Chapter Nine Modern Philosophy and Modern Theology
Modern people have put various things “upstairs” in the area of nonreason in a desperate attempt to find some optimism about meaning and values. We will consider first those things the secular existential philosophers have put there, in their attempt to find meaning to life.
The existentialist who is probably best known is Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). He held that in the area of reason everything is absurd, but nonetheless a person can authenticate himself by an act of the will; everyone should abandon the pose of spectator and act in a purposeless world. But because, as Sartre saw it, reason is separated from this authenticating, the will can act in any direction. On the basis of his teaching, you could authenticate yourself either by helping a poor old lady along the road at night or by speeding up your auto and running her down. Reason is not involved, and nothing can show you the direction which your will should take.
Albert Camus (1913–1960) was always named jointly with Sartre as one of the two leaders of French existentialism. However, Camus was never as consistent as Sartre with the presuppositions which they both held. Being less consistent, he was more human and therefore better liked by the young who were following French existentialism.
But Sartre could not live consistently with his position either. By signing the Algerian Manifesto (1960), which declared the Algerian War a dirty war—that is, by making a value judgment that was not just a leap of nonreason—he destroyed his own position. This action said that man can use his reason to conclude that some things are right and some things are wrong. Sartre’s later left-wing political views did the same.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), a German philosopher, was an existentialist who set forth basically the same idea: that answers are separated from reason. His early books are Being and Time (1927) and What Is Metaphysics? (1929). As a young man, Heidegger introduced the term angst (roughly meaning “anxiety”) as a word defining modern man’s stance before the world. This angst is not to be confused with fear. As Heidegger defined it, fear has an object, while angst is the general feeling of anxiety one experiences in the universe. It is fear without a definite object. In Heidegger’s view this mood of anxiety gives people certainty of existence, and in so doing there is laid upon them a call for decision. Thus out of this mood comes meaning to life and to choice, even against one’s reason. But notice: this rests on nothing more than a vague feeling of anxiety, so nebulous it does not even have a specific object. We shall see that later this view was too weak for Heidegger, and as an older man he changed his position.
Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was a German existentialist, but he is usually thought of as Swiss because he lived and taught in Basel for so long. In some ways he has had the greatest impact on the thought and the life forms which have followed the avenue of existential thought. Jaspers suggested that we may have a “final experience” in life. To him final experience was a technical term. By it he meant that even though our mind tells us life is absurd, we may have some huge experience that encourages us to believe that there is a meaning to life.
The dilemma of Jaspers’s existentialism can be understood clearly by an example. A young man from Holland who followed Jaspers came to study with me in Switzerland. He had had an experience in Amsterdam one night at the theater as he watched the play Green Pastures. Reason had played no part, but it had been a very emotional experience, and it had given him the hope of some meaning to life that he had not had before. Weeks and months passed, and because no reason was involved in the experience, he could not give any words or content to it, neither to others nor to himself. To put the experience into words is impossible, for in the existential system reason is excluded from the experience. Thus, by definition, content is excluded and the possibility of putting it into words is excluded. One can only say to others or to oneself, “I had an experience.” All this young man could keep on saying was, “So many months ago, I had an experience.” He was gradually overwhelmed and ready to commit suicide; the feeling of meaning, which had no basis in his reason gradually slipped through his fingers and, being sensitive, he was left in despair. A bitter thing indeed!
As a formal philosophical position, existentialism is now not influential. But more and more among people generally this frame of thinking is increasing. This is so even if the people thinking this way do not know the word existentialism. They talk about or act upon the idea that reason leads only to pessimism. They say or act upon the concept (with varying degrees of understanding), “Let us try to find an answer in something totally separated from reason.” Humanistic man tried to make himself self-sufficient and demanded that one start from himself and the individual details and build his own universals. His great hope that he could begin from himself and produce a uniformity of knowledge led him, however, to the sad place where his mind told him that he was only a machine, a bundle of molecules. Then he tried desperately to find meaning in the area of nonreason, until, with those following Jaspers, the problem became how one could be sure he would ever have a big enough final experience (or, even if he had one, how he could ever have another) and there was no way to be sure.
