In his brilliant essay “Religion: If There Is No God … ,” Leszek Kolakowski writes: “Religious ways of perceiving the world, institutions of worship, beliefs, are never born of analytical reasoning and need no ‘proofs’ of their veracity unless they are attacked on rational grounds. Logos in religion is a defensive mechanism.”1 Kolakowski argues that within its own sphere, “religion” makes just as much sense as “science.” These two mental cows, one holy, the other profane, simply yield different types of milk. The scientific cow produces predictability and probability; the religious cow consolation and redemption. One can mix these very different liquids to a certain degree: secular reasoners can replace God with “human dignity” as their guiding principle; religious thinkers can build syllogistic structures on the dogmata of faith. But in the end, as Kolakowski says in the concluding words of his essay, “the real is what people crave for.”2 It is futile to look for a common denominator. All attempts to explain faith in logical terms are bound to fail, just as it is futile to understand the spiritual meaning of quarks. One can bat for both teams, as long as one remembers to play by the rules that govern each.
Sadly, as Kolakowski would be the first to admit, metaphysical pluralism is all too often diagnosed as schizophrenia. It works better in theory than in practice. In practice, people (especially people in positions of power) find the “Averroist” idea of Double-Truth irritating. They tend to define the “other team’s” truth as a lie, and make those who adhere to it see the light in rather ungodly ways.
But while Kolakowski is aware of the intricacies of real life, he seems to believe that had it only been possible to separate the spiritually inclined from the materially inclined, each group would live happily ever after. Unfortunately, reasoners of the scientific (practical) and the religious (mythical) modes of explanation live in the same world. They are thus bound to collide, and form, willy-nilly, the monde du mélange in which we live.
Kolakowski’s interpretation of the relations between “religious” and “scientific” ways of thinking is strangely reminiscent of Gnostic myths. In the utopian Urwelt, believers and nonbelievers lived in separate conceptual worlds. At some point, the forces of disbelief (Greek Philosophy, Science, the Enlightenment) invaded the realm of untarnished religion (the faithful were “attacked on rational grounds”), forcing it to defend itself by weapons that, in a deep sense, are alien to its very nature. It should be recognized that Kolakowski’s explanatory model makes no ontological truth-claims. Like Hobbes’s or Rousseau’s “states of nature,” it is a theoretical model, not a historical account of how thing “really” were. In real life, the two modes of thought were never neatly separated. But Kolakowski believes that his model enables us to better understand why people who could be perfectly happy in their “mythical” realm try to fix what he thinks ain’t broke. They try to fix unbroken conceptual systems, because of the critical, sarcastic gaze of others. “L’enfer, c’est les autres.”
There is something quite appealing about Kolakowski’s dislike for mixed modes of explanation. Rationalists do not like hybrids. They find it easier to accept St. Paul’s faith in Christ Crucified, “a stumbling block” to the Jews and “foolishness” to the Greeks, than the scholastics’ hybrid of revelation and Aristotle. Pascal’s God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is more attractive to nonbelievers than the philosophers’ God. One can move from realm to realm only by losing faith or by leaping toward it. As long as He remains in his sphere, Jehovah makes perfect sense. The trouble begins when He is given a metaphysical visa to nonbelievers’ territory. There, alas, he is simply out of his element. The “logical” explanations that theologians produce on his behalf require a greater mental effort than the willingness to accept that some things just defy logic. There is a story about a very learned rabbi who, facing the endless intricacies of Talmudic debates, felt incapable of deciding what the law was in any particular instance. He asked his disciples to go to the town rabbi, a very simple man, and ask for his halachic rulings. But they were not to give him the rabbi’s justifications for them. Authority, like irrational faith, is what it is. Once you try to mix it with reason, it becomes much harder to swallow.
But is unfaith always the aggressor? Are the faithful only using reason as a defensive mechanism? The analytical dualist is eager to answer these questions in the affirmative, but history seems to suggest otherwise. Reason is not an external aggressive force nor are the faithful adopting it as a last resort. The dualist division of the mythical and the scientific is the result of one particular moment in Western thinking (the marriage of the Enlightenment and experimental science). It tells us more about the post-Enlightenment rationalist’s fears of impurity than about the religious frame of mind.
When Greek reason was introduced systematically into the religious thinking of the West in the twelfth century, there were no Greeks to impress or secular scientists to convince. The Church had a practical monopoly on learning. The challenge came from within. Even when it was supposedly aimed at outsiders, like in Thomas’s Summa contra gentiles, for example, the real addressees were other members of the community, eager to ask all the difficult questions that we have encountered in this book, while at the same time committed to one particular type of answer—the “orthodox.”
