The existential community

I

I don’t think it’s a particularly original observation that western modernity’s exaltation of individual autonomy has done us much harm. Of course, modern individualism has brought us a lot of good, that I hope not to take for granted. For all that many of us, and perhaps especially the contributors to this blog, might express frustration at certain aspects of our society’s makeup, we are nonetheless children of our time. So the lens through which I am viewing the problems of secular autonomy is very much one soaked in the thought-world of secularism itself. That ought to be borne in mind in what follows: I am critiquing western individualism, but I am myself a westerner, and I can’t escape that.

That paradox notwithstanding, there remain certain intractable problems that are nigh-on impossible to ignore. To begin with, there is liberalism itself, with the myth of neutrality, of a clearly-defined public domain of truth, outside of which the individual has the power – perhaps even the duty – to determine their own conception of truth, moral value, and the good. It’s not hard to see why this vision of autonomy doesn’t work. There is no such thing as neutrality; the state must define itself along moral grounds, and the polis cannot collectively aim at having no collective aim. One reason the Christian church in the west has been so blind-sided by so-called ‘progressive’ ethics and political ambitions is, I would suggest, that we have implicitly bought into these myths of secularism: that the state can somehow sit apart from the pursuit of the good, and that Christian beliefs ought not to inform politics. We need Christianity in the polis not because a state religion is a virtue we should pursue, but because it is a fact of political society we cannot ignore. All societies worship; it is best that we worshipped the true God.

Then of course there are the social and communal side-effects of enshrining of autonomy as our ultimate good. We tend to view relationships, and particularly those of a romantic kind, as the chief exercise of our autonomy. This seems to be behind the ‘love is love’ mantra, or the articulation of issues of sexual or gender ethics in terms of the right to self-expression, or even the right to exist. But surely the whole point of commitment is the relinquishing of autonomy; the binding of one’s desires, actions and affections to another, not just as an exercise of my heart in the present but as an imperative binding me for the future. That is what covenant is; and, as the covenant-making God is the same God who is Love, it makes sense that that is what love truly looks like. It is steadfast. But if relationships, family, and community flow primarily from our ethic of self-expression and autonomy, then at best they are only what I choose them to be today. They are as fickle as the human heart. And that, as is all too well known, is something we see in the breakdown of family life in our society, and the further but related breakdown of the networks of bonds and obligations that tie us to the particular place, time, and community that make us ‘us’, and that allow us to rest in the givenness of life.

II

This autonomophilia – for want of a better word – is guilty of such painful social and societal ramifications as these. There are all too tangible horizons of its influence, in the degradation of the patterns and communities that bound and delineated us and our social order in times gone by. But its profoundest effect is existential, something perhaps best seen as being incarnate in these more immediate ramifications. It is this horizon which I wish to explore in what follows.

Bernard of Chartres once wrote that we stand on the shoulders of giants, words which in the English-speaking world are more famous on the lips of Isaac Newton. It’s an idea we can fairly readily understand: most of us are aware – though I think it remains underemphasised – that our worldview is shaped by various influences, some of which go back a long way. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor makes the point that it’s not all that difficult to teach undergraduates the rubrics of Descartes’ philosophical system. Much harder to explain and to understand, though, is the Aristotelian philosophy, and especially metaphysics, that it largely replaced. But when Descartes first published his Meditations, he urged his readers, many of whom were steeped in classical and medieval philosophy, to read his work slowly and ponderously. It would take a long time, he supposed, for them to grasp such alien ideas. Why, then, is it the other way round for us? The answer lies in the influence Descartes’ ideas have had. His redefining of conceptions of the self, and the ontological dualism that went along with it, altered the essentials of the western worldview. It’s hard to see that precisely because we’re so steeped in it, because it was so successful. But our default way of understanding the world, and particularly our place in it, is now thoroughly dualistic, however much contemporary philosophers may rail against that. In such a framework, the once-normative metaphysics of Aristotle now seem alien and recondite.

We can conclude from this, of course, that the building-blocks we use to understand the world are very much older than ourselves; in other words, they are inherited. That’s profoundly true at a familial level: I simply can’t avoid the fact that I have imbibed certain values from my parents, which no amount of rebelliousness can properly do away with. My immediate recourse to parenthood, though, is telling. For in reality there is an intergenerational dimension to this, both in lived practice (the influence of the wider family and kinship network upon the individual) and in the deposits – shifted, attenuated, and augmented down the generations – which have passed from my ancestors to my kin of the present day. This intergenerational aspect is all too quickly lost in western societies that view the solution to free-floating individualism (if they seek a solution at all) as lying no further than in the nuclear family. But with that established, we may, like the ancient Greek theorists of the classical polis, take the next step, from the family to the community, and thence from the community to the nation, replete with its cultural, linguistic, ideological and ritualistic traditions. Each individual approaches those all too human questions of existence with such traditions as their armoury, a reservoir on which to draw in beginning to answer such questions with which we are destined to grapple. Even that, though, might be too individualistic a colouring of the situation: in reality, the questions themselves, and the necessary framework of the answers, is of a piece with this tradition.

