THE JESUS STORY CONTINUED --

The Six Ages of the Christian Church

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 6, 2015

NOTE:

Excerpt from Search for the Real Parents of My Soul

Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.

W. A. Billy Sunday (1862-1935), popular outfielder in Major League Baseball, then an American evangelist.

If the growth of modern science has taught anything in religion and in the modern world, it is that the method of progress is the method of evolution, not the method of revolution.  Let every man reflect well on these things before he assists in stabbing to death or in allowing to starve to death, organized religion in the United States.

Robert Andrews Milikan (1868-1953), American experimental physicist, Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for his measurement of the elementary electronic charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect.

American Catholics rejoice in our separation of Church and State, and I can conceive no combination of circumstances likely to arise which should make a union desirable either in Church or State.

James Gibbons (1834-1921), American Roman Catholic Cardinal from Baltimore.

Man is not yet so transfigured that he has ceased to keep the window of his mind and heart open towards Jerusalem, Galilee, Mecca, Canterbury, or Plymouth.  The abstract proposal that we worship at any place where God lets down the ladder is not yet an adequate substitute for the deep desire to go up to some central sanctuary where the religious artist vindicates a concrete universal in the realm of the spirit.

Willard L. Sperry (1882-1954), Dean of Harvard Divinity School.

As The Christian World Turns

We are in a new century, the twenty-first, but the sage voices that bridged the nineteenth and twentieth century still ring with the nostalgic message – we are not complete within and of ourselves.

That said, as this is being written, the Christian Church, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, appears in disarray if not in chaos and crisis.  This is no new experience for Christians in spite of the unity and continuity of the Christian tradition. 

As the world has grown more crowded, the once enormous space between peoples, cultures and religions has all but disappeared.  Now, in this Information Age, there is less space for people but equally less space for the animal kingdom that once graced the oceans, lakes, tundra, hinterlands, deserts, mountains and valleys in bountiful numbers.  

All life is collapsing in on itself with little room for man to breathe and think, or animals to roam.    

Given this development one might think man would recognize that his material side was out of control and that prudence dictated that he engage his spiritual side for insight and a return to balance, but, alas, that has not happened. 

Instead, man in his crippling hubris attempts to invent himself out of the situation with more technology, more cerebral cognitive philosophy, more abstract frenetic wondering that has instead successfully if not unequivocally separated his mind from his body, the material from the spiritual world.  

Will this dichotomous ligation grow until man no longer has forests that reach to the heavens and stretch across hills and mountain tops, no longer has virgin lakes and rivers alive with species going back thousands of years, no longer has quiet hamlets, towns and cities for man has been lost to collateral damage of constant war.

We need a Jesus at the moment, not a god, not a divine being, not an Apostle Paul project, but a voice and a mind, as Jesus had, which is to remind us of our sacred nature, and our latent capacity to love unconditionally, to love ourselves so that we may in turn love each other. 

We don’t find Jesus in Christianity as he has been locked out with our collective obsession with the seven deadly sins.  What we have instead are billionaires, millionaires, entrepreneurs and trendsetters, celebrities and entertainers, spin doctors and communicators, all titillating and scintillating the material side of our nature in our frenetic dance to oblivion. 

It seems appropriate, given these circumstances, to review the Six Ages of the Christian Church in the context of this odyssey.  

Each of these successive ages in Christian history possess distinctive characteristics and facets of what we have come to call the Christian life and culture.  I will address these ages only briefly giving a little more attention to the first age, but all give palpable clues to what we are and from whence we have come, and why we have survived. 

Each of these ages lasted approximately four centuries.  Each begin and ended in crisis, and each, except the last one, passed through three distinct phrases of growth and decay.

First, there is a period of intense spiritual activity when the church is faced with a new historical situation and begins a new apostolate.  There follows a period of achievement when the church seems to have conquered the world and is able to create a new Christian culture of life, art and thought.  Then there is a period of retreat and decline as the church is attacked by new enemies from within and from without, and achievements of the second phase are first compromised, then depreciated and finally lost.

These successive movements of achievement and retreat suggest that the history of Christianity is subject to a social psychological law which might go something like this:

Inherent in Christianity is a limiting mechanism curtailing complete spiritual expression which prevents the individual from fulfilling his self-actualizing needs and the church from completing its universal mission.

Before calling this Fisher’s Law, I might confess in my parochial education I was told again and again that the church on earth “is not of this world” and, therefore, likely to be subjected to continual attack and constant warfare challenging its survival; that it cannot rely on temporal or territorial success.  

As one nun, a Sister of St. Francis once told me, “The enemies of the church have saved the church time and time again.  Why, if it had not been for the likes of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, it is difficult to imagine where we would be today!”

That pattern is found most clearly in the first stage of the church.  From the moment of its existence, the church became involved in a life-and-death struggle between the persecution of the Roman Empire, and finding a separate identity from its Judaic Hellenistic ancestral roots.

After three centuries of conflict, the church was victorious and the Roman Empire became Christian with the conversion of Emperor Constantine.  Almost immediately, however, the church had to face a new enemy in the form of a Christian heresy known as “Arianism.”  Monk Arius (256 – 336 A.D.) was an ascetic Christian presbyter of Libyan birth, possibly of Berber extraction, and priest in Alexandria, Egypt, of the church of the Baucalis. 

Arius and the Deity of Christ

Arius was a tall, handsome, earnestly religious cleric, and eloquent in his arguments. He gave the impression also of being arrogant.  He lived at a time when the Eastern Church was divided because of the Christological dispute which he was instrumental in starting. He taught that Christ is not divine, but created.

Arius was strongly opposed by his bishop Alexander, who was bishop of Alexandria (Egypt) from 313 AD. Alexander insisted that the Son was fully and truly God in as absolute a sense as the Father was. The problem for Alexander was to show that this (orthodox) truth did not lead to a belief in two Gods, as Arius maintained that it did.

Alexander assembled a council of Egyptian bishops in 320 A.D., which deposed Arius for heresy. Arius, however, was not ready to give up without a fight, and went to Palestine, canvassing support from other Eastern bishops.  He wrote letters to Lucian’s ex-students who were now presbyters or bishops, addressing them as “Dear fellow-pupils of Lucian.” Lucian’s views of Christ seem to have been similar to that of Arius.

