The whole point, once again, is to close the gap between the sacred and the world as we actually dwell in it. To consecrate life as we already know and live it. To allow us to feel once again at home in the world—not left distracted and dissatisfied by an illusion of an outside and unreachable transcendence. To the lost soul who yearns for home, modern immanent religiosity says, “But you already are at home; you only need to look around yourself, more attentively, and to give up your distracting and futile search for some other home somewhere else.”
Transcendent religion, in short, seeks to lift our gaze toward an ideal that lies beyond our present mundane existence—to show us that there is a higher reality, if we will only be humble and attentive enough to see it. Immanent religion, by contrast, seeks to consecrate our present existence, or to show us that our present existence is already consecrated—if we only have eyes to see it (and if we can resist the allure of transcendent religion, which teaches us that the sacred is somewhere else, not here).
So, which of these perspectives is more alluring? More illuminating? More intellectually and spiritually satisfying?
Is the World Sufficient unto Itself?
The questions take us back to alternatives that we considered in earlier chapters. One way of posing the question is in terms of goods. From the Christian perspective, as we saw in chapter 5, thinkers like Augustine have contended that the world provides an array of goods—friendship, pleasure, sexual gratification, professional recognition, aesthetic experience—and these are genuine goods. But they are also transitory, in two senses. In time, they grow stale and unsatisfying. And they end with death—our own death, or the deaths of friends and loved ones. These goods are thus not stable ends-in-themselves, but rather glimpses of and pointers to a higher good—eternal life, or the life of and with God. Take away that transcendent reference, and this world—and this earthly city—lose their purpose and become, as Augustine said, a kind of “death-in-life, or life-in-death.”90
Was Augustine right? Or are the goods of this world sufficient, or at least as good as it gets, and thus the only goods we should concern ourselves with?
Another way to put the question is in terms of meaning. In chapter 2 we considered the view of Viktor Frankl, Susan Wolf, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Leo Tolstoy, and others, that human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. We are not content with “flourishing”—in the sense of satisfying our “interests”—or even with living by a code of morality; rather, we want and need to see our lives as having some sort of “meaning.” And in seeking to ascertain the sense of that elusive notion, we considered the proposal of the philosopher John Wisdom that we might understand the idea of “meaning” by analogy to a play. We can see part of a play, perhaps, and wonder how it fits within the whole play. Or we can see the whole play and wonder what it “means.” What is the character or point of the narrative? Is it a tragedy, a comedy, an exhibition of the absurd, or something else? In the former case, we are wondering about the larger play that would complete and thus give sense to the fragment we saw. In the latter case, we are wondering about “the order in the drama of Time.”91
Following Wisdom’s suggestion, we might present our current question in this way: each of us directly observes only an infinitesimally small slice of the human affairs of our own time—namely, the ones we are personally involved in—but we can indirectly learn about some of the affairs of other human beings (still only a tiny fraction, probably) both in our own times and at earlier stages in human history. And with respect to these various human doings, we can ask: Does all this human activity, our own and that of others—all this living and striving and dying—have some sort of meaning? As Viktor Frankl asked as he clung to life as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps: “Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning?”92 Does human existence fit into some sort of overarching plot or narrative? And if so, is that narrative one that plays out and makes sense within this world? Or do the human doings of this world seem more like an act or fragment of a larger narrative that will be fulfilled and redeemed in some other dimension of existence, and without which our mundane doings are ultimately lacking in narrative sense—“sound and fury signifying nothing”?
These questions generate a variety of answers, obviously. But, rounding off, the answers might be sorted into four logical categories. It might be that neither individual lives nor human activity and history as a whole have meaning in the narrative sense. Or, second, it might be that human history as a whole has no meaning, but individual lives do. Conversely, and third, history as a whole might possess some kind of narrative sense, but individual lives might not. Finally, it might be that both individual lives and human activity as a whole have some sort of narrative meaning.
Perhaps the safest and most familiar answer today, at least in elite circles, is the first one: there is neither any overall meaning in human history nor any “objective” meaning in individual lives. “The more the universe seems comprehensible,” physicist Steven Weinberg declares, “the more it also seems pointless.”93 Individuals, likewise, are born; they live; they experience pleasure and pain, happiness and disappointment. And then they die. They may if they like try to think of their lives under the form of some sort of story—a story of which they themselves are the putative authors. But from a detached perspective, there is no overall “meaning” or story in their existence. It is what it is, as the saying goes—no less, but emphatically no more. To Tolstoy’s question—“is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death that awaits me?”94—the most plausible answer is “No. There isn’t.” As Bertrand Russell declared, “No fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave. . . . The whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.”95
As we saw in chapter 9, this is the view most congruent with scientific naturalism, taken not as a framework for research but rather as a worldview. Modern paganism, by contrast, appears to favor the second answer. An individual’s life has meaning, Ronald Dworkin insists—indeed, “objective” and not merely “subjective” meaning—but it does not seem to follow that there is any overall meaning in human history. None that Dworkin managed to articulate, at least. The “religion without God” seems calculated not to supply any such overall meaning, but rather to offer the consolation that although there may be no overall point to it all, our individual lives can still have “objective” meaning (whatever that is).
