How Text Became the Truth Itself Rather Than a Path to the Truth
Scriptures and doctrines are not the truth. Access to spiritual truth comes through dedicated spiritual practice. Text and proclamation can only point the way.
The phrase “the finger pointing at the moon” is a Zen Buddhist analogy that means to focus on the moon, not the finger. The phrase is a reminder not to get too attached to words and teachings, and to not confuse them with what they are pointing to. In the context of the sixteenth-century early Reformation era, Christianity decisively shifted its focus from the “moon” of authentic spiritual experience to the “finger” of texts and teachings.
The moveable-type printing press was invented about seventy-five years before Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. The printing press not only helped propagate the ideas of the reformers, but more importantly, it fundamentally altered the relationship between human beings and the written word, and the significance of the written word to spiritual life. It is no accident that for Luther, spiritual salvation comes by grace alone (sola gratia), through faith alone (sola fide), in Christ alone (solus Christus), based on scripture alone (sola scriptura). For reformers, text and speech became the authoritative media through which truth is administered—a notion that has arguably reached a low point in our own era of mass-mediated delusion.
The word—no longer dependent on church hierarchy or infrastructure—superseded the visual and physical representation of religious narratives and the truths they convey. Ritual shifted its center from visual, symbolic, communal, physically participatory actions toward verbal proclamation and individual attention to language. This did elevate vernacular languages through their association with expressions of the transcendent.
In the Lutheran traditions of the northern European Reformation, some visually aesthetic signifiers of spiritual truth would be retained, and sacred music—connected as it is with language—would arguably reach a high point in the work of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685– 1750). In the Calvinist traditions, on the other hand, objects of visual interest or aesthetic beauty would be utterly eradicated, church music would be ruthlessly simplified, and preaching would become de facto the only sacrament. In the context of an emerging Anglican tradition, English Christianity would violently split, and then oscillate between two poles of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ identity, until a synthesizing middle way (via media) would allow beauty and symbolism to finally become integral to the Anglican tradition.
Printing renders ideas precise, fixed, depersonalized, less subject to supervision, and less relational in their transmission. This had a profound impact on theology, on doctrine, and on religion itself. The narratives of Christianity became the truth in and of themselves, disconnected from their significance as metaphors for the obscure depths of subjectively experienced human consciousness. Symbols and the sacred were separated, symbols becoming ‘only’ symbols, memorials divested of their connection with transcendent experience.
Disputes between reformers and Rome, and later among the reformers themselves as the movement splintered, called for the precise formulation of emerging doctrine. Catechisms with stereotyped questions and answers were developed to properly explain the creeds. Instead of moving beyond language, Protestant religion focused squarely on it, forsaking its function as a vehicle that can take us part way to the transcendent, regarding it as the truth itself.
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Missing in this shift to a focus on scriptural texts and precise doctrinal formulations was any apparent awareness that language requires interpretation. See my post Scripture Is One Thing – Your Interpretation of It Is Another.
Scripture became seen as the exact, original, and supposedly unchanging Word of God. Religion became a correct set of ideas, rather than a means of connecting with something greater than scripture, greater than reader or hearer, but accessible within and through the stories that scripture had to offer. In some traditions, such a connection would ultimately be replaced by human emotion or sentimentality, or by rediscovered ecstatic practices. These shallower experiences, however sincere, lack the power of disciplined spiritual practice, introspection, and the resulting self-awareness that can finally address the real troubles of existence, and enduringly alter undesirable patterns of thought and behavior resulting from them.
Unknown to many, the Catholic church had its own internal reformation, known as the Counter-Reformation. The Council of Trent (1545–9, 1551–2, 1562–3) centralized ecclesial power and reinforced the hierarchy, issued a catechism to ensure doctrinal precision and conformity, set higher standards for the religious education of both clergy and laity, reformed public and private liturgies to make them more internal and individualized, and simplified church music—albeit in a way that allowed for results far more enduringly and elegantly beautiful than those obtained by the Calvinists. The Catholic church was drifting toward the same modern concept of ‘belief’ toward which Protestants were positively marching, but it would never so completely identify belief with factual assent to literalized narratives and precisely correct doctrines.
Concerning the modern concept of ‘belief’, see my post
Is Religious Belief About Facts Outside Us, Or Realities Within?
Counter-Reformation also took place within the monastic and mystical traditions. Teresa of Ávila (1515–82) was a noble and a social celebrity in her home province. She felt called to monastic life and became a Carmelite. She was prominent among a group known as the Spanish Mystics, who sought to reform and restructure the church, and especially, to renew it spiritually. She founded an offshoot of the Carmelite order dedicated to poverty and a life of prayer and meditation. This ‘shoeless’ order of Carmelites found its roots in the eremitic tradition of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Teresa’s written works are now classics of Christian mysticism and meditation practice, and they continue to attract the attention of Christians interested in contemplative practices.
Teresa was an elder mentor to John of the Cross (1542–91), a Carmelite friar from a Spanish converso family with a Jewish background. He is considered one of the foremost poets of Spanish literature. His Dark Night of the Soul (La noche oscura del alma) narrates the often-painful experiences required to attain spiritual maturity and union with God through contemplative practices. He was clearly influenced by the writings of the medieval mystics, and possibly by Pseudo-Dionysius.
For Teresa and John, mysticism should be systematic, well-understood, personally productive, and careful of the pitfalls and dangers of the interior life. This modern approach to meditation is reflected in the work of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus. His Spiritual Exercises (Exercitia spiritualia) provide an efficient, systematic, thirty-day retreat designed to spiritually train Jesuits for their work in the world. During the same era of the politically financed explorers, Jesuit missionaries were dispatched all over the world—Frances Xavier to Japan, Robert di Nobili to India, Matteo Ricci to China.
It should be noted that reformers, both Catholic and Protestant, also succumbed to the intolerant form of modernity that seeks to destroy what it supersedes. Catholics had their inquisitions, and Protestants trashed statues, frescoes, and other objects of beauty. Luther railed against the Pope, Turkish people, Jewish people, women, and rebellious peasants.
Protestants may have stressed the freedom to read and interpret scripture for oneself, but there was no tolerance for those who interpreted scripture in opposition to their teachings. Luther believed heretical books should be burned, and Zwingli and Calvin were prepared to execute dissidents. Monarchs found it necessary to distance themselves from squabbling religious factions, further alienating Christianity from the centers of political power. Emerging nation-states opted for uniform Catholic or Protestant identities, and then persecuted religious nonconformists as political traitors.
Protestant Christianity has retained its focus on scriptural text and teaching as the truth in and of itself, to the point that many evangelical sects now treat the Bible with such sacred regard as to make an idol of it. Relying on facile interpretations of ‘infallible’ scripture and formulaic doctrinal assertions avoids the hard work of engaging in spiritual practice and wrestling with the ineffable challenges of true spiritual growth. Christianity has a fighting chance at renewed relevance if it can take its focus off the “finger” and return it to the “moon.”