Two Meditations on the Idea of the Creation

The Creation 

        Religious and metaphysical belief systems should not be confused with empirical states of affairs.  They are (among other things) rather different ways to understand the meaning of significance of these states of affairs. This distinction is forced on us in ways it could not have been for cultures in which modern science played no role. Logically, the belief that our human meanings are ultimately reducible to causal nexuses of events amenable to scientific explanation – a belief that determines that religious questions will be treated logically no differently from empirical questions – is metaphysical: it is not a possible scientific hypothesis (subject to experiment, etc.); it corresponds to no clearly delimited empirical state of affairs. It organizes how some people interpret the world (or parts of it), thus playing an analogous epistemological role as belief in the Creation. Both express an attitude toward the world. Evolutionary biology may be able to tell us something about the origin of morality; it cannot tell us (at least without committing the genetic fallacy) whether to see a human fetus as an appendage to a female body or as an “unborn child” with all the moral connotations attaching to both expressions. But the attitudes expressed by Genesis and scientific reductionism, while not mechanically determining how a person will see the fetus, reveal it to be different kinds of realities, with similarities and dissimilarities. And no possible scientific, rational procedure will tell us what this reality is apart from the attitudes we bring to the “seeing” of it. Looking at the ultrasound photograph cannot in principle decide the correct attitude.

            Members of set of possible attitudes expressed by Genesis can of course come into conflict with members of the set of possible attitudes represented by belief in reductionism. I would like to emphasis the plurality of these attitudes. Only for “fundamentalist” members of each set need anything resembling a contradiction manifest itself. Clearly, if a person believes that Genesis is to be read like a newspaper report of an actual event in history, then that must collide with the overwhelming evidence accumulated by science that the universe is far older than that suggested by Genesis, that life took much longer to develop, etc. Here atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Creationists share a common ground, epistemologically, with Creationists attempting to cast doubt on scientific findings and create conceptual space to see Genesis as a possible report of how things really were. The attitude that lends meaning to the lives of such people has been fatefully linked with an empirical state of affairs, forcing them into a kind of philosophical skepticism concerning science, in some cases combined with a set of quasi-rational arguments for the existence of God.

            But other positions are possible within these sets (they being far from the only ones). No hidden logical tension inheres in scientific reductionism and Genesis. The tension comes from what people make of them in the course of their lives, the way they use them to express attitudes, justify actions and practices, and so on. As Peter Winch has written, seeing Darwin’s Origin of Species as colliding head-on with Genesis was and is not the only possible understanding, even though given the Enlightenment context (and critique of miracles) it was perhaps culturally if not epistemologically inevitable that they would collide. Both science (though less so scientific reductionism) and Genesis can express “man’s sense of wonder at the world.” To judge the meaning of religious language (and images) in terms of empirical hypotheses to be tested is like seeing Michelangelo’s depiction of God and Adam logically like a diagram of an auto accident for an insurance company. That it can be seen like that is obvious; it should be equally obvious that it must not be so seen.

          And in the context of many people’s lives (and the artist’s intention) it makes more sense to see it as an expression of a sublime attitude – perhaps (as Winch puts it) “how the power of God the Father and Adam’s dependence are, on both sides, inseparably linked by love. God’s power is not simply combined with his love; it is his love (“Meaning and Religious Language,” 121).” This, in turn, we can see as an image of the wonder and goodness of human existence at its core – an attitude, as Winch points out, that may also motivate the work of a scientist. Indeed one may either worship or do scientific work as a sort of homage to this sense of the world. The image expresses an attitude, which may fill a life with meaning, which to give up may empty that life of meaning. It has a formative influence on the way we respond to the things of the world. It can symbolize man’s relation to the cosmos – symbolize in the sense of expressing in concrete images an indeterminate relation to transcendence, meaning a relation that cannot be explained by science or pre-scientific, everyday ways of dealing with empirical matters.

         The idea that “language games” are somehow insulated from one another, such that science is one thing, and religion another, and never shall they meet, does not go deep, even though it does point to problems of understanding the latter thought. Science has changed the senses in which we may find religious language intelligible or unintelligible, and Wittgenstein’s own thought by no means leaves everything in place. The current state of scientific knowledge even in its popularized forms does change the ways we think about, defend, or criticize religious dogmas like the virgin birth or the resurrection of the body – in Wittgensteinian terms, the grammar of many religious concepts has been transformed under the cultural impact of the natural sciences (and capitalism).

        The God of history has indeed become much more problematic than for Aquinas, not only because of apparent conflicts with the scientific worldview but also owing to historical catastrophes and cultural transformation. The intelligibility of religious language certainly cannot be insulated from such developments – indeed, intelligibility is conditioned and limited by them. That in my case, the idea of God as an agent intervening in history is problematic is connected to moral changes: there is less tolerance morally today, and I find it unintelligible for an all-powerful and all-good agent to allow horrible suffering for inscrutable reasons. Of course, suffering can be morally good and necessary. In my life I have suffered but I have never suffered anything that would shake my faith. That doesn't imply all suffering is good or morally necessary (I am sure you can think of examples of what I mean).

       Dostoevsky portrays this brilliantly not only in the scene in The Brothers Karamazov where Ivan confronts Alyosha with his rejection of God’s Creation because (over-simply) for him nothing that could happen an any subsequent afterlife could justify the torture of the child he described – he rejects a world in which such things are possible. He makes it clear that this has nothing to do with the question of God’s existence and that he “lives by this,” which is to say that his rejection is a deep attitude. The Grand Inquisitor parable may then be seen as an image of this attitude. All this may have an impact on one’s ability to embrace Genesis in the spirit of seeing the wonder of the world. That Ivan does not shatter Alyosha’s faith but rather evokes his deep compassion for his brother is only intelligible in light of Alyosha’s whole character. In another man, the adherence to faith might have been blind or sentimental.

 

 Evolution and Genesis – Contradictory Theories? 