All came to a head when Emperor Constantine I, to safeguard the unity of the empire and the church, convened the First Council of Nicaea, which declared the Son to be equal with the Father and issued the Nicene Creed (which we know today as the "Apostles Creed"), saying that Christ is “God from God, true God from true God, only begotten Son (Jesus Christ) not created, of the same essence as the Father....” 

This Nicene Creed is fundamental to Catholicism to this day, and is known with the opening lines: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord ……” (Durant 1944)

Those many years ago all but two of Arius’s supporters, Secundus of Ptolemais and Theonas of Marmarica, gave in and signed the Nicaea Creed. Arius refused. These three were sent into exile by Emperor Constantine. They were anathema to the church and condemned.

To make emphatic the decisions of the Council, Constantine introduced the death penalty for disobedience, and ordered the burning of all books composed by Arius and deposed Eusebius of Nicomedia and another bishop who had been active in their support of Arius.

The dispute, though, continued throughout the fourth and fifth century. The heresy named after Arius was based on his teachings that the Father alone is God. The Logos or Son was a created being and there was a time when the Son had not existed.

According to Arius, the Son was the first and greatest of all that God had created; He was closer to God than all others, and the rest of creation related to God through the Son (for instance, God had created everything else through Christ). 

By developing this arch-heresy, Arius thought he was defending the fundamental truth that there is only one God - monotheism. A belief in the full deity of Christ, he supposed, would mean the Father and Son were two separate Gods, which contradicted the many statements of the Bible about God’s oneness.  

His reasoning: if God the Father is Absolute, unbegotten, and eternal unity, then “the only begotten Son (Jesus Christ) is then subordinate and inferior as “there is a time when the Son was not” (Harvey 1964).

Arius was also unhappy with Origen’s idea that there could be ‘degrees’ or ‘grades’ of divinity, with the Son being slightly less divine than the Father (this became known after the Nicene Council as semi-Arianism).

Arius argued that since the Father is clearly God, it follows that the Son could not be God - so He must be a created being.  Seventeen centuries later, Arianism is having a rebirth.

First Age of the Church Not Following a Precedence

The church was creating something absolutely new.  Hence, its initial phase, the Apostolic Age, stands apart in church history as the archetype (ideal type) of spiritual creativity. 

In that moment, the creative activity of the church was inseparable from the actual creation of the church itself.  So, Pentecost was at once the birthday of the church and the beginning of the church’s apostolate.  

Moreover, the new born church was faced almost at once with a second change of more revolutionary significance than any it would subsequently face, the required departure from the apostolate of a small provincial Jewish state to a much larger Gentile dominated environment with massive conversions across cosmopolitan urban centers in the Mediterranean basin from Antioch, where it all started, to Rome itself, where it would take root. 

We have an account of this change in the “Acts of the Apostles” in the New Testament.  This gives us an invaluable insight into the beginnings of the church from a Gentile perspective.  Unfortunately, we possess no such comparable account of the change from the Judaic-Christian point of view.

The main achievement of the first age of the church was the successful penetration of the dominant urban Roman-Hellenistic culture.  Although the church remained outside civic influence and authority for several generations, and existed with few if any legal or political rights, being intermittently subjected to persecution and discriminating practices including unlawful incarceration, it became the greatest creative force in the Roman world in the third to fifth century while Rome itself was unraveling. 

The church created a new Christian art and a parallel society to that of Rome’s, a culture that would survive and flourish in monasteries across Europe after the collapse of Rome and the nearly thousand years of what has come to be known as "The Dark Middle Ages.”

The Dark Middle Ages

This Medieval period lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery.

The Dark Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: Antiquity, Medieval period, and Modern period. The Medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, the High, and the Late Middle Ages.

Depopulation, de-urbanization, invasion, and movement of peoples, which had begun in Late Antiquity, continued in the Early Middle Ages. The barbarian invaders, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire.

In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East, once part of the Eastern Roman Empire came under the rule of the Caliphate, an Islamic empire, after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with Antiquity was not complete. The still expansive Byzantine Empire survived in the east and remained a major power.

The Empire's Law Code, the Code of Justinian, was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became widely admired later in the Middle Ages. 

In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions. Monasteries were founded as campaigns continued to Christianize pagan Europe. The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established an empire covering much of Western Europe; the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th and early 9th century, but it later succumbed to the pressures of internal civil wars combined with external invasions.  These were led by the Vikings from the north, Magyars from the east, and Saracens from the south.

During the High Middle Ages, which began after A.D. 1000, the population of Europe increased greatly as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and the Medieval Warm Period climate change allowed crop yields to increase.

Manorialism, or the organization of peasants into villages that owed rent and labor services to the nobles, and feudalism, the political structure whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords in return for the right to rent from lands and manors, were two of the ways society was organized in the High Middle Ages.

The Crusades, first launched in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Middle Eastern Holy Land from the Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralized nation states, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant. 

Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasized joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities. The theology of Thomas Aquinas, the paintings of Giotto, the poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the travels of Marco Polo, and the architecture of Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres are among the outstanding achievements of this period.

The Late Middle Ages was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine, plague, and war, which much diminished the population of Western Europe; between 1347 and 1350, the Black Death killed about a third of Europeans. Controversy, heresy, and schism within the Church paralleled the interstate conflict, civil strife, and peasant revolts that occurred in the kingdoms. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern period.

Apart from the religious significance of the church’s survival in that hostile thousand year period, it is worthy to note from a sociological perspective that the primitive church was not merely a sectarian cult-sect-organization but very much a real society.  From the church’s beginning, largely due to the genius of Apostle Paul, the church possessed a strong sense of social cohesion within its ranks and a highly developed hierarchical order anchored to a vibrant priesthood.

Clement and Origen, Tertullian and Cyprian

The culture of the first age of the church reached its full maturity in the first half of the third century with Clement and Origen in the East and Tertullian and Cyprian in the West.

Titus Flavius Clemens (c. 150 – 215 A.D.), known as Clement of Alexandria to distinguish him from the earlier Clement of Rome, was a Christian theologian who taught at the Catechetical School of Alexandria. 

A convert to Christianity, Clement was an educated man who was familiar with classical Greek philosophy and literature. As his three major works demonstrate, Clement was influenced by Hellenistic philosophy to a greater extent than any other Christian thinker of his time, and in particular by Plato and the Stoics.

His secret works, which exist only in fragments, suggest that he was also familiar with pre-Christian Jewish esotericism and Gnosticism.

In one of his works he argued that Greek philosophy had its origin among non-Greeks, claiming that both Plato and Pythagoras were taught by Egyptian scholars.  Among his pupils were Origen and Alexander of Jerusalem.

