Читать книгу A John Haught Reader - John F. Haught - Страница 9

In relating to another person, whoever it might be, but especially if it is someone I love, I may observe the following: sooner or later, the other person will do something or say something that will surprise me. It may either delight or disappoint me. But if I am to sustain my relationship with the “other,” I will have to revise my impressions of him or her. I will have to move to a deeper level of understanding the other. And, after relating to the other person on this level for a while, I will find occasion after occasion to dig still deeper. Of course, I may resist the invitation to look deeper, and perhaps for the most part I do resist it. But it takes very little experience of other persons to see that there is something beneath the surface of my impressions of them. Other people are not what they seem to be. This is, of course, a truism so obvious that it seems almost too trivial even to mention. But perhaps there is more to it than first appears. Let us dig deeper.

Not only are others not what they seem to be, but the same is true of myself. There is always more to me than is contained in my impressions of myself. My “self-image” does not exhaust what I am. I need not be an expert in depth psychology in order to validate this observation. I need only a little experience of living to be able to see its truth. Looking back a few years, or even a few months or days, I remember that I thought I knew who I was. But new experiences have reshaped my life. New questions, new feelings and moods, new dreams and fantasies, and new expectations of myself have intervened. I now know that I am not what I thought I was. I may assume at this moment that I am not exactly what I seem to be to myself or to others. Why is this so? Why are others not what they seem to be? Why am I not transparent to myself? This is a troubling question, so disturbing in fact that I usually suppress it. I cling to impressions as though they were foundational truths. I resist going deeper. Why?

Let us also take note of the fact that the natural and social worlds present superficial impressions of themselves that we must question. They too are not what they seem to be. In the case of nature the point is easily made by looking at science. Not only religion but also science thrives on the conviction that things are not what they seem to be. For example, beneath the world of common sense impressions there is a submicroscopic universe of “counterintuitive” physical occurrences that we cannot picture or even imagine. And in the galaxies beyond us there are likewise unfathomable riches of physical phenomena that, if we could understand them, would expose our world of immediate appearances and impressions as a veil of superficiality. We recoil from the abyss that lies beneath the surface of present knowledge, however, and live under the illusion that our sense impressions or our ordinary experiences of space and time are absolutely valid. And even scientists tend to cling tenaciously to their pet paradigms and models in an effort to domesticate science’s tempestuous inner voice—“things are not what they seem to be”—even after we have gone deeper and yet deeper in our understanding. The question keeps forcing itself upon us, therefore: why are things not what they seem to be? What is reality that in the case of others, myself and nature it continually evades full disclosure. Why is it that what seemed profound yesterday is today exposed as trivial, or that what impressed me as deep before appears now as rather shallow? What sort of universe are we dealing with if it does not exhaust itself in our impressions of it?

And there is also the social world of institutions, politics, economic arrangements, and their history. In this world that we share in common with others we may once again experience the shallowness of our impressions of things. Though peoples and nations can survive for years and even centuries on the assumption that their own social and cultural ideals and experiences are universally normative, sooner or later the events of history will bring about a serious challenge to this prejudice. The resistance to this revision of perspective will prove to be enormous and people will even go to war to defend the alleged finality of their culture, politics, or economics. But eventually they will have to confess: “we are not what we thought we were. Our previous self-understanding has been superficial and misguided. We must rethink what we are as a society.” And so, from a new perspective, occasionally at least, they may look back with amazement at their previous lack of sensitivity regarding their social and political life.

Let us return to our question, then: why is it that, in the case of others, myself, nature, and society, things are never quite what they seem to be? According to Paul Tillich, it is because there lies beneath their surface an infinite and inexhaustible dimension of depth. Perhaps many people would be content to call it a dimension of mystery. But this word, like the word “God” itself, has lost its meaning for many people. And so it might be useful in this context to call this dimension of inexhaustibility beneath the surface of our impressions simply the depth of existence, the depth of reality, the depth of the universe.

In his famous meditation, “The Depth of Existence,” Tillich notes that the wisdom of all ages and continents tells us about the road to that depth. What gives the great classics of philosophy, literature, and religion their authority, generation after generation, is that they are the expression of a journey toward depth undertaken by sincere and concerned individuals or peoples throughout history. The reason that they still grip us today is that we sense in them the call of a depth dimension that promises to give more substance to our lives than what we can find on the surface. They hold out the possibility to us that our own lives can be enriched and that an unexpected contentment with life can be ours if we follow them through the difficult but rewarding way to depth. Those whose lives and experiences have been imprinted in the great classics have all witnessed the same experience:

They have found that they were not what they believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their very lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth.15

What name, then, can we give to this dimension of depth?