The man who followed on from that point was English—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). He proposed drugs as a solution. We should, he said, give healthy people drugs and they can then find truth inside their own heads. They can then have the final experience any time they wish; they do not need to wait, hoping that something will happen. He first suggested this as a theoretical concept in Brave New World (1932), calling the all-important drug soma. He chose this name with care, for in Eastern Hindu myths, soma was the drug which kept the gods contented. Thus, in tying into Eastern thought his hope of finding a meaning for life in the area of nonreason, Aldous Huxley was already opening the door for what would be the next step.
Later Huxley went beyond the theoretical concept in Brave New World and openly advocated the use of drugs in The Doors of Perception (1956) and Heaven and Hell (1956). And in The Humanist Frame (1961), edited by his brother Julian Huxley (1887–1975), Aldous contributed the last chapter, “Human Potentialities,” still pushing for first-order experiences through drugs. He held this view up to the time of his death. He made his wife promise to give him LSD when he was ready to die so that he would die in the midst of a trip. All that was left for Aldous Huxley and those who followed him was truth inside a person’s own head. With Huxley’s idea, what began with the existential philosophers—man’s individual subjectivity attempting to give order as well as meaning, in contrast to order being shaped by what is objective or external to oneself—came to its logical conclusion. Truth is in one’s own head. The ideal of objective truth was gone.
This emphasis on hallucinogenic drugs brought with it many rock groups—for example, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix. Most of their work was from 1965 to 1968. The Beatles’s Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) also fits here. This disc is a total unity, not just an isolated series of individual songs, and for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thinking, and feeling. As a whole, this music was the vehicle to carry the drug culture and the mentality which went with it across frontiers which were almost impassable by other means of communication.
The next accepted version in the West of life in the area of nonreason was the religious experience of Hinduism and Buddhism. This grasping for a nonrational meaning to life and values is the central reason that these Eastern religions are so popular in the West today. Goethe, Wagner, and others had opened the door to Eastern thinking with their vague pantheism. But it came flood-like into the West with Huxley and the emphasis on drugs, for it followed naturally in the line of what people had been putting into the area of nonreason in the hope of finding meaning and values. Young people (and older ones) tried the drug trip and then turned to the Eastern religious trip. Both seek truth inside one’s own head and both negate reason.
In this flow there was also the period of psychedelic rock, an attempt to find this experience without drugs, by the use of a certain type of music. This was the period of the Beatles’ Revolver (1966) and Strawberry Fields Forever (1967). In the same period and in the same direction was Blonde on Blonde (1966) by Bob Dylan.
We are seeing that many things can be put in the area of nonreason to provide an optimistic hope. Indeed it can be a highly sophisticated cultural concept. André Malraux (1901–1976) of France argued that art will give us the hope of some meaning to life—not the content of the art, but simply the fact that art exists. In The Voices of Silence (1953), Malraux showed that he understood very well that modern man is the man of no absolutes. Yet he offered art as a hope, a hope of nonreason.
Heidegger in his later years changed from his existential philosophy. His earlier existentialism had proved too weak and so he tried a new approach. His later books were An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), Essays in Metaphysics (1957), The Question of Being (1956), What Is Philosophy? (1956), and Discourse on Thinking (1959). His new emphasis was clearly exhibited in his little book What Is Philosophy?. According to the later Heidegger, because there is a being (that is, man) who speaks, who verbalizes, one can hope that the universe (that is, Being) has meaning. For him, this was his final cause for optimism. “Listen to the poet,” he tells us in What Is Philosophy?. It is not the content of what the poet says which is important, because the poets may contradict each other, but just the fact that poets exist.
We have also seen a tremendous rash of the occult appearing as an upper-story hope. Though demons do not fit into modern man’s concepts on the basis of his reason, many moderns would rather have demons than be left with the idea that everything in the universe is only one big machine. People put the occult in the upper story of nonreason in the hope of having some kind of meaning, even if it is a horrendous one.
Another example of what can be put in the area of nonreason is found in the thought and the art of Salvador Dalí (1904–1989). At first Dalí was a Surrealist. Surrealism is the uniting of Freud’s concept of the existence of the unconscious with Dada—an art and life form in which all was seen as absurd. The founding group chose its very name in Zürich by opening a French dictionary at random and putting a finger down on a chance word, which happened to be the French word for rocking horse, dada.