I want to call this cultural, ideological and societal framework within which we necessarily hash out answers to such existential quandaries (even if implicitly, or subconsciously) the ‘existential community’. Ideas are at the forefront of the existential community; a particularly obvious manifestation of it, for instance, would be a ‘great books’ curriculum at an American liberal arts college. But, unless I be accused of unwarranted idealism at this point, it is worth observing that the existential community is not merely a heritage of ideas in an abstract sense, but also the weaving (again we might say the incarnating) of those ideas into the social and material fabric of the national, local, and familial communities that I have been discussing. Custom, traditions, culture, and language are sites of existential exploration as much as books and other media of ideas. (I would say they are the ‘vehicles’ of ideas, but that assumes too dualistic a relationship between the socio-cultural and the material on the one hand, and ideas on the other, one that is dependent on the ontological dualism I have just critiqued.) These apparently more reified spheres serve likewise in themselves an existential function, one that, as I have indicated, profoundly shapes us.

If we assume, as I think we should, that all our intellectual, relational, and spiritual pursuits are fundamentally existential (something we learn from Qoholeth), then we can begin to see why contemporary autonomophilia is so problematic. For our exploration of the mystery of existence is not really a lonesome activity. Even the most solipsistic mind confronts the existence (or not) of the real with a plethora of questions, thought processes, and terms of analysis inherited from the existential community. It is fine when that’s implicit; for, like worker ants set upon undertaking the particular task set before us (or like modern academics with their ‘specialisms’), we nudge along the labours of the community by recourse to our particular, manageably-sized sphere, only dimly aware of the dauntingly broad forces within which we are carried along. But the autonomic conception of things cannot make peace with the implicit. An emphasis is inevitably placed on bringing the existential heritage to light (as, really, I am attempting to do now; hence my observations above), and on exposing what we might call the marketplace of existential communities. Either, in a grossly scientistic view, it is hoped that impartiality might be achieved by such a process, that we might somehow transcend the normal strictures that bind the existential questioner to a given community and tradition; or, as appears more common in contemporary culture, the choice of community is increasingly threshed out, as the telos of a specious freedom slumbers into view.

However insidious, however proud such an approach may be, it nonetheless arrives at the crux of the issue that we, as moderns, face. Even if we recognise the necessity of an interpretative community, in today’s (Western) world we must still choose that community. Both in the ideals of our secular religion, and in the physical and technological manifestations of such ideals in the structures and patterns of ordinary life and community (though I don’t assume the relationship to be one way), we have created lives in which an overwhelming level of choice is simply unavoidable. Unless we opt for outright fideism, that means surveying the options available to us, and making something of a judgment. Crucially, this presumes a posture of disembodiment from the various communities available in the market; we stand, or at least we believe we stand, above them, outside of them, before choosing which one to adopt. And of course this choice becomes only as solid as our desire to perpetuate it. Ultimately, however much we stand on the shoulders of giants, we have chosen those very giants on whom we stand. And if the ride gets a little bumpy, who’s to say we won’t jump ship? (Apologies for the mixed metaphors.) So the autonomic stance attenuates the true power of the existential community, however ardently I may believe myself to hold to a tradition or community that I have chosen from within that stance. (This is why I have long thought that converting to Roman Catholicism is a thoroughly Protestant thing to do.) It is a fickle place to be; but it is also a lonely place to be, one that exalts solipsism and disembodiment.

III

I’m told Rousseau made this point about religion. It is simply impossible, he reasoned, for a man to survey all the different world religions in order to ascertain which is true, or truest. To save himself the trouble of such an attempt, which would consume more than a lifetime, it is best for him simply to stay in the religion of his country, the religion of his youth.

For the contemporary Christian, though, the problem persists, and in a far more aggravated form than that faced by Rousseau and his contemporaries. In part that is because Rousseau’s answer seems, to us, irredeemably defeatist. Somewhat like Pascal’s wager, such lowering of evidential standards seems to denigrate the truths which we are claiming to believe. But more than that, it simply isn’t tenable in modern society. Any reasonably sized city is a living embodiment of the marketplace of ideas, and the marketplace has only become more crowded with technological development exposing a plethora of worldviews that are not dependent on local context. In a sense, there is no longer a religion of my country, nor perhaps even of my youth.

