The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  Modernity, Vattimo believes, is over; when we contemplate history, we cannot now see the future as an inevitable and unilinear progression toward emancipation. Freedom no longer lies in the perfect knowledge of and conformity to the necessary structure of reality, but in an appreciation of multiple discourses and the historicity, contingency, and finitude of all religious, ethical, and political values— including our own.59 Vattimo wants to bring down “walls,” including the walls that separate theists and atheists. Even though he believes that society will reembrace religion, he does not want to abandon secularization, because he regards the Church-state alliance set up by Constantine as a Christian aberration. The ideal society should be based on charity rather than truth. In the past, Vattimo recalls, religious truth generally emerged from people interacting with others rather than by papal edict. Vattimo recalls Christ’s saying “When two or three are gathered together in my name, I will be in the midst of them,” and the classic hymn “Where there is love, there is also God.”60

  The American philosopher John D. Caputo has been influenced by Heidegger and the postmodern thinker Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) as well as by Derrida. He too advocates “weak thought” and transcendence of the warring polarities of atheism and theism. He sees the limitations of the old Death of God movement but fully endorses the desire of Altizer and Van Buren to deconstruct the modern God. Although he appreciates Tillich’s emphasis on the essentially symbolic nature of religious truth, he is, however, wary of calling God the “ground of being,” since this sets brakes on the process of endless flux and becoming that is essential to life by stabilizing a grounding center of our being.61 Atheist and theist alike should abandon the modern appetite for certainty. One of the problems of the original Death of God movement was that its terminology was too final and absolute. No state of affairs is permanent, and we are now witnessing the death of the Death of God. The atheistic ideas of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud are “perspectives … constructions, and fictions of grammar.”

  Enlightenment secularism, the objectivist reduction of religion to something other than itself—say, to a distorted desire for one’s mommy, or to a way of keeping the ruling authorities in power—is one more story told by people with historically limited imaginations, with contingent conceptions of reason and history, of economics with labour, of nature and human nature, of desire, sexuality, and women, and of God, religion, and faith.62

  The Enlightenment had its own rigors. Postmodernity should be “a more enlightened Enlightenment, that is, no longer taken in by the dream of Pure Objectivity.”63 It should open doors “to another way of thinking about faith and reason” in order to achieve “a redescription of reason that is more reasonable than the transhistorical Rationality of the Enlightenment.”64

  So how does Caputo see God? Following Derrida, he would describe God as the desire beyond desire.65 Of its very nature, desire is located in the space between what exists and what does not; it addresses all that we are and are not, everything we know and what we do not know. The question is not “Does God exist?” any more than “Does desire exist?” The question is rather “What do we desire?” Augustine understood this when he asked, “What do I love when I love my God?” and failed to find an answer. Like Denys and Aquinas, Caputo does not see negative theology as a deeper, more authoritative truth. It simply emphasizes unknowing—”in the sense that we really don’t know!”66 For Caputo, “religious truth is truth without knowledge.”67 He has adapted Derrida’s différance to create his “theology of the event,” distinguishing between a name, such as “God,” “Justice,” or “Democracy,” and what he calls the event, that which is “astir” in that name, something that is never fully realized. But the “event” within the name inspires us, turns things upside down, making us weep and pray for what is “to come.”

  The name is a kind of provisional formulation of an event, a relatively stable, if evolving structure, while the event is ever restless, on the move, seeking new forms to assume, seeking to get expressed in still unexpressed ways.68

  We pray for what is “to come,” not for what already exists. The “event” does not require “belief” in a static, unchanging deity who “exists” but inspires us to make what is “astir” in the name “God”— absolute beauty, peace, justice, and selfless love—a reality in the world.

  Religion as described by these postmodern philosophers may sound alien to much “modern” religion, but it evokes many of the insights of the past. Both Vattimo and Caputo insist that these are primordial, perennial ideas with a long pedigree. Vattimo’s claim that religion is essentially interpretive recalls the maxim of the rabbis: “What is Torah? It is the interpretation of Torah.” When he affirms the primacy of charity and the communal nature of religious truth, we recall the rabbis’ repeated insistence that “when two or three study Torah together, the Shekhinah is in their midst,” the story of Emmaus, and the communal experience of liturgy. Caputo also sees Anselm’s “ontological proof” as “autodeconstructive”:

  Whatever it is you say God is, God is more. The very constitution of the idea is deconstructive of any such construction … the very formula that describes God is that there is no formula with which God can be described.69

  When Caputo argues that the “event” requires a response rather than “belief,” he echoes the rabbis’ definition of scripture as miqra, a summons to action.

