untitled

(やまだぃちぅ) #1
230 religious revolution now

inexhaustible character of our experience, under the disguise of talk
about God.
Another way of responding to the diffi culty is to oscillate among the
three untenable ideas of God, using each to make up for the incoherence
of the others, as if by being juxtaposed three bad ideas could become a
good one.
Intimidated by the three scandals of reason, educated opinion re-
treats into half- belief. Th e religion becomes a morality tale told in the
style of a fairy tale. Th e high culture of such an eviscerated religion
serves as a superfl uous ornament to the conventional secular human-
ism. It has no basis and no motive to defy the nostrums of that estab-
lished worldly wisdom. It distances itself from the pop u lar faith and
practice of the religion.
Th e pop u lar religion, wedded to formulaic prayer and practice, and
devoted to fossilized belief, whether or not claiming the authority of
sacred scripture, becomes barbaric. It need not, as a result of this bar-
barism, lose its capacity to evolve: like everything in society and in
culture, it can change, under the provocation of shift ing historical cir-
cumstance and spontaneous innovation from below. However, by los-
ing all contact with the transformative power of general ideas, it limits
its sights. It becomes blinded by its inability to represent the faith as a
dialectical whole, in which par tic u lar beliefs and practices can be rein-
terpreted and revised in the light of general conceptions, and general
conceptions remade in the light of the experience of the particulars.
Such a religion turns into a series of tropisms. Th e dead— the architects
of the now closed canon of accepted practice and belief rather than the
original prophet— come to rule over the living.
A religion cannot make itself new under such constraints. It cannot
advance a vision of what is central to its message, as narrative and as
doctrine, and overthrow the habits and compromises that have come to
obscure and diminish this message. It lacks the resources needed to
confront the marriage of half- belief with secular piety except by the
incessant repetition of its formulas. It is powerless to resist the conven-
tional beliefs that contradict the metaphysical presuppositions of the
struggle with the world, or to develop the truncated and suppressed
orthodoxies of the infi nity of the spirit and of the priority of love over
altruism, or to repudiate the contrasting heresies (such as legalism and

Free download pdf