Example 1
Human beings suffer from loneliness in every circumstance of their earthly lives. They can be lonely on their own, or lonely in company; they can enter a crowded room of friendly people only to find their loneliness deepened by it; they can be lonely even in the company of a friend or spouse. There is a human loneliness that stems from some other source than the lack of companionship, and I have no doubt that the mystics who have meditated on this fact are right to see it in metaphysical terms. The separation between the self-conscious being and his world is not to be overcome by any natural process. It is a supernatural defect, which can be remedied only by grace.
That is the conclusion to which I have reluctantly come, and in this chapter I want to complete my argument about the face, by saying something about the presence of God in this world, and why our failure to find him is the cause of such deep disquiet. The position to which I am drawn has been expressed by many thinkers. But every attempt to state it seems to run into logical and metaphysical difficulties. Maybe there is no way to state the position that is not fatally flawed. Writers who see the existential loneliness of man as I see it – as a longing to be dissolved in the subjectivity of God – have written in ways so obscure that I have real doubts whether I can do any better. I am thinking of Kierkegaard, Levinas and Berdyaev, and also of Hegel, in whose shadow they wrote, and whose vision they confirmed by the very vehemence of their attacks on it.
Hegel argued that we self-conscious beings become what we essentially are, through a process of conflict and resolution. Self-consciousness is implanted in us as a condition to be realized, and we acquire it through Entäusserung – through building the public arena in which the dialogue between self and other can occur. The self becomes real through the recognition of the other. Language, institutions, laws are the vehicles through which we achieve Selbstbestimmung, the certainty of self, which is also a limiting of self and a recognition of the boundary between self and other.
The process that leads me to see myself as other to others also makes me other to myself, and this is the ‘moment’, to use Hegel’s language, of self-alienation, in which subjects become strangers to themselves, bound by external laws, hampered in their freedom and in rebellion against the constraints that press on them from outside.
It is in this way that the fatal fracture splits our world – the fracture between subject and object that runs through me. Healing that fracture means reconciling my own view from somewhere with the competing views by which I am surrounded, so that how I am in the eyes of others matches how I am for myself. For Hegel this is achieved objectively through law and institutions, subjectively through art and religion. These are ways in which we re-connect with the world from which our own struggle for freedom and self-knowledge had separated us. Hölderlin expressed some of this in his great invocations of home and homecoming – the journey outwards, which is also a journey back. And Hölderlin’s spiritual journey has been traced in our time, and through a changed emotional geography, by T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets.
To the religious person the journey out into alienation (which Jews and Christians capture in the story of original sin and our expulsion from Paradise) demands the journey onwards into redemption. This demand is recorded by St Augustine in his famous words: ‘our hearts are restless, until they rest in You’ (Confessions 1, 1). And it is recorded by the Sufi mystics in their invocation of the final unity with the source of light granted to the murshid, or spiritual leader. Indeed many of the great religions seem to have the structure of the Hegelian dialectic: an original innocence, in which the soul is at one with the world and its creator; a ‘fall’ or rebellion, in which the soul ‘realizes’ itself as a free individual and is also sundered from its true fulfilment, and a final homecoming through discipline and sacrifice, to be once again in harmony with the cosmos – redeemed by the saviour, released into Nirvana, in the arms of Brahman, or just asleep with the ancestors in the final place of rest.
The metaphysical loneliness of the subject is not a historically transient condition. It is a human universal. As I have argued, the creature with ‘I’ thoughts is accountable to others, and sees himself from outside, as an other in others’ eyes. The endless striving to unite the self who judges with the other who is judged is the religious way of life, and all the great religions are formulae for conducting this strife, through which we seek to be ‘restored by that refining fire/ Where you must move in measure, like a dancer’. Each religion promises one-ness with the cosmos; each describes the way of piety and obedience; each distinguishes the pure from the impure; and each abounds in sacred times, places and rites, through which the eternal can be encountered in time and through which the individual can be purified and redeemed. Each wraps the individual in the comforts of an enduring community. And all these features of religion are natural consequences of the metaphysical condition that compels us – the condition of creatures who must account for what they are and do, and who look around them for the place where forgiveness and acceptance can be earned and received.
Religion therefore begins in the experience of community, and in the desire to be reconciled with those who judge us and on whose love we depend. I have argued that guilt, shame and remorse are necessary features of the human condition. They are the residue of our mistakes and the sign that we are free to make them. But they direct us towards a higher form of reconciliation – a reconciliation in which our guilt is comprehensively acknowledged and forgiven. For the atheist this aspiration must be either suppressed, or turned in a stoical direction – the direction of the one who wills what is fated, and so achieves another kind of unity between himself and the world. For the religious being, however, redemption is an emancipation from the things of this world, and an identification with a transcendental ‘I AM’. For the one who trusts in God this is the consolation for human woes. Our sufferings stem from the burden of responsibility that we assume in our membership of the community of persons. Guilt is the price of our subject-hood, and God’s subject-hood is its cure.
