The religious faith that embraces the prospect of eternity is thus directly at odds with the secular faith that sustains the commitment to a shared, finite life. The state of being that is the worst from the standpoint of the one who is mourning—namely, a state of being in which one would not even care about the absence of the beloved—is presented as the best from the religious standpoint.
One may object here that many religious people nevertheless seem to find consolation in the hope that they will reunite with their loved ones in the afterlife and that there is no reason to deprive them of this consolation. Certainly, if the prospect of an afterlife helps others to cope with the experience of devastating loss it should be respected as such. Notice, however, that this argument itself is based on a secular commitment, since it is motivated by the care for how people can find a consolation that will enable them to go on living. The argument thereby reduces religious faith in eternity to a means toward the end of sustaining temporal lives. Furthermore, the hope that one will reunite with the beloved and live on together is a hope for something that the notion of eternity does not actually promise to fulfill, as we saw with Luther and Lewis. If the supposed consolation of religion breaks down even for these stalwart believers, there is reason to think that many religious people suffer the same fate and that they can benefit from having access to alternative ways of articulating what they are going through in the experience of mourning.
To provide an understanding of why religious consolations do not address the problem of death—and why we need other ways of expressing what we mourn, love, hope for, and believe in—is one of the aims of this book. In contrast to Taylor, I do not think that the reason many secular people still rely on religious funerals is that the latter speak to our “need for eternity.” Rather, it is because secular forms of acknowledging mourning in communal ways are still underdeveloped. This situation is already changing, with the ongoing development of secular funerals, as well as secular ways of understanding the process of mourning and forms of grief counseling or collective support that do not depend on religious belief. While the available versions of such understanding and support can be improved in many ways, what is needed in order to develop them further is not religious faith or a religious vocabulary. On the contrary, if we want to achieve more richly articulated and meaningful forms of acknowledging the mourning of loved ones (“a ceremony for death which will speak to our strongest feelings,” as Taylor puts it), we need a language that expresses our faith in the value of finite lives and our commitment to keeping the memory of the dead.
To get a sense of how secular faith is at work—and yet how far we are from achieving a language that expresses it in the public life of the United States—let us consider a contemporary, deeply tragic instance of mortality: the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. On December 14, 2012, twenty children and six adult staff members were killed. The news of this mass murder was met with profound grief across the country, leading to intense efforts to change gun laws and restrict the use of assault weapons. I will not pretend that I can do justice to these important efforts here, or to the grief of those who lost their loved ones. What I want to highlight is that the efforts to increase gun control—as well as the grief over the lost lives—express a secular faith in the irreplaceable value of the lives that were brought to an end. If this secular faith were removed, there would be no inclination to mourn, since nothing irreplaceable would have been lost. Moreover, there would be no motivation to prevent similar events from happening, since there would be no risk against which to offer protection.
Nevertheless, the religious faith that is supposed to provide consolation is predicated on a denial or relativization of the irreplaceable loss. Thus, at a memorial service for the victims in Newtown, President Barack Obama delivered the following sermon: “ ‘Let the little children come to me,’ Jesus said, ‘and do not hinder them. For such belongs to the kingdom of Heaven.’ God has called them all home.” This religious faith—if one were to believe in it—would fundamentally alter the response to the shootings in Newtown. The children who were killed would not be irreplaceable, but rather transferable to a higher existence. Furthermore, the killings themselves would ultimately not be a tragedy but a transitional stage on the way toward God calling the children “home” to heaven. To be sure, this particular belief—that the slaying of children in the end amounts to God calling them home to heaven—may seem offensive even to many who take themselves to be endorsing religious faith. But one should then bear in mind that a similar relativization of death is entailed by any religious faith in redemption. A secular consolation does not have to redeem death. On the contrary, it can admit that there is an irredeemable loss at the heart of what happened. A secular consolation can thus focus on the social commitments that sustain our mourning, recognizing the love that is intrinsic to grief, extending it to care for others, and motivating us to try to prevent similar tragedies from taking place (e.g., in the case of Newtown: through stricter gun laws, better mental-health care, greater social justice). For there to be anything distinctive about a religious consolation, however, it has to offer something else and claim that—from a metaphysical point of view—the deaths in question are not really final.
