Robbins, Unbelief

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The Gift of Unbelief Jeffrey W. Robbins

a

aDepartment of Religion and Philosophy , Lebanon Valley

College , Annville, PA 17003, USA E-mail:Published online: 14 Jun 2007.

To cite this article: Jeffrey W. Robbins (2007) The Gift of Unbelief, Angelaki: Journal of the

Theoretical Humanities, 12:1, 11-17

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697250701309510

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ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume12 number 1 april 2007

In a recent address at a major international

conference on ‘‘Belief and Metaphysics,’’ the

radical orthodox theologian John Milbank sug-

gested that after the past century of anti-

metaphysics – a century that, coincidentally,

witnessed unparalleled destruction and terror in

the form of world war, genocide, and the threat of

nuclear annihilation – we are now living in a

‘‘metaphysical moment.’’ This paper is at least

partly intended to take a step back in order toreexamine this sweeping characterization of the

last century as suggested by Milbank, to question

and to problematize whether the twentieth

century is rightly thought of as being anti-

metaphysical. For instance, if we consider three

cases in point – the hermeneutical, pragmatic,

and existentialist – these indicate not an anti-

metaphysical stance caught up in an oppositional

logic but more properly speaking a post-meta-

physical stance in the sense that they each take

off where speculative metaphysics ends. Or in the

more hermeneutical sense, each of these intellec-

tual options dwells historically in the ruins that

metaphysics has left behind.

This point of distinction is not merely

semantic; rather, it has important ramifications

for how we read the so-called postmodern return

of the religious, and how we evaluate the

contemporary threats of fanaticism and violence.

For instance, in Milbank’s defense of theological

metaphysics he correctly observes that it is notthe Roman Catholic Church, a church steeped in

the Thomistic tradition, that is the contemporary

source of fanaticism and terror. While this

observation may be correct, the connection

drawn from this observation to the conclusion

that the antidote to religious fanaticism and terror

is a renewed commitment to metaphysics based

on more firmly held religious beliefs and a clearer

sense of religious authority is not self-evident.

On the contrary, there are those such as the

Italian hermeneutic philosopher Gianni Vattimo

who argue that in spite of the Catholic Church’s

at times violent and exclusionary past, the reason

that it is no longer the source of fanaticism and

terror is because it has been weakened, and thushas eschewed its metaphysical pretensions.

Further, it is precisely where its metaphysical

assumptions have not been sufficiently dissolved

(e.g., in the realm of sexual politics) that it fails to

live up to its mission as an agent of peace and

reconciliation in the world.1

Regarding Vattimo more directly, he has

famously written that ‘‘the end of metaphysics

and the death of the moral God have liquidated

jeffrey w. robbins

THE GIFT OF UNBELIEF

an existentialist challenge

in a post-metaphysical world

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/07/010011^7ß 2007 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of AngelakiDOI: 10.1080/09697250701309510

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the philosophical basis of atheism.’’2 This quota-

tion best describes not only Vattimo’s perspective

but more broadly the hermeneutical tradition’s

position with regard to the post-metaphysical.

That is to say, the practice of hermeneutics

implies a post-metaphysical age in which, as

Vattimo is fond of quoting from Nietzsche,

‘‘there are no facts, only interpretations.’’3 For

Vattimo, positively speaking, this means that we

might again take the category of belief seriously

as constitutive of our lived traditions. The

critique, of course, is that this weakening of

truth is actually a capitulation to the cultural

logic of late capitalism. Or, put otherwise,

Vattimo’s weak ontology is another name for

nihilism. To Vattimo, however, this in itself isnot a critique but a compliment, for nihilism is

emancipation.4

The more serious critique of Vattimo and of

the hermeneutical tradition more generally is

whether it has any positive political value beyond

its strictly descriptive analysis of our historical

situation. For while it is true that by virtue of a

hermeneutical understanding we might see how

the philosophical basis of atheism has been

liquidated, and correlatively how this makesroom for the return of religion in the form of

personal belief, at the same time it is difficult to

distinguish between this personal belief and

various forms of fideism which rest on the right

of individuals and individual communities to

choose its beliefs and live its special truth

accordingly. This micropolitics of identity sets

certain limits on the emancipatory potential of

both politics and religion by providing some basis

for the basic liberal assertion of human liberties,

but proves ultimately insufficient for the gravity

of the political crisis that we now face. What is

needed is not a further rationale of belief but a

program of action. This is not a denial of the

importance that hermeneutics has in our serious

grappling with history, but rather a supplemen-

tary realization that while nihilism might very

well be emancipation, it might just as assuredly

allow the dominant cultural logic of Western

hegemony, the economic fundamentalism of neo-

liberalism, and the brute force of neo-imperialism

all to go on unfettered. And if there is some

systemic connection to these various forces, then

perhaps at least one key to resistance is a form of

thinking that calls the system itself into question.