The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth . . . is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life . . . Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth you know much about Him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you or not. He who knows about depth knows about God.16

This dimension of depth, therefore, will be the first of the five ideas in terms of which I would suggest that we think about the divine.

What is there in the experience of all of us to which the word “God” is pointing? Tillich’s answer is that “God” is a name for the dimension of depth that all of us experience to one degree or another, even if only in the mode of flight from it. We truly experience the depth even though we find it impossible to focus on it—as if it were just another object of vision or scientific investigation. Depth appears more as the horizon of our experience than as a direct object thereof. Its apparent elusiveness is quite compatible with its being the very condition of all of our experience. Perhaps, as we shall see in more detail a bit later, this observation can help us to interpret and tolerate the apparent absence of God. As the geographical horizon is unavailable to us since it recedes as we explore further, so God might be understood in part as the ultimate horizon of all of our experience, always receding, encompassing, and illuminating, but never falling within our comprehending grasp. But in thinking of the divine as the ultimate “horizon” rather than as a controllable object of experience, have we diminished our sense of its reality?

There is a fundamental dimension of human experience that has the peculiar characteristic of being too massive and, let us say it, too real, to be trivialized as a specific object capable of being placed under our comprehending gaze. It is more accurate to say that this dimension comprehends us rather than we comprehend it. We experience this dimension as real even though it is unavailable to our verificational control. In our frustration at not being able to comprehend it, we may be tempted to deny that it exists at all, but this is a futile denial. All we have to do is to recall those moments in our personal life, in our relations with others, nature, and society, when we have been rocked from the surface by something that we could not control. We may have called it “fate” or “circumstance” and we may have cursed it or repressed it. But it would be hard to deny that there was something eminently real about the experience. It is as though something much larger than ourselves, our lives, or even our period of history, swept us into its embrace, even though we may have been unwilling participants in this dislocation. We may have been tempted to think of such events as utterly impersonal and in no way as evidence of any sort of providentially divine care governing the course of our lives or of history. Taken in isolation, these experiences may have constituted for us sufficient evidence of the universe’s fundamental indifference to us.

However, there may also have been some moments, after experiencing these “earthquakes,” when we found ourselves on more solid ground than previously. The experience of “fate” was also one that led to a deeper “grounding” in reality. We may even have reached the point of being grateful that we went through such difficult straits since they turned out to be the occasion of growth and a contentment that transcends mere gratification.17 They have made us experience a new level of ourselves and reality. Such earthquakes awakened in us a courage that gave us a deeper sense of being alive. The dimension of depth, therefore, is ambiguous. It is both terrifying and deeply fulfilling. In the words of Rudolf Otto, it is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.18

The experience of depth has two faces.19 It is both abyss and ground. The dimension of depth which supports the surface of our lives initially presents itself to us as an abyss. Instinctively, we recoil from an abyss, since it seems to be unfathomable and bottomless, a void in which there are seemingly no supports. To fall into it would mean to lose ourselves. This is the first face the depth presents to us. It is an anxiety-inducing “nothingness” which seems to threaten our very being.

We might gain a more concrete sense of what this abyss means if we conjure up the specter of being utterly alone without the support of other people or of status or possessions. There is probably nothing we humans find more terrifying or try more ardently to avoid than the state of aloneness. One of the reasons for our anxiety about death is that it is an occurrence that we shall have to go through utterly alone. And so we tend to avoid the threat of death, along with other such “existential” threats as meaninglessness and guilt, since it signifies an intolerable solitariness. We bury our lives in objects, persons, and pursuits that seem to offer us a refuge from the abyss of aloneness.

What would happen, though, if we allowed ourselves, or were forced by “circumstance,” to plunge into the abyss? Again, the wisdom of those seekers of depth whose insights are buried in the classic texts of our great traditions have some encouragement for us that is worth pondering. They tell us over and over, whether in myth or direct philosophical and theological language, that there is yet another side to the depth. The depth will show itself to us not only as an abyss but also as ground. In the final analysis, the depth is ultimate support, absolute security, unrestricted love, and eternal care. Compared to this ultimate grounding of our existence, we are told, our ordinary supports are shallow, or at least inadequate. Hence there is nothing to fear in loosening our grip on these supports after all, allowing ourselves to be swept into the depths of our life. The reason we can have the courage to open ourselves to the depth, to accept our solitude, is that there is an ultimate ground to our existence, there is an ultimate companionship in our aloneness. The abyss is only one side of the experience of depth and we are tempted to think, as are some important philosophers (like Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus), that this is the only side. Most philosophers, and all of the major religious traditions, however, have insisted that the final word about the depth is “trustworthy.”20 It is, in Tillich’s words, the “ground of our being.”21

