Truce to the preposition war

That the First Amendment calls for a truce is obvious. When it comes to religion (and non-religion), there are many potentially warring factions, for even though there is essentially only one non-religion, there's a big raft of religions. And the first clause (the one that guarantees freedom from religion) doesn't protect just the non-religious (from religion generally); it also protects the followers of the various religions from each other's religion (from religions particularly).

Episcopaleans, for example, are fully as happy as I am not to have to indulge Evangelicals or Jehovah's Witnesses (or anyone else who "reads the Bible literally"). And the really true-believing religionists, of course, are generally happy not to have any truck with those agnostic or (horrors!) even atheistic Unitarians and Episcopaleans. And many Americans, including religious Christians and Jews as well as the non-religious, are a little jumpy right now about Muslims, not least because many of even the most religious-sounding Christians don't really take their religion quite as seriously as really believing Muslims do (probably not even Mitt Romney). (Islam after all means "submission [to God]," and Muslim "one who surrenders [to God].") And, of course, American Muslims are reciprocally a little uneasy living in a country whose current "president" (born-again, no less) talks about crusading in the Middle East. (Muslims who aren't Americans are a little uneasy about that too. Bush of course would remind us—since he no longer has Gonzales to do it—that those Muslims aren't protected by our Constitution....)

So, the first clause protects everybody (who is covered by the Constitution).

Whom does the second clause protect? It says, "Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]." Since the non-religious don't "exercise religion," they have nothing for the second clause to protect. (Their interest in the First Amendment comes back into play in the third and following clauses.) So, the second clause is there to protect the religious, that they may go about "exercising" their religion "freely."

But what does "free exercise" mean? It must, of course, at least exclude actions that nullify the first clause....

Bernard's personal revelation

Bernard (in David Lodge's Paradise News) continues to write into his journal the story that he regrets not having told his friend:

You don't have to go very deep into the philosophy of religion to discover that it is impossible either to prove or to disprove the truth of any religious proposition. For rationalists, materialists, logical positivists, etc., that is a sufficient reason for dismissing the entire subject from serious consideration. But to believers a non-disprovable God is almost as good as a provable God, and self-evidently better than No God at all, since without God there is no encouraging answer to the perennial problems of evil, misfortune, and death. The circularity of theological discourse, which uses revelation to apprehend a God for whose existence there is no evidence outside revelation (pace Aquinas), does not trouble the believer, for belief itself is outside the theological game, it is the arena in which the theological game is played. It is a gift, the gift of faith, something you acquire or have thrust upon you, through baptism or on the road to Damascus. Whitehead said that God is not the great exception to all metaphysical principles to save them from collapse, but unfortunately, from a philosophical point of view, that is exactly what He is, and Whitehead never found a convincing argument to the contrary.
      So everything depends on belief. Grant the existence of a personal God, the Father, and the whole body of Catholic doctrine hangs together reasonably well. Grant that, and you can bat all day. Grant that, and you can afford to have a few mental reservations about the odd doctrine—the existence of Hell, say, or the Assumption of the Virgin Mary—without feeling insecure in your faith. And that was what I did, precisely—I took my belief for granted. I didn't seriously question it, or closely examine it. It defined me. It explained why I was who I was, doing what I did, teaching theology to seminarians. I didn't discover that my belief had gone until I left the seminary. [pp. 149-150]
      All the radical demythologizing theology that I had spent most of my life resisting suddenly seemed self-evidently true. Christian orthodoxy was a mixture of myth and metaphysics that made no kind of sense in the modern, post-Enlightenment world except when understood historically and interpreted metaphorically. Jesus, insofar as we could disentangle his real identity from the midrash of the early Gospel-writers, was clearly a remarkable man, with uniquely valuable (but enigmatic, very enigmatic) wisdom to impart, infinitely more interesting than comparable apocalyptic zealots who were characteristic of that period of Jewish history; and the story of his crucifixion (though not historically verifiable) was moving and inspiring. But the supernatural machinery of the story—the idea that he was God, "sent" by himself as Father from heaven to earth, born of a virgin, that he rose from the dead and returned to heaven, from whence he would return again on the last day to judge the living and the dead, etc., well, that too had its grandeur and symbolic force as a narrative, but it was no more credible than most of the other myths and legends about divinities that proliferated in the Mediterranean and Middle East at the same time.
      So here I was, an atheist priest, or at least an agnostic one. And I didn't dare to tell anyone.... [p. 154-154]

