Faith Envy: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil on Desirable Faith 9781978711259, 9781978711266, 1978711255

Citation preview

Faith Envy

Faith Envy Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil on Desirable Faith Hermen Kroesbergen

L E X I N G T O N B O O K S / F O RT R E S S A C A D E M I C

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kroesbergen, Hermen, author. Title: Faith envy : Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil on desirable faith     / Hermen Kroesbergen. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, [2021] | Includes     bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "Faith Envy explores     the idea that both believers and nonbelievers envy those with more     faith. Hermen Kroesbergen shows how philosophers Kierkegaard,     Wittgenstein, and Weil, who each had their own kind of faith envy, can     serve as guides to this phenomenon and the contemporary concept of     faith"-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021015862 (print) | LCCN 2021015863 (ebook) | ISBN     9781978711259 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978711266 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Faith. | Belief and doubt. | Envy. | Philosophy and     religion. | Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855. | Wittgenstein, Ludwig,     1889-1951. | Weil, Simone, 1909-1943. Classification: LCC BL626.3 .K76 2021  (print) | LCC BL626.3  (ebook) | DDC     121/.7–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015862 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015863   The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction

1

Chapter 1: Kierkegaard—More Than an Idea Chapter 2: Wittgenstein—Surrendering Your Self Chapter 3: Weil—Open to the World Chapter 4: The Answers of Faith Chapter 5: The Safety of Faith Conclusion



13

33 53 73 91

109

Bibliography Index





121

127

About the Author



131

v

Acknowledgments

The Introduction and Chapter Five of this book draw upon material that has been published in other places, though they do not simply duplicate that material. The Introduction elaborates on how I first introduced the concept of faith envy in the article “Faith Envy” in HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, 2020b. I thank HTS and the licensee AOSIS for allowing their authors to reuse and republish their publications. Chapter Five is an amended version of my article “The commitment in feeling absolutely safe,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 84(2), 2018, 185–203. I am grateful to Springer Nature Customer Service Centre GmbH for kind permission to make use of this material. I thank the students and colleagues at Justo Mwale University, Lusaka, Zambia, with whom I have discussed Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil on faith throughout the years. Many parts of this book result from these discussions. I thank Professor Johan Buitendag for his enduring trust in me, which has always been so encouraging. I thank the University of Pretoria for supporting my research on faith and faith in Africa by granting me a Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship, and now the possibility to be a Research Associate at the University. Finally, I thank Johanneke, my wife, for the photograph of beautiful Venice on the cover—exploring the world with you is such a joy! Working on this book about three people who lived their lives alone, made me realize even more how important you are to me and in my life. Thank you for your loving companionship in everything!

vii

Introduction

“I envy those who can believe there is a greater hand writing our story, who chooses the words to keep the chaos at bay. Connection. Joy. Love. And resurrection. With these words, the path becomes clear for a moment,” so the main protagonist in a recent episode of the television series Star Trek: Discovery, Michael Burnham, tells us (Fuller and Kurtzman 2019). She envies those whose choices and fate are not completely their own; she envies those who have faith. Faith envy, as I would like to call it, is an interesting phenomenon sociologically and psychologically, but in this book, I will examine its usefulness for philosophy reflection upon religion in general. I do not consider it helpful to look at “faith envy” as if it were some mysterious newly discovered object or feeling, the qualities of which we can study. I will rather take it as a perspective from which many people, inside and outside faith, are prepared to look at themselves. Instead of asking whether it exists and what its properties are, I ask what use it is to adopt this perspective and to what consequences and questions it may lead. The philosophy of religion, particularly its analytical variety, has focused on the beliefs and truth claims within religion, but more and more this approach is being questioned. Faith envy, so I will argue, offers an opening to a broader perspective on religion. In this introduction, I will first discuss what faith envy is, second, highlight the importance of faith envy for the philosophy of religion, and third explain the outline of this book in which the profound thinkers Sören Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Simone Weil—who each had their own kind of faith envy—will be our guides to this contemporary phenomenon.

1

2

Introduction

FAITH ENVY In a recent book on the spiritual state of Australia, social researcher Hugh Mackay (2016) observes an increase in the kind of faith envy Michael Burnham expresses in Star Trek: “Over the past twenty-five years, our yearning for ‘something to believe in’ has become increasingly obvious, as people look for ways to fill the gap left by the mass retreat from traditional religious faith and practice.” People have left the churches and they cannot imagine themselves going back, but Mackay (2016) still finds many “people who, even if only half seriously, have expressed faith envy.” If people have faith, so it is supposed then they have something to rely on, something to hold on to even in dark days or when they feel the end of life is near. Even though most of these people expressing faith envy cannot even imagine having faith for themselves, they regard faith as something positive. Faith is supposed to solve one’s insecurity. Faith envy seems to fit an era Beyond Belief, as Mackay (2016) names his book on contemporary Australia. The author Julian Barnes (2008, 1) expresses it in his memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” Renowned philosopher Charles Taylor (2007, 307), in his extensive study of our Secular Age, speaks of, “a generalized sense in our culture that with the eclipse of the transcendent, something may have been lost.” Whether it makes someone feel relieved or nostalgic, many people feel that something is missing: some substance, weight, or resonance to our actions, goals, and achievements (cf. Taylor 2007, 307). People want what they do to have meaning or significance, that it is part of a bigger plan, that there is “a greater hand writing our story,” as Michael Burnham in Star Trek expresses it (Fuller and Kurtzman 2019). Charles Taylor (2007, 410) notices a different side to the longing for faith as well, however: “Contemporaries are ambivalent about this earlier age [when faith was a natural part of life], or at least their reactions are complex. We feel wider, less naïve, and somewhat patronizing towards our [. . .] forebears, but also somewhat envious of their certainties.” This ambivalence is something that belongs fundamentally to what is called “envy.” In everyday use of language, envy is often used as a synonym for jealousy, coveting, or greed, but some scholars emphasize distinct characteristics of envy. Especially some distinctions made by the renowned psychoanalyst Melanie Klein have been taken up in later envy research. She (1988, 181) says: “Envy is the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable—the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it. Moreover, envy implies the subject’s relation to one person only.” Whereas jealousy focuses on both the desired object and the person who has it or

Introduction

3

threatens to take it; envy is directed especially towards the person who has it. This fits the double feeling of people with faith envy: they want the certainty and trust that faith provides for believers, but they are somewhat unsure about whether they want the object—faith—that gives this security. Faith envy often consists of both a sugar-coated idea about faith as a complete peace of mind and a repulsion for the dogmatism, simple-mindedness, and so on, associated with it at the same time. The focus of faith envy is on what faith supposedly brings believers—security and absolute certainty—and not on the faith that is supposed to give this, for this one might even find repugnant. Faith is not merely missed and admired, it is envied. Mixed feelings are involved. Sören Kierkegaard (1980, 86) describes envy as “secret admiration,” someone envious “speaks another language wherein that which he actually admires is a trifle, a rather stupid, insipid, peculiar, and exaggerated thing.” By portraying faith as something childish and for the weak-minded, people may express their envy and therefore their hidden admiration. In the case of jealousy or coveting, emotions are distinguished: one wants the object and therefore one feels ill will toward the person who has taken it or threatens to take it. In the case of envy, like in the case of faith envy, mixed emotions are in play: someone who envies something, secretly admires what the other has, while he manifestly devalues it at the same time. Faith envy belongs to this era, which is on the one hand proud that it has left faith behind: “Modern culture rejects this belief in a great cosmic plan. We are not actors in any larger-than-life drama. Life has no script, no playwright, no director, no producer—no meaning,” acclaimed historian and atheist Yuval Noah Harari (2016, 200) triumphantly declares. On the other hand, this era longs for what faith seems to have brought people. In a recent book, fellow atheist Martin Hägglund (2019, 28) argues for what he calls “secular faith,” and he states: “Religious faith is not a system of belief that I am trying to disprove, in the sense of demonstrating the nonexistence of eternity. What I am calling into question is the idea that eternity is desirable. The assumption that eternity is desirable is much more pervasive than any alleged certainty concerning its existence.” Proofs for the existence of God are outdated, Hägglund (2019, 28) holds, but still, people seem to think that it would have been nice if religion would have been true. He (2019, 19) dismisses this “conservative nostalgia for a premodern, enchanted world,” but he acknowledges it to be ubiquitous. There is much “believing in belief” as a third atheist author, Daniel Dennett (2006, 221), calls it: “Such a person doesn’t believe in God but nevertheless thinks that believing in God would be a wonderful state to be in, if only it could be arranged.” Society is deeply vexed about faith, but many people envy faith nonetheless. Nonbelievers have faith envy, but, surprisingly enough, faith envy is present among those who are supposed to have faith as well. When I once asked

4

Introduction

students of theology—most of whom who are training to become pastors in South Africa—to give some examples of faith envy, many of them gave examples about themselves (cf. Kroesbergen 2020b, 2–3). For example, they mentioned as their faith envy the envy of people “who keep faith in difficult times, who hold on to the hope that there will be a way out” or “When someone close to you loses someone to death and they still have faith in God.” They envy people who have stronger faith than they have: “I have become envious of his faith and consistency, [for he is] only becoming stronger in faith lately.” The reliability and steadfastness of other people’s faith in trying times is envied. Evangelicals or charismatics were mentioned as well: “I sometimes envy my charismatic friends’ ‘naïve’ and experience-based faith. Because their faith is based on experience, they seem immune to thought of doubt.” Others connect their doubts with studying theology: they feel envy “seeing a simple childlike faith that a friend has in God and the Bible as the Word of God. This is because he has not studied theology.” Being certain without suffering the doubts that come with theological reflection is considered as something to be coveted, although it is diminutively called “childlike” and “naïve” as well. Thirdly, several students mentioned their envy of the faith of Muslims: “I am a Christian and yet I envy the Muslim community in their dedication to word/wisdom and prayer and fasting,” someone wrote. Someone else: “The steadfast devotion of Muslims is very captivating.” And yet another: “My Muslim friend, her devotion to practices that reveal or reminds her of her faith.” The dedication and conviction of Muslims seem enviable to these students, and how through practices their faith determines their entire life. Similarly, in the Netherlands, I noticed a renewed interest in the practice of fasting in some Christian churches inspired by the Islamic practice of Ramadan. Faith envy does not only exist outside of faith, it exists within faith as well. People having faith sometimes envy those who seem to have a stronger faith, both within and outside their own tradition. There is much debate, conflict, and misunderstanding between believers and nonbelievers in society today, but faith envy, surprisingly, seems to be one of the things that both of these groups share. THE IMPORTANCE FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Many people envy faith. This is in itself an interesting phenomenon, but even more so philosophically speaking, because looking at religion from the angle of faith envy actually provides a clearer picture of what religion

Introduction

5

is than approaches that would appear to be more direct. In particular the analytical tradition in the philosophy of religion has always focused on the beliefs of religion. A common way to introduce the philosophy of religion at colleges and universities is still to discuss the proofs for God’s existence. Increasingly, however, people have begun to question the relevance of this kind of approach. Voices are emerging that note that the answers sought through this kind of philosophy of religion are not forthcoming, and people begin to wonder whether they will ever be forthcoming. In 2014, American philosopher of religion Kevin Schilbrack, to mention one example, published a manifesto arguing that the philosophy of religion is too narrow, excessively intellectualistic, and isolates itself from other academic disciplines investigating religion. H​​​​​​​e (2014, 25) proposes “an integrated or holistic philosophical study of religions,” yet he still wishes to focus on an investigation of the truth claims of different religions. Approaching religion from the angle of faith envy, however, will show that this is still too narrow and intellectualistic. Religion or religions do not contain straightforward truth claims that can be analyzed, proven, or clarified. A truly integrated and holistic approach, for example from the angle of faith envy, will show that religion and faith are much more complex. To do justice to the role that faith plays in the lives of both believers and nonbelievers we need a concept of faith that acknowledges the tension between two paradoxical sides of religion: that a being exists who cannot exist, that things happen that cannot happen, that practices that have no use are useful, that there is a plan for your life but it cannot be known. Faith is believing, but it is believing the unbelievable—the latter is just as important as the first. If you look at the lives of the faithful, at what they do and say, it is clear that they know that their gods, spirits, energies, and so on, are not some additional entities in reality that their nonbelieving neighbors fail to notice. To believe is not simply to hold on to a supplementary truth claim that could be discussed philosophically, but it is something deeper and more ambiguous.. We can see this when we look at how awkward discussions about faith often are, because believers and nonbelievers both feel that what they are defending does not really match their own position. A believer argues that God exists, but she herself knows that she could never have been convinced by the arguments she is giving, and even if she could, this faith would be very different from the faith she now feels in her heart. The nonbeliever provides reasons for why God does not exist, but even considering the possibility of God’s existence does not make sense to him. What matters is much more than a debate about truth claims. We see the same when we consider for example a debate about miracles. A believer argues that miracles are real, but if he would succeed in convincing

6

Introduction

his opponent, would they still be miracles? Miracles are by definition those things that cannot happen, so is it still a miracle if you prove that it did happen? Arguably the most important medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas reached the conclusion that: “If we speak with reference to God and his power, there are no miracles” (quoted in Jenson 1999, 44). For a religious person as a religious person, there are no miracles, so, oddly enough, with her denial, the nonbeliever seems to be the one who upholds the miraculous character of miracles. When, to obtain a more integrated and holistic approach, we consider more practical aspects of religion like rituals, we find a similar ambiguity. A believer argues that her rituals are really important and useful. Yet, if we think about anthropology or archeology, scholars recognize something as a ritual exactly because it is not useful and not important in any practical sense. Again, the nonbeliever, by arguing against rituals, is in another sense the one who saves the rituals as rituals. The pattern repeats itself when we consider prophecies, oracles, or divinations. A believer argues that those prophecies belonging to his religion are truthful revelations about the future, but we call them prophecies, oracles, or divinations and we consider them to be religious specifically because they are not simply better predictions. If we encounter prophecies, oracles, or divinations in stories, plays, or movies, whether it’s about Oedipus, Darth Vader, or Harry Potter, for example, we know two things: 1. the prophecy will indeed come true, but 2. the protagonist will not benefit from the imparted knowledge because he or she always misinterprets or ignores it. Although we will hardly ever find a believer trying to demonstrate the uselessness of their prophecies, oracles, or divinations, for these to be recognizably religious they have to be useless in a sense. This kind of ambiguity seems to belong to what we mean by “faith” itself. Faith is said to provide meaning to events that seem to make no sense, it explains what we cannot explain—whether it is the death of a child or the coincidences that make two future lovers find each other. Yet, if it explains the unexplainable, then reasoning how the event is explained and how the event cannot be explained are equally valid and invalid. Faith is something strange, always implying two sides that seem to be at odds with one another. As long as the philosophy of religion does not acknowledge this, it is not yet investigating faith. Faith is not simply the belief that superhuman or superempirical powers and miracles exist, that rituals and prophecies are useful, or that inexplicable events in life make sense. To prove philosophically that God exists or psychologically that prayer works, misses the point, even if it were possible. Whether one interprets religious statements as approximations or hypotheses about the ultimate reality like critical realists do, or one takes religious statements to

Introduction

7

describe the metanarrative or basic beliefs of the faithful like postmodernists or Reformed Epistemologists do, one still fails to acknowledge the intrinsically ambiguous nature of belief (cf. Kroesbergen 2019b, 6–8). God must be beyond existence to be God, a miracle must be impossible to be a miracle, a ritual must be practically useless to be a ritual, the ultimate plan for your life must be unknowable to be ultimate, and so on. Faith is believing the unbelievable and turning it into a probable hypothesis or a legitimate basic belief undoes what makes it faith. Using faith envy as an angle works much better than expanding the philosophy of religion holistically adding more religions, since in the latter case the focus remains on truth claims as such that are being investigated. A different approach is needed. In their lives, believers themselves show that they do not take their gods, spirits, energies, and so on, to be some extra entities in reality that others do not notice. Faith is not a set of beliefs about the world, faith is something else. In this book, I will show that faith envy is a promising avenue to discover new general concepts of faith shared by believers and nonbelievers alike. My intention is to clarify the nature of faith. However, I will not engage much in the vast field of providing definitions of religion or faith. Traditionally, these definitions are divided into two groups: substantive definitions, which take their starting point in the beliefs or the cognitive element of religion, and functional definitions, which focus on the role religion plays in people’s lives. My critique of focusing on the supposed truth claims of religion above, applies to purely substantive definitions of religion. In this respect, I agree with philosopher Norman Malcolm (1964, 108), who once argued that the belief that God exists in itself is not a religious belief: only once it includes a religious response it becomes a religious belief. The atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell is said to have considered the ontological proof of God’s existence to be valid for three days, but he would hardly count as a believer even during those three days (cf. Von der Ruhr and Tessin 1995, 371). Statements regarding superempirical realities, as Schilbrack (2014, 135) calls them, are indeed an important aspect of faith and religion, but the philosophy of religion should not take these as their starting point. Functional definitions often run the risk of turning everyone into a believer: the sociologist Thomas Luckmann, when asked who would not be religious according to his functional definition of religion, answered, “A dog” (cf. Gifford 2019, 3). I will take an almost opposite approach: no one is a believer, the focus on faith envy assumes that people are looking at faith from the outside. Everyone with faith envy—believer and nonbeliever alike—is not yet someone who has this faith himself. Faith is like humility in some respects: if you claim to have it, you can almost be sure that you don’t. If you live it, you will not be concerned with whether you have it. In fact, such a lack of

8

Introduction

concern is the goal of all kinds of envy: “It is hard to feel envy without feeling that one should not be feeling envy,” as cultural theorist Sianne Ngai (2005, 10) observes. To envy is often in part to envy. It will be hard to find someone truly without envy in any case, and no less in the case of faith. A common counterexample or test case for substantive definitions of religion is Buddhism, which in many instances does not imply a belief in God or the supernatural. A common counterexample or test case for functional definitions of religion is football, which brings people together in a way similar to what religion is supposed to do. The fact that there are these classical counterexamples or test cases, however, in itself already shows that there is something off with the quest for a definition of religion. Clearly, we are not asking what religion is because we do not know the answer. Having the counterexamples or test cases available shows that we already know this. When we ask what religion or faith is, it is not because we do not understand the word or how it is used. We can ask this question, nonetheless, when we are puzzled about the nature of this phenomenon that we already know—and often envy—as faith. If we recognize faith in someone or in a particular story, what is it that we see, what is distinctive about the way of life we find there? What role do the odd, ambiguous beliefs of faith play in people’s lives and how do they relate to other beliefs? Faith is connected to beliefs and to a particular way of life, but the nature of the phenomena that we already know to be faith remains opaque. In this book, I will show how a fresh investigation of classical thinkers like Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil through the lens of faith envy provides important building blocks for a much-needed new concept of faith. I will not investigate the arguments they provide in favor of or against faith or how they clarify the conditions of faith, I will not look at what these thinkers say about the proofs for religious truth claims or the reasonableness of faith; but I will explore what light their lives and works can shed upon the nature of faith if we take them to be envying faith. A new concept of faith should acknowledge the tension between the two sides of religion: faith is the suspicion that there is something more to life, but as soon as you know this “more” or can prove it, it ceases to be “more.” As Simone Weil (2002, 20) states: “We have to be careful about the level on which we place the infinite. If we put it on the level which is only suitable for the finite it does not much matter what name we give it.” To think that faith is about believing or proving that some infinite entity exists, is to place that what faith is about on the wrong level. Faith is not about believing some facts but about living your life. The Christian theologian Sören Kierkegaard (1992, 201) even said that someone who worships an idol in the right way is closer to God than someone who worships the true God wrongly. Faith is first of all about the passion with which you pray, he argues.

Introduction

9

Theologian Fergus Kerr (1997, 162) concluded from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s way of thinking that considering the execution of an innocent man is a more promising starting point for Christian theology than proving that God exists. Kerr does not explain what he means by this, but I would say this is a more promising starting point for thinking about faith in general as well. This innocent man was seen as having had something that could not be stopped or annulled by his gruesome death. According to worldly standards, all his missions had failed, and yet, he knew of standards on a different level as well. He believed there was a greater hand writing his story. This is a faith worthy of envy: knowing that you do what you have to do, that you marry who you should marry, that God is with you, that it does not matter what will happen next according to worldly standards. Rather than believing some facts about reality, this is the faith that both those we call believers and those we call nonbelievers long for, but not merely long for: as mentioned above, the envy has another aspect as well. Faith is something to admire: wouldn’t it be great to live such a life, to be able to believe that there is a greater hand writing our story? Wouldn’t it be nice to know what God wants you to do, that this is what you have to do no matter what may happen, that the value of what you do cannot be diminished by whatever may come your way, that the act is enough in itself, it has a virtue which truly is its own reward? No doubts and no worries to bother you; you play your role and confidently you leave everything else to God. On the one hand, this seems a desirable and noble kind of life; on the other hand, however, it is hard not to look down upon it in some way as well. It seems a bit childish, single-minded, and irresponsible not to care about what happens next. If this kind of life were as beautiful and admirable as it sometimes seems, you would have to change your life: you would have to live only for what is good and not also for yourself. Everything in your life should be dedicated to the good or the glory of God, even if as a result you would die innocently on a cross. Do we really want that? Faith is something we envy: we want it and, we do not want it at the same time. God, miracles, rituals, prophecies—all these aspects of faith hint that there is something more than the care about ourselves and the small successes and failures that belong to that realm, something on a different level. As soon as philosophers of religion start to prove the existence or usefulness of these aspects of faith, it is no longer faith, it is no longer what we envy. So, what could faith be if we keep in mind it is something we envy? That is what this book is about.

10

Introduction

THIS BOOK Sören Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Simone Weil belong to the most profound thinkers of the past centuries. Each of them has some extremely interesting and provocative things to say about faith and related matters. They bring together the best of both analytical and continental traditions in the philosophy of religion, although the starting point will be the analytical perspective. Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil have been discussed together before, especially by Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion like D.Z. Phillips, but it will be done here in a more thorough manner treating each of them on equal footing with the theme of faith envy as a unifying point of discussion. In discussing Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil, I will neither argue to have discovered a new character trait, feeling, or motive in these authors, nor claim that faith envy is the only or even best perspective to investigate their comments on religion, but I will try to show that using faith envy as a perspective brings out interesting new aspects and connections in the lives and works of these authors. It is useful to view their thoughts as the thoughts of people who are struggling with faith envy, that is: desiring faith or more faith, but also being very aware of how having faith could go wrong. The reflections on Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil, seen from this perspective, not only clarify important aspects of their work, but they also bring out aspects, consequences, and questions that are important to anyone who is puzzled about the nature of faith. If someone envies faith, what is it exactly that she envies, or what could it be? If it is not some facts or truth claims or some societal benefits, what is it? If someone envies faith, why does she not simply accept faith, what could make accepting faith difficult no matter how much he may envy faith? And, if someone envies faith, and is willing to do what it takes to enter into it, how could she get into it? Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil’s struggles with faith and faith envy exemplify important possible answers to and aspects to consider concerning these questions. In Kierkegaard’s life and work, I will focus on what someone acknowledging faith envy might be looking for, and what not. In Wittgenstein’s life and work, I will focus on why obtaining faith may be difficult even if someone envies faith. In Weil’s life and work, I will focus on how one could prepare for faith seeing that the faith that is envied is often considered to be given by God rather than taken by humans. People envy those who are dying while being consoled by the certainty that heaven awaits them. These dying people probably don’t lack “fear of death,” but they have found a way of carrying it, living despite of it. Similarly,

Introduction

11

Kierkegaard longs for a way of living freely despite the deep melancholia in his heart. People envy evangelicals who seem completely sure about how the world is, and what is right and wrong. These evangelicals probably do know doubts and counterarguments just as well, but they have found a way of living fully convinced despite of them. Similarly, Wittgenstein longs for a way of speaking his mind freely despite his scruples about his dreaded vanity and self-deception. People envy Muslims whose entire life seems to be taken up in their faith, some even taking this as far as freely sacrificing their lives for it. These Muslims are probably aware that they do not always wear their niqab, or that the night before their suicide attack they were drinking alcohol, but that does not stop them to fully engage in their faith the other moments. Similarly, Weil longs to live her convictions fully and freely despite being aware that this “fully” is never completely fully. Maybe because Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil are closer to this kind of faith than most people, they are further away at the same time. They are more acutely aware of what separates them from it, from being able to live and experience purpose in life despite the messiness, brokenness, and incompleteness that is a part of life. They envy faith as the possibility to live despite and with this awareness. Maybe those who envy faith or stronger faith in contemporary society may seem to envy an unattainable and simplistic purity, which could only be held by gross self-deception. Yet, these people may envy a kind of purity that is not affected by the messiness, brokenness, and incompleteness of life, as well. In faith envy, many people look not for blind obedience to a voice from beyond, but for being able to act decisively despite being aware of the messiness, brokenness, and incompleteness of life. That is the faith toward which faith envy could, and maybe should, be directed. Implicitly it often already is directed that way. That is the faith I wish to describe in this book. When Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil envy faith, they long for certainty and knowing for sure, but not in the sense of knowing for certain that God is like this or like that, or that heaven exists. They do not think that faith is about that kind of information. And even if it was, that would not be what they would be interested in. Many of the people discussed above who in interviews concerning faith and faith envy would speak of the certainty of knowledge, often might actually intend to speak of this other kind of certainty as well. Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil look for certainty about what is the right thing to do, about whether they as an individual are good enough. They look for certainty about whether they can safely surrender their mistakes and failings and shortcomings to God, about receiving permission to be who they are including all their shortcomings. They look for certainty

12

Introduction

about their life having meaning and purpose even though they are very aware of their own not being perfect. In Kierkegaard we will see faith as something more than an idea; in Wittgenstein the importance for faith of surrendering your self; and in Weil how faith can help someone to open up to the world. After discussing these three thinkers individually, I will turn to some conceptual problems in understanding the faith that is revealed through faith envy. Does the faith that is envied provide all the answers to life’s problems? What does it mean to “know” such answers? What kind of answers are the answers that faith is thought to provide? What is the apparently sugar-coated experience of absolute safety or complete peace of mind that faith is assumed to bring? And what is the commitment that is such an important aspect of faith? But, before turning to those questions, I will first use the angle of faith envy to see what it can teach us about Kierkegaard and his reflections on faith.

Chapter 1

Kierkegaard—More Than an Idea

If someone envies faith, what is it exactly that he envies, or what could it be? In this chapter, I will address this question beginning with Kierkegaard and then widening the circle to include what anyone who envies faith might be looking for. First, I will introduce Kierkegaard and point out where I will look for faith envy in his life and work. Second, I will discuss different aspects of the faith that Kierkegaard envies. Third, in conclusion, I will highlight what using the perspective of faith envy shows about Kierkegaard and what about faith. KIERKEGAARD His Life Sören Kierkegaard lived in 19th century Denmark. His father had come from a rural area to the capital Copenhagen where he made a small fortune. Kierkegaard and his older brother were brought up in a very strict religious way by their father. After trying out different courses at university, Kierkegaard decided to study theology. He could have become a pastor and civil servant in the Lutheran state church of Denmark. He could have married Regine Olsen to whom he was engaged for more than a year, but he decided that both being a pastor and being a husband were not compatible with his passion for being a religious author. The focus of his writing from beginning to end was what it is to be a Christian, or, rather, how hard it is to become a Christian. Looking back at his authorship, Kierkegaard (1998, 93) claims to have resolved, even before he started publishing any works, “Even if I never managed to become a Christian, I would before God employ all my time and all my diligence at least to get it made clear what Christianity is and where the confusion in Christendom has its basis.” Kierkegaard criticized the fact that in his days 13

14

Chapter 1

being a Danish citizen and being Christian were considered to be synonymous. In contemporary Western Europe, this kind of attitude has evaporated but, according to The Economist in 2017, in the United States, it still exists: “For many whites, especially in small towns and rural areas, ‘adhering to traditional Bible values and embracing a personal relationship with Jesus Christ’—to use one common definition of evangelical faith—is another way of saying ‛I am an upstanding citizen’’’ (quoted in Gifford 2019, 10). Being a Christian and being a good citizen are considered to be the same thing. Having faith is not some lofty noble goal, but, in Kierkegaard’s Denmark at least, it was seen as something ordinary, something easy and comfortable. Faith was seen as something for lazy Sunday afternoons, as Kierkegaard (1967, 90) describes in one of his journals: “The bourgeois’ love of God commences when [. . .] the hands are comfortably folded over the stomach, when the head is reclining on a soft easy chair, and when a drowsy glance is raised toward the ceiling, toward higher things.” As I will show, Kierkegaard has a very different perspective on faith. Kierkegaard wrote many of his books under pseudonyms, which allowed him to use an outsider’s perspective on faith without diverting attention by having readers guessing whether he himself was a man of faith. His pseudonyms like “Johannes Climacus,” “Constantine Constantius,” or “Johannes De Silentio” do not have faith, and the reader does not need to worry about whether Kierkegaard has faith. In one of his final journals, Kierkegaard (1978b, 550) states: “How far Christianity is from existing is seen best in me. For even with the clarity I have—I am not a Christian.” His books should not be about this strange Dane who is not even a Christian; instead, they are intended to encourage the readers to reflect upon their own lives to see to what extent they themselves really are Christian. In this chapter, I will focus on the book Fear and Trembling that Kierkegaard (1983) wrote using the pseudonym Johannes De Silentio. Several commentators do not take this book to represent Kierkegaard’s ultimate considered opinion about faith, but from the perspective of faith envy, it is particularly interesting. In the book Fear and Trembling, De Silentio tries to make sense of Abraham who sets out to sacrifice his son Isaac when God commands him to do so. How can a father even consider sacrificing his son and still be considered the role model of faith? This extraordinary act must either contain the culmination point of faith, or we are wrong to consider Abraham to be the father of all those who have faith, so De Silentio argues (Kierkegaard 1983, 56). Ultimately, De Silentio fails to understand Abraham’s choice, but along the way, he makes important points about what faith could be. I will read these points in the context of Kierkegaard’s personal life and his own faith envy.

Kierkegaard—More Than an Idea

15

Around the time that Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling, he was breaking off his engagement to Regine Olsen. Many commentators have related these personal events to Kierkegaard’s writings. In Repetition, a book published on the same day as Fear and Trembling under another pseudonym, we even read about another young man who after an engagement of a year decides to break it off (Kierkegaard 1983, 184). There are several complicated love stories described in Fear and Trembling as well, but the most direct link to Kierkegaard’s ending of his engagement can be found in its reflections on faith. While writing in Fear and Trembling about what we can learn about faith from Abraham, Kierkegaard (1978a, 233) wrote in his diary: “If I had had faith, I would have stayed with Regine.” It doesn’t stretch the imagination to read this as an instance of faith envy. Kierkegaard wished he could have stayed with Regine, although he felt he could not because of his lack of faith. Looking back, near the end of his life, he dedicated his entire authorship to Regine, and he left his entire estate to her, although she had long since married someone else. Kierkegaard’s writing is all about achieving faith, and one of the great benefits of faith would have been that he could have been with Regine. More Than an Idea As an adolescent Kierkegaard tried out many different things. Despite the strict religious upbringing, his father allowed him to explore the nightlife of Copenhagen to the full. His father provided for these adventures and also for trying out different fields of study. Kierkegaard had studied law and tried acting, for example, but, after some time, he settled for theology. In a letter to his brother-in-law written during this time, he reflected upon what he was looking for. He has tried so many things, but he was never really satisfied: what is it that he wants from life? “What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die,” Kierkegaard (2000, 8) writes. He feels that at university he is learning knowledge of many different kinds, but what he needs to know first, is what he should do. Truths about the world will not help him, he is looking for truths about himself. He (2000, 8) continues: “But in order to find that idea—or, to put it more correctly—to find myself, it does no good to plunge still further in the world. That was just what I did before.” To continue gathering more knowledge and more experiences will not do; he is looking for meaning for his life, for what he should do with his life. He is looking for an idea to live and die for, something that really matters to him.

16

Chapter 1

Such a common adolescent quest to discover what to do with your life can surely be seen as a form of faith envy, definitely in the way in which Kierkegaard phrases it: as an attempt to “see what it really is what God wills that I shall do.” He looks for what can give his life purpose. Kierkegaard (2000, 9) reflects upon the many false starts in his short life so far: “I have vainly sought an anchor in the boundless sea of pleasure as well as in which depths of knowledge.” Throwing himself into the nightlife of Copenhagen or the details of studying law or immersing himself in other people as an actor did not give him something that he really wanted to live for. It did not give him something to dedicate himself to completely. He felt like he was being thrown back and forth on the waves of life, without any direction, without an anchor. If only he had faith, just a little more faith, a closer relationship to God, then he would know what to do with his life, apart from what others around him thought, apart from whatever happened to him, apart even from whether he lived or died. The faith that Kierkegaard envies, the faith that he is looking for at this stage of his life, is knowing who he is, his purpose, and what God has in store for him as this one specific individual. It is knowing the idea to live and die for. In the letter to his brother-in-law, Kierkegaard (2000, 11) seems to feel he is on the right track: “So let the die be cast—I am crossing the Rubicon! No doubt that this road takes me into battle, but I will not renounce it.” He is still far from clear about the idea to live and die for, but he feels that his study of theology will provide it for him. Looking back, we might say that it did but at what price? Was this price really what true faith or enviable faith entails? One fateful day, Kierkegaard met Regine Olsen, he asked her to marry him, and she said yes. By this time, however, he had found what he had to do, he had discovered his idea to live and die for, he knew what was God’s purpose for his life: he was to be a religious writer. His vocation was to write about faith, and he felt he would betray that vocation if he divided his attention between his writing and Regine. He could not be half-writer and halfhusband, and he decided to do what he thought he had to do to break off the engagement. The faith he had longed for as an adolescent now barred him from the married life. He had crossed the Rubicon, he had embarked on his journey as a religious author, and now he felt he could not go back and be an ordinary husband as well. Marriage was good, Kierkegaard would never stop writing about its goodness, but it was not for him. Both his melancholia and his vocation as a religious author made it impossible for him to enter into it. Because of his faith, he has to sacrifice his relationship with Regine. The idea to live and die for prevents him from going through with his engagement. Instead of preparing for a wedding, he writes a book about Abraham in whom he recognizes something important.