Clement is regarded as a Church Father, like Origen. He is venerated as a saint in Oriental Orthodoxy, Eastern Catholicism and Anglicanism. He was previously revered in the Roman Catholic Church, but his name was removed from the Roman Martyrology in 1586 by Pope Sixtus V on the advice of Baronius.

Quintus Tertullianus, Anglicised as Tertullian (c. 160 – 225 A.D.), was a prolific early Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa.  He is the first Christian author to produce an extensive corpus of Latin Christian literature. He also was a notable early Christian apologist and a polemicist against heresy. Tertullian has been called "The Father of Latin Christianity" and "the founder of Western theology."

Though conservative, he did originate and advance new theology to the early Church. He is perhaps most famous for being the oldest extant Latin writer to use the term Trinity (Latin: Trinitas), giving the oldest extant formulation of the Trinitarian terminology later adopted at the First Council of Nicaea.

Other Latin formulations that first appear in his work are "three persons, one substance," which would become known as the Blessed Trinity, or Three Gods in One Person, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost (Holy Spirit).  He wrote his trinitarian formula after becoming a Montanist.  

Montanism, also known as the Cataphrygian Heresy and the New Prophecy, was a heretical movement founded by the prophet Montanus that arose in the Christian Church in Phrygia, Asia Minor, in the 2nd century.  Unlike many Church fathers, however, Tertullian was never canonized by the Catholic Church, as several of his later teachings directly contradicted the teachings of the Church.

Cyprian (c. 200 – 258 A.D.) was bishop of Carthage and an important early Christian writer, many of whose Latin works are extant. He was born around the beginning of the 3rd century in North Africa, perhaps at Carthage, where he received a classical education. After converting to Christianity, he became a bishop soon after in 249. He was a controversial figure during his lifetime with strong pastoral skills, but held firm to his views during the Novatianist heresy. 

Novatianists were early Christians followers of the Antipope, Novatian.  They held a strict view of baptized Christians who denied their faith or performed ritual sacrifices to pagan gods under the duress of possible persecution by Emperor Decius in AD 250.

Novatian was a Roman priest who in 251 A.D. opposed the election of Pope Cornelius, following the assassination of Pope Fabian.  This was a period of sporadic persecution of Christians, who could avoid such fate by tacitly paying homage to the Roman gods. Novatian found this behavior despicable, but Pope Cornelius even more so for being lax in accepting these lapsed Christians back into the fold.

He allowed himself be made a rival pope, one of the first antipopes, holding that lapsed Christians, who had not maintained a confession of faith under persecution, could never again receive Holy Communion in the church.  He also claimed second marriages to be unlawful.

He and his followers were excommunicated by a synod held in Rome that same year. Novatian suffered martyrdom under the Emperor Valerian I (253–60) at Carthage, which vindicated him and restored his reputation, proving his sanctity in the eyes of the Church. His skillful Latin rhetoric led to his being considered the preeminent Latin writer of Western Christianity until Jerome and Augustine.

Given these high charged personalities and the violent clashes of ideas, surprisingly, the third phase of cultural retreat and disintegration that would mark the later years of every other age of the church henceforth, did not dissuade the momentum of the First Age of the Church.

Events were overshadowed by the vast catastrophe of the last great persecution, which threatened to destroy the existence of the church, but, paradoxically, ended in the church’s greatest achievement.  This is how historian Will Durant records the period:

The Diocletian (Roman Emperor) was the greatest test and triumph of the church.  It weakened Christianity for a time through the natural defection of adherents who had joined it, or grown up, during a half century of unmolested prosperity.  

But soon the defaulters were doing penance and pleading for readmission to the fold.  Accounts of the loyalty of martyrs who had died, or of “confessors” who had suffered for the faith were circulated from community to community; and these Acta Martyrum, intense with exaggeration and fascinating with legend, played a historic role in awakening or confirming Christian belief.  “The blood of martyrs,” said Tertullian, “is seed.”  

There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while the enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known.  Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won (Durant 1944).

The Second Age of the Church

The Second Age of the Church begins with the most spectacular of all the external victories that Christendom has known, the conversion of Emperor Constantine to the Christian faith with Rome the new Christian capital of the Christian emerging empire.

This marked the beginning of Christendom in the sense of a political society or group of societies which had found their principle of unity in the public profession of the Christian faith. 

There is also the Byzantine culture in the East, which was now in the process of translating the Hellenistic culture of the Roman Empire into Christian terms.  Both Christianity East and West were to endure.  Emperor Constantine formed an alliance of the Church and State in the West and Emperor Theodosius did the same in the East.

The next three centuries, between the peace of the church and the Moslem conquest of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, have an internal unity and coherence.  This has been known as the “Age of the Fathers,” as both the Eastern and Western church looked back on this period as the classical age of Christian thought and the fountainhead of theological wisdom (Hoare 1954).

It should be pointed out that the Fathers were not systemic theologians in the sense of Thomas Aquinas, but were successful in forcing the mind of the church to norms of theological thought which were to be followed. 

This resulted in massive creative achievement with the rise and development of Christian monasticism which would have immense influence on the Christian culture.  Monasticism is a religious way of life in which one renounces worldly pursuits to devote oneself fully to spiritual work.

Monastic life plays an important role in many Christian churches, especially in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Similar forms of religious life also exist in other faiths, most notably in Buddhism, but also in Hinduism and Jainism, although the expressions differ considerably.

Males pursuing a monastic life are generally called monks while female monastics are called nuns. Many monks and nuns live in monasteries to stay away from the secular world. Yet, monastics differ between and within Christian traditions. As a general rule, in Roman Catholicism, monks and nuns are called brother or sister, while in Orthodox Christianity, they are called father or mother.

From a social psychological perspective, though monasticism spread with extraordinary swiftness across Europe and Eurasia, it retained the imprint of its earlier origins in that the intimacy of small groups clustered in isolation outside the mainstream of society were tantamount to sealing off a belief system with the Christian imprimatur. 

In the Dark Middle Ages, monasteries and convents were citadels where nuns and brothers industriously preserved Western culture and knowledge while outside in an ocean of despair Western civilization took a thousand year hiatus.  

This period was also marked by the flowering of Christian art and architecture, and liturgical poetry.  During the Age of Emperor Justinian every aspect of social and artistic life was subject to Christian influence.  Yet, already the spiritual vitality of the age was beginning to flag.  It was evident that the Eastern and Western churches were not on the same course.

