Advent reappraisal, Part 4: The God Hypothesis in a time of spiritual warfare

To retrace his steps to transcendent understandings, and hence harmony with ultimate reality, faithless man might usefully adopt a demeanour of irony to the world, but in the first instance to God.

Part 4: The ‘hard problem’ of God

The ‘hard problem’ besetting what is called ‘religion’ is presenting its truths and insights — which is to say the truth about humanity —  to cultures regarding themselves as having ‘evolved beyond’ such ways of looking at things, i.e. cultures with a reduced capacity for reason, lacking any means of thinking or processing information that is not literalism or legalism. In such cultures, the natural and inevitable afflictions that can attack even the strongest faith turn into seismic shocks in the isolated hearts of people who might be amenable to reassurance if they could even become aware of what the problem is. And the problem, put simply, is that people no longer know how to believe, how to have what is called faith, how to hope for anything that is not immediate and tangible. Not only is it persistently implied within earshot that human beings do not ‘need’ God in the way our parents and grandparents did, but these human beings themselves appear increasingly to regard themselves as capable of comprehending, describing and living their lives in the absence of any such ‘primitive’ understandings.

Even before the catastrophe of the Church’s compliance with the secular powers in the Covid episode, there were serious issues (dealt with variously on this platform) with the spiritual credibility of the modern Church in the context of its many failures to confront head-on the apparent routing of Christianity — and religion more generally — in the secular age. Up to that point, the Church had continued, with some measure of success, to speak in an ‘old’ way to the old and the very young, though most of the middle cohort had either switched off completely or lapsed into a kind of sleepwalk of ritualistic observance for cultural, social or family reasons, but without conviction or much enthusiasm.

In the bunker of the modern world, it is understandable that many people no longer ‘believe in God’. It would be surprising, given the structure and logics of contemporary society, if a majority could any longer openly declare a clear an unambiguous faith other than by way of empty assertion. There has emerged no functional means of enabling people to perceive the true nature of the problem and therefore make real choices for themselves in a culture which splits reason between different kinds of human knowing, and formally valourises only one kind.

For Christians, the idea of Christ, therefore, risks becoming terminally implausible, whether we like it or not. The problem is not an absence or scarcity of reasonable evidence, but the inability to use the available facts to feed our reason in a manner that persuades us. The main obstacle in modern culture to continuing belief in the Christian proposal is not something inherent in Christianity, but a factor that derives from the positivistic forms of rationality used to distill meaning from reality in everyday life.

In a Christian culture, if you take Christ away, you are left with a hole instantly seeking to fill itself with a question. And if you take away the question, you are left with the hole. So then the culture seeks to deny that the hole exists or sneakily fills the hole with things that neither fill it nor remain, but actually make the hole bigger and seemingly emptier.

The culture of the bunker speaks to the logical capacities and rationality of the human being, but this accounts for just a tiny element of the human capacity for reason. Man has intervened in the world, building things — constructing frameworks of logic and culture that not only block the human being’s view of the transcendent, but actually give mankind a ‘safe’ place to live where the logic of existence becomes increasingly self-contained.  Had the inclination existed, it would undoubtedly have been possible for man to build into the bunker some evidence of the Mystery, some  cultural witness to broader understandings. The culture might thus have retained reminders of the limits of human capacity for investigation, or of the fact that everything we work with, build with, is already given to us. We could have retained some awareness of the ineluctable difficulty with human omnipotence: that we do not make ourselves, but still are made anew in every beating moment. Generally speaking, modern cultures have ‘chosen’ not to retain such reminders at the heart of themselves.

Modern culture rapidly moves towards a condition whereby it may come to define itself exclusively according to its certainty concerning encroaching human omnipotence. This worldview is dominated by manmade tools and technologies, which convey to the individual a sense of belonging to some great and determined ‘progress project’. The advance of human knowledge is sufficient to convey, potentially to each and every ‘individual’ human consciousness, a sense of being part of a new kind of existence, in which mankind has taken charge of its own fortunes and is finally circumventing or disposing of anything that does not fit with the new understandings. The fact that most human beings play no part in the development of any of these technologies, or indeed the ‘progress project’ in general, is skilfully spun out of sight.

At the centre of this adventure is man himself, a frail, forked being, mostly capable of imagining himself omnipotent only when blinded and deafened to mystery and surrounded by like-minded fellows, or with his consciousness disabled by insanity or mind-altering drugs. Although co-opted by culture into asserting a stake and place in this new reality, the average human person is really, secretly, adrift from it all. His sense of powerlessness — loneliness — persists in spite of all the grandiose claims to progress with which he serenades himself. He feels his wounds much as his mother and grandfather felt their wounds before him. He is as haunted by the spectre of death as any man who ever stumbled across the earth in fear of wild beasts and pestilence.