As I have argued, this is not just a deluded way of interpreting ordinary fears and desires. It is an attempt to see our relation to the world as we see our relation to each other – as reaching through the tissue of objects to the thing that they mean. I have suggested that we extend this way of relating beyond the society of our fellows to the whole of nature, finding subjectivity enfolded, as it were, in the world around us. If there is such a thing as the real presence of God among us, that is how his presence must be understood: not as an abstract system of law, but as a subjective view that takes in the world as a whole. And in this view from nowhere we are judged, as we are judged by every ‘I’ that turns its face to us. It is through seeing the world and each other in this way that we develop as self-conscious beings, and as we develop ourselves so do we develop around us the external forms of our inner freedom – the social networks, institutions, and laws; the works of art, buildings and landscapes that are the face of our world.
But this means that religions are inseparable from the communities of the faithful. Without the community the real presence of the other is never granted; and without rites of passage and rituals of worship a community cannot become a settlement, attached to the earth and responsible for maintaining it. This leads to a deep problem: how can a religion defend its theological legacy on the grounds of truth, when it must also defend it as a communal possession and a test of membership? Is there not a fundamental conflict here, between the demands of reason and the demands of social cohesion? And if there is not, is it only because we have defined the community so widely that faith is no longer relevant or because we have made faith, as in Islam, the definition of a universal ummah, to which we all by nature belong?
As I argued in the first chapter, I regard those questions as serious obstacles to be overcome, by anyone who wishes to reconcile the practice of science with the claims of religion. And they can be answered to the satisfaction of faith, it seems to me, only if we regard the experience of community as a preparation for the experience of God, and the experience of God as a revelation granted in response to it.
Modern moral philosophy recognizes that personhood is a central category, and also that personhood is a relational idea: you are a person to the extent that you can participate in a network of inter-personal relationships. To be a person, therefore, you must have the capacities that make those relationships possible – some of which I have been discussing in this book. Persons fall under the scope of Kant’s moral law: they must respect each other as ends in themselves. In other words, they should grant to each other a sphere of sovereignty. Within your sphere of sovereignty what is done, and what happens to you, in so far as it depends on human choices, depends on choices of yours. This can be guaranteed only if people are shielded from each other by a wall of rights. Without rights individuals are not sovereigns but subjects; and these rights are ‘natural’ in that they are inherent in the condition of personhood, and not derived from any convention or agreement.
All of that seems, to the modern philosopher, like so much common sense, and a vindication of the life in freedom that is one of the most important legacies of the European Enlightenment. But it leads not only to the privatization of the religious need, but also to a peculiarly bloodless vision of community – one in which ‘conceptions of the good’, as Rawls describes them, are likewise removed from the public arena and privatized.1 The abstract liberal concept of the person, as a centre of free choice, whose will is sovereign, and whose rights determine our duties towards him, delivers at best only a part of moral thinking. Persons can be harmed in ways that are not adequately summarized in the idea of a violation of rights. They can be polluted, desecrated, defiled – and in many cases this disaster takes a bodily form. If we don’t see this, then not only will sexual morality appear opaque to us and inexplicable; we will lose sight of the ways in which the moral life is lived through the body and displayed in the face.
Many of our moral obligations are chosen, and fall in the public domain of justice and contract. But the obligations on which the enduring community depends are destinies. They are obligations of piety – the ancient pietas which, for many Roman thinkers, identified the true core of religious practice and of the religious frame of mind and which, in the easy-going temper of the Augustan age, seemed scarcely to require a belief in the gods or in anything beyond the natural order.
Piety is a posture of submission and obedience towards authorities that you have never chosen. The obligations of piety, unlike the obligations of contract, do not arise from the consent to be bound by them. They arise from the ontological predicament of the individual. Consider filial obligations. I did not consent to be born from and raised by this woman. I have not bound myself to her by a contract, and there is no knowing in advance what my obligation to her at any point might be or what might fulfil it. The Confucian philosophy places enormous weight on obligations of this kind – obligations of ‘Li’ – and regards a person’s virtue as measured almost entirely on the scale of piety. The ability to recognize and act upon unchosen obligations indicates a character more deeply imbued with trustworthy feeling than the ability to make deals and bide by them – such is the thought. As Cordelia puts it, when unjustly asked to rewrite a bond of piety as a contractual deal: ‘According to my bond, no more, no less’.