Kierkegaard—More Than an Idea

17

Regine herself took this book Fear and Trembling to be a book about their relationship (cf. Green 1998, 274). Just like Abraham had to sacrifice that which he loved most, so Kierkegaard was asked by divine command to sacrifice his worldly hopes of happiness, to break off the engagement, and to dedicate himself completely to being a religious author. The faith that Kierkegaard had longed for—the idea to live and die for—now required from him to refrain from enjoying the conventional bourgeois life of marriage. Yet, is that really faith? “If I had had faith, I would have stayed with Regine,” Kierkegaard writes in his diary. In Fear and Trembling, De Silentio focuses especially on the fact that Abraham not only is willing to sacrifice that what is dearest to him, but that he also receives it back: Isaac lives. Without any hesitance, Abraham receives him back again and lives happily ever after. Fear and Trembling is not about the faith that Kierkegaard longed for as an adolescent, it is not about an idea to live and die for. It is about something more. If only he had had this other kind of faith, which is truly to be envied, then Kierkegaard could have gone through with his marriage to Regine. What kind of faith is this? Fear and Trembling has been taken to exemplify what has become known as the “divine command theory”: something is right or wrong not because of something in the act itself but only because God says so. To be good or to have faith is to obey God whatever he may ask. Is this the kind of faith that is promoted in the book Fear and Trembling? In some ways it is, but it is important to see that in other ways it is not. If people have faith, they do whatever God wants them to do, even if it means sacrificing what is most dear to them—this is assumed throughout Fear and Trembling—but it is not enough. Being prepared to sacrifice whatever God asks someone to sacrifice is not yet what constitutes faith, is not what makes Abraham a hero of faith. To have an idea to live for and even to die for if that is required, is still an important part of Kierkegaard’s concept of faith, but Fear and Trembling focuses on something beyond that. If Kierkegaard had had faith, he would not just have sacrificed his matrimonial happiness with Regine, he would have received it back, like Abraham received back Isaac. In investigating what someone acknowledging faith envy might be looking for, I will emphasize this kind of faith beyond having an idea to live and die for. This is the point where I will look for faith envy in Kierkegaard’s life and work in the rest of this chapter. Kierkegaard envies the real Abraham for being able to receive Isaac back with joy, leaving his worries in the hands of God, accepting the givenness of things, and all of this in the inwardness of his faithful relationship with God. These four aspects I will discuss in turn in the next section.

18

Chapter 1

FAITH ENVY Receiving Isaac Back with Joy After a short preface, Fear and Trembling (1983, 9–14) begins with four portraits of how Abraham could have been. De Silentio portrays four almost Abrahams that he can make sense of, but which are not yet the Abraham of the Bible, the Abraham of true faith. The first Abraham wants to be open to his son: he tries to explain to him why he has to do what he has to do. Isaac, however, does not understand him and pleads for his life. In the end, Abraham decides to pretend to be a monster and idolater, who sacrifices Isaac for his pleasure. It is better, Abraham thinks, that Isaac takes me to be a monster, than that he thinks God is a monster. The second Abraham simply does as God commands him, without trying to explain anything. When he returns home, however, he has suddenly become old, his eyes are darkened and he finds joy in life no more. The ram was there and all is well with Isaac, but Abraham cannot forget what God had asked him to do. The third Abraham leaves Isaac at home and goes to Mount Moriah alone. In fact, he goes many times. He keeps asking God for forgiveness for the fact that he had been willing to sacrifice his son. He does not understand how it can be a sin to obey God, and yet, if being prepared to kill his son was his sin, how could such a sin ever be forgiven? In short, he does not understand what is going on and is left confused. The fourth Abraham does everything like the Abraham in Genesis but with one exception: at the final moment “Isaac saw that Abraham’s left hand was clenched in despair, that a shudder went through his whole body” (Kierkegaard 1983, 14). The moment passes, Abraham finds his resolve again and intends to go through with the sacrifice; the angel comes to point out the ram to save Isaac. That moment of anguish, however, makes Isaac lose his faith. It is never spoken about and Abraham does not suspect that Isaac has seen it, but Isaac cannot share the faith of his father who apparently acted out of despair rather than out of joy and certainty. These four “sub-Abrahams,” as commentator John Lippitt (2004, 29) calls them, do what God asks them to do. They are willing to sacrifice what is most dear to them, and yet, they lack something. Clearly, doing as God commands in itself is not what constitutes faith. Obeying God’s command no matter what, having an idea to live and even die for is not enough. That was the faith that Kierkegaard longed for as an adolescent, but now he finds that that is not truly desirable faith. He envies the faith of Abraham, the faith of the real Abraham in contrast to the sub-Abrahams. So, what is the difference,

Kierkegaard—More Than an Idea

19

what is this real faith that Kierkegaard is looking for later in his life through De Silentio in Fear and Trembling? De Silentio does not explain his sub-Abrahams any further, but we can make sense of them if we use the lens of faith envy. The sub-Abrahams represent the kind of faith Kierkegaard was looking for when he was younger: knowing what God wants someone to do and doing it. The real Abraham, whom Fear and Trembling contrasts with these sub-Abrahams, represents the faith that Kierkegaard envies now, at this stage of his life. It is the kind of faith that would have let him stay with Regine. It is the kind of faith that would allow Kierkegaard to see Regine as a real, concrete woman to whom he is engaged, rather than abstractly as an idea of married life which he has to sacrifice; as a real, concrete woman rather than as a muse like the young man in Repetition does, who breaks off his yearlong engagement (Glenn Kirkconnell 2010, 7). The faith Kierkegaard envies does not imply a detached withdrawal from the real world, but, on the contrary, it asks one to immerse oneself in it more fully. He would still be willing to live and die for whatever is God’s idea for his life, but he also wishes to be able to acknowledge his embodied feelings and desires to take part in life fully. De Silentio explains that Abraham, as the true hero of faith, makes these two movements at once: on the one hand the movement of infinite resignation—he lets go of all his wishes—on the other hand, the movement of faith proper—he holds on to his wishes after having given them up. Abraham does not know how, but he knows that he will keep Isaac, even though he is fully prepared to follow through on God’s command to sacrifice him. He does not believe that he will get Isaac back in heaven after death; he does not even believe that he will get Isaac back through any particular miracle on God’s part, for then he would not be fully giving him up. In that case, he would not have made the movement of infinite resignation, but he would have made the movement of almost giving up. Abraham believes that with God all things are possible, so although he completely surrenders his dear son, he knows he will have Isaac, here and now, in this life. This may seem like a contradiction, but De Silentio calls it a paradox, that is: an apparent contradiction (Kierkegaard 1983, 62). It is hard to say whether De Silentio (and, through him, Kierkegaard) manages to show that this is a paradox and not a straightforward contradiction. De Silentio, who claims to have no faith himself, relies on the argument that either this paradox is possible, or Abraham is lost: he is not the father of all the faithful and the kind of faith he seems to represent does not exist (cf. Kierkegaard 1983, 56). In the latter case, Abraham would have set out to murder his son rather than sacrifice him (cf. Kierkegaard 1983, 57). Yet, with the authority of the Bible and the community of believers inspired by it behind him, De Silentio continues to assume that there is no contradiction

20

Chapter 1

in claiming that Abraham fully makes those two movements: giving up his desires and, nonetheless, cherishing them. The story about Abraham in Genesis is quite elliptical, there is not much evidence present to prove that Abraham either does make those two movements or not. However, there is one suggestion in the text that for De Silentio shows that he does: after the event Abraham simply returns to his life. Despite everything that happened on Mount Moriah, he seems to continue living with Isaac happily ever after; at least, there is no indication in the text that something has changed. For De Silentio (Kierkegaard 1983, 35) this proves that Abraham is special: “What was the easiest for Abraham would have been difficult for me—once again to be happy in Isaac!” If he tries very hard, De Silentio can imagine having given up Isaac, but if he had done that and he had received him back like Abraham did, then De Silentio would have felt embarrassed and withdrawn. He would have been able to receive Isaac back only in pain, because he for himself had given up Isaac fully and completely already. Abraham shows no signs of such embarrassment, withdrawal, or pain; therefore he must not only have given Isaac up in infinite resignation, he must have believed fully that he would receive him back as well, so De Silentio argues. According to human reckoning, it is impossible, but “by virtue of the absurd,” so De Silentio (Kierkegaard 1983, 40) says, Abraham must have made the movement of faith proper as well, otherwise he could not have rejoiced in Isaac again afterward. As far as exegetical or textual evidence goes, this argument does not seem very strong. Hardly ever, Genesis speaks of the characters’ inner motivations and feelings, so it seems to stretch it quite a bit to conclude from lack of evidence to the contrary that Abraham must have been satisfied, joyful even, to continue living with Isaac after the journey to Mount Moriah. Nonetheless, irrespective of the exegetical value of the argument, to what extent does De Silentio (and, through him, Kierkegaard) manage to present a concept of faith here that is worthy of envy? If Abraham would have joyfully received Isaac back, would that prove that his faith is more than “an idea to live and die for”? Would it prove that there is a kind of faith conceivable that goes beyond the sub-Abrahams and Kierkegaard’s adolescent conception of faith, and that would have made it possible for Kierkegaard to have stayed with Regine? The four sub-Abrahams did receive that horrifying command from God to sacrifice their son, and they find a way of doing what God wants them to do. Yet, it comes at a price (cf. Kierkegaard 1983, 9–14). The first Abraham pretends to be a monster and deceives his son; the second one finds joy in life no more; the third one remains confused and restless; while the fourth one goes through with his sacrifice but not without a moment of despair. These are all certainly different from the—according to De Silentio: biblical—Abraham who joyfully receives Isaac back and continues living as if nothing ever

Kierkegaard—More Than an Idea

21

happened. The sub-Abrahams find a way of doing the terrible thing that God asks them to do but that changes them forever, irrespective of whether they receive Isaac back or not. They find a way of performing their heroic act: they have to do the right thing, and therefore, one way or the other, they let go of what they valued in their relationship to God and their beloved son. De Silentio says that he in this situation would have said to himself: “Now all is lost. God demands Isaac, I sacrifice him and along with him all my joy—yet God is love and continues to be that for me, for in the world of time God and I cannot talk with each other, we have no language in common” (Kierkegaard 1983, 35). He has to do what he has to do, but he places his son at a distance to do so, he places God at a distance because of the incomprehensible thing that God asks him to do. The Abraham of true faith, on the other hand, simply does what he has to do without regrets or sorrow or self-defense mechanisms like considering everything as lost already. The real Abraham does not even seem to consider whether it is a terrible thing that God asks of him: God asks and, therefore, he obeys. Leaving Worries in the Hands of God Many aspects of the sub-Abrahams reflect Kierkegaard’s attitude to Regine: he did lose his joy in life; he was confused his entire life, trying to clarify how what seemed like a contradiction was really merely a paradox; he took the radical step of breaking off the engagement but with despair and dread in his heart; he even set up an elaborate plan for years to pretend to be a monster to let Regine feel she was better off without him. What would have been different if he had had the real Abraham’s faith? Would he no longer have felt the need to break off the engagement? Many commentators have tried to rephrase the argument of Fear and Trembling trying to clarify how it portrays a paradox rather than a contradiction. Influential commentator Edward Mooney (cf. Mooney 2009, 108, aptly summarized by Lippitt 2004, 61) describes the message of Fear and Trembling as advocating “care without claims,” which Ronald Green (1998, 262) rephrased as a “traditional defense of selfless love.” According to Mooney (2009), the first movement—the infinite resignation—focuses on giving up all claims: nothing is ours by right, everything has been given to us by grace. Giving up our claims, however, often implies less care: we let go of things in our minds, and thereby we also let go of our care for those things: we consider these things as already lost. This is where the second movement of faith comes in: Abraham has given up his claims on Isaac, like the sub-Abrahams, but, unlike the sub-Abrahams, he still fully cares about Isaac, and he still can be glad without any reservations when he receives Isaac back through the intervention by the angel.

22

Chapter 1

Mooney’s interpretation has the advantage that it is clear, that it seems to fit many aspects of De Silentio’s complicated book about this shocking biblical story, and that it promotes something commendable—who would not support “care without claims” in the sense of “selfless love”? However, people have pointed out several problems with Mooney’s interpretation as well. First, Mooney implies that the sub-Abrahams who only make the movement of infinite resignation have given up their care for Isaac, but is that true? Resignation only makes sense because one cares so much. The sub-Abrahams are willing to “kill” Isaac, but not their love for Isaac, as Sharon Krishek (2009, 85) phrases it. Second, the question has been raised whether the part of “without claims” is actually recommendable. Ronald L. Hall (2000, 31) uses the example of marriage: “What kind of marriage would it be for one spouse to say to the other that he or she does not make any claims on the other, but will simply adjust to the other’s comings and goings?” Is “without claims” really the way to go? The sub-Abrahams lose both Isaac and God in seeing their situation as a tragic dilemma, they accept that they have to choose the lesser evil. Abraham’s fear and trembling, however, is not about making a choice but about whether he sees the situation right. If the situation is as he thinks it is, there is no choice and no tragedy: he does what he has to do—sacrifice his son—and paradoxically he knows that everything will be all right or, more than that, that he will have Isaac. Kierkegaard is already no longer truly “staying with Regine” as soon as he sees his situation as a tragic dilemma, whatever the choice he makes. The faith that could have saved his engagement should have come before there even being a choice. The point is not that Abraham makes a different choice, the point is that for Abraham there is not even a choice in the first place. Abraham has cleared his head and simply does what he has to do. He obeys—no worries, regrets, blame, or estimations about what will happen. He is obedient to God, and leaves everything else that may cross his mind into God’s hands. De Silentio reminds us of his central argument: Abraham did not think that Isaac was lost “as I can prove by his really fervent joy on receiving Isaac and by his needing no preparation and no time to rally to finitude and its joy” (Kierkegaard 1983, 36–37). Any ordinary man, any sub-Abraham, would have needed time to adjust when it turns out that he can keep Isaac after all, but, in the case of Abraham, we hear of no such adjustment time; therefore, he must have been immediately happy to take his son back home. Abraham does not have to be someone who happens not to see the contradiction between sacrificing Isaac today and showing him how to shear sheep next week, for example. On the contrary, his faith is to see this contradiction but to believe nonetheless. He does not hide it, but he faces it full-on, and yet, he does not let himself be deterred by it. His faith is to be able to genuinely

Kierkegaard—More Than an Idea

23

and fully surrender those impossibilities and contradictions to God. Abraham and Kierkegaard should have prayed: “God, if I do this, I do not see how I could still be with Isaac/Regine, but I leave that in your hands and I will do what you want me to do, while rejoicing fully in the sheep shearing/marriage nonetheless.” This would demonstrate the ability to distinguish between what belongs to them and what belongs to God. The true Abraham is able to leave his worries into the hands of God and simply accept the givenness of things. Accepting the Givenness of Things Sub-Abrahams are easily recognized, as they are those who clearly do great things. Those with faith, on the other hand, not so easily. In a post-9/11 novel, John Wray (2019) describes an ordinary American girl who, out of faith envy, has converted to Islam. She is disappointed about life in the United States, and she sets off for Afghanistan. On the way, however, in Dubai, she is already disappointed: “She’d wanted so badly for things to be different. The place and the people. She’d hoped for grace and dignity and unity of purpose. Instead, she felt the same disgust she’d felt at SFO, the same dismay, the same remove from everything she saw” (Wray 2019, 24). She continues her journey, but it does not get better: “Karachi proved a greater disappointment than the airport in Dubai. It reminded her of Oakland and Sacramento and the handful of other cities she knew, but it was hotter and more desperate and smelled of things she could not put a name to” (Wray 2019, 30). She had wanted an environment drenched by faith to be different from what she knew back home, but it seems to be just more of the same, if not worse. De Silentio envies faith, but he knows that he should not expect the lives of those with faith to be entirely different: “externally they have a striking resemblance to bourgeois Philistinism,” he tells us (Kierkegaard 1983, 38). De Silentio describes a contemporary version of the faithful Abraham. The knight of faith is the most ordinary of people, “solid all the way through” (Kierkegaard 1983, 39). If someone would point him out, De Silentio (Kierkegaard 1983, 39) confesses that he would exclaim: “Good Lord, is this the man, is this really the one—he looks just like a tax collector!” There is nothing extraordinary about him, if anything, he is even more ordinary than others. He enjoys everything: his desk job at work, going to church on Sunday vigorously singing all the hymns, a Sunday afternoon stroll in the woods, taking the newly introduced omnibus, and so on: “He belongs entirely to the world; no bourgeois philistine could belong to it more” (Kierkegaard 1983, 39). Significant is the way De Silentio (Kierkegaard 1983, 39–40) describes this hero of faith going home after work:

24

Chapter 1

Toward evening, he goes home, his gait is as steady as a postman’s. On the way, he thinks that his wife surely will have a special hot meal for him when he comes home—for example, roast lamb’s head with vegetables. If he meets a kindred soul, he would go on talking all the way to Österport about this delicacy with a passion befitting a restaurant operator. It so happens that he does not have four shillings to his name, and yet he firmly believes that his wife has this delectable dish for him.

This is a man of faith like Abraham before him: according to human standards it may be impossible to have such an exquisite dish on his salary, but it does not diminish his appetite in the least. He leaves those mundane worries to God and he enjoys in anticipation—as much as any man could—the lamb’s head his wife will have prepared for him. “If she has, to see him eat would be the envy of the elite and an inspiration to the common man, for his appetite is keener than Esau’s. His wife does not have it—curiously enough, he is just the same” (Kierkegaard 1983, 40). He is not disappointed, he has no regrets, he does not consider himself foolish for his anticipatory joy: she does not have it, so be it, and he will take delight in whatever his wife did prepare for him. One could describe this with Mooney’s phrase “care without claims,” but it would be a very particular care, and a very particular kind of “without claims.” The man cares about the lamb’s head, but he can let go of it completely, just as easily. One could say that this “letting go” is a form of being “without claims,” but during his walk home he fully and firmly believed that this lamb’s head was going to be his. What we see is someone fully enjoying life, not in some saintly “selfless love” kind of way but ordinarily, in fact, extremely ordinarily. He accepts whatever comes his way—including his desires!—as a gift from God. He accepts everything, and he is happy about it as well, because he knows that it comes from God. Like Abraham, he lives without regrets or sorrow or self-defense mechanisms like considering the lamb’s head as lost or “not for him” already. He knows he cannot determine fate but only how he responds to events, so he should restrict himself to that what is within his power—those responses—and leave the rest to God. The ancient Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus (2008, #89) explains how he does not want anything other than what God wants and lets all his choices be determined by God: “I submitted my will to God. He wants me to be sick—well, then, so do I. He wants me to desire something, I desire it. He wants me to get something, I want the same; or he doesn’t want me to get it, and I concur.” Similarly, De Silentio’s knight of faith does not worry about what will happen, what is possible or not, what desires arise in his heart, all

Kierkegaard—More Than an Idea

25

he concerns himself with is how to accept whatever comes his way. He leaves his worries to God and tries to love whatever God sends his way. Whatever happens—good or bad—is received with joy as a gift from God. Like philosopher of religion D.Z. Phillips (1986, 87) commenting on Simone Weil’s position, states: “Grace is the giveness [sic] of things under a religious aspect.” You stop asking why things happen as they do, but you accept everything as it comes. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1998, 97e) – to whom I will turn in the next chapter—describes the religious attitude as follows: “It is the attitude of taking a certain matter seriously, but then at a certain point not taking it seriously after all, & declaring that something else is still more serious.” Wittgenstein gives the example of saying that it is very important that someone died before he could finish a particular work, but that “in a deeper sense” this does not matter at all. The attitude Wittgenstein describes as religious fits nicely with De Silentio’s knight of faith. De Silentio’s knight of faith takes his appetite for the lamb’s head very seriously—as seriously as a restaurant operator indeed—but when it is not there, without missing a beat, it is the same to him. In a deeper sense, it is irrelevant whether there is a lamb’s head on the table that night or not. He relishes in his appetite when it comes his way, but he just as easily lets it go, when it turns out there is no lamb’s head for dinner this evening. De Silentio’s knight of faith cares about the lamb’s head if this care comes his way, but he simply lets it go when it turns out not to apply to what he finds for his dinner. What matters is God, and if this is what God has in store for him, it will be for the best. How does this apply to Kierkegaard and Regine? Kierkegaard has found his idea to live and die for: God wants him to be a religious writer. Then Regine comes along. He feels the desire in his heart to marry her, and it is mutual. He starts to worry whether his authorship and marriage are compatible. If he had had faith, he would have left that to God; he would have surrendered his worries in prayer, and not have set out to solve these issues himself. He would be fully convinced of being a religious writer, and going to be a proper husband to Regine, although he cannot imagine how that is possible. He would go ahead with his engagement and not let his worries in any way diminish his enthusiasm for the marriage. Maybe it would have worked, and it would have been a marvel to see. Maybe it would not have worked, the marriage would turn out to be a disaster, but, strangely enough, it would be quite the same to him. He leaves his worries to God and tries to loves whatever God sends his way. It may seem like an irresponsible way of living one’s life, if even questions of responsibility are left to God. As John Lippitt (2004, 50–51) describes as a key aspect of Fear and Trembling’s knight of faith’s joy in life: “the absence of blame and accountability that feature in his view of the world.” It is not for the believer to speak of right or wrong, deserved or undeserved, and so on.

26

Chapter 1

It may seem as if Abraham’s faith “turns out to be an actual indifference,” as Martin Hägglund (2019, 31) claims, although if Abraham did not at all times completely and fully love Isaac, it would not have been faith that he had, Kierkegaard holds. It may seem unfair to Regine as well, for Kierkegaard to go ahead with the marriage while unable to see how it could ever work. Yet, he did never hide his worries, so she could have made her own decision based on those worries as well. The Kierkegaard who had had faith, would have surrendered his worries and simply have done what came naturally: being a religious author and proceeding with his desire to marry Regine. If he had had faith and would have been able to leave his worries to God and simply accept his apparently contradictory desires for what they are, then he could have stayed with Regine. It is a possible way of living one’s life, and it could surely be an enviable way, when someone, like Kierkegaard, has seen how his worries destroyed what felt like his one chance at happiness. As an adolescent Kierkegaard looked for an idea to live and die for; he was hoping that this would put a stop to being thrown back and forth on the waves of life, without any direction, without an anchor. Now, at this later stage in life, he has found such an idea to live and die for in his religious authorship, but now he envies another kind of faith. What he now envies is still the certainty and absolute safety, still the anchor amid the waves, but now this is not to be found in big dramatic gestures and glorious battles, now it is found within the same old messy waves of life throwing him back and forth. Now it is to have the certainty of faith, while at the same time, as De Silentio (Kierkegaard 1983, 40) writes, living “[w]ith the freedom from care of a reckless good-for-nothing.” To be called a “reckless good-for-nothing” does not seem to be a recommendation, “[a]nd yet,” De Silentio (1983, 40) continues, “yet—yes, I could be infuriated over it if for no other reason than envy—and yet this man has made and at every moment is making the movement of infinity.” How does someone find such a way of living? Well, Abraham can accept the givenness of things, not through some grand gesture, but in the inwardness of his heart. The Inwardness of Faith De Silentio paints a picture of a 19th-century knight of faith; The Lego Movie (Lord and Miller 2014) portrays a 21st-century candidate. In this parody of fantasy stories, there is an evil lord—President Business—who threatens life as we know it by gluing everything into eternal stasis, and there is a wizard who has prophesied that there be a special one to rescue the realm. The special one, who is prophesied to be “the greatest, most interesting, most important person of all times,” will find the “piece of resistance,” a cap that will close the glue tube and save everyone. Some eight years later, the

Kierkegaard—More Than an Idea

27

generic construction worker Emmet accidentally stumbles upon the “piece of resistance” and so he must be the special one. Yet, he is the most ordinary person imaginable. He follows by the book all the “instructions to fit in, have everybody like you and always be happy!” like greeting everyone, enjoying popular music, and drinking over-priced coffee. His favorite restaurant is “Any chain restaurant,” his favorite TV show is the silly, repetitive soap “Where Are My Pants?,” and his favorite song is the upbeat pop tune “Everything Is Awesome.” People in the resistance movement resent him for being the special one despite being so extremely ordinary. If there is anything special about him, it is that he sings “Everything Is Awesome” with even more gusto than others, and that he even greets all nine cats of his neighbor every morning. Except for the fact itself that there is literally nothing special about him, there is nothing special about him. He takes delight in everything and is a model consumer in a capitalist society. When warned not to get any ideas, he can confidently claim, “I never have any ideas!” He does not have any ideas, let alone an idea to live and die for. And yet, and yet it could be he that is the special one, although he looks just like a generic construction worker. Because, as De Silentio argues, everything that makes a knight of faith distinctive belongs to his “inwardness” (cf. Lippitt 2004, 44). The wizard and leader of the resistance is not put off by appearances and wants to show that Emmet may indeed be the special one and a “Master Builder”—which is what you need to be to resist President Business. Through a ritual, the wizard enters Emmet’s mind “to prove that you have the unlocked potential to be a Master Builder.” However, Emmet’s mind turns out to be completely empty. Defeated the wizard sighs: “Master Builders spend years training themselves to clear their minds enough [. . .] and yet, your mind is already so prodigiously empty that there is nothing in it to clear away in the first place.” Apparently, Emmet is not a knight of faith after all. From the outside there is nothing that gives him away, he looks just like the ordinary man described by De Silentio, and yet, inwardly, unlike Emmet, the real knight of faith is making at every instant the movements of infinity: resignation and faith. What is important, however, is that Emmet could have been this knight of faith. Someone who likes fast-food restaurants, TV soap series, and silly pop songs, could be the one who De Silentio and Kierkegaard consider as the one who has desirable faith, faith worthy of our envy. De Silentio uses a large part of Fear and Trembling to explain that, inwardly, this faith of Abraham must be something that someone can only face alone—no one can help, guide, or teach the genuine knight of faith. On top of that, this faith is something that cannot be explained; in a way, it cannot even be talked about. Kierkegaard (1967, 100) wrote in his journals: “Every call from God is always addressed to one person, the single individual; precisely in this lies the rigor and the examination, that the one who is called

28

Chapter 1

must stand alone, walk alone, alone with God.” Martin Luther made a similar point, emphasizing that the vocation of each individual Christian is unique: “No saint has ever stood precisely where I stand. Only I stand there” (cf. Wingren 2004:182–184). As soon as Abraham would start to talk about why he does what he does, he will have to explain it in such a way that it becomes clear that everyone in his circumstances would and should have done the same. Yet, he is not doing something that can be explained in such a way. De Silentio (cf. Kierkegaard 1983, 58) contrasts Abraham with the Greek king Agamemnon and others who sacrificed their child for the sake of some greater good. Agamemnon could explain why he sacrificed his daughter: otherwise, his campaign against Troy would be doomed. The priests of the gods had proclaimed this for anyone to hear. Any king in such a situation ought to have done what Agamemnon did. Agamemnon took responsibility. However, in another sense, he did not take personal responsibility, for he was hiding behind “what any king in such and such circumstances should do.” Reflecting upon the book Fear and Trembling, philosopher Jacques Derrida (2008, 62) calls this “irresponsibilization.” He points out that in the case of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, on the other hand, there is a special kind of “taking responsibility.” Abraham has nowhere to hide. If he were asked, he cannot point to the abstract “everyone” to defend himself. The currently popular superhero movies deal with this issue as well. On one level, these movies appeal to our envy: we wish we could be such heroic figures and that what we did had such an impact, saving the world again and again and again. As a superhero, someone can save the world, and this person’s decisions are a matter of life and death. On another level, however, the movies may play into our fears: what if this is, in fact, our situation, that what we do really matters, that we are responsible and have to do what no one else can do for us, what only we can do, thereby saving the world for those around us again and again and again? Only I am now in this particular place in the world, only I have these capabilities that I have, would it not be terrible to let those opportunities go to waste? No one can tell me what is the right thing to do, since for others in similar situations, something else may be right, but I have the duty now to do what I have to do. Many a world may depend on it. Abraham’s faith implies that there is nowhere to hide, not even behind what others would do. No one ever stands exactly where I stand, and even if they did, no one ever is exactly who I am, every single individual has his own responsibility before God. Even an Emmet without anything going on in his head has a great individual responsibility. The true knight of faith is always alone before God. No one can tell him whether he is right or wrong. He is always a single individual before God. No guru or self-help book can tell a believer in the sense of the genuine knight of faith what God wants her to do, no one can teach this person or

Kierkegaard—More Than an Idea

29

reassure her, for whenever someone says something to this person, it is for her to decide whether it is God speaking through this person or temptation. Somewhere Kierkegaard (1978c, 104) makes fun of self-help guides for lovers: in the end, a couple will have completely anonymous conversations, merely copying what their self-help book tells them to say. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus (Kierkegaard 2000, 207) paraphrases faith as follows: “An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person [. . .] the daring venture of choosing the objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite.” He (Kierkegaard 2000, 208) reminds us that: “If I am able to apprehend God objectively, I do not have faith.” Is having more faith having objective certainty? No, that is not having faith. Faith cannot be objective by definition, because then we would no longer call it “faith.” If people envy faith, they must envy something basically inwardly, something that cannot be determined from the outside, something between the individual and God. Whether someone has faith is and remains between that person and God. The knight of faith must have a private, unmediated relationship to God (cf. Lippitt 2004, 101). One cannot post it on Facebook, one cannot even speak about it, for thereby one would make it public, something outward. For Kierkegaard, as soon as someone claims to have faith, she thereby shows that she does not have it. Like philosopher Hilary Putnam (1992, 154) wrote: “For Kierkegaard, to be absolutely sure you are ‘born again’ is a sign that you are lost.” Faith is in this respect like humility: if someone claims to have it, she proves that she does not have it. As soon as one speaks about it, it changes into something wrong, into a temptation. It is like starting to give reasons for why you love someone: as soon as you begin to do so, the true love seems to be gone, for whatever you mention, it could all be taken away and you would want love to be able to continue (cf. Kroesbergen 2015). Ultimately, as Michel de Montaigne (1958, 139) says, the only reason should be, “because it was he, because it was I.” Even if a person acts from faith and he says “‌ Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise,” as soon as one says it, it is clear that he can do otherwise. Faith is something inwardly between the individual and God, and it is changed into something else once someone starts to speak about it. De Silentio (Kierkegaard 1983, 57) says of Abraham: “Abraham is at no time a tragic hero but is something entirely different, either a murderer or a man of faith.” All the time Abraham can be a killer or a knight of faith, just like Emmet in The Lego Movie can at every moment be a plain, extremely ordinary person or the Special One, a true knight of faith. De Silentio contrasts Abraham with Agamemnon and many others; if he had lived about a century later he could have contrasted him as well with Okonkwo, from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (2008). Okonkwo also

30

Chapter 1

sacrifices his son, or at least a boy who calls him father. The boy was captured from a neighboring village and lived with Okonkwo for three years. Okonkwo loved him and hoped that his own son would learn from this boy’s manly attitude. Then the Oracle proclaims that the boy must be killed. Friends advise Okonkwo not to take part in the killing, but he is afraid of being thought weak and in the end, it is Okonkwo himself who cuts him down. He explains to his friend: “But someone had to do it. If we were all afraid of blood, it would not be done. And what do you think the Oracle would do then?” (Achebe 2008, 53). There are many differences between this story and the way De Silentio presents Abraham, differences that make him not a candidate for the faith Abraham has or may have. Okonkwo loves the boy, but he loves his son more, so he is not sacrificing his dearest in life. Okonkwo acts out of fear, fear for his reputation in the village, he does not act to serve the gods (cf. Achebe 2008, 49). The gods have spoken publicly, through the Oracle—it is intelligible to everyone and cannot create a private relationship between the individual and God. People can discuss it, interpret it, put forward different theories about how to respond to the Oracle. There is not a direct relationship between Okonkwo and the gods. Okonkwo is to be pitied or to be praised, but Abraham is beyond that. What is going on there is between Abraham and God: such is true faith, De Silentio argues. The generic construction worker Emmet from The Lego Movie is inconspicuous in every way, yet, he could have been a hero of faith. Okonkwo from Things Fall Apart is remarkable and quite a character, but he could not. This is one of the most important lessons to learn from De Silentio’s investigation into desirable faith. The person of faith can never look back and relax. He will remain for the rest of his life in fear and trembling over whether he is obeying the voice of God in his life. This is the ultimate consequence of the kind of faith Kierkegaard feels he is lacking—if he had had this kind of faith, he would have stayed with Regine, taking delight in everything, albeit in fear and trembling. Abraham, the true hero of faith, can receive Isaac back with joy, leaving his worries in the hands of God, accepting the givenness of things, and all of this in the inwardness of his faithful relationship with God. A PERSPECTIVE ON KIERKEGAARD AND FAITH What does using the angle of faith envy teach us about Kierkegaard and what about faith? One of the most remarkable characteristics of Kierkegaard’s authorship is his abundant use of pseudonyms. His most important books he did not write under his own name but using a made-up name, often even many made-up names and a made-up editor. Why did he do this? There are many theories about this, of course. Reflecting upon it himself near the end

Kierkegaard—More Than an Idea

31

of his life, Kierkegaard claims that it is to show his topic—“becoming a Christian”—from different angles, and to appeal to people in different stages of life. If we look at it from the angle of faith envy, it is a way of speaking of something of which he himself claims that one cannot speak. The kind of faith he longs for, as has been described in this chapter, cannot be put into words because putting it into words means to have lost it. By using pseudonyms Kierkegaard can speak of it without speaking of it. On top of this, using both pseudonyms and his own voice allows Kierkegaard to show how faith envy is shared by those inside and outside the church. Faith is something to strive for, Christian is always something to become never something to be, and for this, it doesn’t matter whether we are a self-proclaimed nonbeliever Johannes De Silentio or the acclaimed religious author Sören Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard speaks about what cannot be spoken about, he teaches about what cannot be taught, and proudly claims with much authority to have no authority. Kierkegaard was struggling with his own position as a religious author. How could he claim to write about becoming a Christian if he himself never did become one? He longs for it but cannot grasp it. All of these struggles with his own role, which play such an important part in his writings, make more sense when seen from the angle of faith envy. Kierkegaard often claims to use “indirect communication” because faith cannot be spoken of or communicated directly. This method was not so much consciously decided upon as it had grown naturally from his own lack of clarity about things. His own faith envy with its inherent ambiguous nature may form an important part of this lack of clarity. In short, many confusing aspects of Kierkegaard’s authorship fall into place when we look at them from the angle of faith envy. About the faith that is desirable, the faith that is worthy of our envy, Kierkegaard’s writings have much to teach us. At first, we may think that we long for the faith that consists of grand gestures, some supreme idea for which to live and die, but, on second thought, maybe that is not really what we envy. It could be more of an attitude toward whatever may come our way, great or small. The knight of faith leaves his worries to God and tries to love whatever God sends his way. No one ever stands exactly where this person stands or is exactly who he is, every single individual has his own responsibility before God. There is still something grand and absolute and certain in all this, but it is hidden away in inwardness, so that faith does not lure people away from life with all its messiness and questions. Truly desirable faith should be a faith that allows people to live that life to the full. This is the kind of faith that allowed Abraham to go ahead and sacrifice Isaac while feeling sure that he could teach him how to shear sheep next week, the kind of faith that would have allowed Kierkegaard to have stayed with Regine.

