Confessions of an inconsistent opportunist
Hux, Samuel
'MY FAITH HAD ALREADY TAKEN A WALK' Confessions of an inconsistent opportunist SAMUEL HUX I was BROUGHT up a Fundamentalist and remained so roughly until of college age. Then I moved swiftly...
...There is a great mystery here, wonderful in its immensity and depth...
...the sun is the sun...
...gradually perceived-I began to realize that I felt contempt for those militant in their unbelief, and something close to incomprehension of those for whom it was of no concern...
...Pascal's wager is what James would call a "genuine option," the specifics of ritual-holy water and such-aside...
...he reasons of providence and its absence endlessly...
...but this mawkishness hardly signals a challenge to the secularism of our age...
...I'd wonder how a species as aggressive as man got a distance on itself enough to try to limit itself, if a reasoned guess at self-interest and chances of longevity is really the answer...
...Rather, it is a genuine option not waiting upon empirical permissions when I think of Authority, and when I think of...
...I knew a man from Sobibor...
...Perhaps were I really paying, were I Hamsun's old blind Lapp, then maybe the direct experience of pain and necessity of coping, instead of impotent compassion, would work some ironic alchemy, so that I'd feel a love of Creation in all its manifold and find myself too busy to despise...
...And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people" (Exodus, 32:14...
...Sometimes, in this mood, I can for sustained periods of time make like a manichee and separate plagues, earthquakes, and heart defects from "true" Creation and ascribe them to darker sources...
...The imperviousness of faith to explanation suggests a mystery, and the recognition that there are needs beyond the capacities of the rational...
...Pain, unwelcome and persistent, never does...
...When we sat smoking together in his turf hut, he talked about all the things he had seen before he went blind...
...And it would take a deficiency of compassion to make judgments upon his optimism...
...From Knut Hamsun's Pan, the narrator speaks: I once knew an old blind Lapp up in the hills...
...to hate...
...And there are pains so much vaster...
...in truth, I think about theologians less often than these notes imply...
...My particular mode of that shared experience, a mode I'd not presume to stick someone else with, I call being an inconsistent opportunist...
...And there I rested easy...
...even an ice-storm I could...
...I answered...
...Hawthorne met Melville in Liverpool after several years' separation, I think during Melville's transit to the Holy Land...
...In the prelude to Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard imagines a man, "not a learned exegete," who tries to imagine what it was like on Mount Moriah with Abraham and Isaac, and afterwards...
...then, I have to answer: yes, I do have to...
...And God tempted Abraham and said to him, Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering upon the mountain which I will show thee...
...I find him maniacal . . . and godly, not some pale Transcendentalist deity, some divine, universal president of an ethical culture league...
...At bottom, what have you to lose...
...His hair was still black, but his eyes were quite white...
...And now, like an amateur divine, I'd like to choose a couple as my "texts...
...my self-romanticizing was absurd, another slippery game...
...But, once more, 1 cannot tone it down-my secular inclinations fail me as often as my belief...
...Jacob'S new name, after the "wrestling," "Israel" (Genesis, 32:28), has alternately been translated "the champion of God" and "He who strives with God...
...that is, "secularize" it: unjust brutality (No, one doesn't have to call it "just," the understanding voice sympathizes) is part of the random symmetry of the way the universe works, without intelligent Author...
...a strange home made for us, if, indeed, it was made for us...
...But I do not think the book ever quite recovers from the terrible visions of the prelude...
...is not imitable...
...Or, tone it down, another might say...
...These are my confessions...
...it's a matter, to a degree, of one's mood...
...I might be able to appreciate the paradox, were I the one truly paying for it...
...Your human reason cannot say...
...For "God" becomes real to me, the option compelling, not when I seek somethng to love or worship...
...or if I do worship, then the experience of worshipping is no more than a metaphor, with becoming rituals, for what I might do with legs asprawl, pencil tapping my teeth, in a philosophy classroom...
...belief will come and stupify your scruples...
...Reconsidering, however, that's not necessarily so...
