Faith During These Times

A Little Lecture

What follows is a lecture I’ve given in a few different courses. This version opened a course I co-taught with Justin Shaun Coyle some years ago at Providence College. Our course was called, “Unbelief in Modernity.” We intend to convert that course’s material into a concise and relatively accessible book sometime soon.

I

This course addresses the following predicament: human beings are inherently religious and yet modern human beings face profound difficulties with the idea of being religious—with having belief or faith in a particular religion.

What a strange predicament for human beings! It’s strange because being human means being religious. This claim might not seem true. After all, we know lots of people—and perhaps we number ourselves among these—who aren’t religious in any typical sense. So what does it mean to say “being human means being religious”?

Here we might consider some boring historical facts to make the point—the way, say, some paleontologists study something they call “middle paleolithic religion,” by which they mean scant traces of burial rituals or markings dating anywhere from 300,000 to 50,000 years ago. Perhaps, one paleontologist writes, these attest to an emerging consciousness that “transcends daily life.” But with such tantalizing breadcrumbs, it’s notoriously hard to speculate.

“Being human means being religious” means more precisely that we ourselves, homo sapiens as we know it, seem inveterately incapable of contenting ourselves with asking questions about things confined to our own tiny life-spans and life-locations. It means asking the “big questions,” as you’ve likely heard time and again in your earlier courses. It means asking—or at least being able to ask—if my life has any purpose beyond breathing, sleeping, eating, working, rearing other humans who breathe, sleep, eat, and work, in the end only to vanish by a pitiless death into unconscious non-existence and comprehensive futility. It means asking where we—everything—came from and whither we’re going. It means asking why there’s anything at all rather than just nothing. It means asking how an ever-proliferating multitude of “things” are yet unified into one “thing,” a single world or cosmos. It means asking whether my relationship with my parents, friends, daughters, contains anything lasting within it, anything that won’t fall finally with the abrupt extirpation of our puny temporal duration—

“Human life is like grass;

They flourish like a flower of the field;

The wind blows over it and it is gone,

And its place remembers it no more.” (Ps. 103.15-16)

Why should I even have the ability to question my life’s ultimate purpose? Of what use is that to me? Whence the capacity to ask about life after death? What does it mean that we can wonder about meaning? And not just symbols—i.e. what does this or that mark or pattern signify—but what does this or that life signify? What does the whole world signify? Anything? Nothing? Sound and fury and so on and so forth?

Yes of course we should distinguish from the outset religion generally from religions particularly. Then too there are also many people who are not particularly “religious” and many more who claim to be but show few signs of the sickness. But when considered generally, it seems inevitable that being human means being religious because religious belief in this sense refers to any belief in anything that transcends or possesses a value that goes beyond the mere utility of this or that for my physical existence. As one theologian put it (Stan Hauerwas): whatever you’re willing to kill or to die for—that’s likely the object of your religious belief, your “god.”

Before bringing our beauteous brood into the world, my wife and I spent a year in Orléans, France. We’d saved some money and learned to live with ascetic frugality. We were thus able to dedicate ourselves to studying French over the whole of our séjour. We couldn’t travel much. A blessing in disguise, that, since it required we spend our weekends and holidays among the local folk. Among those folk were our phonetics teacher and her partner. They weren’t that much older than us, and we became fast friends. One late-night discussion roamed onto the subject of how French laïcité differs from American secularism. We all mostly agreed that the French version carries far more palpable force to it, in that, unlike its American counterpart, French secularism aims not to permit all forms of religious expression but rather to expel them from the public arena altogether.

“Comme ça,” my good friend said, “on impose pas une certaine vision ultime sur tout le monde.” (“That way, we don’t impose a certain ultimate vision upon everyone.”). Something like that.

“Mais,” I stumbled along with my adolescent French, “penses-tu que ce genre de société—cette forme de laïcité, je veux dire—est le meilleur qu’il soit?” (“But do you think that this kind of society—this form of secularism, I mean—isthe best that there is?”)

This question annoyed her. You probably see why. Little weasel that I am, I’d set a trap: If she says no, this version of society isn’t necessarily the best, then it’s difficult to see why the values the French (rightly!) revere—liberté, égalité,fraternité, and now perhaps laïcité—should be revered as superior to other opposing values or ideals. If she says yes, though, then this seems surreptitiously like just the sort of “ultimate vision” for everyone else in society that she’d just proscribed in the name of that superior value—laïcité. Don’t get me wrong: in contrast to what’s fashionable among many especially American Catholics these days—the so-called “postliberals”—I happen to regard classical (political) liberalism as not merely tolerable; I think it a natural and necessary blossom of Christianity itself (with appropriate caveats, but ça va de soi). My point here is merely that no supposed disavowal of the desire to seek the whole, the superior ideals and values that help signify better and worse ways of being human, is ultimately avoidable.

Nearly everyone is “religious” in that basic sense.

II

None of which is to deny that being religious—especially particularly religious—is an increasingly difficult endeavor during these times of ours.