Does Genesis conflict with scientific theories such as the “Big Bang” and evolution?  Of course it depends on how one understands both – on how much one reads into both. Creationists want to make Genesis do scientific explanation; science popularizers like Richard Dawkins want to make science do religious and metaphysical work.  Both ask Genesis and science to do more than they can.  My claim:  religion and science have very little directly to do with each other, at least at the most fundamental level of their practice: no more than writing a poem about a garden because you find it beautiful and wonderful has to do with the practice of making sure the garden grows well. 

            Whatever criteria of sense operate in religious language, they have little or nothing to do with the things science investigates.  If a renowned scientist and philosopher like Stephen Hawkins finds no conceptual space for God in the universe, then it is not science that backs him up, though he himself may be as confused about this as the fundamentalist preacher.  God is not a possible object of scientific investigation. No scientists are actively collecting data to prove or disprove God's existence. 

Of course, scientists are not actively collecting data on the existence of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny either, but (although many people think like this) to put God in the same category as Santa Claus involves a simple error (for an adult if not a child): projecting a human, mythical, imaginative picture of God as a figure in a story (perhaps the somewhat frightening old man with the white beard) into the material universe as we know it.  If Hawkins means there is no conceptual space in the physical universe invested by physics for this fairy tale image of God, he is right; but that doesn’t tell us anything of astonishing importance about serious religion (or even fairy tales).  If Hawkins doesn’t feel the need to speak of God in connection with the deepest longings, with the ultimate mystery of existence, it is not because there is no conceptual space in the scientific universe for God; it is because there is no conceptual space for any of his understandings of God in the universe of his heart or imagination. He just finds other images more meaningful to express his deepest response to existence.

            Science – to take a homey example – can tell gardeners what makes tomatoes grow well, how much water they need, ways to protect them from pests, and such things. What science can tell gardeners (mostly gardeners learn by experience: that’s not the issue here) are things that are true for everybody: If either Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or Atheists – however different their ideas about gardening – forget to water the tomatoes or fertilize the soil properly, the tomatoes won’t thrive. Experience shows this, and science can investigate to find out the causes of what we can learn by experience. The task of scientific understanding is to adapt our thought to the biological aspect of the garden, not force the biology of the garden to conform to our preconceptions. Similarly, finding the cause of cancer, discovering the physical properties of aluminum, or studying climate changes are matters of science.  Religion can’t tell us much about such things. 

            Scientific statements must be somewhere along the way lend themselves to intersubjective research, such that particular biographies, religious beliefs, cultural backgrounds, and emotional states of mind are independent of the results of the research: the idea of a Christian, Jewish, or atheist science is absurd. Ideologically, I may want global warming to turn out to be based on a misunderstanding; personally, I may want to win the Nobel prize and proving global warming is based on a mistake would advance my claim. None of this matters to the science of global warming.          

            But who I am does matter greatly to my attitude towards religious (as well as moral and aesthetic) judgments. When I watched a documentary of the humiliation African Americans were subjected to during segregation, my anger and shame was not incidental to the truth that segregation was evil: it was the form my conviction that it was evil took. Yet I suppose many people of my grandparents generations did not respond with anger; the pictures of humiliation did not signify to them what they did for me. But unlike the case with global warming, no one can point to any independent data beyond personal responses to independently verify the truth of my conviction that what I was seeing was evil. That in no way undermines my conviction that it was evil – of few things am I as certain as I am of that.

Or to get at the point another way: what makes a statement scientific is often that scientists know how at least in principle to test it. Testability is part of what distinguishes astronomy from astrology.  If someone claims that tomatoes will thrive when the soil contains a certain amount of iron, then we can test that assertion by having one garden with soil containing that amount of iron, and another garden that does not contain it, all other things being equal: and see which tomatoes do better.  Questions like “How can these capitalists destroy those ancient forests?” or “How could people treat other people like that?” can be answered by no possible experiment; they are not intersubjectively testable in the way scientific questions such as “How much iron do tomato plants need?” are.  Often our feelings about the former kind of questions are rooted in our deepest response to life – to religious attitudes in the broadest sense of that term.

I was listening to an evolutionary account of why we humans and other animal species are warm-blooded – made for older children, a series entitled ‘It’s Okay to be smart.’ After reconstructing a couples of explanations that made sense (however difficult to test in practice), the speaker noted that “evolution doesn’t really have a destination; it is the journey that is important.” Now that is an interesting thought, possibly, perhaps from the point of view of the kind of evidence that a scientist can take seriously, very probably true. But it is not a scientific hypothesis; it is a metaphysical thought – meaning it cannot be possibly mathematically described, generalized, tested, confirmed or falsified, used to make predictions, etc. It is not possibly something we can know, at least that way, for we would have to know that there are no realities that are to us as we are to cats and fish, realities that may in fact have imprinted the cosmos with purposes, possibilities, tendencies that our finite purely intellectual reason cannot reach. The question of whether there are such realities is not one that interests scientists as scientists, and there is no rational-scientific basis to assume that science explains all there is to explain.

            Indeed, these metaphysical questions are rooted in our experience of meaning. And whether we are open to discourses of meaning does depend on who we are.  Science can’t tell me anything about the meaning of life, my loves, and my regrets, how I should live, what I should do, what I may hope for. And the deepest roots of religion don’t have anything to do with what fertilizer makes tomatoes grow well, what stars consist of, or whether genetically engineered corn causes cancer.  In other words, science can reveal the biology of birth and death: understanding the biology allows technicians to make birth safer and allows pathologists to do autopsies to determine cause of death. But it can tell us nothing whatsoever about the awesome mystery of the birth and death of a human being, which in turn is a function of the meaning an individual life can have in the world – how utterly strange that certain people can move us the way they do!  And Genesis may not have much to say about the causes of birth or death; it does contain deep clues for those who are open them as to their meaning for us, at least one possible way to understand their meaning.  This is only revealed in the inner symbolic (or perhaps better: iconic) universe of the heart – not empirically, like the dissection of a corpse in an autopsy.

