Reverence is a matter of feeling, and as far as feelings go, it doesn’t much matter what you believe. Reverence can occur in ancient polytheism as well as in modern Christianity or Islam, so reverence makes few demands on belief. Otherwise it would not be consistent with so many different creeds.
Reverence must stand in awe of something—something I will call the object of reverence. What could it be? Something that reminds us of human limitations, if we are to stay true to the concept of reverence with which we began. Therefore you must believe that there is at least one Something that satisfies at least one of the following conditions: it cannot be controlled by human means, was not created by human beings is not fully understood by human experts, and is transcendent. Such beliefs are the least you must have in order to be reverent. They do not amount to religion or even to spirituality. For a lover of art, the Something might be a monument of ancient art, since this has passed out of our power to change without destroying. For a reverent scientist, the Something could be the final explanation for the universe, which satisfies the first and third conditions. For a reverent statesperson, the Something might be justice, conceived as an ideal, dimly grasped and much disputed, by which we should try to regulate our poor systems of law. This might satisfy all four conditions. The Something could be nature, or the universe. For many people, the Something will be divine. But if the Something is justice or nature, the reverent person may be an atheist or, as some say, a non-theist.
Small as it is, this kernel of belief makes a profound difference to how people behave and how they feel. We may be willing to sacrifice many of our beliefs to the march of science or to the goal of harmony among religions, but we should never abandon the feelings that keep us humble and respectful of each other.
No poet has had greater powers for expressing feelings than Tennyson. Although he concluded that science had vanquished traditional religious belief, Tennyson felt that reverence must survive, and he gave us the finest expression of reverence that we have in the English language, “In Memoriam.”
The effect of scientific advances since the sixteenth century has been to whittle away at every religious belief that runs counter to the evidence a rational mind must accept. Writing in the 1830s and 1840s, Tennyson had a deep respect for science: “we trust it comes from thee,” he says, meaning that scientific knowledge comes from the divine being he addresses. He is willing to give up as many religious beliefs as he must in order to accommodate science, but he is not willing to trim one iota from his reverence; or, in his terms, he will give science the run of his mind but not of his soul.
“In Memoriam” is by general agreement his finest work. It begins as an elegy (or series of elegies) mourning the poet’s beloved friend, Arthur Hallam, but it grows to express grief on a larger scale for the loss of faith brought on by science. Tennyson tries to balance the growth of knowledge with a new argument for reverence—an argument that is both new and old, for it harks back to the ancient Greek idea that reverence grows from acknowledging human weakness. The Prologue continues:
But vaster. We are fools and slight;
We mock thee when we do not fear:
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light. (29–32)
The light Tennyson finds hard to bear is mainly that of geology, which, at the time he was writing, had been revealing the profligacy of nature. Even before the thought of evolution began to unsettle religious belief, shocking evidence came to light in rocks bearing fossils, evidence that a mind like Tennyson’s could not discount. Many animal and plant species had flourished long ago and then died away. To what purpose? Tennyson would like to believe (as Christians do, if they are untroubled by science) that not a sparrow falls but God notices, and that all such events are part of a divine plan. But in the face of the fossil evidence of a vast carnage of species, how can one continue to hold such beliefs? Still, he says, we trust:
Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy’d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete,
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivel’d in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.
(54.1–12)
But in the concluding stanzas Tennyson will offer no comfort but reverence. Trust is only a dream, and anything he can say to express his faith is no more articulate than the cry of a baby at night:
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
(54.13–20)
So ends this section of the poem. Later sections sound more hopeful notes, but the poem never clings to articles of faith. The poet does not tell readers what he believes; we must work from vague hints in the poems coupled with much later reports by Hallam Tennyson, the poet’s son. And indeed the trust to which the poem returns in later sections has more of the marks of reverence about it than belief. Tennyson harps on how foolish and slight we human beings are when compared to our ideas of God and nature. From start to finish, this poem is an expression of inarticulate reverence—reverence that is too conscious of its own ignorance to make anything but gestures toward the sort of articulate belief that might be stated in a creed.
