The Need For A New Illusion

February 5, 1984
Lakeland

In preparing this talk, I had to come to terms with my own reaction (and possibly yours) that we don’t need illusions, we need reality. Fantasies play no bills. Daydreams do not clean the house. Yet in our humanness, is it not so as one clinical psychologist noted, “If we did not dream, our lives would be haunted by unmanageable tensions.” (Pryser, p. 195)

There is a distinction between illusion and fantasy. Fantasy is more an inclination, a fancy; in more unreal stages, hallucination or apparition. Illusion is more reality based, a perception which may be untested and unrealized that is possible and desirable. Columbus was under the illusion that he had reached India when he touched land on San Salvador. He had believed in Italy and Spain that he could reach India by sailing west. He did not just fantasize. He persevered until the Spanish queen was persuaded and provided the resources. He sailed west. He did not sit on the dock in Genoa fantasizing about the Indies.

Dealing with this theme began in our Wednesday night discussion group when the question was raised about whether followers of Judaism still expect the Messiah to come. Some still do. Members of the Orthodox wing of Judaism pray daily for the advent of the Messiah, but most of the Conservative and Reform wings do not have the expectation of a divine, individual messiah to come and set all wrong things right. Probably the majority of followers of Judaism hold no such illusion.

However, as I thought more about this, it became evident that what I wanted to express was not the “need for a new illusion” but the need for maintaining an idea for humankind – a myth for the future, if you will.

Consider the Jewish concept of a messiah who will come and set things right. The earliest concept was not that an individual messiah would come with the supernatural power of Yahveh to accomplish a reign of justice, love, and light, but that it would be accomplished on earth, in historical time, by a people chosen not for privilege but for responsibility. Look at Isaiah 2 or Micah 4:

And it shall come to pass in the last days
that the mountain of the Lord’s house
Shall be established in the top of the mountains
and shall be exalted above the hills;
And all nations shall flow unto it.
And many people shall go and say,
Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
To the house of the God of Jacob
And he will teach us of his ways,
And we will walk in his paths;
For out of Zion shall go forth the law
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
And he shall judge among the nations,
And shall rebuke many people;
And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
And their spears into pruning-hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war any more.

But then came the centuries of oppression – Assyrians, Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians, Romans. There seemed no hope for a commonwealth of peace and justice. So in the immediate centuries before the common era, hope was given up for justice to be achieved by human hands. So in place of a redeeming people in history, the disheartened and discouraged turned to the dream of a messiah beyond history who would redeem humankind. This dream carried over into Christian thought and theology in the prediction that Christ would come again from the skies to redeem his people.

This is still the dream, the ideal, or the illusion of many millions of people – a myth of the future. Many have been the predictions. The early Christians, Paul, e.g., thought Christ would come again soon, in the lifetimes of many then living. In the ensuing Christian centuries, many dates have been set, all wrong. Many preparations made, all futile. As T.S. Eliot perceived, in human affairs,

“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.”

Consider another example of the future myth – the Puritans who colonized New England. The early settlers were not just escaping religious persecution in England. They cherished a myth of the future. They would establish a Bible Commonwealth, a Light on the Hill. One wrote, “Know this place, where the Lord will create a new Heaven and a new earth in new churches and a new commonwealth together.” (see Drumond, p. 54)

American church historian Roland Bainton noted, “New England might better be called New Canaan. They came not so much to transplant England as to build in the wilderness the New Israel. ‘The Lord God our Governor,’ affirmed the early Puritans.” (p. 215, COLLECTED PAPERS)

But in their narrow Calvinistic pattern, they persecuted dissenters, hanged witches in Salem, expelled Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and other dissenters. They held for awhile to a dream of their Bible Commonwealth, but did not know or ignored the reality that no one religion had all the truth. When any zealot or intolerant religious group believes he or they have all the truth, whether located in Jerusalem, Rome, Mecca, Geneva, Boston, Salt Lake City, or Lynchburg, then

“Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the shadow.”

I read a story about “four young German artists who once set out to paint at the same time the same landscape in Tivoli near Rome. They were close friends, came from similar backgrounds and had received the same art school training. They promised one another that they would copy the landscape as faithfully as possible so as to represent nature with accuracy and objectivity. yet as could have been expected, they produced four very different pictures.” (Dubos, SO HUMAN AN ANIMAL, p. 118).

