Truth as Attunement, Disclosure

Truth is attunement to reality.

Reality shows itself in different ways to different capacities.

Interpretation is not projection but a meeting with what is.

Better interpretations disclose more, cohere more, and endure.

Reason clarifies and tests what attunement first makes visible.

 

 

I want to come back to the Sappho fragment.

 

Like a sweet apple reddening on a high branch,

high on the highest branch,

and the apple-pickers forgot it.

No, not forgot: they could not reach it.

 

A shallow and obtuse interpretation might say this: the poem is simply about an apple that was left unpicked. The correction in the last line adds a small detail about physical limitation. If one insists on symbolism, one might say that love is like an apple because it is pleasant or desirable. On this reading, the image is decorative. It adds color, but it does not disclose anything essential. The apple becomes interchangeable with any other pleasant object. The poem is reduced to a mild observation about missed opportunity.

     A deeper better attends more carefully to both the poem and the thing. The apple is not just any apple. It is ripe, visible, elevated, and just beyond reach. The repetition of height matters. The correction matters. The apple is not neglected. It exceeds the grasp of those who desire it. The image gathers sweetness and distance into one structure. It lets us see a form of desire in which fulfillment is present and withheld at the same time. This is not an just added meaning but arises from what the apple is in that situation and from how it stands in relation to the one who would take it. Thus both the poem and the apple serve as measures. The poem sets limits on interpretation. It directs attention to height, ripeness, visibility, and inaccessibility. Readings that ignore these features or replace them with others fail. The apple also sets limits. It can support an image of sweetness and distance. It cannot support claims that contradict its nature. A good interpretation is one that remains faithful to both. It lets the words and the thing constrain what can be said.

 

. . .

 

     The apple is ripe, visible, and just beyond reach. These features belong to it in the situation of human life. When the poet sees the apple in this way, she is not just projecting a private feeling to a neutral object. She attends to how the apple stands in relation to a human being who desires it. The meaning arises in that relation. The sweetness and the distance belong together in the experience. The apple shows itself as desirable and as withheld. The poem gives words to this showing. It makes explicit a possibility that is already there in the encounter.

 

     Gadamer’s idea of a “fusion of horizons” helps to understand this. The meaning appears where the being of the apple and the world of the person meet. Each brings something latently present in the other. The apple’s ripeness, its place on the branch, its visibility are disclosed; human longing for love and perhaps self-transcendence are disclosed the human being attends to the apple. When these meet in authentic encounter, something true becomes visible. A reader from another time can see this even without sharing the poet’s culture. Distance can sharpen attention and free one from habits that hide the thing. The circle of understanding is not broken. The apple itself becomes more fully present (real) in experience.

     Gadamer denies that the fusion of horizons is a projection onto a blank screen. There is no blank screen. The thing already addresses us with its own being, its own latent possibilities. The apple presents ripeness, color, weight, and place on the branch. Our horizon brings language, memory, and expectation. Understanding happens when these meet and adjust to one another. We test what we see against the thing. We correct ourselves when it resists. Prejudgments are not simply errors. They are starting points that can be revised in contact with what is given. Truth, in this sense, is the success of this meeting. It is a right fit between our words and what shows itself.

    Thus understanding can grow across time and culture. Distance can problematize fixed habits and make new aspects visible. A reader who is not formed by Homer’s world can still see something true in it, because the text carries a claim that reaches beyond its origin. The process is circular. We move from parts to whole and back again. The circle is not a trap. It is the way correction occurs. Better understanding shows itself through greater coherence, richer detail, and the ability to illuminate new cases. It also shows itself in agreement among careful readers and in the endurance of the insight over time. In this way fusion of horizons supports a notion of truth that is neither projection nor mere method, but a disciplined attunement to what is.

 

. . .

 

When one gives up a narrow, positivist model of truth, the danger of relativism appears. It is relatively straightforward to say what counts as right in domains where we have clear procedures of verification. But once we move into poetry, myth, moral perception, we seem to lose those procedures, and with them the confidence that we are still dealing with truth rather than projection. The difficulty arises because we are offered a stark choice: either poetic meaning is objectively true in the same way as scientific claims or it is merely subjective (psychological, cultural, expressive). If there is no single procedure that settles all questions, it can seem that any interpretation is as good as any other. But this assumes that there is only one model of objectivity – the positivist one. The example of Sappho’s apple shows that this does not follow. The poem does not report a fact about apples. It discloses a structure of experience through the apple. The issue is whether this disclosure is fitting and true to the thing and to the experience it illuminates.

   So, rejecting that assumption, a third possibility opens: that there are forms of truth whose objectivity is not grounded in methods that bracket out subjectivity but directly in educated, refined experience, judgment, reflection, understanding.

       There are criteria that allow us to judge in domains that positivism can only consider outside the realm of truth.  What Would It Mean for the Poem to Be True? Take the Sappho image: the apple high on the branch, sweet, out of reach. At the level of empirical verification, it could of course be true that Sappho saw an apple hanging on a tree that was out of reach, but that is irrelevant to the truth of the poem. The poem’s truth consists of it faithfully disclosing something about Sehnsucht. So the question becomes whether this image allows us to see something real that we can recognize upon reflection. Thus one criterion is intersubjective recognizability, at least among those capable of recognizing if not every human being as such. A true poetic disclosure is one that is not idiosyncratic. Others can recognize the truth, basically say “yes, that is how it is.” It illuminates or makes sense of their own experience when brought to attention (even as the idea of a loving God not letting my grandmother be finally annihilated made sense of and illuminated by love for her). This is not logical or scientific proof, but it is not arbitrary either.

     Reality itself constrains interpretation. The analogy or image must be fitting. In Sappho’s case, the apple must really be something sweet, visible, and potentially unreachable; the image must correspond to something in the world. If I said “Love is like a square circle,” the analogy collapses –  ontologically. So poetic truth is constrained by

the real features of things and their possible relations.

   Another criterion is that a true poem does not merely decorate experience but allows us to see more than we saw before. After Sappho, a good reader can recognize a kind of desire one might not have clearly articulated. So the test is whether the poem opens reality, or merely repeat familiar associations. I like to think of it like this: if the insight can be fully captured in flat prose without loss, then the poetic form, which expresses an emotional-existential dimension of meaning, was not essential to the truth. The truth disclosed is not separable from the form of disclosure.