            We all have attitudes to life that originate outside of science. Some people, for example, don’t care about gardens; others deeply love their gardens: for both sorts of people the “laws of biology” are the same, though the difference in what the garden means to one may be infinitely greater than what it means to another.  The lover of his garden may be moved by a sense of wonder over growing things; that things are as they are and not different; over nature’s producing what we need to live and what gives us joy; even over the wonder of life and the beauty and goodness of growing things.  Science can’t tell us anything about meaning, about love, about wonder, but Genesis can.       

            The deepest meaning, our most “primitive” attitudes towards existence – these represent the source of religion.  Genesis is one possible expression of wonder over the miracle of Creation – and existence is a miracle, is the miracle.  It is an expression of the experience of the goodness of existence, or the beauty of the earth:  he saw that it was good, very good.  Genesis expresses a deep moral attitude to the Creation: that its origin is divine; that it is kept in being by love; that it is not ours to possess and desecrate as if it were of no more value than goods humans make for profit; that humanity is privileged to be potentially in (however ambiguous) relationship with the divine source of Creation.  Like the gardeners above, the scientist apart from any conscious religious beliefs may investigate the Creation either in the spirit of wonder, love – or, to find better ways to exploit it for profit, which also expresses an attitude towards nature that is no more independently verifiable than the experience of wonder or reverence.  But the religious orientation of the scientist is strictly speaking no more logically relevant to the practice of science than it is to growing tomatoes, though one may ask whether the scientists and gardeners who are inspired by love and wonder might be differently empowered.         

            Wittgenstein wrote that even if all the possible puzzles of science could be solved, the problems of life wouldn't be touched.  Our thinking can never reach reality at deepest levels. God/Reality/Good is made visible (or not) though experiences of meaning: reverence, love, caring, beauty, wonder, selflessness, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, authentic pleasure (the taste of garden tomatoes!); also, I must add, in remorse, the pained recognition of guilt.  But who knows ultimate reality?  Who can give us the correct theory?  No one.  There is no theory to give.  And this applies to church theologians – the “scientists of God.”  As soon as one starts talking about religion, confusion threatens. When this talk about religion becomes implicated in all-too-human social or personal power, the confusion is inevitable. Thus Wittgenstein wrote, slightly paraphrased: Of the Sublime one cannot speak without reducing it to literal nonsense, and thus one must be silent.

Realism vs. the Icon

Consider this representation of Jesus from late antiquity / the early middle ages:

                                                     

If you look carefully, the two halves of the face are different. The portrait expresses a theological understanding of Jesus: he is part man, part God. He combines two natures that actually can't be combined. Except for orthodox believers, God combined them by becoming human. (John Hamer lecture)

   The unknown painter was most certainly not trying to represent the historical Jesus in a realistic way. He wasn't painting a portrait of Jesus. 

    The New Testament and the texts that were excluded from the New Testament but were considered scripture by groups of Christians deemed heretical by the bishops likewise were composed and collected decades after Jesus had lived. No doubt some sayings and parables of the historical Jesus survive in these texts. Perhaps also some history - the crucifixion, for example. But these texts are also much more a literary icon of Jesus making theological points, points that were at the center of worship for the different congregations and eventually for the dominant Catholic-Orthodox Church. It is as confusing, I think, following the John Hamer lecture, to read them naively as history as it is to see the icon painting of Jesus as a portrait.  Icons let in a light from another world to illuminate the physical things in this world, at their best. 

  This is also a good analogy to metaphysical beliefs (e.g. the world is Creation, or the world is cold, black, indifferent space and matter doomed to entropy, etc.): such beliefs are the light (or shadow) in which the physical things of the world (including ourselves) appear. 

 

 Critical Reflection on Religious Language

            Iris Murdoch thought it useful to ask what a philosopher fears. What philosophers fear about this line of thinking is that religious language seems insulated from philosophical reflection and criticism, and this seems to open the door for any kind of subjective projection onto a blank ontological screen – to obscurantism. Yet this fear only arises from within the “fog” that descends when the language of the sublime is treated as propositional language subject to philosophical speculation. In the course of our lives, many of us come to critically reflect on deep-seated attitudes, and the clarifying of a certain approach to philosophy as not conducive to these ways of reflecting in no way interferes – it really leaves everything as it was.

 

            We can illustrate this with another Bonhoeffer prayer from prison:

 

Father in Heaven, Praise and thanks be yours for the night’s rest. Praise and thanks be yours for the new day. Praise and thanks be yours for all your kindness And faithfulness in my past life. You have shown me much good, Let me now receive from your hand What is hard. You will not lay upon me More than I can bear. For your children you let all things Serve for the best.

 

We can easily imagine that under the circumstances he was in his faith might have weakened; I suppose many a believer’s faith did weaken in these circumstances. And that under this impact, another man might begin to critically question the idea of an agent-God who has shown goodness and kindness, to whom one attributes as blessings what others would describe as good fortune, but who now stands back and allows the man to wait to be cruelly hanged. Admittedly, we might use such reasoning to criticize a literary character as implausible, but here God’s reality encounters what we consider intelligible in terms of morality and agency. We know that goodness means something different that we cannot grasp when predicated of God; yet an agent who had the power to save a man, one of his own, from a cruel execution and for inscrutable reasons allows it – perhaps to test faith – would not in any intelligible sense be considered good. This is so because we cannot find it intelligible that any possible good that might come out of such a cruel execution – and some good came out of it: Bonhoeffer’s writings and the example of the man and his courage – could possibly justify allowing that to happen. Not even compensations in the afterlife would seem to excuse God’s passivity in this case. None of these reflections need lead to a loss of faith – as argued, to give up an organizing attitude pictured can be like giving up one’s identity of soul – but in some situations it happens.