It is not that nothing has been changed by what is called ‘modernity’, but that everything has indeed been changed apart from man’s interior self, man’s heart. The changes, then, have an effect which is quite the opposite of what might be assumed from the objective evidences: They cut man even further off within his own culturally-imposed sense of impotence, exacerbating his sense of aloneness, trapping his inner consciousness and voice inside a body that is being turned into a machine to match the technological and technocratic world all around, isolating him even further from where and what he feels himself to be. At the centre of this maelstrom, the human person stands, each one alone, unable to find himself in anything.

In all our modern logics, the human person is mutilated by the silence that persists about his true nature and needs.  Culture, in this sense, represents an affront to each man and woman, no matter how much he or she may desire to be part of it, or claim to share its values, or even insistently reject antecedent definitions of human reality in public so as to ‘show willing’ in the matter of adherence and obedience. Deep inside, the germ of aloneness burrows away, but the afflicted person, using the tools of the hubristic culture she is part of, can find no words or concepts to articulate the feeling that assails her.

Society invents all kinds of mechanisms and concepts to cope with and describe the unease that arises from this condition. Those who are not alcoholics or drug–addicts are depressed, have poor coping skills, low self-esteem, suffer from obsessive-compulsive or bipolar disorder, and so forth.

Such renderings of human pain and searching superficially seem to assist in understanding, but really just invent a new code of incomprehension for a world in which more ‘traditional’ ways of seeing have been jettisoned or rendered inaccessible. Such coinages have served to expand the territory of psychiatry, suggesting that something fundamental has changed of late in human nature and coping skill, while avoiding the issue of precisely what this ‘something fundamental’ might be.

Religion, as we have noted, can be seen in a certain light as a language which human beings have used through time to grasp things about themselves and the world that are of their nature elusive or invisible. Creating contingent understanding is an essential mechanism of human functioning, because it generates words and concepts to fill what would otherwise be gaping holes in human consciousness. And these holes would not be filled by questions or question-marks, but by a disabling absence of understanding, leading soon to misunderstanding or a crippling frustration. Such a vacuum is actually impossible for us to imagine, precisely because the human being is not structured like this, but made to ask questions, to arrive at understandings based on the best available evidence, couched in the least inadequate words.

Because what rapidly becomes the human ‘mechanism’ can operate only on a self-awareness powered by hoping, it is essential that our cultures carry understandings based on total possibility. The history of human society has shown that human life needs more to sustain it than what mankind is capable of imagining, proposing or generating. The necessity of maintaining a focus on the ‘Beyond’, on the Infinite and Eternal, is hard-wired into mankind, and intrinsic to the imagination that sustains and propels us. Ultimately, all man can create for himself are false hopes that sustain him for an instant and then dissolve, leaving him grasping for the next. His essential ‘motor functions’ depend on a relationship with the Mystery from which he derives.

Without a contingent understanding of what is unknown — and unknowable in the sense of being impossible to capture in words or logics — humankind would be unable to function. Counteracting this conundrum is the role not merely of religion, but those also of mythology, metaphor, story, art and poetry.  No one but a pedant or a fool would question the importance of the work of a playwright on the basis that it offended understandings proffered by psychoanalysis. The purposes of the two disciplines are entirely different, and our cultures continue to respect the idea that the ‘amateur’, the playwright for example, has as much right to speculate on the mystery of human behaviour — indeed to treat human behaviour as a mystery — as the alleged ‘expert’ who has studied this topic via the logic of a schematic ‘science’.  Part of the unstated reasoning for this historical openness is the idea that the playwright accesses truth in a different way, a different language, and may actually be capable of achieving a clearer and more profound way of seeing something. A way of restating the modern problem would be to say that this ‘indulgence’ is gradually being withdrawn from religion, which is increasingly dismissed as speculative superstition.

It is true that religious understandings, apart from having their own self-contained language, are also, by the logics of the bunker, tentative and fraught with risks of excessive substantialism and their own brands of literalism. There have been signal episodes along the way in which the dichotomous religious/positivistic modes of perception have come into epic conflict to the ultimate detriment of religious understandings. Occasionally, as in the saga of Galileo Galilei, matters manifesting in the territory of the ‘unknowable’ become knowable in ways that appear to discredit the process of comprehension utilised to capture understanding in a previous time.  Sceptics tend to jump upon such opportunities to dismiss the entire process of addressing unknowability, opportunistically attaching disproportionate significance to a handful of issues and questions on which the speculation of our religious forebears has been, yes, demonstrably wrong.  Similarly, pedants, ideologues and cynics seek to jump upon the letter of religious texts to demonstrate that a particular characterisation or conclusion arrived at in a prior era is implausible or erroneous. Thus they hope to discredit the entire enterprise of religion and religious thought and return us, each time with less and less hope of alternative recourse, to the dominion of  positivism.

Here, all that is realised is the total ambition of the sceptic: a contingent but destructive pessimism moving opportunistically to replace the prior culture of unrestricted imaginative speculation. Thus, human understandings and working hypotheses are attacked and demolished without any thought to the functions they fulfilled or the possibility of their replacement.

