That old time religion

For some reason, my friends have been talking to me about God lately.  One, in talking about some writing she’s doing, said she wanted to capture the “baggage of God” in her work.  Another has been thinking about the odd path he’s taken in belief, sometimes seeing God vanish entirely while the need to worship, to be a part of a communion, growing no weaker and if anything being more of a support to him as he gets older.  My ex-wife and I had a brief but powerful conversation about how or whether to introduce concepts of the divine to our son – we’re both technically in violation of our pre-marriage pledge to raise him in the Church, but that isn’t really a motivation, it’s just that we’re wondering what it is we should do or shouldn’t do.  Also her parents have asked if I’ve accepted Christ as my savior and groveled for forgiveness for leaving her; again, not a motivation, but part of the dialogue.  Reading lately has brought me back to Max Weber’s sociology of religion, and the Charles Taylor work is dissecting the path way from religion as source of morality and meaning to its redefinition in personalized pathways instead of state-like institutions or outright rejection in the modernist era.  And of course I’m couch surfing at my parents’ house, former clerics both, with my father’s best friend from the monastery coming for a visit next month.

I can’t say comparative religion as a subject of intellectual inquiry engages me in any great way; the question of whether there is something divine in the universe does, but religions, to me, are the human outward expression of specific responses to that question, embodying to a greater or lesser extent broader questions of morality, ethics, and justice, but ultimately just human constructs like any other “big construct” of humanity like the state, or city.  I’m interested in all of those things, but specific cultural responses to it in the form of Catholicism or Islam or Buddhism or what have you are more like having a particular affinity to one genre of art or another.  I like Dutch landscapes and expressionist realism and don’t particularly engage with sculpture or watercolors, while any other person will have a different set of preferences.  That’s sort of interesting and definitely makes for good conversation, but I’m more interested in what both of us find interesting in art and beauty per se, rather than what drives our idiosyncratic likes or dislikes.  I do find it interesting, though, that the nature of God question keeps popping up amongst people whose opinion I really value, whom I often think are closer to a deep understanding of the operations of the world than I am.

I stopped going to Church actively not long after I moved to San Francisco; my working hours (up at 3am, home at 6pm, weekends devoted to sleeping as much as possible) weren’t particularly compatible with normal church hours, and besides, my time at university had weakened the visceral appeal of the Catholicism of my youth.  Going to Mass was a centering act every week – whether at Holy Cross Church in South Portland or with my dad celebrating it in the living room – and the repetition, the ritual, the incantations served for a young boy to make the divine somehow comprehensible physically, in the spectacle of Mass and the spoken word.  The action of “The Word” was, really, probably what I took away from it more than anything: the power of words in structured form, honed over centuries into distilled essences, a kind of institutional poetry that both exposed and kept hidden the workings of a mysterious complexity that could never be fully grasped.  The older I got, though – the more mathematics and science I absorbed, the more critical a thinker I became – and the words lost their power even if the mystery remained.  My parents, moreover, focused on the elements of the Catholic Christian tradition that reveled in the joy of Christ’s message – salvation, love, the transformative nature of love into salvation without even us needing to act, the grace of that gift and its simplicity and perfection – and downplayed largely the darker sides, where doctrine and arguments about the nature of the divine became reasons for schism and dissonance.  In that, I’m now aware, I wasn’t so much raised in religion – although the outward forms of post-Vatican II liturgy were the canvas against which all this was painted – as I was raised in a specific modality of the divine, where the essence of the divine was love and the outward symbols given to us by the divine were all just markers for us, finite beings that we are, to be able to touch an infinite which was beyond our capacity to understand directly.