            The contrast with philosophical reflection should be clear. The context and the significance of what is at stake matters, changes the logic or grammar of the reflection. It has an irreducibly personal character. God’s reality or lack thereof shows itself in the response to situations like Bonhoeffer’s to people like Bonhoeffer. Academic philosophy would like to think the logic of the language may be abstracted from people in their concrete lives and treated abstractly in terms of clarity of concepts, validity of conclusions, and acceptability of premises. But the point is by abstracting the sublime from the sublime experience changes what all these things can possibly mean. It is like making a game – monopoly – out of a serious human practice like capitalism. Monopoly, like philosophy, features some points of analogy with the real capitalist thing, but the reality of capitalism is utterly “transcendent” to the game. (This analogy may break down at the point that abstract models – even Monopoly – may tell us something we hadn’t thought of about the practice of capitalism just as Wittgenstein’s simplified language games may tell us something about “the grammar of our language.”)

            But in the Bonhoeffer case, philosophical translation utterly distorts meaning and reality. Though I would resist applying the game metaphor to Bonhoeffer’s situation, the translation of his language into philosophy talk would be like switching games altogether – like going from chess to a role-play describes going from critical reflections on God’s reality of a man in Bonhoeffer’s situation to academic proofs of God’s existence and the criticisms of these. But it is in only contexts like Bonhoeffer’s (and the ritualized performance of such language, which had better make contact with such situations if it is to retain any meaning-force) that religious language can make contact with reality. The reflections after the fact, in other words, might concern the point the man might see in such prayers, in such a notion of God, perhaps of the very notions of God and prayer themselves, in the concrete living of his life. But crucially, these reflections would have a radically different character than academic speculations about the problem of evil, for example.

            Compare this to the type of account a logical-positivist minded interpreter of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus might give about the prayer: that Bonhoeffer had failed to give a reference for certain signifiers (cf. Tractatus 6.53). In that case, it would be logic that was “sublime”, as Wittgenstein put it in the Philosophical Investigations (§89). This over-simplified version (of which there are many complex variations) will make the kind of account I mean clear: the sense or nonsense of language must be determined by analysis of the underlying, hidden logical structure of the language; for example, names stand for objects; the signifier “God” does not refer to a possible object, and thus is without content, meaning. Humanly it is understandable that Bonhoeffer would use such cognitively empty yet emotively powerful language in the circumstances and given his socialization; yet philosophically that changes nothing about the nonsensical character of the prayer, which logically is analogous to writing a thank you letter to Santa Claus for the presents or a petitionary letter to the current King of Prussia (Winch, “The Meaning of Religious Language”). 

            Speech acts like ‘thanking’ or ‘petitioning’ obviously presuppose the existence of the one to whom gratitude is owed or the one to whom the petition is directed if the act is to have a point. The way I previously imagined critical reflection treated God much like a character in a book about whom we suspend our disbelief while reading and discussing. The critical reflection consisted in questions about the character’s plausibility within the narrative. Religion projects its narrative onto reality, however – logically akin to imagining Ahab as a historical figure and Moby Dick as biography because this satisfied some emotional need. And this would transgress the logical limits of language use. Thus the religious apologist must find ways to make this projection onto reality plausible in order to secure the meaning of a prayer – the language of prayer depends for its sense on a philosophical account of language.

            Religious language can be seen in such ways. It is not a mistake to see it so, as one can be mistaken about some factual state of affairs or an arithmetical sum. That is a possible, intelligible attitude, and clearly attitudes are not subject to testing by evidence (which does not imply that they are beyond all critical scrutiny – more on that below). The confusion is to mistake a possible attitude for a theory corresponding to some objective state of affairs “out there.”

 Religious Language and the Sublime

 

            And in these examples, some attitudes at least approach the religious, which springs from human responses to the natural and cultural worlds as well as to the significance other people can have. One might think of experiences that can go deep: the beauty and goodness of – a long marriage characterized by love and fidelity; the courage of a mother giving birth, or a bystander risking their life at the train station to protect a victim from a violent gang; or a nurse whose comportment around mentally ill patients of the severest sort is without a trace of condescension or sense that these souls would be better off never having been born (Gaita). What it means for God to exist is dependent from the wonder some people feel over existence; the horror some feel over evil, guilt, death; the sublimity of selfless love or courage. Though such things may be deeply meaningful without any reference to God, it is in such matrices that authentic religious beliefs originate and religiously significant attitudes are cultivated. This is the kind of reality such attitudes correspond to, a reality connected to facts but never reducible to them. These religiously significant attitudes do not correspond to reality (the facts) but organize reality into meaningful experience; they are the light which is necessary for reality to appear to us; they function somewhat as criteria do to that of which they are criteria – as the geometrically defined, ideal circle functions with respect to empirically real circles.

            As people use the language of religion in the context of their lives, God is the object of various kinds of prayer and worship: expressing gratitude, reverence, existential fears, deep wishes, needs for comfort, and so on. The language is set apart from everyday language: the language of prayer and worship is not only often ritualized to demarcate it from everyday language, but at its best is more pure than ordinary language – the authentic prayer or worship attempts to express the heart uncluttered by egotistic wishes. This is where the language of the sacred makes contact with reality; not in correspondence to states of affairs in the world. Religious language is the language of the sublime.

            Does this mean it is nonsensical? In a way, Wittgenstein (as least the author of the Tractatus) would have shared the view of those atheists who claim that God talk is not so much false as meaningless – that the language of the sublime is meaningless. If the sense that language can have be restricted to the expression of possible, experience-able factual states of affairs in the physical universe, then the language of the sublime would have to be nonsensical, since by definition the sublime transcends possible, experience-able states of affairs in the universe. Nevertheless, though nonsense, Wittgenstein thought that the sublime (which he called the mystical) was the source of everything that mattered in human life – even the physical world takes on significance for us (or not) in light of that which cannot be expressed: religious or metaphysical attitudes. (As I indicated above, this radical demarcation between fact and value presupposes a certain cosmology – that of modern science: the belief (and it can be no more than a belief) that modern science mirrors nature, the physical universe. The consequence of this dualism: “Not how the world is is the mystical, but that it is.”)

