Aha, says the skeptic. A clear case of projection of human hopes onto an indifferent cosmos. That this is a projection of human hopes is clearly true. However, that the cosmos is indifferent is not a thing that can be asserted with equal confidence. The skeptic’s language implies that human beings are wholly anomalous, the universe of Being an anechoic chamber in which their songs and prayers and laughter and lament are as if nothing, a sound in their own heads, talk in a dream. If this is in fact the case, the next question must be how this verbalizing that goes on among us relates to our collective intelligence, and then why our intelligence gives us our strange, progressive access to the workings of things, notably the cosmos. Einstein and others have said that the universe is most remarkable in being comprehensible by us. And they have left the matter there. But the converse must also be true, that we are most remarkable in our ability to comprehend it. We are anomalous in being able, sometimes, in some degree, to think like the universe, so to speak, which is to say that we are bound to reality otherwise and more profoundly than our biological kindred, the beasts of the field, the birds of the air.
That we see this as making us alien within it is a choice, by no means inevitable or even logical. From an evolutionary point of view, our high intelligence is peacock feathers, a fluke that somehow eluded the threshing and sifting of the demands of survival until it became instrumental in our survival. There seems to be a suppressed teleology in this, wholly at odds with evolutionary theory, as if the big head and long helplessness of the first fully human infant prepared for the day, millennia in coming, when the capacities potential in her or him were sufficiently realized to compensate for these extreme vulnerabilities. There is no need to account in evolutionary terms for the very many things that are singular about us—by the lights of this schema, which is very rigorous except when it is not. By its mode of reckoning, everything about us that can be interpreted by them as promoting the survival and propagation of the individual organism is acknowledged and accounted for, while whatever remains—for example, our tendency to wonder about our place in the universe—is somehow extraneous. And what is evolutionary theory but one major branch of the great human project of pondering just this question? Its exponents should have some insight into the impulses that drive us to expend our energies and resources mulling such things, and some insight into why these theorists assume that they can unriddle, meaningfully reduce, such a high order of complexity. This would certainly be the task of attributes their anthropology cannot describe.
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I return so often to this modern school of thought because it is very widely influential and because it is such a profound deflation of the idea of the human that where it is assumed, there are no terms for speaking meaningfully about our epochal species, individually or as a whole. One reads that by its lights we have neither minds nor souls. Consider what we mean by the words mindless and soulless, and how reduced a human being would have to seem in our eyes before we could begin to justify the use of such language. If we began to realize that he was in fact capable of grief, or loneliness, or loyalty, we would be ashamed of the estimate we had made of him. Yet we are told that humankind altogether is to be thought of in just these terms. As a consequence, we have become inarticulate in speaking and writing about the mind as the stream of reflection and emotion that it is. At the same time that we rejected the conception of a God who could be called loving or passionate, we ceased to attend to like qualities in ourselves. Even to speak of God as “living” is to imply attentiveness with its consequences, qualified by righteousness and by love. The modern anthropology cannot capture the vital individuality of a human being. Absent the great analogy, that we are images of God, we hardly seem to know what we are.
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To stand apart from what we are and consider ourselves. This is definitively human. It is also definitively human to be grossly wrong, about ourselves first of all. Modern thought is represented as having escaped, and renounced, the errors of the past. This means, whatever else, that our propensity to err, even catastrophically, is conceded. The concession does not in any way reduce our liability to further error, a fact far too seldom taken into account. Early Darwinism was the handmaiden of racial science. Early genetics was the handmaiden of eugenics. I will not mention nuclear energy, and its crude and naïve beginnings, whose consequences will play themselves out literally forever. The horrible children of half-baked science are the result of misplaced optimism, confidence so insistent on its own justification that it scorns reasonable doubt. This while it prides itself on rigorous skepticism.
