On religion [Second edition.] 9781138714861, 1138714860, 9781138714885, 1138714887

Table of contents :
On Religion- Front Cover
On Religion
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface to the second edition
contents
Chapter One: The love of God
Religion is for lovers
The impossible
The secret
What do I love when I love my God?
Chapter Two: How the secular world became post-secular Two
The sacral age
Secularization
Our prophets: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
Desecularization: the death of the death of God
Chapter Three: Putting religion in its place
What is what?
Why the why?
The mystical element in life
The place of religion
Chapter Four: Can there be a religion with religion?
Never say “only” a symbol
A God before whom we can sing and dance
Chapter Five: Why is religion so violent?
Impossible people
Religious violence
Ban the Bible
Ban the unconditional
Why was Jesus killed?
The hermeneutics of love
Chapter Six: Cosmic grace: world without why, Amen
God is dead—or maybe not so fast
Cosmo-theology
Panentheism—or the divine milieu
Not your great-grandfather’s Newtonianism
The post-humans
Becoming divine: the electronic tree of life
Cosmic grace: world without why, Amen
Chapter Seven: On religion—without religion
Religious truth/true religion
The tragic sense of life
The faith of a post-modern
Axioms of a religion without religion
Adieu
Index

Citation preview

On

Religion In a thoroughly updated second edition of his popular and engaging book, John D. Caputo revisits Augustine’s ancient question “what do I love when I love my God?” and presses it into service in the post-modern world. Accessible but without compromising the big ideas, he raises the question of what religion means today in the face of widespread religious violence after 9/11, of spreading secularization, the dazzling discoveries of contemporary cosmology, and the eerie advent of the “post-human” world. All along sculpting the idea of a post-modern, post-secular “religion without religion,” which turns on the “mystical element” of our lives, he wonders what the future of traditional religion will be, or whether it even has one. On Religion will fascinate anyone interested in the challenges religion faces in the contemporary world. It offers an ideal starting point from which undergraduate and postgraduate students, teachers, and lecturers can explore religion and philosophy today. John D. Caputo is Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University, USA and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University, USA. He has published both academic and popular books in the area of religion in the post-modern world, where he has advanced the idea of what he calls “weak theology.” His many books include The Weakness of God (2006), Truth (2013), Hoping Against Hope (2015), and recently Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information (2018).

JOHN D. CAPUTO

On

Religion Second edition

Second edition published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  2019 John D. Caputo The right of John D. Caputo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2001 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-71488-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-71486-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-19780-7 (ebk) Typeset in Joanna by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

To Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who loosened my tongue, wherever you are





Preface to the second edition ix

One

1

Religion is for lovers The impossible The secret What do I love when I love my God?

1 7 19 26

Two

39

The love of God 

How the secular world became post-secular 









The sacral age 40 Secularization 44 Our prophets: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche 53 Desecularization: the death of the death of God 61

Three

73

What is what? Why the why? The mystical element in life The place of religion

73 76 82 88

Four

93

Putting religion in its place 

Can there be a religion with religion? 

Never say “only” a symbol 94 A God before whom we can sing and dance 101

Five

110

Impossible people Religious violence Ban the Bible Ban the unconditional

112 114 121 125

Why is religion so violent? 





Why was Jesus killed? 129 The hermeneutics of love 133 Cosmic grace: world without why, Amen 

Six

138

God is dead—or maybe not so fast 140 Cosmo-theology 142 Panentheism—or the divine milieu 146 Not your great-grandfather’s Newtonianism 151 The post-humans 157 Becoming divine: the electronic tree of life 161 Cosmic grace: world without why, Amen 166 On religion—without religion 

Seven

172



Religious truth/true religion 172 The tragic sense of life 182 The faith of a post-modern 190 Axioms of a religion without religion 197 Adieu 207



Index 208

Given all the trouble that religion has caused in the contemporary world one would think that one edition of a book entitled On Religion would be quite enough. But that, in fact, is precisely the reason that I and my Routledge editors, to whom I am very grateful for the opportunity, think that the time has come to revisit this text. The first edition was written before September 11, after which came the war in Iraq, a trifecta of folly, military, political and ethical, after which nothing has been the same. So apart from the obvious opportunity a second edition affords me to update examples and references that are no longer timely, there are more serious considerations. Chief among them is asking ourselves why religion is so violent, and more generally, whether and how religion and politics—subjects wisely banned from holiday dinners with conservative relatives—should be allowed in the same room, which are issues treated only tangentially in the first edition (see the new Chapter Five). I also used this occasion to straighten out my critics, or maybe I should say to respond to what has been the most persistent objection to my defense of a religion without religion: “what about the possibility of a religion with religion?” my more traditionally minded friends ask. Is it not possible that the deep structure of a religion without religion is alive and well—if not always at least often, if not in fact certainly

ix  Preface to the second edition

Preface to the second edition

x  Preface to the second edition

in principle—in the concrete religious traditions? Am I afraid of concrete traditions? If I criticize binary oppositions, have I not created a new one of my own devising, between my idea of a radical religion and the existing traditional ones? (See the new Chapter Four.) The new edition also gives me an opportunity to address a problem that has preoccupied me more and more over the last twenty years: if what we mean by God is the possibility of the impossible, are not the most impossible things today happening in speculative physics? If philosophy begins in wonder, is not the new physics stealing philosophy’s wonder and thus its thunder? If modern—nineteenth century—atheistic materialism made its nest in the old Newtonianism, might not the new cosmology be the occasion of a new cosmo-theology? Have the physicists not begun to sound like the new mystics? Along with the new cosmology, I also look into the new technology in the age of information, which exhibits what Derrida would call the “pharmakon effect,” the poison/cure, the drug that will cure us unless it kills us first, that kills us as it cures us. If the Bible thumpers’ hair was set on fire by the evolution of humanity, what is the future of religion in a world which imagines an evolution out of humanity—into what? The “post-human” is what they call it. Are we becoming gods after all? Are we on the way to finding a new electronic way to live forever? (See the new Chapter Six.) These revisions required, in turn, a tightening of our intellectual seatbelts, that is, a deepening of the theoretical matrix of the first edition. This is supplied in a discussion of what I call “the mystical element of human life,” where we must come to grips with the dark center, the unlit core, the concealed depths, of our lives. This, I argue, is the ultimate place of the deeper structural religion I am analyzing, which is not

xi  Preface to the second edition

a particular place in experience but the element in which all experience takes place. A further development of what is called the “absolute secret” in the first edition, this groundless ground is not unlike what in the mystical tradition goes under the name of the abyss or hidden ground—of God, of the world, of ourselves. In this way the original and guiding Augustinian question of the book is deepened: the question takes love as a given, and then it asks, what do I love, what is going on in the name of the God that I love—if every what and why and wherefore runs up against this abyss? (See the new Chapter Three.) In short, in the second edition, the question of religion is widened to include both its political and its cosmological dimension, and deepened to include an exploration of the groundless ground or displaced place of religion. Those who wish I had left well enough alone will be happy to know that Chapters One, Two and Five in the first edition have been for the most part only lightly edited, updated and made to accommodate the new material. Chapters Three and Four in the first edition have been dropped and replaced with four new chapters (Three through Six). Chapter Five in the first edition has accordingly been renumbered Chapter Seven in the second edition. This book is intended to make difficult materials accessible to a wider audience. For those who have a taste for a further study, I have provided more direction in the second edition in the way of sources and suggested readings in boxes inserted here and there throughout the text. On Religion first appeared in a series entitled “Thinking in Action.” I am grateful to Richard Kearney and Simon Critchley, the original series editors, and to Tony Bruce, my Routledge editor at that time, for the original invitation to write this

xii  Preface to the second edition

book. My thanks to Rebecca Schillabeer and Sarah Gore, my current Routledge editors, for first proposing the idea of a second edition and for their help in seeing it to a conclusion. I also wish to thank several people who read the revisions and offered me considerable sage advice: John Burkey, Clayton Crockett, Roy Darcus, Namsoon Kang, Katharine Sarah Moody, James Olthuis, B. Keith Putt, Sharon Baker Putt, Jeffrey Robbins, Aaron Simmons, Anthony Traylor, and David Welch. Together, they have saved me from myself more times than I can count. Finally, my thanks for the cover photo to my friend B. Brandon Scott, a distinguished New Testament scholar, birdwatcher and gifted photographer, to boot. It was taken in Pebble Beach, CA, where the salts in the sandstone and salt water etch these striking formations called tafoni. As you will soon discover, I advance a saline criterion of truth.

The love of God

One

Any book entitled On Religion must begin by breaking the bad news to the reader that its subject matter does not exist. “Religion,” in the singular, as just one thing, is nowhere to be found; it is too maddeningly polyvalent and too uncontainably diverse for us to fit it all under one roof. There are Western religions, Eastern religions, ancient religions, indigenous religions, modern religions, monotheistic, polytheistic, and even slightly atheistic religions; too many to count, too many to master, in too many languages to learn. I am not complaining or making excuses. Indeed, the uncontainable diversity of what we call in Christian Latin “religion” is itself a great religious truth and a marker of the uncontainability of what religion is all about. I am just trying to get started and I have to start somewhere. I am not trying to begin at the Absolute Beginning. I have no head for that. I am just trying to get something on the table. By religion, therefore, let me stipulate, I mean something simple, open-ended, and old-fashioned, namely, the love of God. But the expression “love of God” needs some work. Of itself it tends to be a little vacuous and even slightly sanctimonious. To put it technically, it lacks teeth. So the question we need to ask ourselves is the one Augustine puts to himself in the Confessions, “what do I love when I love God?,” or “what

1  The love of God

RELIGION IS FOR LOVERS

2  The love of God

do I love when I love You, my God?,” as he also put it, or, running these two Augustinian formulations together, “what do I love when I love my God?”. Augustine, I should say at the start, will be my hero throughout these pages, although with a certain post-modern and sometimes unorthodox twist that might at times have provoked his episcopal wrath (he was a bishop, with a bishop’s distaste for unorthodoxy). I love this question in no small part because it assumes that anybody worth their salt loves God. If you do not love God, what good are you? You are too caught up in the meanness of self-love and self-gratification to be worth a tinker’s damn. Your soul soars only with a spike in the Dow-Jones Industrial average; your heart leaps only at the prospect of a new tax break. The Devil take you. He already has. Religion is for lovers, for men and women of passion, for real people with a passion for something other than taking profits, people who believe in something, who hope like mad in something, who love something with a love that surpasses understanding. Faith, hope, and love, and of these three the best is love, according to a famous apostle (1 Cor. 13:13). But what do they love? What do I love when I love my God? That is their question. That is my question. The scriptural citations are from The Holy Bible: The New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1989). Augustine’s Confessions is available in numerous translations, but I like the translation by Frank Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1970), a consultation of which will reveal the heavy use I have been making of Book X in particular. Garry Wills, Saint Augustine (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999) is as good a general introduction to St. Augustine as one would ever want.

3  The love of God

The opposite of a religious person is a loveless person. “Whoever does not love does not know God” (1 John 4:8). Notice that I am not saying a “secular” person. That is because I am out to waylay the usual distinction between religious and secular in the name of what I shall call the “post-secular” or a “religion without religion.” I include a lot of supposedly secular people in religion—this is one of my unorthodox tendencies that I hope to slip by the bishop’s notice—even as I think a lot of supposedly religious people should look around for another line of work. A lot of supposedly secular people love something madly, while a lot of supposedly religious people love nothing more than getting their own way and bending others to their own will (“in the name of God”). To be sure, there are earnestly religious people in all the great religions, but there are religiously earnest people outside religion, who merit our attention. Some people can be deeply and abidingly “religious” with or without theology, with or without the religions. Religion may be found with or without religion. That is my thesis. Thus, the real opposite of a religious person is a selfish and pusillanimous curmudgeon, a loveless lout who knows no higher pleasure than the contemplation of his own visage, a mediocre fellow who does not have the energy to love anything except his mutual funds. That is what the philosophers call an abusive definition, but I do not feel any great compunction about that, because the people I am abusing deserve it. They do not love God. What is worse than that? What can you say on their behalf? If you know, you should write your own book and defend them. This book is for those who love God, that is, for people who are worth their salt. The New Testament is peppered with references to salt (Matt. 5:13; Mark 9:50; Col. 4:6). Salt is my criterion of truth, and love is my criterion of salt.

4  The love of God

But if my definition of irreligion, of the opposite of religion, is abusive, my definition of religion, the “love of God,” sounds slightly smarmy and pietistic. The love of God is my north star, but it only provides me with a starting point, not a finish, a first word, not a last. Everything depends on the follow through, on facing up to this beautiful and provocative Augustinian question, “what do I love when I love my God?”. Love is the measure. Every historical and social structure, everything created, generated, made, formed, or forged in time—and what is not?—should be measured against the love of God. Even religion—especially religion—insofar as religion takes historical and institutional form, must be tested to see how loyal it is to itself, to its religious vocation, which is the love of God. But the love of God itself, if ever we could find such a beautiful and precious jewel, is beyond criticism. Of the love of God itself I will hear no criticism; I will plug my ears. Let us speak then of love. What does it mean to “love” something? If a man asks a woman (I am happy to embrace other permutations of this formula) “do you love me?” and if, after a long and awkward pause and considerable deliberation, she replies with wrinkled brow, “well, up to a certain point, under certain conditions, to a certain extent,” then we can be sure that whatever it is she feels for this poor fellow it is not love and this relationship is not going to work out. For if love is the measure, the only measure of love is love without measure (Augustine again). One of the ideas behind “love” is that it represents a giving without holding back, an “unconditional” commitment, which marks love with a certain excess. Physicians counsel us to eat and exercise in measured moderation and not to overdo either. But there is no merit in loving moderately, up to a certain point, just so

5  The love of God

far, all the while watching out for number one (which is, alas, what we are often advised by a decadent psychology). If a woman divorces a man because he turned out to be a failure in his profession and just did not measure up to the salary expectations she had for him when they married, if she complains that he did not live up to his end of the “bargain,” well, that is not the sort of till-death-us-do-part, unconditional commitment that is built into marital love and the marital vow. Love is not a bargain, but unconditional giving; it is not an investment, but a commitment come what may. Lovers are people who exceed their duty, who look around for ways to do more than is required of them. If you love your job, you don’t just do the minimum that is required; you do more. If you love your children, what would you not do for them? If a wife asks a husband to do her a favor, and he declines on the grounds that he is really not duty bound by the strict terms of the marriage contract to do it, that marriage is all over except for the paper work. Rather than rigorously defending their rights, lovers readily put themselves in the wrong and take the blame for the sake of preserving their love. Love, St. Paul said in his stunning hymn to love, is patient, kind, not puffed up or boastful; it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Cor. 13). A world without love is a world governed by rigid contracts and inexorable duties, a world in which—God forbid!—the lawyers run everything. The mark of really loving someone or something is unconditionality and excess, engagement and commitment, fire and passion. That excess also explains why the worst things can be done in the name of love and why religion, as we will see below, is never far from violence. Its opposite is a mediocre fellow, neither hot nor cold, moderate to the point of mediocrity. Not worth saving. No salt.

Then what about “God”? What about loving God? One of my main arguments in this essay is that “love” and “God” go together, for “God is love,” as the New Testament tells us:

6  The love of God

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. . . . God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them. 1 John 4:7–8, 16. That is my Archimedean point. But notice how easily saying “God is love” slides over into saying “love is God.” This slippage is provocative and it provides us with an exceedingly important and productive ambiguity, opening up a kind of endless substitutability and translatability between “love” and “God” that I shall also be exploring as we go along (and raising the eyebrow of a bishop or two along the way). As love is the first name of God, “of God” is also the best name we have for those who love. To love God is to love something deeply and unconditionally. But it is also true—there is no stopping this slippage or reversal—that to love deeply and unconditionally is to be born of God, to love God, for the name of God is the name of love, the name of what we love. That is why I will hear no criticism of this idea and why those who do not love God are loveless louts. That is also why the central and most pressing question is not whether I love God or whether there is a God to love, but “what do I love when I love my God?”. Love is given, and the emphasis in the question falls on the “what.” But where do we start—I am always trying to get started— if we want to get an idea of what we mean by “loving God”?

THE IMPOSSIBLE

To explain what I mean by “the impossible” I first need to explain what I mean by the “possible,” and to explain the possible I need to talk about the “future,” which is the domain of the possible. We say that we want the future to be “bright,”

7  The love of God

An old and daunting problem, but my advice is as follows. When the Virgin Mary was told by the Angel Gabriel that she would conceive and bring forth a child, the first thing that Mary said, according to the gospel of Luke, was what any expectant virgin mother might be expected to say: “What are you talking about? I guarantee you, angel or not, that’s impossible” (loosely translated). To which Gabriel responded, with characteristic archangelic composure, don’t worry, “nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). The second thing Mary said is what made her famous: “here I am,” “fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum,” in short, “yes, oui-oui” (in Franco-Aramaic). I will come back later on to the “yes,” which I regard as an important and deeply religious notion and also closely linked to the idea of God, but for the moment I am interested in Luke’s linking of “God” with “nothing is impossible.” With God, all things are possible, very amazing things, even things that are, I am tempted to say, “unbelievable” (which are the things that most require belief), and even, God help us, “impossible” things. After Jesus told the story that it would be harder for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom of God than it would be for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, he added, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible” (Mark 10:27). So to get a start on the idea of loving God, let us take a closer look at what is for me, following Luke and Mark, a closely connected idea, “the impossible.”

8  The love of God

“promising,” “open.” The force of the future is to prevent the present from closing in on us, from closing us up. The future pries open the present by promising us the possibility of something new, the chance of something different, something that will transform the present into something else. Let us make a distinction here. There is a relatively foreseeable future, the future for which we are planning, the future on which we are all hard at work, the future we are trying to provide for when we save for our retirement or when a corporate team sets up a long-term plan. Let us call that the “future present,” by which I mean the future of the present, the future to which the present is tending, the momentum of the present into a future that we can more or less see coming. I have no intention of lightly dismissing this future. Institutional long-term plans, retirement plans, life insurance policies, plans for the future education of our children, well-grounded projections of the future of the planet threatened by climate change, all such things are very serious, and it is foolish and irresponsible to proceed without them. But there is another future, another thought of the future, a relation to another future, which is the future that is unforeseeable, that will take us by surprise, that will come like a thief in the night (1 Thess. 5:2) and shatter the comfortable horizons of expectation that surround the present. Let us call this the “absolute future.” When it comes to the relative future, the future present, we have “reasonable expectations,” “cautious optimism,” “bulls and bears,” but as regards the absolute future we must be like the lilies of the field who sow not, nor do they reap, but who are willing to go with what God provides, which also means that they are ready for anything. For the relative future we need a good mind, a decent computer, and horse sense, those three; for the absolute future, we need hope, faith, and love, these three.

9  The love of God

With the “absolute” future we are pushed to the limits of the possible, fully extended, at our wits’ end, having run up against something that is beyond us, beyond our powers and potentialities, beyond our powers of disposition, pushed to the point where only the great passions of faith and love and hope will see us through. With the “absolute future,” I maintain, we set foot for the first time on the shore of the “religious,” we enter the sphere of religious passion, and we hit upon a distinctively “religious category.” Let me clarify this. By the “religious” I do not mean some preternatural event in a Stephen King novel, or even an extraordinary visitation by a supernatural being like an angel. Of course, that is exactly what Luke’s story of the Annunciation to Mary was, but that is a function of what I call “theopoetics,” which means that religion is served up to us in great Scriptural narratives, in which we find human experience writ large, the defining features of our life magnified in moving and unforgettable stories, in brilliant figures. But having a religious sense of life is a very basic structure of our lives—it is not like worrying about being abducted by an alien—that should be placed alongside other very basic things, like having an artistic sense or political sense, experiences that belong to anyone who is worth their salt (more salt). The religious sense of life is tied up with having a future, which is something we all have, and the “absolute future” is a basic part of having a future. So instead of distinguishing “religious people,” the ones who go to church on Sunday morning, from nonreligious people, the ones who stay home and read The Sunday Times, I would rather speak of the religious in people, in all of us. I take “religion” to mean the being-religious of human beings, which I put on a par with being political or being artistic. By “the religious,” I mean a basic structure of human

10  The love of God

experience and even, as I hope to show, the very thing that most constitutes human experience as experience, as something that is really happening. I do not confine religion to something confessional or sectarian, like being a Muslim or a Hindu, a Catholic or a Protestant, although I hasten to add that the great religions of the world are important and without them we would quickly lose sight of religious categories and practices, which means that we would lose something basic. And once again, we need to remind ourselves, the religious sense of life would never mean just one thing for everybody, as if it had some sort of common ahistorical, universal, transcendental structure. I try to swear off thinking like that about anything. Indeed, as we will see, what we call “religion” is very much a category constructed in modernity. With a notion like the absolute future, we move, or we are moved, past the circle of the present and of the foreseeable future, past the manageable prospects of the present, beyond the sphere in which we have some mastery, beyond the domain of sensible possibilities that we can get our hands on, into a darker and more uncertain and unforeseeable region, into the domain of “God knows what” (literally!). Here we can at best feel our way, like a blind man with a stick, unsure and unsteady, trying to be prepared for something that will take us by surprise, which means trying to prepare for something for which we cannot be prepared. We cross over the border of rational planning methods, venturing into the sort of thing that makes corporate managers nervous, venturing out onto terra incognita. The absolute future is not much help in planning an investment strategy, where the idea is to guess the trends; nonetheless, as every fund manager eventually finds out, it belongs irreducibly to the structure of life in time. This is the sphere of the impossible, of something

I have analyzed the complexities of the work of Jacques Derrida, which is always in the background of this book, in a more detailed way in my The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); modesty prevents me from recommending Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997) as a lucid and lively introduction to Derrida.

The impossible is a defining religious structure—and this is a central motif of this study—the stuff of which religion more deeply understood is made. When the Latin comic poet Terence wrote that since what we wish for is impossible, we would have more peace if we sought only the possible, he was advising us to give up religion. Had Martin Luther King heeded Terence, he would never have written

11  The love of God

of whose possibility we just cannot conceive. But of course the impossible happens, which is the import of the story of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary. So it is not simply or absolutely impossible, like “p and not-p,” which would reduce it to incoherence, but what the French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls “the impossible,” meaning something whose possibility we did not and could not foresee, something that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, that has never entered into the mind of human beings (1 Cor. 2:9). So I am plainly advising us to revisit the idea of the impossible and to see our way clear to thinking the possibility of the impossible, of the impossible, of the possible as the “im-possible,” and to think of God as the “becoming possible of the impossible,” as Derrida also says.

12  The love of God

his speech about the dream he had, which was a dream for the impossible. For with God, as Gabriel told a very surprised virgin, everything is possible, even the impossible. That is what we mean by God. The impossible, if I may be so bold, is all part of a divine day’s work for God, part of God’s job description. Of course, a virginal conception is not all part of a day’s work for the rest of us, but the Scriptures are meant as “good news,” not newspaper stories about current events, but figurations of the impossible, of the miraculousness of life, of unforeseeable events, large or small, that elicit an “it’s a miracle!” from us. The name of God is the name of the chance for something absolutely new, for a new birth, for the expectation, the hope, the hope against hope (Rom. 4:18) in a transforming future. Without it we are left without hope and are absorbed by rational management techniques. But that chance is not without risk, because we never know who is going to come knocking at our door; it could be Gabriel himself or it could be a devil. With the absolute future there are no absolute guarantees, no contracts or warranties. With the absolute future, there is a lot of risk, so faith, hope, and love have to work around the clock. The impossible, I said, is what makes experience to be experience, makes it truly worthy of the name “experience,” an occasion in which something really “happens,” as opposed to the regular grooves and tick-tock time of hum-drum life, when nothing much is really going on. The impossible is what gives life its salt. But notice that if the impossible is the condition of any real experience, of experience itself, and if the impossible is a defining religious category, then it follows that experience itself, all experience, has a religious character, whether or not you march yourself off to church on Sunday morning now that your mother is no longer there

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to get you out of bed. That religious edge to experience, that notion of life at the limit of the possible, on the verge of the impossible, constitutes a religious structure, the religious side of every one of us, with or without bishops or rabbis or mullahs. That is what I mean by “religion without religion” (to borrow another phrase from Derrida), which, I hasten to add, does not mean that we cannot find genuine religion within religion, too (see Chapter Four). This is the main idea I shall be defending throughout these pages. The present and the future-present fall under the range of our powers, our potencies, our possibilities. Here things are manageable, cut to size and proportioned to our knowledge, so that we know what to do in the present situation and what to expect in the future. Here we are self-possessed and we have our bearings. This is the sphere of what the medieval theologians called the “cardinal” virtues, the four strictly philosophical virtues of “prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance,” upon which human life is propped as upon the four hinges (cardines) of a table. These are the virtues of the self-possessed, of the best and the brightest, what Aristotle called the “phronimoi,” the men (and he meant men) of practical wisdom, of insight and practical knowhow, the well-hinged who know what is what, the men of means who went to all the best schools and who set the pace for the rest of us who are lower down on Aristotle’s very aristocratic ladder. But when we come unhinged, when our powers and our potencies are driven to their limits, when we are overwhelmed, exposed to something we cannot manage or foresee, then, in that limit situation of the possibility of the impossible, we experience the limits, the impossibility, of our own possibilities. Then we sink to our knees in faith and hope and love, praying and weeping like mad.

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These are what the theologians call (somewhat chauvinistically) the “theological” virtues, by which they mean that we have come up against the impossible. Here, in the sphere of these limit situations, we are asked to believe what seems incredible (remember the stories of Mary, or father Abraham trekking his way to Moriah). For after all, to believe what seems highly credible or even likely requires a minimum of faith, whereas to believe what seems unbelievable, what it seems impossible to believe, that is really faith. If you have real faith, Jesus said, you could say to the mountain, “‘move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matt. 17:20). So, too, to hope when all seems hopeless, to “hope against hope,” as St. Paul says (Rom. 4:18), that is really hope, as opposed to the sanguinity that comes when the odds are on our side, which is the hope of a mediocre fellow. Finally, to dare to love someone far above our station, like a beggar in love with a princess, or to dare to think that someone so wonderful could love us, to dare to love in such an impossible situation, that is love worth its salt. Or, to go to a further and still more paradoxical extreme: to love someone who is not lovable. It is no great feat, after all, to love the loveable, to love our friends and those who tell us we are wonderful; but to love the unlovable, to love those who do not love us, to love our enemies—that is love. That is impossible, the impossible, which is why we love it all the more. So the unhinged life of love and hope and faith is saltier and more passionate and more worth living than that of Aristotle’s well-hinged phronimoi who swing back and forth effortlessly and make it all look easy (even if it takes a lot of training). Religion, I say at the risk of being misquoted, is for the unhinged. (That is, for lovers.) In religion, the time, time

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itself, is always out of joint. The religious sense of life awakens when we lose our bearings and let go, when we find ourselves brought up against something that exceeds our powers, that overpowers us and knocks us off our hinges, something impossible vis-à-vis our limited potencies. The religious sense of life kicks in when we are solicited by the voices of the impossible, by the possibility of the impossible, provoked by an unforeseeable and absolute future. Here is a realm where things do not bend to our knowledge or our will and we are not calling the shots. We are out of our element. This is God’s element, not ours, the element of the impossible, God’s realm or “Kingdom,” where God rules. Something, I know not what, some element in things exceeds our grasp and eludes our reach. Here things are astir with some element of chance beyond our best-laid plans, some future that we cannot see, something that by withdrawing from sight nonetheless draws us out of ourselves and draws us on, something for which we pray and weep. Our sense of reality and of its limits is disturbed; our sense of what is possible and impossible begins to tremble, to destabilize, to become unsteady and uncertain. We begin to lose our grip and find ourselves in the grip of something that carries us along. We are exposed, vulnerable, expectant, in motion, moving, being moved, by the impossible. We are transformed. Our only recourse is to hang on by our teeth, that is, to have faith and hope, and to love this possibility of an impossible and unmasterable future which is not in our hands. Love and hope and faith are the virtues of the impossible, taking the measure of the immeasurable future. The borders of the possible are safe but flat, sure but narrow, well defined but confining, and they stake out the lines of an unsalted and mediocre life, without a passionate hope,

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where nothing really happens and all present systems will do just fine. If at the end of our lives we find that all our hopes have been sensible and moderate and measured by the horizon of the future present, if we have never been astir with the impossible, then we shall also find that on the whole life has passed us by. If safe is what you want, forget religion and find yourself a conservative investment counselor. The religious sense of life has to do with exposing oneself to the radical uncertainty and the open-endedness of life, with what we are calling the absolute future, which is meaninggiving, salt-giving, risk-taking. The absolute future is a risky business, which is why faith, hope, and love have to kick in. Our hearts are restless (“inquietum est cor nostrum”), Augustine said, astir with the possibility of renewal and rebirth, pregnant with an absolute future, an absolute surprise, just like the Virgin Mary. Religion on my telling is a pact or “covenant” with the impossible. To have a religious sense of life is to long with a restless heart for a reality beyond reality, to tremble with the possibility of the impossible. If the religious sense of life is sometimes thought of in terms of eternity, under the influence of Plato, my advice is to rethink it in terms of time, as a temporal way to be, a way to ride the waves of time, trying to catch its swells while trying not to end up like a drowned rat. That is why religious narratives are filled with so many miracle stories, which are stories of transforming change more stunning than anything Lewis Carroll dared imagine could happen to Alice—virgins becoming mothers, mountains moving on command, seas parting, the dead rising from the grave, and—most importantly, because this is what these stories are all about—sinners being forgiven and given a new heart, metanoia. To forgive is to lift the weight of the past and

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give someone a new lease on life, a new future, which is arguably the most basic thing Jesus had to say. The Scriptures are filled with narratives in which the power of the present is broken and the full length and breadth of the real opens up like a flower, unfolding the power of the possible, the power of the impossible beyond the possible, of the hyper-real beyond the real. So rather than being carried off to some illusory and fantastic realm, which is what critics of religion like Freud and Marx have concluded, faith, hope, and love are what we need to keep up with what is really going on in the real beyond the real, the open-ended hyper-real beyond the constricting limits of the present. Rather than hallucinations, faith, hope, and love are what we need to have a real and transforming experience. “When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the earth,” the psalmist sings (Ps. 104: 30). Embedded in the biblical idea of God as creator is the idea of re-creation. God cannot simply spend six days creating the world and then throw the tools on the truck and drive off for a long weekend. We require God to be on the job around the clock, for part of the job of making all things in the first place is to make all things new, again and again. We are not content to be born, but we want to be born anew, born again, as the Bible-thumpers like to sing and shout (and I am thumping right along with them on that!). Every “yes”—remember Mary’s “yes”—naturally solicits a second “yes,” a confirmation and prolongation of the first “yes,” which insures that we do not go back on our word. The structure of the “yes,” which goes to the heart of human experience, is a structure of doubling or repetition, of “yes, yes,” which is pretty much what the Hebrew “Amen” means—oui, oui, so be it, three cheers, right on! Yes, yes to what is coming, to the God of yes, to the becoming possible of the impossible.

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This also explains why religion has a prophetic dimension. But by “prophetic” I do not mean perfecting our predictive powers about the future-present, foreseeing what the future holds—as if being religious were something like making a weather forecast. I am referring to what is called in the Jewish and Christian traditions “messianic” hope and expectation, which looks forward to the peace and justice of the messianic age. Even Karl Marx, who fancied himself a coldhearted scientist who was dispassionately exposing the futility of religious illusion in the name of revolutionary historical progress, had a bit of the wild-eyed Jewish prophet about him. As anyone who knows anything about prophetic religion can see, Marx’s “science” of political economy, which purported to have calculated the cold economic laws that turn the wheels of history (the side of Marx that turned out to be a howler), was a transcription of a prophetic passion, of a prophetic longing for the messianic age (while he thought he was debunking religion). Marx was praying and weeping for an age in which the rich stop feeding off the poor and making their fortunes off the bent backs of the most defenseless people in our society, off minorities and immigrants, women and children. That is the best side of Marx, the most enduring side, his prophetico-religious side, the way that even he continued to say a little prayer at night to the Hebrew Lord of history, just before nodding off (even if he did not remember a thing about it in the morning). That is a Marxism to which anyone who is not a loveless lout should say “yes, yes,” should devoutly pray “come,” “may Thy Kingdom come.” Marx is descended from a long line of Jewish prophets, which is why, to the horror of Pope John Paul II—who divides the laurels with Ronald Reagan as the World Historical Conqueror of the Evil Empire—certain versions of Marx’s atheism play so well

in the churches of the poor, in which, ironically, his successor, Pope Francis, was nurtured. That is also why I think the distinction between theism and atheism is a little more unstable than people think, including most popes and bishops.

I am all along building up the nerve to pose my question, to really ask my guiding question, which I have learned from St. Augustine, “what do I love when I love my God?”. Everything depends on this question. It is my un-cardinal question—which is, no doubt, why it can make bishops nervous—the question of the unhinged. But before taking it up directly, I must first, once again following St. Augustine, make a confession. This confession comes accompanied by a recommendation that we all join in, because I have no intention of being left all alone twisting slowly in the wind of this confession while everyone else comes off looking innocent as a lamb. I am no phallic hero of the solitary leap and I have no heart for a lonely plunge into the abyss. I confess that I am unhinged, that I do not know who I am. But I highly recommend that we all hold hands and make a common confession that we are all unhinged and do not know who we are. We all want to know who we are and what our lives are “about”— that is our first, last, and constant concern. That is the passion of our lives, and it is a deeply religious passion. For better or worse (it depends on which day you ask me), we do not simply live but we wonder why; for better or worse, we do not simply live but we dream of things that never have been and wonder why not (Edward “Teddy” Kennedy’s beautiful eulogy of Robert “Bobby” Kennedy a half-century ago). We are not content with life, with the limits that the present and the possible press upon us, but we strive and strain for

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THE SECRET

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something or other, we know not what. My modest contribution to that ageless restlessness of the human heart, the one small thing I hope to add to the philosophia perennis, is this: we do not know who we are—that is who we are. “Quaestio mihi factus sum” (it sounds better in Latin) is the way Augustine put it: “I have been made a question unto myself,” echoing St. Paul (Rom. 7:15). Who am I? I am one who finds his life a question, whose life is always being put in question, which is what gives life its salt. We seek but do not find, not quite, not if we are honest, which does not discourage the religious heart but drives it on and heightens the passion, for this is one more encounter with the impossible. We may and we must have our opinions on the subject; we must finally reach a judgment and take a stand about life, but my advice is to attach a coefficient of uncertainty to what we say, for even after we have taken a stand, we still do not know who we are. We do not Know The Secret (notice the caps!). Let there be no misunderstanding: I am not recommending a life of ignorance or of fence-sitting, of the comfort of finding the spot that precedes the “either/or,” the fictitious peace of a space that somehow eludes the pull of competing forces, without siding or deciding one way or the other. Far from it; I have defined life in terms of salt and passion, religious passion, a passion for the impossible. But I am saying that the condition of this passion is non-knowing, that non-knowing is the inescapable element in which decisions are reached, which intensifies their passion. This non-knowing is not a simple garden-variety ignorance but rather more like what the mystics call a docta ignorantia, a learned or wise ignorance, that knows that we do not know and knows that this non-­knowing is the inescapable horizon in which we must act, with all due decisiveness, with all the urgency that life demands.

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For life does not take a break, it does not let up its demands on us for an hour or two while we all break for lunch and a bit of a nap. We are required to act, but our decisions are covered by a thin film, a quiet and uneasy sense, of unknowing. I am not trying to be discouraging. Far from it. I do not regard “the secret” to be all bad news but part of an upbeat and salutary minimalism that proceeds on the assumption that we get the best results by confessing fully the difficulty of the human condition and not putting too high a spin on things or too good a face on our predicament. The secret, on my hypothesis, is that there is no Secret. I am not saying all this in the service of a kind of hip academic skepticism, of a phallic, modish nihilism that is one of the luxuries of life in the tenured lane. On the contrary—to put it in terms that every investor in mutual funds will understand—I think that in the long run this pays the best returns, even if in the short run it is unnerving. As far as I can tell, and I think that this is essential to the unhinging and impassioning sense of life that I am trying to describe, we are not hard wired to some Transcendental Super-Force which communicates to us The Secret about The Meaning of our lives, or of the universe, or of good and evil, on the condition that we pray and fast and have no impure thoughts. That, I think, is how a lot of people think about religion, including a lot of religious people themselves, and I am trying to talk them out of it. As a rule of thumb, I should add, the best way to flag the tendency that I am cautioning against is to capitalize it [It]. We have not, to my knowledge, been visited by some Super-Revelation, some Apocalyptic Unveiling, that settles all our questions. Nor have we, I should add, come up with some SuperMethod in philosophy or even in science that will, so long as we follow It (The Method) rigorously, expose the Essence

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or Hyper-essence of Reality, that will steer us through the stormy waves of becoming or cut through the veil of appearances. We cannot, by science, philosophy, or religion, situate ourselves safely in some privileged spot above the mortal fray below having gained the high ground of a Privileged Access to the Way Things Are, which distinguishes “us” (philosophers, physicists, true believers, etc.) from the poor beggars down there in quotidian life who wander about two headed and do not know The Way. We all need a “way,” I am not denying that, but I deny that anyone has the authority to Capitalize their way. There is no way to know The Way, no way that I know, anyway. By confessing up front that we do not know who we are, that we are cut off from The Secret, we find ourselves forced constantly to traffic in “interpretations,” the inescapability of which is a good way to define “hermeneutics,” a word that has had some currency among contemporary academics. I do not recommend ignorance and I am not saying that there is no truth, but I am arguing that the best way to think about truth is to call it the best interpretation that anybody has come up with yet while conceding that no one knows what is coming next. There are lots of competing truths battling with one another for their place in the sun, and the truth is that we have to learn to cope with the conflict. The skies do not open up and drop The Truth into our laps. Pressing this hermeneutic point about the inescapability of interpretation will also force a shift in what we mean by “truth,” a shift into doing the truth, which will be a little like doing the impossible. I shall take this up in the final chapter, where I shall argue that this is especially characteristic of what we mean by “religious truth.” For by a “religion without religion” I do not mean a religion without truth.