That notion fit perfectly in with my learnings in mathematics and physics, which were precocious from an early age.  I was grew up during a fantastic time in particular in cosmology and subatomic physics, where theoretical physicists were playing with radical new ideas in potential dimensionality and the quantum horizons which may exist in our world, but couldn’t yet test them with gravity wave observatories or the Hadron supercollider, and so the theories just played in the mindspace, implications being imagined and new implications explored without knowing what might take shape in the lab or in future observations.  Those theoretical worlds fit easily in with a moral world in which our notion of a relationship to other beings and to, potentially, a universal presence (whether God or something else) was similarly complex and similarly subject to ideas which were as yet resistent to proof.  We still live in that age, mind you – the discoveries and observations now being made possible only continue to remind us that we have no freaking clue how the universe really exists and why we seem to live in a stable slice of it, and as we test out radical new social arrangements and experience the growing pains of the continuing media and communications revolution, we remain in a land of uncertainty as to how we can find meaning in the world.  But being there as a child (teenager, university student), it became reassuring to know that what was really in common was just radical complexity: complexity beyond our ability to articulate reliably convincing explanations, even if we seem compelled to try.

Part of being taught to think critically involved being taught to question everything – ideally in a respectful manner, although I’ve struggled with that part of the lesson – and in both a moral or divine world and in an empirical and scientific world which were just endless, fathomless pools of complexity always out of our direct grasp, the questioning impulse seemed ideal.  Just keep asking, came the encouragement from my parents and my best teachers.  I was a scourge of bad teachers, although they usually just scored my exams, ignored my questions, and moved on; I probably was worse on the teachers who had been exhausted by bureaucracy and complacent students and helicopter parents, because I was asking questions that they were interested in but which they had been beaten down for asking earlier in their careers.  They just wanted to get through the day, get home, and watch the Red Sox, and here I am asking why we had to read 19th century British epic poetry when it was clear they didn’t like it, thought it wasn’t relevant, and wanted to move on to talk about Faulkner anyway.  Couldn’t we just skip to the Faulkner?

In any event, faced with a complex world, I found a home in a notion of the divine as actually being complexity itself.  It wasn’t so much that God or a universal deity or even other representations of such concepts existed or not – in fact even the question of “their” existence was absurd.  We could see easily enough that as humans, we have limits to our capacity to understand relative to the potential complexity that the universe can contain; beyond the boundaries of our understanding – which, don’t get me wrong, seemed pretty immense and unrestrictive versus our current expression of those capabilities – lay something, we could be sure, and in that unreachable something lay that which to us, as finite beings, would always seem divine.  Maybe it is divine, in the sense that it is sentient and has its own morality and expression of the good and of truth that we experience via a focused, lower dimensional expression of it in the world that we can exist in (much as the extra dimensions required in string theory are opaque to us as beings existing in baryonic matter); but just as easily it’s something beyond our ability to anthropomorphise or deify.  I found it personally easy to just revel in the fact that that complexity gave me fractals – and that fractal representations in biology gives us willow trees, and ferns, and clouds, and waves.  All of those things were lovely to be a part of – and by “lovely” I mean both aesthetically pleasing and transcendant in their expressions of love.  The structure of our DNA, combined in our mother’s wombs for the first time and then released to the world and new chemical and physical stimuli, new data and intellectual stimuli, and with programming that enabled original, imaginative, creative thought and emotional expression both, was just simply complex beyond any human capacity to model or simulate or recreate or understand except through blundering and incomplete and sometimes embarrassingly simple analogy.  I found that I just simply enjoyed it, again, as lovely.

I still do.  But it is a solitary kind of worship, to the extent that it’s worship at all.  More likely it’s just a form of acknowledging the unknowable with my sense of awe, and the practice of seeing it with joy and with love, instead of with fear and trembling.  I don’t feel the fear that, I think, inspires most religious activity.  Fear of God shows up prominently in the English language Catholic liturgy, and being forced to read enough Protestant theology in English literature and philosophy classes, it certainly plays a prominent role in most Christian theory.  Non-western religions and religious philosophy also usually speaks to the terror of facing that which we cannot understand in this world; the approaches to dealing with the fear vary more widely than in the West, from a radical release of the self to the unknowable, to conceptualizations of infinity that bind us and our actions to it in causal ways.  Nevertheless, it seems to me that essentially most expressions of a religious instinct seem to face superhuman complexity as a thing which is to be feared, religion being the grouped human response to that fear.