During the last phase of the period, there developed an open schism between Constantinople (now Istanbul) and Rome.  Finally, the “Age of the Fathers” ended in the loss of the Christian East and the establishment of the new world power of Islam…….

THE JESUS STORY CONTINUED

HIDDEN MIND REVEALED

Continuing the Jesus Story

Search for the Real Parents of My Soul

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 30, 2015

This was first written in my thirties, fresh back from a disturbing and revealing experience in South Africa at the time of apartheid in that country.  This now finds me in my eighties.

South Africa was disturbing, not only because of the draconian practice of apartheid or separation of the races by the Afrikaner government, but this practice compounded with the slim white minority (20 percent) totally controlling the lives and livelihood of the black and brown majority (80 percent).

Imagine a rather idealistic young man with his young family who had risen out of modest circumstances being treated like colonial royalty.  Then add to this seeing the hidden side of his own white society and culture, as well as being introduced to the hidden side of his own mind.  It proved shattering as he thought himself strong, and found himself fragile, and this sense has never left him.

He came home to the United States a broken man, resigned his promising career, suspending himself and his family in an ambivalent economic limbo, while he spent his days reading books, playing tennis, freeze framed in this modus operandi for two years, then once nearly broke, going back to school for six years, changing disciplines from the hard to the soft sciences to earn a Ph.D.

The straitjacket world of the corporation and all its institutional antennae would never again have the same hold on him that they had had previously.  That included his Roman Catholic faith.

He was no longer affluent, but poor; no longer a person of distinction and achievement, but one of the rank and file.  He was, however, free, freer than he had ever been, free to make choices, free to fail, pick himself up and try again, free not to care or too care too much, free to return to his modest roots and make connection with the person he had left behind.

He discovered in his eclectic reading, Krisnamurti, and his theosophy, a man who seemed to speak to him in his dilemma:

The hidden mind is far more potent than the superficial mind, however well-educated and capable of adjustment; and it is not something very mysterious.  The hidden or unconscious mind is the repository of racial memories.  Religion, superstition, symbols, peculiar traditions of a particular race, the influence of literature both sacred and profane, of aspirations, frustrations, mannerisms, and varieties of food, all these are rooted in the unconscious  (Krishnamurti 1963).

From my earliest memory, I have been schooled to think of God in general and my Roman Catholicism in particular in painfully subjective and absolute terms.  Through education, and experience, this proved a myopic view of my situation and a condition that discouraged me from exploring my hidden side. 

It was a strange feeling to discover that I had tunnel vision as if I was looking through the wrong end of my telescope.  From this aspect, reading widely if not always wisely of the major and minor religions of man, from the animism of the tribes of South Africa to the esoteric mind games of the parapsychologists, I felt my Roman Catholicism superior to these more primitive preoccupations. 

Moreover, were I not a member of the only true church established by Jesus Christ?  This I had heard from birth on, never questioned, but internalized with full confidence that it was true.

It found me an engaged student and participant in all things Catholic: from religious attendance at mass every Sunday and Holy Day, and weekly Confession on Saturdays and Holy Communion on Sundays from elementary, high school and through college. 

Then as a husband, father and tither as a young adult, I followed the Ecumenical Second Vatican Council (1962 and 1965) while Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI reigned in Rome.

Before that, I was an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Catholic Elementary, winning the Christian Scholarship and the Latin Scholarship medals in eighth grade for excellence in those disciplines, in a word, I was a receptive Catholic sponge.

By a matter of serendipity, I would have the occasion to visit with Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen at the Shrine of Fatima in Lisbon, Portugal, and to be part of a US military audience with Pope Pius XII and Pope Paul VI. 

Through my military and executive careers, I would have an opportunity to visit many of the great Cathedrals in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and South Africa, many described with eloquence by in The Mind and Art of Henry Adams (1957) and Henry Adam’s Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1905).

From 1956 on, I have had the privilege to observe Christian edifices from splendid opulence to ravishing neglect across four continents, writing something of a polemic of these observations in a 1970 book titled, The Silent Sentinel Speaks Out, which happily a Catholic publisher Paulist Press rejected.  It was written when I returned from South Africa to the United States in 1969.

During the 1990s, extensive research was conducted with a dozen visits to my hometown of Clinton, Iowa with the purpose of writing a book about what it was like to grow up as a preteenager during the Second World War (1941-1945).  That book was published as In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003).

During that research, five Catholic churches and schools were razed as the Davenport Dioceses had been forced to downsize radically in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal of Catholic priests across America, which costs the Catholic Church hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in reparations to the victims. 

St. Patrick’s church, rectory and school were demolished with the intention of building a senior adult center on the real estate.  That was more than a decade ago.  The naked land stares at passersby with these beautiful edifices now only in old timers’ memory.

With it being 2015, and me in my eighties, the sense of the Roman Catholic Church has never left me, although I no longer attend services, no longer make visits as I once did routinely, no longer make the “Sign of the Cross” when I pass a Catholic Church, and no longer see organized religion as important in my life, or me important in the church’s.  Like a father’s voice that never leaves your head, the church has never left mine.

As society has become increasingly secular, and the church with it, I have found myself becoming more attentive to my hidden side where my spirituality resides.

In renewing this Search for the Real Parents of My Soul, the church has faded into the secular shadows but strangely, the Jesus Story has not as it has come to fill the spiritual void. 

Dutifully, I have surveyed many of the tens of thousands of views on the Jesus Story, incorporating samples here, rereading academics in psychology, psychiatry and sociology who have taken positions on Christianity and on Jesus in particular, all to gain a more meaningful and authentic perspective on the Jesus Story for me. 

With sociologist and economist Max Weber as my guide, I have conducted this journey through the social psychology of religion only to discover it is actually the religion of social psychology.  To wit:

The sociological study of religion is relatively recent.  Auguste Comte (1798- 1857), credited with being the father of sociology, was one of the first to direct attention to what may be called the sociological problems of religion.

Some scholars in this field did, however, allude to religious beliefs as myths, and hence wrote as if the truth or falsity of religious statements were of sociological concern.  This was the case with Richard R. Tawney’s book, “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.”  He saw the Protestant Church, in particular, as having uncritically and unfortunately advance the cause of capitalism.  The conclusions reached in his study do make value judgments about religion.

