In the ordinary, modern life of faith, it is as important today as it has even been to locate the intersection of God with human beings, to known what it is that the sense of God, as opposed to anything else, actually amounts to. This is not about saying what God is in Himself – and of course many unbelieving people would respond to this by saying that he ‘is nothing in Himself’! It is rather to talk a little about where is found the experiences which we have always equated with the presence of God in human life, whether you go on to attribute to that experience a real, external referent for it or not.
One important dimension of this experience is often said to be found in the wonder of people’s encounter with their world. The world, even in its ordinary everyday presentations, is fascinating, awe inspiring, enigmatic and in all its variousness it bears witness to the character and presence of the creator. From the colours of a late summer sunset, to the fascinating self unveiling movement of embryonic cells in the womb of its mother, growing knowingly in its various directions to make arms and legs. You would gasp if you’d ever watched the birth of your child live as I have; and you can glory in the renewal of life again in spring, even noting the crocuses struggling to appear between broken bricks on wasteland. There is the encounter with a beautiful woman or man, whether fair of face, lovely in body or a beautiful soul. There is the sheer glory of physical passion, love and sexual climax.
Of particular importance in this context is the experience of the sublime. This is a more dramatic and potentially overpowering experience. There is tte dangerous invigorating power of storms, enjoyable when watched from a safe platform but don’t get too close. We must know this sense when observing the energy of spewing water bursting through a dam, and many of us have gasped at such famous natural splendours as Niagara Falls and Grand Canyon. The heart beats a little faster when we look out from hills and mountains and has raced on windy coastal walks, watching turbulent seas crashing and reaching up the cliff side. I’m sure there are other focuses for the experience that you could name. The experiences of these things have always felt like that of something beyond the ordinary. They have stimulated reflexive expressions in word or body that are attempts to symbolise and capture them. Wonder at the sublime, in particular, is a powerful stimulant to write, sing, compose, paint and generally form expressions of praise. It draws you to want to encompass it in what language you have available to you but often nothing seems entirely adequate.
The experiences of these things have always been important in underpinning a sense of transcendence in the world, which is to say they are experiences of something in the world but seem, somehow, also to point beyond it. They have been adduced as an evidence of the presence of the transcendent (some something above or beyond the normal parameters of human experience), in the midst of the mundane. But the intuitive, automatic sense of what these experiences actually amount to has changed radically. That is to say, while some people on holiday in Buffalo might be awe-inspired at the falls and stimulated into saying that this points them to God somehow, especially if they are themselves religious, there is nevertheless arguably a deeper, intuitive and pre-reflective response that comes with being a modern westerner – perhaps not explicitly noticed – that says effectively: ‘this experience has no external referent, and therefore no reality, it is just something going on in me’.
Universal concepts are things like ‘dog’ or ‘cat’. They don’t refer to this particular dog (Fang), or this particular cat owned by the Brown family, they are concepts pointing to meaning cats or dogs in general. These are plainly important in our language and thinking as we often talk about things generally rather than about their specific instances; car, in general rather than this or that car. During the late Middle Ages there were very roughly two schools of thought regarding universals. The Realists (someone like a Thomas Aquinas), believed that universal concepts were not just in the human head but were external, in the things themselves and ultimately deriving from the creative expression of God who is Pure Act, constantly acting and engaged to sustain – moment to moment – everything in being. The other school was that of Nominalism (people like William of Occam and Gabriel Biel, 14thand 15th century). The Nominalists determined that universal concepts have no external referent and they are just our ways of organising things.
So, in the later medieval period (toward the 15th century), where there had formerly existed a sense of the organic unity of the self with everything around itself, now, arguably, Nominalism was articulating the beginning of a sense separation in the human ‘heart’ – probably in the wake of the horrors and upheavals (plague, famine and war) of the 14th and 15th centuries. There was a separation between the individual and the thinking and speaking they employ to reach out to other people, other things in the world and especially God. If the concepts of our thinking and speaking are in us as individuals, in external things and from God Himself, all being is linked. Under Nominalism thinking that unity is fractured. The individual is starting to left to being locked into a lonely inner self – but there is still a way to go yet before that is properly effective.
