Our subject is T. S. Eliot’s thesis that the future of Western societies will be determined by a contest between Christianity and “modern paganism.” And so our first order of business, it might seem, would be to clarify just what “paganism” is, so that we could then consider what “modern paganism” might look like and how it might contrast with modern Christianity. Never fear: we will indeed address those matters in due course. But both paganism and Christianity are species within the genus of “religion,” and so, with apologies for the delay, our comparison will be improved if we first step back and try to get a grasp on what sort of thing “religion” is.
But that step back calls for a second one, because saying what “religion” is turns out to be no quick and easy task. Indeed, some scholars have concluded that the very idea of “religion” as a distinct thing or category is an artificial modern invention, devised for political or academic purposes.1 So, rather than attacking the question head-on, we may do better to sneak up on it from behind, so to speak, by starting with a different question that is closer to home—the question of human personhood. Not “What is religion?”—not to start off with—but rather, initially, “What are . . . we?”
That question—“What are we?”—is one that law, politics, history, and the social sciences seldom ask but always answer, at least implicitly. All these disciplines are concerned with people—with human beings—and so they necessarily proceed on the basis of presuppositions about what sorts of entities we humans are.2 Indeed, not only in academic studies but also in our day-to-day affairs, such presuppositions are implicit if mostly unnoticed in all our mundane discussions, decisions, and interactions. All these constantly involve people; all thus necessarily import assumptions about how people are constituted and what makes them—or rather us—behave in the sometimes comfortingly predictable, sometimes puzzling or bizarre, ways we behave.
Within legal studies (my own field), the subdiscipline that is probably most self-conscious in its assumptions about the nature of persons is law-and-economics. Economics, Richard Posner explains, “assum[es] that man is a rational maximizer of his ends in life, his satisfactions—what we shall call his ‘self-interest.’ ”3 This interest-seeking conception of the person is taken as axiomatic not only in economics, though, but also in many other academic neighborhoods, as in the virtually ubiquitous rational choice theory.
Perhaps more surprisingly, an interest-seeking conception can animate even thinking devoted not to maximizing satisfactions, but rather to articulating the meaning of justice. Thus, in the contractarian theory offered by John Rawls, probably the most influential political philosopher of the past half-century, the content of justice is derived from a thought experiment that conjectures about the political principles that would be selected by hypothetical persons in an “original position” situated behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents them from knowing the particular situations they will occupy in life.4 These contracting parties are presented as rational interest-seekers. Thus, Rawls describes “the principles of justice as those which rational persons concerned to advance their interests would consent to as equals.”5 These “rational persons” are motivated by a desire “to win for themselves the highest index of primary goods.”6 And Rawls explains that the “rational person . . . follows the plan which will satisfy more of his desires rather than less.”7
Usually the term “interests” is closely associated with “desires,” as Rawls says, or with “satisfactions,” as Posner puts it. What makes something an “interest,” in other words, is that humans in fact desire or feel a need for it, and feel (or at least expect to feel) “satisfaction” upon attaining it. Understood in this way, “interests” seem to be, at least in principle, empirically verifiable facts—and thus compatible with a hardheaded scientific approach to social understanding and to public decision making.8
To be sure, the term is elastic enough to be adapted to other purposes and meanings. For example, a theorist will occasionally try to add a normative dimension by distinguishing between merely “subjective” and more “objective” interests—or between what we do in fact want and what we should want, or what we would want if we were properly reflective. In this vein, Ronald Dworkin contrasted what he called “experiential interests” that we value “because and when they feel good” with “critical interests” that “represent critical judgments rather than just experiential preferences.”9
Nothing prohibits theorists from using the term in these expansive ways. If the term is construed too broadly, though, it risks becoming empty. For example, if the term is used in a more normative sense, as with Dworkin, the claim that “people should act to realize their (reflectively justifiable) interests” risks dissolving into the tautology that “people should act for the ends for which they should act.” Which is true enough, no doubt, but not very illuminating. On the whole, therefore, the “interest-seeking” conception seems most rigorous and useful—even for normative projects, like Rawlsian justice or economics in its prescriptive mode—when “interests” are understood as referring to actual human desires and satisfactions.
If the conception of persons as interest-seekers is powerfully influential, one reason is that the conception has much to recommend it. It resonates with a great deal in our experience. All of us do have interests or desires that we try to satisfy as fully and efficiently as possible (subject to a variety of constraints, perhaps). And yet, although the interest-seeking conception seems realistic and useful for many purposes, it does not comfortably fit all aspects of human experience. Sometimes people deliberately act in ways that do not seem calculated to advance their subjective wants and needs.
The most striking examples, probably, are instances in which people knowingly sacrifice a great deal—including, sometimes, their lives—for some moral purpose or noble cause. Like Antigone in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, a daughter or son gives up a satisfying life or a lucrative and fulfilling career in order to care for an aging parent. Or a person voluntarily sacrifices his or her life in defense of country, or to rescue someone in distress. At least in the ordinary sense of the term, these people do not appear to be acting to promote their own “interests.”
To be sure, as we have already noticed, the term “interest” is elastic enough that it can be stretched to cover these instances. We can simply say that a particular moral or heroically altruistic person felt a subjective desire to care for a parent—he must have, or why would he have done what he did?—or that he felt an “interest” in risking and sacrificing his life in order to defend his country. But this is often not how it appears, either to the person or to others who observe. The person and we would say that she sacrificed her own interests to help another, or to do what was right, or from a sense of duty. As noted, moreover, if the concept of “interests” is expanded to cover all these cases, the idea risks becoming empty and tautological. To say that “people act to advance their interests” is just to say that “people act to do whatever they think or want their actions to do.” Which is to say nothing at all of any substance.
Religion as we conventionally think of it is an area in which the interest-seeking conception fits awkwardly.10 Even in an ostensibly “secular” age, millions of people still donate large sums of money to churches, or take time off from work or sacrifice recreation time to attend worship services that are often less than scintillating. They participate in church-sponsored service activities or regularly devote time to religious study, reflection, or prayer.11 Once again, like all human conduct, religious conduct can be described in interest-seeking terms. “John goes to church because he wants to meet people,” or “Susan donates to her church because she believes this will help her get to heaven.” Scholars have accordingly applied economic analysis to religion; such analyses have been illuminating at least with respect to some aspects of the subject.12 And yet, this sort of description does not capture all of religion; indeed, a purely interest-seeking piety is often thought to be a lesser or illegitimate kind of religion.
As an old saying has it, “man does not live by bread alone.”13 The interest-seeking conception captures and explains a good deal about humans and our dealings, but it does not seem to capture or explain everything about us. Perhaps not even the most important or essential things. Something—something that is arguably crucial—is left out, or is included only in distorted form. But what?
Persons and Meanings
Some thinkers suggest that an understanding of humans merely as interest-seekers fails to recognize that central part of human life that tries to discern meaning or purpose in life, and then to live in accordance with that meaning or purpose.14 In this vein, the psychologist Viktor Frankl argued that “man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain, but rather to see a meaning in his life.”15
Frankl’s view grew out of his own horrific experiences in Nazi death camps (in which his wife, father, mother, and brother died). He observed that the prisoners most likely to endure the grim brutalities of the camps were not necessarily those who were outwardly most healthy or fortunate, but rather those who had some purpose in their lives. Generalizing this insight, Frankl founded a school of psychology that he called “logotherapy.” “According to logotherapy,” he explained, “the striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.”16 What people most urgently need, he insisted, is a “why” for life;17 given this why, “man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.”18
Although developed in less excruciating circumstances, philosopher Susan Wolf’s more recent reflections on meaning run parallel to Frankl’s views. Wolf observes that many of the most important reasons we act do not fit with the psychology of self-interest—or, for that matter, in more purely “moral” imperatives. These reasons, rather, “engage us in the activities that make our lives worth living; they give us a reason to go on; they make our worlds go round. They, and the activities they engender, give meaning to our lives.”19 “What gives meaning to our lives gives us reasons to live even when the prospects for our own well-being are bleak.”20
If meaning can give us reason to live even when conditions are grim, the reverse is also true: the lack of meaning can make life seem empty or intolerable even when we seem to be flourishing—when it seems that all our “interests” are being satisfied. The point is poignantly developed in an autobiographical account by Leo Tolstoy, who explained how his own life, though outwardly prosperous in every imaginable way, became unbearable to him precisely because it seemed so meaningless.
