Dark is the Night, a photo by exquisitur on Flickr.
JPS: But do you think that it is possible to become wholly secular, to come out on the other side of the critique and abandon religion all together, without having lost something essential?
GB: Let me introduce the term 'the dark night of the soul' used in the mystical tradition. The mystics claim that in the process of opening themselves to God, there comes a time—sometimes a long time—when they are so much aware of the obstacles to God in their heart, so much aware of their inner fragmentation and outer superficiality, that God seems to have disappeared altogether for them, so much so that they wondered if they had become atheists. They called this the dark night of the soul. But they also say that you have to wait patiently in the night, for it will end through the opening of a new and surprising window. Today, I have the impression, many Christians pass through a different dark night of the soul. They are deeply disturbed by the suffering in the world, the cruelly unjust maldistribution of wealth and power, and the indifference of the official churches to this scandalous situation that they find it increasingly difficult to believe in divine providence. They feel that they are becoming atheists. Some Christians—friends of mine among them—have never left the dark night. They became non-believers because they were inconsolable. They became agnostics for theological reasons—for which God will reward them. Yet other Christians pass through this night and eventually come out of it. They learn that God is in solidarity with the victims of history. A Jewish rabbi once wrote that the Holocaust has brought the end of 'untroubled theism'. The more we believe that God is love, the more difficult it is to believe that God exists. We don’t want a faith that does not raise uncomfortable questions. We long for a faith that is both serene and troubled.
JPS: To emerge from the dark night of the soul, is it sufficient to maintain a passionately secular hope for justice, or does this messianic yearning need to take an explicitly religious form?
GB: Sociologists like to distinguish different kinds of hope. There is a secular, materialist dream of the future which is nourished by advertising on television recommending the right clothes for you, the right house with a garden and beautiful furniture, the right car and so forth. We have here a messianic dream that has problematic personal and political consequences. Sociologist call future dreams ideological if they sustain the present order and make the victims of society invisible, and they call future dreams utopian if they de-legitimate the existing order and create the yearning for a more just society. Of course, utopian dreams could become dangerous. Ernst Bloch became more specific when he defined 'a concrete utopia' as the image of an alternative society that is close enough to the unrealized potential of the present to sustain a realistic historical project.
To dream of an alternative society where peace and justice reigns is a good thing, even if it is not a concrete utopia. St. Augustine’s famous distinction between the city of Man (the proud city) and the city of God (the humble city) provided a utopian dream. He thought that the great society, the empire, created by love of wealth and power, could not be reformed, it was doomed; but small communities defined by love of God and neighbor, created by co-operation and commitment to the common good, could anticipate God’s glorious reign. The church has been inspired by a utopia. But because it has called itself holy, the bride of Christ or his mystical body, the church found it increasingly difficult to come to self-knowledge. The church fathers still had a realistic view of the church: they spoke about it in paradoxical terms, calling it, for instance, casta meretrix (the chaste whore). Still, the Augustinian dream remains valid: yearning for a community of love and co-operation is nourished by the Gospel. I think that today’s counter-cultural movements have inherited this dream. Like Augustine, they do not believe that the great society, the empire, can be reformed, but they try to create on a small scale a community defined by principles at odds with empire.
The modern, liberal dream of industrial capitalism produced by hard work and reliance on techno-scientific reason produced a certain faith in necessary progress. Yet this dream had many dark sides. Max Weber studied several of them. One of them was, according to Weber (though I am not sure if he was serious), that death had become more anguishing in modernity. People work so hard, spend all their energy on getting ahead, don’t take time to live and reflect, and forever postpone their happiness—so that at the time of their death, they recognize how foolish they have been and feel that they have been cheated. In other cultures, Weber thought, people lived more deeply, had more joy and more suffering, and when the end came, they were quite ready to begin the long sleep. The modern anxiety over death has marked even the philosophers: it was central for Heidegger and even influenced sociologists like Alfred Schutz and Peter Berger.
from
An Interview with Gregory Baum
“Faith, Community & Liberation”
Adam S. Miller, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture
“Faith, Community & Liberation”
Adam S. Miller, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture
