Hi everyone,
There are — very generally speaking — two groups of people who listen to/read Beautiful Possibility. There are those who read it mostly for the discussion of the possibility of John and Paul as lovers, and those who read it for the mythological thruline that frames that possibility. (And hopefully, at least some of you who are in both groups.)
This week, let’s feed the heads of those of you who are here for the mythological part of things.
In Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we talked in very broad strokes about how the story of “suffer now/rewards later” became Western civilization’s first mythological “earthquake.” And we also talked about how for over two thousand years, “suffer now/rewards later” defined Western culture, before being disrupted by only the second-ever mythological earthquake in human history — The Beatles and the Love Revolution, and the new story they created during the 1960s.
In a footnote in episode 1:1 Kairos, I mentioned the book The Swerve, by Harvard historian Stephen Greenblatt.
Here’s that footnote again:
It might be tempting to offer the Renaissance [rather than the Sixties] as the second culture-changing earthquake in human history, and when it comes to scientific and intellectual thought, a case can be made. But remember, most people still couldn’t read and didn’t have access to these intellectual and artistic breakthroughs. What they did have access to — every Sunday — is what the Church told them, and that was “suffer now, rewards later.”
It’s also worth noticing that a lot of the great art of the Renaissance was commissioned by the Church as essentially marketing material, thus reinforcing rather than challenging the “suffer now, rewards later” foundational mythology.
Chapter four in Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve (W.W. Norton, 2011) offers a detailed look at the development of “suffer now, rewards later” as it was spread through the teachings of the Church, although the book as a whole misses the mythological element — as most history books do — and thus, in my opinion, vastly overclaims the impact of the Renaissance on the culture as a whole.
There wasn’t room in Beautiful Possibility to include any passages from Greenblatt’s book. And that’s unfortunate, because as I suggested in the footnote, chapter four of The Swerve is an articulate analysis of how “suffer now/rewards later” was sold to the culture as a whole.
I highly recommend The Swerve overall, despite its [imo] overclaim of the Renaissance as a riverbed-changing cultural earthquake (he doesn’t, obviously, use this metaphor).
For one thing, Greenblatt’s framing device for his larger theme is the story of a medieval book collector (back in the times when getting a copy of a book meant copying it out by hand) and his search for a lost manuscript. That part of the book is a fascinating look at the way in which scribes more or less saved the entire canon of classical literature that we take for granted today.
But for our purposes here on The Abbey, it’s the chapter on “suffer now/rewards later” that matters. So I thought maybe those of you who are especially interested in the mythological part of Beautiful Possibility might like to read some short excerpts of chapter four of The Swerve, along with a few of my annotations.
A meta note:
We’re going to do this upside down from the way it’s usually done. Instead of putting my writing in the main text and the research in the footnotes, the excerpts from The Swerve will be below in italics, and my comments will be in the footnotes.
I’m going topsy-turvy here for a couple of reasons.
First, I’ve already said my piece on all of this in Part One of Beautiful Possibility. The point of this is to offer you a complimentary and expanded perspective on the same topic from another scholar with a different perspective.
And second, this is a way to draw your attention to the footnotes in Beautiful Possibility — which many of you who listen rather than read have, apparently, not yet found. This Skipping Of The Footnotes situation is unfortunate, because in a very real way, the deeper story of Beautiful Possiiblity is told in the footnotes, rather than the main body of the episode.
Also, for those of you who are here mostly for the lovers possibility, the footnotes are where I tend to put material that’s a maybe touch too provocative to include in the main episode — and that’s likely to be even more true in Part Two.
So here’s a chance to practice the habit of reading footnotes. Substack makes it easy — you can just hover over the little number and the footnote will pop out.
Okay, so with that said, I yield the floor to Dr. Greenblatt—
“Instead of the Gnostic insistence that spiritual realization must take place here, now, in this lifetime,1 conventional Christianity came to emphasize faith in an indefinitely postponed future revelation, be it an apocalypse on Earth, or some posthumous destiny for those now known not as gnostics or knowers, but as believers. The very terms reveal their underpinnings: gnostics know because they are united with that which they know, and this unity is knowledge. But believers are by definition separated from what they believe.2 The preliminary (faith) won out over the culmination (gnosis) and drove it away. Dualism won out over gnostic nondualism: this is the real story of early Christianity.”
“What worked for the saint in the early sixth century would, as monastic rules made clear, work for others. In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.”3
“In pagan Rome, the most extravagant version of this pursuit of pleasure came together in the gladiatorial arena with the most extravagant infliction and endurance of pain. If Lucretius offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pleasure principle, Christianity offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pain principle.
Early Christians, brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, the sinfulness of mankind, and the anger of a just Father, found the attempt to cultivate pleasure manifestly absurd and dangerous. At best a trivial distraction, pleasure was at worst a demonic trap, figured in medieval art by those alluring women beneath whose gowns one can glimpse reptilian claws. The only life truly worth imitating-the life of Jesus-bore ample witness to the inescapable presence in mortal existence of sadness and pain, but not of pleasure. The earliest pictorial depictions of Jesus were uniform in their melancholy sobriety. As every pious reader of Luke’s Gospel knew, Jesus wept, but there were no verses that described him laughing or smiling, let alone pursuing pleasure.4
It was not difficult for Christians of the fifth and sixth centuries to find reasons to weep; the cities were falling apart, the fields were soaked in the blood of dying soldiers, robbery and rape were rampant. There had to be some explanation for the catastrophic behavior of human beings over so many generations, as if they were incapable of learning anything from their historical experience. Theology provided an answer deeper and more fundamental than this or that flawed individual or institution: humans were by nature corrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve, they richly deserved every miserable catastrophe that befell them; they needed to be punished; they had coming to them an endless diet of pain. Indeed, it was only through this pain that a small number could find the narrow gate to salvation.
