In this first podcast episode of Faculty Focus, HDS Professor Charles Stang discusses psychedelics and spirituality, early Christianity and demonology, and why Dune makes for good academic inquiry.
Hi there and welcome to Faculty Focus, a special new podcast series from Harvard Divinity School, where we’ll speak with HDS professors about their courses and research interests. I’m Jonathan Beasley.
Our first guest is Charles Stang, who is Professor of Early Christian Thought and the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. Professor Stang’s research and teaching focus on the history of Christianity in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially Eastern varieties of Christianity.
Thanks for listening and joining us today. Let’s jump right into the interview.
Jonathan Beasley: So, just in addition to your role as Professor of Early Christian Thought, you're the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions. Can you talk about what the center is currently focused on, and how students are engaged, or can engage, with the CSWR—so reading groups, different programming…
Charles Stang: Yeah. So we're in the second year of this new initiative called transcendence and transformation, and the core of that is studying religious and spiritual traditions that aim for the transcendence of our accustomed or normal states of being, consciousness, and embodiment, and the transformation that that involves when we have those sorts of experiences.
And this, in its second year, we have a whole new slate of post-doctoral fellows and research associates whom students are, of course, welcome to meet and engage with. But perhaps the three easiest things to mention are, well, there's two reading groups that students are welcome to join. I just came from one.
The first is on Plant Consciousness, which is sort of tracking this remarkable explosion of literature across disciplines, sciences and humanities, attending to the ways in which plants can sense, feel, communicate, and possibly even think. And maybe that's not the order of hierarchy, actually. But there's some really thrilling literature out there.
So we have a reading group on plant consciousness and another one assessing the legacy of Mircea Eliade, who is this very influential mid-twentieth century historian of religions who taught at the University of Chicago, whose work has been much maligned in the last two or three decades. And the sort of impetus behind the reading group is actually to revisit his writings and discern what is of lasting value in them. And those are both student-led reading groups. And, as I said, any students across the university are welcome to join.
JB: That's amazing. I want to just to hold on a little bit to some of what's happening at the Center, and some of the focus areas. You've mentioned the reading groups already, which are exciting.
Over the last year or two, there's been an incredibly interesting focus on psychedelics and their relationship to religion and spirituality. And there's even been shout-outs from other publications, really specifically mentioning the work that's happening at the Center and at HDS. Can you just talk a bit about what compelled you? What was the impetus behind wanting to explore that more here at HDS, and specifically, at the Center?
CS: Yeah, sure. Yeah. In some ways, I find myself a bit of a—it's a little unusual. It's a little unexpected that I would be the host for this series. Psychedelics is not something I had a scholarly or even much personal interest in until about three years ago when I would say two things happened—two lines converged.
One was there's a very influential body of work coming out of Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere that is showing incredible therapeutic outcomes with some psychedelics. But it's explicitly indexed to what they're calling mystical experiences. That is to say, what the researchers are labeling as mystical experiences.
And as a scholar of mysticism, I felt like it would be irresponsible for us not to track and engage that conversation because it's having such an impact in the wider world. So that was an impetus to take psychedelics and religion seriously.
And then another line of inquiry is really best represented by Brian Muraresku's book, The Immortality Key. That book argues, or explores and argues, for evidence of psychedelic use in the ancient Mediterranean world. So as a scholar of the ancient Mediterranean world, suddenly psychedelics were in my purview. So that was the impetus.
And what I've discovered over the years is there isn't actually a lot of consistent attention to psychedelics and religion that's rigorous and responsible. So we've filled a lacuna—we've filled a bit of a gap in, I think, the public conversation. And that's why the series is getting cited. And we hope we're going to have another; we are continuing the series again this year. We're a little slow to start, but we are hoping to have three to four speakers each semester.
JB: Have you noticed because we were able to offer events over the last couple of years, given the circumstances of the pandemic, kind of exclusively online, if not, offering a big component of that, did you see a fairly strong interest from just the outside world, from the people outside of academia in this?
CS: Huge. Huge. So before the pandemic, we would have thought an event that had 50 or 60 people in our biggest room was a success, and that is a success. But when we've moved online, we're finding is our numbers have exploded. And the psychedelic series especially. So I believe there were several thousand who tuned in live when I interviewed Brian Muraresu, for instance. And many more thousands have watched it since.
So yes, there is. I don't know when the wave of enthusiasm for psychedelics is likely to crest. Maybe it's already cresting. And that's partly responsible for these large numbers. But it's very, it's thrilling, actually, to be able to reach audiences around the globe, and audiences that don't have the privilege of access to Harvard. So the fact that these are just broadcast live, it feels nice. It feels very rewarding to be able to offer that to bigger constituencies.
JB: I’m going to skip ahead a little bit, because I want to give you plenty of time to talk about the course that you’re teaching. I’ll let you give me the course title.
