How To Be An Agnostic
there are those who would never darken the doors of a church
but are actually profoundly religious, because they actively
embrace the mysteries of life. For Caputo what makes someone
religious, as opposed to religiose, is summed up in two quintes-
sentially religious moments celebrated in the Christian tradition.
The fi rst is when Mary says to the angel, ‘Be it unto me
according to thy word’. Her pregnancy is an apparent impos-
sibility, but she says ‘yes’ nonetheless. The power of the story,
Caputo says, following Derrida’s idea of ‘religion without reli-
gion’, is in the way it conveys that to be religious is to affi rm
what is on the edge of experience.
The second religious moment is found in Augustine when
he asks what he loves when he loves God. This characterises
that part of the religious spirit which is uncertain about what
it seeks, because it is unknown, but that still seeks it with a
passion. It would not be hard to make a comparison with
Socrates, the lover of much pursued wisdom.
Having drawn the distinction, Caputo recognises that the reli-
gious owe the religiose a debt, for if the former major on the
spiritual, the latter are often the one’s who preserve its ecclesias-
tical manifestations – the containers for the traditions that are
so valuable. Perhaps the relationship between a religious sensi-
bility and a churchy sensibility can be thought of as two lines.
Sometimes the lines move closely and in parallel. Sometimes
they veer wildly apart. When I was a priest and rows fl ared in
the parish about the placing of candlesticks or the wearing of
cassocks, the lines were well apart. At an institutional level,
the same could be said of churches in their bureaucratic and
offi cious guises: the spiritual is then eclipsed.
Socrates, in a sense, had the advantage of being able to draw
directly on the religious milieu of his age in order to inform
his philosophical practice, though it proved too much for the
authorities in the end. Today, the agnostic must sift the religious
practice of believers and the religious discourse of dogmatic
theology in search of the apophatic. We seek the moments where
God comes to us as a question. However, the effort is invaluable,