In early modernism there is Rene Descartes and his locating of the only thing that could be relied upon as real, in himself – in his own subjectivity. Later there was Immanuel Kant and the notion that we can only know things as they appear to us; as they are organised by human cognitive apparatus; we cannot know things in themselves, i.e externally and objectively. Kant would go on to posit aesthetic feeling (in the 18th century this had much more to do with our sensuous feeling than just artistic activity), as something having a certain universality but essentially located only in human responses and not in some actual, external and objective quality of things themselves. Kant also located morality in universal human reason. However David Hume, who influenced Kant, located human moral dispositions in custom and habit and later thinkers, particularly in the light of the break-down of rationally, civilised behaviour during the 20th century’s two great wars, would take a much more relativistic view of moral preference particularly with what is known as post-modernism. This can, in its most intellectually vacuous forms, almost seem to suggest that one man’s notion of what is good and true is only as good as any other; one man’s fascism is on a par with another’s humanism?
What is happening is that thinking people are feeding their ideas into the general symbolic/linguistic culture (ie, ways of thinking and speaking), that are starting to give us the sense that what we are before anything else is creatures lodged firmly in our own head and looking out upon the world from our own, lonely little ‘house’. All we are thinking that we know is our own experiences and nothing outside those. It is part of the great individualisation of western culture, we are reduced even in our own minds, to being little, atomic monads bumping up against other atomic monads. Through Descartes and John Locke (amongst others), and the great scientific cultural revolutions of the 17th century onwards we started also to learn that emotional experiences of things are just in our own heads and that if we can locate anything outside ourselves with any confidence at all then this is the object only insofar as you can measure it, quantify it etc. This is all part and parcel of the formation of modern scientific method and what it is determining is that the emotional response to things simply gets in the way of determining the objective reality of the thing under investigation.
Now, we may not think these high philosophical theories have anything to do with us or the way we think since we are not interested in reading about them. But though we may not be devotees of the history of western philosophy, the great thinkers, artists and statesmen and stateswomen of our history have, through the importing of their ideas into the general flow of our culture’s ways of speaking and thinking, shaped the way we all think and speak. Even some of the most esoteric ideas become deposited down through the layers of language and thought over time and become part of the structure of the way that we all think, albeit in a somewhat simplified everyday form. Many of the great philosophic, high cultural dialectics of yesterday, become the ordinary intuitions of the rest of us today, though marked by certain simplifications and adaptations to our less sophisticated abilities. The words once coined in elevated debate filter through the intellectual hierarchy of society to become common parlance of all even if they lose some subtlety of meaning and undergo manipulations in relation to the peculiarities of ordinary peoples experience of making a life in the world
The point is here, though, that in these days of ours what we are left with is ways of speaking and thinking that tell us that emotive, passionate experiences don’t concern anything external or real, but that such experiences begin and end in oneself. This is not a reflective or explicit thought we have; rather it is pre-reflective, intuit sense of what is going on. It is not, in the first place, any kind of second order, reflective idea; it is part of the background, automatic, taken for granted intuitive notion of what is going on. Certainly when we have that wonder evoking experience of the dimensions of a mountain range, for instance, we say, we tell ourselves that it is external, it is real, and that it puts us in mind of God. ‘This is real’ we say, ‘not just subjective’. But whatever attempts we might make to say that these experiences are reflexes in the face of objectively real dimensions of objective reality, the self-representations that we have inherited especially from western philosophical notions of the individual subject, have resulted in a kind of pre-reflective ‘locked in syndrome’ that effectively undermines an intuitive sense of Being, (i.e, Existence in itself, the whole of Existence as opposed to this existing thing or that) as being real and external to us.