There’s also a more fundamental question for the Christian. Doesn’t this approach run contrary to the structure of our faith? The question is slightly different for those who have been raised as Christians, and especially those baptised as children. But there’s no denying the role that individual choice plays in Christianity. The Church can never be coterminous with political society, and has always involved the plucking of a select few out of the general body of the populace – ‘the world’ – on the basis of their discovery of Christian truth. That’s why Paul’s epistles refer to walking with ‘outsiders’, or why Jesus affirms that his kingdom is not of this world; indeed, that his kingdom will divide that most basic building block of the classical polis, the family. Of course, when medieval Christendom was at its zenith, this division became somewhat blurred, and medieval thinkers like Aquinas reflect this in their modifying of Augustine’s rather stark worldly/heavenly city divide. But it was still reflected in the endless drives of a minority of the population towards a higher order of spiritual life, manifested somewhat paradoxically in both the flourishing of monastic movements and the various medieval heresies that sprung up in the Latin west during the high Middle Ages. In the Atlantic world, the same impulse was reflected in the classic Puritan distinction between ‘the godly’ and those who were deemed to be worldly. The peak of this was English Congregationalism, with its emphasis on forming a community of ‘visible saints’ whose otherworldliness was evident by their life and ‘conversation’.

So: is it not the case that becoming a Christian involves, by definition, the replacing of one existential community for another? Does not Christianity depend on and flourish in the marketplace of worldviews?

There is something to this question; but I want to suggest that it is most problematic only when we conceive of salvation in primarily epistemological terms. That is, my being saved is construed as my coming to a knowledge of salvation. Of course there is biblical warrant for this. Being saved does involve discovering the truth that God is for us in Christ; and God, Paul tells us, desires everyone to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4). We can’t conceive of the process of conversion in terms that don’t take into account the acquiring of new knowledge: of God, of Christ, of the world, of ourselves and our sinful disposition. That’s in keeping with Paul’s emphasis in his epistle to the Romans on the mind as the site of the Spirit’s work, a doctrine that’s in harmony with classical psychology’s emphasis on reason ruling over passions and the will within the soul.

But a few things should caution us against overemphasising this. In the first place, our modern western thought-worlds presuppose a certain view of the self that is wrapped up in an epistemological stance that is foreign to pre-modern (and therefore, apostolic) thought. Because of the triumph of Cartesian dualism – and a whole host of other developments, many of the most significant of which are technological – the self, in our default understanding, is separated off from the world, able to observe the cosmos in something of a disembodied fashion. This means that the fabric of reality comes to be constituted in epistemological rather than ontological terms; what is is what I know to be.

Two examples will, I hope, illustrate this. The first is anecdotal. A few months ago, I found myself in a discussion with some members of my church about the question of whether we can pray for things that have happened in the past. If I don’t know the outcome of a football match that I’m about to watch on catch-up, can I pray for the team I support to have won it? (Not a great example: praying for what we know God wills is always a better way forward.) None of the people I was with seemed to have any qualms with this. At one level I am sympathetic to their lack of unease. Essentially this boils down to the question, at least as old as Augustine and Boethius, of how God relates to time, and it isn’t a simple one to pose, let alone answer. Augustine’s answer, that God is outside time (such that we can’t, for instance, ask how God occupied himself before he created the universe) lends some support to the view that we can pray for past events. But Augustine’s formulation ought to leave us with a sense of unease, or at best a mild confusion, treading as it is that line between the limits of our understanding and the transcendence of God.

My friends, however, simply had no qualms about praying for past events. Why was this? I believe the answer lies in the prevalence of the epistemological stance. If ontology collapses into epistemology, if the limits of the real are what I know to be the real (in essence, of course, a form of solipsism), then past and future events, so long as the former are unknown to me, have the same relationship to reality. Thus, to ask God to move in either sphere is essentially the same petition.

The second example is a broader phenomenon, something I have observed in our attitude to the medical. When it comes to our health, we cannot do without diagnosis. I might present particularly acute symptoms, but until we have a name for it, I am essentially disease-free (the reverse is also true: a mild cancer, with mild symptoms, and eminently treatable, is still cancer). At one level this is a standard human impulse – the desire to name things, to craft understanding out of the otherwise unknown (Adam’s great task, of course). But I want to suggest that it is prevalent today in a way it simply was not in former times, and that this is driven by the epistemologising of truth and truth claims that is typical of the modern, secular worldview. In the area of ‘mental health’ (a concept utterly dependent, of course, on the dualism mentioned above, as I have written about elsewhere), this is seen in the constant drive to describe normal processes and human struggles in terms of conditions – an anxiety problem, rather than a mere disposition to anxiety; or I might have depression, rather than simply being depressed. I am not attempting to claim that such diagnoses are never warranted; more that we leap at them rather too rapidly. That inclination, I want to argue, comes from an underlying suspicion that a condition does not actually exist without diagnosis, without official knowledge.