            It is important to note that all religiously relevant attitudes – including atheistically influenced ones – are sublime (and thus metaphysical): they transcend any possible factual-scientific state of affairs. It may help at this point to make the structure of the sublime and the meaning of sublime language clearer, which I will do using Thomas Weiskel’s three phrase model. First, a contrast to everyday experience is presupposed. Linguistically speaking, signifiers (words) have a conventional relation to that which is signified (referents). Psychologically “the mind is in a determinate relation to the object, and this relation is habitual, more of less unconscious (preconscious in the Freudian sense) and harmonious (22).” A father, to take an example suggested by Cordner, has a conventional relationship to his children: he is preoccupied by work, does his duty by the children – reads to them in the evening, etc – but experiences all this as something normal, everyday, something typical for his culture. We might say this relationship is somewhat shallow without intending a moral judgment. And this shallow relationship is interwoven with the meaning the language of family (son, daughter, love, duty, etc.) has for him, again understood in a rather literal, conventional way.

            And then, in the second phase, something happens to radically disrupt this conventional relationship: he loses a child in an auto accident or, less dramatically, is moved by some loving gesture of the child.

 

The habitual relation of mind and object suddenly breaks down. Surprise or astonishment is the effective correlative, and there is an immediate of a disconcerting disproportion between inner and outer. Either mind or object is suddenly in excess – and then both are, since their relation has become radically indeterminate (22-23).

 

In terms of Wittgenstein, the event unsettles the conventional attitude (and the interconnected meanings of the language of family). The habitual attitude breaks down. Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, he begins to see his previous life with his children in a new, critical light.

            In the third and final stage – assuming it comes at all – a fresh, new relationship is established. This new relationship, incorporating the excess Weiskel identified, has a different character:

…the mind recovers a fresh balance between outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself and object such that the very indeterminacy that erupted in phase two is taking as symbolizing the mind’s relation to a transcendent order. This new relation has a “meta” character that distinguishes it from the homologous relation of habitual perception (23; emphasis mine).

 

The father – again, like Ivan Ilyich – has come to see his children in a different light; has come to change the attitude he has towards them. It is like the linguistic change between conventional uses of words like son, daughter, father, including the ways a sociologist might perhaps use the words in his work, to the super-charged uses of these words in religious poetry – language “used at full stretch” reflecting a deeper love for the children. And the conversion is not restricted to how the father experiences his children; in a sense, he now lives in a different world.

            I would like to connect this change in attitude with something more recognizably religious by reflecting on another example, one used by Peter Winch. We are asked to imagine a pre-historic mountain tribe whose birth, death, initiation, and marriage rituals include a ceremonious moment of silent contemplation of the mountains, prostrating their bodies before the mountains: “I should want to say that members of the tribe were expressing something like reverence and even religious awe (110-111).” A further marker that would bring these practices into analogy with practices we designate as religious would be the degrees of devoutness with which different tribe members performed these rites. Winch notes that in other tribes the solemnity and gravity he associates with his example could be expressed with gaiety, but that would not weaken the analogy. More essential to its religious character – the behavior would have to be

set apart …from everyday practical concerns…not in the sense that it has no connection at all with such concerns (on the contrary), but in the sense that it is stylized, ruled by conventional forms and perhaps thought of as stemming from long-standing traditions. I should also expect such rituals to be associated with a sense of wonder and awe at the grandeur and beauty of aspects of the tribe’s environment…. (111)

 

Winch thinks of religious language and images as growing out of this religious practice, and deriving its sense thereof.[1]

            We can see the sublime at work here. The rituals actualize some original experience of reverence or awe, with which significant events (birth, initiation, marriage, and death) are brought into association. These biological and sociological events are transformed by this association, transforming the way they are experienced. The rituals symbolize the relation of these events and the life of the tribe to a transcendent reality. Talk of the gods in this context has a “meta” character (like language in quotation marks), symbolizing the “very indeterminacy that erupted” when the object called forth the response of awe or reverence.

            This indeterminacy may be elucidated by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus distinction between propositions that represent possible states of affairs in the world and those that must employ the logical-grammatical language of representation but whose meaning cannot be determined by any possible state of affairs for the simple reason that no such worldly state of affairs is possible. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein famously just asserted the meaning of such literally meaningless, other-worldly (in the sense of not being reducible to any possible fact or set of facts in the world) “shows itself.” In his latter work, the notion of Einstellung / attitude previously discussed helps us to understand this showing better. The imaginary tribe undergoing the sublime experience of awe or reverence conceives of gods as objects of their worshipful attitude.

            The language of the sacred (sublime, mystical) that becomes part of their ritualized worship is set apart from everyday language – just as, for example, the language of the Eucharist for Catholics has a fundamentally different character from all other language uses. Here is a part of that language:

 

It is truly right to give you thanks, truly just to give you glory, Father, most holy, for you are the one God living and true, existing before all ages and abiding for all eternity, dwelling in unapproachable light; yet you, who alone are good, the source of life, have made all that is, so that you might fill your creatures with blessings and bring joy to many of them by the glory of your light.

 

The grammatical form here is (and must be) that of assertion, imperative, petition, and so on, drawing on everyday language and speech acts. For instance, the assertion, here paraphrased, that God has existed before human history, that in fact God has existed eternally, and that God is located within a kind of light that human beings could not approach – with the assumption that it would blind us – utilizes the language of assertion and can be stated as I have just done in propositional form. And of course, thought of as assertions, the language seems a bit crazy – mythological (in a derogatory sense) or superstitious as it would probably seem to a man for whom the scientific Enlightenment goes deep as an attitude towards the world. Clearly, it would make no sense in ordinary language to predicate eternity to an agent who performed actions in time – unless eternity meant not outside of time, but existing in time, considered as countless moments going back and forward as numbers to on a number line. If we could get the concepts to make logical sense, we are still left with the non-accidental impossibility of ever having any experience (to check) of what seem assertions of fact.

            But this switching from the language’s origin in the sublime to everyday factual and conceptual would be a bad misunderstanding – to treat the language of “showing” or gesturing towards the indeterminacy of the sublime as profane assertions. Such language, obviously, can only be figurative (or analogical in Aquinas’s sense). The problems with figurative language will be treated below; here it is enough to note that the figurative depends on the literal.            