...And I find it tempting to wonder, when we next meet Isaac in Genesis, dwelling in the south country and going out at eventide to meditate in the fields, if he might not be pondering the mystery of which he'd been a part, weighing the awful test performed upon his father, and trying to come to terms with the awesomeness of divine whim...
...The same ice-storm that is so beautiful is a killer...
...It is wise and necessary to leave her awful symmetries to themselves...
...In the first, Abraham tells Isaac that it's he himself, not God, that demands the sacrifice...
...things were improving steadily, he thought...
...In the third, Abraham assumes it was his own desire and no godly command to kill, and "he prayed God to forgive him his sin, that he had been willing to offer Isaac, that the father had forgotten his duty toward the son...
...I do not have to conceive as some have of God as Nature-which strikes me as both a sophisticated construct and a cop-out from the rigors of faith-to think of him as designer and maker of it and responsible for it, whether a now-resting clockmaker or a constant tinkerer with his hand in things...
...More likely I find my thoughts reflected in the works of poets, novelists, literary essayists...
...William Bolitho's Twelve Against the Gods is a misleading title in this context...
...But, in that case, I confess I'm weak, and hope that He is not listening...
...badgering Job to admit he has no right to ask for explanations ("Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without understanding...
...For to hear that God is The Immutable, or something like that, means to me that he is a metaphysical principle that I grasp, but the grasping does not compel me to worship Him (it...
...but I am not always patient of mysteries: other necessities intervene...
...Weigh what your gains and your losses would be if you should stake all you have on heads, on God's existence: if you win in such a case you gain eternal beatitude...
...All animals except the parasitical dog and cat we have debauched hate us...
...I said before that if I don't say "God" I'm only waiting for someone else to pronounce the name...
...And I have to know that when I say, following the above, that this is wrong because we've agreed to agree, and this is Wrong because it is, then I've pushed back to that place beyond explanations, to very close to a burning, quaking mountain, and that if I do not say "God" I'm only waiting for someone else to pronounce it for me, knowing that's a responsibility someone will assume...
...But I matured and reached a point when I could admit to myself I felt no agony at all: I couldn't even remember when I had lost my faith, it had been so long before...
...the whole of Nature hopefully awaits the day we shall be extinct...
...Rather, he said only this: "I am Who Am...
...Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Augustine, Barth, Pascal...
...I recently chose to spend a dozen months on a craggy mountain island, in a native stone house, in the most primitive village I could find, marveling at the rapid changes of flora, a new landscape every couple of weeks, and, two of those months, huddling in front of a fireplace listening to the gales and hoping there was no back-draught down the chimney to set the only warm room afire...
...But it's in awe of the Lapp himself, not Nature, I stand...
...if he hadn't...
...This giant brooding power, who will not even look straight at us, like a captive tigress, when we dare to put ourselves in her presence...
...James remarks that, to the contrary, faith can create facts: a dozen people can be victimized by two gangsters because no one of the dozen believes that if he stands up anyone else will...
...but when I feel the urgent necessity of passionate anger, need something, almost...
...He'll be no healer to me...
...And I find that it is-although not precisely in terms of the "gain" Pascal writes of: immortality...
...If one says that murder is wrong because we say it is, that saying institutionalized in our laws, and that one need look to no higher authority than our own collective need, the necessity to protect ourselves from ourselves-then, in that case, I'd not scoff at the argument, recognizing a practical sufficiency...
...A game is going on between you and the nature of things which at the day of judgment will bring out either heads or tails...
...and, in an act which has to be judged as arbitrary, since the Lord according to his own thundering owes no one anything, restoring all and more to his afflicted servant, and announcing his wrath against Job's three friends because they had dared to suggest that God could not act but within a moral code and Job must have been guilty of ill-doing to have suffered such afflictions, which strikes Him as an audacious human attempt to justify the actions of the Almighty, and subtly suggesting to us the readers that if we think God was bound to repay Job and the whole ordeal was a test, we are as guilty of the error of presumption as Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar...
