‘Christ the Eternal Tao’ Review
My Introduction to the Tao
In my university pot smoking years, between Bukowski novels and on the way to and from Weather & Climate 101, I found myself very immersed in the text of the Tao te Ching. What a strange little book I’d found– it seemed to confirm everything I’d been looking for– a philosophical justification for my drifting idleness. Of course this was a tragic oversimplification of what the Tao was meant to convey, but I didn’t have the framework to really understand that on my first read.
I also liked it because it felt more exotic than my Protestant upbringing, while not seeming to make any claims that were definitively against that upbringing. In my view it appeared to be merely another perspective on what were ultimately indefinable truths.
Revisiting my copy from six years ago, I’m met with underlined sections whose relevance to my nineteen-year-old self I only vaguely remember:
“It is because of its emptiness that the vessel is useful”
“Advancing in the Tao seems like regression”
“Loss is not as bad as wanting more”
“No matter how much you manipulate / you can never possess the world”
The last two are the most telling– they spoke to me in my nihilist angst. I lacked confidence in my ability to secure a career post-grad, and my extra-curricular certainly did nothing to instill me with such.
I felt very aimless in school, and at times very angry at the lack of any inherent meaning in my day-to-day existence. The Tao arrived in order to explain to me that meaning existed even if I couldn’t locate it, and that a lack of order didn’t necessitate chaos or resentment. When I tried to explain to my parents that getting a job didn’t matter because “the Tao, man” they were understandably very unhappy. “Whatever,” I thought. “They don’t understand Eastern spirituality.” A few years later, while working as an airplane fuel technician, Yunan (an expatriate we were pretty certain was a Chinese spy) told me: “Don’t read that book, or you will become strange…” I asked what he meant, but he couldn’t find the words in English. It was around the time I started to make a return to Christianity, having harrowed some pretty insane depths in order to realize God was in fact realer than I could comprehend. I tried to explain to Yunan my thoughts on being, but he brushed them off. “Christians are so judge… Science will solve all man problem.” After this interaction it was clear to me that whether it was the Tao or Christ in question, he and I were on two opposing sides of the spectrum.
Christ the Eternal Tao, Arriving at a Very Peculiar and Perhaps Providential Time
As I matured in my faith, I became more interested in apologetics, and I found comparative theology a useful tool. After all, how can you defend something if you don’t know how it differs from everything else out there? I had seen a recommendation of the book Christ the Eternal Tao, and it seemed very exotic to me. I had no idea about Eastern Orthodoxy as I was still a Protestant, but a treatment of both Christianity and the beloved Tao of my youth intrigued me.
Early on I had noticed a tendency in the realm of comparative theology toward perennialism and relativism. At first, before re-entering Protestantism, I flirted with this idea, as it was very seductive. As mentioned before, I was enchanted with other religions enough to study and try to make sense of them, and I had then concluded that people are largely pulled to one or the other religion largely as a matter of birth and circumstance. I thought it folly to claim exclusivity in the possession of truth, because of the fact that we don’t choose which culture we’re born into. That was all before I had (what I believe to be) a series of very palpable experiences which confirmed to me the uniquely true nature of the claims Christ makes about himself, which set me down a road of further inquiry.
But my preference for Christianity as uniquely true was not merely a matter of this personal mystical experience– my experience only set me down the rabbit trail. When I dug into the sources, I found a consistent pattern which confirmed that Christianity demands exclusivity in terms of faith, and that syncretism (the combining of religions and religious practice) was non-negotiably refused as a Christian proposition. Fair enough– the Christian God is a jealous God. And yet everywhere there is this tendency, whether it be for the sake of politeness or a preference for the strange and foreign, toward a relativist, perennialist, syncretic view of religious truth.
What impressed me when I came across Hieromonk Damascene’s text is that from the introduction, there is a clear understanding of this tendency in comparative theology toward a relativist attitude, but Christ the Eternal Tao explicitly sets out to explain not how Taoism and Christianity are essentially the same religion at root, but how Taoism is an expression (albeit a naturalist one) of the Christian doctrine of the Logos, devoid of any explicit divine revelation given to its writer Lao Tzu. The Tao te Ching in Damascene’s text is then a preparatory, veiled experience of the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Not only is this claim not surprising to Christians– it also possesses a historical witness among Christian writers, for example in St. Justin Martyr, when he states: “The Greeks and barbarians who have philosophized rightly, by learning from the Logos in the order of creation, have in some sense become partakers of the Logos, though they knew it not by name.” — First Apology, 46 and “Whatever has been rightly said among men is the property of Christians, for it is the Logos who teaches all men, and those who have lived in accordance with reason have in some way been Christians, even if they were called by other names.”
Now this is of course a bold claim, and one not impressive to those outside of the Christian tradition who are perhaps skeptical of the claim’s validity. After all, couldn’t anyone claim “whatever is rightly said outside of my position, is actually secretly part of my position”? Perhaps so, but the claim becomes particularly striking when the comparison is examined closely, considering what each—Tao and Logos—reveals about the underlying reality, while noting that the Logos is a Person, not merely a principle.
Comparison of the Tao and the Logos
The Tao is subtle and resists a single definition, but could be defined as the ultimate reality defining all of existence, the way of nature, beyond human conceptualization, and is the source/ordering principle of the universe. The indefinability of the Tao is in some way essential to its character: it is essentially hidden from the understanding of men in its entirety, but in another sense is totally imminent and omnipresent. The first verse of the Tao te Ching states, “The [Tao] that can be named is not the eternal [Tao].”
Additionally, the Logos as defined by Christian doctrine is the person of Jesus Christ; a divine person, the Son of God the Father, through Whom all things were made, revealing and uniting God to man, imbuing all things with reason, giving all things their telos. John the Apostle says, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made.”
Funnily enough, before the term “Christianity” gained popularity, the burgeoning sect of those following Jesus of Nazareth had been simply called “Followers of The Way.” Damascene states, “The ancient character of the Tao or Way can be deciphered as ‘to follow the leader on the road.’” Damascene’s thesis, then, is that the metaphysical reality Lao-tzu called the Tao is fully revealed and personally manifested in Christ, the incarnate Logos.
But how can this be? Doesn’t it miss the point to claim to have found the Eternal Tao? After all, Taoism itself would not even claim such an intimate knowledge of something so transcendent as the Tao itself. Except the Christian claim is in many ways very compatible with even the Taoist conception of the Tao.
A Note on “Natural Theology” So-Called
Here it becomes indispensable to discuss the character of so-called natural theology. The Eastern Orthodox stance on natural theology, understood as the attempt to know God purely through reason, observation of the world, or philosophical reflection, is generally skeptical, holding that reason alone cannot bring us to knowledge of God, apart from divine grace and illumination.
Why do we bother mentioning natural theology here? Because in doing so, we help to temper the precise nature of our claim that Christ is the “Eternal Tao.” To say such is very bold, especially in light of the fact that the Tao te Ching itself seems to outright reject this very claim. If this is the case, our claim that the Tao can in fact be named in the divine person of the Logos would seem to be cut off at the knees as something simply impossible. However, we maintain that the Tao te Ching, by its very admission, attempts to point to something that transcends the mere human faculties of reason, observation, and philosophy, acknowledging the limitation of man. It embraces the paradox and contradiction in its project, and does not presume to have the tools to ever reach the same level of knowledge as something like the Roman Catholic approach to natural theology, in its assertion of a natural theology that can arrive at positive knowledge of the transcendent. The Taoist and Orthodox approach, then, would seem to be similar insofar as they realize the necessity of an apophatic, rather than a cataphatic, approach to theology. In this regard, Taoism can be regarded as a particularly self-conscious natural theology, insofar as this is possible.
A look into some of the verses of the Tao te Ching reveals what we mean. What I intuited as a nineteen-year-old unfamiliar with the Bible during my initial reading of the Tao I now feel I am able to explicate more fully as a result of my return to Christianity.
