Religion and Theology

The 20th century was an era of spectacular change.  Within this time period occurred one of the great shifts in the way Man perceived his world.  From the late 1800s to the present, Man became Modern.

In ages past, people were more inclined to believe that people had a certain fixed place in the world.  In the West, there was a strict hierarchy that began with the Almighty God and descended through religious leaders to kings and princes and so on down to the fathers of individual families.  There was security in this hierarchy.  As long as a man fulfilled his role then he was doing the right thing, and ultimately his actions would result in the betterment of society and the world in general.  Such a state of affairs was more or less the standard since the days when man first became aware of himself as a historical being.

In time, progress resulted in the Industrial Age, which spurred everything forward all the more quickly.  Machines meant masses of workers engaged in soulless, repetitive tasks, unprecedented amounts of goods and income generated, and in the hearts of men, a renewed spirit of aggression.  Powerful men wanted to conquer more territory, to find new resources to feed the hungry machines.  Other men, worn down by the harshness of the machine age which treated them like machines themselves, began to question the existing order of things.

In the early 20th century kings fell.  Many ancient traditions, practices and creeds were questioned, and questioned to the point of breaking.  In the span of thirty years two great wars ravaged the world, the second including two terrible holocausts of which both sides were guilty.  while Hitlers ovens, gas chambers and camps consumed millions of Jews over the span of years, the Allies atomic bomb incinerated millions of Japanese in minutes and days.  When such horror was possible, Man had to question the old ways of doing and believing.  This questioning creature is Modern Man.

In his desire to destroy the old ways which had failed him, man began to put emphasis on the material world where results could be seen the more quickly.  A reward on earth was surer, if less spectacular, than a reward in Heaven.  Utopia became not a realm in the clouds where angels played harps and the righteous sang praises before the throne of the Almighty, but a society where all were equal and had enough food, clothing and shelter.  While there was nothing wrong with this version of Paradise, it meant that man was also slowly losing touch with the spiritual world.  In his writing, Abraham Heschel sought to bring modern man into an encounter with God.  One way to do this would be to bring him close to the Sublime, a concept that is found in Art as well as in Philosophy.

In the realm of Art, the modern obsession with material things and physical reality was questioned by the group of intellectuals called the Surrealists.  For the Surrealists, beauty was not something that was gotten by tailoring something to what was calculated to be pleasing in terms of mathematically calculated proportions.  Beauty for them was an experience.  It was something felt, something alive.  The Surrealists even thought that madness was relative.  Madmen were simply the people who refused to accept what the majority agree to be the limits of what is real  and usually this meant the limits of the physical world.

When Abraham Heschel writes about the Hebrew prophets and their moral madness, he is taking a similar approach.  While artists spoke of Beauty, prophets speak of the Divine.  In either case, the experience can be both visceral and spiritual.  The Surrealist artists painted pictures of melting clocks and flying horses drawing ships behind them.  The prophets donned sackcloth even as others rejoiced and flew in the face of kings.   Both kinds of men, indeed, seem to be mad.

The definition of madness as the unwillingness to accept the boundaries agreed upon by the greater body answers for the artist as well as for the prophet.

Heschel invokes the Greeks concept of the poet as a madman.  Poetry (which is also Art) was divinely inspired.  There was something different about the poet or the rhapsode at the moment he performed.  At such times he was supposed to have been indwelt or possessed by the gods.  Similarly, the prophet was one whose actions often appeared to go against all reason, but like the poet or the artist, he was also capable of achieving insights and inspiration beyond the reach of ordinary men.

Heschel says that the prophet is a person who suffers from a profound maladjustment to the spirit of society with its conventional lies, with its concession to weakness.  It must be hard to have been the parent, child or spouse of a prophet, indeed, hard to have been a prophets friend.  The essence of living in large groups would lie in compromise.   Indeed, in common speech one who does not know how to compromise is called immature or childish.  The worldly-wise know when to tell white lies, when to stretch the truth, when to close their eyes to transgressions in order to maintain a state of equilibrium.
The prophet, however, like his fellow visionary, the Artist, would have all or nothing.  Nathan, for instance, might have done well to shut his mouth over David and Bathsheba.  Such a seduction was hardly out of the ordinary.  An ordinary man would have been practical about it.  Why thwart a mighty king over a matter as insignificant  that is, when set against the backdrop of politics and war  as a woman  But sometimes, what is most essential is that which is not immediately apprehended by the worldly mind or the physical eye.  Similarly, what use would there be in being a voice crying out in the wilderness  It would be easy to forsake the discomforts of the desert, to return to ones home, ones village, there to be esteemed by friends and family, to eat well and live well.  An ordinary man would say, What does the rest of mankind matter  I have only one life to live.  But a prophet would not be content with letting mankind take care of itself, not when he is burning with a truth or a vision.  At any moment one can put down the torch that one carries, but that is what the weak would do, that is what anyone would do.   It is only a select few who would honestly, truly keep the flame burning to lead their fellowmen out of the imperfect grey light of mediocrity.  Heschel says that the prophet found compromise a kind of corruption of the human spirit.  Indeed, if compromise leads to stagnation, a state where everyone is satisfied enough so that no one strives for perfection or for the heights of the Sublime, then it is indeed harmful to the human spirit.

If the boundary of madness is the reality that everyone else agrees upon, then it cannot be denied that the prophet crosses the boundary of sanity and ventures into the territory beyond.  When everyone else is rejoicing, most men would rather eat, drink and be merry than look beyond the smiles and sensual pleasures, the prosperity and the cheerfulness, to see impending doom.  Yet the prophet can, and does.  The action might be attributed to wisdom and judgment, reading the times as a doctor might be discerning enough to detect a cancer in what appears to be a normal, healthy man.  It might also be that he has a mind brilliant enough to make deductive leaps, or an imagination and intuition that detects truths that most men cannot see.  While man has been trained to trust logic and reason, there is also something to be said for intuition and imagination.  A prophet, it seems, can let go of the supports of logic and reason by which we govern our lives (and which indeed are the justifications for compromise and concessions), in order to go straight to the heart of the matter by abandon to the imagination or to inspiration.  According to Heschel, what makes him different from the psychotic is his ability to pass into this realm of the imagination and then return safely with his treasure of insight which he then shares with the world.  A psychotic would not be able to do so, would be unable to weave the vision with a keen perception of what must be done to better the lot of mankind.  The prophet is morally mad because he cannot reconcile himself to the compromised morality of society.  He insists on preserving the purity of his vision, and thus leads Man to the light.