For that, it is still not necessary to take recourse

in the metaphysical, nor the religious authority

upon which metaphysics so often rests, but still

dwelling within the post-metaphysical we might

turn from the hermeneutic to the pragmatic and

the existential, and therein discern an illustration

of the political and spiritual potency of what is

being referred to here as ‘‘the gift of unbelief.’’

. . .

‘‘Is there really a Hell, Don Manuel?’’

‘‘For you, my child, no.’’

‘‘For others, then?’’

‘‘Does it matter to you, if you are not to gothere?’’

‘‘It matters to me for the others. Is there a

Hell?’’

‘‘Believe in Heaven, the Heaven we can

see . . .’’

‘‘But we are supposed to believe in Hell as

well as in Heaven,’’ I said.

‘‘Yes, that’s true. We must believe every-

thing that our Holy Mother Church believes

and teaches, our Holy Mother Church,

Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman. And now,that’s enough of that!’’

I thought I read a deep sadness in his eyes,

eyes as blue as the waters of the lake.

Migel de Unamuno y Jugo, ‘‘Saint Manuel

Bueno, Martyr’’

If we really must believe everything that the

church teaches, then unbelief would be the only

option in today’s postmodern, pluralistic world.

This is a point made years ago by the sociologist

of religion Peter Berger in his book The Heretical

Imperative. As Berger argues there, the fact that

we must choose whether or not to believe, not to

mention who and what to believe, makes heretics

of us all, at least if we were to take the ancient

Greek meaning of heresy to heart, which signified

a choice made or an opinion chosen (and only

later came to be identified almost exclusively as

either heterodoxy or a rejection of orthodoxy). By

choosing a religion, even if it is the choice to

remain within the religion of one’s birth and

heritage, the very nature of the religious

experience is altered as institutions are weakened,

the gift of unbelief

12




authority is defused, and truth is relativized.

In Berger’s words, ‘‘The Protestant disease has

become a planetary epidemic.’’5

This epidemic is only compounded when we

then consider the connection between belief and

metaphysics. With today’s specter of suicidebombers and faith-based politics we have moved

beyond the no-risk gamble of Pascal’s wager

wherein the choice to believe costs nothing but

holds out the promise of an infinite reward.

Instead, we now know that no choice of belief is

without risk or, even more, without consequence.

Beyond Pascal but still squarely within the

pragmatism of William James’s will to believe

wherein one’s belief helps to constitute reality, or

at least proves determinative in the making of truth.

For James, truth and reality are an unfolding

process inaccessible apart from the risk of belief.

In his article ‘‘The Will to Believe,’’ which he

describes as ‘‘an essay in justification of faith, a

defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude

in religious matters,’’ James demonstrates that

‘‘as a matter of fact, we find ourselves believing,

we hardly know how or why.’’6 Belief refers here

to the passional nature of human cognition, thefact that what the heart does not want the head

cannot – and indeed, will not – make it so. It is

with this in mind that James famously distin-

guishes between what he calls a ‘‘live’’ and a

‘‘dead’’ option, neither being intrinsic properties

to the proposition itself but rather the relation the

proposition has to the individual in question, or

better, the degree to which it appeals as a ‘‘real

possibility.’’ So not only passional but also

subjective and volitional as a truth is made real

only by seeing it through to the end. As James

writes in his essay on pragmatism, ‘‘The truth of

an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it.

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is

made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event,

a process: the process of its verifying itself, its

verification.’’7

For James, it is not as the modern rationalists

would have it, those who treat belief as irrational,

as a remnant of bygone superstition and the

source of fanaticism. On the contrary, belief is

necessary in the making of truth; in the language

of James, it is forced and momentous, making it

the paradigmatic ‘‘genuine option.’’ So much so

that unbelief is not an option – or, more

precisely, unbelief is a form of belief all its

own. As he writes:

The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Ourpassional nature not only lawfully may, but

must, decide on an option between proposi-

tions, whenever it is a genuine option that

cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual

grounds; for to say, under such circumstances,

‘‘Do not decide, but leave the question open,’’

is itself a passional decision – just like

deciding yes or no, – and is attended with

the same risk of losing the truth.8

For James, therefore, the question is not whetheror not we believe, but in our believing whether we

seek the truth or merely seek to avoid error.