But my subject is hope, the theological virtue, which I would distinguish very sharply from what I have called optimism. Hope implies a felt lack, an absence, a yearning. Come quickly, Lord Jesus. The father of the prodigal son hopes for his return. We know that he watches for him. Nothing in the parable implies that he has any grounds for confidence that his son will return, certainly nothing we know about the young man’s character or affection for his family. In fact the father’s hope is based solely on his love for his son. He yearns for a wholeness only his son can supply. If his son, finally returned, is no better than he was when he left, his father will hope for some glimpse of a sign that this is not only or always or essentially true. Hope is loyalty. It seems that earthly love is always compounded with hope.
Skeptics say the religious project their feelings onto an empty heaven. It is important to consider what these feelings are, how they exist in the world of things, as they certainly do. Love is in its nature projected, a spontaneous assertion of one’s own perception on an earthly reality, a reality that could as well be called empty, at least indifferent. This is the sociopathic view. It is entirely possible, in fact very common, to love where there is no trace of reciprocity, and no prospect of it. If the rebel Absalom had returned to his father, David, and asked his forgiveness, this would have answered a hope of David’s, certainly. If Absalom had only survived his insurrection, David’s most desperate hope would have been fulfilled. Neither of these things happen, and David’s love for his son is undiminished. If love is greater than hope, as Paul says it is, this may be true in part because love is prior to hope, a condition of it, and is fulfilled when hope falls away, fulfilled, if in fact it ever is fulfilled. Again, I am speaking of hope the theological virtue that ranks with faith and love, not of any transient, casual state of mind that might be called by the same name. That tiny lady I mentioned, whose expectations have been long since put to the test, had built her conception of heaven around a hope of restored and renewed love. I believe this is often the case, whether the object of love is a person or an idea or God himself. Love never ends, the apostle tells us. Projected forward it is hope. What it would be, fully realized, we can imagine only because we experience hope as absence. Blessed are you who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for you shall be filled. Blessed are you who mourn, for you shall be comforted.
I mentioned the sociopathic view of things, which sees the world as valueless, as exciting neither affection nor loyalty. Then there is the sort of person who loves and is loyal, even, so it might appear to others, in defiance of common sense—King David, the father in the parable. And, by implication, God the Father. In human terms, who has the better sense of reality, the man who knows about love only by report, or the man who, in the face of a terrible betrayal, will still say, “My son, my son”? Granting that this is the father we would all wish to find waiting for us, does this mean the hope is baseless, a delusion to which we are attracted, or subject, because we are aliens in the universe? But what possible grounds do we have for saying that we are, in fact, aliens? If nature, in the reductionist sense, is all there is, then we can only be fully as much a part of it as a mollusk or a stone. If reality is to be thought of as saturated with a strange brilliance, as science that does actual research continuously tells us it is, then we are very much a part of that. And if we are an exceptional expression of a pervasive brilliance, a creature uniquel
y suited to knowing—that is, to science—then we should feel a certain respect for our means of knowing, fallible as they always are. Our ideas are subjective, inescapably influenced by circumstance, but we are not absolutely trapped in our subjectivity because our minds project an expectation, an estimate or a hypothesis that seems plausible to us, imposing it on everything we perceive. Over time we may unlearn our first projections through experience and instruction or by contextualizing them among ideas that seem more plausible or that we accept as confirmed. This is a normal strategy of consciousness, the opening engagement of inquiry with its object.
The important point is that projection is the other side of subjectivity, the bringing to bear of intuition, induction, and existing knowledge on whatever we perceive, in the always wider sense that the word perceive must be granted. Scientists say now that the emergence of the planetary system occurred in a much shorter span of time than had been assumed, in perhaps three million years rather than hundreds of millions. The chain of reasoning that lies behind this spectacular revision downward began with evidence of magnetic polarization in a meteor. Only recently has it been possible to find such evidence. Our powers of perception continuously deepen and expand, leaving us always with the familiar problem of understanding our discoveries in light of existing knowledge and reasonable interpretation, knowing, of course, that both of these will be modified, perhaps radically.