In place of a creed, we find a hopeful trust running through the poems on two points: First, that “somehow good/Will be the final goal of ill” (54), and, second, that we humans are at least partly spirits or ghosts and “not wholly brain”—that is, we are not wholly material entities, and we may therefore survive in some fashion after death (93, 120). Tennyson is in no position to say what he means by these; indeed, he seems ready to modify them as needed to accommodate science. If they are challenged, he has no argument to give on their behalf; all he can say is, “I have felt” (124), and feelings do not discriminate on points of doctrine. That is why he tends to call his attitude toward these ideas “trust” or “faith” rather than “belief.”
We may ask, nevertheless, what sort of theology Tennyson implies by this trust. Certainly it is not Christian. Although many of his peers were uncertain enough about Christian faith to take “In Memoriam” as a reaffirmation of Christianity, Tennyson surely knew what Christians are supposed to believe. There is no sign of specifically Christian belief in the poem, and we know from other sources that Tennyson consciously rejected such doctrines as original sin. The most that can be made of Tennyson’s theology is this:
That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
(Epilogue, lines 141–44)
The movement of creation to which he alludes is progress (118), both from lesser to greater animal species and from lower to higher moral sensibilities. Tennyson’s son, Hallam, tells us also that the poet believes there is a Great Soul, which includes somehow both the creator God and the ongoing principles of Nature, into which the souls of the dead are assumed, and into which the souls of the living can be swept in momentary trances.
For this theology Tennyson has his feelings to thank, but his reason is not entirely innocent. By reason he has found that his faith is less vulnerable to doubt than are most of the standard creeds. Doubt supports faith:
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds. (96)
But he does not, like Descartes, test hypotheses methodically against doubt; instead he pins his hopes on the cloudiest of beliefs, beliefs that are too fuzzy to be in danger of being refuted. No one could seriously test Tennyson’s hypothesis of a “Great Soul,” when he does not say what he means by that. He is so cautious about articulating this belief in the poem that he does not even go so far as to use the expression.
Tennyson’s religion has been a puzzle to readers of the twentieth century, which, in response to challenges such as Darwin’s, has developed a more precise sense of the demands Christianity should make of belief. “He was desperately anxious to hold the faith of a believer,” wrote T. S. Eliot, the sharpest modern reader of the poem, “without being very clear about what he wanted to believe.” Confusions in Tennyson’s talk about religion led Eliot to conclude that the poet’s “feelings were more honest than his mind” and that he was more religious in his doubt than in his faith. But the poem is not about religion in any traditional sense. Its burden is reverence, and this is more in feelings than in the mind. Seen as a poem of reverence, “In Memoriam” is neither confused nor dishonest. Its medium is perfectly in tune with its content. Reverence cannot be expressed in a creed; its most apt expression is in music, which is the most remote of all art forms from the precise representation of content. Tennyson’s gift is musical: in his modulation and counterpoint of images, in his metrical variety and close attention to sound, he has given us a heart-rending expression of reverence triumphing over the battle between religion and science. There is no place here for an articulation of belief.
That is why Tennyson has nothing clear to say about the object of his reverence. His trust in a Great Soul is implicit in the poem, and quite vague at that. He never tells his readers what to believe in order to be reverent. How could he teach others, when he does not know what he believes himself? “In Memoriam” is exquisite word-music, not doctrine. It works through sound and rhythm to bring the poet’s reverence home to his readers’ feelings. The varied cadences of the poem, held in a single verse form, show us how great a distance there is between the articulation of faith and the expression of reverence.
And more: The poem helps resolve a problem that has baffled philosophers about the classic argument from design, which runs as follows: the universe exhibits an awe-inspiring design; therefore the universe had a designer who created it, and that creator we know as God. This is a terrible argument for the existence of God as defined in any creed, and yet it has been enormously influential, even among scientists who claim allegiance to precise and careful thought. How could this be so? The answer, which Tennyson understood, is this: Many of us are awestruck when we contemplate the design we see in nature or the universe, and from awe we find our way quickly to reverence. So far, so good. But if we find our way also to specific beliefs about creation or theology, we can only do so by way of one fallacy after another. Creation is too singular an event to be inferred from the data. Even if it were not, how could we know whether the creator was one or many? Good or evil? Expert or a mere apprentice at crafting worlds? Immortal or perishable? In the eighteenth century, the Scottish philosopher David Hume asked these questions and showed that there is no particular story of creation by a specific deity that we can reasonably infer from our empirical observations. He has never been refuted.