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We are bereft, alas, of any apocalypse that unveils The Secret to us. We all pull on our pants one leg at a time and do our best to make it through the day. The secret is that there is no Secret, no capitalized Know-it-all Breakthrough Principle or Revelation that lays things out the way they Really Are and thereby lays to rest the conflict of interpretations. When we open our mouths, it is only we who are speaking, we poor existing individuals, as Kierkegaard liked to put it, and we would be ill advised to think that we are the Mouthpiece of Being or the Good or of the Almighty. But on my hypothesis, that is not bad news, because it tends to check the violence, to check the spread of people who confuse themselves with Being, or the Good, or the Almighty, who think that they have been sent into the world to tell the rest of us what God or Being or Nature (or Whatever) thinks, when in fact what we are hearing is nothing more than the views of Harry Gutentag, who is a decent enough chap if you get to know him but who tends to take himself a little too seriously. Nor am I denying what we call the “Holy Scriptures” or the “Word of God.” I am just trying to come up with a good description of what that means by admitting that it refers to the words we give to God so that God may speak to us. I am just trying to situate such words within the element of unknowing, within this psalm to learned ignorance whose harp I am plucking at the moment. Hence I will continue to stick to my minimalist hypothesis even if we include a Book of Apocalypse, or of Revelation, in our sacred Scriptures. For we lack an apocalyptic revelation that this Book is “The Apocalypse,” which is something that the believers in that Book take on faith, which means through a glass darkly, which means sans apocalypse. Even the Apocalypse is sans apocalypse. That means that the believers in that Book should

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temper their claims about The Revelation they (believe they) have received, since it is their interpretation that they have received a revelation, while not everyone else agrees. A revelation is an interpretation that the believers believe is a revelation, which they interpret as a revelation, which means that it is one more competing entry in the conflict of interpretations. Believers should accordingly resist becoming triumphalistic about what they believe, either personally or in their particular community. Apart from the intrinsic merits of the book about whose interpretation we can all argue (and argue and argue), what they mainly have to offer in support of their belief that this is The Revelation is the fact that they believe it, or that it has been believed for centuries (one reason for which, history frequently teaches us, is the fate that was visited upon those who declined to believe it). They do not establish anything except their own mean-spiritedness by calling everyone else “infidels” or by looking down on everyone else whom they accuse of lacking “transcendence” in their lives. Once again, religion is never far from violence. To be sure, as I am also arguing, religion does not have a corner on the market of pretending to Know The Secret. I would recommend the same modesty to scientists and philosophers, who should likewise resist adopting apocalyptic and capitalizing attitudes toward Physics or Metaphysics, lest these two otherwise modest and respectable enterprises, together or separately, succumb to the illusion that it is they who have seized the soft underbelly of Nature, or Being, or Reality, that they, if I may say so, have their finger on Being’s button. Confessing that we have no access to The Secret introduces a salutary caution into our lives which tends to contain the violence, the religious and intellectual “road rage,” that threatens to break out whenever we run up against something

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“different.” The different is the bête noire of the faithful. But the effects of this confession are not only critical and negative, but highly affirmative and closely connected to the religious passion for the impossible that I am trying to describe. For if the secret is that there is no Secret, then it follows that we can only and indeed must believe, and indeed that we must believe something. When I say that we do not know who we are, I do not have my chin on my chest. I am not recommending despondency and despair and that we give up the search. Like everybody else, I would like to know as much as I can about as many things as possible and I have spent a small fortune on my library. I am not composing my “lamentations,” not letting out a haunting wail that everything is vanity, a useless Sisyphean labor. On the contrary, this is all part of an upbeat and affirmative operation that recognizes that we are called upon to invent and reinvent ourselves or—since I am talking about the sort of thing over which we do not have mastery— to let ourselves be reinvented, to let ourselves be overtaken by the impossible. I am asking that we open ourselves toward a future we cannot see coming, whose coming we can see only darkly and in a mirror, for which nonetheless we passionately hope and long. Rather than a Sisyphean lament I prefer a great and giant “yes” like the titillating “yes” that Molly Bloom delivers at the end of Ulysses. “And yes, I said yes, I will, Yes.” Very rousing, very arousing. If ever I broke my own rule, “yes” (“Yes”) would be the only thing I would allow myself to capitalize: yes to the future, to what is coming, to possibilities that eye has not seen or ear heard, to the possibility of the impossible, yes to the God of yes, to “Ja”-weh. Oui, oui, amen, jawohl. Yes, God is yes. Yes, yes to my God. Now at long last I have gained the heart to take up our question and to return to my dear St. Augustine, whom we

find praying and weeping over himself back in the Confessions, in scenes so intimate that we blush to witness them, in words so private that we are embarrassed to overhear them.

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WHAT DO I LOVE WHEN I LOVE MY GOD?

Augustine’s opening line in the Confessions is that our hearts are restless and will not rest until they rest in God, which I have transcribed a little impudently by saying that we are all a little unhinged. We are driven hither and yon by one desire after another and sometimes by several desires at once, and we shall get no peace until we rest in “God,” for the name of God is the name of what we love and desire. Whatever that may be. Then the real question shifts to the one that we have been following: what do I love when I love you, my God? You know that I love you, O Lord, Augustine says to God. You know, Lord, and I know as well, that I am after something, driven to and fro by my restless search for something, by a deep desire, indeed by a desire beyond desire, beyond particular desires for particular things, by a desire for I-knownot-what, for something impossible. Still, even if we are lifted on the wings of such a love, the question remains, what do I love, what am I seeking? When Augustine talks like this, we ought not to think of him as stricken by a great hole or lack or emptiness which he is seeking to fill up, but as someone overflowing with love who is seeking to know where to direct his love. He is not out to see what he can get, but out to see what he can give. What is the name of what I love when I love my God? Since we are told that God is love, this question, I have said, tends to draw us into a circle that makes bishops everywhere nervous. Is it the case, as Augustine the bishop thought, that whenever we are carried away by the love of something,

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anything at all, it is really God whom we are seeking, but we simply have not come to realize that it is God whom we love, rather the way I see Peter coming even if I do not know it is Peter? Or might it be the other way around, that the name of God is a name we confer on things we love very dearly, like peace or justice or the messianic age? Which one is the example of which? Is love a way of exemplifying God? Or is God a name we have for exemplifying love? Which is which? What is what? Given what I have been saying about the Secret, I must insist on the productivity and fertility of keeping that question open. If, in the orthodox view of the councils of the confessional religions, love is one of the predicates or names we give to God, and God is decidedly the subject, then I am trying to leave a little space for heterodoxy. Bishops and cardinals tend to be “hingers” who try to hang religion on the Right Teaching, so that the doors of orthodoxy will swing smoothly open for the believers and tightly shut to the infidels, while I am inclined to think that we have all been unhinged by the secret, and that this is what gives life salt and genuine religious passion. I am interested in drawing the lines, not between the orthodox and the heterodox, or even between theists and atheists, or religious and secular. My cardinal distinction is between the salty and the saltless, which is how I mark off the different ways of loving God, with whom nothing is impossible, which is the defining mark of religious passion. Augustine says that God is love and that what we love when we love our God is God, and that when “nonbelievers” (himself included, before his conversion) go off in search of other things, whether it be very sublime things like justice or very low-down things like satisfying lust or greed, they are really engaged in a more or less enlightened

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or benighted search for God, except they do not realize that it is God for whom they search. But, in my opinion, however tightly Augustine tried to close this door, he left it slightly ajar. For Augustine’s question allows us to see that the passion for God has a wider sweep than this, and his question continues to stir even after Augustine thinks he has settled it. That is, I would keep Augustine’s question open, give it a full throttle as a question, and treat it as a crucial and permanent part of the passion of our lives, of the quaestio mihi factus sum of which he spoke. When we put our head down and love God with all our strength, we do not know whether love is an exemplification of God or God is an exemplification of love. Or whether justice is one of the names we use to speak about God or whether the name of God is a way we have of speaking about justice. Or the impossible (the list goes on). We confess that we remain confused about this point and that we do not know how to resolve the confusion. Augustine’s question—“what do I love when I love my God?”—persists as a life-long and irreducible question, a first, last, and constant question, which permanently pursues us down the corridors of ours days and nights, giving salt and fire to our lives. That is because that question is entangled with the other persistent Augustinian question, “who am I?”, to which, as we have seen above, Augustine replies in the powerful tenth book of the Confessions “a soil of difficulty and of great sweat.” In your eyes, O Lord, he says, “I have become a question to myself.” So these two questions, the question of God and the question of the self, go hand in hand for Augustine. So much God, so much self: the more I am inwardly tossed about by what I love, the more I am tossed about by the question of who I am, in virtue of which this

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sense of being a “self” is stirred up and intensified. That is why I think that I am being very Augustinian when I say: we do not know who we are—that is who we are. I do not question the self, but I treat the self as a question. When we confess that we do not know what we love when we love our God, we are also confessing that we do not know who we are, we who love our God. Who am I?, I ask with Augustine, and the answer is, I am a question unto myself. Who am I? The answer that comes back is another question; the answer is to keep questioning, to keep the question alive—that is what a “self” is—to keep questioning and to love God, to love God and to do what you will. That is still another interesting thing Augustine said, although I am giving it a spin. His own idea was meaner; he meant we should feel free to treat “heretics” in a rather unloving way, to be a bit salty with them, as long as we love God, which is why love is a two-edged sword. What do I love when I love my God? Is it God? Is it justice? Is it love itself? Once again, the answer is another question. I am the one who troubles himself about this, and the name of God is the name of what I am troubling myself about. I am being turned and tossed about (perturbatio) by the impossible. Conservative, orthodox, and right-wing religious types will think that I am waffling, that I am trying to dodge the question and avoid giving an answer. Actually, the opposite is true. My idea is to give the passion of this question full throttle. My whole idea is that, since I doubt that there is something called “The Answer” to this question, in caps, the only thing we can do is to respond. The way Mary responded “here I am” when Gabriel broke the amazing news to the Virgin about the birth of a son, or the way Abraham answered “here I am” when the Lord demanded the death of his son (a very problematic story that needs a careful gloss). The whole idea

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is to respond, to do the truth, to make truth happen, facere veritatem, as Augustine said, to do justice, to do the impossible, to make the mountain move, to go where I cannot go, even if I do not know who I am or what I love when I love my God. My “responsibility” is not just to speculate at my word processor about the name of God but to do justice. When the love of God calls, we had better respond. When the demand for justice comes calling, we had better respond “here I am!” For it is God calling, and we must be responsive, responsible. By the same token, conservative, orthodox, and right-wing religious types have to watch out that their willingness to specify and determine in well-formed formulae what they love when they love their God does not turn into an easy irresponsibility and complacency, which allows them to think that since they have signed on to some creedal formula or the other, or done what they were told to do by the creedal handbooks or leaders, they have done their duty and carried out the depths of their responsibility. Then the relatively determinate character of their confession of a confessional faith becomes a convenient answer, which substitutes for responding “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). I am groping for a genuinely religious idea of “truth” and a true idea of “religion,” one that turns on troubling about oneself and about what one loves, on allowing oneself to be unhinged and troubled by the impossible. Inquietum est cor nostrum: Our hearts are restless and they will not rest until they rest in you, O Lord, my God. But who are you, Lord? And where are you? And who am I? I am saying that the structure of the religious breaks into our lives just at that point where we experience the limits of our powers, potencies, and possibilities and find ourselves up against the impossible, which is beyond our powers. Those who refuse the religious

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want to retain their own self-possession, their own power, their own will. The ancient Stoics said that if we seek what is possible, accept what is necessary, and stay within our limits, we shall have autonomy and autarchy; then we shall be happy because we shall not lack anything that we let ourselves desire. Augustine mocked that idea by saying that the happiness of such men is to have made peace with their misery! The Stoics were advising us to refuse religion, to refuse to make ourselves vulnerable, to have calm and apatheia (no passion), whereas in the religious sense of life all that calm is disturbed by a divine passion, a divine perturbatio, a divine unhinging, a restless stirring with a passion for the impossible. Remember that St. Augustine’s famous “conversion” did not exactly lie in giving up sex and romance, which was only its most sensational side, but in giving up his disposition over himself, his attachment to his own career and ambitions as a rising rhetorician who stood to get a comfortable and important post in the Roman government. His conversion occurred at the precise point when his self-possession was displaced by a possession by God, when his love of self gave way to a love of God. It is only when he had broken the spell of selflove—you know that I love you, Lord—that he was visited by the question, but what do I love when I love my God? So long as he was pursuing his own desire for the flesh and his own ambition, there was absolutely no question at all about what he was after. Augustine’s conversion lay in a transformation of what he loved, which involved a self-transformation of Augustine himself into a question unto himself, and a transformation of his love into a question about what he loved. This deep and resonating question of what he loved when he loved God was not a question he was asking in the abstract or prior to the love. It was not as if he had been invited to

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speak on this topic at a conference and the sponsors had offered to pay him a handsome honorarium and to pick up his expenses, so he felt that he had better come up with something. “God” was not some sort of grand theoretical or explanatory hypothesis for Augustine, like the much-soughtafter “unified theory” for scientists today, but something that had transformed his life. The question he asked about love was a question he raised within love, within the passion of his love, in which he tried to understand what he already loved. The love was a given. It was when the love of God began to overtake him and unhinge him and shake his life to the roots that the question, what do I love when I love you, O Lord, began to have some teeth in it. We usually think that we first have to get to know something or someone in order subsequently to get to love them. But one of the great lessons of St. Augustine’s writings is that it is love that drives our search to know. Caught up in the grips of what is loved, love is driven to understand what it loves, which is something that we shall see borne out below when we turn to St. Anselm, whose thought is very close to Augustine’s. Love both drives the question and makes it possible to understand what we love, as far, at least, as it can be understood. In the religious sense of life we passionately love something that resists any Final Explanation, that refuses to be boiled down to some determinate form. Contrary to the way his orthodox readers like to read the Confessions, I think that Augustine’s story shows us that religion kicks in, not necessarily when we sign on the dotted line of some confessional faith or other, but when we confess our love for something besides ourselves, when (on one etymology) we “bind ourselves over” (re-ligare) to something other, which means something other than ourselves, or (on another etymology) when

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we gather ourselves together (re-legere) and center ourselves on a transforming focus of our love. Something grander and larger than us comes along and bowls us over and dispossesses us. Something overpowers our powers, potencies, and possibilities, and exposes us to something impossible. Something makes a demand upon us and shakes us loose from the circle of self-love, drawing us out of ourselves and into the service of others and of something to come. The religious sense of life kicks in when I am rigorously loyal, “religiously” faithful (religio on still another etymology, meaning “scrupulous” or “in a disciplined way”) to the service of something other than myself, more important than myself, to which I swear an oath, which has me more than I have it. Even if we do not have a lot of clarity about exactly what this is. Especially if we do not. Only then am I driven to question and to ask what I love. I am driven by love to understand what I love when I love my God. I am at the very least in love with love, not in the sense that I love being in love, love flirtation without commitment, courtship without marriage, sex without children, but in the sense that I am beset by love, overtaken by love, drawn out of myself by love. I understand that the whole idea of a self rests in this dedication, this gift of myself, to something beyond my own self-love—to the children, all the children, not just my own, to the future, to the least among us. In the name of God, or justice, or the Force, or something, I know not what. Even if, if to all the world, I look like a garden-variety atheist (if you still move around within the increasingly questionable distinction between theism and atheism). Perhaps especially then. I am not making a brief against the confessional faiths (a point I will take up in Chapter Four). The religion of the churches and the organized faiths remains, for better or for worse, the

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dominant form that religion takes today and the permanent depository of the most ancient religious narratives. They provide religion with a critical mass, with a structure and social constancy without which it would likely disappear or dissipate. They provide permanent structures—buildings and institutions and communities—within which the great narratives are preserved, interpreted, and passed on to the next generation. They form and nourish people who perform innumerable acts of selfless service and generosity that shame the rest of us selfseekers. They preserve the name of God by proclaiming it and praising it systematically and consistently. Unfortunately, they also devote an ungodly amount of time to bringing order to their ranks, silencing the voice of dissenters and excluding— “excommunicating”—those who beg to differ from their communities and institutions, doing battle with those of different confessions and in general trying to make people who do not agree with them look bad. So the people of the impossible are also impossible people, a point that I will take up in the fifth chapter. It was always thus (small comfort, that). Institutionalized communities are defined by their identity and by the power to maintain their identity, which includes the power to excommunicate the different. If the community is hospitable to too many “others,” it will cease to be a community. Hospitality, welcoming the other, is something that religious institutions passionately preach but practice with a carefully calibrated caution. Any wider sense of religion, of a religiousness without the confessional religions, including our religion without religion, will always be parasitic upon the confessional forms, will always feed off them, repeat them with a difference, all the while depending upon the worldly body and the spiritual voice that these institutions give to religion.

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I am not denying that genuine religion in the sense I am advancing can be found within the confessional religious communities. I am not arguing against the confessional faiths but only insisting that they ought to be disturbed from within by a radical non-knowing, by a faith without faith, by a sense of the secret, and that they ought to confess like the rest of us that they do not know who they are. Quaestio mihi factus sum is a good institutional model, not just something for the privacy of the heart. It would always be a matter of inhabiting the distance between the concrete and determinate religious faiths, Islam or Catholicism, say, with their vast creedal and institutional armatures, their bishops, their mullahs, and their occasional armies, and this more radical and open-ended religion that does not know what it believes, that does not have the wherewithal to lay down its head, that is made a question unto itself, that does not know what we love when we love our God. Faith is not safe. Faith is not pure faith all the way down, as if all the gaps and crevices of faith are filled with more faith and it all makes for a perfect, continuous and well-rounded whole. Faith is always—and this is its condition—faith without faith, faith that needs to be sustained from moment to moment, from decision to decision, by the renewal, reinvention, and repetition of faith which is—if I may say so— continually exposed to discontinuity, doubt and uncertainty. Faith is always inhabited by unfaith, which is why the prayer in the New Testament makes such perfect sense, “Lord, I do believe, help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). For my faith cannot be insulated from unbelief; it is co-constituted by unbelief, which is why faith is faith and not knowledge. For I do not know what I love when I love my God. Not that I do not love God, for that is not a matter of knowing, but that I am always asking who or what the God that I love is.

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We are social and historical beings, concretely situated in one historical, cultural, and linguistic tradition or another, formed and forged—until recently, at least—by one religious tradition or another. Our religious aspirations have been given one determinate form or another by the traditions to which we belong and by which we have been nourished, by the way the name of God has been given flesh and substance for us. I do not deny that; I affirm that. I have no desire to twist free from such historical situatedness in the name of some purely private religion or of some overarching ahistorical universal religious truth, which would be the religion of an Aufklärer, of an intellectual with a feeling of superiority over gardenvariety believers. A God without historical flesh and blood, a religion without the body of a community and its traditions, is a bloodless abstraction. But I want these determinate forms of religious life to be inwardly disturbed by the secret that springs from their historical contingency, put into question by the question of what they love, and forced always to negotiate the distance between the determinate historical form in which their religious desire has taken shape in them and the open-endedness of the secret, of the equally religious confession that we do not know who we are or what we love when we love our God. The Christian, to take the example I can work with the best, is someone who confesses that the power of God is with Jesus, that Jesus is Emmanuel, which means “God with us,” and at the same time, in the same breath, is continually disturbed by the question that Jesus asks, “who do men say that I am?” (Matt. 16:15). Contrary to the condensed wisdom of the bumper stickers, Jesus is not The Answer but the place of the question, of an abyss that is opened up by the life and death of a man who, by putting forgiveness

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before retribution, threw all human accounting into confusion, utterly confounding the stockbrokers of the finite, who always seek a balance of payments, which means who always want to settle the score. Who is this man who counsels us to forgive, to give up what is our due, who asks, who did, the impossible? What does his life and death tell us about ourselves, including those among us who, because of an accident of birth, have never heard his name? What is happening in and what is opened up by our memory of Jesus, by the dangerous memory of his suffering, by the promise of his kingdom, by the mystery of his unaccountable teachings of forgiveness and who told us to be of a new heart (metanoia)? What is contained in our memory of Jesus that cannot be contained by all the accumulated prestige and power of the institutions and structures, the creedal formulae and the theologies, that dare speak in his name? What mystery unfolds there? The mystery of the love of God, to be sure. But what do I love when I love my God? Where would I be without my tradition, without my worn-out copy of the Confessions? I do not know what questions I would ask, or what texts I would read, in what language I would think, or in what community I would move about. But I make a brief against the “closure” of the confessional faiths, against allowing them to close the circle of faith, to slam shut the doors of faith from the intrusions of other faiths or of un-faith, to keep faith behind closed doors, safe and secure, and thus to suffer the illusion that there is some way to settle the question whose very meaning is to be unsettling and that arises from our unsettled, unhinged, and “unquiet” (inquietum) hearts. It would never be for me a question of choosing between a determinate religious faith and this faith without faith that does not know what it believes

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or who we are, but rather of inhabiting the distance between them and of learning how to let each unhinge and disturb— and by disturbing, deepen—the other. For just as faith needs always to be exposed to the faithlessness of confessing that we do not know what we believe, or what we love when we love our God, so this more open-ended and indeterminate love of God cannot subsist in a vacuum, cannot occupy some timeless, ahistorical, and supra-linguistic spot above the fray of time and chance, some pure desert of indeterminacy. On my accounting we ought to pass our days slipping back and forth between the two, giving the desert of the secret its due while all along seeking out the hospitality of our historical traditions and the shelter of our culture, without which we would simply perish. We might think of ourselves as desert wanderers, post-modern pilgrims, homines viatores, on the way we know not where, but continually finding respite and hospitality in the determinate faiths, even as the safety of these shelters is haunted by the unsettling thought of the searing desert sun and numbing desert nights that lie outside their sheltering circles.

How the secular world became post-secular

All this talk about the impossible has only recently become possible again. It has for too long been declared off limits—by “modernity,” by the “Enlightenment,” by the great “masters of suspicion,” Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, who proposed to unmask it as so much displaced “libidinal desire” or “alienated consciousness.” But many contemporary philosophers have grown increasingly weary with the “old” Enlightenment. Their tendency has been more and more to unmask the modernist unmaskers, to criticize the modernist critiques, to grow disenchanted with the disenchanters, to question modernity’s prejudice against prejudice, and to look around for a new Enlightenment, one that is enlightened about the (old) Enlightenment. That has inevitably led to a break within their own ranks on the hot topic of religion, where even otherwise “secular” intellectuals have become suspicious of the Enlightenment suspicion of religion. That explains my use of St. Augustine in these pages, and my invocation of the story of the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin. I am taking advantage of this moment that has been called “post-modern.” One of the most important things this word would have meant had it not been ground senseless by overuse is “post-secular.” (One other very important thing that it means, or would have meant, is postindustrial, high-tech “virtual culture,” which I shall discuss

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Two

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in Chapter Six.) In this so-called post-modern moment we can listen to great and weepy saints like Augustine without dismissing them as twisted souls casting furtive glances at their mommy. But I hasten to add that this “post-secular” frame of mind is not uncritical or naive. It has arisen as the result of an “iteration” process that by criticizing the critique ends up in a post-critical position, one that is interestingly like but importantly unlike the pre-critical position. The result is the unearthing of a certain analogy between the pre-critical and the post-critical and newly opened lines of communication between them. But this is only an analogy, because the post-critical will have also passed through the critique and taken it to heart, even if it has moved on. Thus it is important for me to tell my story about how the secular world became post-secular, albeit in a highly condensed thumbnail sketch that is unashamedly intent on driving home a point. For this is the story of how the impossible has recently become possible, and it goes to the heart of my argument. A good history is never just a story but is always an argument, for every history worth its salt is telling us who we are (we who do not know who we are). In what follows I will speak of modernity and of its “before” and “after,” which for simplicity’s sake I entitle the “sacral” age, the age of “secularization,” and the “post-secular.” But I solemnly warn the reader to be extremely uneasy about any such easy periodization for, hero that I am, I accept no responsibility for it. THE SACRAL AGE

In the eleventh century, at the onset of a rebirth of learning in the Middle Ages, St. Anselm of Canterbury, a great admirer of St. Augustine, wrote a book entitled Proslogion

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(“allocution”), which he described as an exercise in “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum). He begins this treatise with a prayer that asks God to help him find God, to teach him where and how to look for God. Where are you, Lord? If I have wandered far away from home and have gotten lost, I ask where my home is. I have no doubt that it is there, but the question is where and how shall I find it? Like Augustine’s Confessions, Anselm’s inquiry clearly moves in a circle, from God to God, asking God to help him find God, like a blind man asking someone to keep talking so that he can follow the sound, on the good Augustinian principle that love, which is taken as a given, seeks to understand what it already loves and so in some sense pre-understands. The God whom Anselm seeks is a party to the search, implicated in the very undertaking to find Him, expected to help, indeed to lead the search and to give the seeker signs, for the seeker’s attention is distracted by worldly cares and his mind is darkened by sin. The Proslogion thus does not describe a movement from a cognitive degree zero to infinity, but from a groping and confused sense of something or someone, which we already possess, to a clarified sense of who and what. It describes a movement from God to God and in God, who lights the way. Had someone suggested to Anselm that he break out of this (hermeneutic) circle and start from scratch, from some neutral point outside the circle, Anselm would have thought him mad (or a fool). For Anselm, outside the circle there is no light and nothing happens. It is teasingly difficult to choreograph this scene and to lay out the space of Anselm’s little book. We have to get comfortable not only with the fact that he is turned toward us, face forward, giving us a frontal allocution, pros-logion, confronting us with a proof, but also with the fact that we have come

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upon him at his prie-Dieu, his back to us, his face aglow with prayer and turned to “You,” O Lord. He shifts easily between “God,” a massive theological object, a big metaphysical word with a thunderous semantic punch, and “You,” a word whispered to a lover, ever so softly, tenderly, lovingly, the most loving word in our language. “You” is not a spoken “meaning” at all but an address to another person, to an interlocutor rather than about something allocuted. We must imagine a yearning and tormented lover sighing, “where are You, my Beloved?” “How long will You turn Your face from me?” That adds still another twist to the scene. For if Anselm’s face is turned toward God in prayer, God’s face is turned away from Anselm, and Anselm seeks, if not to see the countenance of God, at least to be seen by God, to have God turn His face to him and look down upon him and hear his prayers. It is in this context that Anselm propounds one of the most tantalizing and frequently discussed “arguments for the existence of God” in the history of philosophical theology, one that makes it into all the anthologies. After having propounded a number of lesser arguments for God’s existence in a previous book, Anselm seeks here one single, overarching, irresistible argument that God really exists that would just sweep us away and bring us to our knees in prayer and praise and admiration for God’s mighty ways. The famous argument is that if we look within ourselves and determine what we mean by the God in whom we believe, we shall find that what we mean is “that than which no greater can be conceived,” as any fool (insipiens) would agree. By a fool he means not someone with a low IQ, but someone who mixes up the finite and the infinite, who mistakes the uncreated for the created, and who says that there is no God. But even this fool knows what he means by the God who he says does not

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exist and would agree that this is the idea that he has in his mind. But that than which no greater can be conceived cannot exist merely in the mind, for then anything that really exists outside the mind would be greater than it. From this it follows that God, that than which no greater can be conceived, must needs exist not only in the mind but also in reality, lest something greater than God be conceivable. Many commentators who have been drawn down the labyrinthine corridors of this argument have never been heard from again. I am not about to add myself to their number, although, were I to do so, the last word you would have heard from me before I disappeared into the abyss would have been an objection that the argument was not formally valid; I would thereby have added my voice to that of Thomas Aquinas, who did not like the formal argument any more than I do, and he was a saint. I am not a saint and I am more interested in the choreography of the scene than the logic of the argument, in the context of a believer seeking understanding, who asks God to give understanding to his faith so that he may better understand what he already believes and so better love what he has come to understand. I am interested in Anselm’s idea of God as one who must exist just because God is so perfect, so plentiful, so really real, and so excessive, an idea Anselm has drawn from a religious experience that is bathed in God’s bountifulness and that respects the incomprehensibility of God. Anselm has a self-delimiting concept of God, a concept that points to the inconceivability of what it conceives, to the excess of God beyond the concept. The point that interests me—the choreography—is that Anselm is conducting this argument on his knees, in a loving reverence and a faithful love of the God beyond God, of the God of his experience beyond the God conceived in any

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concept. He finds God within himself and he finds himself within God, and then seeks to clarify what he believes and finally concludes by giving thanks to God—to “You”—for helping him to understand what he believes. See Anselm, Monologion and Proslogion trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995). Jean-Luc Marion, “Is the Ontological Argument Ontological?,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, v. 30, No. 20 (April, 1992) does a wonderful job of showing what happens to this argument when it falls into the hands of modernity.

SECULARIZATION

Things could not have changed more dramatically when this argument was rehearsed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whether Anselm’s argument is defended or rebutted in modernity, the choreography is ignored, all the candles are blown out, and the animating religious spirit has been drained out of it. The prayers and tears of St. Anselm are replaced by dry-eyed, bare bones logic. The monastery chapel, the spare but gorgeous Gregorian chant, and monk’s prie-Dieu have all disappeared. The argument is labeled by Kant the “ontological” argument, by which Kant means an argument that proceeds not from empirical or experimental data but from pure a priori ideas. But that is the last thing it is for Anselm, for whom it was washed ashore from an ocean of religious experience, from his inner Augustinian experience of God’s bountiful goodness and excess which he seeks to clarify and glorify. What has happened in the intervening six or seven centuries is that philosophers from Descartes to Kant have constructed the idea of “consciousness” and the

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conscious “subject.” The old Augustinian idea of the “self,” this sinful, self-questioning, passionate, prayerful, weepy being, of restless heart and divided will, has been displaced, although you can still find it on the margins of modernity, e.g., in Pascal and later on in Kierkegaard, as we shall see. Any given age, when it is the current age, is “modern” (modo), and in it there are always counter-currents, dissident voices, which are post-modern. In its place we find a sovereign, selfpossessed, dispassionate “thinking thing,” fully in charge of its potencies and possibilities, surveying the contents of its mind to sort out which among them represents something objective out there in the external world and which should be written off as merely internal and subjective. Another way you could describe what had happened is to say that in the meantime somebody has invented “religion” and declared it off limits from “reason.” In the Middle Ages the word religio was a word for a virtue, the habit of being religious, of tending to one’s duty to God “religiously,” that is, with a sense of rigor and scrupulous loyalty to God, with a love of God. That is the sense of religion that I am defending. Vera religio meant being genuinely religious, like being truly just, not “the true religion” versus “the false religion.” But at this point there was no separate sphere or delimited region called “religion,” which was to be differentiated from reason, politics, art, science, or commerce. Religion as a regional and demarcated category is a construction of modernity which, I propose, is being deconstructed in post-modernity. In the pre-modern world, all the masters and practitioners in these several fields of endeavor were in varying degrees religious or irreligious, meaning loyal to or cynical about their religious obligations. The church was, to be sure, a massive institutional presence, and popes certainly waged sometimes epic battles

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with kings. This sense of living in a Christian world—or a Muslim one—pervaded everything. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism were all over the place, covering everything, seeping into every crevice, constituting the very air everyone breathed. But it is for just that reason that “religion” in the modern sense, as some separate sphere, apart from the “secular” order, did not exist. The word “secular” did not describe a sphere separated from “religion” but referred to someone who was not a member of a “religious order,” who was not a monk or a friar, a usage still current in the Catholic Church today. The term “secular masters” in thirteenth-century Paris was not in any way meant to disparage their piety. Nor would anyone have thought to describe the anonymous architects who dedicated their genius to the design and construction of towering cathedrals, or the anonymous artists who painted murals based on the life of Christ or the stories in the Jewish Scriptures, as “religious” artists, since that would not have differentiated them from anybody else. They were just architects and artists, and their work was to make biblical life visible and palpable to the faithful, just as the work of the clergy was to dispense the sacraments. It was not until the Renaissance that “secular” subjects began to appear, one of the earliest of which is the fourteenth-century fresco in Sienna entitled Allegory of Good Government, depicting scenes of civic order and a peaceful countryside without any overt “religious” subject matter. So by the time it gets to Kant, Anselm’s argument for the being whose bountiful excess Anselm experiences daily, in prayer and liturgy, in community and everyday life, has been transplanted to a different world where it is transformed into an argument about whether existence is a predicate. We cannot conclude to the existence of something S simply from the definition of S, Kant argues, because a definition is a set of

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predicates and existence is not a predicate. That can be seen by considering that there is not a dime’s worth of difference between the idea of a possible hundred dollars and the idea of a hundred dollars that actually exists; there is not a penny more or a penny less in the mere thought or definition of a hundred dollars than in the thought of a hundred dollars actually posited in the pockets of our trousers or deposited in our checking account. The only difference is that in the latter situation the conscious subject has grounds to “posit” the actual existence of a hundred dollars, but not in the former. Existence has to do with “positing” some S that is a complex of predicates, but it is not itself a predicate. Next case. We have entered a world composed of thinking, dispassionate, rational “subjects” charged with sorting through their sensations and ideas to separate out those among them that “represent” genuine “external objects” from those that are merely internal subjective mental events. Before modernity, it was the opposite. The medievals regarded “inanimate” things (without a soul or anima) as “contracted” to themselves, while beings possessed of a soul overflow their bodily limits and reach out into (“intend” or “tend into”) the world. The philosophers of medieval and ancient times did not think of knowing as the “internal event” of representing external things; instead, they thought of knowledge as an act by which the soul embraced the whole world—the soul is in a way all things, Aristotle had said—and formed a unity or sameness with it (idem fieri). The soul is always and all along opened out upon the world even as the world has always and all along taken possession of the soul. The task was not to break out of an internal prison into the external world but to clarify the vague and unclarified contact with the world in which we are all along immersed.

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But the moderns took their lead from the “new science” and the way that Galileo set measurable mass, velocity, and spatio-temporal position on the “object” side, while setting sensations like “red” or “warm” on the subject side. When, following Copernicus, he also put the measurable movement of the earth around the sun on the object side and the perceptual experience of the sun’s “rising” on the subjective side, he set the agenda for the philosophers of the Enlightenment to see just how far that sort of subject–object sorting could go. The Church then decided that it had inside information that God preferred Ptolemy to Copernicus. Galileo was a devout man and a serious Catholic, but the Church started a war with him, and thus with modern science—it had found no cause to wage war on St. Albertus Magnus, one of the greatest scientists of the Middle Ages—that it would lose and lose badly, because it could not tell the difference between a contingent historical construction like the Ptolemaic theory and the mind of God. So, in modernity, the question of God is profoundly recast. Instead of beginning on our knees, we are all seated solemnly and with stern faces on the hard benches of the court of Reason as it is called into session. God is brought before the court, like a defendant with his hat in his hand, and required to give an account of himself, to show His ontological papers, if He expects to win the court’s approval. In such a world, from Anselm’s point of view, God is already dead, even if you conclude that the proof is valid, because whatever you think you have proven or disproven is not the God he experiences in prayer and liturgy but a philosophical idol. Is there or is there not a sufficient reason for this being to be?, the court wants to know. If there are reasons, are they empirical or a priori? Are they good or bad? That is what the court has

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assembled to decide. What does the defendant have to say for himself? What’s that you say? Nothing but a few hymns, some pious prayers, and a bit of incense? Whom can he call in his defense? Shakers and Quakers and Spirit-seers all in heat? Next case! The metaphor of the “court” of reason is one of the pervasive features of Kant’s quintessential formulation of modernity and Enlightenment. Modernity has a powerful sense of jurisdiction, of the need to settle questions of law, quid juris: with what right may we say that S is P, and whose domain or jurisdiction is it to do so? As well as questions of fact, quid facti: what are the objective data? Do we have empirical studies? The moderns have a rigorous sense of boundaries, limits, and proper domains, and they make everything turn on drawing these boundaries neatly and cleanly. They insist on drawing sharp lines between subject and object, consciousness and the external world, science and religion, faith and reason, public and private, rational and irrational, empirical and a priori, cognitive and non-cognitive, fact and value, is and ought, descriptive and normative, sacred and profane, religious and secular. In making these discriminations, they made or invented the very categories they were discriminating, none of which had existed, and certainly not in these precise terms, before modernity. While the communication of the soul with God, with “You,” could not have been more “intimate” to Augustine and Anselm, they would have been astonished to hear that it was therefore subjective, private, and non-cognitive. Augustine said if you want to find God, the most real and transcendent being of all, do not go outside, but remain at home, within the soul. For if you go in (intra me) you will also go up (supra me). While Augustine and his successors certainly distinguished faith and

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reason, they treated this distinction like markers or milestones along a continuous path of upward ascent, marking off stages in a continuous movement of the entire community. They did not think of them as two separate and discrete spheres or domains, disjoined from each other as the internal from the external and the private from the public. In modernity, the secular anoints itself as the order of neutrality and rationality whose self-appointed task is to adjudicate religion by both policing its excesses and protecting its privacy. If the word secular is restricted to mean the secular state, the political separation of religious bodies and the administration of the state, most of us are all for the secular. I say “most of us” because there is no need to assume every nation on earth shares this desire and it would be dangerous to act on this assumption. Secularization is a cultural category, a characteristic phenomenon in the NATO nations where mainstream religious belief is becoming increasingly unbelievable, particularly among the educated set and young (the “nones”). Secularism, however, is a normative and ideological claim which sends religion into exile as the right to entertain one’s illusions in private, on weekends and after hours, with the hope that it will eventually wither away. Secularism is fed by the mythology of Pure Reason, as opposed to “having good reasons” to think this rather than that. Pure Reason is a transcendental illusion, the chimera of neutralized consciousness, as if such a disinterested, decontextualized, disembodied, ahistorical and fantastic creature were ever anywhere to be found on earth (or maybe even in heaven). Hermeneutics is the theory that there is no such thing and never has been. If religion is a private illusion, secularism is a public illusion, a mask behind which power hides its incessant, insidious interests. Both “religion” and “secularism”

See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and Formations of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), which I think offer the best account of the creation of the categories of “religion” and the “secular” in “modernity.” If you cannot bring yourself to read all 900 pages of Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), which is also important, see James K. A. Smith’s How (Not) to be Secular (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014) for a great job of condensing and analyzing the argument.

The logic of modernity comes to a head in Kant’s “three Critiques,” his critical discrimination of the lines to be drawn among knowledge (the true), ethics (the good), and “aesthetics” (the beautiful), which constituted a critical delineation of the domain of pure “Reason.” To these three he adds, in a later book, the space that can be carved out for “religion within the limits of reason alone.” For Kant, to take one example, the “work of art” is the occasion of a subjective feeling of beauty, but it is deprived of any “truth” content. That would lay the foundations for a later aestheticism, art for art’s sake, and the image of the Bohemian artist, an image that the great commissioned artists of the Renaissance or the

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are dangerous, too powerful by half, and both stand in need of being weakened into the post-secular and a religion without religion. Religion needs to be deprived of its supernaturalism and Pure Reason of its transcendentalism. We need to take some of the air out of both and recognize that both are finite and historically conditioned human practices. That is the big argument of this little book.