       This view does not imply relativism. As it rejects any form of positivism, it rejects relativism, which ultimately depends on accepting the positivist criterion of truth and meaning. On thus can everything non-empirical and non-logical be relegated to subjective taste, mere emotion, or projections onto a blank screen. A purely relativistic account would say that the poem expresses a cultural or psychological state

its “truth” is reducible to that. But the criteria above – taken from actual practice –  resist this. Neither is recognizability is not reducible to conditioning nor is depth arbitrary.

Fittingness is constrained by reality. Irreplaceability indicates contact with something not freely constructed. So it is not right to say that the poem is true because we feel it; rather, we feel it because it discloses something true.

      An interpretation that depends on accidental features, such as color alone, remains shallow. One that assigns features the thing does not have fails outright. Another may seize on one real feature, such as perishability, and present it as the whole. This can feel persuasive but remains partial and can distort. Better interpretations show a balanced fit. They hold together several aspects without forcing them into a single, reductive claim.

    Poetic truth does require a competent subject, responding to a real aspects of meaning-being in the world. So failure can occur when the poem distorts (bad analogy, superficiality) or the reader is inattentive or malformed in sensibility. This mirrors moral knowledge as not everyone sees what is admirable or shameful equally well. So a poem is true when it discloses a real aspect of the world through an analogy that is fitting, recognizable, and irreducible, and when it calls forth a just attunement in the one who receives it. So the apple in Sappho is not merely a cultural symbol nor merely a psychological projection. It is rather a real thing whose features (sweetness, elevation, inaccessibility) disclose something about desire. And that correspondence is not invented but discovered. Disagreement can remain, since each disclosure is partial. Yet not all disclosures are equal. Some open reality more fully and endure across contexts. In this way one can reject relativism without returning to a single reductive model of truth.

I guess this is based on my understanding of the implications of the work of Gadamer and Heidegger on truth. 

Concept Formation, Knowing, Interpreting

 

 

I want to get into some philosophy today by exploing concept formation and subsequent philosophical deepening, and to what extent interpretation and translations (themselves concepts) play in this process. The examples I would like to work with are: apple, concept/idea, interpretation, and translation. First Apple.

 

 I assume one learns by eating them, pointing at pictures and naming them, picking them from a tree, etc. We learn apple through embodied, situated encounters. The child sees the round, red (or green) object; touches its smooth or slightly waxy surface; bites into it (crispness, sweetness, sometimes sourness); smells it, etc. [My grandparents had next door neighbors who were German immigrants. They had apple trees. The (to me as a child) elderly woman (probably early 60’s) often gathered apples in the autumn. I recall very clearly – I must have been around 5 – that see called me other and offered me one. It was great. I remarked that she talked differently, and she explained she was from Germany. I asked her to teach me some German words, and she taught me “Apfel.” My first German word associated with the first apples trees in my experience and the first delicious apple right from the tree.]

   This is not yet a “concept” in the strict sense. Recurring patterns recognized by the child (unconsciously) as patterns and associated with different experiences and interwoven into the child’s language. The apple is not just perceived but used: eaten when hungry; picked from a tree; placed in a basket; perhaps cut by an adult, etc. So the apple is embedded in forms of life (to use Ludwig Wittgenstein’s phrase) practices. And an adult says: “apple” and in my case also “Apfel.” At first, this is not a definition but a gesture within a shared situation: pointing + word; repetition across contexts. The child begins to grasp this kind of thing, i.e., “apple.” Not a fixed essence at this point but a family of similarities across situations.

     What Is the “Concept” at This Stage? Certainly not a definition (e.g. “a fruit of the genus Malus”) and not a mental image (since apples vary widely). More like an ability to recognize, use, and respond appropriately within a shared practice. Therefore, concept formation is clearly not primarily theoretical. More practical, normative. The child learns what counts as an apple; what does not (a tomato may be confusing at first!); what one does with apples, and the like. This is already a kind of implicit interpretation of the world because the child must do things like group different appearances together (red apple, green apple, sliced apple), ignore differences (size, color variations), attend to relevant features, etc. This is an active structuring of experience. So even “apple” involves a primitive, pre-reflective act of interpretation.

     Later, the concept becomes more explicit: “Apples grow on trees”; “Apples are fruit”; “Apples have seeds,” etc. The concept enters networks of other concepts expressing hierarchical relations (fruit → apple) and causal and biological understanding. At this point, the concept is no longer tied only to immediate perception but becomes something that can be thought about even in the absence of apples.

   And even in this simple case, there is already something like translation. The child “translates” from sensory experience to linguistic category, from one situation to another. Recognizing an apple in a new context requires translating past experience into present judgment. The word “apple” is shared such that my experience gets translated into your experience and vice-versa. Language functions as a bridge across private worlds. In what I am loosely calling translation, the logic of analogy is constantly at work (more on analogy later).

     So even in these early stages it seems clear that concepts come from lived engagement, not imposed on a neutral world, nor simply extracted from it. Interpretation is there from the beginning, the very condition of forming a concept at all. Translation , moreover, is not something that happens after concepts are formed; rather, concept formation itself is already a kind of translation of world into meaning, of experience into shareable form.

 

. . .

 

How to distinguish interpreting vs. knowing what an apple is? Begin with a distinction that does not separate too sharply what in life is intertwined. Knowing what an apple is, at the most basic level, to know what an apple is means, I suppose, one can reliably identify apples, distinguish them from non-apples, use them appropriately (eat, buy, pick), answer simple questions (“Is this an apple?”), etc. i.e., practical, classificatory competence. It is largely unreflective and embedded in action. Knowing (kennen) is a kind being at home with the thing within a shared practice. To interpret the apple is something different in kind, though continuous with the first. It means to take the apple as something, to situate it within a meaningful horizon. Or to see it under a description that is not forced by mere recognition. The apple as been seen as temptation, gifts of nature, symbols of knowledge, products of labor, etc. The question is no longer “Is this an apple?” More like “What does the apple mean in this context?” Knowing recognizes what it is; interpreting discloses what it is as i.e., unpacks the in principle vast range of meanings that are also part of the phenomenon’s being. Knowing stabilizes identity; interpreting opens significance.

     But interpretation is not simply added later. Even the child treats the apple as food, prefers sweet apples and rejects rotten ones. Already, the apple is taken as something. So the distinction is real, but the priority may be reversed. Interpretation is implicit from the beginning; explicit interpretation is its deepening.

 

. . .

 

 Concepts I maintain deepen not first through philosophy, but through narrative, symbol, and shared imagination. Some examples from my childhood and youth. It is clear to me that the meaning of apple was different from pre-sugar cultures and this helps to understand their importance for the imagination of our predecessor cultures. There is the apple in the Garden of Eden.