            This Wittgenstein judges to be a major confusion. What gives religious language its sense is religious life, typically structured by religious practice (prayer, worship, etc.). The sense that religious language may have cannot be grasped independently of that experience and practice by a conceptual-logical analysis that would presume to re-write the imperfect emotive-figurative expression in more precise terms. This does not immunize such language from reflection or critique, but allows us to see what such reflection or critique amounts to and how it might proceed. It also allows us to recognize that treating philosophical-theological language as a more accurate expression of an emotive, metaphorical religious language involves a reductive shift that loses the sublime character of religious language as though it consisted of debatable propositions.

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The religiously significant analogy to the case of the father would be that his talk of his children and his love for them (together with the new spirit in which, for example, he reads to them) has been energized by the attitude shift, by his sublime sense of the utter preciousness of his children, by his gratitude for their lives. We can imagine the latent religiosity of the new attitude if we now imagine some terrible accident that caused the death of one of these children. In other words, the father’s sense of his children’s preciousness has some relation to the tribe’s sense of awe at the majesty of the mountain: both express a sense of transcendent value, both may lead to more general attitudes about the preciousness of life or the world – that is both may flow into religious expressions of gratitude, for instance.

 

 

Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan

 

      There is a wonderful Bach choral – Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan (roughly: Whatever God does, that is well-done). Paul played a version of it at his piano recital.

 

Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan,

What God does, that is done well,

Es bleibt gerecht sein Wille;

his will remains just.

Wie er fängt meine Sachen an,

However he forms my life,

Will ich ihm halten stille.

I want calmly to place my whole trust in him.

Er ist mein Gott,

He is my God,

Der in der Not

who in times of trouble

Mich wohl weiß zu erhalten;

knows well how to maintain me;

Drum laß ich ihn nur walten.

therefore I am content that his will prevails.

 

The hymn, if I had to paraphrase its message, is one of faith in God’s goodness and justice even when we can’t understand it – a calm, peaceful, consoling faith. If I think about it too much, I feel the discomfort I always have with the idea of Providence – of God’s plan, of God allowing evil for the sake of the Good. The specter of an arbitrary God of infinite magical power surfaces, to whom we in fear and awe must simply submit and obey, denying any attempt to think or judge on our own. But that is not the sense I get in this hymn, especially when the words accompany the music. I wouldn’t expect to understand God’s purposes in creating the world and keeping it in spite of evil in being. Intimations we have in our best, deepest joys and loves, and even in our grief and remorse, but only intimations.

        Why did God allow the cross? The collapse of the Roman Empires? The perversions of Christianity during the Middle Ages? The genocide in the Americas in the name of Christ? The 30 Years War? Slavery? The two world wars? The Holocaust? Ted Bundy? The mass murder events after the world war? My uncle Alan’s and Aunt Alice’s MS? Children dying from perverts, war, and famine? The wife beater? The Ukrainian newborn baby killed by Putin’s missiles? (This list would take longer than my lifespan to complete.)  Can I believe such things are done for our good? No. Do I think God planned them in? No. That is both a logical-conceptual and an existential remark. Logically, it’s like asking whether I believe a square might ever be round. What God does, that is by definition good. Or what is not good, that is by definition not from God. How do I know what is good? Well, I am by definition (and existentially) fallible, but if Auschwitz or the African slavery of the American South or the Trail of Tears were not all evil root and branch, then nothing is evil. If the love shown by Mother Theresa for the afflicted and dying of Calcutta was not good, then nothing is good. Some things we can know. We are, after all, created in God’s image and have the teaching and the spirit of Christ to guide our hearts and conscience.

       It is human beings who make history; not God. God’s history, I suppose, would be much different and would not include slavery, the Trail of Tears, or Auschwitz. Or Caesar for that matter. Or the billionaire class. But we human beings exist as the universe exists: through God, whose mind we partly know through Christ. Human beings make history inside of a reality that is of God. Human beings are conditioned to be sure: by genes, family, culture, history, chance, etc. But within that we are free – none of what conditions us determines us. We are the animal that can make promises. We are the animal who must bear finite responsibility for our words and deeds. We are a self-conscious somebody; not just an exemplar of a species.

        What we cannot do: make good evil or evil good. We cannot just legislate what is real, good, or beautiful. We cannot create anything in the strict sense, though they be called on to “sub-create” (Tolkien) – to make of what is, something good (art in the broadest sense; we make communities good or bad). We cannot flourish when we, doing evil, act contrary to our own created being and that of our Creator. There are spiritual currents we are bound to, currents that if opposed lead to disturbances in history. I could try to articulate these currents, but at its most simple we are here to love the good, true, and beautiful, and to develop the virtues and gifts (e.g. music) of our nature. When a human being – perhaps one with the power over the minds of their collective – moves against these currents of our being, then he sets himself up as the Creator and judge of what is real, good, true, or beautiful; sets himself up against his Creator and all of Creation. He can only pervert what is real and sets himself up for a hellish fall, damaging others through history in a vicious chain reaction. To become “autonomous,” like Satan, will put you at odds with your own nature and the Creation:

 

[the autonomous self] seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite. – William Blake

 

        Most all of the hells we must endure are human-caused, directly or indirectly. In a perfectly just, courageous, self-restrained, wise, hopeful, faith-and-trust having, loving community, living in respectful dialog with the nature of the land they inhabit and of which we are the stewards, evil would lose its power over us. (Surely, God appeared to us in Christ to free us from this power, to restart history.) And the misfortunes that we may still be subject to would have a different meaning. The whole cycle of human history when the first human being exercised power unjustly over another and a human collective saw nature as a raw material to be exploited for purposes of greed, power, sex, and vanity, deforming everything that came after. We are all to a greater or lesser extent products of this deforming – though we were given the way to overcome it. We are always measured by the Good, and always fail – to a greater or lesser extent – to measure up. But we can to some extent know how far we fall short.