Eventually, Salvador Dalí abandoned Surrealism—with its acceptance of absurdity—and began his mystical paintings in which Gala, his wife, became the focal point in his leap into the area of nonreason in a hope for meaning. The final breakthrough in this period was his painting A Basket of Bread. He had painted in 1926 and 1945 other works with this same title; these depicted baskets of rough Spanish bread. But in 1945, he used this title for a painting of Gala with one breast exposed. He wrote her name on the picture; there is no mistaking who she is. He made her his mystical center. In some of his paintings he would portray her three or four times, often where Mary would have appeared in Roman Catholic paintings. There are a number of such paintings in the New York Cultural Center in New York City. From this time on, many of his pictures show his mystical leap into the area of nonreason.
This was the period of Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951), now in the Glasgow Art Gallery, and The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington (see ). These were not paintings of the Christ of history. Rather, in them Christ is an upper-story, mystical figure. They were the leap of Kierkegaardianism expressed in painting. The Christ in the Last Supper is a shadowy figure through whom we may look at the landscape behind. The little ships are visible through his body. This is not a body of flesh and blood in space and time. This intangible Christ which Dalí painted is in sharp contrast to the bodies of the apostles who are physically solid in the picture.
Plate 48 Salvador Dalí, The Sacrament of the Last Supper, 1955, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. “. . . Christ is an upper-story, mystical figure.”
Dalí explained in his interviews that he had found a mystical meaning for life in the fact that things are made up of energy rather than solid mass. Because of this, for him there was a reason for a vault into an area of nonreason to give him the hope of meaning. Whether in his interviews or in these paintings, that which causes him to escape the absurdity which Surrealism presented is not reason, and it is not Christianity either; it is a blind leap into the area of nonreason.
One must understand that from the advent of Kierkegaardianism onward there has been a widespread concept of the dichotomy between reason and nonreason, with no interchange between them. The lower-story area of reason is totally isolated from the optimistic area of nonreason. The line which divides reason from nonreason is as impassable as a concrete wall thousands of feet thick, reinforced with barbed wire charged with 10,000 volts of electricity. There is no interchange, no osmosis between the two parts. So modern man now lives in such a total dichotomy, wherein reason leads to despair. “Downstairs” in the area of humanistic reason, man is a machine, man is meaningless. There are no values. And “upstairs” optimism about meaning and values is totally separated from reason. Reason has no place here at all; here reason is an outcast.
This division into these two areas is the existential methodology. This methodology (and the existence of the dichotomy) is the hallmark of the modern stream of humanistic thinking. Once people adopt this dichotomy—where reason is separated totally from nonreason—they must then face the fact that many types of things can be put in the area of nonreason. And it really does not matter what one chooses to put there, because reason gives no basis for a choice between one thing or another.
In addition to the secular existentialism of Sartre, Camus, Jaspers, and Heidegger, Kierkegaardianism brought forth another form of existentialism: the theological existentialism which began with Karl Barth (1886–1968), especially with his first commentary (1919) on the New Testament book entitled The Epistle to the Romans. We must have profound admiration for Karl Barth in that he, as a Swiss teaching in Germany, made a public stand against Nazism in the Barman Declaration of 1934. For many years he taught at the University of Basel, was a prolific writer, and has had a profound effect on the general flow of theology and intellectual thought in this generation. But in his theology Karl Barth made his own kind of dichotomy and brought the existential methodology into theology.
Back in the Middle Ages we saw that certain humanistic elements entered the church. The essence of the Reformation was the removal of these from the church’s teaching. On the other hand, humanistic thinking developed in the Renaissance and again went further in the Enlightenment. The teachings of the Enlightenment became widespread in the various faculties of the German universities, and theological rationalism became an identifiable entity in the eighteenth century. Then gradually this came to full flood through the German theological faculties during the nineteenth century. Thus, though the Reformation had rid the church of the humanistic elements which had come into it in the Middle Ages, a more total form of humanism entered the Protestant church, and has gradually spread to all the branches of the church, including the Roman Catholic. The concept of man beginning from himself now began to be expressed in theology and in theological language. Or we can say that these theologians accepted the presuppositions of rationalism. As the Renaissance had tried to synthesize Aristotle and Christianity and then Plato and Christianity, these men were attempting to synthesize the rationalism of the Enlightenment and Christianity. This attempt has often been called religious liberalism.
