Charles Victor on Religion

Every prayer, every confession of faith or fault is a dynamic of the present striving to create a better, a richer, a more healthful future. Do they have consequence, do they have power, do they have ability to create change, even a change of course? I say Yes. Our every step forward is a matter of belief and hope, and therefore love, that tomorrow, that the next moment is and will be worth it, that we are not clogs in an unmovable system, but that we have power to change events, change hearts, change ideas, change reality because we are a part (in religion’s term “a child”) of the creative power (in religion’s term “God”) out of which and in which all is now and evermore.

Is there an endurance of personality beyond death? Are there ghosts, spirits, saints, demons?  What rests beyond our moment of death is and always must be a mystery, an unanswerable question for both philosophy and religion. Religions may provide narratives about an after-life to enhance the value and meaning systems of this life, but beyond the poetry of their visions they can offer no certainty, only inspiration meant to vivify and enhance this life. St. Paul dismisses the question when it is put to him. He preaches about a seed trying to comprehend what comes after it falls to the ground. How can the seed imagine the experience of germination, of becoming or being a plant?

Aristotle and many of his philosophical disciples posited a sort of universal mind in which all rationality is rooted, with this aspect of intelligence having an endurance beyond any and all individuality. Some of his Christian followers were pressed to get around this important aspect of his epistemological theory and hold to their religion’s vision of individual immortality. Some, not quite at the point of being able to differentiate between the speculative nature of philosophy and the visionary poetics of spirituality, proposed a system of two truths standing side by side. Personal immortality remains a problematic issue for any form of “realist” philosophy, any system grounded in empiric evidence. It is less so for “idealist” systems grounded in the primacy of spirit or mind, but then in them the value of this fleeting world stands on sand. It seems philosophy has perennial difficulty straddling heaven and earth simultaneously.

Personal immortality is a tenant of certain religions, a vision of what ultimately individual life means. Some religions hold reincarnation and envision an ultimate escape out of individuality. If eternality is envisioned as a falling into the arms of the eternal creator enraptured in love, could not one expect that to entail a melting away into the sheer creativity of the eternal one? But then could not one argue the value of the individual would be treasured and somehow preserved?  Religions in the west have usually gone the route of supporting individual preservation, in the east they have gone toward a dissolution into the divine-creative power. Both are visions about the value of life, and neither is a disparaging of life. They all speak about responsibility for life and transcending the limitations of human effort.

Philosophy can provide no answer. Religions exist to provide visions to encourage healthful existence, to cheer us on. Philosophy can speculate on experience with a certain academic air, it can formulate ideas based on personal experience and the work of science, but it can, like religion, offer no more than edifying vision.  But if moments of time endure beyond our passing consciousness  of them, is there not here some basis for our experience of Aristotle’s universal active mind, of ghosts, spirits, saints, heaven, hell? If we are all ever tied together in all that has ever happened, can it be we sometime can awake to some distant or subtle thread of this fabric of history and see, feel, comprehend, be seized by something beyond the ordinary flow of smell and touch and vision and thought? How do we with some intellectual legitimacy reconcile in speculative thought extraordinary experiences without resorting to the affirmations offered (validly in its field and context) by religion as moral visions?

Do I believe in God? Let me rephrase the question because every word in your question is laden with hidden meanings and passion. Do I trust that there is that greater than anything I can grasp with my mind? Yes, I do. Do I trust that expressing that in-expressibility as some power–creative and loving– will help move me toward becoming a power creative and loving, do I trust setting the mask of perfection on “the beyond all-is all-within all” will inspire (literally “spirit fill”) me to rise up to live an integrated, wholesome (“holy”) life? Yes, I do. Philosophy, with its branches of metaphysics, theology, epistemology and ethics, has the intellectual task of supplying theories to circumnavigate that radical trust in living a good life, religion has the emotive and psychological task of creating the narratives, the arts to reinforce that trust.

All theology, all religion is not about a god, but about man, man seeking meaning, seeking answers, the ultimate meanings and values of life. “God” is the face, the mask we place over our highest and deepest hopes.  Are our deepest hopes real? Are our deepest hopes something greater than the sum of their parts?  Are our deepest hopes beyond us in source and end, in definition, in expression?  I trust they are. And so I can and do—truthfully, ritually, realistically–sing “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come”.