 

                       

 The apple (even if not explicitly named in the Hebrew text, it becomes so in tradition) becomes forbidden fruit, temptation, knowledge of good and evil, loss of innocence. The concept is no longer merely botanical or practical.It now gathersexistential, moral, and theological significance.

   I recall also the apples of Idun (from Norse myths).

 

 Here apples signify renewal of youth, continuity of life, dependence of the gods on a sustaining gift. The apple becomes a bearer of vitality and cosmic order.

     I also remember the legend of Johnny Appleseed.

 

Now the apple is tied to cultivation and settlement, generosity and wandering life, human shaping of nature. The apple becomes a symbol of culture, care, and transmission across generations.

   What is happening in all these cases? The same concept apple is thickened, extended beyond immediate perception. But this is not merely subjectively projecting aspects of human psyche onto an arbitrary object!

Each story selects aspects of the apple (sweetness, growth, nourishment, renewal), amplifies them, and integrates them into a vision of the world

So pre-philosophical deepening is the enrichment of a concept through its participation in meaningful wholes. These myths and legends reveal possibilities of meaning already latent in the thing: nourishment/life immortality; attractiveness/desire/temptation; growth/cultivation/culture. Meaning for us can reveal being and heighten it. I totally reject the subjectivism that sees this an arbitrary projection of human subjectivity onto the blank screen of nature.

 

     Now we reach the deepest layer. How is it possible that an apple can mean temptation, immortality, or cultural cultivation without becoming arbitrary? The answer lies in analogy. Analogy is not mere similarity. It is

a structured correspondence between different domains of meaning. For example: Apple nourishes the body, knowledge “nourishes” the mind; apple is attractive and desirable, temptation draws the will; apple sustains life; immortality sustains being. Not random associations. Rather understood proportions or relations carried over into new domains.

   Analogy enables the translation I mentioned above. Translation, whether between languages or between levels of meaning, depends on analogy. Translation requires recognizing that two things are not identical and yet comparable in structure or function. In this case, the movement is from apple as fruit to apple as symbol of knowledge or life. That is a kind of translation from the sensory-practical domain into the moral, existential, or metaphysical domain. And that is only possible because nourishment (physical) is analogous to fulfillment (intellectual or spiritual). Or sensory sweetness is analogous to desirability (moral/existential). If there were no analogy, symbols would be arbitrary, myths would be unintelligible, translation between domains would collapse. But with analogy we get continuity across levels of meaning, intelligibility without reduction, and plurality without chaos.

   The whole movement like this: 1) concept formation begins in lived encounter (apple as fruit); 2) interpretation opens the thing to meaning (apple as something); 3) myth and story deepen and stabilize these meanings communally; 4) analogy makes this deepening intelligible and translatable across domains.  I think philosophical concepts (like “idea,” “interpretation,” “translation”) are ultimately refined versions of this same process. They, too, are grounded in lived experience, deepened by analogy, and stabilized by shared forms of life.

 

. . .

 

Then the move to philosophical reflection. Stick to the concept apple for now. The concept get metaphysically interpreted in different ways: as substance (Aristotle) or participating in an Idea (Plato), in the mind of God (Augustine), as a particular only (Nominalism), as a collection of molecules (science) etc. Here a bit unpacked.

 

1) The Apple as Substance (Aristotle)

For Aristotle, the apple is first and foremost a substance (ousia).

This means:

•             it is a this, an individual thing

•             it persists through change (green → red, unripe → ripe)

•             it has an underlying unity (not just a heap of qualities)

Its redness, sweetness, roundness are accidents; they belong to it, but are not what it is most fundamentally. Thus the apple is a unified being that has properties.

 

2) The Apple as Participation in an Idea (Plato)

For Plato, the apple we perceive is not fully real in itself. It participates in the Form (Idea) of Apple. That is, it is an imperfect instance of a more perfect intelligible reality. So the apple becomes a visible manifestation of an invisible intelligible structure. Note there is both knowing and interpreting (as explained above) involved here (and in all these philosophical accounts). Knowledge is a grasping of the universal: that is, what makes all apples apples. Interpretation understands the sensible apple as pointing beyond itself to a higher, more real order. From this apple to what-it-is-to-be-an-apple. The apple is known within a framework, but it is interpreted into a world.

 

 3) The Apple in the Mind of God (Augustine)

For St. Augustine, the intelligibility of the apple is grounded in eternal divine ideas. The apple exists because it is known by God; its form is a participation in divine reason (ratio). He give Plato’s Ideas an address (Kreeft). Therefore, the apple is a created being whose intelligibility reflects the mind of God.

 

4) The Apple as Particular Only (Nominalism)

With thinkers like William of Ockham, the picture shifts radically. There is no real universal “apple.” Only individual apples exist and “apple” is just a name (nomen) we apply. The apple is only this individual thing; “apple” is a linguistic convenience. The underlying claim is that similarity does not imply shared essence, only practical grouping. Here interpretation reduces the metaphysical weight of the concept.

 

5) The Apple as Molecular Structure (Modern Science)

 In a scientific framework, the apple becomes a complex arrangement of molecules, i.e., cells, sugars, acids, water as describable in terms of chemistry and physics. The apple is a biochemical system governed by natural laws. The unscientific, metaphysical move is then to take what is most real about the apple to be what is quantifiable and analyzable. Other dimensions (taste, meaning, symbolism) become subjective.

etc.

    These philosophical accounts are different ways of taking the apple as something fundamentally. Within each view, knowledge consists in correctly describing, explaining, and classifying the apple according to its principles. Philosophy (interpretation in general) goes beyond this and beyond experience per se. It involves interpretation in the sense that the prior act by which the apple is taken as this kind of being rather than that. It thus determines what counts as relevant, what counts as real, or what counts as explanation. 

      This raises the question of whether there is a way to adjudicate between these interpretations? Or are we moving among different, incommensurable “world-versions”? (Nelson Goodman.) Interpretation is not arbitrary (think Goodman would agree). It is constrained by experience, coherence, explanatory power, and perhaps something like adequacy to the fullness of the thing. So we might ask which interpretation does most justice to the apple, not only as object of science but as lived, meaningful, intelligible reality? Knowledge operates within a framework; philosophical interpretation establishes the framework itself. Knowledge answers the question What is this, given our way of understanding? Philosophical interpretation asks (or decides) What is it to be, such that this counts as understanding at all? Each account claims to be knowledge of what the apple really is and yet each depends on an interpretive stance that could be otherwise.

 

. . .

