Belief and Unbelief - Philosophy of Self-Knowledge 1560007419

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A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge Third Edition.

ova

With a new introduction by the author

A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge Third Edition

Michael Novak With a new introduction by the author

Transaction Publishers

New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)

New material this edition copyright © 1994 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903. Originally published in 1965 by The Macmillan Company, New York. "Appendix: God in the Colleges.. originally appeared in Harper's Magazine, 1961. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conven­ tions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transn1itted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers-The State University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 94-2300 ISBN: 1-56000-741-9 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Novak, Michael. Belief and unbelief : a philosophy of self-knowledge / Michael Novak. - 3rd. ed., expanded with a new introd. by the author. p. cn1. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-56000-741-9 1. Belief and doubt. 2. Self-knowledge, Theory of. 3. God. BD215.N6 1994 121'.6-dc20 94-2300 CIP

CONTENTS Introduction to the Transaction Edition

lX

3 9

Preface to the 1986 Edition Preface

INTRODUCTION: A DIALECTICAL INQUIRY 1. Toward Civil Conversation

15

2. Tke Attraction of Atheism 18 3. Tke Task of Our Inquiry

24

4. A Dialectical, Not Formal, Mode

1: THE CULTURAL CONTEXT 1. Tke "Post-Religious" Age

29 35

35

2. Clarifications: Belief and Faitk

44 55

2: PHILOSOPHY AS SELF-KNOWLEDGE 1. In tke Beginning Comes Decision 55 2. Types of Self-Knowledge 62

3:

75

DECIDING WHO I AM 1. Subject World and Object World 75 2. Wkat Is a Man? 81 3. The Drive to Understand

4:

101 10 7

WHAT DO I MEAN BY "GOD"? 1. In Prayer

107

2. Rules for a Language about God 3. Tke Hidden God

123

114 ·

Contents

5:

DECIDING \VHETHER TO BELIEVE 1. What Is Real?

134

2. Into the Presence of God

6:

GOD OR EVIL

1 34

149 1 59

159 God 165

1. The Irrational 2. The Good

3. The Two Mysteries

7:

171

AN EFFECTIVE HUMANISM 1. God Against Man

1 75

175

2. Corruption and Community 182

Epilogue Appendix: God in the Colleges Notes A Selected Bibliography Index

189 193

210 227 235

INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION

As in the second edition of this book, published by Uni­ versity Press of America in 1985, I have decided to leave the main body of the text intact. That original inquiry presents enduring argu1nents e1nbedded in a vivid, concrete context, and not much is to be gained, and much lost, by recasting them. Most of the original manuscript had been written before the murder of my brother Richard in Bangladesh (as it now is) on January 16, 1964. Dick's death added to the passion informing the argument, which had been taking shape through lectures that I was then giving at the Catholic Cen­ ter at Harvard. As I noted in the preface to the UPA edition, my brother was a missionary priest of the Holy Cross Fathers, and was then studying Arabic for a future career, he hoped, as a scholar of Islam; he was also teaching at Notre Dame College in Dacca. During the Muslim-Hindu riots of that time he went to the assistance of an elderly priest living alone in an area outside Dacca where the danger was most intense, but at a time when fears had somewhat receded. With his usual cool­ ness (my private nickname for him was "the Lionhearted") he set out by bicycle for the twelve-mile trip, was waylaid by young river pirates on the ferry across the swollen and al­ ready corpse-strewn river, and (as testimony at the trial of . 1X

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the culprits later came out, supported by the slashed condi­ tion of the cassock he had been wearing) died by a knife wound to the chest. He was twenty-seven, wiry, thin. Just yes­ terday, I mailed the broken glasses he had been wearing, long ago sent to the family, to the archives of his alma mater Stonehill College, in North Easton, Massachusetts. Some early readers thought that my brother's senseless death had precipitated in me a crisis of faith, to which this book was an answer. That is not really true. I had been ,vork­ ing in the darkness that is quite normal to genuine belief in God (as also to unbelievers) for quite some time. In a sense, I preferred the darkness; it is a surer place. What I can't deny is that my brother's death added to the intensity of my ,vords and to the desire to make every sentence as true and clear as I could make it. It seemed that I owed him that much. He and I had from time to time discussed such matters, recotn­ mended books to each other, even shared some poetry. He understood the darkness. So the reader will understand, perhaps, ,vhy I resist the thought of altering the words I wrote at that time, poor as they may be. They stand as pay1nent on my debt to 1ny younger brother. As noted, � was at Harvard ,vhen these pages were ,vritten, a Harvard whose philosophy department ,vas dominated by Willard V.0. Quine, whichjohn Ra,vls had justjoined. It was a Harvard as yet unshaken by the events that ,vere soon to shatt�r the calm of Harvard Yard, the protests of radical stu­ dents followed by a succession of other protests. The peace of the Enlightentnent still reigned. (In a piece for Harper's Magazine, "God in the Colleges," I tried to capture the intel­ lectual co1nplacence of the tnoment. See Appendix.) Confi­ dence in reason ,vas at an apogee, even if it ,vas often a kind of 1nathen1atical, scientific, logical reason, mixed ,vith an underlying 1nanagerial pragmatism. I didn't find intellec-

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tual kinship there, although I did find much decency and courtesy. My own sources were ancient and medieval, and my own intellectual passions ran more in the direction of various European writers such as the existentialists and phenomenologists. In addition, I was deeply interested in problems of literature and fiction, !iaving just published a first novel, The Tiber was Silver based upon my experiences in Rome, where I had studied for two years. I am afraid that, though I learned much and was never sorry to have chosen Harvard, Harvard philosophy at the time did not much impress me. It seemed to me too thin and airless, much like the logic-chopping medieval Scholasticism that I was most in flight from. Rawls arrived too late to nourish my long­ standing interest in approaching philosophy through ethics. In a sense, then, this book represented my alternative to Harvard philosophy. Its subtitle, "A Philosophy of Intelligent Subjectivity," was also intended to mark out a life's work for me. I suspected at the time that my way toward that goal would be circuitous, like the ascent up a mountain, for I thought, on the one hand, that metaphysics is best approached through ethics, and ethics through politics; and, on the other hand, that to write well on politics, ethics, and finally the deeper and larger things, a student ought first to seek out experiences in those areas that bring knowledge, so to speak, through the tips of the fingers. The French philosopher Jacques Maritain (a hero of mine then and now) once quoted Aristotle as saying that no one could write well about ethics or metaphysics until he was at least fifty years old; too many matters of experience are at stake. This is not literally true, of course; Thomas Aquinas died, like Boethius, at forty-nine; and no one has ever been able to show me a more brilliant discussion of ethics than Aquinas' Commentary on Aristotle's Ethics, which line-by-line sets forth two of the most powerful and practical ethical discussions in history, that of the pre-

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Christian Greeks and that of a brilliant Christian drawing upon some 1200 years of further Christian experience and reflection. (Aquinas knew well the Muslim and Jewish writ­ ers of the time and drew on their works, too. He was also one of the first men in the West to have under his eyes the newly discovered text of the Nicomachean Ethics, lost for more than a thousand years but freshly translated into Latin for him by his friend William Moerbeke.) To make a long story short, after leaving Harvard for 1ny first teaching position, at Stanford, I began a long journey through various explorations of politics, ethnicity, culture, and sports, including a necessary detour through certain con­ troversial investigations into a taboo subject, the moral stand­ ing of capitalistn. I am ready now to take up again where this book left off, in an attempt to give a philosophical account of the founda­ tions of the free society; these lie in the accord behveen "the truth of things" and human consciousness, habits, and insti­ tutions. To accomplish this is to give a full account of "or­ dered liberty," and thus of "intelligent subjectivity." Thus, Belief and Unbelief is the point at which I began the long jour­ ney of my mature ,work, and I need soon to close the circle. Since that time ahnost thirty years ago ,vhen this book ,vas being written, of course, the word "foundations" has beco1ne a much contested word, particularly through the '\\rork of Richard Rorty. Rorty holds that the ancient-to-1nodern Euro­ pean quest for "foundations" is mistaken, and that the A1neri­ can quest, initiated particularly by John De,vey, for an "anti-foundational" approach (via solidarity, pragmatism, and open-1ninded inquiry) represents a 1nore ethical, 1nore hu1nane, and politically tnore successful intellectual approach. To this end, Rorty again and again attacks the ideal of "ob­ jectivity," and tries to replace it ,vith the ideal of "solidarity." Two texts 1nay stand as shorthand for his position:

