On Religion

John Caputo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351771092
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie de la religion

In a thoroughly updated second edition of his popular and engaging book, John D. Caputo revisits Augustine's ancient question "what do I love when I love my God?" and presses it into service in the post-modern world. Accessible but without compromising the big ideas, he raises the question of what religion means today in the face of widespread religious violence after 9/11, of spreading secularization, the dazzling discoveries of contemporary cosmology, and the eerie advent of the "post-human" world. All along sculpting the idea of a post-modern, post-secular "religion without religion, " which turns on the "mystical element" of our lives, he wonders what the future of traditional religion will be, or whether it even has one.

On Religion will fascinate anyone interested in the challenges religion faces in the contemporary world. It offers an ideal starting point from which undergraduate and postgraduate students, teachers, and lecturers can explore religion and philosophy today.

The love of God

One

RELIGION IS FOR LOVERS

Any book entitled On Religion must begin by breaking the bad news to the reader that its subject matter does not exist. “Religion,” in the singular, as just one thing, is nowhere to be found; it is too maddeningly polyvalent and too uncontainably diverse for us to fit it all under one roof. There are Western religions, Eastern religions, ancient religions, indigenous religions, modern religions, monotheistic, polytheistic, and even slightly atheistic religions; too many to count, too many to master, in too many languages to learn. I am not complaining or making excuses. Indeed, the uncontainable diversity of what we call in Christian Latin “religion” is itself a great religious truth and a marker of the uncontainability of what religion is all about. I am just trying to get started and I have to start somewhere. I am not trying to begin at the Absolute Beginning. I have no head for that. I am just trying to get something on the table.

By religion, therefore, let me stipulate, I mean something simple, open-ended, and old-fashioned, namely, the love of God. But the expression “love of God” needs some work. Of itself it tends to be a little vacuous and even slightly sanctimonious. To put it technically, it lacks teeth. So the question we need to ask ourselves is the one Augustine puts to himself in the Confessions, “what do I love when I love God?,” or “what do I love when I love You, my God?,” as he also put it, or, running these two Augustinian formulations together, “what do I love when I love my God?”. Augustine, I should say at the start, will be my hero throughout these pages, although with a certain post-modern and sometimes unorthodox twist that might at times have provoked his episcopal wrath (he was a bishop, with a bishop’s distaste for unorthodoxy).

I love this question in no small part because it assumes that anybody worth their salt loves God. If you do not love God, what good are you? You are too caught up in the meanness of self-love and self-gratification to be worth a tinker’s damn. Your soul soars only with a spike in the Dow-Jones Industrial average; your heart leaps only at the prospect of a new tax break. The Devil take you. He already has. Religion is for lovers, for men and women of passion, for real people with a passion for something other than taking profits, people who believe in something, who hope like mad in something, who love something with a love that surpasses understanding. Faith, hope, and love, and of these three the best is love, according to a famous apostle (1 Cor. 13:13). But what do they love? What do I love when I love my God? That is their question. That is my question.

The scriptural citations are from The Holy Bible: The New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1989). Augustine’s Confessions is available in numerous translations, but I like the translation by Frank Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1970), a consultation of which will reveal the heavy use I have been making of Book X in particular. Garry Wills, Saint Augustine (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999) is as good a general introduction to St. Augustine as one would ever want.

The opposite of a religious person is a loveless person. “Whoever does not love does not know God” (1 John 4:8). Notice that I am not saying a “secular” person. That is because I am out to waylay the usual distinction between religious and secular in the name of what I shall call the “post-secular” or a “religion without religion.” I include a lot of supposedly secular people in religion—this is one of my unorthodox tendencies that I hope to slip by the bishop’s notice—even as I think a lot of supposedly religious people should look around for another line of work. A lot of supposedly secular people love something madly, while a lot of supposedly religious people love nothing more than getting their own way and bending others to their own will (“in the name of God”). To be sure, there are earnestly religious people in all the great religions, but there are religiously earnest people outside religion, who merit our attention. Some people can be deeply and abidingly “religious” with or without theology, with or without the religions. Religion may be found with or without religion. That is my thesis.

Thus, the real opposite of a religious person is a selfish and pusillanimous curmudgeon, a loveless lout who knows no higher pleasure than the contemplation of his own visage, a mediocre fellow who does not have the energy to love anything except his mutual funds. That is what the philosophers call an abusive definition, but I do not feel any great compunction about that, because the people I am abusing deserve it. They do not love God. What is worse than that? What can you say on their behalf? If you know, you should write your own book and defend them. This book is for those who love God, that is, for people who are worth their salt. The New Testament is peppered with references to salt (Matt. 5:13; Mark 9:50; Col. 4:6). Salt is my criterion of truth, and love is my criterion of salt.