 

I could multiply such accounts, also by bringing in theology. Apple is a gift of God’s love, Creation, etc. Apple as commodified in capitalism. Apple as aesthetic object, etc. (Cezanne’s apples).

      

     Myth, religion, art, and metaphysics are not separate domains but different ways in which the same reality becomes intelligible to us. Myth gives narrative shape to fundamental patterns (origin, loss, renewal) showing in story what cannot yet be said conceptually. Art intensifies perception, allowing things to appear in their depth and presence beyond mere use. Religion takes up these disclosures into lived orientation, shaping how one stands in relation to what is ultimate through practice, reverence, and moral formation. Metaphysics seeks to articulate in clear concepts what must be the case for anything to appear and matter as it does. Each domain makes explicit what is implicit in the others: myth and art disclose, religion affirms and inhabits, metaphysics clarifies.

     Because reality exceeds any single mode of access, these domains depend on and correct one another. Without myth and art, metaphysics becomes abstract and thin; without metaphysical reflection, myth and religion risk confusion or unexamined assertion; without religious seriousness, both art and thought can lose existential weight; without art, religion and metaphysics can lose contact with lived experience. They are thus best understood as distinct but interrelated forms of attunement – narrative, perceptual, existential, and intellectual – through which reality shows itself under different aspects. Truth thus lies not in choosing one over the others, but in holding them together so that what is can be seen, lived, and understood with greater fullness.     

   The concept apple does not merely get defined once and for all; it unfolds into an entire world, or rather into many overlapping worlds – religious, aesthetic, economic, scientific – each of which is, in a sense, an open-ended set of meaning. Therefore, any philosophical or pseudo-scientific attempt to close the concept by reducing its meaning must be wrong-headed. So something fundamental: the apple does not have one meaning, plus optional interpretations. Its being is disclosed differently within different horizons of interpretation. Not relativism, but plurality of disclosure. These are not simply competing opinions. Each domain brings out real aspects of the apple while concealing others. For example, science reveals structure, art reveals presence, religion reveals giftedness, etc.

     Now I hope the distinction between knowing and interpreting becomes sharper. Knowledge within each domain aims to be precise, rule-governed, verifiable (in different ways). Philosophical interpretation explores which mode of disclosure is primary. It asks whether the apply is fundamentally a resource, a created good, a perceptual phenomenon, a molecular structure, commodity - the latter two being reductive (bad) interpretations in my view.

I think this is consistent with Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Aquinas. Perhaps even Goodman?

p.s.  One of my favorite apple interpretations, a fragment of a poem by Sappho

Sappho fr. 105a:

Like a sweet apple reddening on a high branch,
high on the highest branch - 
and the apple-pickers forgot it.
No, not forgot: they could not reach it.

Easter and Philosphy

 

    I would like to discuss difficulties with the resurrection, post Enlightenment. I have observed in myself a tendency that is probably quite common when it comes to the super-natural (in the strict sense of not conforming to how we believe on the authority of science nature works and what is possible and impossible). This tendency is a success of cultural positivism: when a dogma x (e.g. the Incarnation) seems to violate the well-established laws of physics or biology, reinterpret x in a spiritual sense, or as mystery, relying on our metaphysical finitude (“more things in heaven and on earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy/science”). This moves x out of the range of the empirically, objectively testable and into a range where certain kinds of experience come into play, not proving x in a logical or scientific sense, but making x seem plausible, making x make sense of these experiences. These experiences are hinge experiences like loving your children, and to the extent to dogma opens up space for a world in which love is real, they make sense of the experience.

     I fully understand why someone like Christopher Hitchens would reject this move, and due to the metaphysical finitude (can't get out of the world or experience to objectively compare our pictures of reality, how reality needs to be to correspond to our most deeply felt needs) it remains an intellectual stalemate between the person of faith and Hitchens, which allows one to go on believing without making Kierkegaard’s fully irrational leap of faith (i.e., I believe because it is absurd). Science can't replace metaphysics because our experience of the world is on another plane than that of science.

      When it comes to the resurrection story, this approach breaks down. I have been inclined to see the resurrection as some kind of epiphany or mystical experience. But this not only goes against the plain sense of the Gospels (not an absolute barrier for me) but probably changes the essence of the faith. It seems God would need to help us poor post-Enlightenment people. At some points, it seems you have to positively choose irrationality to accept traditional Christianity. Was Kierkegaard right?

   Indeed, the retreat into the merely spiritual can feel like both an evasion and a genuine attempt to preserve meaning. First, the epistemological dilemma. Folks like myself are caught between three powerful intuitions: 1) the authority of modern science (nature appears governed by stable, exceptionless laws. Dead bodies do not come back to life); 2)the authority of the Gospel witness (the resurrection is not presented as a vague spiritual survival or inner illumination, but as something stubbornly concrete: empty tomb, eating fish, wounds touched); 3) our metaphysical finitude (we cannot step outside our conceptual schemes to compare “reality as it is” with “reality as we see it”). Thus the need to reinterpret the resurrection so that it no longer conflicts with (1), even if that strains (2), justified by (3). The cost is apparent. At some point, the thing itself may have been transformed into something else.

  If the resurrection becomes merely an inner experience of the disciples, a symbolic expression of hope, or or a myth encoding moral truth, then several things happen. The apostles look less like witnesses and more like interpreters of an experience. And most importantly: death is not actually defeated, only re-described. This is why someone like Hitchens presses so hard here: once you concede this move, the claim becomes psychologically intelligible but metaphysically thin.

      What about the status of the “laws of nature” that seem to exclude resurrection. You can understand them as describing what is metaphysically impossible to violate. In that case, the Resurrection would be impossible.  You can also describe them as describing what always happens in our experience, but not legislating what reality must do in all possible cases. In that description, the Resurrection becomes highly improbable, but not incoherent. Or the “laws of nature” may describe how created things act given their natures, but do not bind the source of being itself (Aquinas). In that case, the Resurrection is not a violation, but an act from a deeper ontological level. I notice in myself that (modern as I am) I tend to slide the second to the first without noticing. Yes, in the strong understanding of the laws, the belief in resurrection becomes irrational (Hitchens). But if the laws of nature are not metaphysically absolute in that sense, then the issue shifts from whether resurrection is impossible to whether there sufficient reason to take this particular claim seriously?

    The deeper problem does not involve the problem of science and miracles but trust. We cannot step outside our experience to compare worldviews. That entails that science itself rests on trust in the intelligibility and regularity of the world, even as historical knowledge rests on trust in testimony and personal life rests on trust in persons. The resurrection question is therefore not purely scientific. It involves the question of whether these witnesses be trusted when they claim something that lies beyond ordinary experience. And here the tension becomes existential rather than purely epistemic.

