spirit.

In his impatience with the Christian tradition Tacey would revisit the fourth century councils of the Church in which the being and relations between the persons of the Trinity were satisfactorily solved. He would bring back the Gnostics who proclaimed the presence of the divine in the human soul and Arius who believed that Jesus was subordinate to God the Father. While the former would have left us seemingly spiritually complete, the latter would produce an incompetent saviour, the pre-eminence of grace would have been lost and we would be left with a work that we must do, in this case endless introspection directed towards an abstraction of divinity.

In conclusion, this is not a book I would recommend to those who are thinking again about Christianity. While its aim is to address disengagement with the Church, it offers only an incompetent theology that obliterates the very basis of the faith.

The book is strangely out of time. It reminds me of fellow students of theology, thirty years ago, who had become entranced by the ideas of Jung and who failed to put together a workable theology from their studies. Tacey shows no evidence of reading recent theology but relies on people like Northrop Fry, Harvey Cox, Rudolph Butlmann and Paul Tillich, all superannuated now by the mainstream. While I understand the necessity to find a conversation with late modernity this cannot be it because the centre of the faith is missing.