by Harvey Cox
Niebuhr is describing what some call “myself as mystery.” Not only can we watch ourselves thinking; we can watch ourselves watching our thinking. The next step, watching the watcher watching, opens onto endless and baffling horizons, like mirrors reflecting mirrors. However freighted with infinite regression our thoughts about time and space are, our experience of ourselves seems even more perplexing. Modern psychology has approached this dilemma with the concept of “identity,” and it seems clear that identity is inextricably tied up with ethics. “What should I do?” is always linked to “Who am I?”
Once when I was teaching a class on ethics, a student proudly announced that his only rule for living a moral life came from his being a “Polonian.”
“Don’t you mean an Apollonian?” another student asked.
“No,” the first insisted. “A Polonian, like Polonius in Hamlet. You know, ‘To thine own self be true, and it must follow as night the day, thou canst not be false to any man.’”
“Yes, but that’s just the problem,” the other student immediately retorted. “Just who is this ‘myself’ I am supposed to be true to?”
This student’s reply not only exposed the fatuousness of Polonius’s advice to Laertes (which Shakespeare wanted to sound inane); it also pointedly illustrated what is meant by a “mystery.” That student, like all of us, will continue to ask the “Who am I?” question and may come to more or less satisfactory answers. But then circumstances will change, and the “identity” that seemed in place last year will no longer serve. This is why the “I” is not a problem that can be solved, but a mystery that remains with us as long as we live. The apostle Paul came closer to the truth than the bard’s loquacious Polonius when he complained that the very thing he wanted to avoid doing was what he always seemed to do, and what he wanted to do he did not (Rom. 7:15, 19).
The self is not a static entity. It is a battle site. Sometimes there are truces in the conflict, even fairly long ones, but inevitably the melee begins again. There is never a final settlement as long as we live. Further, the significance of this continuing conflict itself poses its own dilemmas. The “universe within” is just as mysterious as the universe out there. Some whole cultures, like that of Tibet, have devoted immense energies to its exploration. Some Western mystics, like Teresa of Avila (1515–82), and writers, like Marcel Proust (1871–1922), have done so as well. So did Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the inventor of psychoanalysis, and his disciples. The testimonies of these intrepid voyagers to the inner reaches of the self can be both puzzling and inspiring to those of us who live in a culture determined to travel outward. But we still find ways to undertake this inward pilgrimage, even if it is coded as an outward one. The long time TV favorite Star Trek, though cast as a series of journeys into space, was in actual fact an inspired exploration of the multiple dimensions of the human. This was the real source of its appeal. It found an audience because the self remains a mystery, one that we cannot stop probing.
Inevitably, however, looking inward, like looking outward, generates anxiety and frustration. Creation myths are often quickly followed by narratives of self-destruction. The Garden of Eden is followed by the story of Adam’s attempt to become a god and Cain’s murder of Abel. In the archaic Greek myth, Narcissus became so entranced by his own reflection in the pool and then so furious at it that he killed himself. Both the universe and the self can stir up tremendum as well as fascinans. Faith involves our response to both.
But mystery has still another locus, namely, the “other.” Not only do the universe and the self open onto mystery; so do the other people we meet and live with. Existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) once described the scene of a man seated alone in the waiting room of a dentist’s office. Bored and a bit ill at ease, he glances at the cheap prints on the wall, the frayed magazines on the table, and the spotted old rug. Then the situation changes. The door swings open and in walks another patient, who sits down across from him. For a moment they try to ignore each other. Then they glance at each other furtively, but finally their eyes meet. Now, in Sartre’s gloomy view, a deadly duel begins. They stare for a moment, but then one eventually looks away. Sartre’s moral is that either I am an object in your world, or you are an object in mine. For this joyless French thinker, there was no other possibility.
But is this the only possible ending? No wonder the same Sartre wrote a play entitled No Exit, in which the most famous line is, “Hell is other people.” Still, Sartre had an insight. Encountering another person can ignite the same fascination and terror, the same hope and longing that the vastness of the universe and my place in it generate. They all seem part of the same unfathomable mystery.
The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) who spent his long life probing the other-as-mystery, had a more hopeful view, at least up to a point. Levinas was born in Lithuania, where a particularly strict school of text-oriented Orthodox Judaism held sway, and he received a traditional Jewish education. In 1924 he began studies at the University of Strasbourg and went on to become one of France’s most prominent philosophers. Throughout his life Levinas pursued a dual career. He was both a highly respected philosopher, who introduced German thinkers like Heidegger and Husserl to France, and a consummate scholar of the Talmud, on which he wrote several interpretive essays. Although members of his family died in the Holocaust, the Germans captured Levinas in his French army uniform, so he survived in a prisoner-of-war camp. He taught at the Sorbonne from 1973 until his retirement in 1979.
