The Christian mystery’s westward drift was a literalizing one. In the east, the understanding of Jesus was figurative, ecstatic, made fertile by the rich soil of the Greek language. The dream of Montanus’ priestess Priscilla, in which Jesus appeared as a woman who laid beside her as she slept and ‘put wisdom into me…and that in this place Jerusalem above comes down’, could only have occurred in Greek. Likewise, Marcion’s disgust at the Apostles’ stupidity, his reminder that Elisha had had children eaten by bears, and that Joshua had halted the sun itself in order to keep slaughtering his enemies – that horror comes from frustration with the dull literalism that admits of no echoes between things and things, worlds and worlds, which is the revelatory power of metaphor. Going west, we see only attempts to curb the proliferation of meanings to which words are naturally given, in the manner of those vines carved on the temples of Attis in Cybele. This literalism culminated in such absurdities as John Calvin, the Christian Israelites, and the Westboro Baptist Church.
Fortunately, the spherical nature of Earth – whatever certain Zetetics claim – inevitably makes oriental even the most determinedly occidental thing, and the mystery of suffering is no exception. Upon reaching the American continent, the stringent literalism of European Protestantism eventually accepted a suit of figurative clothes, cut from the language of that place and that time. Through that language, uniquely suited to their materialistic outlook and love of aphorism, Americans came to understand the suffering and death of Jesus of Nazareth, and the problem of the human soul.
The specific language was Rheology, one of the lesser children of Chemical Engineering, and the prophet who spoke it to the sinful world of the 1930s was a chemistry professor named Eugene C. Bingham. History dares us to ridicule the admission of Eugene C. Bingham to the company of Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, John Dee, and Emanuel Swedenborg, but Saul of Tarsus made tents, Jan Zizka was a general, and Lodowicke Muggleton was a tailor – so we might ask why a religious visionary should not also be a chemist, and use that language to express the nature of the soul.
America in the 1930s was not only respectful of science and its mysteries but confident of their potential to relieve depression both economic and spiritual. On a bright day in June 1933, Eugene C. Bingham was seized by a spirit both revelatory and beneficent which spoke to him rheologically. In this Damascene moment Bingham understood that the soul is a viscoplastic entity, a body which remains static, colloidal, and viscid under low stresses. But when subjected to the stress of temptation, that viscid hypostasis becomes motile and fluxive. Indeed, he saw, the greater the stress of sin, the faster the once congealed soul flowed. A more competent (perhaps because less confident) demonstrator of the Mysteries than was Simon Magus, Bingham knew that this had to be shown to the masses, who accept demand that miracles be sold drummed up with a speech. Using those homely American products which make plausible even the least likely of propositions, Bingham revealed the proof of his rheological revelation to the thousands of dispossessed, vagrant souls who flocked to Lafayette College as if it were a second Pepuza.
Although he did not succeed in confirming whether the soul really did weigh 21 grams, the Binghamites received the Word made viscoplastic and rejoiced. Had not your soul been a stable quantity within you, he asked, the particles of various humble virtues bonding together, private and sufficient unto themselves as toothpaste within the tube, mayonnaise within the jar? And when the evils of poverty, fatigue, and temptation bore down upon you did you not resist, until the shear stress of sin was so great that your very soul turned fluid and fled from it? And when you had fled that stress, did not your soul become still once again, made coherent even as mustard upon the hot dog, clay suspensions within the drilling pipe?
Verily, Bingham brought a new dualism to the world, of yield stress and plastic viscosity, and the Binghamites saw the soul as an imperfect emanation of higher forces, caught between shear stress and shear rate. Embracing this revelation, the Binghamites articulated salvation through the tongue of non-Newtonian fluids, just as the Phibionites formulated their abominations in Greek.
But prophets must offer a praxis through which the faithful can live the doxis, so Bingham created that great exercise in American mobile asceticism, the Appalachian Trail. Today the Binghamites test the viscoplasticisty of their souls by exposure to the shear stresses of rain, wind, fatigue, and pain in the hope that, between Georgia and Maine, their sin-fluid souls will cohere and experience the styptic mystery of faith.
The Diogenes Blog 