Doubling the wager:
Garvey, John
OF SEVERALMINDS John Garvey DOUBLING THE WAGER DOUBT, FAITH & RISK Doubt and faith go togeth-er. This is said often, and too easily. It is true, in its way, but we console our-selves with this...
...Therese experienced profound darkness during the last eighteen months of her life...
...There are clues, in both directions, but no proofs...
...The greater risk is not to live this way, but to live as if we are called to rise from the dead, hoping that on the last day it will be revealed that we were not crazy...
...Trust too much and you might be disappointed...
...To live as if this were true, to hope deeply that it is so, will lead us to doubt, and the more total and intense our hope, the more powerful our doubts will be...
...Although it is true that many saints speak of an assurance and confidence that come with great faith, this is a gift-it isn't guaranteed that we will not face Therese's darkness...
...Real faith can't hedge bets...
...Paul speaks in Romans of Abraham, "hoping against hope" and this is the sort of hope and doubt that Christians all know, at crucial moments...
...We believe that a God who created an immense universe from nothing loves us to the point of death, that death is not what we are called to, that we are meant to rise as the incarnate God did...
...it will only mean a night darker than ever, the night of mere nonexistence.'" At the end, The'rese found peace and joy, but not without the cost of the terrible burden she described in her autobiography, the enduring of serious doubt, doubt not as an intellectual exercise but as the consequence of serious hope...
...Think of what we claim to believe...
...There is no proof...
...We live as if death will cancel us completely, in the sense that our fear of death drives us in many directions: to shore up our egos, to hoard against disease and starvation, to wall off those who remind us of our limitation and mortality-the old, the mad, and the ill...
...the darkness itself seems to borrow, from the sinners who live in it, the gift of speech...
...As Therese's example makes clear, there is a great emotional risk in believing, and in acting as if the belief were true...
...I hear its mocking accents: 'It's all a dream, this talk of a heavenly country, bathed in light, scented with delicious perfumes, and of a God who made it all, who is to be your possession in eternity...
...if I truly believed that the good news of reconciliation is true...
...She wrote, "I get tired of the darkness all around me, and I try to refresh my jaded spirits with the thoughts of that bright country where my hopes lie...
...would I live the way I do...
...Living as if what we say we believe were true would mean living with a fearlessness which we usually lack...
...Here is Abraham's hope against hope...
...So faith is not a question simply of adding up the possibilities and risks and taking the lesser risk...
...Isn't there another way to look at this...
...From one point of view it is an intellectual discomfort, a sort of deliberate cramp in reasoning, a mental speed-bump...
...and what happens...
...But you can hope that on the last day it will be revealed that you were not, and you can risk living that way...
...We look for the kingdom to come, but the agnostic in all of us suggests that this desire for completeness could be a neuronic trick...
...Doubt isn't a single or simple thing...
...We live ethically, in a crude way, refraining from adultery and murder and intentional rudeness, as well we should...
...In a remarkable essay ("The Jonas Experience," in Heaven in Ordinarie, Templegate, 1979), Noel Dermot O'Donoghue quotes Saint Therese of Lisieux's autobiography...
...If you accept Christianity, even if Christianity is false you will have given up comparatively little, but if Christianity is true you have gained eternal life...
...As a bet, it makes much more sense to accept Christianity...
...However, if faith is the substance of things hoped for, we are ordinarily much too weak in our hoping...
...It is the necessary part of us that forever sings, "It ain't necessarily so...
...But death will make nonsense of your hopes...
...But much of our morality is a refraining from, a not doing, with an occasional decent deed, the coin in the beggar's cup...
...It is worse torment than ever...
...It means taking the chance that it is all meaningless, and still stepping off the edge into the dark, living as if the hope is grounded...
...Pascal's wager, you will recall, says that you can approach faith this way: If you refuse to accept Christianity, assuming it to be false, and you live as desires dictate, then you lose eternity if Christianity is true...
...It may well be that Therese was a victim of depression, but in a sense this is beside the point, because genuine doubt of the sort that accompanies every believer is a consequence of serious hope, and does not need to be courted-it will be there...
...But doubt is also an emotional response...
...If I really hoped for, yearned for, the coming of Christ...
...and {contra Pascal's wager) belief is not the lesser risk, if it is lived...
...It is not ordinarily living in response to having been loved so much that the crucifixion was done out of love for me, in the hope (and the fearlessness that should accompany the hope) that the Resurrection is a grounded hope...
...Here I am not denying that doubt accompanies faith...
...This is what we lack...
...Better to hedge your bets, as in Pascal's wager...
...At the level of reasoning clearly about anything, deliberate and systematic doubting is essential...
...You really believe, do you, that the mist which hangs about you will clear away later on...
...faith is a surrender and submission, not the response to something proven, like a problem in algebra...
...All right, all right, go on longing for death...
...But aren't we all in some way living out Pascal's wager...
...You can't intellectually or emotionally know that you won't be wrong...
...It is true, in its way, but we console our-selves with this line and keep ourselves from being really challenged by genuine faith, or genuine doubt...
...Faith is not simple certitude-this would remove the freedom we must have...
...At one level this makes some intellectual sense, but I am not sure that what it encourages is anything like faith, at least not the faith Jesus talks about, although it may increase church attendance...
...The desire for completeness is no proof that the completeness exists, but could be an evolutionary carrot and stick...
...But hoping against hope implies a determined hoping...
Vol. 122 • January 1995 • No. 1
