“As a Platonist, Augustine knew that God was to be found in the mind, and in Book X of the Confessions, he discussed the faculty of what he called Memoria, memory. This was something far more complex than the faculty of recollection and is closer to what psychologists would call the unconscious. For Augustine, memory represented the whole mind, conscious and unconscious alike. Its complexity and diversity filled him with astonishment. It was an ‘awe-inspiring mystery,’ an unfathomable world of images, presences of our past and countless plains, caverns and caves. It was through this teeming inner world that Augustine descended to find his God, who was paradoxically both within and above him. He could only be discovered in the real world of the mind:
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“God, therefore, was not an objective reality but a spiritual presence in the complex depths of the self.”
Karen Armstrong
Trinity: The Christian God
THE HISTORY OF GOD
THE HISTORY OF GOD
In searching for God, I, too, have looked within my mind—my psyche—and with an understanding of self melded into a historical perspective found meaning for the concept of God.
God is the iconic fetish for satisfying our need for belongingness to the cosmos starting with a group—tribe, clan, community. As if we were birds heading south for the winter, we are driven (pulled?) towards bonding with those with whom we identify. Religion—the set of symbols, behaviors, and rituals tied together in a supporting set of beliefs or theology including a concept of God—establishes the means of identifying other trustworthy group members, and ourselves to them. Then as this group—which I believe is the basic unit of humanity because only within such a group can all our needs be met—we can evolve into the future.
Abraham Maslow, the renowned psychologist, taught us—through his now famous concept—that we have a hierarchy of needs that have to be met. We need air, water, food, shelter, sex, and so forth. We also need acceptance within a group—a tribe, a clan, a community—that allows us to attain and maintain the status with which we are emotionally/psychologically comfortable.
It is now known that when we are deprived of a biologically programmed human need, our minds focus on satisfying that need. Thirsty people think about water. Hungry people think about food. Sexually frustrated people think about sex.
Taking a closer look at our sexual frustrations, we also know that when people are taught to not think about the actual sexual act—say they believe it is sin and they will go to Hell if think about it because thinking about triggers lust—then all sorts of strange mental circumventions take over to allow the individual to pursue sex without consciously thinking about “real” sex. Shoe fetishes, underwear fetishes, even breast fetishes spring up in the mental landscape of the sexually frustrated.
When the social landscape became distorted by shifts in populations such as migrations, population growth, wars, famines, weather patterns, and so forth, then the groups with different customs and their accompanying symbols, rituals and behaviors with supporting beliefs, begin to intermingle and the old customs which heretofore served the need of group identity became muddled. Strangers started showing up in otherwise homogeneous communities as slaves or conquerors or traders or runaways or any number of non-integrated roles.
As the interaction of more and more diverse groups grew in intensity and frequency, more and more individuals became estranged from the groups of their emotionally formative childhood years, or never bonded to a group in the first place. Within these estranged individuals the need for belonging to a group was not met. Their minds focused on satisfying that need, as our still do in similar circumstances. Slowly but surely the concept of God took shape as an iconic fetish around which humans could re-establish common symbols, rituals, and behaviors and—when deemed as having God as their source with a supportive theology—religions for establishing belongingness to a group.
With the evolving discovery of new knowledge, religions also had to evolve through new insights to explain and allow us to understand and accept a suitable concept of God in relation to the new knowledge. The iconic fetish has to make sense or it becomes an object of humorous skepticism and derision. And while the sexual fetish can maintain its hold over the individual even when debunked because the act is most often private and secretive, the “belongingness” iconic fetish has to be shared because its purpose is to attract others. (Unless we are dealing with secret societies, which is an issue outside the scope of this treatise.)
The more people this iconic fetish draws together, the more powerful it becomes in forming a religion.
The interesting concept for me is that just as shoes, panties, and breasts work as sexual fetishes, faith in a concept of God along with a correspondent practice of religion works in bringing about the fundamentally necessary sense of belongingness that provides fulfillment as a human being.
My personal journey is formed out of the belief that we can go beyond the iconic fetish of God to discover the real thing.
Next: Finding God, Part 3, Discovering the Real Thing
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