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| The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall first published in 1936 |
What is the Worship-Dread Paradox?
Imagine you were a duckling raised your whole life without ever being allowed to see a body of water larger than a little drinking cup. Imagine drinking then rolling around in the remaining teaspoons of water. You occasionally look at your webbed feet and are struck by their strangeness. Also, you feel a deep but unknown longing for something beyond your ducky matrix.
There’s a colossal mystery of religion. It’s not a mystery because it’s difficult to understand since most cultures and people in history have assumed it's a thing natural to humanity and self-evident. It’s mysterious in the sense that our modern prejudices have hidden it from us, making us like the caged duck.
The mystery is this: Certainly the Biblical authors felt love towards their God, but their experience of God was accompanied by other, seemingly contradictory emotions—terror and dread.
The Biblical Examples:
Jacob, arising from his night vision of celestial immortals calls the 'house of God' (נורא) ‘dreadful’; Moses ‘hid his face’ in fear before the ineffable desert flame; Ezekiel, at the shore of the Kebar, sees the wheels and cherubim star-sprayed with eyes and describes their height as 'frightful.'
Grab a modern translation of the Psalms and you'll see the translators themselves are often guilty of trying to protect you from the worship-dread paradox: In Psalm 47, the translators tell us God is “awesome” or “wonderful” in his sanctuary. Awesome is an ok translation in its fossilized etymology, but not in its evolved modern connotation (expressed in such specimen phrases as, “That selfie was awesome”). The real meaning of the term in passages like Psalm 47 is ‘terrible’ (ירא), signifying fear.
The Psalmists constantly praise God as ‘terrible’ (יהוה עליון נורא).
The paradox isn't just in those weird, Israelite-y Old Testament passages either. (Ok, so the New Testament is actually no less weird or Jewish, but I'm trying to work the "all things to all people" angle here.) John, witnessing the Lord on his throne writes, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, ‘Fear not.’”(--That's white Evangelical approved, post-Alexander, straight up New Covenant stuff!)
The Bible Slaps Down our Expectations
Why is it that men who were giants in their affection for God did not, as our contemporary music wants them to, dance, shout, or sing “I’m H-A-P-P-Y” in God’s immediate presence? Did the author of Revelation believe the gospel? Then why was he terrified of Jesus? Why was his reaction before the enthroned Christ practically the opposite of what we would have told him it should have been? The secret to unraveling this curiosity, I believe, can be discovered by taking a field trip to a haunted house for the night.
How Ghost Stories Solve the Paradox
I'm not here to discuss a Biblical view of ghosts. If you want that here's the best series you'll ever read on the subject by a Biblical languages expert. (Turns out it's more complicated than your Sunday school teacher made it seem.) I'm interested strictly in the feelings ghost stories give us as a thought experiment.
Imagine your spouse has died. In keeping with the grand, odd thing that is the western mortuary tradition, everyone lowers (let's go with 'her') expensive lacquer casket into the ground and heads back to the church for potato salad. You find yourself returning home, and soon, in your bed, alone. Waking at 2:00 AM, with the smoke of dreams hanging in your mind, you leave the room for a glass of water.
Returning to your bedroom, slowly, you open the door. But there, in the black window you see a flicker of pale contrast. Your eyes adjusting now, it is a hanging form, with hair falling and white-washed eyes spying languidly through the glass at the bed she has joined you in for so many years. Slowly, the misty specter pivots her wan face towards the doorway—towards you.
Now, it cannot be doubted that you loved your wife and still do, as when Odysseus tried pitifully to hug the phantasmal shade of his dead mother. But, despite whatever pleasant feelings of affection this event would spark in you, what you would most heavily feel in this moment is fear (and maybe a moistness in your knickers). Fear, but of a very strange sort.
Imagine you had returned to the room and found a silverback gorilla on your bed waving a loaded automatic assault rifle in the air instead of the ghost. You would experience what we will call natural fear. Natural fear is the most common sort of fear. It is that familiar concatenation of feeling which has as its object physical harm—like hearing a snake’s rattle, the half-second before you realize you are having a car wreck, or turning on the television and seeing Donald Trump's face.
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C. S. Lewis, who I'm shamelessly plundering here, observed that if anything is certain, it is that the fear of the spirit was something distinct from natural fear. “For, no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost will [physically] do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost[!]”—a being from the non-human realm.[1]
What is Creeping-Flesh Fear?
Your “fear” of a ghost is not of the natural sort, but of the creeping-flesh sort. Eliphaz’s description in Job of this dreadful awe is quaintly familiar despite having journeyed to us across thousands of years from an alien culture in a desert tongue:
“In thoughts from the vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling . . . a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up (תסמר שערת בשרי).”
