Chaucer’s scholar is a prig. He has set himself against the world of work and play; all he wants to do is study and lecture to others on virtues. Is he reverent? Perhaps. But he is not the model of reverence for us. You do not have to be a prig to be reverent. Reverence and sex are not enemies.
In “High Windows,” the poet Philip Larkin writes of a young couple recently liberated by the sexual revolution of the sixties. He asks whether they have found a paradise, and starts to show that this is a paradise in imagination only. But then, suddenly, in place of the expected irony, the poet sends us “the thought of high windows”—a moment of inarticulate awe. Whatever does the poet mean? What has Larkin seen or thought that inspires awe? Perhaps he is impressed by the repetition of desire and frustration that is the lot of human beings. Or perhaps he remembers that although we are all destined to large dreams of endless happiness, we are all doomed to die. And this remembrance would be sharpened by the thought of God He who is, or perhaps is not, endlessly beyond those high windows. These windows—do they light up a church? We don’t know. There is no thought of color in the windows, no stained-glass images of God or prophet. The poet’s thought is without faith, without memory of cross or altar. More to the point, the thought bears no reference to himself. In the face of the infinite whatever beyond the windows, his own thinking personhood drops away. Faithless, alone, at the boundary where his dream of happiness clashes with an immense reality or an immense nothing, he feels awe, and for this moment he knows reverence.
Is it strange to find reverence in a poem about sexual revolution? Not really. Every aspect of human life gives occasion for reverence. The obvious place to look for reverence is organized worship, but the argument of this book is that worship is not central to reverence. Members of a modern society do not all worship together, and some do not worship at all, so we need to look for reverence in surprising places. Otherwise we may truly lose the ability to bind ourselves together as a society through common virtues. Family life, education, sports, music, military training, even sex and marriage can, in the right form, be occasions for reverence.
Worship is a confusing place to look for reverence. To begin with, worship is not always reverent; even the best forms of worship may be practiced without feeling (and therefore without reverence), and some forms of worship seem downright vicious. Besides, some forms of worship put great emphasis on faith, which is quite different from reverence, and this too may confuse a seeker for reverence. Reverence is not faith, because the faithful may hold their faith with arrogance and self-satisfaction, and because the reverent may not know what to believe.
That is why this chapter looks for reverence in odd places, outside religion. If your form of worship or your faith is reverent, so much the better. You know one place to look for reverence. But you should look further, so that you can see how you might share reverence with people who do not worship with you or share your faith. You can construct your own examples of reverence, once you have a glimmer of what I am talking about. Here is mine. I have deliberately chosen an example that has nothing to do with religion. I will come back to religion at the end of the chapter.
The four amateur musicians in a pool of light have reached the last note of Mozart’s “Dissonant” quartet, and they have done so more or less at the same time. They find contact with each other’s eyes, all looking to the first violin to see how long to draw out the note. Then they fall silent for a moment, subdued by a sense of awe none of them could fully explain. They are not impressed by their own playing; all are conscious of measures counted incorrectly, of pitches missed. They know the piece, however, and they have been aware of harmonies they have not played or heard: from one perfectly resolved dissonance they can extrapolate the perfections of the piece.
Their egos as musicians were out of the picture. They have no audience to make them self-conscious; each has for a time lost the sense of being an individual with goals and values that might be at variance with those of the others. They have followed the lead of the first violin without feeling themselves to be followers, and she has led without feeling herself to be a leader. She has not been annoyed at slowing down for the barely competent cello during a hard passage, and the cello has outdone himself, drawn by her musicianship to play better than usual.
There was ceremony at the start—the chairs and music stands arranged in a certain way, respectful discussion of what to play, decision deferred to the first violin, no audible complaints about the viola’s first note, and so on. There is also, plainly, a hierarchy at work. The first violin is the first violin and by happy coincidence the best musician of the four. All know roughly where they stand in this pecking order, but all are happy to be where they are, and they play without envy. And tonight, for once, no one has apologized for missing a note; no one has been conscious enough to take personal responsibility. And that is good in the context of this group effort, in which every apology breaks the spell.
What spell? They have felt awe. But at what? Not at Mozart; they have not been thinking of him either. Not at the elegant counterpoint Mozart has used; though conscious of the demands it makes on them, and the beauty that emerges from it, they are not analyzing this music as they play it. They would say, if asked, something like, “That Mozart!” or “What a lovely piece!” But those remarks, which will soon break the silence, also break the spell. They do not quite catch the mood or explain it. There really is no saying what wonderful thing it is that they feel has brushed them in their imperfect performance.
