As a philosopher, many people find it completely dumb-founding that I could be a religious person. However, I seem to never find myself questioning whether the postulates of Christianity are true, but incessantly trying to figure out what they mean. That is to say, I question what it is that I believe, not whether I believe it. This is something that I find few people doing, or at least few people talking about around me, and my suspicion is that the apparent conflict between scientific findings and (what seems to me a very facile and un-nuanced reading of) religion has prompted many to simply reject the latter wholesale without inquiring into the matter of whether a more appropriate reading of religion might be possible, one that fits better with one's other beliefs about the nature of the world, what's in it, and particularly its beginning.
Anyway, those issues are all far too sweeping to address in such a modest forum as this, but one thing that I will address is rite. In particular, a certain rite that I think loses its impact because of constant repetition. I'm referring to the Lord's Prayer, which is recited every Sunday in every church of which I am aware. It's a beautiful piece of poetry, but what I notice about it, in fact what hits me square in the face every time I hear it recited, is that it comes out so much like a song. Those reciting it speak the words in a very particular way, always with the same cadence, and even with the same melody. The problem with that, of course, is that we seldom reflect on what is said, and the prayer thereby loses its meaning (or its power, if you're into that sort of thing). We don't think about the content of what we're saying so much as we spill out its form by rote, like if one were to write out the alphabet not by knowing which letter comes next in the series, but rather what the next shape looks like. (The alphabet song has an interesting effect on us as children worthy of note here: because the letters L M N and O are 1/16th notes instead of 1/8th notes as are the rest of the letters, that is to say, since they're sung at twice the speed, many children believe for a time that there is a letter called "ellemeno.")
My intention in this entry, then, is simple, though difficult. I wish to make the meaning of the Lord's Prayer resurface, and I will do that by offering a different interpretation of it. For anyone not familiar with the original, I will write it out at the end of this post.
(Warning, the following verse contains a good dose of platonism, and may therefore not be suitable for all audiences. Reader discretion is advised.)
Here goes:
Righteousness and virtue,
pure by nature but not in it,
we revere and seek you:
that the Earth may be more full of you,
that we may follow your dictates more boldly and courageously,
and thereby bring about a better world.
Grant that our lives may be sustained,
that we may be forgiven when we falter from your straight and narrow path,
and that we may have the strength to forgive thus around us, for they, too, falter.
Let us not be tempted into vice,
and be spared the violence and the hate that vice promotes.
For you are the ideal
that inspires and drives us
eternally forward.
Amen.
Some might call this heresy, though such accusations these days are not nearly as widespread as they once were. (That's a sad thing, too: the world was a pretty exciting place when people were gallivanting around calling one another heretics.) I'm interested to see what reaction this will bring about, both from those who de-religify Christianity, and from those who think that that's what I'm doing here. I'll say outright that that is not my intention.
Some might call this heresy, though such accusations these days are not nearly as widespread as they once were. (That's a sad thing, too: the world was a pretty exciting place when people were gallivanting around calling one another heretics.) I'm interested to see what reaction this will bring about, both from those who de-religify Christianity, and from those who think that that's what I'm doing here. I'll say outright that that is not my intention.
Here's the original, by the way:
Our Father,
who art in Heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done
on Earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
But lead us not into temptation,
and deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power, and the glory,
forever and ever.
Amen.
I grew up attending Church regularly and really fitting into the programmed delivery of prayers you describe. In late high school, feeling frustrated with religion I decided that I was not going to "follow along" in the same way I had been until I could be sure i knew and agreed with what was being said. I really like your interpretation, and think you've shared a really interesting piece of wisdom here.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you decided to take on the topic, though it does sound a little Kantian to my ears.
ReplyDeleteQuestion: what does "pure by nature but not in it" mean?
Ryan, I believe that "pure by nature but not in it" is referring to the fact that righteousness and virtue are ideals. As such, they cannot be perfectly enacted or achieved in our lives. The next line, that "we revere and seek you" emphasizes that point, in my mind.
ReplyDeleteBrooke, I really like your translation! I think that some of the wording would have certain religions circles upset with a few of your word choices, but I identify with your translation and see where you are coming from. It is interesting that you write something like this, because earlier this year, I attended mass on sunday where the priest talked about how it is about the quality of prayer and not necessarily the quantity. Specifically, he referred to the Lord's Prayer and advised that the next time we say it, that we say it slowly and deliberately, reflecting on the meaning of it. He went to the point of saying take 10 minutes to recite it, but that was just a suggestion. However, following his main goal of reflecting on this prayer, I did reflect and found a new appreciation for the words that I had often taken for granted, a theme echoed in this post.
It would be interesting to see what kind of other comments get posted and get a feel for how different people feel about this. I think a follow up post on the more general view you take on religion, as you mention briefly in the intro paragraphs, would be really interesting for people to read and share.