  Indeed, the resurrection is different from other “supernatural” claims. It is not a private mystical experience or a vague metaphysical postulate; rather, it is a claim about a concrete event in public reality. Thus It cannot be safely relocated into “symbol” without loss. Indeed, it confronts the modern worldview directly. In a way, Christianity has tied its own hands here. As St. Paul says: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain.” There is no easy retreat.

    Perhaps instead of choosing between a literalism that forces many of us into epistemological embarrassment and a symbolism that dissolves the connection to reality, there is a third path? The Resurrection as ontological breakthrough, not anomaly; not a “magic violation” of nature, but the manifestation of a deeper layer of reality ordinarily hidden. This does not make it scientifically predictable but neither is consciousness, freedom, or value fully capturable by physics. In this view, the resurrection is not against reality; it reveals that reality is more than the closed system we often assume.

    I am sure that belief continues because certain experiences make it plausible. (I related my experience at my grandmother’s funeral and its connection to fully conscious beliefs in a recent entry.) Such experiences are not proof, of course, but may indicate an attunement with reality. Think of experiences of goodness that feel unconditional, encounters with persons that seem to exceed utility, or the sense that love is not merely subjective but claims reality. Such experiences shape the question about the Resurrection. If reality includes this kind of depth, is it closed to something like resurrection?

     I think there is no way out of the intellectual stalemate (see Hans Küng, Existiert Gott? And Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking). But the stalemate exists because one side assumes closure of the natural order. The other assumes openness to transcendent agency. Neither can be proven from a neutral standpoint. So the decision is not reason vs. irrationality, but rather which metaphysical picture best makes sense of the whole of experience and whether this experience can be trusted as a disclosure of what the world must be like.

    I wrote that it seems God would need to help us poor post-Enlightenment people. Perhaps the deeper issue is not that belief requires irrationality, but that it requires a form of trust (grounded in the deepest existential experiences) that cannot be compelled by argument alone. And that is precisely what feels most difficult to a mind trained in philosophy. We moderns are caught between the Scylla of naïve acceptance (which Tolstoi so admired in the Russian peasantry) and the Charybdis of easy reinterpretation.  Accepting the Resurrection requires entrusting myself to a picture of reality that cannot be secured through natural reason alone.

 . . .

       But even granting that I have metaphysical conceptual space for the possibility of the resurrection - I do - the story you have to believe about God demands a lot. It has been over 2000 years ago. The world has changed. To make someone's salvation depend on believing so improbable a story, to make salvation an epistemological problem! or a problem of interpreting an ancient text!, does not make sense to me. I have been thinking about these things for decades and I struggle. How can someone who cannot accept this story be blamed? Why would God make salvation dependent not on goodness, say, but the capacity to believe what to moderns is a story that doesn't make sense of God, though it may support a clergy?

    At bottom, I am saying that it would be unjust for God to make a person’s ultimate fate depend on accepting a proposition that is historically remote, epistemically difficult, and psychologically implausible in one’s intellectual context. This is very close to what Ivan Karamazov protests in The Brothers Karamazov, not about belief as such, but about a structure of reality that seems to place unbearable demands on finite creatures. If Christianity really meant “Believe this unlikely story or be damned,” then this objection would be devastating.

     But salvation can’t be an epistemological test. There is a popular form of Christianity (especially in certain Protestant strands) that does reduce things to assent to a set of propositions about specific historical events under the threat of eternal loss. But that formulation has always been contested, even within the tradition itself. Consider a different (and older) way of putting it: Salvation is not primarily about believing that something happened, but about being rightly related to the Good, the True, the Living God. On this view, doctrines are not arbitrary tests, but attempts to articulate what that reality is like. The resurrection, then, is a claim about the nature of reality and its ultimate hope. What the world must be like if our deepest desires are to be believed – like the funeral story I related earlier in its relation to belief in the immortality of the soul.

   Still, why this story, at that time, in that place, mediated through texts and traditions? Why should a 1st-century event in Roman Palestine become the axis of universal salvation? Contrast two models. First, the “Information Test” Model: God reveals a set of facts; humans must believe them; salvation depends on correct assent. This is the model I cannot accept. In the second model, God is the Good itself (something like what you find in Plato, Aquinas, Murdoch). Salvation is alignment with or participation in that Good. Historical revelation is an invitation or disclosure, not a test. Here a person can be oriented toward the Good without solving the historical puzzle. Failure to believe may reflect honest difficulty, not moral failure. I asked how can someone who cannot accept this story be blamed? On the second model, the answer would be that they are not blamed for intellectual non-assent as such. The deeper issue would be the rejection of truth as such, or refusal of the Good when it is genuinely encountered, which is of course very different from not finding the resurrection historically convincing enough. This would be to say that if a person sincerely seeks truth and goodness, but cannot honestly affirm the resurrection, that is not culpable unbelief. I am free to hope that Hitchens can be saved.

   Why not simply “Goodness alone,” then, as Gaita and Murdoch would have it? Why not make salvation depend simply on goodness? Aquinas agrees that goodness is central. But we are often confused about what goodness really is. And we are often unable to sustain it. Revelation is a clarification and empowerment of what the Good actually is. The resurrection, in that light, is not primarily “Believe this happened,” but “Death, evil, and injustice do not have the final word.”

 . . .

     The Resurrection as a "true disclosure of reality"? What does that mean? Start with the familiar. We already accept that reality shows itself in different modes, not all of which are reducible to scientific description. For example, in physics: reality is disclosed as quantifiable structure (mass, charge, motion); in personal encounter: reality is disclosed as a person, not reducible to data; in moral experience: reality is disclosed as binding or calling (“this is wrong,” “this must be done”); in beauty: reality is disclosed as worthy of contemplation or love. None of these are “irrational.” But they are not all the same kind of access. So already we live with a layered sense of “disclosure.” To say something is a disclosure of reality is to say that through this event, experience, or encounter, something about the nature of reality becomes visible that was not otherwise accessible. Not invented. Not projected.

     If one calls the resurrection a “true disclosure of reality,” one is not (at least not primarily) saying: “Here is a strange biological anomaly you must believe happened.” One is saying something more like in this event, reality shows itself to be such that death is not ultimate, the Good is not defeated,

and the structure of being is, at its deepest level, life-giving. In other words, the resurrection is not just a fact within reality, but a revelation about what reality ultimately is like.

