(no subject)
Some time ago, in a discussion on here, someone called JJ asked me a question: 'If you do dismiss literal interpretations of religious stories, how do you deal with the language of "belief" and "faith" that so pervades religious discourse?' I have been slow to reply, because the series of posts that led to the question were riddled with assumptions which, while widespread among educated people, I don't share. But cool_moose has been looking at my (slightly out of date) website and mentioned the subject of church, which started me thinking. Maybe I can offer some kind of answer to JJ in the process.
One of my oldest friends was recently ordained as an Anglican priest - I felt a joy for him quite unlike what you would ordinarily feel about someone getting a new job. Myself, I feel closer to Alan Garner:I couldn't go far with any creed. But that to me is not relevant. It's enough that I know. I wouldn't try to persuade others, and it doesn't concern me, though I know it concerns some churchmen, that I'm not a member of the Church of England. They say, "Well, if you know, why don't you join...". And I have to say: "My job is not to join; it's to have another angle, to report the view from here."
I don't mean that I'm agnostic - rather that I have never been able to take the modern (in the long historical sense) confinement of religion to certain times and certain buildings very seriously. It's all around, or it's nothing. We may take the world for granted, as something which is simply 'there', yet we are always either engaged in the process of drawing out meaning from what's there, or else living within the result of others efforts at drawing out meaning. It is possible to say such meaning is entirely arbitrary (though it is harder to believe this than to say it). On the other hand, there is the experience that some attempts at making sense of things ring true, seem to correspond to something out there. Garner again:Most of my friends are as recognisably priests as anyone can be. People who work in the theatre are in a religious profession: a theatrical director has the same job as a vicar. There's no difference in kind. They have to make manifest that which is not manifest, but which is. And they have to do it by presenting a picture or a metaphor of reality, because you cannot describe reality, but you can present a metaphor. A play, a novel, a parable, a religious text - all serve the same function. Just try seeing things this way, you say: you won't see it all but it will be another facet.
My issue with JJ is that - like a lot of people, including some liberal Christians, not to mention the literalists themselves - he thinks literalism was the natural form of religion and that seeing religion as metaphor is a modern trick by which to dilute unpalatable nonsense. This view is difficult to argue with, because it is widely held by intelligent people, yet incredible to anyone who has spent much time with theology - or, which had more influence on me, poetry - that predates "modernity".
In fact, I tend to see the process the other way round to JJ. Up to around the seventeenth century, the orthodox position for western thinkers was similar to that of St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face...
To 'see through a glass, darkly' is to see indirectly, by telling stories, by metaphor - to treat the stuff that matters as difficult to get at, not directly accessible to us, but real and important, nonetheless. It seems to me that during the early modern period Paul's analogy was rearranged - the significant breakthroughs in scientific and technical knowledge led to a sense that we could 'put away childish things' and see all of reality 'face to face'. This became the new orthodoxy - that only that which can be observed directly exists, and that the stuff of stories is for children. ('Alice in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' are littered with the tropes of medieval religious dream poetry...)
Isaac Newton, for example, was deeply entangled in mysticism, but among the first generation to see the significance of his work, the sense grew that this process should unravel the workings of the universe all the way back to God Himself. (On this, see AD Nuttall's book on Pope's 'Essay on Man'.) This is where that desiccated form of religion, Deism, came from - although its appeal to thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century is perhaps only comprehensible in that the prospect of a scientific formula for religion may have seemed to offer an end to the religious wars which Europe had suffered. (Wars which must be understood as being rooted in social and economic tensions, rather than simply irrational religious feuding - the spread of secularism didn't make the twentieth century notably peaceful...)
Far from being the historical form of Christianity, biblical literalism (and fundamentalism in general) is Deism for the scientifically illiterate - religion reduced to a set of pseudo-scientific formulae, of which Creationism is only the most explicit example. Religion that claims 'face to face' knowledge, that has no place for mystery, develops a peculiar kind of intolerance and incuriosity. (This is not to say that this new form of religion has a monopoly on either, nor on bloodiness.) Those versions of liberal Christianity which hitch themselves to a secular narrative of progress and cede the ground of tradition to the fundamentalists do a deep injustice to their forebears. More practically, they also lose the ability to offer a genuine theological critique of the world today - getting sucked into feuds over sexuality within the church rather than challenging the cult of instant gratification which has been passed off as genuine sexual liberation.