For the same reason, any religious consolation diminishes the significance of death and lessens the gravity of our responsibility for mortal life. In a remarkable passage in A Grief Observed, Lewis makes precisely this point:
It is hard to have patience with people who say, “There is no death” or “Death doesn’t matter.” There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.42
In speaking out of his experience of mourning, Lewis here articulates a profound faith: not faith in a transcendent God, or in a life exempt from death, but faith in the irreplaceable value of a life that is bound to death. If what happens matters and our actions have consequences, it is because they are irreversible and cannot be undone. If they could be undone, what we say and do would not have the significance that it does. The sense that something matters thus emerges from a secular faith, which sustains the commitment to a finite and fragile form of life. The risk of death is not the “cause” of care, in the sense that it would explain why one cares about one thing rather than another. The risk of death, however, is an intrinsic part of the reasons one has to care about anything and to take responsibility for what happens. Without the risk of irrevocable loss, what happens would have no meaningful consequences and there would be nothing at stake in keeping faith with the ones we love.
Love
I
More than sixteen hundred years ago, Saint Augustine explored the experience of time through a simple exercise. You can still try it today. Choose a song that you love and learn it by heart. Keep practicing until you remember every part of the song and every shift in the melody. As you sing it, you will know how much of the song has passed since the beginning and how much of it remains until the end. Yet—in holding the song together—you will find that it is already slipping away. There is never a moment in which the song is present to you. You can sing it only by retaining the notes that have passed away, while anticipating the notes still to come. Even each individual tone is never present—it begins to recede as soon as it sounds and you have to hold on to it to hear anything at all.
This experience of time is, according to Augustine, at work in every moment of our lives. You may think that you are present here today. But in everything you do, you are divided between the past and the future. As you get up in the morning, part of the day is already gone and what remains of the day is still to come. Even if you wake up at dawn and focus only on the first hour of the day, you will never be able to seize it as a present moment. “An hour,” Augustine writes, “is itself made of fleeting moments. Whatever part of the hour has
flown away is past. What remains of the hour is future.”1
You may then try to forget about the hour and direct all your attention to the present moment, concentrating on what you are experiencing right now. Yet, as you grasp the present moment, it is already ceasing to be. As Augustine observes, “if the present were always present and did not go by into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity.”2 Even the most immediate experience is marked by this temporality. There is never a presence that reposes in itself. Rather, every moment of time is disappearing. This is not to say that the experience of time is an illusion. On the contrary, it is at work in everything you do. Any experience requires that you hold on to a past that is no longer and project yourself into a future that is not yet.
In one of his sermons, Augustine describes the experience of time as follows:
Do not our years fail every day? Do they ever stand still? The years that have come exist no longer; those that are still to come have no existence yet. The years that have passed have already slipped away, and the years in our future will slip away in their turn. The same is true even of a single day. Take today: we are talking now, at this moment, but the earlier hours have slipped away, and the hours ahead have not yet arrived. When they have arrived, they too will slip away….3
As in many of his sermons, Augustine dramatizes the experience of time by calling attention to his own act of speaking in the present: today, at this moment, now. He thereby invites his audience to feel concretely how the moment—now, when I address these words to you—is vanishing even when it is being apprehended. “I seek for the present,” he emphasizes, “but nothing stands still. What I have said is now gone; what I am going to say has not yet come. What I have done is no longer present; what I am going to do has not yet arrived.”4
Wherever you go, then, there is never a still point where you can come to rest. Augustine captures this insight through his beautiful renditions of the Latin verb tendere: to stretch and to strive, to strain toward something or reach out for someone. In everything you do, there is an element of stretching and striving. Even when you are at rest, you have to stretch out the period of rest, striving to maintain yourself in repose. This is ultimately because every activity is temporal. The activity in which you are engaged—including the activity of resting—cannot be reduced to a single moment but has to be sustained over time. In stretching out your period of rest, you are holding on to the state you are in and reaching out toward a continuation. As in the case of singing your beloved melody, even the simple act of resting requires that you hold on to the state you are in and project yourself into a continuation.
Hence, Augustine describes the form of the experience of time as a distentio, which both holds you together and pulls you apart. The experience of time is always distended, since you must retain the past and project into a future that exceeds your grasp. By the same token, there is no guarantee that you can sustain what you love. Happiness consists in having and holding (habere et tenere) what you love. But since both you and the beloved are temporal, your having and holding will always tremble with the anticipation of mourning. The moments you stretch out to keep in memory may be taken away, and the possibilities you strain toward in hope may never arrive.
The result is a life in which opportunity and danger are inseparable. The light of bliss—even when it floods your life—is always attended by the shadow of loss. “Either loss of what we love and have gained,” Augustine explains, “or failure to gain what we love and have hoped for.”5 This is the condition of secular life. Augustine uses the Latin word saecularis to evoke how we are bounded by time, through our commitments to a shared world and history, as well as to generations before and beyond us. The historical world in which we find ourselves is the saeculum, and this world (hoc saeculum) depends on generations across time.
