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

Dennett sheers off the contemplative side of faith, its subjectivity, as if the collective expressions of religion and the inward experience of it were nonoverlapping magisteria, as if religion were only what could be observed using the methods of anthropology or of sociology, without reference to the deeply pensive solitudes that bring individuals into congregations and communities to be nurtured by the thought and culture they find there. Thus is he freed to bypass John Donne and the Sufi poets and to move on to a description of the practices of cargo cultists, whom, it is unfortunately fair to assume, anthropology does not present in the richest light, either. For the moment it is sufficient to point out that the religious experiences James describes in his Varieties of Religious Experience are attested to as the subjective experience of individuals who are in fact associated with denominations. Their experiences are of a kind reported, especially in America, through both Great Awakenings and long after them. These individuals are hardly lone communicants of private religions.

What an interesting problem is being evaded here! The great quarrel in modern Western life is said to be between religion and science. They tend to be treated as if there were a kind of symmetry between them, presumably because of their supposed Manichean opposition. But science is a comparatively recent phenomenon, for several centuries strongly identified with the culture of the West, which it has profoundly influenced and by which it has been formed and channeled. Because it is recent and culturally localized, it is difficult to distinguish from its setting. Certainly modern warfare, hot and cold, has had a profound impact on the development of science in the same period that science has had its most profound impact on human life. Nuclear energy and the Internet are two cases in point.

Religion, on the contrary, is ancient and global, and, since it has no clear geographic or temporal limits, persisting as cultural habit even where it seems to have been suppressed or renounced, it is very difficult to define, “definition” being a word which means etymologically and in fact “a setting of limits.” Christianity as a subset of religion is associated in its origins and its spread with a historical period and with particular regions and populations. And yet, fractal-like, it seems to replicate the complexities of the larger phenomenon. Bertrand Russell, distinguished mathematician, philosopher, and despiser of religion and Christianity, said, “At all times, from the age of Constantine to the end of the seventeenth century, Christians were far more fiercely persecuted by other Christians than they ever were by the Roman emperors.” 7No Christian with even a sectarian sense of history would dispute this, since every sect has its own tale of persecution. And most acknowledge that they — the tradition with which they identify — have at some time engaged in it. But if the Roman emperors martyred fewer Christians than the Christians, their relative numbers in the population are certainly relevant here — the emperors presided over a remarkably brutal society, brilliant as it was. As is usual, Russell blames Christian violence on the traditions of Jewish monotheism, not on the norms of the pagan civilization in which the faith took root.

Still, it is true that religions differ less from the world at large than one might hope. And yet the fact that conflict occurs along national and demographic lines that are sometimes also religious lines cannot be assumed to mean that the issue or motivation of the conflict is religion. Not long before Russell spoke, Christian Europe had been engulfed in a terrible war whose causes seem to have been secular ones — the fears and ambitions of rival states and empires. It is seldom if ever the case that religious considerations are determinants in such matters. This adds another dimension to the difficulty of defining religion.

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Russell means to refute the argument that religion raises the moral level of civilization, a defense the religious do offer. The atheist regimes of the French Revolution and of the twentieth century may come as near providing a point of comparison as there has ever been, and they hardly argue in favor of this view. But there is no point quibbling. If the Christianity Russell loathes is the Christianity he encountered, then that is a form in which the religion has lived in the world. Others have encountered other Christianities. This is one more instance of the universe of difficulties that surrounds a definition of one religion, not to mention religion as a whole. Nevertheless, it is odd to see a controversy rage at the center of the civilization over so many generations, at least half of it the impassioned work of self-declared rationalists, and to find so little attempt at a definition of major terms, beyond the polemical kind of definition that guarantees one position the satisfactions of finding itself true and right.

I linger over this because religion is indisputably a central factor in any account of the character and workings of the human mind. Does religion manifest a capacity for deep insight, or an extraordinary proneness to delusion? Both, perhaps, like the mind itself. In 1927, in the course of refuting the classical arguments for the existence of God, Russell dealt with the belief in a Creator in these terms: “There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.” 8From a scientific standpoint, this was a perfectly reputable statement at the time he made it. Then, two years later, Edwin Hubble made observations that were understood to imply the universe is expanding, and the modern narrative of beginnings emerged, that more-than-explosive imparting of motion. No one need be persuaded to belief by the fact that things did indeed come into being, or that their genesis, so to speak, seems to have been as abrupt as Genesis says it was. Still, Russell’s science was in error. In the great matter of beginnings, so germane to the nature of being, many “primitive” or classical religions have had a sounder intuition. If this fact has no force as evidence of human insight, it is still impressive in its own uninterpretable right. That ancient minds pondered cosmic origins should inspire a little awe for what human beings are, what the mind is.

I did not plan to give particular attention to religion here. I intended to cite Bertrand Russell and John Searle, both nonreligious, in support of my argument that the mind as felt experience had been excluded from important fields of modern thought. I meant to restrict myself, more or less, to looking at the characteristic morphology of the otherwise very diverse schools of modern thought for which the mind/ brain is a subject. But I find that these schools are themselves engrossed with religion — as problem, as anomaly, or as adversary — to a degree that makes the subject unavoidable. When faith is described as an element in culture and history, its nature tends to be grossly simplified, despite the vast and unconsulted literature of religious thought and testimony. It would surely be difficult to condescend to religion when it is articulate in terms that are accessible to Western understanding. An honest inquirer into its nature might spend an afternoon listening to Bach or Palestrina, reading Sophocles or the Book of Job.

Instead, religion is a point of entry for certain anthropological methods and assumptions whose tendencies are distinctly invidious. It is treated as a proof of persisting primitivity among human beings that legitimizes the association of all religion with the lowest estimate Europeans have made of aboriginal practices, and legitimizes also the assumption that humankind is itself fearful, irrational, deluded, and self-deceived, excepting, of course, these missionaries of enlightenment. If there is an agenda behind the implicit and explicit polemic against religion, which is now treated as brave and new, now justified by Wahhabism and occasional eruptions of creationist zeal, but is fully present in the rationalism of the eighteenth century, it may well be that it creates rhetorical occasions for asserting an anthropology of modern humanity, a hermeneutics of condescension.