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Ultimate Religion

George Santayana's address, "Ultimate Religion," delivered at the Domus Spinozana (The Hague) during a conference celebrating the 300th anniversary of Spinoza's birth has been something of a touchstone for me since I first read it around 1980.

He begins with a question: "What inmost allegiance, what ultimate religion, would be proper to a wholly free and disillusioned spirit?" To be "wholly free and disillusioned" seemed to me then, and continues to seem now, a goal worthy of aspiration. What I did not know then but have since come to know is that freedom and disillusionment require constant vigilance and struggle. They are also two sides of the same coin--you cannot have one without the other. Consequently, though it is fashionable for many people (especially in the United States) to boast of their freedom while clinging tightly to their illusions, one can conclude only that they are self-deluded.

Santayana understood this fact about his adopted country only too well. It is interesting to note that he did not deliver his address in the United States, but in Europe; and not only in Europe, but in the one place in Europe where Benedict de Spinoza was able to secure sanctuary from his enemies. Europeans are no less subject to delusional thinking than are Americans.

After posing his initial query, Santayana invited his audience to "challenge [their] own assumptions and come to spiritual self-knowledge" by abstaining "from all easy faith." The pay-off of this procedure would be to achieve a state of mind utterly "denuded" of wishful thinking about the universe and the place of the human being within it. His goal was to elicit "the sincere confessions of a mind that has surrendered every doubtful claim and every questionable assurance." For Santayana, first and foremost among these doubtful claims is the belief that "though [an individual may be] living, [she] is powerless to live; and though [she] may die, [she] is powerless" to do so. Indeed, says Santayana, "the most important and radical of religious perceptions" is that "at every instant and in every particular," every person finds him or herself "in the hands of some alien and inscrutable power."

Is this "inscrutable power" God? Santayana argues that any such inference would require not only a logical leap but also "many qualifications." Instead of making that leap and conjecturing, he professes agnosticism. He will only say that this power is (and here he coins a word) "omnificent": it is, "by definition, the doer of everything that is done." Moreover, he does not assert "the physical validity" of his "sense of agency or cause"; instead, he is reporting a feeling, an impression--that of "the force, the friendliness, the hostility, the unfathomableness of the world."

It is not a "physical validity" of force that he feels, but a moral one: "... the moral presence of power comes upon a man in the night, in the desert, when he finds himself, as the Arabs say, alone with Allah."

Those familiar with the Qur'an cannot help but be reminded of Q. 8:17, where the Divine voice speaks to the Prophet regarding (later Muslim tradition holds) the Battle of Badr: before the fight, the Prophet is said to have tossed a handful of sand in the direction of his Meccan adversaries as a symbol of their impending defeat; God says, "...when you threw it was not your throw but God's" [cp. also Phil. 2: 12-13].

What can this possibly mean? Santayana offers: "...omnificent power flows in part through our persons; the spirit itself is a spark of that fire, or rather the light of that flame..."

On its face, this sounds bizarre; yet it is no more so than Dylan Thomas's famous lines:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Santayana felt the "force" of which the poet spoke. Interestingly, without ignoring the ominous (and, in Santayana's view, ultimately tragic) aspects of that force, he "chose" to submit to it (i.e., he accepted his fate as a mortal being). In so doing, he discovered that, by forgoing self-delusion and submitting to his tragic fate, he, qua mortal human being, was rendered capable of charity.

This somewhat surprising conclusion followed from his recognition that the fate to which he had surrendered himself is, in fact, common to all; both the manifestation of "omnificence" in a particular life and its eventual and inevitable withdrawal is a shared experience. Like it or not, we are all in this together. We can choose to be bitter about it, but what (Santayana wondered) would be the point of that? Bitterness would change nothing. Why not make the best of a bad situation and be charitable?

Santayana termed "health" the emotional and moral adjustment that every individual must learn to make regarding the stark and unforgiving facts of the human condition when that adjustment results in a charitable disposition towards the whole.

Moreover, he argued that when we learn to love for others what we love for ourselves (for Santayana, following Spinoza, the perfection of our existence--a life lived to the fullest), we attain a vision of "the good."

Far from being wholly disinterested, Santayana (who appears to have read Freud) regarded this love of (and for the "good" of) others erotic--it is "really love and not something wingless called by that name."