The question, however, is whether he wrote as a sociologist or a moralist.  A similar question may be raised with regard to Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  There seems to be little doubt that Weber was unsympathetic toward many of the allegiances which Protestants had demonstrated.  Are such expressions of antipathy sociological conclusions, or philosophical conclusions, or are they simply part of Weber’s autobiography? (Wells 1962)

Besides Wells, Elton (1963), Samuelsson (1961), C. H. and K. George (1961), W. S. Hudson (1961) and R. W. Green (1959) have wondered in print about this problem.  Now, we have Pope Francis I who sounds much like them only as something of a scold from the perspective of institutional Catholicism as a social psychologist if not a social psychiatrist and moral philosopher.

His Supreme Eminence became pope in March 2013 when Pope Benedict XVI resigned unable to cope with a church that didn’t behave as he would like, not to mention the scandals and dysfunction at the heart of the church.

While the popular Pope John Paul II resembled the arrogance and charisma of St. Paul in his ministry, Pope Francis I reminds one of servant leadership more in the unscripted style,  spontaneity and humility of Jesus. 

It would appear that I’ve been looking for someone like Jesus to emerge out of the firmament.  Permit me to explain.  In my novel, “A Green Island in a Black Sea,” Dirk Devlin, the young conflicting American executive in South Africa reflects:

Dostoyevsky had a fever for the Special One, not as the Anointed Christ but as the vine to which he felt tethered.  The “God” thing was a problem for him.  Why did the Special One have to be God, when clearly Jesus was quite a man?

He doubted if he would see faith and science on a collision course but rather believed they were parallel universes.  Devlin’s faith was the heart of his imagination, science the mind of his reason.  Why should these two worlds collide?  Yet they did for the Special One whose faith was His science.  Jesus told it as He saw it and saw it as He told it, and for that He was crucified? 

The Special One had contempt for hierarchies, for pomp and circumstance, for grand costumes and exalted pretense.  He wore his badge of lower class like knighthood.  Devlin wondered why this had not survived in his church.

The Special One was a rebel, an outsider, who despised the herd mentality.  He formed a community of dregs and sinners.  What would the Special One think of the church in his name? 

When Devlin was a small boy, he went to St. Boniface Church and School, there Father Sunbrueller could not raise his rhetoric above sin or the fire and brimstone of hell.  Never did Devlin hear a single word in love about the Special One.  Jesus rarely talked about sin or hell.  Devlin wondered if the Special One would accept the seven deadly sins, or see sin as he did in terms of waste and deceit. 

“Dear Jesus,” he whispered as he thought of his life going forward with a potpourri of marginal but pressing demands, “I am younger than you were when you died.  My cross is my refusal to be predictable.  My wonder is whether my life is about over or ready to begin.” 

He waited in silence for an answer.  When none came, he got up from the pew and walked into the late morning sunlight to take on the world.

Pope Francis I reminds me now, in my eighties, of the Special One, the Good Shepherd, when Devlin, my alter ego in the novel, was but thirty-years-old.  But is Pope Francis too late to save a dying religion as well as a dying church?

His Holiness doesn’t talk in hyperbole about the world as did Pope Benedict who blamed the increased marginalization of Christianity in Western society on a collective apostasy rooted in the materialism of secular modern society. 

Pope Francis, like Jesus, was local and specific with the focus on the poor, the disadvantaged, the forgotten and the unloved. 

He refuses to blame the church’s spiritual ailment on secularism for that had no purchase with him, but on institutional Catholicism, that is, the church itself sounding much like a social scientist. 

His Christmas message in December 2014 was replete with catchy phrases that were like punches to the solar plexus as were those of Jesus in Jerusalem to the Chief Priests and Elders in the Temple who had varied from their appointed tasks.

Not commonly understood, the conclave of Roman Catholic Cardinals in the Curia dictate the church’s business and create its ubiquitous but shadowy profile.  It is from here that church’s money laundering and fraud have been traced.

Popes come and go but the Curia is immortal.  That is especially disturbing with this pope clearly the Good Shepherd, a servant to all men, but alas, living with one lung. 

That notwithstanding, Pope Francis hit the Curia where it lives, speaking of its “spiritual narcissism” and “pathology of power.” 

He also addressed the “Martha complex” of excessive activity as surrogate to doing anything meaningful.  He accused the church hierarchy of being incapable of “weeping with those who weep,” but instead acting like “lords and masters.”   

When this behavior is brought to light, the pope claims the clergy are beset with “spiritual Alzheimer’s” which leads to building “walls and routines around them and forgetting the spirit of the Gospels.” 

He attributes this to cliquishness, acquisitiveness, careerism, competitiveness, leading to “progressive spiritual emptiness.”  Because these inclinations can become habitual “many abandon their pastoral services,” restricting their indulgence to bureaucratic matters.   

The pontiff was not through in his Christmas message. 

The “theatrical severity and sterile pessimism” comes with a “funeral face” that often “attends the use of power.”   Those so afflicted, he emphasized, “cowardly use the terrorism of gossip by which to slander, defame and discredit others, even in newspapers and magazines.” 

If these people in elevated stations in the Roman Catholic Church appear to be behaving like adolescents, I can assure you from my long corporate executive and consulting career, it is par for the course.  Look at the American Congress and its gridlock and corporate America’s industrial-military-commercial malfeasance and pettiness, and you might think those in power never left the sixth grade.

Permit me a small smile at the pontiff’s scathing rebuke of the Roman Curia and the papal administration.   His remarks, although more poetic, could easily have been lifted from one or more of my books on the state of the corporation, which I call “corpocracy.” 

For this, I have been seen as “angry.”  I write of “pyramid climbers,” who are always campaigning for the next job never having time to perform their own; on the duplicity of management which is atavistic and dysfunctional, on the internecine feuding within mahogany row, on schadenfreude that ruins careers, on the cowardly “six silent killers” that handicap organizations and institutions, but frankly, in less incendiary terms than his eminence, Pope Francis I. 

Will the church hierarchy and clergy heed the pope’s words?  His papacy appears to be turning away doctrinal and institutional concerns to a bona fide interest in and loving engagement of the poor who make up most of the world’s population.  The pope’s hidden mind is showing.  Can this lead to revealing the people’s as well?

*     *     *

"TIME OUT FOR SANITY!" -- an excerpt

Is Society Sick?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 28, 2015

REFERENCE:

Another excerpt from “Time Out for Sanity!”  Due for publication April, 2015 by Tate Publishing Company.

“Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws.”