Levinas nourished a lifelong fascination with how human beings encounter each other. The keystone of his approach is his reversal of the traditional definition of philosophy as the “love of wisdom.” Levinas prefers the “wisdom of love.” Without citing Sartre’s dentist-office scenario, he nonetheless sees every encounter with another person as a kind of distillation of human life as such, and he agrees that, at least at first, we want to either dominate or withdraw. Like an animal, we feel the impulse to flee or fight. But, Levinas reminds us, we do not experience just one such encounter. All of life, day in and day out, is made up of such meetings. Some are casual, with shopkeepers and waiters, people we may never see again. Some are with people we see now and then. But other encounters bring us together with people with whom we interact on a regular basis. This is why Levinas felt so intensely interested in family life. His fascination is also something that differentiates him from Sartre, who seems to have tried, not always successfully, to dodge long-term commitments, most noticeably in his famously wobbly nonmarriage to Simone de Beauvoir.
For Levinas, as we experience longer-term encounters with the “other” repeatedly, we notice something focal. Our compulsion to dominate or to withdraw is limited by two qualities. First, the “face” of the other carries with it a message to me that is almost like a plea. If I am torn between dominance and withdrawal, but unable to find a third way, then so is the other, and paradoxically this failure on both our parts makes that third way possible. Second, I begin to notice that my encounter with the “other” opens a dimension of reality I do not find anywhere else. Since ultimately I cannot be simply an object to the other and the other cannot just be an object to me, clearly the possibility of “objective” knowledge in this crucial realm of existence is not possible.
Levina’s reflection on the interpersonal and Einstein’s awareness of mystery led them both to a similiar conclusion: the objective knowledge science rightly insists on is not the only kind of knowledge human beings need. This recognition is not a “religious” event in Levinas’s thought, but it is something analogous. It is, as he says, “nonfinite,” because it pushes me beyond myself toward a sense of responsibility, one that repeats itself and deepens with each encounter. It is, Levinas believes, “a signal of transcendence,” an undeniable indication, drawn from the “secular” world, of a kind of knowledge that is radically different from the way we know other things. It demonstrates a way of knowing that is not only possible, but
imperative.
Levinas’s thinking helps but up to a point. Interpersonal encounters do reveal a kind of knowing that is different from the objective, scientific kind. And he is right that permanent or completely satisfying harmony or reciprocity is not fully possible in human encounters. But Levinas was markedly unwilling to extend his thinking into the realm of society. He stopped short of asking: Why do some people, those of a certain color, gender, or social class, often think they do have the right to view other people as objects? And, sadly, why do those who are treated as objects often begin to think of themselves as objects? Why do so many people who live with each other a long time treat each other so badly, even abuse and kill each other? Why did seemingly ordinary peasants in Poland, just across the border from Levinas’s native Lithuania, grab scythes and hatchets and brutally murder the Jewish neighbors they had lived with for years? How do power and money distort the self-other encounter? Our meeting with the “other” carries with it horror as well as promise.4
There is another question. The self-other split seems to mirror a split within oneself. It echoes the peculiar duality between “I” as subject and “me” as object. The anxiety generated by my discovery of my own finitude and mortality drives me toward futile efforts to control a self and a world that constantly elude my attempts. The failure can prompt a violent reaction. The myth of Narcissus’s self-absorption and the story of Cain’s murder of Abel belong together. These are divisions that cry out for some resolution, but appear insurmountable. True, the mystics of the different religions seem to transcend the internal dichotomy, and the social reformers constantly strive to reshape the human community so that more equality and mutuality are possible. But is there any real basis for their efforts?
This is the point at which the encounter with mystery meets the possibility of faith. The three ways we encounter the great mystery—the universe, the self, the other—all leave us with a sense of uneasiness, incompleteness, and dissatisfaction. Do we have any clues, even provisional ones, to the question of why there is something and not nothing? Is time going anywhere? Or is it cyclical or maybe just illusory? What about the fracture I find in myself as both the subject and the object of my reflection, ad infinitum? Is that a permanent feature of being human? Is my hope that my encounter with the other need not always be a conquest, a capitulation, or a stand-off a futile one? Faith, although it is evoked by the mystery that surrounds us, is not the mystery itself. It is a basic posture toward the mystery, and it comes in an infinite variety of forms.
CHAPTER 3
Ships Already Launched
The Voyage from Mystery to Faith
Faith begins with awe in the face of mystery. But awe becomes faith only when it takes the next step. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) once remarked that as soon as we are old enough to look around, we find ourselves on a ship that has already been launched. As we become aware of the mysteries of world, self, and other, they always arrive suffused with the specific languages, emotions, and thought patterns of a particular cultural tradition. And these supply the theories, myths, and metaphors with which we respond. Living with the mystery is something we all have in common. But how we live with it differs. To extend Kierkegaard’s metaphor, we sail on one launched ship among many, large and small, that often seem to be crisscrossing, colliding, and heading in different directions.
This metaphor has its limits. There are similarities and overlapping between and among these traditions. Scholars of comparative religion often point them out, as Huston Smith has done in his many books. Psychologist Carl Jung (1875–1961) believed he could discern what he called “archetypes” common to all of them. But there are also elements of irreducible particularity in our distinct religious and cultural worldviews. Hindu and Buddhist perspectives on time and history differ markedly from those of Christianity and Judaism. Nirvana is different from the Kingdom of God. There are radical dissimilarities in views of the human self and its relations to others.