And he recognized that there are a great many complications involved with envisioning "the good" in this Spinozistic manner; he did not engage in any sort of moral casuistry on its behalf (i.e., he did not pause to work through the details). He acknowledged both the faith and the idealism required to organize one's life in light of the "healthy-mindedness" his essay advocates.

But he doubted that better alternatives are available to those who would live "wholly free and disillusioned."

I share his doubts and his naturalistic idealism. Santayana's student, the poet Wallace Stevens, not only shared those doubts and naturalistic idealism but spent a lifetime converting them into song--a symphony he would entitle "the Whole of Harmonium."

Santayana was the architect of a wholly free and disillusioned spirituality; Stevens was its bard.

Henry James

Surely part of the greatness of Henry James resides in the fact that James Baldwin thought him great. Between he and his brother William, I tend to think that Henry was the more accomplished psychologist. William mistook psychology for a science; Henry knew better and the deft psychological portraits that appear as character studies throughout his fiction are as masterful as any found in modern literature.

For example: in a review of James Elliot Cabot's 2 volume A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (published in 1887 and reviewed by James in Macmillan Magazine that same year), James captures Emerson's life and personality with a few sentences:

"Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his Discourses on America, contests Emerson's complete right to the title of a man of letters; yet letters surely were the very texture of his history. Passions, alternations, affairs, adventures had absolutely no part in it. It stretched itself out in enviable quiet--a quiet in which we hear the jotting of the pencil in the notebook. It is the very life for literature (I mean for one's own, not that of another): fifty years of residence in the home of one's forefathers, pervaded by reading, by walking in the woods and the daily addition of sentence to sentence."

James does not stop there, for he is not writing a biography of Emerson but, rather, a review of a memoir. With those lines, however, he has introduced us to the Sage of Concord in a manner that establishes for the reader what she can expect from any life of Emerson. Baldwin was right to admire him: James had--and still has--few peers in American letters.

Go Tell It On The Mountain

James Baldwin's first novel is as fresh a wound today as when it was first published in 1952. Baldwin was so steeped in the Bible as a living Word for African Americans--or a certain sub-culture of African Americans (the sub-culture from which he had himself emerged)--that pages of the book read as if they must have poured, without effort, from his pen. The Bible as "living Word" envelops Baldwin's characters, an insistent presence that promises them meaning (and, therefore, dignity) in the white-dominated world that denies them dignity; it promises them hope of victory over that world and over the temptations that crowd in on them from all sides when the animal pleasures of the body are all that are left them for solace in that world.

But Baldwin's is not a simple tale of Christian redemption: the relation of that great Myth to the daily lives and loves, hates, and lusts of his characters is complicated and, in the end, the reader is left wondering if it can actually deliver on its promise or if, as Marx remarked famously, it offers only an opiate or palliative alongside sex and booze and other entertainments.

At the end of the novel we find John, the preacher's adopted son, struggling to find a way to live by that Myth, to use it as means of penetrating the oppressive nature of Black life, North and South, in mid-twentieth century America, to something more true, more powerful and elemental:

"And John tried to see through the morning wall, to stare past the bitter houses, to tear the thousand grey veils of the sky away, and look into the heart--that monstrous heart which beat forever, turning the astounded universe, commanding the stars to flee away before the sun's red sandal, bidding the moon to wax and wane, and disappear, and come again; with a silver net holding back the sea, and, out of mysteries abysmal, re-creating, each day, the earth. That heart, that breath, without which was not anything made which was made. Tears came into his eyes again, making the avenue shiver, causing the houses to shake--his heart swelled, lifted up, faltered, and was dumb" [James Baldwin, Go Tell It On The Mountain, New York: Dell (1980), 257].

Baldwin closes the book with John hopeful--or at least trying to convince himself--that ecstatic religious experience and the community that promotes it and offers to support him in the future will all prove effectual. But given the life of the preacher himself, and the lives of other members of John's extended family, it is difficult to imagine how this might actually happen.

Go Tell It On The Mountain is a powerful reminder of the ways in which myth and experience overlap and mutually inform one another in the life of religious communities, providing them with rich resources for interpretation; but it is also a reminder that there is more to the story of every individual life than the available stock of enculturated interpretations will allow:

"'God sees the heart,' [the preacher] repeated, 'He sees the heart.' 'Well, He ought to see it,' [his sister] cried, 'He made it! But don't nobody else see it, not even your own self! Let God see it--He sees it all right, and He don't say nothing'" [ibid., 253].

Wright Requires Baldwin

Just like Martin requires Malcolm.

