In preparation for the 2007 Theological Conversation, here is the fourth of several accessible (hopefully) summaries and reflections on the various reading for the theological conference.
On Religion: Chapter 5: On Religion-Without Religion
Summary/reflections by Rick Power.
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In describing “religion without religion,” Caputo’s starting point is that “there is a fundamentally religious quality to human experience itself.” One can be religious as an adherent of any of the historic religious systems or of no religion at all. Caputo’s essay on religion, therefore, “is also an essay on being human.”
RELIGIOUS TRUTH/TRUE RELIGION
These are opposed terms: religious truth exists in the several religions, each of which are “irreducible repositories of their distinctive ethical practices and religious narratives,” while none of these particular religious traditions can lay claim to being the “one true religion.” Religious truth is true in a different way than scientific “truths” are true; therefore, there can be no one true religion any more than there can be one true language or one true culture. Religious truth is truth without knowledge in an epistemologically rigorous sense; so, it is belief without certainty.
Paul says in I Cor. 8, “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” Love trumps knowledge, which is at its best when it concedes what it doesn’t know. The faithful of any religion should accept that their faith is the historical shape that the love of God has assumed for them. There are many ways to know and love God and they are all true. We must be aware of the historical contingency of the language, symbols and formulations of our particular approach to God.
Caputo wishes to return to the medieval sense of vera religio—true religion as the virtue of being genuinely religious, genuinely or truly loving toward God. God is greater than religion. Religion in its institutional forms is deconstructible—the love of God is not. Religion is to the love of God as a raft is to the ocean. A raft is a human artifact, constructed in the hope of navigating a boundless sea. Contrary to what has been claimed, God does not show a preference for one particular style of raft over another. We must renounce exclusivity and avoid the trap of claiming a privileged divine revelation. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” (I John 4:16) “Anyone, anywhere, anytime. Period!”
The proper approach to religious truth is not a propositional attitude; rather, truth calls for action—doing something to make truth happen. We are called to “do the truth.” If the name of God is a deed, then loving God means getting something done or letting something impossible get done in us. But doing the truth should not be confused with misguided attempts to impose one’s faith on others. Confusing religious truth with Knowledge can (as history testifies) move human beings to enforce the truth through violence.
THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE
In the face of the endlessly varied forms of religion, faith is fragile and tenuous. But on an even more basic and primordial level, the love of God is haunted by a specter of emptiness, nothingness—“an anonymous and loveless force in things.” Is there anyone or anything out there? Will all our words and strivings come to nothing? Should we not simply stare bravely into the abyss with Stoic (or Nietzschean) resignation?
The religious sense of life takes shape against this backdrop of the tragic. The tragic sense of life keeps the religious sense honest and blocks the triumphalism and self-enclosure of fundamentalism. Though Caputo cannot make the specter go away, he does not allow it to have the last word. This is because, first, the tragic view suffers from a “phallic romanticism,” a kind of macho heroic hopelessness that enjoys cursing the darkness. But, second, and more tellingly, the tragic sense of life comes up short in the sense of Augustine’s facere veritatem, doing or making the truth. The tragic view would call innocent both the impersonal destructive forces of nature and the malice of the human heart—each are seen just a part of the way cosmic forces play themselves out. This leaves no basis for valuing altruism above genocide other than some kind of aesthetic sensibility. So, in Caputo’s view, the tragic sense of life is inauthentic.
Nevertheless, there is no cognitively definitive way to decide between the tragic and religious senses of life. We do not find the religious without the tragic (unless the tragic has been violently suppressed). “Faith is faith in the face of the facelessness of the anonymous”—not in the denial of the tragic.
THE FAITH OF A POST-MODERN
“God is love,” as the religious centerpiece of Caputo’s presentation, cuts both ways. The phrase can be taken to mean that when we love anything it is really God whom we love. Or, it can be turned around to say that love itself is a divine force. Both of these are attempts to unmask what is “really real.” The pre-modern approach to unmasking says that love is really God (Augustine); the modern approach says that God is really love (secularizing reason). But post-modern faith announces an end to the projects of unmasking, of seeking the really real. We’re left with undecidability, with the passion of non-knowing—truth without knowledge.
The holy undecidability between God and love, God and truth (or justice, or beauty) is where faith takes place. Undecidability is the reason faith is faith and not Knowledge. With Augustine, Caputo confesses that we do not know who we are . . . and that is who we are. We are not thereby left with nothing; we are left with our passions—of non-knowing, for God and of our love for God.
We do not know what we believe or to whom we are praying. Though we can all quote prayers and creeds to describe the content of our beliefs, these creedal statements are trying to give propositional form to a living faith and a radically different form of truth. But the undecidability, the endless translatability and substitutability of names like “God” and “love” must remain open. Undecidability protects faith and prayers from closure and allows faith to be faith indeed.
Though the question of love and faith resists one big final answer, it demands a response in the form of action—not a formula to recite, but a deed to do. Prayer, too, in its many forms, is a way of doing the truth. Each form of religion and prayer is true, though none has absolute or transhistorical credentials. Each is a historical how, not a transhistorical what. God is everywhere and dwells among everyone. “Everyone who loves is born of God.”
AXIOMS OF A RELIGION WITHOUT RELIGION
Following Augustine’s and Bonaventure’s “journey of the mind toward God,” Caputo proposes three stages of post-modern existence or three ascending axioms of a religion without religion. 1) “I do not know who I am or whether I believe in God.” This is too cognitivist and not passionate enough. Here, undecidability runs too close to complacency and indecision. 2) “I do not know whether what I believe in is God or not.” This is moving in the right direction, but still not passionate enough; it continues to think of life as an epistemic problem to be solved—a determining of what rather than a doing of how. 3) “What do I love when I love my God?” (or, Caputo would revise, “How do I love . . .”) This is moving out passionately in love, though the question of who or what we love remains undecided and undecidable.