So, how do I 'deal with the language of "belief" and "faith" that so pervades religious discourse?' I deal with belief with difficulty, as many have before me. I think of the father who said to Jesus, 'I believe; help my unbelief'. And when none if it makes much sense, I don't see it through the Victorian lens of the 'crisis of faith', but the 16th century lens of the 'dark night of the soul'. Because part of what was mislaid with the mystery and the riddles and the dark glass was the sense that whether I believe in God is no more important than whether God believes in me.
One of my oldest friends was recently ordained as an Anglican priest - I felt a joy for him quite unlike what you would ordinarily feel about someone getting a new job. Myself, I feel closer to Alan Garner:I couldn't go far with any creed. But that to me is not relevant. It's enough that I know. I wouldn't try to persuade others, and it doesn't concern me, though I know it concerns some churchmen, that I'm not a member of the Church of England. They say, "Well, if you know, why don't you join...". And I have to say: "My job is not to join; it's to have another angle, to report the view from here."
I don't mean that I'm agnostic - rather that I have never been able to take the modern (in the long historical sense) confinement of religion to certain times and certain buildings very seriously. It's all around, or it's nothing. We may take the world for granted, as something which is simply 'there', yet we are always either engaged in the process of drawing out meaning from what's there, or else living within the result of others efforts at drawing out meaning. It is possible to say such meaning is entirely arbitrary (though it is harder to believe this than to say it). On the other hand, there is the experience that some attempts at making sense of things ring true, seem to correspond to something out there. Garner again:Most of my friends are as recognisably priests as anyone can be. People who work in the theatre are in a religious profession: a theatrical director has the same job as a vicar. There's no difference in kind. They have to make manifest that which is not manifest, but which is. And they have to do it by presenting a picture or a metaphor of reality, because you cannot describe reality, but you can present a metaphor. A play, a novel, a parable, a religious text - all serve the same function. Just try seeing things this way, you say: you won't see it all but it will be another facet.
My issue with JJ is that - like a lot of people, including some liberal Christians, not to mention the literalists themselves - he thinks literalism was the natural form of religion and that seeing religion as metaphor is a modern trick by which to dilute unpalatable nonsense. This view is difficult to argue with, because it is widely held by intelligent people, yet incredible to anyone who has spent much time with theology - or, which had more influence on me, poetry - that predates "modernity".
In fact, I tend to see the process the other way round to JJ. Up to around the seventeenth century, the orthodox position for western thinkers was similar to that of St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face...
To 'see through a glass, darkly' is to see indirectly, by telling stories, by metaphor - to treat the stuff that matters as difficult to get at, not directly accessible to us, but real and important, nonetheless. It seems to me that during the early modern period Paul's analogy was rearranged - the significant breakthroughs in scientific and technical knowledge led to a sense that we could 'put away childish things' and see all of reality 'face to face'. This became the new orthodoxy - that only that which can be observed directly exists, and that the stuff of stories is for children. ('Alice in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' are littered with the tropes of medieval religious dream poetry...)
Isaac Newton, for example, was deeply entangled in mysticism, but among the first generation to see the significance of his work, the sense grew that this process should unravel the workings of the universe all the way back to God Himself. (On this, see AD Nuttall's book on Pope's 'Essay on Man'.) This is where that desiccated form of religion, Deism, came from - although its appeal to thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century is perhaps only comprehensible in that the prospect of a scientific formula for religion may have seemed to offer an end to the religious wars which Europe had suffered. (Wars which must be understood as being rooted in social and economic tensions, rather than simply irrational religious feuding - the spread of secularism didn't make the twentieth century notably peaceful...)
Far from being the historical form of Christianity, biblical literalism (and fundamentalism in general) is Deism for the scientifically illiterate - religion reduced to a set of pseudo-scientific formulae, of which Creationism is only the most explicit example. Religion that claims 'face to face' knowledge, that has no place for mystery, develops a peculiar kind of intolerance and incuriosity. (This is not to say that this new form of religion has a monopoly on either, nor on bloodiness.) Those versions of liberal Christianity which hitch themselves to a secular narrative of progress and cede the ground of tradition to the fundamentalists do a deep injustice to their forebears. More practically, they also lose the ability to offer a genuine theological critique of the world today - getting sucked into feuds over sexuality within the church rather than challenging the cult of instant gratification which has been passed off as genuine sexual liberation.
So, how do I 'deal with the language of "belief" and "faith" that so pervades religious discourse?' I deal with belief with difficulty, as many have before me. I think of the father who said to Jesus, 'I believe; help my unbelief'. And when none if it makes much sense, I don't see it through the Victorian lens of the 'crisis of faith', but the 16th century lens of the 'dark night of the soul'. Because part of what was mislaid with the mystery and the riddles and the dark glass was the sense that whether I believe in God is no more important than whether God believes in me.