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unknown artists of Greece would have found baffling. The modern art gallery is a testimony to the power of the discriminations Kant made and reinforced. Here numerous works of art, from many different times and places, hang on the wall to be passed in review before an aesthetic subject who looks them over on weekends (if they have a timed ticket). The art gallery is a characteristically modern institution, where art is detached from the rest of public life and made into a picture for the pleasure of a subject-viewer, while the art of the ancient and medieval world melted into their life of politics and prayer. Just so, the concert hall in which we attend a “performance” of a Requiem mass is a modern construction, as opposed to leading a liturgical life. Kant’s “three Critiques” produced the effect of an archipelago that left us all island hopping from science to ethics to art. In religion, Kant said, we take the moral law, which is the voice of Reason, also to be the voice of God. So God does not get his own island but must build his temple on the island of ethics. That means that we should distinguish the rational element in religion, which is its universal ethical content, from the superstitions, supernatural dogmas, and cultic practices which vary from one religion to another. When Lessing wrote Nathan the Wise, he dramatized a good Enlightenment point. In response to a trap question put to him by Saladin, the Muslim Sultan of Jerusalem, about which faith is the one true religion, Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, Nathan, a wise Jewish merchant and diplomat (Lessing’s stand-in for Moses Mendelsohn), tells the Sultan a parable about three rings (Act III, sc. 7). Three sons are given identical rings, one of which has the power to make its owner beloved of God, but since none of the three is sure which ring has this special power, the only way each son can prove

OUR PROPHETS: KIERKEGAARD AND NIETZSCHE

Hegel rightly thought that the oppositional, dichotomizing way of thinking characteristic of modernity that had come to a head in Kant was a mistake, and he put the torch to it.

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his claim to have the authentic ring is to lead an exemplary ethical life that makes him truly worthy of God’s love. The three rings represent the three great religions of the Book, all of which are equally true in the eyes of God. If we go back to our characterization of a religious person as someone who has made a pact with the impossible, then we can say—without denying that it would always be possible to undertake a post-modern reinvention of Kant, which reads Kant against Kant—that Kant is a policeman who patrols the borders of the possible. Indeed, Kant is the Chief of Police. Kant is always telling us what is possible and what is not, always laying down the conditions of the possibility of this or that, of science or art, of ethics or religion, and all along trying to contain them rigorously within their borders. That is why he is so deterministic about science, moralistic about ethics, and aestheticizing about art, and why he shrinks religion down to ethics. There are no fuzzy edges or blended shades in Kant’s world. He does not allow these spheres to interpenetrate each other and he has no interest in opening them up to what lies beyond their horizon of possibility, to the impossible. Eventually, when this all got a little boring and you told him about the impossible, he would accuse you of what he called Schwärmerei, a kind of irrational exuberance which proves that you are a little mad. (Which of course we are, but with a divine madness, which is vastly to be preferred to the sanity of the philosophers. But that is to get ahead of my story.)

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He thought that Kant was trading in “abstract” concepts of the “understanding,” thin, one-sided, formal schemata that dissolve into the richer unity of concrete life. He thought that Kant’s “moral law” was a formal and empty morality for morality’s sake that acquired content and teeth only in the concrete ethical and social life of an historical community. He criticized Kant’s predilection for timeless a prioris for failing to see that reason’s necessities unfold in the contingencies of empirical life, that universals require the body of particularity to develop, that eternity needs time in order to spread its wings. By insisting on the historically situated character of reason, and by criticizing the abstract and ahistorical thinking of Enlightenment rationality, Hegel was clearly on to something which is an antecedent of a post-modern way of thinking. But Hegel was held back because he never questioned Kant’s Enlightenment idea that reason is a “system,” which led Hegel to argue that the historical process was governed from within by a law of Divine Reason. Hegel trumped Kant’s abstract “understanding” with historical “Reason,” which is the power to apprehend the convergence of opposites in the concrete historical world, and to see that history is the autobiography of God in time. But every time that Hegel said that Christianity painted a beautiful religious “picture” (Vorstellung) of which he was delivering the hard-core “conceptual truth” (Begriff), that his philosophy was “Christianity” raised up to the level of Reason, Kierkegaard howled in pain. In a series of passionate, brilliant, and witty pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard complained that the God of Abraham and Isaac had not come into the world in order to get an account of himself from German metaphysicians. In contrast to the apostolic age of Christianity, the pseudonyms complained, when it took the

Kierkegaard’s Writings, VI, “Fear and Trembling” and “Repetition,” trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). It is only a slight exaggeration to say that had Kierkegaard written only Fear and Trembling and nothing else he would still be one of the immortals. A good place to begin with Nietzsche is Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Classics, 1973).

It is with Kierkegaard, I would say, that the “post-” in what we call post-modern or post-secular or post-metaphysical first surfaced. Against the “System,” Kierkegaard (following Schelling) took his stand with the concrete existence of the “singular individual”—for the God of the Scriptures has numbered every hair on our head and counted every tear, and God prefers the single lost sheep to the ninety-nine safely in the fold (the “millions”). By refocusing us on our own religious purity of heart, Kierkegaard (following Luther) brings us back to Augustine, back on our knees before God, coram deo. The external worldly “results” of our actions are in God’s hands.

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courage to face the lions to call oneself a Christian, today the whole world (they meant Western Europe) calls itself Christian. In “Christendom,” a term of abuse Kierkegaard used to describe a world with too many philosophers and too few lions, where everyone thinks they are Christian, the essential task is to get beyond Christian faith to Reason, the System, philosophical Truth. But, as “Johannes de Silentio” objected, far from surpassing father Abraham, he has spent a whole life trying without success to get as far as the fearsome and awesome faith, the fear and trembling, that accompanied the patriarch up to Mount Moriah.

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History is not the story of the Eternal unfolding rationally in time, but the mind-numbing event of the altogether astonishing and free intervention of the Eternal into time in the Moment of the God-become-man, a crashing of the party of reason and history by the God who assumes the form of a servant, which scandalizes the Jewish respect for God’s transcendence and confounds the philosophers who want proofs. Back in the middle of the twentieth century, we honored Kierkegaard as the “father of Existentialism,” whereas today a good many “post-modernists” number him among their prime progenitors. Kierkegaard is the whistle-blower, the bleeding individual being chewed up by the Philosophical System who first shouts “Enough! Somebody get me out of here!” Out of the nineteenth century, out of World History, out of Absolute Philosophy, and even out of Christendom! Kierkegaard was being driven mad by all this Reason, suffocating from all this Absolute Knowledge. Like the author of the Letter to the Romans, his brilliant and caustic pseudonymous authors do not think that the world makes sense, or that human beings could lift themselves up by the bootstraps of their own Philosophical Reason, or that the soundness of the Moral Law would make us whole. He thought that the opening monologue in the first scene of Shakespeare’s Richard III—“I that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty . . .” (Act I, sc. i)—was worth more than all the moral theories of the philosophers, which have not the slightest idea of the terrors of existence. We have all been wounded by existence like children by a cruel step-parent, and ethics makes sport of us. He took existence to be a gaping wound whose bleeding can be stanched only by a transforming leap of faith, which is why, in my opinion, one of the predecessor figures of one version of “post-modernism” is St. Paul.

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For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the apostle Paul headed up the list of people who never would be missed. It never fails to amaze careful and sympathetic readers of both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard—it takes a certain type to pull that off—how deeply convergent and yet how wildly divergent their views are. Nietzsche is the other nineteenth-century predecessor figure of the post-modern situation, the other voice desperately crying help, the other academic outsider and renegade philosopher who took the world to be a wild and untamable vortex. Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche was a brilliant stylist who broke the mold of philosophical propriety by writing in a madly beautiful, bitingly witty, and unnervingly aphoristic style that could not abide the academy, who added another famous pseudonym, “Zarathustra,” to the likes of “Johannes Climacus” and “Johannes de Silentio.” Both were miserably unhappy and tormented geniuses who wrote with their blood; had they ended up happily married, with three children, and tending their lawns on weekends, we would likely never have heard a word from them. They had made pretty much the same diagnosis of the nineteenth century as the advent of “mass man,” as the triumph of the bourgeois middle class, with its accompanying mediocrities—mass values, mass reading habits, mass thinking (or thoughtlessness), and the disappearance of singularity and passion. They were both made green around the gills by the mediocrity of “Christendom,” by the leveling effects of mass media, and they practically predicted the emergence of the mediatized culture of the age of information. But they prescribed radically different remedies for recharging the intensity of passion and the courage for singularity in the increasingly moribund culture of nineteenthcentury Europe. For Nietzsche turned to Dionysus, not

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Christ, to the ecstasy of aesthetic pleasure, not the passion of religious faith. Kierkegaard would have agreed with Nietzsche that “God is dead,” that the life has gone out of European faith—that is pretty much what defined “Christendom” for Kierkegaard—but he sought to restore this life by wandering the ancient streets of old Europe holding the New Testament over his head and shouting Augustine’s “tolle, lege.” Just take this Book and read it, anywhere you choose to begin, and you will see that the comforts of bourgeois Christendom are everywhere contradicted by the true demands of evangelical life, for Christian life is the way of the Cross, the immense difficulty of the passion of faith that needs to be reaffirmed from moment to moment. Do not be comforted by the thought that you have been baptized or have signed your name to the Nicene Creed. That is no different than the pagans who thought that they could be saved by Philosophy, or the Jewish confidence in the Law, or anybody who has been duped into thinking that the world makes Sense. We are not supposed to earn a comfortable living off the Crucifixion; we are supposed to be crucified to the world. Nietzsche, on the other hand, thought that if you took the New Testament in hand, you should wear gloves so as to avoid contamination. Nietzsche had a terrifying vision of the world as so many forces swirling and sweeping their way across infinite cosmic space, building up and discharging their energies, forming unstable constellations that soon enough come undone. We ourselves are proud little animals, stationed on a distant outpost in some remote corner of the cosmos, who have no stomach for the cruelty of the cosmic play. We require a tidier view of the world than is suggested by all that tumult if we are to get ourselves through the day. So we invent the categories that we need, words to simplify

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the forces and a grammar to organize them for us, like the “ego” or “self,” “cause” and “law,” along with distinctions that inspire us and give us guidance, like “truth and falsity,” “being and appearance,” or “good and evil.” These are all signs we have made up and sunk into the surface of the forces, so many fictions of grammar we have devised, like a veil we weave and then lay over a visage too hideous to behold. But these words have no purchase on the forces, and underneath this veil of grammar the forces continue to play themselves out. Soon enough the distant planet spins itself out and falls back into its sun and the little animals have to die, disappearing without a trace. Then the forces draw another breath and continue their dance across an endless cosmic sky. In both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the world is a chaotic tumult, a senseless game into which we did not ask to be entered. Why was I not consulted about being born?, one of the Kierkegaardian pseudonyms asks. Where is the manager to whom I can make my complaint? In both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the figure of the God torn to pieces holds center stage. For Nietzsche, “Dionysus” is not a god governing the world but a god of the world and its life-cycles, the god of the vine cut back to the stem every fall only to be reborn in the spring, the god of the festival, of cyclical rebirth, of the endless circle of life and death. He who truly says yes to life does not do so half-heartedly, with his fingers crossed, trying to take the good without the bad, life without death, joy without suffering. Rather, he says yes to the whole of life, without subtraction, attenuation, or substitution, the whole wheel of becoming, life and death together, for each is linked to the other in a golden chain. For Kierkegaard, the god torn to pieces is Christ, and Him crucified, whose sacrifice of blood washes over us and redeems us from this body of death and

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sin, a transcendent God who has come down into the world and assumed our flesh, which He has allowed to be pierced and torn, in order to lift us up with Him when He comes again at the end of time. In Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the world of Enlightenment Reason and of Hegelian Absolute Knowledge is left far behind. They each foresee in his own way the madness of the twentieth century, a century whose genocidal violence made a mockery of Hegel’s sanguine view of history as the autobiography of the Spirit in time. That is why the twentieth century took them as its prophets. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche sketch the lines of a world after the Enlightenment, after Hegel, after Philosophy, writ large. For after the fury with which Kierkegaard bit into the hide of German metaphysics, and after the way that Nietzsche told the tale of how the “Real World” that the philosophers conjured up had become a “fable,” anyone who would dare write Philosophy large again would have the wicked wit of these stern critics to deal with. By the end of the nineteenth century God was indeed all but dead among the intellectuals. Religious faith had become scientifically dubious (Darwin), psychoanalytically twisted (Freud), and economically and politically reactionary (Marx), while Kierkegaard was saying that Christian faith represented a leap into the Absurd. The view from the pews was largely unshaken by all this. Modernity had no spiritual vision to offer in the place of the one it had torn down, which is perhaps why religion still prospered among the poor and uneducated rank and file in the churches. But religion was dead or dying fast among its learned despisers who confidently predicted that it was destined to disappear as science progressed and the general level of learning rose.

But it just did not work out that way. A funny thing happened on the way to the funeral.

The status of God and religion had undergone a deep transformation in modernity. Failing to meet the muster of “objective” proof and demonstration, religion was lodged deep in the domain of subjectivity. There it was either considered safe and sheltered from the harsh lights of its critics and cherished by those who nourished religious faith as something that belongs to the realm of the “heart,” or it was written off by the heartless, hard-nosed scientifically minded as some kind of purely private buzz. “Faith” now stood in much sharper contrast with “reason” than could ever have been imagined by the authors of the Confessions or Proslogion, who viewed their books as an exercise in fides quaerens intellectum. Reduced to a cognitively thinner, more emotive phenomenon, more a matter of an interior commitment or existential passion, faith had little or no purchase on the nature of things. What had disappeared under the guns of modernity was the robust faith of the medievals where fides and intellectus, the love of learning and the love of God, went hand in hand. The middle term, an inner lining of metaphysical or speculative theological reason—and our own St. Augustine was the crucial player in the formation of this lining—that moved confidently between metaphysics and prayer, had melted away under the combined heat of Luther’s attack on the “theology of glory” and Kant’s critique of speculative metaphysics. Uniting the spirit of Greek metaphysics with their biblical faith, the medievals—Christian, Jewish, and Islamic—were just as at home with thinking philosophically about God and God’s relationship with the world (including

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DESECULARIZATION: THE DEATH OF THE DEATH OF GOD

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even detailed accounts of the “spiritual substances,” angels) as they were at prayer. Now in my efforts to reinstate a dialogue with pre-modern thinkers, I do not think that we can get the old metaphysical style of arguing that the medievals cherished back on its feet. I have not given up on philosophy, but I think philosophy is best understood as a hermeneutical and phenomenological, not a speculative metaphysical enterprise, that is, I steer its nose close to the earth of the interpretation of concrete experience. Besides, if we go back still further, before the medieval age of faith seeking understanding, back to the world of the Scriptures, we find—as Luther, a sometime Augustinian friar, never tired of pointing out—a situation in which faith flourished but without the metaphysical back-up, without the thick carpet of metaphysical rationality upon which faith and reason could curl up with each other in medieval times. Indeed, St. Paul took great delight in berating Greek philosophers about the futility of their speculations and urging upon them the need for what Kierkegaard, who was going back to Luther and Paul, called the leap of faith. So clearly this lack of a robust metaphysical theology was no impediment to faith and religion; it was a characteristic of biblical faith, both Hebrew and Christian. The metaphysical theology had come later, when Christianity, having become the established religion of the Roman Empire, had come to terms with Hellenistic learning, a program that had first gotten off the ground with Philo Judaeus back in first-century ce Alexandria. That made possible a phenomenon like “Christian Neoplatonism,” which is the world to which Augustine and early Christian theology belonged. But neither Jesus nor Paul, neither the early apostolic communities nor the rabbinic tradition before them, had a head for “metaphysics,” which was

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a Greek idea—whence Tertullian’s famous question, “what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?”. That produces an interesting effect, a fascinating mirror play between the earliest biblical and apostolic age and what fairly secular continental philosophers in the last third of the twentieth century were calling “the deconstruction of metaphysics” or “overcoming metaphysics,” in which we see a certain recuperation or repetition of the pre-metaphysical situation of faith. That puts Nietzsche and St. Paul on the same page, at least on this point (which would certainly have given Nietzsche one more of his famous migraines). Nietzsche had argued for the historical contingency of our constructions, the revisability and reformability of our beliefs and practices, all of which, as he said, are “perspectives” that we take on the world and that have emerged in order to meet the needs of life. Of course, he used that argument to torpedo what he called the “Christian Platonic” tradition, the unholy wedding of two great despisers of the body (some wedding night!), under whose cruel rule, he complained, the West has suffered too long. In that respect, Nietzsche’s thought can be joined up with that of Marx and Freud as part of the continuing Enlightenment critique of religion, a further extension of the argument for secularism. But any such supposed alignment of Nietzsche with the Enlightenment—a ruse that Walter Kaufmann employed for years to make Nietzsche look good to the Anglo-American philosophical establishment at Princeton—is inherently unstable and bound to come unstuck. Marx and Freud always insisted (to the point of protesting too much) that they were “scientific” thinkers. But Nietzsche thought that science was just one more version of Christian Platonism, that the death of “God” implies the death of “absolute truth,” including the

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absolutism of scientific truth; physics too is a perspective. Nietzsche was trying to argue that Christianity was crucified on its own Cross: by insisting that God is truth and hence on the need for the faithful to be truthful, Christians ought finally to be brought to the point of honestly and truthfully confessing that Christianity too is another fabrication. But a surprising thing happened on the way to the death of God: Enlightenment secularism also got crucified on the same Cross, and that spelled the death of the death of God. Nietzsche’s argument boomeranged in a way that nobody saw coming. What the contemporary post-Nietzschean lovers of God, religion, and religious faith took away from Nietzsche was that psychoanalysis (Freud), the unyielding laws of dialectical materialism (Marx), and the will to power itself (Nietzsche) are also perspectives, also constructions, or fictions of grammar. They are also just so many contingent ways of construing the world under contingent circumstances that eventually outlive their usefulness when circumstances change. That is, Marx and Freud, along with Nietzsche himself, find themselves hoisted with Nietzsche’s petard, their critiques of religion having come undone under the gun of Nietzsche’s critique of the possibility of making a critique that would cut to the quick—of God, nature, or history. Enlightenment secularism, the objectivist reduction of religion to something other than itself—say, to a distorted desire for one’s mommy, or to a way to keep the ruling authorities in power—is one more story told by people with historically limited imaginations, with contingent conceptions of reason and history, of economics and labor, of nature and human nature, of desire, sexuality, and women, and of God, religion, and faith. All these reductionistic critiques of religion turn out to be, on Nietzsche’s own account, more

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varieties of what Nietzsche called the “ascetic ideal,” a belief in a rigorous and unbending order of “Objective Truth.” For Nietzsche’s assertion that “God is dead” had a wide sweep that included Absolute Truth, Physics, and the Laws of Grammar, anything that tries to hold the center firm. The declaration of the “death of God” is aimed at decapitating anything that dares Capitalize itself, which included not just the smoke and incense of the Christian mysteries, but anything that claims to be the Final Word. That had the amazing and unforeseen effect of catching up hard-ball reductionistic and atheistic critiques of religion in its sweep. The danger here is that what would emerge from this Nietzscheanized historical critique is an “anything goes” relativism—nothing is true, everything is possible, one belief or perspective is as good as another. That danger was not always resisted by the “academic left,” which Allan Bloom grumpily but accurately called the “Nietzscheanized left,” those lovers of Nietzsche who headed in the direction of an aestheticized view, not only of art, but of science and ethics, which made them vulnerable to the objection of relativism. That is why I insist that the “post-secular” style should arise by way of a certain iteration of the Enlightenment, a continuation of the Enlightenment by another means, the production of a New Enlightenment, one that is enlightened about the limits of the old one. The “post-” in “post-secular” should not be understood to mean “over and done with” but rather after having passed through modernity and come out on the other end, a little wiser for the experience. The “post-” in “postmodern” should not be confused with the cavalier disregard for evidence on the part of the climate-change deniers, or with the cynical invocation of “alternate facts” in Trumpworld, where truth has died. A more enlightened Enlightenment is

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no longer taken in by the dream of Pure Objectivity, even as it deploys a new idea of reason that is no longer taken in by the illusion of Pure Reason. It has a post-critical sense of critique that is critical of the idea that we can establish air-tight borders around neatly discriminated spheres or regions like knowledge, ethics, art, and religion and undergird them with rock solid foundations. By carefully tweaking modernity, we can give it a post-modern twist. Post-modernists are modernists with a wrinkled brow, people who begin to squirm every time someone begins talking about things in caps and in the singular, like “Reason” or “Religion.” So far be it from me to say that modernity and the secular project were a bad idea and that things were just fine back in the middle ages. As beautiful as the Proslogion is, the philosophical texts of those days are devoid of the voice of women and they are silent about the world of serfs that supported them from below. Augustine spent a lot more time fretting over stolen pears than about the fate of his unnamed common-law wife, from whom he severed himself at the time of his conversion. Heaven protect me from lamenting the break-up of a top-down trickle-down hierarchical conception of power and sovereignty, or the break-up of deep metaphysical systems that tried to lend the weight of Being or of God to purely contingent political orders and institutions, to historically contingent philosophical and theological formulations of the traditional faith. That is why it is always the Augustine of the Confessions that I invoke, the intensely personal story of the conversion of a man of prayers and tears, not his more metaphysical ruminations and not the City of God, where the bishop in Augustine comes out swinging. While I am far from being a Cartesian, I am not prepared to dismiss Descartes, who started something that led to

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the most modern idea of all, the idea that in a way defines modernity: that we have the right to ask any question, to say what we think, to think what we want, to publish what we think, to think or publish or doubt or believe anything, without fear of censorship, excommunication, exile, or execution. The only limits on such rights are the rights of others to do the same and to enjoy the same freedoms. The only criteria for evaluating such beliefs are their plausibility and capability of surviving in a public debate. That is the defining idea of modernity, the light of the Enlightenment, and I love that idea very much. The post-modern idea, if that is a word we can still employ, which casts a shadow on all that light, is to insist that we all understand that a free and public debate and the unforced force of pure reason are also fictions and hence that they do not guarantee fairness or a good outcome, not by a long shot. That idea I also love (a good mind, it has been said, is one that can cling tenaciously to two contradictory ideas). That is because wealth, educational advantages, linguistic, historical, cultural, and nationalist prejudices, racism, sexism, and the influence of special interests inevitably distort public debates, public elections, and public space generally, which is always curved in somebody’s favor. The post-modernists do not have a better alternative except to suggest that we try to conduct public debates, in politics and academies, in the full realization that there is no such thing as an undistorted perspective and try to correct for that. There is no unforced force of pure reason or ideal speech situation, no view from nowhere or timeless ahistorical answer; there is no one right answer to most questions. There are many different and competing beliefs and practices and we should make every reasonable effort to accommodate them, to let many flowers bloom, including the flowers of religion.

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That is a particularly risky business today, with the degradation of journalism as “fake news” and the proliferation of the internet, where the only standard of “publication” is the ability to turn on a computer, which would be the worst nightmare of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. They feared that universal literacy would eventually produce a world of illiterate readers and writers. What no one saw coming was the way the Nietzschean critique undoes the modernist critique of religion and opens the doors to another way of thinking about faith and reason. The result of a more sober reading of Nietzsche is not relativism and irrationalism but hermeneutics, that is, a heightened sense of the contingency of our interpretations and the revisability of our constructions, not the jettisoning of reason and objectivity but a redescription of reason and objectivity, one that is a lot more reasonable than the bill of goods about an overarching, transhistorical Rationality that the Enlightenment tried to sell us. For that is a highly unreasonable Reason, a hyperenlightened illusion that no one can live up to. No one foresaw that Nietzsche’s theory of fictions would converge with the biblical critique of idols, of mistaking our own graven images for the divinity. In this way of looking at things, the Enlightenment and its idea of Pure Reason are on the side of Aaron and the golden calf, while Nietzsche, God forbid, he who philosophizes with a hammer, stands on the side of Moses as a smasher of idols, and stands right beside Paul giving the Athenians in the Areopagus and the Corinthians holy hell about the idols of the philosophers. That opens the door for a notion like the love of God, the idea I love most of all, to get another hearing among the intellectuals. For it is a bald Enlightenment prejudice, unvarnished reductionism, to try to run that idea out of town and to denounce it as sucking on

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your thumb or longing for your mommy. The name of God is the name of the impossible, and the love of God transports us beyond ourselves and the constraints imposed upon the world by what the Aufklärer called “reason” and Kant called the conditions of possibility, transporting us toward the impossible. Today, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are all dead but God is doing just fine, thank you very much, and still the source of a very great deal of trouble. In the wake of Nietzsche and many others—Wittgenstein and Heidegger foremost among them—philosophers today have largely rejected the idea that there is some proud overarching ahistorical thing called pure “Reason” and they have settled instead for the humbler hermeneutical idea of “good reasons,” in the plural and in lower case. Their idea is not to reject reason but to redefine and historicize it as a historically contingent interpretive “take” we have on things—which makes it look a lot more like a certain hermeneutic “faith”— the best one available at the time and the one we go along with until we are forced to revise it by some unexpected turn of events, which is why it has nothing to do with relativism or supernaturalism. These philosophers have a more modest sense of how far our concepts cut, a heightened sense of the difficulty of things, and a sharper sense of knowledge as a more open-ended, fluid, mobile, less logo-centric under­ taking. Knowledge for them does not require freedom from presuppositions, but it is seen as uniquely structured by gaining the right presuppositions, ones that should be as supple and fertile as possible. They think that disciplined learning in the sciences and the humanities has as much to do with the insights and instincts of the well trained, the suggestions and questions of the initiates, imagination, a measure of good luck, and an ability to cope with an utterly unexpected turn

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of events as with the much-vaunted “method” of modernity. Their idea of “reason” looks a lot more like what Aristotle called phronesis, which means the practical good sense to know how to apply relatively general and empty schemata in very concrete circumstances, allowing for the differences. They have a sharper ear for the “other” and the anomaly and a sharper sense of the prison house of the “same,” that is, of the way “I,” “we,” and “our” tend to be traps set for us by an inherited way of thinking and doing things. They have not jettisoned philosophy but have taken up philosophy in a humbler, uncapitalized condition, pursuing philosophical projects in a more modest register. They do not think that there are rigorous, airtight borders between faith and reason, public and private, subject and object, politics and science or religion, but that these things have a disconcerting way of running together and that it is an artifice to try to separate them too stringently. Philosophers today have largely rejected the idea that there is some overarching meta-language (say, the language of sub-atomic particles) into which the various particular languages can be translated and adjudicated and they have taken up the idea of what Wittgenstein dubbed “language games.” There are multiple games, each with its own internal rules of consistency and meaning, each of which serves a different end. On that telling it would be a mistake to try to translate or to reduce one game to the other, to reduce what is going on in a prayer, for example (which clearly belongs to an especially religious language game), to the terms of economics or psychoanalysis. Something would surely get lost in the translation (namely, the prayer). It would be like calling “checkmate” in football. Philosophers have largely rejected the idea that there is some overarching meta-narrative, some vast “story” of what

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is going on in “Western” history, like the old story of the emancipation of the masses (Marx), which is the left-wing version of Hegel’s “History of the Spirit,” or a recent version, the end of history as the triumph of the free-market economy (Francis Fukuyama), which represents the right-wing version of Hegel. They denounce such stories as “totalizing” and they are more inclined to see history in terms of innumerable little narratives, competing stories that throw the big picture into question, including the stories found in remote places among indigenous peoples threatened by globalization. That is why I distrust my own story about pre-modern, modern, and post-modern as too clear, too neat, too “totalizing,” and why I said above that in any given time there are both prevailing currents (modern) and counter-currents (post-modern). They keep an eye out for the little ones, the voices and languages and peoples of the past that were ground up in the Big Story that history tells, which tends to be the story told by the winners, by the mainstream, by the people with the power to publish and promote their story. What interests me is how, after the big guns of these great philosophical warships from Plato to Hegel grew silent, the still small voice of religion could once again be heard. In the second half of the twentieth century, important “secular” philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard took up the prayers and tears of St. Augustine, not to mention Heidegger, whose Being and Time was significantly impacted by the Tenth Book of the Confessions, or French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray meditating on the “divine”—all in search of the God who comes “after metaphysics.” To the great astonishment of learned despisers of religion everywhere, who have been predicting the death of God from the middle of the nineteenth century right up to the present, religion in

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all of its manifold varieties has returned. Even to say that is misleading, since religion was reported missing mostly by the intellectuals. This is particularly true in the United States, which to the astonishment of the rest of the NATO alliance continues to be a religious country. But religion has returned even among avant-garde intellectuals who have given it a new legitimacy by discrediting its discreditors, suspecting its suspectors, doubting its doubters, unmasking its unmaskers. The flower of religion is one of the blossoms in our postmodern anthology. I give a more leisurely account of this little history of truth in Truth: The Search for Wisdom in the Postmodern Age (London: Penguin Books, 2013).

Putting religion in its place

In our primal scene, Augustine praying and weeping over what he loves when he loves his God, love is given. Love is taken as a fact. The question is, what does he love? That he loves precedes the what. He starts out with the love of God, the love of what is going on in the name of God, in order to understand what he already loves. This is love seeking understanding, amor quaerens intellectum. How is he, how are we, to understand our love? How to think or give a name to what I love and desire with a desire beyond desire? That is the question we have been pursuing, or better, by which we are pursued. But just how are we supposed to go about answering this question if, as we have maintained, we are up to our ears in the secret, where the secret is, there is no Secret, no Big Theory of Everything? (We have no Big ToE.) That, replies love, is no excuse! Even if, especially if, this is a question that cannot be answered it would be all the more urgent—in the interests of love—to come up with a response! If I ask “what” is this or that, that requires an answer. But when presented with a fact, I am forced to respond, no matter what! No matter what the what! WHAT IS WHAT?

We get valuable advice in this matter from an unlikely source—a famous apostle, who did not suffer Greek philosophers gladly. There is an interesting scene staged by

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Three

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Luke where Luke has Paul preaching to the Athenians in the Areopagus (“Mars Hill”), a place where Stoics and Epicureans and people of every stripe, Luke says, love to spend their time talking about the latest ideas. These days Luke would have chosen a café full of smoke and Parisian philosophers for the apostle’s speech. Luke has Paul take the occasion to comment on their statue to the unknown god. You got that one right, Paul told them. In the shrines made with human hands the God who has made the world will remain forever unknown, he says, but it is in and through the world that God created that God can be known. Just look around. God is all around, for all the peoples of the earth to find: so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your own poets have said, “For we too are his offspring”. Acts 17:27–28 Without commenting on Paul’s diplomatic skills, and without pointing out to him that things made with human words (like the Scriptures) are every bit as much man-made as things made of stone, his philosophical strategy here is on the money. As all these shrines prove, the Greeks love their gods, that is given, but the problem is they do not know what they love. Still, even if they do not know God, their own poets tell them God is more intimate to them than they are to themselves. As Paul Tillich puts it, they are alienated from God, but God is nothing alien, so the Athenian philosophers do not need to set off in quest of an alien being but to overcome their own alienation, which they can do here at home. As with Anselm,

“God,” Paul announces with apostolic assurance. “Being” Heidegger reports from his Schwarzwald hideaway. “Spirit” the German Idealists reply, after a long and complicated discourse. “Whatever” we say in American English, not dismissively, of course, but with a sense of who can say? We live and move and have our being in a vague preunderstanding of something, no matter what, where the challenge is to make this implicit understanding explicit. Are we all the children of God? Or Being’s offspring? Or maybe a bit of stardust that has curled up into a complex stardust ball of thinking stuff and has started asking questions (and unto stardust we shall return)? Or even, heaven help us, information processing systems? Given the plethora of possible answers, we might be well advised to follow the counsel of one of our own poets, John Keats, and cultivate our “negative capability,” the ability to sustain an uncertainty, to embrace

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the path is circular; from God to God with God’s help (and St. Paul’s). Taking Paul’s approach to God solves a big problem. We are finite beings and God an infinite one. Good luck trying to cross an infinite distance! Paul is saying God is already there, already here. God is all around, in all things, the very element of our lives. Knowing that they love their gods, but not what, they need to clarify something they already have, to grasp explicitly what they already know implicitly. A couple of millennia later the philosophers whom Paul was snubbing would end up dubbing this the “hermeneutic circle.” Still, something is eating at us—alienation from what?

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the ambiguity, to remain “open to the mystery” (Heidegger again), to keep the question open. As we have been saying, this non-knowing does not stifle the passion of my love and desire but intensifies it all the more. Openness to the mystery of what? What is going on? Love is given, and we will never give up on love. But what is love’s element? That’s the nagging question we want to take on here and the big reason I think the distinction between religious and secular ultimately belongs in a metropolitan museum of modernist bones. After protecting us from the threat of a theocracy (the modern bit), this distinction should be given a gold watch, thanked for its services and gracefully retired. It is becoming obsolete, undermined from within by something running underneath it (the post-modern bit). Notice my orientation. Unlike Hegel, who recommended looking “up” for a higher synthesis of the two, I advise digging down. If, so far, we have been sailing along rather breezily on the sunny surface of the sea, talking about God and love and religion, which all sounds rather sublime, I am now urging a plunge into the cold, dark deep, where we love and hate, hope and despair, live and die, move and are immobilized, and have our being while growing anxious over non-being. But what is that? What is what, the what? WHY THE WHY?

Human life has a dark center, an unlit core, a concealed depth, to which we have at best limited access. That is the ultimate condition under which we live our lives. That is my thesis. That is the sum total of a lifetime of study, teaching and writing, of attending academic conferences, including not a few impromptu but important latenight sessions in conference hotel bars. That is the ultimate

presupposition of this little book and—in my opinion—of just about everything else. I hasten to add that I am not singling out human beings for particular abuse—among whom I number my dearest friends and loved ones—because everything is beset by this condition. It’s just that in human beings the darkness of the deep is close to home, making for sleepless nights, a matter of concern, a matter for thought. Beings who do not have to think are not bothered by this point in the least. As Angelus Silesius, the great mystical poet says:

Roses blossom, rivers flow. Like the lovers in romantic novels, such things live happily ever after (unless we humans poison their air, soil and water), wholly unbothered by the why and wherefore. Roses live “without why,” whereas we human beings are driven hither and yon worrying over whither, why and whence, whether that gives us peace, which it usually does not, or drives us to distraction, which it usually does. If you are willing to risk getting absolutely no sleep at all, try on this question, first framed by Leibniz: Why is there something rather than nothing? That is a good candidate for the question of all questions, the first and last question, and it has, alas, a stubborn unanswerability about it. It reveals a “that-than-whichthere-is-no-whicher” wall in things against which the ball of thought inevitably bounces. That in turn reveals that it is a different sort of question. We have the right to ask any question but, as a rule, if a question is unanswerable in principle,

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The rose is without why; it blossoms because it blossoms; It cares not for itself, asks not if it’s seen.

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that proves there’s something questionable about the question. But this question is different. It has a sui generis character about it, because it packs not merely an epistemic but an existential punch. It is not merely a particular question put by thought but a question that puts thought itself into question. It refers to the fact, the mother of all facts, that being gets there before thought, the priority, the a priori-ty of being. That is true historically: we puny upright thinking-speaking bipeds are a very recent arrival in the vast history that goes back to the Big Bang; and existentially: as soon as we come to be, we find that being is already up and running. Heidegger called that the “facticity” of Being: Being is just there, rather than not, period, full stop. Facticity means suck it up, like it or not, no matter what, no matter the what. See Angelus Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer, trans. Maria Shrady (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 54, and for a provocative commentary, Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 32–40. Leibniz’s question is found in his “The Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason” (1714); the philosophers among us may hear me using F. W. J. Schelling, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures, trans. Bruce Matthews (Albany: SUNY, 2008).

Try sustaining that, the thought of the sheer facticity of being itself. It is like holding your breath under water, which they say we can only do for about three minutes. I have never tried that, but I have repeatedly tried thinking this thought and I dare you to try. You can do it for a minute, maybe two, but eventually—your intellectual lungs about to burst from lack

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of explanatory oxygen—you blurt out why? But why do we give in? Why do we need to know why? Why not live a carefree, why-free life like the rose? Why the why? Well, there you are. You see the problem—we are already asking why. That is what we thinking things do. That is what we are. Asking why is like breathing. All of us desire to know, Aristotle said, and knowing why is a big part of knowing anything at all. Let’s call this, slightly tweaking Kant, the mind’s “pulmonary imperative.” For thinking things, asking why is a categorical call to which we cannot plug our ears. The tree outside my window, on the other hand, is currently enjoying the morning sun completely unperturbed by all the turmoil going on inside my poor tormented philosophical skull. The pious souls among us, sure they are exempt from all this trauma, are itching for their turn at the mic: Because God created the world. God, who is love, created it freely. Facticity is a gift of love, love’s gracious gratuity. But in a book called On Religion, despite a lot of pressure from on high, we cannot give religion a free pass. Religion here is under the bubble. After all, this answer has been around for a while and it is not as though the philosophers did not see it coming. It invites the obvious retort, what is the whence and whither of God? To which the right response is that God is a necessary being. If we press the theologians about how God got to be a necessary being, they have no non-circular answer. That’s just what God means. God is the one who is there, eternally, absolutely, necessarily. That is what God is. God is the being whose very essence is to be. God’s being is a se, from itself—here counting on the hoary prestige of the Latin version to get us to stop asking questions! But I am no longer intimidated by Latin (as I used to be, when I was an altar boy). We have just seen what Kant (and Aquinas) pointed out to Anselm, you may

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define God to be a necessary being from morning until night, but that does not mean that such a necessary being exists. A triangle has three sides by essential necessity, and a chiliagon a thousand sides, but that does not mean that there are any such critters. Existence is a fact, not an essence. Consequently, our question included God’s existence as well. Why is there anything at all, including God? Now the tough-minded scientists impatiently seize the mic. Drop all this supernatural poppycock, they say. It all started with the Big Bang. That is not so much an answer as a relocation of the question. And as for the Big Bang? After a period of some silence, hushed consultation and considerable shuffling of sober scientific feet, we are told that we have to do here with the laws of Nature, and Nature itself is the necessary being. That is all well and good, unless, of course, if we press the question, how did nature get its necessity? That’s just what “nature” is, that’s natural law, de rerum natura, comes the reply. Well, who passed this law? Was it a close vote? In both cases, what we get are conversation-stoppers, Latin intimidation, stipulative definitions. Neither side has a non-circular answer. Essences do not exude existence. Essences do not spontaneously combust into existence. A what, no matter how glorious and sublime, does not get you a that. Quiddities are not worth a quid when it comes to sheer existence. Have neither God nor Nature, in all their everlastingness, ever taken the time to ask themselves, why are they there rather than not? They do not get a pass. To say that being or world, or God or nature (Deus sive Natura) is because it must be is pretty much to confess that it is because it is, and we have reached the limits of our intellectual imagination. We are intellectually exhausted, out of breath. The sound you are hearing now

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. One (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 163. I have also been making use in this chapter of Tillich’s Theology of Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), “The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion.” There is a renewed interest among post-modern theologians in Tillich. See Retrieving the Radical Tillich, ed. Russell Re Manning (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).