       Es bleibt gerecht sein Wille. God in his goodness and justice keeps the world in existence. In spite of the mess it has become. And God is good. This gives me hope. Will ich ihm halten stille. I am content to trust God’s wisdom, especially since Christ has taught me that God is indeed loveable. In secular words, I would say that I have faith that the good, the true, and the beautiful will win out and those who have suffered from evil done will somehow be comforted. I think questions like What is God’s purpose in allowing the Holocaust or the horrors of Ruanda? are confused and based on a wrong picture of God. All evil is contrary to God’s will, contrary to God’s being – it seems blasphemous at worst, ignorant at best to think otherwise. I could not consent to the hymn if it meant believing that God was fine with the genocide in the Americas for some inscrutable purpose of His own that is beyond my understanding. If God is good – and it is a truism that God is perfectly good – then God hated that. My consent is that such horrors will be made good and that there is still hope for a good life on earth. That I consent to.

      Thus when my aunt Alice in her dying agony said “God is in control” or when D says my actions were ‘meant to be’ or when someone talks about “God’s plan,” I can accept that not as God’s explicit wish that my aunt was in agony or that I break my oath, but as a faith that everything that happens is contained by the love that God poured into the Creation. Why doesn’t God intervene?! Why doesn’t he put a stop to all the evil?! Well He did intervene. He suffered one of the most excruciating and most demeaning deaths humanity has ever devised. But it couldn’t destroy Him; it couldn’t destroy His love. Thus evil cannot destroy hope. We might want a great magician in the sky that makes life just and happy but that is just not the way it works. Dealing with that is a necessary step toward spiritual maturity. 

Refutation of Dualism 

  The Good (or goodness) as attributed to any reality, substance or action, only makes sense as distinguished from preferences. Goodness means what you ought to prefer irrespective of what you happen to prefer – and would prefer if your whole heart and mind were in tune with reality. And what you ought to prefer doesn’t make sense apart from what love commands. What ought I to do as a father or a teacher, in the end, reduces to what is truly good for my children or students, what is really in their best interests – which is a translation of what it means to love them (in a Christian sense anyway).

  The problem is my limited understanding. The problem is aligning my will with what my mind and heart understand. What love commands doesn’t make sense apart from reality – apart from the deepest reality of what you are dealing with (often present in potential only; think of a mother’s love for her son, a murderer). To will a person’s good is just to will what a perfect love (with a perfect understanding of them) would will. That is the standard written into the nature of things. Good is in right relation to this standard; evil is the opposite.

    I have been attracted to Gnostic mythology in the past; to the idea that there are two equal powers contending: Good and Evil, God and the Devil, Spirit and Matter. It seemed to explain my own alienation from my bodily (especially sexual) desires. It seemed to explain the inherent non-being of anything material: coming into being just to decay and die - not an accidental but an essential feature of material beings. Mind, spirit, Ideas were eternal, and this real. Materials beings were never fully present, always changing, dying from the moment they - we - come into being. To exist in time is to be less than real, less than good. Our being is infected from birth with nothingness. A radical dualism between spirit and matter made sense of this to me. 

   In the moral-religious myth, Dualism as the Idea that Satan is the opposite of God, rather than the Archangel Michael, as in Christianity (C. S. Lewis).  

   If dualism were true - metaphysical and religious - we should weep when our children are born. 

   Dualism is incoherent for the following reason:  the very concept of good and evil implies that one is in a right relationship with an ultimate standard and the other is not; that one is in tune with metaphysical reality and the other is not. Therefore, they cannot be equal powers. One can only be a corruption or negation of the other. There could in principle be a dualism of radically different substances: spirit and matter (cf. physics: energy and matter are one). But not Good and Evil. 

   

  This is an ancient insight, in no way original to me. I tried to put it into my words. 

 Two Sunday Meditations on Thoughts of Wittgenstein

Faith and Dogma 

     Wittgenstein wrote:

 

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to a human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it. (Culture and Value, 28e)

 

The connection between religious beliefs – whether personal or in the form of dogmas or doctrines as here – and personal faith is interesting. When I was a practicing Catholic, the biggest problem I had was saying the Credo during mass. I either had to understand the dogma symbolically as I repeated it:

 

I believe in God,

the Father Almighty,

Creator of Heaven and earth.    

 

Or I was merely embarrassed – as when I had to repeat that Jesus ascended into heaven, a dogma I could not even make sense of symbolically. (Comic, blasphemous images of Jesus flying up into the sky like a rocket.)

      Clearly, no one (in his right mind) understands these dogmas as propositions that like those of science can be, should be empirically tested against the independent reality of factual states of affairs, or the reality that can be expressed as mathematical equations. Nor can speculative reason do anything with them. They must be considered revelations: that human reason cannot find fully intelligible though the heart might understand (why must we assume the heart is not connected to aspects of reality that logic and science is not?). Because they cannot be found fully intelligible, and because they might allow a believer to see his whole life in their light, and thus could serve to guide and regular every aspect of his life, … because of these things Wittgenstein would call them religious beliefs. But they are not anything that can be known speculatively or philosophically. Literally, they are nonsensical.

      Any meaning they can have must come from individual appropriations, translations of them in their lives. The notion of God the Creator can make sense out of an experience of the overpowering beauty, majesty, infinity, terror of nature, the universe. One can feel the birth of one’s child or the life of a beloved parent was a gift. One can suffer remorse for evil done and wish with all one’s heart for forgiveness. Even be profoundly moved and shocked by reading the story of the adulteress (‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ – words that pierced my heart light a bolt of lightning, transforming the way I understand myself and others). The encounter with the reality of God happens in such sublime experiences; not speculative philosophy, theology, or church dogmas. This powerful, sublime emotional response can be translated into a picture – which for a community of believers can become defining, can become a dogma, an experience recreated in a different mode through ritual (dogma without ritual is blind). The reality to which the picture refers is the experience of the universe as overpoweringly beautiful, majestic, etc.

