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Asking if God exists is like asking if electrons are purple.
The questions are alike because both are category mistakes. It makes no sense to ask if electrons are purple, because the concept of color is utterly inapplicable to electrons. They are smaller than the wavelengths of light required to have colors at all. Electrons are relevant at a more fundamental level than are color categories.
My position (inspired especially by Paul Tillich) is that asking whether God exists implies a similar category mistake. Just as the content of the electron-concept is more fundamental than color-categories, the content of the God-concept is more fundamental than ontology-categories. This is why Tillich, for example, talks about God not as a being but as the ground of being. Subatomic particles can in some sense be thought of analogously as the ground of color, because they enable color-categories to be relevant.
So “Does God Exist?” is the wrong question to be asking. Some of the right questions to ask instead might be, “How do we interpret experiences of the divine?”, “Is it meaningful to talk about the action of God in the world?”, or “For what is the language of the divine a useful metaphor?” But if we ask the ontology-question, if we ask “Does God exist?”, we’ll always be disappointed, because there is no answer.
The broader issue, of course, is that of what categories we can use for God if not ontological ones. Aesthetic? Ethical? These are questions to consider. Hopefully I’ll have some more thoughts on this once I read Marion’s God Without Being, which arrived from Amazon today. But these are some preliminary thoughts on the subject before I dive into that text.
[this post derives in large part from a comment i made in the vigorous and ongoing discussion to this post on my blog]
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that there is exactly one ethical principle and that it is universal and absolute, but also contextualized and played out in specific cases. In Christianity, it is called the Golden Rule; almost every other major religious tradition has an almost identical formulation. In Kantian ethics, it is called the Categorical Imperative. In modern political terms, it is called “sustainability.” In all cases it is a way of expressing the conviction that ethical action consists in reciprocity and mutuality of action.
The reason this is universal and valid is because it is the natural ethical conclusion of the idea that every human person has absolute and equal worth. (In Christian terms, the human person in made in the image of God; in Kantian terms, the human person is an end in herself.) All moral principles that cannot be reduced to this principle of reciprocity are not ethical at all, but are merely ways of enshrining oppression and injustice in the language of morality. Because such pseudo-moral rules do not spring from reciprocity and mutuality, they must rest on some principle that denies the inherent equality and absolute worth of every person.
For most people, this ethical principle is known and integrated into life through traditions, communities, and narratives — in a word, through religious systems. Of course, many religious systems add their own baggage to this basic universal (Christianity has certainly done so at times, and in large part continues to do so today). But religious traditions also tell stories of how this principle has been understood and applied and interpreted in a diversity of contexts and situations, and they give us guidance in figuring out just what it means for our lives. A key epistemological insight of postmodernity is that no knowledge is universal, that all epistemic experiences are conditioned by social location, by context, by communities and by personal narratives. Religion is one such context-space, one such way of making relevant the principles that are theoretically universal but can only truly be known in the particulars of day-to-day life.
One of the major themes in my theological and philosophical wandering (and wondering) of late has been the relationship between aesthetics and religion. I started thinking about this question more narrowly in terms of the connection between aesthetics and ethics (and I may be making some headway on that front, though I’m not ready to publish it here yet), but more recently I’ve been considering the nature of the relationship between aesthetics and religious experience more broadly. These questions have been brought to mind most especially by a couple pieces I read on Sunday.
Over at Resident Theology, Brad East, one of my longtime favorite theobloggers, has a fascinating piece on “Avatar, God, and the Modern Religious Question.” East notes that the theological ideas explored in James Cameron’s Avatar present the central religious question as that of God’s empirical existence, that is, of whether or not “God is real.” He writes:
But this is not and cannot be the Christian posture. It is regrettable that Cameron’s question (and answer) is so determinatively reflective of the wider modern ethos, including perhaps especially American Christian ways of talking culturally about God’s existence. But Christian faith and hope is not like that (nor, even in the film’s terms, are the Nav’i). At the terrible but inevitable moment of death, upon saying, as we pass, that we are with God, the next statement is not the happy realization that Pascal’s wager was right. We do not go to death in the anticipation of having our philosophical speculations answered. Rather, Christian hope is, among other things, aesthetic; given relationship, given presence with the One who is the beginning and end of all things, it is entirely the glory of the vision of God that will — and shall forever — hold our once death-shadowed gaze.
What shall we then say?
“I am with the Lord, friends. And he is beautiful.”
Given that I am prepared to make the argument that belief in God’s existence is, strictly speaking, not required for Christian faith (more on that some other time), this reframing of religious experience in terms of aesthetics rather than supernatural ontology resonates with me strongly. The idea that religious experience and aesthetic experience are closely interlinked was reinforced as I read another piece, this one published in the New York Times’ online philosophical column, “The Stone.” In the June 3 edition of the column, the Columbia University philosopher Arthur Danto addresses questions in the realm of philosophy of art raised by the recent performance of “The Artist is Present” by Marina Abramovic at the MoMA.
What struck me most about Danto’s column was the way he naturally used religious metaphors and religious vocabularies in analyzing the significance of performance art. Danto speaks of one of Abramovic’s pieces—wherein she sat in a chair for several hours a day opposite another empty chair where anyone else could sit for any period—as a “ritual moment” of “spiritual exchange.” He later writes of Abramovic’s “shamanic gift” and discusses the “sacredness” that is lent to the performance by the presence of the artist’s body.
In the final paragraph, the philosopher responds to the question, “What possible meaning can an event staged in person 3,000 miles away have to me?”:
…If the event calls you, you will be there if you can. Art is something that demands presence. That calls for pilgrimage. How many visitors came for Marina because they felt they were called from afar? That they needed to be there? It is not tourism, strictly speaking. It is being in the presence of something. Not touched by that thing physically, but being touched, as being touched by a poem. The spiritual wiring of the human soul remains to be diagrammed. That is what art is for.