Being’s existence precedes its essence. Being has an un-fore-graspable, “un-pre-thinkable” (Schelling) priority over thinking, which

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is that of the ball of thinking bouncing off the wall of being. At this juncture on the path of thought there are road signs all around reading “Warning, Road Out Ahead.” Thinking cannot turn on the lights fast enough to see the dark. Thinking cannot catch up to being, which got there first. To put this in Hegel’s haughty high-brow language, thinking cannot quite come up with the pure “Concept,” from the Latin con + capere, which literally means to get a grip, to grasp round about, which nicely translates Hegel’s Begriff, from greifen, to grip or grasp. Whichever way we go, in Latin, German or English, thinking cannot get its head around Being. Thinking cannot catch being in its net. Kant, the greatest of all the modernists, said that at this point we have reached the “abyss of reason.” Paul Tillich, my favorite “official” theologian (I have several unofficial ones, including an atheist or two), said, “Thought must start with Being; it cannot go behind it.” Or, if you have never heard of Kant, Hegel or Tillich, let us say that Being has a bare-naked thereness about it, an irreducible that-it-is-ness, an inexpugnable that-ness, whatever subsequent what-ness we come up with.

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leaves us structurally in the dark. Even when we finally give in, as we must, gasping for intellectual oxygen, grasping (conceiving) for a what to explain and contain the that, for a why to back up the because, we have not dispelled the deeper darkness. We have not removed the obstinate, irreducible ambiguity down at being’s unplumbable bottom. It could, perhaps, be God, or Nature, or both (Deus sive Natura), or neither. By spelling out the need for a necessary being, we have not dispelled the “perhaps.” If, at this level, we ask, “what is what?” the best answer we have is, “that is that.” If we ask “why,” the best we can do is “because.” To the question, “why is there something rather than nothing?” the mystical poet replies, “the rose is without why; it blossoms because it blossoms.” This turns out to be qualitatively unlike other questions. It is not solely an act of intellectual inquiry; it puts into question the whole order of intellect itself, which is interested in the what. This question packs an existential punch, because it is interested in the that. Posing this question deposes the poser, delivering a traumatic blowback upon the questioner. It knocks us off our intellectual horse and pushes us into another—existential—order, a point of absolute wonder, where we are led to confess, to “circumfess,” as Derrida says, our existential limits. We are not going to come up with an essence that will be the match for this existence. Being, existence, is a priori, which is philosophyspeak for “it got there first,” and thinking follows along afterwards, a posteriori, following the tracks left by being as it recedes from view like stars in the sky of an ever-expanding universe. THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT IN LIFE

But love is still standing. The love of God, or let us say now, the love of what is going on in the name of God, in the name

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(of) “God,” is still given. So, we have circled back to where we started. Love is given, but if we ask, what do I love when I love my God, we are not going to get an answer. But that is not the end of it, only the beginning. I begin with the fact of the world, and the fact of love, of loving something, I know not what, something that goes under the name of God, which is a stand-in for something-I-know-not-what. Our question will not get an Answer, in caps and in the singular, but, being a matter of love, it urgently requires a response. Love insists—we exist, and love insists on a response. That response is called religion, remembering that there is a (quasi-Pauline) distinction between the historical religions we make and the love that makes us, that elicits our response. The response is our religion, our religion without religion—this is my hypothesis—the religion of anyone worth their salt, salt being my criterion. If I defend a saline theory of truth, my saline solution to this conundrum is as follows. If, as I submit, the human condition is such that, at this deep level, the order of the “what” is knocked off its pins and deprived of its primacy, if our guiding question, “What do I love when I love my God?” runs into a stone wall, I further submit that instead of saying our cause has suffered a breakdown, we turn the tables on the conundrum and announce that we have made a breakthrough! Like an instant replay that reverses the call on the field, we declare victory just where it looked like defeat. The victory is lodged in the defeat. The trauma of the dead end, I proffer, unearths what I will call the mystical element of our lives. Love’s element is the elemental mysticism, the mystical ground or un-ground, the divine or mystical milieu of human life. By the mystical I do not mean yoga, meditation and a regular diet of organic food. That’s California, not mysticism. Nor do I have in mind levitations, visions of the Blessed Virgin

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on the basement wall, statues of saints weeping or bleeding in Italian churches, out-of-body experiences, or alien abductions. That’s mystification, not mysticism. I mean an experience of genuine non-knowing, of awe and wonder, mixed with no small measure of fear and anxiety, about a matter that concerns us all deeply, for which we lack a “concept,” on which we have no handle. So, we may summarize the mystical element of our situation thus: The irreducible human condition is to be concerned with something unconditional—thinking does not get there fast enough to lay down the conditions in advance that being must meet—and impossible, the impossible, because thinking does not get there in time to dictate in advance what is possible. We pass our days between the rock of the human condition and the hard place of the unconditional. This primal and irreducible facticity represents a kind of absolute past, a past that was never present, a past that got there before we did, before anybody did, that goes along with the absolute future, the one that no one can see coming, that no one will be around to see when it does come. That makes for a mystery—a mystery of being and time, of time and being— that clings to our hides with fierce obstinacy. We seek the unconditional but everywhere encounter conditions. This is an obdurate mysticism buried deep in our bones over which the clerics have no jurisdiction, to which they, like the rest of us, also submit. This factical condition levels the playing field between the naturalists and the supernaturalists, the Biblethumpers and snotty hard-nosed atheists, the Big Bangers and the creationists, dogmatists of every stripe and fashion. This mystical river runs beneath the distinction between

•• A kind of profound humility, over and above, or better, deeper than moral humility, a kind of cosmo-ontological humility, which appreciates that we are late arrivals on being’s sojourn, with a lot of catching up to do. Thinking is the raft tossed about on being’s infinite sea. •• A socio-ontological empathy, for we are all in this together, on the same raft, stranded on the same cosmic island, physicists and metaphysicians, theists and atheists, rightwingers and left-wingers, north and south, east and west, poets and used car salesmen.

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religious and secular, between science and art, fact and values, and any other distinction you come up with. It is the sort of thing that led Stephen Hawking to entitle the first chapter of one of his last books “The Mystery of Being,” which sounds more like Heidegger than Hawking. Men like Nietzsche and Camus approach it all puffed up with phallic heroism, shaking their defiant fist at it. Women like Luce Irigaray and Catherine Keller, with gentler grace, treat it as the great womb of being, as being’s nourishing element. But either way, there it is, big as life, deep as death, older than time: be-ing rather than not be-ing, a world without a why in sight. That it is in which we have life (zoe) and movement (kinesis) and being (einai) (Acts 17:28), rather than not. That, we might say, is the onto-zookinetico-logical constitution of our factical condition. That’s a mouthful, I agree, useful mostly for cocktail parties where you want to make an impression, but I think you see what I mean. However we put it, by coursing its way along a subterranean stream underneath the several undertakings of humankind, of everything and anything, including “religion” in the confessional sense, the abyss beckons, inducing several religio-mystico-ontological effects:

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•• An ontological gratitude for the gratuitousness, giftedness, the grace of being. Gratitude to what or to whom? Is this facticity the doing of Somebody? Or is it just a random throw of the cosmic dice? •• A deeper ontological “courage to be” rather than not (Paul Tillich), the courage to hope against hope (the apostle Paul), beyond a particular hope and moral courage. •• And, last but not least, last because first, love, a love of being rather than not, which I sing and sign, symbolize and emblematize, under the name (of) “God,” like Augustine weeping over his God. On the distinction between moral virtues and deeper ontological ones, see Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). I referred to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010).

Love? How do I dare? Where is there anything to love in all this darkness? Well, do not lovers prefer the dark? The woods of being are lovely, dark and deep. The dark is love’s element, and love is religion’s element. Love’s element is a non-knowing, an unconditional love no matter what. Love’s passion is a passion of non-knowing. Love is like a little flare sent up against a dark night, a star against a blue-black sky, a negentropic protest against entropic dissipation. The mark of religion, of this religion, is that, instead of feeling defeated by all this ambiguity, instead of treating our inability to come up with a final why and wherefore as a failure, we turn the tables on our factical fate and treat it as an insight into a certain groundless ground; instead of a breakdown, a breakthrough into a

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why-free life; instead of exhaustion, we affirm the inexhaustibility all around us; instead of a dead end, a living mystery. If this non-knowing is a fault, let us say it is a happy fault! Life is a felicitous failure to come up with a what that is equal to the that. Much as we do know, and I am all for knowing as much as we can, this much we do not know—who we are or what is what or why the why or what this concealed depth is, which is why we call it a dark center, an unlit core, a concealed depth. The non-knowing does not enervate but energizes and impassions. Embracing this non-knowing is a feat, not a defeat. This indeed is who we are. We are questers energized by the quest in such questions. The gripping thing in our lives is to come to grips with the fact that we cannot get a grip (Concept, Begriff) on ultimate matters such as this. Let us be like the rose, live and love like the rose, without why. Then why bother with such a question at all? I do not—it is bothering me. Why call it God? I did not. It called upon me under this name. It does not care what you call it. Why raise the question? I did not. It raised me, disturbed me from my bed in the middle of the night. I didn’t raise the question; the question has levelled me. God, what is going on in the name (of) “God,” is not a projection, but a projectile; it is not in my head but heading right at my head. I did not pose the question; it has deposed me, unhorsed me like Paul on the way to Damascus. I have been thrown into question. By what? By the that. By the inbreaking of being’s facticity upon my life. Augustine put it perfectly: He does not say I make (facio) things questionable; he says, I am made (factus sum) a question to myself—by the facticity of being. That is the breakthrough. That is who we are, we who ask, what do I love when I love my God?

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THE PLACE OF RELIGION

My proposal is that the mystical element of life, the elemental mystery of facticity, of the without why, is the element of religion, the place of religion, the place of religion’s love. This place is, to sharpen the paradox, a bottomless abyss. This mysterious place, or non-place, is where religion takes place while also leaving it a bit displaced. No need for cold, costly houses of worship to maintain, or candles, incense, preachy sermons, long robes, or tithing. This is religion run on a shoestring. Its true place is the (groundless) ground beneath the feet of both the discalced and the well-heeled (which, being shod, feels not), beneath the feet of both the philosophers and theologians. Ordinarily, if you want to clear a room full of philosophers, simply shout “theology” and you will have your choice of seats. But on my accounting, the mutual mistrust the two have of each other is a lovers’ quarrel about how to address the dark center, the unlit core, the concealed depths. At such depths we require all our resources, and, unlike the modernists, we are not epistemologically fussy. We need to have all of our wits about us—both philosophical and theological, logical and pre-logical, scientific and pre-scientific, conscious and pre-conscious, cognitive and affective, theoretical and practical. To such a list one would ordinarily add both religious and secular—but that is precisely my point. Here the bottom drops out of that distinction, for which a special wall in my modernist museum of dead white male philosophers has been reserved. It no longer cuts it (and never did), because something deeper cuts across or runs beneath that distinction. The place of religion, of this religion, is not an isolatable region of experience, which differs from science, politics, art, etc., as one place on a map differs from another, as if religion is something set aside for the Sabbatarians while secular types

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can sleep in on Sundays. This religion does not have a national headquarters in Nashville, Canterbury or the Vatican; it does not have a college of cardinals or a board of elders, great cathedrals or valuable paintings, or feast days and days of fasting. That is the regional demarcation of religion which I call religion in the “confessional” sense, the one that gets a tax exemption, the one we tick off on a survey of our “affiliation”—where it is of some concern to the long robes that there are more and more “nones” and fewer and fewer nuns. Rather than a particular region in experience, this is the deep structure of experience itself, what is fundamental to all experience, the element in which experience takes place, where we face up to the mystery of our lives, to the dark center (unless we fail to show). This religion does take not place in experience; experience takes place in it. This is the source of religion’s salt. But if this region is so hidden away in some subterranean stratum of our experience, then how are we ever expected to get access to it? How do we get there from here? That’s why I felt called upon to seek out no one less than the apostle Paul for help. We are already there! Or better, it is already here! It is the element in which we live and move and have our being. It is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. It is here if we can hear it. How? For that, I call upon no one less than the Beatles, who must have been reading Meister Eckhart: let it be. It happens. It happens to us. It happens in uncanny moments when it slips by the guard we have stationed over it. Hidden though it may be, it does not take an earthquake or a cataclysm to uncover it. It wears through the surface of everyday routines as when, driving down a long and empty highway, we start to wonder where we are going and what’s the big hurry. It steals upon us in the middle of an unsettling sleepless night. It happens to us under a starry sky when we realize we may be staring

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at stars now long dead and we wonder if any of these stars once played solar host to inquiring beings like us. Then the uneasy thought steals over us that the same fate awaits our little star, and that maybe, many million millennia hence, other thinking beings may see the light of our star and think the same uncanny thought on some dark star lit night—about us! It is then, in such “unguarded moments” that we allow ourselves to be exposed to the hidden depths of our being, to the unguardable groundlessness of our grounds, to the what-is-what?, to the no-matter-what, to the something-Iknow-not-what, to the without-why-ness of things. This is the precise point where this religion is located, its point of origin, the underground stream that nourishes it. Here our tiny little finite selves make contact with the infinite. Here we are hinged with the infinite, which leaves us not a little unhinged. Here, in contact with this elemental somethingI-know-not-what in which “we live and move and have our being”—whatever, no matter what, that may turn out to be— is a moment of salutary discomfort, of saving unease, of a healthy dis-ease. Our first instinct is to take flight from this uncanny feeling and hasten back to the whys and wherefores of everyday life. We wake the guards who have fallen asleep on the watch and warn them sternly, please, no more intrusions like this! No more spooky, nocturnal, uncanny visitations! If this is the place of religion, then this place is off-limits. We do not go gentle into that dark night. Contrary to Hegel’s assurance, religion is not the Sabbath of life, not a safe harbor in life’s storm. Not this religion. This is an implacable place where the bottom drops out, or where, if we may say so in a book on religion, all hell breaks loose, which leave us with us a sense of being strangers in a strange place. It does not readily yield to the light of logic, of theologic or ontologic, which is why our contact with it is more likely

Hegel describes religion as the “sabbath of life” in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, One Volume Edition, “The Lectures of 1827,” ed. Peter Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 75–77. This book is not a bad place to start reading Hegel. I sketched a phenomenology of this spookiness in “Proclaiming the Year of the Jubilee: Thoughts on a Spectral Life,” in It Spooks: Living in Response to an Unheard Call, ed. Erin Schendzielos (Rapid City, S.D., Shelter50 Publishing Collective, 2015), 10–47.

The opposite of this religion is not “secular” but superficial, selfish, narrow, cowardly, no salt. If we lack this religion, we are afraid of the dark. If we refuse to go there, to that uncanny place, we are consigned to live a safe, shallow, saltless, lightweight life, entertained by things of passing curiosity, preoccupied with self-aggrandizement or amusements, entertaining divertissements to pass the time away between now and the grave. We would have made a choice, of a sort, but the choice is to

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to be made with the rhythms of music, in the suggestive play of color in a painting, in the figures of a poem, in the tall tales told in a novel, all of them things that penetrate us to our bones. This ur-region does not yield to our consciously created concepts, but it does break through in a more preconscious or even unconscious way in a work of art, or in a quiet communication with a night sky, or a meditative moment beholding a mountain, or standing on an ocean’s edge. Our pre-conscious and unconscious do not lock us inside ourselves narcissistically. Resonating with the deep dark forces without, they are ecstatic, exposed. The deeper down we go, the farther out things are spread. We go in, in order to go out, ec-statically, ek-sistently, rhizomatically.

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choose not to choose, to live without making a real choice, without engagement, exposure or abiding commitment. We would seek to live without risk, without being willing to put our finite selves in harm’s way for something infinite, something greater than ourselves. So, when I sing a song to “religion without religion” I mean sounding the depths of life without signs or wisdom, without the support of the reassuring stories, songs and securities of the confessional religions or the arguments of the philosophers. The confessional religions are something made with human hands in response to love’s insistence, because love demands a response, but this religion without religion is what makes us. It is the deep structure of a faith that runs beneath the beliefs that make up the creedal statements of the confessional religions, of a hope that is not contracted to a creedal expectation that we get to live forever in return for obeying all the rules. Then, a faith and a hope in what? Well, in what we love. Love is given, but what do we love? What is that? That is that, the that, that in which we live and move and have our being. Love flourishes in being and movement and life, this life, before death, where religion is faith and hope and love of life. The physicists speak of the world as if we were dead, but religion is the response we are urged by love to make to the world while we are still alive. Religion means to dig down into that deep point, to make contact with that elemental stratum, where thinking’s why is silenced, and we embrace living and loving, moving and being without why. That is what is celebrated in religion’s dance and song, like the mystical poet’s song, where life, like the rose, is lived without why. The mystical poet was not opposing us to the rose but posing the rose to us as our standard. He was telling us to pay attention to the rose, to learn to live and move and be like the rose, without why.

Can there be a religion with religion?

In the 2014 film Calvary, Father James (Brendan Gleeson) is a Catholic priest of a different stripe. Having been ordained after the death of his wife, with an adult daughter with whom he is close, James has a first-hand experience of life in all its bodily concreteness. One day he is threatened with death by an anonymous man in the confessional as retribution for the abuse the man suffered years ago as a child at the hands of a parish priest. This man knows that Father James himself is innocent, but that injustice is precisely the justice the man seeks, because he, too, was an innocent child. After a week spent tending to the difficult circumstances of his parishioners, Father James meets the man on the beach, as arranged—like Jesus going up to Jerusalem, like a lamb to the slaughter, warned he would meet a certain death—where he is shot to death, dying for the sins of his church. This film makes an important point. My idea in this book is to make a case for an underlying religion without a religion in the strict, narrow or confessional sense, and this on the premise that traditional religion has already gotten quite a lot of press and has had several millennia to prove its worth—with what we can politely call mixed results. So, my idea here has been to stake out a third way, neither a traditional confessional religion nor a modernist-anti-religious secularity, to take up the cause of religion understood otherwise. I wish I had thought

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Four

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of calling it an “alt-religion” before that excellent prefix alt-, as in alternative energy sources, fell into the hands of white supremacists, climate-change deniers and conspiracy theorists interested not in deconstruction but in a flame-throwing destruction, pure and simple. Now, since making this argument, it has frequently been objected that I am hoisted on my own petards. I have been told that I have rigorously opposed the two and thereby installed a new post-modern binary opposition to add to the list of modernist ones that I denounce. Might we not, I am asked, have a more radical religion in the deeper sense I advocate that goes along with religion in the traditional or confessional sense? Might not religion in both senses set up shop in the same head, or heart, or community? There are two books in which this debate is carried on, along with my responses. Religion With/out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo, ed. James H. Olthuis (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion with Religion, eds. J. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012). See also Katharine Sarah Moody, Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity: Deconstruction, Materialism and Religious Practices (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2015), 121–38. In the final chapter of What Does Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernity for the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2007) my example of a deconstructive church is a Catholic priest whose actual life makes much the same point as this film.

NEVER SAY “ONLY” A SYMBOL

As Calvary illustrates, the answer is yes, of course. Indeed, I have spent most of my life among people on the radical

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“peace and justice” Catholic left where that is exactly how it works. So this distinction does not introduce a new dualism. I saw this objection coming and I argued against it explicitly above (see Chapter One, pp. 33–38). But let me restate my case more explicitly so there is no confusion. I am not making a (modernist) case against the confessional faiths, which are the depository of our oldest religious memories. They are the way that we give words and deeds to our love of God, which cannot exist in an ahistorical vacuum. It was never my idea to deny that the deeper or more radical religion may very well exist within religion in the strict or narrower sense. As I say several times in this book, it can be found with or without the traditional religious bodies, which we might signify orthographically by writing religion “with/out” religion, as James Olthuis proposes. There is certainly a place for this religion without religion in religion itself, and there are two very good reasons for saying this. First, if this radical religion, which I consider the deep structure of all experience, is not to be confined to a particular region of experience, if, as I have been maintaining, it can be found anywhere, then it certainly can be found inside the confessional religious traditions. It is found whenever and wherever the depths of experience are sounded, and certainly can be found in the concrete religious traditions of which it is the radicalization. Indeed, one of the most important ways that radical religion makes its appearance is as a radicalization of religion in the familiar sense. In this case, radical religion is parasitic on traditional religion, remembering that parasites play an important part in our health. It is a modulation, inflection, reinvention (read: deconstruction) of classical religion, not a drive-by shooting like the (not so very) “new atheists.” The radicality of Father James is the radicality of his imitatio

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Christi, but without Christianity the image of Jesus and of his radical non-violence in the face of death would have been lost forever. Secondly, the very existence of the particular religious traditions—Christian, Islamic, etc.—bears witness to the alienation from the underlying mystical element of life I am describing. It is just because this mystical sense of life to which I appeal is regularly forgotten or covered up that we require a specific cultural form to recall and uncover it. In that sense, religion in the narrow sense is something of a privileged expression of this proto-religion, the question being, given how reactionary it can be, whether and how long it will continue to enjoy such privilege. “Religion” prospers as a separate category (paradigmatically in modernity, where it was first constructed) directly in proportion to our alienation from religion as a deep structure of experience. Religion in modernity is something like a modern art museum or a concert hall. In the pre-modern world, art and music were simply a part of life. In modernity, they are set apart, or take refuge, either way, are given a separate viewing or hearing of their own (in their own little boxes). If our sense of the depth—be it of God or of the mystery of the cosmos—were alive and well throughout the length and breadth of cultural life, the need for “religion” as a particular practice might very well wither; it would certainly be transformed. There are no temples in the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev. 21:22). But absent such a sense, we need temples. Maybe someday we will not; but it is hard to imagine how that would look. So, religion provides a time—hence the importance of a sabbath day— and a place—hence the importance of the liturgical space of a “house of worship”—for meditation and reflection, where the press of the world is temporarily suspended, and we may

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act as if the Kingdom of God is here. It sets aside the rush of life in order to ponder the narratives that have been handed down to us and to celebrate the elemental mysteries of birth and death, of joy and sorrow, justice and injustice. The several religious traditions do this not in the manner of the philosophers, who speculate, or scientists, who investigate, but by way of compelling stories that narrate, by way of powerful images, striking sayings, and affecting song and ritual. I said that the name of God is stand-in for something that we love with a love that surpasses understanding, with a desire that passes all desire, lacking which we are not worth our salt. It is, at the risk of shocking the pious, what Hegel calls a figuration (Vorstellung), Tillich calls a symbol, or what I call a theopoetics, by means of which the grip of dissipated everydayness is broken. We sometimes hear it said that sports is a metaphor for life. I am proposing that religion is a metaphor for life, a deep symbolic outbreak where, as Tillich says, if you understand what a symbol is, you will never say “it’s only a symbol.” Collectively such symbolic resources have proven time and time again to have more power to transform lives than lean clean syllogisms. Like the great works of art, religious traditions draw from the depths, resonating with the power of being. They produce memorable and imaginative figures that touch bottom on human experience, that communicate with the bare-naked facticity of being, with the “unconditional,” the “unprethinkable,” wherever and whenever it is to be found. They take time out to ponder the mystery of the ultimate why and wherefore. I am not making a brief against religion in the strict sense. I am just saying that too much of the time it has fallen into the wrong hands and I am proposing a way for it to understand itself. Indeed, I would even go so far as to say that the more

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radical religion I am describing does not exist. It insists. It does not exist as such, but only insofar as it stirs in the depths of the various kinds of experience that do exist, whenever we run up against the radical mystery in things. Radical religion and confessional religion do not form a dualism or a polar opposition but a circle, a circular composition, the hermeneutic circulation between the conditional and the unconditional. The unconditional, if there is such a thing, does not exist; it can only be realized or actualized under certain determinate conditions, while the conditional, which does exist, is always a limited realization or actualization of something unconditional. As Derrida would put it, the unconditional and undeconstructible demand for justice cannot be realized without the construction of laws; but no positive law or set of laws can ever be identified with unconditional justice itself, if there is such a thing. The same thing goes for this more radical religion. As a religion of the unconditional, of the impossible, it is only actualized under certain conditions. It is always found in or under concrete conditions. But, while it is true that it cannot exist without these conditions, it is also true that its real force cannot be confined or restricted to these conditions. We seek the unconditional but the only thing we come upon comes with conditions. For the Heideggerians among us: Being is not a being, but there is no Being without beings; Being is not a being, but beings are always beings in their Being. The unconditional requires something concrete and embodied, which is necessary, and up to now that has mostly taken the form of religion in the confessional sense, the future of which depends upon its ability to reinvent itself—otherwise, it will neither have nor deserve to have a future. If religion wants to exist, it must make itself worthy of what is going on in religion. The undeconstructible does not exist. It insists,

I have spelled out what I mean by “theopoetics” and the “insistence” of radical theology in confessional theology in The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), chapter 4. See Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 1957), chapter 3, “Symbols of Faith,” for more on his idea of symbols.

I am not making a brief against the traditional faiths, but I am trying to infiltrate them and disturb them from within, to disturb their balance and keep them in a state of optimal disequilibrium. In this way I want to vitalize and energize the concretely constituted institutions. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this can only happen by making trouble for them, creative trouble, by constantly visiting upon them the structural gap or distance between the unconditional itself and the concrete and particular conditions under which it necessarily exists, which, as Paul told the Athenians, have been made by human hands. The unconditional itself does not exist as such but only under conditions which it inhabits or “haunts.” It does not exist; it spooks. How so? It makes the concrete and conditional traditions restless for something unconditional. What exists is something present, constructed at a point in space and time, while this radical religion is a religion of the

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it calls, lures, solicits from without even as it disturbs from within. It is not an eternal essence floating high above the earth like a Platonic form but something stirring deep within the concrete conditions of life. Such insinuating insistence explains the rumblings and restlessness of our heart. Inquietum est cor nostrum, Augustine said on the first page of the Confessions, as he was about to tell the story of the journey of his heart.

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undeconstructible, of the lure of the undeconstructible, an endless search for something coming, for something I know not what, “in which we live and move and have our being.” So, not only are the confessional traditions put at risk by being invaded or infiltrated by this more radical religion, they are never so alive as when they are! They should be grateful for all the trouble radical religion causes. That is what I mean by having some salt! In some congregations, we would have a hard time convincing the pastor of all this; in other cases, it is the pastor who is trying to convince the faithful, who would rather not be disturbed. In the mystical sense of life I am describing, the conditional makes a passing and tenuous contact with the unconditional, the construction with the undeconstructible, the finite with the infinite, the infinitival to-come. When that happens, when that contact is made, it gives off sparks, it activates a field of potentialities, and that can happen anywhere, from science to art to politics to religion to ordinary life. An old pipe, or worn hat, an old piece of jewelry, things of no worth at all commercially, can be “priceless” to someone if they belonged to a dearly loved now departed parent. Every time we see it, it touches our heart and the whole mystery of life and death spreads out before us. Painters regularly take the most commonplace things and find in them a whole world. Painters do not make a copy of reality; they magnify it into a hyperreality. Van Gogh became the most popular painter in the western world by painting the most commonplace things in the life of peasants, evoking the dark corners of life and death. Andy Warhol pushed this point to its limits by painting Campbell tomato soup cans—unless this had already been accomplished by Marcel Duchamp when he mounted a urinal on a platform, signed it “R. Mutt,” entitled it “Fountain,” and

A GOD BEFORE WHOM WE CAN SING AND DANCE

When theologians in the concrete conditioned confessional traditions make contact with the unconditional one result is what I am calling a theopoetics. By this I mean that while the logos in theology provides a more reflective conceptual account of the community’s figures and narratives, it does not produce a strong logic that would have real purchase outside the imagination of the community. Confessional theological debates about the Trinity or the resurrected body bear an epistemological analogy to a “Star Wars” convention, where you can hear technological explanations of the imaginary hyperdrives by which the starships are propelled or of the prosthetics, bionics, and cybernetics that went into the reconstruction of Darth Vader’s body. In both cases the logic is local; it only makes sense to the insiders, helping them unpack the community’s shared imaginative configurations. When a confessional theology succeeds in reaching beyond confessional limits, which does happen, it is because it touches upon the deeper or radical theology I am describing. The way to think about this is to say that confessional theologians “report back” to the communities to which they belong. If the community fails to recognize itself in the theologian, either the theologian is sent packing or the community packs up and

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transformed the history of art. For Marcel Proust, a whole world is lit up by a cup of tea and a madeleine. The point is that nothing is exempt from this process. Every conditional thing has a potential resonance with the unconditional, every quotidian construction reverberates with the undeconstructible, every finite thing stirs with the infinite. The conditional is disturbed from within by the unconditional, the finite by the infinite, and that disturbance is its life.

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splits (schism), following the theologian’s innovation. But the advocates of the religion with/out religion whose cause I am pleading “report back” to anyone who is born and destined to die, to anyone who is willing to listen; they are not providing a local community service. The next question is the one that sends tempers flaring and makes the confessional pots boil over: Are these symbolic systems true? My first answer to this question is only slightly tongue in cheek. The Good Place is a clever TV sit-com about Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), a young woman who seems to have been mistakenly admitted into heaven. In her orientation interview with Michael (Ted Danson), the superintendent named after a famous archangel, she asks, out of curiosity, which religion down there on earth actually got it right about the afterlife? All the major religions did about the same, Michael replies, around two percent, but one night, Doug Forcett, a stoner who got high on mushrooms back in Calgary (Canada) in the 1970s, launched into a long disquisition on his own theory and scored a 92 percent. He’s a hero around here, Michael says, pointing to a picture of Doug hanging on his office wall. In the 2014 film Arrival, the aliens arrive in twelve (tribes of Israel, apostles, marks on a clock or compass?) different ships around the globe, each of which provides one-twelfth of their message, hoping this tactic will inspire global cooperation. Such works of whimsy are not without wisdom—like the wisdom of “Nathan the Wise,” Lessing’s story of the three rings—all of which make excellent theo-mathematical models of religious truth that can be gainfully employed by the theologians. At the risk of ruining my chances of ever gaining elective office in Alabama, I have to say that the confessional religions are neither “true” nor “false” in the logical sense of truth but

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they are eminently true in the saline sense of truth. They are not true in the way that the propositions are true and the arguments are binding, in the way that scientific theories or historical investigations are true. Theirs is not a propositional but a living truth. They are living or dead, vital or moribund, have salt or no salt, but are not correct or incorrect. They do not pick out facts of the matter, but that does not in any way waylay their deeper truth, no more than locating a novel in the “Fiction” section of the library waylays its truth. When, at the end of Jane Eyre, Jane hears Mr. Rochester call her name from many miles away across the moors, we are not being given new neurological information about hitherto unknown resources of the human auditory nerve. Jane’s preternatural powers of hearing instruct us about the deep channels of love, not about auditory canals. Novels “reveal” a truth to us that touches the very depths of love (and hatred), without purporting to be a record of historical or scientific facts. That’s why Aristotle said, if you want the particulars, study history; if you want universals, read the poets, and also why he said this sort of truth does not admit of the precision of mathematics. Narratives like this, whether they are religious or not, are connected up with the deep structure of human experience; they resonate with the mystical element, they draw upon the powers of being. When they no longer connect with experience, they lose their vitality and they go under. When its figures grow stale or obsolete, the community perishes. The older Greek and Roman religions were not refuted by the logical arguments of the Christians. They simply lost the battle of the imagination with the figure of the “Cross,” with what Paul—who was, pace Kierkegaard, both a genius and an apostle—called the logos of the Cross, which was a sign of folly to the Greek philosophers.

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They succumbed to the new Christianizing stories that grew up around Jesus of Nazareth. That is why the life of religious ritual and song—a god to whom we can sing and dance, as Heidegger said—is not a bit of external ornamentation layered like a garment over a body of doctrinal propositions. The opposite is the case. Liturgy is a vital center of religion in the confessional sense of which the doctrines are the abstract distillation. From the song and dance of unschooled evangelicals in rural America, depicted so powerfully in Robert Duvall’s The Apostle, to the glorious high liturgies of the Greek orthodox churches, the rhythmic power of song and ritual touches and transforms the heart. James Cone, the great spokesman of black liberation theology, has written extensively about the theological power of the “blues” to stir the heart of African Americans. Cone singles out the transformative power of Billie Holiday’s rendering of Strange Fruit. For Cone, the Christian “cross,” a figure of the lynching tree, helped sustain them throughout their long history of oppression and fanned the flames of the civil rights movement. Indeed, the cross is not a symbol of the lynching tree; it is a lynching tree: “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 10:39). Heidegger made this famous statement in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York, 1969), 68–73. See James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011).

Hegel saw the point of these stories when he said that they are the way we get to feel the spirit (Geist) of a religion, the way we get it in the gut. Gut is not the worst way to translate Geist.

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But Hegel also haughtily held that these religious images were a lower level expression of what is best expressed by the Concept, so religion is the way that the common folk can get what is being discussed more clear-headedly back in the philosophy department. I am saying the opposite. The figurative images of religious traditions give us access to a level of nonpropositional truth to which the concepts of the philosophers, the controlled experimental work of the natural sciences, and the rigorously controlled procedures of historical-critical investigation are denied. After the biologists have told us how much of human behavior can be explained by the story of evolution, as opposed to the story of a serpent and an innocent, bare-naked couple in a garden in ancient Mesopotamia, and after the “Jesus Seminar” scholars have explained how most of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the New Testament were the product of the imagination of the later Greekspeaking Gentile communities, the mystery of our life remains standing, still staring at us or waking us in the night. The “call” of what is called in the New Testament the “Kingdom of God,” which is a poem of which Jesus is the poet and theology is the theopoetics, continues to solicit us. Turning life over without further ado to the controlled disciplinary investigations of the academy, which are, of themselves, make no mistake, of the utmost importance—lest we be swallowed alive by ignorance and primitive superstition—is like turning life over to the police, or to the lawyers, or to the computers. That, the ancients would say, is foolish, lacking in wisdom (sophia), where wisdom means the whole ball of wax, cognitive, ethical and affective, the true, the good and the beautiful altogether, in a complex, confusing and ever-restless whole. To turn life over to logic is like thinking a poem can be translated into an argument with premises and conclusions

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without worrying that something has been lost in the translation. When this logic includes God, what is going on in the name (of) “God,” in its equations, it is reduced to what Heidegger called onto-theo-logic, in face of which Heidegger said he preferred a God before whom we can sing and dance. Even if the physicists come up with a theory of everything, that won’t include everything. Theopoetics is sustained by the tension between the unconditional and the conditional. The concrete religious traditions provide an access to the unconditional which, given their inclination to contract into dogma, doctrine and authority, they likewise threaten to block. We are, if I may say so, damned if we do and damned if we don’t. We will only be saved if we inhabit the distance between the two. If the unconditional were not given concrete and conditional expression, the unconditional would simply pass us by or never come to mind. But once it is expressed, we are hip high in intellectual quicksand, sucked in by the lure, sorely tempted to mistake the unconditional for the conditional (which in theology is called idolatry or blasphemy). Many Protestants confuse God with a conditioned, historically constructed book, and many Catholics create the same confusion with a conditioned, historically constructed institution—but we still need books and institutions. The confessional traditions are a pharmakon in Derrida’s sense, a drug that will cure us unless it kills us first. They are a “gift” that may turn to “poison,” which is an Anglo-German pun (die Gift in German means poison), which is why giving gifts to elected officials is a way to poison a democracy. The saving thing in the concrete religious traditions is their power to make contact with the powers of the deep in figurative and imaginative ways unavailable to straightforward calculative thinking.

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Their danger—to themselves and to the rest of us—occurs when the theopoetics breaks down, when the figurative is literalized, when the unconditional is contracted to its conditional expression, when the undeconstructible is identified with historically constituted constructions. When we ask, what do I love when I love my God, we should remember the expression used by Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, who used to speak of “the mystery we call God,” where the mystery comes first and “God” is one of the names we have for the mystery. This is a wonderfully subversive expression, which is the sort of thing that earned Rahner the suspicion of Pope Pius XII but made him a hero of Vatican II under Pope John XXIII, who advanced a saline sense of truth. This is just the sort of expression that gets theologians in trouble with the powers that be. It is what happens when theologians touch bottom, when the radicality of their theology wears through to the surface and exposes the theopoetic character of the confessional theology. It happens when pastors take an uncompromising look at themselves in the rectory mirror and confess—or “circumfess,” as Derrida would say—that, after a life time of seminary studies and of teaching and preaching, they do not, in any deep sense, know what they are talking about. I’m not picking on pastors and theologians. The quantum physicists admit the same thing. They say only six people in the world understand quantum physics, and five of them are lying. That confession is not the end of theology (or of science), but the beginning. Like the rest of us, these theologians confess that they do not know who we are, or what the name of God means, or what we love when we love our God. That after all is what “mystery” means—when the ball of thinking bounces off the wall of being. They are feeling about for a more radical

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proto-theological stratum, for that deeper element in which we live and move and have our being, running beneath the doctrines, candles, computers, downtown offices and clerical appointments up above. At first, a passing thought, quietly, to themselves, and then it leaks into their preaching. They are starting to wonder what point there is to preaching. The congregants suspect something is up because the sermons are starting to get interesting. That is when the trouble starts. One unmistakable sign of the unconditional is that it makes trouble, of which what is going on in the name (of) “God,” is exemplary. That is why being a prophet is a hazardous occupation. The powers that be regard them as troublemakers, but really, they are the ones for whom trouble is being made—by what is going on in the name of God, in the name (of) “God,” by what they love when they love their God.

I appreciate the account of post-modern preaching in Phil Snider, Preaching After God: Derrida, Caputo, and the Language of Postmodern Homiletics (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2012).