But if my definition of irreligion, of the opposite of religion, is abusive, my definition of religion, the “love of God,” sounds slightly smarmy and pietistic. The love of God is my north star, but it only provides me with a starting point, not a finish, a first word, not a last. Everything depends on the follow through, on facing up to this beautiful and provocative Augustinian question, “what do I love when I love my God?”. Love is the measure. Every historical and social structure, everything created, generated, made, formed, or forged in time—and what is not?—should be measured against the love of God. Even religion—especially religion—insofar as religion takes historical and institutional form, must be tested to see how loyal it is to itself, to its religious vocation, which is the love of God. But the love of God itself, if ever we could find such a beautiful and precious jewel, is beyond criticism. Of the love of God itself I will hear no criticism; I will plug my ears.

Let us speak then of love. What does it mean to “love” something? If a man asks a woman (I am happy to embrace other permutations of this formula) “do you love me?” and if, after a long and awkward pause and considerable deliberation, she replies with wrinkled brow, “well, up to a certain point, under certain conditions, to a certain extent,” then we can be sure that whatever it is she feels for this poor fellow it is not love and this relationship is not going to work out. For if love is the measure, the only measure of love is love without measure (Augustine again). One of the ideas behind “love” is that it represents a giving without holding back, an “unconditional” commitment, which marks love with a certain excess. Physicians counsel us to eat and exercise in measured moderation and not to overdo either. But there is no merit in loving moderately, up to a certain point, just so far, all the while watching out for number one (which is, alas, what we are often advised by a decadent psychology). If a woman divorces a man because he turned out to be a failure in his profession and just did not measure up to the salary expectations she had for him when they married, if she complains that he did not live up to his end of the “bargain,” well, that is not the sort of till-death-us-do-part, unconditional commitment that is built into marital love and the marital vow. Love is not a bargain, but unconditional giving; it is not an investment, but a commitment come what may. Lovers are people who exceed their duty, who look around for ways to do more than is required of them. If you love your job, you don’t just do the minimum that is required; you do more. If you love your children, what would you not do for them? If a wife asks a husband to do her a favor, and he declines on the grounds that he is really not duty bound by the strict terms of the marriage contract to do it, that marriage is all over except for the paper work. Rather than rigorously defending their rights, lovers readily put themselves in the wrong and take the blame for the sake of preserving their love. Love, St. Paul said in his stunning hymn to love, is patient, kind, not puffed up or boastful; it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Cor. 13). A world without love is a world governed by rigid contracts and inexorable duties, a world in which—God forbid!—the lawyers run everything. The mark of really loving someone or something is unconditionality and excess, engagement and commitment, fire and passion. That excess also explains why the worst things can be done in the name of love and why religion, as we will see below, is never far from violence. Its opposite is a mediocre fellow, neither hot nor cold, moderate to the point of mediocrity. Not worth saving. No salt.

Then what about “God”? What about loving God? One of my main arguments in this essay is that “love” and “God” go together, for “God is love,” as the New Testament tells us:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. . . . God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them.

1 John 4:7–8, 16.

That is my Archimedean point. But notice how easily saying “God is love” slides over into saying “love is God.” This slippage is provocative and it provides us with an exceedingly important and productive ambiguity, opening up a kind of endless substitutability and translatability between “love” and “God” that I shall also be exploring as we go along (and raising the eyebrow of a bishop or two along the way). As love is the first name of God, “of God” is also the best name we have for those who love. To love God is to love something deeply and unconditionally. But it is also true—there is no stopping this slippage or reversal—that to love deeply and unconditionally is to be born of God, to love God, for the name of God is the name of love, the name of what we love. That is why I will hear no criticism of this idea and why those who do not love God are loveless louts. That is also why the central and most pressing question is not whether I love God or whether there is a God to love, but “what do I love when I love my God?”. Love is given, and the emphasis in the question falls on the “what.”

But where do we start—I am always trying to get started—if we want to get an idea of what we mean by “loving God”? An old and daunting problem, but my advice is as follows. When the Virgin Mary was told by the Angel Gabriel that she would conceive and bring forth a child, the first thing that Mary said, according to the gospel of Luke, was what any expectant virgin mother might be expected to say: “What are you talking about? I guarantee you, angel or not, that’s impossible” (loosely translated). To which Gabriel responded, with characteristic archangelic composure, don’t worry, “nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). The second thing Mary said is what made her famous: “here I am,” “fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum,” in short, “yes, oui-oui” (in Franco-Aramaic). I will come back later on to the “yes,” which I regard as an important and deeply religious notion and also closely linked to the idea of God, but for the moment I am interested in Luke’s linking of “God” with “nothing is impossible.” With God, all things are possible, very amazing things, even things that are, I am tempted to say, “unbelievable” (which are the things that most require belief), and even, God help us, “impossible” things. After Jesus told the story that it would be harder for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom of God than it would be for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, he added, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible” (Mark 10:27). So to get a start on the idea of loving God, let us take a closer look at what is for me, following Luke and Mark, a closely connected idea, “the impossible.”

