Superstitions

Friend Xerxes, in his latest column, conflates, or at least does not clearly distinguish, superstition, ritual, and placebo. Superstition = ritual = placebo = sympathetic magic.

Not so. These are all different issues.

Rituals are not superstitions. A wedding, for example, or the coronation of a king, is not superstition. Rituals have a practical purpose that is often easy to understand. One does not normally get married out of superstition.

A placebo is not superstition. Doctors do not prescribe placebos because they are superstitious, and the patient does not need to be superstitious in order for it to work. Placebos serve a known practical purpose. And, if some superstition has a placebo effect, it is not superstition.

And as for what superstition actually is—I guess that is already implicit. We call actions that serve no known or understood practical purpose “superstitions.” Perhaps we say “good luck” or “bad luck”; but isn’t that just saying, “unspecified or unknown benefits”?

Of course, the conflation of ritual with superstition is intrinsically anti-Catholic. In his column, Xerxes expressly cites the Catholic sacramental of holy water, and the sacrament of communion, as superstitions.

They obviously are not for Catholics. Catholics understand them as producing specific benefits. They are not done for “good luck.” To call them superstitions is to say that you do not believe in Catholicism.

Once when a fellow instructor was scoffing at the Korean tradition of pung su chi ri—feng shui—as superstition, I asked her to define what she meant by the term “superstition.” She said “beliefs not supported by science.” Xerxes suggests something similar with his concluding statement: “Even in a supposedly scientific age, we remain creatures of myth and wonder.”

But this is not an adequate definition. Well before empirical science, philosophers condemned superstition; as do the Buddhist scriptures. One example: it was a superstitious Irish practice to avoid biting on the host; one had to let it dissolve in the mouth. Biting was wounding Jesus.

This was superstition, like stepping on a crack to break your mother’s back: it innocently violated correct Catholic theology.

In other words, “superstition” is whatever violates your accepted world view. If your religion is “scientism,” then things that cannot be explained scientifically are superstitious. If it is Buddhism, then things that do not fit the Buddhist dharma are superstitious.

Just in passing, having studied pung si chi ri, it makes good sense to me. It is “unscientific” because it attends to our emotional nature in planning our surroundings, and science is incapable of taking emotion into account. But the true value of feng shui or pung su is immediately apparent on entering a Korean coffee shop, a Japanese garden, or a Chinese restaurant.

In sum, “superstition” is a term we use to describe some practice for which we cannot see the justification, based on our world view, our religion.

This being so, it is judicious to honour superstitions, all else being equal.

I will not pass under a ladder if I can avoid it. I also will not write anybody’s name in red ink, a practice I learned in Korea. I will not stick my chopsticks upright. I will knock on wood.

It is arrogant to assume any given “superstition” is wrong. I am reminded of Chesterton’s advice. One must never take down a fence merely because you do not know why it is there. To be justified in taking down a fence, you had better first know exactly why it is there.

Friend Xerxes, in his latest column, conflates, or at least does not clearly distinguish, superstition, ritual, and placebo. Superstition = ritual = placebo = sympathetic magic.

Not so. These are all different issues.

Rituals are not superstitions. A wedding, for example, or the coronation of a king, is not superstition. Rituals have a practical purpose that is often easy to understand. One does not normally get married out of superstition.

A placebo is not superstition. Doctors do not prescribe placebos because they are superstitious, and the patient does not need to be superstitious in order for it to work. Placebos serve a known practical purpose. And, if some superstition has a placebo effect, it is not superstition.

And as for what superstition actually is—I guess that is already implicit. We call actions that serve no known or understood practical purpose “superstitions.” Perhaps we say “good luck” or “bad luck”; but isn’t that just saying, “unspecified or unknown benefits”?

Of course, the conflation of ritual with superstition is intrinsically anti-Catholic. In his column, Xerxes expressly cites the Catholic sacramental of holy water, and the sacrament of communion, as superstitions.

They obviously are not for Catholics. Catholics understand them as producing specific benefits. They are not done for “good luck.” To call them superstitions is to say that you do not believe in Catholicism.

Once when a fellow instructor was scoffing at the Korean tradition of pung su chi ri—feng shui—as superstition, I asked her to define what she meant by the term “superstition.” She said “beliefs not supported by science.” Xerxes suggests something similar with his concluding statement: “Even in a supposedly scientific age, we remain creatures of myth and wonder.”

But this is not an adequate definition. Well before empirical science, philosophers condemned superstition; as do the Buddhist scriptures. One example: it was a superstitious Irish practice to avoid biting on the host; one had to let it dissolve in the mouth. Biting was wounding Jesus.

This was superstition, like stepping on a crack to break your mother’s back: it innocently violated correct Catholic theology.

In other words, “superstition” is whatever violates your accepted world view. If your religion is “scientism,” then things that cannot be explained scientifically are superstitious. If it is Buddhism, then things that do not fit the Buddhist dharma are superstitious.

Just in passing, having studied pung si chi ri, it makes good sense to me. It is “unscientific” because it attends to our emotional nature in planning our surroundings, and science is incapable of taking emotion into account. But the true value of feng shui or pung su is immediately apparent on entering a Korean coffee shop, a Japanese garden, or a Chinese restaurant.

In sum, “superstition” is a term we use to describe some practice for which we cannot see the justification, based on our world view, our religion.

This being so, it is judicious to honour superstitions, all else being equal.