...No.] . . . Understand that "truly to be" means: to be always in the same way...
...This is my mode of a shared experience, remember...
...Did he who made the Lamb make thee...
...mine was not...
...He was tough and healthy, without feeling, imperishable, and he kept his hope...
...He did not say: "I am God," or "I am the Author of the world," or "I am the Creator of all things," or "I am the Guardian...
...And here the tone of urbane distance I've been trying to practice deserts me...
...Melville can neither believe, wrote Hawthorne, nor rest easy in his unbelief...
...The Anglo-Catholicism, confirmed though it was, lasted no longer than the Roman...
...When it was time for me to go, he stepped out with me and began to point in various directions...
...for though you surely risk a finite loss by this procedure, any finite loss is reasonable, even a certain one is reasonable, if there is but the possibility of infinite gain...
...had each the faith that all would stand up when he did, then all would, and faith would have created the fact of resistance...
...I will lay mine hand upon my mouth"), badgering yet again, flaunting his credentials, a manic display of divine irritation and petulance ("Hast thou an arm like God...
...I'd best try to control the passions here and attempt to make myself understood-and that perhaps best incrementally...
...Anger is the enemy of reason-and the stronger foe...
...Or, be reasonable, I might be told...
...But, O Lord, our God, what then is not of all that You have created...
...So I take it as a characteristic of our time that, in intellectual discourse, unbelief does not have to be explained or justified-which is not like saying that faith cannot be explained...
...And then-cutting many musings short-I realized that I was the sort of person about whom I write this essay: Someone with an equal distrust of, or lack of talent for, both Faith and Unbelief...
...Mature...
...Even the gales I can enjoy...
...THIS REMAINS a predominantly secular culture that we live in...
...Why should you not...
...Quite right...
...That is the south, he said, and that the north...
...theology" has to give a place to an occasional lack of distance to credit how life feels...
...To conceive of such requires that one follow one of several philosophical directions beyond the utilitarian, but does not really require Faith, not as I understand it...
...If all went well, he would be able to make out the sun in a year or two...
...Indeed...
...I can say something about chlorophyll and such and lunar actions upon the earth), and, in part, suggests a kind of presumption, a certain laziness parading as reason, an easy subscription to the current fashions of wisdom...
...BUT, ONCE AGAIN the conjunction but...
...Things are getting steadily better...
...Then the Lapp gave a little contented laugh and said: You see, forty or fifty years ago I didn't know that, so I must be seeing better now than I used to...
...I think I'd have liked for someone to speak of me as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in one of his diaries of Herman Melville...
...But...
...And I would prefer that my own brave young son had not had to store up visual memories, and to cultivate such courage, to make a singular adventure of his going blind...
...to build for ourselves a beauty and a world out of her ken...
...a sparrow that will not move aside for an elephant will hide itself before the most angelic child on earth can come within reach...
...But on the other hand, faith in one's visible fellows is a somewhat different matter from Faith in a Father one's not seen save in his confusing manifestations, some of them afflictive...
...Both believers and non-believers are welcome in our politics, as in our homes, so long as the non-believer is not aggressive about it, so long as the believer does not appear excessively righteous (can admit to occasional lust, for instance...
...I wrestle with no angels, hear no voice from the whirlwind, climb no Moriah...
...we tend to shun efficiency apartments if we can, and if we choose them are usually apologetic about it...
...Rather, since I think that unbelief, as the prefix suggests, is a passive thing, an absence, I think it more challenging, curious, and revealing to try to explain my faith . . . which fails me...
...he is a noble man, says Hawthorne, and much worthier of salvation then most of us...
...The Divine has to be, such is my apparently incorrigible inheritance, something which sounds less like an idea than like a figure (bearded and upon a throne not necessary), not Ethical Principle or The Immutable, but Creator of the Universe, Personal Savior, the Judge...
...but I'm enraged that I can't, that death, disease, destruction, decay are so insatiable that such expectation is impotent childishness...
