The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

by Jonathan Sacks

  Few put it with the drama Tolstoy did. He tells the following story. Once there was a traveller who, wandering in the steppe, sees coming towards him a ravening beast. To save himself he climbs into a waterless well, but he looks down and sees at the bottom a dragon, its jaws open, waiting to eat him. He dare not climb out and he dare not fall. So he clutches hold of a wild bush growing in a cleft in the wall of the well. This alone suspends him between the death awaiting him above and below. But his hands grow tired. He feels he must soon let go. Then he sees two mice, one white, one black, gnawing at the roots of the bush. Soon, even if he manages to keep hold of the bush, it will break off and he will fall into the mouth of the dragon. At that moment he sees some drops of honey on the bush’s leaves and he reaches out to lick them. That, says Tolstoy, is life. The dragon is death, the white and black mice, our days and nights, and all our pleasures are no more than drops of honey on a bush that will soon give way.4

  Tolstoy searches in science, philosophy, wisdom and reason and finds no answer to convince him that life is worth living. Science answers many questions, but not the one that obsesses him. He sees too that meaning does not lie in something superadded to life: possessions, achievements, honours, awards. Those are externalities, gift-wrapping, not life itself. The answer that eventually came to Tolstoy was religious faith. ‘No matter what answers faith may give, its every answer gives to the finite existence of man the sense of the infinite – a sense which is not destroyed by suffering, privation or death.’ Faith, he said, is the force of life. ‘If a man lives, then he must believe in something.’ If that something is finite, it will not ultimately satisfy him, since everything finite eventually perishes. The only thing worth believing in is the infinite. And, ‘Without faith it is impossible to live.’5

  The faith that Tolstoy arrived at was not a conventional religiosity. He was highly critical of the Church. He believed it had not kept faith with its original mandate. He developed his own idiosyncratic Christianity. But he became a changed person, a Homo religiosus, a man of faith. He discovered truth not among the aristocrats and intellectuals he met in the capital cities of Europe, who, he said, were living lives of self-deception, ‘grabbing hold of everything they could’ yet secretly afraid of suffering and death. He found it in the strength and endurance of ordinary people. I think that was the genius of Rembrandt too: the ability to show the radiant light that shone from the faces of people who were neither beautiful nor specially favoured by fortune. The meaning of life is not so obscure that it needs advanced degrees in physics or metaphysics, nor so rare that it is the possession of only the few.

  Tolstoy did not give precise definition to the faith he found, other than the divine call to ‘love one another in unity’, but I suspect it was something like this. The meaning of life is the realisation that you are held in the arms of a vast presence; that you are not abandoned; that you are here because you were meant to be. It is the sense that life is something you have been given, so that you live with a feeling of gratitude and you seek to give back, to ‘pay it forward’, to be a blessing to others. This presence in which you live knows you better than you know yourself, so it is no use pretending to be what you are not, or denying your shortcomings, or justifying your mistakes, or engaging in self-pity, or blaming others. It is a loving, forgiving but challenging presence, demanding much but never more than you can do. It asks you to give your best, not for the sake of reward, but because that is what you are here on Earth to do.

  This is not a testable proposition. There is no scientific experiment that would establish it to be true or false. It is more and other than a belief, a creed. It is an attitude to life, what Wittgenstein called ‘a trusting’.6 It is the opposite of the mood that runs through ancient myth and contemporary atheism, that of a universe at best uncaring, at worst hostile, to our existence: ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’7 Instead, in the love of the Infinite for us we find eternity in the here and now.

  Though lovers be lost, love shall not;

  And death shall have no dominion.8

  Tolstoy knew that he had essentially undergone the same journey of radical doubt travelled by the author of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, in Hebrew, Kohelet, meaning ‘Teacher’ or ‘Preacher’, traditionally identified with King Solomon. Ecclesiastes is the most unexpected, even subversive, book in the Bible. Tolstoy quotes it repeatedly in A Confession. Its author is the man who had everything – palaces, vineyards, gardens, parks, pools, servants, the entire entourage of wealth and success – and finds that they mean nothing:

  ‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher.

  ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’

  (Ecclesiastes 1:2)

  Ecclesiastes is obsessed by mortality, to a degree understated by most translations. The key word of the book – it figures thirty-eight times – is hevel, usually translated as ‘vain’, ‘pointless’ or ‘meaningless’. In fact, though, it means ‘a breath’. As in many other ancient languages, the Hebrew words for soul or life are all forms of respiration. Nefesh, ‘life’, comes from the verb meaning ‘to breathe deeply’. Neshamah, ‘soul’, means ‘to inhale’. Ruach, ‘spirit’, also means ‘wind’. Hevel is a part of this family of words. It means specifically ‘a shallow breath’.