The most ardent early believers in this doctrine, those fired by an explosive mix of fear, hope, and fierce enthusiasm, were determined to make the pain to which all humankind was condemned their active choice. In doing so, they hoped to pay to an angry God the dues of suffering that He justly and implacably demanded. They possessed something of the martial hardness admired by traditional Roman culture, but, with a few exceptions, the goal was not the achievement of Stoical indifference to pain. On the contrary. Their whole project depended on experiencing an intense sensitivity to hunger, thirst, and loneliness. And when they whipped themselves with thorny branches or struck themselves with jagged stones, ,they made no effort to suppress their cries of anguish. Those cries were part of the payment, the atonement that would, if they were successful, enable them to recover in the afterlife the happiness that Adam and Eve had lost.”
This harsh treatment was the only way of the pursuit of pleasure actually being realized by more than a tiny privileged group of philosophers who had withdrawn from public life. People would have to believe, at a bare minimum, that there was an overarching providential design — not only in the state but in the very structure of the universe itself and they would have to believe as well that the norms by which they are meant to regulate their pursuit of pleasure and hence discipline their behavior were reinforced by this providential design. The way that this reinforcement would work would be through a belief in rewards and punishments in an afterlife. Otherwise, in [Thomas] More’s view, it would be impossible drastically to reduce, as he wished, both the terrible punishments and the extravagant rewards that kept his own unjust society in order.”
FOOTNOTES:
You might recognise this as the “life is worth living here, in the present day” ethos of the Love Revolution that we talked about in Part One. “Live for now” didn’t win the day back in the time of the Gnostics, but it won the day in the Sixties, and in Western culture ever since.
Here’s Paul McCartney in 1966—
“One thing that modern philosophy, existentialism and things like that, has taught people, is that you have to live now,” says Paul. “You have to feel now. We live in the present, we don’t have time to figure out whether we are right or wrong, whether we are immoral or not. We have to be honest, be straight, and then live, enjoying and taking what we can.”
— John Lennon and Paul McCartney, interview w/ Michael Lydon for Newsweek: Lennon and McCartney: Songwriters — A Portrait from 1966 (unpublished)
This is the foundation for why the Love Revolution — sparked, shaped and led by The Beatles — is a mythological earthquake. The central revolutionary principle of the Love Revolution was that we have the right to live a life according to our individual values, preferences and sensibilities, even if our choices are outside of what the culture deems “normal” and acceptable. And that idea — arguably the single most radical idea humans have ever proposed — is in turn built on the belief that life is valuable in the here and now, not just as a prelude to a promised afterlife.
These ideas of living for now and individual expression have always existed, of course, but only in fringe movements. The Sixties is the first time those concepts of living for the now and according to our own individual preferences reached the mainstream in a widespread way. And those ideas have formed the basis for our definition of “good life” ever since.
Without any exaggeration whatsoever, every single one of us has had our individual lives defined by The Beatles, and the Love Revolution that they sparked and shaped — whether we lived through the Sixties or not and whether we’re consciously aware of it or not. That’s why it matters so much that we heal the wound at the heart of this story.
This is the distinction made between the old mythology that required an institutional religious authority to speak to God on our behalf, and the Love Revolution’s belief that there should be no middle man between us and the Divine (in whatever way we choose to use that word). As with the idea of living individually and in the present moment, direct contact with God simply wasn’t socially acceptable in any widespread way prior to the 1960s.
The Love Revolution’s embrace of music, cannabis/LSD, meditation and Eastern spirituality as vehicles for higher consciousness led to the widespread acceptance of “spiritual but not religious” as arguably the dominant “religion” in contemporary culture — which in turn made it a lot harder for the powers-that-be to control the culture and get people to work for little-to-no share in the rewards of that labour — which in turn is why the powers-that-be are still hanging on so tightly to institutional religious authority as a way of turning the world back to the way things used to be, before The Beatles changed literally everything.
Remember, mythology shapes history more than history shapes mythology — which is why it matters so much that we understand at least the basics of how mythology works in a culture. And again, why it matters that we treat the story of The Beatles with respect and care, so that there’s love and collaboration — rather than competition and rivalry, — at its centre.
What Greenblatt calls “one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West” is another phrase for the mythological, riverbed-changing earthquake from paganism to “suffer now/rewards later.” See, I’m not making this stuff up…. ;-)
Here’s a good place to remind you again that when we talk about the Christian roots of “suffer now/rewards later,” we’re not talking about the actual teachings of Jesus (and neither, I think, is Greenblatt). We’re talking about the way those teachings were twisted by the powers-that-be into a means of holding onto political power by controlling the common folk and keeping them (us) from revolting at the suffering and deprivation most people were expected to endure In exchange for the vague promise of an afterlife in heaven, while a tiny percentage of privileged land owners used up the vast majority of the available resources to live in splendor (sound familiar?).
I don’t think I’m saying anything new by pointing out that had the historical Jesus been around in the Sixties, he’d have been hanging out not with the people burning Beatles records, but with the Flower Children (and probably with the Fabs themselves).
And THAT gives me the opportunity to finally use the meme I couldn’t find a spot for in Part One—
Until next week,
Peace, love and strawberry fields,
Faith ☮️
PS If you’re new to Beautiful Possibility and want to understand why we’re talking about all of this on a substack dedicated to The Beatles, you can find the answer beginning with episode 1:1 Kairos.
A full list of episodes is available here:
https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/beautiful-possibility
