Marilynne Robinson - Absence of Mind - The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

These sociologists and evolutionary psychologists and philosophers carry on an honorable tradition, though in a radically declined form. Indeed, a great part of the excitement of life in the post-Enlightenment period has come with the thought that reality could be reconceived, that knowledge would emancipate humankind if only it could be made accessible to them. Such great issues, human origins and human nature, have the public as an appropriate theater, since the change they propose is cultural. This being the case, however, it is surely incumbent upon writers who undertake to shape opinion to resist the temptation to popularize in the negative sense of that word. Vast and contentious literatures lie behind psychology, anthropology, and sociology. But the popularizers in these fields now are highly regarded figures whom a nonspecialist might reasonably trust to deal competently with the great subjects their books take on, which include human nature and consciousness, and, with striking frequency, religion. The degree of fundamental consensus among these writers is important to their influence.

A model that shapes contemporary writing across any number of fields is the crossing of the threshold. It asserts that the world of thought, recently or in an identifiable moment in the near past, has undergone epochal change. Some realization has intervened in history with miraculous abruptness and efficacy, and everything is transformed. This is a pattern that recurs very widely in the contemporary world of ideas. I pick up a slender volume of philosophy and read as follows: “In this post-modern condition, faith, no longer modeled on the Platonic image of the motionless God, absorbs these dualisms [theism and atheism] without recognizing in them any reasons for conflict.” 1Here we have news of the explosion of an assumption — Western religion was modeled on a pagan conception of God as “motionless,” until postmodern hermeneutics intervened.

Then what is Western religion? Apparently nothing I have come across in my nonspecialist perusals of the theology of the past five hundred years. If the Unmoved Mover, whom I take to be the subject here, imparted motion to the created order, is it meaningful to call him “motionless,” which sounds very like “static” or “inert,” and is not consistent with the great and ancient intuition brilliantly understood as the imparting of motion? An early Christian writer, Gregory of Nyssa, said of God, “That which is without quality cannot be measured, the invisible cannot be examined, the incorporeal cannot be weighed, the limitless cannot be compared, the incomprehensible does not admit of more or less.” 2From antiquity, insistence on the ontological unlike-ness of God to the categories to which the human mind has recourse is at the center of theological reflection. What cannot be measured or compared clearly cannot be unmoved in any ordinary sense of that word. This is exactly the kind of language positivism finds meaningless, though in its reaching beyond accustomed categories embedded in language it resembles nothing so much as contemporary physics. In any case, did this idea of a motionless God, whether the understanding of it was complex or simple, continue to influence faith until the very recent arrival of the “postmodern condition”? What are believed by some to have been assumptions powerful enough to shape the culture of a civilization, and to reshape it by their demise, have been for many others no assumptions at all.

The paradigm for narrative of this kind is based on the idea of the historical threshold — before we thought thus, and now, in this new age of comprehension, we, or the enlightened among us, think otherwise. There are any number of thresholds, which initiate any number of new conceptual eras. And in every case there is a statement about the past, as seen from the vantage of a fundamentally altered present. In the philosophy books I find sentences like this one: “This hermeneuticization of philosophy freed religion from metaphysics at the moment when it had identified the death of God, announced by Nietzsche, with the death of Christ on the cross narrated by the Gospels.” 3Nietzsche, and some phrases that are identified with him, notably this one and “There are no facts, only interpretations,” often figure as threshold events in these metanarratives, as they appear to do in this case.

It would be helpful to the general reader if such books were to provide definitions of major terms. To define Western Christianity is no easy thing, granted, considering the very prolonged history of conflict and schism within Christianity. I have quoted from the preface to The Future of Religion by Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo. It is a good-hearted, even rather joyful book that announces the passage of Western Christianity from a law of power through its Nietzschean moment to an embrace of the law of love. I am eager to welcome the first sign of the reality of this transformation. Still, I suspect no attempt at a definition of Western Christianity would arrive at a place where generalization would be possible, and I suspect therefore that definition may be avoided here as elsewhere in order to permit generalization.

The Future of Religion is a departure from other books I will mention in that it takes religion to have a future of a kind, and the world to be better for the fact. The transformation of God from a figure of awe and fear to a force of love immanent in humankind grants him being, realized through consensus of belief. This looks to me like the sort of thing William James might call a monism, a Hegelism. 4How exactly is such a consensus reached? Let us say historic change does occur in that thinly populated upper atmosphere where a phrase of Nietzsche’s matters, where the “deconstruction of metaphysics” has consequence. How is it lived in the hundreds of millions of minds who might actualize this consensus? These questions are not meant to invoke any sort of populist standard, as if I were to say, “The man on the street may be wholly unaware that metaphysics has been deconstructed, and might not approve the project if he were aware of it.” No, quite the opposite. They are meant to call to mind the voice of the Psalmist, the voice of any ancient poet, saint, or visionary on the far side of the threshold who has attested to his or her own sense of the holy, and all those who are moved by these voices and attest to the truth of them.

This goes to the very nature of religion. James defined religion as the “feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” 5The words “solitude” and “individual” are crucial here, since this is the unvarying condition of the mind, no matter the web of culture and language by which it is enabled, sustained, and limited. The thing lost in this kind of thinking, the kind that proposes a “moment” in which religion is freed by “hermeneuticization,” is the self, the solitary, perceiving, and interpreting locus of anything that can be called experience. It may have been perverse of destiny to array perception across billions of subjectivities, but the fact is central to human life and language and culture, and no philosophy or cognitive science should be allowed to evade it.

Where a definition of religion is attempted in this literature, it tends to be of the kind tentatively proposed by Daniel Dennett, who describes religions as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” The book I have in hand is Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon . Dennett says his definition of religion is “profoundly at odds with that of William James,” the one I have quoted. He rejects the definition on the grounds that it describes “individuals who very sincerely and devoutly take themselves to be the lone communicants of what we might call private religions,” and on these grounds “I shall call them spiritual people, but not religious.” Note that religion is singular in James’s definition and plural in Dennett’s. James is describing an experience that he takes to be universal among religions of all descriptions, while Dennett sees religions as distinct “social systems.” The insistence in Dennett’s writing on the demographics of religion, on what, by his lights, is observable and therefore accessible to science as he understands it, recalls Bertrand Russell’s remark that “it is the privacy of introspective data which causes much of the behaviourists’ objection to them.” Bertrand Russell was writing as a critic of behaviorism in 1921, but behaviorism is a branch of psychology that seems to have passed out of style without taking its major assumptions along with it, so his comment is still to the point. 6