Category: Spirituality

I rarely write on anything of a “spiritual nature” for the simple fact that I do not consider myself a spiritual person or, rather, I find my “spirituality” (however narrowly or broadly defined) tepid. This has never been truer since I started to (re-)attend Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) after a long period away. I was never convinced that I needed AA and a significant part of me resists it even now. Were it not for my sponsor, an eminently sensible veteran of the program who effectively blends good humor with a serious commitment to sobriety, I would have left (again). Having dipped my toes in other “recovery”/sobriety programs (I dislike the word “recovery” for alcoholism, but I’ll save that for another time), none have struck me as immediately superior to AA’s 12-step approach and all of them share some commonalities with it. Even when I was attending an intensive outpatient program (IOP) for alcoholism, I found a good deal of overlap between it and AA. In private therapy sessions I was encouraged to add AA onto the 10 plus hours of IOP. There was to be no quick turnaround that would allow me to avoid AA.

I do not intend here to be critical of AA despite still harboring reservations. There may come a time and a place to say more about the program, but now is not that time. I would never discourage any soul from attending AA if they believed they needed it. In fact, I have started to believe that those who claim they do not need it or any other program are the ones who could receive considerable benefit from not merely going to meetings, but actively engaging in the Twelve Steps. As I am fond of telling newcomers at so-called “First Step” meetings (i.e., the “initiation meeting” where a first-time attendee is directly spoken to by other members about their experiences with the program), “Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” There are good meetings, bad meetings, and in-between meetings. Some people like to use meetings to tell “war stories” about how drunk they got one night or have a good laugh at themselves or others over drunken follies. There are some where people routinely shed tears and even a few where almost nobody talks at all. At almost every meeting I have attended, I have heard at least one thing that stuck with me and more than a few that have helped me turn away from the liquor store entrance. That also means I have encountered plenty of excuses, faux wisdom, self-justificatory rhetoric, and outright lies. Afflicted as I am with a tendency to “make faces” when I hear raw nonsense, AA compels disciplined listening; I rarely like it, but I imagine I am better for it.

Circling back to the beginning, the reason I mention spirituality and AA is because the program is shot through with “spirituality,” albeit of a mundane sort that should be unrecognizable to most devout Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc. AA’s “spirituality” can (and I would argue should) be enhanced by the true spirituality available only through faith in God. While God is mentioned throughout AA’s Twelve Steps and its attendant literature, it is typically “[g]od as we [i.e., individual AA members] understood [h]im.” On one hand, this is a harmless formulation insofar as it acknowledges that different AA members have different religious backgrounds. On the other, it risks (and often leads to) making God out to be little more than an “imaginary friend” who is there to give members a boost when the going gets tough. Any “spirituality” that emanates from such a low point is not one I care to be associated with and yet it surrounds me day in and day out. I find my current incapacity to transcend it to be indicative of a grave pneumatic defect that has yet to be corrected.

Maybe things have not gotten so bad as to render me “a-spiritual,” but judging by my recent reading habits, which include everything from the Russian classic The Way of the Pilgrim to Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises to a number of anthologies of other spiritual traditions, it is possible I am showing signs of desperation—but I am far from being without hope. If my current trajectory has taught me anything, it is the simple fact, obvious to many but too often lost on me, that I cannot will myself to be more than a shadow Christian; I must trust in God. If someone were to tell me that sounds impossible, especially today in this “worst of all possible worlds” (Elon Musk now owns Twitter!), I would be tempted to agree. Many things that are not tied up with a joyless consumer-driven existence fueled by incessant feelings of anger, fear, and inadequacy probably do sound impossible. God’s love, from which all authentic hope flows, seems like the most impossible thing of all.

And yet it is unfathomably true.

