Splendour in the whatsit
Andrew Sullivan justifies the ways of god to human beings (though decidedly not to other animals) – by which I mean he says things about the ways of god to human beings (but definitely not to animals).
For me, the unique human capacity to somehow rise above such suffering, while experiencing it as vividly as any animal, is evidence of God’s love for us (and the divine spark within us), while it cannot, of course, resolve the ultimate mystery of why we are here at all in a fallen, mortal world. This Christian response to suffering merely offers a way in which to transcend this veil of tears a little. No one is saying this is easy or should not provoke bouts of Job-like anger or despair or isn’t at some level incomprehensible.
There’s a certain amount of caution there – ‘for me,’ ‘somehow,’ ‘offers a way.’ But the caution doesn’t make much difference to the fact that he’s just saying things.There’s some priestly vocabulary that’s supposed to make the things sound deep – unique human capacity; somehow rise above; divine spark within us; ultimate mystery; fallen, mortal world; Christian response to suffering; transcend this [vale] of tears – but priestly vocabulary is just that, and the sonorities remain just sonorities.
It’s interesting to wonder if even Sullivan would find it so convincing in the demotic. ‘The way I look at it, people’s knack for getting on top of all that stress, even though it’s still a huge pain in the ass, is evidence of God’s love for us (and the twinkle in our eye), even though of course it can’t tell us what we’re doing here in this shit-hole.’ My guess is that he wouldn’t, and that he wouldn’t write it that way because he would suspect that other people wouldn’t either. So out comes the sub-Wordsworthian jargon.
I was brought at one point to total collapse and a moment of such profound doubt in the goodness of God that it makes me shudder still. But God lifted me into a new life in a way I still do not understand but that I know as deeply and as irrevocably as I know anything. If this testimony is infuriating to anyone with a brain, then I am sorry. It is the truth as I experienced it. It is the truth as I experience it still.
But he doesn’t know it, because he doesn’t know it was God that lifted him. He knows that something did – he knows that he had an experience that felt like being lifted into a new life – and I can easily accept that that would be a hugely powerful and meaningful experience. But I can’t accept the claim that he knows the experience was God’s doing. Maybe he thinks he’s helping people by putting it that way. But doesn’t it occur to him that he might help more people by describing the experience as an experience without attributing it to a god? Leaving people free to think it was god if they wanted to and free to think it was human resilience if they wanted to. It might not sound as poetic, or even as consoling, but it would sound more possible.
Odd that Sulli should be on a god kick. Hope he is OK.
Sullivan – “This Christian response to suffering merely offers a way in which to transcend this veil of tears a little.”
And if you can’t do it then it’s your own fault and there’s nothing else.
Sullivan – “I was brought at one point to total collapse and a moment of such profound doubt in the goodness of God that it makes me shudder still.”
The psychic self-harm required to resolve a crisis of faith in favour of God rather than oneself is something I’ve always found obscene. And a counter-example to the comfort claimed for faith.
OB – “But doesn’t it occur to him that he might help more people by describing the experience as an experience without attributing it to a god?”
No. We have to chain back to God. Because we have to chain back to God.
If religion is like literature then “show don’t tell” might be a good idea.
William James has a lot of explainng to do! It was his Gifford Lectures, after all (The Varieties of Religious Experience), which first gave a kind of epistemic certificate to all religious experience. And we’re still stuck with the idea. People don’t need to justify claims about religious experience. The Epoché has been done. This is as pure as experience gets, so religions get to make all sorts of claims simply on this basis. And since none of these is inter-subjectively checkable, they’re all phenomenologically equally reliable.
If you read through David Hay’s book Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit you come across the very same kind of thing that Sullivan goes on about, in much the same terms. Hundreds of accounts of “spiritual experience,” we are told, while they change nothing materially, give the person “a sense of being placed in a larger, ultimately benign context.” (67)
Strange thing is, though, that most people who are in situations where things are going badly, are also in a human context which, for reasons of compassion and concern, is already a benign context, so it would not be surprising to find people’s experiences following suit, nor surprising to find that they are expressed in religious terms. But which seems more reasonable, to attribute benignity to the effects of human compassion, or to the situation in which, aside from human compassion, there is literally nothing? It’s like people thanking God after having been rescued, at great risk, by Search and Rescue technicians.
Show, don’t tell, is good advice. However, showing is the one thing that religious people can’t do. The only thing left is tell, and that’s what they’re going to do. It’s the only way it becomes real. Otherwise, it’s just a private experience, a beetle in a box.
Ain’t it the truth about Billy James – Andrew Brown recently informed the world that it was reading The Varieties recently that turned him around – so it’s thanks to Bill that CisF is so choked with belief-crap.
Hahaha–I actually find it more persuasive in the demotic!
Unpersuasive either way, but at least the demotic is more concrete, you know?
I do know! I find Wordsworthian language immensely unpersuasive for most purposes – Wordsworthian poetry being one of the exceptions. Sullivan ain’t Wordsworth, and that kind of gassy rhetoric puts my back up. It reeks of both deception and self-admiration. Echh.
Hey! I didn’t know that about Andy! Imagine! Trust Andrew Brown to read uncritically. William James and Michael Ruse, in that order.
Speaking of critical sense, I’m sure you didn’t mean all of Wordsworth’s poetry. Some of his later CofE period poems are really very very bad!
I kind of like flowery sentimental prose. But hey, maybe middle-class spiritual America will be more receptive to PZ Myers if we try translating a nasty crude shrill awful Pharyngula post into sweet dewey-eyed new age rhetoric.
Eric, yeh, one of his recent ‘belief’ posts explained about his conversion to whatever this is he has now.
And yes of course – I meant Wordsworth at his best! But I am very partial to W. at his best. Which is suprising, in a way…
Ben – ick. Get over that taste. Develop a taste for 17th century prose instead – check out Sir Thomas Browne. Baroque but not bogus; much better.
I would point out that at least some of Mr. Sullivan’s “uplift” into a new life came via the all-too-human development of new pharmaceutical therapies that, if they came too late to save his friends, have enabled him and many others to live reasonably healthy, productive (and extended) lives with HIV.
Eric: “It’s like people thanking God after having been rescued, at great risk, by Search and Rescue technicians.”
Indeed! When I recovered from a serious illness as a teenager, a dear, but very religous aunt exclaimed: “Thank the Lord!”
I think I said something like: “I thank the doctors and nurses”.
I thought (but didn’t say): “If the Lord exists, he gave me this thing in the first place.”
Ophelia:
It seems to me that part of the “problem” of evil, is that our language has retained the word, without retaining its meaning.
Evil today is commonly understood now as on the far side of really really bad. Something so bad, that bad a sting of modifiers on bad won’t do.
But it seems to me that the word for evil comes into our language with the intention to represent a force that attaches supra natural connotations. The Devil is Evil, the Lord is Holy.
Good is the opposite of Bad, but Holy or Divine is the Opposite of Evil.
It seems to me that we no longer have the ability to mean evil as the opposite of God in the serious sense that it was once really understood. Evil was agency, caused by an agent. So today God, who once caused floods and sent plagues, has moved to some infinite distance in some unknowable realm, and interacts with us though unknowable mystery, while evil remains, just on the other side of really really bad.
In fact, you can have an entire blog smackdown today without anyone talking about “the devil”.
Raise the specter of Satan’s Curse, and unless you really wrap it in metaphor, or are in a church in Wassilla, and most people in the modern world assume you to be a bit of a nutter.
Yet it is still perfectly fine to talk about God’s Grace. How I miss the clinical use of “demonic possession”.