Piety connects us to the sacred and the sacramental. Pious sentiments gather round moments of sacrifice, in which people devote themselves, undertaking obligations that are too vast or indeterminate to be contained within a contract. These moments are connected with birth, initiation, sexual union and death. They are moments in which the tribe has an interest of its own, as great as the interest of the individual. Marriages belong with Christenings, Bar Mitzvahs and funerals, to the ceremonies that anthropologists, following Van Gennep, have grouped together as ‘rites of passage’, moments, as Durkheim describes them, of ‘social effervescence’.2 In all societies rites of passage have a religious character. They are episodes in which the dead and the unborn are present, and in which the gods take a consuming interest, sometimes attending in person. In these moments time stands still; or rather they are peculiarly timeless. The passage from one condition to another occurs outside time – as though the participants bathe themselves for a moment in eternity and return cleansed to the temporal order.
This way of understanding rites of passage, as sacraments, should not surprise us. For these are moments in which individuals assume the full burden of responsibility, before the eyes of those who will hold them to account for what they are and do. There are plenty of things that an evolutionary psychologist can say, by way of explaining why such moments might have been protected and selected for. But my interest is in the intentionality of the emotions that arise within them. These moments are understood, by the participants, as sacred, and in the concept of the sacred we have a clue not merely to the distinctiveness of the human condition, but also to the religious need that animates it. Evolutionary explanations of our deep desires and deep refusals are indifferent to their intentionality. From the evolutionary point of view it is indeterminate whether incest, for example, should be physically disgusting, like faeces, or a violation of the moral law like theft, or a desecration of the home like gross rudeness. Any of those ways of thinking would ensure that the revulsion against incest is ‘selected for’. Evolutionary explanations will therefore tell us nothing about concepts like piety, purity and the sacred, which must be invoked to define the specific intentionality of the incest taboo.
The idea of the sacred influences our response to sexual behaviour, to the rites of passage of the community, and to the moments of consecration in which the deep solemnity of the human condition is rehearsed and condoned. Rather than suggest a biological genealogy of this idea, I would propose instead a metaphysical foundation. The idea of the sacred is attached to times and places in which the real presence of the subject comes vividly into view, so that we sense a bottomless chasm in the scheme of things, a falling away into the transcendental, and ourselves as poised on the edge. This is what happens, it seems to me, in sex and death – at least when they are properly contained and focused by prohibitions, so as to ensure that it is the subject and not the object that is targeted.
In seeing places, buildings and artefacts as sacred we in effect project on to the material world the experience that we receive from each other, when incarnation becomes a ‘real presence’, and we perceive the other as forbidden to us and untouchable. Hence sexual desire provides us with some of the primary material from which the experience of the sacred is constructed. That was why it appealed to Wagner, as the core subject of his music dramas.
Death too presents us with the mystery of our incarnation, though it does so in another way. In death we confront the body voided of the soul, an object without a subject, limp, ungoverned and inert. The awe that we feel in the face of death is a response to the unfathomable spectacle of human flesh without the self. In fact, the dead body is not so much an object as a void in the world of objects – something that ought not to be there, since it ought not to be there as a thing. The sight is uncanny, unheimlich, and demands to be rearranged – though rearranged metaphysically, as it were, so as to heal the void. Hence in all societies the dead are treated with reverence: they become untouchable, precisely in the moment when the self retreats from them. Somehow this body still belongs to the person who has vanished: I imagine him as exerting his claim over it, but from spectral regions where he cannot be touched. In encountering death, therefore, our imagination reaches spontaneously towards the supernatural. The dead body, by becoming sacred, exposes itself also to desecration – a fact upon which the drama of Antigone turns. Just as sex and death provide us with two of our primary experiences of the sacred, therefore, they also present us with a primary threat of desecration.
That tentative theory of the sacred is not a piece of empirical anthropology; nor is it an exercise in genealogy, of the kind given by René Girard in his account of ritual sacrifice. According to Girard, all societies are embroiled in conflict, due to the ‘mimetic desire’ of their members.3 This rivalry through imitation threatens to blow the community apart, and traps its members into cycles of revenge. In every community, however, there are those who are marked out as Other by some existential fault, such as incest, kingship, hubris or some similar sign of ontological ‘apartness’. By selecting such a person as victim and putting him to death the community can escape the cycle of revenge. Hence his death, in an act of communal sacrifice, will focus and assuage the existing hostilities, and bring peace and reconciliation to his murderers – who won’t be murderers at all, but innocent members of a renewed and purified community. Then, Girard argues, the communal sigh of relief will be projected onto the dead victim, who will be regarded as an offering, a thing of infinite worth, a precious redeemer who must be thanked and revered. This is the primal emotion, according to Girard, from which our sense of the sacred derives. And subsequently this sense spreads to embrace all the rituals and objects that are connected with the act of sacrifice.