Uriel da Costa (born Gabriel) was a rather pious man, at least for a time. Born into a family of cristãos novos in 1585 who thought it better to convert than be thrown out of Portugal with the other Jews, he lived in the tension between his ancestral Judaism and his family’s new-found (but not altogether sincere) Catholicism. Costa tried to make a good run of it. After studying canon law in his teenage years, he came to hold an ecclesiastical office and later, when penning his brief autobiography, made a point to present his father in particularly as a devout Catholic. His father’s early death, coupled with other misfortunes, prompted the Costa family to flee Portugal for the Netherlands and Germany, respectively. Having already come to doubt the tenets of the Christian religion in favor of Judiasm based on his own independent study of Scripture in Portugal, Costa was in for an existential crisis when he finally came face-to-face with Rabbinic Judaism abroad. While Costa thought of himself as a faithful adherent to the Law of Moses, he saw little in Continental Judaism except for emptyheaded legalism and ritualism.

Now in his early 30s, Costa set out to disrupt the flawed but stable orthodoxy of his day through a series of publications which, inter alia, challenged the structure of Rabbinic Judaism; denied the immortality of the soul; and posited that that the Judaism of his day was devoid of the spiritual riches contained in Scripture. Prior to his critiques reaching their crescendo with the 1623 work An Examination of the Tradition of the Pharisees, Costa was excommunicated by the rabbis of Vienna—a mark that would follow him to his eventual settlement in Amsterdam. While Costa appears to have been able to maintain a decent standard of living through his business dealings during this period, his life became one of painful solitude. By 1633, he sought to reconcile himself with the local Jewish community, though it failed to take. Here is Michael Della Rocca’s account of the closing years of Costa’s life from his book, Spinoza.

Da Costa’s ban was harsher than most. When he was banned in 1633, the possibility of atonement was left open, but it was atonement by flagellation that was required. Da Costa refused, but by 1640, after enduring years of isolation, he agreed to go through with the punishment during which he was not only whipped in the synagogue, but, after the display, was forced to lie down at the threshold of the synagogue. Those who exited then stepped on his body on their way out. Unable to bear this humiliation, da Costa shot himself several days later.

Many years after his suicide, Costa’s autobiographical statement, Exemplar Humanae Vitae, made it to print. Later criticized by scholars for its inaccuracies and incompleteness, the document still stands as Costa’s last word on his beliefs—beliefs that had degenerated from a hopeful embrace of Biblical Judaism to religious skepticism. By the time he had reached the end, Costa could confidently declare that religion was little more than a human invention and that God (or, rather, his own conception of god) cared little for man-made rites and ceremonies. Even the Law of Moses, which Costa had once held up against the rules of the rabbis, lost its divine character. Lonely and humiliated, Costa left this world without the comfort of the religious outlook he once suffered to defend.

For those few who bother to pay Costa a bit of mind today, he is typically seen as the forerunner to Baruch Spinoza and an early progenitor of Biblical criticism. Some Jewish scholars, uncomfortable with the nature of Costa’s treatment during his lifetime, have attempted to rehabilitate him as a Jew whose conditions removed his culpability for heresy. Costa, after all, was born into an environment of coerced conversions where any sign of “Judaizing” could result in the loss of property, freedom, or life at the hands of the Inquisition. Having never been brought up in an authentic Jewish milieu (i.e. a Rabbinic Jewish milieu), Costa cannot be blamed for his errant understanding of Judaism generally and Holy Scripture particularly. Moreover, infused with non-Jewish ideas at an early age, Costa’s outlook—so the apologetic story goes—was forever marred; no matter how hard he might have struggled to reconcile himself with the faith of his fathers, it was never to be. As such, Costa must be held harmless for his heterodoxy while his life and legacy should be interpreted as a tragedy rather than a blemish on Jewish history.

That is, so-to-speak, a nice way of putting matters, though one wonders what Costa would think of this revisionist narrative. It’s hard not to imagine that Costa would see the biggest error of his life not in his rejection of Rabbinic Judaism, but in his attempt to reintegrate into the Jewish community of his time. Further, it is hard to shake the feeling the true tragedy of Costa’s life was not the confusion imposed upon him by his environment but rather his mental-spiritual instability, an instability that led him to expect far more from the religious culture of his times than it possibly had to offer. Of course, perhaps Costa wasn’t that unstable, mentally or spiritually. Maybe, like some now living, Costa believed that the lofty spiritual, philosophical, and theological teachings of the Bible warranted earthly representation which, though always inadequate to the task, could be far, far better than what’s available. Costa, tortured by this dashed hope, ultimately succumbed; most tortured similarly today walk away from the pain under the guise of becoming illumined.