Measured against Wisdom’s suggested narrative or theatrical analogy, though, the contention that individual lives have meaning within the frame of this world seems wildly implausible, at least as any sort of general proposition. To be sure, some people’s lives may add up to a satisfying narrative pattern. They live through and savor the stages of life—youth, adulthood, old age.96 They posit and achieve worthwhile goals, perhaps, enjoy many of the pleasures and achievements they set out to enjoy, or raise healthy and productive children who will remember them and carry on their legacy. Good for them—for the “favourites of fortune,” as Gibbon put it.97
But then, many other people’s lives are deformed by deprivation or truncated by tragedy. They meander aimlessly through life, never even figuring out what they want from it. Or they have aspirations but fail miserably to achieve them. Maybe they inflict immense and gratuitous harm on themselves and others, and perhaps die prematurely (sometimes at their own hand) while their aspirations and potential remain unrealized. If a novelist or playwright abused, tortured, or killed off her characters in these arbitrary and senseless ways, we would rebel: that is not how a coherent story is supposed to go. But, all too often, that is how actual human lives do unfold.
The French philosopher Luc Ferry attempts valiantly and reflectively to develop some notion of meaning and value within this life98—“transcendence within immanence,” as he calls it99—but he admits that the fact of death poses a serious obstacle to this
enterprise. Of the various possible responses to the inevitability of death, Ferry says, “I find the Christian proposition infinitely more tempting—except for the fact that I do not believe it.”100
The skeptical or resigned response to these morose observations, of course, would be that human lives simply do not have, and do not need to have, meaning of the kind Wisdom describes and Ferry seeks. That again was the answer of Bertrand Russell and countless others. But if human lives do have meaning in the sense of a satisfying or fulfilling narrative, it is surely not realized here. Even the “favorites of fortune,” as Gibbon put it, die after a relatively brief span; even if their legacy somehow lives on, they are not around to appreciate the fact. For individual people, it seems, this world is not sufficient unto itself. Hence Gibbon’s own melancholy in his more advanced years.101
Another possibility is that individual lives lack meaning in the narrative sense but human history as a whole is meaningful. Marx offered one version of this answer.102 Hegel offered a different version.103 History in its vast sweep is like a grand master’s chess game that will culminate in some splendid victory—the classless society, perhaps, or the final triumph of reason; individual human beings are merely the pawns who are pushed about, sometimes advanced, and often sacrificed in the pursuit of that grand culmination. Or, as Hegel put it, history is “the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised”—but all as part of an overarching agenda in which reason will ultimately be realized in the world.104
So, should we individuals—we pawns on the chessboard, or sacrificial victims at the slaughter-bench of history—find consolation in the reflection that our own lives, while meaningless in themselves and perhaps miserable, are the ingredients for a larger and triumphalist historical story? Some people have evidently found that thought comforting—all those who willingly sacrificed themselves for the Marxist dream, for example. But should they?
Unlike the preceding answers, Christianity teaches that there is an overall meaning, and also that individual lives have their own meanings or meaningful narratives—meanings that fit into and fulfill the overall narrative or meaning. This is a teaching, though, that may require a leap of faith. And the teaching seems utterly implausible if we limit our framework to this world and this life. This world is not sufficient unto itself: taken merely on its own terms, it does not add up to any discernible or satisfying narrative. And so Christianity expands the scope, and looks to a transcendent frame and goal. As G. K. Chesterton’s fictional priest-detective Father Brown put it, “We are here on the wrong side of the tapestry. . . . The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else.”105
In this respect, the theologian E. L. Mascall argued that “the modern absurdists [like Sartre and Camus] are fully right in maintaining that the world does not make sense of itself.”106 Mascall quoted Wittgenstein: “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. . . . All that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”107 And Mascall summarized the alternatives: “So we are presented with this choice. We may, if we so decide, make the best of a world which is in the last resort a senseless and hostile desert, in which we must either bury our heads in the sands or make, each for himself, our little private oases. Or we may look for the world’s meaning in some order of reality outside and beyond it, which can do for the world what the world cannot do for itself.”108
The Pagan City and The Christian City
Our discussion in this book would suggest a slight revision of Mascall’s description of the alternatives. Mascall supposed, as so many have, that the live alternative to Christianity or transcendent religion today is something like the “disenchanted” scientific naturalist worldview that resonated with the resigned or heroic (or mock-heroic) declarations of people like Bertrand Russell and Walter Stace, and that we considered in chapter 9. But as we have seen, that sort of “disenchanted” worldview, though it may in some sense be the official orthodoxy of domains like contemporary academia, probably has a comparatively small constituency. Nearly everyone believes and asserts that something is sacred and inviolable. And so in the political domain, the leading potentially viable alternatives, once again, seem to be the city centered on the immanent religiosity of “modern paganism” or the city that continues to accept Christianity, or transcendent religion, or at least the possibility of transcendence, as a regulative ideal.