...His concerns are not faith and unbelief, God and nature, not directly (his subtitle in fact is The Story of Adventure), so the passage I quote has the authority of disinterestedness...
...If one says it is wrong to go without sleep, there's no problem: "wrong" simply means "unhealthy" and we need appeal to no higher authority than the body...
...I seek an object of my anger, feel a need to despise something for botched nature...
...and then notice bitterly how at the first sound of your step everything living and dead closes, hushes, disappears...
...I didn't then lose my faith...
...obviously my faith had already taken a walk or I'd not have been able to make of religion such a trivial game...
...Then I moved swiftly through Roman Catholicism, unconfirmed, to Epis-copalianism, and I suppose my name is still on the books of the latter...
...And I'd wonder-since there clearly are distinctions to be made between laws, this prohibition an extremely old and near universal one, and this other circumscribed in time and place (You may not marry a Bantu...
...I think him consistent with the enraged monarch ready to end the Hebrew experiment until Moses convinces Him otherwise-I almost said "cons" Him...
...One night, at the height of summer, walk in the most humanely artificial park, and clearing your brain of all the kindly cant of the lesser poets (for Shakespeare never misled you), perceive first in delight the huge rustling flood of life that is playing- in hope that you would not come...
...Well, I don't expect that...
...I might even be able to shudder in wonder if I'm one of those upon whom He works mysteriously performing His wonders...
...I judge that that's a fairly common state of mind (or soul): little recognized, probably, but an experience shared by a sizable if silent minority...
...One can almost appreciate the random afflictions from Nature...
...The exemption of unbelief from explanation suggests, in part, the recognition that most things can be explained with no reference to the religious (I do not have to thank God for green grass and tides...
...And in the words strive, strife, I cannot help but read some degree of resistance, and...
...For fifty-eight years he had not seen a thing, and now he was seventy...
...Must we understand this "I am Who Am" as if everything else were not...
...with which I'm dissatisfied...
...My conditioned attention slips even when I read in Augustine, whom I normally revere, The Lord then said to Moses: "I am Who Am...
...The latter, I confess, seems lighter to me, although I am no Biblical scholar and am reading subjectively...
...I don't think one should read this as allegory...
...But if one says it is wrong to commit murder, my problems begin...
...I might be perfectly well satisfied by one of those disembodied metaphysical designations, "Ethical First Principle" or some such...
...No word of this had ever been spoken in the world, and Isaac never talked to anyone about what he had seen, and Abraham did not suspect that anyone had seen it...
...I flirted with Roman Catholicism as a cultural rebellion about the same time that I became a secret Fellow Traveler with Communists, surrounded by Dixiecrats...
...The suburban landscapes, the neatly growing trees, the gently curving rivers, with, naturally, a dear little cottage in the foreground, is not Nature, but artifice, the work of man...
...One cannot always live life as if he were but an appreciative observer of it marveling at its complexities and ironies...
...The television spectacular-a kind of liturgical Lawrence Welk Show, presided over by the showman-clergyman of the Saint Carnegie Temple of Positive Christianity with his delivery and substance half pitchman, half undergraduate sociology C student, and attended by a congregation of smiling, self-satisfied faces one thinks he's seen already as audience of "Let's Make a Deal"-is more dramatic than quiet worship at the local church...
...After all it is better for him to believe that I am a monster, rather than that he should lose faith in Thee...
...But I cannot attain to an infinite view of things, am stuck by my existence with a finite view and an immense dissatisfaction with what I see and experience...
...I'd not have deserved a hundredth of that...
...or canst thou thunder with a voice like him...
...but when he turned and drew the knife, Isaac saw that his left hand was clenched in despair, that a tremor passed through his body-but Abraham drew the knife...
...Bolitho is objecting to the romantic naturalistic aesthetics of one of his dozen adventurers, Isadora Duncan...
...God is the one and only One and provides Himself to be such by His being both the Author of His own Being and the source of all knowledge of Himself...
...and who can tell of the mysteries of the random selection of victims...
...he has earned his love of it...