Introduction to the Transaction Edition x111 The desire for "objectivity" boils down to a desire to ac­ quire beliefs which will eventually receive unforced agree­ ment in the course of a free and open encounter with people holding other beliefs. Pragmatists would like to replace the desire for objectiv­ ity-the desire to be in touch with a reality which is more than some community with which we.identify ourselves-with the desire for solidarity with that comn1unity. For Rorty, in the one case, the yearning for objectivity is to be boiled down; in the other, it is to be replaced. In both cases, Rorty is at war with objectivity but not with rationality and reasoned discourse. In both cases, too, Rorty is not pro­ posing a vision of the isolated individual-self-enclosed, and walled-off from others-but, quite clearly, a vision of humans­ in-community. (One might even call Rorty's vision, in a bow to its more or less hidden roots in the work of his grandfa­ ther, Walter Rauschenbusch, a secular version of the Protes­ tant "social gospel.") The attentive reader will already have noted that my own conception of "intelligent subjectivity" must have some rela­ tionship to Rorty's effort to move beyond the tradition of objectivity. But what relation? This is not the place to offer a full-dress contrast between Rorty's view and my own, or even to mark out all the places where I am not persuaded to fol­ low him, and to point out all the turns I think he should have taken, but missed. Nonetheless, in introducing a work which departed from the well-trod (but deceptive) path of "objec­ tivity"-and which deliberately invoked both "intelligence" and "subjectivity" in its subtitle-I owe the reader at least a sketch of some similarities and differences. First of all, both Rorty and I have been influenced (to dif­ ferent degrees and in different traditions) by Christian phi­ losophy. Rorty, for example, has noted that philosophers today may owe considerably more to the teachings of Jesus

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Christ than to the ancient Greeks and Romans-and rather more than they commonly make explicit. Among the propo­ sitions introduced into modern discourse by the life and teach­ ings of Christ are the unalienable dignity of every single person, slave or free; the imperative of universal compassion; the equality of all human beings before their Creator and Judge; and the vocation to make this ,vorld better through "building up the Kingdom of God" by whatever approxima­ tion, generation by generation, humans may attain. Even Rorty's own primal intuitions about the most privileged start­ ing place of philosophical writing-an ethic of solidarity-sug­ gest a powerful dose of the Christian idea of community. Nor is Rorty's writing unmarked by a sensitivity to the weak­ ness and perversity of human agents, who do not always act reasonably; nor are his ,vorks altogether remote from the world of contingency, singularity, and irony that underlies doctrines of Providence, as distinguished from those non­ Christian doctrines of the Deist Watchmaker and Eternal Logician. I see Rorty' s work as a rough approximation to a liberal Christian social ethic, on a resolutely nonbelieving, secular basis. True to the Enlightenment's hope to overturn the Je,v­ ish-Christian sense of reality, Rorty tries to devise a philo­ sophical outlook that needs make no reference to God or to anything else divine or sacred. Nevertheless, it is i1npossible to miss in his work a serenity, kindliness, sense of solidarity, and fundatnental reliance on a sort of cos1nic ( that is, histori­ cal, evolutionary) hope that are by no 1neans inherent in ni­ hilism. "What do they lack but churches, these atheists of our generation, to distinguish them from being Christians?" Albert Catnus asked of his "secular saints." To "saint," of course, Rorty might prefer the title "ironist." All right, then, a kind, tolerant, open, happy, and hopeful ironist. Does it seern too ironical to see in Rorty an unavowed Christian ironist?

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Rorty thinks that in showing that the 1nind is not "the 1nir­ ror of nature" he has disproved the correspondence theory of truth. What he has really shown is that the activities of the human mind cannot be fully expressed by metaphors based upon the operations of the human eye. We do not know sitn­ ply through "looking at" reality as though our 1ninds were si1nply 1nirrors of reality. One needs to be very careful not to confuse the activities of the 1nind ,vith the operations of any (or all) of the bodily senses. In describing how our 1ninds work, one needs to beware of being bewitched by the meta­ phors that spring frotn the operations of our senses. Our minds are not like our eyes; or, rather, their activities are far richer, more complex, and 1nore subtle than those of our eyes. It is true that ,ve often say, on getting the point, "Oh, I see!" But putting things together and getting the point nor­ !! mally involve a lot 1nore than "seeing," and all that we need to do to get to that point can scarcely be 1net si1nply by fol­ lo,ving the imperative, "Look!" Even when the point, once grasped, may see1n to have been (as it were) right in front of us all along, the reasons why it did not dawn upon us i1n1ne­ diately 1nay be tnany, including the fact that our i1nagina­ tions were ill-arranged, so that we were expecting and "looking for" the wrong thing. To get to the point at which the evi­ dence finally hits us, we may have to undergo quite a lot of dialectical argument and self-correction. There is an analogous problem in thinking of kno,ving as the activity of predicting and controlling, the fantasy that knowing is only what arises frotn Bacon's seductive dictum, "Knowledge is power." Power-seekers, even those who seek power through knowing, are quite properly regarded as well on the way to corruption, as Lord Acton's fa1nous caveat warns, and they typically a,vaken in others caution, fear, and loathing. Since their proclivities lead thetn to approach prob­ lems as manipulators, those who are close to thetn rightfully

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resist becoming "possessed" by them, and fear coming un­ der their power. Many very intelligent men and women take fertile, intimate spaces and turn them into deserts, driving other people away from them by the aggression apparent in their self-presentation. One more point. Any God who could be known by way of scientific method, a method whose aim is power, not wis­ dom, a method that gives the knower power to predict and (within limits) to control the known, would be a God subject to human manipulation. And any God reached by that 1nethod is likely to be imagined as the Great Manipulator. Against such a God, it would be necessary to rebel. Unavoidably, we embodied persons (humans that we are) can only express ourselves by way of metaphors; necessarily, our language draws upon the experiences of our senses and imagination. To try to express ,vhat our kno,ving is taxes us mightily, therefore, since our kno,ving is rather 1nore complex than our mere sensing or imagining. We do not have immediate, unmediated insight into our minds, but come to know them through their doing, catching sight of the1n, as it were, indirectly and by a kind of reflected radiance. (One of the most vivid descriptions of this difficulty in philosophi­ cal literature arises in the sustained effort by Aquinas to dis­ cern what the knowing of pure spirits ,vithout bodies­ angels-would be like. His inquiries forced hi1n to press ,vhat we do know about our own knowing to the limit, and then to step beyond that lin1it to conceptualize how creatures ,vith­ out such li1nits could experience kno,ving.) For etnbodied persons, learning taxes every part of the body, frotn seat to eyes. But, to paraphrase Madison, "If men were angels," teach­ ing would be a snap-the instantaneous co1n1nunication of one mind directly to another, ,vithout hour-long lectures, full setnesters, or tedious cramtning for exams. Every teacher kno,vs, further, how important it is to give students vivid and exact examples of every point he makes;

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most of the time, students can't get the point until they see it in an image taken from their own bodily experience. Our minds work most comfortably through and with our senses, or at least through sense images stored up in memory and imagination. As we are, so also are our minds: embodied. Not, of course, as ghosts in a machi�e; rather, as vitality in a spirited horse, as light in a blazing fire, as the point in a well­ shaped joke, as the attentive questioning in a student's eyes. We do not know our own mind naked, pure, apart from its embodiment in the engagement of our intelligent activities with their objects. For this reason, one of the most fruitful arenas in which human knowing of an everyday kind can be reflected upon in full exercise, as it were, lies in the face-to-face knowing in which one human being learns that he must respect, dare not harm, must pay honor to another. When we allow our­ selves to be in the presence of another, to be attentive to her, and to regard her as we would be regarded, we become poignantly aware of the vulnerability that plays across her face. We experience a commandment: "Thou shalt not strike, thou shalt not harm." Perhaps deeper, we are commanded: "Respect." More strongly yet, the face of the other says to us, "Submit to my dignity." We may not heed these imperatives; we may violate them. What we cannot deny, as Emmanuel Levinas points out, is the truth they express. In this way, we experience, we gain insight into, we form the virtually un­ conditioned judgment, that every other human being com­ mands respect. One does not have to have a doctorate in philosophy to know this. This knowing is the basis of all so­ cial life, even in a den of thieves. Before the commandment expressed by the living visage of another of our kind, we sense both our humility and the other's nobility. The human visage demands of us deference, perhaps even the sacrifice of our life (like the young man diving into the dark waters of a Louisiana bayou to pull strang-

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ers through the windows of a submerged train car). The faces of others tell us that we cannot "know" them in the sense of willfully submitting them to manipulation as means for our own ends. We cannot "know" them in the sense of imagin­ ing that they are unfree, dense, exhaustible, and discardable, like inanimate things. In their dignity, mystery lies. In each lies a secret, a sacredness, a touch of unknowability: signs that each is a free agent of her own destiny. In honoring others, we learn to honor ourselves. "Know thyselfl" turns out to mean: "Know at least one other-Be attentive to an­ other. Be respectful." Knowing another person well is no simple thing. "Sensitivity training" doesn't get at it. You have either experienced know­ ing another well, knowing her character, knowing what to ex­ pect of her, knowing what she could not possibly have done-or you haven't. If you have, you know that knowing another is not like seeing with your eyes and not, either, like that method of experiment and action that pragm atists write of, that ability to predict and to control that scientists and aerospace engineers practice. Knowing another demands that you bring into exer­ cise every capacity you have for self-restraint, attentiveness, imagi­ nation, sympathy, connaturality, discrimination, the discern1nent of nuance and of the subtle motions of the soul, and respect for what is other than yourself. It demands a sum1noning up of your full powers of insight and exact judgm ent, the full a,vaken­ ing of yourself as subject, different fro1n the other and yet also self-possessed. It also requires that you refuse 1nerely to objec­ tify the other-that is, to distance yourself from and imagine yourself superior to the other. To grasp the extent to ,vhich to know another is not like "seeing" with the eye, but a far more co1nplex activity, is an i1nportant step in inquiry into belief and unbelief. For believ­ ers say that they "kno,v God," if not exactly as they know another, then at least more like that than like any other kind

