The Serpent of Heresy

There is an ancient story, apparently of Indian vintage, with which I am sure you are all quite familiar, having no doubt heard it at some point or other in a sermon or in Sunday School. It seems there were six blind men, each of whom was presented with an elephant and asked to describe what the elephant looked like based upon how it felt. According to one version of this story,

Thereupon the men who were presented with the head answered, "Sire, an elephant is like a pot." And the men who had observed the ear replied, "An elephant is like a winnowing basket." Those who had been presented with a tusk said it was a ploughshare. Those who knew only the trunk said it was a plough; others said the body was a grainery; the foot, a pillar; the back, a mortar; the tail, a pestle, the tuft of the tail, a brush.¹

And so on. Despite its Eastern origin, this quaint little parable is often invoked—perhaps with a dash or two of boutique Buddhism thrown in for good measure—in defense of a very Western idea, namely, that truth depends entirely upon your perspective of things; and because this is so, it is ultimately a question of your truth against mine. In other words, "You call an elephant a pillar, fine—you are entitled to your opinion. I, for my part, rather like to think of an elephant as a megaphone." Of course, so the story goes, we must both be right, since there is no one to provide us with the right answer to what an elephant really is. Put another way, truth, because it is nothing, cannot be the object of real knowledge, so the best we are left with is the endless exchange of mere opinion. Witness, for example, probably the most famous version of this tale, from the very minor American poet John Godfrey Saxe (1816–87).² After rehearsing the familiar confusion of the elephant with a snake, a rope, and suchlike, Saxe goes a little farther than the original: in case we didn't get the point, he adds two further stanzas. In the first, we read:

And so these men of IndostanDisputed loud and long,Each in his own opinionExceeding stiff and strong,Though each was partly in the rightAnd all were in the wrong!

And finally, the kicker, and just for the faint of mind (and apparently for the faint of vision as well), he has kindly added, in big capital letters, "moral."

So oft in theologic wars,The disputants, I ween,Rail on in utter ignoranceOf what each other mean;And prate about an ElephantNot one of them has seen!³

Of course Saxe was writing and moralizing in the late nineteenth century, in a time when there was still such a thing as a "theologic war," when there was still something to be contested. Now, by contrast, even that vaunted abstraction of the nineteenth century—religion—is identified (even, perhaps most often, by "religious" people) with all that is superstitious, prejudicial, and irrational. Hence talk of "people of faith" as opposed to "followers of a religion," and the widely heard comment that one is "spiritual but not religious."

Not all this is such a bad thing. Perhaps it is better not to use the word "religion" at all than to use it in the nineteenth-century sense. But in another sense it is indicative of a state of affairs in which there is general unease about religious belief and its claims to truthfulness and the apparent policing of various voices of dissent. We take it for granted that we are indeed the blind men in the tale, but somehow we do not seem to recognize blindness as a lack of one kind of vision.

The heartwarming moral of this parable disguises a certain conceit: this story—call it a joke, if you like—only works because we are told from the beginning that the six blind men are each trying to name the same thing...