CS: Yeah. The course is titled, Philosophy in the Desert, colon, The Gnostic Trilogy of Evagrius of Pontus.
JB: You got that right.
Nailed it. So, tell me about the course. Tell me what's at the heart of the course, and what do you hope students take away from the class?
CS: All right. So just a bit, maybe a bit of background. I'm a historian of early Christian thought, and increasingly interested in Christianity in the kind of broader matrix of Mediterranean philosophy and religion. This course is, focuses not just on a single figure—I often teach classes that focus on a single figure—but a particular work of this figure, a trilogy of works.
And this figure, Evagrius, is not a household name, but he was in the early church. He is a controversial fourth-century monk and philosopher—a philosopher before he became a monk—who spent the second half of his life and career in the deserts of Egypt, the Western deserts, which were home to the newly emergent phenomenon of Christian monasticism. Christian monasticism is usually credited to Anthony the Great, whose earlier in the fourth century.
Evagrius is fascinating to me because he brings all the learning of fourth century—he brings all the learning of someone trained in the classical liberal arts to bear on this newly emergent monastic experiment, what is, is this remarkable pursuit of holiness. The Gnostic trilogy is supposed to be a whole curriculum that first addresses a monastic practitioner.
And it's largely about demonology—how to guard your mind against what he calls the eight demon thoughts. And this process of guarding yourself from these eight demon thoughts should yield a kind of transformation that he calls apatheia, or freedom from passion. And when you achieve this freedom from passion, which he also equates with love or agape, one becomes ready to teach other monks. And that's where the monastic enterprise becomes explicitly contemplative. So he moves from a kind of practical demonology to a contemplative enterprise focused on contemplation of the natural world, and then contemplation of the Godhead.
What I'm most excited about in this class, Jonathan, is that I'm asking the students to read this trilogy as if Evagrius was speaking to them. I want them to take on the readerly position of—I want them to experience him as a sage. And so to collapse the kind of distance that we often insist people have in reading this text.
Because that is actually I think the best way to read this text, because that is how he wanted this text to be read. He did not want anybody to read this dispassionately or object—with critical distance. He wanted you to be—it's an invitation. But it's very it's going to be very interesting to do so, because it's going to mean taking his demonology seriously.
So as I said to a friend of mine, I want his demonology to be their demonology for the year.
JB: The students?
CS: The students. Yeah. I want Evagrius's demonology to be the student's demonology. And I'll do the same, and we'll take that on. I want his contemplations to be our contemplations for the year. I'll let you know how it goes.
JB: You've talked about—or you just mentioned that you had students from your previous year-long seminar now taking this one. Can you just talk about who are these students? What are they studying? What are they interested in? Are they all soon to be scholars of early Christianity? Or who are these students?
CS: Oh, it's a diverse group. I have students who are—I have doctoral students who have been with me for almost a decade in the class, who did their master's degrees before their doctorate. And I have students who no longer need to take classes who are in this class. So that's fun.
I have first-year MTS students—not many, a few. I always like to have a diverse group of students in the room. And we have staff. We have the HDS Episcopal chaplain. We have a full professor from St. Nersess Armenian Seminary in the class. We have an MIT doctoral student in theoretical physics in the class, who has taking classes with me for five or six years. So it's a pretty thrillingly diverse group.
So we have a Kennedy School student. At least—we have two Kennedy School students in a class on the fourth century. Who can explain that? We have somebody from the design school. It's great. It's a wonderful mix.
JB: Let’s take very short break before we rejoin Professor Stang for the second half of our conversation. If you enjoy what you’re hearing, I encourage you to subscribe to Harvard Divinity School wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re interested in learning more about Professor Stang and his work, or you want to know more about HDS, our faculty, students, and degree programs, check us out on our website or follow us on social media @HarvardDivinity.
Now, let’s get back to my conversation with Professor Charles Stang.
JB: So, this could be a number of different things, but how would you describe the classroom experience at HDS, and why is it perhaps unique or special in some way?
CS: So one of the problems is I don't feel like I know the answer to this question because I'm not in my colleagues' classes. So I actually don't know what it's like other than the reports I get from students. And from those reports, what I gather is that these classroom experiences are very, very, very different.
It's like people have affinities with particular faculty members or particular topics, and so there's like little subcultures of inquiry. So the only thing I can say with great confidence is what happens in my classroom. But I don't think this is necessarily representative.
So my classes tend to be between 15 and 30. I'm teaching mostly seminars these days, and I try to keep that around 15. And what I absolutely can promise students who take the classes with me is we read primary sources. We read them—I do not bury students in hundreds and hundreds of pages of reading. I like to ask them to read a manageable amount of primary source material.
I like that their noses is in the books in class. We are talking about these texts and traditions, and I'm very interested in how people integrate those. But I want us to be talking about primary texts rather than secondary literature. I assign some secondary literature, but I don't tend to focus on it in the classroom.