That genealogy of the sacred is intriguing, but like so many genealogies it begs the principal question. For it can explain the acquisition of a sense of the sacred only by assuming that people already possess it. The awe that the original community directs towards the sacrificial victim is not any kind of awe. It is the awe owed to sacred things – things held apart and untouchable. What explains that emotion? This is surely the question that the genealogy sets out to answer, and which it fails to answer. By contrast the explanation I have given is not a ‘myth of origins’. It is a piece of philosophy, an attempt to derive the intentionality of religious awe a priori, from the Kantian metaphysic upon which I have been relying throughout my argument. It is not, I venture to suggest, the act of sacrifice that generates the awe surrounding the scapegoat. It is death, and the moment of death. We look with awe on the human body from which the life has fled. This is no longer a person, but the ‘mortal remains’ of a person. And this thought fills us with a sense of the uncanny. We may be reluctant to touch the dead body; we see it as in some way not properly a part of our world, as though it has departed from us into another sphere where it cannot be reached.
This experience demands from us a kind of ceremonial recognition. The dead body is the object of rituals and acts of purification, designed not just to send its former occupant happily into the hereafter – for these practices are engaged in even by those who have no belief in the hereafter – but in order to overcome the eeriness, the supernatural quality, of the dead human form. The body is being reclaimed for this world, by the rituals which acknowledge that it stands apart from it. The rituals, to put it in another way, consecrate the body, and purify it of its miasma. Hence they may be the subject matter of a sacred duty, one that eclipses all rival duties, as in the Antigone of Sophocles.
In dealing with the dead body, we are in some way standing at the horizon of our world, in direct but ineffable contact with that which does not belong to it. That, I venture to suggest, is the essence of the sacred. And the experience of the sacred needs no theological commentary in order to invade us. It is, in some way, a primitive experience, as basic as pain, fear or exultation, awaiting a theological commentary perhaps, but in itself the inevitable precipitation of self-consciousness, which compels us to live forever on the edge of things, present in the world, but also apart from it.
Only that which is sacred can be desecrated. Hence the habitual desecration of death and sexual love are, I venture to suggest, proofs of their sacred nature. And in a culture which is in full flight from the sacred, the practice of desecration becomes a kind of moral necessity – something that must be constantly performed, and performed collectively, in order to destroy the things that stand in judgement over us. All around us, therefore, we find a relentless habit of ‘objectification’: the display of human beings and their settlements as objects to be consumed and disposed of, the reduction of sex to a relation between body parts, and the display of death in images of crazed destruction, such as those presented in the films of Quentin Tarantino. The rule of the Greek tragic theatre was that death should take place off-stage, to be reported by the chorus or a messenger. It was not squeamishness that dictated this rule (what could be more gruesome than the death of Pentheus as the chorus recounts it in Euripides’ Bacchae?). The rule was dictated by the deep emotions that death invites, the sacred aura of the victim, and the real meaning of tragedy for us, the survivors. In tragedy death is faced; in the violent cinema of today it is defaced. Moreover, we have acquired the habit of defacing not merely the human form but all those aspects of our world in which we recognize that we are called to account. And the explanation is simple: we no longer trust in the intentionality of our sacramental attitudes: they reach out to the sacred, but they do not find it. No God, we believe, reaches down to meet the arms that reach for him, and our arms fall helpless to our sides.
Hence the question that comes immovably into the centre of my discussion is that of the face of God. Granted the intentionality of our ‘immortal longings’, what can we say about their epistemology? Is there any way of reasoning from our experience in this world to the conclusion that God is immanent within it, or must all this remain an ‘as if’, whose epistemological failings are supplemented, if at all, only by faith and never by reason?
Certain religious and mystical thinkers have claimed direct experience of God, and their accounts have been generalized by Rudolf Otto in his theory of the ‘numinous’: the ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’ which evades our ability to describe it, and which is identified by those who experience it as an intrusion into this world from an indescribable reality beyond it.4 Undoubtedly there are experiences of which we can make sense only by referring them to the transcendental. The experience of being ‘in God’s hands’, of being absolutely safe, which can come as a sudden gift or blessing even in the moment of supreme danger – this is well known in the literature, and no doubt known to many readers of this book. The experience of being guided, impeded, encouraged by an all-observing person: this too is familiar. And even for those who have not encountered God in this way, there is that other and more desolating thing, the sense of guilt and pollution, which can come like a cloud across our lives.
Undoubtedly there are such experiences. But – as Otto’s language conveys – they do not contain the proof of their own veracity. Nor can we ascertain, by any empirical enquiry, what these experiences are experiences of. Reverting for a moment to the thoughts expounded in the first chapter: no science could ever connect such experiences with a transcendental reality, for the simple reason that science is about causal relations between objects. A causal explanation of the mysterium tremendum might connect the experience with disorders of the digestive system or with some neurological disturbance induced by fasting and prayer. But to describe the experience as an encounter with the transcendental is automatically to put it outside the reach of causal reasoning.
