PART I
Secular Faith
Faith
I
He never knew it would feel like this. She had entered his life, transformed his world, opened his body and mind. Yet, throughout it all, he had told himself that his devotion to her did not compromise his devotion to God. “I had warned myself,” he recalls, “not to reckon on worldly happiness.”1 But it turns out that this is precisely what he did. He loved her, and because he loved her he is shattered by her death. For days and nights, he records “the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in-tears.”2
His pious friends tell him to take solace in God and in the words of Saint Paul: “Do not mourn like those who have no hope.” He comes to understand, however, that “what St. Paul says can comfort only those who love God better than the dead.”3 His faith in God would direct him toward an eternal life. But in loving her and in mourning her death, he is not comforted by his faith in God and eternity. He does not want to repose in eternal peace; he wants her to come back and their life together to go on, in the time and space of their shared existence. “The earthly beloved,” he writes, “incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.”4
The words belong to C. S. Lewis in his book A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. While Lewis was one of the most influential Christian writers of his time, A Grief Observed strikes a different tone. Rather than preach or instruct, Lewis seeks to describe what is happening to him in the experience of mourning, as he explores the pain and desperation of losing his beloved. What emerges through this account is not simply a crisis of faith, in the sense that the death of his wife makes him doubt the existence of God. What emerges is something deeper: an insight that his faith in God cannot offer any consolation for the loss of a loved one. If a mother is mourning the death of her child, Lewis writes, “she may still hope to ‘glorify God and enjoy him forever,’ ” which may be “a comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.”5
In contrast to his religious faith in eternity, Lewis describes a passionate commitment to a finite life. The mother who is mourning her child, or the lover who is mourning his beloved, is devoted to a relationship that requires time to be what it is. Love is not something that can take place in an instant. Rather, love expresses a commitment to caring for another person across time. The temporality of such love is not merely an unavoidable condition; it is intrinsic to the positive qualities of being with the beloved. In loving another, one cherishes a projected future, the repetition of acts, and the ongoing time of living together. It is the end of such a temporal life that one mourns when the beloved is lost. And as Lewis makes clear, the hope for eternity is not a consolation. Even if the hope for eternity were fulfilled, it would not bring back the life they shared together:
Suppose that the earthly lives she and I shared for a few years are in reality only the basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings. Those somethings could be pictured as spheres or globes. Where the plane of Nature cuts through them—that is, in earthly life—they appear as two circles (circles are slices of spheres). Two circles that touched. But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me, “[S]he goes on.” But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say, “H. is dead,” is to say “All that is gone.” It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where “the former things have passed away….”
Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions “on the further shore,” pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible.6
Lewis here vividly articulates how the attachment to the beloved is expressed through a commitment to living on with her. He cannot come to terms with the death of his wife because he wants their life together to continue, in the temporal rhythm and physical concreteness that gave their relationship its unique quality. Accordingly, he does not want them to be self-sufficient, timeless beings (what he describes as “two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings”). Rather, he wants them to be in need of each other, vulnerable and open to being transformed by the touch of the other. For the same reason, the promise of an eternal state of being cannot deliver what he desires. In the consummation of eternity—here described as a state of heaven where all “former things” have passed away in favor of eternity—there would be no time for their relationship to live on. Eternity would put an end to their time together and in such a state their love could not survive.
The commitment to his beloved that animates A Grief Observed is therefore at odds with Lewis’s commitment to God. As a long-standing reader of Christian theology, he is well aware that he is not supposed to love mortal beings as ends in themselves but only as means toward the love of God. As he explains in A Grief Observed: “If you’re approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you’re not really approaching Him at all.”7 This is why Lewis emphasizes that the Bible does not support visions of an afterlife that project reunions with the people you have loved throughout your life. Such visions are not directed toward God as the End, but at most treat God as a means for retrieving the mortal beloved. The vision of an afterlife where Lewis’s wife would welcome him is attached to living on with the beloved rather than to dwelling in the eternity of God.
Lewis thus illuminates my central distinction between living on (prolonging a temporal life) and being eternal (absorbed in a timeless existence). As he makes agonizingly clear, the former cannot be reconciled with the latter. In mourning his wife, Lewis loves her as an end in herself. He does not want anything beyond her; he wants her to return and their life as lovers to go on: “the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace.” This desire is committed to sharing a life that requires time to be what it is. In wanting his beloved to come back, an eternal life is not only unattainable but also undesirable. He wants their relationship to live on, rather than to be absorbed in an eternal life.
