Ascent of Mountain, Flight of Dove - Invitation to Religious Studies

275 Pages·1978·5.264 MB·English

by  Michael Novak

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AN INVITATIOTNO RELIGIOUSST UDIES
REVISEEDDI TION
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface to the Revised Edition x1
Introduction: An Invitation to Religious Studies xv
One: The Voyage
1. The Religious Drive 1
2. What Religion is Not 6
3. Way of Life 11
4. Earthy Ecsrasy 24
5. Conversion to the Sacred 28
Two: Autobiography and Story
1. Religion as Autobiography 44
2. Cultural Stories and Personal Stories 49
3. Standpoint to Standpoint 53
4. "Story," Elaborated 60
5. What Cannot Be Said 7 3
6. The Aesthetic, The Moral, The Religious 76
7. Among the Many Rises and Declines of Reason 84
vii
viii
Three: Cultures
1. Paradoxes of the Finite 89
2. Sense of Reality 95
3. From Culture to Cult 109
Four: Societies and Institutions
1. Institutions are Man's Natural Habitat 11'7
Freedom and Coercion 122
2.
Are Institutions Obsolete? 128
3.
4. The New Heteronomy 131
5. Secular Religion 137
6. The Communal Imagination 147
7.Th e Realities of Economics 150
8.P olitical Revolution 153
9. Civil Religion 157
Five: Organizations
1. Organized Anything 163
2. Liturgy 167
3. Church, Denomination, Sect 171
4. Holy Texts 177
5. Theologies 181
6. A Map of Theologies in the United States 186
7. Theology as Suitor 195
Six: Nature and History 200
Epilogue: Another Turn on the Mountain
212
Notes
225
Index of Names 257
Acknowled ments
g
Carol Christ made many astute criticisms of the early drafts of
this book, supplied me with readings, and supervised the footnot­
ing, particularly for the first three chapters. In the years since, she
has gone on to win the wide recognition, especially in the field
of women's spiritual quest, predicted for her in the first edition;
and her life's work is barely at its beginnings.
Karen Laub-Novak, whose husband I am, completed the draw­
ing which deepens these pages.
Sharon Winklhofer left her concert piano and came east yet
once again, this time from UCLA rather than Stanford, to type the
first draft from my cryptic handwriting. Evelyn Becker of Bayville
typed the later drafts. Isabelle McKeever and Ida McDaniel at
S.U.N.Y., Old Westbury, helped with several related tasks.Judy
Lally typed portions of the revised edition. William Gooley as­
sisted me in the revision of the footnotes.
M.N.
Praectfeto hR ee vEidsietdi on
The response to this short book over the seven years since its
publication has been a joy to me. Many letters have come to me
on account of it, and many seminar discussions and general assem­
blies in schools across the country have permitted me to hear
students react to it. I recognize that the book stretches beginners
a little. Some of the words in it are jawbreakers (my favorite is
<
intussuscept). But virtually everyone seems to have grasped the
basic insight and learned a way of talking about the self and
religion that is both accurate and helpful. That is the important
point. The purpose of the book is to help each reader to find
words to express his or her own religious experience in a comfort­
able and exact way.
In the years since the first text-was being written ( 1970), Amer­
ica has lived through some vivid experiences. Some of those now
using the book-I keep reminding myself-were only nine years
old in 1969, the year of the "march on the Pentagon," and only
thirteen or fourteen in 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned.
Many have no memory of the years when John F. Kennedy was
xi
xii ASCENT OF THE MOUNTAIN, FLIGHT OF THE DOVE
president. The hippies and even the Beatles seem very long ago.
And new history is being made. The "horizon" of our lives keeps
shifting.
It is a disadvantage of living in our era, in fact, that so many
layers of our experience are flooded over by great public events,
broadcast for our attention. It is harder now than it used to be to
grow up as a private person, shielding one's inner life from intru­
sions by public noise. Young people spend a great deal of discre­
tionary money, and so advertisers seek out new "styles" and
"attitudes" that can attract millions of imitators. The young are
necessarily insecure. The young have always been willing follow­
ers of ideals and causes-have marched in many different armies,
for many different purposes-and they are vulnerable to all the
public incantations and pressures. We have not learned suffi­
ciently how to resist the public world. We safeguard too little
private space in which the self can encounter itself in inner dia­
logue, alone and in silence.
For this reason, it is even more important than it used to be for
religion to strike more deeply into the self, away from public
glare. Unless Americans become more sophisticated about the
language of the self, inner life will shrivel. In addition, our people
will continue to be vulnerable to fundamentalist movements like
those of the Reverend Moon and Scientology. Such movements
take over too many innocents. They promise, and sometimes
deliver, a touching happiness. But they do so by closing the spirit
in a powerful and dangerous way. Because our families and our
schools do not provide a large and critical vocabulary by which
to express the inner longings of the spirit, the souls of many are
parched and they gladly accept water, any water, from those who
offer it. The liberation of the religious spirit from trivial, closed,
and simplistic systems of thought can only be achieved through
a kind of "cure of souls"-the development of a critical language,
exercises, and disciplines that open rather than close the mind,
that lead to higher viewpoints, breakthroughs, and new syn-
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION xiii
theses, in a constant enlargement of spirit. A religion which stifles
the inquiring spirit is unworthy of that spirit.
In this revised edition, many small changes have been made
throughout the text: Chapter Five, Section 6 has been thoroughly
revised; the notes have been brought up to date; and a new
epilogue has been added to provide one more in the book's series
of "higher viewpoints," in order to account for developments
since the appearance of the first edition in 1971. For one thing,
the circle of my own work has expanded as I have tried to explore
the stories, symbols, and myths hidden in several unexplored
areas of American life.
Michael Novak
Syracuse University
September, 1977