The disparity between the randomness, chaos and cruelty of nature and the aspirations of the human heart for forgiveness and understanding are reflected in two different masks religions usually give to the divine: God the Just Judge and God the Loving Creator-parent. There is usually some attempt to have love trump justice, and that reflects well the human hope for acceptance, forgiveness and love. That for which we hope we trust in, and that which we trust in we love. We define God, we set our ultimate goal within our hearts, and so we define ourselves and our world today and for eternity because all times stand together, connected and enduring. Our awareness of a moment may flow on and fade, but the moment endures, and that is the ultimate basis of responsibility. No act, no state, no time is ever absolutely past, merely past for our awareness of it. The moments we create endure forever, and in them we endure forever. Therein religion finds its basis for the narratives of heaven and hell and life everlasting. We can speak of a Creator only because we find ourselves creating. We can speak of life eternal because the time we create, our moments past and present endure forever, linked, meshed, melded, woven together in absolutizing endurance, purest history. The future is the potentiality of time awaiting its externalization in the absolute of experience, of communication, of communicity, of community.

It is this creation of meaning through experience, of living in time, that is reflected in the Platonic philosophical theory of Logos (creative idea) and its Christian theological parallel mask of Divine Word (the Son in and through whom all is created). The divine transcendent can enter, become immanent, incarnate, only through and in its Word—its process of creative and communicative thought. Communication—be it with nature, self or other—is the groundwork and being of all creation and creativity. Christian sacred writings begin and end with the creativity of communication: “in the beginning was the Word…”, the Word  names itself  “alpha and omega” (the alphabetic parameters of the Greco-Roman world) and speaks “behold, I make a new heaven and earth”. The intelligent experience, the communicity of our existence creates, spins out, weaves our world and eternity.

We can move from moment to moment building with creative and positive, with loving acceptance. We can fixate on moments and revisit them with tortured hearts and weave a knot of frustration and deformity. We can create, we do create—really, concretely, and eternally–our own heaven, our own hell.

I shall stand by my word that “trinity” is a philosophical position. Scriptures offered varied pictures of Jesus’ relation to the God of Israel. The terms “son”, “father”, and “spirit” are the most often used. The drive to take these word-pictures and to unify them in a clear and systematic way meant it was necessary to analyze them logically within the confines of some system of logic. The prevailing logic of the day was that put forward by Aristotle. It was rather straight forward to logically connect the father and son. It was considerably more complex to arrive at their sharing of a nature, and even more complex to then decipher which parts of Jesus were human, which divine, and how eternal perfection could enter into temporal flux and imperfection. The spirit’s position was even more complex in so far as the texts spoke of the spirit in so many seemingly contradictory ways. Was this the father’s spirit, was it the son’s? Could it belong to the father and yet be sent by the son? I could exhaust a fortune in ink listing all the questions in need of systematic answer around this “trinity”. Here is the problem: visionary religious imagery was tugged and pulled into terms for syllogistic argument. Once this appropriation of mythos into logos began, the game was on.

Two major camps came about. Augustine was a philosopher somewhat beholden to Plato. He wanted to understand how we know, how we think, how our thought is related to the world outside our thought. His presentation of the trinity is a summation of his epistemology. Thomas Aquinas became beholden to Aristotle’s somewhat different theory of knowledge, and so his trinity reflects that somewhat different epistemology. He, like others of his day who embraced the “pagan philosopher”, had more than one confrontation with  authority as a result of it, and when he died, the kindly bishop of Paris burned his work. But this ancient Greek thought filtered through Iberian Islam and Mozarabic Judaism, distilled by an Italian monk dislocated to France was not easily cremated.

All western theologians have basically been in either the Augustinian or Thomist camp.  For each of them, father, son and spirit exist and are related in a manner consistent with the theorizing of how knowledge, understanding and will inter-relate in the human mind.

Modern philosophy threw a bit of a curve to this two camp culture. Suddenly new ways of considering the divine inter-workings were being discussed. This was not appreciated by institutions in charge of transmitting the teachings of the ages. By the early nineteenth century there emerged a concerted effort to standardize the philosophical framework of dogmatic language. Thomism was the winner. The Vatican still has no will to consider dogmatic discussions that are not framed within the Thomistic parameters.

It is not just the “trinity” that is fundamentally a philosophical proposition. All dogmatic statements are philosophical. All dogmatic statements begin with a religious vision and then proceed to reduce it to a logical, an empirically-based, term, relate it to other such “translated” terms in a proposition, pair it against another such proposition to deduce a statement that is “logical”,“true”. Unfortunately, as lovely to behold as some of these arguments are, they are all surds. Terms from one system of knowledge (imaginative vision) cannot be reduced to being valid terms in another system of knowledge (empiric knowledge). And with that falls all the power of systematic theology to explain trinity, creation, fall, virginal birth, incarnation, resurrection, spirit, and life everlasting. With that also the church gains the power to narrate and celebrate the unending creativity of faith, hope, and love in the world and for the world. The loss is one of academics. The gain is one of genetics– palingenetics.

