Eyre Lines

I’m going through Peter Rollins “Atheism for Lent” course at the moment. This course brings up a set of challenges to Christianity, and the objective is to deconstruct familiar and sometimes unthought of positions; the possible outcome is a refreshed faith – or, if not, one could contemplate Paul’s adage of “test everything, hold to what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21) and think that if these challenges succeed, what you had was not good…

We have reached week four, which is labelled “Masters of Suspicion”, and the first reading is from Ludwig Feuerbach. He is sometimes, but not always, included in the standard list of “Masters or Suspicion” which includes Freud, Marx and Nietzsche.

Feuerbach writes: “Man first unconsciously and involuntarily creates God in his own image, and after this God (Religion) consciously and voluntarily creates man in his own image”. Somewhat earlier, Voltaire rather more famously wrote “In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.” I’m fairly confident he had his tongue stuck in his cheek for the first part of the sentence…

In reality, of course, both are describing a feedback loop, and at a point when the loop has been running for a very long time, it seems foolish to state axiomatically that one or the other came first. Our concepts of God form us, and we form concepts of God and so ad infinitum ⁽ⁱ⁾ – but the same is true in our interactions with other people. The psychoanalytic approach which Pete so often takes says that God is fulfilling psychological needs for us, and that we are projecting onto God, just as we do onto a psychoanalyst.

Curiously, that does not seem to be used as an argument for the nonexistence of psychoanalysts…

Equally, we have a nasty habit of falling in love not with other people but with our concept of other people – and then falling out with them when we realise they do not correspond to the concept we have of them (other people do not always try hard to conform to the image we have of them… whether God does is an open question). That does not mean that those people do not exist, merely that we do not know them as well as we think, they do not exist as we think they are – and that is a large part of what the mystics are saying in contradicting God-concepts which have grown up. They may well have grown up in much the way Feuerbach suggests.

In conscience, I cannot argue too much with the idea that the supernaturalist concept of God has historically interacted with a large percentage of believers in just this way. As Pete points out, this is what Feuerbach was talking about; he regarded the God described (or who failed to be described) by the mystics as an irrelevant sideline, not what religion was really about – and he was clearly a case of the “religious but not spiritual”.

Is any of this a critique of the mystics? Well, I suppose that saying that mysticism is an irrelevant aspect of religion is a form of critique. However, personally I don’t think mysticism is irrelevant; I think all the major religions have harboured mystics since their earliest days and most of them display some evidence that either their founders or people very early in the chain of transmission of the belief were mystics (I’m confident Jesus could be so described, as could St. Paul and the writer of the Fourth Gospel, for instance), and while they may well have not been well understood by the majority and were quite frequently persecuted (consider both Eckhart and Porete, for instance, or the Sufis within Islam), they have provided a source of life to those religions, and there might not have been any of our major religions without mystics.

So my first reaction to the Masters of Suspicion is to say, as Rowan Williams said of Richard Dawkins (paraphrased) “I have no problem with him: the God he doesn’t believe in, I don’t believe in either”. You can’t present a mystic with an argument showing why God cannot exist, when the mystic (from his or her point of view) experiences God on a daily basis.

There are, however, a couple of critiques which are perhaps implicit from Feuerbach’s writing (and Freud and Marx) which need to be brought out.

Firstly, the mystics have not been terribly successful in communicating their viewpoint to the masses or in persuading the masses that they should become mystics themselves. If they had been, we would not now see a major proportion of Christianity sold on the ideas that the gospel is equivalent to “Christ died as a payment for our sins and you need to accept that” or that religion is primarily about life after death. We would not see a predominant God-concept of a wrathful God whose primary raison d’être was to punish (or at least exclude) us for not being perfect. We might ask “what good is the mystic’s perspective if the predominant God-concept is so different from theirs?”

Of course, it isn’t an easily communicated viewpoint, given that mysticism and rational analysis are not particularly compatible with each other, and there is no widely acknowledged technique which can reliably make someone a mystic if they haven’t already had some mystical experience.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

Secondly, to quote Feuerbach again, “God is the explanation for the unexplainable which explains nothing because it explains everything without distinction — he is the night of theory, nonetheless making everything clear to the mind by removing any measure of darkness and extinguishing the light of discriminating comprehension — the not-knowing which solves all doubts by repudiating them, which knows everything because it knows nothing in particular and because all things which impress reason are nothing to religion, lose their identity and are nil in God’s eye. The night is the mother of religion”

There is an ever-present problem with the basis of human comprehension, which operates primarily by contrasting or comparing two things, when a quality is said to be universal – if it is, it offers no way of contrast with any other quality, and it is not unreasonable to say that if everything is x, then nothing is x. Mysticism is, frankly, incompatible with reductive analysis; the easiest way to terminate an incipient mystical experience is to start analysing it.

But then, it is a feature of reductive analysis that it tends to destroy the thing analysed. Once I have fully dissected a goat, it is no longer a goat, but a heap of meat, bone, hair and sinew. There is, however, something to be said for just observing the goat – and in the process, perhaps finding that it is able to traverse the face of a dam…

The unifying factor between the Masters of Suspicion seems to me to be that they think they have found the reason for religion. In other words, they have a metanarrative which they prefer to the traditional one. Feuerbach is, in essence, saying that the Mystical viewpoint is such a metanarrative.

But perhaps, just perhaps, it’s just saying “you can see things like this…”?

One other thing regarding the “everything is x so nothing is x” view; that would probably apply to pantheism, which equates God with the material universe. Most mystics are, however, panentheists, who hold that the material universe exists within God, but is not all that God is. I’m minded of the trick used in science and mathematics, where in order to examine something all-pervading, you adopt a viewpoint which is at least notionally outside the scope of the thing studied.

Are we panentheists rather than pantheists merely because we need some way of standing outside the universe? Perhaps. Does it matter?

Meh.

 

 

 

 

• ^{(i) This may be a good and sufficient reason for declaring that God is Love, despite any misgivings we may have on the subject…}
• ^{(ii) Although you can induce something at least very similar to mystical experience via the use of certain drugs or via electromagnetic stimulation, such experiences are transitory and I am not aware of any studies indicating that they can be built on in the way other mystical experience can be.}