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of knowing. It is not so much that they know that God exists ( or that the proposition "God exists" is true) as that they know God. The proposition that He exists .is merely analytically included in that knowing. In the order of time, one does not first know that God exists and then come to know God. On the contrary, one comes to know tha� God in fact exists only after one has come to know God. One may have heard others speak of God, but one tends to discount these accounts until one actually comes to know God for oneself. That, at least, is the usual case. In English, unfortunately ( or perhaps fortunately), we use the same verb "to know" both for knowing persons and for knowing propositions. In French, one says la connaissance de Dieu for the first knowing and le science de Dieu for the second.John Henry Newman has distinguished the two different kinds of knowing in something close to plain English as "real assents" and "notional assents." Judg­ ments of the notional sort are made with detachment be­ cause of their relative simplicity. Scientific judgments, for example, are intended to be replicated by any observer competent to perform the prescribed methodical steps. Of course, even these judgments require the knower to become aware of being awake, attentive, and ready to work-not distracted, or careless, or unfit. But the empha­ sis properly falls on getting straight on definitions, proce­ dures, and operations to be performed; on notional clarity. By contrast, real assents depend far more on the many competencies of the knower acquired through attention to the broad experiences of living. The knower's entire grip on reality is at risk in such judgments. Among our acquaintances, we cherish those whose judgments are more often than not on the mark about how events will actually turn out. These are the sort of persons whose advice we most value, who seem most "in touch with reality."

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Real judgments demand personal commitment in two senses: First, a commitment of all one's instincts, memories, insights, and sense of reality to a judgment about what is true and enduring in the flux of impressions (as when some­ one asks you, "What do you think is act�1ally going on in the department [White House, health care reform, etc.]?"); sec­ ond, a commitment of one's being and action to that truth. Notional judgments place at risk only one's intellectual acu­ ity at the moment, and even if one errs it is fairly easy to recover without impugning one's own character or even ba­ sic intelligence. Real judgments place at risk one's own real­ ism, and therefore one's habits and character. Who we are is determined by our real assents. By our judgments and our decisions to act on them, we make ourselves ,vho we are. Knowing in any field is an activity wholly different from mere sentimentality. Its opposites are self-deception and il­ lusion. Its thirst is to grasp fearle�sly what evidence com­ mands, to honor it, and to hold to it at any price. Kno,ving is not an act that we experience constantly; it is an act quite thrilling to exercise, since it demands that, regarding mat­ ters commensurate with our abilities, we rise up to our full powers of alertness, attention, insight, and judgment. Al­ though (or perhaps because) it is surrounded by a vast dark­ ness of ignorance, knowing is an act worth exercising frequently, every day, day after day. Indeed, those ,vho do not exercise it frequently are properly called stupid. Further, in those kinds of kno,ving that issue in actions that affect other persons, we necessarily 1nakejudgments that are not only true or false, brilliant or stupid, but good (in some measure) or (in sotne 1neasure) evil. For not to give unto others the respect that their being demands is not only to miss the truth but to do harm. To the extent that we are made for truth, and held to judgment by truth, to fail in that way is not only to injure others but also to injure ourselves.

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Perhaps I have said enough to show how this book's explo­ ration into the no-man's-land that lies between those who know God and those who do not anticipated Rorty's revolt against the false objectivity of the Enlightenment. But I would like to add one thing more, in order to tie in Belief and Unbe­ lief with one of my later books, The Experience of Nothingness ( 1 970). One of the most ironical characteristics of those who, like Professor Rorty, call themselves nihilists is that they write books. They claim to believe in nothingness, a bedlam in which truth cannot be distinguished from nontruth, a swirl­ ing sea of impressions and events for which there is neither top nor bottom, foundation nor direction, but only contin­ gency, accident, hazard, idiotspeak, and randomness all the way down. And yet they dedicate their days, their beautiful days of bright October skies with the sun streaming through the yellow and red leaves of maples and oaks on campus with a glory that makes one's heart shout-they dedicate such days, and many others, to sitting at their writing machines pecking away messages for people in remote climes and times, in full faith that there will be enough rightness about things for those distant others to understand exactly what they are . saying. They are men and women of faith, our nihilists. They have a stronger sense of truth than they let on. They value-they do value, you can see them do it-the courage it takes to sit on one's bottom for hours typing, risking hemorrhoids and worse, fighting off stiff necks and weary wrists and sore backs, rubbing one's eyes to remove the ache and to change focus for a moment's blessed relief. All this they do, craving praise for their honesty (and no doubt their solidarity with others), in a world which, as they have elsewhere shown, cares not a fig for their honesty; indeed, permits no possibility of such a thing (nor of its opposite, either).

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In other words, the moral and intellectual requirements for being a practicing nihilist, as I have tried to show both here and in The Experience of Nothingness, are many. They in­ clude powerful prior commitments to honesty, courage, a sense of community (without which one would not write), and a decision to act (even by writing, a painful labor). Thus, in the prior moral commitments they must make, not even unbelievers, not even nihilists, not even ironists, are altogether different from those who know God. Moreover, not even those who know God ever see God. God (as those who know Him report) is beyond every image that our imaginations can form and any notion that our pow­ ers of conceptualization can muster. So those who do not see God may, if they wish, take cold co1nfort from the fact that those who do know God are also, like them, left in dark­ ness and alone, with no one (so it often happens) to comfort them. What unbelievers cannot do is pretend that they are the brave ones, going out courageously into that cold night, raging against the dying of the light. What have they got to rage against, if there is no God? Stupid it is to rage against a fact: that there is only night. By contrast, plaints against God make sense. Those ,vho know God, even when God is silent and does not appear, might seem to have heartfelt poetry on their side, as indeed they do, in the Psalms. (He made us for Himself, yet aban­ dons us in impenetrable darkness.) Plaints against nothing­ ness are purely tnaudlin. (No one 1nade us, no one o,ves us anything, we are not ,vorth a plaint.) Yet, the believer, though he has poignancy on his side, finds scant comfort in the dark­ ness that belongs to him even more than to the nonbeliever. Trouble is, so1ne unbelievers want it both ways. And so do so1ne believers. In my experience, both get the darkness. Frotn studying closely St. Therese of Lisieux, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, certain Zen masters, and many others, I

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am confident that my experience is not untypical. Let others report about, and analyze, other experiences. This is what I have learned: serious believers and serious unbelievers expe­ rience a common darkness, even when they interpret i t differently. Finally, it is important for me to point out that in this book I am not writing aboutJewish or Christian faith. True enough, even atheists in our culture tend to be Jewish or Christian atheists; the God they rej ect is one they have learned to think about (however badly or well) in terms of a specific cultural history. But I am not writing here about Jewish and Christian faith . That is another (and more important) matter, but not for this time or place. I am raising a question that, experi­ ence shows, grips many people even if they have (as yet) no interest in becoming Christians or Je,vs; and many Christians and Jews, even if they have (as yet) no interest in becoming atheists or agnostics. There is something that many such people just want to know, as far as intelligence will take them. That question is, What can we know about what our iden­ tity as intelligent subj ects portends? Does it mean that we participate in, and may converse with, Another? Or does our identity offer no such clue at all, and means nothing what­ ever about anything at all? How should we interpret who we are, under these stars, with the wind on our faces? Michael Novak Washington, D.C. November 1, 1 993

Belief and Unbelief

PREFACE TO THE 1 986 EDITION

The customs agent at JFK eyed me quizzically after studying my papers . Customs agents are intimidating. " You the writer? " he finally asked . He was about thirty . "Belief and Unbelief? I h ad to read it in college . Good book . '' Over the years, at receptions and chance encounters · and by letter, many strangers have similarly mentioned the book . It is twenty years now since Belief and Unbelief first appeared . Of all my books, it may h ave reached the greatest number of readers . It is a j oy to see it coming back into print . While it is not my first book, it was my first sustained philosophic state­ ment . It signalled the " philosophy of self-knowledge " I h ave been developing since . In the classic dichotomy between the head and the heart- ' ' the heart h as its reasons that the reason knows not of ' (Pascal)-my temperament has always inclined me to the side of the heart, against narrow rationalism . On the other h and, 3

4 Preface to the 1986 Edition

my deepest antipathy ( of the sort one has against one ' s own most powerful temptations) is against romanticism . At least from the time in college when I read Jacques Maritain ' s Creative Intuition in A rt and Poetry, I knew I wished to push intellect as far into the reaches of the ' ' heart ' ' as I could . Clearly , it seemed to me , there is " reason " in our histories, our cultures, our habits of the heart , our imaginations, our judgments . This " reaso n" i s subtle , difficult to discern , more difficult still to articulate . But it richly rewards investigation and patient disentanglement . I wrote Belief and Unbelief as a graduate student at Harvard . (Incidentally, it is not such a good idea to publish books while still a graduate student . ) Belief and Unbelief was my fourth book , after A New Generation, The Open Church, and the editing of The Ex­ perience of Marriage. And by that time , I was already in the midst of my own fourth " cultural shock . " The first , so to speak , was my family ' s move while I was a child from the Slovak, Croatian , Hungarian and other ethnic neighborhoods of M orrellville to the suburb of Southmont in Johnstown , Pennsylvania-into a mostly affluent Protestant world . (In 1 944 , we then moved to rural Indiana, Penn ­ sylvania, and in 1 946 to highly urban McKeesport , Penn ­ sylvania, just a trolley ride to Forbes Field, the museums, the galleries , and the Light Opera of Pittsburgh . ) The second was an almost monastic ' ' formation ' ' among my cherished col­ leagues in the C ongregation of Holy Cross , at Notre Dame, In­ diana , and at Stonehill C ollege in Massachusetts ( 1 94 7- 56) . The third was two years of study in Italy, at the Gregorian University in Rome . The fourth was the philosophy depart ­ ment , and later the Divinity School , at Harvard, where I studied the History and Philosophy of Religion ( 1 960- 1 965) . In each of these worlds , the ' ' horizon, ' ' the worldview , the sense of reality , and the dominant symbols and styles of discourse were quite different . In each there were attractive and intelligent people . How could they think , and live , so different-

