The Scapegoat
This sometimes gruesome story of the Hebrew trek to Babylon after the fall of the temple (2 Kings 25:8-11 and 2 Chronicles 20) and of life during the Babylonian captivity mirrors the Bible’s most violent and brutal descriptions enunciated in Lamentations. It is Breen’s only first person story, told by Abba,6 to his grandson. Perplexed at their fate, the Hebrews try to make sense of their misfortune and hear one elder compare the consequences of the sins of Israel to the mark of Cain. As a forgotten people they attempt a complex ritual sacrifice involving two goats to bring JHWH back to them. The first goat is successfully sacrificed to JHWH, but the second intended for Azazel7 escapes leading to additional hardships. The desperate Israelites engage in a crescendo of sacrifices which fail to bring divine forgiveness. At last the sudden overnight appearance of an obelisk at the edge of their village heralds a series of unexpected events again displaying the metaphysic of opposites.
The Last Anchorite8
Breen departs from the manuscript of the Bible starting with this story of a young 14th century Irish woman seduced by a man from whom she hears and then repeats “a blasphemy of the Holy Ghost” from which there is no divine forgiveness. When she learns of her eternal damnation, she pleads to become an anchorite, wherein she will be sealed in a 10 foot cube cell at the Church of the Blessed Virgin for life, without offering an explanation to the Bishop, who nonetheless agrees to permit her seclusion. Breen’s descriptions of her isolation are horrific, including the fact that the only opening to the outside world is a slit (called a squint) in one wall looking into the Church. She becomes famous for her sacrifice ostensibly to the Church and her community and receives many gifts from her grateful admirers. Towards the conclusion of the story she learns the Church is turning away from such martyrdom, and Breen relates her tragic end.
The Lake of Fire Church
In this story set in the near future, a traveling evangelist named Ahab Bale9 and his wife are given a gold charm – the saharon – to support their mission by a poor, elderly follower named Anna Faunel10. They sell the priceless piece, once touched by the infant hand of Jesus, for $100,000,000 at auction and use the proceeds to fund an electronic ministry which becomes the greatest in America. Events in the world and in Christianity portend the story of Revelation, and Ahab decides to deliver the most important sermon of all time. Despite warnings from his aide, Micah,11 Ahab delivers his millenarial sermon full of gruesome descriptions of the fate of non-believers and half-believers. An ending worthy of a horror film completes the tale.
(3rd continuation next post)
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6Abba is the Aramaic word for Father.
7Azazel in Jewish legends was a demon to whom the ancient rite of Yom Kippur (day of Atonement), a scapegoat was sent bearing the sins of the Hebrews (from Wikipedia).
9In 1 Kings 16:29-34, Ahab was the wicked king of Israel who married Jezebel and eventually worshipped Baal instead of Jahweh.
10In Luke 2:37, Anna Phanuel was a prophetess descended from the tribe of Asher, who at age 84, with St. Simeon, was witness to the infant Jesus at the temple of Jerusalem. In ancient Hebrew, saharon means a crescent moon or crescent shaped ornament (Bible Hub website).
11Micah was the sixth of twelve minor prophets in the Hebrew Bible (and has an eponymous book in the Old Testament). His prophecies were directed at leaders in Samaria and Jerusalem particularly regarding injustice toward the unfortunate, but also included the foretelling of the birth of Christ and the coming of the millennial kingdom.
This science fiction-like short fictional piece imagines the gods of humanity as members of a divine club called the Cosmogony Society meeting on a distant planet. The treasures of the club are modern and prehistoric hunting trophies, living tapestries, and its polyglot library with precious original religious and philosophical masterpieces. The main speaker, a god named Hadad,1 recounts in brief the narrative of the Old and New Testaments. We are told that when the gods divided up Earth, JHWH insisted he would create humans as immortal beings (by their eating fruit from the Tree of Life) in a separate paradise (Eden). Hadad mocks JHWH who was repetitively surprised by human disobedience which he punished by driving them out of paradise and forcing them deeper and deeper into the realms of the other gods where they become progressively morally depraved. However Hadad seems to express admiration for JHWH’s solution of sending a deus ex machina2 to redeem mankind.
At one point, Cain comes upon Adam’s image originating from Sheol 4 but seen in a pool of water at the root of the mountain, Ekur.3 Their conversation is perhaps the most poignant of Breen’s entire book as Adam pleads with Cain to find a means of redemption and hope for humanity in the face of inevitable sin, death, and damnation. It is also here that Cain asks Adam about the mark on his forehead and is told, “It is a strange mark, it is one I have not seen before. I do not know it. Did God place it on you? If He did, then joy and sorrow and day and night are yours.”5 There is so much to this rich story, including the unfolding significance of Cain’s mark of opposites, but I will leave it for the reader to discover this treasure for himself of herself.
Modern Myths: Stories from the Bible by Michael Breen, published 2018.
Mike is a theist and religious, but not a churchgoer, nor particularly attached to a denomination. In addition to philosophy and theology he has an interest in mythology and psychology. He has been working on what he calls ‘counter-intuitive theology’ wherein the world is viewed as dominated by opposites (e.g. good and evil) and pervaded by a ‘paradoxical’ God who may not be aware of his omniscience and who is not fixed or static, but in the process of ‘becoming.’ God in his model is an invisible being manifested in time and space, and amoral, even reckless, perhaps without being conscious of this.
In his theory of the Forms, Plato argues that not only are the ideal versions of everyday entities real, but that they are more real than those entities themselves. The perceptual world, he believes, is not fully real nor fully unreal, but continually changing and ultimately unknowable. Only the unchanging Ideas are real and knowable, though the latter only with great effort. In Plato’s own words, from Timaeus:
For myself, I think Plato is at least partly correct to assign ultimate reality to the Forms. At the level of some concepts – for example mathematical ones – existence seems to be independent of the human mind. Just as we assume that the universe was real prior to our existence even though we were not here to witness it; similarly, it is reasonable to assume should humans become extinct, other rational beings will be able to recognize the concept of a perfect circle or the number 2. Plato seems to be the first philosopher to endorse a more expansive view of nonphysical reality – the principle that not just ‘Thought” but specific ‘thoughts’ or Ideas have ‘being.’ In a different sense, Plato’s Forms represent the never quite reachable limits of perceptual reality, such as we understand in a differential equation or the notion of infinity.