The rationalistic theological liberalism of the nineteenth century was embarrassed by and denied the supernatural, but still tried to hold on to the historic Jesus by winnowing out of the New Testament all the supernatural elements. Let us notice, though, that they were functioning as the older secular thinkers had functioned: either a thing was true or it was not. It could not be true and untrue at the same time. For example, either Christ was raised from the dead or He was not.
This came to its climax with Albert Schweitzer’s (1875–1965) book The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) in which he tried to hold on to the Jesus of history. We should remember Schweitzer as an expert on Bach and a genius on the organ, and we certainly should not forget his humanitarianism in Africa, but unhappily we must also remember his place in the theological stream. The Quest of the Historical Jesus (especially the conclusion of the second edition, which was never translated into English) showed the impossibility of ridding the New Testament of the supernatural and yet keeping any historical Jesus. The rationalistic theologians could not separate the historic Jesus from the supernatural events connected with Him. History and the supernatural were too interwoven in the New Testament. If one retained any of the historical Jesus, one had to keep some of the supernatural. If one got rid of all the supernatural, one had no historical Jesus. Albert Schweitzer himself was left with what has often been called a poetic ethical pantheism.
Ever since theology accepted the presupposition of rationalism, it has followed, always a few years later, the shifting form of humanistic thought. Thus, as humanistic thought in general was first optimistic about finding out the answers to life by reason starting from man alone (but with Kierkegaardianism shifted to pessimism and accepted the existential methodology and its dichotomy), so liberal theology did the same. With Karl Barth the existential methodology and the dichotomy were accepted in theology. After the older theological liberalism had failed, Barth stepped into the vacuum with his Kierkegaardian theology.
Karl Barth held until the end of his life the “higher critical” views of the Bible which the nineteenth-century liberal theologians held, and thus he viewed the Bible as having many mistakes. But he then taught that a religious “word” breaks through from it. This was the theological form of existentialism and the dichotomy. In other words, the existential methodology was applied to theology. This meant that theology has now been added to all the other things which had been put into the area of nonreason.
Following the advent of the existential methodology there arose the neo-orthodox existential theology, which says that the Bible in the area of reason has mistakes but nonetheless can provide a religious experience in the area of nonreason. Neo-orthodox theologians do not see the Bible as giving truth which can be stated in contentful propositions, especially regarding the cosmos and history, that is, as making statements which are open to any verification. And for many of them the Bible does not give moral absolutes either. For these theologians, it is not faith in something; it is faith in faith.
But this finally brings them to the place where the word God merely becomes the word God, and no certain content can be put into it. In this many of the established theologians are in the same position as George Harrison (1943–2001) (the former Beatles guitarist) when he wrote “My Sweet Lord” (1970). Many people thought he had come to Christianity. But listen to the words in the background: “Krishna, Krishna, Krishna.” Krishna is one Hindu name for God. This song expressed no content, just a feeling of religious experience. To Harrison, the words were equal: Christ or Krishna. Actually, neither the word used nor its content was of importance.
Many of the established theologians also came to the place where the word God had no certain content; but one can use the word God and other religious words as the basis for a contentless religious experience within which reason has no place. J. S. Bezzant (1897–1967), a Cambridge don, in the volume Objections to Christian Belief (1964) gave his opinion of the neo-orthodox position (though he himself was an old-fashioned liberal): “When I am told that it is precisely its immunity from proof which secures the Christian proclamation from the charge of being mythological, I reply that immunity from proof can ‘secure’ nothing whatever except immunity from proof, and call nonsense by its name.” He understood neo-orthodoxy very well.
The new liberal theology, because it says that the Bible does not touch the cosmos or history, has no real basis for applying the Bible’s values in a historic situation, in either morals or law. Everything religious is in the area of nonreason, and since reason has no place there, there is no room for discussion; there are only arbitrary pronouncements. Immanuel Kant could not bring together the noumenal and the phenomenal worlds, and the new theologian has no way logically to bring his personal arbitrary values into a historic situation. Or to say it another way: Sartre said that in an absurd world we can authenticate ourselves by an act of the will; but, as we saw, because reason has no place in this we can help people or hurt them. Similarly, because the pronouncements of these theologians about morals or law are arbitrary, in a different mood they, too, can be totally reversed.