My question, the one that brought me to the point of suicide when I was fifty years old, was a most simple one that lies in the soul of every person, from a silly child to a wise old man. It is the question without which life is impossible, as I had learnt from experience. It is this: what will come of what I do today or tomorrow? What will come of my entire life?
Expressed another way the question can be put like this: why do I live? Why do I wish for anything, or do anything? Or expressed another way: is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death that awaits me?21
To his dismay, Tolstoy discovered that he had no answer to these questions. “I could not attribute any rational meaning to a single act, let alone to my whole life.”22 This condition left the novelist with feelings of “fear, abandonment, loneliness” until he found meaning in religious faith—the faith not of the theologians and churchmen, in his case, but of the ordinary working people.23
So people do not merely pursue “interests”; they also seek—and seek to live in accordance with—“meaning.” But what is meaning, exactly? We talk about people having (or not having) a “meaningful” life, or about having (or not having) “purpose” in life. But what does “meaning” in this existential sense entail?
Sometimes the proponents of meaning appear to be contemplating something purely subjective and personal—something like the “projects” or “goals” that different people set for themselves. In this vein, Viktor Frankl sometimes described meaning as an “aim,” a “purpose,” or a “task”;24 these descriptions might suggest that the sort of meaning he had in mind was little more than a personally chosen goal that an individual might care about and pursue.25 Susan Wolf, similarly, says that meaning does not need to come from anything grand or heroic; it can be supplied by humble activities like gardening or practicing the cello.26
On this view, claims about the need for meaning may seem to boil down to something quite platitudinous: “Your life will be happier and more fulfilling if you have goals that you’re pursuing, or projects that you care about.” And yet, this merely subjective conception was insufficient for both Wolf and Frankl. Although meaning is associated with subjective satisfaction, Wolf observes, not all activities that people find satisfying are meaningful. After all, some people get subjective satisfaction from “smoking pot all day, . . . doing crossword puzzles, or worse (as personal experience will attest), Sudokus.”27 These activities may provide subjective satisfaction. But they do not make for “meaning” in life, Wolf contends, because they lack objective value.28 Wolf thus defends a “bipartite conception” in which “meaning” must have both a subjective and an objective dimension:29 it “arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.”30
And what is “objective” value or attractiveness, exactly? Wolf admits that she has no very satisfactory account of what “objective” value is; nor, she thinks, do other philosophers.31
While emphasizing the personal quality of meaning, likewise, Frankl stressed as well an objective, unchosen dimension of meaning. He disagreed with “some existentialist thinkers [like Sartre] who see in man’s ideals nothing but his own inventions.” Rather, “the meaning of our lives is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.”32 Without some larger or more encompassing meaning, the more mundane and personal meanings would lose their efficacy: “The question which beset me [in the death camps] was, ‘Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance—as whether one escapes or not—ultimately would not be worth living at all.’ ”33
Frankl occasionally talked in almost mystical terms of an “ultimate meaning” that “necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man,”34 or of an “infinite meaning of life” that “includes suffering and dying, privation and death,”35 and hence that could work to redeem even the horrific and senseless savagery of the death camps. The focus on “ultimate meaning” became more overt in Frankl’s later work. Neither in his earlier nor in his later work, however, could Frankl offer any very clear account of what “ultimate meaning” might be.36
Is “Meaning” Meaningful?
The difficulty of giving a good account of “ultimate meaning,” or (as Wolf acknowledges) of providing a satisfactory explanation of the “objective value” that seems a necessary condition for meaning, may provoke a familiar objection: perhaps the very notion of “meaning,” or of “ultimate meaning,” is nothing more than a confusion of thought. More generally, the idea of “ultimate meaning” seems closely akin to the idea of a “meaning of meanings,”37 as Terry Eagleton puts it, or of a “meaning of life”—notions much scoffed at by skeptical thinkers. Queries about the “meaning of life” can have an adolescent or even comical feel to them; they evoke associations of Douglas Adams’s supercomputer (“Deep Thought”) that calculates the meaning of life to be . . . 42.38 Eagleton remarks that the very idea of a meaning of life “seems a quaint sort of notion, at once homespun and portentous, fit for satirical mauling by the Monty Python team.”39 The dedication of his book on “the meaning of life” reads “For Oliver, who found the whole idea deeply embarrassing.” (Tellingly, Eagleton was not deterred by the embarrassment and did not stop at the dedication; instead he proceeded to write a book on the question—though not one that purports to disclose what the meaning of life really is.)
In the deconstructive vein, the Oxford philosopher Antony Flew methodically dissected Tolstoy’s autobiographical account of his own angst-ridden quest for meaning and tried to show that the novelist was fundamentally confused.40 It was appropriate enough for Tolstoy to ask “Why?” or “What for?” with respect to various particular activities in his life—writing a book, educating his son, and so forth. But Tolstoy had perfectly good answers to those particular and sensible questions, Flew thought. Unfortunately, Tolstoy “would not take an answer for an answer”;41 he persisted in asking the “What for?” question beyond the point where the question made sense. He was like the child who keeps asking “Why?” when the most basic and only possible kind of response has already been given.42
In a similar vein, another Oxford philosopher, R. M. Hare, described an incident in which a foreign student who had been living with Hare and his wife, and who was normally a “cheerful, vigorous, enthusiastic young man,” became despondent after reading Camus and coming to the conclusion that, as the student put it, “nothing matters.”43 As Hare recalled the incident, he was able to restore the student to good spirits simply by pointing out that his existential despair was the result of a conceptual or semantic mistake.
My friend had not understood that the function of the word “matters” is to express concern; he had thought mattering was something (some activity or process) that things did, rather like chattering; as if the sentence “My wife matters to me” were similar in logical function to the sentence “My wife chatters to me.” If one thinks that, one may begin to wonder what this activity is, called mattering; and one may begin to observe the world closely (aided perhaps by the clear cold descriptions of a novel like that of Camus) to see if one can catch anything doing something that could be called mattering; and when we can observe nothing going on which seems to correspond to this name, it is easy for the novelist to persuade us that after all nothing matters. To which the answer is, “Matters” isn’t that sort of word; it isn’t intended to describe something that things do, but to express our concern about what they do; so of course we can’t observe things mattering; but that doesn’t mean that they don’t matter.44
So we should not confuse “matters” with “chatters.” Dismissive analyses like those of Flew and Hare are in the spirit of the logical positivists, who argued that a sweeping set of beliefs and propositions—including virtually all moral, religious, and aesthetic propositions—are merely meaningless or nonsensical. Philosophers have come to view this as an inadequate response to genuine human questions and beliefs,45 however, and some philosophers likewise suggest that the question of “the meaning of life” is a real one that cannot be deflected through analytical deconstruction. It is, as John Cottingham observes, “the question that will not go away.”46
But then, what is the sense of that question—the one that will not go away?
