A New Age Prophecy: The Imperial Self vs. the Catholic Church
Jeffrey Finch
April 1, 1995
The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure, by James Redfield (Warner Books, 1994), 246 pp. An unlikely pair appeared together atop the bestsellers list in late 1994: for fiction, The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield and, for non-fiction, Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II. This strange juxtaposition may reflect the ambivalence with which our divided culture approaches the question of religious truth. The Celestine Prophecy is a dilettantish attempt, thinly disguised as a novel, at constructing a comprehensive spiritual theology out of a confused patchwork of unidentified Eastern philosophies, quantum physics, popular psychology and, regrettably but predictably, Christianity. Liberally peppered with gratuitous tree-hugging scenes, it's a story about the discovery in Peru of a 600 B.C. Mayan manuscript that foretells a universal shift in consciousness near the end of the twentieth century Redfield predicts that this "new consciousness" will inaugurate the consummation of the dialectical evolution of Western history by forging a "synthesis of the religious and scientific world views" as represented, in his scheme, by the theological hegemony of the medieval Church (thesis) and the atheistic materialism of modernity (antithesis), respectively. Redfield's ambitious synthesis proffers a trendy cosmology in which the "common stuff underlying all matter" is said to be composed of "a kind of pure energy that is malleable to human intention and expectation." All things, in his bizarre tale, exhibit a semi-corporeal aura of energy which is visible only to the illuminati-that is, to those individuals who have appropriated the "insights" of the manuscript, have enjoyed an environmentally correct diet, and have thereby acquired ...
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