—Charles Simmons (1798-1856)

American clergyman

“The proposition that the madman does not know what he is talking about, or that his utterances are untrue, is explicitly contradicted by an old German proverb which asserts ‘Only children and madmen tell the truth’.”

—Thomas S. Szasz, American psychiatrist

The Manufacture of Madness (1970)

MADNESS AS A GOAL-ORIENTED MASK & STRATEGY

Shakespeare once lamented that if a thing were real in our minds, it would be real in its consequences.  So, if we think of ourselves as in a sick society, according to the Bard, in all probability we are. Yet the evidence suggest we are functioning if ineptly so. You may say, “When was a society not sick?” Good point. Perhaps that is why we seem to push the envelope constantly as if it has an unlimited capacity to give.

It is also Shakespeare that gave us the famous phrase likening devious method to madness: “Polonius: Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

It would appear Elizabethan England (early seventeenth century) understood that insane behavior, no less than sane behavior, is goal-directed and motivated. Shakespearean audiences regarded the behavior of the madman as perfectly rational from the point of view of the actor or affected individual. This perspective has had to be rediscovered and defended by modern psychoanalysts and existential psychologists.

For English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) claims the difference between an insane man and a fool are that a fool draws the wrong conclusions from the right principles, while an insane person draws a just inference from false principles.

What are false principles? They are principles that fly in the face of natural law and law civil. Such would be the case of a man who kills his family because they are possessed by the devil.  Madness less extreme, however, is an everyday affair.

There are constant reminders that a tinge of madness accompanies our behavior. We insist in seeing ourselves as immortal, burning the candle at both ends, treating our bodies, minds and souls as if they can take unlimited punishment, still holding confidently to the myth of resiliency as our lungs collapse, our liver shrinks and our kidneys fail. Madness masquerades as self-indulgent modernity.

Madness is given permission to flaunt itself during social and political upheaval. Death and destruction become the norm of society as leaders save their countries by destroying them. What is war but collateral damage of the innocent as a necessary price to save a culture? You have to be a little mad to endure all this and yet function.

Kahlil Gibran catches the flavor of this in “The Madman” (1969):

“You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: one day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen—the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives-I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, ‘Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.’  Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me. And when I reached the marketplace, a youth standing on a housetop cried, ‘He is a madman.’ I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, ‘Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.’ Thus I became a madman. And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us. But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a thief in a jail is safe from another thief.” 

That is the dilemma. We all wear masks (our personalities).  They can imprison us if not balanced sufficiently with our essence (our character) into something approaching authenticity. And what is that?

Being authentic is having our minds, bodies, hearts and souls working in consort with us as opposed to against us. It is the difference between producing music in life consistent with our gifts rather than disruptive noise. It is being healthily skeptical of circumstances as they materialize rather than retreating into disabling cynicism. It involves knowing when to be independent and interdependent without ever falling prey to counter dependency.

In a word, it means embracing rather than retreating from life.  As an authentic person we respect our assets but are aware of our limitations, acting consistent within that framework. It is recognizing we are part of nature and thus confined to its edicts.  It is showing kindness first to ourselves so that genuine kindness can be shown to others.

THE BRACING RANT OF A REFRESHING AUTHOR

It is difficult to get through to us because of all these masks we wear that lead to self-deception. So, it should come as no surprise that serious observers often use shock as a framework to penetrate these barriers and garner our attention.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. demonstrates this in “Breakfast of Champions” (1973), a novel in which Kilgore Trout, the author’s second self, leads a thoroughly dysfunctional life. When I asked a bookseller, Charles Haslam of St. Petersburg (Florida), not a fan of Vonnegut’s writings, why this book was doing so well, he answered: “I suppose it’s because crazy as the book is he is saying something nobody understands yet seems to think, whatever it is, is important.” Haslam claims Vonnegut makes no sense to him, revealing one of his own masks.

Admittedly, Vonnegut is not for everyone as his opinions are often quite caustic. This comes through in an interview he had with the “World Peace News” (May 1972):

On the state of the arts: 

“Our arts are just another way of excluding the poor from participating in civilization. We pay two million for six feet of canvas. Opera we think is nice. So is symphony music. It seems to me there is a stupidity in all this, a case of damaged brains.”

On corporate malfeasance: 

“There is the ITT stupidity. A large idiot company finds out about playing with loaded dice! They’ve been shooting crap with everybody else, why not the government?  What’s wrong with that?”  On the state of the poor: “Of course we are now beginning to see that it’s useless to exploit the poor. We don’t have to anymore. We don’t need large labor pools anymore. We have no reason to care about what goes on in the slums. The poor rob each other, not us!  Meanwhile, someone paints blue colors on canvas and calls them the ‘Stations of the Cross.’ He wins extravagant praise! The poor don’t get it, and because they don’t get it, the poor are excluded from the ruling class. That is what art is for. A person needs to pretend an interest in these things in order to qualify. He has got to find out about art in order to prove that he’s acceptable.”

On the United Nations: 

“It’s an East Side operation.  Ambassadors, delegates, secretaries, and undersecretaries frequent parties all over the East Side. There are the decent parties of the rich. These people share the same artistic interests.  They agree Picasso is the greatest artist since Shakespeare, or maybe since Mozart. They all enjoy the opera and symphonic music. They admire each other’s furniture, and they persuade themselves that they have higher sensibilities because it is difficult to admire these things. These art things seem to baffle poor people. Some people in the ruling class suspect that poor people are too dumb to appreciate these fine things and that, therefore, the poor are not fit to rule. All this represents dumbness on everyone’s part.”  How to change all this: “We will need to teach anthropology in the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. We’ve got to get it through our heads that all cultures are equally rich.  Levi-Strauss was right. As of now, the poor man doesn’t have culture good enough to qualify him for the ruling class because he doesn’t have a beautiful apartment on the East Side. We’ve got to get through our heads that this is wrong.”

On UN delegate representatives:

“They do let some funny looking people in. Some hate symphonic music. They should be represented, too. Let someone into the UN who thinks it’s a crime to spend two million on a Velasquez or a Rembrandt. Let someone in who hates opera. Let someone in who wears suede shoes. The key is this: let someone in with bad teeth, with real root damage showing, with unstraightened rotten teeth!”

On the canary in the coal mine: 

“I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts were. The best thing I could come up with was what I call “the canary in the coal mine theory” of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.” 

On high school: 

“High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.” 

On writing books: “Why write books...why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it’s been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with...humanity, and they become generals and presidents and so forth, and however you want to poison their minds, it’s presumably to encourage them to make a better world.”