32

Chapter 1

This kind of faith is hard to recognize; it is not to the extremes that we should look for it—even a generic Emmet might have it. If people recognize the sub-Abrahams in themselves, they may well be heroes, but they do not have this faith. If people see Okonkwo in themselves, they do not have it. However, if people see Emmet in themselves, they cannot be sure that they have it either. The faith people envy and long for cannot be taught or explained. It is not making some heroic choices or bold statements, but it is discovering what someone personally cannot do otherwise. It is something between the single individual and God. But if someone envies this kind of faith, why does she not simply accept faith, what could make accepting faith difficult, no matter how much one may envy faith? For that question, we now turn to an admirer of Kierkegaard’s, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Chapter 2

Wittgenstein— Surrendering Your Self

In the previous chapter, we learned from studying Kierkegaard’s life and work how faith envy can betray us. Kierkegaard thought that he needed faith as an idea to live and die for, but later in life, he discovered that his real need was very different. The moving back and forth between all kinds of desires and obligations in life may give rise to faith envy. Someone may desire faith to lift her above such messiness, but then it turns out that the faith she really desires consists in accepting that messiness. But if someone does, why does she not simply do it then? Who or what is stopping someone like that? That is the question to which we will turn in this chapter, looking at the life and work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. How come obtaining faith is so difficult, even if one genuinely wishes for it? First, I will introduce Wittgenstein and his life and work, and show how we may see a continuous faith envy in his desire for absolute safety, the concept to which I will return in the final chapter. Second, I will discuss his professional and personal insights concerning the strange kind of language that belongs to a faith that can express such an absolute attitude toward life, continuing by focusing on the particular kind of life that is crucial for this kind of faith. In the third and final part of this chapter, I will summarize what using the perspective of faith envy shows about Wittgenstein and what about faith. WITTGENSTEIN His Life Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889 as the eighth and youngest child to a wealthy family in Vienna. His father was a steel magnate of Jewish descent. Wittgenstein was raised Roman Catholic by his mother, but there was never much emphasis on religion in the household. Music, on the other hand, was 33

34

Chapter 2

very important. The house—nicknamed Palais Wittgenstein—contained seven grand pianos and regularly hosted famous composers like Brahms and Mahler. Ludwig’s brother Paul became a concert pianist, but Ludwig himself did not seem very gifted in performing music. As a child, he built a working sewing machine, and later on, he went to study engineering in Manchester, England. Through an interest in mathematics, Wittgenstein switched to studying logic and philosophy with Bertrand Russell, one of the most widely recognized philosophers at the time, in Cambridge. Russell told Wittgenstein’s sister that he expected her brother would make the next big step in logic. Wittgenstein withdrew to an isolated hut in Norway to concentrate on his work in logic, but when the First World War broke out, he returned to Austria to volunteer for the army. In the war, he asked for the most dangerous positions, because he felt that only a direct confrontation with death could help him to live fully. In the trenches and as a prisoner of war he finalized his work on logic, which would after the war be published as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922). Meanwhile, his father had died and the inheritance made Wittgenstein a very rich man. Yet, he did not want that wealth and gave most of it away to his brothers and sisters. They were rich themselves already so they would not be spoiled by it, was his thinking. Convinced that his Tractatus had solved all major problems in logic and philosophy, Wittgenstein looked for different vocations. He spent some time as a gardener in a monastery, as a primary school teacher, and he helped the architect of a house his sister was building in Vienna. Slowly Wittgenstein’s interest in philosophy returned and he started to develop a philosophical approach radically different from the one in the Tractatus. The Tractatus presupposed that the only valid language was descriptive, scientific language. Language ought to be a picture of the world. One of the inspirations for Wittgenstein’s early view on language had been a story he had heard about a court case in Paris about a car accident. In the courtroom, a scale model of the situation was built: small streets, houses, miniature dolls to represent people, and so on. Words that make sense ought to be as straightforwardly portraying facts in the world as this scale model, Wittgenstein argued. Other expressions, like in ethics or religion, were a misuse of language and plain nonsense. From the 1930s onwards, after a break from philosophy, Wittgenstein no longer saw language as one kind of thing, a scale model of the world. In the way that there are many kinds of games, he now sees that there are many ways in which language is used. There are many different “language games” according to the phrase he introduced. When we speak of a car, we speak of

Wittgenstein—Surrendering Your Self

35

an object, but when we speak of pain or meaning, our words work differently. Walking is an activity, reading or thinking can be called activities as well, but the kind of rules according to which we apply these words are not similar. Wittgenstein in his later work emphasizes these differences, although within all of this he remains focused on the question of what it means to say something. When he completed the Tractatus, he thought he had solved all philosophical problems by stipulating what kind of language makes sense; in his later work Wittgenstein still assumes that classical philosophical puzzles, for example, those about free will or truth, can be solved—or at least disappear—when we have a clear view of how language works. Instead of trying to force the verb “to will” into the mold of an activity, we should look at how we use the word. Instead of assuming that truth must always mean the same thing, we should observe how the word “true” is used in a particular context. Absolute Safety As previously mentioned, Wittgenstein was raised as a Christian in the Roman Catholic tradition, but there was not much emphasis on faith in the household he grew up in. As a schoolboy he decided that actually he didn’t believe all things Christians are supposed to believe and that he’d better be honest about it (cf. Monk 1991, 18). This decision did not seem to be a very important event, either for himself or for the people around him. He was not religious, but with a good-natured indifference toward Christianity, as has since become the most common stance on religion in Europe in the 21st century. When he was twenty-one years old, something changed, as Wittgenstein recalls in a lecture on ethics after his return to philosophy (cf. Malcolm 1984, 58). He visited a play, which he did not consider a very good play or a very deep one, but within it, a protagonist said something that caught his attention. “I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens,” said the protagonist (cf. Wittgenstein 1993, 41). On the one hand, this confirmed the idea Wittgenstein would elaborate in the Tractatus: ethical or religious statements are meaningless because the protagonist contradicts himself: if he speaks of “whatever happens” then injury or harm is of course among the things that can happen. On the other hand, Wittgenstein felt that something important was being expressed here. He would later say that this was the first time in his life that he saw the possibility of religion (Malcolm 1984, 58). We can look at this event as the origin of a faith envy that would never leave him. Wittgenstein’s eyes had been opened to the possibility of absolute safety. This does not need to be a religious possibility, but for Wittgenstein it was. To be safe no matter what happens, to be independent of fate and circumstances, to accept whatever may come one’s way—for Wittgenstein, this was a religious attitude toward how things are in the world. When he volunteered to

36

Chapter 2

participate in the First World War, we find him writing again and again in his diaries: “Thy will be done” (cf. Monk 1991, 138). For him, the way in which one can accept whatever happens was to accept everything that happens as God’s will. This perspective was deepened by his quite accidental encounter with Tolstoy. On military campaign, Wittgenstein was looking for something to read in a local bookshop. They still had postcards, but only one book was left: the Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s summary of the gospels. Wittgenstein bought it and read it over and over again. His fellow soldiers knew him as “the man with the gospels” (Monk 1991, 116). Tolstoy’s austere interpretation of Christianity matched Wittgenstein’s own inclinations: to be religious meant to have a kind of absolute perspective completely independent of whatever may happen in the world. When a few years later a colleague presented a paper on conversion to Christianity, Wittgenstein is reported to have said that, “as far as he knew, it consisted in getting rid of worry, having the courage that made one really not care what might happen” (McGuinness 1988, 151). Like Kierkegaard, whom he admired, the faith Wittgenstein envied was a faith that helps someone to put aside one’s worries and simply accept whatever may come his way. Historian Modris Eksteins (2000) compared the letters soldiers in the First World War sent home. The English and French spoke of duty to serve their fatherland and the values it stood for. The German and Austrian also spoke of duty (Pflicht), but for them, it was a duty for duty’s sake. It was more a sacred duty, not with some practical goal in mind (Eksteins 2000, 193). This was Wittgenstein’s attitude: he complains in his diaries that he still is not able to do his duty purely for duty’s sake (cf. Sánchez Durá 2015, 77). After the Second World War, Wittgenstein commented on a film footage of German planes bombing the Polish countryside which was accompanied by music from Wagner (cf. Rhees 1997, 309). The music, Wittgenstein observed, made one look at the actions of these soldiers as tragic acts; they did what they had to do, beyond good and evil, beyond noble or base goals. That is the way of living one’s life that Wittgenstein envied. As long as somebody has some external goal in mind, he is not independent of whatever happens, for that goal may be realized or not. Wittgenstein envied those who could be completely independent of the world and the judgments of others. His personal greatest moral concern was about vanity (cf. Rhees 1981, 92). He was not extremely vain in an ordinary sense—in fact, these scruples would have stopped him from that—but recognizing that he depended upon the approval of others, made him aware he still lacked the independence of the world he was longing for. When he had given up his professorship in part for these reasons, he was disappointed: “I thought when I gave up my professorship that I had at last got rid of my vanity. Now

Wittgenstein—Surrendering Your Self

37

I find I am vain about the style in which I am able to write my present book” (Rhees 1981, 77). He wished he did not care so much about his achievements. Near the end of the movie Frozen (Buck and Lee 2013), Elsa learns to accept who she is and sings: “Let it go, let it go, / turn away and slam the door! / I don’t care what they’re going to say,”—to really not care about that is Wittgenstein’s ideal. “Here I stand in the light of day / Let the storm rage on!” Elsa continues—to be independent of whatever may happen, is what Wittgenstein envies and he interprets this religiously. If he could believe in the Last Judgment, if he could surrender to that idea, then really all other judgments about his life and work, even his own, would have become superfluous. Religion could make him independent of the world, yet, still, he could not fully surrender himself to religion. Despite having been known as “the man with the gospels,” despite praying “Thy will be done” countless times, Wittgenstein did not consider himself to be a religious man. His whole life he remained outside of faith. When he spoke highly favorably of Kierkegaard, he often reminded friends that he did not believe the things Kierkegaard believed. He felt faith would require him to give something up that he was unable to do. He remained an outsider, but continued to admire something in faith. The most widely debated statement of Wittgenstein about his own personal stance on religion has been his statement that: “I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view” (Rhees 1981, 94). Wittgenstein’s student Norman Malcolm (1993) was working on an essay about this, which was posthumously published together with a response from another Wittgenstein scholar, Peter Winch. Malcolm (1993, 85) sees a parallel between Wittgenstein’s philosophical emphasis on the fact that explanations come to an end somewhere—at some point the philosopher simply has to say, “This language game is played”—and the religious statement, “It is God’s will.” Winch (in Malcolm 1993, 116) is doubtful that this was Wittgenstein’s intention with his cryptic statement about his religious point of view, as it blurs the distinction between philosophy and religion whereas the later Wittgenstein always emphasized differences. Winch (in Malcolm 1993, 96) takes Wittgenstein to be mainly speaking of other problems other than philosophical ones. Wittgenstein was often deeply bothered by what he considered his moral failings, and thinking about these issues he was inclined to ask himself how such an issue would be addressed from a religious point of view, that was the attitude that came naturally to him. Philosopher Lance Ashdown (2004) presents an even more down-to-earth interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remark: whenever Wittgenstein has to come up with examples in his philosophical work, he cannot help but think of religious examples first. All of these interpretations, however, do not fit the context in which Wittgenstein made the remark according to the one who recorded it, his

38

Chapter 2

student and friend Maurice Drury. When Drury first published Wittgenstein’s remark, he placed it in the context of a conversation about Wittgenstein’s nearly finished book, the Philosophical Investigations (in Rhees 1981, 94). Other remarks from the conversation that he records are about the impossibility for someone to understand his book if he does not know how important music has been in his life; and Wittgenstein’s observation that “My type of thinking is not wanted in this present age.” Wittgenstein strongly feels his approach to thinking moves in the opposite direction compared to the scientific culture and emphasis on progress during our times. Later, when Drury returns to Wittgenstein’s remark, he adds a clause. Now it reads: “I am not a religious man but I can’t help seeing every problem from a religious point of view, I would like my work to be understood in this way” (Drury 2017, 206). When Wittgenstein makes his remark, he is not comparing his philosophical work to religion, nor does he speak of the examples he chooses in it, nor does he speak of non-philosophical problems. Wittgenstein speaks of how he wants his philosophical work to be understood. He speaks of the context in which he wants it to be read, and my suggestion is that he speaks both of the book itself and his engagement in working on it. He wants both to be part of something higher, something beyond the ordinary world. He wants his work and the results of his work to have meaning independently from the respect it earns him as a person and philosopher, independently from the opinions of others in general and even from himself. He wants his work to have a value that does not depend upon coincidences, accidental circumstances, or even the outcome of the work. It has to have meaning in and of itself. The work ought to have its reward within itself, in the sense in which it is sometimes said that virtue is its own reward. While contemplating the value of the book he was working on, and on what to say about it in its introduction, Wittgenstein received a letter from a friend in Austria, a priest. Wittgenstein tells Drury: “In it he says he hopes my work will go well, if it should be God’s will. Now that is all I want: if it should be God’s will. Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbuchlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbor may be benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have liked to say about my work” (Drury 2017, 142). Later when he reflected upon dedicating his own book to the glory of God he added: “Nowadays this would be the trick of a cheat, i.e., it would not be correctly understood. It means the book was written in good will, and so far as it was not but written from vanity etc., the author would wish to see it condemned. He cannot make it more free of these impurities than he is himself” (Drury 2017, 150). Wittgenstein wished that all he cared about in his work was that it was to the glory of God, that he only cared about that part of it which had value independently from him. Yet, time and time again he caught himself in

Wittgenstein—Surrendering Your Self

39

the sin of vanity, being proud of his insights. He envies those he considers to be truly religious for being able to surrender those impurities to God. In his notebooks, Wittgenstein (1998, 66e) admonishes himself: “Is what I am doing in any way worth the effort? Well only, if it receives a light from above. And if that happens,—why should I take care, not to be robbed of the fruits of my labor? If what I write really has value, how were anyone to steal the value from me?” He finds himself annoyed about how other people distort his ideas. This is one of the reasons that he works so hard to get his book finished, so the world can see what is truly his new philosophical approach. Unable to release the book to the publishers, Wittgenstein writes angry letters to journals that published according to him distorted representations of his position (cf. Wittgenstein 1993, 156–157). It makes him furious, although he wishes this were not the case. If the work truly has value, it should have value independently from who can claim credit for it. He wishes he did not care about the credits. He is not a religious man, but he wishes his work to be seen from a religious point of view, he wishes he himself could see it from a religious point of view, as belonging to something beyond him, something higher, as something receiving light from above. Wittgenstein (1998, 39e) considered using a line from Longfellow as his motto: “In the elder days of art, / Builders wrought with greatest care / Each minute & unseen part, / For the gods are [‘see’ in original, HK] everywhere.” The sculptors of the medieval cathedrals knew that most of their work would never be seen by anyone: it was too high up, too dark for regular churchgoers ever to notice it. Yet, as we can see now in the quality of their work, they worked with the greatest care, because they knew God was their witness. Wittgenstein wishes his work was like that, that all he cared about was the quality it had in itself. He finds himself unable to fully consider it like that— he is not a religious man—but he cannot help but envy those who are religious in that sense. Like the work of the sculptor, he wishes his philosophical work were to the glory of God. Nowadays, however, Wittgenstein says, such a claim is the trick of a cheat. The religious phrasing of his ideas may make Wittgenstein’s view of life seem quite far away from contemporary culture in the West, yet there are many parallels as well. Many books, films, and computer games portray a protagonist who is looking for some higher perspective, for doing what she has to do no matter what, for the right thing only because it is the right thing—think, for example, about The Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, or The Hunger Games. All of these stories focus on concepts like vocation, duty, devotion, and hope (cf. Verbrugge, Buijs, and Van Baardewijk 2018). The idea that a person should live her life in such a way that she does not fear death might be behind the common aphorism “You only live once.” People want their lives to be something more than a

40

Chapter 2

haphazard string of futile episodes; they envy those whose life has a purpose beyond that. That is why many people read these books, watch these movies, and play these games. The anxiety implied in the thought that life ought to be more than trying to get rich, successful, or famous, reflects an envy similar to the one we identified in Wittgenstein. In 2001 the author Salman Rushdie (2001) wrote the book Fury. It deals with the unspecified, undirected anger that the protagonist finds everywhere around him in society. In a recent textbook in philosophy for high schools in the Netherlands (Verbrugge, Buijs, and Van Baardewijk 2018) it is noted that people feel constantly pressurized to perform, they feel being victims of everyone else who is trying to keep them down, and as a result, they are angry at everyone around them and even themselves, without any particular reason to point to. Rushdie’s protagonist (2001, 183–184) connects it to the globally still rising nationalism: In spite of all the chatter, all the diagnoses, all the new consciousness, the most powerful communications made by this new, much-articulated national self were inarticulate. For the real problem was damage not to the machine but to the desirous heart, and the language of the heart was being lost. An excess of this heart damage was the issue, not muscle tone, not food, neither feng shui nor karma, neither godlessness nor God.

Meaningless violence, mental and physical abuse, cursing, offending others in whatever way one can is the result, the protagonist Malik Solanka observes. “In the tormented flames and anguished bullets Malik Solanka heard a crucial, ignored, unanswered, perhaps unanswerable question—the same question, loud and life-shattering as a Munch scream, that he had just asked himself: ‛is this all there is? What, this is it? This is it?’” (Rushdie 2001, 184). People don’t see any purpose anymore: “They no longer saw a reason not to shoot” (Rushdie 2001, 184). The inarticulate anger consumes everything. The anger that reflects an envy of something more to life, the envy of faith, a faith that is beyond the godlessness or God as they are used in the shouting-matches concerning the new, much-articulated national self. A faith that is not concerned with damage to the machine, not concerned with what is the focus in our scientific age with its emphasis on progress, but a faith that is concerned with damage to the desirous, envious heart of which the language seems lost. At the age of twenty-one, Wittgenstein was struck by the idea that one could feel absolutely safe. It awoke in him an envy of faith, an envy of a calm heart whatever may or may not be happening around oneself. This longing for independence of the world is the place where I in this chapter look for the faith envy in Wittgenstein’s life and work, although the link to faith in his

Wittgenstein—Surrendering Your Self

41

work is often less direct than in Kierkegaard’s case. As hinted at above, I do not consider Wittgenstein’s philosophical work in itself as religious or analogous to religion: Wittgenstein envied being able to place it within a religious context, in the same way as the sculptor or carpenter or transcriptionist could do. It is not about the content of the work so much as about the attitude in which it is done. Yet, Wittgenstein’s philosophical work can be of use as well in the quest to understand faith envy, in particular concerning the language of it, the language of the heart that seems to be lost, as Rushdie describes it. Throughout his quest for that feeling of absolute safety which had struck him at the age of twenty-one, Wittgenstein discovered that the faith he envied required a particular language and required a particular life. To that, I will turn in the next two sections. I will begin with Wittgenstein’s professional and personal insights concerning the strange kind of language that belongs to a faith that can express the absolute attitude toward life that he envies in faith. FAITH ENVY A Particular Language—the Tightrope Walker During his entire life, Wittgenstein can be seen as envying faith as a way of being independent of fate and circumstances, independent of approval and recognition, independent of the world. While writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein concluded that in that case faith cannot be put into words, as words describe things in the world, not beyond them. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein had learned that, while he still considered desirable faith to be about what is beyond the ordinary world, when words are taken up in a particular way, in a particular life, they could be a part of it. We cannot tell someone’s faith—whether it is worthy of envy or not—by looking at her words alone (cf. Wittgenstein 1998, 97e). Words themselves do not show what someone believes, in the sense of what is her attitude to life, whether or not she has reached that independence of the world. Words can be a part of a genuine life of faith, but we need to pay close attention to the role that these words play in someone’s life. After the First World War, Wittgenstein continued to read Tolstoy. One of Tolstoy’s stories that was Wittgenstein’s favorite and which he often recommended to friends was the short story of “The Three Hermits” (Tolstoy 2007, 177–184). A bishop comes across an island where three hermits live. He discovers that the only prayer they know is “Three are ye, three are we, please, have mercy upon us!” and he decides to teach them the Lord’s prayer (Tolstoy 2007, 181). After an intensive day of studying, they know the Our Father by heart and the bishop leaves. In the middle of the night, however,

42

Chapter 2

the bishop sees a light approaching his boat, coming across the sea. It comes closer and closer, and, finally, the bishop sees what is going on: it is the three hermits running across the water. “We have forgotten your teaching, servant of God.” The three shout, “We can remember nothing of it. Teach us again!” (Tolstoy 2007, 183). The bishop realizes that their faith is so much greater than his own: they walk across water, even though the only prayer they know is “Three are ye, three are we, please, have mercy upon us!” It does not matter which words you use, what matters is the faith that they express. Kierkegaard (1992, 201) expresses this idea by posing the following question: If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with a knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol— where, then, is there more truth? The one prays in truth to God although he is worshiping an idol; the other prays in untruth to the true God and is therefore in truth worshiping an idol.

What matters is the passion with which a person prays, not the words or symbols that he uses. Wittgenstein (1998, 97e) states: “Theology that insists on certain words & phrases & prohibits others makes nothing clearer. [. . .] It gesticulates with words, as it were, because it wants to say something & it does not know how to express it. Practice gives words their sense.” Words— in particular in religion—do not have meaning in themselves, but they depend upon their context for their sense, upon the practice in which they are used. Wittgenstein interpreter Anthony Holiday (1985, 134) goes as far as to state that there is no development in this respect in Wittgenstein’s thought: “It is a noteworthy—possibly the most noteworthy—feature of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy that, despite many other retractions and revisions, the doctrine that religio-ethical values are propositionally inexpressible is never explicitly denied.” Religions and ethics are still considered to be ultimately inexpressible in words; however, the later Wittgenstein no longer holds that one should remain silent about ethics and religion. Now he emphasizes again and again that expressions in ethics and religion maybe do their job just fine, but they can easily go wrong as well. The later Wittgenstein compares having faith to being a tightrope walker. He tells one of his students who has just converted to Roman Catholicism: “If someone tells me he has bought the outfit of a tightrope walker I am not impressed until I see what is done with it” (Rhees 1981, 88). To begin using the words of faith is not enough. In his notebooks, Wittgenstein (1998, 84e) explains: “The honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. It almost

Wittgenstein—Surrendering Your Self

43

looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.” On every side it looks like the words will go wrong, yet, for the truly—honest—religious person it is possible to avoid the pitfalls to either side. Philosopher of religion Severin Schroeder (2007, 443) identifies the tension that Wittgenstein’s image of the tightrope walker illustrates with the tension of, on the one hand, believing that God exists and the resurrection of Christ is true and so on, and, on the other hand, knowing that these things are not likely to be true. He calls this an unresolved tension in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion, and considers it to be a position that is, in fact, psychologically impossible. Schroeder’s fellow philosopher of religion Mikel Burley (2012, 80) responds that a person may feel contrary impulses without this leading to a combination of beliefs that is an impossibility. According to Burley (2012, 80), Wittgenstein was merely concerned to stress the difficulty of Christian faith. Wittgenstein himself struggled with, “occasionally, fleetingly, feeling able to speak the language of faith with an open heart, while at most times feeling constrained by doubts” (Burley 2012, 80). He found himself not to be a religious man, although he envied faith and saw that it really is possible for some people to walk on that tightrope. On the one hand, the believer believes that God exists, on the other hand, he knows that his existence cannot be proven scientifically. This is not a contradiction of beliefs, or a psychological impossibility, as Schroeder (2007, 462) holds; nor does it represent contrary impulses, as Burley (2012, 80) suggests. It shows how words in religion can be easily misused: if someone says “God exists,” this should not be used in such a way that it contradicts “God’s existence cannot be proven”; or if someone says “God’s existence cannot be proven,” this person should not be taken to imply that God does not exist. It is a tightrope, for one can fall off so easily on either side. Elsewhere, Wittgenstein (1998, 34e) gives the example of John Bunyan’s devotional classic The Pilgrim’s Progress. It tells the allegory of someone named Christian, who leaves his hometown—the City of Destruction—and, encountering obstacles and temptations along the way, reaches the Celestial City atop Mount Zion. Wittgenstein (1998, 34e) notes: Religious similes can be said to move on the edge of the abyss. B’s allegory for instance. For what if we simply add: “and all these traps, swamps, wrong turnings, were planted by the Lord of the Road, the monsters, thieves, robbers were created by him?” Without doubt, that is not the sense of the simile! but this sequel is too obvious! For many & for me it robs the simile of its power.

44

Chapter 2

The allegory only works if one does not elaborate on it in the way Wittgenstein suggests; if someone does that, she falls into the abyss, she drops from the tightrope. Wittgenstein continues by giving the example of wanting to encourage people to be grateful to the bees. This in itself is fine, but once this person starts to add reasons like “for look how good they are,” things go wrong, for the next moment the bees may sting (Wittgenstein 1998, 34e). Making religious and ethical statements can be compared to tightrope-walking because there are all kinds of natural conclusions from one’s words that one should not draw. The words can be used in the right way, but it is impossible to see this from the words in themselves. Within the practice that gives these words their sense, there are pitfalls everywhere. To a large extent, the history of dogmatics or systematic theology can be seen as a balancing act in this way. People want to say that everything is in accordance with God’s will, without denying that God only wants the good. People want to say that God calls us away from our cultural environments, without denying that God may speak through culture. People want to say that praying works, without advocating to use prayer instead of other means. People want to say that God loves us unconditionally, without saying that it does not matter if one does wrong. People want to say that something is good because God said so, without denying that God wants it because it is good. People want to say that God is transcendent, without denying that he is immanent. People want to say that Jesus Christ is human, without denying that he is God. And so on, and so forth. Without a doubt, these consequences are not the sense of these religious statements, but these sequels are too obvious. Someone cannot see from the words in themselves whether someone manages to speak them in a religiously acceptable way. If someone says that everything is in accordance with God’s will, we need to look at the rest of his life to see whether for him this implies that God does not only want the good. It is often a sign of religious conviction if someone says that God exists, but if in his life this statement does not play a radically different role from the statement that the moons of Jupiter exist, one should wonder whether this person really is religious. This does not yet appear to be very controversial, but it may become so when it is applied to the Resurrection of Christ, for example. It is often a sign of Christian faith if someone claims that Christ is risen, but if for her it is nothing more than a historical fact, it may not be Christian at all. Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch (in Springsted 2004, 368) explains: “What would damage the integrity of such a belief [in the Resurrection of Christ] is not so much a demonstration of its historical falsity as the asking of such technical historical questions concerning it in the first place. It is a belief of the sort which precludes the asking of such questions.” As soon as

Wittgenstein—Surrendering Your Self

45

people start to ask historical questions about the Resurrection of Christ, they are no longer speaking religiously, they have already fallen off the tightrope, whatever may be the outcome of their inquiries. Elsewhere, I compared this to beginning to calculate what someone puts into a friendship and gets out of it, which would be the end of that friendship, whatever the calculations may show (cf. Kroesbergen 2015, 109–114). The moral concept of friendship is lost once prudential calculations appear on the scene. Similarly, the religious concept of Christ’s Resurrection is lost once one engages in the historical investigations. Wittgenstein (1998, 37e–38e) even states: “Queer as it sounds: the historical accounts of the Gospels might, in the historical sense, be demonstrably false, & yet belief would lose nothing through this [. . .] because historical proof (historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief.” Once one starts playing the language game of historical proving, one has fallen off the tightrope of religious language games. Quotes like these are probably the ones that have led philosopher Brian Clack (1999, 125) to doubt whether anyone could, “accept all that Wittgenstein has to say about religion in his later period and yet still be able to continue in his or her faith.” According to him (Clack 1999, 125), Wittgenstein’s perspective is at best “the frustrated and bitter recognition that the passionate beauty of the religious life is no longer open to us,” in other words: a form of faith envy. Be that as it may for Wittgenstein himself—religious life was indeed no longer open for him—I think Clack’s dismissal is too soon. If one reads a central Christian text like Psalm 23 “The Lord is my Shepherd,” for example, it is hard to see how the historical proof-game could even begin to make sense. Beyond that, Wittgenstein does not deny that a believer may emphasize that God exists, he merely points out that it plays a different role in the life of this believer than his conviction that the moons of Jupiter exist. As I argued elsewhere (Kroesbergen 2019b, 93) and can be seen in the day-to-day lives of believers, religious belief in the resurrection of Christ commits one to certain values and to not turning it into a queer historical happening. Wittgenstein (1998, 38e–39e) states: “faith is faith in what my heart, my soul, needs, not my speculative intellect. [. . .] Only love can believe the Resurrection.” The desire for one’s beliefs to be based on evidence—historical or otherwise—is a temptation, something that will not strengthen someone’s belief but eradicate it. Having more faith is not having objective certainty; in fact, having objective certainty is not having faith, as we noted in the previous chapter. The strength of the faith that we saw portrayed by Kierkegaard is inside a believer, she cannot show it, no one can teach it or confirm that someone is right, one cannot even speak of it. Wittgenstein, while writing the Tractatus, used to think that one cannot speak of faith either, but the later Wittgenstein saw a possibility for honest religious language—in fact, in these cases he often referred to Kierkegaard himself. However, the practice that gives this

46

Chapter 2

language its sense requires struggle. Like Kierkegaard’s faith, faith to be envied for Wittgenstein implies a battle that never ends: no one can ever tell the believer, “Yes, you did the right thing, you have reached solid ground!” Religious language continuously moves on the edge of an abyss, like a tightrope walker she may drop at any moment, or rather, find that she has dropped already (cf. Zizek 2014, 150). The language of the heart that Rushdie’s protagonist was longing for, is not just being lost, it is something that, once found, continuously requires struggle. People both admire and are repelled by the certainty of faith and its often static or archaic imagery. Wittgenstein’s reflections show that to understand faith properly we need to distinguish the words and how they are used. As Kierkegaard showed in his comparison between a Christian believer and an idolater, ultimately it is not the words that matter. It is practice that gives the words their sense. The language of faith moves along the edge of an abyss. Someone who speaks the language of faith is like a tightrope walker, risking to fall off to one side or the other at every moment. Yet, if Wittgenstein knows all this and he envies faith, how come that he cannot take it? Why not start using this particular kind of language? What is stopping him? Well, if practice is what gives words their sense, it is not just a particular language that is required for the kind of faith that Wittgenstein envies, it also requires a particular life, and that may be even more difficult to will oneself into. A Particular Life—the Marionette Wittgenstein uses the metaphors of a tightrope or an abyss when speaking of religious language. When contemplating how only love can believe the Resurrection of Christ, however, he uses a different metaphor: a marionette or puppet, although he does not use these words explicitly. Belief in the Resurrection is not something for the intellect, but something for the heart, for one’s entire being, and, Wittgenstein (1998, 39e) holds: “this can only come about if you no longer support yourself on this earth but suspend yourself from heaven. Then everything is different and it is ‘no wonder’ if you can then do what now you cannot do.” Wittgenstein found himself to be unable to believe in the Resurrection, but had he had this particular kind of love in his life, it would have been no wonder that he believed it. Between brackets, Wittgenstein (1998, 39e) adds: “It is true that someone who is suspended looks like someone who is standing but the interplay of forces within him is nevertheless a quite different one & hence he is able to do quite different things than can one who stands.” An outsider may not see any difference in the way someone moves, but the interplay of forces is completely different. In the previous section, we saw that for faith the words in themselves do not matter that much, but the practice gives them their sense. Here it seems that

Wittgenstein—Surrendering Your Self

47

even the life as it is outwardly visible may not be criterion enough to discern that someone has faith. We need to look deeper at the interplay of forces that works on a person. The point of Wittgenstein’s analogy is obviously that one cannot see the difference between people with faith and those without it from the outside. The one with love who can believe in the Resurrection does not need to behave in any way different from the one without this love, just like there does not need to be any difference between the movements of a marionette and a regular person, other than that the marionette is being pulled upwards when it lifts its arm, whereas a regular person uses her own muscle-effort to raise her arm. The only difference is a difference in the interplay of forces at work in the movements. How can we apply such a subtle and hidden difference to concrete cases? Imagine the father of a successful young athlete. He is a very conscientious man and when he notices that he actually enjoys bathing in the reflected glory of his son, he begins to worry. In the past, people have often commented that his enthusiasm and support for his son was a way of gaining glory for himself through his son. These remarks were always made off-hand, without any evidence brought forward, merely as the kind of thing people say when they want to hurt someone in such a situation. The father had always dismissed such accusations without devoting any further thoughts to them. Yet, now he finds himself enjoying the indirect glory that all the sacrifices he made for his son’s career bring to him, and he starts to wonder whether there was not a hidden motive after all. It is hard to know oneself after all. Was the love and devotion to his son’s career really pure? It is difficult how to decide this. The father now considers that maybe it was not pure after all, but there might not be any difference between what he did or said or even thought at the time to distinguish pure from impure in this matter. Let us say that the father decides that his devotion had been impure, without being able to give us any other reason than that he is now enjoying his fame so much. There may be absolutely nothing in the past to point to—no act, no word, no thought—and yet, he would have lived completely differently if his love for his son had been pure. The interplay of forces had been completely different: what he did, was not pointing upward toward the love for his son, it was coming from below, his personal desire for glory. Looking back, he does not think “I should have done this,” “I should not have said that”—there was no problem with what he said and did and even thought, the problem lies deeper. Despite all his efforts to do the right and to do it unconditionally, behind the scenes, it remains his own vanity that runs the show. This is the deeper level that Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the marionette hints at; this is the level where the life of those with the faith that Wittgenstein envies, is different, completely different. Kierkegaard (1990, 177) once noted

48

Chapter 2

that what Christ does to a believer is worse than what a thief or slanderer does. A thief or slanderer takes away our money or reputation, but, in that very act, they reaffirm that our money and reputation are worth something. Christ, however, does not rob us of our money or reputation, but of the value we attach to it: “He did not steal the rich man’s money—no, but he took the idea away from the possession of money” (Kierkegaard 1990, 177). Even the money or reputation that remains, is now taken away in a sense: it no longer matters, it has no value. Christ teaches believers to dream new dreams. They still live in the same world—the world with money and reputation—but it is no longer what they consider valuable. Reality is no different, but their dreams are: they dream of different things. On a deeper level, everything is different. Wittgenstein (1998, 38e) wrote that he cannot say ‛Jesus is Lord’ because it does not mean anything to him. It could only mean something to him if he lived completely differently, if he found himself able to surrender completely. As previously mentioned, all his life Wittgenstein was struggling with what he considered to be one of his greatest moral failings: his vanity. Destroying his vanity was one of his motives to resign his professorship, for example, but soon after, Wittgenstein states he finds his vanity return in the pride he takes in his style of writing (cf. Rhees 1981, 77). He muses: “When I say I would like to discard vanity, it is questionable whether my wanting this isn’t yet again only a sort of vanity. I am vain & insofar as I am vain, my wishes for improvement are vain, too. I would then like to be like such & such person who was not vain & whom I like, & in my mind I already estimate the benefit which I would have from ‘discarding’ vanity” (Wittgenstein 2003, 139). Even trying to get rid of vanity, may be an act of vanity. Wittgenstein often expressed the desire to become a different man, but this seems to mean first of all that he comes to recognize himself for who he is. He wished to rid himself of all traces of falsity, self-deception, and vanity (cf. Rhees 1981, xix). One of the benefits of discarding vanity would be to have access to the faith that he envies and to be able to work purely. He would be able to work only for the value that it has in itself, for the light from above that shines on it. He wants his work and his life in general to have a real purpose, but he feels vanity keeps pulling him down. It is a circle from which he cannot escape. “I keep hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different person,” he is reported to have said (Rhees 1981, 191). Wittgenstein feels that only religion can destroy his vanity, but vanity itself is stopping him from entering religion. Wittgenstein knows that faith requires a particular language and a particular life, but despite doing all the right things—giving away his inheritance, conducting a harshly ascetic lifestyle, and even resigning his professorship—he does not find it in him to truly bend his knees.