     The Resurrection may thus not be treated like a mere story. A “mere story” would be expressive, meaningful, but not answerable to reality. A “true disclosure” claims this really happened, and what happened reveals something universally true. (History become myth or myth become history, as Lewis put it).  So the claim is doubly strong – historical (something occurred) and ontological (it shows what reality is).

       Think of falling in love. From the outside, it can be described in terms of hormones, behavior patterns, and evolutionary advantage. But from within, it is experienced as seeing something real about this person, something that calls for my response. Now imagine someone saying “That’s just your brain chemistry.” You might reply, if you were a certain kind of thinker, that no, though the experience of being in love something real is disclosed.  The claim is not irrational. It’s a claim about a different level of access to reality.

    The resurrection, if taken seriously, is an extreme version of this structure: not just experiencing something meaningful, but the intuition that reality itself has shown, in an event, that its ultimate nature is not exhausted by what we ordinarily observe. (A philosophy professor once warned us that when your argument has to rely on intuition, you are in trouble.) This is why neither the reduction to science or symbol must have the final word.

    Admittedly calling the resurrection a “true disclosure of reality” does not remove my earlier concern. One can still ask why such a disclosure would take this particular historical form, requiring interpretation, trust in testimony, and cultural mediation? That question remains unavoidable. But the expression does shift the issue from whether one can accept an improbable report to whether reality could be such that, at certain moments, it becomes manifest in ways that exceed ordinary expectations. Or whether if such a manifestation occurred, how would I recognize it, given my historical and conceptual limits.

    Perhaps a more philosophical way to put would be that the resurrection is an event in which the deepest truth about reality, its orientation toward life, goodness, and meaning, became visible in history.

 . . .

     If the resurrection is the ground for believing what it “discloses,” then rejecting the event seems to undercut the disclosure itself. Without the event, aren’t we left with a gap that can only be crossed by something like a Kierkegaardian leap?

     So the Church trusts on faith that the resurrection happened.Therefore, reality is as Christianity claims. Thus the inability to believe that the event happened in history collapses the meaning, and recovering the meaning would then require a leap. That is the Kierkegaardian situation in a strong sense.

   Or perhaps it could be like this: one has some prior sense (however inchoate) of the Good, truth, or reality. (My feeling during my grandmother's funeral that it is cold and unloving not the believe in the possibility of her continued existence in God.) The resurrection is then seen as fitting, as illuminating, as disclosing that reality. In that case, the event is not the sole foundation, but the meaning is also not independent of it. They interpret each other. If the first explication is the only option, then without accepting the resurrection, one lacks any rational bridge to what it claims. Hence, either one believes against the grain of reason, or one rejects the whole. But if second makes any sense, then one might have access to what the resurrection “points to” independently, though perhaps less fully. For example, the sense that goodness is not reducible to power. Or the intuition that love has a kind of ultimate authority. Or the experience that truth is not merely constructed. The kinds of things that are emphasized by Iris Murdoch or Raimond Gaita. Of course, these are not proofs of resurrection. But they are attuned with what the resurrection means such that the person who has such experiences might find it easier to believe in the Resurrection.

    Even in Kierkegaard, the “leap” is often misunderstood. He really doesn’t mean by it just believing something without a foundation. He means rather

committing oneself where objective certainty is unavailable in a situation where something has already gripped one as significant. So the leap is not into sheer darkness, but into a kind of lived coherence that cannot be fully secured in advance. At least in some formulations it is like this.

     Still, one could object that all those experiences of goodness, truth, love do not uniquely point to the resurrection. They are compatible with many metaphysical pictures. And that is true. So the resurrection remains underdetermined by experience, and therefore not rationally compelled. So Where Does That Leave Us? The resurrection is not a priori irrational (given a non-closed view of reality), but it is also not derivable from what we already know. Therefore, accepting it is neither a pure inference nor a blind leap, but something like a responsive judgment under uncertainty.

     Without the event, is the answer to “why believe this about reality?” missing? The resurrection, within Christianity, functions as a decisive sign, not merely an illustration. Without it, the picture of reality it supports becomes philosophically attractive perhaps, but lacking an anchor. That is precisely why Christianity insists on it so strongly, which is why it creates the difficulty many people feel. One might then hold that the vision of reality (Goodness, love, ultimate meaning) is independently compelling to some degree, as do Gaita and Murdoch. The resurrection is a proposed confirmation or disclosure of that vision, but one may remain agnostic about the event while still taking the vision seriously. This is not orthodoxy but it is not incoherent either. It defines my struggles. For me the options are full orthodoxy vs. a love of the Good without metaphysical anchoring (Gaita, Murdoch). There are trade-offs either way. If you accept the Resurrection, you get a coherent vision with the event at the cost of epistemic strain. If you detach Goodness from the Resurrection, you relieve that strain but lose the hope bound up with the event. Your love becomes tragic.

    My doubts, occurring within my faith, come from my conviction that faith must not violate the integrity of reason, fallible as reason is, mine more than others perhaps. If faith cannot be so lived, something is wrong. I know that when I think about my Platonic side, the vision of Goodness, love, reality not reducible to mechanism, I don’t feel secure without the Resurrection (and Incarnation). The vision feels fragile without God, and God is revealed though the Incarnation and Resurrection, through Christ. At least that is what my deeper intuitions point to even if my mind must be dragged along at times.

. . .

    As Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, Christianity looks like a wild fairy tale and yet, when one lives with it, it seems to fit the contours of reality uncannily well. The story is a key that unlocks the meaning of Being. Chesterton makes sense when he writes that  the truth, if it comes from beyond us, would feel surprising, even disorienting. Because if reality ultimately exceeds us, then a fully “reasonable” religion, one that fits neatly into our expectations, might actually be too small. So the resurrection, in this light, is not just a difficult claim but the kind of claim one might expect if reality were more like a drama than a mechanical system. 

Reflection on Mark Johnston, Surviving Death (2010)

 

I read the book by Mark Johnston, Surviving Death, many years ago. It did make an impression on me. Let me try to recall Johnston’s project.

 1. Johnston’s central move is radical: he rejects the traditional idea that you or I, as individual egos or soul-substances, survive death. He argues that this picture (of a persisting inner “thing” that continues after bodily death) is philosophically confused, and tied to a kind of subtle egoism (“I want me to go on”). So he agrees with me, or rather I with him, that “surviving death” can seem incoherent if imagined as the continuation of the same embodied subject.