Having said all that, it must be patent that when I use the expression “God is Love”, the reality I am talking about is empirical experience and understanding of love. The “God” term means I make it my highest principle, goal, idea, ideal.  Words and ideas like “god” and “nature” are just terms or masks for the ultimately inexpressible power we find ourselves a product of, immersed in, and moving along in. It is a power beyond all our reason or understanding; it can certainly be seen as cruel, heartless, mindless, chaotic, and violent, but I, and I think most of us, do not want to live in that sort of way, and as a product of that power I have the power to say there is more to be said, and the best I can say of it and make of it is to interpret it as a field wherein I am called to create as much as possible well being for myself and others.  The best thing I can do as a person is to act lovingly. To say “God is love” is simply, poetically, and truly to say “to love is to be god”. That is the best thing one might aspire to. That I can praise. To that I can open my heart.

Do I believe in God as some uber-father with humanoid personality? No. That, in all sincerity, is akin to believing in a tree-god or a cow-god etc. It is, at best, a pictogram for the mystery of mysteries. No one ought to belittle so great a power with so piteously poor an equation. Person may be the greatest and most comprehensive concept for intelligent and caring existence we can conceive of, but to apply that concept to the absolute as absolute, to the most high power, as anything more than a shield, a mask, for religion’s task to make integrated persons, is a sacrilege and a travesty of life’s innate quest to be. It is to worship the idol rather than that to which the idol points, the sheer and overwhelming power of being.

Judeo-Christian sacred (founding) texts never talk about any other world than this. There is no attempt to define the transcendent. The focus is always about how you live your life, how you value your life, your family, your neighbour, your venture to be godly, to be creative. The focus is man’s environment, the world. The message: open as wide as you can your mind, your heart, your arms, and you can trust (believe) that that attitude will never fail you, that your life will always find its way to deeper and greater meaningfulness and purpose, despite every and all apparent failure. That is the whole of the symbolism of cross (failure, despair, and their ultimate form, death) and resurrection (meaningfulness to life, every life, beyond even death in the spirit we leave in and with the loved ones and the world that we leave behind us).

Religion is about providing not answers, but visions. It is not about the meaning of life, the definition of the indefinable or what is beyond our world; it is about creating meaning in human life and training the human spirit to rise ever higher. It uses narratives and poems, rituals, music, dance, and art in all its forms to achieve that. These are its tools, its exercises for the spirit of man. When it starts to worship them rather than use them, it becomes institionalized idolatry and deserves to be ignored.

I think our great problem today is that religion has become too greatly an institutionalized idolatry. But as humanism, the latest child of our Judeo-Christian heritage, takes its place as the Western world’s secular religion, where are the ritual re-enforcements to keep that system of values before our eyes and minds? We have a Charter of Rights in Canada, and the UN has a nest full of such inspiring visions for humanity. We have feasts to remember those who have sacrificed themselves for the well-being of others. How do we keep them? Where is the community gathering to celebrate and hold them up and dear, to re-enforce them in ourselves and transmit them to future generations?  We are remiss as a society to give so much latitude to business and business hours, and so piteously little time simply to be together and cherish and celebrate what we have. It is shameful that Remembrance Day is not a national holiday, and that national holidays are constantly eroded by celebrating them as days to ever expand retail hours and sales. A society that is all about business and bottom lines and profit cannot and will not sustain its higher values. We become what we worship (literally, obey). Is our ideal, our vision for humanity, really things like the charters of rights or ever expanding profit and consumerism?

You object to “god-fearing”. It is an interesting phrase well worn by thumpers of bibles, people who seemingly have little interest in understanding words and the art of translation. The word “fear” here is really better translated as “astounded, overwhelmed” as in overwhelmed by the sheer power of the gushing endlessly forth of whatever all it is–life, being, nature. When one is overwhelmed, knocked over, there is concomitantly a loss of bearings, a need for reorientation.

