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 confo
rmity 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.
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