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Abdication of responsibility and personal power is a chronic problem in human society. Most people are quite willing, even eager, to be told what to think and how to behave, so long as the one or ones dictating the thinking and behavior are deemed persuasively credible and "right." Even in America, which prides itself on personal freedom, people routinely acquiesce to the arbiters of taste dictating the clothing, cars, electronic gadgets and other "choices" everyone should make as an expression of their freedoms! The cultural impetus to orthodoxy erupts repeatedly and in many forms, and the search for conformity as the guarantor of security is both an enduring delusion and a recurring cause of injustice.
Orthodoxy is generally translated as "right thinking"- a slight but significant distortion of its etymology. Ortho, in Greek, means "straight", "correct" or "true". Doxa means "brightness", "radiance", "splendor", or "glory", ( a term referring to illumination, not fame). There is a huge, almost antithetical difference between the implications of right thinking and those of true radiance. It is also an ironic difference, given that the etymology of the word orthodoxy seems to point to an illuminating experience, whereas the predominant usage of it indicates belief about something- a cerebral, intellectual (or at least mental) rather than experiential phenomenon.
The passions fueling orthodoxy are largely fed by a curious admixture of longing and fear. People long to feel safe as a necessary component of a sense of well-being. They fear, consequently, anything that seems to threaten that safety. Some threats are deservedly worth fearing- our fear is a natural warning system that can protect us from danger. It would be stupid and dangerous, if not fatal, to ignore the appropriate fear of shark attack if one had a copiously bleeding wound and was in waters known to be the habitat of those shark species documented as frequently attacking humans. But many fears are unwarranted or disproportionate to the circumstance. This is especially so in the case of a fear of knowledge- a disturbingly common phenomenon often exploited by a leadership seeking to appear non-threatening to the constituency they hope to manipulate. Yet it is a fundamental premise in both politics and religion that knowledge is the source of freedom. A democracy can only function with an informed and literate populace. Enlightenment comes, according to the sages, through self-knowledge. Jesus of Nazareth is quoted in the scriptures of his followers as proclaiming, "You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free." The religiously orthodox are not wrong to insist that the knowledge implicit in right understanding is the key to right relationship with God- but they generally fail to recognize the crucial difference between belief and experience in achieving such knowledge, assuming that belief is synonymous with understanding, even in the absence of corroborating experience.
When my younger son was very little, he had a sponge-like mind that absorbed information with voracious enthusiasm. His intellectual grasp far outstripped his physical capabilities- a source of frequent frustration when his fascination prompted him to create projects which depended on integrating knowledge with experience. He would stand with clenched fists and tears of frustrated rage pouring down his cheeks when he was unable to get his project to match his intellectual construct of what he wanted to manifest. It was a somewhat difficult lesson in patience for him to grasp the difference between knowing how to do something and understanding how it is done. This gap was substantially narrowed as his physical coordination and small motor skills improved with age, but it is a frustration anyone who has attempted to create anything- from baking a cake to painting a masterpiece- can relate. The distinction between knowing how it's done and knowing how to do it speaks to the dilemma of orthodoxy. Even assuming that the orthodox may at times at least be right (or justified) in their beliefs, unless those beliefs are tried and tested in the crucible of direct experience, they cannot be said to be possessed of full understanding or knowledge, nor can the believer make manifest the fruits of its validity. Frustration and anger generally follow.
Human beings have an unfortunate tendency to vilify or even demonize those who threaten them- and where understanding and experience are lacking, there is a much higher probability that people will feel threatened. When understanding and experience are separated or deemed unrelated, the consequences are frequently destructive of the well-being sought. We are confronted with a painful choice between holding onto belief that doesn't fit our reality, thereby denying our experience, or accepting the reality of our experience even if it appears to contradict our beliefs. In this either/or dilemma, too often we overlook the both/and option, since we all have more than one way of knowing. The English language, however, has only one word for knowledge. Some other cultures have a more nuanced nomenclature- distinguishing between what we might term relative vs absolute knowledge, and between the mental gathering and retention of data and the integration of that data into living experience. The partisans of seemingly opposing modes of knowledge- linear and rational vs. intuitive and experiential- have too often been categorized as the orthodox in contrast to the unorthodox, the "counterculture", rebellious and irrational (charges leveled at the ancient gnostics).
The early centuries of the Common Era saw huge controversies between these camps. Those who came to be known as the orthodox dismissively labeled their opponents as gnostics- their theological expletive for "know it all". Princeton biblical scholar Elaine Pagels in her brilliant new book Beyond Belief , has compellingly chronicled the evolution of the competing camps in this theological divide and makes a moving case for how the dominant voice in Christianity may have gotten Jesus' message wrong- or at least understood it incompletely. Though biblical scholarship may seem arcane, esoteric and largely tangential to our current secular society, the issues at the root of this ancient controversy are highly visible in the geopolitical realities of today. The phenomenology of orthodoxy stands in stark contrast to that of more intuitive and less institutionally controllable ways of knowing. However, there is a possibility that we as a species and now a global society may be reaching a point of sufficient maturity to finally grasp that the orthodoxy vs. gnosis divide is an artificial one, and that either/or choices are unlikely to bridge the gap between the truth and our understanding of it. A probing exploration of the first rank spiritual giants of human history- Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Mohammed- shows a remarkable integration between reason and intuition based on direct personal experience of something transcendent. If we continue to operate predominantly on an either/or model of duality, forcing an exclusive choice between modes of thinking or party platforms (whether religious or political), continuing conflict is guaranteed. Amore integrated approach is a preferable alternative.
When the orthodox establishment actually experiences the true radiance the mystics insist is inherently discoverable within us all, and the visionaries and innovators recognize that structure and reason do not preclude direct experience but can actually facilitate it, we might actually begin to find solutions to persistent problems afflicting humankind. Experience alone, to be sure, may be misleading (we can all feel good or bad without apparent reason), and thinking is highly unreliable as a sole criterion for decision making (we can rationalize and justify all manner of stupidity without ever entering the realm of direct experience - witness many public and foreign policy decisions in any nation today). But each can be a set of checks and balances against the other that, taken together, give us a higher assurance of integrated, balanced and healthy functionality. Wholeness is an enduring aspiration. The secular world recasts it in the jargon of holism, the religious in terms of holiness, but both approaches recognize it as a goal. Reason and intuition, orthodoxy and gnosis joining forces in its pursuit is becoming more than a good idea- with our potential for mass destruction, it is a necessity.
Robert H. Stucky is the Executive Director of Faith In Diversity Institute.
Copyright © 2003 by Faith In Diversity Institute
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