Parallel Myths (51 page)

Authors: J.F. Bierlein

Finally, there was the controversial Rudolf Bultmann of Germany (1884-1976), who viewed the New Testament texts as essentially mythical and attempted to separate the mythic from the historic in the accounts of Jesus’ life.
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Positivism and Logical Positivism

A major philosophical assault on the validity of the supernatural was positivism, the philosophy of August Comte (1798-1857) of France. It is in his philosophy that modern materialism, and the interpretations of myth offered by both Freud and Lévi-Strauss, have their antecedent.

He believed that the scientific method could be applied to the study of any phenomenon and certainly to human behavior, making
Comte the founder of sociology and the other social sciences. Anything that could not be observed scientifically, in his view, did not exist.

Not at all a modest man, Comte asserted that his positivism was the third and last of three successive phases in the history of humankind. In the first, or “theological” stage, religion and myth were needed to explain all phenomena. The second, the “metaphysical,” stage was based on philosophical speculations about “ideals” or “absolutes.” In the stage of “positivism,” scientific observation alone would suffice. For Comte, causative thinking was the final form of thought.

Comte believed that religious beliefs based on the supernatural would soon be abandoned. So he founded his own “religion of humanity,” borrowing heavily on the ritual of Roman Catholicism. Comte instituted elaborate rites, complete with robes, incense, and liturgies. This religion was described by his contemporaries as “Catholicism without Christianity.” Comte “demythologized” the calendar by providing months named “Gutenberg” and “Shakespeare.”

Like any good eccentric, Comte had some very entertaining inconsistencies. Although he largely lived off his wife’s income—he was married to a prostitute who shocked him by offering to “entertain” wealthy clients—Comte kept a ledger of every penny, including the change in his pants pockets. He was fond of wearing the robes and vestments of his new “religion.”

His direct philosophical descendants were the twentieth-century Logical Positivists, including Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Logical Positivists believed that any statement that could not be empirically proved should be rejected. Logical Positivism relied on minute examinations of the use of language, and has not proved durable.

Die Wissenschaft des Judentums: The “Science” of Judaism

The demythologization process that profoundly affected Christianity had its parallel in Judaism. For a nineteenth-century German intellectual, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, there was no greater compliment than to be called
wissenschaftlich
, or “scientific.”

Prior to the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and its Jewish parallel, the Haskalah (Hebrew for “enlightenment”), there was but one sect in European Jewry, the Orthodox. There were differences, to be sure, between the Sephardic and Ashkenazic
*
rites, but in all cases, Judaism was a thoroughly orthodox and thoroughly “mythic” worldview, although the “mythological” in Judaism, as a monotheistic, revealed religion, was less advanced than in other world religions, and the nature of biblical and Talmudic Judaism was highly conservative.

Yet, the forces of empiricism were at work among European Jews, especially in Germany. The great Jewish Enlightenment thinker Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786)
†
mirrored the thoughts of many of his contemporaries.

It is true: I recognize no eternal truths, other than those which can not only be comprehended by human reason, but also demonstrated and verified by the human faculties.

The forces of “demythologization” and assimilation produced profound changes in European Judaism, characterized by the Reform movement in Germany. These forces were accelerated by the “emancipation” of the Jews—their guarantee of full civil and political rights—during the Napoleonic period. Soon, many German Jews began to think of Judaism as one of several “German” religions, destined to take its place beside Protestantism and Catholicism in “modern” Germany.

Reform Judaism was the expression of both assimilation and demythologization. German, rather than Hebrew, was to be the language of public worship; all prayers describing the Jews as a “nation” were abandoned. In fact, the first Reform services, held in a “temple”
rather than a synagogue, very closely resembled services held by their Lutheran neighbors. A follower of Moses Mendelssohn named David Friedlaender (1756-1834) was the “father” of Reform Judaism, even going so far as to ask the Lutheran authorities in Berlin to admit him as a Lutheran, provided that he and his followers were not required to accept the divinity of Jesus. They were refused.

In 1810, Israel Jacobson established the first Reform Jewish temple in the German state of Braunschweig—complete with German-language sermons and hymns, as well as organ music—previously unknown in Jewish worship. In 1849 Samuel Holdheim of the Berlin temple went so far as to hold services on Sundays.

Contemporary with these innovations, Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) exhorted Reform Jews to review the Scriptures from a “scientific and historical” point of view, in short, a demythologized approach, which emphasized the ethical teachings of Judaism while rejecting many traditional practices, including dietary laws, circumcision, and the divine origins of the Torah.

In Germany, an effort to demythologize Judaism (as the New Hegelians were doing to Protestant Christianity) focused on Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), who founded a movement called Die Wissenschaft des Judentums, or “The Science of Judaism.” It was his goal to establish a systematic and scientific study of the Jews and their history (conducted in German, of course) that emphasized the communal, rather than the religious, aspects of Judaism.