“It is because of its emptiness that the vessel is useful,” resonates with the humble spirit of one who has come to realize that the believer must be the vessel for the Holy Spirit, that “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Lao Tzu also states, “advancing in the Tao seems like regression,” which is not foreign to those who know “whom God loves He chastens” and in the words of Christ, “whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it,” and in the words of Paul, “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Beyond the imposition of an ethic of humble self-emptying and self-sacrifice for the sake of conforming to the Tao/Logos, there is also a recognition of that which is opposite to this: namely, vain striving and strife. “Loss is not as bad as wanting more,” could easily be said to be the inverse proverb of “godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it,” and “whoever loves money never has enough,” and “be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”
Finally, let us consider the words of the Tao: “No matter how much you manipulate / you can never possess the world.” Do these words not resonate fully with that Christian resolution to submit oneself totally, uncompromisingly, to God’s will, and the recognition that this world is passing away? Despite our greatest efforts and technological abundance, we cannot escape the way of things. The Scriptures say, “Consider what God has done: Who can straighten what he has made crooked? When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider this: God has made the one as well as the other, so that people may not find out anything that will be after them.” And again, “Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” And again, “we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.” And again, “as he came from his mother’s womb, so shall he go again; naked shall he return; and shall take nothing for his toil that he can carry in his hand.” And finally by the Word of God: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven… For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
And consider the contrary: that a man, by his conniving, should come into a position wherein he were able to for the course of his whole earthly life come into possession of everything he sees. What then would be the state of him? Would he have escaped the way of things? Certainly not, knowing the Scriptures say, “what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his soul?”
Of course these make up only a fraction of the connections in the ethic of the Tao and that put forth by the Logos, but it's enough to clarify that each of those above-quoted verses from the Tao resonated with me during that first reading, even though I did not know that the Scriptures themselves carried the same teachings. Like the prodigal son, I had to travel far from home before I learned what wisdom was to be found there all along.
Arriving Somewhere in Particular
But why not stay abroad? Why not become immersed in Taoism?
We have made the point ad nauseum elsewhere, but Christianity demands a necessarily particularist view of truth. Truth is a particular person, found in a particular place, appearing at a particular point in history. Not only that, but it demands exclusivity. This is quite scandalous to the very agreeable personalities out there that want to avoid offending others who may not share their same particular view.
Wouldn’t it be easier to affirm a relativist framework? Better yet– if the Tao is pointing toward what is true, why not remain in that ambiguity, if it at least is gesturing toward the full truth while still maintaining its incomplete grasp of it?
An appeal to relativism would be to mistake what is an essentially paradoxical feeling possessed by the Tao te Ching. The text is in no way relativist, although it has been mistaken for such in the Western world, as evidenced by teachers like Alan Watts. The Tao states: “The Way is rarely known; men only prize rare words… Those who know the Tao do not argue, those who argue do not know the Tao.” The mistaken assumption would be to interpret this as saying that any difference that exists in worldviews is not real, but it actually says the opposite. In reality, it is saying there is a clear difference between those who do and do not follow the Way, which necessitates difference in activity and/or worldview.
“In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of the Way, every day something is dropped.” Again, this would appear to prove the opposite of what it is really suggesting. If every day something is dropped, ought we assume that what is dropped is a particular stance toward what is true or what the way of things is? No– instead, we admit that in what is accumulated (knowledge of various worldviews) some of it is worth discarding as we progress toward the ultimate truth of the Way.
Damascene’s interpretation of the Tao is one in which: “One who sees all ways as having equal truth / Will find his life not long enough to follow the Way to the end. / One cannot be simple and guileless, free of multiple deliberations. / One will be as a person having many lovers, / Occupied with each, yet given wholly to none / One will not be married to the Way, / But will remain outside the Bridal Chamber.”
This reminds me of a genuine, palpable fear I possessed as a young man. I frequently recited a very cynical poetical phrase, almost in the form of psalmody: “I fear by the time my life is done, I will only just have learned to live it.” Oh how melodramatic a lyricist I was! But that was essentially my nihilist position before Christ, and even after reading the Tao. Not that the Tao is responsible for that nihilism (my guess is it was the pot)– but rather I had been given, as the Tao suggests, a glimpse at the Way of things but one which was essentially incomplete by virtue of its being human, all too human. As a pothead pizza delivery driver, I found myself flirting with a coworker who was not my girlfriend in between delivery runs in which I listened to the ramblings of McKenna, Watts, and the usual psychedelic suspects. One night, worn from the seemingly endless roadrunning in the pitch-black Texas winter evening, I crashed on my sofa at shift end and fell asleep and dreamt of the mistress. In one house I lived with my girlfriend, and in the other with the mistress. Each asked why I had been away so long– each wanted me to do nothing but lie down and rest to be with her alone.
