Fall/Winter 2005: Belief

Belief without Surrender

By James C. Foster

When I was a kid during the fifties, my parents were big fans of Nat Cole. I remember Cole crooning in his scotch-and-soda voice: "It is only a paper moon/hanging over a cardboard sea/but it wouldn't be make-believe/if you believe in me." Looking back, it's clear to me that repeated listening to those words formed the first tributary that imbued me with an intuitive sense of the importance of belief in our lives--and of belief's limitations. Currently, we seem to be in the grips of yet another one of those religious Great Awakenings that periodically course through America. We're again awash in absolutes. Surrounded by people ardently professing varieties of unquestioning belief, I ask myself: WWND--What Would Nat Do? Puzzling over how I might embrace believing while continuing to dance with doubt, I have drawn on several converging streams.

A short time ago I read Elaine Pagels's book, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. A historian of religion, Pagels immersed herself in original sources besides the "New Testament Gospel canon of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John." Thomas taught Pagels that another way of being a Christian is to embrace searching. She writes, "Thomas's gospel encourages the hearer not so much to believe in Jesus ... as to seek to know God through one's own divinely given capacity, since we are all created in the image of God."

Pagels's studies reveal that there are at least two visions of Christ's teaching. First there is the questing Christ who challenges: "seek and ye shall find." By contrast, there is the canonical Christ who consoles: "I am The way, The truth, and The life." For Thomas's questing Christ, meaning resides in making meaning. For this Christ, searching for truth is more fundamental than any fundamental Truth a person finds. One might say that the search is the truth. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber illustrate dramatically this distinction between searching and finding in Jesus Christ Superstar, their 1971 version of the Passion. In their rendering of Christ's trial, an increasingly frustrated Pilate wants answers, but Christ offers none:

Pilate:

Talk to me Jesus Christ

Where is your kingdom?

Jesus:

There may be a kingdom for me somewhere--if I only knew.

Pilate:

Then you're a king?

Jesus:

It's you that say I am.

I look for truth and find that I get damned.

Pilate:

But what is truth?

Christ was a great teacher by indirection. His method of teaching was to tell parables. A second tributary feeding my effort to balance belief and skepticism is a musical parable, of sorts. Recently I reencountered Charles Ives's 1906 composition "The Unanswered Question." Like a Zen koan, "The Unanswered Question" sweeps one into a personal quest. A person does not merely listen; he or she participates. "The Unanswered Question" is Ives's most enigmatic composition and because of that, it is his most demanding. Like a koan, the music is a vehicle for seeking wisdom, for demanding that one immerse oneself in ambiguity. The immersion is the answer, which, ultimately, is unknowable. One can only know the knowing. Engrossed once again by Ives's composition, I remembered critic Kenneth Walton's observation that "[t]he Unanswered Question ... somehow achieves penetrating unity through its unconventional diversity."

My close encounters with Pagels and Ives started me thinking about how different what I'd call a "politics of principled skepticism" is from the currently chic "politics of belief." My reflection led me back to Hannah Arendt, an old "friend"--a political philosopher whose work I've known since graduate school thirty years ago. My understanding of politics is profoundly influenced by Arendt's writings--a third tributary. Politics, for Arendt, is "a world ... of speech and action created by human relationships." This public space, created by human beings sharing words and deeds born of principles, decidedly is not confined to professional politicians. Politics, for Arendt, entails one's taking a stand in relation to others (to adopt a metaphor from theologian Martin Buber). The cardinal political virtue is what Aristotle called phronesis (insight) and Immanuel Kant termed an "enlarged mentality"--"the greatest possible overview of all the possible standpoints and viewpoints from which an issue can be seen." The politics of principled skepticism is based upon a conscientious interpersonal quest for phronesis. In comparison, the politics of belief is based upon allegiance to catechism.

As I pursue the politics of principled skepticism, my model is the quizzical Christ, my method is the unanswered question, my goal is phronesis.

Practitioners of the politics of principled skepticism like me reject absolutes as we endeavor to create communities of shared belief. We understand that such communities are ephemeral and that our common convictions are fallible. Like Arendt, we realize that when answers preclude questions, politics ends and a tyranny of truth prevails. The preeminent student of totalitarianism, Arendt understood that believing we "can realize the absolute" introduces "the real and deadly antipolitical principle into politics."

In the end, my personal search for a way to be a believer while not surrendering to belief, returns me to the wisdom in that Nat Cole song. WWND? In confluence with Thomas's questing Christ, Ives's unanswered question, and Arendt's understanding of politics, I have learned from Nat that, although it may well be a "Barnum and Bailey world, just as phony as it can be," by believing in our human capacity to converse and to connect, we can live with our incidental nature.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2005 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2005 Oregon Council for the Humanities