Meaning and the Drama of Time
Another (fortuitously named) philosopher, John Wisdom, proposes a potentially helpful analogy. Sometimes we arrive at the theater late, or leave early, and thus see only part of the play. We might then ask what the play “means,” and “in this case we want to know what went before and what came after in order to understand the part we saw.” But then again, sometimes we see the whole play and nonetheless ask, “What did it mean?” In this case also, “we are asking a question which has sense and is not absurd. For our words express a wish to grasp the character, the significance of the whole play.” Similarly, when we ask about “the meaning of it all,” “we are trying to find the order in the drama of Time.”47
Of course, we might be asking something a bit more basic; we might be asking whether there is any “drama of Time.” Wisdom acknowledges the question. “Is the drama of time meaningless as a tale told by an idiot? Or is it not meaningless? And if it is not meaningless is it a comedy or a tragedy, a triumph or a disaster, or is it a mixture in which sweet and bitter are forever mixed?”48
We can extend Wisdom’s analogy by adopting the perspective not of the theater audience but rather of people who may be—or may not be—actors in a play. We find ourselves on what might be a sort of stage, and in the midst of people and scenes in which some sort of action seems to be unfolding, but we do not know for certain whether there is any overall script or drama or whether instead people are just milling around, pursuing their individual aims and projects—their “interests”—but without any larger encompassing plot or purpose. In this situation, we might want to know—and might ask, meaningfully—whether we are part of a drama or not.49
Something like that, it seems, is what the question of Meaning, or of “meaning” in its more ambitious forms, is typically asking. Beyond our purely human plans and finite projects, is there some larger Story—some “secret plot to it all,”50 as Terry Eagleton puts it—in which we have somehow been placed?
Suppose we accept this as a (perhaps metaphorical) formulation of the question of Meaning. And suppose we venture an affirmative answer to the question, or at least acknowledge the possibility of an affirmative answer: there is—or there may be—a grand narrative or a “secret plot to it all.” We are then, it seems, in the realm of religion. Indeed, the view that there is some larger Meaning in the cosmos, and that we ought to live in accordance with it, is a plausible candidate for an answer to the vexing question of what “religion” is, or of what the difference is between religious and nonreligious worldviews.51 Sigmund Freud thus maintained that “the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.”52
A thoughtful recent articulation of this view comes from Jonathan Sacks, formerly chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain. Like Viktor Frankl and Susan Wolf, Sacks contends that meaning is central to human life. “We are meaning-seeking animals,” Sacks asserts. Other animals do not ask the question, so far as we can tell, but we do. “It is what makes us unique. To be human is to ask the question ‘Why?’ ”53 Sacks adds that “by a meaningful life . . . I do not mean life as a personal project. I mean life with a meaning that comes from outside us, as a call, a vocation, a mission.”54 This conception has a religious quality, as Sacks explains.
That is what religion for the most part is: the constant making and remaking of meaning, by the stories we tell, the rituals we perform, and the prayers we say. The stories are sacred, the rituals divine commands, and prayer a genuine dialogue with the divine. Religion is an authentic response to a real Presence, but it is also a way of making that presence real by constantly living in response to it.55
In support of this interpretation, Sacks quotes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:
To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.
To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.
To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.56
Wittgenstein’s propositions may be misleading in one respect: not all religious understandings are theistic in character.57 But a belief in Meaning, or in a Story, is the sort of belief that typically elicits the description of “religion.” As William James observed, “If any one phrase could gather [religion’s] universal message, that phrase would be ‘All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.’ ”58
The Limitations of “Meaning”
Our discussion thus far has suggested that although human beings are indeed interest-seeking organisms, we are more than that: we are also “meaning-seeking” beings who attempt to discern and live in accordance with both local and larger meanings. And on one view, religion engages this meaning-seeking dimension of our nature by offering a sort of Grand Story or metanarrative that confers meaning by explaining what the cosmic and human drama is all about.
But this account will generate objections. Let us notice two especially pertinent ones. One objection would contend that this “metanarrative” version leaves out a good deal of religion. Not all religions offer a metanarrative. And even in those that do, the metanarrative is arguably not what is most essential or fundamental. It may not have been there at the outset at all—not explicitly, at least; the metanarrative may have been elaborated as the religion developed. When Moses kneels in awe before the burning bush,59 he is not responding to any cosmic story telling him where he came from and where he is ultimately going. Christianity, similarly, offers a cosmic narrative in which the main chapters are creation, fall (into the world of pain and mortality, our present habitation), and redemption leading to eternal life. The metanarrative provides guidance with the usual questions of “meaning”: Who am I? Why am I here? How should I live? What does the future hold for me? And yet when Jesus calls Peter, James, and John to leave their fishing boats and follow him, he does not expound any metanarrative into which this invitation might fit. He merely requests, or perhaps commands: “Come, follow me.”60
A different objection would observe that the foregoing account grounds religion in human needs—more specifically, in a need for “meaning.” But that version of religion seems problematic for at least two reasons. First, some people seem to feel no such need. At least to outward appearances, many people go through life working, sleeping, eating, drinking, loving, and grieving without worrying overmuch about “what it all means” or “what the point of it all is.” Tolstoy’s account of his existential crisis is intriguing, arguably, in part because Tolstoy himself was exceptional. More generally, it may be that accounts of religion explicitly in terms of its ability to provide “meaning” are mostly modern in character—responses to the widespread modern sense of a “loss of meaning” in a “disenchanted” world; we will say more about that condition in a later chapter.
A second problem with understanding religion by reference to a “need for meaning” is that the account can be subtly subversive of religion. The need-based account plays nicely into dismissive interpretations of religion as mere “wish fulfillment.”61 We may “need” lots of things—a loving home, a secure job, good health, world peace. It does not follow that we will get these things, or that there is anything in the world—anything real—that corresponds to these needs. The French philosopher Luc Ferry thus observes that “there is a strong likelihood that the need pushes us to invent the thing, and then to defend it, with all the arguments of bad faith at our disposal, because we have become attached to it. The need for God is, in this respect, the greatest argument against His existence that I know of.”62
But for at least some religious believers, religion has not been primarily a response to any need or wish; rather, it arises from a perception of something that, like it or not, is real or true—perhaps uncomfortably or distressingly so. Once again, when Moses unexpectedly encounters God in the burning bush, the man is far from happy about this newly encountered Reality and the associated duties that have suddenly been thrust upon him.63 When Saul of Tarsus suffers an epiphany on the road to Damascus, the experience is neither sought after nor pleasant.64
To notice these objections is not to dismiss or disparage the “meaning”-based account of religion, but rather to suggest that “meaning” and a need for meaning may not be the only or the most fundamental ground of religion. But what might a more fundamental ground be?
Starting Over, with Sublimity
Another Jewish thinker, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, suggested a different starting point. Like Frankl and Sacks, Heschel talked about “ultimate meaning,”65 but that is not where he began. He maintained, rather, that religion commences with a sense of “wonder,” or of “awe.” “Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward history and nature.”66 This attitude is subjective, obviously, but it is not merely or reductively subjective. Rather, “awe . . . is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding. Awe is itself an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves.”67
Religious awe discerns that there is in the universe something that is “sublime,” which is related to the beautiful but transcends it. “The perception of beauty may be the beginning of the experience of the sublime. The sublime is that which we see and are unable to convey. It is the silent allusion of things to a meaning greater than themselves. It is that which all things ultimately stand for. . . . This is why the sense of the sublime must be regarded as the root of man’s creative activities in art, thought, and noble living.”68
So religion starts with a sense of the sublime—of the sublime not merely as a subjective emotion but as a reality independent of our perceptions of it. But where and what is that reality? In this respect, Heschel contrasted the attitude of ancient Greek religion with that of what he called “Biblical man.” Greek religion identified the sublime with nature, and more generally with the world; in essence, it sacralized the world, or parts of it.69 By contrast, biblical man understood the sublime as a manifestation of something—or of Someone—who stood behind and above nature and the world.70
Consider this account from the first-century Stoic philosopher Seneca:
If you have ever come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees which rise far above their usual height and block the view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest and the seclusion of the spot and your wonder at the unbroken shade in the midst of open space will create in you a feeling of the divine (numen). Or, if a cave made by the deep erosion of rocks supports a mountain with its arch, a place not made by hands but hollowed out by natural causes into spaciousness, then your mind will be aroused by a feeling of religious awe (religio). We venerate the sources of mighty rivers, we build an altar where a great stream suddenly bursts forth from a hidden source, we worship hot springs, and we deem lakes sacred because of their darkness or immeasurable depth.71
Seneca’s articulation agrees with Heschel’s account of religion as arising from awe or a sense of the sublime; it supports as well his claim that classical or pagan religion identified the sublime with nature or the world.
