In her last post, Val cited a sentence from Lumen Fidei, speaking of religious faith: “It is impossible to believe on our own.” Indeed, faith is ecclesial; it is held together, in community. Yet in a certain sense it is also impossible to believe anything on our own, at all.
Val quotes St. John Paul:
[T]here are in the life of a human being many more truths which are simply believed than truths which are acquired by way of personal verification. Who, for instance, could assess critically the countless scientific findings upon which modern life is based? Who could personally examine the flow of information which comes day after day from all parts of the world and which is generally accepted as true?
Taken in our social context, this uncontroversial-seeming assertion cuts at least two ways. While it can be understood as a rejoinder against a radical empiricism skeptical of anything not susceptible to material verification, it seems even more to address a certain conspiratorial mindset, a suspicion of anything proposed on the basis of training, expertise, or consensus, much less lawful authority. This brings us to a deeper point, more directly pertinent to the beliefs by which we live, day by day.
In his late work, the American philosopher Donald Davidson increasingly emphasized the importance of the related concepts of coherence and triangulation in the adoption and formulation of beliefs. Coherence means that our beliefs exist, not like the unrelated 0-1 states in a computer, but contextualized within a network of other beliefs; triangulation entails that this network of beliefs extends such that it covers not only our own beliefs, but to some degree the beliefs of others, as well. In practical terms, the person whose beliefs are incoherent is irrational; the person who takes no cognizance of the beliefs of others in formulating his own is a crank.
I believe that much of the simultaneous decline in religious practice and in social trust which we have seen in recent years follows from the democratization (and debasement) of the profoundly flawed Enlightenment anthropology. Ethician Virginia Held summarized Enlightenment man as “the free, rational individual acting in his own self-interest.” As Held points out, none of us can actually live out that fantasy. We begin our lives as helpless, aphasic infants. We spend many subsequent years profoundly dependent on others choosing to act in our interest, often to the detriment of their own. Thereafter, the most privileged among us may enjoy (or endure) a few years of Enlightenment-man independence, before we take on responsibilities for the interests of others, generally voluntarily. If we live long enough, these responsibilities will stabilize, just about the time when bodily infirmity will sharply limit our own freedom, as (let us hope) others once more choose to act in our interest.
This figure of Enlightenment man, though an illusion, has spread in the common mind as the conditions for its cultivation and propagation have improved. Our self-understanding is marked by familial and social fragmentation, the advent of near-universal literacy without a concomitant formation in enculturated learning and critical thinking, and above all by the valorization of an individualism which once was available to few outside of the class in which it was generated (middle-aged male European intellectuals of adequate to lavish means without marriages or families), but is now the lot, chosen or unchosen, of nearly all of us.
About twelve years ago, Ross Douthat (whom I have mentioned here before) published a book entitled Bad Religion: How we became a Nation of Heretics. My intention here is not to engage with his book – some of which I find valuable, some of which seems to me misguided – but rather to commend him specifically for the subtitle, which concisely expresses the culture I have been describing.
Anyone may deviate from orthodoxy, intentionally or unintentionally – it was almost a commonplace for many theologians of the past, the brilliant and the saintly included among them, to add to their writings a caveat retracting in advance any propositions contrary to the teachings of the Church. I would even go so far as to say (and, mind you, if I am in any way contradicting the teachings of the Church… well, you know the drill, but I am entirely serious in including this parenthesis) that someone adhering with reluctance and in extremity of conscience to a heterodox teaching because they, like Luther, kann nicht anders (in English, cannot do otherwise) – I can’t quite bring myself to call that person a heretic. No, to my mind the heretic is that individual who is unwilling to believe.
Now wait, you may ask: Aren’t you talking about an agnostic, or perhaps an atheist?
Bear with me. I took the trouble of examining the ecclesial and social aspects of belief, of belief as faith and belief as socially embedded conviction. In that aspect, the agnostic is someone (at least temporarily) incapable of believing; the atheist is someone who disbelieves, which in the sense of socially embedded conviction is of course itself a belief. The heretic is unwilling to believe, inasmuch as he is obstinately committed to believing alone – whether in solitude, at the head of a mob, or embedded in the pack. He does his own research. He will not be taken in. He will not accept anything on the authority of another, except insofar as that other is invested with authority by his own choice – which renders him impervious to theological reasoning, which requires docility and studious application to be understood and grasped in the first place, while paradoxically leaving him uniquely vulnerable to conspiracists, frauds, charlatans, and yes, false mystics. He wants to be the sole curator and arbiter of his own potential for belief – and thus he cannot believe.
All of the abovementioned contemporary conditions foster the heretic – the nomad-monad without stable familial, communal, or social bonds; the literate ignoramus bonded to the omnipresent stream of social media flowing through his smartphone; the prideful individualist who believes it a credit to his views and opinions that they are self-generated, perhaps even “original”.
And this is why the heretic cannot believe: because, in the argot of the Horatio Alger-stamped American self-made man myth, he believes in himself. I recall this passage, from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:
Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, “That man will get on; he believes in himself.” And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written “Hanwell.” [for Americans, read ‘Bellevue’-PJC] I said to him, “Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.” He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. “Yes, there are,” I retorted, “and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has ‘Hanwell’ written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus.”
In fact, I suspect (again, with the requisite caveat; see above) that some good part of why you cannot believe by yourself is because, in attempting to do so, you will end up merely believing in yourself - and perhaps even praying to yourself. For example: The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity – greedy, dishonest, adulterous – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.’ [Emphasis mine!]
And this extends to social trust as well; for all the betrayals the American public has endured over the years (and they are not few), a key factor in the loss of social trust in this particular country (after all, haven’t Swedes been betrayed as well?) is the refusal to live by belief, the need to do it all for ourselves. We cannot trust each other; we cannot trust anything. Meanwhile, the ecosystem collapses; cultures fragment and tribalize; world powers realign themselves for war. And what do we do in response? We do our own research.
I am not sure that orthodoxy, even if it is possible now, would be enough (caveat #3, with extreme prejudice). I think we need humility, and repentance, and that orthodoxy will grow naturally therefrom. An orthodoxy of propositions alone will not save us; it will not even save us from becoming heretics. We need to find God, and we need to find each other. We need family, community, ecclesia. We need to remember how to live by belief.