Reverence has been at work in this scene; this sort of music-making does provide an occasion for realizing the musicians’ capacity for reverence. We can see in the scene as I have described it many of the features of this virtue that will occupy me in this book: (1) The musicians have been engaged, more or less harmoniously, in a project as a group; (2) their project involved ceremony; (3) they have felt themselves largely without ego; (4) they have felt themselves to be part of a clearly defined hierarchy that was painless for all of them; and (5) they have achieved in the end a shared feeling of inarticulate awe. One activity, four kinds of feelings—all become possible for these musicians at the same time and at least partly because of each other. A sense of impending awe, for example, allows the ego to slide back in the order of awareness, and that makes the hierarchy painless, so the four people become able to play as a group.
They have not played as one. Truth to tell, they have not been playing very well at all together. But they feel as if they have played as one, even though they are fully aware of their deficiencies. Had they actually played as one, I might have said that was due mainly to musicianship—to their skill as musicians—but that is not the case here, and my goal is to explain feelings, not technique. Even professionals must have the right feelings if they are to advance beyond a boring perfection of technique. To say that musicians should have certain feelings implies that they have the capacities for those feelings. Reverence, as a virtue, is primarily a capacity for having certain feelings at the right time and in the right way. In the case of the music, the root feeling was awe, and this made the rest possible. That is why I think it right to say that the virtue that was realized on this evening of quartets was reverence.
Notice a certain striking absence. I have told this story without mentioning God or faith. The first violin believes that nature itself is divine, the second violin is a Lutheran, the viola is a Jew, and the cellist is an agnostic. Yet they have been united in reverence. For this they must have something in common; in their case it is the culture of amateur chamber music, and this supports the small elements of ceremony that were essential to their evening—the unspoken rule against apologies, for example. Ceremony is like a language: You cannot simply invent it and you cannot do it all by yourself; it must be part of the texture of a shared culture. You need not believe in God to be reverent, but to develop an occasion for reverence you must share a culture with others, and this must support a degree of ceremony.
Sex could be an example; reverence ennobles sex as, I believe, every well-joined couple intuitively knows. The act of sex may reflect a hierarchy and hierarchies may be brutal: there may be one who takes and one who is taken. Even in a bed of love we may feel like animals. But nothing is brutish in a bed of reverence. There is a sense of awe that follows reverent love, and where awe is felt, the acts of love are human.
In the presence of death we expect ourselves and others to be reverent; the expectation feels natural, and yet the ceremonies through which we express reverence at such times take very different forms in different cultures. We have such a mix of cultures in the United States today that we face a special challenge: Death calls us to be reverent together, but we often find ourselves in groups that do not know how to do this.
The young men and women sit in clumps around the church. It is a strange place for many of them, and they are wearing strange clothes, the young men in suits bought by their parents for a wedding or a funeral or a job interview. They do not know the family of their friend from college who has died; they do not think their friend liked her family very much, and so they keep to themselves. They are from a variety of backgrounds—Christian, Jewish, Confucian, Jain, Muslim—and many of them are questioning the religious beliefs or practices of their ancestors. They do not think their friend was religious. For some of them, this is their first funeral. They take part in hymns, prayers, and a few formal silences. They hear a sermon about faith and salvation, applied meticulously to the case at hand. When all is over, they will remember this most clearly: The one personal thing anyone said about their friend was about her faith, and it was not true.
Reverence should leave no gap between generations, but there is no reverence among these students on this adult occasion—only sorrow and the sense of alienation they think they shared with their friend before she died. This ceremony has been empty for them; rather than bringing them together with the other mourners, it has been a barrier. A few days later, they will mount their own ceremony in their own place on the campus. They will talk about their friend, they will tell the truth as they remember it, they will share sorrow and silences, and this will be for them an occasion of reverence. Together, they will be conscious of the fragility of their own lives, and perhaps they will feel a sense of awe, like Philip Larkin’s, at the immensity of a reality that does not conform to human wishes, the reality of death.
Why could they not be reverent when faith was in the air? And how can they now be reverent without faith? Is their reverence an illusion? Or is it a symptom of a submerged faith they are not prepared to admit? If there is true reverence here, it must be reverence without faith. These students belong to their era; they are Americans of many backgrounds and there is no faith that they share. They do not even have a set of different faiths in the sense that Christians have faith. They have religious traditions, some of which involve faith, and some of which do not. Many of them are questioning their traditions; others come from parents who turned away from ancestral religion, and some of these young people are trying to find their way back.
Yet they have, on the memorial occasion they put together for themselves, been reverent together. How can they have done this?