The Wright-Baldwin pairing is an odd one, though, because it is fraught with the personal agon that erupted between the two men--or rather, the personal agon that Baldwin undertook with Wright, who had helped the younger and unknown writer see print only to find himself in Baldwin's polemical cross-hairs in Notes of a Native Son. It is all quite complicated but perhaps unavoidable--necessary even--when individuals find themselves in circumstances in which they cannot comfortably realize their own true characters but find they must thrash about like the mud-covered damned in Canto VII of Dante's Inferno: "...smiting each other not with hand only, but with head and chest and feet, and tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth" (Singleton translation, p. 77). The pressure-cooker of race in America demanded as much and so the two clashed. Yet oddly, to this day, the two complement each other as well. Hence we must learn to read one, then the other, then the first again, until understanding begins to dawn.

Richard Wright

Anthony Pinn invokes Richard Wright as a voice of uncompromising African-American atheistic humanism and he is doubtless correct in doing so. I knew nothing of Wright's work beyond a couple of titles (Native Son and Black Boy) until the summer of 1992 when I read Louis Menand's thoughtful review of the Library of America's two-volume re-issue of five Wright novels (Louis Menand, "The Hammer and the Nail," The New Yorker, July 20, 1992, 79-84). That review prompted me to purchase the first volume of the pair (Wright's early work) and to marvel at the blunt manner with which the novelist confronts the reader with Black suffering. Many White Americans have some inkling of the cruelties visited upon Black Americans in the Jim Crow south but, until one reads Wright's Uncle Tom's Children, it is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp the level of unmitigated terrorism Blacks were forced to endure. This may be one reason that Wright's reception continues to be attended by ambivalence and his place in the canon of American letters--though assured--is never quite what it ought to be.

Of course, critics can (and do) take cover behind aesthetic considerations, as Menand acknowledges: "It's true that Wright's convictions flatten out the 'literary' qualities of his fiction, and lead him to sacrifice complexity for force. His novels tend to be prolix and didactic, and his style is often dogged" ("Hammer and Nail," 80). But Menand's next remark is equally important: "But force is a literary quality, too--and one that can make other limitations seem irrelevant" (ibid). One must weigh the potential socio-political import of Wright's novels in the balance of their total artistic impact--as one should do with the later Tolstoy--and then adjust the critical estimate accordingly.

Pinn's turn towards Wright is much like James Cone's turn towards Malcolm X: a refreshing exercise in candor. An exercise that White America continues to find difficult to contemplate, much less put into practice, when it comes to the history of race relations in this country (and many other matters of consequence in our national life).

The End of God-Talk

Anthony Pinn and James Cone at Revolution Books in NYC.

Ronald Hepburn (1927-2008)

I read Professor Ronald W. Hepburn's first book, Christianity and Paradox, in 1977. It was the first book of analytical philosophy of religion that I had ever read and one of the few such works to make a lasting impression upon me. Perhaps what impressed me most about the book was Hepburn's reluctant rejection of the claims of theism. The popular skeptics of the last decade or so--people who've managed to make a living out of militant unbelief (Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al.)--don't impress me (or don't impress me favorably). I find nothing attractive about having to choose between dogmas. Hepburn's honest wrestling with the cogency of theistic claims won my admiration and, eventually, persuaded me of the deeply problematic nature of "God-talk." In the Preface that he wrote for the American edition of his book, Hepburn observed that "We need calm and undramatic reflection; or else we shall merely substitute new illusions and new obscurities for old ones. We need religious imagination and critical toughness in equal measure: a sense of the numinous, certainly--but as strong a sense of the logically absurd" (Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox, New York: Pegasus (1966), viii).

In chapter One, Hepburn described his philosophical project and what motivated it. His project was to subject "a number of influential theological views" to critical scrutiny and to show that they are "exposed to a variety of logical objections which render them untenable--or at least less sure than their upholders believe" (Hepburn, 1). He then averred that he would not have written the book had he not undertaken a "personal pilgrimage in search of a satisfactory justification of religious belief." In his view, he had managed, in the end, "to bring out how a theology may be logically faulty but yet express insights of enduring value concerning human experience, and thus still be worth study by sceptics as well as believers, for all their differences over the interpretation of those experiences" (ibid).

I call this the "tough-minded, tender-hearted" study of religion. The scholarship of Ronald Hepburn was, and remains, an exemplary model of this approach.

The Short Answer Is: Yes.

Was Wittgenstein right?