On September 16, 1666, in the ancient city of Adrianople, Sabbatai Sevi, the reported Messiah of the Jewish people, converted to Islam. Although the event did not bring to a close the movement known as Sabbateanism, it did mark the decline of the last great messianic movement within Judaism. Scorned by Muslims and Christians alike, the Jewish populations of Europe and the Middle East, arguably, never quite recovered from the blow their “Mystical Messiah” dealt them. Meanwhile, over in the land of Russia, an archpriest named Avvakum was causing a bit of a stir himself. Steadfastly opposed to the liturgical reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, Avvakum turned altering the Sign of the Cross and Slavonic orthography into an apocalyptic event. As the best known of those Russian Christians who would come to be known as “Old Believers,” Avvakum is credited with creating the first masterpiece of Russian literature: his frenzied, paranoid, and heterodox story of his life. Avvakum, unlike Sevi, had no pretense to being a messiah; he did, however, see himself as God’s agent in the world, the last of the saints who would hold fast to the spiritual, liturgical, and linguistic patrimony of the Russian Church in the face of torture and death. Having had enough of his antics, the Russian state burned Avvakum and three of his followers at the stake in 1682.

With the publication of Gershom Scholem’s monumental work on Sevi in the mid-20th century, a small but noticeable scholarly enterprise has been built up around this seminal figure in Jewish history. Scholem’s study, which eschewed a materialist explanation for Sevi’s popularity among the Jews of his day, has been met with equally compelling accounts that see, for instance, the origins of Sabbateanism in the plight of Eastern European Jewry in the 17th century. Others see in Sevi an opportunity for the Jews to abandon beliefs and practices which had made them stand apart for centuries. As a messianic figure, one of Sevi’s perceived tasks was to abolish the ritual law of the Jews before inaugurating a bloodless restoration of the Kingdom of Israel. Perhaps, some opine, Sevi’s appeal came about due to a general Jewish exhaustion of adhering to religious tenets that seemed to bring them nothing but misery for over 1,000 years. Whatever the reasons behind the growth and popularity of the Sabbatean movement, the final world has yet to be written about this delusional figure and the impact his life had on Jewish history.

And what about Avvakum? In the Anglophone world, Avvakum is typically only known by way of passing mention in Orthodox history books or the English-language translation of his autobiography. He is not, in the estimation of most Orthodox Christians, a figure to be revered. Yet there is an argument to be made that he is a figure who lurks behind any and all liturgical pedantry among the Orthodox, particularly the Russians. Avvakum’s great error, as many have pointed out, was to identify the Christian Faith with liturgical praxis. Avvakum, like almost all of his Russian contemporaries, did not realize that the Byzantine Rite, no less than any other approved rituals within the Universal Church, did not spring into being by way of a few strokes of a saint’s pen. The Byzantine Rite, as it was kept in Russia in the 17th century, was the byproduct of numerous revisions, redactions, and recensions—sprinkle on some scribal errors, obscure local practices, and a general ignorance of Church history and theology and what you have is a recipe for religious disaster. The Old Believer movement, though always a minority movement within the Orthodox Church, nevertheless caused a serious rupture within Russian Orthodoxy and arguably contributed to the eventual secularization of the Russian Orthodox Church by Tsar Peter the Great at the turn of the 18th century.

Today, the Jewish people are still waiting for a messiah while Russian Orthodox zealotry typically takes the form of militaristic nationalism rather than spiritually inspired apocalypticism. Might an argument be made that this tempering of what one might call the “religious spirit” is a sign that despite protestations to the contrary, secularism—with its inordinately positive appraisal of a certain type of rationalism—has, on some level, “won”? (Won what? I do not know.) The Jews, on the one hand, appear to have lost hope, or at least otherworldly hope, while the Christians of Russia, on the other, see their “mission” to the world materially rather than spiritually. Maybe this is for the best. After all, few good things, humanly speaking, befall those who get carried away by enthusiasms not easily measured empirically, and the sum total of the psychic and moral damaged caused by misplaced enthusiasms is likely incalculable. Still, their absence is decidedly felt, especially in a world where the surest cure for boredom is an iPhone.