“Nature”, the term you want to apply to the absolute of absolutes, is a wee less than clear. I am not comfortably disposed to the idea of “Nature” as the first principle of philosophy. First, it is a quotidian term with a multitude of meanings and nuances. Second, philosophy has usually tried to envision the dynamic of existence as a dialogue, a back and forth encounter between a transcending element and an immanent element—God and Nature, Ideal and Real, Mind and Matter.  When the God-Ideal-Mind element falls out of that equation, Nature becomes pantheistic and ultimately anile.  It is rather like subscribing to the infinity of positive numbers to the exclusion of the negative and zero. The term or idea of Nature being nature fell out of fashion long ago because of that deficiency. I realize some philosophers have, and justifiably, like concerns with the terms “Being” and “God”, but, to date, no one has devised a vision or terminology to either sway or capture the mind of our society. We have been discussing the meaning of Being and God since well before Alexander conquered the world, and perhaps in another two and a half millennia some philosopher will find the words to re-direct the reflections of the species. Until that date, we live the language we have as best we can to express the all and the beyond all of our experience.

Early in Christian history, its scholarship navigated a revision of a philosophical system by one Plotinus (a reviser of Plato’s thought) to get around the root problem of Nature and their sacred texts; they called it “Trinity”. The absolute is the totally Transcendent, beyond any ability to discuss or understand it (Father), but it is also the totally Immanent, found in and being the foundation of all that is (Son Incarnate) and so allowing us some understanding of what the Transcendent is all about, and it is also and lastly the totally Dynamic (Spirit) constantly pulsing and drawing all things forward; it is never just one of these aspects, but always and everywhere all three united. It is a brilliant solution to “Nature” which as a totally transcendent idea is irrelevant to daily life, “Nature” as immanent, a concept that lacks power by being excessively mundane, and “Nature” as nothing more than a will to power or to be, a concept eviscerated of care. It is and shall always be one of those astonishing insights into “Being” that will constantly fall below the horizon, because most people will not go about puzzled by the irregularities of existence as just existence, just as we do not go about puzzled by the variants between Newton’s physics which we use every day, and quantum mechanics that also operates every day, but below our horizon of experience.

How does a drop of water comprehend the ocean in which it exists or what so ever might be beyond the ocean? Yet, I and an assortment of others have by inclination or institution been forced to rehearse that problem and its history.

How do I live a decent life?  That’s an easier problem to tackle. Be gracious. I think that’s Buddha, Confucius, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad and the lot in two words.

Having once been one and sometime accused of being one still, I do not believe in atheists. That thought or idea which for you denotes the absolute, the idea unsurpassable by any other, is the divine—be it absolute chaos, absolute determined order, or a system wherein individual input is part of the process. That is the rational and logical and philosophical vision of the absolute, sheer being or power to be. How one relates to that is the field of religion. No one can relate or literally get their head around the absolute foundationality of being, but we all want to find a sense of meaning about our existence. The job of religion is to place a mask over the inexpressibility of life that interprets it within a system of values. There are the primitive versions of the tribal overlord, and there are more global or cosmic versions. The masks of god are the cult and cultural foundations of a society’s value system. As long as they are understood to be masks for expressing the inexpressible, we remain in the field of healthful psycho-social or spiritual development. Whenever the masks become concretized items, idols, we are in the realm of delusion and institutional obscurement of the divine.

I think we can reach no higher than the poet Whittier’s vision “the silence of eternity interpreted by love”.  Jesus’ great contribution to the effort of valuation and meaning in life was to understand himself not as a part of a deterministic system but as an intimate part of absolute creativity, not as creature but as child of creator, a part of a family business of fostering and nurturing life and wellbeing. The title Christ itself means divine delegate. To be a Christian means to “put on the heart and mind of Christ”, to understand oneself as an incarnation in one’s own time and space of absolute and caring creativity. The early followers expressed that in terms of their day—rituals of Jerusalem’s temple, ideas of Greco-Roman mythology and philosophy. But those ideas are all culturally and socially specific. It is unfortunate that they have become institutionalized and to many today little more than surds, relics of a past unrelatable and unretrievable.

But the silence of eternity, the sheer power of life persists. It cannot be ignored or denied, because I, you, we all, live it and in some way value it and respond to it and in it, and that system of value, that understanding of life and its meaning is the veil we place over the ultimate inexpressibility of being, our mask for the Font of Life Everflowing. It is not an idol, because I am a part of the everflowing of life that seeks to comprehend it even in its incomprehensibility, and to the extent that I believe it is incarnate in me, I can legitimately place over it the mask of personality and call it Father, Mother, or Lord God.

St. John’s letter gives us that great image “God is love”. What is love but the power to stand by and with another, to nurture and foster, to be wise enough and strong enough to know what to remember and cherish, what to forget and forgive. Religion exists to celebrate that. Religion becomes empty religiosity when it fails that. I cannot say there is no god as long as my life is in some sense a reality understood as more extensive than me, and that creative impulse is what is ultimately, in religion’s word, God.