The so-called argument from design is a sorry excuse for an argument. It does not prove a single article of faith; it does, however, brilliantly explain an experience that leads to reverence. Tennyson understood the difference.
When you begin thinking about this topic, you may be shocked at the religious beliefs of people who claim to be reverent. Yet if you think of reverence as a virtue, you must be prepared to recognize it in religions other than your own (just as you must be prepared to see versions of justice in many other cultures if you think justice is a virtue). Here is an outline of beliefs, widely held in our society, that are not necessary for reverence. If you are worried about these, read on; if not, I suggest you skip to chapter eight, “Reverence Across Religions.”
No. Polytheism can be reverent, and polytheism does not hold this belief. (If you do not think polytheism can be reverent, go back and read about ancient Greece in chapter five.)
Better. But belief in the divine is not universal in Buddhism or Jainism, and people can be reverent in these religions. Reverence is possible for such objects as moral perfection, justice, life, nature, and truth, which are not gods. (For justice as an object of reverence, see chapter eleven on leadership; for truth see chapter thirteen on the reverent classroom.) You may be inclined to attack reverence for something that is not a god on the ground that it is idolatrous, but you would be mistaken. Idolatry is the worship of something other than God. But reverence is not worship. Albert Schweitzer writes eloquently of reverence for life, but he does not propose to worship life, and so by monotheistic standards he is not guilty of idolatry.
Some people use the expression “God-fearing” as if it meant the same as “reverent,” but they are confused. Reverence stands in awe, but awe is not the same thing as fear. Schweitzer was never afraid of life, though life was an object of his reverence. And, in my experience, the people who are the most reverent towards God are the least afraid of Him.
Reverent people may or may not believe that God or the gods personally intervene in human life, to punish those who violate divine commands. But anyone who identifies reverence with fear of God must hold that God acts in some way on human life, here or in the hereafter. Tennyson feels he has found evidence that God does not intervene on earth, and still he wishes to be reverent. In fact, fear of punishment is the opposite of reverence; if all you have to keep you in line is the fear of God, then you have denied yourself all of the virtues, including reverence. Virtues are the source of feelings that make you want to do the right things; but fear of God would merely keep you from doing the evil things you would want to do, if you had no virtue whatever.
Reverence is the virtue that makes us feel like not arrogating properties such as infallibility that could only belong to divine beings. There are at least three different kinds of reasons for observing the “No Trespassing” signs along the fence between the divine and the human: (1) you might be afraid of what the gods do to trespassers; (2) you might dread the violence that arises among human beings when some of them put on divine airs; or (3) you might simply hold that it is morally wrong to trespass, out of respect or awe for those who dwell on the other side. Only the third reason is strictly reverent; reverence is doing the reverent thing for the reverent reason.
Fear is not in itself a moral consideration. Even a vicious criminal can be kept in check through fear. Fear of gods cannot belong to any virtue. Even in cultures that do fear the gods, fear is not the same thing as reverence. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the hero refuses to yield to threats from Zeus and shows no fear of what the god can do to him. He is admirable even so, in his reverence for the unnamed power that will topple the tyrannical Zeus from his throne.
Fear of gods fails other tests than the moral one. From where we stand now, it is easy to see that it is foolish to fear Zeus or Poseidon or Apollo. We know that they cannot harm us, because we know where thunder and earthquake and plague come from. By the end of the fifth century BCE, many Greek intellectuals had given up the old idea that you could bring on fearful disasters by changing or dropping old ceremonies. Ancient travelers saw that different peoples staged different ceremonies to different gods, with no great difference to their chances of prosperity or bad fortune. This meant there was no basis for any group to insist that their gods and their ceremonies were the only ones with real power.
The most telling objection comes from history: Why shouldn’t the human story make sense on its own—why suppose that gods intervene? Plague, famine, and tempest come and go, and there is no clear evidence that religious ceremony keeps them at bay. The plague at Athens made no distinctions between those who practiced religion and those who did not.