I sense that that is what my friend was getting to in speaking of the baggage of God.  She grew up in Quebec a good generation after the anticlerial, hyperliberal quiet revolution of the sixties and seventies, and so has only whiffs of the French-Canadian Catholic core of her grandparents.  She’s trying to picture how the world would be viewed by a comprehensible next step in human evolution – not from the standpoint of an unknowably complex superbeing, but from the standpoint of creatures who might comprehend more of the world than we can but are still finite.  Part of her theory is that such a being or society of beings would be truly released from the fear of the divine, they would lose the baggage of God.  It would be a communal sense that fear is unnecessary, perhaps, one arrived at collectively as well as in solitary form, indeed jumping past the fear would be what would be necessary to collectively embrace a different perspective on that which we cannot understand simply because we are finite.

That makes me think about my friends who are members of congregations, who seek others in their pursuit of this question.  Some of those are devout in their faith, and view their faith as the means to transcend a fear of the divine – my parents are very much in that camp.  Others see in community a way of being linked with others who are subject to the same sense of fear, but by being together, can obtain the strength to face it with equanimity at the very least.  As a human being who craves understanding, on a certain level I envy the sociability that comes with communion in this way.  I wish to be understood, but how do I find others who feel de-institutionalized joy and wonder and love in the complexity of the world?  If I were afraid of it, I’d just find the congregation that made me feel welcome, or whose expression of fear was closest to that of my own.  But being confronted with what I can only describe as transcendant and indescribable beauty and love, I’m sort of left to revel alone.

And then there are the artists.

The counterpoint of art to religion in the modern world came up in reading Taylor on the plane to Seattle last week.  He makes a fundamental link between the dissolution of traditional religion in the West from 1750 to 1950 and the rise of what he calls the notion of art as the modern source of epiphany, the new font of moral inspiration.  The unfolding process of the Enlightenment discredited religion as a source of transcendence for us as individuals, but didn’t eliminate the human need to gain access to windows to the transcendant.  Art came to replace religion as art itself lost its direct religious purpose in the post-Reformation West, as art patrons – many of whom were of that deeply cynical conservative tendency that is seen in cultural moments of late stage decadence – looked to artists to continue to capture a quasi-religious sense of meaning, of moral truth, through visual, lyrical and musical expression, only now freed from the explicit need to reference a Christian ontology.  The rise of a highly individualized notion of the self reinforced this, with artists embracing the idea that an aesthetic window to the divine had validity that an ontological rationality of God had lost.  The result was first representational art which sought to pierce through simplistic realities and show the soul of a subject, whether in portraiture and figurative art or in landscape and still lives, and then later the idea that decoupling representation into abstract, performance, or other contemporary art forms such as photography and hyperrealism could lead to an even more direct expression of “truth” and its ambiguity.

In the last few years I’ve met a surprising number of artists, given that I’m a banker from Maine without obvious appeal to artists, and the ones who seem to thrive are the ones who embrace this role.  I’ve seen some who do so without intellectualizing it, and those seem to produce what I’d call the best art – whether it is technically skilled or not, it’s the art that is most compelling – while the ones who intellectualize it often are more skillful but their art work isn’t nearly as impactful.  One’s vision may be arrested for a moment by a brushstroke, or the precision of form, or the intricacy of color involved (not so much the latter for me, admittedly, as I’m color blind), but the work as a whole often only barely hangs together or does so awkwardly.  Those who overintellectualize it appear cute, at least to my eyes, although the accessibility of their usually simplistic messages seems to appeal to the modern art buyer – the heavy handed didactism of Ai Weiwei comes to mind – but then again, the modern art buyer isn’t buying transcendence, they are buying an object with human exchange value.

In speaking to my artist friends, though, I’m struck by how the teaching of art involves almost no discussion of their role as moral exemplars in today’s world.  If anything, they are grounded in the realities of the marketplace, the need to think of their work as intellectual property as much as a creation unto itself.  Art for art’s sake remains a cherished ideal but it has been severely tempered by the self-reference of our modern world, despite the reflex we have when confronted with non-verbal expressions of beauty or of meaning to move beyond a simply human self-defining world and into a zone of transcendant meaning.  Moreover, most artists that I know – with a few rare exceptions – are products of the non-religious, detatched generation of post-industrial liberal capitalism.  They come from suburbs, from good prep schools and good universities, or at least from good commercial families who gave them a sense of material well-being and thus released them to explore an aesthetic career.  In some cases the parents are a little wary of their artist children, but even in those cases, at a certain basic level, those parents existed in and helped expand a worldview of materialism and ruthlessly stripped down humanism that enabled the emergence of the modern artist in his or her role to emerge triumphant.