  Above all, both Caputo and Vattimo stress the importance of the apophatic. All these perceptions that were once central to religion tended to be submerged in the positivist discourse of modernity, and the fact that they have surfaced again in a different form suggests that this type of “unknowing” is inherent in our very humanity. The distinctively modern yearning for purely notional, absolute, and empirically proven truth may have been an aberration. Caputo himself suggests as much. Noting that atheism is always a rejection of a particular conception of the divine, he concludes: “If modern atheism is the rejection of a modern God, then the delimitation of modernity opens up another possibility, less the resuscitation of premodern theism than the chance of something beyond both the theism and the atheism of modernity.”70

  It is an enticing prospect. If atheism was a product of modernity, now that we are entering a “postmodern” phase, will this too, like the modern God, become a thing of the past? Will the growing appreciation of the limitations of human knowledge—which is just as much a part of the contemporary intellectual scene as atheistic certainty— give rise to a new kind of apophatic theology? And how best can we move beyond premodern theism into a perception of “God” that truly speaks to all the complex realities and needs of our time?

  Epilogue

  We have become used to thinking that religion should provide us with information. Is there a God? How did the world come into being? But this is a modern preoccupation. Religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason. That was the role of logos. Religion’s task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life. Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage. Scientific rationality can tell us why we have cancer; it can even cure us of our disease. But it cannot assuage the terror, disappointment, and sorrow that come with the diagnosis, nor can it help us to die well. That is not within its competence. Religion will not work automatically, however; it requires a great deal of effort and cannot succeed if it is facile, false, idolatrous, or self-indulgent.

  Religion is a practical discipline, and its insights are not derived from abstract speculation but from spiritual exercises and a dedic
ated lifestyle. Without such practice, it is impossible to understand the truth of its doctrines. This was also true of philosophical rationalism. People did not go to Socrates to learn anything—he always insisted that he had nothing to teach them—but to have a change of mind. Participants in a Socratic dialogue discovered how little they knew and that the meaning of even the simplest proposition eluded them. The shock of ignorance and confusion represented a conversion to the philosophic life, which could not begin until you realized that you knew nothing at all. But even though it removed the last vestiges of the certainty upon which people had hitherto based their lives, the Socratic dialogue was never aggressive; rather, it was conducted with courtesy, gentleness, and consideration. If a dialogue aroused malice or spite, it would fail. There was no question of forcing your interlocutor to accept your point of view: instead, each offered his opinion as a gift to the others and allowed them to alter his own perceptions. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the founders of Western rationalism, saw no opposition between reason and the transcendent. They understood that we feel an imperative need to drive our reasoning powers to the point where they can go no further and segue into a state of unknowing that is not frustrating but a source of astonishment, awe, and contentment.

  Religion was not an easy matter. We have seen the immense effort made by yogins, hesychasts, Kabbalists, exegetes, rabbis, ritualists, monks, scholars, philosophers, and contemplatives, as well as laypeople in regular liturgical observance. All were able to achieve a degree of ekstasis that, as Denys explained, by introducing us to a different kind of knowing, “drives us out of ourselves.” In the modern period too, scientists, rationalists, and philosophers have experienced something similar. Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Popper, who had no conventional religious “beliefs,” were quite at home in this hinterland between rationality and the transcendent. Religious insight requires not only a dedicated intellectual endeavor to get beyond the “idols of thought” but also a compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood. Aggressive logos, which seeks to master, control, and kill off the opposition, cannot bring this transcendent insight. Experience proved that this was possible only if people cultivated a receptive, listening attitude, not unlike the way we approach art, music, or poetry. It required kenosis, “negative capability,” “wise passiveness,” and a heart that “watches and receives.”

  The consistency with which the various religions have stressed the importance of these qualities indicates that they are somehow built into the way men and women experience their world. If the religious lose sight of them, they are revived by poets, novelists, and philosophers. My last chapter concluded with postmodern theology, not because this represents the pinnacle of the Western theological tradition but because it has rediscovered practices, attitudes, and ideals that were central to religion before the advent of the modern period. That is not to say, of course, that all faiths are the same. Each tradition formulates the sacred differently, and this will certainly affect the way people experience it. There are important differences between Brahman, Nirvana, God, and Dao, but that does not mean that one is right and the others wrong. On this matter, nobody can have the last word. All faith systems have been at pains to show that the ultimate cannot be adequately expressed in any theoretical system, however august, because it lies beyond words and concepts.

  But many people today are no longer comfortable with this apophatic reticence. They feel that they know exactly what they mean by God. The catechism definition I learned at the age of eight—”God is the Supreme Spirit, who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections”—was not only dry, abstract, and rather boring; it was also incorrect. Not only did it imply that God was a fact that it was possible to “define,” but it represented only the first stage in Denys’s threefold dialectical method. I was not taught to take the next step and see that God is not a spirit; that “he” has no gender; and that we have no idea what we mean when we say that a being “exists” who is “infinite in all perfections.” The process that should have led to a stunned appreciation of an “otherness” beyond the competence of language ended prematurely. The result is that many of us have been left stranded with an incoherent concept of God. We learned about God at about the same time as we were told about Santa Claus. But while our understanding of the Santa Claus phenomenon evolved and matured, our theology remained somewhat infantile. Not surprisingly, when we attained intellectual maturity, many of us rejected the God we had inherited and denied that he existed.

