The Case for God (40 page)
Authors: Karen Armstrong
Paley’s image was attractive at a time when the Industrial Revolution had inspired a new interest in machinery. It made the idea of God as “easy” as Newton believed that it should be: it was not difficult to understand; it gave a clear, rational explanation; and the vision of a universe operating as regularly as clockwork was a comforting antidote to the terrifying tales of the French Revolution. Throughout the nineteenth century,
Natural Theology
was required reading for Cambridge undergraduates and was accepted as normative by leading British and American scientists for over fifty years. The young Charles Darwin (1809–82) found it deeply persuasive.
But it did not please everybody. The Romantic movement had already started to rebel against Enlightenment rationalism. The English poet, mystic, and engraver William Blake (1757–1827) believed that human beings had been damaged during the Age of Reason. Even religion had gone over to the side of a science that alienated people from nature and from themselves. Newtonian science had been exploited by the establishment, who used it to support a social hierarchy that suppressed the “lower orders,” and in Blake’s poetry Newton, albeit unfairly, became a symbol of the oppression, aggressive capitalism, industrialization, and exploitation of the modern state.
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The true prophet of the industrial age was the poet, not the scientist. He alone could recall human beings to values that had been lost during
the scientific age, which had tried to master and control the whole of reality:
Calling the lapsed Soul
And weeping in the evening dew
That might controll
The starry pole
And fallen, fallen light renew.
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The Enlightenment had created a God of “fearful symmetry,” like the Tyger, remote from the world in “distant deeps and skies.”
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The God of Newton must undergo a
kenosis
, return to earth, die a symbolic death in the person of Jesus,
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and become one with humanity.
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In 1812, the revolutionary young aristocrat Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was expelled from University College, Oxford, for writing an atheistic tract, but “The Necessity of Atheism” simply argued that God was not a necessary consequence of the material world. Shelley did not want to get rid of the divine altogether. Like his older contemporary William Wordsworth (1770–1850), he had a strong sense of a “Spirit,” an “unseen Power” that was integral to nature and inherent in all its forms.
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Unlike the philosophes, the Romantics were not averse to the mysterious and indefinable. Nature was not an object to be tested, manipulated, and dominated but should be approached with reverence as a source of revelation. Far from being inactive, the material world was imbued with a spiritual power that could instruct and guide us.
Since childhood, Wordsworth had been aware of a “Spirit” in nature. He was careful not to call it “God” because it was quite different from the God of the natural scientists and theologians; it was rather
A presence that disturbs me with the
joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
,
And the round ocean and the living air
,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things.
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Always concerned with accuracy of expression, Wordsworth deliberately called this presence “something,” a word often used as a substitute for exact definition. He refused to give it a name, because it did not fit any familiar category. It bore little resemblance to the arid God of the scientists that had retreated from nature but was strongly reminiscent of the immanent force of being that people in the ancient world had experienced within themselves and in animals, plants, rocks, and trees.
The Romantic poets revived a spirituality that had been submerged in the scientific age. By approaching nature in a different way, they had recovered a sense of its numinous mystery. Wordsworth was wary of the “meddling intellect” that “murders to dissect,” pulling reality apart in its rigorous analysis. Unlike the scientists and rationalists, the poet did not seek to master nature but to acquire a “wise passiveness” and “a heart that watches and receives.”
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He could then hear the silently imparted lessons that had been impressed upon him by the streams, mountains, and groves of the Lake District during his infancy.
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Since reaching adulthood, both Wordsworth and Shelley had felt estranged from this living presence; the receptive, listening attitude had been educated out of them. But by assiduously cultivating this “wise passiveness,” Wordsworth had recovered an insight that was not dissimilar to that achieved by yogins and mystics. It was a
blessed mood
,
In which the burthen of the mystery
,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood
,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony and the deep power of joy
,
We see into the life of things
.
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Like some of the philosophes, Wordsworth was fascinated by the workings of the human mind; he understood that the mind deeply
affected our perception of the external world but was convinced that this was a two-way process. The external world silently informed our mental processes; the human psyche was receptive as well as creative, “working but in alliance with the works which it beholds.”
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Wordsworth’s younger contemporary John Keats (1795–1821) used the term “Negative Capability” to describe the
ekstatic
attitude that was essential to poetic insight. It occurred “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
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Instead of seeking to control the world by aggressive reasoning, Keats was ready to plunge into the dark night of unknowing: “I am however young writing at random— straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness— without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion.”
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He claimed gleefully that he had no opinions at all, because he had no self. A poet, he believed, was “the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity.”
