Our faculties, our methods, our sensory access to the world all address aspects and fragments of our experience. They shadow and extend the range of our actions. No matter how extensive their subject matter or scope of application may become, they never lose their fragmentary and restricted character. In religion, however, we must take a position with respect to the limiting and shaping features of our experience as a whole. For this task, our equipment is, by its very nature and origin, inadequate. Nevertheless, the need to do what we will always be unprepared to accomplish is inescapable.
If the position to take were only cognitive, we might be able to take no position at all. However, it is not merely cognitive; it goes to our need to form an attitude, implicit and unelaborated if not explicit and fully formed, to the most disturbing and perplexing aspects of our condition. We will have an attitude, whether we want to or not and whether or not we are fully conscious of the ideas informing it. In arriving at such an attitude, however, we are condemned to cognitive overreach: we must stake the course of our lives on suppositions whose grounds fail to do justice to the gravity of their implications and to the scope of their claims.
This paradoxical feature of our situation—our need to enlist the most fragile ideas in support of the most important decisions—is the half-truth in Pascal’s account of faith in God as a wager: a bet that pays off fabulously if it succeeds and that leaves us no worse off than we otherwise remain, death-bound in the darkness of a godless world, if it fails. The truth in this account is that we must take a stand—a fateful stand—without having such grounds as we might demand even for decisions of much less consequence. The falsehood is the suggestion that the spirit in which we take such a stand could or should mimic the calculus of the gambler. It is not about a particular benefit or cost (although the Jansenist focus on salvation and damnation might make it seem so); it is about the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives, as viewed from the outside, from the perspective of their defining limits, for what goes on inside our existence, for the way we live.
This inescapable cognitive overreach, imposed on us by our circumstance, is what the vocabulary of the Semitic monotheisms calls faith. To suit the purpose at hand, a conception of faith must not depend on the distinctive tenets of each religion. It must acknowledge the two sides of faith: risking and trusting.
The risking side of faith is the consequence of the unavoidable overreach: the stand without grounds that could ever suffice to justify it by the lights of the criteria that we apply to our decisions of more limited scope. However, such overreach is also prophecy, and self-fulfilling prophecy at that. The vision that results in an imperative, on a basis that is always dubious, prompts us to act, individually and collectively. By our actions we change the world in the light of the vision; thus, the self-fulfilling aspect of the prophecy.
However, we do not change the world at will; we only bring it a little closer to the prophetic message and to its imperative of world transformation. The world resists the prophecy. This resistance tests the truth of the faith. It is an always ambiguous test, but a test nevertheless.
The trusting side of faith has to do with the consequences of this cognitive exorbitance for our relations to other people, including our dealings with God, when we represent him in the mode of personal being. Because the actions undertaken in the light of religious ideas concern matters of ultimate significance, but at the same time are bereft of adequate grounds for belief, they amount to an adventure. In this adventure we become relatively more vulnerable to others; in one sense or another, we are forced to lift our shields. To put ourselves in other people’s hands on account of our beliefs, or in the hands of God when our relations with him are represented by analogy to our relations with other people, and to do so in a way that must seem reckless by the standards of our worldly calculations, is one of the marks of faith.
The risking and the trusting sides of faith are inseparable. The element of trust shows that the risk is never just about a conjecture, however grand, concerning our place in the world: it reveals its meaning in its implications for our connections with other people. The element of risk shows that what we make of such connections remains entangled in our understanding of the limits to our existence and to our insight.
To see religion as the mode of experience defined by these three attributes is to understand why we suffer a perpetual temptation to treat many other forms of practice and of thought—philosophy, art, and politics—as substitutes for religion. It is also, however, to grasp why they are unable to perform this surrogate role without violence to them and to us.
Philosophy may deal with the penumbra of what lies beyond our achieved knowledge. It may wrestle with the insoluble contradictions that arise when we try to overstep the bounds of sense and of understanding. Nevertheless, when it abandons or dilutes the requirement of reasoned justification, it loses direction as well as force.
Art may conjure up the flaws in our condition, and promise a happiness lying beyond them, through some resolution that we can achieve right now despite them. When it tries to reproduce the link between a vision of the world and an imperative of existence that lies at the heart of religion, it degenerates into didacticism. It then degrades its transforming power.
Politics, represented and conducted in a visionary voice, may relate the reordering of society to a view of the ascent of humanity. Notwithstanding the potential scope of our political beliefs and aspirations, no program for social improvement is capable of bearing the full weight of our ultimate anxieties about us. If made to do so, the result is likely to be mystification in the service of oppression.
Religion has no unchanging essence, any more than philosophy, art, or politics. Like them, it is a historical construction and part of the self-making of humanity. Nevertheless, as we have constructed it and as it has constructed us, it cannot without danger and illusion be replaced by these other forms of experience. We must reckon with religion, and decide what to make it of it: what to turn it into, now.
2
Overcoming the World
Central idea, historical presence, and metaphysical vision
The vision of the world embraced by this first direction in the religious history of humanity is one that has always been exceptional in Western philosophy since the time of the Greeks. However, it has been predominant in many other civilizations. It is the position to which, outside the modern West, philosophy and religion have most often returned. (The focus on impersonal being at the heart of this view of reality weakens the distinction between religion and philosophy.)
The Indic Vedanta, the Upanishads, early Buddhism, and early Daoism represent the clearest instances of this religious and philosophical path. In these traditions it has had any number of metaphysical elaborations: for example, Nagarjuna’s doctrine of emptiness (sunyata) in the context of the Madhyamaka school of Indian Buddhism. It describes aspects of the doctrines of Parmenides, Plato, the Stoics, and the neo-Platonists, especially Plotinus. In modern Western thought, the teaching of Schopenhauer is its consummate expression, both as metaphysics and as practical philosophy. We can also find it, however, under different cover, in both the monism of Spinoza and the relationalism of Leibniz: the decisive common element is denial of the ultimate reality of time and thus as well of distinctions among the time-drenched and seemingly mutable phenomena for which we mistake the real.
The overcoming of the world resonates in the mystical countercurrents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mysticism, the opening to a personal God risks being sacrificed to a vision of impersonal, unified, and universal being. This vision in turn inspires an ethic of selfless benevolence and a quest for indifference to suffering and change. It does so, however, on the basis of a devaluation of the reality of time and of the distinctions among beings, including the distinction among selves. No wonder these mystics have regularly fallen under the suspicion of heresy in each of