Reform Judaism was carried to the United States by immigrants, where it flourished beyond the highest hopes of its German founders. The basic statement of a demythologized Reform Judaism can be found in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885:

We hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domains of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism, the Bible reflecting the primitive idea of its own age and at times clothing its conception of divine providence and justice dealing with man in miraculous narratives.
… We hold that all such Mosaic and Rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas altogether foreign to our present mental
and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.

New Hegelian thinking colored much of the intellectual life of German Jews during the nineteenth century, and “form criticism” of the Bible was even more directed at the Old Testament than the New. The term
positivism
was even applied to the study of Judaism by Zechariah Frankel’s (1801-1875) “positive-historical” school of Judaism.

A reaction to the demythologized Judaism resulted in Conservative Judaism, championed by the brilliant Solomon Schechter (1850-1915) of Great Britain, who felt that there need not be a conflict between reason and traditional Judaism, nor did the communal history of the Jews need to be divorced from religious practice. Schechter spoke directly to the “form critics”:

Some years ago when the waves of Higher Criticism of the Old Testament reached the shores of this country, and such questions as the heterogeneous composition of the Pentateuch [the Torah, or “five books of Moses”], the comparatively late date of the Levitical Legislation, and the post-exilic origin of certain prophecies as well as the Psalms began to be freely discussed by the press and even in the pulpit, the invidious remark was often made: What will now become of Judaism when its last stronghold, the Law, is being shaken to its very foundations?
… There is hardly any metaphysical system, old or new, which has not in the course of time been adapted by able dialecticians to the creed which they happened to hold. In our own times we have seen the glorious, though not entirely novel, spectacle of Agnosticism itself becoming the rightful handmaid of Queen Theology. The real danger lies in “nature” (Natural Science) with its stern demand of law and regularity in all phenomena, and in the “simple meaning” (or Philology) with its inconsiderate insistence on truth.

Schecter’s words apply to the forces of positivism and New Hegelianism dominant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they might have been addressed to his Protestant theological colleagues as well as to European culture at large. A
wissenschaftlich
worldview, unlike a mythic worldview, answered the “how,” but not the “why.”

THE LEGITIMACY OF THE SUPERNATURAL

God Is Dead—Nietzsche
Neitzsche Is Dead—God
—1980s T-shirt

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the son of a Lutheran pastor, declared “God is dead” as early as the 1880s. Again, in the 1960s, after the “demythologization” of the Christian religion, Thomas Altizer—a theologian, and not a scientist—made the statement “God is dead,” launching a worldwide debate.

A contemporary German feminist theologian, Dorothee Sölle, looking back on the then-radical statement, considers it one of the great “nonstatements” of history: Those who believed in God were in no way affected by the statement, and those who did not believe in God were also not affected.

By the end of the 1960s, there was a sense that there was no longer any place left for the supernatural in our lives, the product of one hundred and fifty years of Hegelian “historical” thinking and the inheritance of positivism. It was also in the 1960s that widespread interest in Eastern religion, fantasy literature, and new forms of Christianity began to flower.

Myth
now meant “falsehood” in the popular vocabulary. At the same time, the scholars of myth fought hard to demonstrate that myth did not mean falsehood, but was rather a vehicle by which truth was conveyed.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a large-scale interest once again in religion, and particularly in the supernatural. The period after the declaration “God is dead” was characterized by a rise in Christian fundamentalism, interest in Eastern religions, the New Age movement with all its emphasis on the paranormal, the Charismatic renewal in the Christian churches, and a rising interest in the traditional
practice of Judaism. As Paul Johnson wrote in his book
Modern Times
, there were probably fewer atheists in 1980 than in 1880.

In short, the mythic worldview is alive and well and making a comeback. To be human is to have myths. The mythic worldview cannot be eliminated.

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The author pointed out that he had first heard the Greek myths in a parochial school!

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“Charismatic” or “pentacostal” Christians of many denominations stress the experience of baptism of the Holy Spirit, evidenced by supernatural phenomena such as speaking in tongues, healings, and so on.

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The word
cult
is used here in the sense of “ritual.”

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In Christianity, Christ is believed to be God in human form.

†
The German existentialist theologian Rudolf Bultmann is discussed at length later in this chapter.

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Or perhaps the substitution of a new, incomplete myth.

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But remember that Bultmann defined
myth
as “a breakthrough of the sacred into history”.

*
Ashkenazic Jews are the German- and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Germany, Central Europe, and Russia;
Ashkenaz
is Hebrew for “Germany.” Sephardic Jews are the descendants of the Jews of Spain (the Hebrew word is
Sefarad)
, who later settled in the Netherlands, North Africa, Turkey, and Greece after being expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

†
Moses Mendelssohn was the grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who converted to Lutheranism and composed a “Reformation Symphony” based on Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

Notes

Most sources are given in the text. The edition of the Bible quoted in this book is The Jerusalem Bible. The Greek, Roman, Indian, and Norse myths are composites of sources found in the Bibliography (unless otherwise noted).

Chapter One