When will dogmatic religionists learn this is a truth of religious experience?

But the dangers of illusions are not limited to the record of religions. Consider that 19th century American dream of “Manifest Destiny.” The wagon trains were heading west and southwest. Riches were opening up. The land belonged to Indians, Mexico, England. But we told England “54/40 or fight,” so much of Oregon and Washington became ours. Texas, the southwest and California belonged to Mexico. So we went to war, won and gave Mexico $15 million for California, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arizona. Treaties signed by Indian tribes in good faith were worth nothing when their lands became attractive. So we betrayed, dispossessed, killed, or confined the native Americans. Even then, the acquisitive patriots, lured by land and power, said that it was “manifest destiny” that Central America to Panama and Cuba should be ours. And I’m afraid that dream, that illusion, is still nurtured and that the price will be much blood, treasure, and deceit.

“Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow.”

Consider the shattered dream of Woodrow Wilson for a League of Nations which would outlaw war. Even after the blood and suffering of World War I – no great power treated with ... his ideals ....

Within the memory of most of us is the ideal of a United Nations to eliminate the scourge of war. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Was it just a fantasy to think that nations, particularly the powerful, would think beyond their own self-interest? The record shows that. Or is it a more foolish and deadly illusion to believe and act in the belief that war and arming for war will bring about peace and justice? Shall we give up our illusion of a world of peace? Shall we turn to the fantasy of a supernatural messiah – who will arrive, spark Armageddon, and in the battle, the saved will be saved, and the damned will be damned? That is a myth of the future that has no human appeal, justice, mercy, or reason.

Consider the Jewish messianic concept again. If I am correctly informed, most followers of Judaism today do not expect that the Messiah, a person, will come to set things right. The ancient ideal, the future myth of Isaiah, prevails. That the commonwealth of righteousness and peace will be established in history and all nations will come to it.

Is it the impossible dream? We better not acquiesce in its impossibility. That path is the hopeless way. The Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes, wrote,

“Societies are sick when they accept that history – the history we have made – and words – the words we have made – are finished, complete, perfect, and that the correct answers must be imposed by orthodox judges on the totality of the culture. Societies are healthy when they accept that history and language are unfinished business – our unfinished business – and bring questions and skepticism to bear on that unsatisfaction.” (CONTEXT, Regis College)

Thus I believe we need no new illusion, but the old ethical proclamations of the Hebrew prophets, never yet realized, but still the dream. A Bible scholar quotes a Russian writer, Lermontov, “I’m sorry but people have been fed on sweets too long and it has ruined their disposition. Bitter medicines and harsh truths are needed now.” Then Dr. Hans Wolff continues (MICAH THE PROPHET),

“Such were the sentiments also of lonely Hebrew prophets like Amos, Isaiah, Micah, and Jeremiah. The people of God have not only grown complacent but actually take advantage of their neighbors. They follow after false gods; lust after each other’s property; oppress the weak, women and children; and follow their rulers into foreign alliances and wars.”

A psychoanalyst wrote, “Inherent in human thought is a tendency to create ideal images, to stabilize and elaborate them, however vaguely and unstably, to search the environment for their counterparts, and to perceive and assess the environment (and the self) in terms of correspondence to these ideal images.”

More simply stated, there is power in imaging. It is recognized in some branches of illness, where imaging recovery strongly enough has curing force. In athletics where a high jumper holds the image of clearing the bar before starting down the runway, there is a better chance of succeeding.

We need to hold the image of peace, of justice. In the world that beats on our doors with bad news of international conflict and domestic troubles, that is difficult. But without that image, that old dream of the prophets, we will be vulnerable to despair, disinterest, and fail to be among those who will persist in each his/her own way to make the ideal come closer to the real.

In the ancient Homeric legend of Ulysses, Tennyson captured in that figure the human pilgrimage, wandering, battered, scarred, old, yet coming home to Utica and winning over old foes -

“We are not now that
strength which in the old days
moved heaven and earth; that
which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts
Made weak by time and fate,
but strong in will
to strive, to seek, to find
and not to yield.”