Unsolved Mysteries 0 comments

LIKE most late-twentieth-century American males, I am given to that odd neuralgic habit known as "channel surfing." I take no pride in this confession, but I have noticed that, for all its deleterious effects, the habit occasionally yields unexpected and illuminating insights into the state of American culture. To mix the metaphor, one could say that the channel surfer, like a scientist at a microscope, sees a cross section of our social order.

On my most recent travels across the media waves I have noticed the enormous popularity of such pseudo-documentary programs as Unsolved Mysteries, Sightings, and The Extraordinary. The range of these shows is astonishing: from UFOs, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster to telepathic twins, alien abductions, Marian apparitions, and faith healing. I suppose that these mystery programs, like the scandalmongering Hard Copy and its clones, ultimately derive from the same source in tabloid journalism.

But my intention here is not to launch into another sermon on the decadence of popular culture. What interests me is the hunger for mystery that permeates all levels of our culture. Consider the phenomenal success of more sophisticated television programs like The X-Files. This show plays elegant variations on one standard scenario: two FBI agents, in their crusade for truth about human contact with an alien race, become entangled in a web of disinformation, shadowy conspiracies, and government repression. In episode after episode, agents Mulder and Scully come to the very brink of revelation, only to be thwarted in their quest for truth. Moreover, their enemies are not only bureaucrats, scientists, and businessmen; their own egos and personal obsessions also threaten to corrupt their quest. The most common visual metaphor in the series is the blinding light—whether from a UFO or just a flashlight—which is too bright for human eyes. Mulder and Scully learn that mystery will not simply yield to aggressive investigation of the rational Enlightenment type. There are times when intuition plays a crucial role, and there are even times when they have to allow the mystery to remain inscrutable.

There is no doubt that The X-Files plays on fashionable aesthetics, from paranoia a la Oliver Stone to the dark obscurities of David Lynch's post-modern soap opera Twin Peaks. But the success of The X-Files is grounded in its subtle understanding of the relationships between mystery, truth, fear, desire, and denial.

The success of The X-Files is based on our powerful sense of identification with agents Mulder and Scully. Their passionate desire to penetrate into the heart of mystery, to risk contact with the otherworldly, awakens the same desire in us. Though Mulder and Scully never "solve" their cases, they become guardians of those mysteries, keepers of a flame too bright to look into directly.

With the recent collapse of Enlightenment rationalism—from Marxist social planning to Freudian psychoanalysis—we are once again searching for mystery, for moments of illumination in a world that is larger than our own egos. Though many still look to science as a source of mystery and wonder, it seems to me that scientific discoveries are more than ever pointing our minds in the direction of religious wisdom. If that is true, then there is an enormous opportunity today for a revival of the religious imagination.

The biggest threat to such a revival, however, is the common notion that religious dogma are antithetical to mystery. There is no doubt that religion itself can become rationalized, its mysteries bled dry in abstract theological formulations. But the genius of the Judeo-Christian tradition is that its central dogma are mysteries, from the covenant with Abraham to the Trinity, Incarnation, and Resurrection. Church Fathers like Augustine and Athanasius saw their mission not in making these mysteries explicit, but in protecting them from various forms of reductionism.

If one looks at the great religious writers and artists, you will find that nearly all of them were theologically orthodox. Perhaps as artists they had an intuitive understanding of the need for balance between flesh and spirit, concrete form and abstract idea. Dante, Bach, Rembrandt, Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot believed in the mysteries preserved and enshrined by the dogma of the Church. That those mysteries were paradoxical and many-faceted they never doubted.

The alternatives are either to worship mystery for its own sake—an undertaking that inevitably leads to a vague, unfocused, and subjective vision of the world—or to seek comfort in the pharisaical explicitness of fundamentalism.