One very good reason I am not trying to simply oppose in a binary way this more radical religion to the confessional traditions and their theologians is that confessional theology is very often just where radical theology is found—right there, precisely inside the confessional traditions. Truth to tell, one of my favorite places to locate religion without religion is in religion itself. Whenever confessional theologians are brought to the realization that they are living in a symbolic and theopoetic space, whenever they come to appreciate the

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darkness implied in their icons and figures, their narratives and metaphors, made to realize their through-a-mirrordarkly quality, or what I am calling the mystical element, and whenever they go on to confess all this honestly to themselves or to their congregations, we end up reading about their fate in the newspapers and they end up reading the “help wanted” page. When that happens, we can be sure, they have hit upon something of radical importance. If you dig deep enough, you will eventually hit the dark center, the unlit core, the concealed depth, within religion or without.

Why is religion so violent?

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Five

As I just said, one unmistakable sign of the unconditional is that it makes trouble, which is sometimes of a salutary and creative sort, and sometimes not so much. I say this by way of a segue into saying the time has come to confront the elephant in the room, the problem of religion and violence. Up to now I have been advancing the cause of love by way of the “return to religion” found in post-modern thinkers. They are people interested in recovering a certain religion, albeit a religion without religion, as opposed to the belligerent and reductionistic drive-by shootings of religion characteristic of modernity. My idea has been to put the confessional traditions in their place, to displace their confessional entrenchment, which would if heeded infuse their hospitality and defuse their hostility. No more holy wars, please. In this approach, both the Biblical and non-Biblical religious traditions, both the theisms and the atheisms, both the religious and the secular, all these opposing sides are displaced by being exposed to the deeper mystery in things, which brings us all up short. But it has never been my intention to deny that in the twentyfirst century, the “return of religion” has taken an ugly turn, not a post-modern but a thoroughly anti-modern turn. A great deal of religion today has turned against modern science and democracy, as well as against the post-modern celebration of difference and diversity. Religion, that religion, is engaged in

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waging a holy war—against both the modern and the postmodern alike. The contemporary world is trembling under the shocks of a new Crusades, a new battle over Jerusalem, a new wave of religious wars, which has flared up with particular fury since September 11 and the subsequent war on Iraq. That war was a trifecta of folly: a bad military decision, a disastrous political decision, not to mention, if anyone still cares, an egregious violation of just war theory (a pre-emptive strike on a trumped-up premise). It played perfectly into the extremists’ hands that Islam is under attack, caught up in a holy war with the “great Satan,” whose counterpart in the west is the “war on terrorism.” Here, the return of religion means a resurgence of religious violence, a reactionary anti-modernism where the modern means secularism and secularism means Godlessness. To this tragic state of affairs, the right response is not Islamophobia but to acknowledge the role Anglo-EuroAmerica and its thirst not for justice and democracy but for oil have played in creating this situation in the first place. Islamic extremism did not drop from the sky; it is the bitter fruit of the poisonous tree of Euro-American colonialism and the failure of the United States to be an honest broker of the conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinians. That is, to say the least, a complicated story that I cannot undertake here. But there is a second thing we must do which I can address here, which is to think more carefully about the role of religion in this violence and of violence in religion, to consider what is going on in religion which lends itself to such violence, and to do so in a more sensitive and deeper way—which is the point of the religion without religion that I am defending here. In the war between religion and secularism, both sides are dangerous, both sides are too strong. My whole point, here as

elsewhere, is to weaken the secular into the post-secular, the modern into the post-modern, while assuring that the postmodern does not degenerate into anti-modern.

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IMPOSSIBLE PEOPLE

I like to say, only half in jest, that the only problem with religion is religious people; without them, religion’s record would be unblemished. The “people of God,” the people of the impossible, impassioned by a love that leaves them restless and unhinged, are impossible people. In every sense of the word. If, on any given day, you go into the worst neighborhoods of the inner cities of most large urban centers, or into disaster areas long abandoned by TV cameras, the people you will find there serving the poor and needy, expending their lives and considerable talents attending to the least among us, will likely be religious people— evangelicals and Pentecostalists, social workers with deeply held religious convictions, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic, men and women, priests and nuns, black and white. They are the better angels of our nature. They are down in the trenches, working in the poorest schools, serving the Biblical widow, the orphan, and the stranger, while the critics of religion are sleeping in on Sunday mornings. In love with the impossible, they will not rest until the impossible happens, which is impossible, so they get very little rest. The learned despisers of religion, on the other hand, happen to be away that week, staying in a nice hotel, reading unreadable papers on “the other” at each other, which they pass off as their way of serving the wretched of the earth. Then, after proclaiming the death of God, they jet back to their tenured jobs, unless they happen to be on sabbatical leave and are spending the year in Paris.

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Religious people are the people of the impossible, God love them, and impossible people, God help us all. Both these things under the same roof, both in the name of God. If religious people make the rest of us look like loveless loafers, they are also capable of the worst violence. They confuse themselves with God and threaten the lives and civil liberties of anyone who disagrees with them, which they confuse with disagreeing with God. They regularly confuse the love of God with somebody’s career or ego, politics or race, gender or sexual ethics, to which it is systematically sacrificed. Religion is our doing, not God’s. We made it and God is an innocent by-stander. Christopher Hitchens should have entitled his book Religion is Not Great and left God to people who think more carefully about such things. The Biblical story of Moses and Aaron (Exodus 32) is religion’s story about itself, where religion occupies the place of Aaron and the golden calf. Religion is not to be blamed for building institutions and theologies—without structures, life will be Hobbesian, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”—but it must keep constant guard about building idols and be ready to theologize with a hammer. The idea is not to level these structures to the ground. We need structures made with human hands; nobody else is going to build them for us. But we need to keep them open-ended, revisable, honest, on their toes, always threatened and at risk. If, as the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida once said, the religions are rafts that sail on an endless sea, then we must keep watch that we do not allow our preoccupation with the business on the raft to displace God’s business, which is love. That is why I have always loved Meister Eckhart’s brilliant little prayer, “I pray God to rid me of God.” Religion is for lovers and the only measure of love is love without measure, but—in post-modern theory, there

is always a but—love without measure can do immeasurable harm. Nothing is innocent. Love is unconditional, but it is when the wheels of the unconditional hit the ground of the conditional that all the trouble starts. Then the promise becomes a threat and all hell can break loose. What we seek is the unconditional, but everything we find comes with conditions attached.

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RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE

Let us not mince words. I begin by citing a 2018 report in Politico on one of the Rohingya camps in southern Bangladesh where some 700,000 souls—by souls I mean bodies—sought refuge from the military dictatorship in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, which has driven them across the border from a region they have lived in for centuries: The Moynarghona refugee camp, a claustrophobic, chaotic mass of bamboo and tarpaulin shacks, slumps over hillsides stripped bare of vegetation. Scrawny teenage boys in T-shirts and sarongs linger on its edges, staring aimlessly at trucks and rickshaws skidding by. To wander inside the camp is to have your senses assaulted—by the chatter of a thousand half-naked toddlers, the stench of raw sewage, the bitter taste of dust. The heat, which can climb toward 90 degrees during the winter season, only adds to the misery. But the air is stifling mostly because this place, this supposed refuge, has been sucked empty of hope. The Rohingya, stripped of their citizenship by a 1982 law, once numbered some 1.1 million inhabitants before August 2017, when the campaign of assaults began in which countless thousands have been killed, villages burnt, and

Begum lost hold of her 3-year-old son in the chaos. Then, as she jumped into the water to get away, an assailant tore her 18-month-old daughter [Yasmeen] out of her arms. Back on land, Begum stumbled on the body of a woman whose throat had been slashed. Next to the body sat a dazed little girl covered in blood. Begum grabbed the girl and ran, joining other Rohingya in the exodus to Bangladesh. When I met them in Moynarghona, the round-faced girl, who looked around 2 years old, called Begum “ma.” Begum called the girl Yasmeen. Throughout this persecution, Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her resistance to the military dictatorship and embraced by the Obama administration, and the political party she leads, frustrated the efforts of journalists and UN investigators to get this story out. In March 2018, the United States Holocaust Museum revoked the prestigious “Elie Wiesel” human rights award she had been given in 2012, accusing her of having “promulgated hateful rhetoric against the Rohingya community.” The Rohingya’s crime? They are Muslims. The Buddhist majority fears the country’s Buddhist national identity is threatened by what had been a largely peaceful minority (about two percent of the population). One does not need to be an expert in Buddhist studies to be stunned by the sight of Buddhist monks in the middle of such violence. Of all the world’s great spiritual traditions,

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women raped. An official of the United Nations said it bears the “the hallmarks of a genocide.” One of the refugees was Laila Begum, who took flight with her children when her village was attacked. The account continues:

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the leitmotifs of Buddhism are arguably the most radically peaceful: a critique of the ego, the self, and desire, an emphasis not on the identity of the particular—Buddhist “nationalism” is a square circle!—but on openness to the whole, described as “Nothingness” (no-thing-ness, no-particularthing-ness), not unlike what I am calling the mystical element in life. It seeks meditative calm, a will-less “no-mind,” an ethics of the “great compassion,” inviting comparison with the Sermon on the Mount in Christianity.

Nahal Toosi, “The Genocide the U.S. Didn’t See Coming,” Politico (March/April, 2018).

If you think the problem is that the Buddhists are not theists and indeed have no comparable idea of a personal God who would put a stop to such things, think again. Things are arguably worse in the monotheisms of the Biblical tradition. There the founding texts are marked by terrible violence in the name of God—one God, one people, but a lot of blood! Take the Exodus story of the liberation of the Israelites from captivity, which inspired the “liberation theologians” to take up the cause of the poorest of the poor in Latin America, and, in the United States, supplied the famous rallying call of the civil rights movement “Let my people go” (Exodus 8:1). The Lord said this to Moses on the occasion of visiting the second of ten horrible plagues upon the Egyptians—it makes for rather gory reading, if you have the stomach (plagues of frogs, flies, diseased livestock, boils, locusts, darkness)—the tenth of which is utterly ghastly, which was to kill their firstborn children, which is what “Passover” means. The Lord also

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took this opportunity to “harden the heart” of the Pharaoh, which seems counterproductive, except that it afforded the Lord the opportunity to show how much pain he could inflict (Exodus 8:10). The grand finale, which made for a film spectacular, Cecile B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments, was to drown the pursuing Egyptian soldiers in the Red Sea. “The Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel.” Well, we were not likely to miss that point. A more pacific deity (read: ancient author) might have used his divine might (read: imagination) to come up with a more non-violent solution, say, by divinely inducing a deep sleep in the Egyptians who, upon waking, would find the Israelites had quietly taken their leave. Then the only loser would have been DeMille. But even then, God is still the tribal God of the Israelites, while the Egyptians, whose God must have been the one sleeping on the job, are on their own. The Jewish prophets call for justice to flow like water over the land, but in the oldest and most venerated narratives of the Bible, God commands his people to let the blood of innocents flow like water. Genesis is not without its genocides. The Lord set the high-water mark, if I may say so, for genocide, when, in an act of regret—and short-temper, we have only gotten to Chapters Six–Seven—he wiped out the entire human race and all living things, save a selected few (the dinosaurs seem to have missed the boat). A few chapters later, the greatness of “father Abraham” is displayed in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, his innocent son, as a test of his faith. Now I know he did not go through with it, but he would have; at the very least, nowadays, we could get him on child endangerment. Not to mention that Abraham already had a son, Ishmael, by his concubine, Hagar, whom he and Sarah treated badly. Sarah thought Hagar was behaving like an “uppity slave” when she

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got pregnant with Ishmael. In Islam, Mohammed is said to descend from Hagar, and the Ishmaelites are taken to be the predecessor of the Muslims. Abraham led his clan to slaughter the Canaanites, who already occupied the land that the “God of Abraham” had assured him was his for the taking (the “promised land”). We never hear the opinion of the God of the Canaanites and there evidently were no title searches in those days. In Leviticus, the list of offenses meriting capital punishment would make Texas look liberal. The main consolation remaining to us from these appalling stories is that there is not a shred of historical or archeological evidence that any of this ever happened. Their vindictive cruelty is not a fact of history but a fiction of the fire and fury of the Biblical story-teller’s imagination. The early Israelites were likely Canaanites themselves and no such brutal invasion ever occurred. If 600,000 Israelites spent forty years crossing the desert, they did not leave so much as a broken vase or shard behind; they must have been an excessively tidy lot. We have no reliable historical evidence for the flood, or Noah’s ark, or Abraham, or the wall of Jericho, or Exodus, or any of these stories, and that is not for lack of trying. Indeed, William F. Albright, the grandfather of Biblical archeology, set out precisely to back up these stories, but the project is widely taken to be a failure. Except of course by—you guessed it—the Christian nationalists, who opened a “Museum of the Bible” just a few blocks from the Capitol in Washington in a risible attempt to persuade the gullible that this is all the Bible truth! The brutality of the Bible stories led early Christian theologians (Google “Marcion”) to oppose them to the “God of love” in the New Testament, and very nearly led to banning them from the Christian canon. Careful! Love may be a

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many-splendored thing, as the old song goes, but love is also a two-edged sword. Nothing is innocent, even love, especially love. The “Fourth Gospel,” the gospel of love, lost no love on “the Jews.” It proved exceptionally good at stirring up hatred for the “iniquitous Jews” (from a mercifully retired Catholic liturgical prayer). It uses “the Jews” as a term of abuse, an appalling Greco-Gentile anachronism, as if Jesus were not a Jew, as if the Jews were not his own people. By blaming “them” for the crucifixion and making out a bloody Roman procurator to be innocent as a lamb, the gospel of love laid the foundations of an ugly history of hate, of persecution and anti-Semitism that finally culminated in the Holocaust. “Those who say ‘I love God’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars” (1 John 4:2). Physician, heal thyself! Before we wag our self-righteous finger at these ancient writers, we should not fail to flag the resemblance these stories bear to the tales Americans tell themselves in the books of their own Genesis. They sing songs to the “discovery” of the “new world” by waves of white European invaders whose God told them to found a “city on a hill” (John Winthrop) and whispered in their ear that it was their “manifest destiny” to spread this city from sea to shining sea. This was to be a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men (sic) are created equal, except of course for the men (and women and children) who already lived on that hill and between those shining seas. These indigenous people were decidedly not equal, of which the foreign invaders had been assured by no one less than the Pope himself, who (infallibly, no doubt) instructed the conquistadores in the “Doctrine of Discovery” that unbaptized “savages” were not entitled to own land. So, have at it. These “savages” do not have (our) “religion”—this colonial

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moment was an important part of the construction of this category in modernity. The shining city on a hill went on to prosper in the nineteenth century on the backs of enslaved Africans dragged in chains from their homes to work for white Christian masters, who had been assured by the Bible that these were the cursed “sons of Ham” (Gen. 9:20–27), a story white-washed in the movie classic Gone With the Wind. Today, the world is rocked by renewed religious violence and a rising tide of intolerance to the immigrants displaced by these wars. The Trump campaign did not start all this, but it accelerated it and rode its waves to the oval office. Trump tapped into the real frustrations of white blue-collar workers who were ignored by what passes for a left in the United States. But this campaign was pushed across the finish line by appealing to the basest instincts of the voting public and managed to gain the overwhelming support of evangelical Christians. After claiming for years that “character matters,” the Christian Right embraced a candidate of dubious character, allowed the end to justify the means, and left its own moral credibility in shreds. It succeeded in doing what its worst critics could not do, in making the word “evangelical” a term of opprobrium from which responsible Christian leaders dissociate themselves. Evangelical now means an anti-gospel, hypocrisy, a deal with the Devil, enlisting the name of Jesus in the service of ignorance, racism, divisiveness, and gun-toting violence against the stranger. The danger today in the United States is that evangelicals will get what they want, a culture informed by the Bible, their Bible. The danger posed by the return of religion today is that it is their religion that is making a return, representing not a post-modern turn but a turn against both the modern and the post-modern.

BAN THE BIBLE

So, then, why not ban the Bible? Well, for starters, there is no such thing as the Bible. As if it were one, as if it were a single book and not an anthology of many books with multiple authors separated by centuries, laced with love and hate, mercy and divinely sanctioned ethnic cleansings. Like any book, like the Quran, like every classic text, religious or not, it requires the most carefully honed hermeneutic skill in sorting through its complexity. As one of its earliest theorists, J. J. Rambach (1737–1818), said, hermeneutics is the subtilitas intelligendi, the delicate art (subtilitas) of reading between the lines (from inter + legere), of having a light touch, the right touch, to deal with very touchy texts. Books are not like potters and readers are not like clay; books are not rigid active agents and readers are not malleable passive subjects. They are like musical scores; there is no music until someone plays them. Books need to be read, that is, interpreted, and readers are responsible for their interpretation.

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On monotheistic violence, Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). For a comprehensive inventory of case studies of contemporary religious violence, see Marc Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, Fourth Edition (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). On not blaming religion for everything, see William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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From here on I will make use of the idea of what I like to call “radical hermeneutics,” a notion I introduced in Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) and have recently elaborated for a general audience in Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information (London: Penguin/Pelican, 2018).

The authors of these early Bible stories were neither cosmologists nor historians nor moral theologians; they were story-tellers. Their intended audience was not Sunday school classes on the Bible or modern congregations. Their purpose was not edification. They were forging the founding narratives of the people of Israel, tales of legendary heroes, mythical accounts of the foundations of the world, of the human race, of the tribes of Israel. Their texts are more like novels, not unlike rousing battle hymns for the people about a God who has “loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.” They were not writing a handbook on being good people; they were creating the heroic story of the formation and legitimation of the people, their people. In all this the hero, the protagonist, the central player is (their) God. I will be your God and you will be my people. One nation under God, one God ensuring one people. Once we realize this, we understand the shocking violence of their God. While still inexcusable—as Jack Miles said in God: A Biography, “God is not a saint”—it makes more sense. These are not stories of people who set a good example for the rest of us to follow. They are threats, violent stories of a violent tribal God, chestthumping exercises in bravado, warning other peoples, with other gods, not to mess with the Lord, with this Lord, who distinguishes between Israel and anybody else! We should

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be extremely guarded, on high hermeneutic alert, if we look to these stories for ethical or political guidance, not to mention the untold harm that has been done by (mis)interpreting them as having special information about the origins of the universe or of the human species. This God is not a “religious” idea in the modern sense, not a term of private piety. The founding idea of God in the Bible is the founding of a people and many modern political theorists see the sovereignty of the modern state to be the secularization of the pre-modern idea of the sovereignty of God. That is why the separation of politics and what we today call religion is an artifice. Theology was always political; politics was always theological. They were never not. Theology has to do with the totality of a culture, of a civilization, of a form of life. We do not have to think that religious violence is a myth to agree with William T. Cavanaugh that it has never been possible to separate religious violence from ethnic and nationalist violence. The “promised land” did not mean heaven; it meant real estate, land and children. Religion is not an isolatable factor or ingredient in a culture. Every theology is a theology of culture, of its culture, because it represents the depth dimension in a culture, which can be transported to other cultures only with difficulty and accommodation. So, the solution is not to deny the co-implication of the political and the theological, to forcibly separate the one from the other, to keep politics safe from religion, as in modern secularism, but to interpret the relation between politics and theology sensibly. On the one hand, there is a politics in theology and that politics is not accidental or occasional but structural. It cannot be avoided because theology is always and necessarily tapping into deep roots, into the founding powers of the culture, and is always and necessarily political. On the other hand, there

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is a theology in politics and that theology is not accidental but structural. At bottom, day to day politics is driven by the political, and the political is driven by a religious passion, inwardly disturbed by an excess, by a more-than-political something of unconditional importance, in the name of which concrete political conditions are organized. Contrary to political realism and utilitarianism, politics is not the art of the possible; it is the art of making the impossible possible, which is its deepest religious impulse, for better or for worse. Concrete political conditions are made restless by something unconditional for which they grope. That co-implication, that complicity between religion and the political, is why religion spills over into the streets—be it the streets of Selma, Alabama where 600 freedom-fighters marched in protest and in peril of their lives to the state capital of Montgomery or streets filled with angry mobs of white Christians lynching black Christians. A purely “secular” culture in this sense would be soulless. It would volatilize into empty utilitarianism; it would not be worth saving, no salt! Western secular society would do better to recognize and affirm this, not by returning to an established religion, God forbid, but by cultivating a sense for a deeper religion without religion on offer here. The “word of God” does not break into time from eternity; it means the words human writers give to God in order to speak to us; it means to portray what is going on in the name of God as if it were speaking to us. It is rightly said to be sharper than any two-edged sword (Heb. 4:12): it cuts through the joints and marrow of our vanity and self-will, even as it provides us with a sword of self-righteousness with which to smite our enemies. Absent such admissions, God and death-dealing, religion and violence, will never be far apart. The multiple “fundamentalisms” spawned across the

BAN THE UNCONDITIONAL

Well, then, why not simply say, look, there is an easy solution to all this. This is simply “bad” religion, which we should be careful not to confuse with “good” religion. True, that is an easy solution, too easy, facile, a lame account of what is going on in all this violence. It represents a severe underestimation of what religion is, where the violence of love (putting oneself in harm’s way for what we love) and the love of violence (putting others in harm’s way) fatally intermingle. As C. S. Lewis once said, those who are willing to die for a cause are often willing to kill for it. Nothing is innocent, especially love. Well, then, what is the source of the problem? The passion for the impossible, which draws upon the dark center, the unlit core, the concealed depths, the mystical element.

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religions of the Book are all too prone to turn the name of God, of the possibility of the impossible, into the name of terror. Today, the violence to which they are disposed is a fearful and anxious reaction against modernity. Fearful that their form of life, their culture, is about to be uprooted by globalizing, cosmopolitan, and secularizing forces, they look to their book (and to their guns) for sword and shield. They make an idol out of a book, of something woven from the cloth of contingency. Such fundamentalism in turn represses the abyss within, so that its extremism and violence represent the return of the repressed. It is healthier and less traumatic just to recognize this abyss, that we—we mortals, we earthlings, all of us—do not know what we love when we love our God, and to recognize that we are all in this together. If we feel a need to make war, it should be on our own fear and anxiety and the murderousness of our gods.

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The difficulty is that in religion both the good and the bad have the same source. The violence springs from the depths, from the unconditional, from the impossible, the same depths as the non-violence. There is an undecidability here which can lead to either extreme. Well, then, let’s ban the unconditional, which is clearly more trouble than its worth. Again, that’s too simple. The unconditional is not something we came up with of an idle afternoon; it is less a claim we make than what lays claim to us, like it or not. The remedy is not to extinguish the depth dimension but to distinguish it, to interpret it. The trouble is that as a structural matter, the possibility of the impossible includes the worst possible. Is it not a fit formula for the Holocaust? It is in virtue of the same structure of the possibility of the impossible that, as Derrida once pointed out, some people dream of a “National Socialism to come” and others of a “democracy to come.” The extremes of good and evil are not the same, but if you eliminate the source of the one, you have also eliminated the source of the other. It would be like breaking the spirit of a creative child who will be capable of doing great things in the future but who at present is driving the parents to drink. If we eliminate the risk of love (violence), we eliminate the promise of love (non-violence). The “love of God,” as lovely as that sounds, can lead to the worst violence against those who do not share our love of our God, which is why Augustine’s question, what do I love when I love my God, is of inescapable importance. We cannot neutralize the “for better or for worse” quality of the religious passion for the impossible. Neutralization makes sterile. Religion goes all the way down. It makes contact with the dark center, which is also, as Joseph Conrad puts it, “the heart of darkness,” a very dark heart. It taps into the deep sources of our being, draws upon our

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unconscious, mobilizes our affective life, stirs our heart like a rousing song—everything from the “Horst-Wessel-Lied” to “We Shall Overcome.” A religious text is a text you can sing, not just read. Religion is not found in a freeze-dried set of propositional claims drawn up by a council of presbyters (old white men). Religious life is bodies resonating with the depths of being; it is not believing but belonging; it is a movement that takes place in our entire psychosomatic, sensuous-symbolic system, in which we sway in unison with—what? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Love? Justice? God? The Universe? The Nation? The Party? Can we keep these apart? Can we even tell them apart? What do I love when I love my God? Love seeks and needs understanding, discernment, insight, a responsible response. Without hermeneutics, the flame of love is just a raging fire. That is why there is no better way to save the world than religion, and there is no better way to burn it down. At bottom, under whatever name we adopt, religion is the sparks given off when the possible comes in contact with the impossible, when the conditioned comes in contact with the unconditional, when the finite comes in contact with the infinite—for better or for worse. Were we able to prevent that contact, we would prevent the event. Were we to shut that down, the computers could run everything. The result would be a calculative, meansend driven, narrow being devoid not only of religion but of everything else of human importance—of judgment, passion, art, creative outbursts, world-transforming deeds, scientific and political revolutions, everything groundbreaking. The “passion for the impossible” would collapse into the apathy of the programmable. If modern rationality means dispassionate neutrality, the result will be inhuman, because the human means the passion for the impossible, which is love. I would say that

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the result would be something like Mr. Spock in Star Trek, a dispassionate calculative mind driven not by passion but by algorithms, except for the fact that Mr. Spock was also loyal and oddly lovable—but that was because he was only half Vulcan (pure logic). The other half was human—alogical, affective, tender, passionate, which is what humans are, at least just so long as they remain embodied, which is not necessarily a foregone conclusion (see Chapter Six, “The post-humans” section). The solution is not to be found in calling the police, invoking the mythical neutrality of the secular order standing watch over religious irrationality. Better to dig deeper into a more profound order, into the passion for the impossible, which requires not adjudication in the court of an equally mythical Reason but a sensitive interpretative rendering of a form of life. Religion is not accidentally violent. Neither is it essentially violent. It is risky business, structurally ambiguous, a simmering fire, something unconditional seeking to be expressed in concrete conditions, which means it is both merciful and violent, both hospitable and divisive; it functions on a structurally deeper level, marked by what Derrida calls “undecidability.” In religion, both the good and the bad are ramped up, magnified, amplified, driven to an excess, by being wired up to the deep structure in our lives. Pushed to an extreme, we are capable of either extraordinary works of mercy or fanaticism of the worst sort, of people ministering to the persecuted and oppressed in the poorest places on earth or merciless terrorists. The reason for that is found in the roots of religious passion in what I have been calling the powers of being, the mystical sources of our being, in what Derrida calls the passion for the impossible, in what Tillich calls matters of ultimate concern. When matters of ultimate concern are at stake, the resort to ultimate means of achieving them kicks

WHY WAS JESUS KILLED?

Understanding religion means interpreting religion, and that requires having the right touch, the ability to negotiate treacherous waters. We cannot read the Bible like that old deist Thomas Jefferson, by cutting out the disagreeable parts. We need to read responsibly, with the lenses of hermeneutics, not with the scissors of rationalism, warned in advance that, in the Bible, both the worse and the best are on full display. If, as we are instructed by the Beatles, love is all we need, this love must include a love of hermeneutics, a hermeneutics of love, which is a delicate art. Just how delicate is perfectly illustrated by the paradox at the heart of Christianity, the passion narrative, the story of a torture and ignominious execution. I said above (p. 36) that Jesus is not “the Answer,” as the right-wing bumper stickers say, but the name of a question. “Who do men say I am?” (Mark 16:15). Never is that truer than when it comes to interpreting the terrible violence of his death. How to sort out the love and the violence, the divine and the human, the politics (a Roman execution) and the religion (a Christian symbol)? To this end

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in—for better (putting ourselves at risk for the sake of others) or for worse (putting others at risk for the sake of ourselves). Religion makes us capable of demonizing our enemies (“terrorists”) and divinizing our friends (“martyrs”). Religion’s ambiguity is pharmacological, a poison/cure. It swings back-and-forth structurally between the promise and the threat. Time and again, it confuses the conditional with the unconditional, the symbol with what is being symbolized. It whipsaws wildly between the extremes of violence and nonviolence, of killing the other or of risking being killed for love of the other.

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I will offer three interpretations of why Jesus was killed—the first two turning on a hermeneutics of violence and the third on a hermeneutics of love and non-violence. (1) The Child Abuser. In the interpretation that has become standard, the Father sends his only begotten Son into the world to suffer and die “for our sins,” in order to pay off the mounting debt that human beings have been incurring ever since Adam and Eve got outsmarted by a tricky serpent. This account, given by Anselm in Why the God Man, came to be known as the “satisfaction” theory. Since the debt humankind has run up on its credit card with God is infinite (an offense committed against an infinite God) and cannot be “satisfied” (appeased) by making human (finite) monthly payments, it requires a payment made by a being both human (since the debtor is human) and divine (since the debt owed is infinite). Ergo, only a victim who is both man and God. Quod erat demonstrandum. This was not Anselm’s finest moment. He casts God “the Father” in the worst possible light, as an incensed and legalistic deity who sends his only son to be cruelly sacrificed to appease his offended sense of justice (like the offended honor of the medieval lord). Flatly contradicting the parable of the prodigal son and the constant preaching of Jesus on forgiveness, the idea of sacrificing one child for the sake of the others offends the ears of any parent worthy of the name. He makes the Father look like a child-abuser. Here love is lost entirely among the ruins of legalism and rationalism, inviting Nietzsche’s mockery of “Christianity’s stroke of genius”—"God paying himself personally out of a pound of his own flesh” and “from love (can you believe it?) from love of his debtor.” (2) Christus Victor. Anselm’s idea of justice, as Luther pointed out, is drawn from Aristotle, not from St. Paul. Anselm enters God into a rational calculus which tallies up what is owed

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by human beings and what is owed to God. In a now classic study, known to the scholars but not well known in the pews, Swedish Lutheran theologian Gustaf Aulén showed that view is unknown to the New Testament, which portrays instead a great cosmic battle between the power of God and the powers of darkness, Paul’s “powers and principalities.” In this view, sin is not an individual offense but a matter of coming under the cosmic rule of Satan. First among those who do battle with the powers is Jesus, who drives out demons, straightens crooked limbs, and announces God’s coming victory. At first it appears that Jesus loses—he is condemned and crucified—which is the great sign of contradiction that confounds Paul. Until it hits him that in the very ignominy of the cross is the salvation, that God, as Luther says, manifests himself in Jesus under the form of the opposite (sub specie contraria)! In the cross, the God of Israel shows forth his true and greatest power by raising up Jesus from the dead on the third day. God does the impossible, a dramatic reversal in which God is triumphant and the Devil confounded. Notice the dramatic stratagem: God “played” the Devil, sending his chosen one under the humble form of a servant upon whom the Devil descended, not knowing who this was (1 Cor. 2). Jesus is something of a surrogate whom God sends into the world to fool the forces of darkness. Then God, in a show of divine power, turned the tables on the Devil, raised Jesus from the dead and crushed the power of the Devil. God establishes his rule on earth and scatters the powers of the old world (Rome, Satan), an event all at once (to check off the boxes constructed in modernity) religious, political, social, economic, and historical. “Christus Victor” means God’s victory over the imperial powers of darkness carried out not by Christ but in Christ. Hence, nothing about paying

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off a debt due to the divine accounts. How would all this come about? Paul, never reluctant to offer an opinion, told the Thessalonians that Jesus would come down on a cloud, lifting up the living faithful and opening up the graves of those who had already fallen asleep. Quite a spectacle, but then it gets ugly. The rulers of this world will get their comeuppance. Ruing the day they ever persecuted Jesus, they would be crushed by “hosts” (= armies) of angels, God’s warriors sent down to earth. The foolishness of the cross will have turned out to be divine wisdom, and the weakness of God a celestial army. The Christus Victor version prevailed for eleven centuries until Anselm decided to replace a great cosmic drama with a logical argument, turning it into an economic exchange between humankind and a divine hanging Judge, thereby severing its ties with the depths of our affective and preconscious being. It was like an embalming: he drained the dramatic blood from the passion narrative and replaced it with the serum of a scholastic syllogism. But the passion narrative (theopoetics) is meant to be read (hermeneutics), not rationalized (theo-logic). Like all great religious literature, it proceeds from the unlit core, the concealed depths, the dark center of our being, to which it gives narrative form. But even the Christus Victor story is violent. While it makes the powers and principalities of this world responsible for the crucifixion, instead of God, nonetheless, like Anselm’s satisfaction theory, it still makes Jesus the subject of substitutionary violence, a surrogate victim upon whom this cruel fate is visited. In one version, Jesus is even said to be the “bait” which Satan took. It treats redemption as a rousing military victory, which is why the original editors of the New Testament saw fit to wrap up their anthology with a fantasy

THE HERMENEUTICS OF LOVE

(3) Innocent Victim. That is why a third interpretation arises, neither the payment of a debt nor a war waged upon the demons, but an innocent victim, who speaks truth to power and is taken out by that power, who instead of engaging his persecutors in lethal combat treats them with forgiveness. The passion narrative is not a story of divine violence wrought by God upon the body of Jesus (shades of Abraham and Isaac, child sacrifice) but the exposure of human violence—we killed Jesus, not God—where the divinity lies on the side of the victim, the non-violence, the forgiveness. The narrative lays bare the cruelty of a violent execution and God’s loving solidarity with the victim of violence, calling for the end of violence. God is not a figure for power but for the victims of power. The cross is not a sign of conquering but of God standing with the innocent victims of conquest, an account variously advanced

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of power, an apocalyptic showdown, in which the infidels get their just desserts from God (shades of the ten plagues on the Pharaoh). In the end times, the itinerant lake-side pacifist and preacher of the Sermon on the Mount in the synoptic gospels returns to earth as a fierce flame-throwing warrior. The one who tells us to put down our sword returns as a conquering Christ mounted on a white horse with a sword in his mouth (Revelation 19:11–21). The religion of love cannot swear off the sacred violence, the holy war. Armed with this model of cosmic combat, it is not hard to imagine medieval Crusaders, or gun-toting Christian nationalists today, arming for a real war against those whom they conveniently describe as “God’s enemies.” The New Testament, the religion of love, is topped off with an ancient religious template, as old as Genesis—a holy war.

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by René Girard (1923–2015), by liberation theologians, and anticipated by the medieval theologian Abelard under the name of the “Moral Examplar” theory. Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, trans. A.G. Herbert (London: SPCK, 1931; reprint, Middletown, DE: CrossReach Publications, 2016). The state of the present debate in the theology of the cross is nicely anthologized in Cross Examinations, ed. Marit Trelstad (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006). René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). Nietzsche’s wisecrack is found in On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, No. 21, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Books, 1969). I offer my own view in A Radical Theology of the Cross (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). Elizabeth Johnson provides a good account of Anselm and of an eco-theology of creation in Creation and the Cross: The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018).

As Aulén says, there are texts in the New Testament that could be used to support in varying degrees all three interpretations. That does not mean you can take your pick but that it comes down to hermeneutics; some interpretations are better than others. In our case this means to be guided by a hermeneutics of love and non-violence, which shames the violence of the oppressor. This served as a model of political action for Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. That decision exposed King to the criticisms of Malcolm X, who contended that racial violence must be met with a cold-blooded counterviolence, which is a rationalist argument from equity, like

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Anselm’s, not from the impossible love of one’s enemies preached by Jesus. It also inspired Nelson Mandela, in the early years—until he changed his mind and became a realist! Non-violence pursues the unrealistic alogic of the impossible; that powerlessness is a more genuine but paradoxical power. But make no mistake. If such resistance to evil is non-violent, it is far from passive; it requires an enormous act of courage and it is not without its own power and effectiveness. For it springs from the depths of our being, from a passion for the impossible, from which it draws its power. It requires the depths of passion to put oneself in harm’s way for the sake of peace and justice, to expose oneself to being imprisoned or killed—but not to imprison or kill—in the name of God. Here the excess, the passion for the impossible, the unconditional love, the love beyond measure, the expenditure without return is made in the name of a non-violent God, a paradoxical God who, as Paul says, chose the foolish to shame to wise, the weak to shame the strong, the nothings and nobodies of the world to shame the powers that be (1 Cor. 1)—until Paul himself walked this back (1 Cor. 2). The problem with shaming is that it only works on people who are capable of being shamed. It does not work on the shameless, where the only thing that counts is winning. Still, even that is not a decisive objection, since the passion narrative is not a strategy. The execution of Jesus is not about winning but witnessing. The non-violence, the forgiveness is unconditional, not a cunning way to outwit the enemy. Love is given unconditionally, not as a strategic means to an end. Love is the impossible, the event of the impossible that is going on in the name of God. It is not a move made in a chess game, not an attempt to outplay the opposition. It is an expenditure without return, drawn from the mystical

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depths of our being, from the dark center, the unlit core, the concealed depths. To be sure, life is indeed a battle, a terrible struggle, and a certain war remains, a struggle of which the mythical war between the power of God manifest in Jesus and the powers and principalities is the emblem. Dramas are not meant to be rationalized. Myths are not meant to be demythologized. They are meant to be read, which means interpreted, which means— sorry to keep repeating myself—hermeneutics. Love is not a free-standing self-interpreting unambiguous absolute. We seek the unconditional but conditions are all we ever find. Like everything else, without a hermeneutics, love is a loose cannon (or canon!). The cosmic drama between the forces of light and darkness, justice and injustice, love and hatred, is best understood both as a battle we wage within ourselves, the struggle between love and hatred within our own heart, and, no less, as a battle with the structural violence and evil in the systems all around us (“the powers and principalities”), which is why religion is always and already political. If there is any violence here, it is what Heidegger called the “hermeneutic violence” with which we must brush against the grain of received opinions, of our own presuppositions, of our own self-interest, of our own power, our own personal power and our own complicity with collective power, against the murderous power embedded in saying “I” or “we,” which shows up in the threat expressed in Exodus that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel, which spells war, not love. Religion is for lovers, but the recurring test for religion and for its conception of God is to get over its love affair with power and violence. The test is to stop thinking of God as the real power who is going to show up one day

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and settle the hash of the enemies of God (by which we invariably mean our enemies). That’s not the power of love; that’s the love of power. That inversion of love is the original hermeneutical sin of religion, of theology, of politics, of us all. The passion for the impossible is not a passion for the spectacle of the power of a superhero who will crush his enemies. Love is not power as a ruthless “world” understands power. The power of love is to risk exposing oneself to the brutality of worldly power, unto death, which is impossible, the impossible, the passion for the impossible. The true power is love, but the test of true love is to understand the power of love as the paradox of a powerless power, like the power in hospitality, the power (potens) to welcome the stranger (hostis), or like the power it takes to love our enemies, all of which is risky business.

