“According to the teaching of St. Paul, discrimination of the spirits is a sign of true spiritual consciousness. You have to be able to tell one invisible from another. One method the Catholic Church used for refining this discernment is its proliferation of official angels and saints. The variety of figures showed many qualities, a host of different natures and areas of operation. (The more recent rationalized church has been downsizing the invisible realm, submitting its imagination to historical criteria. Every invisible saint had to have a visible forebear with a historical pedigree. So we lost St. Christopher and others who were ‘sheer myths.’)
“Then in the kingdom (or is it a mall?) of the West, consciousness has lifted the transcendent ever higher and farther away from actual life. The bridgeable chasm has become a cosmic void. The gods have withdrawn, said the poets Hölderlin and Rilke; it takes a leap of faith, said Søren Kierkergaard. Not even that will do for God is dead, said Nietzsche. Any bridge must be of superhuman proportions. Well, that kind of bridge our culture has ready to hand; the greatest bridge, some say, ever constructed between visible and invisible: the figure of Jesus Christ.
“Once invisibility has been removed from backing all the things we live among, so that all our accumulated ‘goods’ have become mere ‘stuff,’ deaf and dumb and dead consumables, Christ becomes the only image left in the Kingdom for bringing back to our culture the fundamental invisibility upon which cultures have always rested. Fundamentalism attempts, literally and dogmatically, to recover the invisible foundations of culture. Its strength lies in what it seeks; its menace in how it proceeds.
“Christ as bridge (and isn’t the pope, vicar of Christ, still called the pontiff from pons, bridge), because the Incarnation means the presence of the invisible in the common matter of walking-around human life. A god-man: visible and invisible become one. Centuries of huge and vicious debates have attempted to split the unity by coming down on one side or the other: Jesus is really a divinely inspired but visible man; Christ is really the invisible God borrowing human shape.
“Some glue, some independent link was required to hold these two theological incommensurables together, a third term that was different from the other two and that could join mortal and immortal. This third person, Christian theology named the Holy Ghost. But this figure, too, belongs among the invisibles, which still tilts the balance away from the world. So the debate goes on, as it should, because the relation between these two terms gives rise to metaphysical speculation and religious practices that keep the problematic idea of the invisible from slipping away. Besides, the debate gives rise to this chapter’s focus upon the often strained relation during school years between the invisible acorn and the life of the person with whom it lives.
“The great task of a life-sustaining culture is to keep the invisibles attached, the gods smiling and pleased: to invite them to remain by propitiations and rituals; by singing and dancing, smudging and chanting; by anniversaries and remembrances; by great doctrines such as the Incarnation and the little intuitive gestures—such as touching wood or by fingering beads, a rabbit’s foot, a shark’s tooth; or my putting a mezuzah on the doorpost, dice on the dashboard; or by quietly laying a flower on a polished stone.
“All this has nothing to do with belief and so it also has nothing to do with superstition. It’s merely a matter of not forgetting that the invisibles can go away, leaving you with nothing but human relationships to cover your back. As the old Greeks said of their gods: They ask for little, just that they not be forgotten. Myths keep their daimonic realm invisibly present.”
James Hillman,
The Soul’s Code, 97-127.
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