What the literalists, sceptics and cynics appear to miss is that the tendency of ‘believers’ to appear literal about religious ideas is to a high degree a function of the incapacity of collective language to carry simultaneously two different and possibly paradoxical understandings. At the level of the person, such understandings are capable of coexisting as a matter of course. Paradoxes, contradictions, even apparently opposing ideas, can be held harmoniously and concurrently, notwithstanding the semantic incongruities they might seem to involve. A human being, for example, can quite readily create a private space wherein he/she speaks to a summoned-up deity while seeing no need to formulate sentences to describe this relationship in public. Indeed, the requirement to adopt singular modes of self-expression in positivistic culture requires that person, when speaking publicly, to choose between either denying such a deity or attesting grandly to His existence and omnipotence.  There is no allowance for a space in between, and no possibility that an understanding of this God may coexist alongside an inability to assert belief in words — even amounting, at times, to an apparent expression of faithlessness — the two responses held simultaneously and held together by a binding agent that might be something resembling what we call irony, but which is really an expression of the indescribability of God. The conventional mind — especially in the Anglophone world —  tolerates only an ‘either/or’, having no capacity to accommodate a ‘both/and’ — this latter deemed by culture to be a pathological condition termed ‘cognitive dissonance’. This means that those who speak publicly about such matters at all tend for the most part to be confined to the two extremes of literalism: the literalism of a faith that takes every word of scripture as hard fact, and the ‘modern’ literalism that, citing ‘science and reason’, increasingly regards all religious thinking as outdated and absurd.

In fact, most people seeking to subsist in modern positivistic cultures appear to place their religious beliefs, if any, in a different category to other kinds of ‘knowledge’.  If you ask people to imagine two different categories labeled ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, or perhaps ‘true’ and ‘untrue’, most believers will be reluctant to place religious beliefs in the category that would imply, for example, that these beliefs are ‘factual’ or ‘true’ in the same sense that they might regard it as factual or true to say that the earth moves around the sun. It is not that people do not ‘believe’ what they attest to believing; nor is it that they do not regard their beliefs as ‘factual’ or ‘true’; nor is it necessarily that they are confused. It may simply be that they recognise different qualities of fact and truth which do not necessarily belong together, which cannot be separated into categories like ‘more true’ or ‘less true’, and that overall the language available in the culture is inadequate to communicating the complexities they intuit to exist in these connections. Positivistic cultures require human beings to divide and differentiate between categories of fact: on the one hand the deterministically demonstrated facts and certainties of the quotidian reality (the bunker); on the other, broader understandings or (as yet) unanswered questions as to the ultimate meanings of things. Human beings can resolve these contradictions in their hearts, but cannot necessarily explain what they’re doing, even to themselves.

It seems that, sometimes, even people who define themselves as ‘religious’ — being unaware of the reasons for some block within themselves and the reasons for it — tend to interpret what they can only regard as their own incoherence and dissembling in the face of questions concerning ‘the evidence’ as a sign of the weakness of their ‘beliefs’. This causes them discomfort and anxiety, but at a low level of awareness due to the absence of any discussion of such matters in the surrounding culture. Hence, they either experience their religious sensibilities as waning, or else their sense of what they believe concerning the ultimate meanings of things tends to become separated from their sense of everyday ‘reality’.  When they consider the two realities alongside one another, it can appear that there is an irresolvable conflict, which they can deal with in one of three ways: accepting the positivistic analysis and rejecting religion as irrationality; conversely, rejecting the evidence of three-dimensional reality as definitive and opting for a religious fundamentalism grounded purely in the supernatural; or, holding both understandings simultaneously, but in a way that, because of the absence of cultural supports, seems to them increasingly untenable, because it is ‘incoherent’. In the latter case, faith tends to become privatised, retreating into ritual, moralism and sentimentalism, and getting separated from responses to everyday affairs of the world. The outcome is a dualism of thought and action that lacks any clear understanding of its own workings.

Our societies provide no platforms for such discussions. Religious forums, for obvious reasons, do not seek to explore these questions; secular forums regard them as superfluous and irrelevant. In the middle, the human person is cast adrift, his heart starved for nourishment or reassurance, and therefore lurches either towards fundamentalism or nihilism.

Addressing a group of university students in Riccione, Italy, in October 1976, the founder of the Catholic movement Communion and Liberation, Father Luigi Giussani, spoke about the necessity to adopt a demeanour of irony before both the original questions of existence and the person of Christ. Christians, he said, must be ‘full of irony and humour, because all the attempts at expression of our communion that are born as a consequence are fragile, reformable, modifiable. If the purpose of every action is the presence of what we are, we are freed from the inevitable claim made by the forms that our action assumes. The presence “acts” through ironical, not cynical attempts; irony is the opposite of cynicism, because it makes you take part in something, but with a certain detachment — because you recognise its fragility — and a sense of peace, because it is filled with passion for the already immanent Ideal. Thus, we can be agile in changing tomorrow what we made today, free from what we do and the forms that we necessarily give to our attempts.’