Although we cannot know exactly what the pagan city would look like, we have tried in this chapter to assess the strengths and weaknesses of such a prospect. The pagan city would be one that accepts and respects immanent sanctities but is self-consciously closed off against transcendence. The city might not actually prohibit belief in transcendence. But such belief is a foreign and offensive element within the ethos of pagan civility; the city would accordingly try to marginalize transcendence and its devotees—to relocate them outside the (ever-expanding) walls that define the civic or public sphere. Forceful measures might be needed to achieve such closure and marginalization.
In this chapter we have questioned whether this sort of civic paganism is a viable basis for community under current circumstances and, even if it is, whether the community that it contemplates is the sort of city we really want to live in. Would the pagan city allow us to be free and at home again in the world, after so many centuries of alienation? Or would it entail a new and more repressive authoritarianism? And would it impoverish and degrade our communal and individual existence, reducing that existence to the mundane pursuit of fugitive and ultimately futile goods and pleasures in a world understood to have no ultimate point or purpose, and relegating those with a different and more transcendent vision to a life of civic pariahs subsisting outside the city walls? Eliot suggested that something like the latter scenario was more likely.
Many will take a different view. And they might ask: What, after all, is the alternative—the “Christian” alternative that Eliot preferred? This book is almost at its conclusion, and we have said little about that alternative. But that is because, as with the pagan city, we cannot know exactly what the Christian city would look like; but in another sense the Christian city, unlike the pagan one, is one we have known and inhabited already, for centuries.
So we know that Christianity has proven to be compatible with—and at the same time in tension with—a whole variety of political and cultural regimes. Christianity has persisted under monarchies, oligarchies, and democracies; in poverty or prosperity; in societies that were technologically backward or technologically advanced. The common feature has been that Christian societies have embraced as an aspiration and critical standard a transcendent ideal (“Thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”) that they have known in advance would not be realized in this world. That transcendent ideal has been—and would surely continue to be—the source sometimes of intolerance (toward those who do reject the ideal), of criticism (of the society for its ubiquitous and inevitable failures to realize the ideal), and of progress (as society attempts to respond to criticism and to move closer to the ideal). Hence inquisitions and persecutions—and also campaigns for the abolition of slavery, discrimination, and poverty, and in favor of religious freedom. And hence also a sort of perpetual restlessness, because in the Christian earthly city the citizens are never, and are not supposed to be, fully at home. The human heart, as Augustine said, will be restless until it rests in its eternal abode.109
Unlike in some past instantiations, a central feature of any contemporary Christian society under conditions of modern pluralism is that it is unlikely to sponsor any official account of what transcendence is and requires—any official orthodoxy. The modern Christian society would be open to transcendence, and it would attempt to accommodate its citizens in their efforts to live in accordance with their understandi
ngs of transcendence. It would not declare or prescribe what the transcendent Truth is.
In this openness, and in this ongoing struggle to grasp and approach a transcendent ideal that cannot be officially articulated and that is not realizable in this world, the city would of necessity call upon the political skills and virtues, the creative efforts, the moral aspirations and imagination, the empathy, and the willingness to sacrifice of its citizens. Which seems to be what Eliot contemplated—and this seems a fitting conclusion to our investigation of his thesis—when he observed that “the only hopeful course for a society which would thrive and continue its creative activity in the arts of civilisation, is to become Christian. That prospect involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience and discomfort: but here as hereafter the alternative to hell is purgatory.”110
Purgatory, of course, is a transitional place or condition. As is human life—for pagans and Christians alike. This world is a fugitive state. Unlike the gods, and for better or worse, we mortals have here no abiding city.
Pagans and Christians in the City Page 53