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