Preface to the 1 986 Edition 5

ly? And yet clearly they did . They each laughed at quite dif­ ferent j okes, poking fun at the worlds of the others. Trying to " translate " in my own heart and mind from one of these worlds into the languages of the others fascinated me . Pluralism was my daily sustenance . I n Belief and Unbelief, I called my project a ' ' philosophy of self­ knowledge " and " intelligent subjectivity . " It was an attempt to push intelligence and articulation ( the head) as far as I could in­ to the stuff of what so many philosophers simply set aside as " subjectivity " ( the heart) . I despised the distinction, common in H arvard philosophy those days, between the ' ' e1notive ' ' and the " cognitive . " That distinction was quite false to my own ex. penence . During my first interview in the department of philosophy at Harvard, the acting chairman expressed pleasure that I intend­ ed to concentrate upon epistemology and the philosophy of God, especially the latter. " We don ' t often get students in­ terested in that these days, " he said , and with a smile : ' ' Especially any who actually believe in God . '' An articulate and cheerful atheist, who loved David Hume, he became one of my best friends there . Meanwhile, during twelve years of almost monastic life in the seminary, I had learned quite a lot about darkness, the desert, the emptiness, in which those who pray for long hours are com­ monly abandoned . You ng I may have been , but by the end no novice . Spiritually, I had long been much tried . Most of Belief and Unbelief had been written before the murder of my younger brother Dick, a missionary of the Congregation of Holy C ross in Dacca (then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) on january 1 6 , 1 964 . He was twenty-eight, much loved in Dac­ ca and popular at the U niversity where he was the only Chris­ tian studying Islam in Arabic, which he hoped to make his lifelong speciality . He was killed with knives by young river pirates during Hindu-Muslim riots . H is body was never of­ ficially found . Du ring those days , the river was full of bodies and the vultures fcasted .

6 Preface to the 1986 Edition

It would be wrong to think Dick ' s death precipitated this book. On the contrary, it forced me in re - writing it to take every line seriously . I certainly did not feel like believing in God during that long period, before and after . I n the original [ Preface] written in December, 1 964, I wrote words that are still full of power for me : I only know that my salvation lies in fidelity to conscience , in fidelity to my work , in fidelity to those I love , in whatever contribution I can make toward diminishing the amount of suffering in this world . I do not think about the end ; I attend to each task at its appointed time . If, occa­ sionally , I raise my heart in prayer, it is to no God I can see , or hear, or feel. It is to a God in as cold and obscure a polar night as any nonbeliever has known . God is no " ex­ tra" in my life . My nose is at my task . With a naked belief I believe that such fidelity is not in vain , not a mere spark of sense in a suffocating universe , but the key and impor­ tant fact within man ' s range of knowledge . I am prepared to admit that my belief may be wrong; I set no special store by it . My obligation is to be faithful to my cons­ cience , and I do not expect that I would hesitate an instant once it was clear to me that atheism is a more consistent human policy . A conscience faithful till death is of more importance than being on a certain side , whether of belief or unbelief. Both among the great authors I have read , and among outstan­ ding human beings I have come to know , I have often admired the fidelity to conscience of some who describe themselves as atheists . In the darkness often experienced in my own life of belief, I came to see many similarities to what they seemed to be experiencing. U nder certain conditions , in the quality of ex-

Preface to the 1986 Edition 1

perience they engender, belief and unbelief are quite close . One should not, I think, try to " score p oints. " Still, my own interpretation of human experience, even more practiced in 1 985 than it was in 1 964, is that it is enclosed within a perso n - to - person relationship with the Source of all thin gs, although in darkness and ( often enough) in aridity . This in­ stinct, conviction, and tested way of living inclines me to believe both that God is ever present to us and that between those who know this and those who do not there may be a remarkable kin­ ship of the human spirit, at least when both are faith ful to the sources of honesty, courage, and community within them . I n practice, the line between belief and u nbelief is not-need not be-a dividing line . It is often another sort of line, a razor's edge in the night that surrounds us, a line of mutual support, to which persons of good will and inner urgency often repair for reinforcement . In this, there is only a seemin g paradox . I would not want to change places with the unbeliever; belief is such that it issues, naturally, in thanksgiving. Yet I do not wish to forget the night. Later, I returned to the subject of the philosophy of God in several essays collected in A Time to Build ( 1 96 7) and from a more existentialist point of view (parallel to much in Nietzsche, Sartre and C amus) in The Experience of Nothingness ( 1 9 70) . The philosophy of approaches to God is a subject that one must ad­ dress differently in every decade of one's life, as one lives, observes, grows. It is not a subject for " mind " narrowly con­ strued ; it engages the intellect in every one of its dimensions and immersions in experience . Meanwhile, I was beginnin g to explore the activities o f in ­ telligence in other realms o f ' ' subjectivity . '' Ascent of the Moun­ tain, Flight of the Dove ( 1 97 1 ) gave me some excellent tools for analysis-special definitions of myth , story, symbol, and horizon . These helped me greatly in my books on ethnicity (The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, 1 972) ; o n the symbolic dimensions of the U . S . presidency (Choosing our King, 1 974) ; on the " natural religion " embodied in the liturgies of sport ( The joy of

8 Preface to the 1986 Edition

Sports, 1 9 7 6) ; and in telling one of the stories of " my people , " the immigrant miners studied in The Guns of Lattimer ( 1 9 78) . They have also been of powerful use in my most recent explora­ tions of the spiritual meaning of the democratic capitalist political economy . I n this sense, Belief and Unbelief has served me well, just as I hoped it would when I completed its manuscript in late 1 964 . Intellectually, it marked out for me five major traditions which I have continued to mine for their treasures: the C atholic tradi­ tion of Aristotle-Aquinas- Newman-Lonergan ; European ex­ istentialism, personalism, and phenomenology ; American thought, especially Peirce, James and Niebuhr; and-to a lesser, but helpful extent-the British tradition of analysis, which predominated at Harvard . Recognizing limitations I observed in writing Belief and Unbelief, I next set myself to reading widely in anthropology, sociology and political theory (Lasswell, notably), for help in dealing with symbol, story, and myth . That was an obvious necessity . Throughout this long process I rediscovered the " liberal" and " Whig" tradition, via Hayek ' s " Postscript " in The Constitution of Liberty: not only " the first Whig, " St . Thomas Aquinas, but Adam Smith , Edmund Burke, Lord Acton and others. So I came home again . So, too, re-reading Belief and Unbelief is like " going home again, " returning to origins. I like where I began, and hope the reader finds in it the pleasures, both of head and heart, it has yielded me . That is where ,vriter and reader meet : in C ardinal Newman ' s motto, Cor ad cor loquitur: intelligent subj ectivity to intelligent subjectivity . - Michael Novak June, 1 985

PREFACE

"Atheism is a cruel and long-range affair," Jean-Paul Sartre ,vrites in Tbe Words. "I think I've carried it through." 1 But now that he has carried his project through, ho,v does his state of mind differ from a believer's? Is atheism a more truthful, more human project? Ho,v does one answer such questions, faced with the prospect of a single, short life which it is necessary to live well? One does not want to misconceive the nature of life; one does not want to choose badly. What direction shall one take? In the end one's decision springs from, and determines, who one is. An inquiry preceding such a decision requires clarity about one's starting place. I ,vas born a Catholic, and many times that fact has prompted me to alternate between gratitude and despair: gratitude because I am quite sure that if I had not been born a Catholic I would scarcely have found my way into the Church. Like a certain French philosopher, I would have thought of it as "that dunghill." I have often felt despair because God came to me too easily, before I had a chance, entering my blood and bones through my mother's milk. It might have been easier to decide freely whether to believe or to disbelieve if I had been born an atheist. There are many things in the atheistic position that I envy, and struggle to make my own. But always there have been contrary experiences and reflections that made it impossible for me to become an atheist conscientiously. The reflections which preoccupied my mind as I labored to complete this inquiry in the summer of 1 9 64 concerned the Negro 9