I interpret his words to mean something like this: The ‘presence’ that constitutes the human condition — the alliance between the ‘I’ and the process of constant generation by Another — proposes motives and explanations for our actions that are not the true ones. We should therefore hold these reasons and explanations lightly, for to do otherwise would be to misunderstand ourselves. In the bunker, for example, we are motivated by bunker objectives, problems, challenges and goals — which is fine, so long as we do not enter completely into these. All the time, we are something else — spirit, one might say, having a human experience, but spirit most of all. Thus, we hold to our bunker existence and its demands and exigencies only ironically, lightly, with agility within the infinite context in which we truly reside, but nonetheless with a certain gravity befitting our temporary but continuing state and abode.

It is both strange and interesting that Giussani spoke of irony in this context. Irony, after all, is more readily understood as an instrument of the bunker culture, indicating the presence of — if not cynicism — certainly a calculated evasiveness, an  affected detachment. Irony passes itself off as a pose, but is essentially an avoidance or postponement of judgment or decision. Irony is fundamentally about ambiguity, a dualistic mode of addressing reality, of saying one thing — or appearing to say one thing — while meaning another; or pretending to say one thing while seeming to mean another but really meaning precisely what you say; or meaning two things at once. In this regard it has a clear function: to avoid being pinned down; to avoid being accused of giving offence; to avoid giving offence while still conveying a judgmental meaning, softening the edge of criticism. Generally, irony says more about the culture it is used in than about its user. A culture in which irony is pervasive is most likely one that imposes rigid meanings by artificial means to stymie openness and fullness of expression. In its everyday modern cultural sense, irony is a way of creating deniability, greasing the wheels of modern freedom-seeking, consumerism and licentiousness, protecting against the disappointment that arises as the inevitable outcome of seeking satisfaction where it is ultimately unavailable — so everything is both serious and not, mocking and sincere. Irony creates safe ground — where you can appear not to care what transpires. Seemingly arising from a jaded knowingness, irony may as often be the product of fear and uncertainty, or a desire to fill in ambiguous ways the gaps in the questions the world directs at the individual. It can bespeak a desire to liberate from the stranglehold of culture an empowering capacity for contradiction — in, for example, a dodging of the literalness of cultural beliefs, certainty or clarity.  It can also be a kind of insulation against the imposed meaninglessness of excessive modern knowingness.

Irony, when you come to think of it, is ultimately a core mechanism of the way we nowadays live lives that are unknowable as to their purpose or destination. We suspect that we are the butts of some cosmic joke but must go on anyway, having no realistic choice.  We contemplate the words of solace or certitude offered by religion and are unconvinced.

A disposition of irony may provide me with a lightness in earthly reality that allows me to hardly touch it at all, to disregard it except for the purposes of getting by, to ‘see through’ everything and yet see everything for its immediate usefulness and dangers. In the bunker, the only truly complete human is the ironic human, because he or she accords everything there just the weight it merits in the functional matter of survival, i.e. very little, knowing that the ultimate destination — or the absence of an ultimate destination — renders everything contingent. In these circumstances, only a fool would show his hand, and in irony the atheist and the convinced believer find a common mode of cultural and existential negotiation.

Fr Giussani had in mind, I believe, a particular kind of leveraging of the conventional use of irony — much the way a judo fighter can sometimes use the strength of an opponent against himself, yielding to the opponent’s energy so as to exploit his own force and weight against him. Fr Giussani was proposing ‘lightness’ — ‘agility’ — as a route to the most absolute heaviness: the desire for re-immersion in the Mystery. But, deeper into his prescription is another provocation, facing squarely the necessity to understand that Christianity can only be comprehended in the heart of the person, where there are no words and no room for words.  To speak at all, then, is simply to try to guide another towards the portals of his own heart, in the knowledge that, when he gets there, the words will be left behind. As Christians, we speak of Christ so as not to have to speak of Him. We trade in ideas about Him so as to convey that He is more than an idea. But the same method can be employed with any form of religious engagement.

If we apply Giussani’s formula to the question of the erosion of faith within the bunker, it is necessary partially to reverse the method, here applying the ‘irony’ in the first instance to the diminishing attachment to the Mystery, which we summon towards us by re-asserting a belief that we may not be certain of. We must cease to see this loss of attachment as definitive, as terminal, while at the same time taking the activities and phenomena of the bunker less seriously. In this way, we render possible a ‘matching’ or ’balancing’ of ironies — this ‘ironic’ opening up to the Mastery being matched by  the pursuit of a concomitant ‘agility’ towards bunker matters, which is what Giussani was alluding to without naming it explicitly. Thus, we may at first hold together, with equivalent ‘lightness’, these two distinct and seemingly oppositional understandings, but with practice find ourselves able to ‘juggle’ them in a unitary disposition towards reality. In the bunker, it is vital to come to know that it is a bunker, and that there is another place that is not the bunker, and that both can be inhabited at the same time.

And this, ironically, calls for another layer of irony: an irony that embraces everything the bunker claims to know, and then moves one step further, reopening the God question again so that, ultimately, it becomes impossible for anything to close it down. It’s a little like the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in his manifestation of the mock rude-boy character Ali G, asking the mathematician to give him a definition of Infinity. Having briefly considered each equation proffered by the mathematician, Ali responds to them with the same question: ‘Plus one?’ Albeit in an unlikely context, it is a kind of prayer of homage to the Force or Being that generates Infinity.