Nevertheless, as William James showed in The Varieties of Religious Experience – a book derived from one of the earliest series of Gifford lectures – that is how the experience is understood by the subjects themselves. The philosophical question is not whether we can connect the experience of the ‘numinous’ case by case with some transcendental origin – for that is impossible – but whether we can present a picture of the world that enables us to interpret the religious experience in that way. If we can get this far, then we have made way for the only thing that can sustain the truth of what we feel, which is trust in a personal God who reveals himself.
It is worth dwelling on this point, since it seems to be so completely misunderstood in the current debates between atheists and theists. Explanation by cause and effect involves the discovery of law-like connections between events. The concepts in terms of which those laws are framed are concepts of objects – particles, fields and forces, situated within the space–time continuum. Subjects have no place in those laws, not because they are mysterious or supernatural, but because they exist only for each other, through the web of inter-personal accountability. Look for them in the world of objects and you will not find them. This is true of you and me; and it is true too of God. Physics gives a complete explanation of the world of objects, for that is what ‘physics’ means. God is not a ‘hypothesis’ to be set beside the fundamental constants and the laws of quantum dynamics. Look for him in the world of objects and you will not find him, just as you will not find human freedom with a brain scan, the self with a microscope or a sake in the bath.
That observation takes us back to the topic from which I began: the topic of contingent being. The idea of ‘being qua being’, as Aristotle and Aquinas put it, has received a fairly bad press among more recent philosophers. Kant’s attack on the ontological argument, Frege’s theory of the existential quantifier, and Quine’s account of ontological relativity all feed into the now orthodox view that there is no such topic as being qua being. We can describe what it is to be a giraffe or a pop song; but not what it is to be simpliciter. Any account of being would presuppose itself, since it would have to assume that we understood what it means to attribute being to the entities referred to in the account. If you don’t think that is sufficient proof, then just look at the reams of nonsense poured out by Heidegger, Rahner and others, on the topic. Heidegger has much to say to us, but it is only obscured, in my view, by the invention of Being in its many varieties – in-advance-of-itself-being, being-to-hand, being-towards-death, and so on – as though being were a kind of property, that you might possess at one moment, and lose at the next.
And yet, is there not, after all, a ‘question of being’? Or perhaps more than one question? The God of the philosophers entered my argument in response to the question of contingent being. ‘Why is there anything?’ seems like a cogent question. Of course, if we construe the question as asking for a cause, then it may well not be cogent. For it would be asking for a cause of the space–time continuum itself, i.e. for a cause of the system of causes, which is not an item within that system and therefore not a cause. In other words it would be a question that can be answered only by a self-contradiction. But this is not how the question is understood by those who have traditionally asked it. Theologians have been seeking for a ‘ground of Being’, in other words, for an entity that provides a reason for the whole of things, rather than a cause. It is not causation but revelation that leads us to such an entity – the kind of revelation that I have been describing in this book.
Being is bound to be a puzzle for us. To explain the being of one thing is always to assume the being of another: and either the regress is infinite or being presents us, somewhere, somehow, with its own rationale. Such a rationale would take us out of the empirical world – the world of scientific investigation – so as to obtain what Kant says to be impossible, the transcendental perspective, the view from nowhere, which embraces the world as a whole. We have the idea of this perspective, however, and often we feel that we can understand the being of things – of individual things and of the totality of things – because we have been able to understand being as something granted. Through meditating on being in that way, we glimpse a path out of the system of causes to a relational picture of the world – a picture of the world as standing in relation to something revealed within it.
Aquinas argued that being is characterized by three features: truth, unity and goodness. These three features, because they belong to everything real, he called ‘transcendentals’.5 That is to say, their presence cannot be explained by some specific or local condition of things, but only by reference to the world as a whole. Maybe there is a fourth transcendental – beauty. But at any rate, there are these three. And we understand being as that which is coextensive with truth, unity and goodness. Everything that is – every being – is also true, one and good. (Aquinas adopted the standard medieval view that evil is not being but privation.) God wills the being of things – that is what his love consists in. Hence he wills truth, unity and goodness in all their varied realizations.
To a modern reader it often seems as if all this is going round in circles, using one abstraction to replace another until we come back to where we started. But a sympathetic reading of Aquinas would suggest, rather, that he is showing the deep connection between the world of contingencies, and the world of values. Being presents us with unified individuals, and therefore with plenitude; it presents us with truth, and therefore with knowledge; and it presents us with goodness, and therefore with the end or purpose of the world. These are a priori features of being, and ways in which being makes itself known to us.
It is not only Christian thinkers who have sought for a key to the mystery of being. The Hindus believe that, case by case, we can find our way to the subjectivity of objects, so as to understand each being from within, as a manifestation of the atman, the ‘self of the world’. That which had appeared arbitrary is referred, instead, to the being upon which all depends. Being then makes sense to us, not as mere being, nor as ‘being there’, but as ‘being given’. We receive the world as a gift, by relating it to the transcendental subjectivity, the primordial ‘I’, in which each thing occurs as a free thought. It seems to me that this is the message of religion in all its forms: and we come to understand it by encountering the spirit of gift within ourselves.