Most modern religions attribute moral perfection to the Being they worship, but this is not necessary for reverence. This belief is at least consistent with reverence, but it is not necessary for it. Believers in polytheism often hold that their gods are the source of evil for human beings, without making any attempt to show that their gods are morally good (and similarly for some monotheists). And yet such believers insist on reverence—not because the gods deserve it in some moral sense, but because they demand it, and because human beings will live better and more human lives if they are reverent.
If reverence required human beings to behave in the way they think their gods behave, then worshipping nasty gods would make for a nasty sort of reverence. But reverence actually bars human beings from trying to give themselves divine attributes, and this is especially important when those attributes are thought to be horrible. Again, if reverence always implied respect, and if respect amounted to good opinion, then you would have to twist your values backwards before you could be reverent towards a divinity that you did not believe to be good. But as we shall see, respect is not the same as good opinion. Reverence treats fools and criminals with a measure of respect. The reverent worshipper of an evil god will hold the god in awe and respect, but not admiration.
Reformers who complain about the worship of evil gods are usually showing their failure to understand reverence. From at least the sixth century BCE, Greek intellectuals objected to the immoral behavior of gods in Greek myth. The gods of myth are, among other things, models of what we must not be. It is as if myth says, “Look at all the dreadful things the gods do; they get away with crimes like that, because they are immortal. You, however, are a mortal human being, and you would not long survive if you followed their example. Remember your place, and do not do as the gods are said to do.” Generally, people need not believe in sweet, loving, or even fair-minded gods in order to be reverent.
If I am right so far, cultures that prized reverence should have no complaint to make about lack of any particular belief (beyond the minimum previously discussed). Some modern religions make much of belief and faith. Ancient religions, generally, did not.
Even the Greek poets of reverence were not dismayed simply by lack of belief in this god or that. Pentheus, like many monarchs in Greek tragedy, is a model of irreverence (Bacchae, 370ff.). Is this because he fails to believe in Dionysus? Or is it because of positive beliefs that he holds, which the Chorus repudiate (for example, 997ff.)? Although Euripides set the play in long-ago Thebes, he meant it to speak to Athenians of his time, and I believe the play expressed a fairly popular view of reverence—one not influenced by the agnostics or humanists I mentioned earlier.
Athenians held at least three fundamental beliefs: (1) that the gods exist; (2) that the gods pay attention to the affairs of men; and (3) that the relation between gods and men, though unequal, is actively reciprocal. Pentheus, so far as we can tell, does not set himself against any of these beliefs as stated. So far as we know, there are gods about whom he has these three beliefs. He just does not have them about Dionysus. But—and this is a subtle point—Pentheus is not in trouble for not believing in Dionysus. He and his family have never believed in Dionysus, nor have they taken part in Bacchic rituals. Neither has anyone else in Greece, yet only Pentheus and his family are in trouble. Why does Dionysus single out Pentheus and his family for punishment, of all the legions of unbelievers in Thebes and Greece? Their crime is not unbelief; they insulted a god. Dionysus converts unbelievers, holding them innocent, while wreaking savage vengeance on those who insult him.
Pentheus is in trouble because he explicitly denies that Dionysus is a god and rejects the practices of Dionysus worshippers as a danger to society. He is wrong on both points, as the play shows us. Dionysus introduces himself to us as a god in the prologue, and the Maenads in the mountain are dangerous only when disturbed by men. Pentheus’ fears of violence and sexual disturbance are unfounded, so long as he does not try to shut down the practice of Dionysus worship.
Pentheus is in trouble, too, because his family did not listen to their weakest and most vulnerable dependent—young Semele, Dionysus’ mother, pregnant, unmarried, and in need. They have turned away from one of their own. These are two impieties in one: violation of family obligation and refusal of a suppliant. If the family has such arrogance towards troubled young Semele, no wonder they are out of touch with the common people of Thebes.