Notice how we’re framing the predicament this course (partially) explores. It’s not a course meant to raise and meet explicitly anti-religious, anti-Christian, criticisms, though there’ll be some of that (Nietzsche). In fact, most of the authors we’ll read see themselves as trying to preserve religious belief from the deep suspicion it has attracted during the modern era. No: our course explores not so much denial of religious belief as indifference to it.

Put otherwise and plainly: religious belief no longer seems worth the time and energy it requires to pursue it. Particularly particular religious belief—belief à la “organized,” myopic religion. Modernity is that era, we might say, wherein (at least Western) human beings consider themselves to have grown out of such childish belief, rather the way some of us pretend to have gotten over our belief in fairies or monsters or ghosts or Santa Claus. Few people are againstbelief in Santa Claus. It’s alright for a time. But everyone grows up.

The following anecdote will surprise exactly no one at all, as it forebodes full fruition of my nerdery. When I was a strapping young lad, dominating the monkey bars on the fourth-grade playground at recess, my good friend summoned the nerve one day to inform me that Santa Claus is not real. What did I do? Decided to prove him wrong, obviously. That very day I visited the school library in search of documentary proof of Santa’s existence. And I found it. There it lay in some book about a certain “St. Nicholas”—a black and white photo portrait of the man himself. Did I check the date? No. Did I read the book? No. Did I realize, then, that the photo was just an illustration of later appropriations of St. Nicholas? Ha! No. Still, I carried the tome along with an imperious gait to recess the next day. I proved my friend wrong.

“See? I told you he’s real.”

“That’s just some guy dressed up as St. Nicholas.” This he said with such disdainful levity as he ran off to chase some girl, that I nearly decked him.

Instead I did the next best, most manly thing I could think of: I complained to my parents after school that day about my friend’s incomprehensible insensitivity to documentary evidence. My mom glanced with some trepidation at my dad while I eviscerated my friend’s integrity before them. She asked me back to her room to “talk about something.” “Jordan,” she mustered, “your friend’s right: Santa’s not real.” My first thought was rage at having lost an argument for which I’d labored so intensely (one hour at the library). The second was: “What else isn’t real? Tooth fairy? Easter bunny? God?”

What happened to me is a parable, I suggest, of what to the modern mind has happened to humanity itself. It’s not so much that faith has been demonstrably overturned. It’s just that its credibility and especially its confidence has been repeatedly undermined. After awhile you just, well, lose faith in faith.

{CAVEAT: This course considers mainly intellectual challenges to faith in the 19^th–20^th centuries. It does not, for instance, consider matters just as weighty and immediate: the moral failures of, say, church clergy. That’s certainly not because the latter are unimportant.}

III

Consider just three horizons that have vastly expanded over the past three centuries.

Almost exactly a century ago we knew of only a single galaxy: our own, the Milky Way. And although we’d long since decentered the Earth in our solar system in favor of the Sun, we yet imagined that the universe was, on the whole, basically static. Today we observe around two trillion galaxies, each huddling together billions of stars, each of those averaging several planets in its relatively small ensemble. Moreover and against Einstein’s initial protests, our cosmos appeared 13.8 billion years ago (or so) already in mid-explosion, racing exponentially in all directions not into further space but stretching space itself. So dynamic and all-encompassing is this cosmic dynamism, that in a mere handful of billions of years, very many of those two trillion galaxies we see today will have moved beyond the distance light itself can travel to reach us on our relative time scale. They will have moved beyond the horizon of our most technologically-enhanced vision, that’s to say, so that we’ll no longer be able to see them at all. The cosmic horizon has literally expanded in almost every possible dimension and on every conceivable scale, within the cosmic blink of an eye.

It was commonplace in the nineteenth century to imagine that human beings were only several thousands of years old and that their history dawned roughly when written history did, reaching perhaps back into the second or third millennia B.C. Today we know that the human being, homo sapiens, was one among a few dozen (or so) hominid species and dates somewhere from 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. The Earth itself is 4.5 billion years old. It features a period spanning 190 million years when giant reptiles roved the world over. Those monsters were likely extinguished 66 million years ago with the impact of a six mile-wide asteroid, along with 99% of Earth’s surface organisms. That was one of five mass extinction events in Earth’s history. Now, even if we optimistically set the origin of modern human history to, say, the middle of the fourth-century B.C with the development of cuneiform in Sumeria, then we possess documentary evidence for only less than two percent of all human history and a bit over 0.00004 percent of all Earth’s history (I refuse to do the calculation for cosmic history). The historical horizon has also receded to magnitudes beyond the reach of our best methods of inquiry.