One may ask here why the choice between living on and eternity has to be an either/or. Many popular conceptions of the afterlife assume that living on and being in eternity can be combined, allowing one to keep the positive qualities of life without the threat of losing them. Thus, in response to my argument, the prominent theologian Miroslav Volf has emphasized that Christian visions of eternity are better understood as visions of an endless rather than a timeless existence.8 Volf concedes that a timeless life would be meaningless, since there can be no experiences and no events without time. Nevertheless, he maintains that it would be desirable to live forever. In such an eternity, there would still be time, but none of the changes in time would be experienced as a negative loss. Rather, all forms of change would be experienced as an ongoing part of the divine good. The afterlife would thus enable one to live on with the beloved, in an experience of eternity that is untouched by the prospect of tragic loss.
My argument, however, is that an endless li
fe is just as meaningless as a timeless one. The risk of tragic loss—the loss of your own life and the loss of what you love—is not a prospect that can be eliminated but an intrinsic part of why it matters what you do with your life. If you and your beloved did not believe that your lives were finite, neither one of you could take your lives to be at stake and there would be no urgency to do anything with your time. You could never care for yourselves, for one another, or for the commitment that you share, since you would have no sense of fragility. By the same token, you could feel no need to make an effort on behalf of the relationship, since you would have no apprehension that the other person could leave you or that your relationship could break down. The moments of profound intimacy would not be experienced as precious, but as the given state of things. You would expect everything to be settled, rather than dependent on your engagement and attention, as well as on the unforeseeable responses of your beloved. This is why living on with your beloved is incompatible with being in eternity, even on the level of the imagination. As soon as you remove the sense of finitude and vulnerability, you remove the vitality of any possible love relationship.
The sense of finitude reverberates in every aspect of your life. In living on, you always remain vulnerable by virtue of leading a temporal life. Living on does not protect you against the regret of having done something irreversible, the pain of not being able to fulfill a given ambition, or the heartbreak of being left by the one you love. Indeed, your world can break down precisely because you live on after the death of everything you love. This “death” can be much more painful and fearful than the prospect of your own death, not least because it is a death that you have to survive.
Hence, as long as you are attached to someone or something that you can lose, you are susceptible to suffering. To attain a peaceful state of eternity you must be liberated from the risk of losing what you love. Were such liberation possible, however, nothing would matter to you. You literally would not care. There would be no urgency to do anything or maintain love for anyone, since nothing of value could be lost. You could not even be motivated to sustain a single activity, since it would not count as a loss for you if you did not engage in the activity.
The passion and pathos of living with your beloved are therefore incompatible with the security of an eternal life. The sense of something being unique and irreplaceable is inseparable from the sense that it can be lost. This relation to loss is inscribed in the very form of living on. To live on is never to repose in a timeless or endless presence. Rather, to live on is to remain after a past that has ceased to be and before an unpredictable future that may not come to be.
The precarious experience of time is not only a negative peril but also the positive possibility of coming into being, living on, and being motivated to act. The motivation to undertake any form of project—to sustain a commitment, to pursue a course of action—requires that the project be precarious: that it not be given as a fact but must be upheld by conviction and fidelity. You have to believe in the value of the project, but you also have to believe that the project may cease to be and needs to be sustained. Thus, when you love someone, that love exists only insofar as you sustain it. Your love is not given as a fact but is something that has to be achieved and—once achieved—has to be maintained and developed. This project requires that you believe in the value of the love, but it also requires that you believe that the love can be lost and solicits you to care.
II
The connection between caring and believing has a long philosophical lineage. With his characteristic lucidity, Aristotle makes clear that any form of care depends on belief. The beliefs that we hold should not be understood primarily as theoretical propositions but as practical commitments. Aristotle’s argument proceeds by showing that even our most immediate emotions are intelligible only in terms of the beliefs to which we are committed. For example, if you fear death you believe in the value of your life but you also believe that your life is under threat. As Aristotle points out, “nobody will be afraid who believes nothing can happen to him.”9 This sense of precariousness is not limited to the prospect of your own death but extends to everything that matters to you. If you feel fear when your beloved is walking next to the edge of a cliff, it is both because you believe that the beloved is vulnerable and because you believe that his or her life is valuable. Without either of these beliefs—without your commitment to the beloved as valuable or as vulnerable—you would feel no fear, even if the other elements of the situation were the same.