The withdrawal of God is not intended to give rise to guessing games about what is going on behind a great cosmic curtain. God’s withdrawal is a matter of justice—of God’s deflecting our approach from God to the neighbor. Is justice then another name for God? Or is God another name for justice? This kind of question is not only undecidable (as we have said), it is also pointless. “If I serve the neighbor in the name of God, or if I serve the neighbor in the name of justice, what difference does it make? If the name of God is a how, not a what, then the name of God is effective even when it is not used.”
The meaning of God is enacted. It is enacted equally but differently in the quests of, for example, Gandhi, Jesus and Chief Joseph. It is enacted in an openness to the possibilities and impossibilities of the future. The meaning of God is enacted in the multiple movements of love. “In the translatability of the love of God, it is we who are to be translated, transformed, and carried over into action, carried off by the movements of love, carried away by the transcendence that this name names and commands.”
Comments
Are all rafts equally fit for ocean navigation? Allowing that all religions, as human artifacts, are deconstructible, how might we evaluate some as more appropriate than others for conveying human beings toward the love of God? Caputo makes clear he wouldn’t trust a fundamentalist raft to get him across a pond. So, he is not accepting of just any religious impulse. I think he would look at all religions or religious atheisms as territories inhabited by both saints and slackers—those who are true lovers of God and others who are pretenders (and a lot of folks struggling in the spaces between). How to tell the true from the false? “Salt is my criterion of truth, and love is my criterion of salt.” (p. 3)
So, Caputo, drawing upon the vocabulary of scripture and Augustine, lifts up love as the trans-historical and trans-cultural criterion of religious truth. His meta-theory of religion employs a criterion from within a particular religious tradition to evaluate religion (or religiousness or spirituality) in general. If this is the case, it leaves us hoping for a clearer understanding of just what this “love” looks like from one cultural context to another. But Caputo isn’t applying the criterion in this way. He says the movements of love are “too multiple, too polyvalent, too irreducible, too uncontainable to identify, define or determine.” (p. 140) In other words, love, as understood in the Christian tradition, is not the criterion; rather, “love” is the Christian placeholder for “passion for the impossible,” that kernel of human experience Caputo calls religious.
This clears away a lot of fog. For, as Caputo acknowledges, many approaches to God or Reality do not use the language of love to describe their experience. For such persons, “the love of God means to learn how to dance or swim, to learn how to join in the cosmic play, to move with its rhythms, and to understand that we are each of us of no special import other than to play our part in the cosmic ballet.” (p. 139-40) This would stretch the concept of love so thin that it no longer resembled the Christian notion of sacrificial self-giving for the good of another. The meaning of love is indeterminate, as is the meaning of the God who is love. This indeterminacy, or “undecidability,” means there is no starting point that is better than another. The biblical and Augustinian vocabularies of love and justice work well, as would Tibetan Buddhist “compassion,” Jewish “righteousness,” Confucian “benevolence,” or any other historically and culturally appropriate way of expressing the passion for the impossible.
We should not think Caputo is offering a Christian theory of religiousness. What he has given us (and it is a gift) is a sympathetic understanding of human religiousness explained by means of Christian language and narratives.
Thanks for the summary. The more I read these summaries, the more I am concerned that the "gift" Caputo offers us is nothing other than a way of remolding the Kantian project and hence, refeuling liberal protestantism.
To put it as starkly as possible: the notion by which Caputo judges whether other religious systems are acceptible rafts is simply on whether they cohere with his white, educated, postmodern, late capitalist culture. In other words, it's an update of Kant's project, with exactly the same consequences. Watch how this works:
Exactly like the modern project, Caputo removes God from any particular revelation, hides God behind epistemological blockades, and sets up this abstract God as the God that concerns all humans. Our lives with this God are then explained using undefined notions parasitic on Christian terms: faith, hope, and love are detached from the Christian narrative and then used to speak something quite distinct from orthodoxy (e.g., Caputo on faith). If Christians adopt this view, then Christianity functions just like it did in liberal protestantism (remember 19th century German theology).
Like modernity, all of this is done in order to advocate / advance / justify a white cultural project as THE human project. Caputo still possesses a criterion for judgment--those rafts that aren't good rafts--and this criterion is simply his project (which is specific to a certain form of white, post-modern, educated, late capitalistic culture).
Thus, those people who don't fit his mold (I suspect that many of the churches in Africa would not fit) are viewed as somehow departing from authentic human living. In other words, just as with Kant (as well as Hegel and Heidegger), authentic humanity is defined in terms of its conformity to a specific western cultural project: whiteness is universalized. A significant difference is that culturally, unlike Kant, we don't want to say that the other races will simply self-destruct, we now say--and are polite enough to mask that this is what we are saying: they all have the potentiality of being white (i.e., multi-culturalism). But whiteness is still the horizon--the goal. And whiteness is still the means to the goal. Look at how this plays out in his division of human history.
*For this analysis of Kant, see J. Kameron Carter's forthcoming book, Race and Theology. The charge against Hegel and Heidegger is brought out in Kelley's Racializing Jesus.*
Posted by: Tim McGee | March 29, 2007 at 09:45 AM
I would like to hear if Caputo addresses where Jesus says, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." Where its about personhood and not some universal spirit...however it is that Caputo frames or unframes the universal spirit thing. Of course if he does address it, I'd like to hear how...???
Posted by: Jason Hesiak | April 03, 2007 at 02:25 PM