Wittgenstein—Surrendering Your Self

49

Philosopher John Gray (2016) wrote an interesting essay on free will comparing humans to marionettes. He (2016, 25–26) states: “humans are caught between the graceful automatism of the puppet and the conscious freedom of a god. The jerky, stuttering quality of their actions comes from their feeling that they must determine the course of their lives.” A marionette moves gracefully, without doubts or second-guessing himself, without the self-defeating worrying about his vanity that plagued Wittgenstein. If only he could just convert in the sense of being able to leave his worries with God, and do his duty for duty’s sake; if only he could see his work in a different light. But he cannot let go of his feeling that he must determine the course of his own life. Maurice Drury followed the advice Wittgenstein gave to all his students, namely to stop studying philosophy. Drury switched to theology to become a pastor. Wittgenstein tried to convince him that this was not right either: if you have to write a sermon every week, he told him, the temptation is too great to try to give some philosophical justification for Christian beliefs, thereby falling off the tightrope described in the previous section (cf. Rhees 1981, 123). Drury was not convinced by this, but two incidents soon after, did change his mind. Wittgenstein visited Drury’s new room in the theological college and saw the crucifix above his bed. Wittgenstein warned Drury: “Drury, never allow yourself to become too familiar with holy things” (Rhees 1981, 121). Afterward, they visited the college’s chapel, and someone started playing the piano over there: “Wittgenstein jumped up at once and hurried out; I followed. ‘Blasphemy! A piano and the cross. Only an organ should be allowed in a church.’ He was obviously very disturbed” (Rhees 1981, 121). This made Drury reconsider his relationship to Christianity: “I felt that my life hitherto had been superficial and aesthetic. That something much more costly was required of me. I began for the first time to have serious doubts about continuing my plan to be ordained in the Anglican Church” (Rhees 1981, 121). Drury reckoned that his faith had been something at the surface and did not have the depth it required. If someone sees a crucifix every day, it loses its power to refer to something beyond the ordinary world—it is no longer part of that particular language that belongs to faith. If someone finds that one cannot bluntly shout “Blasphemy!”—maybe because neither organ nor piano existed at the time of the cross, or because one merely considers which instrument sounds nicer, and so on—then this person does not live that passionate kind of life that belongs to faith. Such a person would be like the conscientious father who discovers that his motives were not pure after all. Drury switched studies again and became a psychiatrist. He continued writing on philosophy and religion, though. Wittgenstein biographer Monk (1991, 403) even calls a collection of his essays “the most truly Wittgensteinian work published by any of Wittgenstein’s students.” The most interesting of these essays is the one on madness and religion: what if we recognize a

50

Chapter 2

psychiatric condition in someone from the past whom the church deems to be a saint? Drury (1996, 135–136) considers it prejudiced to think that Joan of Arc cannot be both a schizophrenic and a saint. When he finds one of his patients reading the Bible with tears streaming down her face, he (1996, 136) thinks: “this woman understands that book better than I do, or indeed many a learned theologian.” Yet, he does not have any scruples about treating his patients who maybe would have been considered saints in previous ages. Relieving the suffering of the mentally ill is the task he has been given and which he tries to do as best as he can. He (1996, 137) concludes his essay quoting what God reportedly said to St Augustine: “Run on, I will carry you, I will bring you to the end of your journey and there also I will carry you.” In other words, do your duty for duty’s sake, and leave your worries and all the rest to God. A believer should see his work from a higher perspective, a perspective beyond what concerns this person himself. It belongs to someone else now, to God. Wittgenstein (2003, 227) describes as what can make humans blissful: “when people believe, wholeheartedly believe, that the perfect one has sacrificed himself for them, that he has therefore—from the beginning—reconciled them with God, so that from now on you shall simply live in a way that is worthy of this sacrifice,—then this must refine the whole person, elevate him to nobility, so to speak.” Wittgenstein envies this. In the recent TV series on Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson’s wife sacrifices herself for Sherlock, and Sherlock does not know what to do with it: “In saving my life, she conferred a value on it. It is a currency I do not know how to spend” (Moffat 2017). Wittgenstein did not find himself able to spend such value either, despite seeing how it would bring him the envied state of bliss. What if worries and vanity are stopping someone from living this particular life? If, like the father of the athlete, someone genuinely wants to love his or her son in a pure way, but one finds one cannot help loving oneself as well? Ray Monk (1991, 410–412) sees Wittgenstein’s religious ideal here ending up in a vicious circle: “He thought that if he could overcome himself—if a day came when his whole nature ‘bowed down in humble resignation in the dust’—then God would, as it were, come to him; he would then be saved,” but he could only surrender completely with God’s help, so there is “a persistent and nagging doubt” about whether “it was in his hands or God’s.” One cannot decide to surrender or let go, for then there is still the one who is deciding. In a Dutch textbook on philosophy (Verbrugge, Buijs, and Van Baardewijk 2018) it is noted that nowadays the advice to “let go” simply adds to the psychological pressure: Now you have to dare to be vulnerable as well! Like a review of contemporary American books about raising children rightfully notes: “we’re told that the non-competitive, non-pressuring approach is best because it gets us to the medal stand, or close. But what if it didn’t? [. . .]

Wittgenstein—Surrendering Your Self

51

The point of a non-competitive attitude can’t be that it makes us better able to compete; the value of an unpressured approach can’t be that it creates a more effective kind of pressure” (Gopnik 2018). As long as personal success is the measuring stick, people can never enter that other kind of life. The desire for a different life may itself be the stumbling block on the way to that other life. Like Rushdie wrote, the real problem was damage not to the machine, but to the desirous heart—an important aspect of faith envy is often the envy of a life without envy. The particular life that is essential for the kind of faith Wittgenstein envied, is itself something that must be given to someone, the kind of life in which the interplay of forces is completely different, the kind of life without vanity or concern for oneself. Someone who speaks the language of faith is like a tightrope walker, risking to fall off to one side or the other at every moment. Someone who lives the life of faith is like a marionette; one may not be able to detect it but the life he lives is completely different from everyone else’s. Wittgenstein knows about the particular language and the particular life that faith requires, and he envies faith, yet, he cannot seize it, for, so he discovered to his dismay, it is not fully up to us to live that particular kind of life. A PERSPECTIVE ON WITTGENSTEIN AND FAITH What does using the angle of faith envy teach us about Wittgenstein and what about faith? Looking at Wittgenstein’s life and work from the angle of faith envy explains Wittgenstein’s many ambiguous statements about faith. He said that he considered dedicating his work “To the glory of God” like Bach wrote on his title pages, but he feels that such a dedication would be misunderstood in this time and age (cf. Rhees 1981, 181). According to Wittgenstein “To the glory of God” should mean that the reader is invited to take from the following work only what is good and just, what is godly, and disregard everything that speaks of the vanity of the author, everything where the author tries to impose himself and show off (cf. Malcolm 1993, 131). “To the glory of God” would mean that the author wishes for those impure, imperfect parts to be committed to the flames. Wittgenstein says that “To the glory of God” would not work because people of this time and age would not understand it, but my suggestion would be that he also hesitates because he is not fully certain that he can say it with full honesty in the sense in which the phrase according to him should be taken. Does he really want everything in his work that points to himself to be committed to the flames? Can he genuinely say that that is his wish? There seems to be faith envy here in the sense that he wishes that he could have truly wished this.

52

Chapter 2

This leads me to unorthodox readings of some other cryptic remarks about faith from Wittgenstein as well. Wittgenstein (1998, 63e) says that he wishes to pray, but that he is afraid that he would dissolve if he did. I would say he is afraid that if he accepts God’s permission for him to be who he is including all his mistakes, that then he would let go of everything, that he would give up fighting to be perfect and thereby lose whatever height he had reached in striving. That the comfort he would receive through prayer and surrendering his faults to God would make him slack and no longer be as thorough and rigorous as he is now proud to be. Another way in which Wittgenstein (1998, 63e) phrases this is that he wishes to pray but finds his knees are stiff. I would think that this is his pride again, that does not allow him to relax and backslide. Wittgenstein says he is not a religious man, but he cannot help seeing everything from a religious point of view (Rhees 1981, 94). I would say that that is because he envies faith: he wishes to be accepted, feel accepted in the way religious people feel accepted by God. He longs for it and therefore it is in his mind all the time. Wittgenstein says that he hopes that his many former students who have converted to Catholicism pray for him (Rhees 1981, 148). These prayers, I would say, would keep him close to the acceptance he longs for. He cannot himself accept the acceptance, but through his students maybe he can share a bit in it nonetheless. Concerning faith in general, Wittgenstein’s life and work shows how both a particular language and a particular life are a crucial part of it: a language that is used while resisting the temptation to justify it or draw unintended consequences from it; a life that is different on a deeper level, where words, deeds, or thoughts may be quite the same, but the interplay of forces is different nonetheless. True people of faith work for love and other higher goals, and not for themselves and their own glory or recognition. To be able to live this kind of life is to a large extent something that has to be given by God rather than taken by humans, which makes obtaining faith difficult even for someone like Wittgenstein who genuinely envied faith. In the next chapter on Simone Weil’s life and work, we will focus on how one could prepare for such a faith nonetheless.

Chapter 3

Weil—Open to the World

How could one open oneself to the kind of faith that Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein deemed worthy of envy? That is the question to which we will turn in this chapter on Simone Weil. If someone envies this kind of faith and also is willing to do what it takes to seize it, how could she get into it? As we will see, Weil shares a similar conception of faith as Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, and a similar kind of faith envy. First, I will introduce Weil and her life and work, and show how one of the most controversial aspects of her life and work—her supposed pathological masochism—can be seen as a form of faith envy. Second, I will discuss the two main obstacles, from Weil’s perspective, toward being open to faith—self-will and imagination—and elaborate what, from her perspective, contact with this kind of faith would look like. In the third and final part of this chapter, I will summarize what using the perspective of faith envy shows about Weil and what about faith. WEIL Her Life Simone Weil was born in 1909 as the second child in an upper-middle-class family of agnostic Jews in Paris, France. Her entire life Weil envied her older brother André, who was a mathematical prodigy. Weil struggled about whether her life was worth living, as she lacked her brother’s genius. Several times she considered suicide over the fact that she could not live and understand life as fully as someone with more insight could. Not being considered a genius, Weil did nonetheless enter one of the highest institutes of education in the country as one of the very few women at that time. After her education, Weil was assigned as a teacher in philosophy to several schools in different parts of France. She was part of the communist movement and supported the cause of laborers wherever she could. She 53

54

Chapter 3

became disappointed in the official communist parties, however, and she decided that she needed to share the fate of laborers herself. In 1934 she quit teaching for a year and worked, among other places, in the car manufacturing plant of Renault. Her weak health made the long, monotonous days in the factory even worse. Before Weil returned to teaching in 1935, she visited Spain and Portugal with her parents. Here, she had her first religious experience. She heard Portuguese fisherwomen in procession singing heartbreakingly sad songs and realized that Christianity is a religion for slaves—she had come to experience herself as a slave during her factory work earlier. In her spiritual autobiography, she (1973, 32) describes “three contacts with Catholicism which really counted,” of which this one was the first. Later, she was struck by the purity of Saint Francis and his chapel in Assisi, and by how the worship Easter services in Solesmes were able to lift her spirits despite the splitting headaches she was suffering at the time. Because of the Second World War and their Jewish background, Weil and her parents flee France. They reach New York, but Weil returns to London hoping to take part in the Resistance in France. She is assigned desk jobs, however, and suffers from tuberculosis. The doctors advise her to eat well, but she refuses to take more food than the people in France have access to. She dies in 1943. The local newspapers write about “the strange case of a ‘French Professor’ who had ‘starved herself to death’” (Von der Ruhr 2006, 18). Envy of the Cross? The manner of her death and many of her remarks have led commentators to assume that Weil might have been pathologically inclined to look for suffering. I do not believe that Weil was psychologically masochistic in that sense, and I think that the perspective of faith envy can help to bring out what it was that she was after in her controversial statements and acts. Weil speaks very positively about suffering. She says things like, “The suffering all over the world obsesses and overwhelms me to the point of annihilating my faculties and the only way I can revive them and release myself from the obsession is by getting for myself a large share of danger and hardship” (Von der Ruhr 2006, 16). As a pupil in school, she is reported to have burst out in tears when she heard about an earthquake in China (cf. Allen 1983, 98). Yet, at the same time, she makes it clear that suffering is not something she desires or that anyone should desire. She (1970, 3) writes: “I believe in the value of suffering, so long as one makes every (legitimate) effort to escape it.” Similarly, after a thought experiment about receiving the order to go to the center of hell and remain there, she (1973, 41) clarifies: “I

Weil—Open to the World

55

do not mean, of course, that I have a preference for orders of this nature. I am not perverse like that.” She did not avoid personal suffering and made some radical choices in that respect, but she enjoyed the good things in life as well, like skiing, swimming, smoking, reading, and traveling to Italy (cf. McLellan 1990, 270 & Weil 2019, 5). Weil had long conversations and correspondences about whether she should be baptized and become part of the church. She felt she had been a Christian all her life already, but she did not want to join an institution that excluded people like the unbaptized infants or the Cathars in Southern France (cf. McLellan 1990, 224). Neither did she want to make the decision to join the church unless she felt a clear vocation to do so—we will return to her concept of vocation—and she never did (cf. Weil 1973, 42). Weil never said she envied faith, yet, she did use the word “envy” at least twice in connection with suffering. She says that from all the people beyond Christ that are mentioned in the Gospels she envies the good thief on the cross the most by far (cf. Weil 1973, 26). On another occasion, she (1973, 49) says that “every time I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.” Two occasions where she says she envies being crucified—that may sound like masochism, but it does not need to be read in that way. She does not enjoy the feeling of imagining being crucified, she (2002, 88) explicitly states: “One cannot choose the cross.” In fact, that is the very reason she thinks the cross might be enviable, might be useful. Weil does not enjoy suffering, but she considers suffering the best means for her to reach what she really wants and envies: faith. In a clear and important aphorism, Weil (2002, 81) states what makes her a Christian, if not in practice, then in spirit: “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.” Suffering is not an end in itself, nor is it something that needs to be remedied, but it can be useful, supernaturally useful. “In general we must not wish for the disappearance of any of our troubles, but grace to transform them,” Weil (2002, 35) says. Elsewhere, she (2002, 111) speaks of “the chief use of suffering” as being “to teach me that I am nothing,” for God is everything. The extreme suffering of the cross is not to be envied in itself, but because it can be put to good use as a means to open oneself completely to God. If a person loves God because he secretly expects something for it in return, if this person imagines how he will be honored and glorified for it, for example, then his love for God is not pure. Self-will and imagination block a real openness toward God. At the cross, however, at least as Weil pictures it, self-will and imagination are completely crushed. A person will have nowhere to go, nothing to hope for. The one to whom such strong affliction happens, so she (1973, 93) writes, “has no part in the operation. He struggles

56

Chapter 3

like a butterfly which is pinned alive into an album. But through all the horror he can continue to want to love. There is nothing impossible in that, no obstacle, one might almost say no difficulty.” Extreme suffering is to be envied, but only because it helps a person to be pure in his love for God. Suffering helps to clear out blockades between a person and God, and it, therefore, is a contact point between a human being and God. Speaking about suffering is not very popular in most churches these days. Yet, some inkling of its importance I encountered when I was back home to visit churches in the Netherlands to share about our experiences as missionaries in Africa. I remember one of these evenings started with a very long story about a suffering missionary on Greenland over a century ago. Despite our protests proclaiming the contrary, the story, prayers, and questions that evening all emphasized how much we as missionaries in Africa must be suffering. Missionaries, so it seems, are supposed to suffer. Colleagues later told me they use this sentiment in their fundraising: in their reports and blogs, they emphasize the difficulties they experience, as people back home apparently want them to suffer on their behalf. Likewise, the psychologist of religion Marc De Kesel (2017, 189) shows how suffering in Christianity is not only that from which people need to be redeemed, but suffering itself is paradoxically also the way of experiencing that redemption. In the final chapter, I will discuss the important statement “A good man cannot be harmed”: what better way of proving this than to be in circumstances that are generally considered to be harm? Now, if Christians in the Netherlands cannot suffer on behalf of their faith themselves, missionaries can do so for them. De Kesel (2017, 191) observes that in mission reports, right from the start of Modernity, the suffering of the missionaries has always been more important than, for example, the number of converts. The suffering was important in itself, De Kesel says, although I would add: to show one’s commitment, one’s conviction that one is beyond suffering, and one’s openness to God. Weil is far from unique within Christianity in her envy of the cross, and we should not interpret this as pathological masochism but as a way of opening oneself toward God. It expresses many a Christians’ envy of having a faith that is strong enough to withstand suffering. As Weil explored, it can be used as a way of getting rid of the blockades of self-will and imagination.

Weil—Open to the World

57

FAITH ENVY What Is the Problem with Self-Will? Weil’s breakthrough as an author came after her death, when farmer-philosopher Gustave Thibon, on whose farm she spent some time picking grapes, published a selection from her notebooks under the title Gravity and Grace (2002). Gravity and grace refer to the two main forces that Weil sees at work in the world. On the one hand, gravity refers to the forces of nature that she recognizes in human behavior as well: if someone has power, he will use it for his own advantage; if someone puts an effort into something, she expects to be compensated; if someone is hurt, he will want revenge. These forces work with the unstoppable necessity of gravity. On the other hand, Weil holds, there is also another force: sometimes people do not use all the power they have, sometimes people do something without expecting a reward—these instances may be few and far apart, but, in between the harsh forces of necessity, this other force exists: the force of light, the force of grace, that from time to time lifts the downward force of gravity. Weil considers the ancient Greeks as being especially aware of the forces of gravity and grace. She (1973, 98–99) refers to the historian Thucydides describing the powerful city-state of Athens destroying the small island of Melos. The people from Melos complain that it is not fair, but the Athenians tell the people of Melos: “We know quite well that you also, like all the others, once you reached the same degree of power, would act in the same way” (Weil 1973, 99). History shows that whoever has power, will use it for their own advantage wherever they can. Weil acknowledges that this is not an unfair description of history, and yet, she holds that something else must be possible. “The Christian faith,” she (1987, 3) says, “is nothing but the cry affirming the contrary. The same is true of the ancient doctrines of China, India, Egypt and Greece.” The core of all faiths she holds dear, is that power is not everything, that another way of living, another perspective on life is possible. Weil (1946) sees this other perspective expressed in Homer’s Iliad. The Iliad describes the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. It would become a defining text of Greek civilization, and yet, if one reads the Iliad, it is often not clear on whose side the author is. Homer sings with as much love about the Trojans as about the Greeks. The war is not described as a fight of good versus evil, but all sides, all actors, are merely puppets with whom we as listeners should have compassion, as they merely do what the laws of nature make them do. Years before her compatriot Michel Foucault made the idea famous, Weil (1946) describes how people do not have power, but power has people. People who think they wield power are mistaken, as they are simply

58

Chapter 3

acting out their role in the necessary unfolding of history. This insight allows the author of the Iliad to write with equal love about both sides in the war. It makes his perspective supernatural. Weil (1970, 147) explains the concept of the supernatural using the following example: “If a man describes to me at the same time two opposite sides of a mountain, I know that his position is somewhere higher than the summit. It is impossible to understand and love at the same time both the victors and the vanquished, as the Iliad does, except from the place, outside the world, where God’s Wisdom dwells.” If a person can describe what happens on both sides of a mountain ridge at once, then this person himself must be above it. His perspective is no longer bound to the natural order of things, but it has become supernatural. The Iliad is not part of the melee of the war, but it exemplifies the perspective of grace, hovering above it. To open oneself for this supernatural perspective of grace, a person has to let go of his self-will, he has to learn to see that self-will is an illusion: someone’s self does not have power, power has this person’s self. Some years ago, I was trying out a new racing game on the computer, or, at least, I thought I was. Enthusiastically, I moved the joystick to avoid the obstacles that my racing car was facing. It all went very well. I began to wonder, however, when I noticed I was also avoiding obstacles that I had not even seen: was I that talented that I intuitively had avoided them? Before long, I realized that I was watching a demo by the computer: my moving the joystick had nothing to do with what was going on on the screen. This is the kind of realization that Weil encourages in people’s lives. People should not be proud of the good things they do; neither should they be too much too concerned about the bad things they have done (as long as they are really past), if they happened, they must have been God’s will. Like Wittgenstein is reported to have said when Rhees gave the example that one may think “With a little effort I could have controlled myself, and not have spoken to him so sharply”: “‘That is something that happens to me every day.’ And later, ‘And yet, you know that at the time you couldn’t have’” (Rhees 1981, 219). From a certain perspective, one could say that people do what ever circumstances and personality force them to do. Therefore, people should not be angry if others hurt them, it is merely a necessity, and ultimately God, who is acting through these other people. Looking at life like this, someone can be open for the supernatural perspective of grace, open for God. The faith that has been described as desirable in this book so far is a faith that offers absolute safety, a faith according to which someone who has it cannot be harmed. The opening oneself up and letting go of one’s self-will is how Weil (1973, 113) proposes to reach that kind of faith: “There is only one way of never receiving anything but good. It is to know, with our whole soul and not just abstractly, that men who are not animated by pure charity are

Weil—Open to the World

59

merely wheels in the mechanism of the order of the world, like inert matter.” Everyone is merely pushed by the laws of nature, the laws of gravity, even those who hurt others. After that we see that everything comes directly from God, either through the love of man, or through the lifelessness of matter, whether it be tangible or psychic; through spirit or water. All that increases the vital energy in us is like the bread for which Christ thanks the just. All the blows, the wounds and the mutilations are like a stone thrown at us by the hand of Christ. Bread and stone both come from Christ and penetrating to our inward being bring Christ into us. Bread and stone are love. We must eat the bread and lay ourselves open to the stone, so that it may sink as deeply as possible into our flesh. If we have any armor which is able to protect our soul from the stones thrown by Christ, we should take it off and cast it away. (Weil 1973, 113)

That is why Weil envies the cross, for on the cross one can be sure that no armor is left. People need to accept everything that comes their way as a gift from God. People should not do so by shielding themselves. “If I say to myself every morning: ‘I am courageous, I am not afraid,’ I may become courageous,” Weil (2002, 99) tells us, but it would be a hardened, unfeeling kind of courage. Faith, enviable faith, requires a different kind of courage: “Grace alone can give courage while leaving the sensitivity intact” (Weil 2002, 100). People should not amputate their sensitivity and feeling; they should allow it to be and still be courageous enough to face whatever may come their way. Lovingly, people should be just as grateful for suffering as they are for joy, Weil holds, for then nothing but good can come their way. Yet, on a deeper level, it is not just the others who are merely vessels in God’s hand, but also people themselves: every individual is nothing in this interplay of powers in the world. Weil (1973, 88) writes: “Men can never escape from obedience to God. A creature cannot but obey. The only choice given to men, as intelligent and free creatures, is to desire obedience or not to desire it. If a man does not desire it, he obeys nevertheless, perpetually, in as much as he is a thing subject to mechanical necessity.” People are just like I was when I thought I was trying out the racing game: I thought I was doing things, but in reality, I was completely irrelevant for what happened in the game. Whatever happens, happens because God allowed it, there is nothing to be done about it, but if we see this and desire it, then we open ourselves to be used by God. Or not “we” as we have learned that there is no “we.” In the second book of the absurdist series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (2002, 61–62) describes a machine called the “Total

60

Chapter 3

Perspective Vortex.” The man who invented it was irritated by his wife who kept nagging him about the amount of time he spent doing philosophy and so on. “Have some sense of proportion!” she would tell him thirty-eight times a day (Adams 2002, 62). Therefore, he built this machine, just to show her: “when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it” (Adams 2002, 62). To his horror, however, “the shock completely annihilated her brain” (Adams 2002, 62). If a person sees her role in the complete whole of the universe, this person will see how completely insignificant she is. If a person wants to see reality as it is, if this person wants to be above the mountaintop and see from the perspective of grace, the price she has to pay is realizing that this person herself is next to nothing. Psychologist of religion Marc De Kesel (2017, 223–224), to whom I referred before, notes how many segments of popular culture today, like Hollywood movies, play with the idea of realizing one’s insignificance or selflessness. The protagonist often actively looks for situations that threaten his ego. For example, the hero risks everything to perform his heroic acts, or in erotic adventures, one loses oneself in the pleasure of the sexual act or falls for a femme fatale. De Kesel (2017, 224) notes, however, that at the end of the movie the hero is always restored into an even stronger self. De Kesel does not give examples, but we can see this, for example, in the Hollywood movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Liman 2005). Secret agent Mr. Smith discovers that his entire life is based on a lie: his wife is another secret agent, their marriage is her work assignment, and Mr. Smith’s agency suspected as much and only gave him fake assignments. Nothing of his self-image remains, but, at the very end, Mrs. Smith confesses that, despite everything, there is nowhere she would rather be than with him. His work and his social role as a husband have turned out to be fake, but apparently beneath that, his deeper self is all the more valuable for it. Mr. Smith loses his self, but he finds an even more profound and stronger self in the end. Despite such endings, so De Kesel (2017, 224) asks, why is most time in these adventures spent contemplating letting go of oneself? Maybe popular culture shows a more general awareness that something is to be gained by giving up one’s self-will as well, although they have no other means to express this “something” than by portraying an even stronger self. By surrendering one’s self-will, one opens oneself up for real contact with grace and with God, with something beyond the powers of the world, something which, in the language of the world, by its very nature, cannot be expressed but by using worldly images of self-will and ego again. Below we will see how Weil in writing a play tried to find another way of expressing this and how awkward the result is, but first, we need to speak about imagination. It is not only the self-will that blocks one’s access to God, and a true perspective of the world, or the beyond.

Weil—Open to the World

61

What Is the Problem with Imagination? Kierkegaard looked for a faith that would allow him to marry Regine, a faith that would allow him to take things as they come. Wittgenstein looked for a faith in which he could stand even in the dark days, no matter what happened, but he realized he could not surrender his pride and vanity to obtain it. Weil envied the cross, not because she liked suffering, but because she felt it would allow her to get rid of pride and vanity, her self-will. Yet, it is not only the self-will that can block access to an enviable kind of faith. People’s imagination can be a stumbling block preventing them from receiving faith as well. A possible solution for the problem of self-will could be to adopt whatever the church is offering. The French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal (quoted in Allen 1983, 40) suggests: “You want to be cured of unbelief and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you and who now wager all they have. . . They behaved just as if they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said, and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally.” In other words, fake it until you make it. Put aside the hesitations and doubts that your self-will whispers in your ear, pretend that you believe, and over time, you will believe. Weil does not think that this is not true, nonetheless, she considers this method to be disastrous (1973, 37). According to her (1973, 148), one of Pascal’s “several mistakes” was “that of confusing faith and auto-suggestion to a certain extent.” In her “Spiritual Autobiography” Weil (1973, 28–49) describes how she had a mystical encounter with Christ when reciting a particular poem. She (1973, 36) tells us that she was glad that she had never read any mystical works before. She had the habit of only reading that to which she was unmistakably drawn, and mysticism repulsed her. Had she read mystical texts, she would have been worried whether she was not imagining things. She would have wondered whether reading about mystical experiences made her see things that were not there. Because she had never read mystical works, now that she had a mystical experience herself, she could be sure it was genuine. As she did not know what mystical experiences were like, apart from her own experience, she could be sure that it was a real encounter with Christ. For the same reason, Weil (1973, 37) explains, she did not pray: “During all this time of spiritual progress I had never prayed. I was afraid of the power of suggestion that is in prayer—the very power for which Pascal recommends it. Pascal’s method seems to me one of the worst for attaining faith.” Weil does believe that the power of suggestion works, but, because it works, people can no longer distinguish between genuine faith and make-believe faith once they have chosen to pretend to believe. If people start to take holy water, have masses said, and so on, because they envy faith, then they will never know

62

Chapter 3

whether their faith is real. They will have no way of distinguishing between genuine contact with God and mere imaginations. A young anthropologist observing certain rituals in Congo, was paying close attention to discover who of the dancers really was in trance and who was merely pretending (cf. Peeters 2017, 281). Then an elder told him that to achieve the state of trance you first have to pretend. Weil would not deny that it might work this way—the power of suggestion is strong—but for her, it would undo the entire purpose of religious rituals. It would stop people from ever knowing whether they are really in touch with something genuinely from the beyond. Imaginations block access to the divine and to enviable faith, just as much as self-will does. Often imaginations in the religious context function in conjunction with the self-will. People may imagine a heaven, for example, so that their selves will be compensated for the losses they suffer on earth. For Weil, this is false religion. In a letter of farewell, she (1973, 27) writes: “As to eventual meetings in another world, you know that I do not picture things to myself in that way. But that does not matter very much.” Language about heaven can be used to express a different order of things, the perspective of grace in Weil’s terms. Ideas of heaven are okay if we speak of heaven as “not-earth”: as Gareth Moore (1988, 165) states “Treasure in heaven is the treasure that you acquire by not being interested in acquiring treasure.” However, language about heaven can also be easily misused to reinforce people’s own selfs and self-will. Weil envied suffering, as we have seen, but if our suffering is compensated in some kind of after-life, that would defy the purpose of suffering, so she (2002, 111) argues: If I thought that God sent me suffering by an act of his will and for my good, I should think that I was something, and I should miss the chief use of suffering which is to teach me that I am nothing. It is therefore essential to avoid all such thoughts, but it is necessary to love God through the suffering. I must love being nothing. How horrible it would be if I were something!

People should be careful and not allow imaginations to reinstate their self and self-will to stand in between them and God’s grace. The attitude that Weil promotes is one of patience and acceptance, all things should be recognized as either blessings or trials by the believer. Nothing is ours by right, and should stop considering oneself as the center of the world. “Why should I have any anxiety?” Weil (1973, 20) asks, “It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God.” Once, I felt very strongly that a particular action would be good for the organization for which I was given responsibility. Other people in the

Weil—Open to the World

63

organization opposed. I was working on the concept of vocation at the time, and I started to wonder: did God send me here to push for that particular action nonetheless? Did he send me here because with my stubbornness I could help this organization forwards? Or did he send me here to teach me a lesson, that the strong opposition would reduce my stubbornness? Or, maybe, did he send me here because here my stubbornness could not do much harm? I struggled with these questions for a long time, but Weil’s answer would have been straightforward: none of the above! Just do what you cannot do otherwise and do not imagine God to have special plans for you—do not think you are anything special, and better do not imagine God at all. God is beyond our imaginations. “The imagination,” even or especially when it concerns God or the divine, according to Weil (2002, 16), “is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.” Contact with something beyond the forces of gravity, contact with something real beyond that, is only possible if people surrender all their imaginary compensations. Weil (2002, 53) wonders, “How can we distinguish the imaginary from the real in the spiritual realm?” answering herself saying that: “We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.” Only when people know they are not imagining things, and they still experience something from beyond, then they can be sure that it is grace acting in their lives. People need to make sure they can distinguish between what is real and what exists merely in their imagination. In 1974 the philosopher Robert Nozick (1974, 42) proposed a thought experiment about “The Experience Machine.” The machine would give a person every experience she wants. If there is still something that this person feels lacking in her life, then we simply imagine a next-generation Experience Machine where even this experience is added (cf. Nozick 1974, 44). Why is it that no matter how many generations of machines we imagine, most people would still feel that something is missing? Nozick (1974, 45) concludes that people do not just want the experience of being in contact with reality, they want to be in contact with reality. For example, they do not just want to experience displaying particular character traits in their actions, they want to actually display them. They want to have actual achievements, and so on. Similar thought experiments can be recognized in many instances of popular culture: the movies The Matrix, the TV series Dollhouse, or the episodes on San Junipero in the TV series Black Mirror, for example. These thought experiments work because they bring out that people care about being in contact with reality, however difficult it may be to express what this consists in. If someone says one needs to feel real resistance, obstacles to conquer, if someone needs to feel acknowledged and respected by others, and so on, all of this may be added to the Experience Machine, and yet, something will still be missing.

