S. Brent Plate - A History of Religion in 51/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses

Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses

S. B RENT P LATE

B EACON P RESS

Boston

To my father, who taught me to think.

To my mother, who taught me to write.

To my companion, who taught me to feel.

To my children, who taught me to play.

And to my grandfather

Carlyle Metz Baehne (19162013),

who taught me a lot of things.

This is what life is all about: salamanders, fiddle

tunes, you and me and things, the split and burr of

it all, the fizz into particulars.

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone

to Talk

half. I. Being one of the two equal parts into which a thing is or may be divided.

Oxford English Dictionary

Less solace in these songs half-ourselves & half-not.

Colin Cheney, Half-Ourselves & Half-Not

After making eight mostly successful movies, Federico Fellini set to work on 8. Since its release a half century ago, the surrealistic, self-reflexive motion picture has hit the tops of all-time best lists the world over. Fellinis film within a film portrays a middle-aged filmmaker, Guido Anselmi, played by Marcello Mastroianni. Between love and lust, desire and creativity, Guido quests for something, but seems unsure exactly what that might be. His life is incomplete and he knows it. He gestures toward love, often lasciviously, but as the beautiful Claudia suggests, he doesnt know how to love. Guido rhetorically queries her: Could you choose one single thing, and be faithful to it? Could you make it the one thing that gives your life meaning... just because you believe in it? Could you do that? Guidos limited life persists.

Two and a half decades later, Julian Barnes inserted what he called a Parenthesis between chapters 8 and 9 of his novel A History of the World in 10 Chapters. Equally as eccentric as Fellinis film, Barness fictional writings speculate on love, history, and artistic creation, meanwhile self-referentially questioning the authors role in it all. The parenthetical half chapter asks what it means for two people to love each other and the effects that may or may not have on a history of the world. Among other felicitous phrasings, Barnes likens love to a windscreen wiper across the eyeball. Even so, he wonders whether love is a useful mutation that helps the race survive. Or maybe it is a luxury, some value-added option to our lives: unnecessary but persistent. Regardless, we must believe in it, or were lost.

Two different works of art that examine love, desire, creativity, and the meaning of life, and both use 1/2 in their titles. What can this possibly mean? Is the half some extra value, like a bakers dozen? Or does it reflect something taken away, as if it was supposed to be the ninth but part of it was lost, or never finished? The beginnings of an answer were laid out a long time ago.

Almost two and a half millennia before Fellini and Barnes, the philosopher Plato wrote a work known as the Symposium, another meditation on the nature of love. In the midst of the convivial conversations of the story, Aristophanes stands up and presents what is perhaps the first artistic, amorous exploration of the half. The ancient playwright waxes mythological as he tells a comic tale of human origins: The first creatures were different from us, doubled in form from our present appearances; they had spherical bodies, with four hands, four feet, one head with two faces, and two sets of genitals. Because of their multiple hands and feet, they could move quite fast, and as such made a cartwheeled attack on the gods, which sent shock waves through the heavenly realms. Instead of killing the human The result is the human body we each have today, living our lives as incomplete creatures, always looking for our other half. Love, the story suggests, completes us by coupling us, making us whole again with the perfect fit of another creature.

Aristophaness halving is, I suspect, what Fellini and Barnes were after in their approaches to the topic of love. The 1/2 in their titles, and mine, stands as a symbol of our incomplete natures, the need for a human body to be made whole through relations with something outside itself. No man is an island, entire of itself, as John Donnes seventeenth-century text declares. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Except that we get disconnected from our surroundings, from each other, from our gods, from the natural world, becoming floating islands. Our lives are half-lives, and we desire fulfillment, completion, wholeness. Aristophaness mythologizing intimates that a perfect fit exists, somewhere out there, for our half bodies.

But this is not a book about finding a soul mate, one other human body that completes us. Many such books are readily available. This is about another kind of fullness, another kind of bonding for our coupling bodies, another kind of love. This is about a religious love, though not necessarily the love of a god.

This book tells the story of the human half body, such as we are, and some of the objects we connect with in our quest for religiously meaningful, fulfilling lives. Because, lets face it, Aristophanes tells a nice tale, but another body doesnt actually complete us. We humans may experience a few, fleeting moments of all-consuming, all-connecting ecstasy that grow rarer as life goes on, but we dont, cant, live in that state. We still need to eat and explore, to touch and talk, to breathe plant-produced oxygen and drink from one stage of natures water cycle. Moreover, our ability to love can be amazingly vast, well beyond directing our affections toward one other single creature. We love (and love is indeed the word) a very good meal, our children and their imaginary plays, the color orange just so at sunset, the feel of our cats fur as we pet it, a film that makes us laugh, a book that makes us cry. All these things too we love. They link us with a world beyond our own skin. Taken collectively, these experiences make us feel as if we are not one-half but one.

Beginning with our incomplete half body, the following chapters discuss five types of objects that humans have engaged and put to use in highly symbolic, sacred ways: stones, incense, drums, crosses, bread. These objects are ordinarily common, basic, profane. Profane stems from the Latin roots pro and fanus, meaning outside the temple; in other words, the deep meaning of the profane is not inherently negative, just everyday life: houses, trinkets, bakers, and post offices are all outside the temple. Such is the paradox of religious experience: the most ordinary things can become extraordinary. We often forget this, overlooking the commonplace because were trained to respond to mass media spectacles, expecting an overwhelming lightning-bolt transmission from on high. Or we do the opposite and believe that spiritual truths are to be found in some remote setting, far from the quotidian, in a pretense of utter silence and absence, usually a mountaintop, desert, or other spectacular natural setting. Situated in between these two extremes, the spiritual objects discussed here are things that many readers will come across in the course of the next twenty-four hours. Chances are, you will find them where you didnt expect to find them, right under your noses, at your fingertips, on the tips of your tongues.