Their rejection of Semele is especially insulting to the gods because it involves particular refusals to believe in interventions by gods in their own lives: the impregnation of Semele by Zeus, the thunderbolt that killed her, the undying fire on the site of Semele’s death. Now it is the son of Zeus who has thrilled the women of Thebes into their mountain-dancing. How many times will this family insult the gods and remain in power?
Why did the family reject Semele? Were they seduced by rationalist arguments into doubting that divine intervention occurs? Or did they simply fall into the habit of expecting the normal pattern of events to continue? Unmarried girls often grow pregnant, after all, without any help from Zeus; thunderbolts may strike for no obvious reason, and people fall prey to bizarre religious teachings with alarming frequency, owing to the frailty of the human mind.
Simple belief, however, is not the main point. Dionysus in the Bacchae does not spread his religion in order to save souls from damnation, but mainly to secure his own honor. The rest of Greece has up to now lacked faith, but only the Theban royal family has insulted the god by rejecting his mother Semele, and only Pentheus has threatened to put down the Maenads:
Oh Reverence, queen of gods,
Reverence, who over earth
Spreads golden wing,
Have you heard Pentheus?
Have you heard the outrage …?
(Bacchae, 370–74)
And the failure that lies behind this outrage—the failure that the chorus single out for reproach—is Pentheus’ failure to recognize his own mortality:
Wisdom? It’s not wise
To lift our thoughts too high;
We are human and our time is short.
(395–97)
Death makes judgment sound, hears no
Excuses. When you face the gods, remember
Your mortality, if you’d live a painless life.
(1002–4)
To live in the knowledge that you are not divine—that you are mortal—is to have good judgment, and to have good judgment in action is to pull back from every sort of excess, especially from excess of power. Honor is given to gods in many ways, most visibly through sacrifices and other rituals, but also by taking to heart the difference between human and divine. People must not only understand that they are mortal but live in a way that reflects that understanding: they must not be too ambitious, for example, and they must not be too boastful, or they will bring on themselves the anger of the gods. Above all, they must listen to the weakest among them. They should have listened to Semele.
Pentheus puts himself in competition with the god by setting out to take back the minds of the Theban women from the stranger who, he thinks, has addled them. But only a god could compete with a god, and the prize in this case—tyranny over people’s minds—is a power no human being may safely enjoy. “The god does not allow anyone but himself to have great ambition”—that is the warning Xerxes has from his uncle (according to Herodotus) when he considers invading Greece (7.10). For a mortal to act like a god is the peak of irreverence (Bacchae 395–96).
Reverence crops up in many different systems, with religion or without—so widely, in fact, that there can be no core of required beliefs beyond an inarticulate trust that there is something of which we must stand in awe. Tennyson was right, and so was the mixed group of students I described at the funeral, who longed for a reverence that would not divide them from their friend who had died, and that would not divide their friend from his family. Religions have been in crisis before now, creeds have come and gone, even within Christianity, but reverence lives on.
If you ask the poets of reverence, “What must I believe in order to be reverent?” they will fall silent. But ask them, “What must I not believe?” Then they have an answer: any belief that trespasses on divine ground is the enemy of reverence. Do not believe that you are supreme in any way; do not believe that you alone know the mind of God. These would be troubling violations of the boundary between human beings and the object of reverence. Such violations are common—and are sometimes even considered essential—in some organized religions; that is why being religious is not the same as being reverent. When violence breaks out between people of different religious beliefs, reverence has fled the scene. Reverence—like Tennyson’s poem—cannot take a stand on fine points of belief. True reverence does not kill heretics or unbelievers. Reverence knows the limits of human knowledge and never presumes to represent literally the mind of God.
Reverence is not subject to the deaths of men;
They live, they die, but reverence shall not perish.
—Sophocles, Philoctetes (lines 1442—44)
Oh ye who tread the Narrow Way,
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when the heathen pray
To Buddha Kamakura!
—Rudyard Kipling, epigraph to Kim
My brother kneels (so saith Kabir)
To stone and brass in heathen-wise,
But in my brother’s voice I hear
My own unanswered agonies.
His god is as his Fates assign—
His prayer is all the world’s—and mine.
—Rudyard Kipling “The Prayer,”
epigraph to chapter XIV of Kim