In the religions that are familiar to us, the idea of grace is of fundamental importance. The term (Latin gratia) translates a variety of words in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and Sanskrit, but all our sacred texts seem to point in the same direction, affirming that God’s relation to the world as a whole, and to each of us in particular, is one of giving. The beseeching of God’s grace is the central feature of the Anglican liturgy. The great prayer of the Catholic Church, based on a poem in the New Testament, greets the Virgin Mary with the words ‘Hail Mary, full of Grace, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus’. The Koran opens with the verse that forms a refrain in the life of all Muslims: bism illah il-raHmân il-raHîm, in the name of God, full of grace, full of graciousness, as Mohamed Asad translates it, and the root rHm is shared with Hebrew, used often in the Old Testament to denote God’s concern for us, his recognition of our weakness, and his abundance of gifts. The idea that the world is sustained by gift is second nature to religious people, who believe that they should be givers in their turn, if they are to receive the gift on which they depend for their salvation.
As I argued in Chapter Four, agape does not raise us to God, but comes down to us from God. It is received as a gift, and then distributed by each of us to our neighbours, as another gift. Hence C. S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, called it ‘gift-love’. It fills the world with the spirit of gift – but not a personal, exclusive or jealous gift, like erotic love. It is a gift that makes no demands; agape pursues the interest of the other and not that of the self. Mephistopheles describes himself to Faust as der Geist der stets verneint, the spirit that always negates. Just so is agape the opposite – the spirit that always affirms, by following the path of gift and sacrifice. Through agape we overcome the guilt of our own existence; we recognize that contingency brings suffering, and that suffering is a call to sacrifice. This spiritual transformation, whereby we come to accept both suffering and sacrifice, and find in them the moral order that makes sense of our lives, is rightly described as a ‘redemption’.
There is surely a great difference, which we all understand, between seeing something as just there (there for the taking) and seeing it as a gift. Only what is owned can be given, and gifts therefore come wrapped in the perspective of the giver, who has claimed them as ‘mine’, and also relinquished that claim for another’s sake. And the one who receives something as a gift receives it as a mark of the other’s concern for him; gratitude is not just normal – it is the recognition that the thing has really been given, and is not the first step in a bargain. Gifts involve conscious reflection on self and other, on rights and duties, on ownership and its transcendence. Hence they can only be offered I to I, and gifts are acts of acknowledgement between persons, in which each recognizes the freedom of the other. What looks like gift in other species is something else: for example, an instinctive withdrawal in favour of a kin-related member of the herd. And as I argued earlier, those evolutionary psychologists who describe the genetically motivated ‘altruism’ of animals in the language of human self-sacrifice overlook what is most distinctive of the human case, which is the decision to sacrifice oneself for the sake of another. I earlier remarked that it is as nonsensical to speak of the self as an object as it is to speak in the same way of a sake. Perhaps it is worth adding that only a self can understand a sake, and that to make sacrifices for others’ sake is to walk with God.
The religious frame of mind involves two ‘moments’ – as Hegel might put it. There is the moment of communion, and the moment of gift. The religious person is the one who experiences the deep need to give thanks; and he experiences this need as a communal impulse, something that he shares and which brings him together with a community, even if only a would-be community, a ‘communion of saints’ whose ‘Holy City’ has yet to be realized on earth. His need to give thanks is not circumstantial but metaphysical. It is rooted in the experience of being itself, in his way of understanding what it is to be. Being, for the religious person, is a gift, not a fact. It is through understanding this that we overcome our metaphysical loneliness, and understanding may require privation and suffering, through which we discard the dross of our own distractions. Hence the world, and the objects contained in it, come before the religious consciousness as the signs of another perspective – the perspective that has ‘given these things to me’. That perspective, which the Hindus call Brahman, is hidden from us in the way every other ‘I’ is hidden. But like those other ‘I’s it can appear in our world as a real presence. The gathering together of the community in the moment of thanks prepares the way for this.
The most important occasions for communal thanks are the ceremonies in which social membership is renewed. For the participants the rite of passage is an enhanced experience of being, in which the aspect of gift is emphasized and solemnized. Birth is a gift of new life; the rite of initiation is a gift of the world and its knowledge to the youth and of the youth to the tribe; marriage is a gift of two people to each other, in which others participate with gifts; the funeral is a service of thanks for a life, and a ritual mourning for someone whose life is thereby replayed in retrospect as a giving, its previous character as a ‘taking’ entirely expunged.