__________________
Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I don't have the right to publish long excerpts from copyrighted work (such as the novels of David Lodge). I console myself with the thought that I have so few readers—a few friends—I can hardly be said to be "publishing" anything. It's more like calling the friend over to my reading chair and saying, "Come here, look over my shoulder. What do you think of this?"

The "paradise news"

In Chapter I of Part Two of Paradise News, David Lodge reveals what I think is the theological reference of his novel's title. Bernard has just returned from dinner with the woman who was driving the car that knocked his father down. He feels that he behaved clumsily and churlishly, having listened to her story but not having told her his. In a journal he has begun to keep in Hawaii, he writes, "I should have repaid her confidence. I should have told her the whole story. Something like this:

...My role [as a pastor] was clearly designated, "supernatural reassurance." They looked to the Church to provide a spiritual dimension to lives outwardly indistinguishable from those of their secular neighbours...They wanted me to marry them, to baptize their children, to comfort them in bereavement, and to relieve them from the fear of death. They wanted me to reassure them that if they were not as prosperous and successful as they might have wished, or if their spouses deserted them, or their children went off the rails, or they were stricken with fatal illnesses, it wasn't the end, it wasn't a reason to despair, there was another place, another time out of time, where everything would be compensated for, justice done, pain and loss made good, and we would all live happily ever after.
      That, after all, is what the language of the Mass promised them every Sunday....
      This has always been the basic appeal of Christianity—and no wonder. The vast majority of human lives in history have not been long, happy, and fulfilled....It explains why Christianity spread so rapidly among the poor and underprivileged, the conquered and the enslaved, in the Roman Empire of the first century....The appeal of the Gospel message, though, remains essentially the same. The Good News is news of eternal life, Paradise news...." [pp. 144, 151-153]

[More of the story Bernard would have told his friend in Hawaii will be posted tomorrow under "Bernard's personal revelation."]
__________________
Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I don't have the right to publish long excerpts from copyrighted work (such as the novels of David Lodge). I console myself with the thought that I have so few readers—a few friends—I can hardly be said to be "publishing" anything. It's more like calling the friend over to my reading chair and saying, "Come here, look over my shoulder. What do you think of this?"

Comfort in silence

Non interludus

Among the English Roman Catholics portrayed in David Lodge's 1980 novel How Far Can You Go? [published in the U.S. as Souls and Bodies] is Austin Brierley, a parish priest on a sabbatical to take a degree in psychology:

The books in [his] rucksack were paperbacks on sociology, psychology, philosophy, sexuality, comparative religion. Austin felt that he had a lot of reading to catch up on—too much. His head was a buzzing hive of awakened but directionless ideas. There was Freud who said that we must acknowledge our own repressed desires, and Jung who said we must recognize our archetypal patterning, and Marx who said we must join the class struggle and Marshall McLuhan who said we must watch more television. There was Sartre who said that man was absurd though free and Skinner who said that man was a bundle of conditioned reflexes and Chomsky who said he was a sentence-generating organism and Wilhelm Reich who said he was an orgasm-having organism. Each book that Austin read seemed to him totally persuasive at the time, but they couldn't all be right. And which were most easily reconcilable with faith in God? For that matter, what was God? Kant said he was the essential presupposition of moral action, Bishop Robinson said he was the ground of our being, and Teilhard de Chardin said he was the Omega Point. Wittgenstein said, whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent—an aphorism in which Austin Brierley found great comfort.