...A kind of balance of powers, of sensibilities rather, prevails, leaning actually a little in tone and substance to the secular...
...The trees themselves, it might seem, turn their backs on you...
...Then they returned again home, and Sarah hastened to meet them, but Isaac had lost his faith...
...Their agony was real, I assumed...
...But not for long...
...I ask myself: is faith really a genuine option for me, living, forced, and momentous...
...Then he bent down and crept into the turf hut again, that everlasting turf hut, his home on earth...
...SO FULL of mysteries, the contemplation of Faith...
...But, frankly, I'd think that perverse and arrogant of me-both because I do not consider myself the noble person worthier of salvation than most I once would have liked to be thought, and because I'm not the only, or even the major, one to pay the cost...
...Actually, this is not Pascal speaking directly, but William James's summary of the Frenchman's challenge in his essay "The Will to Believe," which I quote for the sake of compactness and because of the following...
...I even have my moments before Creation of a kind of swelling warmth, a befuddled awe as when listening to Beethoven or in a theater with Shakespeare...
...Until-no date that I can think of, just a gradual uneasiness Samuel hux teaches humanities at a city college and is a frequent contributor to Dissent, Moment, Worldview, and other journals...
...That traverse looks like a considered movement from one denominational extreme to the other, and then a considered theological compromise leaning a little to the high church end of the spectrum...
...Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth...
...But my memory serves me better than that...
...wants none of us...
...Is the earth not also...
...and when Job has yielded ("Behold, I am vile...
...Without doubt, Creation is a wonderful thing to the Lapp, a gift...
...At any rate-I reach again for the urbane distance-it's a curious thing to find a long-sustaining Unbelief become unsustaining-without my fully losing it-and to find a Faith lost in the hinteryears asserting itself-without my fully possessing it-and that not because of love and acceptance but because of hatred and anger...
...The nightingales, dear naturalist, do not sing for us or you...
...Still, perhaps we prefer home not to be too easy...
...Even here, though we have painted a friendly smile on her mask, beneath the artifice (and it is thin), there is the same implacable...
...But this Nature, this dear, beautiful mother...
...I can imagine someone constructing a semi-Malthusian justification of the human letting of human blood, murderer as agent like frost or tiger...
...To those whom the gods have chosen, grace comes like a violation-reasoned Aeschylus...
...The "genuine option" turns out to be, well . . . sort of genuine...
...Our religious institutions thrive best either when parishioners are not burdened with theological questions, or when "theology" means simply some catchy form of the "social gospel...
...For I am of a certain cultural conditioning, spent more years, and formative ones, as a Fundamentalist than I have as a reader of, say, Spinoza, and consequently to know that I'm hearing about "God" as I understand that name I have to hear not alone philosophical talk about first principles but "Godtalk," something as insistently orthodox and as assuming of faith, no matter how baffling I find the language, as Karl Barth's: "Knowledge of the truly one and only God gains this meaning when it is brought about by this truly one and only God Himself...
...I'd wonder if the very fact of those distinctions doesn't mean that there is Authority and there are local authorities...
...MOW, I AM not a Jacob, a Job, or an Abraham or Isaac, as imagined by Kierkegaard or otherwise...
...Since I have a personal, constitutional mistrust of any wisdom not ancient, it's not a subscribing to the current that leads me to beg off explaining my unbelief...
...Isaac throve as before, but Abraham's eyes were darkened, and he knew joy no more...
...Since I believe that man is, by human nature, more beast than angel, am more convinced by Hobbes than by Hume, by Freud than by Fromm, by Calvin than by Emerson, I cannot say that murder is wrong because unnatural...
...But I'll not allow to Hitler the retroactive power to make all pains acceptable because less than what he wrought...
...You must either believe or not believe that God is- which will you do...
...So it's an immense thing I speak of, faith, not just an archaic notion in a rationalist age...
...Recall Pascal's "wager" from the Pens'ees...