It seems now that this is all that many of us now feel, intuit, what religion is. And of course many of us don’t take any further steps toward considering the matter. It is considered to be an externalisation, a projection or transference of our subjective ‘coloration’ onto external reality. It thought to be a matter of human beings conjuring metaphysical objects – God, Holy Spirit, Angels and so on – into being on a separate, metaphysical Spiritual realm. But it is not the stuff of real, external reality in itself. It’s just how we chose to see and arrange thing to make sense of them; to give us hope of something beyond death. Again, this is inherited not as some theory or reflective thesis, it is inherited as intuited grasp of reality, just how things are.
Religion has long been undermined as something that sensible, rational people should not concern themselves with. And it is often taken as just a part of simple folks’ emotional response to the horror of death; religion helps to compensate us with the thought that there might be a life after death. However, it is worth noting that many Enlightenment thinkers were also Christians and one thing that has emerged from Enlightenment rationalism since has been some very sophisticated and thought provoking theological and Christian philosophical discourse, though sadly these tend to be confined to discussion in university faculties and haven’t got through to ordinary Church going Christians. Also, Enlightenment thought was, in the first place, not antipathetic so much to religious faith, as to the Church, the clergy and their pretended prerogatives.
Nevertheless once many of the thinking elite of Europe generally and more frequently thought that traditional religiosity could no longer be credibly confessed, the educated stewards of our cultural life hid their disdain for classical religious teaching from the ordinary people for fear of planting confusion and upset. They were quite happy for ordinary, small and silly folk to go on believing the traditional pieties. And this all added to the sense that what we were dealing with in the form of religion was merely silly emotionalism. It’s worth noting that at least one strain of enlightenment rationalism, and a really quite dominant one, was a much attenuated notion of human reason that reduced everything to individually presented ‘things’ that can be observed, measured and quantified. Through the 19th and 20th centuries these morphed into various scientifically grounded prescriptions and designs for managing life, including the rationally organised administering, regulating, stamping, filing and surveilling of mass society. This techno bureaucracy has been important and useful in managing the huge scale of modern, technological society, but once it began to assert itself as part and parcel of the only true way of perceiving reality, and even human beings, it became dangerous. It became part of the assessment of human beings in terms purely of their material, physical and biological presentation. And people sociologically, psychologically and biologically observed under some kind of micro and macro-scope, and being deconstructed thereby, are easier control by techno-bureaucracies that become more and more tempted to manipulate them thereby. What is more it also starts to encourage people to see themselves and their world in this way. Over the course of late modernity this way of thinking the real, especially of human beings, has underpinned the notion of an ideology (a logical, rational way of organising ideas), and was deeply influential upon the formation of ideologies like communism and fascism. It was part and parcel of the logic of the sickeningly, coolly, rationally organised barbarism of the Holocaust; the mass, scientistic-mechanistic reduction of people to measurable things, being assessed in utilitarian fashion as useful or disposable, and therefore as the Jews as very much disposable items that need to be eradicated in the ‘final solution’. In some cases, then, the Enlightenment’s great promises and ambitions for liberty, resolved obscenely into their opposite and in the end became impaled on the brutal bull horns of the Shoah and the Stalinist terror.
The age of ideologies has almost past now in the west because consumerist secularism has proved to be a much more effective mode of social control. Effectively all that has been left is …shopping. I’m being only mildly facetious since the replacement of Christianity in the west seems to be some libationary eschatology (the study and discourse about of what we all exist for in the end), of sheer ownership. And the distractions facilitated by the sudden arrival of disposable income for ordinary people have been instrumental in maintaining effective social and political stability through directing all our attention away from the face of cultural vacuousness. It will be interesting and scary to see what happens during the mass suspension of the machine’s operation during this present, hysteric reaction to Covid-19!
Religious people have a sense of the intellectual vacuousness of their religiosity which is effectively the expression of a certain emotionalistic weakness that some of us possess. This has suited the great machine for reproducing the 24/7 worker/consumer society; the focus upon more and more private property within capitalist modernity. It stops religion becoming any kind of truly credible challenge to its perpetual operation and its myopic obsession with cultivating more and more new markets and creating a larger and larger stock of capital, because it reduces the Church to being just one consumer choice amongst many others. And since it is only a load of mythopoetic, emotionalism then no one really needs to take it seriously, do they?