64

Chapter 3

In the 2001 novel Life of Pi (Martel 2010), two accounts of a strange sea journey with one survivor, Pi Patel, are recounted: one story with unbelievable acts by all kinds of animals, one a bit more believable with humans who happen to perish. In the end, the storyteller asks his inquisitors: “So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without animals?” (Martel 2010, 317). His guests have to admit that the story with the animals is the better story, and Pi concludes: “Thank you. And so it goes with God” (Martel 2010, 317). Which one is the better story, that is what it all boils down to for Pi. Stories can be told about the world without God and stories can be told with God, and the latter are the better stories, so they are to be preferred. For Weil, this would not do. Just like most often in people’s personal lives they would not want people to tell them the better story, but they want others to tell them the true and genuine one, so Weil wants people to make sure they can identify the true one about God by blocking out all their imaginations as far as possible. As a factory worker, Weil experienced a life without past or future: continuously one was far too tired to consider either, all one could think about was the monotonous duty of the work at hand. She (2002, 179–180) reflects: Work makes us experience in the most exhausting manner the phenomenon of finality rebounding like a ball; to work in order to eat, to eat in order to work. [. . .] A squirrel turning in its cage and the rotation of the celestial sphere— extreme misery and extreme grandeur. It is when man sees himself as a squirrel turning round and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation.

Suffering is to be envied, because it can make a person see the world as it is, without his self-will or imaginations of grandeur blocking one’s view. If it is used in the right way, suffering can help a person to obtain the perspective of grace, to obtain salvation. Like the author of the Iliad, this person sees things as they are, both sides of the mountain at once, proving that they must be somehow above it, they must have this enviable faith. As a short introduction to Weil’s theology, Ford and Higton (2011, 243) state: Weil’s “theology did not situate encounter with God in an escape from the world, or from suffering, or from the conditions of everyday life, nor in some consolation available despite those things, but suggested that one should learn to read all things as the expressions of God’s self-renouncing love.” If a person has faith, he can see the beauty of the world, through the world both in its pretty sides and in its most harsh and cruel ways. One of the great things about living in Africa is the ability to visit national parks: watching the lions, leopards, elephants, giraffes, hippos, and so on. When traveling with

Weil—Open to the World

65

Christian friends, they often speak of how nature shows the greatness of God, how beautiful he has put everything together, imagining him as some kind of master-builder. There is another perspective possible as well, however. Weil (1973, 116–117) reminds us the Christ in the gospels, “tells us to contemplate and imitate the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, in their indifference as to the future and their docile acceptance of destiny; and another time he invites us to contemplate and imitate the indiscriminate distribution of rain and sunlight.” Nature can teach people to live in openness to whatever God sends their way, without allowing either self-will or imagination to get in the way: “Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude” (Weil 2002, 63). What Could Contact with God Look Like? Where do we end up without self-will and without imaginations? Paradoxically, Weil (2019) portrayed this in a work of the imagination, the unfinished play Venice Saved. The play presents an officer in the Spanish army of the 17th century, named Jaffier. After a promotion, he is assigned to take his men to destroy the city-state of Venice which has resisted the Spanish empire. Out of the blue, however, he is struck by the beauty of Venice, a glimpse of which you can see on the cover of this book. Jaffier decides to betray his own operation and to save Venice. Now he is despised by all sides. His army friends resent his betrayal, and the government of Venice does not trust this foreigner either and decides to execute his friends and Jaffier himself. He dies a broken man, cursing his executioners and their city. The story is a story about selflessness: Jaffier sacrifices his self-will, his career, and his imaginations, and he saves Venice. Unlike the Hollywood depictions of selflessness previously mentioned, however, there is no reward for the selflessness at all. The play does not even allow Jaffier to be proud of himself. His good deed has brought him nothing. This makes the story a bit awkward, but for Weil, this awkwardness is precisely the point: suffering without compensation is what allows someone to be open to God. A well-known line in Dutch poetry reads that, “the soft powers will surely win in the end”—a commentator on Weil (De Lange 1990, 62) notes that Weil would have considered this to be naïve foolishness. In this world, soft powers will be crushed without mercy. If a person loves truly, he will have to accept that, Weil holds. She resists the temptation to give her character Jaffier any kind of reward in order to show that being touched by grace is reward in itself enough. Jaffier had his moment when he was touched by the divine, namely when he was struck by the beauty of Venice. This moment of being struck by beauty was clearly not part of the forces of gravity at work in the world: he would never have given up his career,

66

Chapter 3

self-esteem, and even his life, had he followed the laws of nature. This was a moment of grace, and this is what is worthy of envy, in Weil’s perspective. This is the faith that could have allowed Kierkegaard to marry Regine despite the troubles it would probably have caused. This is the faith beyond pride and vanity that Wittgenstein felt himself unable to grasp. Such a moment of grace is what Weil herself was looking for when she expressed her envy of the cross. To be open for an intervention from the other side, to not let one’s experience be blurred by self-will or imagination. Jaffier could not do otherwise than save Venice, even though it did cost him all he had, and he never got to relax and look back at his one encounter with grace. Yet, he did have it and that is presented by Weil as worthy of envy, as it is more than many others can say. Jaffier acted despite of himself. This matches Weil’s concept of vocation: I saw the carrying out of a vocation differed from the actions dictated by reason or inclination in that it was due to an impulse of an essentially and manifestly different order; and not to follow such an impulse when it made itself felt, even if it demanded impossibilities, seemed to me the greatest of all ills. Hence my conception of obedience [. . .] The most beautiful life possible has always seemed to me to be one where everything is determined, either by the pressure of circumstances or by impulses such as I have just mentioned and where there is never any room for choice. (Weil 1973, 30)

Most often people act—or, actually, think they act—being pushed to and fro by the forces of nature, sometimes, however, they can withstand those forces. They act from another kind of necessity, something beyond nature: the supernatural or the necessity of grace, like Jaffier when touched by the beauty of Venice. This is what Weil envies: carrying out your vocation in such a way that there never is any room for choice. Elsewhere, Weil (1973, 104) gives the example of almsgiving: “It is not surprising that a man who has bread should give a piece to someone who is starving. What is surprising is that he should be capable of doing so with so different a gesture from that with which we buy an object. Almsgiving, when it is not supernatural, is like a sort of purchase. It buys the sufferer.” In normal, natural transactions people always expect something in return for their good deed, if nothing else then at least gratitude or recognition. Almsgiving which is supernatural is beyond this system of compensations. An important concept in Weil’s thought is that of “balance.” Within the natural order of things, if someone does something good, she expects some kind of reward; if someone has luck, she expects that there will be a price to pay. Everyone should get what they deserve. Weil’s concept of balance is remarkably similar to the African concept of “equivalence,” of which Robert

Weil—Open to the World

67

Thornton (2017, 139) says: “This is not a concept that relates to access to rights, but rather a concept of fundamental equivalence, or even interchangeability, among same-sex members of a community.” On a fundamental level people expect there to be a balance between every individual, and everything that does not fit that balance is not normal. Like I argued elsewhere: “Anyone, who is not within the average range of success, wealth, health, is suspect—they may be a threat to the community, they may endanger the balance within this organic unity of the whole” (Kroesbergen 2019b, 211). Within the African context, whatever is beyond the natural balance, belongs to the spirit world of witchcraft, ancestors, rituals, and so on; within Weil’s thinking whatever is beyond the natural balance, belongs to the supernatural and grace. An act is an act of grace if this is not to be expected within the natural balance of things. It is beyond the natural. Outside of the natural balance of things is where contact with God takes place. Like Jaffier acting on behalf of Venice does not fit the natural order of things, or like giving alms without expecting anything in return. Someone who acts supernaturally does good, not to obtain a reward, but merely because it is good. Virtue is taken purely as its own reward. In an interesting essay on education, Weil (1973, 66–76) recommends pupils to use school studies to exercise a kind of waiting, to train themselves in being open for God’s intervention through them. School studies should be used to learn the practice of attention: Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles. (Weil 1973, 70)

Paying attention is something of a very different nature: In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it. There is a way of giving our attention to the data of a problem in geometry without trying to find the solution, or to the words of a Latin or Greek text without trying to arrive at the meaning, a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words. (Weil 1973, 73)

To pay attention is to just open yourself and wait. If self-will is used, it is only used to clear the ground, to get rid of all one’s wrong imaginations. The students should open themselves for the right answer, just like, Weil continues,

68

Chapter 3

in real life, people may open themselves for each other. To be able to do so, to really see one’s neighbor, one needs to “know how to look at him in a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this” (Weil 1973, 75). If a person looks at her neighbor like that, without any personal considerations, without any imaginations about the other or what might happen, but simply pays attention, then she may see the way Jaffier saw Venice. Kierkegaard looked for a faith that would allow him to take things as they come and combine marrying Regine with religious authorship. He should have let go of the self-will involved in wanting to be a religious writer; he should have let go of his imaginations about how things could go wrong if he tried to pursue both his authorship and a marriage with her, and he should have opened himself, looked, paid attention both to his particular writing project and to this woman, Regine, instead of seeing her a specimen of wife in a married life. “Rather than trying to impose sense on your life, you will be content to let meaning come and go,” philosopher John Gray (2016, 165–166) says in an essay on freedom, for such people “do not have to wait until they can fly before they can be free. Not looking to ascend into the heavens, they can find freedom in falling to earth.” Wittgenstein looked in faith for the assurance of absolute safety, security no matter what happened, but he felt he could not surrender his pride and vanity to obtain it. If he had been able to let go of his self-will and imaginations of grandeur, he could have received something deeper, although, intellectually, he knew that himself already. Weil (1998, 1) reminds us that, “in the Gospels there is never, unless I am mistaken, question of a search for God by man. In all the parables it is the Christ who seeks men, or else the Father has them fetched by His messengers. Or again, a man finds the Kingdom as if by chance, and then, but only then, he sells all.” It is more important to allow oneself to be found than to go out and search for God or faith. How could one open oneself to the kind of faith that Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil deemed worthy of envy? Weil (2002, 47) provides the following as a method: “If we make a quietness within ourselves, if we silence all desires and opinions and if with love, without formulating any words, we bind our whole soul to think ‘Thy will be done,’ the thing which after that we feel sure we should do (even though in certain respects we may be mistaken) is the will of God.” If people can clear their minds from all self-will and imagination, if they radically empty this place in themselves, then they allow God to speak to them.

Weil—Open to the World

69

A PERSPECTIVE ON WEIL AND FAITH What does using the angle of faith envy teach us about Weil and what about faith? When people envy people with faith or stronger faith, they envy their apparently immediate access to all the answers, to the truth, and, at the same time, they are aware that they themselves could never accept those answers simply as the full and complete truth. Simone Weil struggled with and reflected upon this ambiguity of faith and faith envy like no other. Her entire life, Weil moved along the borders of faith. She had long discussions about whether or not she wanted to be baptized. She wished to follow Christ whom she regarded as the truth, but her love was not limited to Christ; she found parts of the same truth in Catharism, the Bhagavad Gita, or Marxism as well. To truly find God, Weil decides that she has to give up all claims to knowledge about God, even the claim that he exists. Only by emptying herself completely, she can open herself up for a revelation that truly comes from the other side, open herself up for the real truth, open herself up for God. She envies a faith that is forced upon her. She says if her happiness were on a table in front of her and she would only have to reach out and take it, she would not take it unless she had been ordered to do so (Weil 2002, 44-45). Only if a person cannot do otherwise, she has a right to accept whatever blessings may come her way. Just to be on the safe side, to make sure that one does not enjoy anything that is not rightfully theirs, it is better to always choose suffering for oneself, according to Weil. Weil’s deep wish is to love God in a pure way. If love of God brings a person anything—comfort, safety, trust, etcetera—then it would not be pure love of God: this person would love both God and this good that it brings. Therefore, the only way of genuinely loving God is in deepest suffering, affliction where one cannot even be comforted by the idea that God exists, just like Jaffier was not comforted by having saved Venice. This is the kind of pure love, of pure faith that Weil envies. Faith where a person can truly give to a beggar without expecting anything in return, not even gratitude or the feeling that one has done something good. Giving to a beggar should be pure, emptied of all the rewards (cf. Weil 1973, 104). Once it is pure, however, someone could receive in gratitude whatever good things that may come his way. If someone acts purely, he can receive as well, then he can even join the church and enjoy the comfort of community, beliefs, and traditions. Like Kierkegaard, however, Weil finds herself only able to make the first movement and even that only halfway through: she tries to empty herself of expectations, the second movement of receiving nonetheless is the level she never fully reaches. It is the faith that she is waiting for, the faith that she envies.

70

Chapter 3

Weil’s extreme statements about envying the cross and suffering do not reflect some pathological character trait, but, seen from the angle of faith envy, they highlight how she sees the way toward the faith that she envies. Her strong statements about the need for a purifying atheism (cf. Weil 2002, 114-115) are not intended to attack the faith, but, like Kierkegaard attacked the Christendom of Denmark in his age, these statements are borne from a deep concern for a pure kind of faith. She does not just want any faith, she wants a faith that can accept the truth, a faith that is the truth. She tried to open herself fully to the kind of faith that she, like Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein before her, deemed worthy of envy. Faith for Weil is no escapism and can never be that. In their introduction to the philosophy of religion, Beverley and Brian Clack (2008, 186) propose a particular way of looking at religion: “Rather than see religion as effecting an escape from the world, it might become one way of cultivating a reflective perspective on the world.” Weil offers such a perspective. Once she even wrote in her notebook: “To love God, to think on God, is nothing else than a certain way of thinking on the world” (quoted in Von der Ruhr 2006, 84). The Clacks are responding to Islamist violence. After an Islamist attack in Paris, a local pianist made popular again John Lennon’s classic song “Imagine” (1971): “Imagine there’s no heaven. . . No hell below us; Above us, only sky; Imagine all the people living for today.” This is what Weil tries to do: imagining there is no heaven. Still, she envies faith, she aspires it, but this faith does not need all kinds of imaginations, what matters is love, love through the world, love of the world. Like the Austrian poet Erich Fried (1996) wrote, “Es ist was es ist sagt die Liebe” (It is what it is, says love): wit, fear, insight, and so on, all have their own opinions about something, but only love can see something for what it is. For Weil, faith is not about escaping the realities of the world, it is about loving the world. To speak of God is for her a way of loving the world, in the full way in which the faithful tax-collector that Kierkegaard introduced, loved the world. If there is a difference between this kind of loving and that of any ordinary man or woman, it is that the love is even deeper, the life is lived even more fully. The faith that Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein envied is a faith of living fully in this world with all its good and bad. Kierkegaard was looking for a way of accepting the world in all its messiness. Wittgenstein wanted something to hold on to, no matter what may happen in this world. Weil envies the same kind of faith, and she proposes as a way of achieving it to open ourselves up to the world, to not let our self-will or imaginations get in the way, but to love God through the world as it is. Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil envy not the knowledge of some facts or being able to believe such facts, but they envy being able to look at the

Weil—Open to the World

71

world and their lives in a particular way. The answers of faith that they envy are a peculiar kind of answers, because they play a very particular role in their lives. In the next two chapters, we will focus on these two aspects: starting with the nature of the answers of faith, continuing with the safety that belongs to the faith that is worthy of our envy.

Chapter 4

The Answers of Faith

Kierkegaard used to think that the faith he envied consisted of finding an idea to live and die for. In the course of his life, he discovered that the answers of faith he was really looking for, were not that straightforward. He still envied faith for how it makes one’s life matter and gives someone perspective on what is the right thing to do, but he realized that this must be possible in a much more messy and ordinary life as well. Wittgenstein knew what answers he was looking for from the age of twenty-one, and yet, he never managed to fully accept those answers in his own life. He wanted the absolute safety of being independent of the world, but he could not let go of himself. Weil considered herself to be a Christian and to believe in God her entire life, yet, it was also an important part of her Christianity not to be baptized, and part of her belief in God was to believe that God does not exist. She envied the answers of faith that can be found beyond all self-will and imaginations. The answers of faith that these three thinkers envied are a very peculiar kind of answers. In this chapter and the next, I will elaborate on the special nature of such enviable answers of faith. In a recent introduction to the philosophy of religion, Beverley and Brian Clack (2008, 177) describe a common conception of faith as being “convinced that their beliefs about God mean that they have all the answers to life’s problems.” If a person has faith, then she has all the answers, so it is assumed by many people who experience faith envy. Doubts are gone, and it makes sense what one is doing. According to the Clacks (2008, 180), this sentiment resonates with the human desire for certainty: “Living our lives against [. . .] a shifting and uncertain background, it is perhaps not surprising that we might long for something that is certain and stable; that we might wish for something that transcends this fragile world and gives it its meaning.” Religion answers the human quest for something to hold on to: “religion arises out of the turbulence and anguish of human life, the apparent hollowness of the human condition. It is a sign of our all-too-human longings and 73

74

Chapter 4

frustrations” (Clack and Clack 2008, 186). Given the fragility and emptiness of life, the uncertainty and lack of answers, it is no wonder that people envy faith, if faith promises them answers and certainty. Their faith envy may often be a quite superficial, fleeting emotion, but with what we have learned from Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil, we discover a deeper layer to it. The answers of enviable faith will tell a person that it matters what she does and what is the right thing to do. Yet, what kind of answers are the answers that faith is thought to provide? In this chapter, I will first show that the answers of faith are not what they appear to be—we might even question whether they are answers at all. Second, I will elaborate on how the answers of faith are second-level moral oughts. Third, I will discuss in what way the answers of faith can be considered as the right answers. Let me start with the very peculiar nature of the answers of faith. ARE THE ANSWERS OF FAITH ANSWERS? Renowned theologian Paul Tillich held that all human beings need to put their faith in something. The issue, according to him, is not faith in itself but whether the “something” people put their faith in, is up to the weight of expectations placed upon it. People are looking for answers, and this, Tillich (1951, 64) argued, is a chance for Christian theology: “The Christian message provides the answers to the questions implied in human existence.” He proposed “correlation” as a method for theology in modern times: theologians should correlate Christian concepts and stories as answers to the life questions and anxieties that exist in broader society. Christianity will give people the answers they are after, the kind of answers they envy, whether they are fully aware of this or not. Theologian David Tracy (1994) follows Tillich’s line of thought. Tracy (1994, 86) identifies many different questions present in contemporary society, like, “those provoked by radical contingency and mortality; questions evoked by the transcience of all things human; questions attendant on an acknowledgment of the historical and social dependency of all values embraced and all convictions lived by; the question of suffering, which enters every life at some point to interrupt its continuities and challenge its security,” and his list goes on. These questions look like theoretical or metaphysical questions, he says, but in their religious variety, they are slightly different. Like metaphysical questions, religious questions are “about the most fundamental presuppositions, the most basic beliefs, of all our knowing, willing, and acting”; however, religious questions are not simply about “the nature of Ultimate Reality,” but about how “it is existentially related to us” (Tracy

The Answers of Faith

75

1994, 86–87). Many people want to know for sure what is right; they want to be relieved from the burden of responsibility of having to decide for themselves; they want to get beyond the eternal vagueness and nuance and evasion of truth—sometimes at least. The answers offered by the different faiths are “testimonies to the responses of the religions to those questions. They are testimonies by human beings who, like ourselves, have asked these questions and believe that they have received a response from Ultimate Reality itself” (Tracy 1994, 87). In short, contingency, suffering, and so on, pose questions, and faith provides personal answers to these questions, answers that people often envy. Anthropologist John Beattie (1966, 238) states: “religious and magical beliefs and practices [. . .] provide satisfactory answers to otherwise insoluble questions: they fill gaps in the human knowledge and so diminish areas of doubt and uncertainty.” Now, Tracy (1994, 87) admits that both questions and answers in this respect are “logically odd,” because they are about the fundamental, ultimate aspects of our world, but one might even wonder whether they are really questions and answers at all, or, at least, to what extent it makes sense to treat them like that. Let us consider some examples that would fit Tracy’s muster for questions and answers: “Why am I suffering?”—“A virus infected you.”—“Okay, but why did it infect me, and why now?”—“It is God’s will.”; or: “What is the right thing to do for me now?”—“On the one hand, this, on the other hand, that.”—“Okay, but what is the right thing?”—“God calls you to do x!”; or: “I want him to be healed.”—“The doctors try all they can.”—“But what if it is not enough?”—“Just pray, for ultimately, it is only God who can heal him!” The statements “It is God’s will,” “God calls you,” and “God heals” certainly look like answers to questions, but they also seem to play a very particular role. This particular role can easily be misunderstood. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek (2007, 116) discusses a perversion of religion: The pervert claims direct access to some figure of the big Other (from God or history to the desire of his partner), so that, dispelling all the ambiguity of language, he is able to act directly as the instrument of the big Other’s will. In this sense, both Osama bin Laden and President Bush, although political opponents, share the structure of a pervert. They both act upon the presupposition that their acts are directly ordered and guided by divine will.

Bin Laden and Bush are both convinced that they have direct access to God’s answers to all our questions; they know what God wants. The Clacks (2008, 178), previously mentioned, note the same similarity between “the world-view of Islamist terrorists and their apparent enemies on the Christian Religious Right.” “A fundamentalist does not believe, he knows it directly,”

76

Chapter 4

Zizek (2007, 116–117) concludes, adding that “Both liberal-sceptical cynics and fundamentalists share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe, in the proper sense of the term.” Zizek (2007, 118) recognizes this loss of faith in particular developments within Buddhism and Judaism as well. Misunderstanding faith properly can be seen in a different context as well when the protagonist in a Dutch novel describes the traditional Christian Pietistic environment to an outsider: Only those who have experienced a miracle go to heaven. And what is maddening about it, [. . .] is that you cannot evoke a miracle or earn it. You can only receive it. The chances that you receive it, is just very small. Very, very small. Whereas people want their hearts to be put at rest so badly. Their hearts being put at rest. So they do not have to think about it anymore.” (Treur 2017, 87; my translation, HK)

God needs to tell a person through a miracle that she is one of the elected, and this person wants to be among them—that is why she is a member of that church—but very few will really be chosen. Therefore, pietistic believers want and need this miraculous certainty: “Just like in love. Only now she noticed,” the novel continues (Treur 2017, 87; my translation, HK). In love or faith, when all is well, people do not question the other’s love, but this is not because they have some external guarantee or scientific proof. If they had that, that would be a perversion of that love, like Zizek says. Yet, a lover wants to be certain that the other loves him or her, a lover may want it so badly and does not want to think about it anymore. The certainty should be an integral part of the love and not some external fact. If a believer treats “This is God’s will” as some external fact, instead of as part of his relationship with God, he misuses religion. “It is God’s will” is not an answer to the question “Why am I suffering?” because as soon as someone can say “It is God’s will,” she no longer asks that question. “It is God’s will” does not answer the question, but it takes its place. “Why am I suffering?” and “It is God’s will” are themselves two of the many possible responses to the uncertainty when confronted with suffering. Objective certainty, miraculous or otherwise, would have turned it into something else completely. When people in the West nowadays envy faith, there is often the image of faith as present in the irretrievable past, or someplace far, far away like Africa. British anthropologist Robin Horton (1993) describes the faith that is present in these faraway and past places as attempts at explanation, prediction, and control. Elsewhere, I have argued that the opposite is true (Kroesbergen 2019b, 47–58). For example, Horton’s fellow anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1937, 67) described how a potter among the Azande in Sudan would say “It is broken—there is witchcraft,” whenever a pot

The Answers of Faith

77

would break in the fire, as he knew he was a skilled potter and used good clay. “Witchcraft” was not an explanation, it may look like one, but it is what you refer to when there is no explanation. When the Roman Catholic church investigates a healing ascribed to the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in France, they do not investigate whether Mary was responsible, but they investigate whether there is no other explanation (cf. Moore 1995, 141). People in Africa go to a diviner to ask for advice about a journey whose outcome they cannot predict. The apostles in the Bible cast lots to choose a successor for the traitor Judas, because they could not predict which one would be best (cf. Moore 1995, 145–146). Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1948, 31) described that the Trobriand islanders use magic when they go fishing at sea, but not when fishing in the lagoons. They knew that fishing at sea they cannot control. In Christianity, people offer prayers for the sick but only for those whose illness they cannot control. Religious practices and statements may seem like means for explanation, prediction, and control, but it makes more sense to say that these practices and statements are what people revert to when they know that no explanation, prediction, or control is available. The answers of faith are responses to this ordinary world full of contingency, uncertainty, and chance. In The Language of Faith in Southern Africa, I elaborate these points for the Southern African context, but by comparing it with Western examples I show that this is not a characteristic that is specific for African contexts (Kroesbergen 2019b, 47–58). The answers of faith are not really answers, but they are the things that people say when they know that there are no answers available. People may be troubled by questions like “Why am I suffering?” or “What is the right thing to do for me now?” and these questions may be the occasion for much faith envy. People may desire for control over something uncontrollable like an illness. They cannot let go of their desires, for the desires are too strong, and they cannot hold on to them, for these desires would destroy them, or at least, they would impair their ability to enjoy what good things there are left in life. People envy those who do not worry about their suffering, envy those who are certain about what they have to do. People envy those who have a place to take their desires. People may envy faith, and faith is related to life’s questions provoked by radical contingency, as Tracy (1994, 86) phrases it, but it does not follow that faith provides answers in the ordinary sense of the word. The answers of faith are used in a very particular way. As I (Kroesbergen 2019a, 12) argued elsewhere, they are like “left-over containers with respect to explanations”: the language of faith comprises the words we use for what cannot be explained. To speak of the things of faith is “to deal with what is not clear and certain. It is a response to the insecurity of the world. It is a normal part of life, but the part that remains insecure” (Kroesbergen 2019a, 12).

78

Chapter 4

For those answers of faith to perform the role people envy them for, these answers must be personal and adjusted to a specific context, and they must be certain and undoubtable. These two aspects will be elaborated in the rest of this chapter. In the next section, I will use an example of Peter Winch to show how the supposed answers of faith are personal in character and can be considered as moral oughts on a second level. In the section after that, I will use an example of Rush Rhees to show in what way the answers of faith cannot be mistaken and cannot be taught either. SECOND-LEVEL MORAL OUGHTS In archaeology, an artifact is identified as religious or ritual if it does not have a clear socioeconomic or practical function. In language, a statement is often identified as religious if it does not describe plain facts. “God helped me” or “God sent the earthquake” does not make sense in a straightforward explanatory sense, so most people will immediately assume that they must be taken as religious statements. Instead of looking for a way of nonetheless turning religious statements into some kind of description, we should pay attention to the distinctive nature of religious language and in particular the answers of faith. Religious people make statements about God’s rules and God’s plans; they refer to a different reality behind what is visible to everyone, and to a kind of safety that does not seem to match what we see in reality ordinarily; they speak of sin and spirits and sacrifice, of prayer and powers and prophecy. How can we make sense of such statements? Instead of debating the truth or falsehood of religious statements as if they must be intended as descriptions of the world somehow, it would be better to pay attention to the practice which gives these words their sense, as Wittgenstein phrases it (cf. 1998, 97e). As soon as people identify a particular statement as religious, they place it in a particular category, a strange category. The special character of this category of language becomes clearer if we look at it from the angle of faith envy. One of the things that the answers of faith are supposed to tell someone is what she ought to do, what is the right thing to do. When making an important decision in one’s life, there are often many reasons for one kind of action or the other. If this person wants to make money, she should do this; if she wants to please the parents, she should do so; if this person wants to do something that makes a difference, she should do that, and so on. A person weighs all these different considerations and opinions when making her life choices. Now, the answers of faith may also seem like just one more of these opinions. Upon a closer look, however, we see that actually, they function

The Answers of Faith

79

very differently. If someone’s father wants her to do something, she has to ask herself what she wants; if God wants this same person to do something, she simply has to do it. God’s calling will make all the other considerations irrelevant; that is what makes it special, that is what makes it an answer of faith. How does this work? For that, let us look at ethics, in particular at the theory of moral oughts. In moral theory, it is widely accepted that if a person thinks something is wrong for her, it is implied that this person thinks it is wrong for anyone else in a similar situation as well. Someone’s moral judgments should always be universalizable, so it is assumed. Wittgensteinian ethicist Peter Winch (1972, 151–170) questioned this universalizability of moral judgments by discussing a case in which this is not necessarily the case. He (1972,161) states: I am interested in the position of a man who, ex hypothesi, is completely morally serious, who fully intends to do what he ought to do but is perplexed about what he ought to do. He feels the force of conflicting moral demands on him. “On the one hand I ought to do this, on the other hand I ought to do that. So what ought I really to do?” I am interested here in the force of the word “ought” in that last question and in the answer given to it. And I shall argue that when, in answer to such a question a man says, “This is what I ought to do,” there is nothing in the meaning or use of the word “ought” which logically commits him to accepting as a corollary: “And anyone else in a situation like this ought to do the same.”

Winch is talking about a moral dilemma, where people have to find their way balancing different moral obligations: on the one hand one ought to do this, on the other hand, one ought to do the opposite. In such cases a new level of moral ought arises: what ought someone to do when he feels the force of two contradicting “oughts” appealing to him? In such cases, Winch argues, people may reach a decision for themselves— “This is the right answer for me!”—whereas at the same time they may recognize that favoring the other first-level ought may be the right thing to do for someone else. Two oughts conflict—different basic level oughts are in play—and people have to decide between them on a higher level. If this is the case, then a person’s own moral decision does not necessarily imply the universalizability of one’s moral judgments. People may recognize that what is right for them does not need to be right for someone else. Winch uses an example from Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, Sailor (2017) to make his point. In the story, navy officer Vere has to decide whether or not to condemn Billy Budd to death. Someone had bullied Billy, Billy pushed him, and the other person fell in a very unfortunate way and died. According to military law, Billy is guilty of an offense that deserves the death penalty. However, everybody can understand that it was not his fault.

80

Chapter 4

Vere considers what he should do: “How can we adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow creature innocent before God, and whom we feel to be so?—Does that state it aright? You sign sad assent. Well, I too feel that, the full force of that. It is Nature. But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King” (Melville 2017, 55). So, Vere is weighing two moral oughts: he ought to condemn Billy according to the rules Vere has to follow as a navy officer, and he ought to set Billy free according to the common sense that it was not really Billy’s fault. “Now, what ought he to do?” is the second-level moral ought question on which Vere needs to decide. While acknowledging that he feels the force of both moral oughts, he can choose only one. Vere decides that the right answer for him is to condemn Billy to death. Ultimately, his allegiance is to the King and the navy regulations, he discovers, and not to his natural personal feelings of what is just. Winch (1972, 163) comments: I believe that I could not have acted as did Vere; and by the “could not,” I do not mean “should not have had the nerve to,” but that I should have found it morally impossible to condemn a man “innocent before God” under such circumstances. In reaching this decision I do not think that I should appeal to any considerations over and above those to which Vere himself appeals.