I will not pass under a ladder if I can avoid it. I also will not write anybody’s name in red ink, a practice I learned in Korea. I will not stick my chopsticks upright. I will knock on wood.

It is arrogant to assume any given “superstition” is wrong. I am reminded of Chesterton’s advice. One must never take down a fence merely because you do not know why it is there. To be justified in taking down a fence, you had better first know exactly why it is there.

Friend Xerxes, in his latest column, conflates, or at least does not clearly distinguish, superstition, ritual, and placebo. Superstition = ritual = placebo = sympathetic magic.

Not so. These are all different issues.

Rituals are not superstitions. A wedding, for example, or the coronation of a king, is not superstition. Rituals have a practical purpose that is often easy to understand. One does not normally get married out of superstition.

A placebo is not superstition. Doctors do not prescribe placebos because they are superstitious, and the patient does not need to be superstitious in order for it to work. Placebos serve a known practical purpose. And, if some superstition has a placebo effect, it is not superstition.

And as for what superstition actually is—I guess that is already implicit. We call actions that serve no known or understood practical purpose “superstitions.” Perhaps we say “good luck” or “bad luck”; but isn’t that just saying, “unspecified or unknown benefits”?

Of course, the conflation of ritual with superstition is intrinsically anti-Catholic. In his column, Xerxes expressly cites the Catholic sacramental of holy water, and the sacrament of communion, as superstitions. 

They obviously are not for Catholics. Catholics understand them as producing specific benefits. They are not done for “good luck.” To call them superstitions is to say that you do not believe in Catholicism. 

Once when a fellow instructor was scoffing at the Korean tradition of pung su chi ri—feng shui—as superstition, I asked her to define what she meant by the term “superstition.” She said “beliefs not supported by science.” Xerxes suggests something similar with his concluding statement: “Even in a supposedly scientific age, we remain creatures of myth and wonder.”

But this is not an adequate definition. Well before empirical science, philosophers condemned superstition; as do the Buddhist scriptures. One example: it was a superstitious Irish practice to avoid biting on the host; one had to let it dissolve in the mouth. Biting was wounding Jesus. 

This was superstition, like stepping on a crack to break your mother’s back: it innocently violated correct Catholic theology.

In other words, “superstition” is whatever violates your accepted world view. If your religion is “scientism,” then things that cannot be explained scientifically are superstitious. If it is Buddhism, then things that do not fit the Buddhist dharma are superstitious.

Just in passing, having studied pung si chi ri, it makes good sense to me. It is “unscientific” because it attends to our emotional nature in planning our surroundings, and science is incapable of taking emotion into account. But the true value of feng shui or pung su is immediately apparent on entering a Korean coffee shop, a Japanese garden, or a Chinese restaurant.

In sum, “superstition” is a term we use to describe some practice for which we cannot see the justification, based on our world view, our religion.

This being so, it is judicious to honour superstitions, all else being equal. 

I will not pass under a ladder if I can avoid it. I also will not write anybody’s name in red ink, a practice I learned in Korea. I will not stick my chopsticks upright. I will knock on wood.

It is arrogant to assume any given “superstition” is wrong. I am reminded of Chesterton’s advice. One must never take down a fence merely because you do not know why it is there. To be justified in taking down a fence, you had better first know exactly why it is there.

On Just Repeating Prayers Like a Trained Seal

 

Friend Xerxes, former left-wing political columnist, has eschewed politics. I suspect this is because he realized that the left-wing position has become indefensible. Why fasten himself to a dying animal? His latest column is about prayer. In a piece titled “Getting Beyond the Rituals,” he expresses the common Protestant objection to rote prayers and ritual generally. Instead, you are supposed to speak and do from the heart.

I was seduced when younger by this dismissal of rote prayer—after all, surely your heart can’t be in it? And the inevitable result was that I stopped praying. 

“What deadens us most to God's presence,” Xerxes’s source argues, “is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought… including the chatter of spoken prayer.”

Here “spoken prayer” is being conflated, Improperly, with rote prayer. St. Theresa of Avile would agree that “mental prayer” is better than praying out loud. But that, as the quotation goes on to make clear, is not what Frederick Beuchner, Xerxes’s source, means.

“I keep trying, and once or twice I have been conscious, but not conscious of anything, not even of myself. I have heard a stillness that encloses all sounds, stilled the way whiteness encloses all colors, stilled the way wordlessness encloses all words. I like to believe that once or twice, at times like those, I have bumbled my way into at least the outermost suburbs of the Truth that can never be told but only come upon, that can never be proved but only lived for and loved.”

And my Catholic objection is this: this is not prayer. He is necessarily not conscious, as he claims, of “God’s presence”: he is “not conscious of anything, not even of himself.” Whatever is happening, this allows for no personal relationship with God, which is what prayer is supposed to be about.

Moreover, this amounts, by his own admission, to praying only once of twice in your life. 

In other words, it is an alibi for forgetting about God.

“The Truth that can never be told?” A Truth beyond words? Jesus is the Word; and he is the only path.

I recently came across a map on the internet that sought to divide Europe into two zones: religious Europe and atheist Europe. I presume they had no particular religious axe to grind, but the line they drew was almost exactly the line between Catholic Europe and what had been, since the Reformation, Protestant Europe.

Being filled with the Spirit, being inspired, is great, but it does not stick around. And, without ritual, you are left with nothing. And no way to get it back.