Meanwhile, my friends who aren’t artists – probably a slight majority as I do a quick mental headcount – are either extraordinarily deep in their thinking about art, or view art as being decorative and interesting but they don’t particularly engage in a conversation about aesthetics within it.  And that division, oddly, is, respectively, between those who have no particular religious grounding or instinct, and those who do.  The irreligous – who have left solidly behind them a notion of an externally defined and deducible trust – look to art with wonderment and they do explore its morality in a kind of quest mode.  Those with a religious background, even if they have left its active practice or role as foundational faith behind, co-exist with art as things of beauty, but one of many paths towards beauty only, and the moral nature of art comes more from representational issues – “was it really necessary to have that much pig’s blood on her bed?” – than from any moral statement that may be possible or may have been intended in a given work.

One thinks of the history of aesthetics in the last 150 years or so, though, and one can observe that Taylor is on to something: with religiously defined sources of morality and ways of dealing with superhuman complexity largely discredited, and furthermore, with purely humanistic sociological visions of explaining the universe falling one by one into the reductio ad absurdam they exhibit in practice (think Marxism, fascism, liberal democratic capitalism), art has emerged as the prominent space in which moralities can be expressed and experimented upon, perhaps only rivaled by the experimentation which occurs implicitly in modern mass media.  I think, though, that’s a telling counterpoint: neither media theorists nor art and art criticism explore the moral expressions of either realm, at least not particularly often.  Some do; the midcentury American art world had Delmore Schwartz and Dwight MacDonald and the public intellectuals of the New York Review of Books first couple of decades, and mass media had MacLuhan in North America and the semioticians in Italy.  But they are easy to name partially because there have been so few of them.  And there are, seemingly, fewer of them today, at least in the sources I’ve been able to get a hold of.

Part of this is the increasing reluctance to speak of morality at all; morality is associated with things like sexual practice, or ecological theory and environmental responsibility, or with the “morality” of pleasure in drugs or the like.  Those are incredibly narrow, almost tactical expressions of morality, though, and they aren’t what I’m talking about here.  I’m talking about the underpinnings for thinking that there is an order to the universe, whether an order experienced socially as humans, physically in the empirically experienced universe, or transcendently in our spirit or sense of the divine.  Again, I come back to my personal view here: the universe is patently more complex than we can understand, we experience downstream representations of a kind of order in what we are able to understand, yet any more foundational order is beyond us and so we are forced to live in a state of unknowing, and can choose to either embrace it with love and with joy or protect ourselves and shield ourselves from the existentially overwhelming sense of incomprehension in fear.  Morality, or moral philosophy, is the way in which we explore the infinite complexity of our lives with the finite tools of our being as sentient, mortal humans, and explore the practical and theoretical results that emerge from our differential understanding.

Engaging representational, performance, musical, and lyrical art in the moral philosophical conversation is, really, essential: not all of what we can express with respect to our moral lives is verbal, and engaging our sensual capabilities alongside our minds – and our hearts – is a correct expansion.  But what Taylor seems to see, and I agree with him, is a growing tendency to replace an intellectual dialogue of morality with a purely expressive, materialistic artistic or aesthetic expression of it, instead of expanding the expressive power of the concept of morality with a greater range of tools for potentially accessing meaning.  We replace, in other words, one kind of imbalanced rationality – one in which concepts of morality are limited to The Word, words, and rigidly institutionalized expressions thereof – with another kind of imbalanced aestheticism, one in which concepts of morality are limited to The Artwork, The Design, and the Neitzchean ubermensch who creates it.  Dialogic philosophy, meanwhile, has fallen back to a kind of engineering discussion, decoupling from any attempt at the transcendent and focusing merely on the dialectical and rational consideration of society as it is found.