      The experience should not be thought of as “subjective,” a mere projection onto reality.  It might stand as a symbolic placeholder for an aspect of reality that transcends full comprehension; the image may itself (Being as Creation) be divinely inspired. [I am not doing ontology here, but phenomenology, making no existential assumptions but trying to understand the thing itself.] In any case:  As Wittgenstein wrote, it is not the speculative intelligence that desires salvation but the flesh-and-blood human being conscious of falling short. (And a ‘religious’ belief system that denies that we fall short is for me nothing but the subjective attempt to whitewash one’s shortcomings. It is almost a test of the seriousness of a possible ‘religious’ belief that it confronts this feature of human life. The shamans of modern therapeutic consciousness, of course, are working around the clock to make the reverse true, to make the experience of ‘sin’ unreal and the ego-life a source of angelic purity: psychologists rationalizing! All supported ideologically by secular humanism and appeals to science. Absurd.)

       If the powerful, defining emotional experiences – which can produce religious pictures as well as deriving from the contemplation of religious pictures – are not a part of our experience – and we, the hollow men, may be cut off from such experience (cf. imagine trying to experience the Grand Canyon as did Cárdenas) –  or if the picture cannot translate those experiences, then the dogma will be meaningless; we will not see a point to them. That is all their “falsity”  amounts to, logically. In many or even most cases, to see dogma as contradictions to scientific propositions and therefore false or nonsensical fails to understand how they work (or fail to work) in the lives of believers and skeptics alike. As Wittgenstein put it in the first passage – I could not reject a dogma I now believe in without living completely differently.

         Dogmas make sense only in the context of religious life. To criticize them is always possible, and not only from a religious point of view. For example, I might wonder whether my sublime emotional response really implies a relation to an extra-personal reality, as the Creator dogma implies, or to a subconscious psychological realm deriving from my infancy; and I may doubt that subconscious, infantile psychic realm has any connection to supernatural reality – I might think it has evolutionary explanations, which itself, however, is not scientific; even it has evolutionary causes, the religious need not assume that God is not somewhere present in those causes. God or No-God – neither are possible scientific hypotheses and to that extent, questions about God really are beyond narrowly scientific or everyday reason. But any criticism that fails to understand the peculiar logic of religious belief (perhaps criticizing them for lacking scientific evidence) is completely out in left field. How and why a religious belief-expressed-as-dogma can make sense (or not) is logically a vastly more complex than the reductive syllogism:

 

(1)    Only scientific propositions and what can be translated into scientific propositions can be true.

(2)    Religious beliefs cannot be expressed as scientific propositions.

(3)    Therefore, religious beliefs cannot possibly be true. 

 

  

 Analogies of Good 

       "So, there is no sense to speak about something which is “good”. There is no analogy for “good”. There is no logic of a concept “good”. The concept “good” is not translatable into other languages." Be careful! Recall examples of unproblematic attributive uses:

 

·                 a good knife

·                 a good argument

·                 a good dive

·                 a good teacher

 

It makes perfect sense – also for Wittgenstein – to apply ‘good’ to these objects. ‘Good’ doesn’t mean the same thing when applied to each: a good argument is not sharp and doesn’t literally cut well; a good knife doesn’t feature clear meanings, true premises, and a conclusion that deductively follows from those premises. Still, one can speak of analogical meanings. All these objects fulfill some purpose, and there are criteria that must be met to fulfill that purpose: e.g. the purpose of a knife is to cut, and in order to cut it must be sharp; the purpose of a Borscht soup is to taste good and be nutritious; in order to taste good and be nutritious one must use fresh vegetables, the right amount of spice, etc. Where the analogy breaks down in when ‘good’ is used in ethics or religion:

 

·         God is good.

·         An unexamined life is not worth living (i.e. not good)

·         It is better to suffer than to do evil

 

The analogy breaks down because the references are sublime – not facts in the world, and the purposes are also either not present or at least not present in the same sense: ‘better to suffer evil than to do it’ ‘Why? In order to fulfill what purpose?’ ‘No reason other than not doing evil, evil is something you never should do!’

        I suppose you could say something like ‘in order to be a decent person’, but that doesn’t give a purpose like cutting, something external to the means. I want a good education so I need money – money is a purely external means to get educated; in another social system, money might not be necessary at all. ‘Being decent’ is not an external purpose to which ‘not doing evil’ just happens to be a means (perhaps in a different situation it wouldn’t matter? Nonsense). Being decent is just another way of referring to a person who refrains from doing evil, not the reason for the sake of which one refrains from doing evil.

      And so, according to Wittgenstein in the “Lecture on Ethics” at least, good is being used metaphorically, in a literally senseless way in ethics and religion. I would say: it is being used to refer symbolically to a relation to transcendence, which by definition cannot be referred to with ordinary literally meaningful language, but which nevertheless stands in an analogical connection to that which we do understand.

      The goodness that, for example, Edith Stein showed in a concentration camp, being sublime, may not be without remainder translated or paraphrased into the ordinary language we use. The goodness revealed through her demeanor is on another plane that the goodness of a knife or language instructor. We can’t fully understand it, because we cannot relate it to a clearly understood telos, we cannot see it as a means to any higher purpose at all. And yet, if the word goodness forces itself on a person, as it does me, that means I am conceiving the person’s demeanor under an imaginary telos-like image: that such transcendence of the animal- and ego-fueled fears and desires shows itself in a love that is indifferent to the animal and ego-centered self is like a telos, though again only by analogy. It would be as though the end of being a competent chess player paled in significance to the qualities of losing oneself in concentration was one was learning the game – the losing oneself in concentration is not a telos like mastering the game, but it would be incomparably more valuable than any consequence.

     The strength of the analogy lies in that the telos – mastery in chess, transforming yourself into an image of Christ – is a necessary condition in making sense of the action, and the action takes on the force of something good and necessary relative to that telos; the difference lies in the absolute importance of the good that reveals itself on the way to realizing the telos relative to the telos, and thus the transformed sense of telos that results. In a sense, the telos is a ladder that gets thrown away when one has ascended high enough. The Good (for Christians, Christ) is the judge of all purposes, ends, goals.