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True poetry had no time for “the egotistical sublime,”
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which forced itself on the reader:
We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hands in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.—How beautiful are the retired flowers! how they would lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out “admire me I am a violet! dote on me I am a primrose!”
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Where the philosophes had been wary of the imagination, Keats saw it as a sacred faculty that brought new truth into the world: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their Sublime creative of essential Beauty.”
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The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who was greatly influenced by the Romantic movement, was also in retreat from Newtonian religion. He too sought a presence in “the mind of man.” In
On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers
(1799),
he argued that the religious quest should not begin with an analysis of the cosmos but in the depths of the psyche.
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A religion of this kind would not be an alienating force but involved with what was “highest and dearest” to us.
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God was to be found in the “depths of human nature,” in “the ground of its actions and thought.”
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The essence of religion lay in the feeling of “absolute dependence” that was fundamental to human experience.
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This did not mean abject servility toward a distant, externalized God. Crucial aspects of our lives—our parentage, genetic inheritance, and the time and manner of our death—were entirely beyond our control. We experienced life, therefore, as “given,” something that we received. This “dependence” was not merely something that had been implanted by God; it
was
God, the source and “whence” of our being.
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Yet this theology was somewhat reductive: for Schleiermacher, the human being had become the center, origin, and goal of the religious quest. Instead of being the ultimate explanation of the universe, God was a necessary consequence of human nature, a device that enabled us to understand ourselves.
The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770— 1831) remained fully committed to the Enlightenment ideal of objective knowledge but would have agreed with Blake that the externalized God must lose its lonely isolation and immerse itself in mundane reality. Human beings had thoughts and aspirations that exceeded their rational grasp, and they had traditionally expressed these in the mythos of religion. But it was now possible to reformulate these philosophically. In
The Phenomenology of Mind
(1807), Hegel argued that the ultimate reality, which he called
Geist
(“Spirit” or “Mind”), was not
a
being but “the inner being of the world, that which essentially is.”
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It was, therefore, being itself. Hegel developed a philosophical vision that recalled Jewish Kabbalah. It was a mistake to imagine that God was outside our world, an addition to our experience. Spirit was inextricably involved with the natural and human worlds and could achieve fulfillment only in finite reality. This, Hegel believed, was the real meaning of the Christian doctrine of incarnation. Conversely, it was only when human beings denied the alienating idea of a separate, externalized God that they would discover the divinity inherent in their very nature, because the universal Spirit was most fully realized in the human mind.
Hegel’s vision articulated the optimistic, forward-thrusting spirit of modernity. There could be no harking back to the past. Human beings were engaged in a dialectical process in which they ceaselessly cast aside ideas that had once been sacred and incontrovertible. Every state of being brings forth its opposite; these opposites clash, are integrated, and create a new synthesis. Then the whole process begins again. The world was thus continuously re-creating itself. The structures of knowledge were not fixed but were simply stages in the unfolding of a final, absolute truth. Hegel’s dialectic expressed the modern compulsion to discard recent orthodoxy. Religion, he believed, was one of those phases that human beings would leave behind as they progressed toward their ultimate fulfillment. In what with hindsight we can see to be a sinister move, Hegel identified the alienating religion that we had to reject with Judaism. Apparently unaware of the similarity of his philosophy to the Kabbalah, he blamed the Jewish people for transforming the immanent Spirit into a tyrannical external God that had estranged men and women from their own nature. In a way that would become habitual in the modern critique of faith, he had presented a distorted picture of “religion” as a foil for his own ideas, selecting one strand of a complex tradition and arguing that it represented the whole.
Even though Hegel stressed the relentlessly progressive movement of reality, he, like the Romantic poets, had actually recast older ideas in a modern form. As modernization proceeded, Western people were about to enter a world that was at once enthralling and disturbing. To keep pace with these fundamental changes, they had been forced to change their religion, their methods of education, and the social and political structures of their society. As they struggled to adapt to their radically altered world, they had abandoned traditional attitudes that seemed, however, to be embedded in the structure of humanity. As the Enlightenment proper drew to an end, some of these were beginning to resurface. Poets, philosophers, and theologians were urging people to recover a more receptive attitude to life. They were questioning the modern dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural and countering the distant Newtonian God with the image of an immanent Spirit. They had revived the idea of mystery. Condorcet, Hume, and Kant had suggested that unknowing was an inescapable part of our response to the world. The Age of Reason
was not over, however. Only an elite group of intellectuals had been able to participate in the Enlightenment proper. But a religious movement was about to bring many of its basic assumptions into the mainstream so that they would become essential to the Western outlook.
Atheism