In a remarkable move, Augustine emphasizes that living in this world is always a matter of faith—not religious faith in eternity but secular faith in what is temporal and exposes you to risk. This is the faith I explore and defend in this book. While Augustine holds that we long to transcend the condition of secular faith in favor of religious revelation, the present chapter will draw on Augustine’s own insights to show that secular faith animates and sustains our deepest commitments. Secular faith—rather than religious belief—is the source of our passion for the world and our care for one another.
A good place to start is our relation to and dependence on other persons. As Augustine points out in his treatise Faith in Things Unseen, you can never know for certain that another person loves you or harbors good will toward you. You may see that he performs good deeds or proves himself to be a source of support in difficult times. But these acts provide no guarantee that you can trust him. “It certainly is possible,” Augustine reminds us, “for a man to deceive by feigning kindness and by cloaking malice. He may not even plan to do harm—still, by expecting some advantage from you, he simulates love because he does not possess it.”6 Accordingly, you can never see or be certain of his goodwill toward you. Rather, in trusting him, you have to believe in what you cannot see. Of course, this does not mean that you should blindly trust and believe in other people. But it does mean that—even when you do everything you can to know as much as possible—there is an irreducible element of faith and trust in giving yourself over to another person. Even in the most intimate relation, you have to believe in something that is never certain—namely that the other person loves you. This moment of uncertainty cannot be eliminated, since “out of your heart you believe in a heart that is not yours.”7
Augustine proceeds to demonstrate how secular faith is at work throughout all aspects of our lives, ranging from friendship to marriage and parenthood, as well as social and communal life at large. “If this faith in human affairs is removed,” Augustine asks, “who will not mark how great will be their disorder and what dreadful confusion will follow?” He continues:
For, who will be cherished by anyone in mutual charity, since love itself is invisible, if what I do not see I ought not to believe? Friendship, then, will wholly perish, since it rests upon nothing more than mutual love. What of this will one be able to receive from another, if it shall be believed that nothing of it can be shown? Furthermore, when friendship perishes, neither the bonds of marriage nor of relationship and affinity will be retained in the mind, because in these, also, there surely is a friendly spirit of harmony. Then a husband and wife will not be able to have mutual affection, since they do not believe that there is any love, inasmuch as love cannot be seen. Nor will they desire to have children, for they do not believe that the children will return their love. And, if children should be born and grow up, the parents themselves will love their own much less, and they will not see love for themselves in their children’s hearts because love is invisible….Therefore, when we do not believe what we cannot see, concord will perish and human society itself will not stand firm.8
Augustine here provides an account of what I call the necessary uncertainty of secular faith. Since you depend on others to live on and to flourish, you have to keep faith in your friends, your partner, or your children. While such faith may be maintained in a “spirit of harmony,” it is always haunted by the possibility of being broken, since each trusted one is mutable and may overturn your expectations—for better or for worse.
Moreover, the uncertainty of secular faith is a necessary condition not only for your relation to others but also for your own experience of yourself. As Augustine emphasizes, all temporal experience involves an element of believing (credere), which is intrinsic to understanding (intelligere).9 Augustine does not develop this remark, but following his analysis of time we can unpack the argument. Since the past is no longer it cannot be an object of certainty but requires that you trust your memory or other people’s accounts of what has happened. And since the future is not yet it has to be taken on faith. This secular faith exposes you
to an uncertainty that is an irreducible part of your experience. Given that you cannot ever repose in a present moment—always relying on memories of the past and expectations of the future—you are dependent on what is beyond your control.
The necessary uncertainty of secular faith is the source of both positive chance and negative risk. It gives access to your past and opens the promise of your future, but keeping faith in this promise may leave you shattered by what happens. Likewise, faith makes it possible to trust and love another person. But by placing trust in another, you may find yourself betrayed or left behind. These vulnerabilities testify to the existential commitment that is inherent in secular faith. It is because you are committed to sustaining your life—or the life of someone for whom you care—that the promise of your future may be broken. And it is because you are committed to living on with your beloved, affirming your life together, that you are vulnerable to the grief of parting. These commitments express what Augustine calls cupiditas, which is the love of a world that is temporal (amor mundi or amor saeculi). You are seized by cupiditas when you love someone for her own sake or when you are devoted to the flourishing of a shared, secular world as an end in itself.
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