Cosmic grace

World without why, Amen

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Six

When Augustine asked what he loved when he loved his God, he consulted God’s creatures, but they piously declined the honor, saying “He created us” (Ipse fecit nos). Today, the Bishop might not get such a docile reply. Nowadays, creatures appear to be reconsidering their response. They are rising up in competition with their creator, threatening to seize the laurels of divinity from their maker, staging a democratic revolution of which the Bishop would surely disapprove. Having made what is turning out to be an even more remarkable world than God (read: the classical theologians) previously thought, the world is threatening to give the Ancient of Days a run for the divine honors. God—correction, make that theism—the classical theist understanding of God as the ex nihilo creator of heaven and earth, is starting to feel the heat. If the name of God is the name of the possibility of the impossible, the impossible possibilities that are stealing all the headlines these days are more and more a matter of the stupefying mysteries of the material universe itself and the extraordinary advances being made in the information technologies. If philosophy begins in wonder, as the ancients said, the scientists have stolen the philosophers’ wonder and are moving on to stealing God’s thunder. The more we learn about astrophysics and quantum theory, the more the physicists start to sound

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like philosophers and theologians, or even like poets and mystics, and the less they sound like hard-nosed, hardheaded, reductionistic know-it-all nineteenth century scientific atheists. Who among these myopic materialists would have dared, like Stephen Hawking, to start off a book with a chapter on “The Mystery of Being”? Modernism disenchants; the post-modern rediscovers the magic. What is life without magic? That’s my thesis, my religion, in a nutshell. In the opening chapter, I defined religion in terms of the absolute future, the one we cannot see coming. In my book, those who seek to silence religious passion pass their days within the secure confines of the safe, settled, and foreseeable, where life passes them by. On my accounting, religious souls, by contrast, are like climbers without a rope clinging to a granite wall by their fingertips. Ever since Copernicus decentered the anthropocentric geocentrists, humanity has been seriously spooked by a series of unsettling paradigm shifts—paradigm shocks is more like it—that have set off tremors so profound and transformative that today the very word “human” has been made to tremble. Being “human” is threatened with obsolescence! Can you believe it? Not just the evolution of humanity, which still sets the Bible thumpers’ hair on fire, but an evolution out of humanity—into what? Into God-knows-what! The post-human, they tell us. From the magic of Einstein and quantum physics to the wonders of the information age and beyond, we find ourselves wondering what will become of us, of religion, of what we humans love when we love our God. If creatures are in revolt against the Big Guy in the Sky, and if the name of God is the name of an unforeseeable future, what in God’s name lies ahead? So, before I dare try to wrap all this up in the final chapter (as if that were possible!), I want to pursue the possibility

of the impossible in an unexpected direction (which is only fitting if the topic is the unforeseeable), as a groping humanity wends its uncertain way towards a future about which it is in equal measure hopeful and scared half to death. Today, techno-science is changing everything. Myopic materialism is giving way to a much more mystical materialism. The human is starting to become post-human, challenging the future of religion and of everything else, a challenge which we will address under the rubric of a coming cosmo-theology.

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GOD IS DEAD—OR MAYBE NOT SO FAST

If the philosophers were investment counselors, we would all be broke. The positivists (like Auguste Comte) have been confidently assuring us ever since the nineteenth century that “God is dead” (Nietzsche), or will be quite soon. At the very least, they say, the Ancient of Days is feeling his age and can hardly be expected to last out the year. Those tough-minded men of the Enlightenment were sure that religious fantasies were like mushrooms that would perish in the sun of scientific rationality. By the latter they mostly meant a physical universe in which Matter (spoiler alert: note the upper case), a clunky, hard, dumb, dense stuff, takes up empty space and, rather than sitting around waiting to be moved by a mover (Aristotle), just keeps on moving mindlessly until something deflects its course (Newton). In either case it lacks the wits to act on its own. Meanwhile, religion’s apologists, girded with the belt of faith and clad in the breastplate of Spirit, champion the ancient cause of God, the soul and immortality, the trinity of trophies on the mantle of classical theology. An ancient duel, an ancient dualism. Too ancient; it’s getting old. Today, were this a prizefight, religion would spring from its corner, ready to

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slug it out with the enemies of God (read: its own enemies), only to find the other side did not show up. Matter, the old common-sense idea of matter, a solid and well-defined mass, in a definite place at a definite time, precisely measurable, has in the meantime discreetly dematerialized into a more elusive and subtler stuff. With that, the old materialism, in which classical, garden variety atheism made its nest, has become a no less troubled enterprise. And as Matter goes, so goes Spirit. The old war between cold hard Matter and fiery subtle Spirit, earth and heaven, time and eternity, mortality and living forever, each side lined up with sword and shield, is starting to look like a debate between typewriters and fountain pens. Everything we mean by God, humanity, and religion has suffered a series of shocking shifts that have rattled the timbers—rewritten the terms—of science and religion, and just about everything else! So, it is not just the Ancient of Days who is feeling a little arthritic. Matter and materialism, too, are not quite as spry as they used to be. Of course, I am not saying the word “materialism” is finished. While it has its faults, it still has work to do. I love the semantic shock delivered by speaking of a “religious materialism,” where religion is taken to be about saving this life, not being saved in some imaginary immaterial after-life. The limitation of the word is that it has a chip on its shoulders. Like most “-isms,” it is trying to pick a fight, in this case, to antagonize the religious Right. Now the latter has become a particularly reactionary and dangerous morass of hypocrisy, ignorance, greed, xenophobia and primitive superstition. Having mistaken Fox News for the Good News, having confused the Holy Spirit with mean-spiritedness, as if the Holy Spirit inspires white male supremacy, hostility to the stranger, science denial, and denouncing God’s poor as

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losers on the dole, far be it from me to object to anything that makes the religious Right as miserable as possible. But whatever its polemic value, which it still retains, “materialism” obscures a deeper point—that the war between Matter and Spirit has been superseded, their fortunes being tied to each other. Their advocates conduct a dated debate on the deck of a sinking ship. “Materialism” is becoming a Victorian period piece. It has an increasingly quaint Newtonian ring to it as the mysteries of “matter” unfold before the eyes (and the math) of contemporary science. The electron is turning out to be the Cartesian “pineal gland” which mediates in the obsolete opposition of Spirit and Matter as the lines between the two antagonists are blurred by the revolution in physics and the information technologies. As for the right-wing apologists for religion—well, if you are too young to remember Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” on Saturday Night Live, Google it. My point is this. Far from spelling the end of theology, the new cosmology is spelling out an inspiring cosmo-theology, a much more magical, mysterious, and mystical materialism. That is only fair, given how deeply the old theology was embedded in the old cosmology. Today we are encountering another alternative, an increasingly seductive and important instance of religion without the old religion. Today, the contact of the finite with the infinite, of our conditioned selves with the unconditional, of the possible with the impossible, has acquired a distinctly cosmo-scientific ring. Today, were Augustine to ask creation, what do I love when I love my God, its answer would be that you have come to the right place! COSMO-THEOLOGY

Bear with me if I re-tweet my thesis one more time: postmodernism does not represent the end of religion but the

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beginning of a new post-modern reinvention of religion. In terms of the current debate between religion and science, this means the emergence of a beguiling post-theistic cosmotheology. The latter is the offspring of a post-secular sensibility, a fascinating mix of mathematics and mysticism, imagination and speculative adventure. Like everything else that I have been saying, what goes around comes around. The post-critical echoes with the pre-critical. The characteristically post-modern repeats the pre-modern in a new way. The post-modern has, if not its roots, at least its counterpart in the pre-modern world before the police of modernity arrived at the scene to round up the usual suspects. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that, although they have not gotten equal shelf space in seminary libraries, there have always been theologians who cultivated a special sensitivity for the natural world and emphasized the intimacy of God and the world. They subtly put their distance from the old bombastic model of creatio ex nihilo, a theory of creation which is itself a creation of a second century C.E. debate, which posits a burst of super-causality from a Big Guy in the Sky, creating the world from absolutely nothing at all. Shazam! These cosmo-theologians insinuate instead a creatio ex profundis, an emergence from out of the depths, describing creation not as the separate product of a transcendent causal God (theism) but as the expression and manifestation of an immanent God (post-theism). The world is the way that the invisible God makes Godself visible. Spirit is invisible Nature and Nature is visible Spirit. So says Friedrich Schelling, the great German Idealist philosopher whose critique of Hegel supplied Coleridge and the Romantic poets (and Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel and theologian Paul Tillich) with a lot of their theoretical steam. You can start with either one,

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whatever your druthers, but if you dig deep enough into one, you will be sure to hit the other. The difference between the two is a function of their common ground in a third and more primal in-difference. Did anyone say dualism? Why, in heaven’s name, would anyone want to start a war between Spirit and Nature, religion and science? In this approach, the world itself is the mystical element of our lives, that in which we live and move and have our being, to go back to our go-to text from Paul. The world comes of age, reaches its maturity, packing a theological punch all its own, a cosmo-theological punch. Today, the universe itself has become a commanding, incomparable mystery, taking on mystical dimensions. The natural no longer needs a supernatural booster shot because it already has its own supernatural charge; creation is autopoietic! God is not only the poet of the world but the very poetry. Of course, when these theologians went on to add that without the world God would be incomplete and unfulfilled—as when Nietzsche has his Zarathustra address the sun, O great star, what would you be without us to shine upon! —they got a lot of heat from the powers that be, who took it personally. They always do. In the ninth century, Johannes Scotus Eriugena (c.800– c.877)—literally this means “Irish-born,” so if his Latin name is too much of a mouthful think of him as “Irish John”— worked this out in a particularly striking way. For Eriugena, God is the beginning, the middle, and the end, from which all things proceed (exitus) and to which they return (reditus). That sounds pious enough but hear him out. Creation means a procession, emanation or emergence from God, so that the world is God in an emergent state, and God is the world in its pre-emergent state. There is a circle, a circulation, between them, not an opposition or dualism. Now the thing that really

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gets our attention is what Eriugena did next: he called this whole process Natura, which literally means “birthing” (from nator, natus). For Eriugena, the creative power of God is what he called Natura naturans, which we usually just transliterate as “nature naturing.” But we might also translate it as “birth birthing,” or maybe “life life-ing,” while the created world is described as Natura naturata, nature natured, birthed or brought forth. Creatio ex nihilo is the work of the Father and elicits masculine metaphors; creatio ex profundis elicits images of birth and wombs and suggests an immanent feminine Spirit. As with Schelling, God and the world are different stages of the same underlying thing! Deus sive Natura is the way this cosmotheological point was put by the great Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza (1632–77), which got him in dutch with the rabbis. Spinoza’s formulation, interweaving God and Nature, became a classic, playing an integral role in this history of heretical breakthroughs, a heresy being the name of a breakthrough in its early stages. The world is the unfolding of what is concealed in the secret folds of God, Eriugena said. As we have been recently reminded by the contemporary American theologian Catherine Keller, this image of folding and unfolding was exquisitely choreographed by the great Renaissance theologian Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64). Cusa said that God’s absolute simplicity (= syn or com + plicatio, foldedtogether) is un-folded (explicatio) in the world. Each thing is folded into—implicatio or “entangled” with—the other and with the whole, so that the smallest finite thing in the universe reflects and in a sense contains the whole infinite universe. If you understood everything about a finite thing, you would understand the infinite, rather the way an expert paleontologist could in principle reproduce an entire anatomy on the basis of a single bone. This coincidence of finite and infinite

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Cusa famously called the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. He called theology a docta ignorantia, which was not like an insult hurled by Christopher Hitchens. A “learned ignorance” means that the more we learn about any finite thing, the more we realize how much we don’t know about the expanse of infinity with which it is entangled. As the physicist John Wheeler said, “We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” Interestingly, Cusa’s expansive cosmology translated into an accommodating ecclesiology. Cusa, a Roman Catholic Cardinal and a Church diplomat charged with negotiating with Islam, said that, in virtue of this mutual co-implication and this learned ignorance, no one finite theology or church can claim a monopoly on the infinite truth of God. Remarkably, the Church did not condemn him for that; not so remarkably, it did not listen to him either.

The best place to catch up with the new cosmo-theology is Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), a magisterial work which includes an interesting presentation of Cusa.

PANENTHEISM—OR THE DIVINE MILIEU

This cosmo-theological tradition, always a minor chord in mainstream theistic theology, is experientially funded by a spirituality, a nature mysticism, a theo-poetico-mystical sensitivity to the mystery of nature, which is why I like to call it a cosmo-poetics, or a cosmo-theo-poetics. We see this mysticism plainly in someone like Francis of Assisi but also in the

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reverence for the earth shown in Native American and other indigenous religious traditions. In Hawaii, for example, the lava rock has a sacred status. It has also funded Francis’ most famous namesake today, Pope Francis, whose earth-shaking, earth-saving encyclical Laudato Si’, attempts to put Catholicism and Christianity generally on the right side of the environmental movement. Climate change, the anthropogenic kind, is a human attack upon the body of God. Needless to say, the orthodox were panicked by this trend of thought and tried to stamp it out by calling it a bad name— “pantheism.” Now anytime we can cause panic in people trying to stamp out creative thinking, anytime we can throw a scare into them, that’s a good thing, and to that extent I tip my hat to the word “pantheism,” which is also what I think of the word “materialism.” If you are not a scandal to that kind of authoritarianism, you are falling down on the job. But I do think that, as a term of philosophical and theological art, pantheism is a little artless and ham-fisted. It sounds like these people are saying something stupid, which is the way theists tend to present pantheists, that everything is God—the bathroom toilet, a soup can, the fire hydrant, your cat. In that sense, you would be hard put to find a pantheist anywhere. What they are saying is that God is manifested and expressed in everything, that everything expresses and manifests God in some way, even very humble things (remember Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp). So, no, not a flat-out God-All, but rather a more nuanced God-in-all and all-in-God. Better panentheism than pantheism. God is the inexhaustible source from which things arise and into which they return. The passage from the theistic to the panentheistic represents a theological jolt, a profound paradigm shift. We move from one model of creativity, a top-down transcendent causal

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agency, to another, a bottom-up immanent expressivism. We move from one model of spirituality, of standing face to face before the transcendent God (apud Deum), which organizes not only the Confessions but Christian spirituality generally from Augustine to Luther to Kierkegaard, to a very different model, that of being-in God, being in the divine milieu, in which we live and move and have our being. A milieu is a surrounding medium. To have a milieu is be located in the middle (from medius + locus), to be mid-way, to be in the midst—of Deus sive Natura. We live in medias res, in the middle of an emergent process of divine birthing. The divine milieu is the mystical element of our lives. We live-in and move-in and have our beingin-this-medium, in which are rooted our deepest existential interests (inter + esse), literally, being-in-between, being-inamong. Panentheism represents an atheism about the God of theism that is closer to the truly divine God than the theists dare to admit, which is why it makes the powers that be squirm in their episcopal seats. As an important aside, let me say that this whole cosmotheological current of thought goes counter to the great underlying distortion which defines modernity, which is to set up a table of rigorous binary distinctions, an antagonism, between conscious subjectivity, on one side, and a separate objectivity, on the other side, and then, having mistakenly opposed the two, to declare that the main problem of philosophy is “epistemological,” that is, to discover how you would ever cross from one side to the other. Philosophy’s task is to solve a problem of its own devising. How to put back together what modernity should not have separated in the first place? Modern epistemologists are like firemen who go around starting fires in order to keep up the annual firefighting budget. That distortion distracted the attention of

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philosophers for a good two centuries and still persists today. Descartes is rightly called the father of modernity since he is the one who fathered this fire (and he was a bachelor, so you know what that makes this problem!) Too bad the philosophers (and this goes for the Church, too) did not take the celibate but more oceanic Cusa as the father of modernity, instead of Descartes. That would have spared us all the tediousness of the philosophical “proofs for the existence of the external world,” and the Church’s self-defeating war on Galileo, its stupefying and highly unlearned ignorance, a war they continue to wage even today on billboards and in churches all over rural America. The answer to Descartes was given by Paul to the Athenians: there is no need to build a bridge. You are already there; it is also already here. The world is that in which we live and move and have our being. In other words, we are the world, our bit of the world; we are worldly bits ourselves. The question of whether there is a world raised by beings who are beings-in-the-world makes no sense, as Heidegger says to the modern epistemologists. As we always stand under the grip of the world we always implicitly understand the world. We are enfolded by the world and the world is explicitly unfolding itself in us. When the evolutionary biologists unfold the history of evolution before our astonished eyes, that is evolution unfolding itself in the biologists! When physicists explain the Big Bang, that is the Big Bang reaching a point where it can explain itself. We are the world becoming conscious of itself. That is the argument made by the Germans Idealists, Hegel and Schelling above all, under the name of the principle of identity, the unity of the finite and the infinite. All this, I hasten to add, without letting this go to our head! That is the hard part. We are but a point, a puny point, where the

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universe (or Being, or God, or Life or something) becomes conscious of itself—with this post-modern reminder: just a miniscule point on a remote planet, not the pinnacle, and probably just one of many such points, and not as the consummation of cosmic history, but just for a while. Both subjectivity and objectivity, both God and the world, both facts and values, both the religious and the secular, all have a common ground in the underlying, underpinning, inexhaustible depths of being. It is all in the cosmic cards. That’s cosmotheology in a nutshell. On this cosmo-theological telling, on the panentheistic model, God is the divine milieu, not Captain Marvel. God is a wellspring of life, not a Superhero in the Sky, not a SuperAgent with superpowers, capable of miraculous deeds. God is the inexhaustible source from which things—all things great and small, persons and agents, rocks and trees and cats— come to be and into which they return. God is not a Supreme Being but the ground of Being. God is not a particular person— except when personified for dramatic purposes in mythotheology—because God is not a particular at all. Here we reach a sensitive point which sets off alarms and sirens all over orthodoxy: If love is a given, a starting point, how can we love God if God is not Somebody? That is a very important question. The cosmo-theological answer is that panentheism does not mean that God is less than a person—and this is crucial— but that God is deeper than a person, even three of them. God is the ground from which the personal emerges, and the person is an emergent or supervenient property of the ground. When the personal happens, when inter-personal love happens, that is telling us something about the powers of the divine ground; that is the issue of the divine source. The emergence of actual, particular persons, and of the love by which they are

Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 130–32.

NOT YOUR GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S NEWTONIANISM

This venerable but often persecuted cosmo-theological tradition is starting to show up today in a surprising place, in a number of physicists, post-Newtonian types, of course, whose mathematical-experimental brilliance has sharpened rather than dulled the poetry that flows through their souls (neural networks). Their poetic imagination is not at odds with but works in tandem with their poetic imagination, which do not stunt but stimulate each other. Interestingly, the founding genius of modern neural science, Santiago Ramón y Cajul (1852–1934), who first envisioned the communication that takes place between neurons, is also the author of magnificent ink and pencil drawings of retinal cells, axons, neurons,

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intertwined, manifests or unfolds some implicit (enfolded) proto-personal feature of the inexhaustible being of God or of Nature, of Deus sive Natura, or really, of what we call the universe. As Paul Tillich says, calling God a person is a symbolic or theopoetic way of saying something important about the ground of Being. So, if we return to our primal scene, to Augustine consulting creatures about what he loves when he loves his God, this time the creatures take the Bishop by surprise. “Love us, love us all, all creatures great and small,” they say, “for the divinity variously emerges in us and we variously merge into the divine ground, the Godhead is concealed in us and we manifest the Godhead,” all this while choirs of heavenly angels chant on high “Deus sive Natura.”

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and ganglions that, taken purely visually, we might think to be the work of a Durer or even a Van Gogh. Scientists like this support the argument of Carlo Rovelli that great science is sensitive to the poetry of the universe, its stunning beauty, its mathematical elegance, like the magnificent simplicity—the being-folded-together—of a formula like (E = mc2), or of the general theory of relativity, where the whole of physics lies in unfolding its implications. That is why Einstein was lured by Spinoza’s cosmo-poetic formula Deus sive Natura, and why he would sometimes say that in physics we are exploring the mind of God. Einstein stressed both the creative imagination which scientific exploration requires and the humility which is imposed on the scientist before the mystery we call the universe, a formula which recalls Rahner’s expression about the mystery we call God. Augustine said, “if you comprehend it, it is not God.” That formula can be transferred without missing a beat to the universe. More and more that is what has the makings of the mystical today. Consider briefly what the physicists are telling us. In the ancient cosmology that the Bible writers had in their head, “up” was the “natural place” of light-airy-fiery things and “down” of wet-earthy-heavy things, which is why fiery-airy things like the risen body of Jesus “ascended into heaven” (“up”), which no longer makes any sense. After Copernicus straightened that one out, Newton worked out the mathematics of the law of inverse proportions governing gravitational attraction, of bodies attracted to each other in virtue of their “gravitational force,” which is what keeps the earth in orbit around the sun (instead of resting on the back of a great turtle, where the answer to the next question is that it’s turtles all the way down). But to Einstein, “gravitational force” was like “natural place,” a placeholder for some kind of mysterious

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something or other (like ether) we did not understand. In the general theory of relativity, he held that gravity is a gravitational field which does not take place in space, or fill space, but is space. Space is not a vast, fixed empty container through which solid material objects move, but a field of currents and waves like an ocean, which bends and flexes. The reason the earth rotates around the sun is that the sun puts a dent in space and the earth rolls around the rim of the indentation. Space curves wherever there is matter. That “simple” intuition changed the face of physics forever after. Not only does space curve, but so does time, so that time passes more quickly high above than it does here on earth. Furthermore, space expands, having started out some 13.8 billion years ago as an extremely small hot spot and, we have since learned (Hubble), is continuing to expand at an increasing rate of acceleration, evidently heading for oblivion. So much for space, time, and gravity. Next comes matter, which Einstein said is interchangeable with energy and is redescribable at the level of elementary particles in terms of quanta or packets of energy, which, he said, “move without dividing,” which “jump” in discontinuous leaps from one orbit to the next. Now comes more magic. Werner Heisenberg—my favorite scene in Breaking Bad is when the drug dealers demand to know Walter White’s name and he tells them “Heisenberg” and they do not so much as blink— showed that they do not always exist. They only exist, they only “materialize,” when someone is observing them! Or, when something acts on them, and then they do so not with Newtonian necessity but with a calculable probability! Otherwise they remain latent, in potency, in no place at all. This was too much for Einstein himself, and it was the occasion for him saying that God does not play dice! It sounded

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to him like Heisenberg and Niels Bohr were denying the existence of a reality independent of the observer, almost like it needed us to be there if it was to be there, too. Quantum reality is not made of building blocks like a Lego set. It is a set of “elementary excitations” of a field, mini-wavelets, which appear and disappear in strange ways, and in the case of “quantum entanglement,” the world gets “curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice says. If a particle is split in two, and the parts are separated, they continue to act in tandem. As Brian Greene said, it’s like splitting a pair of dice and rolling one in Atlantic City and the other in Las Vegas, and they come out the same. That was also too much for Einstein, who called it “spooky action at a distance.” This was one of Einstein’s better-known blind spots and it was the result of reading too much David Hume (the English empiricist philosopher) who insisted on the spatial continuity between cause and effect, which is common sense, instead of thinking in terms of an uncommon sense-defying underlying quantum field. He should have listened to the German mystics, or the panentheists, who are a little mad, not the empiricists, who suffer from an excessive sanity! I think we can agree that this is all a long way from your (great) grandfather’s Newtonianism, “where minute, cold stones eternally wandered on long, precise trajectories in geometrically immutable space.” That soulless construction, with which modernists mocked the theopoetic and mythological cosmos of the Scriptures, belched up “atheistic materialism.” But it has since been replaced by a “restless swarm” of ephemeral vibrations, of “happenings,” not “things,” in a spooky spectral world where there is something spooky afoot, which is also a long way from Deism and from atheistic materialism.

Such spooky action and curious happenings have a religious resonance that shows up in the popular culture in (the irrepressible) Star Wars, if we focus on its quieter moments and cover our ears to the noisy battles (more religious war!). The “Force” is not the God of the Bible, not a personal transcendent creator of the visible heavens and earth but a pervasive mystico-scientific power—or energy field—that runs through the universe and holds everything together, more Eastern than Biblical, more mystical than conceptual, more panentheistic than theistic, more quantum than Newtonian. In the “Gospel according to Lucas” faith and reason, nature and the supernatural, matter and spirit, are all cut from the same cloth. Accordingly, the war in Star Wars does not transpire between two equal but opposed Forces, as in Manicheanism, but turns on a disturbance or lack of balance within the one and only Force. The rule of peace and justice depends upon the smooth and harmonious flow of the Force. War rages between the Sith lords, who make the Force an instrument of their own evil intentions, and the Jedi knights, who make themselves an instrument of the Force. In a classic mystical gesture, the Jedi have learned to suspend their ego and let the Force flow

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I am drawing here upon Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (New York: Riverside Books, 2016), 31–38, a work I cannot recommend too highly. See also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design (New York: Penguin, 2015). Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Universe (New York: Random House, 2005), ch. 4.

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freely and harmoniously through their being, undistorted by conflict, anger, fear, and aggression. This recalls Paul’s “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20) and Meister Eckhart’s “letting-be” (Gelassenheit). Had Paul been a Jedi in Star Wars he would have proclaimed Jesus to be “the chosen one” (Messiah) by spreading the word around the galaxy that “the Force is with him,” an expression that borrows upon the structure of Emmanuel, God with us, and son of God. Interestingly, in the 2017 installment, The Last Jedi, the Jedi themselves must be prepared give way in order to keep open the way of the Force. Luke Skywalker is not important, the Jedi Scriptures are not important, not even the Jedi themselves. (So much for the battle between the Scriptures and the institutional Church!) The only thing that is really important is the Force, which, inexhaustible and endless, is greater than all of them and for which they are to clear the way. That is an exercise in autodeconstruction from which the fundamentalists and the mainstream churches today can learn a thing or two. The famous New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann said that we have to “de-mythologize” the New Testament— that is, get past the old cosmology—if we want it to make religious sense today. True enough, but we cannot stop with de-mythologizing. One key to the enduring success of Star Wars—if the Force has been with anything, it has certainly been with Stars Wars at the box office, where it has been a commercial force for forty years and counting—is that it re-mythologizes by way of a contemporary cosmo-mythology. It draws upon our mystical sense, our implicit and preconscious resonance with the powers of the universe, in which we live and move and have our being. Instead of debunking religious transcendence, it re-describes it, but without the dualities of classical theism, like earth and heaven, body and

soul, time and eternity. The religious sense of life, which emerged originally in a pre-Copernican imaginary, is not extinguished in Star Wars, but re-imagined. The metaphysics of the Force converges with its physics, its theology with its technology. It thereby visualizes in a popular image (which is what Hegel would have called a Vorstellung) a cosmotheology beyond the limits of the imagination of mainstream (theistic) theology. THE POST-HUMANS

But, as with the Force itself, this can all go over to the dark side. This can all get to be very scary stuff, spooky and uncanny. This we can see by simply asking ourselves what does all this mean for us? What lies ahead for us? What does the cosmos have in store for us? And for religion, which is our doing? In a headier day, we used to identify our place in the universe by saying that we were the geographic center and theological summit of material things, an exquisite mix of matter and spirit, high above the beasts and a little less than the angels. Pre-modern theocentrism went hand in hand with a correlative “humanism” (= human exceptionalism), God-with-us. So much God, so much us! We prided ourselves on being the apple of the divine eye, the pinnacle of God’s creation, the Creator’s finest handicraft. That now seems not only narcissistic but naive. Today, we realize that we are late arrivals in a very old universe, on a planet and solar system destined for destruction, in a remote corner of a galaxy, in a universe in which there are billions upon billions of galaxies. There may well be, or have been already, countless other

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Electronic immaculate conceptions, virtual virgin births, copy and paste resurrections

forms of such life multiplied throughout the universe, or even many universes. Nowadays, far from culminating in us, it seems, as Philip Plait says, the universe is out to kill us! But don’t take it personally—it’s just business, cosmic business. The expanding universe is out to kill everything.

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Don’t miss Philip Plait, Death from the Skies (New York: Penguin Books, 2008). But don’t take it on an airplane, as I stupidly did, or you may attract unwanted attention from an alarmed flight attendant.

That calls for a bit of onto-cosmological humility. The notion that we are God’s gift to the universe, the only, or the highest, species of intelligent life, the summit of the material universe, does not hold up. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that instead of a material body informed by an immaterial soul (antiquity), or a ghost in a machine (Cartesian modernity), we are now understood to be an interconnected system, a complex network made up of about a hundred billion neural connections. The artificial intelligence industry, having taken due note of that point, has set out to supplement, stimulate and simulate it and is itching to design a new and improved model (or so it thinks) to replace this system. Beyond the biologists who are trying to reverse the process of the unraveling of our telomeres, otherwise known as aging, which would extend our biological life possibly into centuries—called the Methuselah project, a fittingly Biblical name—there are still spookier, post-biological things in the works. We should keep in mind that the future that is being envisioned by some AI people is speculation stretched to a

•• Were humans able to shed their mortal coils (fragile biological substratum) and henceforth enjoy (or so they think) an electronic life, they would acquire a preternatural electronic immortality (relatively speaking, since not even the universe is really immortal), no longer subject to biological death. 1 Cor. 15 meet AI. The Pauline fieryairy “spiritual body” will be made of electrons. •• Resurrection would then basically become a matter of copyand-paste. In the opening episode of The Year Million, a National Geographic television series (2017), Jess, a futuristic (holy) family’s only child, after being killed in an automobile accident, is “resurrected” (Jess/Jesus?) from the electronic back up in the database kept just in case of such unfortunate eventualities, like the Resurrection Ships in Battlestar Galactica. This would probably lower life insurance premiums. •• That would also put a shelf life on the Incarnation and rob it of its cutting edge, as it would no longer be the turning point of cosmic history, just the instantiation of God in a local, transient biological form of life on a remote planet and solar system destined to become ash, including all those resurrected bodies, if you insist that they are really bodies.

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presently fantastic point. There are more promissory (or threatening) notes than can be counted here. Still, it is not to be ignored or treated with scorn. Were the AI people to someday pull this off, were they really to reach what Ray Kurzweil called the “Singularity” point, where the exponential increase of the capacity, speed, and artfulness of the artificial intelligence machines will overtake biologically based human intelligence, the theological implications would be staggering:

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•• The final shedding of its biological foundations would also mean a fate worse than Darwin—the final unravelling of the yarn that Augustine spun about the “corporeal transmission” of “original sin.” This would send the architects of “redemption” back to the drawing boards (using CAD, no doubt). •• Thereafter there will be only immaculately electronic conceptions (we would all be as free from carnally inherited sin as Mary) and virginally virtual births. If that makes bedtime sound boring, don’t be alarmed. There won’t be any need for beds at all as there will no longer be a need for sex or sleep. We will all be flesh-free and on-line all the time. •• Even the Holy Spirit would get an electronic make-over. The Year Million follows the story of the family adjusting to their AI-restored, web-enabled daughter through the subsequent developments in AI world. This even­tually culminates in merging individual minds into a single collective super-computer. At this point we encounter something approaching the prediction by the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) of the evolution of what he called the “noosphere.” If Teilhard was expecting a global Christ, what we get instead is a global Watson, a complex web of interlinked consciousnesses from around the world—like a “cloud”—merged into one universal collective superintelligence. This is a far remove from isolated Lockean individuals acting on Humean animal faith. It is a great deal more like the evolution of Spirit (Geist) in German Idealism, in which God finally becomes God, finally becomes conscious of himself as God. Cogito → Spirit → the Cloud! It would give a surprise ending to the medieval visionary Joachim of Fiore’s prophecy of the “age of the Spirit,” the “third age,”

In short, we would henceforth “live and move and have our being” in information systems! As for us, well, we would pretty much no longer be us. “We humans” would be posthuman and post-“we” if by we you mean us, today. All the basic biological, anthropological, and cosmological assumptions upon which the great religious traditions are built would have been torn down and “all things made new” in a way no one from St. Paul and the Delphic Oracle to the Las Vegas odds makers saw coming—except maybe the mystics, panentheists and German Idealists! Such a post-biological and post-zoological life would no longer have an unconscious or preconscious, an affective base, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity—we will need to look around for something new to discriminate against—everything we think of as “human,” except for consciousness (which is why we call it posthuman). The futurist film Transcendence (2014) tried to imagine such an unimaginable possibility. In it, the intelligence of AI scientist Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is uploaded on to a giant supercomputer and linked to the internet, with uneven results for Will and humanity at large—and for the critical reception of the film, which was mostly a missed opportunity to exploit a provocative premise. BECOMING DIVINE: THE ELECTRONIC TREE OF LIFE

Of course, given the foolishness of our species—“Lord, what fools these mortals be,” said Shakespeare’s Puck—specifically of the know-nothings today who deny anthropogenic climate change, not to mention the ever-present threat of nuclear

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which anticipated German Idealist metaphysics, in which the Holy Spirit (love and grace) would be all in all—with a bit of a boost from the computers!

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destruction, we may well bring an end to the species long before we reach the Singularity. We earth-bound bio-zoorational types will then have played the part of the dinosaurs in the cosmic story of extinction. Maybe our bones will turn up as fossils in a future museum as the ancient biological stage of a post-biological super-species to come, the turning point having been in the late twentieth century when the first IT systems got up and running. Nietzsche said present day humankind is a rope stretched between the ape and posthuman, which is not a bad way to translate his Übermensch. The Psalms said we are higher than apes and a little less than the angels. Now it may turn out that we are much closer to the apes, biological-material living things, while acquiring angelic and divine status is what we really desire! Angelology will have supplied a blue print for information technology. We have all heard about avenging angels, who are agents of the divine wrath, but today we are witness to what we might call the revenge of the angels, who suffered a lot of abuse from insufferable modernists who mocked them by asking, “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Yet classical “angelology” is starting to look like the ultimate prophecy, which is finally being realized by technology. In the Bible, the “angels” (from angelos meaning “messenger”) are immaterial, imperishable, super-intelligent, airborne, instant-message and guidance systems. That sounds like an advanced IT system to me, not only the smartphones we are building but the electronically guided systems we are becoming! So, now, ask yourself, how much information can be stored on the head of a microchip? How instantly can it be sent? Mock that! But we also know that angels also are capable of breaking bad. The “powers and principalities” Paul referred to were bad angels, who, filled with pride at being super-smart, turned on

For a learned and detailed study of the perils and promises of the post-human, which became a New York Times bestseller, see Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). I explored these post-human possibilities further in my Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information (London: Penguin/Pelican Books, 2018), 245–72, and I elaborated the analogy of technology and angelology in Hoping against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), 135–54.

Make no mistake. Setting aside any far-out speculation on the Singularity, which envisages a fully post-human condition,

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their maker, against whom the archangel Michael led God’s loyal angelic troops in the Book of Revelation. A “host” of angels means an army of super-smart warriors, like a sky full of smart bombs! Are our angels, a.k.a., super-intelligent computers, going to break bad? Are we heading straightaway for a catastrophe? Will we hit a point when the computers will build the computers, resulting in super-computers communicating among themselves, beyond both our ken and our control? Will they will turn on us like Lucifer? Or Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Will we fail to heed the warning given to us by the Romantics, who represent the anti-modern (or pre-postmodern!) flip side of the Enlightenment, about the destructive hubris of the march of science and technology, famously represented by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818)? Are we building our own future masters? Might that be the new—and last—form, the final scene, taken by the “human” battle with the powers of darkness?

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we have already set off down the road of the trans-human enhancement of our condition. We already refit diseased organs and joints with artificial replacement parts and are already developing computer technologies that will interface with the brain to enable the deaf to hear, the blind to see, the lame to regain the use of their limbs. Are there any limits? Will we be able one day to interface the brain with the internet itself? Are we not witnessing a technological realization of Biblical “miracles,” which will turn out to have been prophetic “science fiction” stories, imaginative explorations and idealizations that ultimately achieve technological realization? Is the human becoming less and less as we hand over more and more of our decisions to Watson? We have to give the author(s) and redactors of the story of the Garden of Eden credit. They saw something like this coming. This becoming-divine is just what they were worried about. It is not often pointed out that eating the fruit of the forbidden tree is not exactly what earned our first parents their walking papers from Eden. Their expulsion was actually a pre-emptive strike made when the gods (in the plural) started worrying about what our first parents would do next, which was to eat of the other tree, the “tree of life,” in which case they would live an ungodly length of time, or rather a godly one. They would live forever and be “like us” (Gen. 3:22). Immortality was strictly prohibited in the Bible and denounced as a pagan practice, like Egyptian ancestor-worship, compromising the exclusive transcendence of God, and it remained off limits all the way up to the Book of Daniel. Contrary to Augustine’s theory of original sin, death was not a punishment for their sin; their sin was to want to avoid death. Have not the AI people picked up where Adam and Eve left off? Have they not set their sight on just that, on partaking of an electronic tree of

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life and living forever and being like the gods? Haven’t we always wanted to be like gods? Would that not spell the end of religion? What would there be left for religion to do? All its promises would have been fulfilled by quantum computers! What about the universe itself? The leading theory now is that it is headed for oblivion under the pressure of dark energy, which is driving it to expand into a void. But who can say for sure? Is that the final word? Maybe that will be true for our universe but, at some point, this expansion will be thrown into a reverse contraction (exitus followed by reditus) and a new universe will be generated from a Big Crunch. One Big Bang after another, in a series of endless universes? (One damn universe after another!) Quite possible, another possibility of the impossible! And, finally, what is ahead for God? Does God have a future? If the panentheists think of God as Deus sive Natura would not the entropic death of the universe spell the death of God? If God is Natura naturans, is not God headed for a Natura de-naturata? Or is God the endlessness of endless universes, Natura naturans sempiterna? In The Last Question, a 1956 short story that has proven to be quite prophetic, Isaac Asimov imagines another possibility. In this story humanity, having eliminated reliance on fossil fuels and running entirely on solar energy, congratulates itself for having solved all its energy problems. Oops. Not quite. The sun, too, is non-renewable, ultimately! The sun is consuming its own fuel and is headed for eventual star-death, as is every star. Indeed, the universe as a total system is itself running on a non-renewable energy. So, the last question is, how to reverse the irreversible law of entropy, which will eventually spell doom for our little star and everything else?