The truly curious thing is that these two distinct emotions of natural and creeping-flesh fear are not elaborations of the other in anyway. That this is certain, your own experience will assure you. Imagine you had stepped into your bedroom and found ten silverback gorillas dancing wildly with loaded assault rifles on your bed. (If you wish, multiply the terror even further by imagining they're all wearing Donald Trump masks.) Would your natural fear have gained or lost a single centimeter towards inspiring the goosebumps and awe-full dread of witnessing the ghost? Rudolf Otto, the creative German thinker and early explorer of religion expressed it this way:
The distinction between such a ‘dread’ and natural fear is not simply one of degree and intensity. The awe or ‘dread’ may indeed be so overwhelmingly great that it seems to penetrate to the very marrow, making the man’s hair bristle and his limbs quake. But it may also steal upon him almost unobserved as the gentlest of agitations, a mere fleeting shadow passing across his mood. It has therefore nothing to do with intensity, and no natural fear passes over into it merely by being intensified.[2]
Though, both may occasionally be excited at the same time in your mind, the two principal objects which excite the two fears repel like oil and water. The first has as its object physical danger, the second is produced only as a reaction to the perceived haunting of someone from a spiritual address.
I'm Actually Going Somewhere with this, really
No, I'm not saying that feeling a ghost is equivalent to feeling God. I'm saying feeling God stands in relation to feeling the ghost something like the feeling of a lake stands in relation to the duck's feeling its little drinking cup.
Encountering a mere ghost-spirit is terrifying simply because it is from the non-human realm, consider then that whatever religion is, it is agreed to involve the encountering of great spirits from that realm.
I’m implying that once you have grasped the ghost you are at the fringes of the temple veil whose dark passage leads into the uncanny emotion haunting and unifying all religions. Its object is the Numinous, that lurking of divinity which invokes a trinity of terror, mystery and fascination.
Encountering a mere ghost-spirit is terrifying simply because it is from the non-human realm, consider then that whatever religion is, it is agreed to involve the encountering of great spirits from that realm.
I’m implying that once you have grasped the ghost you are at the fringes of the temple veil whose dark passage leads into the uncanny emotion haunting and unifying all religions. Its object is the Numinous, that lurking of divinity which invokes a trinity of terror, mystery and fascination.
Examples of the Paradox among the Gods of Ancient Religions
Anyone who is acquainted with the world’s religions will know that the awe inspired by the Numinous extends to those worshiped spirits. The “separateness” or “otherness” of these beings is retained in the iridescence of the original etymology of the Hebrew word we translate as holy, קדוש. They are that category of beings circumscribed by the ancient Hebrew word elohim.[3]
“Do not be afraid!” is often the obligatory introduction to an angel’s appearing before a mortal, and Lewis cites the feeling in its higher expression in Malory's tale of the holy grail--Galahad’s trembling when “[mortal] flesh began to behold the spiritual things”; we encounter it plainly in Virgil’s palace of Latinus, described as, “awful (horrendum) with woods and sanctity (religione) of elder days,” and a Geek fragment tells of the earth, sea, and mountains shaking beneath the “dread eye of their Master” [4].
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| The Asaro Mudmen dress as forest spirits and prowl their boarders at night. By doing this, they convince their neighboring enemies never to invade their land. |
Musical Examples
I know of several examples of this feeling expressed in music. I’ve clipped two here into sound bites. The first is from an album entitled Mystery of the Yeti. The artists who created it were Hindu influenced mystics with strong penchants for hallucinogenic drugs. As misguided as their approach was, we shouldn't be too proud to sympathize with what they were pursuing.
In the album, they tell of a legend that the Yeti is a numinous god accessible through trance then paint a divine encounter with the being through sound. The second example is from the first track in Shai Linne’s album The Attributes of God. After being read one of Moses’s encounters with God, one drifts to imagining the desert and a foreboding holy presence:
In the album, they tell of a legend that the Yeti is a numinous god accessible through trance then paint a divine encounter with the being through sound. The second example is from the first track in Shai Linne’s album The Attributes of God. After being read one of Moses’s encounters with God, one drifts to imagining the desert and a foreboding holy presence:
Conclusion
So, we have a distinct and unique category of feeling that corresponds with the supernatural. This feeling is something different from natural fear and appears in most ancient religions and especially the Bible. One might say that the world's religions are attempts to interface with this emotion in its higher form.
This is just where the fun begins. In part 2 we'll see why the mere existence of this feeling is a powerful philosophical argument that the divine exists. We will respond to the mainstream naturalistic explanation of religion and asks where the heck this emotion has gone within contemporary Evangelicalism(!). If weather permits we may even share an angel story or two and saunter around in some Mayan temples.
[1] TheProblem of Pain: How Human Suffering Raises Almost Intolerable Intellectual Problems (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 17.
[2] The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 16
[3] Contrary to what is often said, the word elohim did not just refer to a god in Biblical literature. There are five beings which are called Elohim in scripture: angels, demons, the disembodied human dead, the 70 sons of God and YHWH, the God of Israel. Dr. Heiser has pointed out that what all these beings share in common is that they belong to the non-human realm. An Elohim then is simply any being which has a spiritual address. http://www.thedivinecouncil.com/What%20is%20an%20Elohim.pdf
[4] Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 18-19.
[4] Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 18-19.