In sum, both classical and biblical religion were awe-inspired responses to the sublime. But classical religion located the sublime in the world and treated the world itself—or at least some parts of it—as divine. By contrast, biblical religion posited that the sublime transcended the world. (This distinction will become centrally important in a later chapter.)
The Holy
In other passages, Heschel associated “the sublime” with “the holy.”72 In this respect, his view converged with the classic account by the German scholar Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy.73 The source of religion, Otto contended, was the direct experience of a transcendent reality: “the holy.” This reality is not merely subjective; it is “felt as objective and outside the self” (11).
The holy is sui generis, Otto thought: neither the holy nor the experience of it is reducible or analyzable into anything else. At one point he impatiently declared that a reader who had never had “any deeply-felt religious experience” would be unable to understand his work and “is requested to read no further” (8). Nonetheless, Otto struggled to explicate the concept of the holy. He invented and analyzed suggestive terms (the “numinous,” “mysterium tremendum” [7, 12]). And he offered a variety of imperfect analogies. The experience of the holy, he suggested, was akin to the sense of awe (14), or to the “horror and ‘shudder’ in ghost stories” (16), or to the sense of “the sublime” (42), or to the feeling of the erotic (48), or to the “blissful rejoicing” experienced when listening to beautiful music (49).74
In a similar vein, the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, in his influential book The Sacred and the Profane, connected religion to a sense of, and a commitment to, the “sacred.” The sacred represents a different kind or order of being; it is “the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world.”75 To the religious person, “the world becomes apprehensible as world, as cosmos, in the measure in which it reveals itself as a sacred world.”76
Meaning and Sublimity, Need and Truth
We have considered two different accounts of what “religion” is and of how it grows out of human nature and experience. In one account, humans have a need for “meaning,” and this need is satisfied, ultimately, by a metanarrative that explains what the point of the “drama of Time” is and how humans fit into that drama. In a second account, religion arises as a response to the human encounter, which might or might not be pleasant, with another Reality—a Reality typically described with terms like “sublimity,” “sacred,” or “holy,” and contrasted with ordinary mundane or “profane” reality. A person is “religious” insofar as he or she discerns such a “sacred” reality, respects it, and tries to live in harmony with or in conformity to it.
This second sense is very close to the definition proposed by William James: “Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”77 James is sometimes criticized for defining religion in the purely individualist terms of “individual men in their solitude” (although in fact he acknowledged religion’s communal dimension and explained that he was merely not focusing his lectures on that aspect).78 We will return to the point, briefly. With that qualification, James’s definition captures a central sense of religion as a relation to the holy or the sacred.
Though different, the “meaning” and “sacredness” accounts seem fully compatible, even convergent. In the religious view, the sacred Reality that is the source or locus of sublimity is also what confers “meaning” on the world; we will return to the point shortly. In addition, although the “meaning” account seems to arise from a human need—the need for meaning—while the sublimity account starts with truth, or the encounter with something that is Real, these approaches are in the end nicely complementary.
That is because, in the religious perspective, the observation that we need something can have evidentiary significance; it can be a clue to the nature of the drama in which we are acting. The fact of need is thus pertinent to the question of truth. The connection of need to truth—or, if you like, the evidentiary significance of human need—was perhaps most insistently and eloquently pressed in recent times by C. S. Lewis.79 Lewis perceived in human loves and pursuits and emotions—in our pursuit of beauty, in our romantic or nostalgic yearnings for a purer time or better condition—a desire for a good that no merely mundane activities and achievements can ever fully supply.80 This desire suggested to Lewis that we are creatures oriented to some higher good—to a “transtemporal, transfinite good [that is] our real destiny,” or to “our own far-off country, in which we find ourselves even now.”81 And then Lewis confronted the objection that the fact of desire does not entail the possibility of any satisfaction of desire.
We remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? “Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.” But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a sexless world.82
To the skeptic, Lewis’s argument will likely seem question begging. If we begin by assuming some overall purposeful design in the world, then the fact of desire may well be a clue to that purpose and design. Conversely, if we do not begin by assuming any such purpose or design, or if we look at the world as the product of random, evolutionary natural selection, then it is not hard to imagine that creatures (namely, us) might evolve with desires and needs for which there is no satisfaction. We evolve with a sense of enjoyment or appreciation of life, perhaps—that quality might well be survival enhancing—and so we naturally project that enjoyment forward and thereby conceive a desire, say, to live forever. But it would not follow that any such possibility exists.
So the skeptic will think that Lewis’s argument from desire begs the questions. To be sure, the believer might make a parallel objection against the skeptic. Skeptics, that is, may triumphantly point out that religion satisfies a deep human need and suppose that they have somehow discredited religion or shown it to be mere wishful thinking.83 But the epistemic inefficacy of human need follows only if one begins by assuming that there is not any overall drama or design.
In the end, the fact of a need—for meaning, for comfort, for guidance, . . . for everlasting life—seems compatible with either a believing or a skeptical position, but arguments to either position from the fact of need or desire seem to work by assuming what is at issue—namely, that there is or there is not some overall design, of which human desires might be one piece of evidence. The upshot is that the conception of religion as a truth-oriented response to a human encounter with a higher Reality—the sublime, the holy—seems more fundamental, while the need- and meaning-based account seems complementary to but dependent on that more fundamental account. A religious metanarrative may speak to the need for meaning, but that need does not in itself give us grounds to suppose that the metanarrative is actually true. Those grounds must come from elsewhere—perhaps from some sort of actual encounter with the holy.
The Imperative of Consecration
In either the “meaning” or “sublimity” versions, religion serves a similar function: it serves to consecrate. Consecration is typically thought of as something done to a priest, or perhaps a king, or to a ritual object, endowing these with a sacred quality and setting them apart for the performance of sacred functions. Literally, the word “consecration” means “association with the sacred”; to “consecrate” is thus to “sacralize” or to sanctify—to bring something into alignment with the sacred.84
And why is consecration so imperative? In the “meaning” version of religion, the sacred is the source of “ultimate meaning” from which lower or more mundane realities gain their meaningfulness. Previously, we have explained the “meaning” that humans seek, or the Meaning, in terms of a metanarrative or cosmic drama. But that Meaning might also be thought of in terms of a sort of higher or more ultimate Reality that would serve to redeem or give significance—or “meaning”—to the otherwise ephemeral, quotidian, and apparently pointless occurrences of mortal life. Consecration, or association with the sacred, thus gives a thing—an object, an event, a life, a world—its purpose, its meaning.
In the religious perspective, William James explained, “the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance.”85 Consequently, “when we see all things in God, and refer all things to him, we read in common matters superior expressions of meaning. The deadness with which custom invests the familiar vanishes, and existence as a whole appears transfigured.”86 Unconsecrated reality, conversely, would become meaningless: “sound and fury signifying nothing.”