Hey Brooke,
ReplyDeleteGood post.
I like your re-writing of the lord's prayer and my guess is many christians would (at least most of the christians I grew up around).
If you end up writing more on religion, I'd like to read a little more, especially if you want to get into the "beginning"!
Ryan: I've finally sorted out my commenting woes, and now that I arrive on the scene ready to respond, I realize that Daniele has already beaten me to the punch. In fact, he got it absolutely right. Righteousness and virtue, as ideal forms, are pure by their very nature. However, we only ever encounter imperfect instantiations of them in the natural world. (Hence my foreword about platonism.)
ReplyDeleteDaniele and David: You both suggest that I write more about religion. So be it! I'll try to get my thoughts in order over the next few days and crank out the next post over the weekend.
ReplyDeleteAlso, thanks to all of you for the encouragement. I'm really heartened by the idea that these little musings of mine are actually prompting (and perhaps even fruitfully informing) reflection in the community.
Thank you very much for posting this, Brooke. I enjoyed it greatly.
ReplyDeleteThe problem that you raise is, I think, a very vital one. Last semester Peter Loptson and I were engaged with one of the major texts of American pragmatism and philosophy of religion, Josiah Royce’s The Problem of Christianity, and while it had a great deal to say about the metaphysical implications of the Pauline church as both a universal and concrete (verily THE concrete universal, in the old Hegelian sense) community of interpretation (in the Peircean sense, and certainly not in the Pickwickian sense), it had very little to say of historical church rite and ritual and how these would either exemplify or deviate from his main thesis. The work was written partially as a response to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, which Royce thought entirely too enamored of the meaning of religious experience as it concerns the individual experiencer, neglecting what Royce took to be the essential Pauline insight of the preeminence of the loving/interpreting community. It is worth noting, however, that when James touches on the communal experience of religion that it is usually to examine the hollowness of rite and ritual as anything that could inspire anything like a profound experience within the life of the person. It is a case of langweilige Wiederholung; of a rote and trite formula for experience, which is totally anathema for someone like James.
I think your post is a very interesting strike at a middle ground, where rite and ritual such as devotions or prayers are and remain a vital part of meaningful religious experience, but the relevance of these practices must be rediscovered unless they merely become pleasant exercises in sing-song, if they don’t become something totally mechanical and perhaps boring and repellent. There surely is something very comforting in the unreflective recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, and this may be regarded as the aesthetic appeal that religion provides. This is not to trivialize it, as I fear some have done, such as Iris Murdoch and George Santayana, by reducing the aesthetical aspect of religion’s well-burnished music to a pleasing, soothing spectacle. This is rather to say that very hard and seemingly entirely removed ideas such as God and universal love become something tangible through beauty, in the apprehension of value superior to the lesser, the more debilitating; the truly deadening. In other words, it is “in-spiration” in the sense that the organism is revitalized and reanimated through a feeling for something beautiful, compelling further pursuit of it in thought and deed (po-tay-to/po-tah-to). The problem is, at least terms of a certain social problems, that these feelings are for the most part removed from any articulated system of value. So that the beauty felt in certain aspects of religious life, such when dozens of voices come together in prayer as the multiplex tongue of communal love, can become easily lost and co-opted within codes and dogmas, which can just as easily discover ways of generalizing these moments of inspiration into formulas for further advancing the cause of inspiration and beauty as they can generate proscriptions against the discovery of inspiration and beauty. Not for nothing did William Blake equate the established church with Newtonian science: God (or, in Blake’s mythology, Urizen) spreading his compass over the depths, in an attempt to curtail the chaotic irruptions of novelty via the imagination by the adamantine order of formula, law, code, identity, contract, cause, etc., etc.