Gift lies at the heart of sacrificial religion too. The offering at the altar is a gift to the god, who himself returns it as a gift to his worshippers. There is a mysterious feeling of unity that is experienced by the worshippers at this moment – the moment of the sacrament, when what is given is also received, but received in another form. All sacred moments are moments of gift – of gift revealed as the way things are. The distinctiveness of the Christian Eucharist is that it makes this wholly specific. The Eucharist commemorates God’s supreme gift, which is the gift of himself – his own descent into the world of suffering and guilt, in order to show through his example that there is a way out of conflict and resentment – a way to restore through grace the givenness of the world.
For me the Christian view of the matter is the one that gives the greatest insight into our situation. The Christian God is agape, and even in a world that has launched itself on the path of desecration, he can show himself in the sacrificial acts of individual people, when they set aside the call of self-interest and act for others’ sake. Acts of self-sacrifice appear in the world of objects and causes as revelations: the I that gives itself opens a window in the scheme of things through which we glimpse the light beyond – the I AM that spoke to Moses.
God revealed himself on that occasion as we do – by coming to the threshold of himself. He came before Moses as a point of view, a first person perspective, the transcendental ‘I am’ that cannot be known as an object but only as a subject. This perspective can become a real presence among us only if it can be revealed in the world of objects, as the human subject is revealed in the human face. But how can this be?
Christianity has an answer to that question and that answer is the incarnation. God, in the person of Christ, is present among us. It is from the life of Christ that we can understand the true nature of God’s goodness. Christians believe that, in undergoing crucifixion, Christ took the sufferings of the world on himself – in other words, he lifted suffering out of the negativity in which we tend to view it, and showed it as an attribute of God, something which is not, therefore, alien to the world of creation but an integral part of it. Through suffering Christ showed us that our own suffering is worthwhile, and the occasion through which to grow morally by imitating him. By making himself available for suffering, so to speak, God could make a gift of himself in Christ, a sacrifice which points us towards salvation, by showing that sacrifice is what life on earth is all about.6
The power of this idea is evident. It makes the real presence of God easy to understand, because it becomes merely a special case of the real presence of the human subject (an experience that independently dominates the lives of human beings). But it leaves us with a residual concept – that of the Incarnation – every bit as puzzling and mysterious as the one that it set out to explain: a concept that once again lies inexplicably suspended between causation and revelation. So is this as far as we can get? Perhaps it is, from the metaphysical point of view. But from the moral point of view there are a few thoughts to be added, which are thoughts that are as relevant for an atheist as they are for a believer. Indeed it was a non-believer who gave them their deepest expression.
When Wagner set out to write The Ring of the Nibelung he was not a Christian, but an agnostic, heavily influenced by Feuerbach’s projectionist account of religion in general and Christianity in particular.7 But he asked himself an interesting question that Feuerbach had ignored, which is this. Suppose the gods are our invention, made in our own image, infused with our own passions like the gods in Homer, but with the additional attribute of ensuring the maintenance of law and order here below. What would those gods need in order to be truly objects of love? Wagner depicts the attempt of Wotan, king of the gods and lord of the world, to achieve the kind of serenity that comes from absolute control of the universe – a universe that preceded his own rise to power, and which obeys its own inscrutable and primeval laws. He shows that Wotan cannot do this without defying the moral law, and that his status as guardian of law and order is a sham. He is not evil, but he lacks something that is necessary to achieve true virtue. Meanwhile, in his attempt to retain the power that he has unjustly acquired, he creates a race of earthly beings who will have the freedom that he himself no longer possesses and who, guided but not compelled by him, will undo the mischief that he had set in motion by wanting to be the supreme ruler of the world.
The human world that he has created is portrayed in Die Walküre, as a world of struggle and resentment. But it contains two precious attributes that Wotan himself does not possess, though he has a kind of polished veneer that substitutes for them – the attributes of freedom and love. The freedom of the human being, as Siegmund and Sieglinde exemplify it, is the freedom to defy laws, fate, death itself, for the sake of another – the freedom to make a gift of oneself. And this freedom is possible only where there is also suffering, otherwise the gift is costless, and not a genuine sacrifice. Self and sake become one in the moment of sacrifice.
In the second act of Walküre we encounter this process of sacrificial gift played out in the character of Siegmund, and in the great stichomythic dialogue between Siegmund and Brünnhilde we see a free mortal, accepting death and suffering out of love for another, confronting a cold-hearted immortal, and awakening in her the sense of what she lacks. Siegmund’s questions are framed thus (Example 1):
Example 1
The melody ascends through an octave, as the bass descends by the same measure, carrying with it suspended harmonies that move to a dominant seventh – left unresolved, expectant and petitioning. This epitome of our mortal prayers receives only stony, implacable re-statements of the divine decree. When an answer comes it is Siegmund who provides it:
So jung und schön erschimmerst du mir,
Doch wie kalt und hart erkennt dich mein Herz!