  What Kohelet means in the opening chapters of the book is that seeking refuge in wealth and possessions, or even in books and wisdom, is futile since life is no more than a fleeting breath. Ecclesiastes is a sustained meditation on the vulnerability of life. It speaks of hevel in a way that recalls King Lear at the end of Shakespeare’s play as he holds dead Cordelia in his arms and says, ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life / And thou no breath at all?’

  Hevel, a shallow breath, is all that separates the living from the dead. We live, we die, and it is as if we had never been. We build, and others occupy. We accumulate possessions, but others enjoy them. The good we do is soon forgotten. The wisdom we acquire is useless, for it merely brings us back to a recognition of our mortality. To seek happiness in objects that endure is a kind of self-deception: they last, we do not. This leads Kohelet to a dark and almost heretical conclusion:

  Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both. As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over animal. Everything is but a fleeting breath. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. (Ecclesiastes 3:19–20)

  What is extraordinary about Ecclesiastes, given our conventional understanding of religion, is that it makes no reference to an afterlife. There is no moralisation of fate. There is no argument that virtue is its own reward. There is no alleviation of the stark fact of mortality.

  Yet Kohelet refuses to let disillusion have the final word. Once we acknowledge that only God is eternal and human happiness must be sought within the limits of our all-too-brief span of years, then we can find it in the now-ness of time:

  A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God. (2:24)

  I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. (3:12)

  The sleep of a labourer is sweet, whether he eats little or much. (5:12)

  Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this fleeting life that God has given you under the sun. (9:9)

  Ecclesiastes, a man of untold wealth and sophistication, like Tolstoy eventually finds meaning in simple things, love and work, eating and drinking, doing good to others and knowing that there is a time for all things: to be born and to die, to weep and to laugh, to acknowledge the eternity of God and to accept the limits of a human life.

  This is the happiness of the great wisdom traditions, not a million miles from the Stoics and Epicureans, or even Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell. Yet Ecclesiastes is ultimately a religious book: ‘Remember your Creator in the days of your youth,�
� the author says at the start of his great poem about creeping old age (12:1–8). He is a man trying to find meaning in what God has given us, not in a godless world. What he discovers at the end of his journey is not what the Stoics and Epicureans found. Their form of happiness was ataraxia, a kind of affectless calm that is indifferent to triumph and disaster, Kipling’s ‘twin imposters’, alike. Ecclesiastes’ happiness – another key word of the book, as it is of the Hebrew Bible generally – is simchah, which means ‘joy, celebration, exuberance’. More about simchah anon, but suffice it to say that Ecclesiastes’ vision of the good life is simply happier than that of the Greeks of the third pre-Christian century, and this too has something to do with a basic attitude of trust.

  The third great explorer of the human desert was Albert Camus (1913–60) who, like Tolstoy explicitly and Ecclesiastes implicitly, identified as the central existential question, ‘Why should I not commit suicide?’9 What makes Camus emblematic for the subject of this book is that he refused to take refuge in religious faith. He is the prime example – the only other serious competitors are Nietzsche and Schopenhauer – of the Western intellectual for whom the God of Abraham is not an option and who refuses to see this as a superficial fact. Rightly he recognises that it changes everything. The conclusion to which he is driven is that life is absurd:

  The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.10

  How then are we to characterise such a life? Camus’s answer is the Greek myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was the king who stole the secrets of the gods, in return for which he was condemned by Zeus to spend his life laboriously rolling an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again and having to repeat the labour endlessly, never achieving either the final goal or rest from it. That, says Camus, is life as ‘the absurd’. And that is what we are condemned to. We can either be defeated by it, or we can refuse to be defeated. That refusal, tragic, heroic, defiant, is what gives life its glory and even its brief fragments of happiness.

  I have mentioned this view of life before. Give or take a detail here and there, it is, I think, what my teacher Bernard Williams believed. It is quintessentially Greek. It is the lifeblood of Greek tragedy, of Aeschylus and Sophocles. It believes in fate rather than freedom. In the deepest sense it is bereft of hope. It is coherent, consistent, lucid, perfectly rational within its own terms of reference, and yet hardly compelling as the only possible way of interpreting the universe and our place in it. These are Camus’s closing words about Sisyphus’s life in a godless world:

  This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.11

  Must one? Really? If that is happiness, what is misery? What is despair? Where is Tolstoy’s or Ecclesiastes’ joy? They too peered into the abyss with no less honesty. But they returned with an affirmation that led them back into a world of relationships, of love and kindness to others, a willingness to accept their vulnerability but rest secure within it, knowing that they were held in the vast embrace of Being-as-love. Camus rightly says, ‘There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.’12 But scorn is not the only possible response to a life that one knows must end. The atheist is no more sure of the godlessness of the universe than the believer is of his or her God-filled vision. So why choose that way rather than this? There may be no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn, but there is none either than cannot be transfigured by a sense of dimly discerned significance, and transmuted by a principled and fearless hope.