On evolution and a divine engineer: 

“I do feel evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can’t help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.”

Vonnegut does not hide behind language to mask his refreshing madness. Instead, he uses plain speak to display his unconventional attitude in mind bending ways with straightforward English.  He was at the University of Iowa in the mid-1950s when I was there, and didn’t let the students down when he conducted his seminars in creative writing. Only in his early 30s at the time, he was already craggy faced from being a chain smoker of unfiltered Camels. Yet there was magnetism to him, as if devilish angels danced behind his sparkling eyes. These eyes peaked out from elephant like folds to display the pain and pleasure he observed in a dysfunctional universe.

He sent his students out to study workers in the workplace, asking them to wonder about the person that would be so employed, suggesting that work and workers after a time come to be indistinguishable from each other. For example, a powerhouse superintendent moves with the precision of the turbines he maintains and appears almost devoid of human emotion.

MADNESS AS PALLIATIVE

R. D. Laing subscribes to a similar madness. For him, everyone is crazy because everyone sees the world within through a culturally neurotic perceptual system. The only one who has a chance of getting ut of it is the one who is mentally ill, who has a breakdown and so leaves the old perceptual system behind and emerges into a new one that is less automatic and constricting.

When he was touring a schizophrenic ward with a cadre of medical students, he came to a man lying on the floor, completely nude, viewing the group quizzically. The good doctor smiled at the man, and then unceremoniously proceeded to completely disrobe and join the man naked on the floor. The two men immediately engaged in conversation. The students were shocked. One whispered to another that he was going to report the doctor.  Sensing the concern, Laing advised the students that sometimes the only way to know your clients is to meet them at their level, doing whatever that takes.

Vonnegut and Laing are asking us to step outside convention, drop our masks, and embrace a little madness because it is where we are most alive. We use the filters of sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers to separate us from ourselves by explaining our natures away. But it doesn’t appear to work, and therefore, is a waste of time and energy.

These rebels to convention imply, as does Gibran, that it is high time that we drop the pretense and shrink from the grasp of convention to discover our naked minds. This takes getting past the conceit of organic medicine, which separates physical illness from mental illness as if treatment of the body is different from the cure of the soul. This arbitrary dichotomy must be understood if we have any chance at all in being fully human, as well as our own person.

If we do, we will see it takes a little madness to get from here to there. Now, if we have little such interests that is another story.  We don’t have to worry. All our masks are in place, and “they,” whomever “they” happen to be, own us.  We may have straight white teeth, a good education, a nice home, people that care about us, so to our minds, what is all this noise about madness and society being sick? I’m just fine, we say, thank you very much. Vonnegut would suggest we have a lot in common with the powerhouse superintendent who is on automatic pilot with a dull hypnotic affect.

For argument’s sake, let us say that society is not sick. If not sick, can we say with any confidence that it is not becoming progressively passive?  It would seem the evidence is overwhelming. We spend an astonishing amount of our hard earned money and time on celebrity entertainers. We use them to escape active involvement in our own lives beyond living in insulated islands of grandeur cut off from the rest of the struggling world. What is saddest about this is that we live vicariously because we can afford it, not because it enhances our sense of self-worth.

Quite the contrary, it is a way to self-forget while being mesmerized by the sights and sounds provided by others. And now we are in the marvelous age of electronics with tweeting and texting on our mobiles to our hearts content all of our waking hours, being in the same room with others, at dinner with family or friends, in a classroom or in a work station, being cut off from life and others while being totally distractedly engaged in the social network. If this is not madness, what is?

Entertainers, technologists and entrepreneurs are the true doctors of civilization. They medicate us with their madness masquerading as artists or athletes, or innovators, while keeping our own madness at bay. We watch tennis on television rather than play the sport. We watch brainless television programs every week with an ensemble cast mouthing the same sick jokes or sorry plots ad infinitum. We post pictures and personal messages on Facebook and other social media, and when we communicate in a personal sense with others we have nothing to talk about with each other than the latest exploits of our soap opera family, or sports heroes. It led William Goldfarb to rephrase Descartes’ famous philosophical dictum: “I am doing, therefore I am.”

Emerson and Nietzsche saw man as “a god in ruin,” who must be awakened in order to fulfill his godly potential. Colin Wilson shares the sentiment. Using phenomenological analysis in his futuristic novel, “The Mind Parasites” (1968), Wilson argues man can capture and extend moments of vision and wholeness; he can expand consciousness; he can be at one with the evolutionary life force in his being; and he can chart a geography of the world of the inner mind. I, too, think he can, but will he?

British American poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) finds this doubtful. He writes in “The Hollow Men“(1925):

Between the idea

And the reality . . .

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the shadow

The “shadow” is the twinge of mistrust, the shrinking from self, the conviction that this life is all an illusion. We only have to glance at the enormous volumes of history, philosophy, theology, anthropology and psychology on the library shelves to see that very few of these authors got beyond their own shadows and around to living their own knowledge. Virtue to them was knowledge. So it has been throughout our Western history from classical Greek philosophy to the rise of Christianity to the Renaissance and the Reformation, through the American ……

PRISONER OF THE MIND (excerpt from TIME OUT FOR SANITY!)

PRISONER OF THE MIND

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 27, 2015

REFERENCE:

Excerpt from TIME OUT FOR SANITY!  It is due to be published by TATE Publishing Company in April, 2015.

“Psychological manipulation pervades all areas of society, not only through the use of skills and techniques, but through the conveyance of oppressive behavior to the oppressed themselves, and through the use of psychology as an ideology for the defense of the status quo.”

—Phil Brown, Radical Psychology (1973)

There is a reluctance to focus on the question: is society sick? This is not only a problem for professional thinkers but also for laymen. There is a kind of normalcy to the idea that society is sick and people are sick in society. So what? When has society not been sick?

The frenetic pace of society, the compulsive waste making, the robbing Peter to pay Paul, the planning for planning sake, the living without consequences, the lifestyle diseases, the looking for miraculous drugs to cure addictions, hey, what’s all the fuss about? It’s the way it is, Mac! But is it? And if so, why?

We are told we are a nation of believers in God but that doesn’t include going to church. We are told we are religious and a caring nation, but that doesn’t include knowing and fraternizing with our neighbors next door. We are told we are a melting pot of nations, but that doesn’t include socializing with other ethnic groups. We have had our portrait painted as to what we are and have had this freeze framed to be our reality, when it has little in common with our real self.