 

2. But he also rejects simple annihilation: i.e., the conclusion that, therefore, everything that matters is simply extinguished. Why? Because he thinks this assumes that what we fundamentally are is a self-enclosed individual subject. Which is what he challenges.

 

 3. We are not really what we think we are, according to Johnston. He draws on Christian tradition to argue that the soul is not best understood as a separate, bounded entity, but as something essentially relational and participatory. Our identity is bound up with truth, goodness, and love, which are not private possessions but realities we participate in. So the question shifts from whether an individual consciousness continues to whether that which is the true nature of the soul (its participation in love/goodness/truth) could survive.

 

 4. Johnston’s answer is that what survives is not the ego, but the life of love and truth in which we participate. In other words, when you love someone, that love is not merely inside your head but a participation in something real and enduring. And that participation is not annihilated by your biological death. Therefore, we “survive” insofar as our life has been taken up into what is not subject to death: namely, the Good (the life of God).

 

5. Johnston thinks much traditional belief in personal immortality is driven by the fear of non-existence and attachment to one’s own ego-consciousness. And he calls this, in effect, a kind of spiritual narcissism. True salvation, for Johnston, would actually involve being freed from the demand that this particular self must go on.

 

6. This leads to a moral transformation. The highest form of life is one in which one’s concern for one’s own survival recedes. (Recalls Schopenhauer, albeit from a different metaphysical ground.) We should strive to live in truth, loves others (i.e. will their objective good), and thus participate in what is intrinsically good. This is already a kind of “eternal life,” for Johnston; not in duration, but in quality of being.

 

7. Thus he reinterprets and in a way demythologizes Christianity. “Resurrection” is not the reanimation of individuals; “eternal life” is participation in divine love; “salvation” is liberation from the false self. He speaks of God the reality of perfect love and truth in which we participate.

 

 I agree that love cannot be meaningless; that a “ghostly survival” is not fitting for a human being; and that the Good is unconditional. My ego consciousness is an alienated form of consciousness and I lay no value on its survival (I hope I don’t have to deal with all my inadequacies for all eternity). But my love of my children and many others seems to require their continued existence as themselves (previous entry: cf. Gabriel Marcel). Justice also requires personal recognition, not just absorption into the Good. We must all face the real meaning of what we did and how we lived, if the universe is as it ought to be. I resist losing the concrete, embodied person, or at least that spiritual part of us that can love and seek truth beauty.

    Johnston tries to save what is deepest in the hope for immortality while abandoning what he sees as its egoistic or incoherent elements. So instead of insisting on the continuation of the same individual he claims that what is really real in me – i. e., my participation in the life of truth and love – is not lost.

     I would still affirm life even if I knew death was final. Johnston would say that very stance is already participation in something that does not pass away. I could embrace Johnston for my own personal fate but when it comes to people I love, I don’t think so. I do not need to persist; it is enough that I have participated in truth and love. There is a kind of purification in that, something even ascetical, a relinquishing of possessiveness, even toward my own being. That appeals to me. (This might reveal that I find it hard to love myself, not in an ego-centered way, but as loved and made by God.)

 But the moment I turn outward to your children especially but all the people, places, things I love, something changes. It is easier to say that I do not need to go on than to say: “You whom I love will dissolve in being part of the life of God (love), like a Buddhist perhaps imagines the soul becoming part of Being and Nothing. And I think that reveals something about love itself. Love is not symmetrical self-regard; it is a directed affirmation of another as irreplaceable. It is to encounter this person as not substitutable. And that is precisely what Johnston’s view struggles to preserve.

     Johnston wants to purify love of possessiveness. Fine. I should not cling to my survival. Fair enough. But when extended to others, it risks becoming not insisting that they live on as the irreducible individual soul they are. To love someone seems to involve the hope that they themselves are not simply lost. Not just that love existed, or goodness was instantiated. Johnston argues, in effect, that what matters survives in the Good. But love longs for more. It long for preserving not only that what is good about the beloved but that they are there. This is where I have more moved by thinkers like Gabriel Marcel who insist that love is not satisfied with abstraction or absorption; it longs for presence. Thus Marcel: love implies “Thou shalt not die” – not as a theory or wishful thinking, but as a demand that reality itself be faithful to the beloved.

    With one’s children, the issue becomes almost unbearable. They are not replaceable. They are not “instances of the Good.” They are this child, with a face, a voice, a history. So my hope is not that “goodness continues,” but “you will not be lost.” My love of my children compels me to hope.

     So I agree with Johnston that ee must let go of egoistic clinging and that our deepest reality lies in participation in the Good. But Love also affirms the irreplaceable person and hope reaches toward life beyond this world, not mere participation. If reality is truly faithful to love, it must somehow preserve both the purification of the self, and the eternal life of the beloved.

On the Immortality of the Soul

 

Writing in a time of war, again. Though my sympathies are with those Iranians, mostly women, who are victims of the theocracy, I am just sickened and appalled by these wars of choice inflicted by my country on the peoples of that region. Nothing those war-makers want to gain is worth destroying the life of one of those little girls, much less the whole school. And all the other innocent lives, any life maimed or lost in this war ordered by those wicked fools. 

 

. . .

 

As I get closer to the end – a weird thought of how many people have died, namely, everyone who was ever born except those currently breathing and taking in the sweet light of the sun – the question of the immortality of the soul moves more to the forefront. Here the basics for me as I understand it, in a brainstorming way: the Good requires love and obedience whether or not there is an afterlife, whether or not it means anything in the end; I don't see how surviving death – the very idea seems an oxymoron – is physically possible, thus would require divine intervention into physics and biology (nature); in C. S. Lewis's explication of "glory," I don't think it primitive carrot-stick morality to hope for it; I am a bodily creature and would not choose afterlife as a ghost, without the life of the senses, the taste of good food, the sweet light of the sun, etc.; love requires hope (you can't really love someone and accept their annihilation as final); the argument of Ivan Karamazov notwithstanding, those who suffered horrors in life must be comforted, and there must be some kind of judgment on evil-doers (though I think Christians must hope for universal salvation with Purgatory); my love of my children compel me to hope they are loved by God and hope for their being taken up into God's life after death; I personally, just for me, would still affirm life even if I knew for sure death was final; trust in Jesus' is the main source of belief in immortality for Christians, and the deepest longings of the human heart (C. S. Lewis on "joy" and Sehnsucht); I believe that consciousness nor spiritual capacities like love and intellect (Aquinas) are not reducible to what science can conceptualize, that the material body transcends our science; this connects with Plato’s thought still, I have little faith and almost no hope that my soul will survive the death of my body, almost no hope, meaning a little. Any arguments or sources of hope I missed?