10

Preface

revolution in America, the workings of the Second Vatican Coun­ cil in Rome the preceding autumn, and the assassination of President Kennedy. The first of these impressed upon me with great clarity how irrelevant religion can be in the daily struggles of men for compassion and justice. Many who bore the brunt of the racial struggle, giving of their blood and their integrity of life and limb, had no need of religious inspiration. What did they lack, these moralists and doers, that religious men might boast? The preceding autumn had brought me a profound sense of the human weakness of the Catholic Church, assembled in Council. Such reflections were not new to me, but they struck me with great, deep, steady force. Some few men who still wield great intellectual and spiritual leadership in the Church appeared to be puny, often benighted, and certainly limited human beings. The degree to which they are prisoners of certain historic forms, ceremonials, patterns of judgment, and aspirations could not escape an honest eye. Why should one's salvation be bound up with men of such inconsiderable stature, with minds and spirits that offer so little to admire? There were many outstanding and attractive men in Rome, to be sure. But the quality of those few who had for so long held so much power in the Church de­ pressed me more than the promise held out by the many. If the leadership of the Church had been involved in such mediocrity for several generations, why should one take it seriously, or commit one's life to it? I returned from Rome to the United States in January, 1 9 64, weary and exhausted by the strain of meeting a close deadline on my report upon the Council. The news that met me immediately upon arrival was that my younger brother, a priest in Pakistan, was mi�ing in the violent riots near Dacca, and was presumed dead. I knew he was dead. As the reports became more definite, the details were only crueler than I had expected. He had been challenged by several thugs, for no apparent reason, was stabbed

Preface

11

several times, and his body either left to pariah dogs or buried secretly and irretrievably. His clothing, glasses, and bicycle were later found; there was reason to believe that officials knew the fate of the corpse but refused to reveal it. The murder was senseless. It seemed as useless as that of President Kennedy, which had preceded· it by exactly eight weeks. It was not, however, the emotional shock but a cumula­ tive weariness that oppressed me. I became aware of human fragility, the need for absolute reliance upon conscience and determination, the uselessness of illusions, props, or "extra" or "super" faiths. We are what we are, we do what we do. It is not at all certain that it makes any difference to our identity whether there is a God, a heaven, and all the so-useless parapher­ nalia of a church. Without these things, some men do as well as others do who have them. And even if one has them, they are of no comfort when pure and naked faith before an in­ scrutable God is called for. Masses for the dead are small consola­ tion when one is numb and all the patterns of security have been fractured. They mean something only if there is a God. But if there is, his ways are so foreign to men's that the visible liturgy of men is next to meaningless unless one already believes. And that is the very point in question. In any case, when one's faith has been beaten and winnowed, and when one finds oneself saying, not knowing how, "Though he will slay me, yet will I love him," then the project of belief seems to be as cruel and long-range as Sartre has found unbelief to be. And one is left with the same practical, daily necessities as Sartre. There is no comfort in the heart, no oil upon the fore­ head, or ointment on one's wounds. There is no vision of a heaven nor any haven of hope. One lowers one's head, unfeeling, and does what one has to do. What is there to do but go on, seeing a little more clearly, having fewer illusions, knowing better the limited jobs one has to do? Sartre describes the task of writing in terms one can only accept: "It's a habit, and besides,

12

Preface

it's my profession. For a long time, I took my pen for a S\vord; I now lmow we're powerless. No matter. I ,vrite and will keep writing books . . . my sole concern has been to save myself . . . nothing in my hands, nothing up my sleeves-by ,vork and , faith. ,2 My brother, at twenty-eight, was the first priest to study Arabian philosophy at Dacca University, after generations of Christian and Moslem isolation. Many Moslems ,vere delighted by his interest, and he himself ,vas beginning to look at Christi­ anity with Eastern eyes. For a moment the future seemed to be opening. Yet it is futile to count on success in history. I no,v see that there is nothing to do but ,vork. One must do one's best, unable to control the consequences or set the limits of one's fate. Like Sartre, I "relegate salvation to the proproom," not understanding in the least what is meant by the ,vord. Yet, unlike him, I do not call salvation "impossible." It is simply that I do not understand God, nor the ,vay in ,vhich he ,vor ks. Per­ haps there is a heaven, and I will see my brother, together ,vith his murderers. That is beyond my ken. I only lmov, that my salvation lies in fidelity to conscience, in fidelity to my ,vork, in fidelity to those I love, in whatever contribution I can make toward diminishing the amount of suffering in this ,vorld. I do not think about the end; I attend to each task at its appointed time. If, occasionally, I raise my heart in prayer, it is to no God I can see, or hear, or feel. It is to a God in as cold and obscure a polar night as any nonbeliever has kno,vn. God is no "extra" in my life. My nose is at my tasks. With a naked belief I believe that such fidelity is not in vain, not a mere spark of sense in a suffocating universe, but the key and in1portant fact ,vithin man's range of knowledge. I am prepared to admit that my belief may be ,vrong; I set no special store by it. My obligation is to be faithful to my conscience, and I do not expect that I would hesitate an instant once it was clear to me that atheism is a more consistent human policy. A conscience faithful till death is of

Preface

13

more importance than being on a certain side, whether of belief or unbelief. A word about this inquiry: the attempt to complete it has met countless interruptions. At least ten ti1nes more pages than here appear have been written and discarded, since the first draft made in 1 960. I ,vish the final product showed a precision and a polish j ustifying the several rewritings. But I am afraid the final draft is even more different from the one preceding it than the iatter ,vas fro1n its predecessor. The manner of pro­ ceeding, perhaps, has improved if the finish of the prose has not. Finally, I could not have completed this book without the severe, bracing, and helpful criticisms of Richard Roelofs of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Rochester. Over the years many other friends have helped me correct mis­ takes or forced n1e to raise further questions-Daniel Callahan and David Burrell especially. My wife Karen suffered with me through long summers spent mainly indoors at ,vork on this book. Valentine Rice, the Reverend Frederick Crowe, S.J ., Robert Schrader, Thomas Tymoczko, and several others read the manuscript and made useful suggestions. Mrs. Muriel Goodridge, Mrs. Patricia Thomp­ son, and Miss Ann Murphy helped with typing, bibliography, and related tasks. MICHAEL NovAK

Cambridge , Massachusetts December, 1 964

INTROD UCTION: A DIALECTICAL INQ UIRY 1 . Toward Civil Conversation

This book is an attempt to work out some of the problems of self-identity, and some of the problems of belief and unbelief. The roots of the two sets of problems are entangled. For in deciding who one is, one relates oneself to others, to the world, and to God. If there is a God, one approach to human life is fitting. If there is not a God, another approach makes its demands. But there seem to be many men today-and their numbers con­ stantly increase-who both believe and disbelieve, who are not agnostics but who recognize in their hearts a divided allegiance. Through all their busy activities for the betterment of men, they keep "an open mind" regarding a power or an intelligence they do not dare to call "God." "Ah, mon cher," Albert Camus has written, "for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style. Besides, that word has lost its meaning. . . . Take our moral philosophers, for instance, so serious, loving their neighbor and all the rest-nothing distin­ guishes them from Christians, except that they don't preach in churches. " 1 Among such nonbelievers, the question of God has not been dismissed. Among such believers, doubts are persistent. Many men today are divided men, if not in their commitments yet nevertheless in their intellectual theories. Who can say, to his

16

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

o,vn or anyone's satisfaction, what it is thoroughly to believe? or thoroughly to disbelieve? Most of us borro,v our values ,vhere ,ve find them, since a thorough atheistic humanism has not yet been worked out. Yet it is impossible for one who believes in God to ,vork in the intellectual ,vorld of the United States ,vithout becon1ing a,vare that among intellectuals the bias of the age leans in quite the opposite direction. A great many of one's philosophical as­ sociates, and certainly the most articulate , are agnostics or atheists. 2 One need not drift ,vith the stream, of course. Those ,vho believe in God are no,v, by a ne,v tum of the conventional ,visdom, the chief bearers of the tradition of dissent. But ,vhy does one believe? What is the basis of one's belief, its root and its dynamic? And ,vhat prevents one from j oining the nun1bers of those who have ceased to believe? These questions are not easy to ans,ver, not only because they deal ,vith matters difficult in themselves, but because the language of science and comn1on sense systematically excludes reference to experiences fundan1ental to belief, and because the traditional language of our religious culture is no,v bankrupt. The aim of the present inqui ry, however, is not so much to propose a ne,v vocabulary for belief, ho,vever seriously that task requires to be done, as to focus attention upon the direction from which that vocabulary must spring. The contribution this study hopes to n1ake, then, is: ( 1 ) to have staked out for further inquiries a fruitful vein of human experience; and, more specifically, ( 2 ) to have begun the hard ,vork of elucidating those experiences of human intellectual life in ,vhich belief in God is rooted; that is, the experiences of "intelligent subj ectivity." The phrase "intelligent subj ectivity" represents the central point of this book. Nevertheless, to offer a definition of it here ,vould altnost surely pron1pt the reader to misunderstand it. For to call attention to intelligent subjectivity is not to call attention to a new concept, a ne,v formula, a ne,v use of words, which

