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.
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?
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