  Paul Tillich pointed out that it is difficult to speak about God these days, because people immediately ask you if a God exists. This means that the symbol of God is no longer working. Instead of pointing beyond itself to an ineffable reality, the humanly conceived construct that we call “God” has become the end of the story. We have seen that during the early modern period the idea of God was reduced to a scientific hypothesis and God became the ultimate explanation of the universe. Instead of symbolizing the ineffable, God was in effect reduced to a mere deva, a lowercase god that was a member of the cosmos with a precise function and location. When that happened, it was only a matter of time before atheism became a viable proposition, because scientists were soon able to find alternative explanatory hypotheses that rendered “God” redundant. This would not have been a disaster had not the churches come to rely on scientific proof. Other paths to knowledge had been downgraded in the modern world, and scientific rationality was now regarded as the only acceptable path to truth. People had grown accustomed to thinking of God as a “clear,” “distinct,” and self-evident idea. Had not Descartes, founder of modern philosophy, told them that the existence of God was even clearer and more obvious than one of Euclid’s theorems? Did not the great Newton insist that religion should be “easy”?

  Above all, many of us forgot that religious teaching was what the rabbis called miqra. It was essentially and crucially a program for action. You had to engage with a symbol imaginatively, become ritually and ethically involved with it, and allow it to effect a profound change in you. That was the original meaning of the words “faith” and “belief.” If you held aloof, a symbol would remain opaque and implausible. Many people today can work with the symbolism of the modern God in this way; backed up by ritual and compassionate, self-emptying practice, it still introduces them to the transcendence that gives meaning to their lives. But not everybody is able to do this. Because “faith” has come to mean intellectual assent to a set of purely notional doctrines that make no sense unless they are applied practically, some have given up altogether. Others, reluctant to abandon religion, are obscurely ashamed of their “unbelief” and feel uncomfortably caught between two sets of extremists: religious fundamentalists, whose belligerent piety they find alienating, on the one hand, and militant atheists calling for the wholesale extermination of religion, on the other.

  Idolatry has always been one of the pitfalls of monotheism. Because its chief symbol of the divine is a personalized deity, there is an inherent danger that people would imagine “him” as a larger, more powerful version of themselves, which they could use to endorse their own ideas, practices, loves, and hatreds—sometimes to lethal effect. There can be only one absolute, so once a finite idea, theology, nation, polity, or ideology is made supreme, it is compelled to destroy anything that opposes it. We have seen a good deal of this kind of idolatry in recent years. To make limited historical phenomena—a particular idea of “God,” “creation science,” “family values,” “Islam” (understood as an institutional and civilizational entity), or the “Holy Land”—more important than the sacred reverence due to the “other” is, as the rabbis pointed out long ago, a sacrilegious denial of everything that “God” stands for. It is idolatrous, because it elevates an inherently limited value to an unacceptably high level. As Tillich pointed out, if it assumes that a man-made idea of “God” is an adequate representation of the transcendence toward which it can only imperfectly gesture, a great deal o
f mainstream theology is also idolatrous. Atheists are right to condemn such abuses. But when they insist that society should no longer tolerate faith and demand the withdrawal of respect from all things religious, they fall prey to the same intolerance. Some atheists are unhappy about this militancy. For Julian Baggini, atheism means “open-hearted commitment to truth and rational enquiry,” so that “hostile opposition to the beliefs of others combined with a dogged conviction of the certainty of one’s own beliefs … is antithetical to such values.”1

  During the early modern period, Western people fell in love with an ideal of absolute certainty that, it seems, may be unattainable. But because some are reluctant to relinquish it, they have tended to overcompensate, claiming certitude for beliefs and doctrines that can only be provisional. This has perhaps contributed to the aggressive tenor of a great deal of modern discourse. There are very few Socratic “philosophers” these days who know that they lack wisdom. Too many people assume that they alone have it and, in matters secular as well as religious, appear unwilling even to consider a rival point of view or seriously assess evidence that might qualify their case. The quest for truth has become agonistic and competitive. When debating an issue in politics or in the media, in the law courts or academe, it is not enough to establish what is true; we also have to defeat—and even humiliate—our opponents. Even though we hear a great deal about the importance of “dialogue,” it is rare to hear a genuinely Socratic exchange of views. It is often obvious in public debates that instead of listening receptively to other participants, panelists simply use others’ remarks as grist for a brilliant point of their own that will deliver the coup de grace. Even when the issues debated are too complex and multifaceted for a simple solution, these discussions rarely end in a realistic Socratic aporia or an acknowledgment that the other side may also have merit.