While it is true that ‘‘the attitude of skeptical

balance is . . . the absolutely wise one if we would

escape mistakes,’’ it is also the case, as James

argues, that ‘‘faith may bring forth its own

verification.’’ In this light, one may in fact

remain in an unbelieving state, but for James it is

a sorrowful, even damnable, state of being, not

unlike the illustration Dante provides in Canto 3of The Inferno: as Dante warns, the ‘‘souls

unsure’’ are ‘‘wretched souls who,’’ have ‘‘lost the

good of intellect,’’ ‘‘whose lives have earned

neither honor nor bad fame,’’ who are ‘‘neither

rebellious to God nor faithful to Him.’’ They are

those who have never chosen a side, ‘‘but kept

themselves apart.’’ And now ‘‘heaven expels

them’’ and ‘‘hell rejects them,’’ as they are

‘‘repellent both to God and his enemies,’’ and

thus are confined to chase after a blank,

indecipherable banner for all eternity.9

In such a world as this, the stakes of belief

could not be any higher. Indeed, from this world

to the next, we become more fully who we are.

Belief becomes reality – or at least apart from

belief, whatever it is we mean by truth loses a

quotient of the real.

. . .

For the existentialist option, return to the story of

Saint Manuel: this story, which is set in a small

provincial Spanish town in the early twentieth

century, is about a simple but saintly parish

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priest as remembered by Angela Carballino, the

story’s narrator. To Angela, and all the towns-

people for whom she spoke, Don Manuel was a

true saint. ‘‘How he loved his people!’’ Angela

recalls, and goes on to describe his saintly life and

character:

He spent his life salvaging wrecked marriages,

forcing unruly children to submit to their

parents, or reconciling parents to their

children, and, above all, he consoled the

embittered and weary in spirit and helped

everyone to die well.10

He treated everyone with the greatest kind-

ness; if he favored anyone, it was the most

unfortunate, and especially those that

rebelled.11

And so it was that he was always busy,

sometimes even busy looking for things to do.

He wrote very little on his own . . . , on the

other hand, he acted as a scribe for everyone

else.12

While he would always describe himself as ‘‘only

a poor country priest,’’ to the townsfolk, there

was something marvelous about the man.

However, the deeper Angela gets into herportrait, the reader begins to sense that beneath

this always frenetic activity and perhaps the

source of Don Manuel’s great kindness was an

even greater sense of pathos. As Angela tells it:

The marvel of the man was his voice; a

divine voice that brought one close to

weeping . . . When on Good Friday he chanted,

‘‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken

me?’’ a profound shudder swept through the

multitude. . .

It was as if these people heardOur Lord Jesus Himself; as if the voice sprang

from the ancient crucifix, at the foot of which

generations of mothers had offered up their

sorrows.13

It was Angela’s older brother Lazaro who first

detected Don Manuel’s secret sorrow. Lazaro was

one of the few who had escaped the confines of

this small town. He had left for America and had

learned the ways of the new world. It was he who

was responsible for Angela’s education by

sending home money to make sure that the

parents could afford to send her off to school.

And as the representative of the lone modern man

in this provincial town, it is perhaps not

surprising that he was also the lone unbeliever,

holding the town’s traditions in contempt and

regarding its religious beliefs as nothing more

than superstitions. As Angela described him: ‘‘He

did not set foot inside the church nor did he miss

an opportunity to parade his lack of belief.’’14

What was surprising, however, was that he

would become Don Manuel’s chief confidant and

most trusted collaborator. Even after their first

meeting, Lazaro returned sensing that there was

something special, unpredictable, about this

simple country priest who was beloved by all,

a depth of character, feeling, and insight. As

Lazaro reported back to Angela: ‘‘He’s not likethe others.’’ But still, while he exempted Don

Manuel from his scorn, Lazaro also confessed that

‘‘he doesn’t fool me, he’s too intelligent to believe

everything he has to teach.’’15 So at least

according to Lazaro’s first impressions, Don

Manuel stood somewhere between the ignorant

and indiscriminate credulity of the provincial

townsfolk and Lazaro, the proud skeptic and

modern man of the world. Likewise, we the

readers are led to believe that perhaps there issome middle ground between believing every-

thing and believing nothing. Perhaps we could

have our cake and eat it too?