In the “sublimity” account of religion, similarly, consecration endows the world and its contents—people, animals, mountains, seas, birds, flowers—with beauty, sublimity, enchantment. Conversely, if the world is unconsecrated, or desecrated, it becomes just a collection of brute facts without meaning or majesty. In this vein, Abraham Heschel asserted that “without [sublimity], the world becomes flat and the soul a vacuum.”87
Heschel’s analogy suggests a previously three-dimensional world now crushed down to two dimensions—the depths, the heights, the mountains and valleys now leveled away. As an alternative analogy, imagine a movie with the musical sound track deleted. Visually, the same actions occur, but something is missing—something that helped to endow the movie with mystery and joy, romance and suspense. An unconsecrated world would be a world with no musical score.
Mircea Eliade described what consecration adds to the world, for the religious, in even stronger terms—in terms of “being.”
Religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence. This religious need expresses an unquenchable ontological thirst. Religious man thirsts for being. His terror of the chaos that surrounds his inhabited world corresponds to his terror of nothingness. The unknown space that extends beyond his world—an uncosmicized because unconsecrated space, a mere amorphous extent into which no orientation has yet been projected, and hence in which no structure has yet arisen—for religious man, this profane space represents absolute nonbeing. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it, he feels emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were dissolving in Chaos, and he finally dies.88
In the religious perspective, in short, consecration or association with the sacred is imperative because it is what gives life and the world meaning, beauty, order—even being. A sense of the subtle and yet vast qualitative difference between a consecrated and an unconsecrated world is probably most evident to the person who has lived in both—who has gone over from unbelief to a genuine faith, or vice versa. Tolstoy’s autobiographical account is an instance of the first kind of transition—from a paralyzing meaninglessness to a meaningful faith. Conversely, those who have felt pushed away from religion—by reflecting on the ubiquity of suffering, maybe, or by what they take to be the implications of science—will sometimes have a tragic sense of what has been lost. It may be as if a world that once resonated with music and glowed with color has lost these enchanting qualities, and has thus become drab and empty.
Conversely, to the person who has always lived comfortably in the unconsecrated world, the supposed difference is likely to seem unreal or illusory. The matter-of-fact world has whatever meaning we choose to give it; that is all it ever had, or could have. The world is beautiful in the only way it could be beautiful. And to say, as Eliade put it (not for himself but for “religious man”), that the unconsecrated world would decline into nonbeing will seem starkly absurd. Here that world is, all around us. Here we are, smack in the middle of it. No problem of “nonbeing” here! Rejection of the sacred and the constraints it imposes will seem not tragic but rather liberating—like waking up from a misty dream (even a pleasant dream) and seeing the world for the rich and solid if unenchanted reality it is.
And yet, even the comfortably unconsecrated person may at times have a sense that something is lost or missing. She may read old literature and sense with a twinge of regret the “disenchantment of the world,” as Weber put it;89 or be like a person who never heard music and was happy enough but who then, momentarily catching the strains of a distant melody, wonders whether there might in fact be some whole dimension of sublimity to which she has somehow not been privy. Even the confidently unconsecrated man may find himself paralyzed by a crisis of meaninglessness, as John Stuart Mill did.90 And, like Mill, he may try to find some substitute for the sublimity of sacredness in nature or literature, or perhaps in some lover whom he heroically but implausibly endows with almost divine qualities (as Mill did with his lover and later wife, Harriet Taylor). Commenting on Mill’s “Harriet-worship,” A. N. Wilson quotes Mill’s friend Alexander Bain, who observed that “no such combination [of virtues as Mill attributed to Taylor] has ever been realized in the whole history of the human race.”91 And Wilson adds that “as [Mill’s] encomiums of Harriet Taylor remind us, the human race can easily deprive itself of Christianity, but finds it rather more difficult to lose its capacity for worship.”92
Death is the stark, inescapable fact that sometimes brings on this sense of the need for . . . for what? For something beyond the profane facts of secular existence, perhaps. In a short essay called “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” the philosopher Jürgen Habermas recalls attending the memorial service for the Swiss playwright Max Frisch. Frisch was an agnostic, and his service was accordingly conducted without any priest or prayer. The service was attended mostly by “intellectuals, most of whom had little time for church and religion.” Nonetheless, at Frisch’s direction the service was held at Saint Peter’s Church in Zurich, and it included a statement from Frisch thanking the ministers of Saint Peter’s for permission to use the church. Habermas surmises that Frisch’s choice of a church amounted to a public declaration “that the enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rite de passage which brings life to a close.”93
Or we might say that the church reflected a last, touching effort to consecrate the life being memorialized.
Divergent Desiderata
For those who (unlike Frisch and Habermas) affirmatively embrace a religious view of life, the imperative of consecration provides a different order of desiderata to direct and regulate life. In the interest-seeking conception, goods are additive in nature, and choices are instrumentalist and calculative. Making decisions about how to live is like filling in and adding up the credits and debits on a perpetual, ever-unfolding balance sheet. Hence the seemingly ubiquitous efforts of contemporary academics to explain human behavior in terms of rational choice calculations, game theory, and cost-benefit analyses.
In a religious perspective, by contrast, the crucial imperative is to maintain the association with the sacred that is the source of meaning, beauty, possibly even being, and this imperative gives rise to a different order of desiderata that must be honored in a wholly different way. The decisive consideration now is to become and remain in harmony with the holy—with the Reality that gives meaning and purpose and sublimity to life. “Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible,” William James observed, “one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”94 And so the religious person strives for sanctity, or purity, which is necessary to sustain that harmony.95 The opposite of consecration is of course desecration, and so the religious person seeks to avoid impurity, or corruption, or pollution, that would negate or undermine the association with the sacred. Rather than a calculation of costs and benefits, life is more analogous to a cherished personal relationship, in which one strives to show loyalty and love—and to avoid even small insults, betrayals, or gestures of disrespect, however slight the material cost might be.
This emphasis on purity and fidelity naturally calls upon different sorts of cognitive operations than does a focus on interest satisfaction. As noted, the pursuit of interests invokes a calculating, instrumentalist kind of reasoning. But the religious vocation is not at its core calculative or instrumentalist. It may be more analogous to a sort of aesthetic judgment or sensibility, in which one discerns what colors in a painting or what chords in a musical composition would support or instead disrupt the desired harmony. Or, if one believes (as in many religions) that directives have issued from the holy—in a sacred scripture, perhaps—then the religious vocation may call for a hermeneutical reasoning that seeks the true interpretation of what the directives mean and entail.96
The divergences in the desiderata sponsored by the interest-seeking and religious conceptions help to explain two other, often noticed differences between secular and religious approaches to living. First, in the religious mode, feelings, or perhaps what William James described as a kind of “cosmic emotion,”97 are likely to play a vital role.98 Once again, the religious mode is anchored in the sense of sublimity, as Heschel contended, or in the discernment of “the holy.” Such discernment, as Otto emphasized, is not a purely “rational” operation. It is not irrational, he stressed, and indeed the response to the holy is typically elaborated and developed in highly rational forms;99 nonetheless, the basic experience of the holy is not a merely intellectual operation.
The imperfect analogies we have employed here would underscore Otto’s claim. Thus, a personal relationship, with a friend or a spouse or a lover, may have a rational dimension, but it is unlikely to flourish unless it is also grounded in and supported by the partners’ affective or emotional nature. Similarly, the aesthetic response to a beautiful painting or a musical masterpiece is not a merely intellectual operation. We would be inclined to say that someone who can meticulously explain and analyze, say, a Bach concerto, but who feels no emotional response to it, has missed the real concerto altogether.
Second, the differences in the interest-seeking and religious desiderata help to explain why the latter are deemed to have a kind of priority over the former and a kind of categorical quality. To slight or neglect an “interest” means merely that a person has somewhat less of some good. He is a dollar (or a million dollars) poorer than he would have been. But to disobey or disregard the demands of the sacred—to “desecrate” it—is to disrupt a relation upon which meaning, beauty, even (as Eliade suggested) “being” depend. Religious pursuits thus display a kind of zeal and passion, and a kind of absolutist quality, that seems foreign—and perhaps puzzling or irrational—to the mundane pursuer of “interests.”