What else can I say? I would say, the other thing I would say about my classroom is that, and this is increasingly the case over the years, I am teaching figures I think have something to teach us. And so I want students to come in and take up that position, I am here because I have something to learn from this ancient figure.
That doesn't mean I have to agree with everything he—very often he—or she wrote. But that I am here essentially to apprentice myself to this. I'm doing the same. I'm apprenticing myself to these ancient texts. So that's the kind of pedagogical stance that I'd like students to take up.
JB: When did you start seriously considering becoming a professor, getting into the world of scholarship and academia as your career? When was that?
CS: Yeah. Great question. I mean, I did not enter college with that as a goal. I did not think—I never thought that would be an option for me. I didn't think, to be perfectly honest, I didn't think I was going to be very good at this. I expected to work hard and be a mediocre student at Harvard.
But something took over, and my enthusiasm for the topic took over pretty quickly. And by the topic, here, at that time, it was philosophy. And I found myself more enthusiastic than most of my peers. But I also found that philosophy increasingly became an ill fit.
Because philosophy, as it's conducted in most American universities, is dominated by what's called analytic philosophy, which I never really aligned with. And so I was always a bit of a marginal character in philosophy. And I found that religious studies was a much more hospitable field for someone with my sets of interests.
I didn't major in philosophy, but I sought out the margins of that discipline. And it was clear to me that if I had a future in academia, it should be in the study of religion. At that time I was also trying to discern whether there was a kind of professional religious life that I should pursue. So I was discerning a call to the priesthood in my twenties.
And so I've always been interested in the study of religion. Or I should say, I've always—since I was an adolescent—didn't know what to do with it. And found my way into being an academic rather circuitously, and somewhat ambivalently.
Because becoming a scholar of things you care deeply about, things you have a deep existential investment in, can be a bit of a devil's bargain because you have to, you trade, there's a trade involved. Because it allows you to be very proximate to these texts and traditions. My day job is to read and study and teach about these.
But being part of a university can also distance you from the text that you're ostensibly working with every day. And so I'm really struggling—struggling may be the wrong word—I'm really trying, endeavoring, to close that gap now. And I feel more confident than I can than I did when I started.
JB: Maybe we can end here. We’ll see what you have to say about this because I cannot let a conversation with you go by without talking about Dune. And so you wrote in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin on the Dune series, and appeared on our Harvard Religion Beat podcast to talk about it, too. And I love this, that you even used a quote from Dune to accompany your high school senior photo.
So what is it about Dune that makes it particularly interesting just from an entertainment point of view—the books and the film, if you want to talk about that, but also seemingly a viable and rich academic subject as well?
CS: So its entertainment value, I think, has to do with just that Herbert imagined a universe that is sufficiently familiar to ours. I mean, it's actually supposed to be a descendant of ours, as to be compelling, but sufficiently alien, as to be captivating. And it's a total world. It's a total universe, which is why people like me and others can get lost in it.
I think the first Dune book is a really well-written book, and maybe even Dune Messiah, the second. So the experience of reading Dune—a lot of science fiction is not well written, and this is. I don't think the quality of the writing sustained over the course of the whole series.
And then, but the Dune world is also so ripe for grand cinematic scope. And as I write, there have been a few attempts at putting it on the screen. And the two that I talk about are David Lynch's, which I have a secret love for because David Lynch knows how to make something weird. He really—I think his adaptation was genius.
And now we have Denis Villeneuve, who has all the resources of Hollywood to put—to bring to bear on this. And it's a pretty amazing spectacle. I'm not—it's a safe production. That's my major criticism of the Villeneuve. It's faithful, but there's not yet any genius in it.
But I think Dune—I didn't answer the second part of your question, which is I think Dune is a fascinating topic of academic inquiry because Frank Herbert poured so much learning into that book. And especially for a student of history of religions, Dune is fun because the world that he imagines is he imagines a descendant civilization, actually a kind of empire of civilizations, so far downstream of us historically, but in which the religions that we know today have combined and recombined and evolved and devolved into this new mix.
And so it's just fascinating to imagine somebody—it's almost like if we today—we do scholarship to try and understand how religions a millennia old are still informing religion today. He's done the opposite, which is sort of imagine where we might be. And it's fun to see that arc. Because he is actually quite clever and really well informed about certain things. And I found it intensely interesting.
I mean, in some ways Dune is like—it’s been uncanny to return to it in my middle age, and realize how much of my life is packed into that book.
JB: Thanks to Professor Stang for giving us an inside look at his classroom and his research interests. This is the first interview in our new Faculty Focus podcast series. Again, please subscribe to Harvard Divinity School if you haven’t already so that you never miss a future episode. And don’t forget to visit our website or follow us on social media if you’re interested in learning more about HDS, our faculty, and the student experience.
Until next time…