So our default is the epistemologising of the real. That is an important context to have established in considering the New Testament’s descriptions of salvation in terms of acquired knowledge. Context counts for far more than modern advocates of sola scriptura (which never actually meant sola in the first place, but that is for another time) are usually willing to concede. To speak of salvation in terms of gaining knowledge within a culture steeped in Platonic philosophy, with its emphasis on mind, soul and spirit as woven into the cosmic order (however much it is casually, and incorrectly, dismissed as a dualist philosophy today), is worlds apart from such an emphasis in the context of today’s epistemologising, secular worldviews. St Paul operated in the former context, and in his worldview, salvation as the acquiring of knowledge at no point involves the exaltation of choice and autonomy. True reality is impressed upon the mind, by God, in his grace. The mind thus enlightened has come into harmony with the created order itself, with the cosmos. There is no room for construal here; nor is mere knowledge, however true, the highest good, but the reality which establishes it as true.

That is a helpful context, too, for understanding my previous emphasis on the primacy of knowledge in the Christian life. It is not knowledge as a function of autonomy, of blind (however learned) groping in the dark; but rather knowledge that is worked upon us by the Holy Spirit, which is in harmony with the true structure of reality. It is, in other words, revelation. And this might serve to explain how such an emphasis – which I hope to have shown previously is thoroughly biblical – fits with what is often deemed its counterweight, a sacramental and/or liturgical approach to worship, devotion and Christian experience. These appear to us to be two different approaches only because we conceive of the former as the outworking of our autonomy. But if both true knowledge (the Word of God), and the sacraments, are seen not in epistemological terms, but rather as the effectual work of the Spirit of God in and through both our minds and the symbols and seals of the sacraments, then the purported dichotomy falls away. Both have a givenness to them; both are the work of divine grace.

IV

Needless to say, none of this is how we are accustomed to thinking. I hope I am not saying that to elevate myself; perhaps my readers are already familiar with these ideas. But in my experience, Christians of the West are part of much the same individualising tendencies as the world around us. Perhaps that is unfair, and I ought to give more credence to the role of the church and the Spirit in changing that; after all, to come to Christ is fundamentally to relinquish the autonomy the world around us so cherishes and exalts. But there is a Christian equivalent of that strain of thought. You might have heard it in the numerous personal testimonies that begin by discounting or undermining the efficacy of a Christian upbringing. The givenness of belief, we assume, belies its authenticity; we must detach ourselves from the origins of our dogmas if we are to hold them legitimately. So every person raised a Christian must tread the path of the younger son in Jesus’s parable, one of apostasy and rebirth, rather than allow that, like the elder son, we may have been at the Father’s side all along. Those more virtuous than me might not follow the younger son into the far country, but they are able to express their fear of inherited belief in terms of the epistemologising of faith that I have outlined above; their testimonies become about basic misunderstanding replaced by knowledge of gospel truth. I do not wish to belittle the genuine experience of believers. But nor can we deny the shaping of that experience, and of our understanding and framing of it, by the culture in which we live. Time and again, it is couched in terms of losing the faith of our fathers, only to rediscover it with the comfort of doing so as our newly-autonomous selves. Alien to us are the words of the psalmist:

Yet you are he who took me from the womb;
    you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts.
On you was I cast from my birth,
    and from my mother’s womb you have been my God. (Ps. 22:9–10)

God is not a God of individuals only. Of course, we shall all stand, individually, before his judgment seat, giving account for how we have each led our own lives. But he is the God who covenants himself to a people who become his own possession, who in so doing binds those individuals not only to himself but also to one another, in the bonds of his Holy Spirit, bonds of love and self-sacrifice. The people of God are their own existential community, guided by the one who alone has existence from no other, who alone understands the nature of existence. And he is the God who visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, who has so made the world that the pursuit of good or evil flows down the generations and is at the mercy of no one individual, time or place.

Our task is not blind fideism, an undiscerning faith in whatever tradition we find ourselves within. God has made us rational beings, able to play a part in the discerning of truth. But we do not do so alone. We do so as his people, brought into the community of the faithful by the work of his Spirit. Our job is to build that community, to shape it towards greater truth, love, and knowledge of the living God. And to rest in the givenness of it all: of the structures and rhythms of life and community, of our talents and weaknesses, and ultimately, of salvation.

The Fourth Discourseman