Even for the devout, no doubt, much of life is still given over to the instrumentalist pursuit of “interests”—to building the house and planting the crops, to working to achieve health and wealth and power. But these interest-pursuing activities must be performed within the framework and subject to the constraints of the sacred, with its injunctions and prohibitions. After all, what good would it do to become wealthy and powerful while cutting oneself off from the source of meaning and beauty and even being? “What doth it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”100
As an analogy, think of a scholar who travels to a distant city to participate in an academic conference. The scholar may attempt during the trip to satisfy various wants and needs—to stay at a comfortable hotel, to have dinner with friends at a recommended restaurant, to take in the scenic or historical attractions of the city—but these preferences must not be permitted to interfere with the central purpose of the trip. The scholar may make choices among hotels or restaurants on the basis of personal preferences. But if the real and central purpose of the trip is to participate in the conference, then one thing the scholar must not do is schedule scenic trips or get-togethers with friends during the crucial sessions of the conference; to do that would be to defeat the whole purpose of the trip. So that desideratum, in contrast to all the others, is categorical. In a similar way, devout believers may have any number of subjective “interests” that they will seek to satisfy, but insofar as they are faithful to their understanding, they will not let these “interests” interfere with their religious obligations.
These implications of “religion” are widely perceived, and they are reflected in everyday usages of the term “religion.” “Do you attend the symphony?” I ask, and you respond, “Yes, I do. Religiously.” I understand that you are thereby expressing a kind of extraordinary, almost categorical commitment—one you do not merely assent to but about which you also feel a kind of passion.
To be sure, this description simplifies, as any description of life does, and idealizes. The messier reality is that the believer holds that he should always prefer religious goods and duties over more mundane interests. That is the believer’s conviction and aspiration. But like most aspirations, it is not fully realized. “There is no one righteous; not even one.”101 The believer thus covenants to practice her faith, fails, regrets her failure, resolves to reform, does reform, then fails again, regrets again, and so forth. Such is the familiar, bumpy career of the religious life. The believer’s life is not primarily devoted to “interests” in the conventional sense—and yet interests are always crowding in.
But then we might ask: Is something similarly true of the nonreligious, interest-seeking life? The nonbeliever thinks he may pursue his interests unimpeded by (illusory) “religious” values or mandates. But do such desiderata influence him nonetheless?
Religion and Personhood
We will revisit the question. For now, though, the question touches on a possible criticism of the basic argument of this chapter. Setting out to propose an alternative to the “interest-seeking” conception of the person, the chapter has elaborated a different, “religious” conception—a conception of, as William James put it, “man’s religious constitution.”102 But this conception doesn’t seem to fit all human beings: some people are religious, we say, and others aren’t. Can qualities that only some people have, but that cannot be attributed to persons generally, support an account of human personhood?
To this criticism, either an audacious or a more conciliatory response might be given. The audacious response would contend that whether they know it or not, all people are religious. A religious impulse or inclination is lurking in everybody, perhaps in the person’s subconscious, or in the inherited customs and habits that help to constitute the person. Viktor Frankl sometimes advanced the first version of this claim; Mircea Eliade sometimes proposed the second version.
Thus, just as his Freudian counterparts attributed much in human psychology to the repressed sexual urges, Frankl argued on the basis of his own clinical experience that many people repress their religious inclinations. But such inclinations surface in the course of sustained therapy; there is, Frankl asserted, an “unconscious religiousness” and a “latent relation to transcendence” discernible even in people who believe themselves to be wholly secular.103 Frankl thus proclaimed the “omnipresence of religion”: “a religious sense is existent and present in each and every person, albeit buried, not to say repressed, in the unconscious.”104
Eliade perceived a continuing and widespread religiosity in people’s customs and habits. While acknowledging the fact of secularization in the modern world, Eliade added that “nonreligious man in the pure state is a comparatively rare phenomenon, even in the most desacralized of societies. The majority of the ‘irreligious’ still behave religiously, even though they are not aware of the fact. . . . Modern man who feels and claims that he is nonreligious still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals.”105
A version of the audacious response can be grounded in theological assumptions. Augustine famously began his spiritual autobiography, written in the form of a confession to God, by declaring that “thou hast made us for thyself, and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee.”106 Not everyone feels this restlessness with the same sharpness, perhaps—here Pascal’s gloomy reflections on men’s tendency to use diversions like gambling, sports, work, and warfare to avoid noticing their existential condition, or their “wretchedness,” might be pertinent107—and of course, not everyone who does feel such restlessness will connect it to the absence of the sacred. Augustine was perfectly aware of these facts; indeed, his Confessions is basically a record of how he himself made the connection only gradually and after repeated false starts, mistaken interpretations, and misguided choices. But, in this view, whether we know it or not, the connection to the sacred—to God—is necessary and real for all of us.
These assertions will seem uncompelling, of course, and possibly offensive, to unbelievers. More generally, the audacious claim that all persons have a religious dimension or inclination whether they know it or not will likely seem implausible and insulting to people (such as a friend and colleague with whom I was just yesterday discussing the question) who feel quite sure that they know their own minds, and that there is no religious belief, inclination, need, or gap anywhere there to be found. The theologian E. L. Mascall observed that “nothing . . . should prevent us, as believers, from holding that God is at work, so to speak anonymously, even in the minds and lives of those who disbelieve in him; but we must not exasperate them by refusing to take them seriously in their unbelief.”108
For our purposes, fortunately, we need not try to decide whether the audacious claim is defensible (an issue on which agreement seems unlikely). It is enough, rather, to offer a weaker and more conciliatory claim—namely, that religiosity of the kind discussed here is a sufficiently important and widespread feature of many human beings that we will understand human history and behavior better by taking that feature into account than by ignoring it, or by trying to dissolve it without remainder into something else—like “interests” as usually conceived.
So let us stipulate, at least for the sake of argument, that the “religious” conception of human personhood does not apply to all individuals. In that respect, it is no different than other useful conceptions of personhood. Thus, the traditional assertion that “man is a rational animal” is not negated by the observable fact that many people often act irrationally, and that a few seem largely lacking in rational capacity. Similarly, claims that humans are “moral” beings,109 or “economic” beings,110 are not discredited by the existence of a few psychopaths or by the occasional ascetic hermit. In the same way, the conception of humans as “religious” beings who seek meaning and respond to perceptions of sublimity or the sacred is fully compatible with an uneven reality in which some humans are self-consciously and profoundly pious, others are tepidly and intermittently religious, and still others, as Thomas Nagel says of himself, “lack the sensus divinitatus that enables—indeed compels—so many others to see in the world the expression of divine purpose.”111
Nor are the various conceptions of personhood in any way incompatible or mutually exclusive. Homo religiosus coexists with homo economicus . . . and with homo ludens, and homo sociologicus, and so forth—all of which descriptions fit some individuals better than others. Borrowing and adapting a formula, we might say that a human being is composed of two (or more) natures in one person. Moreover, the strength of these various natures surely varies from person to person. “Ought it to be assumed that in all men the mixture of religion with other elements should be identical?” William James asked, and then he replied to his own question: “I answer ‘No’ emphatically.”112
Nonetheless, James concluded a celebrated lecture series by predicting that “religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history.”113 In a similar vein, the sociologist Émile Durkheim asserted that “the religious nature of man” is “an essential and permanent aspect of humanity.”114 If James and Durkheim were right, then an effort to understand our history and even our current situation—our so-called culture wars—that does not take full account of our religious dimension seems foreordained to fail, and to distort.
In sum, acknowledging the religious conception does nothing to negate the interest-seeking conception. That conception remains available, useful, powerful—but not exclusive. Recognition of the religious conception implies that some aspects of human behavior will be understood better in religious than in interest-seeking terms. Conversely, an insistence on explaining all aspects of behavior in interest-seeking terms is likely to lead to a distorted and impoverished understanding of human and social and political phenomena.