  What then is meaning? What would help us understand what is truly at stake between Camus and Tolstoy, or my late father and today’s non-believers? Here I come back to the deep question Bernard Williams asked me – the only one he asked me – about my faith. ‘Don’t you believe that there is an obligation to live within one’s time?’ What he meant, I think, was that you cannot live as if history had not happened, as if there had been no Enlightenment, no Hume, no Kant, no Darwin, no challenge to a literalist understanding of certain biblical passages, no shaking of the foundations of the medieval worldview. Unless we are prepared to live, like the Amish or certain ultra-traditionalist Jews, in complete segregation from the wider world, we are creatures of our time. We live, in the deep sense given by Charles Taylor in his masterwork of that title, in ‘a secular age’. We live in the world of Camus, the absurd, and the meaningless. Meaning in the old, traditional sense simply is not available to us. So, I think, he implied.

  Well, yes and no. Certainly a naive, pre-modern traditionalism is not available to us. But what if tradition was never as naive as we thought it was? There is, to be sure, a certain naiveté as well as an undeniable beauty to the Greek rationalist tradition, the tradition Nietzsche associated with Apollo as against Dionysus, of order, harmony, time as the moving image of eternity, reason as the lens of truth, and the compatibility of all true ideals and virtues, the orderliness of Greek architecture and formal gardens and the music of Bach. Much of that today lies in ruins, enchanting and enchanted ruins to be sure, but not a structure within which we can live.

  We postmoderns know the darker truth about the bestiality within man that Darwin charted biologically and Nietzsche philosophically. We know about eros and thanatos and the will to power. We know that progress, modernity’s masterword, is neither limitless nor guaranteed. We have moved beyond the touching faith of Mandeville and Adam Smith and Montesquieu, that you can devise economic and political systems that will turn vice into virtue and greed into the common good. Vice remains vicious and greed rapacious, despite all the control mechanisms built into liberalism, democracy and market economics. The ‘dream of reason’ can all too readily turn into a nightmare when, under stress, people elbow reason aside in pursuit of their more destructive passions.

  But I for one never read the Hebrew Bible as that kind of document, infused with that kind of naive optimism. To the contrary, it tells us that the first inhabitants of paradise, instead of enjoying all they had, longed for the one thing they could not legitimately have. The first recorded act of worship – the offerings made by Cain and Abel – leads to the first act of murder. The world by the time of Noah is filled with violence, and even in the mind of Isaiah, the poet laureate of hope, a war-free universe is only a distant utopia. God creates order, but man creates chaos, and within his world as opposed to the world of nature, truth, beauty and goodness are won only by constant effort against perennial temptation. The world we live in now is the world the children of mortals never left, and the illusions we have lost are ones Moses and Amos and Jeremiah never had.

  So how does time affect the meaning of meaning and the possibility of a meaningful life? One suggestive set of concepts was set out by the strange, unclassifiable critic of what he called our ‘therapeutic’ culture, the late Philip Rieff (1922–2006). In My Life among the Deathworks he spoke about the history of civilisation as a move from fate to faith to fiction.13

  It is a difficult work, and the interpretation I give of it is almost certainly not quite what he intended, but this is how I see it. In an age of fate, everything was in the hands of the gods. Meaning is a given. It is out there, written in the fabric of the cosmos. Our lives are shaped by forces beyond our control and the best we can do is placate the gods, or at least not offend them, for if we do we will die. Meaning is inexorable, and it tells a story of birth, growth, decline and death in which only nature – the rule of power over the powerless – is eternal.

  In the age of fiction – what has come to be called the postmodern condition – everything people once thought was true
is now seen as merely constructed, invented, a fiction. There is no truth any more, only the various stories humans devise to make sense of their lives. Usually they are stories told by the strong to keep the weak in their place. They are ‘colonialist’ or ‘imperialist’ or ‘hegemonic’ narratives, and behind them is a history of oppression. Of course, we can liberate ourselves from these narratives, but there is nothing to put in their place because we are now too sophisticated, too knowing, to believe that there is such a thing as truth. We no longer take meaning seriously. Our attitude to the world becomes ironic, detached, amused. In short, we are back with the Cynics and Sceptics of third-century BCE Greece.14

  Between these two is the age of faith, the axial age that saw the appearance of Israelite monotheism, Greek philosophy and the classic traditions of India and China. It was an age of great thinkers and a dawning sense of human dignity. The individual was no longer powerless in the face of blind forces. Humans began to understand the universe of which they were a part. They learned how to control their environment. They built cities, devised systems of agriculture, invented writing, accumulated knowledge, substituted the rule of law for the operation of vengeance, and began to tame the wilderness of untrammelled nature. They were neither helpless in the presence of the gods, nor godless in a world of their own devising. That was the age of faith.

  It is precisely here, in the middle of Philip Rieff’s scheme of things, that the concept of covenant – the central concept of the Hebrew Bible – belongs. Covenant is about the meanings we make together, as opposed to the meanings people found written in the stars in an age of fate, or the meanings we individually invent in an age of fiction.