ReplyDeleteThis is all a very roundabout way of applauding your contribution to the discovery of religious meaning by the thinking-out of a new significance from the Lord’s Prayer. As the prayer is part of church ritual it can be beautiful, inspiring music, and, contrariwise, its potentiality for remaining meaningful and inspiring can also be lost if it is not also meditated upon, and a new, vitalizing significance drawn forth from the act. In this way it may be thought of as prayer not only as a way of altering ones thinking in order to follow a certain formula for the sake of apprehending God, which can be valuable in times of duress when what is needed is a certain music, a certain assuredness in the beauty that may be experienced in life. It is also as a response to a historical, cultural tradition which has engendered the formula. As you pointed out in one of your responses, the problem becomes that we forget that even in these moments of simple aesthetic enjoyment that we are actually participants and inheritors from a cultural tradition which has composed the rite and aligned it with a certain religious or ethical conceptualization, itself created not in a vacuum, but it itself a part of a perpetual process of creative insight producing tradition which then becomes the ground for the irruption of creative insight. The danger, then, becomes not only the susceptibility of personal aesthetic enjoyment to potentially debilitating tradition, dogma, formula, etc., but the possible obscurity of the cultural situatedness of any religious tradition or religious experience. Your goal, as I understand it to be, is the rethinking of the ritual of prayer as a product of a cultural tradition which may nevertheless refocus our thinking in such a way that we may be able to recognize this condition which, to a degree limits us, as well as the situatedness of every other person within similar limitations, but also of our universal potentiality to recognize this and overcome such particular limitations for the sake of an experience of greater love and capacity of enjoyment and understanding. In Spinozistic terms, it is the maximizing of our capacity to bear and produce affect. In this way we have brought rite and ritual within the process of interpretation, or as the activity of contemplating the potentiality for greater power of love and feeling (God), addressing it both as a problem to be faced and interpreted, and from within this problem discover the condition of the interpreter as being produced from the interpreted, and the universality of this condition for all potential interpreters. Thus rite and ritual may become both the means by which the loving community of interpretation perpetuates and extends itself (Royce) and the font of novel creative individual insights and feelings (James), for in re-translating the meaning of the prayer you have in fact re-created the prayer as something different from the meaning of the original, thus producing a fresh source of potential inspiration.
ReplyDeleteThe problem that remains for me is the Platonism of the prayer itself. While we may still say that it is a contemplation of the potentiality for greater love and feeling (or greater capacity to interpret), and by such a contemplation a particular interpretation emerges from which we discover ourselves as part of the ongoing process of interpretation, thus rendering whatever emerges as both tentative, provisional, and personally significant if nothing else (in terms of naming that which is found, that is, what is relevant and identifiable within the process of interpretation), we may then return the favor, as it were, and offer up our own contemplation of the contemplation, and ask whether such words as righteousness and virtue identify universals which, if not universals distinct from God, whether they name attributes of God. Is this a thinking of God as a substance with attributes of virtue and righteousness? How do these attributes participate as universals in a world of fallen particularity? Can these be in fact named or identified in such a way where we are just not naming some particular quality, completely a part of a particular context and its historical, free development, and not that which is a self-representing universal independent of all such particular instances? I appreciate, however, the fact that these are meant to be ideals that persuade us, rather than power that coerces us, towards greater love and feeling, but if greater love and feeling is to be always our goal (and for the moment we’ll assume that Plato is right and that we have only confused ideas at times about what we really want) is it always certain virtues and codes of righteousness which will engender such powers, or do the desires themselves select and name their own virtues in the process of discovery? Love, after all, is no respecter of moral codes. Should the prayer be a stabilizing influence, directing us towards notions of virtue and righteousness that we may gleam from our own insights and those of others until these become no long satisfactory in terms of producing vital concepts for the spiritual quest?
ReplyDeleteHey Pat, thanks for the lengthy and articulate response. I quite appreciated it. I agree with basically everything that you've said, but I figured that I might be able to add some helpful synthesis by way of some neat references to Cassirer, whom of course I find very interesting. Cassirer's point in _Logic of the Humanities_, and in _The Myth of the State_, is that cultural practices are always in the process of reinterpretation. (That's obviously a huge break from Platonism, and a move that I endorse. Part of my disclaimer was about the Platonistic language, and the remainder was facetious.) No matter what we do when we carry out a rite or a ritual, its meaning is never a given, it is always being constructed afresh each time. For instance, if I am inspired by divine revelation and write a beautiful prayer, and if that prayer becomes a popular and frequent recitation, then those who recite it because of its popularity, because "that's what everyone else is doing," or even just because it's beautiful, are not praying for the same reason that I was as its original author. My intention, of course, was to express the divine revelation.
DeleteSo the meaning of cultural practice is never given, never ready-made. What this calls for, then, is that if we wish for our actions to be meaningful in any kind of profound way, we must put some effort into interpretation.
In _Myth of the State_, Cassirer talks about the danger of allowing cultural meanings to hypostasize, specifically when members of culture are in situations of duress and are willing to latch onto any promising-sounding doctrine. The book is actually about the philosophical undergirding of Nazism.
So, the take home message is something like: we need not accept the hypostasized meanings of cultural practices, including religious rite. In fact, dogmatic and unquestioning adoption of those practices can be very dangerous, especially in situations of acute duress. And as I argued in a recent paper (taking up a line from Charles Taylor), we shouldn't therefore abandon these cultural practices either, as they are fundamental for the coherence of our communities. The trick is to straddle the line: adopting cultural practice reflectively and intentionally, rather than taking it up dogmatically or abandoning it entirely.
Again, Pat, thanks for the responses. I hope that you'll read my next post on the subject of religion. I'd be interested in hearing your responses to that as well.