The religion of the West is imbued with the idea of God and the individual as infinitely precious and irreducibly real for his having an immortal soul. Yet, the history of carnage in the West, and violent crime in the United States, contradicts this perception.

Thinking and behaving are worlds apart.  Churches are constructed as houses of worship, but have become increasingly empty of worshipers, as modern society has moved away from religious doctrine to secular dogma.

In Freudian speak, religion once kept the “Lid on the Id,” but no longer. The moral highway has no speed limits, no consensus rules of the road, and so crashes have become the symphony of the times. We lost 55,000 Americans in the Viet Nam War. We lose that many every year on American highways as a gauge of this reckless carnage and despair.

The Id (our compulsive self) is running rampant, as there is little Superego (moral self) in evidence. We have lost our moral compass and thus our way.

The paradox is that everything is set on the rational while the emotional needle seems fixed on the irrational. Incest and murder, corruption and malfeasance, and coveting the neighbor’s wife and property have become banner headlines, not only in the supermarket rags, but also in traditional newspapers. We have lost our way. Even being nice has been replaced by being with it.

The idea of the immortal soul has been superseded by the idea of the individual personality, which is not immortal, but is considered all the more precious for not being so. Identity and role relationships have become the new psychology. The irony is that psychology rose out of philosophy and has never found its own identity much less its role. So, rather than create that role, it continues to search for its identity.

The evidence is demonstrated as psychology develops a new branch every time a perplexing problem surfaces. Currently, we have existential psychology, which rises out of the philosophy of the absurd, and humanistic psychology, which attempts to be everything and to please everybody suggesting the philosophy of the Pollyanna. The clergy, desperate for survival, grab these new psychologies as if long lost relatives, accepting their premises, and incorporating them into their sermons as if pure wisdom.

This was patently evident when Eric Berne took Freudian psychology and its quid pro quo implications and wrote “Games People Play” (1964), simplifying Freudianism to “transactional analysis,” creating the “Adult” (Ego), “Parent” (Superego”) and “Child” (Id) egostates to illustrate the dynamics of interpersonal relationships.

Thomas Harris then came along, turning Berne’s transactional analysis into a practical guide with his “I’m OK—You’re OK” (1967). A decade later, John Dusay came up with “Egograms” (1977), solidifying the role of the “Adult” (Ego), but further differentiating the “Parent” (Superego) into the “Nurturing Parent” and “Critical Parent,” and the “Child” (Id) into the “Free Child” and “Adaptive Child.” Parents, teachers, and preachers, as well as gurus latched onto this new nomenclature seeing children, as well as people in general in these schematic terms.

In this new age of the idea of the individual, we measure a person’s worth not by his bond, or what he has done, but what he can become. Becoming, not being, is the philosophy of instant celebrity consistent with instant everything.

Syndicated columnist and practicing psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer saw this trend apparent in national politics in 2013. “President Barak Obama is perhaps our greatest president as campaigner,” he reflects, “but this excellence doesn’t appear to extend to governance.” The columnist was referring to the procession of “fiscal cliffs” that had stalled monetary policy between the President and Congress from 2011 on.

Then in the fall of 2013, while promising everyone could keep their health insurance if they wanted to, which proved not to be true, the president delegated the problem solving to the bureaucracy on the Affordable Healthcare Act. Instead of rolling up his sleeves and taking charge of the enrollment computer glitch, he went on a national whistle stop campaign across the country to sell the program.

Barak Obama, the first African American President of the United States, not only shocked the nation by winning the presidency in 2008, but also confirmed the power of his personality and charismatic presence by being reelected in 2012. That said he has unwittingly personified phantom leadership or leaderless leadership, which allows events to dictate circumstances rather than initiatives to dictate events.

This is the role of the consummate actor who demonstrates neither the will nor the way to lead. And like that actor, he emotes what has the widest appeal where substance is reduced to shadows of the mind. The only problem is you cannot eat shadows and they provide little shelter or security.

Should the reader think I am taking unfair measure of our president, nothing could be further from my intention. The state of the presidency, at the moment, seems to represent the highest profile of the American collective conscience being “prisoner of the mind.” We acquire the leadership we deserve which is confirmed by our feet in voting President Obama into a second term.

President Jimmy Carter sought reelection handicapped with similar economic circumstances, but he didn’t see the role of the presidency as that of an actor, and of course actor Ronald Reagan unceremoniously replaced him.  Carter, Reagan, Obama, indeed, all presidents since the 1970s have promised “transparency,” including President Clinton, but only President Carter attempted to practice it, one time addressing a national audience on television in a polo shirt and cardigan sweater (July 15, 1979), insisting the nation had “a crisis in confidence.”

Listeners took it as a scold and were none too happy for the reminder. Viewers preferred a presidential euphemistic “hope rope a dope,” which is quite Machiavellian. The author of “The Prince” (1532) provided a practical guide to leaders on how to win and stay in power, which had little to do with virtue much less transparency, but much to do with using any means to a desired end, while giving a nod to virtue in rhetoric if not reality.  Reagan, Obama, Clinton, et. al., knew what the Renaissance author was advocating, being as clever as a fox, ruthless as a lion, while seemingly as docile as a lamb.

Leadership in the American Republic has devolved to presence and platitudes, which takes good actors, but doesn’t necessarily translate into prudent action. The more a leader can astonish us with his glibness the more vivid he is. We connote “brilliance” to presentation skills forgetting how seldom such command relates to action. Whatever the discipline, we see leadership of a politician, an artist, scientist, businessman or entertainer, not on the strength of his contribution, but on the mesmerizing quality of his presentation skills. We may see this presenter as a phantom chasing shadows, but it never occurs to us that he is our invention.

“Phantom” here is used in the Buddhist sense. The Buddhist would read the careerist’s resume with a smile as a picture in the mind without blemishes and not as a person. You cannot shake hands with a picture. A picture is a cold medium devoid of feeling other than what the observer projects of himself into the image.

There is no exchange. This makes the individual appear near perfect if unreal, while projecting that phantom world he has created as real. The motivation is to connect, but at the price of being empty of individuality, and therefore a shadow of the self. The first electronics guru of the Information Age, Marshall McLuhan, defined this as “The Medium Is The Message” (1967). He discerned that television is a cold medium and the viewer puts his subjective warmth into that cold phantom object on the screen. The aim of the televised personality is to capture the viewer’s attention with one objective in mind, to influence.