But then to think that we would have to forget

that Unamuno was a self-proclaimed disciple of

Kierkegaard, the great thinker of the either/or,

the one who pressed every line of thought to a

point of decision, and for whom every decision of

true consequence was a leap of faith, a grasping at

the unknown and an embrace of the absurd.

For Unamuno, therefore, the character of Don

Manuel represents much more than the negotia-

tion of some compromise, the carving out of some

middle ground, and some point of consensus.

And the more that Lazaro learned of the great

burden Don Manuel carried, the more his respect

grew and the more he sought to emulate him. As

time went on, it was Lazaro the unbeliever who

accompanied and assisted Don Manuel on his

journeys to those in need. Together they visited

the sick, gave company to the lonely, food to the

hungry, solace to the troubled. To most it would

seem that Lazaro was being converted, that Don


14




Manuel allowed Lazaro to accompany him so that

Lazaro could reconnect with those he had thought

he had left behind and regain an appreciation of

the necessary services that the church provided.

But as Lazaro once told Angela, Don Manuel’s

motives were much less ambitious. All that heasked of Lazaro was for him ‘‘to set a good

example, to avoid scandalizing the towns-

people, . . . to feign belief even if he did not feel

any . . . – all this without attempting to catechize

him, to instruct him in religion, or to effect a true

conversion.’’16

With this request, Don Manuel’s own secret

was revealed and his burden shared, if not

unloaded. By requesting Lazaro to ‘‘feign

belief’’ he had also confessed his own lack of belief. In contrast to his instruction to Angela

that she must ‘‘believe everything’’ that the

church teaches, even those most discomforting

teachings about Hell and the torment that was the

unbelievers’ fate, to Lazaro he confesses that his

belief, or lack thereof, was of little or no

consequence. What mattered more than his

belief were his actions; and what gave his actions

value was the appearance of his conversion.

As Lazaro appeared with Don Manuel doingacts of goodwill and service, this gave truth to

the lie that was Don Manuel’s secret, the secret

that he, like Lazaro, could not bring himself

to believe the very instruction he gave to

others. By feigning belief he successfully hid

the awful truth from those who could not bear

it. For ‘‘the truth,’’ as he once told Lazaro, ‘‘is

perhaps something so unbearable, so terrible,

something so deadly, that simple people could

not live with it!’’17

By this description of truth Don Manuel

reveals that his secret sorrow, the lie that

remained concealed, was of a graver nature than

that of his own unbelief. As he later confessed, it

was a despair born of his own face-to-face

encounter with God:

Like Moses, I have seen the face of God – our

supreme dream – face to face, and as you

already know, and as the Scriptures say, he

who sees God’s face, he who sees the eyes of

the dream, the eyes with which He looks at us,

will die inexorably and forever. And therefore,

do not let our people, so long as they live,

look into the face of God. Once dead, it will

no longer matter, for then they will see

nothing.18

To look into the face of God while loving God’s

creation as Don Manuel did was to die a spiritualdeath. His faith, his solidarity, his integrity

required of him nothing less than a willed

unbelief, a saintly life that hid a truth too

grave, too severe, too full of suffering to share

with others.

As such, Don Manuel’s faith follows the

existential crisis of belief as described by

Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard before him.

Whether concerned with the suffering of an

innocent child, as in the case of Ivan fromDostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, or with

the integrity of the Christian faith in contrast

to the worldliness and corruption associated with

the culture of Christendom, the claim made by

Kierkegaard in his Attack upon ‘‘Christendom’’

still resonates – namely, ‘‘by ceasing to take

part . . . in the public worship of God, as it now

is (with the claim that it is the Christianity of

the New Testament), thou has constantly one

guilt the less, and that a great one: thou dost not

take part in treating God as a fool . . .’’19 But the

difference between Dostoyevsky’s Ivan and

Kierkegaard’s attack when compared with

Unamuno’s Don Manuel is that Don Manuel is

not interested in remaining guilt free, or even

authentic for that matter. As such, he is much

more reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s ‘‘Grand

Inquisitor’’ than he is any knight of faith. For

his integrity not only requires a willed unbelief

but also a deliberate hypocrisy. He takes on the

guilt, sorrow, and damnation of unbelief and

skepticism so that others might witness his

goodness and still believe. And the irony is that

by the integrity of his faith, even if it is only a

feigned belief, even if it is a disavowal of the

very truth he taught to others, he helps to

establish a truth in a reality that even he himself

could not see. In contrast to Kierkegaard,

therefore, he takes on the guilt and assumes

the unbelief of others. He asserts a truth that

he himself could not bring himself to believe.