For Winch—himself a former navy officer—if he had been confronted with the same two moral oughts in the same circumstances, then he would have made another second-level decision. He could not have condemned Billy, although, just like Vere, he also feels the force of both moral oughts. For Winch, the right answer to this moral dilemma would have been to acquit Billy. And yet, Winch (1972, 163–164) maintains that this does not imply that concerning second-level moral oughts he thinks that Vere has done something wrong: “The story seems to me to show that Vere did what was, for him, the right thing to do.” Winch for himself could never have reached the moral conclusion that Vere reached, but Winch, nonetheless, thinks that Vere did what was right for Vere. In cases of such dilemmas, a person may see the moral ought that leads to the other deciding what is right for her, whereas for this person herself another moral ought carries more weight. She understands how for the other what the other decides is what he has to decide—he cannot do otherwise— whereas at the same time this person herself decides the opposite. The good is not objective or universalizable in Winch’s terms, because someone may acknowledge that the right answer to a moral question for oneself is different from the right answer for someone else. The distinction between the two levels of moral oughts can also be used to bring out the personal character of the answers of faith that many people

The Answers of Faith

81

envy or would envy if they reflected upon it more. People may recognize that there are different moral obligations in a particular situation, and then they have to decide which of these is most important for them. These second-level oughts is where God and faith come in naturally. These second-level oughts are where we find the enviable answers of faith. Someone ought to do one thing, he ought to do the opposite as well, so, what ought he to do? This last question is the question about what God wants a person to do. This is what people are looking for when they exclaim in envy: “If only I had faith, I would know what I have to do.” Wittgensteinian philosopher Gareth Moore (1995, 136) succinctly states: “The will of God is necessarily authoritative for me.” If a believer acknowledges something as the will of God, then she has no choice but to obey. That is part of how people speak of the answers of faith; it is part of the grammar of “God’s will.” The obligation toward God is different from other moral obligations in the sense that the obligation toward God by definition overrides all other obligations. Moore’s fellow Wittgensteinian philosopher D.Z. Phillips explains (1966, 139): “Sometimes it is not wrong to decide against one’s obligations to one’s father, religion recognizes no circumstances in which one is justified in deciding against one’s obligations to God.” When an earthly father asks something, then people may feel a moral obligation to honor his request, but it is always possible that some other moral obligation is even more important. If God asks a person something, he has to obey. As Phillips (1966, 139) continues, “To reject God’s claim is not to reject one of many competing claims in a way of life; it is to reject a way of life as such.” As long as God is part of someone’s way of life people have to obey him no matter what. All kinds of ought play a role in these people’s lives, but whatever other oughts may be in play, God’s will is necessarily authoritative for them. Particular moral oughts can conflict with other moral oughts, but the moral ought to do what God wants a believer to do can never conflict with another ought: the believer has to obey. God’s will is always a second-level moral ought; it is never part of a moral dilemma but always the solution to a moral dilemma. People envy the answers of faith, because they envy having such a solution. Now, the concept of God and the language of faith are used in other ways as well. We can imagine a situation where someone says: “God tells us not to steal, but if I do not steal I cannot feed my children; what ought I to do?” We see the same in the example used by Winch: officer Vere says that Billy Budd is “innocent before God,” nonetheless, Vere does not declare Billy innocent. Here God is part of the primary level of oughts. I argue that there is something wrong with that logically. It does not fit with the role God plays within the language game of faith. If God asks a person to do something, she has to do it, so it makes no sense to ponder over whether or not one should obey God’s

82

Chapter 4

command. God’s command cannot be part of a moral dilemma, it is always the outcome of a dilemma. Only then, the answers of faith are enviable. If God asks this particular person at this particular time not to steal, then there is no longer any dilemma: it is this person’s duty not to steal. If God considers Billy innocent, then there is no longer any dilemma: Vere has to acquit him. As soon as a believer says that God asks her not to steal, but continues to contemplate stealing, then she must have been using the word “God” in a very loose way. If this person meant to say that this is what God asks her to do, then, by even contemplating that she might reject it because of another moral obligation, she would have rejected God altogether already. God’s commands are always to be obeyed. God’s commands in this sense are not a set of general rules once and for all stored in the Bible, but, through the Bible or otherwise, God’s command is personal and livingly directed to someone particular in a specific situation. God’s will, as it is spoken of in enviable answers of faith, is absolute: the believer has no choice but to obey it. If he even considers not obeying it, he is no longer within the form of life that acknowledges God. This is not a biased theological statement, but it philosophically describes how the answers of faith that someone envies who exclaims “If only I had faith, I would know what I have to do,” function in people’s lives. When the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (cf. 2004, 661–662) made the same points, he was not making a theological point, but a grammatical one. Barth reflects upon the nature of faith when he “rejects the view of ethics as a fixed set of rules and of God’s command as a collection of general precepts the application of which would be a matter for man’s judgment and action” (Hartwell 1964, 163). God always gives specific commands applicable to a particular situation and: “Man can only obey or disobey” (Hartwell 1964, 163). A believer is not asked to apply some general rules that God has given, but she has to follow whatever God wants her to do: “God’s continual fresh giving and man’s continual fresh receiving of the freedom to obey God’s will in a particular situation” (Hartwell 1964, 163). Barth does not regard the Bible as a book full of commandments that believers have to follow, rather God’s command that believers should obey is always particular and specific for this particular believer now in this particular situation. The commandments in the Bible are part of the wider story of the Bible that, according to Barth, shows that God always used to work like that, giving his people specific commandments at particular times. This may look strange, since there are many laws and commandments in the Bible. However, most of the laws in, for example, Numbers and Leviticus, nearly all Christians no longer follow, if only because contemporary structures of state and society are different. Yet, these same Christians will hold that Jesus Christ did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it (Matthew

The Answers of Faith

83

5:17). He intensifies the laws sometimes, making them even harder to follow. For example, people should not only not commit adultery, but not even look at a woman lustfully (Matthew 5:28). After Christ’s death and resurrection, Peter is taught that laws of food purity no longer apply to Christians (Acts 10:9–23). Paul in his letters emphasizes that Christians are free from the law (Romans 7:1–6). Other preachers tried to impose Jewish laws on the church, like circumcision, but Paul stood firm claiming that the Christian is free. All of this shows that in practice Christians adhere to a personal interpretation of the laws and regulations in the Bible, a personal interpretation of the answers of faith. The Bible may look like just another rule-book, but the Bible as it plays a role within the concept of faith that is present in faith envy has a different character. This holds for people inside and outside the church. People who envy faith or wished they had just a little more faith, are not looking for some more rules to consider. They know that if they follow their father’s rules, they have to do A, if they follow their financial advisor’s rules, they have to do B, and so on. They are not looking for yet another set of rules, like, “If you follow the Bible, you have to do C!” They envy being free from considering and weighing all of those rules. If they look at the Bible as a source for the faith they envy, then the Bible should not provide more rules, but it should provide the ultimate answer. It is expected to provide the second-level moral ought that solves all complicated moral dilemmas, doubts, and deliberations. That is the faith that is generally envied in faith envy. This perspective of faith looks at the commandments of God in the Bible in a particular way: they must be very different from ordinary rules. To return to Barth, he (2004, 663) states: “The law of God cannot be compared with any human law. For it is not merely a general rule but also a specific prescription and norm for each individual case.” If a believer knows God’s will for a particular situation, she has no choice but to obey. This requires Barth to give an uncommon reading of, for example, the ten commandments (2004, 676): “The Ten Commandments teach that in the command of God we are face to face with the person of God.” The commandments in the Bible do not provide rules which believers have to apply, but the commandments show that God always speaks specific commands to specific people at specific times. There are no rules and applications between God and the believer, but God speaks to believers face to face. From within this concept of faith, God’s commandments in the Bible are not rules given to people for all time; rather, these rules in the Bible are part of stories which show that God gives humans always concrete, specific commands adjusted to the particular situation in which they find themselves. Within enviable faith believers do not need to apply rules, God gives them a specific command every time anew. The answers of faith

84

Chapter 4

are personal and context-specific by definition. The answers of faith are not part of moral debates or considerations, they are the solution to those. The philosophical point that Winch makes using the story about Billy Budd is that moral judgments do not need to be universalizable. Winch himself would not have condemned Billy Budd to death, yet, he does not think that Captain Vere was wrong in doing so. My point is that these non-universalizable moral judgments are second-level moral oughts, and that the kind of answers of faith that are enviable are these kind of moral judgments. This requires the Bible to play a particular role in the lives of Christian believers: it is not a book of first-level moral oughts, but it encourages looking for second-level moral oughts in everyone’s own life. The answers of faith that people may envy are personal and context-specific, but can people be mistaken about what God wants them to do? Can these answers of faith not be the wrong ones? THE RIGHT ANSWERS Hugh Mackay (2016), whom I referred to in the introduction, says: “When people reveal a kind of ‘faith envy’ (as many people do), they are as likely to be hankering after faith in the inherent goodness of humans, or ‘some power beyond ourselves,’ or some interpretation of life’s meaning that offers more than biology, as they are to be yearning for conventional religious faith.” People know what it means to speak of the right answer in mathematics or biology, but now they look for something else, something beyond that. Now, they look for the right answer coming straight from heaven, the answer that cannot be wrong. When people face important decisions in their lives, they are looking for the right answer. Although it is difficult to grasp what could be meant by a mistaken answer, it feels like there must be the possibility of ending up with the wrong answer. Wittgenstein’s student Rush Rhees (1999, 72) observes: “It looks as though there could be a wrong decision. Because otherwise, your decision would just be a preference for one rather than the other. Why does one feel, from one point of view, that unless you can say that her decision may be a mistaken one, it must be the expression of preference?” People want to maintain that there must be the possibility of a wrong answer, for otherwise one feels obliged to say that the answer is just a matter of preference and one definitely does not want to say that. That does not fit the kind of faith that is considered enviable. It is completely up to a particular individual to decide upon for example what is her favorite color. Whatever color someone picks, that will be it, and nobody can tell her that she is mistaken. If someone thinks that her favorite

The Answers of Faith

85

color is blue then that is her favorite color. It is simply a matter of preference. Moral matters and matters of faith are not a matter of preference. When people envy those who have answers of faith, those who have discovered second-level moral ought for themselves, they consider these answers to be more than mere instances of personal preference. If people ask themselves what they ought to do, they cannot pick whatever answer they like, they want to find the right answer. Their decision matters in the way that it does, because it is not simply an issue of preference. They want to make the right decision. As Rhees (1999, 73) states: It is deciding what I am going to do; what I ought to do. My trouble is partly that I want to distinguish between those two, and yet from another point of view I want to keep them close together. If I say it is just deciding what I am going to do, that makes it look like a preference. And the whole problem is of the distinction between what I want to do and what I ought to do. But on the other hand I am trying to say that the relation between those two is very close. And that there is a great affinity between deciding what I ought to do and making up my mind what I want.

It is not a matter of preference, it is not at someone’s mercy what is the right answer. One has to find out what is the right answer, for only the right answer would be an enviable answer—that is what makes it enviable. Yet, Rhees (1999, 71) notes, “There is something queer in that notion of ‘the right answer.’ How could one decide that the answer I do give (say that I ought to stay single, or I ought to refuse to serve in the war) was mistaken?” If someone finds an answer to the question of what he ought to do—a second-level moral ought—then he will desperately want it to be the right answer and not the wrong answer, but it is difficult to see how anyone could say about such an answer that it is the wrong one. If someone says “I ought to stay single,” a friend could tell him that he is deceiving himself, but does that show that the answer is mistaken? One person can think the other one is mistaken, but that in itself would not make him in the wrong. It shows more about the person who is criticizing and her perspective than it does about the decision of staying single in the first place. How could someone ever show that a particular answer that someone has reached, is the wrong answer? Maybe years later, this person himself says that he was mistaken, but does that prove that he indeed was mistaken? Again, it shows more about the person at the time when he is criticizing his earlier decision and his current perspective than it does about the original decision of staying single. How could he know that he is not being mistaken now in the judgment that the earlier answer was wrong?

86

Chapter 4

Rhees discusses an example from a story about a certain Sue from Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure (1993). Sue is a married woman who has had an affair with Jude, and now she considers returning to her husband: “I don’t dislike you, Jude. I love you as much as ever! Only—I ought not to love you—any more. Oh, I must not any more!” (Hardy 1993, 310). She has been struggling with this for some time, but now has finally made a decision: “I have made up my mind that I am not your wife! I belong to him—I sacramentally joined myself to him for life. Nothing can alter it!” (Hardy 1993, 311). Of course, if this is true, then it has been true in a sense all along, also during the affair, but now she realizes it: “I can’t help being as I am, I am convinced I am right—that I see the light at last” (Hardy 1993, 311). She begs Jude to let her go and stop trying to convince her to stay with him: “I can’t bear it! I was in error—I cannot reason with you. I was wrong—proud in my own conceit!” (Hardy 1993, 312). She tries to explain her decision to Jude, but ultimately she knows that she cannot do it. She knows also that the longer she stays with Jude the harder it will be for her to hold on to her decision: “I can’t say any more—it breaks my heart—it will be undoing all I have begun! Jude—good-night!” (Hardy 1993, 314). She begs Jude to turn around and go, which he does. Sue has discovered that this was the right thing to do for her. What should we say about such a case? Rhees (1999, 73) reflects: “When Sue decides to go one way, she cannot say that of course the other way is all right also, but she just happens to like this. No, the other way is not all right also, if this is the way she can go. That makes it look as though she could be mistaken, although I still do not think that makes sense.” If a person decides that blue is her favorite color, this person could say that if she would have chosen red that would have been all right also. In questions about how to live one’s life, it is different; here someone is looking for the only one right answer. Rhees (1999, 73) continues noting about Sue: “She is deciding something about herself, and yet she is not simply deciding what she prefers or what she wants.” The answer that Sue is looking for—what she has to do—is connected to herself. In important ways, nobody else can decide for her what she ought to do. In that way, it is like deciding what somebody wants, nobody else can do that for a person either. However, in important other ways, deciding what a person ought to do is very different from deciding what she wants. Now, she looks for the truth, for what she has to do (Rhees 1999, 74): As things have worked out, it has got to be this. Can she be mistaken about that? I do not see that she can. That is the decision she reaches, that is all. Certainly this decision is toto genre different from the mere expression of a preference. And I am not inclined to weaken that difference or to play it down in any sort of way. But I do not think you do weaken that difference by saying as I do, that

The Answers of Faith

87

it makes no sense to ask whether she is mistaken. By which I do not mean that she is infallible or that she must be right. I just mean that the question has no sense here.

After a moral struggle Sue makes a decision: this is what she has to do, this is her second-level moral ought. Now, can that decision be wrong? Can it be mistaken? People may think that she is misguided, she herself at a later stage in her life may think that she did not see clearly what she had to do, but at the moment that she reaches the decision, it is hard to see what one could mean by saying that she is mistaken. Therefore, it is equally hard to see what we mean by saying that she is right. Part of what is meant by “the right answer” in questions about living is bound up with the person herself reaching a particular decision. Before that personal decision, the answer is not yet there; it is not lying around waiting to be discovered. Sue has arrived at the decision that she has reached; for her, this is the only way she can go, this is the only thing she can do, so how can she be wrong? Someone may argue that Sue should do something else, but it is hard to see what could decide who is right in this disagreement. I may think that Sue is right or that the other one is right, but then again, what would make my opinion right? There are no “facts of the matter” “out there” that could be investigated to check who is right. “The right answer” or “the truth” concerning moral questions is not like that. Many problems can be solved by weighing different options and opinions or asking an expert about it; the problem of how to live, and the problem of discovering the answers of faith, however, is a different kind of problem. The right answer in this respect, the second-level moral ought, someone has to find for herself: it is personal. As Rhees (1999, 67) continues: “You can instruct people in so many things, why can you not instruct them how to live? Well, you cannot; and that is not because the subject is so difficult.” The point is that what a person ought to do is not some fact that somebody else can have stumbled across before her (Rhees 1999, 70–71): “‘Guidance in life’ is not anything to be found in philosophy or in any theory of right and wrong,” therefore, “It is idle to profess to instruct people how to live; as it is idle for the perplexed to seek such instruction. This is because of the sort of problem practical problems and problems of living are. Because of what is asked and sought in them.” This belongs to the nature of these kinds of questions and answers. If someone has found the answer, like Sue now knows she has to leave Jude and return to her husband, then that is the right answer for her. If her peers or parents or pastor disagree, that does not tell us that the answer may have been wrong, it simply tells us something about the perspective of these peers or parents or pastor. If next week or next year Sue herself regrets having done

88

Chapter 4

what she did, this does not show that she was mistaken the first time, but it simply shows what is the right answer at this new particular time and place. Sue has discovered what she has to do, what is the right answer for her here and now, and there is no context within which the rightness or wrongness of this answer can be discussed. Such questions make no sense concerning these particular kinds of statements or decisions or judgments. Bringing out the peculiar nature of such statements is the philosophical point that Rhees is making using the story of Sue. And this applies to the answers of faith as well. My point in the context of this book is that this particular kind of judgment is the kind of judgment that people look for when they envy faith. They wish to know what is the right thing to do for them in their lives. They do not want some extra moral opinions to weigh in the process, but they want the solution to their issues: the second-level moral ought, the answer of faith. This answer of faith should be the right one, no matter what. With Kierkegaard, it should be the right thing to do, however messy and ordinary one’s life may remain. With Wittgenstein, it should be independent of the world, receiving light from above. With Weil, it should be beyond concern for one’s self, and irrespective of speculations about what may or may not happen in the future. It should be right in such a way that it makes no sense to even ask whether it is wrong. Maybe one’s peers or parents or pastor disagrees, but that is their business. Maybe one’s future self no longer agrees, but that is for that future self to sort out. Here and now, this is the right thing to do. “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise,” the Reformation theologian Martin Luther (in Bainton 1977, 180) is supposed to have said when the court asked him to withdraw his conviction that the church needed reformation. He refused to change his mind. Others maybe would have changed their minds, but that does not concern him. He felt he had no choice but to remain faithful to his position. The expression “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise,” illustrates the faith that is worthy of envy: the faith that allows a person to find out and do what he has to do, what he cannot do otherwise. This is what faith envy could, and I would say, should be, directed toward. Once someone like Sue has found the answer, she sees how it never could have been otherwise: “I belong to him—I sacramentally joined myself to him for life. Nothing can alter it!” (Hardy 1993, 311). She not only decides that she has to return to her husband now, but she discovers that this was always what she ought to have done. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek (2014, 2 and 108) speaks of a circular relationship between the answer one finds and its reasons that is present in faith, like it is in love, and the end of love: “I do not fall in love for precise reasons (her lips, her smile. . .)—it is because I already love her that her lips, etc. attract me,” and “Divorce always has a retroactive scope: it does not only mean that marriage is now annulled, but something more radical—a marriage should be annulled because it never was a true marriage.”

The Answers of Faith

89

The answer one has found creates its own reasons. As soon as Sue knows she has to return to her husband, it can be seen that it could never have gone otherwise. I say “as soon as,” but Zizek (2014, 150) correctly notes: “The Fall (into love) never happens at a certain moment, it has always-already happened.” Before her personal decision, Sue’s answer is not yet there, it was not lying around waiting to be discovered. Yet, as soon as Sue has reached the decision, it is as if the answer has always been there: “Nothing can alter it!” (Hardy 1993, 311). Beforehand, no one could have deducted with any kind of certainty that Luther would do what he did, but once he did it, it was clear that it could never have gone otherwise. Luther was not after personal advantage, he does not act upon personal desire, he is not following a strategy or policy to reach a particular goal: he was open to the world, in the sense we saw in the previous chapter on Weil. He finds that this is what he here and now has to do, that this is the right thing to do. A person can only find that out for himself, and the conclusion that a person reaches about what he ought to do, does not in any way imply what his judgment about someone else’s behavior in similar circumstances should be, if this judgment is ever required. Everybody has to find their own right answer to the question of what one ought to do, that what one cannot do otherwise. If one has found the right answer, if one has found what God wants him to do, then this person is safe no matter what. CONCLUSION The answers of faith are personal; they go beyond moral dilemmas and operate on a different level where, irrespective of all deliberations and considerations, someone has found what he has to do, no matter what. The answers of faith are the right answers, not because they are comparably better than other possible answers, but because they are beyond comparisons. It makes no sense to discuss the rightness or wrongness of the answer of faith. As Weil (2002, 70) argues, choosing good is surely better than choosing evil; it would be even better, however, if one did not even consider doing evil. The envied answers of faith are on this different level. When people envy faith, they envy something that goes beyond the ordinary world, beyond biology, debates, or nuance. In trying to prove the worth of one’s answers of faith, there is the risk that people try to show how right these answers are within the arena of different opinions and ideas. If people give in to this temptation, however, the answers of faith stop belonging to the beyond, stop belonging to the second level, stop being answers of faith. It would be like self-contradictory proving the value of selflessness by showing how much it boosts your ego, as we saw

90

Chapter 4

in the previous chapter on Weil, or like proving the value of an unpressured approach to raising children, by showing how it creates a more effective kind of pressure, which was discussed in the chapter before on Wittgenstein. Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling discusses Abraham having to sacrifice Isaac because if killing your innocent son is good, clearly a perspective beyond any worldly moral standards must exist. When people envy faith, they do so because they long for something beyond the ordinary world, like Wittgenstein emphasized. Therefore, to understand the concept of faith implied in this envy, to understand enviable faith we should let it be truly beyond the ordinary world. Instead of worrying about what is the right thing to do and weighing different moral oughts, the envied believer is beyond the ordinary world and sings: “The Lord is my shepherd.” Instead of being burdened by desires that one can neither let go nor hold on to, the believer may sing: “I shall not be in want.” Instead of struggling with the suffering that has entered one’s life and interrupts its continuities and challenges its security, wondering whether one is mistaken or not, the believer may sing: “I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” The answers of faith do not belong to the ordinary world, but are responses to this ordinary world full of contingency, uncertainty, and chance from somewhere within the world but beyond it at the same time. That is why faith often expresses a kind of safety that is absolute. This holds for Psalm 23 which I have quoted here, for Reformer Martin Luther (1520, 13) who claimed that nothing whatsoever can do a Christian any hurt, if he does what he cannot do otherwise, and for popular hymns such as “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” and “Under His wings, I am safely abiding” alike. The experience of feeling safe even in the midst of trials and temptations is a central feature of the Christian faith and many other faiths alike. The feeling of absolute safety is one of the aspects of faith that particularly arouses envy: it would be so much better to feel safe than to struggle with questions about suffering or whether things will be okay. However, what does it mean to be “safe” even in the valley of the shadow of death? What sense can it possibly make to claim complete safety in this unpredictable and insecure world? These questions we will deal with in the next chapter on the safety of faith.

Chapter 5

The Safety of Faith

As discussed in the introduction, faith envy entails by definition a kind of double feeling: one desires to have the security that faith is supposed to bring, but one does not want and cannot even imagine to want the faith part. This chapter focuses on the apparently sugar-coated experience of absolute safety or complete peace of mind that faith is supposed to bring. I will try to solve some conceptual difficulties in understanding this kind of absolute safety by discussing some problems noted by thinkers in connection with it. 1 First, I will investigate whether there is an invalid prediction implied in this feeling of absolute safety: how can someone know that nothing will hurt her? Second, I will examine whether this experience of complete safety is dependent upon impossible requirements, such as being a good man or an impeccable Christian. Third, I will consider the character of the people who claim absolute safety as portrayed by the philosophers discussed in this book: do these people need to be so cold and inhumanly detached from the world for them to be able to say that nothing can hurt them? I will argue that if, instead of asking how someone can claim absolute safety, we ask what someone commits herself to in making this claim, these difficulties disappear. This will not give a recipe for how to feel absolutely safe or obtain the faith that is envied, but it will become clear what it means to have faith of such a kind that nothing whatever can do her any hurt, a faith worthy of envy. KNOWING THE ANSWERS OF FAITH? How can someone know that he is absolutely safe, that nothing will hurt him? Philosopher Peter Winch (1972, 206–207) answers this question saying: “A man who has such an attitude to life sees that as long as afflictions do not deflect him [from acting decently], they do not harm him—not in relation to what he regards as really important in his life.” A good man cannot be harmed, as Socrates is supposed to have said. Whether the judges release him 91

92

Chapter 5

or condemn him to death, Socrates claims that he is not harmed, for he is still good. Likewise, whether he walks either in the light or in the valley of the shadow of death, the Psalmist may claim he never fears any evil, for his fear does not depend upon his circumstances. However, Winch (1972, 207) holds that the person who feels absolutely safe because a good man cannot be harmed “still thinks that something could harm him, namely, for him to cease to ‘will the Good’; and it is clear that this may befall him as a result of afflictions which he has to suffer.” Prison, torture, death—it all would not harm him, because all he cares about is willing the good, but what if he stops willing the good? Is it not overconfidence or pride to assume that afflictions cannot break you? Winch (1972 207) concludes: “Thus, if he says ‘nothing can harm me,’ there is still a predictive element in what he says; so he is not really entitled to add ‘whatever happens’ and if he cannot do this, then his utterance does not have the absolute character it was intended to have.” Without a predictive element, someone like Socrates or someone with faith may claim absolute safety. His circumstances may change, but he will fear no evil, whatever happens, because God is with him. What if Socrates is crushed by the torture his judges apply to him, what if he does break and no longer has the strength to continue being good? Yet, what if God is no longer with the believer, or if the shadows of death do so engulf him that he turns away from God? As soon as there is a prediction implied in saying “nothing can harm me,” the safety is no longer absolute, and isn’t there always the prediction implied that the speaker will continue to have this particular perspective on life? Winch thinks that this prediction is unavoidable and that, therefore, someone cannot legitimately say that he is absolutely safe no matter what. His safety cannot be unconditional. He is only safe on the condition that he does not lose his ability to view life from this perspective that a good man cannot be harmed and he is in God’s hands. Mikel Burley (2010, 88) agrees: “One certainly cannot say of oneself that one is immune to moral harm, since as long as one is alive and able to speak, one continues to be susceptible not merely to worldly harms but to the moral harm of falling short of virtue as well.” Absolute safety can only be ascribed to someone by someone else after someone’s life is completed. Wittgenstein may feel “I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens,” but the part of “whatever happens” is not justified for he may lose the patience that he experiences at that time. Someone may feel absolutely safe in the arms of Jesus, but in truth, it can only be said after someone died that someone was safe in the arms of Jesus. This seems to be a serious problem for making sense of the experiences of feeling absolutely safe, however, other perspectives on these experiences of faith are possible as well.

The Safety of Faith

93

Lance Ashdown (1995, 165), for example, notes that Winch and others, “fail to see any other use for the first-person expression ‘I am absolutely safe’ other than that of a prediction of patience.” Yet, Ashdown does find another use for this expression, namely in Paul claiming that “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:11–13). Here, Paul is not predicting his own patience but entrusting himself to God. Ashdown (1995, 166) paraphrases him saying: “Yes, I am pure, but the purity is of God, not me.” Paul’s perspective on life through which he can be content in any and every situation, is not his own, but is God’s gift, and if he loses this perspective later in life, that must be God’s will just as well. Here, Ashdown (1995, 169) summarizes: “‘I am absolutely safe’ is the expression of freedom in the face of the radical uncertainty of life; or, to put it differently, his freedom from the need to have his life turn out a certain way is precisely the absoluteness of his safety.” The fact that there is no prediction involved makes the statement independent of what happens in the future and in that sense absolute. Part of the meaning of “I am absolutely safe,” according to Ashdown, is that someone takes everything as it is, including the future. He (1995, 166) states that Winch and others, “see ‘I am absolutely safe’ as a commitment to being in a particular way in the future regardless of what that future brings. What I am suggesting is that it is a willingness to accept whatever comes that gives the safety its absolute character—not the belief that one will act a certain way next week or next year.” Someone who claims to be absolutely safe, is not predicting about oneself, but expresses a willingness to approach whatever may happen in a particular way. He is like the knight of faith that Kierkegaard described: when his wife does not have the lamb’s head for supper which he was hoping for, he is not disappointed, he has no regrets, he does not consider himself foolish for his anticipatory joy: she does not have it, so be it, and he will take delight in whatever his wife did prepare for him. He intends to accept everything that comes his way as a gift from God, like Weil recommends. Whether or not someone may turn out to be strong enough to live up to that willingness or commitment, is another matter, but Ashdown’s emphasis on willingness and commitment points out the direction for solving the puzzle of how the feeling of absolute safety does not necessarily imply an invalid prediction. In his article on “Can a Good Man Be Harmed?” Winch fails to consider the question to what it commits someone to make such a statement, whereas in the article on ethical reward and punishment, he (1972, 226) does do so concerning the statement “No crime goes unpunished”: “We must try to

94

Chapter 5

understand, that is, exactly what such a judgement commits its author to.” He (1972, 226) continues: There is an extremely simple short answer to this question: namely, that one who believes that all wrong-doing is punished is committed in all cases to pitying wrongdoers, not only when they are subsequently visited by worldly misfortunes (including pangs of remorse) but also, and even more especially, when they seem to have escaped any consequences of their crimes.

“No crime goes unpunished” is not a prediction about what will happen to particular offenders, but saying it does commit someone to something, namely to feel sorry for whoever has done wrong—however difficult this may be. The meaning of the statement is not in any implied prediction about what will happen in the future, but in “exactly what such a judgement commits its author to.” Had Winch used the same approach toward the statement “I am absolutely safe,” he would not have had the problems with invalid predictions that force him to leave his central question in “Can a Good Man Be Harmed?” unanswered. Winch should have asked: to what does the experience of feeling absolutely safe commit its author to? Using this question in trying to make sense of the experiences of faith, it becomes clear that to live in the assurance that a good man cannot be harmed does not commit someone to the belief that she will never lose that conviction. In fact, it commits this person to not committing to that belief—to not worry about whether one will be able to hold on to that perspective. This person takes life as it comes, whatever happens. One is committed to not worrying about losing this perspective, which is something very different from being committed to the prediction that one will not lose it. This does not mean that this person is insecure about whether she will continue to hold on to the conviction, but the issue of losing it or not, is simply not on someone’s mind in that way. There are interesting similarities here to the promise people make in marriage. Camilla Kronqvist (2011, 650) in “The Promise That Love Will Last” discusses the “presupposition that the sense of our promises to love is dependent on our ability to make predictions.” People promise each other that they will love each other forever. How can they do that? As Kronqvist (2011, 651) states: “Reflecting on the break-ups of other people’s relationships we might ask, what sets our love apart? What protects us from harm?” Everybody knows that marriages often end in divorce. How could people know that their marriage is different, that their love is going to last? Well, they cannot know this. Harm may come to everyone’s marriage. To long for some external guarantee or scientific proof that in this particular case it is different would be a perversion of love, as we saw in the previous chapter. Yet, the promise

The Safety of Faith

95

that someone will love someone else forever does not need to imply such a prediction that love will last either. Kronqvist (2011, 653) argues that, instead: “My promise to love you is not a conclusion about the probability of my continuing to act and respond to you in certain ways in the future, drawn from observations of myself.” It is not the prediction that this love will not be harmed. “Rather I mark the perspective against which I understand, and want others, and especially you as the one to whom I make the promise, to understand my actions as well as my feelings at present and in the future. I am expressing my trust in you and my willingness that our relationship continues” (Kronqvist 2011, 653). During marriage, people do not predict that this love will beat the odds and last forever, but they dedicate themselves to their love. Maybe over time, the love slips away, but in their marriage vows, they have committed themselves to regret it if that happens. As predictions come with estimates and probabilities, and the marriage vow does not. In making a promise to love someone forever, one is not making a prediction. As Kronqvist (2011, 655) states: “promises are constitutive of the meaning my actions have. It is against the background of my promise that it is meaningful to describe what I do as either keeping a promise or breaking it.” The promise to love someone forever changes not so much what will happen itself, but it changes the meaning of whatever happens afterward: losing love would become breaking a promise. Someone made a promise and now this person is guilty of breaking that promise. The promise to love someone forever does not involve an estimate about the risk that someone’s love will die—however high or low. Not thinking about one’s relationship in terms of risk and vulnerability is part of what people commit themselves to. That would be a perversion of love, Kronqvist (2011, 660) argues: “The perspective of love is characterized by my not thinking of my relationships in terms of risks, exposure and vulnerability, especially not of my own.” Someone takes responsibility for continuing to love and wants to be blamed if one stops doing so, irrespective of what overpowering risks or outside forces did play a role. Promising to love someone is not making factual or hypothetical statements—neither about the present, nor about the future—but it is to present, as Kronqvist (2011, 662) states, “an absolute perspective on our life with other people, which itself provides the background for what we come to think of as good and possible in our life in the first place.” It is an absolute perspective because it is not relative to the facts, but it is the framework within which facts are seen. In committing themselves to that perspective people vow that, now and in the future, they will see their actions from that perspective, and request others to see them from that perspective as well. The promise to love someone forever changes the character of things that happen afterward: it may be the same things that would have happened

96

Chapter 5

otherwise, but now they are either keeping the promise or breaking it. In the promise, people express the background against which they want their actions and feelings to be understood by themselves and by others, now and in the future. As Yaniv Iczkovits (2012, 183n., quoting Akeel Bilgrami) explains: “Standing up to a commitment is not accounted for by the actual deed, that is, the actual fulfilment of the commitment, but rather, by seeing a failure to stand up to the commitments as an occasion for ‘self-criticism and for trying to do better to act so as to fulfil her commitment.’” A commitment is not a prediction—not even a prediction about what one will do in the future, but presents a perspective from which one wishes one’s future acts to be judged. In another context, Winch (1958, 50) comments on the commitment involved in using a slip of paper as a bookmark: it commits someone to start reading at that place in the book later on, but, “this does not mean that he must necessarily actually so use it in the future (though that is the paradigm case); the point is that if he does not, some special explanation will be called for, such as that he forgot, changed his mind, or got tired of the book.” Commitment provides the perspective from which to judge future actions: actions may still be different from what you promised, but, if they are, that requires a special explanation or—in more important cases—self-criticism and remorse. Likewise, to believe that a good man cannot be harmed or that someone is safe even in the shadow of death does not commit someone to a prediction about whether one will be able to remain good in the future, but it does commit someone to guilt and regret if one happens to lose this goodness or this perspective. It provides the background against which someone wants to measure oneself and want to be measured by others. The conviction that a good man cannot be harmed expresses a commitment to a particular conception of harm, and often also of suffering, punishment, reward, happiness, blessedness, etcetera. That other conception of all of these concepts is the perspective that this person adopts in how she looks at the world: a good man cannot be harmed, it is better to suffer than to inflict suffering, virtue is its own reward, no crime goes unpunished, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, nothing whatever can do a Christian any hurt, under His wings I am safely abiding, etc. These statements are not observations about the world which can be true or false, but they are descriptions of a particular way of looking at the world. They are not statements of fact, but statements that express a perspective, the perspective of faith. And this perspective commits someone to feel sorry for those who do evil, even if it turns out to be the person herself who becomes evil, and to refrain from predictions about the future—even one’s own future. From this perspective, the person ought to regret it and people ought to feel sorry for her if it so happens that this person starts to fear evil at some point in the future.