...An option to be "genuine" does not need to conform to the demands of scientific verification, but must be "living" (a real cultural possibility for one, as belief in the Mahdi, James's example of a "dead" option for most Westerners, isn't), "forced" and unavoidable ("Either accept this truth or go without it," which leaves no third alternative), and "momentous" rather than trivial...
...It is the God of Job I have in mind: wagering, punishing his servant Job although "there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and es-cheweth evil...
...In either case, I am by the lights of Aquinas a great sinner...
...Nature is the night, the iceberg, the uninhabitable crags of mountains, the black gulfs of the ocean, in whose unveiled presence we are dumbstruck and tremble...
...I "BELIEVE" in God when it is intellectually useful for me to do so (I am, as I've said, an opportunist), or when a train of thought leads me back to a point beyond which there is no explaining...
...And I'd wonder: if I should decide to ignore those laws which are in my, your, self-interest, pull a trigger at whomever I choose, am I "wrong" or simply anti-social and are they really the same...
...the human, the unwanted, the horror...
...Yes, I know...
...Go, then, and take holy water, and have masses said...
...So when I hear or see "God" it's in a more mundane way- I'm observer of creation, part of it, subject to it, unheard railer at it...
...listen, you don't have to go back beyond the argument from self-interest and insurance-for-longevity, because, can't you see?, it works more often than not...
...and since one can easily observe nature pruning itself with no regard for this frail flower or that poor prey...
...But there is something loosely religious about the passage, a poem of hope, resiliency, and courage...
...but is mostly unconcerned with them, except in so far as religion can be studied as one human phenomenon among hundreds of others...
...I can remember afterwards sharing confessions with some lapsed Roman Catholic friends about the agony of having lost one's faith...
...And if another should advise me that...
...but that gets me ahead of myself...
...Our intellectual life is not actively antagonistic to religious considerations...
...For instance: I believe with most people that some things are right and some wrong, although we often don't agree about what the " are" means...
...What is is good because created by God, Aquinas says in the Summa Against the Pagans, and to despise any of Creation is to reflect sinfully upon the Divine...
...they almost seem to have a place if they can demand and give muscle to such expansive courage...
...Is the sky not...
...And he sat as before in front of the fire, full of hope that in a few years he would be able to see the sun...
...It is perverse, I might be told, to color creation with your own pains-such an act of arrogance...
...But, sad to say, I find all thoughts of "God" vanish when I try to think of Nature as the work of a "Poet...
...William Blake asks of the Tiger, rhetorically...
...So obviously I am not indiscriminately unappreciative of Creation...
...And, but, in the last, Abraham prepared everything for the sacrifice, calmly and quietly...
...if you lose, you lose nothing at all...
...injury...
...In the second, Abraham can never forget the test required of him...
...Perhaps an enormous edifice of indescribably wonderful and unplummetable symmetries, its architect a genius, but with rooms too small for habitation or so large as to make the occupant fear himself a dwarf...
...belief is stirred only when events conspire to remind me of that "same implacable...
...now you go first in that direction, and when you have gone a little distance down you turn off that way...
...and that observation might serve as description of both the Biblical and historical careers of the chosen people...
...Then four imagined versions follow...
...And I became an Episcopalian shortly after having become an English major, reading T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, all those initial-named Anglo-Catholics, and convinced that John Henry Newman should, never have left the Anglican Oxford Movement for Rome, and wondering if he'd be called " J.H...
...Then Kierkegaard spends a book constructing his "own" version, in pursuit of the "teleological suspension of the ethical" and in celebration of the greatness and simplicity of Abraham, who "in a hundred and thirty years...
...He imagined he was seeing better as time went on...
...why should you expect a world free of horrors...
...If there were an infinity of chances, and only one for God in the wager, still you ought to stake your all on God...
...We often do it a bald disservice, assume it merely an act we take when reason fails, an act not motivated by facts and taken in the absence of them...
...didst not get further than to faith...
...I agree that it is-but who says so...
...Lest I be assumed to be enjoying a bit of blasphemy, let me hasten to add that this God makes sense to me...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 15