Let us say that religions explore the ancient human intuition that there is an energy behind experience, something not sufficiently like the reality accessible to us to be captured in the language that has developed to accommodate ordinary experience. Projection is our method of inquiry, the grounds of speculation and hypothesis. For millennia no one would have imagined that we might sometime literally read the history of the universe in a stone. Given time and the basic integrity of civilization, there is no way to set any limit to what we might sometime know about physical reality. Nor will there be any way, if the project is carried on for a million years, to know what will still be unknown, which it is prudent to assume will be almost everything. If science sometime answers the question of the existence of other universes—and the answer is not no, which could never be more than a tentative conclusion, since their nonexistence might look exactly like their inaccessibility—then every question opens again about their physics and chemistry, not to mention their origins and duration. If three or five are proximate in some sense of the word, how many are there at, so to speak, a further remove? Are the ones we might access typical of their kind? With what confidence could we generalize from our sample? These are all reasonable questions that our scientists may sometime be in a position to address. First they would project on these new systems of Being everything experience taught them to expect. Then they would modify expectation as circumstances required, and as their resources permitted, though, we may assume, never sufficiently.
My point is simply this. We can easily imagine that our brilliance and ingenuity are so great they will finally find their way to their own limits. Then let us assume a reality of another order in which all this glory and mystery and force is comprehended, as ancient Hebrews and as Christian metaphysicians have done. The voices of the Bible magnify the Lord. He is enthroned on the praises of Israel. For millennia these voices have prepared the way for our grasp of this exuberantly limitless universe in which as a planet we are minute to the point of disappearance and as a species we are as passing as a breath. If we did not know our nature and situation, they would seem flatly implausible. But here we are. We are in fact proof that plausibility is a meaningful standard within special circumstances only. Yes, we cannot resist the pull of gravity, and no, we cannot really take in the fact that our cluster of galaxies is flying at 392,000 miles per second toward something called the Great Attractor, driven in part by pressure from an expanding void. Reality on its grandest scale bears no analogy to daily life here on our singular, weather-swaddled little earth. But there it is, and here we are, the great rush of the cosmos silent and impalpable to us. And within our starry calm exotic things can flourish that are unimaginable without it—history, memory, hope and doubt, love and loss, good and evil, and, less abstractly, tiny old women who are vesicles for all of them. We might praise the fruitfulness of the ground and the general constancy of the seasons more rapturously than even the psalmist did, knowing what he could hardly know, that reality is overwhelmingly of another kind, and that this earth is so minor an exception to the generality of things that it is insignificant in any account of the universe, unless, of course, it is the very quintessence of significance.
If the second view of it is granted, and, more broadly, this view of the special circumstances that make it fecund and allow for its endless effusions of elegance and variety, including among them humankind, then the so-called indifferent cosmos—vast and cold and fiery as it is, ancient as it is, enthralled as it is by forces we as yet can’t name or describe—seems the wrong place to look for evidence of divine interest in our world. This is not to say that the whole cosmic arrangement is outside the reach of Providence. It is only to say that the world is indeed a stage. Things happen here, under this roof, fretted with golden fire—improvisations on themes of hope and fear, dread and hatred and love. Curtains rise on lives and civilizations, things happen, and curtains fall. Centuries seem like a stately dramatic convention over against the wheeling eons that roar beyond this strange little theater, where words and actions are bracketed by the assumption that they can matter. How can this be true? But it is. How can passions and emotions script our brief hour? But they do.
Of course the old conceits about the indifferent cosmos and the empty heavens are condescensions. They impose crude notions of the worship of a sky god on cultures of remarkable subtlety and brilliance, which happen also to be a great part of our heritage. Those who dislike religion assume that it is primitive, the kind of error or nostalgia people who are modern and enlightened should be ashamed to persist in. And many don’t persist, a testament to the power of shaming. But a truer reckoning, one that looked at the life we so ironically call mundane, would vindicate the wisdom of every soul who ever said a grace over her supper.