Example 2
And the melody finds its completion in a gesture of defiance (the four-note motive on E, F sharp and G, Example 2) which henceforth dominates the musical line. Siegmund’s need enters the soul of Brünnhilde and her façade of divine implacability cracks. He forces her to account for herself and in doing so she confronts him I to I, and so falls into the human world of love and suffering. As her divine façade crumbles, a face appears, and it is a face ready for love and destined for sacrifice. In the third act Brünnhilde prepares herself for the trials of mortality. She throws in her lot with the world of human love. But she will suffer as humans suffer, being used and discarded by the person to whom she has made a gift of her entire self.
The third act of Walküre is a profound philosophical reflection on the idea of incarnation, suggesting that the things that we truly value, and which are for us the avenue to meaning, are intimately connected with suffering, and the ability – definitive of our humanity – to accept suffering for the sake of love. Wagner’s later works – notably Tristan and Parsifal – take this theme further. But the dénouement of the Ring already depends on the idea that the gods achieve redemption only through accepting the condition of mortality, since only this renders them capable of sacrifice and the love of which sacrifice is the proof. In accepting this they too learn suffering. And through this suffering a god acquires the ability to make a gift of himself, by renouncing life (and therefore immortality).
The Ring can be understood as an attempt to show, through artistic rather than intellectual means, the deep connection between freedom and suffering. It is in terms of this connection that we understand the highest form of love – the love in which giving is total. If God is to enjoy that love, and the redemption that is innate within it, the implication is, then he too must be incarnate in mortal form. Love belongs to the human condition, and God becomes a complete object of love by accepting that condition as his own.
Although, as I remarked, Wagner’s plot was conceived against the background of Feuerbach’s projectionist account of religious belief, it contains an important moral for believers too. It attempts to show at the deepest emotional level, that all that we truly esteem, love included, depends in the end on suffering, and on our freedom to accept suffering for another’s sake. This idea is contained in the motive (Example 3) that occurs twice, once in Sieglinde’s thanks for Brünnhilde’s barely guessed-at sacrifice, and once at the end of the whole cycle, as the waters of the Rhine settle over the wreckage and nature is restored. Suffering is made available to God himself by the act of incarnation, and it is the way – perhaps the sole way – in which he can show that he loves us with a humanly intelligible love, by suffering for our sakes. How to incorporate that thought into a cogent theology of creation is of course a difficult matter – but in itself it is a perfectly cogent thought, and fundamental to the Christian understanding of our relation to God.
Example 3
So what and where is the face of God for the one who believes in his real presence among us? The answer is that we encounter this presence everywhere, in all that suffers and renounces for another’s sake. Things with a face are illuminated by the subjectivity that shines in them, and which spreads around them a halo of prohibitions. When someone enters the moment of sacrifice, throwing away what is most precious, even life itself, for the sake of another, then we encounter the supreme moment of gift. This is an act in which the I appears completely. It is also a revelation. In sacrifice and renunciation the I makes of its own being a gift, and thereby shows us that being is a gift. In the moment of sacrifice people come face to face with God, who is present too in those places where sorrow has left its mark or ‘prayer has been valid’.
We should not be surprised, therefore, if God is so rarely encountered now. The consumer culture is one without sacrifices; easy entertainment distracts us from our metaphysical loneliness. The rearranging of the world as an object of appetite obscures its meaning as a gift. The defacing of eros and the loss of rites of passage eliminate the old conception of human life as an adventure within the community and an offering to others. It is inevitable, therefore, that moments of sacred awe should be rare among us. And it is surely this, rather than the arguments of the atheists, that has led to the decline of religion. Our world contained many openings onto the transcendental; but they have been blocked by waste. You may think that this does not matter – that mankind has had enough of sacred mysteries and their well-known dangers. But I think we are none of us at ease with the result. Our disenchanted life is, to use the Socratic idiom, ‘not a life for a human being’. By remaking human beings and their habitat as objects to consume rather than subjects to revere we invite the degradation of both. Postmodern people will deny that their disquiet at these things has a religious meaning. But I hope that my argument has gone some way to showing that they are wrong.
Notes
See A Theory of Justice, Oxford, 1971. | |
Arnold Van Gennep, Les rites de passage, Paris, Émile Nourry, 1909. | |
La violence et le sacré, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1972. | |
Das Heilige, 1917, trans. as The Idea of the Holy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1923. | |
Disputed Questions on Truth, q1 a1. | |
See the illuminating account by Max Scheler, ‘The Meaning of Suffering’, in Max Scheler, On Feeling, Knowing and Valuing, trans. Harold J. Bershady, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992. | |
The Feuerbachian allegory that inspired Wagner’s original poem and which provides one layer of meaning in a many-layered palimpsest has been authoritatively set out by Paul Heise. See his magisterial analysis of The Ring at Wagnerheim.com. |