The new theologians also have no way to explain why evil exists, and thus they are left with the same problem the Hindu philosophers have; that is, they must say that finally everything that is is equally in God. In Hindu thought one of the manifestations of God is Kali, a feminine representation of God with fangs and skulls hanging about her neck (see ). Why do Hindus picture God this way? Because to them everything that exists now is a part of what has always been, a part of that which the Hindus would call “God”—and therefore cruelty is equal to noncruelty. Modern humanistic man in both his secular and his religious forms has come to the same awful place. Both have no final way to say what is right and what is wrong, and no final way to say why one should choose noncruelty instead of cruelty.
Plate 49 Kali. “. . . and cruelty is equal to noncruelty.” Photo by Mustafa Arshad.
Paul Tillich (1886–1965) of Harvard Divinity School was one of the outstanding neo-orthodox theologians. A student related to me that when Tillich was asked just before his death in Santa Barbara, California, “Sir, do you pray?” he answered, “No, but I meditate.” He was left only with the word God, with no certainty that there was anything more than just the word or that the word equaled anything more than the pantheistic pan-everythingism. The God-is-dead theology which followed Tillich concluded logically that if we are left only with the word God, there is no reason not to cross out the word itself.
But for many modern liberal theologians (even if they do not say that God is dead), certain other things are dead. Because they do not accept that God in the Bible and in the revelation in Christ has given man truth which may be expressed in propositions, for them all content about God is dead and all assurance of a personal God is dead. One is left with the connotation of religious words without content, and the emotion which certain religious words still bring forth—and that is all.
The next step is that these highly motivating religious words out of our religious past, but separated from their original content and context in the Bible, are then used for manipulation. The words became a banner for men to grab and run with in any arbitrary direction—either shifting sexual morality from its historic Christian position based on the Bible’s and Christ’s teaching, or in legal and political manipulation.
Modern people and modern theology, in trying to start from man alone, are left where the brilliant German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) found himself. Nietzsche in the 1880s was the first one who said in the modern way that God is dead, and he understood well where people end when they say this. If God is dead, then everything for which God gives an answer and meaning is dead. And this is true whether it is a secular man or a modern theologian who says, “God is dead.” It is also equally true whether the modern theologian says, “God is dead,” or whether he reacts against those theologians who say that God is dead, but he continues to use an existential methodology. He himself is left with all content about God being dead and all assurance of God as personal being dead. The final result is the same.
I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.
I know well the beautiful village of Sils Maria in the Swiss Engadine, where Nietzsche spent his summers and did much work from 1881 to 1888. His house is still there. And on the lovely peninsula of Chastè a quotation from Nietzsche is inscribed on a plaque on a great rock. The following is an English translation from the German (translated by Udo Middelmann):
of what the dark midnight says:
I slept, I slept—from deep dreams I awoke:
The world is deep—and more profound than day
would have thought.
Profound in her pain—
Pleasure—more profound than pain of heart,
Woe speaks; pass on.
But all pleasure seeks eternity—
Surrounded by some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, Nietzsche knew the tension and despair of modern man. With no personal God, all is dead. Yet man, being truly man (no matter what he says he is), cries out for a meaning that can only be found in the existence of the infinite-personal God, who has not been silent but has spoken, and in the existence of a personal life continuing into eternity. Thus Nietzsche’s words are profound: “But all pleasure seeks eternity—a deep and profound eternity.”
Without the infinite-personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make “systems.” In today’s speech we would call them “game plans.” A person can erect some sort of structure, some type of limited frame, in which he lives, shutting himself up in that frame and not looking beyond it. The game plan can be one of a number of things. It can sound high and noble, such as talking in an idealistic way about the greatest good for the greatest number. Or it can be a scientist concentrating on some small point of science so that he does not have to think of any of the big questions, such as why things exist at all. It can be a skier concentrating for years on knocking one-tenth of a second from a downhill run. Or it can as easily be a theological word game within the structure of the existential methodology. That is where modern people, building only on themselves, have come, and that is where they are now.