There is a modern proclivity to take intellect as the epitome of being, and because of that inclination many think it profitable to frame the idea of the divine in terms of intellect. The divine becomes the all-knowing as well as the answer to all we do not know.

The divine term, whatever it may be, cannot be used as an answer for the inexplicable or the unexplained. If the divine is tied to the idea of that which we do not know or understand, sooner or later, the divine will become irrelevant, since knowledge progresses. The divine can never be used as a Deus ex machina without becoming discounted.

I suggest it is better to think of the divine in terms of the “in-expressible”. We are intellectually able to use ideas such as life, love, hope, beauty, truth, contradiction of opposites, etc., but the depth of that to which they refer is in-com-prehensible (because they enfold us, not we them), non-under-standable (because we stand on them), in-expressible (because their scope transcends us and our intellectual categories).

The Prophet Isaiah speaks of the divine as dwelling in light inaccessible, as completely transcendent, and Apostle Paul speaks of the divine as that power working in us that can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, the divine as completely immanent. These ideas are contradictory, but they express two aspects of the divine that every theology has struggled with: God as the wholly other and beyond, and in that sense, irrelevant, and God the totally immersed in the fabric of being, and in that sense indistinguishable from it. That the divine is both may be is logically a contradictory statement, but instinctively, this inexpressibility carries weight.

Too often talk about the divine forgets that the great theologians have consistently taught that we talk of the divine by way of some form of analogy. We have no direct empirical experience of the divine. But we do know something about ourselves and the world we live in. We have the ability to organize matter and information, and the ability to project ourselves (in trust in others and ideas, in hope, in love). We can extrapolate or infer that the order of science, the will to be and to live, the impulse to put ourselves forward in search of knowledge, possibilities, others, are qualities that have an origin or basis in the source of all things, the very life-force of (or beyond) the universe. There is, in this sense, a basis to speak of the divine as the source of all knowledge, hope, love, even as a person, since for us “person” is the concept that expresses all those things in one independent sustained package. But, we cannot allow ourselves to rationally erase the words “by analogy”. We cannot jump from saying these things are reflective of life, to saying these things are the nature of Life-Itself, the definition of Life-Itself.

And there is a wee problem in the use of analogy based on human nature: we are not perfect. We may have the capacity to live and love and hope and trust and learn, but we also have a capacity to vegetate and turn to dust, and to hate and destroy. We can scarcely exalt the good things about us to the highest degree and ignore the bad. If the divine is the source of life as we know it, and we feel justified in talking about the divine as the source of all that is good and orderly in the universe, we cannot turn a blind eye to the existence of chaos and evil.

There is a wonderfully insightful line in the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. When humanity tastes the forbidden, God decries that they shall now be like the divine knowing good and evil. Keep in mind it is one thing to know something, another to comprehend it, another to understand it. Knowledge indicates a working experience of something. Comprehension is a broader term indicating an ability to encompass the experience, and understanding indicates an ability to grasp the root of the reality. We neither comprehend nor understand evil, physical or moral. That is why it is perennially referred to as the “problem of evil”.

But, sanctimoniousness aside, we cannot deny these powers to the divine, and we instinctively know that, and manifest that in talk about gods of destruction, judgment to hell, divine wrath, etc. I suggest it is our own dislike for the darkness within us and the ills that plague us that cause us to delete these qualities form inclusion in the divine. We experience them as negative experiences, and want life to be a positive experience. This is a point for hope. But if the Life-force, the divine, is the font, the foundation, the fabric of all that is, in some in-expressible way that frothing, gushing, ever flowing creativity is at once and in the ultimate degree the bedrock of good and evil, the Father not only of Jesus, but Satan, not only of Gandhi, but Hitler. Our logic demands contradictions cannot exist. Our questing for the ultimate leads us to, if only in the most contorted of ways, acknowledge that opposites can be reconciled, if only within the scope of the eternal, the all-encompassing, the in-expressible source and end of all that is. But the “problem” cannot be erased except by hope or better said, “in hope”.

The great myths, the holy scripts and creeds, the great theologians and spiritual teachers have all, in the words and ideas of the day, tried to convey the mystery that enfolds us, that we flow out of, that we flow into. Their words are not the words of science, but the sighs of love and hope, the poetry of the human spirit soaring out into the vastness of being, the song of the soul closing its eyes in upon itself. These things yield no science, speak no knowledge, but they raise the heart and mind to a level where hope dares, trust takes a step out into the vast future, and man can bless himself and his world saying “yes, life is good” and be thankful for it, for it all.