As I consider this, though, the push to view art as the emergent pathway to moral expression feels like just another kind of religion – that is to say, it’s another way of confronting complexity, this time as expressed by the aesthetic expression of art, through collectively sharing a fear.  We can’t face the morality we potentially face in examining ourselves rationally, the world of art seems to imply, so we will hide behind art, whether representational or abstract, whether material in canvas and paint and stone or ineffable in performance or music or poetry, we get to avoid the structure and challenge of intellectual meaning.  Via art criticism, mass media, and the circular marketplace of the art market and the design branding of commodities, this new aesthetic religion captures alternatives much in the way that older religions coopted and owned the aesthetic by holding artists in bondage to the creation of religious works.

Both instincts seem misplaced to me, however.  Again, why can’t we just skip to the Faulkner?  There’s no need for us to linger too long on Longfellow, or divert ourselves to Shelley for a bit of ethereal whimsy, even if the meter is easy to parse.

There are two other individuals I’ve met in the past few years, in vastly different circumstances, which approach the problem differently.  Both are artistic, without being artists; both are deeply intellectual, and think carefully about moral questions, without asking for answers in rationality.  Neither one of them expresses a moral philosophy explicitly, but both work in the world and demonstrate their morality in a combination of dialogue, action, and the blended act of creating beauty in the world.  And – this I think is key – both act as individuals.  They’ve been in relationships and out of them, have communities which they are a part of but with whom they do not identify, and yet can’t be called solitary in the way I’ve felt in my own journey of trying to do, roughly, the same.  Both, in their way, helped me come together more completely as a person, to the point where I’m able to write these essays without expecting to find or wanting to find meaning, or truth, or a more correct manner of expression.  They’ve avoided the extremes of aesthetics and of constructive rationality.  They also both seem to live in comfort that their journeys are enough, that expressing what can only be described as joy and love will demonstrate enough to accelerate the creation of a third way.

I’m with them.

Interestingly, both “new” art and old time evangelicals use the same techniques to bring people into the fold.  They put up a tent – the art gallery for one, typically in a rundown neighborhood where rent is cheap and existential terror rampant; an actual revival tent for the other, typically in a rundown town where house prices are low and alienation runs deep – and they pass out handbills and promise refreshments and a view into the new world.  Once you have your glass of bad chardonnay, or weak lemonade, and once you’ve listened to the curator or the artiste or hear the choir or the preacher – then you see the revealed truth, and all you do is see and experience the faith.  They both tap into loneliness, to the sense that the world as experienced lacks sense, and reveal a world of moral certainty with a dose of aesthetics to make it go down easier.

Bridging away from fear, though, jumping onto the glass bridge of love and wonder that is the third way of those couple of others that I’ve encountered, doesn’t involve pamphlets or punch and pie.  It just means taking a turn, leaving the line.  I’m scared of heights and I’m still not all that comfortable taking each step across this transparent bridge on the way to transcendence, but I’m getting better at focusing forward.  The old time religion, and its new fangled replacement, haven’t lost all of their appeal – who doesn’t like a bit of incense, a bit of repeated and comforting chant; who doesn’t like a painting by Turner or Seargent or Klimt that can absorb you out of yourself – but they’re still there in the background as I focus on simply the colors of my apartment, the hugs I give my son, the walks I take with my dog, and the companionship I show my friends.

In the meantime… I’m at a neighborhood pub, eating possibly the best pork Milanese I’ve ever had, perfectly pan fried and instead of a salad, topped with wilted marinated bok choi and a pickled mustard seed vinegarette, wiling away a cool breezy Seattle spring day until my son gets out of his after school golf class.  The birthday party Saturday was a roaring success, a perfect day, 14 children and a lot of parents, mini golf a fine amalgam of chaos and laughter and steady movement from one hole to the next, culminating in cake and a tired son and an evening of rapturous joy playing a new game involving train travel in Europe.  Last night was an extended family dinner at the 60s era steakhouse, canned shrimp cocktail starter and grilled garlic bread and the boy jumping from one chair to the next, hug to hug.  We played “volleyball” with a balloon in the tiny apartment for half an hour before bed, listening to the ESPN Sunday baseball game of the week, laughing and jumping around, the balloon whipping around the slow-moving fan and bopping us on the head.  He fell asleep in record time, and so did I.  Today I’m solitary again, but I’m not alone.