THE IMPOSSIBLE

To explain what I mean by “the impossible” I first need to explain what I mean by the “possible,” and to explain the possible I need to talk about the “future,” which is the domain of the possible. We say that we want the future to be “bright,” “promising,” “open.” The force of the future is to prevent the present from closing in on us, from closing us up. The future pries open the present by promising us the possibility of something new, the chance of something different, something that will transform the present into something else. Let us make a distinction here. There is a relatively foreseeable future, the future for which we are planning, the future on which we are all hard at work, the future we are trying to provide for when we save for our retirement or when a corporate team sets up a long-term plan. Let us call that the “future present,” by which I mean the future of the present, the future to which the present is tending, the momentum of the present into a future that we can more or less see coming. I have no intention of lightly dismissing this future. Institutional long-term plans, retirement plans, life insurance policies, plans for the future education of our children, well-grounded projections of the future of the planet threatened by climate change, all such things are very serious, and it is foolish and irresponsible to proceed without them. But there is another future, another thought of the future, a relation to another future, which is the future that is unforeseeable, that will take us by surprise, that will come like a thief in the night (1 Thess. 5:2) and shatter the comfortable horizons of expectation that surround the present. Let us call this the “absolute future.” When it comes to the relative future, the future present, we have “reasonable expectations,” “cautious optimism,” “bulls and bears,” but as regards the absolute future we must be like the lilies of the field who sow not, nor do they reap, but who are willing to go with what God provides, which also means that they are ready for anything. For the relative future we need a good mind, a decent computer, and horse sense, those three; for the absolute future, we need hope, faith, and love, these three.

With the “absolute” future we are pushed to the limits of the possible, fully extended, at our wits’ end, having run up against something that is beyond us, beyond our powers and potentialities, beyond our powers of disposition, pushed to the point where only the great passions of faith and love and hope will see us through. With the “absolute future,” I maintain, we set foot for the first time on the shore of the “religious,” we enter the sphere of religious passion, and we hit upon a distinctively “religious category.” Let me clarify this. By the “religious” I do not mean some preternatural event in a Stephen King novel, or even an extraordinary visitation by a supernatural being like an angel. Of course, that is exactly what Luke’s story of the Annunciation to Mary was, but that is a function of what I call “theopoetics,” which means that religion is served up to us in great Scriptural narratives, in which we find human experience writ large, the defining features of our life magnified in moving and unforgettable stories, in brilliant figures. But having a religious sense of life is a very basic structure of our lives—it is not like worrying about being abducted by an alien—that should be placed alongside other very basic things, like having an artistic sense or political sense, experiences that belong to anyone who is worth their salt (more salt). The religious sense of life is tied up with having a future, which is something we all have, and the “absolute future” is a basic part of having a future. So instead of distinguishing “religious people,” the ones who go to church on Sunday morning, from non-religious people, the ones who stay home and read The Sunday Times, I would rather speak of the religious in people, in all of us. I take “religion” to mean the being-religious of human beings, which I put on a par with being political or being artistic. By “the religious,” I mean a basic structure of human experience and even, as I hope to show, the very thing that most constitutes human experience as experience, as something that is really happening. I do not confine religion to something confessional or sectarian, like being a Muslim or a Hindu, a Catholic or a Protestant, although I hasten to add that the great religions of the world are important and without them we would quickly lose sight of religious categories and practices, which means that we would lose something basic. And once again, we need to remind ourselves, the religious sense of life would never mean just one thing for everybody, as if it had some sort of common ahistorical, universal, transcendental structure. I try to swear off thinking like that about anything. Indeed, as we will see, what we call “religion” is very much a category constructed in modernity.

With a notion like the absolute future, we move, or we are moved, past the circle of the present and of the foreseeable future, past the manageable prospects of the present, beyond the sphere in which we have some mastery, beyond the domain of sensible possibilities that we can get our hands on, into a darker and more uncertain and unforeseeable region, into the domain of “God knows what” (literally!). Here we can at best feel our way, like a blind man with a stick, unsure and unsteady, trying to be prepared for something that will take us by surprise, which means trying to prepare for something for which we cannot be prepared. We cross over the border of rational planning methods, venturing into the sort of thing that makes corporate managers nervous, venturing out onto terra incognita. The absolute future is not much help in planning an investment strategy, where the idea is to guess the trends; nonetheless, as every fund manager eventually finds out, it belongs irreducibly to the structure of life in time. This is the sphere of the impossible, of something of whose possibility we just cannot conceive. But of course the impossible happens, which is the import of the story of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary. So it is not simply or absolutely impossible, like “p and not-p,” which would reduce it to incoherence, but what the French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls “the impossible,” meaning something whose possibility we did not and could not foresee, something that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, that has never entered into the mind of human beings (1 Cor. 2:9). So I am plainly advising us to revisit the idea of the impossible and to see our way clear to thinking the possibility of the impossible, of the impossible, of the possible as the “im-possible,” and to think of God as the “becoming possible of the impossible,” as Derrida also says.

I have analyzed the complexities of the work of Jacques Derrida, which is always in the background of this book, in a more detailed way in my The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); modesty prevents me from recommending Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997) as a lucid and lively introduction to Derrida.

The impossible is a defining religious structure—and this i...