Irony provides a way of combating literalness, in both the religious and bunker contexts.  Correctly pitched, it can imply an awareness of and respect for both the content of something and the idea that the truth of things, without that content being set aside, may reside elsewhere, further on, always further on — i.e. an ‘infinite’ postponement of the consolidation of certitude, accompanied by an expanding openness. In the Christian context, this would involve both the presentation of the stories, witness and meanings accrued in 2,000 years of human culture, but also the idea that all this is but a line of stones across a torrent, to help us get to the other side.

Is there a single Christian to be found anywhere who imagines that when he dies he will ascend through the clouds to a place in which Saint Peter will greet him at pearly gates and usher him through a vestibule to the Father?  Or that, on her arrival in Heaven, the Holy Family will entertain her to afternoon tea and chat about how things are back in the old world? Perhaps there are such people but, for every one such, there must be at least a million who, while holding to certain assumptions concerning Saint Peter or the Holy Family, manage to employ these understandings with a far greater ‘agility’ than is normally imputed to the religious mentality by our contemptuous contemporary cultures. 

There is a risk in excessive literalism: that the creation of images and ideas relating to the ultimate destination of human beings becomes fossilised in crude anthropomorphic forms which, through time, become dated and quaint, then outmoded and unlikely, finally reaching a condition of implausibility which is ‘obvious’ to everyone. One part of the audience draws attention to this implausibility, applying it to demolish the very idea of transcendence; the other clings to literalism all the more, defending its ‘beliefs’ against the sneers and scorn of the infidel.

In speaking — even thinking to themselves — about where human life goes to when its earthly phase ends, human beings may use concepts and hypotheses provided by the religious imagination to visualise, speculate, imagine, pray, comfort themselves. But, at another level, most people are intuitively aware that the reality they address in this way is quite different to the three-dimensional reality they deal with in the quotidian bunker arena. They are aware that the reality of God is of a different order, that such concepts are beyond ‘logical’ understanding, beyond the conventional use of the senses — Beyond everything. And yet, propelled by the enormity of the questions we hold within ourselves, we feel a need to find a way of accessing this different reality in one way or another.

We realise — or perhaps we don’t but don’t worry about it that, all our lives, the mechanism we have adopted employs fairly crude earthly concepts to dramatise and render visible to the imagination things that are ineffable and mysterious beyond words, thoughts or pictures. We have a sense that, were we to succeed in putting words or images on this force or person called God, we would in all probability be talking to or seeing something that bears no relationship to the thing we desire to reach. And yet the human imagination requires such concrete understandings — words, images, concepts — if it is to achieve any kind of traction in the terrain of the Mystery. So we make the best of things with what we can find and build into a functional understanding, always aware that it is contingent, tentative, and always against the persistent resistance of the bunker.

The language of art, properly wielded and understood, is not supposed to be naturalistic, never mind sociological; its purpose is to catapult the hearer from the everyday into a different realm. In truth, in the modern bunker, it does this less and less, because the intention of bunker art, increasingly, is ideological: imposing supplied shapes and ideas on society. Religious language suffers from a different kind of problem. Though it began conjoined to and having much the same intentions as the language of art, it has become reduced by repetition and familiarity. It announces itself within a few syllables, and thereby defeats its purpose. Mostly, it ejects the hearer out of the present, but not into Infinity, rather into a preconceived security or prejudice, a comforting tableau which, for all that it bears no relationship to everyday logic, is actually constructed of kitschified elements of everyday cultural  phenomena. Hence, the pearly gates, the Holy Family at dinner, the Father sitting on His throne with angels at his head.

This notion is variously debunked in multiple theological sources, for example by Pope Benedict XVI, in his question-and-answer memoir Last Testament, when his ghost-writer, Peter Seewald, asks him where the God of hope and love is actually to be located. Is it not the case, Seewald wonders, that Heaven is nowhere to be found in what we see as reality? Where, then, might God be enthroned? The Pope laughs: ‘Yes, because there is not something, a place where He sits. God Himself is the place beyond all places. If you look into the world, you do not see Heaven, but you see traces of God everywhere. In the structure of matter, in all the rationality of reality. Even when you see human beings, you find traces of God. You see vices, but you also see goodness, love. These are the places where God is there.

‘We must do away with these old spatial notions as they do not work anymore. Because the all is certainly not infinite in the strict sense of the word, although it is so vast that we humans may certainly refer to it as infinite. And God cannot be found in some place inside or outside; rather, His presence is something wholly other.’ 

This quick sketch of things, enigmatically, liberates us, if only briefly, into a space within our reason that we instantly understand has the capacity to contain our infinite longings.

The French Christian existentialist (he hated the term but it represents a sufficiently ironic encapsulation of his position to raise an eyebrow in modern culture) Gabriel Marcel, wrote: ‘At the very depth of ourselves, we don’t know what is happening. We don’t even know if anything is happening. We throw the net of our interpretations into depths that are impenetrable in every respect. . . . We draw out only phantasms, or at least we cannot be sure that they may be anything else.’