It is this ground of courage, testified to even by serious atheistic thinkers, that helps us, in part, to indicate what we mean by God. The reader may have experienced occasions in his or her own life when, facing a seemingly impossible challenge, an unanticipated influx of strength made it possible to go on. In such experiences, one may have felt a surge of vitality that is absent in less urgent moments. What “God” means may, in part at least, be hinted at when we ask for the ultimate whence of this courage and vitality.22

Religion

The wisdom of the great traditions teaches us that the experience of depth often occurs after or within the experience of despair, disgrace, impoverishment, loss, suffering, and especially the threat of death. Tillich summarizes this wisdom when he says “there can be no depth without the way to depth. Truth without the way to truth is dead.”23 This “way” involves not only the experience of pain and loss but also joy and ecstasy. It is only because we sense somehow that in the depth lies joy that we have the incentive to abandon ourselves to the abyss. We surmise that beneath the surface there is something that does not disappoint and that can bring a kind of contentment that runs deeper and endures longer than the usual forms of consolation we seek. This sense gives rise to religion. Religion is the passionate search for depth and for an ultimately solid ground to support our existence.

In simplest terms, then, religion may be understood as the search for depth. To those who think that religion’s only function is to provide answers, this may seem to be an unusual and even unacceptable way of understanding religion. However, once we acknowledge that the dimension of depth is inexhaustible, we must also confess that no present state of understanding can ever adequately represent this dimension. There is always a “more” that goes infinitely beyond what we have already grasped. Our relationship to this transcendent depth can never be one of mastery or possession. Indeed, to attempt such an absorption of the infinite horizon of our existence into the scope of our knowledge is repudiated by all the explicitly religious traditions as a deviation from authentic life. Instead, the appropriate attitude to take with respect to the depth is that of waiting and searching.

But religion is more than a search. For religion is also a confident naming of the dimension of depth. It is the jubilant enunciation of a sense that the depth has broken through into our lives in one way or another. Religion is the symbolic (and at times ritualistic) expression of the shared experience of this depth that has made itself transparent to human consciousness. In order for us to undertake the adventurous quest which we have called religion, we already need at least some sense of what we are seeking. Otherwise, we would not be aroused to seek it at all. Somehow or other, the depth has already insinuated itself into our lives at the same time that it has elusively receded into the distance. One way in which it makes itself provisionally known to us is to embody itself in events, persons, or aspects of nature and history. These then function as symbols that inspire us to trust and that motivate us to look deeper. Religion, therefore, is a surrender to those symbols and stories that give us the courage to seek further.

This view of religious existence recognizes that “there can be no depth without the way to depth.”24 The fulfillment of our deepest longings cannot occur in one instantaneous act of consciousness, though perhaps a radical decision to live irreversibly in trustful waiting may be one that takes place in a single moment. The experience of God as depth involves our embarking on a way, a journey, a pilgrimage with the full awareness that the end of it may lie an infinite distance ahead. Radical waiting is, of all possible responses to our life, the most difficult, the most arduous, the most ungratifying. But it is also, as Tillich says, the most realistic and the most fulfilling, the one that takes the depth most seriously. And it is not as though by this waiting and searching we are deprived of strength to endure joyfully in the present.

In summary, if God is the depth of existence, then religion is the confident search for this depth as well as the celebration of those events, persons, or occasions where the depth has broken through the surface of our lives in an exceptional way. The test of whether we are religious or not is simply whether we are concerned with this dimension of depth. And it is the degree of seriousness whereby we ask ultimate questions, and not the degree of doctrinal certitude, that determines whether we are surrendering to the transcendent depth of our lives—that is, to God.

14. The following text is an excerpt. Previously published in Haught, What is God?, 11–24. Reprinted with permission.

15. Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations, 56.

16. Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations, 57.

17. Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations, 464–67.

18. See Otto, Idea of the Holy.

19. See Tillich, Systematic Theology.

20. Ogden, Reality of God, 34–38.

21. Tillich, Courage to Be, 156.

22. Wilde, De Profundis, 18.

23. Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations, 55.

24. See Tillich, Courage to Be.