Reason and unreason cannot be separated, because human beings need both. The fault is not with Greek philosophy. Moments of reflection always follow the initial act of faith. The question, in other words, is not why we believe in “God”—we believe because we believe—but what it is that we believe in, what the content of our belief is. Very few people are capable of leaving faith in its pristine purity, as a mental attitude. Least of all are intellectuals capable of it. The mixing of realms is not an external addition to believers, not (just) a defensive weapon (though it can be that too), but an integral aspect of the human mind—of both the faithful and the faithless. Reason is an essential element in the development of religious systems. It is true that in the West the language of reflection was deeply influenced by Greek models, but reflection can exist in a great variety of ways, some of which are clearly unphilosophical. The Talmudic rabbis, for example, found Greek philosophy unappealing. They committed philosophical atrocities that would have shocked Plato and Aristotle with total equanimity. Against our “progressive” expectations, they often made God more, not less, human, more, not less, material.
And yet, even our nonphilosophical rabbis were not simply adding mythological and devotional elements to the God of revelation. They sought to make sense of a God that, according to Kolakowski, already made perfect sense. Making sense led them into trouble, logical trouble. This “trouble” is not the unfortunate result of sloppy thinking, as is too often suggested. On the contrary, the trouble they introduced into their belief system was sophisticated, complex, often ingenious. Religious reasoners were not adding a patch to a dysfunctional system. As we saw, difficulties were often introduced into the sacred corpus where a literal reading would have been quite unproblematic from both a believer’s and a nonbeliever’s point of view. Take transubstantiation, for example: surely, the Real Presence was simpler without it. And what about the bizarre story of God shaving the king of Assyria? Did we really need that? Making religious sense does not proceed by the simplest, shortest path. Riddles, contradictions, complications, and detours are not accidents; they are the flesh and blood of religious thinking in complex communities.
It is tempting to think that the experts are simply motivated by class interest—complexities make them indispensable—but that would not be the truth, or at least not the whole truth. Experts do gain social benefits from their mind games, but the main benefit is, for lack of another term, aesthetic. Complex systems are intellectually more pleasing, at least for intellectuals. Beautiful explanations are encouraged and rewarded. What makes them “beautiful”? Sometimes it is their ability to create a metaphysical Esperanto, a logical language that all can understand—the ultimate logical “proof “that even the most stubborn skeptic would find irresistible. But more often, this has nothing to do with convincing nonbelievers (foreign or domestic).
The dynamic nature of all societies forces them to change their aesthetics (sensual and intellectual) to correspond to changing circumstances and needs. But while new arguments are being produced, the old arguments cannot simply be forgotten. They continue to exist as layers of past tastes and preferences that must be dealt with in a way that will not destroy the all-important myth of continuity on which religious establishments are based. The coincidence of new with old solutions engenders new problems and requires new solutions, some more beautiful, others, sadly, less.
Many of the issues discussed in this book are beautiful explanations that ran into trouble. The idea that God is both transcendent (totally unlike us) and immanent (hence like us; hence sensual, if only “spiritually”) is universal, as is, to varying degrees, the urge to offer explanations for this uneasy coexistence. In the historical ages discussed in this book, the existence of God was never seriously challenged. God was a constant—the ontological foundation of all else. But at the same time, the content of the idea, “God,” was ever changing in an attempt to catch up with the flow of ideas produced by professional “explainers.” The complex products of colliding trains of thought are constantly projected onto God—the “ontological substratum of everything”—so that speculation is reified and rereified. God is that which theology asserts; hence, what theology asserts, within varying moments of the speculative process, is God. At any given moment, he is the consensus theologorum—a reification of past strata of theological thought, philosophical trends, and political, social, and cultural pressures. That is why, in spite of all efforts to make him a coherent set of ideas, he is a logical chimera. Absolute coherence exists only in the fons et origo—in the Hidden God whose coherence is without spot and blemish because he is an empty concept, because he is, in a deep sense, totally unknown, unknowable.
Does knowing this (assuming that a believer might concede that this is knowledge and not nonsense) change anything? Probably not. The news of God’s death has proved, once again, premature. For those with a thirst for God, God, as Kolakowski (and Paul) observed, requires no proof. Cognitive, psychological, and sociocultural observations can merely scratch the surface of faith. That faith cannot be reconciled with the current philosophical dogma is unfortunate, but it is not critical. It is always possible to turn to the ultima ratio fidelium: credo quia absurdum. Indeed, under the combined assaults of Darwin and Freud, the faithful are more likely than in the past two millennia to use this ultimate weapon. One might even suspect that Kolakowski’s argument—which would have been totally unacceptable to St. Thomas Aquinas and Maimonides—is itself just a symptom of a (temporary?) retreat of the religious reasoners to their last defense lines.
Too satisfied with itself, the present generation does not like the beautiful explanations of the past, but the next generation may again find pleasure in them, or produce others. As long as the need for the Ultimate exists, as long as people sense the urge to feel, to fear, and to understand a force profoundly greater than them and yet profoundly intimate, they will produce explanations full of tensions and internal contradictions, making their God in their image.