This is irrefutably the case. But there is, however, an urgent need to find some way — however crude or inchoate — of throwing those nets on the ocean of the unknowable. While words may be an inadequate instrument of such probing, there are ways of going at these questions with the tool of experience, using words as a way of tracking the journey, while also remembering the importance of transcending the limitations of these words: to approach the use of the tool of language in a manner that will allow it to lift us off into the otherness beyond the literal and substantial, so that we leave the bunker and its logics behind.

Any conversation about these matters must obviously bear this paradox in mind. We speak words to take us to the vanishing point — to say what we think we are, what we believe about our desires and our purpose, what we hope for. But then, having submerged ourselves in as much logic as our reason is capable of accepting, we have to continue, without language, into the wordless ether, free from everything, including all conventional notions relating to ourselves. I believe that what Fr Giussani was getting at when he spoke of ‘becoming agile in changing tomorrow what we made today’, was the way language starts to fray when it approaches the vanishing point.

The important questions   faced by humanity are not about 'the future of the Church', the ‘future of religion’ or even the ‘future of God’, but about the future of this man, that woman, those children not yet born — and, before that, the futures of our cultures and their capacity to enable human beings to be vivified in their total, infinite dimensions, so that they may continue to wish to live at all, and be adept — ‘agile’ — at doing so. The centre of our obsession must become not doctrine, ideology or theology, but human hoping, not philosophy but life, not theories but being. To conduct even a preliminary conversation about the difficulty of conducting such a conversation right now would be difficult if not impossible also, because the channels of communication have been hijacked by forces espousing an ideology deeply hostile to such considerations. But, were it to become possible, such a discussion — to itself avoid the positivistic trap — would require to use words of the utmost lightness, refusing the legalistic definitions usually imposed by the codes of the increasingly positivistic model of mass communication that rules our cultures and the channels we depend upon to enable us to say things out loud.

That ‘ironic’ response might become something — if a sufficiency of ‘agility’ could be achieved — like a fake-it-till-you-make-it programme of moral and spiritual renewal, perhaps along the lines of what occurs in the Alcoholics Anonymous model of addiction recovery programmes, in which the defeated addict, and usually debased agnostic, is led back to transcendent ideas by an invitation to enter into a relationship with a ‘higher power’, subjectively apprehended. Or, perhaps, something an implicated society might usefully propose to itself might be some variation on Pascal’s famous ‘wager’, whereby, instead of betting against the idea of God, we might contemplate the possibility that some deity who cares about our welfare and destiny may actually exist, and elevate this value culturally for ourselves.

Pascal held that it was impossible for man to say whether God was or was not, and that it was therefore unreasonable to demand that Christians supply ‘rational grounds’ for their beliefs. Either God is or is not, he argued, and reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us from the answer, and at the end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun. How to choose — heads or tails?

Pascal rejected the idea of refusing to make a choice. We are committed, and so must choose, and our reason is no more affronted by choosing one than the other. We stake our reason and will, knowledge and happiness, seeking to avoid two things: error and wretchedness. If we choose to decide that God exists and end up winning, then we win everything, but there is no penalty if the bet is lost. Interestingly, Pascal believed that reason, although of no use in deciding whether God exists or not, was an essential instrument in contemplating this wager. It would, he declared, be renouncing reason to invest fully in a narrow concept of a purely earthly happiness ‘rather than risk it for infinite gain, just as likely to occur as a loss amounting to nothing’. 

If this proposition can be said to make sense for an individual, it makes at least as much for a society, which depends on what it can generate from within itself for its own well-being and resources of happiness. An individual, especially one existing in a society in which belief is immanent, can hedge his bets, resort to ambiguity and prevarication, defer the decision until a moment when the notional loss might be minimised — leech, if you wish, on the benefits generated from the beliefs of others, and still reserve all his rights to repent and convert. Individual citizens may interpret and customise religious concepts as they please, but the society and its culture requires to be specific and unambiguous. It therefore makes even greater sense for a society than for an individual to bet on God’s existence rather than to ‘renounce reason’ (Pascal) by adopting a more pessimistic outlook as its cultural position. 

The main impediment to such a realisation is the fear of moralism that grips modern society like a vice. The first objection to a restoration of Christendom as a going concern would be the question of how to keep the clergy out of our bedrooms. But, stripped down,  so to speak, the moral programmes of the various churches — in the final analysis the first cause of their growing marginalisation — amount to no more than mnemonics of the ‘laws’ of reality as inscribed on the very heart of man. In the long run, this may again become clear, when the present post-1960s obsession with narrow understandings of freedom has run its course. This, ultimately, is the great tragedy of the bunker: that its banishment of faith is a reaction against a straw man argument.