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

17

once memorized has been mastered. It is to ask the reader to discover certain facets of his inquiring, thinking, and knowing that he has perhaps seldon1 reflected upon. It is to ask the reader to attend to his own intellectual activities-for example, as he reads the pages of this inquiry. Our study, then, is not an inqui ry into the use of the ,vords "intelligent subjectivity," nor into the meaning of the concept "intelligent subjectivity." It is an exercise in using intelligent subjectivity. It is an inquiry into how the reader, and the writer, inquire. It is an inqui ry into the real cognitional life of the reader, and of the writer. At the end of the inquiry, each should know more about hi1nself, and not merely have added a ne,v phrase to his vocabulary. By "subjectivity," then, I mean to call attention to what the reader-and the writer-does, as a conscious subject rather than as an object. I mean to call attention to those experiences of personal life ,vhich cannot, technically, be observed, either by others or by oneself. For to observe is to regard an object, and the self as subject is not to be discovered as an obj ect is dis­ covered. The experiences which we have of ourselves as subjects emerge in our awareness without our looking for them or at them. They are not observed, although they may upon demand be adverted to and analyzed. By "intelligent" I wish to emphasize that these experiences of the subj ect are not emotional, nor "of the heart"; rather, they are proper to our intellectual life. I have been anxious to avoid as much as possible the fashionable new language of "encounter" or of "I-thou," wishing instead to work out a more e1npirical and intellectualist approach to belief. By focusing attention on in­ telligent subjectivity, then, I hope to have succeeded in calling attention to an obvious part of our experience which is properly described neither as emotive nor as cognitive, in the sense that present usage generally ascribes to these words. Nevertheless, this inqui ry is addressed to the general reader rather than to the professional philosopher-to that general reader

18

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

who has ever been the lifeblood of Anglo-American philosophy. The professionals, I hope, will look kindly on my efforts to attain clarity in a neglected and difficult area of discussion, and find some of my emphases or distinctions of interest. But it was ever the lay reader whom I tried to keep in mind as I prepared the final draft, whose interest in the decision between belief and unbelief may be presumed to be as keen as my own. I have not the faintest hope of convincing anybody, one way or the other, and even less of solving all the technical problems of both belief and unbelief from a philosophical and ethical point of view. But if this inquiry has singled out, in intelligent subjectivity, a fruitful and perhaps the basic area of disagreement, then it may perhaps have opened a way for believers and nonbelievers to speak seri­ ously and civilly with one another. For as matters now stand, the one word one does not use in serious conversation ,vithout up­ setting someone is "God"-unless in the context the word has been domesticated and rendered by mutual agreement rather meaningless.

2. The Attraction of Atheism Atheism is an attractive policy of life; but is it consistent with intelligence and love? 3 There is something compelling in the vision of Prometheus, chained to rocks, defying the gods. It is satisfying sometimes to rage openly-"Do not go gentle into that good night." The indifference of the Anglo-American pragmatist is also attractive; although his indifference to religion is a marvel a believer can but envy from afar and practice only upon occa­ sion. A believer might sometime enjoy the inner conviction, pres­ ently appropriated by the nonbeliever, that he is deciding bravely who he is and what he shall be for the sixty years or so of con­ sciousness allotted him on earth. He might like to share in the '1onesty, courage, and integrity which in our time the nonbeliever

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

19

attributes only to himself. He is sometimes attracted by the myth that spiritually men are isolated individuals. For then he would have no Church to carry on his back, and would not feel each of the historical sins of the Church as a needle driven into his flesh. Perhaps there is no God at all in the deep point of his con­ sciousness. Perhaps a habit of mind not ' yet uprooted deceives him. Going to Church or saying "Lord ! " is no guarantee that belief resides at the core of one's spirit. What is the guarantee? A believer tries to imagine himself an atheist. But always, when he has as a model an atheist whom he admires-M. Sartre , or even more, M. Camus-for a few days he has their emptiness, their polar night. And then it occurs to him, that that same night is the God he had fled. In M. Sartre and in M. Camus, he finds the image of what he wants to be. He does as they do-except that he does not find it effective, so far as God is concerned. Thus, he keeps finding that after all he does believe in God. Sometimes he is even certain that he knows him, that he loves him. Do not ask him how; there is no proof. He sits here under a lamp, in August, 1 964, pen in hand. He is sure : there it is. And yet it is only partly his serenity that tells him he believes; it is even more his inability to believe any countervailing arguments in the face of that serenity. No atheist he has ever read has helped him cut the roots of his belief in God. The gods they have de­ stroyed have sometimes startled him by the noise of their crum­ bling. But he was ever sure these were not God. "Nietzsche is dead" he has seen scrawled in crayon upon a billboard; " (signed) God." Many a believer feels out of step with others in his generation. He neither believes with the believers, nor disbelieves with the atheists. He is not an agnostic ; it is not fear nor hesitation that inhibits him. He goes on writing, and reflecting . His happiness, and his salvation, lie in his work. If he is true to his conscience, he will be "saved," one way or the other. But whether that "salvation" will usher him into the Face of

20

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

God he does not know. Will there be silence? Nothing at all? What could a God possibly be like? Had he not been born a believer perhaps such questions ,vould not bother him. The "lin­ guistic therapy" offercd by some philosophers, in any case, has failed to cure him. Their scalpels and their tiny lights do not touch the area of intelligence in ,vhich his questions breed. They seem to speak a sirnpler, more puritan language than he has ever heard. They have too long spoken of God as someone else's problem, a distant memory, a disease. The origin of his difficulties lies doubtless in a decision made long ago to live bet,veen two ,vorlds, not as one in doubt, but as one to ,vhom the usual resources of comfort on both sides have been closed. The securities of believers are easily unmasked by nonbelievers; and those of nonbelief, by believers. The be­ liever ren1ains in the part of his conscience ,vhere belief and unbelief ,var. Fidelity to conscience is his comfort, full of illu­ sions and infidelities, yet self-corrective. Such fidelity does not lead decisively to "truth" or "error." He is a practicing believer, in many ,vays an enthusiastic believer, in all '\Vays his o,vn kind of believer. Yet he feels spiritually far closer to men like Albert Camus than to many a bishop and theologian. And that closeness establishes the problem to be examined in this book. Ho,v does unbelief differ from belief? In each man, elements of both ren1ain. It is a legitimate prayer for a believer to say, "Lord, help 1ny unbelief." And it is becoming common to hear an unbeliever cautiously adn1it: "Son1e things arc as if there ,vcre a God." In our generation there appears to be a crisis of unbelief, as years ago there ,vas a crisis of belief. The unbeliever speaks of his temptation to succumb to "a failure of nerve." Young people, brought up by nonbelieving parents, are raising again the question of God, just as their parents, brought up by believing parents, cleansed their minds of it. On the other hand, many young believers, the first in their families to receive a college education, or at least to take education seriously, are

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

21

tempted by nonbelief. Scandalized and repelled by the institu­ tional church and by a ,vorld vie,v fashioned in a bygone age, they encounter too few authentic believers who, furthermore, can understand their restlessness. They admire and emulate the life of the good nonbeliever, the secular saint. Belief and unbelief -the double attraction of our age. The n1ore one has lost one's illusions-the more, St. John of the Cross ,vould say, one's faith advances frorn the human tokens of faith to the Uncreated, whose mode of presence is en1ptiness and nothingness-the less impressive is the rhetoric of the churches, the causes and the comforts of institutional belief. Inevitably, one stands before God, and God is silent. He does not sho,v himself to any man in his lifetime, at least not in a ,vay that can influence the decision of one who does not believe. Unless one already believes, there is no "revelation." This is not a question of temporal priorities; it is a question of the structure of communion ,vith God. The instant a believer "sees," he at once "believes." Revelation and belief are mutually constitutive. In this sense belief and unbelief have nothing to say to one another. One sees, or one does not see. Being irreligious is like being tone-deaf or color-blind. But the question remains whether it is the religious or the irreligious who see correctly; perhaps the religious perceive what is not there. On the other hand, a man's o,vn experience of belief cannot be taken from him merely because others disbelieve. His obscure, inarticulable experience of God (if such he interprets it to be ) may have meaning only for him. But it may have a great deal of meaning for him-so much so that it out,veighs all challenges brought against it. In another area of discourse, the same situa­ tion arises. A group of philosophers with a certain limited theory about ,vhat it is to know may hold that a man cannot be certain that he perceives his own hand in front of his face. For anyone who accepts their idea of what knowing is, what certainty is, and what perception is, their position, however discommodious,

22

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

is unassailable. And yet it will always be open to a Mr. Green to say, as a harbinger of philosophical renewal: "But I do know that my hand is in front of my face and, confound it, I have no more certain knowledge than that." He may even say this before he is able to work out a new theory of knowing, of certainty, and of perception that will justify his saying it. A belief that one has experienced God counts only for the person who holds that belief; and there are many reasons ,vhy a man who cherishes such a belief should be on guard against illusions. The believer often fails to recognize that he needs a criterion for distinguishing in himself true belief as opposed to false; he needs a way of guarding against illusions; he needs a method of "testing the spirit." We can go even further : a man who believes he believes in God may require another belief to assure himself that he truly believes in God. For perhaps he has only inherited certain reflexes, certain emotional responses, cer­ tain conceptual frameworks, just as he once inherited a belief in Santa Claus that explained the mysteries of Christmas. Ho,v does one know that one's belief is truly in God, not merely in some habitual emotion or pattern of response? How does one con­ vince oneself that one in fact believes in God-merely by repeat­ ing the words and feeling a certain emotion? It is difficult for some persons to ascertain whether they have ever actually be­ lieved in God, though they have often performed religious acts and thought religious thougJJ.ts. It would be possible to object to M. Sartre, moreover, that he ' sells belief far too short. As his authentic atheism is a long-range proj ect, so is authentic belief. No one who has come to authentic belief, beyond earlier illusions, thinks of God as a railway con­ ductor who examines one's ticket, inquires about one's destination, and determines one's rjght to be met safely at the end of the line.4 The true God is no all-seeing eye scrutinizing one's secret conduct, like the projection of an overactive superego.5 If one believes in God-the true God and no created counterfeit-there is no consolation and no terror to be derived from dreams about