The Safety of Faith

97

Someone does not predict what will happen or how one will react, but one places how one does react and will react within a particular perspective. “I am absolutely safe” or similar statements of faith may look like predictions or claims to knowledge, but when one considers to what these statements the author commits herself, it becomes clear that it implies a commitment to a perspective from which to judge whatever event may happen. WITHOUT A DOUBT? To say that the Lord is your shepherd, is there not something self-congratulatory in such a statement? Is it possible to claim of oneself that one is a true believer, or does such a person, even if he were a believer, immediately stop being a true believer by bragging or pride? Like I mentioned that philosopher Hilary Putnam (1992, 154) wrote: “For Kierkegaard, to be absolutely sure you are ‘born again’ is a sign that you are lost.” Mikel Burley (2010, 85n.) refers to this as a “performative contradiction”: in the very act of saying it, someone contradicts himself. D.Z. Phillips (1992, 276) compares this to a similar example: “There are cases where this is even more obvious. Ascriptions of humility come from spectators. ‘I am the humblest of men’ is a self-refuting remark.” It is not very humble to call yourself humble. Such a “performative contradiction” applies to goodness, faith, or moral purity, according to Phillips (1992, 276): “What I want to emphasize is that the character ascribed to such moral purity by others, is not part of the agent’s perspective on his own deeds.” Someone may say of someone else that she is absolutely safe because she is a person of faith, but no one can say of herself that she is absolutely safe no matter what happens, for that implies a self-refuting claim to moral uprightness concerning herself. If someone cannot say “All will be well with me, for I am a good man and a good man cannot be harmed” because it is a performative contradiction, does this imply that people cannot say “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” or “I am safe in the arms of Jesus” either? If someone says that he believes without a shadow of a doubt, does that in itself not show that he considers the possibility of doubt? The answers of faith are envied because they are certain, but how certain can anyone be? Could anyone ever be completely certain about his statements of faith? Will there not always be at least some doubt in his mind? The word “absolute” in “absolute safety” could mean something like “unconditional.” As long as there are conditions attached to the safety, it is not truly absolute. However, from the fact that “one’s immunity to harm [. . .] is not contingent upon one’s own moral character,” as Burley (2010, 93) puts it, it does not yet follow that this invulnerability does not have a moral

98

Chapter 5

dimension. The fact that being morally or religiously good is not a precondition for the experience of feeling absolutely safe does not mean that this kind of experience does not have a moral aspect at all. Without falling back into the self-congratulating and self-refuting declaration to be a good man and therefore invulnerable, I would argue that there is a moral commitment that is part of feeling absolutely safe. In a footnote, Burley quotes an anonymous reviewer who pointed out that he failed to discuss grace. The reviewer stated: “What makes any person invulnerable in an absolute sense is grace that operates in all circumstances. For grace is available at all times to all persons as long as they surrender themselves to it. So there is not boasting involved in saying ‘My safety lies in God’s grace. We all need grace, and I most of all’” (Burley 2010, 91n.). Similarly, Ashdown pointed out the importance of grace in discussing the example of Paul in Philippians 4 quoted above where Paul says he has learned to be content in all circumstances. Ashdown (1995, 166) comments that Paul here is “recognizing what it means to be both high and low; he can make sense of the world’s perspective on his actions. His purity consists in his ability to see his moral successes and failures sub specie aeternitatis.” Paul does not need to be good before he may feel safe in the hands of God, but as far as he is good, he praises God for it rather than himself: it is God’s grace that strengthens him. His goodness is not a condition for being content in whatever state he is—he goes through moral successes and failures, so he is not self-congratulating—but Paul ascribes all moral purity that he happens to possess to God. It would be odd to conclude from this that he is now indifferent toward how he fares morally. Of course, he is not indifferent toward his moral successes and failures. He wishes to be good, he wishes to have faith, although always too often he will find himself needing to pray as the father of the boy with an evil spirit in Mark 9:24: “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” or as Paul says himself: “I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep doing” (Romans 7:18–19). Grace allows someone to recognize both his moral successes and failures, without falling prey to Burley’s performative contradiction, and also without falling prey to indifference toward one’s moral character. “I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens” is the statement that Wittgenstein gives as an example of an ethical experience in his Lecture on Ethics. It is a statement that expresses his faith envy. This is the statement about which Burley claims that it is detached from moral integrity and goodness. However, if we ask, to what someone commits himself who says that he is absolutely safe, it would be strange not to include at least a willingness to be good. The invulnerability referred to in this experience is not a license to throw all moral considerations out of the window. Someone cannot have

The Safety of Faith

99

the experience of feeling absolutely safe and then continue saying “So now I can do whatever I like, for nobody can stop me anyhow!” That is not what Wittgenstein or anyone else who envies this kind of faith intends. This person wants to do good. One feels embraced by a goodness—Burley (2010, 93) expresses this by saying that this person feels that he is “in the hands of a supremely benevolent God”—and it would be self-contradictory to not want to be good and benevolent in response oneself. In claiming absolute safety, people are not congratulating themselves on their goodness, but they do commit themselves to want to be good as far as grace allows them. The experience of feeling absolutely safe is not detached from morality, rather a particular morality is implied, although Burley is right to emphasize that this morality does not fulfill the function of a requirement. So, how is the safety of faith that people envy related to morality? Reformation theologian Martin Luther who claimed that nothing whatever can do a Christian any hurt, coined the phrase simul justus et peccator, indicating that the Christian always at the same time is both righteous and a sinner. The Christian’s justification does not rest upon the condition that someone stops being a sinner, but one should wish to stop sinning and wish to work for the good, while acknowledging how infinitely small one’s contribution is: all good that someone does, is from grace. The commitment to wishing to do good without making grace in any way conditional upon actually doing good, is illustrated in Luther’s exegesis (1962) of Psalm 127:1: “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain.” The believers should labor as good and as hard as they can, but whether their work will be successful, is not within their control, so they should leave that part to God. They should not worry about the results of their work. They should focus on doing what is within their power. If they have worked well, they have played their part and the rest should be left in the hands of God. Reaching goals is outside of a human being’s control, so one should leave that to God, just try to do right, whatever the consequences may be. A person can only be free from harm, if one gives up looking at the results. On the one hand, Job and Paul, for example, are to be considered happy despite all the suffering they had to endure. They cared about something else. On the other hand, Judas and the brothers of Joseph are not to be praised, despite the important roles they played in God’s salvation history. If someone does something good, but unexpectedly, the results are a disaster, this person has done well nonetheless. If someone does something bad, but God turns it into something good, one should be ashamed of oneself. If someone has a particular goal or ambition, people can influence this person by either promising him that goal or threatening to take it away. Having goals or ambitions makes someone vulnerable to harm, and it makes someone vulnerable to corruption as well. Someone will no longer be concerned with

100

Chapter 5

simply doing the right thing, but now one is also concerned with pleasing these people who can give or take away one’s goal. This person has become what Kierkegaard (2000, 272) calls “double-minded” and are no longer fully concentrating on what is good, no longer purely wishing the good. People of faith surrender all their expectations of compensations or balance, as Weil (cf. 2002, xxii) argued. From the perspective of faith, someone should let go of all goals and ambitions, but, even if someone wants to, one may not always be able to live up to this perspective, and in as far as one does, it is from grace, so it can also be phrased more paradoxically: someone’s ambition should be to let go of one’s ambitions. We saw how Weil criticized the idea of heaven; Gareth Moore (1988, 177) expresses a similar reservation saying: “To have the ambition to go to heaven is to have no ambition.” If a believer uses his self-will, it is only used to try to clear the ground, to get rid of all one’s wrong imaginations. This does not mean that anyone can ever fully achieve that goal of not having any goals. Self-will does not need to be refuted completely before someone can have faith, but faith requires someone to look at it in a particular way, namely as something to surrender to God. “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief,” as it is said in the Gospels (Mark 9:24). Living with the answers of faith does not depend upon any untenable requirement to be pure, but this experience does come with a commitment: the commitment to wish to be pure as far as grace allows that person. If people sing that they are safe in the arms of Jesus, they cannot do whatever they like; they can only feel safe in the arms of Jesus if they wish to do good, or rather, to be an instrument for good used by grace, for they should even leave their being good into the hands of God. The commitment of faith is to wish to surrender oneself including one’s doubts and mishaps to God’s goodness. INHUMAN DETACHMENT? If somebody has the safety of faith, the safety no matter what, does she still really care about what happens in the world? Or does the safety of faith require some kind of inhuman detachment and unworldliness? In an attempt to make sense of people living the safety of faith, different scholars have painted a picture of these people as being completely detached from the world in an almost inhumanly cold way. In the chapter on Kierkegaard, I discussed already it may seem like an irresponsible way of living one’s life, if the knight of faith should even leave questions of responsibility to God. This would turn faith into something a lot less enviable. Lance Ashdown introduces a hypothetical person he calls “Jean,” who seems to be detached in such a questionable way. He (1995, 170) says about

The Safety of Faith

101

her: “Rather than saying things such as ‘Once I get a promotion, things will be much better,’ she is inclined to say ‘I take each day as it comes’ and ‘Why worry about what you have no control over?’” Jean is content with her life and accepts whatever comes her way. She is absolutely safe because whatever hurt may come her way she will simply embrace it as it is. She is not concerned with whether she will be in a particular way in the future or not. There is no prediction in her feeling absolutely safe: “In fact, the absence of this sort of self-preoccupation constitutes the safety in question,” Ashdown (1995, 171) says. Jean does not worry about herself, she does not worry about what may or may not happen to her in the future, and that is what makes her safe in a non-predictive way. There is no prediction in this kind of absolute safety, but the commitment to a particular perspective—taking every day as it comes—and there are no untenable requirements, but Jean surrenders herself to whatever comes her way without expectations and ambitions. In many ways, Jean fits the description of the safety of faith that has been described here so far. She looks like the knight of faith Kierkegaard described who cares about the lamb’s head, but he can let go of it completely, just as easily. However, Jean’s safety does not seem to be the safety of Psalm 23 or “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” Apart from the religious aspect, something else is missing in Jean’s kind of safety as well. Ashdown describes how Jean is admired by many for her calmness and groundedness. She seems to be free from worries. Yet, other people around her may respond less positively to Jean: “Perhaps she will be criticized for lack of ambition, or maybe for indifference to the concerns of her peers,” Ashdown (1995, 171) notes. Jean is so free from concern about the future that she appears indifferent concerning a lot of the things that matter to the people around her. Ashdown (1995, 171) continues: “she may be judged as cold and unfeeling, given her calmness and mild amusement when others become upset with her.” Jean does not make predictions about what will or will not happen, but expresses a willingness to accept whatever comes her way. Now, this may be a way of being absolutely safe, but it makes her seem cold and unfeeling as well. Does Jean have no feeling at all? Is she even really alive? Does not having ambitions imply not having any feelings about the future either? Does this safety make it impossible for someone to understand one’s fellow’s emotions? Is this kind of inhuman detachment the price that one necessarily has to pay for the safety of faith? Ashdown (1995, 171) states: “The safety of Jean is her willingness to deal with the events of the day with calmness and resolution. That freedom, meeting the contingencies of life with open arms, is the safety.” Does this freedom also set her apart from the people around her? Can she still love them, if she meets whatever contingency with open arms not only the ones she faces but also the ones they face? Is Jean’s calmness

102

Chapter 5

not plain coldness? Is coldness the price one has to pay for the experience of feeling absolutely safe? About ten years after Peter Winch, Antony Duff wrote an article presenting his interpretation of Socrates’ claim that “A good man cannot be harmed” under the title “Must a Good Man Be Invulnerable?” (1976). Like Winch and the other authors discussed in this chapter, Duff immediately dismisses attempts to justify morality based on what someone gets out of it. Duff (1976, 300) states: “this is not an impossible attempt to provide prudential reasons for moral commitment but, rather, an attempt to spell out the implications of a genuine and nonprudential commitment.” Even if being good makes someone invulnerable that should never be the reason to be good. Someone’s being moral cannot rest upon prior ideas about what brings well-being, but rather the other way around: someone’s ideas of what counts as “well-being” rest upon someone’s moral stance. Therefore, so Duff argues, if someone is invulnerable—whereas in this unpredictable, contingent world, harm can never be excluded beforehand—then what someone wants must be beyond the world. If someone wants something within the world, the person may get it or maybe not; therefore, if someone claims to be safe—even absolutely safe—then what this person wants must lie outside the world. It must be supernatural, as Weil phrases it. If, however, what someone wants lies outside the world, whereas one’s body is inside the world, then the answer to the question “Can a good man be harmed?” cannot be “no”—nor “yes” for that matter—but the question should be counted as irrelevant. It is not a question about something that a person wants, as what the person wants is beyond what the question is referring to. Duff (1976, 301) gives the example of a doctor who dedicates his life to helping people: “he is living the life he wants to lead and doing what matters most to him.” Duff (1976, 301) asks whether he can be called “happy”: “within the world as it is, the doctor cannot be said to be unhappy with his life; the point is, rather that the categories of happiness and unhappiness are irrelevant to him.” Happiness and unhappiness do not matter, as harm and no harm would not matter, not because this doctor is invulnerable, but rather because he does not care about those things, what he cares about is doing good. Duff (1976, 302) concludes: “He must be detached from his own suffering and from that of others; but his detachment must not be such that he is callous and unpitying toward the suffering of others.” His basic attitude must be detachment, with one exception, namely in so far as attachment is needed for what he really wants: helping others, doing good. Duff (1976, 302) continues: “It is this notion of detachment which seems to be central to much of what Simone Weil has to say about man’s proper relationship to this world.” Duff continues by expounding his interpretation of Weil’s concept of detachment as the proper reading of Socrates’ statement “A good man cannot Be harmed” or

The Safety of Faith

103

Wittgenstein’s concept of absolute safety. He (1976, 302) sets out to “clarify some of the ways in which the good man, if he is to be invulnerable, must be detached from his own sufferings and from those of others.” Duff (1976, 302) begins by noting that the morality of such an invulnerable good man “must be strictly one of intentions, not of practical success; [. . .] that he wills the Good, that he sets himself, with all his skill and effort, to do what is required of him.” The good man should limit himself to laboring as good and as hard as he can, but should leave building the house to God, following Luther’s image from Psalm 127. He should be without particular goals and ambitions. Duff (1976, 305) summarizes: “The Good that he serves lies beyond the affairs of this world and beyond his own practical success or failure; his commitment and his moral well-being lie in willing and striving for the Good, not in achieving the practical goals at which he aims.” Like Paul, the good man sees both moral successes and moral failures from the same perspective; his safety lies beyond that, he is in the hands of God whatever happens. Duff (1976, 308) continues: “He must ‘die to the world,’ not just by abandoning self-seeking goals and material aspirations, not just by detaching himself from his own worldly desires and ambitions, but also by detaching himself from those relationships which are so central to most human lives and moralities.” As long as a person cares about other people, one can be harmed through them, and Duff (1976, 308) quotes Weil on “the need to ‘seek solitude,’ to do without friendship.” Duff (1976, 309) takes the argument even further: the invulnerable good man does not care about himself, he does not care about others, all he cares about is the good, he does not even care about his doing good: “what he must believe is not that he cannot be harmed but, rather that no harm to him, not even his own moral destruction, will matter. He must be detached even from his own moral survival.” Such a person’s own being good or doing good should not even matter to him: “To try to decide for myself whether or when it is right to do evil that good may follow is again to fall into a kind of egocentricity or arrogance” (Duff 1976, 310–311). Finally, Duff (1976, 311) adds: “I think that this is the force of what Weil says about Necessity and Obedience: ‘We should not take one step, even in the direction of what is good, beyond that to which we are irresistibly impelled by God, and this applies to action, word, and thought.’” Duff’s description of the invulnerable good man, based on Weil, seems to go even beyond the coldness of Ashdown’s Jean. Duff’s portrayal is of someone who is completely out of this world, completely detached in an almost inhuman way. Is such an ice-cold breaking down of every connection with the world and its concerns really necessary to claim the experience of feeling absolutely safe? This seems unlikely. If someone wishes to stretch things, Luther’s argument that the freedom of a Christian implies that he cannot be

104

Chapter 5

hurt and Socrates’ show of dignity in front of his judges might be compatible with such a coolness, but the emotion in songs like Psalm 23 and “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” definitely does not fit such inhuman detachment. Nor does it fit with the Weil we encountered when we contemplated her faith envy. The faith she envies, asks people to open themselves up to the world, to not let their self-will or imaginations get in the way, but to love God through the world as it is. Weil’s expressions do often sound extreme, but the love within them is clear. There is a commitment in feeling absolutely safe. Someone cannot feel it and say “So now I can do whatever I like,” but neither can someone feel it and say “So now I don’t care about anything anymore.” The true knight of faith is not actually indifferent as Hägglund (2019, 31) holds. This person must want to do good, he commits to that, and someone must not want to do good in a cold, unfeeling way, since he commits to that as well: to genuinely care and love. When a person feels safe in the hands of a supremely benevolent God, it would be self-contradictory to not want to be good and benevolent oneself in response. In claiming absolute safety, people are not congratulating themselves on their goodness, but they do commit themselves to wanting to be good including the feelings of care and love as well, of course, as far as grace allows it to them. Duff uses his interpretation of Weil to paint the picture of the invulnerable good man as being detached from everything in the world in an inhuman way. Peter Winch in his book on Weil notes this tendency toward extreme detachment in Weil’s work as well, but he (1989, 204) balances this by other threads in her work such at the emphasis on love and attention: “For Simone Weil love and attention are closely connected; perhaps the latter is even a form of the first.” Winch quotes Weil (1970, 349) stating that “Real love wants a real object, and to know the truth of it, and to love it in its truth as it really is,” commenting: “That is very far from ‘detaching’ love from the things of this world” (Winch 1989, 204). The things and the people around a believer require true, genuine, and full attention and love. This implies that this love and attention are not instrumental in any way either. In Duff’s first example, the good doctor has an attitude of detachment, except in so far as attachment is needed for helping others. Weil would not consider this as real attachment, real love, or real attention: the doctor really cares about doing good, and his love for his patients is only a means toward that end. In Weil’s opinion, people should not think about themselves when they help others, they should not even think about doing good, they should not even think about God: “There are times when thinking of God separates us from him,” Weil (1973, 93) says in Waiting on God. If someone genuinely wants to help, his full and complete attention should be on those people in front of them. People should open themselves for each other, emptying

The Safety of Faith

105

themselves of everything to receive into themselves the other that one is looking at, just as she is, in all her truth, so we have heard Weil argue in an earlier chapter. Being good is not to be found in a cool, inhuman detachment from the world, but it implies true love and attention, genuine care and empathy. We have heard already that Weil distinguishes between two types of courage: someone may become courageous by suggestion, by telling oneself again and again that one should not fear anything and that one has to have courage, and someone may become courageous in a different way. Weil (2002, 99–100) writes: “A sensitive person who by suggestion becomes courageous hardens himself; often he may even, by a sort of savage pleasure, amputate his own sensitivity. Grace alone can give courage while leaving the sensitivity intact, or sensitivity while leaving the courage intact.” Courage that is acquired by suggestion is a courage that bit by bit excludes feelings and sensitivity. Someone works hard to stop oneself from feeling anything. However, another kind of courage is possible, the courage that is given to someone from beyond, given by grace, and what makes this kind of courage special is that it leaves the sensitivity intact. Such a person is without fear but not because this person is without feelings: one still feels everything and yet one feels absolutely safe. Now, how does this courage by grace work? D.Z. Phillips (1986, 88) reflects upon this perspective of grace, explaining that: “Acceptance of all things from God’s hands may be thought, in these days of talk of activism, to involve a resigned quietism.” Someone might think that to surrender everything to God, thrusting oneself into the arms of Jesus and feeling absolutely safe, is a withdrawal from the world, is a withdrawal from what goes on around us, but, Phillips (1986, 88) continues: “This is not so, for seeing God and not the self at the center involves combating the many styles, relationships and institutions where this truth is denied and where men are related to each other in different forms of self-appropriation and exploitation of others.” Feeling safe in the hands of God, someone does not stop caring about what goes on in the world, on the contrary, such a person cares even more. Yet, such a person is also are aware that: “Such endeavours, however, will not be totally successful. They may show little sign of getting anywhere. At such times, the kind of religious believer I am talking about will be sustained by the religious patience in the name of which he acts. He will realize that in all his strivings the outcome too is in God’s hands” (Phillips 1986, 88). The one who feels absolutely safe leaves everything in the hands of God, but instead of giving up caring about the world, it implies a commitment to care even more about the world (pace Hägglund 2019, 31). He belongs entirely to the world, as Kierkegaard said, no bourgeois philistine could belong to it more. The safety of faith as being in the hands of God and caring about what goes on in the world belong

106

Chapter 5

together. As we heard in connection with Weil, what matters is love, love through the world and love of the world. Merold Westphal recognizes this same combination of safety and caring in Kierkegaard’s description of the true believer. Such a “knight of faith” makes two movements. First, the knight of faith resigns from the world: “Resignation is the end of hope, the loss of a future. [. . .] But resignation’s loss of hope and a future is not despair. It is the withdrawal of the self out of time and into eternity” (Westphal 2014, 33). This is the cold, inhuman detachment painted by Ashdown and Duff: someone withdraws oneself from the world. “It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm in order to gain eternity,” Kierkegaard (1983, 49) explains. This “human courage” is the courage by suggestion, by trying hard enough, that Weil speaks of. However, Abraham, as Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, does not stop there. The knight of faith by grace receives the courage that leaves the sensitivity intact. Therefore second, Westphal (2014, 33) continues, “Abraham believes, ‘by virtue of the absurd,’ that he will get Isaac back. The promise of God keeps hope alive. Abraham still has a future.” First, he dared to let go of hope in setting out to sacrifice his only son Isaac; second, he holds on to hope nonetheless. As discussed in the chapter on Kierkegaard, De Silentio (1983, 35) described that he himself would have felt awkward if he got Isaac back again: unlike for Abraham, for him, it would have been difficult to find joy again in Isaac. The hardest part is not giving up Isaac—however hard that may be—the hardest part is when someone has given up Isaac to be able to receive him back. If someone has gathered all one’s strength to give him up, how can such a person live with him again? Yet, Abraham does do this. Westphal (2014, 35) notes that throughout Kierkegaard “puts great emphasis on the worldliness of Abraham. He does not withdraw from time to eternity, from the body to the soul.” Abraham is as worldly as Emmet in The Lego Movie. The cold detached good man withdraws from the world, but the knight of faith does not. As elaborated upon in the chapter on Kierkegaard, De Silentio (1983, 38) describes how from the outside the knight of faith is hardly distinguishable from any ordinary man. He looks just like a tax collector, and he enjoys ordinary life to the full. Whatever comes his way, he receives as a precious gift from God. He has risen far beyond the earthly realm in courage, but it is a courage which leaves the sensitivity intact. He belongs entirely to the world at the same time, no one is immersed in it more: “he has this security that makes him delight in it [the finite things] as if finitude were the surest thing of all” (Kierkegaard 1983, 40). He has this security, this absolute safety of faith that has been discussed in this chapter. The faith we envy is not a set of beliefs about the world but it is to have courage with sensitivity fully intact. The believer truly to be envied experiences safety without feeling any

The Safety of Faith

107

less love and care for all around him. The feeling safe commits him to that love and care. In the detective series Waking the Dead (Machin 2008), the policeman Boyd visits his estranged grownup son Luke after he has just been taken to a rehab center for his drug addiction. His son assumes that his father will try to keep him there, but Boyd tells him he loves him no matter what: “Whatever you do next, Luke, it’s your call.” Luke scoffs and responds: “So you don’t mind having a junkie for a son?” In response to which Boyd has no choice but to answer: “Yeah, yeah, of course I do.” This is the absoluteness of “no matter what” but with the sensitivity intact. Wittgenstein (1998, 97e) hints at the same thing when he describes the attitude of a believer: “It is the attitude of taking a certain matter seriously, but then at a certain point not taking it seriously after all, & declaring that something else is still more serious.” Boyd takes his son’s substance abuse very seriously, but at a certain point, something else is still more serious: that Boyd loves his son no matter what. After admitting that he does care whether he minds that his son is a junkie, he explains: “What I mean is. . . I’d rather have you in this world any way I can than not have you.” His son not being a junkie is important, but at some point, something else is endlessly more important still. We see this attitude in De Silentio’s knight of faith whom we encountered in the chapter on Kierkegaard as well: he takes his appetite for the lamb’s head very seriously—as seriously as a restaurant operator indeed—but when it is not there, without missing a beat, it is the same to him. In a deeper sense, it is irrelevant whether there is a lamb’s head on the table that night or not. In the same way, we may imagine Abraham telling Isaac at the foot of Mount Moriah: “Whatever happens, know that I love you, son,” Isaac responding: “So you don’t care if I die on the altar,” and Abraham assuring him: “Of course I care.” The caring is an integral part of the loving someone whatever happens. Coldness and withdrawal from the world do not suit someone who feels safe in the arms of Jesus. They do not belong to faith that is truly enviable. In living the answers of faith, in feeling absolutely safe, there is the commitment to feel care and love as well. CONCLUSION From Psalm 23 to Martin Luther’s claim that nothing whatever can hurt a Christian, the experience of feeling safe even in the midst of trials and temptations seems to be a central feature of the Christian answers of faith. Different difficulties have been noted in making sense of this kind of safety of faith. Is there not an invalid prediction involved? How about untenable moral or religious requirements that are implied? And is such a feeling not

108

Chapter 5

necessarily connected to an inhumanly cold detachment from the world and everyone within it? In this chapter I have argued that these difficulties disappear once, instead of using a direct way of interpreting the absolute safety of faith, we consider to what someone commits oneself if one claims to feel absolutely safe. The commitment in feeling absolutely safe is not a commitment to a prediction about what will or will not happen in the future, but it is a commitment to understand and want others to understand one’s actions in a particular light. This is the light of the safety of faith, the light of God being with someone so one needs to fear no evil even though one walks through the valley of the shadow of death. The commitment in feeling absolutely safe is not presupposing any moral or religious achievements but is to wish to surrender oneself to God’s goodness with all one’s moral successes and failures. And, finally, within the experience of feeling absolutely safe, there is the commitment to feel care and love as well, as far as grace allows it to this person at least. Instead of the misguided focus of much of the contemporary philosophy of religion on statements of faith concerning superempirical powers, the lens of faith envy shows the way in which religious statements make sense in the lives of believers. Using the profound thinkers on religion Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil as guides, we have reached a deeper understanding into what faith is and could be, and which role the safety of faith that is so often envied by believers and nonbelievers alike, can play in our lives. When people envy people with faith, or with a stronger faith, they will often envy their apparently immediate access to all the answers, to the truth, and the absolute safety that comes with it. All kinds of difficulty in connection with absolute safety disappear once we focus on what someone with faith commits oneself to. Faith envy proves to be a good angle to investigate faith and religious language. The faith that we envy is not a set of beliefs about the world but it is to feel truly safe within it. NOTE 1. Parts of this chapter are reprinted by permission of Springer Nature: Springer Nature, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Hermen Kroesbergen, “The commitment in feeling absolutely safe,” Vol. 84(2), 2018, 185–203.

Conclusion

A common idea about faith is that it must at least imply some beliefs about the existence of some superempirical powers that influence our reality. Faith has many other aspects and is implied in and expressed by many other practices, but these beliefs are taken to be what makes faith faith. Indeed, statements concerning superempirical realities are what is distinctive about faith. When asked, most of the faithful will also assure you that these statements are true, they might even emphasize the veracity of these religious statements much more emphatically than they do concerning other beliefs they hold to be true. Yet, increasingly, it has become clear that the analytical tradition in the philosophy of religion which focused on the truthfulness of these beliefs has reached a dead end. Investigating the truth claims of faith turned out to oddly miss the point. In as far as one hypothetically would be able to prove one or another of these truth claims they stop being religious. Gods and spirits explain the unexplainable, but if the explanation is proven to be valid, is it still unexplainable? Rituals and divinations control the uncontrollable, but if the pragmatic use of these practices has been determined, would the uncontrollable still be uncontrollable? The practices of faith imply beliefs about the existence of some superempirical powers that influence our reality—these beliefs are what makes these practices religious in the first place. Yet, if we take these beliefs as our starting point, we cannot derive the practices of faith from them. Investigated in a neutral, philosophical way, these beliefs become strange curiosities that have little or no connection to faith at all. For far too long, the philosophy of religion has focused on the statements of faith concerning superempirical powers, forgetting that if they would ever be able to prove these statements, they cease to be religious. For the philosophy of religion to investigate religion, a different approach is necessary. In 109

110

Conclusion

this book, I have explored the possibility of using the angle of faith envy as such an alternative approach. Using the angle of faith envy has the advantage that it starts from the other end, namely practices and life rather than beliefs and cognitive statements. The idea that faith must at least imply some beliefs about the existence of some superempirical powers that influence our reality is shared by both believers and nonbelievers, which seemed to make it a good starting point for the academic study of religion. Yet, the envy for faith or a stronger faith is widely shared as well: many believers and nonbelievers alike consider having faith to be at once a desirable state of mind and something they look down upon. The angle of faith envy places believers and nonbelievers all on the same side: they look at faith from the outside. In this book, I have used the angle of faith envy to investigate afresh the lives and works of Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil. They are profound thinkers who each in their own way moved about the boundaries of faith and reflected upon it, personally and philosophically. Their lives and works have often been studied in the philosophy of religion for what they have to say about beliefs about the existence of some superempirical powers that influence our reality. In this book, however, the focus has been on what they have to say about the faith they envy and the answers and safety that faith viewed from this perspective could offer. This new approach provided many fresh and interesting insights into their lives and works, and it demonstrated the value of the angle of faith envy as one possible new direction for the philosophy of religion. In this conclusion, I will first evalute some of the new insights into the lives and works of Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil. Second, I will summarize the new concept of faith that follows from their reflections combined. Third, I will test the usefulness of this concept for the philosophy of religion in the future by drawing out its connection to beliefs about superempirical realities. The philosophy of religion reached a dead end because faith could not be derived from the beliefs it investigated, but it turns out that such beliefs about superempirical realities as well as the truth claims connected to them do make sense if we investigate the angle of faith envy. I will begin with some implications of the renewed study of the lives and works of Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil from the faith many people envy.

Conclusion

111

NEW INSIGHTS FROM KIERKEGAARD, WITTGENSTEIN, AND WEIL Kierkegaard lived in a time and place where everybody belonged to the church: being Danish and being a Christian were being considered to be one and the same thing. Within this context, Kierkegaard envied faith. Faith for him was clearly not the same as being Danish or belonging to the church. This may be an important lesson for those who care about the church in the secularized West nowadays. Even if one had some kind of miracle medicine that could make the churches full again, that in itself should not be a reason to use it. Full churches do not necessarily equal more faith. Kierkegaard would say it equals less faith. Faith—enviable faith, at least—and belonging to the church are not the same thing. Something else that Kierkegaard challenges, is equating faith and morality. People inside and outside the churches often justify the importance of faith by stressing its role in upholding morality in society. Some people who do not have much faith left themselves, think it is good people go to church, because it teaches them good morals. Kierkegaard’s example of Abraham setting out to sacrifice Isaac shows us otherwise. Enviable faith goes beyond moral rules and principles, it offers a second-level moral ought, to use the language of the chapter on the answers of faith. In his philosophical work, Wittgenstein struggled to make sense of the concept of the human will—we did not have time to discuss that in this book—but in his faith envy we can see some of the difficulties surrounding this concept as well. Wittgenstein wanted to have faith, but he found himself unable to do what it takes to obtain it. His knees were stiff, so he writes. So, did he really want it? Is the will in his mind—desiring faith—or is it in his knees—unable to bend? Wittgenstein’s faith envy shows us how complex it is to speak of what we want, especially in connection with questions about life and faith. Wittgenstein reflected personally and philosophically on how words, especially words of faith, in themselves do not matter that much; what matters is the difference that they make in people’s lives. What do people do with their words? Do they manage to live a different life? People’s commitments can be seen in their lives. “Practice gives words their sense,” Wittgenstein (1998, 97e) says when reflecting upon faith. This should serve as a warning not to focus too much on the words we hear when thinking or researching about faith. The same words can mean very different things on different levels of faith; very different words—outright contradictory statements even—can mean the same thing, can reflect the same kind of enviable faith.

112

Conclusion

Weil expressed her faith envy in speaking of how she envied suffering, since she could use suffering to achieve a state of selflessness. Many books and films from popular culture toy with the possibility of selflessness. Traditionally, religious practices to exercise selflessness like mindfulness and yoga are widely practiced. Yet, in the books and films and Western adaptations of mindfulness and yoga, the value of these experiences of selflessness is expressed in portraying how it creates an even stronger self. This paradoxical aspect of modern culture is brought out by Weil’s stark refusal to follow suit. For her, the goal of practices of selflessness is selflessness. This encourages new and deeper reflection upon the puzzling aspects surrounding self and selflessness in our contemporary society. “Religion,” Weil (1956, 238) holds, “insofar as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith.” She wants to avoid using religion as an escape from the realities of the world at all costs. She does not picture something like heaven or life after death, she is even wary of making too strong claims about the existence of God. She wants to love God in the world and through the world as it is, with all its good and all its evil. Whether or not people want to go as far as her in this respect, her example of faith and faith envy clearly shows that religion is not necessarily bound up with responding “yes” to questions like whether God or heaven exists. People do not need to find comfort or peace of mind in faith, nor do they necessarily want to find it, Weil shows. This challenges most quantitative research into religion and a lot of qualitative research as well, which will not easily be able to accommodate such a perspective on true faith either. The last two chapters explored the peculiar character of questions and answers concerning faith. Questions concerning religion are not always really questions, and answers not always really answers. David Tracy (1994, 87) says the questions and answers in religion are “logically odd,” because they are about the fundamental aspects of the world, but they are logically odd in many different ways as well, as I indicated before. The philosophy of religion should take note of that and that does not work as long as it takes the statements of belief with their truth claims as its starting point. For the philosophy of religion to investigate religion as religion, a different approach is necessary, such as focusing on the concept of faith that appears when we use the angle of faith envy, as I have done in this book. A NEW CONCEPT OF FAITH It is not the case that, for believers, gods, spirits, energies, and so on, simply exist. To have faith does not mean to be aware of gods, spirits, energies, and so on, as some additional entities in reality that others fail to notice. Having

Conclusion

113

explored the concept of faith from the angle of faith envy, we have seen that it is a misconception to reduce faith to the belief in superempirical powers. The faith implied in faith envy does not consist of a set of beliefs about the world, but it is more a particular philosophy of life, a response to whatever may happen to someone. This particular response can rightfully be said to arouse envy. On the one hand, it does indeed seem to be a very desirable way of living one’s life, as it makes oneself free and open-minded and safe no matter what may come one’s way. On the other hand, it may also feel too easy, too light-footed, too superficial sometimes even, as one seems able to let go of particular commitments, care, and love without a second thought. To envy this kind of philosophy of life is truly a kind of envy since it combines a sugar-coated image of a complete peace of mind, and a repulsion of what is seen as simple-mindedness at the same time. The philosophy of life that emerges from studying Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil from the angle of faith envy requires someone to commit to two attitudes simultaneously. On the one hand, a person of faith of this kind is asked to live a life full of passion, to not limit one’s desires in any way. On the other hand, this person of faith ought to accept without further ado everything that comes her way as a gift from God, and to leave everything that will be, all hopes, aspirations, and ambitions, into the hands of God as well. We have seen this kind of faith in Kierkegaard’s knight of faith: he is completely taken away by his desire for a lamb’s head for supper, but when it is not there, he lets his desire go just as easily and accepts whatever he finds on his plate now. Imagine there is something that you want someone to do for you, this person has even said he will do it and you are full of anticipation, it is on your mind the entire time. Then something happens and it does not come to pass. This philosophy of life asks you to let it go without even a second thought and to live on as if this desire was never even there. Having this philosophy of life is like walking on a tightrope: as soon as you start to think about what you are doing, you are lost. As soon as you think you ought to have passion, you can no longer really have passion; as soon as you tell yourself you should accept everything or leave everything to God, it becomes a decision and your self gets in the way of full acceptance. Having this philosophy of life is being like a marionette: from the outside, there is nothing special about this person, but the forces at play are completely different. The ordinary person is drawn downward to the ground, the person of faith may make the same movements, but she is suspended from heaven. Emmet from The Lego Movie can be this person, although this is not really a recommendation. Okonkwo from Things Fall Apart cannot be it: his great struggle for the well-being of the tribe and the glory of traditional religion makes it impossible for him to have this kind of faith.