I frequently meet people who, when they discover that I teach religion, assure me that “underneath, all religions are really the same.” I used to respond that, during a lifetime of studying them, it appeared to me that they are not. But since that usually ended the conversation on a disagreeable note, I have recently just let their opinion pass. It is true that we are all responding to the same mystery, the one that confronts us all not just as mortal beings, but as beings aware of our mortality. Still, we sense it and cope with the mystery in quite disparate ways. The various world religions constitute complex codifications of these responses, and they differ from each other in significant respects. This is what makes the study of comparative religion so absorbing. If all religions really were essentially the same, it would soon become unbearably boring.
The ship I found myself on—the narrative through which I came to awareness of the different facets of the mystery—is the Judeo-Christian one. Of course this is largely a matter of the circumstances of my birth and upbringing. Had I been born in Bombay or Baghdad or Beijing, I would have found myself on a different ship and would undoubtedly have absorbed different customs and narratives. Not only are we traveling on different vessels; the tradition that first formed our consciousness gets under our skin. Even if we reject it, we reject it within its own frames of reference. A Christian atheist is different from a Buddhist atheist, in part because they are each rejecting radically different concepts of the divine. This is important for the study of religions, since what we eventually come to see is that there is no neutral platform, no place where anyone can stand outside of all of them and make comparisons and judgments.
Of course one can always try to understand other religions, to be sympathetic, or to “get the feel” of them. I have spent much of my career in this effort. But when I recite a verse from the Qur’an, sit in Buddhist meditation, or chant a Hindu mantra, I do so as one steeped in a tradition different from those. I do not agree with those who claim that only people with no attachment to their own religion can possibly understand another. On the contrary, my participation in my own, my experiencing one faith tradition “from the inside,” deepens my understanding of the others. Most practicing Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim scholars who also study comparative religion agree on this point. The allegedly neutral observer is really operating from some basic posture, some faith stance, even if it is unacknowledged. In trying to understand religions, no space platforms or skyhooks are available.
The “launched ship” of the Judeo-Christian tradition within which I meet the mystery has three main foci. Like other people in a host of different traditions, I was first exposed to the tradition in which I find myself through stories and rituals. I call them the Hebrew cycle, the Christmas cycle, and the Easter cycle.
The Hebrew Cycle: Most people describe the Baptist denomination, in which I grew up, as not having any rituals. Even Baptists often make this claim. But it is not true. Rituals are enactments—in song, story, visual representation, and gesture—of the narratives that inform a people’s identity. In our church we heard sermons galore about Old Testament episodes, and we sang hymns about its key figures. The Sunday school walls were plastered with pictures of Noah, surrounded by giraffes and zebras, in his storm-tossed ark; Abraham trudging up the mountain with Isaac and the donkey loaded with kindling wood; Joseph sporting his flashy coat in front of his scowling brothers; and spunky little David slinging his pebble at the hapless Goliath. There were several depictions of Moses—staring at the burning bush, confronting the pharaoh, or lifting his staff over the receding waters of the Red Sea. One picture that made me uneasy was of Absalom, David’s rebellious son, hanging by his hair from a tree limb. As I neared pubescence, my favorite showed a shapely Delilah seducing a strapping but naïve Samson into getting a haircut. Of course there were also pictures of Jesus, from the nativity scene to the events of Passion Week.
Not only did these pictures cover the walls. As tiny children we crayoned them in coloring books and stuck their
cutouts on flannel boards. If I close my eyes now, I can still see them. We chirped little songs about them, some of which I still remember. As we got older, we sang cantatas, choir anthems, and spirituals about them, and we pulled on worn bathrobes and acted out their escapades in church plays. By the time we were ready to leave Sunday school, these sagas had become permanent features in the topography of our imaginations. They did exactly what rituals are supposed to do.
As I grew older and learned more about the religion of the Israelites, I discovered that the God these people served, although he could lose his temper and change his mind, in the end was just and powerful. I also noticed that this God was a God of promise, always pointing people toward the future. He told Abraham to leave the place where he lived and to go to one that he would show him. Later, when Moses asked him who he should tell the Israelite slaves had dispatched him to lead them out of captivity, the voice from the burning bush said something that is usually translated, “I am who I am,” but that some Hebrew scholars claim should be, “I will do what I will do.” Later the prophet Isaiah declared that God would deliver them from their captivity in Babylon. The latest books of the Old Testament look forward to a time when God will transform the whole world into a place of concord and justice. As the German philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) once wrote, the biblical God is one “whose essence is futurity.”
From the Hebrew cycle I also learned that the God of the Bible favors the little guy. He makes his most dramatic appearance in the book of Exodus by liberating a ragged band of ungrateful peons from bondage in Egypt. He fingers younger sons for special assignments and demonstrates a distinctive bias for widows and orphans. He promises to vindicate the poor and to restore captives and refugees. His prophets inveigh against the indolent rich who “lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches,…who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils” (Amos 6:4–5). Years later, when I read the liberation theologians who wrote about God’s “preferential option for the poor,” they did not seem to be inventing anything new.