But what, after all, if none of the things that are believed in Christianity or any other religion are, in any sense, ‘true’? What if they are no more than useful confabulations, beautiful lies designed to make human life more bearable, more ordered, hopeful and happy?  Would this not be the end of the discussion? It seems unlikely, since, even if the God hypothesis is utterly false (and how would we ever know for sure?) it appears to have a remarkable harmony with the structure and dynamics of human desiring.

What is the worst that might arise from an attempt to rehabilitate the religious hypothesis? That such a position represents an affront to modern human reason? This would be to say that, if religion is indeed no more than confabulation — if we could but know this — then the atheist is vindicated, for this is what the atheist insists: that since there is no ‘proof’ of God’s existence, it is therefore unreasonable to believe in Him. But, since there is no way of knowing, the vindication of the atheist ought at least be postponed. And, in any event, what would such a ‘vindication’ of atheism be calculated to achieve?  The secular-atheists answer that they wish to live in truthfulness, unsupported by superstition. But why could it be better to live in such a bleak truthfulness? Would even an innocent credulity not be something of an improvement?

To consider this argument further, I propose momentarily to leave aside the question of the ‘rationality’ of belief, to place a question-mark over everything we know concerning the verification of historical records, the testimony of witnesses, including the Gospels, and of our reasonable apprehensions of the facts of Christianity as we have inherited them. Let us even ignore the way religious thinking has survived as an explanation for human structure, existence and meaning, when nothing else has. Instead, let us suppose that, perhaps some 1,900 years ago, a group of very clever people gathered in a room and decided that such a confabulation would greatly add to the quality of human life and possibility. Perhaps, identifying some fundamental lacuna in the working of human reality, culture and existence, some such group of ‘conspirators’ decided to construct this ‘beautiful lie’ to fill that gap, so as to make human life happier, more hopeful and more orderly. And, skipping over the fragile hope that it might be nice if people of such intelligence could be located in the present, let us consider the putative results. What we can say without doubt is that this plan, if it was indeed formulated, has been overwhelmingly successful. Somehow, these people managed to create a narrative for human society that has worked for billions of people in the past two millennia. Applied, even at the most rudimentary level of understanding, to a human life, the Christian proposal has tended to lend optimism, joy, motivation, cooperation, respect for others and a hundred other qualities that it can scarcely be imagined would have materialised in human society without some such narrative to support them. There have been down-sides, too, of course, but we have already heard enough about those to place them approximately proportionately on the scales.

It is certainly hard to imagine that, in the society operating to the ‘truthfulness’ proposed by the secular-atheists, all these same positive qualities and conditions would be available in the same way. So, at the very least, it has to be acknowledged that the ‘beautiful lie’ is also a ‘useful lie’,  even a ‘noble lie’ — that it fulfils a function approximating to the needs of mankind, and that it is therefore, in a certain sense, superior to any conceivable version of ‘the truth’ that might be formulated  otherwise.

But then I would like to move on and have us ask ourselves a different question: What is ‘the truth’? Surely, as in so many things, the truth must exist is some kind of verisimilitude to, or correspondence with, the evidence? It is not, surely, that we expect the truth to be a three-dimensional construction that one day will reveal itself in its simplicity and clarity, and be found to leave mankind outside itself? The ‘truth’, as far as mankind is concerned, must be rooted in, and therefore concerned with, man’s own nature, or at least must take this factor into account. The ‘truth’, in other words, must have some correlation with man’s deepest desires and whatever means may exist offering the hope or prospect of satisfying these. Therefore, whether it can be certain of confirmation in human time as objectively ‘factual’ or not, a typical set of ‘religious’ propositions can at least be seen as approximating to some deeper truth suggested by the nature of human desiring.  So, even if you decide that Christianity, for instance, is a fiction, you have to admit that this fiction coheres with something — arguably everything — in man’s nature, and that, if it is indeed a confabulation, it is a work of great genius. And if our only reason for eliminating it is that it is not ‘factual’ or ‘rational’, then we must ask ourselves whether an appetite for such a literal and banal sense of ‘truthfulness’, or ‘rationalism’, is really worth the elimination of our civilisation as we know it — the total collapse of everything we have built and a period of unimaginable chaos before we start to build again from the beginning, even if this held out any hope of success. Is our desire to ‘live in the truth’, rather than in the ‘beautiful lie’, so great and so determined that we are prepared to eliminate our happiness, hope, values, even our future, to achieve it?

How could Christianity achieve such a correspondence to the deepest longings of mankind and be a lie, even a beautiful one? How could something adhere so faithfully to human longing and be remote from the truth? And what other examples are there of a narrative surviving for 2,000 years while depending on illusion and trickery? Would it be possible to construct an edifice like this based on pure sentimentality, superstition and unreason, and would it be possible to sustain this edifice through millennia, in many different cultures, against sometimes ferocious opposition and scepticism?

The ease with which secular-atheists manage to make their case in present-day culture is enough, of itself, to alert us to the fallacies on which such forms of logic rely. For the most part, they avail of a series of reductio ad absurdums driven by sneers and vilification by way of addressing the deepest questions of existence. Our culture of public discourse, increasingly controlled by secular-atheists, makes this easy. But how can something be so ‘easy’ when it is actually impossible? How can the idea of God be dismissed out of hand when some of the greatest minds that have existed have decided that, at best, the question cannot be decided?