In this chapter, we have mostly followed William James in focusing on what religion is and does for individual human beings. It would be wrong to end the chapter, though, without acknowledging that religion often has a communal dimension—a communal dimension that, though perhaps neither necessary nor sufficient to constitute “religion,” seems more than merely incidental or aggregative.
Community is not strictly necessary for religion, it seems, because a person might encounter the sacred and find meaning just on his or her own. Indeed, religion sometimes can produce a sort of antisocial impulse; the imperative of purity can drive the believer away from the corruptions of human society. Saint Antony leaves society and retreats into the desert.115 Jesus had done the same thing—for a period.116 Saint Simeon Stylites sits apart atop his Syrian pillar for thirty-seven years (though he depends on followers and admirers to bring him sustenance). Roger Williams, the great champion of freedom of conscience, though evidently gregarious by nature, is moved in his quest for purity to separate himself, first from the Church of England, then from his Massachusetts Bay brethren, then from his more religiously stringent Plymouth congregation, eventually from his wife.117 Williams’s progressive flight from community is reflected in the chapter headings of Edwin Gaustad’s sympathetic biography: “Exile from England,” “Exile from Massachusetts,” “Exile in London,” “Exile from the Church,” “Exile from the World.”118
More commonly, though, religion pulls the faithful together. They found a church, a monastery, a synagogue, a temple. They feel that they cannot fully realize their religious aspirations except in union. The reclusive monks of the desert, like Antony, are succeeded by orders of Benedictines, later of Dominicans and Franciscans and Jesuits, living and worshiping together.
Moreover, the religious union is more than merely a mutual assistance society, or an enterprise in which collective efforts can better achieve each person’s individual goals. If you need to move a boulder, you will be prudent to enlist the aid of other people—especially other strong people—but the value of the group effort is merely aggregative. One really strong man is just as good as two weak ones. The communal dimension of religion, it seems, is not like that. It is a union that is itself a sort of natural end or culmination of the believers’ spiritual imperatives.
“Where two or three of you are gathered together,” Jesus tells his followers, “there will I be in the midst of you.”119 And the church founded by and around Jesus is not just a voluntary association devoted to remembering him and attempting to live by his teachings. It in a sense is Christ; it is “the body of Christ.” Or so the faithful believe.120
This communal dimension of religion can be viewed as a means of expressing or fulfilling one central aspect of human personhood—namely, sociality. Humans are naturally social animals, Aristotle observed, and the individual who feels no need of society is not quite a man but is “either a beast or a god.”121 Just in itself, though, this social dimension can be satisfied by all manner of groups—families, teams, business partnerships, political parties, bowling leagues, book clubs, bird-watching societies. A religious community is both like and unlike these other associations. It is a form of human society, yes. But it is a society in which the propensity to fellowship converges with the need for meaning and the sense of the holy.
Community, we might say, tends to perfect or complete religion, and, conversely, religion can serve to perfect or complete community. To consecrate community. A community bound together around a shared sense of meaning and a shared commitment to the sacred has a more profound connection than one committed, say, to some important but mundane goal, like making a profit or securing passage of a piece of legislation. Persons in a religious community are bound together, we might say, at a more fundamental level of their being.
This emphasis on the communal dimension may go against the grain of modern individualist thinking that sees religion as something for or by “the individual in his solitude,” as William James put it. But the communal dimension would have seemed utterly obvious to peoples of the ancient world. For them, it was the isolated believer who would have seemed anomalous. Religion—or what we would call “religion” in their world, because they likely would not have used or perhaps even understood the term—was inherently connected to temples, rituals, processions, theatrical spectacles, mass gatherings and entertainments, and cultic initiations.
In short, religion tended and tends to culminate in community. In, we might say, a city. This natural culmination is perhaps obscured for us today by familiar notions of “separation of church and state.” But two thousand years ago, humans suffered from no such obstruction. Religion and the city went hand in hand; both practically and conceptually, the city and its religion were essentially inseparable. In the next chapter, we will consider what was surely the most glorious example of this union.
1. See, e.g., William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 57–122. Cavanaugh notes that the eminent scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith “was compelled to conclude that, outside of the modern West, there is no significant concept equivalent to what we think of as religion” (61). Cf. Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 179 (describing “the major expansion of the use and understanding of the term ‘religion’ that began in the sixteenth century”); Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and End of “Religion” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13–17 (describing “the invention of ‘religion’ ”).
2. See generally John H. Evans, What Is a Human? What the Answer Means for Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
3. Richard A. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 5th ed. (New York: Wolters Kluwer Law and Business, 1998), 3–4.
4. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).
5. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 19 (emphasis added).
6. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 144.
7. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 143 (emphasis added).
8. “People who use the terms preference, wants, needs, and interests,” Charles Lindblom observes, “often assume that they refer to some objective attributes of human beings, such as a person’s metabolic rate. . . . These are bedrock facts about ‘real’ preferences or interests.” Charles E. Lindblom, Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 19.
9. See, e.g., Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 201–2.
10. See Jonathan Haidt, “Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness,” Campaign Stops (blog), New York Times, March 17, 2012, http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/forget-the-money-follow-the-sacredness/?_r=0.
11. Considerable data regarding religious practice in America is collected in Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
12. See, e.g., Paul Horwitz, “Freedom of the Church without Romance,” Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 21 (2013): 89–125; Michael W. McConnell and Richard A. Posner, “An Economic Approach to Issues of Religious Freedom,” University of Chicago Law Review 56 (1989): 1.
13. Matt. 4:4.
14. As noted, the term “interest” is potentially broad and elastic; consequently, a proponent of the interest-seeking conception might try to annex or absorb the criticism by simply acknowledging a possible “interest” in living a meaningful life, or in searching for a “purpose” in life. But the annexation can run either way: if one side can say we have an “interest” in meaning or purpose, the other side can say that the “purpose” of life includes the satisfaction of interests. This sort of debate seems quite pointless. The important question is whether an exclusive focus on subjective “interests” functions to distort or shortchange the importance of “meaning.”
15. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), 179.
16. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 154.
17. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 121, 127, 164.
18. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 179. The “mass neurosis” of the twentieth century, Frankl thought, was an “existential vacuum,” or lack of meaning (204, 167).
19. Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 2 (emphasis added).
20. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 56.
21. Leo Tolstoy, “A Confession,” in A Confession and Other Religious Writings, trans. Jane Kentish (London: Penguin, 1987), 34–35.
22. Tolstoy, “A Confession,” 19. “This spiritual condition presented itself to me in the following manner: my life is some kind of stupid and evil joke that someone is playing on me. Despite the fact that I did not acknowledge any such ‘someone,’ who might have created me, this concept of there being someone playing a stupid and evil joke on me by bringing me into the world came to me as the most natural way of expressing my condition” (31).
23. Tolstoy, “A Confession,” 63, 63–78.
24. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 121–22.
25. Consistent with this subjective conception, Frankl emphasized that meaning is a personal matter that varies with the individual, not a monolithic universal imperative. See, e.g., Man’s Search for Meaning, 122 (“These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way”).
26. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 4.
27. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 16. See also 47 (“People do the darnedest things. They race lawn mowers, compete in speed-eating contests, sit on flagpoles, watch reality TV”).
28. For Wolf’s defense of the requirement of objective value against objections, see “Response,” in Meaning in Life, 102, 119–27.
29. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 20. On this bipartite view, for a life to be meaningful, both an objective and a subjective condition must be met; a meaningful life is a life that the subject finds fulfilling, and one that contributes to or connects positively with something that has value outside the subject.
30. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 62.
31. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 45–47.
32. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 156–57. “We have to beware of the tendency to deal with values in terms of the mere self-expression of man himself. For logos, or ‘meaning,’ is not only an emergence from existence itself but rather something confronting existence. If the meaning that is waiting to be fulfilled by man were really nothing but a mere expression of self, or no more than a projection of his wishful thinking, it would immediately lose its demanding and challenging character; it could no longer call man forth or summon him” (156).
33. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 183.
34. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 187.
35. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 132.
36. In later work, Frankl linked “ultimate meaning” to religion—but to religion “in its widest sense,” as he put it, and indeed in a sense “encompassing even agnosticism and atheism.” Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2000), 153.
37. Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 31, 77.
38. Douglas Adams, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), 165.
39. Eagleton, The Meaning of Life, 53.
40. Antony Flew, “Tolstoi and the Meaning of Life,” in The Meaning of Life, ed. E. D. Klemke, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 209.
41. Flew, “Tolstoi,” 210.
42. Flew’s dismissive analysis would not have taken Tolstoy by surprise. Indeed, Tolstoy himself raised similar criticisms. Thus, in his “search for the overall meaning of life” (Tolstoy, “A Confession,” 28), he tried to persuade himself that his questions were misconceived. “The questions seemed so stupid, simple, and childish. But the moment I touched upon them and tried to resolve them I was immediately convinced, firstly, that they were not childish and stupid questions but were the most important and profound questions in life, and secondly, that however much I thought about them I could not resolve them” (29).
43. R. M. Hare, “Nothing Matters,” in Klemke, The Meaning of Life, 277.
44. Hare, “Nothing Matters,” 281.
45. See Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 105–6.
46. John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (London: Routledge, 2003), 1. Cf. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 677 (“Lots of people don’t want to ask the meta-question [‘what is the meaning of it all’]; but once it arises for someone they will not easily be put off by the injunction to forget it”).
47. John Wisdom, “The Meanings of the Questions of Life,” in Klemke, The Meaning of Life, 257, 258–59.
48. Wisdom, “Meanings of the Questions,” 260.
49. Cf. Robert M. Adams, “Comment,” in Wolf, Meaning in Life, 75, 83 (“But judgments of meaning in life are assessments of something that does have a narrative structure”).
50. Eagleton, The Meaning of Life, 106.
51. In this vein, Michael Perry associates “religion” with “religious or limit questions,” such as: “Who are we? Where did we come from; what is our origin, our beginning? Where are we going; what is our destiny, our end? What is the meaning of suffering? Of evil? Of death? And there is the cardinal question, the question that comprises many of the others: Is human life ultimately meaningful or, instead, ultimately bereft of meaning, meaning-less, absurd?” Michael J. Perry, The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 43 (footnotes omitted).
52. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, [1930] 1961). Scornfully dismissive of religion as “so patently infantile, so foreign to reality” (22), Freud endorsed the deflationary conclusion that “what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle” (25).
53. Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Schocken, 2011), 25. “We are the meaning-seeking animal, the only known life form in the universe ever to have asked the question ‘Why?’ There is no single, demonstrable, irrefutable, selfevident, compelling and universal answer to this question. Yet the principled refusal to ask it, to insist that the universe simply happened and there is nothing more to say, is a failure of the very inquisitiveness, the restless search for that which lies beyond the visible horizon, that led to science in the first place” (288–89).
54. Sacks, The Great Partnership, 104.
55. Sacks, The Great Partnership, 197.
56. Sacks, The Great Partnership, 19.
57. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, rev. ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), 39.
58. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 44.
59. Exod. 3.
60. Matt. 4:19.
61. See, e.g., Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, ed. Todd Dufresne, trans. Gregory C. Richter (Toronto: Broadview Press, [1927] 2012).
62. Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 230.
63. Exod. 3.
64. Acts 9.
65. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 107, 119.
66. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 45.
67. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 74. Cf. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 61 (“It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed”).
68. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 39.
69. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 88–89.
70. “To the Biblical man, the sublime is but a form in which the presence of God strikes forth. . . . To the Biblical man, the beauty of the world issued from the grandeur of God; His majesty towered beyond the breathtaking mystery of the universe. Rather . . . than praise the world for its beauty, he called upon the world to praise its Creator.” Heschel, God in Search of Man, 95–96.
71. Quoted in Valerie M. Warrior, Roman Religion: A Sourcebook (Newburyport, MA: Focus Pub.; R. Pullins, 2002), 2.
72. E.g., Heschel, God in Search of Man, 117.
73. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine, trans. John W. Harvey, rev. ed. (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, [1917] 2010). Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
74. Otto contended that the holy designated both a transcendent reality and a category of value (Otto, Idea of the Holy, 52). “Especially as encountered by mystics, the holy is experienced in its essential, positive, and specific character as something that bestows upon man a beatitude beyond compare, but one whose real nature he can neither proclaim in speech nor conceive in thought. . . . It is a bliss which embraces all those blessings that are indicated or suggested in positive fashion by any ‘doctrine of Salvation.’ . . . It gives the Peace that passes understanding, and of which the tongue can only stammer brokenly” (33–34).
75. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (Orlando: Harcourt, 1957), 11.
76. Eliade, Sacred and the Profane, 64 (emphasis deleted).
77. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 39. James acknowledged the institutional nature of religion.
78. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 37.
79. For an exposition, see Peter J. Kreeft, “C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire,” in The Riddle of Joy, ed. Michael H. Macdonald and Andrew A. Tadie (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 249.
80. See, e.g., C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins/HarperOne, 1949), 25–34.
81. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 29.
82. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 32–33.
83. See Freud, The Future of an Illusion.
84. See Otto, Idea of the Holy, 56; Eliade, Sacred and the Profane, 17, 30, 32.
85. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 418.
86. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 409. Cf. E. L. Mascall, The Christian Universe (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), 47–48 (suggesting that “behind and beyond the world that our senses perceive, there is another realm of being which, . . . in some way or another, confers explanation upon the world of our senses and gives meaning to human life”).
87. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 36.
88. Eliade, Sacred and the Profane, 64.
89. See, e.g., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155 (“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’ ”).
90. J. S. Mill, “A Crisis in My Mental History—One Stage Onward,” in The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, [1873] 2008), chap. 5.
91. A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (New York: Norton, 1999), 51.
92. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 52.
93. Jürgen Habermas, “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” in An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 15.
94. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 57. See also 418 (summing up the religious life as founded in the beliefs that “the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance” and that “union or harmonious relation with that higher world is our true end”).
95. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 255–62.
96. Even here, though, a sort of quasi-aesthetic sensibility may be needed to separate the “spirit” from the “letter” of the directives. See, e.g., 2 Cor. 3:6.
97. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 79.
98. See James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 36 (discussing “the many sentiments which religious objects may arouse . . . [including] religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth”).
99. Otto, Idea of the Holy, 1–4.
100. Mark 8:36.
101. Rom. 3:10.
102. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 5.
103. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 68. Frankl emphasized, however, that he used the term “religion” “in the widest possible sense” and in a way that “goes far beyond the narrow concepts of God promulgated by many representatives of denominational and institutional religion” (17).
104. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 152, 151.
105. Eliade, Sacred and the Profane, 204–5.
106. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 2002), 1.1.
107. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1995), 37–43.
108. Mascall, The Christian Universe, 18.
109. See, e.g., Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
110. See Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 3–4.
111. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12.
112. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 419.
113. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 431.
114. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, [1912] 1995), 1.
115. See generally Athanasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. and ed. Robert C. Gregg, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1980).
116. Matt. 4:1–11.
117. See Steven D. Smith, “Separation and the Fanatic,” Virginia Law Review 85 (1999): 238.
118. Edwin S. Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1991), vii.
119. Matt. 18:20.
120. E.g., 1 Cor. 12:27.
121. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 1.1253a.