What is this faith you keep talking about, and where did it go? All this about the transience, the cheapness, the ugliness of the contemporary world may be true, but the decline of faith began long before that. God died, man killed him— back in the 19th century, in an era to which your insatiable nostalgia still applies, when grandmother’s initials were stamped on the flatware and families lived in ancestral homes and the light of gas lamps hardly dimmed the stars.
The faith that I long for is not necessarily faith in God. I want to say that it is faith in the world, and that it outlasted faith in God. But this phrase, faith in the world, is at best vague and impressionistic. The following fanciful account may make it more precise, or at least more rich in associations.
Faith is a more fundamental concept than God. I want to say: the idea of God is a way of expressing faith. First there is the impression that the world is oozing with meaning and with spirit: the trees, the wind, the water, plants, animals, other people. For the wild animal, I suppose, this impression is so complete and untroubled that it requires no expression in anything beyond itself. But ancient man and woman must put it in different terms: there is, for them, no doubt that the world is imbued with meaning and spirit (which is why they do not speak of the concept of “faith”— for it has not yet become possible to doubt); but their faith has enough distance to begin to express itself fantastically, aesthetically. It is no longer enough simply to encounter the world oozing with meaning; they must invent stories and deities to describe and define this meaning; the void between them and reality fills up with expressions of reality.
The rise of monotheism, then, is a further crisis: a further separation has appeared; the world is no longer its own justification; it must be justified and explained and given meaning by a plan that is formulated outside of it. (The Bible, of course, contains multiple parables of this development: the fall from Eden, Cain and Abel, etc.) God is now no longer merely an expression of the meaning inherent in the world but something posited outside of and beyond the world; and his role becomes increasingly explanatory rather than merely expressive—but this does not happen right away. It seems to me wrong to understand Genesis 1 (and other ancient creation myths) as explanatory. To demand an explanation is to express doubt; an explanation is an account that stands behind the thing itself, that supports it from without, as if it could not stand up on its own. But this is not the spirit of Genesis 1, and this is precisely why it is so powerful. A person who is so troubled, so alienated from things as to ask “Why is there light? Why is the day separated from the night?” would not be satisfied with the account given in Genesis 1. We cannot understand how ancient peoples could believe in such fanciful creation myths, because we take these myths as offering explanations of the material world; and indeed, explanations is what we need, because we are in a state of separation and cannot simply accept the world on its own terms; but ancient peoples were not in this state, and their myths were not explanations but expressions of a feeling for the world.
But in the middle ages, theology becomes distinctly explanatory: that is, driven by a sense that the world on its own does not make sense, that it requires external backing. Already in late antiquity the early church fathers are engaged in theodicy: explaining how a good god could allow such an evil world; and this means that a question had already arisen as to the goodness or badness of the world. It is not that the ancients affirmed that the world is good; such an affirmation is possible only when the question has already been raised; to ask such a question is to cast doubt on the whole of reality, to say: “Why this and not a different world?”
All five of Aquinas’s proofs of God are distinctly explanatory with all the associations I attach to that word. In the “Primary Cause” argument, for example, Aquinas observes that each event has a cause, so there is a chain of causality, working backwards through time; but an event cannot be its own cause, so how can this chain begin? That is, the world on its own presents a problem; it does not make sense; it requires something external to make it all fit together. The other four proofs work in exactly the same manner.
If there is a decline here, it is not a decline in religious thought. What we see here is religion adapting as it had to to new circumstances. The world was (and is) imbued with meaning and spirit; but it was no longer sufficient simply to express that condition, for that condition was in doubt and needed justification; so religion rightly adapted to provide that. The basic perception was that the world had meaning, was filled with spirit; the action of a judging, planning, rational deity had become necessary to make sense of that condition. But the loss was considerable: explanation had come at the expense of expression; if religion now provided a reason to believe that the world was imbued with meaning and spirit, it no longer expressed that notion; it was vividly expressive, but what it expressed was its own system and not the world; in order to justify the world it had been forced to turn away from world. In this way, the separation between things and spirit was further advanced.
Humanity was then forced to choose between the world and religion; of course, it chose the world, because that was where the wellspring of spirit and meaning actually lay. Thus the flowering of humanism. But the conditions of life continued to alienate us from the world; our anxieties over its reality, meaning, justification continued to grow….
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I am in no way capable of writing an account of the history of faith and religion. The above is probably wrong in a dozen ways, and I don’t know how to continue it. That is, anyhow, beside the point. My purpose was to express what I mean by “faith in the world;” I doubt very much that I have done so; I suspect I have only greatly confused the issue.
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