Pursuing the implications of Aristotle’s analysis, the Greek and Roman Stoics argue that all our passions are forms of belief. The beliefs do not have to be consciously held, but are forms of practical commitments that are evident in the passions themselves. If you suffer from envy, you believe in the value of what someone else possesses and are committed to attaining it. If you are seized by anger, you believe in the value of what someone else has damaged and are committed to retribution. If you are overcome by grief, you believe in the value of what you have lost and are committed to remembering it. If you are elated by joy, you believe in the value of what you receive and are committed to maintaining it.
The passions are forms of acknowledging your dependence on others and on events that exceed your control. If you are hopeful, you believe in the value of what is promised, and if you are fearful, you believe in the value of what is threatened. By the same token, you are vulnerable, since you cannot finally control what will happen. Your hopes may be shattered and your fears may come true.
The goal of Stoicism is to overcome such vulnerability and attain peace of mind. The Stoic is well aware that everything he has will be taken away, but he seeks to eliminate the passions that make him suffer from the loss.10 Developing this argument, the early modern philosopher Spinoza advocates release from the “bondage” of the passions. Both the Stoics and Spinoza are eminently religious thinkers in my sense of the term. They seek to overcome secular faith—the commitment to a life that is finite and dependent on the fragile recognition of others—in favor of religious devotion to eternity. While Spinoza is deeply critical of religious superstition and pious submission to authority, he takes his own philosophical method to fulfill the deepest aim of religion—namely, to provide the path to “true salvation and blessedness,” which “consists in true peace of mind.”11 In a characteristic passage, which draws on the Stoic analysis of the passions, Spinoza describes the path to such peace of mind:
Strife will never arise on account of what is not loved, nor will there be sadness if it perishes, nor envy if it is possessed by another, nor fear, nor hatred—in a word, no disturbances of the mind. Indeed, all these happen only in the love of those things that can perish, as all the things we have just spoken of can do.
But love toward the eternal and infinite feeds the mind with a joy entirely exempt from sadness. This is greatly to be desired, and to be sought with all our strength.12
The source of all “disturbances of the mind”—from sadness and fear to envy and hatred—is here identified as “the love of those things that can perish.” The key to achieving peace of mind is to remove your love from those things that can perish and instead direct your love toward the eternal, which “feeds the mind with a joy entirely exempt from sadness.” This joy is not itself a passion but rather the state of blessedness (beatitudo) that provides the “complete peace of mind,” which Spinoza identifies with religious salvation.
For Spinoza, salvation is not achieved by a personal, immortal soul or through transportation to a transcendent afterlife. Rather, salvation is achieved by letting go of your passions and seeing yourself as part of what he calls God or Nature. The two terms are interchangeable for Spinoza, since both designate the eternal, immanent substance of everything that exists, in contrast to finite bodies that perish. As Spinoza makes clear, any given idea or affection of a finite body is susceptible to decomposition. Furthermore,
as a finite body you can always suffer from being overpowered by external forces that are stronger than yourself and leave you shattered. Yet, by aligning yourself with the eternal substance of God or Nature, you will be able to bear all this with equanimity. You will neither be hopeful nor fearful, since you will not be guided by passionate love for something finite but rather by an intellectual, contemplative love of God’s eternal nature. Accordingly, Spinoza asserts that we should strive toward pure contemplation as the highest good. While we cannot escape the fact that everything we are passionate about will be lost, we can eliminate the passion that makes the loss agonizing and achieve peace of mind by contemplating the world from the standpoint of eternity (sub specie aeternitatis).
Spinoza presents a clear version of what I call the religious aspiration to eternity. This aspiration is not limited to visions of a transcendent afterlife, but pertains just as well to an immanent ideal of attaining complete peace of mind. Indeed, I define as religious any ideal of being absolved from the pain of loss. While many religious ideals include pain and suffering as necessary steps on the way to salvation, the ultimate goal is to be absolved from vulnerability. I argue that such absolution is not only impossible to attain but also not a goal worthy of our striving, since it would remove the care that animates our lives. Whether the absolution is conceived as transcendent or immanent, it requires that we renounce our commitment to finite life. To achieve absolution we cannot love any mortal beings as ends in themselves but only as means toward the end of suffering. If we were absolved from suffering—viewing the world from the standpoint of eternity—we could no longer care about whether someone lives or dies, since nothing that happens could count as a loss for us. Being eternal is therefore undesirable and a standpoint of eternity is unintelligible, since it would remove any form of practical commitment that makes it possible to be engaged in the world.
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