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

23

a watching, inquiring, waiting authority in a functionary's uni­ fonn. No such image manifests the content of authentic belief in God; no image whatsoever represents the object of such belief. It is for this reason that the believer can never be certain that his belief is accurate and true ; he must go out into a great night of his senses, imagination, and intelligence, and cling with naked adherence to a God he cannot clearly apprehend. The believer who thinks carefully about his belief has placed him­ self in a darkness as intense as that of the nonbeliever. His world view and his actions may be very different ( or they may not be) . But he is no more comforted or consoled than the non­ believer by the course of the world or of his life. He does not hold within his fist the mystery of human life. He is held in darkness by a hidden God. Stripped of all consolation-as he sometimes, even often, is­ the believer can only continue to do what he knows he must do. He tries to do it well. He can count on no assurance but that of his own conscience that he is on the right path in his work. He places one foot in front of the other as best he can. He eats but the crumbs of peace. If his peace sometimes surpasses under­ standing, so at other times does his emptiness. Yet it would be less than honest to say that the believer does not know a precious serenity, often hardly detectable beneath the stress of his poverty of spirit and his uncertainty. It is a serenity that comes from fidelity to the deepest instincts of his conscience, a fidelity in the acceptance of darkness and distress. It is a Yes to the universe and the unseen God, the Yes Ivan Karamazov could not say to both at once, a Yes even to the cruel and irrational suffering of human life. It is a reconciliation such as M. Sartre manifests, knowing that the world is not glibly changed: "I now know we're powerless. . . . Culture doesn't save anything or anyone, it doesn't justify." 6 It is the reconcilia­ tion of Matthew Arnold choosing Dante's "In His will, our peace," as the most noble line in human poetry. For the non­ believer, the reconciliation . may be sad or fatalistic. It may be

2 4 Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry merely an aged, wise refusal to rage like an adolescent against nonexistent gods. For the believer, the reconciliation is more than that. It brings a secret, light, restful j oy. It brings a serenity that measures blind power, cruelty, and indiscriminate suffering for what they are, often enough drains them to the bitter dregs, does not fathom ,vhy they are, yet continues to trust that they are the disguises of love. The believer need not forgive God for the suffering of this world ; like Job, he n1ay accuse God to his face. But he does not cease to remain faithful to the conscience ,vhich cautions him not, finally, to be dismayed. Belief in God, he knows, could be an empty illusion, even a crime against his own humanity. He knows the stakes. If he is faithful to his conscience and thinks clearly concerning what he is about, he has no place in his heart for complacency or that sweet pseudoreligious "peace" that sickens honest n1en. His belief is not unsteady-quite the con­ trary-though he kno,vs that the thread supporting it, ho,vever firmly, is so slender that in the night it cannot by any means be seen. This commitment to conscience keeps him faithful, and his daily experience may make his commitment as plausible as Sartre's experience made his, but there is no final ,vay short of death of proving who is right. Each man has but a single life, during ,vhich his choice may go either ,vay. That choice affects many things in his life, but one thing it does not affect: his reliance on his o,vn conscience (formed, no doubt, in friendship with other men) as his sole concern and comfort. No one has seen God.

3. The Task of Our Inquiry This book, we have said, is an attempt to work out some problems of self-identity. Its aim is to provide empirical tools for sorting out the elements of belief and unbelief in one's own

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

25

mind. (For how shall we begin to answer: Who am I? Is there a God? What shall I hope for? How shall I live? ) It hopes to provide tools for coming to grips with oneself. To this end, it must first try to create a more adequate language than we yet have at hand. Most of the pages in this book must thus be given to an inquiry into the recurrent experiences of •intelligent subjectivity. Such an inquiry is basic to a discussion of belief and unbelief, all the more so because it has long been neglected by philosophers. Serious belief in God, or serious unbelief, arise from decisions made consciously, intelligently, and for oneself. Such decisions are subjective in the sense that they alter the inner life of their subject. They alter his view of himself, his relations to others and to the ,vorld, and even his use of the common word "God." But such decisions are intelligent or rational in proportion as the subject can give reasons for the decision that he makes. Intelligent subjectivity, however, is operative in a very large range of human actions. There are many ways in which intel­ ligence influences our theoretical and our practical decisions, in the sciences, in politics, in friendship, in concrete pragmatic action. Our present philosophical skills do not allow us to articu­ late these influences clearly. Michael Polanyi, in Personal Knowl­ edge,7 has spelled out some of them. Bernard Lonergan, in Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,8 has spelled out others. But even those who have not wrestled with these large and difficult volumes are often aware, as they listen to the lectures or read the books of many scientists and philosophers, that more things are wrought by human intelligence than men can yet speak well about. Concerning intelligent consciousness, in short, we are still at a rudimentary stage of human speech. We make facile and unsatisfactory distinctions between "emotive" and "cognitive," "rational" and "irrational," "reasons of the reason" and "reasons of the heart," "obj ective" and "subjective" ; whereas, in fact, most of our important decisions in life-whether con-

26

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

cerning the canons and criteria of rationality in our sciences, or concerning the general criteria and concrete decisions of our practical actions-depend on the exercise of intelligent sub­ jectivity. At the root of the fundamental acts of human life lies the making of intelligent decisions. The ancient name for making such decisions well is wisdom. Philosophy is love of wisdom. It is also the study of intelligent subjectivity-not in the abstract, but in the actuality of one's own life. What good would it do one's self to be able to recite dis­ tinctions important to intelligent subjectivity, if one could not exercise its realities in one's own life? Philosophy is primarily self-knowledge. Perhaps that is why philosophers who imitate mathematicians, or physicists, or linguists, are tempted to think that philosophy no longer has a function, and why certain ways of "doing" philosophy seem to be like playing games with ,vords. At the root of one's inquiries into one's o,vn identity, however, the question of God inevitably arises. The fact of human con­ sciousness is a surprising fact in the universe as we now know it. A man is not like a tree, a planet, or a cat9 -a fact that once reflected upon brings the inquirer up short. There are ways, of course, to dissipate this surprise . One can study human con­ sciousness "objectively," "from the outside," to observe its effects in other men, to generalize about it in the abstract. Human consciousness seems then like any other phenomenon. But as soon as one becomes oneself again, aware of oneself, and content to reflect upon this awareness and its implications, the surprise­ and a new set of questions-emerges once again. Philosophy be­ gins with such surprises. It is difficult to regiment oneself as one would plant a tree or train a cat. It is difficult to condition oneself as thoroughly as one can condition mice in a cage. For there seems always to remain the option between this way of conditioning and that other way, between making a new effort and simply drifting with the present current. As soon as one gains insight into a pattern of conditioning already operative in one's life, one seems

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

17

to have the primary option of inventing another pattern, and then the further options ( i) of deciding whether to favor the old pattern or the new, and (ii) of making an effort to continue the old or to initiate the new. One contemporary way of getting at this sense of personal consciousness is through an analysis of the use of the first-person (and/or second-person) pronouns in our fanguage. To speak of a person present in one's group as "him," "her," "someone," or "it" is-in certain contexts of friendly discourse-an insult, if, for example, the implication is that the person referred to is an unwanted eavesdropper. Martin Buber 10 and Gabriel Marcel 11 have independently explored such human facts. William Poteat, 1 2 Ian T. Ramsey, 13 and Stuart Hampshire 14 have variously explored first-person language and other basic considerations in religious and ethical contexts. But a more direct way of coming to an understanding of one's own personal consciousness is by learning certain techniques of self-understanding which are subj ect to empirical controls and intersubjective testing. If a man says, for example, that he gets the point of a j oke-he laughed when everyone else did-we may ask him what he thought was funny. We come to know our­ selves, and to test our self-knowledge, as members of an articulate community, not as isolated consciousness. Thus introspection and public discourse fecundate one another. The original creative man is nourished by, goes beyond, and then, in turn, nourishes the ongoing life of his community. us A philosophy of the human subj ect, then, relies upon that self-understanding by which each person consciously appropri­ ates his own intelligent subj ectivity; and yet it is subj ect to public and empirical controls. The situation of such a philosophy exactly matches the situation of men: one can lead a man to freed om, but no one can make him free ; one can talk about intelligent subj ectivity, but only the subject can exercise it. There are public and empirical signposts, distinctions, and con­ trols that enable individual men to come to understand their own

