Reverend Wilmot’s life were his relationships with those who lived right under his roof as his own family, as well as the people in his parish. But ideas were more significant than people for him, and people, even his wife, could not deter his being self-destroyed by his ideas which he, for some reason, could not synthesize. Yet faith as mutual trust between humans is essential to life, to self-integrity, and to responsibility in community. Religions at their best, speak in the latter terms. But must they speak heteronomously in rigid absolutes, and take no blame for the casualties?
Ah, but this is only an Updike novel. Indeed, but the parallels to it have been experienced time and again in real human history. If one sees no burden in one’s religion, certainly I would not want to create some fear of what is not real. Yet, perhaps, just perhaps, one could be warned against the hetereonomous rigidity religion can take in one’s life. If most religion is actually inherited, it likely is mixed in with a culture in which some of the present cultural values compete with the religion’s values or unconsciously replace them. If the religion promises “more” life, but the person does not experience any more, then all the “goods” of this world end up being discounted in favor of some imagined life after death, or else one has to find “more” life presently in a different way. In such cases, it may be that only the shock of death of some family member or close friend reverses one’s priorities to see human relationships as most important. Does this mean abandoning religion’s rigidity or redefining or limiting its Absolute before it destroys our most important relationships?
NOTES
1. Susan Jacoby, Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016), pp. xxiv–xxv.
2. John Updike, The Beauty of the Lilies (New York: Random House, 2013). Specific citations are given page numbers in parentheses in the text hereafter.
3. This is the primary problem with the “historical” method of the great nineteenth-century Christian theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, due to his Romanticist leanings and imagination. I analyze his approach in more detail in my upcoming Ethics and the Future of Religion: Redefining the Absolute.
4. This is what Susan Sontag warned against in her analysis of “interpretation.” Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), pp. 543–50.
5. See Laurence H. Tribe, Constitutional Choices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. vii–8, which gives a more meaningful brief hermeneutic for legal theory than mere “original” intent. He proposes a position in which one always realizes one’s present subjectivity, presuppositions, contingency, tentativeness of different possible choices, as well as their substantive effects of the possible choices one faces in any interpretation—substantive issues all the way through. Why should the mere intentions of the author really matter?
6. In fact, the very idea of “finding truth” or “discovering truth” rather than articulating, expressing, making, or shaping truth, is likely an emphasis on “truth” being “out there” somewhere, a quite Platonic approach with some world of eternal Forms or equivalent. Richard Rorty addressed this misunderstanding of “truth” in his Contingency, Irony & Solidarity.
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