My reverent students have few religious beliefs in common. They do not all believe in God; some believe in more than one divinity, and some believe in divine powers that are not all benevolent by human standards. But some shadow of belief appears to be universal among those who practice reverence; it is the idea that human beings are weak and fragile by comparison with whatever ideals they have of power or longevity or moral perfection. Philip Larkin, in the poem discussed at the start of the chapter, leaves open the question of God; what he does not leave in question is the puniness of human beings: his dream of happiness, like that of the young people whose freedom he envies, clashes with something immense and resistant to human will. Whether it is an immense reality or an immense nothing makes no difference. Either way, it is the largest context the poet can imagine, and it inspires in him awe and the sense that he belongs to a race that is puny, vulnerable, and easily self-deceived.
You might reply that there could be no true reverence without belief in the Christian God; you would, in effect, be declaring that there was no true reverence in pagan Greece or ancient China—only something deceptively like reverence. If you are right, then reverence is not a cardinal virtue. No one would insist that a cardinal virtue like courage is to be found only among Christian believers; why should reverence be a different case? Much hangs on the definition of reverence. Suppose reverence is primarily a matter of belief. If so, when we use the word “true” of reverence, we would be transferring it from the associated beliefs, and reverence would be true if and only if its defining beliefs are true. Then we would have to insist, for example, that Unitarians and Presbyterians cannot both be reverent. Their two beliefs about the nature of God are contrary—that is, they cannot both be true—and it follows that one of the two religions is false and cannot be reverent—if, that is, the truth of reverence is tied to the truth of belief. But both groups claim to be reverent. How can we adjudicate their claims? If reverence required specific beliefs, then only God—who should know whether or not He is a Trinity—would be able to make a final judgment as to who is reverent and who is not.
Suppose, on the other hand, that reverence is to be defined as a capacity for certain feelings—the central hypothesis of this book. When we say that reverence is true or false, I think we mean that the feelings that flow from reverence may be sincere or faked. Perhaps you wanted to object when I drew the inference in the preceding paragraph that Unitarians and Presbyterians are not both reverent. If you did, that shows you probably do accept the view that reverence is about feelings; you may have known believers in both camps who are sincere in their reverence, and though you cannot agree with both doctrines—because they cannot both be true—you do not wish to deny the claims of both to have genuine and deeply felt religious feelings.
I may call your reverence true even when I am sure that your beliefs are false. By means of this distinction between belief and feeling we can avoid the trap of relativism and still appreciate a sort of truth in many clashing religious traditions—the truth of genuine feeling. Christian and non-Christian beliefs cannot be equally true, but the associated feelings of reverence may be equally sincere. This result is fortunate for my grieving students. If I ask them whether they agree that Christian belief is true, they will break out into disagreement. But they all want the ceremony to express feelings that are true—that are sincere, deeply felt, and really belong to them—unlike the feelings they thought the official funeral was asking them to fake.
At this moment of grief, the students want to share something with each other. Do they want to share each other’s beliefs? Certainly not. They want to share real feelings, their affection for their lost friend, their grief at her loss, their gratitude for having known her. And they want to do this in a way that will allow them to begin the next day without these feelings hanging over them. I would say that they want the closure that only ceremony provides. Their ceremony is stripped to the bare essentials: They speak in turn, they include everyone, they take food together, no more. But it is enough. Their ceremony has the kind of meaning for them that can come only from reverence.
How can we conceive of reverence as a virtue this group may practice together? What may become of reverence in a society that cannot share a faith? These students are at a pivotal point in the history of reverence—indeed, in the history of cultures—but their experience is not entirely unique. Something like this has happened before. Religions have faded, religions have been displaced by violence, religions have fractured; but ceremony and reverence live on. Ceremony is older than any surviving religion, and wherever there has been ceremony, there has been a way of taking ceremony seriously, and that requires reverence.
There was reverence before the birth of the great modern religions that divide my students from each other and from their elders. What was that early form of reverence? “What it always has been,” I would like to say. If reverence is a cardinal virtue, we should be able to define it—as I believe we can define courage—apart from its many expressions in human culture. Can reverence be defined in this way? Is there such a thing as “bare reverence” that can be detached in theory from particular beliefs and practices? That is one of the central questions of this book.
Whenever they gathered into groups, [early human beings]
would do wrong to each other, because they did not yet have the
knowledge of how to form society. As a result they would scatter
again and perish. And so Zeus, fearing that our whole species
would be wiped out, sent Hermes to bring Reverence and
Justice to human beings, in order that these two would adorn
society and bind people together in friendship.
—Protagoras in Plato’s Protagoras 322c