But in living a lie he makes that belief real

to others.

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In this portrait of a saint of a man, Unamuno

provides us with a compelling counter-

perspective to the one offered by Dostoyevsky’s

Ivan in the tale of the Grand Inquisitor. Like the

Grand Inquisitor, Don Manuel would seem to will

his own damnation. In addition, for both of them,

there is an integrity to their faith, an integrity

that can only be properly appreciated when it is

understood to be animated not by scorn but by

love – a love for humanity, an empathy for

human suffering and a sympathy for human

weakness. Is it possible that it is those who have

seen and yet still cannot believe who are the true

saints of the church? Is it possible that in

believing we might perpetuate the truth of a lie,

whereas by our unbelief we might attest to a truthunseen, unknown, even unknowable? In any case,

such was the apparent conclusion drawn by

Angela as she reflected on her memory of Don

Manuel many years later:

Now, as I write this memoir, this confession of

my experience with saintliness, with a saint,

I am of the opinion that Don Manuel the

Good, my Don Manuel, and my brother too,

died, believing they did not believe, but that,

without believing in their belief, they actuallybelieved, in active, resigned desolation.20

The difference, however, when contrasting

Unamuno to Dostoyevsky, is that with

Unamuno’s portrait of Don Manuel he stands

together with and for the unbeliever, in solidarity

and in sorrow. His tale provides no silent kiss

from Christ as in the closing lines of ‘‘The Grand

Inquisitor.’’ No redemption but that of a young

girl come of age and struggling to reconcile her

own conflicted memory in which there is belief

without believing, the truth of a life lived as a lie,

and the making of a saint.

. . .

We are all heretics, every last one of us. The

reality of the postmodern, pluralistic world makes

it so. May we nevertheless still strive for the life

of saintliness that makes real others’ best beliefs

and hopes about ourselves. As a program for

political resistance, it is also our spiritual

awakening. It is precisely at this point that

today’s political theology stands poised,

whether in its radical orthodox or secular

theological guises. In other

words, if not a metaphysical

moment, at least our theology

is laid bare by the political –

the urgent demand of our life

together.

notes

1 For a discussion of this, see the interview with

Gianni Vattimo entitled ‘‘A Prayer for Silence’’ in

John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the

Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York:

Columbia UP, 2007) 89^113.

2 Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. LucaD’Isanto (New York: Columbia UP, 2002) 17.

3 For Vattimo’s extended reflection on the signifi-

cance of this insight from Nietzsche for hermeneu-

tics, see ‘‘The Age of Interpretation’’ in Gianni

Vattimo and Richard Rorty, The Future of Religion,

ed. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia UP,

2005) 43^54.

4 See Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation:

Ethics, Politics, and Law (New York: Columbia UP,

2004).

5 Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative

(NewYork: Doubleday,1979) 60.

6 William James, ‘‘The Will to Believe,’’5http://

falcon.jmu.edu/omearawm/ph101willtobelieve.

html4.

7 William James, Pragmatism (New York: Dover,

1995) 77^78; emphasis in original.

8 James,‘‘The Will to Believe.’’

9 Dante, The Inferno of Dante, trans. Robert

Pinsky (New York: Farrar, 1994) 19^25. With this

comes an irony, as pointed out by Slavoj Z ›iz›ek

when lampooning the multiplication of qualifiers

and conditions within postmodern deconstructive

discussions of truth. After all, Z › iz›ek points out,

only those who truly believe in the power of

truth and the meaning of language would try so

desperately hard to mute its force and annul its

meaning.

10 Migel de Unamuno y Jugo, ‘‘Saint ManuelBueno, Martyr’’ 259^ 60.

11 Ibid. 261.


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12 Ibid. 264.

13 Ibid. 261.

14 Ibid. 272.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid. 275.

17 Ibid. 276.

18 Ibid. 286.

19 Soren Kierkegaard, Attack upon ‘‘Christendom’’

(Princeton: Princeton UP,1968) 59.

20 Migel de Unamuno y Jugo, ‘‘Saint Manuel

Bueno, Martyr’’ 291.

Jeffrey W. Robbins

Department of Religion and Philosophy

Lebanon Valley College

Annville, PA 17003

USAE-mail: [email protected]

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