28

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

intelligent subjectivity, but only the individual can come to exercise that understanding himself. It is possible, under satis­ factory conditions, for others to judge by a man's behavior whether he has made such a self-appropriation. 1 6 But there is no possible way for one man to make it for another. There are four activities experienced by the human subject ,vhich it seems crucial to be able to recognize in oneself, in their exercise and in their implications: awareness, insight, reflective consciousness, and the drive to understand. There are, of course, countless other experiences it would be well to recognize in one­ self, but these four will prove especially important. Moreover, it does not matter what names one gives these experiences; what matters is that they be recognized for what they are, by whatever names one calls them. I have chosen names as best I can, in the hope of accurate communication; but each reader must show generosity in looking for the experiences intended, and in not being blocked by objections he might have to my choice of names. Nowhere is communication more difficult than in the search­ with another-for one's own identity. We are each victims of certain sets of words, certain points of view. It is very difficult for us to follow an argument in which another person uses our favorite words in a pejorative way, and our damning words with favor. "Reason" or "science," for example, invite suspicion from some persons, loyalty from others; "pragmatism" is noble to some and ignoble to others; "intuition" is the secret of life, or the chief source of illusion, to different persons. Yet it often turns out that the experiences to which persons refer by their different use of words are strikingly similar; men are sometimes kept apart more by words, than by realities. In coming to under­ stand ourselves, we should attend primarily to our o,vn ex­ periences, to words only secondarily, lest screens of words separate us even from ourselves. The main contribution such a book as this can hope to make, then, is to tum attention to an overlooked area of human ex-

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

29

perience. Such an attempt, initially at least, recommends itself, since a philosophy which springs from new self-knowledge re­ news itself at almost eve ry point. For when a man knows that he knows, and knows better what his knowing is, then there is every likelihood that he will avoid many mistakes in what he claims to know; his epistemology, his metaehysics, his philosophy of science, art, and politics, and his ethics flow from a clearer stream. In the second place, when a man seeks to know who he is, he enters into the universe of religious discourse. His inquiry may not be explicitly religious, but he is at least engaged upon the soil in which religious inqui ry takes root.

4. A Dialectical, Not Formal, Mode There is a special temptation for Christians living after the Enlightenment to try to spell out their experience in the lan­ guage of the Enlightenment. To succumb to that temptation is to invite failure. 1 7 From the time of Descartes onward (Pascal 18 said he would never forgive Descartes for speaking of God in this language) a special class of interpretations has surrounded the word "reason," such that anyone who begins to use the language of intelligence according to that class of interpretations must end by placing "reason" and "faith" on opposite sides of a divide. There are many things about belief in God that cannot be said in words dear to the Enlightenment. There are many experiences of human life which are spoken of only with great difficulty, if at all, in the systems clustering around the various canons of "reason" employed by post-Cartesian philosophers. To every age of philosophers some debt is owed; but each age also has its deficiencies. One deficiency not yet met by philosophers is the lack of a suitable language for talking about intelligent sub-

.

. .

J eCtlVlty.

Such a language would make it much easier to speak about

30

Introduction: · A Dialectical Inquiry

belief in God. For, formally, deciding to believe in God is in many respects like deciding to accept certain canons of ration­ ality. There is no way of demonstrating that such canons are necessary, though one may off er reasons for choosing one set rather than another. One cannot compel their acceptance, though one can show their acceptance to result in certain fruits. A man does not commit himself to fidelity to scientific method by a priori necessity; for not all men do so commit themselves. Yet such commitment of one's entire intellectual energy is not merely arbitrary. Like belief in God in another age, however, it may be made without much critical reflection, merely as a matter of course. No doubt, even if a language for speaking about intelligent subj ectivity comes into common use, it will still be impossible to speak adequately about God. Yet one must do what one can. It is as natural to try to express one's beliefs as it is for a child to make sounds before he has learned to talk. We must speak of him ; yet when ,ve do, we babble : "Balbutiendo ut posszanus excelsa Dei resonamus." 1'i> No one ,vho believes in the true God ( and in no counterfeit) thinks that he can talk well about him. On the other hand, if any language is even remotely useful for talking about God, the likelihood is that it ,vill be the language by which we speak of intelligent subj ectivity. For God is be­ lieved to be at least more like men than like any other thi ng in the universe about ,vhich men can speak. Finally, many of the themes in this book will be reminiscent of points made by Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, though my o,vn intellectual orientation is not as marked as theirs by studies in German idealism and classical rationalism. My main intellectual debt, instead, is probably to Bernard Lonergan. His influence ,vill be felt in nearly every chapter, though he himself may ,vell be a severe critic of my inquiry. For ultimately this book is personal. The question of belief and unbelief cannot, in the end, be discussed in a formal way.

Introduction: A Dialectical Inquiry

31

Through many failures in what may be called ( though not in Carnap's sense) the formal mode, I came to see that the philo­ sophical form required is what Kierkegaard called "an edifying discourse," a form which engages each reader in an inquiry into his own identity. For God, as we shall come to see, is the objective not of our concepts and our syllogisms but of our intentionality, and thus is not enclosed in our formal systems. Undoubtedly, some professional philosophers will look askance at a form so little used in the schools. Yet one can ask their for­ bearance, and hope that a better formalist will succeed on that level which the formal mode can reach, as Lonergan has suc­ ceeded for certain of his readers. Nevertheless, the structure of the problem under inquiry works against the formal mode. Even if a man should come to get all his definitions straight and to use the proper technical words correctly and in their proper relationships, still he will not yef have succeeded in coming to grips with his own intelligent sub­ j ectivity, nor gained insight into the way God is come upon and spoken of by men, nor yet made a free act of belief or disbelief in God. Unless that insight has been gained and that choice made, words in the formal mode are like words in a foreign language. Neither belief nor unbelief is the conclusion to a syllogism. The problem on which this inqui ry is attempting to throw light is that of the radical similarities and dissimilarities between atheism and belief, in order that intelligent decisions can be made, and in order that believers and nonbelievers can begin to speak intelligently to one another. This inquiry forecloses no questions, but tries to locate them in their proper area. It tries to enter that part of human experience where belief and unbelief thrive together, and contend for possession.

Belief and Unbelief

THE C ULT URAL CONTEXT

1 . The «Post-Religious" Age No man believes, or disbelieves, in isolation; he believes in the context of a certain historical community. Moreover, belief and unbelief draw their concrete meaning from the life of a particular community. There are no abstract essences "belief" and "unbelief." There are only changing historical realities of di.fferent types. 1 One cannot understand the belief of John Locke, the unbelief of David Hume, the belief of Bishop Butler, the unbelief of John Stuart Mill, the belief of Madame Sartre or the unbelief of her son, the belief of American Protestants and the un­ belief of American intellectuals, without understanding the par­ ticular life of the communities from which they spring. It is within such a community that each of us works out his ideas of belief and unbelief. In certain communities, the probabilities of one decision or the other are especially high or especially low. For one chooses according as one sees; but one sees-probably­ according as one has grown accustomed to see. Many a young person in the United States today seems to be quite confused by the opposite attractions he feels in his intel­ ligence and heart. It is taken for granted in most intellectual circles that an intelligent person does not believe in God, and certainly not in any institutional religion. Given the general panorama of belief in God in America and the life of institutional 35

36

Belief and Unbelief

religion in America, the young person is inevitably attracted to unbelief. The story of many a sensitive, intelligent man's life­ told often in our literature-appears to recapitulate the recent history of the West. Such a person moves from a pious child­ hood to a questioning and finally cynical adolescence ; he moves from religion to enlightenment. For in reaction against romantic, narrow, and anti-intellectual forms of religion, many of the best minds in the vVest have long since cut off their adherence to a communal religious faith and an intelligent belief in God. They devote their moral energy to this world. From "St. David" Hume, who bore ,vitness to the possibility of living a life of moral goodness and equanimity without God, to Albert Camus, ,vho ,vas himself a secular saint, such men have created a new ,vay of life. For the first titne in human history, they have made unbelief a chosen proj ect of the hun1an will, and on a large scale. 2 Nevertheless, in our day there is a "crisis of unbelief," just as there ,vas once a "crisis of belief." 3 As events have come full circle, men on both sides seem more understanding of o ne another; perhaps each feels the shado,v of the other in his heart. Many hundreds of thousands of young Americans, for example, have grown up in households that have been not religious but enlightened. U nprejudiccd by an anti -intellectual religious up­ bringing, some are raising again the religious questions. They arc not satisfied ,vith their parents' vie,v of life, but neither arc they ready to return to the fara,vay religious life of their grand­ parents. They are torn by interior movernents both of belief and unbelief, believing in a kind of God on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and warning themselves against illusions, a failure of nerve, and intellectual co,vardice o n other days. They do not kno,v ,vhich ,vay to turn; their enlightenment has proved empty and fallacious, but the religious thought they encounter is un-­ intelligent. Like the dry leaves of the Inferno, they blow back and forth in the empty spaces outside the gates of heaven and of hell

The Cultural Context

37

Moreover, intellectual life in the United States is curiously cosmopolitan. To many uninitiated students, the European world of Camus and Sartre is at first strange and much too emotive. America did not truly know the terrors of this century's wars, neither the nihilism of the cafes nor that more terrible nihilism of the concentration camps. Americans did not see the values, traditions, and beliefs of the Middle Ages-so long, and neces­ sarily, eroded-come crashing down in the flames of Berlin in 1 945. A ne,v world was about to arise in Europe ; but no one exactly saw its shape. 4 Albert Camus wrote in The Rebel: "We are no,v at the extren1ities. At the end of this tunnel of darkness, ho,vever, there is inevitably a light, ,vhich we already divine and for ,vhich ,ve have only to fight to ensure its coming. All of us, among the n1ins, are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilisrn. " 5 Separated by an ocean from the nightmare of th

I ISBN: 1 -56000-74 1 -9