 

Here a brief explication of these ideas.

 

1. “Surviving death” (taken from the title of a book by Mark Johnston, the Princeton theologian) may not be the right picture. I wrote the idea seems like an oxymoron, and that is right if we imagine survival as a continuation of the same biological process. But Thomas Aquinas would remind us that the soul does not survive as a body survives, and it does not survive as a ghost either (a diminished human). For Aquinas, the act of understanding and loving is not intrinsically tied to matter in the way digestion or vision is. Thus the claim in not that “the organism keeps going” but “what is most properly you is not identical with the organism.” True, that doesn’t make it easy to believe but it does reframe the “oxymoron.” It is only an oxymoron if we assume in advance that the human being is exhaustively physical in the current scientific sense.

 

2. When we grasp a universal (e.g. justice, truth, triangle), recognize a logical necessity, or love someone as irreplaceable, we are not relating to particular, measurable data. Aquinas’ (Platonic) argument is that if an act is intrinsically non-material in its object (the universal, the absolute, the irreplaceable person), then its root cannot be fully explained by material processes. Now that in itself does not prove immortality. It does intimate something interesting though. If intellect and love are not reducible to matter, then their principle may not be subject to corruption in the same way matter is. That opens a door. Not to certainty regarding the immortality of the soul, but to the intelligibility of the very idea of it.

 

3. “You can't really love someone and accept their annihilation as final.” I read this thought in Josef Pieper’s Über die Liebe. Pieper wrote: "Love is affirmation… it means: it is good that you exist." And he connected that thought to something Gabriel Marcel wrote: "To say to someone ‘I love you’ is to say ‘you shall not die.’" The idea is conceptual: to love someone is to say: it is good that you exist, not just now, but simply; and therefore it cannot be right that you are simply erased. So love contains, implicitly, a protest: “Death must not be the final truth about you.” This is not a proof, of course, but it is not nothing either.

     When I read this, I immediately affirmed it, not because I grasped as I might a geometrical proof but because I had already experienced exactly that. When my grandmother Lovan died, I was a hardened rationalist for whom religion and its dogmas meant nothing. At the Methodist funeral I found myself feeling condescension towards the Christian views about death implicit in the rituals. During the recitation of the 23^rd Psalm, in particular at the “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” it struck me how cold and indifferent my rationalism had left me, and something broke. I began to cry for I had loved my grandmother and she was gone. At that moment I felt intensely the thoughts expressed by Pieper and Marcel without being able to articulate them. Reading Pieper articulated them, finally, perfectly.

   Either love is fundamentally at odds with reality, or reality is deeper than death.

 

4. Ivan’s protest (in The Brothers Karamazov) is not just “There must be justice” but “No future harmony can justify past suffering.” Now, one response (found in Simone Weil, see previous entry) shifts the focus. The deepest need is not compensation but attention, recognition, and restoration of meaning. If that is right, then immortality is not about balancing accounts, but about the full acknowledgment of reality. And if reality is ultimately true, then nothing truly meaningful can be lost without remainder. Otherwise, reality itself would be, in part, a lie.

 

5. C. S. Lewis, his thought about joy and Sehnsucht (a longing for that which exceeds this life in principle, painful insofar as it always exceeds our grasp but for more pleasurable in its painfulness than all longings for pleasures that might be realized). The point is not that we desire immortality, therefore it exists. That is too easy. Lewis’ argument is that we experience a desire that nothing finite can satisfy; this desire is not for “more time” or “more pleasure” but for a kind of fulfillment that would not pass away. Lewis’ claim is that if a natural desire is not satisfiable by any finite object, it points beyond the system of finite objects. Again, not proof. But it intimates that human consciousness is open-ended toward Being itself.

 

6. One of the most outlandish and unbelievable dogmas of Christianity is the resurrection of the body, yet that is the only kind of resurrection that I would desire. Idea of a ghostly afterlife, at least in my present state, seems undesirable to me. I have no longing for that. The Christian hope is not that

the soul escapes the body, as it was for Plato. Rather the hope is that the person, as embodied, is restored and transformed. And that is what I long for. Logically, this shifts the burden from whether the resurrection is physically possible to whether there is a God who can re-create.

 

7. Which leads to the crux of the matter. I wrote: “Trust in Jesus is the main source… but I have little faith, almost no hope.” That is, in a sense, exactly where the New Testament locates things, not in a demonstrative proof ala Plato but in a kind of relational trust. Hope need not entail confidence. Hope can be grounded in a refusal to believe that love is meaningless and that the good is finally defeated, that my children and all the people I love and all the people who are loved are ultimately disposable, doomed to extinction.

It can begin as refusal. That refusal is already a form of hope. And the same man who gave us the Sermon on the Mound, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and forgave the adulteress tells us that we may indeed hope.

 

8. Of course I agree that the Good must be followed unconditionally. Plato and Jesus both are clear on this. For me that means whatever else is true about the soul or Being as such, love my neighbor as myself. (I will not unpack what this means here except to agree with Aquinas that love means to will the good of the beloved, not equivalent to liking or having warm sentiments.) So how does the longing that my loved one will be resurrected fit in? C. S. Lewis, in “The Weight of Glory,” argues that the desire for re-creation (“glory”)is not a mercenary longing for reward but a response to the intrinsic worth of the Good itself. What this longing amounts to is to be fully seen and delighted in by God, to know, as it were, the divine affirmation that one’s existence is not in vain. This does not subordinate goodness to reward; rather, it reveals that the Good is so good that participation in it naturally awakens a hope for its consummation. The moral life, then, is not sustained by a bargain (“I obey in order to be rewarded”) but by fidelity to a reality whose value is unconditional, yet whose very nature is to draw the creature toward fulfillment. Thus, to hope for glory (resurrection to a life in friendship with the Creator) is not to instrumentalize the Good, but to acknowledge that the Good is not indifferent to the one who loves it. (If I do something good for my children, I do no expect praise or any reward. If they love me partly because I do good for them, however, rejecting their love to preserve the purity of my motives in doing the good would be absurd.)

 

9. Thus I affirm the Good, regardless of outcome. I see reasons to think the human person is not reducible to matter as understood by natural science. I experience love as incompatible with annihilation. I find the idea of the immortality of the soul hard to conceive. I retain a small, stubborn hope. That “little hope” is not irrational. I would say that it is, in fact, proportionate to the evidence available to finite creatures. Put philosophically, it is reasonable to live as if reality is ultimately faithful to love, even when one cannot see how.