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The plan the humans devise in Asimov’s tale is to upload their human intelligence to a computer, hightail it off this doomed planet, and get the computer to work on answering this question. After six (as in six days of creation?) successive waves of new generations of computers over many eons, a single giant supercomputer of all computers finally solves the problem by a simple utterance, “Let there be light.” Is the “omniscience” of “God” a limit concept in which we are imagining the combination of all the information of all the generations of all the computers over the stretch of endless time into a supercomputer of unimaginable superintelligence? Suppose it turns out that the entire universe is a massive information system, that we live and move and have our being in information systems, and that what religion calls “God” is in fact a super-intelligent quantum computer that has been running everything on automatic pilot, which is not the personal God in which our mortal lives are anchored for which the classical theists were hoping? Suppose we are on the way to building the computers that will eventually build the computers that will take over the controls? Not only will we take over evolution, we, well, let’s say, the species formerly known as human, will take over everything! Hegel here we come. Or rather, here comes somebody, some non-body. Talk about a Begriff! COSMIC GRACE: WORLD WITHOUT WHY, AMEN

Meanwhile, back here on planet earth, where the woods are lovely, dark, and deep, where we still awake to snowfilled fields and bask in summer suns, where we are still born of woman and grow old and die, back here where we live and move and have our geo-mortal being and pass our days under the sun, what do we do now? Where does all

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that trans- and post-human speculation leave religion and the love of God and what I love when I love my God? What do we do in the meantime? Religion, which is not to be confused with God, belongs to the meantime, the in-between-the-beginning-and-theend time. Everything does. St. Paul certainly thought so, as he raced about Asia Minor trying to alert the known world to the second coming. We need new hos me sayings (1 Cor. 7: 25–31), to live life now as if we will soon be dead, appreciating life in the kairos, the opportune moment, as the time is short. We live and move and have our being in the meantime, where we have the time of our lives. (Or so we hope.) So, in the meantime, in the cosmo-theological possibility I am exploring here, the best cosmo-theological advice is to treasure our little lives here and now, in a remote corner of the universe, as a bit of fleeting grace, as a proto-cosmic grace. Our much beloved Dr. Einstein to the contrary notwithstanding, we are living proof that God, Deus sive Natura, does indeed play dice. The cosmo-theological point is that, for one brief shining moment, once there was a spot where love and justice and their opposites did battle, in a larger longer story, a single second in a chronos of incomprehensible cosmic proportions, after which it all disappeared without a trace. If what I love when I love my God is Deus sive Natura, then our lives are a great gratuitousness, a great gift of cosmic circumstance. In this view, when we say that “God is love” we are speaking in figures, symbolically—we always are, anyway, like it or not—of a cosmic love or proto-love, of cosmo(theo)logical forces that gave a magical gift, of remarkable properties, what Derrida calls a pure gift. What is that? A pure gift is given without a particular, identifiable, or personal giver, given in the middle voice, an emergent

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property without anyone trying to be generous and without putting any of us in an infinite debt (hence, nothing we need to pay off, nothing from which we need redemption). A pure gift is given without why, as we have heard the mystics say, which means gratuitously, with nothing up the cosmic sleeve. That is what in theology is called “grace.” Instead of “Natural Law,” why not natural grace, the grace of Nature (Natura sive Deus)? Then the sheer facticity of Being would turn out to be the sheer grace of Being. Facticity will have turned out to be cosmic grace. Live without subordinating life to any goal beyond life. Do not let faith in life be contained within the limits of the beliefs we have constructed. The perishability of our lives and loves—which leads some to cry “nihilism”—does not destroy life’s value; it constitutes it, giving life more intensity, which is why I speak of the nihilism of grace. Mortality is vital! Immortality is lethal. How could we be courageous if we cannot risk our life? The prospect of the final setting of our little sun in stellar death is the setting of a new faith in life here and now. Resurrection, post-modern style, means more life, a new chance for life, a remission, coming back when all seemed lost. Theology’s beata vita is life itself, this life, the depths, the utter solemnity of which is made visible when we are brought up short by the birth of a child or when someone is close to death, reduced to “bare life,” when we sense the depths of the life that flows beneath the empirical individuality of someone who may even be mean and unlovable. Life is its own “because.” If we asked someone why they love life, they would likely be lost for words. In the nihilism of grace, there is nothing you would want life for, nothing that would not be more life, nothing other than life. So, life is literally lived for-nothing, for nothing other than itself, without why.

The usefulness (Augustine’s uti) of life is absorbed into its enjoyment (frui). Life is ruined the moment it becomes the coin of the realm in a heavenly economy, which turns the works of mercy into the works of mercenaries. Life is demeaned by making it a means. This faith and hope and love of life is a transcription of a theological discourse to which modernity has covered its ears. It is the heart of a heartless world.

Perhaps this cosmic grace is what we earth-bound mortal types will have meant by God, and gratitude for this grace, for the possibility of this impossible, is what we—back here on earth, nestled in the arms of Mother Gaia—will have meant by loving God, and by speaking—in Christian Latin— of “religion,” of a heart made restless by seeking to know what I love when I love my God. When presented with this cosmo-theological possibility, that there is no (theistic) God above and no personal immortality thereafter, some religious people protest—rather ungratefully, if you ask me— “Is this all there is?” Really? By “this” they mean to diss this amazing roll of the cosmic dice which resulted in our life in this infinitely mysterious and overwhelming universe, which may be but one of an infinite number of universes, in which to some amusement they say they feel “trapped!” Where are they standing when they look down on all that? Do they really imagine that there is nothing

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I have elaborated on this cosmic grace, or the nihilism of grace, in Hoping against Hope, 169–82 and The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 223–45.

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more important than them and that if they don’t get to live forever as a reward for doing what they should have been doing anyway—love is only love when it is without why— the whole thing is a “useless passion,” “a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing?” Talk about hubris! Talk about a mean and narrow idea of loving God! Either they get to live forever or else the whole cosmos is a waste! Their interests have to be served. They have to come first or the whole thing be damned! Have they never read that the first will be last? No salt! Let us recall what we said above, in our discussion of the placeless place of religion, of the theopoetics of the divine milieu, which induces in us a series of cosmo-ontological counterparts to the moral virtues—a profound humility about the modesty of our cosmic status, an empathy with all creatures great and small, for we are all in this together, a deeper gratitude for the gratuitousness of the pure gift, a “courage to be” rather than not (Tillich), to hope against hope (St. Paul), and above all, or beneath all, a love of being rather than not, like Augustine praying and weeping over his God. Eye has not seen, nor has ear heard, what is stored up for us stardust-molded things by the mystery of the universe, by what is to-come, by the event, in which we live and move and have our being. The world is mysticism enough, and religion enough, and God enough, for an increasing number of people today, who have lost their patience with the incense and candles, the hypocrisy and self-righteousness, the meanness, violence, and reactionary politics of a great deal of what dares to call itself religion today. Then religion, this religion of the world, the love of God, will have turned out to be an affirmation, “yes, I said yes” (Molly Bloom), of life in a world without

why, of living and loving without why. Then, when called together (ek + klesia) not inside a house of worship but at an ocean’s edge or at the foot of a massive mountain or under an infinite sprawl of stars, they sing their doxology:

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Glory be to the world, as it was in the beginning, is now, and whatever it shall be, world without why, Amen. Yes, I said yes.

On religion—without religion

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Seven

In this final chapter I want to bring my argument to a head. Human experience, I am contending, comes alive as experience by and through the impossible. Experience is really experience, something that really happens, something to write (home) about, only when we are pushed to the limit of the possible, to the edge of the impossible, driven to an extreme, which forces us to be at our best unless, alas, it brings out our worst (Chapter Five). Now since this experience of the impossible is the very quality that also defines religion for me, then as I have been arguing there is a fundamentally religious quality to human experience itself, whether or not you have the blessings of the bishop or the rabbi, whether or not you subscribe to one of the institutional faiths at all, whether or not you believe in the “God” of one of the traditional confessions, whether or not you are an “atheist” vis-à-vis the several theisms. There is a deeply religious element within us all, with or without religion, so this little essay on religion is also an essay on being human, even in the face of a looming post-human world. That is how I gloss the talk of a “religion without religion” that I have borrowed from philosopher Jacques Derrida, and it is by defending that idea head on that I wish to conclude this study. RELIGIOUS TRUTH/TRUE RELIGION

I am inching toward another idea of “religious truth,” which is a centerpiece of my little treatise On Religion (Without Religion).

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The idea is to move beyond literalism, fundamentalism, and outright superstition without simply repeating an Enlightenment critique of religion whose presuppositions, as I have argued, have been widely discredited. For a religion without religion requires a full charge of “religious truth” where that is to be sharply distinguished from “true religion” in the sense of “the one true religion” (by which we always mean, invariably, mine-not-yours). The several religions, in the plural, are unique and irreducible repositories of their distinctive ethical practices and religious narratives, representing so many different ways to love God, but without laying claim to an exclusive possession of “The Truth.” In the Confessions Augustine said that the Scriptures may have many meanings, so long as all of them are true. That I would say also goes for religion. We may and need to have many religions, and many “sacred scriptures,” so long as all of them are true. Any given religion is better off without the idea that it is “the one true religion” and the others are not, as if the several religions were engaged in a zero-sum contest for religious truth. They need to drop the idea of “the true religion,” to stop running “negative ads” about everyone else’s religion or lack of religion, and to kick the habit of claiming that their particular body of beliefs is a better fit with what is “out there,” as if a religion were like a scientific hypothesis, which is the mistake of the Creationist “scientists.” Unlike a scientific theory, there is not a reason on earth (or in heaven) why many different religious narratives cannot all be true. “The one true religion” in that sense makes no more sense than “the one true language” or the “one true poetry,” “the one true story” or “the one true culture.” While rejecting the modernist idea that science is the exclusive depository of truth, we should have learned something from modernity— post-modern means having passed through and learned a thing

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or two from modernity—namely, that religious truth is true with a truth that is of a different sort than scientific truth. Religious truth is tied up with being truly religious, truly loving God, loving God in spirit and in truth (John 4:24), and there are more ways to do that than are dreamt of by the faithful in the traditional confessions. God is not restricted by the limits of the imagination of confessional theologians. Loving God in spirit and in truth is not like having the right scientific theory that covers all the facts and makes all the alternative explanations look bad. The faithful need to concede that they do not cognitively know what they believe by faith in any epistemologically rigorous way. While faith gives the faithful a way to view things, they are not lifted by the hook of faith above the fray of conflicting points of view (hermeneutics). They do not enjoy certain cognitive privileges and epistemic advantages of which others have been deprived, and their beliefs are not entitled to special treatment outside their own communities (which I encourage them to maintain and promote, with all of the tensions that beset community life, in communities that go easy on all that excommunicatory stuff). To be sure, a religion without religion cannot do without religious truth. There is indeed something deeply true about religion, but it is, I claim, a truth without knowledge, by which I mean without absolute or capitalized Knowledge, without laying claim to enjoying privileged cognitive, epistemic, propositional information that has been withheld from others. “Knowledge puffs up,” St. Paul said, “but loves builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by Him” (2 Cor. 8: 1–2). Love trumps knowledge and knowledge is at its best when it concedes what it does not

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know, whereas loving can never brag about not loving. Any given faith is certainly a way to see and to know, one more among many, since indeed all genuine knowing is knowing “as” (which Heidegger calls the “hermeneutic as”), and all knowledge depends upon faith, not “supernatural” faith but faith as a way of seeing, construing, knowing. But faith lacks the wherewithal to absolutize its perspective, to lift itself up above the others in Capitalized form and cow the rest of us into submission. The faithful need to concede that their faith is the historical shape that the love of God has assumed for them, the historical way they have been gifted to see things, and that it is “true” in the same way that a novel can be deeply “true” even though it is rightly classified as “fiction,” not “fact.” It is true the way stories and symbols are true. One of the lessons of contemporary hermeneutics is that there are many ways to know and love God: “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” (2 John 4:7), too many to contain or to count. The several religious communities thus need to remember that “hospitality” requires them to sharpen their sense of the historical contingency of their language, symbols, and formulations, of their narratives, images, and figures, to remain alert to the contingency of the setting of their faith in a particular place and time, in a particular culture and tradition. The faithful need to remind themselves that “others”—people who have never heard of the “God of Israel,” “Allah,” “the name of Jesus,” or any of the long-forgotten names for what we call “God” in languages of which we no longer retain a trace, not to mention the inhabitants of distant galaxies, which is a post-Ptolemaic consideration—do not share and cannot be expected to share their “confessional faith,” their favorite body of approved

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propositions, any more than the faithful can be expected to share the approved propositional faith of others. Religious truth, the love of God, does not have to do with approved propositions. It is a form of life, a way the world is lived, and it is expressed in narratives and powerful figures like “the Kingdom of God.” The idea of a religion without religion amounts to the recommendation that we return to the medieval sense of vera religio, where “religion” meant a virtue, not a body with institutional headquarters in Nashville or the Vatican, so that “true religion” meant the “virtue” of being genuinely or truly religious, of genuinely or truly loving God, not The One True Religion, Ours-versus-yours. God is more important than religion, as the ocean is more important than the raft, the latter bearing all the marks of being constituted by human beings. Religion, which is a human construction, is always deconstructible in the light of the love of God, which is not deconstructible. The one love we need to spare ourselves from is loving the violence of the “we,” the extremism and madness that are involved when the faithful get it into their heads that “we”—Jews or Christians, Hindus or Muslims, whoever—have been granted a privileged access to God in a way that has been denied to others, or that we are loved by God in a special way that God just cannot bring “himself” (sic!) to feel for others, or that we have been given certain advantages that God just has not granted others. Notice that “we”—this is just about what we mean by “we”—never imagine that God revealed himself to and loves someone else in a privileged way and that we are a third party to this intimate relationship between God and his beloved and will have to settle for second best, looking in from the outside, our noses pressed hard against the glass of their religion. We need

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to steer around the dangerous path of imagining that God, that what is going on in the name of God, plays favorites, that God favors or has “chosen” Jews but not Egyptians, or Christians but not Muslims, that in general God has revealed Himself to “us,” but not to the “others,” to Paul on the way to Damascus but not to the rest of the Jews who stuck with the Torah, that God prefers men to women in order to do “His” work, or white people to black, or Western Europeans to Asians, or has in some way or other granted special privileges to a particular individual or nation, race or gender—or planet or galaxy or possible universe!—in a particular time and language, that has been withheld from others. It is always possible—in fact, you can bet on it—that someone might fold their hands and piously looking up to heaven tell us that we must take the bull by the horns and face up to the fact that God’s special revelation at just one time and place to just one people in just one language is all part of a Great Divine Mystery, that God’s ways are not our ways. Excuse me? There is nothing divine or mysterious about that (although there is a great deal of bull). It sounds much more like our ways, not God’s, our own very unmysterious and human, all too human ethnocentrism and egocentrism, our own nationalism and narcissism, our own sexism, racism, and self-love writ large, in short, a gross human weakness that is being passed off as a Great Divine Attribute. The nerve of some people! The exclusivist claim that almighty God has been exclusively revealed to a particular people, at a particular time, in a particular place and language, is at the root of a good deal of the violence that religion perpetrates in the name of God, whose name is supposed to be love, not war. There are many ways for God to be revealed, too many to contain in a book entitled On Religion, too many to be contained within the limits

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of our historical and cultural imaginations, and many, many ways for religions to be true, too many to count. True religion, genuine religiousness, means loving God, which means a restlessness with the real that involves risking your neck; it means serving the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in the worst streets of the most dangerous neighborhoods, without getting trapped by the claim to a privileged divine revelation made by the particular religions. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (2 John 4: 16). Anyone, anywhere, anytime. Period! Full stop! Religion is a form of life, not a set of beliefs. Religious truth is not the truth of propositions, the sort of truth that comes from getting our cognitive ducks in order, from getting our cognitive contents squared up with what is out there in the world, so that if we say, “S is p” that means that we have picked out an Sp out there that looks just like our proposition. Religious truth belongs to a different order, to the order or sphere of what Augustine called “facere veritatem,” “making” or “doing” the truth, even if, especially if, what we are called upon to do exceeds our powers and we are asked to do the impossible. Even if, especially if, we have become unhinged, and have sunk to our knees in faith, hope, and love, praying and weeping like mad. That is why it is expressed in a theopoetics, not a theo-logic in any strong sense. Theopoetics is a constellation of discursive resources, like metaphors and metonyms, narratives and parables, which evoke a lived sense of the world which extends its reach beyond any confessional boundary to anyone who lives in the world, whether they live with or without confessional religion. “No one has ever seen God” (1 John 4: 12)—that is, when it comes to God, nobody’s cognitive ducks are in order.

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So, if we say, “God is love,” that means that we are expected to get off our haunches and do something, make that truth happen, amidst our sisters and our brothers, not that we have just nailed something in rerum natura, as when we say, “the moon is a satellite of the earth.” We must say and pray, sing and dance, shout and whisper “God is love”—with all the gusto of E. F.’s “One Way Road to Heaven” congregation in The Apostle (1997), or with all the splendor of a Greek Orthodox liturgy, or with all the solemnity of the monks of Gethsemane at morning matins—in spirit and in truth, which means in deed, for the name of God is the name of a deed. We must get something done, or better let it be done (fiat!), let something impossible get done in us. Notwithstanding the objections raised by the logicians (a difficult breed, notoriously hard of heart, with grossly overgrown cognitive and proposition-making faculties), “doing the truth” is not a category mistake. On the contrary, it is the very truth of religious truth, what is true and truthful and honest about religious truth, which is also why we can be very truthful in disclaiming that we have any secret access to The Truth. That should likewise help keep the violence in check. Religious truth is a truth without Knowledge. Religious truth is a deed, not a thought, something that demands our response, without pretense or dissemblance, that costs us our blood and our tears, even if we do not know who we are. Especially then. Otherwise it is a hollow bell, a tinkling cymbal, a lot of noise (1 Cor. 13:1)—or a list of propositions drawn up at a conference of well-fed theo-logicians. Some theologians, God bless them, not all, thanks be to God, tell us that faith must be “certain,” otherwise it is waffling, and what good is that? By “certain” they do not mean transparent, for faith is through a glass darkly, not face to face (1 Cor. 13:12). They mean that it must be held “securely” by

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the will which will not let it waver, and even that it can be “testified” to up to the point of death and martyrdom, which is decidedly not waffling. But testimony still does not turn faith into Knowledge, into “seeing God,” although it gives faith a quality of “truth” in this sense of facere veritatem, which is a certain sort of truth without Knowledge that I am trying to defend. Having faith means testifying (which is what the Greek martyreo means) to the love of God, doing something, a deed, making justice flow like water over the land, not getting a proposition right. Nor does testimony lift the love of God up above the historically limited and culturally situated contexts in which it always takes root and finds the words to formulate itself. Over the ages people have testified with their blood to a lot of very different things; there are martyrs for every cause, and too often for the worst cause. One community’s martyrs are another’s terrorists. It is precisely this confusion of religious truth with Knowledge that crosses the fatal line between being willing to die for the love of God and being willing to kill, that emboldens the faithful to wage war in the name of God against everyone who does not share their faith. That is one reason I agree with Paul, who, champion though he was of faith, says that of the three passions for the impossible, love is the greatest (1 Cor. 13:13), which means that love is a way to keep faith, which is through a glass darkly, from driving us into a ditch. God is more important than religion as love is more important than faith. Religions are rafts, human artifacts, historical constructions, symbolic or theopoetic configurations, that are organized in their particulars by human communities in order to articulate the love of God, and their human origins keep showing through their seams. The faithful constantly congratulate themselves with the belief that their religion is

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“instituted by God,” and that is certainly true in the sense that the various religious forms of life arise in response to something that has swept us away, something impossible, something other or wholly other to which we are responding, which has driven us to the limit. That is what we called the mystical element in religion, where religion is what results when the unconditional hits the ground of concrete conditions. But this means human beings are responsible for constructing all the particulars of the response, for the vocabularies, the theologies, and all the institutional structures, which formulate in conditional, definite and determinate ways just what has swept them away. One very effective way to deconstruct something is to meticulously recount how it got constructed in the first place. A scrupulously close history of any given religion will reveal in painful detail just how deconstructible it is. The faithful rarely have the heart to hear a cold and heartless rendering of the history of the human formation of their religious tradition, which they prefer to believe has dropped from the sky. The only thing I think has dropped from the sky, so to speak, is the love of God, which I have been arguing descends upon us in the form of a question, “what do I love when I love my God?”. So what has dropped from the sky is not The Answer with which I may smite my enemies, but a question with which I am myself put in question! God, what is going on in the name of God, is a question, not an answer, the most radical thought we can entertain, that exposes the questionability of all the other answers we think we have, exposing the fragility of the raft, the continency of our constructions, the facticity of our figures, the revisability of the determinate conditions under which the various religions conduct their business, forcing them to ask themselves again and again, “what do I love when I love my God?”.

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THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE

However robust our faith, faith is also unnervingly fragile. The fragility of faith is in part a function of the multiplicity of the formulations of the several faiths, of the multiplicity of religious traditions, each of which represents its own integral and irreducible form of life, each of which is true without Knowledge, which is why I speak of a religion without religion. But that is only part of the story. For beyond the historical particularity and cultural contingency of the forms it assumes, which can also be quite lovely, the love of God is inwardly disturbed by something more distressing, something more stark and unlovely, indeed utterly loveless, which I shall call here, not without a flare, “the tragic sense of life.” The love of God is haunted by a specter, disturbed from within by a dark and mystical element that causes it to pass many a sleepless night. If Ebenezer Scrooge had his sleep disturbed by three very upsetting ghosts, the advantage he had over me is that he at least knew the names of the ghosts that haunted him, which is perhaps why it all turned out well in the end, and he also got it all over with in one eventful night. But my problem is that I am permanently spooked by an “anonymous” spirit, by a specter whose name is “no name,” “no one,” “no-one-knows-we-are-here,” a loveless specter who revisits me night after night. For the name of God, and the love of God, always transpires against the spectral background of an anonymous and loveless force in things, which is why, even though love is a given, I am always asking, what is given, what gives, “what do I love when I love my God?”. One way to look at religion is to see it as turning on the question, “Does anyone know or care that we are here?” In this world of time and happenstance, of good fortune and

“On the Truth and Lies in the Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 79.

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bad, of pleasure and pain, of surpassing joys and nightmarish cruelty and unhappiness, is anyone watching? Does anyone take notice or care? Is there something in things that rises above the flux of the shifting tides of time and fortune to give it all sense? Does God “in heaven” watch over us, counting every tear, numbering every hair on our heads, knowing what is in the heart of each one of us? Is there someone to whom we can pray like mad, like Augustine in the Confessions praying and weeping over stolen pears, someone who sees the secrets of our hearts, who weighs the good against the evil, and steers all things mightily and wisely unto good? Or are we rather, as Nietzsche mused, just so many little animals scurrying across the surface of a little planet in a faroff distant corner of the universe inventing proud words for ourselves—like “the love of God”? In time, Nietzsche says, the little planet will run out of steam and sink back into its sun and be reduced to ash, and the little animals and their noble words will have to die. And what then? The cosmos will simply draw another breath and move on, utterly unmindful of us and uncaring, without regret and without so much as giving us a thought, since it does not think in the first place. Shall we and all our lovely words vanish without a trace? Shall we all have been speaking forgotten languages? Is that our story, our history, our fate? That numbing thought is what I am calling the tragic sense of life, and you can see why it keeps me pacing the floors night after night.

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Does anyone know we are here? Does anyone care? Are we on our own? Is there nothing beyond the heartless and unrelenting cosmic rhythms, nothing loving, kind, or fair? Should we not, following Nietzsche’s advice, simply stiffen our spines and cut the whining? Should love then mean learning to love this fate, learning to love the flickering moment of time allotted us without asking too many questions, without looking for something more? Should we simply learn to take life straight up, without the admixture of anything to sweeten or attenuate it, to blunt its sharp edge? Should we not take the gift of life for what it is, say “yes” to it for what it is, neither more nor less, without any additions or subtractions? Yes to life. Just as it is? Yes. With all its joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, births and deaths, kindnesses and cruelties linked together in a single chain, inextricably entangled with each other? Yes, yes. Thus spoke Zarathustra. Is that what it means to live “without why?” The religious sense of life, which I have defined as the love of God, takes shape in the face of this facelessness, is forged over and against this tragic sense. To be sure, by a certain accounting, the tragic view is already a kind of religion, a rather phallic religion forged out of tragedy, where the love of God takes the form of saying “yes” to the tragic fate of the god Dionysus, of loving necessity, amor fati, which means the loveless love of loving a loveless fate. Then the debate between the tragic and the religious would have to be recast as an intramural dispute transpiring within religion, between a tragic religion and a non-tragic one, between the love of necessity and the love of the impossible. It is certainly possible to work things out like that, but I think that for present purposes that would muddy the waters and take religion and the love of God so loosely that they begin to lose all sense, which will

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become plain in what follows. I see the love of God both as permanently opposed and exposed to this love of loveless anonymity and as haunted and disturbed from within by it. On my impudent hypothesis, which is that we get the best results from facing up to the worst and not putting too sanguine a spin on things, religion should renounce even trying to insulate itself from the tragic view. Religion is co-constituted by the tragic sense, which is both the very sense that would undo it and the sense against which it itself takes shape. For the tragic keeps the religious honest, keeps it on its toes, and rejects the triumphalism and self-enclosure of the impossible people I have complained about, and brings more sharply into focus what I am calling here a truth without Knowledge. Let there be no mistake. I am not giving the tragic the last word. I am not saying that after hearing religion’s long and lovely discourse on the love of God, the tragic comes along at the last moment and scores a knock-out punch in the last round by exposing the naive and childlike heart of religion, while counseling us all to grow up, for religion is our childhood and enlightened disillusionment is our maturity. I am not saying that the tragic is the real truth, because I think that the tragic view is also just one more perspective, just another take on things. The problem is that, like any ghost worth its salt, I cannot make it go away; it haunts me day and night. That is the spectral condition of our lives. But haunting though it be, it is a little too romantic and a little too macho to steal my heart. There is something perversely appealing about the tragic view, a certain heroic hopelessness, a phallic fist-shaking defiance that enjoys cursing the darkness and even dances to the tune, that says “yes” to it, that goes chin to chin with the cosmos and dares it to break our will. Let us love life, this phallic romanticism says, for life is cruel but it

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is innocent of wrong-doing and we are tough as nails. What does not kill me, Nietzsche crowed, makes me stronger, happier, healthier, more sublime—yes, yes! That is why I resist calling all this the love of God; it is a little more like loving orgasms (which, I hasten to add, I do not simply oppose), or like the braggadocio of the “boys” after a game. But above all I do not give the final word to this macho heroics precisely on the grounds of my salt-giving, saline criterion of truth, which I have taken from St. Augustine, facere veritatem, which is where I think the tragic view comes up short. On the tragic view both the cruel indifference of natural disasters and the malice in the human heart are of a kind, equally innocent, equally the outcome of the impersonal and unknowing forces of nature. Are the fierce winds and waves guilty because they destroy the seaside homes of thousands of people and take their lives? Or the rains that flood the streets and towns and farmlands? Or the hawk that sweeps down upon its prey? Or the lion that preys upon the fawn? (So far, so good, but let’s go on.) Or the Nazi executioners who “exterminated” millions of “innocent” people in the name of a hideous ideology? Or the Ku Klux Klan lynching “innocent” black men in Mississippi and Alabama? Or the terrorists who maim the bodies and take the lives of “innocent” children? You see the snag, the hook on which we are hung by tragic phallo-logic? If everything is innocent, innocent children have no special claims as against the equally innocent forces that slaughter them or force them into a sex slave trade for personal profit, greed, and self-aggrandizement. There is no moral difference between a foul wind and a cigarette manufacturer out to make a profit by hooking vulnerable youngsters on carcinogens. The whole bloody thing is just the way the bloody cosmic forces play themselves out, nature red in

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tooth and claw. You cannot separate the doer from the deed, the forces from the way the forces discharge themselves. You might be able to say that some forces produce great works of art or lasting institutions, and that these are “higher” or more “powerful” forces, and that those that engage in genocide are “lower” and “meaner,” but that would be a purely “aesthetic” way to look at things. And it would also be fatalistic—how could amor fati not be?—inasmuch as there is no suggestion here that anyone could do otherwise. For we are as we are, and we do what we do, just the way it is only a fiction of grammar to think that there is a distinguishable “it” that does the deed when we say, “it rains.” That is why this tragic line fails the test of the facere veritatem and why, by the way, the lovers of the necessary are usually tied up with rightwing politics; they usually tell us to have the steel to love things the way they are, and not to coddle the weak or the idle poor, the shiftless people who are “on the dole,” while religious people, who are lovers of the impossible, are down in the bad neighborhoods trying to change things, doing the truth. For the religious sense of life, the bonds of the present are not nailed down by necessity but broken open by the possible, by the possibility of the impossible, by the absolute future, which is prophetic time, when all things will be made new, as opposed to tragic time, which is the love of the necessity of the inevitable. The religious relationship to the world arises in the face of this facelessness and hopelessness, which is why no less a critic of religion than Karl Marx said that religion is the heart of a heartless world. The tragic sense is very much an individualist stance, a solitary individual contemplating the starry expanse; the religious sense remembers the communal setting of our lives. The great religious symbols and figures have always

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included figures of suffering, for the love of God always comes to rest upon the least among us, upon the ones who suffer needlessly. If anyone is indeed “privileged” by God, it is the underprivileged, because with God the last are first. In the interpretation of the passion narrative advanced above, the name of God is the name of the One who takes a stand with the persecuted, with those who suffer, who expresses a divine solidarity with suffering, the One who says no to suffering, to unjust or unwarranted suffering. In Christianity the central symbol is the “Crucifixion,” a slow, sadistic, hideous, and torturous execution used by the Romans to put some teeth in the “pax” Romana, which any court today would readily declare a cruel and inhuman punishment. The Crucifixion has been portrayed by so many beautiful works of art and reproduced as exquisite gold and diamond-studded jewelry worn by opulently adorned clerics, people who make a profitable living off the Crucifixion, as Kierkegaard said, that we quite forget that it is a gallows or a death chamber, a lynching tree. Wearing reproductions of it is like dangling a miniature diamond-studded gold “electric chair” around our neck. But the meaning of the Cross is that God chose to manifest solidarity with an innocent man, a convicted criminal, legally speaking, who suffered an ignominious execution, just the way Paul says that God chose to manifest solidarity with the foolish of this world to shame the wise, and with the lowborn nobodies (ta me onta) to shame those who “are” (1 Cor. 1: 28), the powers that “be.” I am arguing for a radical and inescapable fluctuation or “undecidability” between what we have called here the tragic and the religious sense of life. There is no cognitively definitive way to settle what is what or what is going on, no way to adjudicate their dispute, no knock-down argument for the

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one and against the other. That is what I called the absolute Secret, the mystical element, the dark center, the unlit core, the concealed depths, which is the ultimate condition to which our lives are subject. We do not find the religious without the tragic, or when you do it is because the tragic has been violently suppressed, repressed, or excluded, which means that we are then threatened by a return of the repressed, which is pretty much how the powerful convulsions of fundamentalist violence are to be interpreted, as I argued above. At the core of fundamentalism, I maintain, there lies a repressed fear that faith is only faith and as such a risk with no guarantee of anything, which is the truth about religion to which it testifies in the mode of repressing it. The religious sense of life grows up in the face of this facelessness, against its backdrop. The anonymity is inexpugnable; it is first, last, and constant, preceding and following faith, all the while invading the very interstices of our faith. For however much the several religious faiths flourish, we must all “fess up” that we do not know who we are or what is going on, not “Really,” not in some “Deep Way,” although we all have our views. No one really knows what they love when they love (their) God, even if they do not lack for words when we ask them. That indeed is the condition of their faith in something unconditional, the reason their faith is faith, not Knowledge, and why religion can be true without Knowledge, why religion is also without religion. Faith is faith in the face of the facelessness of the anonymous. Faith is always haunted and disturbed from within by this specter of a heartless world of cosmic forces, where the waves that beat against the shore and the murderous hearts of violent men and violent regimes are all alike just part of the cosmic economy, all part of the way the forces discharge

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themselves, all part of the cosmic ebb and flow, where many an innocent lamb is sacrificed on the altar of the cosmic play. Faith is faith that there is something that lifts us above the blind force of things, a mind in all this mindlessness, a heart in all this heartlessness. That there is something—like the Force in Star Wars, which is, as we have seen, a bit of a transcription of the Buddha nature, or like the cosmos conceived of as an embracing womb, not a blind play of forces, as in panentheism—or someone, as in the personifying figurations of God found in the great monotheisms, who stands by us when we are up against the worst, who stands by others, by the least among us. Faith is faith that we can say that certain things are wrong, are evil. Faith is the memory of evil done, the dangerous memory of suffering that cannot be undone, and the hope of a transforming future, which is what I love when I love my God. THE FAITH OF A POST-MODERN

I am slowly working my way back to my beginning, that religion is the love of God. “God is love,” which is my religious centerpiece, cuts both ways. It could mean what Augustine means, that when we love anything, it is really God whom we love, however obscurely. Or it could mean what French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray means, that love is a divine force, a divine milieu that sweeps the lovers up into each other’s arms and allows them to embrace and intermingle with each other. Then the name of God is one of the names we have for love, one of the oldest and most prestigious names, to be sure, maybe even a primum inter pares, but still just one of many names, and what we really mean by “God” is love. There is a certain undecidability here, by which I mean an inability to put a stop to the translatability or substitutability

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of these two terms, “God” and “love.” The love of God—or the god of Love? How are we to tell which is really a translation of which, which is a substitute for which? How can we resolve this fluctuation, decide this undecidability? The troublemaker here is the word “really,” which is attempting to “unmask” the passion for love as a passion for God (Augustine), or, alternately, to “unmask” the passion for God as a passion for love (Feuerbach). The first unmasking is pre-modern, theological, and uplifting, a hermeneutics of the sublime, always looking up to the sun to explain the patches of light here below. The latter unmasking is modernist, critical, and desublimating, a hermeneutics of suspicion, belonging to the spirit of an age of a secularizing reason which tries to cut religious figures down to size, to fit them within the limits of reason alone, or explain them away altogether. Either way, the unmasking claims to boil things down to the way they really are, to provide the final word about what is really real, to settle the matter once and for all, to decide things one way or the other. But one of the things that the word “post-modern” would have meant had it been able to hold on and mean something relatively determinate (which, alas, seems not to have happened) is the end of all those projects of unmasking and of cutting through to what is Really Real, the renunciation of the attempt to speak the Final Word, be that a sublimating Theological Final Word or a desublimating Critical Final Word. One of the things “post-modern” would have meant is de-capitalization, the willingness to get along as best we can without capital letters and without final authoritative pronouncements, without a Knowledge of the Secret, and to splash about in the waters of undecidability. For we do not know who we are. What then? Comes the chaos? Does all hell break loose? Are we left without any

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guidance? If we do not know who we are, or what we love, what is left for us? We are not left with nothing, but with the passion and the not-knowing. The passion of not knowing, truth without Knowledge, the restless heart, living without why. Inquietum est cor nostrum. We are not left for dead, as some would think, who require a firm foundation, an absolute propositional base, before taking a single step forward, or left to drift aimlessly, bobbing on the surface of an endless sea. We are left a little lost, no doubt about that—quaestio mihi factus sum, Augustine said, but, to stay with the marine metaphor, swimming like hell (holy hell, to be sure), facere veritatem, doing the truth with all the passion of non-knowing, asking all the more insistently, “what do I love when I love my God?”. But the whole idea behind this argument for a post-secular position is to avoid being drawn into the fray about what is really real and to make a leap of love into the hyper-real, to the real beyond or up ahead, which eye hath not seen or ear heard. There is, I am arguing, a kind of endless translatability or substitutability, a holy undecidability, let us say, between God and love, or God and beauty, or God and truth, or God and justice, in virtue of which we cannot resolve the issue of which is a version of which, which is the translation of which, which is the substitute for which. Not if we are honest. But by insisting on “honesty,” I am saying of course that if the truth be told, we really do not know. But is that not a fatal, performative contradiction (which is how professional philosophers say “Gotcha!” in their journals), my own gesture of unmasking? Am I not hoisted on my own petard, snagged on the very hook of the “really” to which I have just said we should show the door? Not so, I would say (not really). I am not trying to unmask both positions, to trump both of them

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by means of a third, still higher, triumphant and triumphal unmasking than which there is no greater unmasking. I am just trying to swear off unmasking and concede that I really do not know which is which. I am not trying to excommunicate the word “really” from our vocabulary, which I really could not do anyway, but only to say that I really do not know what is Really Real, and that I have pledged my troth to the hyper-real, to making the impossible happen. Undecidability is the place in which faith takes place, the night in which faith is conceived, for night is the element of faith and hope and love. Undecidability is the reason that faith is faith and not Knowledge and the way that faith can be true without Knowledge. It is when we recognize that we do not know who we are, or what is really going on, despite our several takes on it, that faith and hope and love are called for, and the time has come to give our heart to the hyper-real. I am simply saying, or confessing, in a kind of postmodern Augustinian circum-confession, that we do not know who we are—to which I have hastened to add: and that is who we are. We are not thereby left with nothing but rather with ourselves, with the quaestio mihi factus sum. We are left holding the bag—of our passion, the passion of our non-knowing, our passion for God, of our love of God, where we do not know what we love when we love our God. A good many religious people think that passion must be fixed and determinate and nailed down, that a passion must have a definite destination. They think that a passion must keep its head and know where it is headed, and they are scandalized by the very idea of a passion of non-knowing. I have nothing against passions that know where they are heading, and I do not deny that they have their place, but I do not think that is the deepest or most interesting form of passion. If a passion of non-knowing runs

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the risk of getting lost, a passion that knows what it is about and has a good idea about how things are supposed to turn out is in danger of resting on its oars and becoming a mediocre fellow; it risks becoming a routinized and rote performance, which is putting in its time until the end result rolls around. Unless, by convincing itself that it Really Knows what it wants, it turns into violence. In my view, the very highest passion is driven by non-knowing. Its tensions are heightened and the stakes are raised when we lack assurance about what is going on, or how things will turn out, when all we can do is push on, have faith, keep going, love and trust the process about which we lack any final assurance. Passion falls back on faith and faith is a kind of passion. Passion is guided by faith and faith is driven by passion, and this passionate faith is what gives life savor and salt. But if that is so, then, contrary to what a good many orthoreligious people think, people who are rigidly attached to the particular figures and symbols and propositions by which they have been formed, by what is largely an accident of birth, we do not know what we believe or to whom or what we are praying. To be sure, we can all recite our prayers and various creeds, and thanks to the theologians, bless their hearts, we know the propositional contents of what we confess, sometimes in very great detail, sometimes knowing more than we need to know! But these creedal statements are trying to give propositional form to a living faith and a radically different form of truth; they present religious truth sometimes very well and in inspiring forms, and sometimes in certain well-formed, prepackaged, freeze-dried formulations, some of which have been voted on by councils and assemblies of (almost invariably male) elders. But beneath them, within them, before and after them, stirs a living faith, a restless heart, a hope against

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hope, in love with love. A faith in what? A hope for what? A love of what? Given what I have been saying about undecidability, about the endless translatability and substitutability of names like “God” and “love,” that question must remain open, and as long as it does, as long as it is not answered, as long as it is not closed down, then faith is faith indeed. If we really do not know who we are, then faith is really faith. Undecidability protects faith and prayer from closure and by keeping them thus at risk also keeps them safe. But if the question of faith resists an answer, a Big, Final Conclusive Answer, it requires a response, a modest but passionate, humble but heartfelt response. When faith and love call the roll, we had better respond, like the Virgin Mary in Luke’s story, “here I am.” When love calls for action, we had better be ready with something more than a well-formed proposition even if it has been approved by a council. We had better be ready with a deed, not a what but a how, ready to respond and do the truth, to make it happen here and now, for love and justice are required now. The love of the not yet real, of the impossible and hyper-real, and the dangerous memory of the dead who must not have died in vain, requires a deed, here and now, in spirit and in truth. Religious truth, being truly religious, is not a formula to recite but a deed to do. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7). The name of God is something to do. Without the deed, without doing the love, without doing God, the name of God is just noise, or a way to get my own way, or to earn a comfortable living for his reverence, or to get elected, or to smite my enemies with a large and massive sword. Prayer, too, is a form of truth without Knowledge. When a Protestant prays to the crucified Christ, or a Catholic prays the

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Rosary for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, or Jews pray at the Wailing Wall, or a Buddhist bows humbly before a statue of the Buddha, or when Muslims turn earnestly toward the East and sink to their knees, who is getting it right? That question is not only wrong-headed and non-sensical—like seeking the one true language—but it is also impious, irreligious, and insolent, for we have to do in each case with an integral and mutually irreducible form of life. Each form of prayer is the issue of its own intensity, heartfelt sincerity and humility, its own good will, and makes sense inside the historical form of life that it nourishes. Each represents its own way of doing the truth. We should have many religions and many prayers, so long as all of them are true, so long as all of them are doing the truth. But none of them has absolute or transhistorical credentials. Far from it. Each is nested in a historical setting from which it cannot possibly be extricated without being destroyed. Each is an historical how, not a transhistorical what. Far from assuring us that we know who we are praying to, their very diversity assures us that while the prayers of the faithful come in many historical forms, we do not know in some overarching ahistorical way to whom we are praying, for prayer can be true without Knowledge. The diverse forms assumed by the life of prayer assure us that the essence of prayer does not turn on resolving that indecision, on determinately nailing down the what, but, once again, on “doing the truth,” praying in spirit and in truth (John 4:24)—in multiple, irreducibly, disconcertingly different ways. If God is anywhere, it is in the diversity. Augustine also liked to ask, “where are you, O Lord,” to which the right answer, the most orthodox of answers, is “everywhere,” inside me and outside me, within me and above me, here and over there. The name of God is the name, one of the names, of that in which

we live and move and have our being. God has pitched his tent and dwells among us and, to add my own post-modern pitch, she dwells among others as well. Everyone who loves is born of God.