It is not possible for mankind fully to grasp its situation, but religion offers us a way of imagining at least a process of understanding, of moving towards our ultimate destiny in something akin to hoping, which is the next best thing. Unless a man moves towards his destiny, he stands still. And standing still, he dies.

As for humanism, as the contemporary philosopher John Gray (an unbeliever himself) has written, this offers nothing but Christianity minus Christ, an absurdity and ultimately an untenable proposition, because it bogs mankind down in its own mess. There is no ‘brotherhood of man’. Without the civilisation wrought by faith, there is, as recent experiences have strongly hinted, only the jungle. Justice, rights, free speech, education — all these values have their roots in religion, and no attempt to grow them in other soils has met with an enduring success.

There is no conflict between religion and life. Religion offers maps for achieving a total relationship with existence, based on scrutiny of total reality. Such endeavours are a vital element of an authentic human experience. The hope faith offers is therefore not merely a matter of plausibility, but is, far more urgently, a matter of necessity. Without it we wouldn’t be here, or human by any understanding we currently have. We would be stooped, empty creatures waiting for nothing.

Religion, properly understood, is not organisations or their rules, but the truth about the human heart, mine and yours. Increasingly, most people in modern cultures experience difficulty in accessing this fundamental understanding of themselves because the initial entry available from culture, which needs must be achieved through language, has been booby-trapped by an ideological war waged on the one hand by a militant faction too ‘modern’ and ‘clever’ to give any credence to the idea that man is fundamentally religious, and on the other by certain among those calling themselves religious-minded, who have reduced the question of God to sentimentalism and fuelled what is called secularism by holding faith up as a mere moral shield against the world. Between these two warring sides we must find the true essence of our humanity.

For a society to decide on the balance of probabilities that God does not exist, and to place this belief at the core of itself, is to leave the greater number of its citizens with no possibility of contemplating Pascal’s wager with clear heads, and therefore of maintaining a freedom of choice over the full span of a lifetime. A society that cleaves, culturally speaking, to a belief in God offers its citizens the choice represented by Pascal’s coin spun at the end of that infinite distance. Citizens can choose to believe or disbelieve, and of course, following Pascal’s logic, might be moved by reason to believe rather than not. But a society that seeks to remove from public view the God hypothesis and the hope it represents, is seeking in effect to rig the game so that the most reasonable approach — by Pascal’s irrefutable logic — is made to appear unreasonable, elevating the more unreasonable position above it.

These conditions have made it inevitable that a de facto unbelief would become the default response of our cultures. But far worse is that this loss of faith has been converted from an attitude of pessimism and fear of disappointment to a contingent certitude, by which it is as though we have resolved to continue as if God does not exist. Having called ‘tails’ on Pascal’s wager, our societies become more and more determined to demonstrate their independence of any authority higher than man. Thus, for believers and non- believers the consequences are virtually identical, since all the collective affairs of human beings are now conducted as if God, even if He exists, has nothing to do with us. For non-believers this appears to raise no immediate issues. For believers it means that God is converted into a kind of ‘bonus’: His existence, for those who manage to cleave to the idea, adds a gracing aspect to reality, but has ceased to be central. It is at most a consolation. And, more and more, our consciousness of this element of reality, being something that we must keep to ourselves, intermittently slips our immediate attention and becomes increasingly a slightly embarrassing secret. Worst of all, God’s place on the throne of reality is taken by mere men with notions of themselves.

In my country, Ireland, this is pretty much the way it goes. Some people state clearly that they do not believe. Most believers tick the box marked ‘Catholic’ and pay lip-service to the idea of belief. But most of us, most of the time, continue as if we don’t take the idea of God’s existence half as seriously as atheists take his non-existence. Somehow, even professed believers have virtually all come to disport themselves as if the things we do every day can be conducted without reference to a creator, as if it has been decided that God won't notice that we've left him out of our everyday reckoning and will be content with occasional wheedling or flattering words at the weekend. 

Hence, for various reasons, we have arrived at a set of answers to the great questions that resides in a strange form of doublethink. For those who don’t believe, it’s straightforward: They merely sneer and scoff from inside their positivistic bubbles. For believers, it’s been a matter of privatising their beliefs, and behaving in everyday life as though the questions headed ‘God et cetera.’ could be moved, for public purposes, into a no-man’s-land between fact and fiction — not quite ‘true’ in the way the Book of Kells is ‘true’, but not ready to be jettisoned just yet.

It should be obvious, even to the most obtuse, that this endeavour is doomed, and not because God may be a hyper-sensitive being whose feelings are easily hurt. It is doomed because God is not merely a Supreme Being — if that is something He can ‘merely’ be — but more importantly because, even if (at the very worst) only imaginatively, God is a vital element of man’s fundamental architecture, and this way of proceeding therefore denies both our own structure and the construction and nature of reality.

Series concluded