The Shattering of Certainty: Life and Creativity After Religion
While reading How to be an Artist by the art critic Jerry Saltz, I had my first encounter with the above work of art. After having to disentangle myself from my disgust towards the philosopher Francis Bacon (the one who said we should torture nature+400 years of doing so=our climate catastrophe) to approach the painter Francis Bacon, I have yet to keep this painting out of my sight. As Saltz and many an artist would argue, a profound work of art is not a static object. It is a living presence, a radiance of energy and intent which changes the very molecular fabric of whatever space the work of art happens to be in. Just as much, a profound work of art inhabits the mysterious spaces of our own consciousness.
This is what Saltz says of this painting in How to be an Artist:
The subject matter of Francis Bacon’s 1953 Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X is a pope, a seated male in a transparent sort of box. That’s it. The content, however, is the dark matter within the art that powers it, pushing it out at us, pulling us in. Bacon’s content includes rage against authority; an indictment of religion, claustrophobia, hysteria, the madness of civilization; a protest against British strictures on homosexuality; the need for love; the powers of disgust and beauty; and sheer visual force. It also includes Bacon’s willingness to go too far, to be a show-off with paint, to depict the depths of his despair and ecstasy. (I’m not even a big Bacon fan and I can appreciate these things.) (p.69)
I don’t even know that much about Francis Bacon the painter, but this painting in and of itself already makes Bacon one of my favorite artists. Why? Because at this very point in my life, in my own journey through the cauldron of faith/religion/spirituality, I very much feel the rage against authority and the indictment against religion the painting emanates. Bacon’s painting is a distortion of the portrait of Pope Innocent X by the Spanish artist Diego Velazquez. That very distortion is everything I feel right now towards what we call, with a tremendous amount of amorphousness, that phenomenon known as religion.
Before we go any further, you might be wondering if I’ve become an atheist. No I haven’t, although I would never denigrate anyone who identifies that way. Or, if you know me personally, you might be wondering if I have gone mad? Yet isn’t madness/darkness one of the most fecund sources of awareness and creativity. I would ask you in turn what are you so afraid of?
Have I thrown out the baby with the bathwater? I’m currently debating if that is necessary. But Dr. Fici, didn’t you spend the last ten years engaged in Masters and Doctoral studies in religion/theology? What happened? Is this what happens to every once-faithful person who actually studies what religion is? Perhaps. It’s happened before to many a soul thus tossed into the dark night of the soul when one actually looks into the nuts-and-bolts sausage-making human-foibles from which much of our understanding and experience of religion comes from.
I often say the best way to understand what religion is to toss it on the floor into a million pieces like a broken plate. By this literal act of deconstruction/construction one can begin to see and think clearly about this phenomenon which has brought so much joy and so much pain to so many people. By shattering our understanding of what religion is, by removing our certainty about what religion is, we open ourselves to life, reality, and creativity beyond the confines of religion-in-a-box.
What is religion-in-a-box? It results from the audacity of anyone, but especially those in positions of authority, to put the uncontainable experience of spirituality into a rigid frame. You know the type. The street preacher who demands that Jesus is the only way and truth of life. The robed “yogi” who thinks you are a demon because you are not a properly devoted child of God. The masculine father-figure deathly afraid of the feminine. All violence in the name of religion comes from this uncritical certainty.
For many of us, after many years identifying body, mind, and soul with a certain religious tradition and community, we have become unmoored from this uncertainty. At the risk of speaking generally, this is a frightening experience. We find ourselves groping about in the opaque darkness. Friends, family, and colleagues we once knew, that we may once lived with in the hothouse intensity and intimacy of a living religious community, become pariahs to us and us to them. Our experience of what was once so certain and nurturing now makes us feel as Bacon did in his holy/unholy desecration of the papacy. What was once beautiful is now an image of the most intense monstrousness. What was once to be revered we can barely contain from spitting upon. We flee from the gilded cage of the religious institution. Note how Bacon’s pope seems eternally trapped in his own golden cage.
In recent weeks we have learned of the massive sexual-abuse cover-up in the Southern Baptist Church, rivaling the scope of evil we know has occurred within the Catholic Church. The hashtag #churchtoo is now viral. In the yoga community I am part of, a very necessary reckoning is now under way concerning a teacher who was credibly accused of sexual abuse (which he admitted to) but who remains a leading personality in our community, with thousands of students worldwide, decades after his act of sexual abuse. This is potentially leading to a (necessary?) schism over the lack of, but also the demand for, institutional accountability and integrity after decades of similar sexual abuse cases.
On top of all of this, within the last two years of COVID spacetime, in a time in which a great deal of our own certainty has fallen away, we have watched many members of our own religious communities fall headlong into the worst and most dangerous combinations of paranoia, prejudice, and out-and-out identification with the worst elements of the fascist/white supremacist matrix in order to find any certainty to frame their own ignorance and fear as some kind of Absolute Truth.
There is a serious anti-reality contingent within our religious communities which idolizes their own fear and ignorance in the form of hatred of the body, hatred of the feminine, hatred of those who are queer, hatred of those who explore their own gender identity naturally, hatred of science, hatred of compassion, hatred of justice, and hatred of their own humanity. This anti-reality is the toxicity which oozes up whenever we dare to defend those who are vulnerable within such hierarchies and power dynamics. This toxicity threatens to poison whatever we find dear, true, and good in our own religious/spiritual experiences. Often we are told to focus instead on the positive, progressive people and teachings within our communities. There is a lot of kind truth to this advice, but it often comes across as being way too adjacent to the very spiritual bypassing which has created so many of the issues in the first place.
What do we do after all of this religious plate-smashing on the floor? Some of us become spiritual-but-not-religious (SBNR). Yet even that category/phenomenon of spirituality has its own destructive and dangerous pathways (consider the long and ongoing history of intersections between fascism and the New Age/yoga/occult sphere). Some of us do throw the baby out with the bathwater yet still find ourselves, in the deepest part of our being, yearning for something real, eternal, and holy. I have no easy answers here. I am trying to write my way through this. I know, as I wander through the darkness, that I always encounter fellow-souls grasping for truth and meaning in the same way that I am. Deep down, we instinctually know that we must pass through the darkness to not necessarily find our way back to where we were before, but to a place which is more authentic to who we are and to what reality actually is.
I always take solace from one of my favorite teachings from the bhakti-yoga tradition in which I practice in. The eminent Indian poet and translator A.K Ramanujan, in his work Speaking of Siva, argues that ““love of God…is necessarily anti-structure…unmaking, undoing, the man-made. It is an act of violation against ordinary expected loyalties, a breakdown of the predictable and the secure…The Lord is the Illicit Lover; He will break up the world of Karma and normal relationships.” It’s rather helpful, to say the least, that the Divine is the Illicit Lover. It’s rather helpful to know that love of the Divine means in and of itself the constant shattering of destructive certainty. It’s rather helpful to know that the Divine is out here grasping for truth and meaning in the same way we are.