And then there are the various, less-quantifiable horizons that converge upon what I can only call the “existential” or “cultural” or “ethical” horizon. Pascal’s musings on the arbitrariness of custom get at this. In myriad instances, the sense here is that so many things within this sphere that once seemed obvious or natural or built-in to the very fabric of being—“just the way things are”—have proven not only conventional but concealed as conventional. Kant’s critical philosophy forced post-Kantians of many varieties to concede that there is no merely external or objective sphere unaffected by the subject’s perception of the objective, and thence of the subject’s self-perception as affecting the very objects as perceived. If the truth of all things were merely objective, then this would exclude the subject’s very apprehension of the truth from truth itself. But is not the subject true? Isn’t her very “seeing” or knowing of the truth, true? And then, to skip way ahead along this line, if the subject cannot be rationally extracted from the truth of things, then aren’t we admitting at least the possibility that everything in the subject—their biases, their culture, their values, their personal experience, their social location, their “unconscious” drives, etc.—aren’t we admitting that all of these almost inevitably determine the truth as we know it and represent it and propose it to others for belief? At what point, then, does the quest for truth itself become a play of subjective power, of one subjugating another in the name of some higher truth? Hence cascade the many strategies of deconstruction, genealogy, dialectic. Hence too the many reactionary strategies of reconstruction, tradition, apologetics.

I’ll stop this potentially sprawling tangent right there. The basic point will be obvious, I trust: the actual history and development of the human spirit is not some simple, objectively documented cache of information or unassailable world-pictures. We have not simply grasped one truth, then the next, then the next in a neat succession of steady progress. Nor have we simply received an objective, self-interpreting deposit, so that our only task is to hand it on in pristine condition from one generation to the next. Rather we discover that what we once discovered was perhaps wrong, or at least the way we understood it was wrong. We realize that, actually, enslaving human beings isn’t morally good at all. We realize that, actually, religious liberty is itself a positive fruit of our own religion. We realize that, actually, historical-critical investigation into our sacred texts is essential. We realize also that, actually, historical-critical investigation into our sacred texts is not and never could be sufficient. We realize that, actually, just because something is given doesn’t make it true, and in fact its givenness might conceal its error. And we Catholics especially realize that, actually, just because we have a Pope and a Magisterium, we are not magically relieved of having still to interpret everything, all the time (and in time). In a word, we “moderns” have realized that, actually, you cannot short-circuit your way out of being an actual person who must seek to understand, to know, to think, to desire, to strive for the whole truth even as you cannot bypass any part of it.

IV

The shock isn’t that we’ve gotten stuff wrong on occasion. It’s that we’ve misunderstood very, very basic things, and gravely so. Ancient philosophy used to make much of the fact that, even on their picture of the world, the way the Sun appears is not simply the truth of how the Sun is. It’s wrong to think that just because you can hold out your thumb and squint, like this, and cover the Sun, that therefore the Sun is the same size as (or smaller than) your thumb! The ancients knew that thinking requires going beyond mere appearance. But what now if the Sun’s entire appearance deceives? What if its very appearance covers the truth about itself and other stars—other galaxies which we’ve mostly never known! And what now if something like this has happened under almost every known horizon of human knowing?

We’ve had to mature. We’ve had to find ways to think ourselves not just beyond initial appearances but behind the whole appearance. We’ve had to question everything—only to find ourselves afloat on a seemingly endless sea of expanse and space and time and misjudgments and deception and, in a word, ignorance. It’s hard to grow up. The French analyst, Jean Laplanche, depicts the development of the childhood ego as a process of “Ptolemizing” our sense of self, a self that was once more “Copernican” in that its attention and intention and consciousness orbits, in the early stages, almost entirely around the other. As one develops—or rather integral to one’s development, is the fact that one starts sensing the many “enigmatic messages” sent, wittingly or not, by all the “others” around which the child has revolved. The very enigmatic character of these messages undermines the ego’s integrity, as if it were constantly beset by unknown, potential menaces. It must establish itself against the onslaught, make itself the center as a survival mechanism. The ego “Ptolemizes” itself to fortify itself. Whether or not this psychology is correct, it’s an apt metaphor for appreciating the modern human being’s attempt at religious faith. Modern humanity does not deny all the others. But it has come to a keen sense of the inherent ambiguity and instability of those others. It turns to shore itself up, so tired of being undermined that it loses the drive to orbit around any other at all. Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” is modern man in his self-awareness.

Religious faith, in modernity, seems to many either a bit of childish fancy or a trail of speculation as irrelevant as it is endless. Either characterization tends to produce the same effect: religious faith is a matter of indifference. It’s not exactly evil. And perhaps it’s not even entirely wrong about the world. But how would we know either way? Just like the physical universe—which teems with galaxies and stars and an immense history of age upon age upon age, before we first showed up on a tiny, pale dot against the deep dark backdrop of edgeless space—if there’s a God and a purpose to it all, better, rather than making rash declarations about them, to restrain oneself. That’s the mature thing to do, isn’t it?

This course is an exploration of precisely that predicament: modern humanity has grown up and wishes to discard its childish religious superstitions; and yet it cannot, at the very same time, cease being religious.

The wager of this course, which I can only declare with the promise that we’ll consider it thoroughly this semester, is that this very predicament is not foreign to religious faith. Christian faith in particular, at its best, never forgets that the life of faith is not a line or a point. It isn’t accomplished all at once, nor does its path move sequentially from one stage to the next. No. The play of belief and unbelief is the Christian faith’s spiritual life. Faith, after all, reaches for the whole and so questions everything—including itself.

“I do believe; but help my unbelief!” (Mk 9.23)