I\u2019m going through Peter Rollins \u201cAtheism for Lent\u201d 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 \u2013 or, if not, one could contemplate Paul\u2019s adage of \u201ctest everything, hold to what is good\u201d (1 Thess. 5:21) and think that if these challenges succeed, what you had was not good…<\/p>\n
We have reached week four, which is labelled \u201cMasters of Suspicion\u201d, and the first reading is from Ludwig Feuerbach. He is sometimes, but not always, included in the standard list of \u201cMasters or Suspicion\u201d which includes Freud, Marx and Nietzsche.<\/p>\n
Feuerbach writes: \u201cMan first unconsciously and involuntarily creates God in his own image, and after this God (Religion) consciously and voluntarily creates man in his own image\u201d. Somewhat earlier, Voltaire rather more famously wrote \u201cIn the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.\u201d I\u2019m fairly confident he had his tongue stuck in his cheek for the first part of the sentence…<\/p>\n
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)<\/sup> \u2013 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.<\/p>\n Curiously, that does not seem to be used as an argument for the nonexistence of psychoanalysts…<\/p>\n Equally, we have a nasty habit of falling in love not with other people but with our concept of other people \u2013 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<\/em> \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 and he was clearly a case of the \u201creligious but not spiritual\u201d.<\/p>\n Is any of this a critique of the mystics? Well, I suppose that saying that mysticism is an irrelevant aspect of religion is<\/em> a form of critique. However, personally I don\u2019t think mysticism is<\/em> 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\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n So my first reaction to the Masters of Suspicion is to say, as Rowan Williams said of Richard Dawkins (paraphrased) \u201cI have no problem with him: the God he doesn\u2019t believe in, I don\u2019t believe in either\u201d. You can\u2019t present a mystic with an argument showing why God cannot exist, when the mystic (from his or her point of view) experiences<\/em><\/strong> God on a daily basis.<\/p>\n There are, however, a couple of critiques which are perhaps implicit from Feuerbach\u2019s writing (and Freud and Marx) which need to be brought out.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cChrist died as a payment for our sins and you need to accept that\u201d 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\u2019\u00eatre was to punish (or at least exclude) us for not being perfect. We might ask \u201cwhat good is the mystic\u2019s perspective if the predominant God-concept is so different from theirs?\u201d Of course, it isn\u2019t 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\u2019t already had some mystical experience.(ii)<\/sup><\/p>\n Secondly, to quote Feuerbach again, \u201cGod 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\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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