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Religious hope is often thought of, even by religious people, as an evasion of plain, brute death. Death is truly a fearful thing. Then again, traditional Christianity has taught that survival beyond death also has its perils—judgment, hell, Purgatory in Catholicism. And narrow is the path. Many people who believe that omniscient scrutiny will be brought to bear on their earthly lives would actually prefer extinction, to avoid what must be called embarrassment. Christianity would have softened its worldview instantly by offering extinction as one possibility. It would also have weakened the essential thing implied by the teaching of endless damnation—that what we do or fail to do really, really matters. How this fact could be underscored more boldly can hardly be imagined, except in Jesus’s saying that he is hungry with the hungry, imprisoned with the prisoner, and is himself denied whenever they are denied. Then the day of judgment is any day, every day. We choose between self and Christ as individuals and as citizens continuously, a truth that should either sanctify the world to us or give us a bad scare. Probably both.
This has everything to do with hope. It means Christ is in the world and we actually can do right by him. How can this be true? I know I look on the more glorious assertions of my religion with confidence enhanced by the shallowness of arguments against them. I believe an assertion that is simultaneously an ethos and an aesthetic is true in every important sense of the word. It means that a profounder communion than Communion itself is offered to us, because in the least of these, however least is reckoned, Christ is present, body and blood. It means that, as godliness is the height of our aspirations, complicated by our fallibility but sometimes approached by God’s grace, so our moments of deepest vulnerability cannot reduce us to less than utter sacredness. The crimes we suffer and the crimes we do are all assaults on holine
ss. Knowing this, if we could ever really know it, would make us Christians, respectful of ourselves and reverent toward the world.
If so very much is at stake, what follows? That absolute values are invested in the world, and that, because they are shared by God, they are absolutely real, as our possessions and attainments, our suffering and sorrow, are circumstantial and transitory. We can hunger and thirst after righteousness, hoping to be filled, because righteousness will outlive greed and oppression, and we will live in the unclouded radiance of God’s most gracious justice. Like David, like the father in the parable, like the lady in my anecdote, we can hunger and thirst for love, too, whether it is scorned and frustrated, or still only possible, or deeply remembered, because, we are told, God is love. I said we can hunger and thirst. I mean we do hunger and thirst, because we bear a likeness to God. We are a part of this ultimate reality and by nature we participate in eternal things—justice, truth, compassion, love. We have a vision of these things we have not arrived at by reason, have rarely learned from experience, have not found in history. We feel the lack. Hope leads us toward them.
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Scripture tells us that we can ourselves vindicate hope by our loyalty to the more profound reality with which the world is invested. When Jesus says we are to love one another, he is telling us to serve one another, to feed and clothe, to visit, to bless—to be aware of other’s hopes and to honor them. Who is my neighbor? We know, two thousand years on, that this question is by no means rhetorical. There are whole political parties ready to tell us how much harm can come from the indiscriminate sharing of loaves and fishes. Meanwhile, hopes of just the kind to arouse God’s compassion somehow don’t stir ours. King Lear, cast out on the heath, feeling what wretches feel, calls on “pomp,” wealth, to “shake down the superflux and show the heavens more just.” This gives rise to an alarming thought. Greed, even indifference, imperils God’s good name among, for example, workers whose pay is stinted or the poor to whom justice is denied. Then a kind of blasphemy is added to the flouting of law and gospel. “Let your works so shine before men that, seeing them, they praise God.” Then, what if men see no works, or if such as they see are stingy or grudging? The hopes that moved Christ, that a child or a friend or a brother might live and be well, are disappointed day after day, because we stand between grave need and gracious heaven. We are dishonest stewards. But we all know this. If we are God’s stewards, that means he has placed his hope in us, his loving hope for the well-being of that population always present to him, widows, orphans, strangers, laborers—the whole nation of the poor, one by one. Scripture calls him a living God. The thing that can give hope a kind of bitterness is that it is also living, constantly and intensely vulnerable, an opening to the possibility, or probability, of disappointment. Scripture is full of divine disappointment—“Can you not watch with me one hour?” The most indubitable proof of human freedom is that in general we prefer to sleep, and do sleep.
What Are We Doing Here? Page 23