Note the application of the idea of the religious experience of pilgrimage to the aesthetic experience of performance attendance. Journeying to the showing of “The Artist is Present” lies in the same category of experience as traveling to Jerusalem and walking in the steps of Jesus. True, one journey may be more potent than the other (though which is more powerful will of course vary from person to person) — but both varieties of pilgrimage attempt to give the pilgrim real “spiritual” experiences that put him or her in touch with some kind of “truth.”
What these reflections suggest is that this truth lies more directly in the realm of aesthetics than in that of supernatural metaphysics. Religion can be understood, therefore, as a particular framework for the interpretation of specific varieties of aesthetic experience. Religion and aesthetics are not coextensive, for most would agree that there exist aesthetic events that are not necessarily religious and that there exist religious events that are not necessarily exclusively aesthetical. But if (as Brad East seems to argue) Christian religion says that “God is beautiful” before it says that “God is real,” then Christianity’s task is to give us a framework for the interpretation of experiences of beauty in the world and in our interactions with others. The religious framework translates statements about aesthetic experience into statements about other aspects of human life. Thus it is that Christian religion links the beauty of God in God’s self with the image of God in human beings and so with the ethical duty that every human person has towards every other human person.
Perhaps then the concept of the supernatural, much maligned (and often justly so) in recent centuries, can be re-applied. If we frame religious experience in terms of aesthetics (the beautiful and the sublime) and not in terms of metaphysics (the real and the unreal), then the supernatural begins to refer not to events that break the norms of what is real but rather to events that impinge the beautiful or the sublime upon our experience in an utterly exceptional way. A meditative encounter between God and a mystic is thus supernatural not because it represents an event that breaks some sort of “rule” of the “real world,” but because the sublimity of the infinite divine breaks in on the mystic’s experience in a narrative, aesthetic way that shatters the norms of daily interactions with the world.
This suggests also a reëvaluation of we mean by “faith” and of the distinction between faith and belief. Belief relates to metaphysics: it is how we engage propositions about what is real or unreal. We believe that God exists or doesn’t exist, or we believe that the sky is blue, or whatever. Faith is something else entirely. I favor Paul Tillich’s definition of faith as “the state of being ultimately concerned”; faith is oriented toward people, events, or narratives rather than toward empirical propositions. Thus, faith can easily be understood in aesthetic terms, as a way of engaging of aesthetic experiences or a way of reacting to aesthetic events. It is certainly not the only way to engage aesthetic events, but within the religious framework that can be overlain on aesthetic experience, it is typically the most prominent. If faith is the state of ultimate concern, then in Christian religion faith entails a personal commitment to engaging the ways that the ultimacy of God is revealed in experiences of the beautiful and the sublime. Faith is a way of understanding aesthetic encounters, a way of encountering beautiful or sublime experiences with fresh eyes that give them meaning through metaphors, rituals, and ethical ideals. Faith is a lens that filters our aesthetic experiences and allows us to engage them afresh, incorporating “supernatural” aesthetic events into the fullness of Christian life in community.
Hannah Arendt has become one of my favorite political philosophers of late. I was introduced to her work in my History and Politics course at Yale this past semester, wherein we read large selections from her brilliant Origins of Totalitarianism. Just last week I read the brief entirety of her On Violence in an evening (her nuanced discussion of the differences between power and violence is one of the most valuable contributions to the topic I have encountered).
One of the most striking passages of Origins was, as it happened, the closing paragraph:
But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only “message” which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est — “that a beginning be made man was created” said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
I see the hints of an entire philosophy of history in this paragraph (though I don’t know enough about her work to know if it would be one that she would agree with), a philosophy of history that rejects both linear notions of progress and cyclical notions of endless circles of fortune and instead holds up the absolute worth of every human person as an end in him/herself (in the Kantian sense). I also see a powerful theological idea that resonates with my understanding of the resurrection of Jesus.
One of my long-time “favorite quotes” has been from William Stringfellow, who once wrote that “The essential and consistent task of Christians is to expose the transience of death’s power in the world.” That is, Christians are called to constitute a radical community whose task it is to witness to the transformative power of the Resurrection in the universe. The significance of the narrative of the Resurrection is inherently political, for it challenges the supposedly absolute power of the kingdoms of the world, whose rule is always based on violence and death. The implications of the Resurrection are that human life embodies transcendent hope within the physical world, that death cannot destroy the power of that hope, and thus that every human person has absolute worth no matter what assaults upon the Image of God in her are made by the Powers That Be. In Arendt’s terms, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus tell us that the end of every human life contains a new beginning; every birth, every human person, is a guarantee of the transience of death’s power in the world.
The two statements of Arendt and Stringfellow are saying essentially the same thing. What both Arendt’s concept of human beginning and the Christian concept of the Resurrection give us is a way of interpreting the events of the world. This interpretive lens tells us to view events with an eye towards hope rather than despair, to see new beginnings in every end, to look for the resurrection that accompanies every death. It is a worldview that does not rely on an overarching (and probably ultimately untenable, for all its attractiveness) teleology of constantly ascending human progress. It is rooted rather in what I would term a “reverse teleology” of beginning rather than ending, an inverted telos not of an external end or purpose but rather of the end-in-itself (again in the Kantian sense, as a reflection of the absolute worth of every person). In this view of the world, individual human worth derives not from some future “end” of human life but from each life’s individual beginning, from the very fact of being human — religiously speaking, from the reality of the Imago Dei. The uncontainable, bursting-forth expansiveness of this process of beginning and resurrection is what validates continued hope despite the evils of the world.
