poses a problem, though. In its emphasis on loving Christ, Christianity is the most bhaktic of the world's religions—bhakti being (in Hinduism's four yogas) the way to God through love—whereas I am primarily the jnanic type that gets mileage primarily through knowing God. Interestingly, that makes Christianity the most challenging of all the religions I've tried to work my way into. Jnanic Christians do exist, it's just that you have to hunt for them. The Church fathers were heavily jnanic. They are not read much anymore, but it was they who gave Christianity the theological sinews that have powered it. Anyway, I like challenges. Perhaps working with Christianity will round out a flat side in my personality.
If it does, that will be all to the good, but having touched on the four yogas—the way to God through knowledge, love, work, and meditation—I want to put in a word for my own primary yoga, the first of the four. The knowledge it works with is not rational knowledge. It has nothing to do with quantity of information or logical dexterity—the kind universities tend to prize. It is, rather, an intuitive awareness of things, a discernment of the way things are. What could be more important or interesting than that? In any case, that is the direction of my religious search. Religion for me is the search for the Real, and the effort to approximate one's life to it. Such approximation should be easy because the Real is so real, but in fact it is difficult, because we are so unreal. “So phony” is the slang way to put it.
BENEKE Have you been much involved with religious institutions over the years?
SMITH No, I haven't. For one thing they take time—G. B. Shaw said the worst thing about socialism was that it takes too many evenings. And beyond that, institutions are ambiguous. They bring out the bad in people along with the good; I don't know any institution, religious or otherwise, that is pretty through and through. But it has occurred to me of late that in remaining aloof from the institutional side of religion I've been something like a parasite. I live by the truth of the enduring religions, but I've done precious little to help the institutions that have kept those truths alive. I am working now on changing that—trying to repay some of my debt to these religions—and Christianity (as the faith I was born into and am currently focusing on) is the natural place to pitch in.
So I am going to church again. To resurrect a phrase from the 1960s, it feels like I'm “walking the talk” more. As for which church, a friend who knows me well says, “Huston, you are the only Confucian Methodist I know. The only reason you stay with the Methodist Church is filial piety and ancestor worship. It keeps you connected with your parents.” There is something to that. As I say, my friend knows me well. But while I hold no special brief for the Methodist denomination or even Christianity vis-à-vis the other world religions, it's the tradition I was born into. And Christianity does house profundities; that's beyond question. So I am exploring them. That is a long answer to why I read the Bible this morning.
BENEKE One of the major themes of your work is the idea that behind the major religious traditions lies a deep truth that most educated secular people do not understand. It is a metaphysical truth about the universe and eternity, which involves seeing the eternal in the temporal, and seeing all the universe as a manifestation of eternity. This consciousness of the world puts one's own personality and all its accidental qualities, like gender and nationality, in a different perspective, and alters one's orientation to life. I sense that you want passionately to convey this to people.
SMITH Fair statement. As I suggested earlier, what is more important than the way things are? Sometimes when I give a talk I discover from questions that the audience is only really interested in social issues. I agree that these are important, and though we should all do more, I pay my dues on that front, I think. My wife and I were charter members of the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE) in St. Louis in the 1950s. I do everything I can for the Tibetans, and my book One Nation Under God: The Triumph of the Native American Church is on the injustice of the Supreme Court's infamous decision that stripped that Church of its constitutional rights.
Still, isn't it also important to find out the way things are? Religion has many facets, but if you skip the question of what finally exists, it looks pretty much like wheel-spinning to me, and it's hard for me to think of its practitioners as really serious about life's quest. Even practical dealings call for knowing the lay of the land, so to speak. Orientation. Life requires it if it is to be lived well, and orientation derives from knowing the nature of the universe.
Beyond all that, if what exists is in the end incredibly wonderful, to know that fact infuses one's life with energy, call it psychic or spiritual energy, as you wish. Joseph Campbell made that point when he wrote, “It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” I agree with that assertion, while adding that, at that level, myth and religion are indistinguishable. So beyond the minimal payoff of knowing where you are—the payoff of orientation—if where you are turns out to be breathtakingly beautiful, how much greater the reward that comes from knowing —seeing—that.
BENEKE Okay, so where are we? What is the lay of our land?
SMITH It sounds glib when I put it into words—as bland as E = MC2—but the truth is that absolute perfection reigns. In addition to being glib, it sounds dogmatic when I say it that categorically, but please understand that I see myself as basically a transmitter, reporting what the intellectual and spiritual giants of the past pretty much attest to in unison. Arthur Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being—one of the classics of intellectual history—says that up to the late eighteenth century, when the scientific worldview began to take over, virtually every great sage and prophet the world over saw reality as a vast hierarchy ranging from the barest entities at the bottom, which barely escape nonbeing, all the way up to the ens perfectissimum, perfect being, at the top. My studies confirm this report.
I admit that it sounds outlandish to say that absolute perfection reigns, but I have two arguments in its defense. First, Einstein said that if quantum mechanics is true, the world is crazy. Well, experiments since his day have confirmed quantum mechanics, so the world is crazy—crazy from the standpoint of what our senses tell us the world is like. We accept that verdict because we have to; it comes from science. But when the mystics make the same point about the world in its reach for values, we back off because they can't prove their claims.
Look at Bosnia, we say, or the Holocaust; how are you going to square them with absolute perfection? Well, in something of the way a physicist would try to explain to an eight-year-old that the ratio of solid matter to space in the chair he is sitting on is of the order of a baseball to a ballpark, which is to say, not easily. But truth is not easy or obvious in religion any more than in physics. In both we need to get beyond the third grade.
My second rejoinder to people who dismiss absolute perfection out of hand is to point out that if you do that it leads to life being incoherent and not making sense. Either we settle for its not making sense, or we press to the hilt the possibility that it is the way it should be.
BENEKE Even a tumor in your lungs?
SMITH Yes, if we can see that tumor in its total context. We are back to the point that religion takes up where our routine reactions to life leave off. At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome. We don't see the complete picture.
Eighteen months ago our oldest daughter died of sarcoma, one of cancer's most vicious forms, though what cancer isn't vicious? The anguish our family experienced was like nothing any of us had remotely known before.
BENEKE Did you have doubts about the perfection of the universe? Were you angry at the universe?
SMITH Not angry. But of course I couldn't feel perfection then. Or more precisely,