I have been arguing for opening up the lines of communication between the life of faith before modernity and the post-secular moment we are presently experiencing. I have been proffering a post-modern or post-secular repetition of St. Augustine, a reiteration of St. Augustine for a post-secular time, which has all the makings of a religion without religion (upon which Augustine the bishop might sometimes cast a disapproving episcopal glance). Accordingly, I would like to propose my own new millennium version of St. Augustine’s and St. Bonaventure’s itinerarium mentis ad deum, a kind of postmodern ascent of the mind to God, or to the impossible, or to the hyper-real. It is designed for people like me, people whom Kierkegaard liked to call “poor existing individuals” (that’s me), by which I mean those who do not know who they are. I describe an ascent that unfolds in three phases, which given this Kierkegaardian allusion we might also characterize as three stages of post-modern “existence,” or of what I shall call three gradually higher or more radical axioms of a religion without religion. “I do not know who I am or whether I believe in God.” That is a start, and it is true enough. I am a mystery unto myself, a question mark, an enigma, a land of turmoil and difficulty, as Augustine said. Accordingly, I fluctuate between faith and faithlessness, God and Godlessness, religion and irreligion, not knowing which one is me or mine, or where I belong. That is true enough, but it is not enough truth, in the sense

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AXIOMS OF A RELIGION WITHOUT RELIGION

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of the facere veritatem, which means that it is too cognitivist and not passionate enough. The fellow peddling this line is too much inclined to stay home and not venture out at all in bad weather, to generally go below whenever foul winds blow, to sit back in his chair and puff on his cigar of a stormy afternoon and let life run its course, wondering how it will all turn out for those poor beggars outside who are caught in life’s tempests. Undecidability here runs too close to the edge of complacency and indecision. “I do not know whether what I believe in is God or not.” That is better. I am up off the couch, taking a step in the right direction, making a movement in the direction of passion, engaged in a more committed and passionate act, with a taste for faith. For here at least I recognize that life does not take a single step forward without faith, that if we are going to get anywhere, faith is first, last, and constant. I know that if I wait for all the results to come in, for definitive information to settle the matter, life will have long since left the station without me. I do believe, help thou (somebody) my unbelief. But I do not know in what I believe, or whether what I believe in is God or not, whether it should be addressed with the name of God. Perhaps I do not believe in God but in something else. Perhaps what I am responding to is the call of “life,” its immanent energy and inner momentum. Perhaps I am embracing the auto-justifying exercise of life itself, for life is its own reward and it does not have to answer the question, “why desire life?” Life is without why. This is all true enough, but it is not enough truth, not passionate enough. It is still too much inclined to think that life is exclusively some sort of epistemic problem, a question of determining a “what” rather than of doing a “how,” a question of identifying what we believe in or to what we are praying, rather than embracing the how of

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living full steam, with all the passion of love, the how of praying in spirit and in truth for I know not what. “What do I love when I love my God?” Here I hit full stride, releasing all the passion of the impossible, all the energy of love. Here love is given, first, last and always. For who would be so hard of heart, so lacking in faith and love, as not to love and not to love God? You know that I love You, Augustine says, but the question is what do I love when I love You, my God? God is love. God is the name of love. God is the name of what we love, and the question is what do we love when we love God, love our God, love “You, my God?” The name of God is the most powerful, the most beautiful, the most indispensable name we have, the first among all names, at the sound of which every knee shall bend, the name we must revere and embrace, love and guard from its detractors. (All this without forgetting that it is also the most dangerous!) Those who are atheists about this God have no heart, no salt, no love— whoever does not love, does not love God—for they deny the love of God and the God of love. The name of God is the name of the ever-open question. Unlike reductionists, who think that the name of God closes every question down, that it supplies a ready-made answer for every possible question, the name of God in my post-modern Itinerarium is the name of infinite questionability, of what is endlessly questionable, for no name can cause my head to spin more than the name of what I love and desire. Instead of the God of the gaps, here we embrace the gaps God opens! But what do I love when I love my God? In loyalty to St. Augustine, whom I also love, I have retained the “what,” but of course, if I dared to correct a Saint, which I would never do, if I were an obscure copyist in an Irish monastery in the tenth century working on the Confessiones, I would in all fear and trembling have furtively

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amended the what to a how. How do I love when I love my God? At the end of the day, after asking again and again, “what do I love,” we find the what yields to the how. For love is a how of doing, not a what of knowing. As we have tried to show, we begin with the that, on the groundless grounds that we do not know what is what! As existence precedes essence, love precedes knowledge. Over and above the creedal formulas and the councils, the theological treatises and the official prayer books of the official religions, which labor over the what, settling important questions like the filioque debate, God is a how, not a what. The name of God is the name of the passion of life, the passion of my life, the passion of my unknowing, my passion for the impossible. God is served in spirit and in truth, not in propositions. That we learn from a reliable source, a Jewish prophet with a taste for giving the Jews hell (holy hell) for their infidelities. You who turn justice to wormwood, who trample on the poor and push aside the needy, had best take care about calling for the day of the Lord, Amos warns them in his memorable fifth chapter, lest you get more than you bargained for. I hate your festivals and your solemn assemblies, and I will not accept your burnt offerings, Amos has the Lord God tell them. Take away your songs and your glorious liturgies, and the melodies of your harps—take away your “religions,” Amos seems to say. “But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). The name of God is spoken in spirit and in truth, not by being sung in solemn assemblies, but in love, for whoever loves is born of God, and in “doing” justice, in making justice happen, which Amos describes as serving the poor and the needy, not stealing from them or letting them rot. Amos, I think, was among the first to propose the idea

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of “religion without religion,” which means more justice and fewer burnt offerings and solemn assemblies. For Amos, the name of God is the name of justice, and justice is not a thought but a deed, and its truth is attained only in doing the truth, in making justice happen in truth. Of course, Amos is not denying that love and liturgy, justice and song cannot be found together. Indeed, they make a powerful combination and just try separating them! But he is insisting that justice is not had simply by talking the talk in solemn assemblies, but by walking the walk in the inner cities. The justice of God, the God of justice—that is a deed, a how. Thus, at the end of these reflections, we learn, alas, that the distinction between theism and atheism, religion and unreligion, is beset by a certain confusion and subject to the holy undecidability that I have been analyzing. For religion is the love of God, which is living and life-transforming when justice rolls down like waters, which is also denied when justice is denied. “Those who say ‘I love God’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars” (1 John 4:2). Justice takes place inside and outside the historical religions, inside, with the Dietrich Bonhoeffers and Martin Luther Kings and Mother Teresas and countless nameless saints who lead lives of quiet and obscure heroism serving the least among us while the rest of us are leading lives of ease. And outside, for there is no safely secular sphere where we can be so sure that no religious fires burn. Religion—with or without religion— wherever there are men and women who love and serve justice, who love and serve God. Where are you, my God? If God is a deed, not a thought, then that puts in perspective and gives us a way of sorting through the profusion of nonsense that is readily available on Amazon.com in

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which the love of God gets confused with poppycock like the Celestine prophecy, visitations by angels, channelings, sightings of Elvis, UFOs, or God knows what! The love of God has nothing to do with the idle curiosities—what Augustine (following 1 John 2:16) called the curiosities of the eyes (curiositas occulorum)—of the well-heeled looking for amusement. It has to do with the transformability of our lives, with the possibility of a transforming future, and with serving the poorest and most defenseless people in our society, with welcoming the strangers who make their way across our well-defended borders, the homeless and the abandoned, the ill and the aging. Lord, when did we see you hungry and give you to eat (Matt. 25:37)? God is not playing a great guessing game with us in which we all sit around and take a stab at who or what is going on behind a great cosmic curtain that has been drawn down before us. The withdrawal of God is not the occasion of amusement for the curious or of puzzlement for the metaphysicians. The withdrawal of God from our view is always a matter of justice, of God’s deflecting our eye from God to the neighbor, as the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas says, a structural declining to be made visible or palpable in order to incline us to justice for the visible neighbor and the palpable stranger. This Levinasian deflection is a deeply religious version of the death of God. The deflection of God is the inflection of God in our lives, the translation of God into a deed: Lord, when did we see You thirsty and give You to drink? We also see this logic of deflection in the Synoptics, where Jesus does not so much speak of God as of the Kingdom of God, and not so much of the kingdom of God as of mustard seeds and treasures hidden in a field. It requires doing things, not philosophizing or theologizing them half to death.

I discuss Levinas’s religious atheism, his “adieu sans Dieu,” his logic of religious deflection, in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 269–73.

Religion in the sense of the love of God cannot contain what it contains. We have defined religion in terms of the love of God, but the love of God cannot be defined—or contained— by religion. The love of God is too important to leave to the religions or the theologians. When it comes to loving God, who is in and who is out? We get a clue from a very famous parable in the New Testament, which tells a story about a wedding party madder than any party ever imagined by Lewis Carroll (Matt. 22:1–14). When none of the guests who have been invited show up

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Philosophy and theology have their place, and I am myself very fond of (even addicted to) both of them, but they can prove to be a distraction, a curiositas. People who are doing justice but have no theology or philosophy, no list of approved creedal pronouncements, or even a name of God at their disposal, are far closer than the theologians or philosophers would like to think to what the Rhineland mystic Meister Eckhart liked to call the “divine God.” As opposed to the human one, the God of the raft, the one we enjoy speculating about, or making guesses about, or dismissing as an illusion, as if God were an even higher-flying and still more unidentifiable UFO. Unless you are this poverty about which I am preaching, Eckhart said in one of his sermons, do not waste your time trying to understand me.

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for the wedding feast, the host sends his servants out into the streets to bring in the strangers and casual passers-by who just happen to be in the neighborhood, who are not dressed for the occasion, and who do not even know the bride and groom. Can you imagine a more unimaginable and unbelievable wedding reception than that? But that, we are told, is how the “Kingdom of God” works. The Christians composed this story as a way of putting it to the Jews, who rejected Jesus (a tactic not unknown to “John,” the author of the gospel and epistles of love, as we have already pointed out), but of course, the story has a kick to it and boomerangs equally on Christian exclusivism. In the Kingdom, the insiders are out, have missed out, while the outsiders are in! The Kingdom of God, the place where God’s love rules, does not turn on formal invitation lists and formal memberships, but includes anyone who does justice in spirit and in truth. Anyone who loves is born of God. The Kingdom of God is a how, not a what. The Kingdom of God is not a geographical place but a paradoxical form of life, even as the year of the Jubilee whose coming Jesus announces is not a year in calendar time but the very structure of prophetic time. It is always coming, always to-come. What do I love when I love my God? Not the burnt offerings and solemn assemblies, but justice. Is justice then another name for God? Or is God another name for justice? We have insisted all along upon the undecidability of this sort of question, to which we should add now an insistence upon its pointlessness. If I serve the neighbor in the name of God, or if I serve the neighbor in the name of justice, what difference does it make? If the name of God is a how, not a what, then the name of God is effective even when it is not used. Perhaps it is more effective, more of a “force,” as George Lucas might

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say, if it is not known, even never known, because then the name of God, and the love of God, can stay clear of all the violence and complications of human “religion.” That is the genuine meaning of living and loving “without why” and the lesson of Matthew 25 in which the servants did not know that it was the Lord himself to whom they gave food and drink. The meaning of God is enacted, or else it is refused and we devote our time instead to building up our stock portfolios. It is enacted equally but differently in Mahatma Gandhi, who waged non-violent battle with evil, in the life and death of Jesus, who was executed because of the subversiveness of his message that the One he dared call Abba has forgiven us, even as it is enacted in the reverence of Chief Joseph for the majesty of the natural world, who expressed astonishment at the perversity of the white man’s idea that the earth belongs to human beings instead of recognizing that we belong to the earth. The love of God is enacted whenever our human, all too human drives are contradicted and thrown into reverse and we are drawn out of ourselves by something larger or other than ourselves, whenever the finite makes contact with the infinite, whenever the unconditional disturbs the concrete conditions of our lives, whenever our powers and potencies come unhinged and we are left hanging by a prayer for the impossible. The meaning of God is enacted in an openness to a future that I can neither master nor see coming, in an exposure to possibilities that are impossible for me to imagine, which surpass my powers, which overpower me, which drive me to the limits of the possible, which draw me out to God, à Dieu. With whom nothing is impossible. What do I love when I love my God? To a Buddhist, or to a native American, or to a contemporary eco-feminist, the

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cosmos is not a blind and stupid rage, as Nietzsche thought, but a friend, our element and matrix, the beginning and the end, the gentle rocking of a great cosmic womb, a friendly flux from which we take our origin and to which we return, like the steady beat of ten thousand waves in the sea. Then the love of God means to learn how to dance or swim, to learn how to join in the cosmic play, to move with its rhythms, and to understand that we are each of us of no special import other than to play our part in the cosmic ballet, all without why. In Judaism, Islam and Christianity, on the other hand, where the symbolics and the theopoetics are personifying, the name of God is the name of the One who has counted every tear and has numbered every hair on our heads. That makes each individual precious, a lost sheep or a lost coin, a lost son or a lost daughter, and the name of God is the name of the good shepherd who sets out in search of the single sheep who is lost while the other ninety-nine are safe, or of the parent (“father”) who forgives the lost child (“prodigal son”) and throws a party to celebrate the child’s return even though the child has squandered everything. That does not mean that this Lord of history is not the same Lord of the elements who rides on the wings of the wind and waters the cedars of Lebanon in the majestic 104th Psalm, which is a point where Biblical religion joins forces with the panentheistic motif of Deus sive Natura found in people like Eriugena, Cusa and Spinoza. The meaning of God is enacted in these multiple movements of love, but these movements are simply too multiple, too polyvalent, too irreducible, too uncontainable to identify, define, or determine, too polymorphic to be contained under what we call in Christian Latin “religion.” By asking Augustine’s question, “what do I love when I love my God?”, we concede that the love of God is radically reinventable,

ADIEU

What, then, do I love when I love my God? God be with you. Thank you, Jesus, thank you! Oui, oui! Adieu (à Dieu).

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ineradicably translatable, that we cannot contain the process of substitution or translation that it sets in motion. But this translation is not a semantic process but an existential or pragmatic one. It is not a matter of finding a dictionary equivalent for the love of God but of doing it, of giving testimony to it, of seeing that its effect is to translate us into action, to move and bestir us. Love is not a meaning to define but something to do, something to make. When we pondered the translatability or substitutability of these two terms, “God” and “love,” and we asked which is a translation of which, we were looking in the wrong place for a translation. In the translatability of the love of God it is we who are to be translated, transformed, and carried over into action, carried off by the movements of love, carried away by the transcendence that this name names and commands. The translation of the love of God is transcendence; it is the movement that it names, the deed that it demands, for the love of God is something to do. The love of God is not explained or explicated in a proposition but testified to, enacted, performed. “God”—that is not only a name but an injunction, an invitation, an insistence, a solicitation, to commend, to let all things be commended, to God. To God.

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Index

Aaron 68, 113 Abba 205 Abelard, 134 Abraham 14, 29, 54–55, 117–118, 133 Adam 130, 164 Albertus Magnus, St. 48 Albright, William F. 118 Alice 16, 154 Allah 175 Amos 200–201 Angels 62, 132, 151, 157, 162–163, 202; information technology (IT) and 162–163 Angelus Silesius 77 Annunciation, the 9, 11, 39 Anselm, St. 32, 74; the ontological argument in 40–44, 46, 48, 79; Why the God Man 130–131, 132, 135 answer, the 67, 79–80, 82; 181; is another question 29; distinguished from response 83, 195; Jesus is not 36, 129; see also response Apostle, The 104, 179 Aquinas, St. Thomas 43, 79

Aristotle 47, 79, 103, 139, 140; the phronimos and 13–14, 70 Asimov, Isaac 165–66 atheism 33, 65, 81, 141, 139, 154, 199; theism and 27, 85, 110, 172, 201; Levinas and 201–202; Marx and 18–19; of the “new atheists” 95; panentheism and 148 Augustine, St. 25, 39, 40–41, 49, 55, 58, 61, 62, 66, 86, 148, 151, 152, 160, 164, 169, 173, 179, 183, 196, 202; doing the truth 30–31, 178, 186, 192; the love of God 1–2, 4, 19, 27, 32, 73, 126, 138, 142, 170, 190–191, 199, 206; postmodernism and 39–40, 71, 197; a question to himself 20, 28–29, 31, 35, 87, 192–193; restless heart 16, 26, 99 Aulén, Gustaf 131, 134n Aung San Suu Kyi 115 Beatles, The 89, 129 Begum, Laila 115 Bell, Kristen 102

Calvary 93–94 Camus, Albert 85 Carroll, Lewis 16, 203 Carvey, Dana 142 Cavanagh, William T. 123 Christus Victor 130–133 Climacus, Johannes 57 Coleridge, Samuel 143 Comte, Auguste 140 Cone, James 104 Conrad, Joseph 126 Copernicus, Nicolaus 48, 139, 152, 157 cosmic forces 186, 189 cosmic grace 166–71; facticity and 168; the gift and 86, 167–168, 170; nihilism and 168; see also gift

cosmo-theology 139, 142–146, 150, 151, 167, 169; cosmopoetics and 146 creation see God Cusa, Nicholas of 145–146, 149, 206 Danson, Ted 102 Darth Vader 101 Darwin, Charles 60, 160 de Silentio, Johannes 57 death of God 61–72, 112, 140; Levinas and 202–203; panentheism and 165 deconstruction (deconstructible) 63, 94, 95, 156, 176, 181; the undeconstructible and 98–101, 107 DeMille, Cecil B. 117 Depp, Johnny 161 Derrida, Jacques: circumfession 82; the impossible 11, 182; the pure gift 167–168; religion without religion 13, 172; the unconditional 98, 107; undecidability 128 Descartes, René 44, 66, 149 Devil, the 2, 12, 120, 131 Dionysus 57, 59, 184 Duchamp, Marcel 100, 147 Dürer, Albrecht 152 Duvall, Robert 104 Eckhart, Meister 89, 113, 156, 203 Einstein, Albert 139, 152–54, 167

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Bible, the 17, 84, 116–21, 121–125, 129, 139, 152, 155, 162; science fiction and 164; see also God; the Scriptures Big Bang, the 78, 80, 84, 149, 165 bishops 13, 19, 26, 27, 35 Bloom, Allan 65 Bloom, Molly 25, 170 body, the 59, 63, 156, 158; of God 147; of Jesus 133, 152; resurrected 101, 152, 159 Bohr, Niels 154 Bonaventure, St. 197 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 201 Breaking Bad 153 Buddhists (Buddha, Buddhism) 115–116, 190, 196, 205 Bultmann, Rudolph 156

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Enlightenment, the 39, 48–49, 52, 60, 140, 163, 173; critique of 63–68; Hegel and 53–54; old versus new 39, 65 Eriugena, Johannes Scotus 144–145, 206 Existentialism 56 experience 17, 18; deep structure of 89, 95, 96–98, 103; of God 43–44, 46, 48; of the impossible 12–13, 172; religion as 9–10, 13, 44, 89, 172 facticity (givenness): of being 77–82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 97, 168; of existence 80; grace of being and 168; of love 73, 76, 79, 83–84, 181–182, 199–200; thinking and 80–82 faith 14, 23, 49, 58, 64, 198–199; of Abraham, 55, 117; confessional (traditional, institutional) 30, 32, 35, 37, 52, 95, 99, 172, 175–177, 179–181, 182; distinguished from belief 92; hermeneutics and 69, 175; knowledge and 174–175, 179–180, 189–190; leap of 56, 60, 62; in life 168–169; post-modernism and 190–197, 198–199; reason and 49–50, 55, 61, 62, 68, 69, 70, 155; seeking understanding 41, 43, 61–62; unfaith and 35, 37–38, 189, 197 faith, hope and love 2, 8–9, 12–13, 14–17, 92, 169, 178, 180, 193

Feuerbach, Ludwig 191 Force, the 155–156, 204; see also Star Wars Francis of Assisi, St. 146–47 Freud, Sigmund 17, 39, 60, 63–64, 69 Fukuyama, Francis 71 future, the 29, 140, 165, 190, 202, 205; relative vs. absolute 7–19, 84, 139, 187; of religion, 98; see also impossible, the fundamentalism 124–125, 156, 173, 189 Gabriel, the Angel 7, 12, 29 Galileo 48, 149 Gandhi, Mahatma 134, 205 gift 106; of life 184, 186; pure 167–168, 170 Girard, René 134 givenness see facticity Gleeson, Brendan 93 God: Anselm’s proof for existence of, 40–44, 49; the Bible and 116–119, 122–23; contemporary physics and 151–66; creation and 79–80, 138–39, 142–46, 147–51; enemies of 133, 137, 141; the impossible and 7–8, 11, 17, 138; is love 5–6, 167, 178, 179, 190; Kingdom of 7, 15, 97, 105, 176, 202, 204; love of 1–7, 26–38, 61, 73, 82–3, 108, 126, 173–81, 191–5, 199–207; name of 83, 87, 97, 106, 108, 135,

Hagar 117–18 Ham, sons of 120 Hawking, Stephen 85, 139 heaven 50, 102, 123, 141, 152, 155–156, 169, 179, 183 Hegel, G. W. F. 60, 71, 76, 90, 143, 149; the Concept 81, 146; critique of Enlightenment, 53–54; Vorstellung 97, 104–105, 157 Heidegger, Martin 69, 149; Augustine and 71; Being and beings 75, 98; facticity 78; God 104, 106; hermeneutics 136, 175; mystery 76, 85 Heisenberg, Werner 153–154 hermeneutics 50, 62, 68, 69, 123, 127, 129, 134, 174–175, 191;

circle, 41, 75, 98; definition of, 21–22, 121; of love, 133–37; of violence, 130–33 Hitchens, Christopher 113, 146 Holiday, Billie 104 hope against hope 12, 14, 86, 170; see also faith, hope, and love Hubble telescope 153 Hume, David 154, 160 hyper-real, the 17, 100, 191–193, 195, 197; see also reality 15–17 impossible, the 7–17, 20, 22, 25, 28–31, 37, 39–40, 69, 84, 98, 135, 137, 172, 178, 189, 184, 187, 193, 195, 197, 199–200, 205; contemporary physics and 138–142, 156; people of 34, 112–113, 185; as a religious category 11–13, 53; and religious violence 124–128; see also experience information technologies 138, 142; angelology and 162–63 insistence versus existence 83, 92, 98–99, 207 interpretation see hermeneutics; truth Irigaray, Luce 71, 85, 190 Isaac 54, 117, 133 Jane Eyre 103 Jesus of Nazareth 7, 14, 17, 62, 93, 104, 119, 152, 156, 175, 202, 204, 207; not the Answer 36–37; Christian right and 120; death of

211  Index

190, 196–197, 199, 200–201, 204, 206; Nature or (Deus sive Natura) 80, 82, 145, 151, 165, 167; as necessary being 79–80; as personal 116, 150–51, 155, 190; of song and dance, 101–106, 200–201, 204; supercomputers and 166; translatability of 6, 107, 190–192, 195, 202, 207; the unknown 74–76; weakness of 132; withdrawal of, 202; word of 23–24, 124; see also death of God; panentheism; theism; theopoetics; violence Gone With the Wind 120 Good Place, The 102 grace of being 86

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129–136; non-violence and 96, 205; resurrected 152, 159; theopoetics and 105 Jews, the 176–177, 196, 200; in the gospels 119, 204; Israelites and 116–118; Judaism and 46, 52, 206 John: Gospel of 30, 174, 196, 204; Letters of 3, 6, 119, 175, 178, 195, 201, 202 Joseph, Chief 205 Kant, Immanuel 52, 53, 54, 69; modern versus postmodern 53; ontological argument and 44, 46–47, 79, 81; religion and 52 Kaufmann, Walter 63 Keats, John 75 Keller, Catherine 85, 145 Kennedy, Edward (Teddy) 19 Kennedy, Robert (Bobby) 19 Kierkegaard, Søren 23, 45, 68, 103, 143, 148, 188, 197; leap of faith 62; prophet of postmodernity 53–60 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 11, 134, 204 King, Stephen 9 language games 70 Lessing, G. E. 52, 102 Levinas, Emmanuel 202, 203n Lewis, C. S. 125 liturgy 46, 48, 52, 96, 104, 119, 179, 200–201 Locke, John 160 love 41, 42, 7, 76, 79, 95, 97, 127, 138, 142, 170; death of Jesus and 129–130, 133–137;

of fate 184–185, 187; of God 1–4, 6–7, 26–38, 41–45, 61, 68–69, 74–5, 83, 175–176, 188, 192–193, 199–207; of the impossible 14–15, 112–113, 184, 187; knowledge and 174, 189, 193; of life, 168–69, 170–71, 185–86; meaning of 4–5; measure of 113–114; the mystical element and 82–83, 86–87, 92, 182; as personal 150–51; as response, 195; as two-edged sword 118–119, 121, 125–126, 133; undecidability of 190–192; without why 170; see also faith, hope and love; God; hermeneutics; the impossible; religion Lucas, George 155, 204; see also Star Wars Luke: Gospel of 7, 195; Acts of Apostles 74, 85, 104 Luther, Martin 55, 61, 62, 130–131, 148 Lyotard, Jean-François 71 Malcom X 134 Mandela, Nelson 135 Marcel, Gabriel 143 Marcion of Sinope 118 Marion, Jean-Luc 44n Mark: Gospel of 3, 7, 35, 129 Marx, Karl 17, 39, 60, 63, 64, 69, 71; atheism of 18; prophetic influence 18, 187 materialism 64, 147; myopic (old) versus mystical (religious) 139–142, 154

mystics, the 20, 92, 154, 161, 168; physicists and 139, 163 Nathan the Wise 52, 102 nature 23, 64, 80, 143, 186; Deus sive Natura and 80, 82, 145, 148, 151–152, 165, 167, 206; grace and 168; mystics and 146; in Scotus Eriugena 144–45; supernatural and 155 Newton, Sir Isaac 140, 142, 151–55 Nietzsche, Friedrich 39, 85, 130, 140, 144, 162; critique of modernity 63–65, 68–69; as postmodern prophet 57–60; tragic sense of life and 183–87, 206 Nishida, Kitaro 113 Olthuis, James 95 ontological argument, 42; Anselm and 42–44; criticized by Kant 46–47; see also Anselm; Kant panentheism 146–151, 190; atheism and 148; the mystical element and 148; pantheism and 147; personal God and 150–51; theism and 147–48 Pascal, Blaise 45 passion 29, 32, 61, 76, 127–28; Christ’s 129–133, 188; for God 28, 191, 193; for the impossible, 20, 25, 31, 125–128, 135–36, 180, 199–200; of non-knowing 20, 35, 76, 84, 86–87, 192–194,

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matter 153; versus spirit, 140–144, 155, 157; see also Einstein; materialism Matthew: Gospel of 3, 14, 36, 202 Mendelsohn, Moses 52 Messiah, the 156 messianic age, the 18, 27 metaphysics 24, 42, 60–63, 66, 85, 161, 202; after 71; overcoming 63; post- 55; of Star Wars 156–57 Michael the Archangel 102, 163; see also Danson, Ted Miles, Jack 122 modernity 39–40, 47, 51, 53, 54, 66, 67, 70, 125, 131, 143, 158, 169, 197; binary oppositions and 148–9; Cusa and 149; God and 48–9, 61; religion in 10, 45, 96, 110, 120, 173–174; as secularization 44–53 Mohammed, the Prophet 118 Moses 68, 113, 116 Mother Teresa 201 mystery 97, 98, 110; of being 84–85, 139; of facticity 88–89; of God 96, 107, 152; of life 100, 105; of love 37; openness to 76; of the universe 96, 146, 152, 170; see also Rahner, Karl mystical element 82–87, 96, 103, 109, 116, 182, 189; divine milieu and 148, 190; effects of 85–86; the Force and 155–156; as the place of religion 88–92, 181; the unconditional and 84, 100; violence and 126, 128–129; as the world 144, 152

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199–200; prophetic 18; as religious 2, 5, 9, 19, 20, 27, 31, 57–58, 124, 139 Paul, St. 86, 89, 130, 161, 162, 170, 177; Letters of: 3, 5, 14, 20, 74, 131, 135, 156, 159, 167, 174, 180, 188; on the logos of the cross 103, 131–132, 135, 188; love and 5, 174, 180; the mystical and 156; philosophy and 62, 68, 74–75, 99, 144, 149; postmodernism and 56–57, 63 pharmakon, the 106, 129 Plato 16, 71 political, the 9, 18, 50, 60, 66, 111, 127; death of Jesus and 129, 131; the impossible and 124; the theological and 123–124, 134–136; the unconditional and 124 Pope Francis 19, 147 Pope John XXIII 107 Pope John Paul II 18 Pope Pius XII 107 post-human 128, 139–140, 157–61, 163, 167, 172; artificial intelligence (AI) and 158–161, 164 post-modern, the 2, 38, 39–40, 71, 76, 94, 113, 150, 191, 199; anti-modern and 110–111, 120; Augustine and 2, 197, 197; contemporary cosmology and 139, 142–143, 150; as counter-current 45, 71; faith and 190–196;

Hegel and 54, 76; Kant and 53–54; Kierkegaard and 55–60; modernity and 66–67, 71, 112, 139, 173–174; Nietzsche and 57–60; St. Paul and 56; preaching and 108n; premodern and 143; resurrection and 168; see also post-secular post-modernism see post-modern, the post-secular 3, 31, 92; Augustine and 197; contemporary cosmology and 143; Enlightenment and 65; Kierkegaard and 55; postmodern and 39; secular and 40, 51, 11–12; see also post-modern; secular prayer 35, 52, 61–62, 66, 70, 119, 194–196, 200; Anselm and 41–43, 46, 48; 205; Augustine and 45, 71; Eckhart and 113; for the impossible 205 Presley, Elvis 202 prophetic, the 18, 187, 204 Proust, Marcel 101 Ptolemy 48, 175 quantum theory 107, 138–39, 153–55; computers 165 radical religion 35, 94–95, 98–100, 108 radical theology 101, 107–108 Rahner, Karl 107, 152 Rambach, J. J. 121 Ramón y Cajal, Santiago 151 Reagan, Ronald 18

religion with or without religion 13, 35–38, 93–109, 172 religion without religion 3, 13, 22, 34, 51, 83, 92, 110–11, 124, 172–173, 174, 176, 182, 189; axioms of 197–201 religious people 3, 9, 12, 112–13, 169, 187, 193–194; see also impossible, the religious sense of life 9–10, 15–16, 31–33, 157; tragic sense of life and 184–190 religious violence 5, 24, 110–137; hermeneutic violence and 137; hermeneutics of 130–133; non-violence and 133–137; the unconditional and 126 response (responsibility), 30, 73, 83, 121, 127, 195; distinguished from an answer 83, 181, 195; religion as response, 83, 92, 179, 181, 195 Richard III 56 Rovelli, Carlo 152 Saladin 52 Sarah 117 Satan 111, 131–132 Saul 96, 97 Schelling, Friedrich G. W. 55, 81, 143, 145, 149 science, natural 60, 63, 105, 141, 163; conflict with Church 48, 110, 143–144; fiction 164; hermeneutics and 69–70; materialism and 142; method and 21–22; as modern category

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reality 43, 100; sense of 15–16; essence of 21–22, 24; hyperreal and 17, 100, 192–193, 195, 197; quantum 154 reason 56, 61, 64, 128; court of 48–49; faith and 49–50, 61–62, 68, 70, 155; good reasons and 50–51, 69; Hegel and 54; Kant and 51–52, 54, 69, 81; Kierkegaard and 55–56, 60; Pure Reason and 66, 67, 68, 69; religion and 45–46, 66, 191 relativism 65, 68, 69 religion: confessional (institutional, historical) 3, 4, 10, 27, 33–38, 52–53, 85, 88–89, 92, 93–109, 173–178, 194, 200, 201; as covenant 16, 53; critique of, 63–65, 68, 173, 187; diversity of 1, 9, 66–67, 173, 196, 206; etymology of 32–33; as human construction 45, 113, 157, 176, 180–181, 205; intellectuals and 71–72; love of God and 1–4, 29, 137, 203–207; modern category of 10, 45–46, 49–53, 61, 119–120, 131; place of 86, 88–92; as raft 113, 176, 180–181, 203; return of 110–111, 120, 125, 189; secular and 50–51, 76; truth and 172–81; as virtue 45, 176; see also faith; the impossible; love; mystical element; radical religion; truth

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45, 48–49, 52–53, 173; mystery and 85, 107, 152 Scriptures, the Holy 12, 17, 23, 46, 55, 62, 74, 154, 156, 173; see also the Bible Scrooge, Ebenezer 182 secret, the 19–26, 27, 35–36, 38, 73; Eriugena and 145; mystical element and 189, 191; the Secret and 20–25, 27, 73, 179, 183, 189, 191 secular, the 39–72; distinguished from religious 3, 27, 46, 49, 50–51, 76, 128; distinguished from post-secular 40; weakening of 15, 50–51, 111–112; see also modernity; post-secular Shakespeare, William 56, 161 Shelley, Mary 163 Shellstrop, Eleanor 102 Sith lords 155 Skywalker, Luke 156 Snider, Phil 108n Spinoza, Baruch 145, 152, 206 Spirit 60, 71, 75; distinguished from nature 140–145; Holy Spirit 141, 160–61; see nature Star Trek 128 Star Wars 101, 155–57, 190 Stoics, the 31, 74 symbol 94–101, 129, 151, 167, 180, 187–188, 194, 206; Tillich on 97; truth and 102, 104, 108, 175 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 160 Terence, Publius 11

Tertullian 63 theism 138, 143, 156, 157, 172; atheism and 18–19, 33, 110, 201; panentheism and 148; post-theism and 143; violence and 121; 116- see also atheism theopoetics, 9, 97, 101, 105–107, 132, 151, 170, 178, 206 Tillich, Paul 74, 81, 143; courage to be 86, 170; ground of being 151; symbol 97, 151; ultimate concern 128 tragic sense of life, the 182–90; distinguished from religious sense 184–90; see also religion; religious sense of life Transcendence 161 Trump, Donald 65, 120 truth 22, 51, 54–55, 59; absolute 63–65; doing the 22, 30, 178–180, 186–87, 192, 195–198, 201, 207; interpretation and 22; propositional 103, 105, 174, 176, 178, 194; religious 1, 30, 36, 102, 172–82, 194–195; saline criterion of 3, 83, 107, 186; the Truth and 22, 55, 65, 173, 179; without knowledge 174, 179–180, 182, 185, 189, 192–93, 195–196 unconditional, the 84, 97, 98–101, 125–29, 110–111, 142, 181; the concrete traditions and 106–109; faith

and 189; forgiveness and 135; the impossible and 84; insistence of; justice and 98; love and 4–6, 86, 114, 135; the political and 124; violence and 110, 114, 125–129, 136; see also the impossible; the undeconstructible undecidability 126, 128, 188, 190–195, 198, 201, 204 undeconstructible, the 98–101, 107; see also the impossible, the unconditional unprethinkable, the 81, 97

Virgin Mary, the 160; the Annunciation and 7, 9, 11, 14, 16, 17, 29, 39, 83, 195

Van Gogh, Vincent 100, 152 violence see religious violence

yes, the 7, 17–18, 25, 170–71, 184–86; in Nietzsche 59

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Warhol, Andy 100, 147 Watson (IBM) 160, 164 Wheeler, John 146 Wiesel, Elie 115 Winthrop, John 119 without why 87–88, 92, 168, 184, 192, 198, 205–206; the cosmos and 166, 168, 170–171; the mystics and 77, 82 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 69–70