114

Conclusion

Imagine someone looking for a job who encounters nothing but rejections to her applications. A person with this philosophy of life would not be bothered. Every time while writing an application, with flourish she  imagines how great it would be to get this job, how everything in her life has been building up to this particular position, and you see a big smile on her face when she tells you about the opportunity. Yet, the rejection does not disturb her at all: it is all the same. She accepts it and genuinely thinks that it must be for the best. There is no trace of disappointment or crushed pride to be detected. When this person of faith encounters a dilemma or faces a difficult choice in life, she does not ignore it or fight it but lets it come as it is. However, she will not worry too much. This person knows that she will do what afterward can be recognized as what she could not have done otherwise. It will be the right thing to do anyhow. The person with this philosophy of life will not get angry soon and be extremely generous in forgiving, both others and oneself. It makes no sense to her to hold a grudge or feel remorse: things are as they apparently had to be. Everyone is merely a puppet in the hands of God. She considers everything and everyone around her with this kind of equalizing love: “it is what it is,” she will think lovingly. This is the concept of faith implied in much faith envy, in particular, if we use Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil as our guides. The philosophy of religion reached a dead end because faith could not be derived from the beliefs it investigated, but it turns out that such beliefs about superempirical realities, as well as the truth claims connected to them, do make sense if we investigate the faith many people envy. What implications follow from this concept of faith concerning beliefs about superempirical realities? A NEW DIRECTION FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Kierkegaard showed us that at first sight people may think they envy straightforward answers to live and die for, yet, this may not be enough. This may not be what it is that people envy in faith. Instead of some grand idea, it could be more of an attitude toward whatever may come one’s way, great or small, good or bad. For Kierkegaard, faith ought to have made it possible to stay with his fiancée Regine, despite his doubts and worries about the many ways in which this relationship could fail. Kierkegaard envied a kind of faith that would have allowed him to accept his engagement and marriage with Regine nonetheless, but he did not find it in himself. The faith people envy and long for cannot be simply adopted, it cannot be taught or explained. It is not about making some heroic choices or bold statements, but it is about discovering

Conclusion

115

what a person personally cannot do otherwise (cf. Kroesbergen 2020c, where I describe this process). If faith had been about some grand idea, it would have been part of the ordinary empirical reality, merely expanded a bit. The passion that belongs to faith is not recognizable by worldly standards, as it is an attitude towards the desires one finds in one’s heart, living them and leaving ordinary worries about them aside. It is something between the single individual and God, even generic construction worker Emmet might have it. The passion is out of this world, and the acceptance of whatever may come one’s way does not belong to this world either. A general attitude of acceptance as we saw in the four sub-Abrahams could be a valid approach according to worldly standards, but it would not make sense to accept everything with joy as the true Abraham did. That only makes sense if one receives everything as a gift from outside, a gift from a God who is good no matter what happens. The outward, empirical, human world becomes relativized compared to something else, so it makes sense to speak of superempirical realities. It would be a natural way to express this kind of faith. Kierkegaard sacrificed the possibility of a married life to dedicate himself fully to his religious authorship. This is something that can be explained. Even if someone would himself never be able to make the same choice, the choice makes sense: one person cannot dedicate himself fully to two different objectives. If he had had faith, he could have been a religious author and have married Regine at the same time, without dividing his attention between his two engagements. From a calculating point of view, this makes no sense. This way of life only makes sense if we add a completely different perspective: a superempirical God for whom all things are possible. This is where the truth claim comes in: it is not about whether some mysterious entity exists, but about whether it makes sense to assume that such a different perspective is possible. To believe that it is God who has given Kierkegaard both the urge to be a fully dedicated religious author and the desire to marry Regine is not to believe that a particular entity has expressed some specific wishes, but it is to believe that this life is possible. It is to believe that Kierkegaard would not have been deceiving himself in accepting both desires, like faith says that Abraham was not deceiving himself when he thought he could dedicate himself fully to both God and the love for his son Isaac. It makes no sense to check whether there is a God who issued particular demands or planted particular desires; if this could be checked God would no longer be God in a religious sense, no longer truly superempirical. The truth claim in religion cannot be about such a kind of checking by definition. Elsewhere, I (Kroesbergen 2018a) have argued that such a sharp, even absolute, distinction between faith and other areas of life like science present in our practices. Such a contrast is often dismissed as ahistorical and

116

Conclusion

uncontextual, but, in fact, “it is vital for being able to understand these very same messy historical contexts to be aware of this sharp contrast and to reflect upon it” (Kroesbergen 2018a, 27). The philosophy of religion reached nowhere ignoring this absolute distinction, trying to investigate religious truth claims in a quasi-empirical manner. The truth claim within religion is that this life that Kierkegaard envies is possible: that Abraham can do both everything for God and everything for Isaac; that Kierkegaard would do both everything for his religious authorship and everything for his relationship with Regine. The philosophy of religion cannot decide the truth value of such claims, but what it can do is to investigate the nature of such truth claims and the kind of superempirical reality they are referring to. This does not imply that God or any other superempirical reality is not independently real, but “what God’s independent reality comes to, is shown in the grammar of faith as it is practiced by the communities of believers,” as I (Kroesbergen 2020a, 283) argued elsewhere, discussing Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein became aware of the kind of faith that he envied when he was twenty-one: it should be the kind of faith that makes him independent of the world, that sets him free and makes him safe, no matter what happens. This is the kind of faith he longed for, this is the kind of faith that stayed on his mind for the rest of his life, in his personal reflections and his philosophical work alike. Yet, he found that he did not have it in him to surrender himself to that kind of faith. He displayed a clear vision of both the particular language and the particular life that are crucial to this kind of faith that he considered worthy of envy. In language, a true person of faith does not seek to justify his faith, in his life this person does not work for himself and his own glory or recognition, but this person leaves those concerns aside and cares only about higher goals. Wittgenstein often expressed the desire to do so, but he discovered that this kind of life is something that needs to be given to someone. Wittgenstein was looking for a way of being involved in his work that was beyond any kind of personal recognition in the world. To be able to work for the glory of God is to live assuming that there is something beyond the human or empirical realm. Speaking of God in this connection is only natural and it would be self-defeating to try to prove the existence of such a completely different motivating force if proven: it would no longer be completely different from the world. The truth claim, like in Kierkegaard’s case, is not that something like “God’s glory” exists, but that this way of life is possible and the knight of faith is not necessarily deceiving himself, secretly desiring to be admired for his religious zeal for example. It is being able to say “Thy will be done” or “All the glory to God” without any second thoughts. Whether there are no second thoughts is itself something that needs to be given from beyond the world. It cannot be seen from the outside, like the example of Emmet showed in the chapter on Kierkegaard, and it cannot be willed, as the example

Conclusion

117

of the father of a successful athlete showed in the chapter on Wittgenstein. These characteristics belong to the religious truth claims whose nature the philosophy of religion ought to investigate. Weil became a religious author only later on in her life; for her this was no conversion, however, but merely a deepening of the concern for the truth that had always guided her writing. Being completely open to the world was for her the most important task in life, paying attention to everything and, in this, waiting for God. Faith for Weil is no escapism from the world, and it can never be that. The faith she envied is to fully love the world as it is, to see how insignificant we people and our egos are, to make every effort to put aside imaginations that get in the way and obstruct our full attention to that what is what it is. She envies a faith that is so open that God himself and his grace can appear. The openness to the world that Weil envies is an openness that by definition cannot be motivated by anything in the world. If she would be open for the sake of this or that or him or her, then she would no longer be open to the world as whatever it may be. The motivation for the openness to the world must itself be superempirical, or supernatural in Weil’s phrasing. The truth claim involved is that this kind of openness is possible. Weil’s play about Venice shows the nature of this truth claim: Jaffier is touched by Venice’s beauty for no worldly reason at all and he is rewarded for it in no way at all, his love for Venice is completely otherworldly. For faith to exist, this kind of pure, uncontaminated love must be possible. Weil’s plea for a purifying atheism is an attempt to clarify both the nature of faith and of religious statements. To speak of God in itself is not yet religious, as we have seen as the task of the philosophy of religion is to elucidate this further after itself having been misled by this misconception. In the chapter on the answers of faith, we saw that these answers are no answers in any ordinary sense. “It is the will of God” does not answer our why-questions, but it may replace them. If we hear someone say “It is the will of God,” we may affirm this, but we cannot say that we agree or that it is true what this person is saying. It makes no sense for the philosophy of religion to engage in trying to investigate the veracity of the statement. What does make sense for the philosophy of religion to do, is to reflect upon what kind of life would make such a statement true. The truth claim that the philosophy of religion can investigate is whether faith can take the place of our why-questions: what kind of perspective is claimed to be possible by someone who says “It is the will of God”? Such an inquiry would reveal the nature of reality in spiritual matters, where the unexplainable is explained and yet remains unexplainable, and the uncontrollable is controlled and yet remains uncontrollable. The kind of reality involved here implies a way of living one’s life and responding

118

Conclusion

to whatever may happen with a particular attitude. Without this way of living, religious statements cease to be the statements they are. To have faith is to be absolutely safe, although not in any worldly sense. This kind of safety does not imply any prediction, but rather a commitment or passion for a particular perspective on the world. One may obtain safety by withdrawing from the world, but the truth claim of religion is that an even fuller safety is possible with sensitivity intact, in fact, with a life full of passion and care, not limiting one’s desires in any way. Martin Hägglund (2019, 151) argues that “Abraham sacrifices his care for Isaac. Because Abraham believes that he ultimately cannot lose his son.” Yet, the truth claim of faith is that passionate care and complete acceptance can be held at the same time. In the final chapter, policeman Boyd was discussed who encounters his son who is addicted to drugs. Simultaneously, he wishes for him a different life and he loves him no matter what. He combines passion and acceptance, both in an out-of-this-world way: he wants him to stop his stealing and substance abuse, not just because of the consequences, but because it is wrong no matter what; and he loves him no matter what, not in exchange for anything, but just because he loves him. Passion for what is the right thing to do irrespective of what may happen, and acceptance in love purely as a gift, are both, by definition, outside of the calculations of this world. They are both religious in that sense. Boyd does not express himself religiously, but it would be quite natural to express his attitude as something superempirical. The truth claim in “God has brought Regine and me together,” “I dedicate this work to the glory of the most high God”, or “I encountered Christ when reciting this poem” is not something that the philosophy of religion can investigate without looking at these statements from within the attitude of faith that gives meaning to these statements. An important task for the philosophy of religion should be to clarify how the truth of these statements relates to the attitudes of faith. Even to say, for example, that God created the world, is not true or false in itself, but it is a statement that implies the possibility of accepting everything that may happen as a gift from God. Whether this possibility exists is something for every individual to decide or discover; if the possibility would exist in any other way it would no longer be a religious belief. The philosophy of religion had been retreating from its object—religion—when it sets out to prove that God created the world. Someone who claims that it is true that God created the world, does not claim that something verifiably happened a long time ago. Instead, if it is true that God created the world, then everything can be accepted with joy. To believe that God created the world is to believe that there is a greater hand writing our story, as Michael Burnham said to envy. The philosophy of religion should adopt a different approach and investigate the nature of the faith that gives sense to religious statements.

Conclusion

119

To look at faith from the angle of faith envy would be a good starting point to set out on this quest.

Bibliography

Achebe, Chinua. 2008. Things Fall Apart [Novel]. Harlow: Heinemann. Adams, Douglas. 2002. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe [Novel]. London: Picador. Allen, Diogenes. 1983. Three Outsiders: Pascal, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil. Cambridge (MA): Cowley. Ashdown, Lance. 1995. “Absolute safety.” Philosophical Investigations 18(2): 162–172. Ashdown, Lance. 2004. “Much Ado about a Point of View.” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 43(4): 685–706. Bainton, Roland. 1977. Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. Peabody (MA): Hendrickson. Barnes, Julian. 2008. Nothing to Be Frightened Of [Memoir]. New York: Knopf. Barth, Karl. 2004. Church Dogmatics II/2. London: Bloomsbury. Beattie, John. 1966. Other Cultures: Aims, Methods and Achievements in Social Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Buck, Chris, and Jennifer Lee, dir. 2013. Frozen [Motion Picture]. United States: Disney. Burley, Mikel. 2010. “Winch and Wittgenstein on moral harm and absolute safety.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 67: 81–94. Burley, Mikel. 2012. Contemplating Religious Forms of Life: Wittgenstein and D.Z. Phillips. New York: Continuum. Clack, Beverley, and Brian R. Clack. 2008. The Philosophy of Religion; A Critical Introduction; Second Edition. Cambridge: Polity. Clack, Brian R. 1999. An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. De Kesel, Marc. 2017. Zelfloos; De mystieke afgrond van het modern Ik. Utrecht: Kok. De Lange, Frits. 1990. Totale Beschikbaarheid; Het Ethos van Simone Weil. Baarn: Ten Have. 121

122

Bibliography

Dennett, Daniel. 2006. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. London: Viking. Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Gift of Death; Second Edition & Literature in Secret, translated by David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Drury, Maurice O’Connor. 1996. The Danger of Words and Writings on Wittgenstein. Bristol: Thoemmess. Drury, Maurice O’Connor. 2017. The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury: On Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry, edited by John Haynes. London: Bloomsbury. Duff, Antony. 1976. “Must a Good Man Be Invulnerable?” Ethics 86(4): 294–311. Eksteins, Modris. 2000. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Epictetus. 2008. Discourses and Selected Writings, translated by Robert Dobbin. London: Penguin. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon. Ford, David, and Mike Higton, editors. 2011. The Modern Theologians Reader. Malden (MA): Wiley. Fried, Erich. 1996. Es ist was es ist; Liebesgedichte, Angstgedichte, Zorngedichte [Poetry]. Berlin: Wagenbach. Fuller, Bryan, and Alex Kurtzman, creators. 2019. Star Trek: Discovery; Saints of Imperfection; Season 2, Episode 5 [TV Series]. United States: CBS All Access. Gifford, Paul. 2019. The Plight of Western Religion: The Eclipse of the Other-Worldly. London: Hurst & Co. Glenn Kirkconnell, G. 2010. Kierkegaard on Sin and Salvation: From Philosophical Fragments through the Two Ages. London: Continuum. Gopnik, Adam. 2018. “How to Raise a Prodigy; Can achievement be engineered.” The New Yorker, January 29, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/29/ how-to-raise-a-prodigy. Gray, John. 2016. The Soul of the Marionette; A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom. London: Penguin Philosophy. Green, Ronald M. 1998. “‘Developing’ Fear and Trembling.” In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, edited by Alastair Hannay, and Gordon D. Marino, 257–281. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hägglund, Martin. 2019. This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. New York: Pantheon. Hall, Ronald L. 2000. The Human Embrace: The Love of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Love; Kierkegaard, Cavell, Nussbaum. University Park (PA): The Pennsylvania State University Press. Harari, Yuval Noah. 2016. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Harvill Secker. Hardy, Thomas. 1993. Jude the Obscure [Novel]. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Hartwell, Herbert. 1964. The Theology of Karl Barth: An Introduction. London: Duckworth.

Bibliography

123

Holiday, Anthony. 1985. “Wittgenstein’s Silence: Philosophy, Ritual and the Limits of Language.” Language & Communication 5(2): 133–142. Horton, Robin. 1993. Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iczkovits, Yavin. 2012. Wittgenstein’s Ethical Thought. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jenson, Robert W., 1999. Systematic Theology: Volume 2: the Works of God. New York: Oxford University Press. Kerr, Fergus. 1997. Theology after Wittgenstein; Second Edition. London: SPCK. Kierkegaard, Sören. 1967. Sören Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Volume 1, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kierkegaard, Sören. 1978a. Sören Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Volume 5, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kierkegaard, Sören. 1978b. Sören Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Volume 6, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kierkegaard, Sören. 1978c. Kierkegaard’s Writings, Volume 14: Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age, A Literary Review, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, Sören. 1980. Kierkegaard’s Writings, Volume 19: The Sickness Unto Death, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, Sören. 1983. Kierkegaard’s Writings, Volume 6: Fear and Trembling/ Repetition, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, Sören. 1990. Kierkegaard’s Writings, Volume 21: For Self-Examination / Judge For Yourself!, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, Sören. 1992. Kierkegaard’s Writings, Volume 12: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, Sören. 1998. Kierkegaard’s Writings, Volume 22: The Point of View, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, Sören. 2000. The Essential Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Klein, Melanie. 1988. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963. London: Virago. Krishek, Sharon. 2009. Kierkegaard on Faith and Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kroesbergen, Hermen. 2015. “‘Superstition’ as a Contemplative Term: a Wittgensteinian Perspective.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 77(2): 105–222.

124

Bibliography

Kroesbergen, Hermen. 2018a. “An absolute distinction between faith and science: Contrast without compartmentalization.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 53(1): 9–28. Kroesbergen, Hermen. 2018b. “The commitment in feeling absolutely safe.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 84(2): 185–203. Kroesbergen, Hermen. 2019a. “Religion without Belief and Community in Africa.” Religions 10(4), 292: 1–20. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10040292. Kroesbergen, Hermen. 2019b. The Language of Faith in Southern Africa; Spirit World, Power, Community, Holism. Cape Town: AOSIS Scholarly books. Kroesbergen, Hermen. 2020a. “God regulates the church, even if he doesn’t; Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion and realism.” Philosophical Investigations 43(3): 254–283. Kroesbergen, Hermen. 2020b. “Faith envy.” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 76(4), a5811, 8 pages. Kroesbergen, Hermen. 2020c. “African leadership and the kind of reality of the spirit world.” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 76(2), a5846, 9 pages. Kronqvist, Camilla. 2011. “The Promise That Love Will Last.” Inquiry 54(6): 650–668. Lennon, John. 1971. Imagine [Pop Song]. United States: Apple. Liman, Doug, dir. 2005. Mr. & Mrs. Smith [Motion Picture]. United States: Fox 20th Century Studios. Lippitt, John. 2004. The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling. London: Routledge. Lord, Phil, and Christopher Miller, dir. 2014. The Lego Movie [Motion Picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Luther, Martin. 1520. On the freedom of a Christian. www.jmstanton.com/Docs Luther, Martin. 1962. “Exposition of Psalm 127, for the Christians at Riga in Livonia, 1524.” In Luther’s Works, vol. 45. American edition, edited and translated by Walther I. Brandt, 324–325. Philadelphia: Fortress. Machin, Barbara, creator. 2008. Waking the Dead; Skin, Part 2; Season 7, Episode 8 [TV Series]. United Kingdom: BBC. Mackay, Hugh. 2016. Beyond Belief: How We Find Meaning, with or without Religion. Sydney: Macmillan Australia. Kindle. Malcolm, Norman. 1964. “Is it a religious belief that ‘God exists’?” in: John Hick (ed.), Faith and the Philosophers. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 103–111. Malcolm, Norman. 1984. Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malcolm, Norman. 1993. Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? London: Routledge. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1948. Magic, Science and Religion. New York: Doubleday. Martel, Yann. 2010. Life of Pi. London: Walker Canongate. McGuinness, Brian. 1988. Wittgenstein: A Life: Young Ludwig, 1889-1921, Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press. McLellan, David. 1990. Utopian Pessimist; The Life and Thought of Simone Weil. New York: Poseidon.

Bibliography

125

Melville, Herman. 2017. Billy Budd, Sailor [Novel]. Mineola (NY): Dover. Moffat, Steven, creator. 2017. Sherlock; Season 4; Episode 2 [TV Series]. United Kingdom: BBC. Monk, Ray. 1991. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage. Montaigne, Michel de. 1958. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mooney, Edward. 2009. “Understanding Abraham: Care, Faith, and the Absurd.” In Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: Critical Appraisals, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 100–114. Eugene (OR): Wipf and Stock. Moore, Gareth. 1988. Believing in God: A Philosophical Essay. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Moore, Gareth. 1995. “Tradition, authority and the hiddenness of God.” In Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, edited by Timothy Tessin, and Mario von der Ruhr, 134–160. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books. Peeters, Koen. 2017. De mensengenezer [Novel]. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. Phillips, D.Z. 1966. “God and Ought.” In Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy, edited by Ian Ramsey, 133–139. London: S.C.M. Press. Phillips, D.Z. 1986. R.S. Thomas; Poet of the Hidden God; Meaning and Meditation in the Poetry of R.S. Thomas. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Phillips, D.Z. 1992. Interventions in Ethics. Albany: SUNY. Putnam, Hilary. 1992. Renewing Philosophy. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Rhees, Rush, ed. 1981. Ludwig Wittgenstein—Personal Recollections. Totowa (NJ): Rowman & Littlefield. Rhees, Rush. 1997. Rush Rhees on Religion and Philosophy, edited by D.Z. Phillips. Cambridge: CUP Archive. Rhees, Rush. 1999. Moral Questions, edited by D.Z. Phillips. London: Macmillan. Ruhr, Mario von der, and Timothy Tessin, (eds.). 1995. Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ruhr, Mario von der. 2006. Simone Weil; An Apprenticeship in Attention. London: Continuum. Rushdie, Salman. 2001. Fury [Novel]. New York: Random House. Sánchez Durá, Nicolás. 2015. “Wittgenstein on War and Peace.” In The Darkness of This Time; Ethics, Politics, and Religion in Wittgenstein, edited by Luigi Perissinotto, 161–182. Milano: Mimesis International. Schilbrack, Kevin, 2014. Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto. Malden (MA): Wiley-Blackwell. Schroeder, Severin. 2007. “The Tightrope Walker.” Ratio, new series 20: 442–463. Springsted, Eric O. 2004. “Faith, Belief and Perspective: Peter Winch’s Philosophy of Religion.” Philosophical Investigations 27(4): 345–369. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Thornton, Robert J. 2017. Healing the Exposed Being; A South African Ngoma Tradition. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

126

Bibliography

Tillich, Paul. 1951. Systematic Theology; Volume One. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Tolstoy, Leo. 2007. Twenty-Three Tales [Short Stories]. New York: Cosimo Classics. Tracy, David. 1994. Plurality and Ambiguity; Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Treur, Franca. 2017. Hoor nu mijn stem [Novel]. Amsterdam: Prometheus. Verbrugge, Ad, Govert Joan Buijs, and Jelle van Baardewijk. 2018. Het goede leven & de vrije markt: een cultuurfilosofische analyse. Rotterdam: Lemniscaat. Weil, Simone. 1946. The Iliad: Or, The Poem of Force. New York: Politics. Weil, Simone. 1956. The Notebooks of Simone Weil, translated by Arthur Wills. London: Routledge. Weil, Simone. 1970. First and Last Notebooks: Supernatural Knowledge, translated by Richard Rees. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weil, Simone. 1973. Waiting on God, translated by Emma Crawford. London: Fontana. Weil, Simone. 1987. “Are We Struggling for Justice?” translated by Marina Barabas. Philosophical Investigations 10(1): 1–10. Weil, Simone. 1998. Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks. London: Routledge. Weil, Simone. 2002. Gravity and Grace, translated by Emma Crawford. London: Routledge. Weil, Simone. 2019. Venice Saved [Play], translated by Silvia Panizza, and Philip Wilson. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Westphal, Merold. 2014. Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science; and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Winch, Peter. 1972. Ethics and Action. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Winch, Peter. 1989. Simone Weil; ‘The Just Balance.’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wingren, Gustaf. 2004. Luther on Vocation, translated by Carl C. Rasmussen. Eugene (OR): Wipf and Stock. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1993. Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951, edited by James Klagge, and Alfred Nordmann. Cambridge: Hackett. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1998. Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains; Revised edition, edited by George H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2003. Ludwig Wittgenstein; Public and Private Occasions, edited by James Klagge, and Alfred Nordmann. Lanham (MD): Rowman & Littlefield. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations; Revised 4th edition, edited by P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Malden (MA): Wiley-Blackwell. Wray, John. 2019. Godsend [Novel]. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Zizek, Slavoj. 2007. How to Read Lacan. New York: W.W. Norton. Zizek, Slavoj. 2014. Event: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin.

Index

absolute attitude. See religious attitude accepting whatever happens, 17, 23–26, 30, 33, 35–37, 52, 59, 64–65, 69–70, 91, 99, 103, 111–113, 116 Achebe, Chinua. See Things Fall Apart Adams, Douglas, 59–60 Africa, 4, 56, 61, 64, 66–67, 74–75 Agamemnon, 28–29 analytical philosophy of religion. See philosophy of religion anthropology, 6, 61, 73–75 Aquinas, Thomas, 6 Ashdown, Lance, 37, 91, 96, 98–99, 101, 104 atheism, 3, 7, 69, 115 Augustine, 50 Barnes, Julian, 2 Barth, Karl, 80, 81 Beattie, John, 73 Bible, 4, 14, 18–20, 22, 50, 75, 80–82 Billy Budd, Sailor, 77–80, 81 Black Mirror, 63 Buddhism, 8, 74 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 39 Bunyan, John, 43 Burley, Mikel, 43, 90, 95–97 Burnham, Michael. See Star Trek

care, 9, 21–22, 24–26, 39, 102– 106, 115–116 charismatics. See evangelicals Clack, Beverley. See Clack, Brian Clack, Brian, 45, 70, 71–72, 73 Climacus, Johannes. See Kierkegaard, Sören Congo. See Africa Constantius, Constantine. See Kierkegaard, Sören courage, 36, 59, 103–104 creation, 43, 59, 116 critical realism, 6 Darth Vader, 6 Dennett, Daniel, 3 Derrida, Jacques, 28 dilemma, 22, 77–81, 87, 111 divination, 6, 107 dogmatics. See theology Dollhouse, 63 Drury, Maurice, 38, 49 Duff, Anthony, 100–102, 104 Eksteins, Modris, 36 Emmet. See The Lego Movie entities in reality, 5, 7–8, 110, 113 Epictetus, 24 evangelicals, 4, 10, 14 127

128

Index

Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 74–75 evil. See good vs. evil existence of God, 3, 5–9, 11, 43–45, 69, 71, 107–108, 110, 113–114 Foucault, Michel, 57 freedom, 11, 26, 35, 48, 59, 68, 80–81, 91, 99, 101, 110, 114 Fried, Erich, 70 Frozen, 37 Game of Thrones, 39 God’s command, 14, 16–20, 79–81 good vs. evil, 36, 57, 87, 110 grace, 21, 25, 48–49, 55, 57–60, 62–67, 96–98, 102–104, 106, 115 Gray, John, 48–49, 68 Green, Ronald, 16, 21 Hägglund, Martin, 3, 25–26, 102–103, 115 Hall, Ronald L., 22 Harari, Yuval Noah, 3 Hardy, Thomas. See Jude the Obscure Harry Potter, 6, 39 heaven, 10–11, 19, 62, 68, 70, 74, 98, 110 Holiday, Anthony, 42 Holmes, Sherlock, 50 Homer. See Iliad Horton, Robin, 74 The Hunger Games, 39 Iczkovits, Yaniv, 94 Iliad, 57–58, 64 infinite, 8, 29 Isaac, 14, 17–23, 26, 28, 30–31, 87, 104–105, 109, 113, 115 Islam, 4, 11, 23, 70, 73 joy, 1, 17–18, 20–25, 27, 30, 47, 55, 59, 65, 75, 91, 104, 113, 116 Judaism, 74 Jude the Obscure, 83–87

Kerr, Fergus, 8–9 Kesel, Marc de, 56, 60 Kierkegaard, Sören: and an idea to live and die for, 15–20, 25–27, 31, 33, 71, 112; and Christianity in Denmark, 13–14, 69, 108–109; as Constantine Constantius, 14; Fear and Trembling, 14–19, 21, 25, 27–28, 87; as Johannes Climacus, 14, 29; as Johannes de Silentio, 14, 17–31, 104–105; and knight of faith, 23–29, 31, 91, 98, 103–105; and Regine Olsen, 13–17, 19–23, 25–26, 30–31, 60, 65, 68, 112–113, 116; and resignation, 19–22, 27, 103–104; use of pseudonyms, 14–15, 30–31 Klein, Melanie, 2 Krishek, Sharon, 22 Kroesbergen, Hermen, 4, 6, 29, 45, 67, 74–75, 106n, 112–114 Kronqvist, Camilla, 92–93 The Lego Movie, 26–32, 104, 111–112, 114 Life of Pi, 63–64 Lippitt, John, 18, 25, 27, 29 The Lord of the Rings, 39 love, 1, 6, 14–16, 21–22, 24–26, 29–31, 44–47, 50, 52, 55–59, 62, 64–65, 68–70, 74, 83, 86, 92–93, 99, 102– 106, 110–116 Luckman, Thomas, 7 Luther, Martin, 27–28, 86–88, 96, 101, 105 Mackay, Hugh, 2, 82 Malcolm, Norman, 7, 35, 37, 51 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 75 marriage, 15–17, 19, 22–23, 25–26, 60, 68, 83, 86, 92–93, 112–113 The Matrix, 63 Melville, Herman. See Billy Budd, Sailor miracle, 5–7, 9, 19, 74, 109 Monk, Ray, 35–36, 49, 50

Index

Montaigne, Michel de, 29 Mooney, Edward, 21–22, 24 Moore, Gareth, 62, 75, 79, 98 Mr. & Mrs. Smith, 60 Muslims. See Islam Ngai, Sianne, 7 nonbelievers, 3–7, 9, 106, 108 Nozick, Robert, 63 Oedipus, 6 Okonkwo. See Things Fall Apart Olsen, Regine. See Kierkegaard, Sören oracles, 6, 30 paradox, 19, 21–22, 56, 65, 98, 109 Pascal, Blaise, 61 passion, 8, 13, 24, 29, 42, 45, 49, 111– 112, 115–116 Phillips, D. Z., 10, 25, 79, 95, 103 philosophy of religion, 1, 4–5, 7, 10, 43, 70–71, 106–108, 110, 112–116 post-modernists, 6 prayer, 4, 6, 8, 23, 25, 37, 41–42, 44, 52, 56, 61, 73, 75–76, 96 predictions, 6, 74–75, 89–95, 99, 105, 115 prophecy, 6, 9, 26, 76 Psalm 23, 45, 88, 90, 99, 102, 105 Putnam, Hilary, 29, 95 reality, 5–7, 9, 48, 60, 63, 70, 72–73, 76, 107–108, 110, 112–115 Reformed Epistemologists, 6 religious attitude, 25, 31, 33, 35, 37, 41, 62, 89, 100, 105, 111–113, 115–116 resurrection of Christ, 1, 43–47, 80 reward, 9, 38, 57, 65–67, 69, 91, 94, 115 Rhees, Rush, 36–38, 42, 48–49, 51–52, 58, 76, 82–86 rituals, 6–7, 9, 27, 61–62, 67, 76, 107 Rushdie, Salman, 40, 41, 46, 51 Russell, Bertrand, 7, 34

129

sacrifice, 11, 14, 16–22, 28–31, 47, 50, 65, 76, 87, 104, 109, 113, 115 Schilbrack, Kevin, 5, 7 Schroeder, Severin, 43 self-help literature, 28–29 sensitivity, 59, 103–105, 115 Silentio, Johannes de. See Kierkegaard, Sören Socrates, 89–90, 100, 101 spirits, 5, 7, 67, 76, 96, 107, 110 Star Trek, 1, 2, 116 sub-Abrahams, 18–23, 32, 113 Sudan. See Africa superempirical, 6–7, 106–108, 110, 112–116 supernatural, 8, 55, 57–58, 66–67, 100, 115, 122 systematic theology. See theology Taylor, Charles, 2 theology, 4, 9, 13, 15–16, 42, 44, 49, 64, 72 Thibon, Gustave, 56–57 Things Fall Apart, 29–30, 32, 111 Thornton, Robert, 66 Tillich, Paul, 72 Tolstoy, Leo, 36, 41–42 Tracy, David, 72–73, 75, 110 truth, 1, 3, 5–10, 15, 29, 35, 42–43, 57, 64, 67–70, 73, 75–76, 84–85, 94, 102–103, 106–108, 110, 112–116 truth claims. See truth uncertainty, 29, 72–75, 88, 91 vanity, 11, 36–39, 47–51, 60–61, 65, 68 Waking the Dead, 104–105, 116 Weil, Simone: Gravity and Grace, 57, 59, 62–65, 68, 103; and masochism, 53–56; and religious experience, 54, 61; spiritual autobiography, 54, 61; and suffering, 54–56, 59–62, 64–65, 69, 100–101, 109; Venice Saved, 65–68, 115; and vocation, 55,

130

66; Waiting on God, 54–55, 57–59, 61–62, 64, 66–67, 69, 102 Westphal, Merold, 103–104 Winch, Peter, 37, 44, 76, 77–78, 79, 89–92, 94, 100, 102 witchcraft, 67, 74 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: and absolute safety, 33, 35, 41, 68, 71, 90, 100; and language games, 34, 37, 45,

Index

79; and marionette, 46–51, 111; and music, 33–34, 36, 38, 51; Philosophical Investigations, 38, 41; and tightrope-walker, 41–46, 49, 51, 111; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 34–35, 41, 45 Wray, John, 23 Zizek, Slavoj, 46, 73–74, 86

About the Author

Hermen Kroesbergen is a Research Associate in the program “Understanding Reality” at the Faculty of Theology and Religion of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He received his PhD from the Protestant Theological University in the Netherlands for a thesis on ordinary language of faith from a Wittgensteinian perspective. In 2019 he published a well-received book on religious language in Africa: The Language of Faith in Southern Africa; Spirit World, Power, Community, Holism, AOSIS Scholarly Books. He has edited four books on topics in contemporary Christianity, and he has published widely in international journals for theology and philosophy of religion. He has been working in Theology and Philosophy of Religion in Africa for nine years and is now a pastor in a congregation in the Netherlands again. Based on his experiences in these two very different contexts, both at an academic and a congregational level, he writes in an engaged as well as scholarly way, combining theology, philosophy, and an ordinary language approach. In October 2019 his essay “Strange Religion and the Need for Philosophy” was awarded the John S. Mbiti Essay Prize on African Philosophy and Religion at the Third Biennial African Philosophy World Conference at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He is a thoughtful and insightful writer with a keen theological sensibility. His writing distinguishes itself by its clarity and creativity.

131