The Fall : An epilogue on the De-conversion of Anthony

An epilogue on the D-conversion of Anthony

 

When I begun this series, I wanted to explain why I was no longer a Christian. I was almost angry that I’d spent so much time in a fantasy, a coping mechanism that simplified the universe into something a Heavenly Father had created. 



 

As you read the series, it’s probably the case that you sensed this anger amidst the rhetoric and logical argumentation. Anger is not always rage, but can be an ember of passion that begins to change the temperature of everything around it. 


 


Anger is also usually a less embarrassing face that we put on emotions we don’t want to admit to having-fear, envy, abandonment. 10 years on from when I first started the draft of the first entry into this series-I think that anger is gone because I have finally accepted it. 



 

My perspectives have changed on faith and religion. Auguste Comte(see image below) wrote about the three stages of development being the theological, the metaphysical and then the positivistl-in other words we look at the world and explain it by way of  spirits, then of impersonal powerful forces (“the universe desires for us to ..”), and then we speak of logical systems. He argues this is progress. I’m not quite so sure. I’ve gone through those stages but find myself instead of discarding, rather appreciating what each of those views holds without necessarily agreeing that any one can capture the truth. 


 

So in this entry , I will give an update on where I stand with faith, on Christianity and on what those two things brought me to my fall : a fall into  a love of wisdom , or as I am now calling it , the wisdom of love — philosophy. 



 

On Faith



 

Faith is the evidence of things unseen-so beautiful. It is by faith that great actions are taken int he world. I truly believe this, but yet it is also by faith that great atrocities are committed in the world. The essence of religion faith is it is precisely not ethical-because the ethical is something that can be communicated and shared with others. The gold standard of faith, the father of belief is Abraham, and the examples given for his faith are both heart-warming and harrowing. 


 


It was counted to his credit that Abraham believed that his wife could bear a child long after childbearing age-faith is only faith in hopeless situations. When there’s no reason to, he hoped, and it was counted unto him as righteousness. The fruit of this was his son Isaac-we won’t mention how he tried to help God along by sleeping with another woman and resulting in Ishmael. His faith was rewarded with an heir. Heart-warming. 

 

Later, God asked for him to sacrifice this treasure, this promise form the Lord to prove his faith. And Abraham took his son up a mountain to slay him. Kierkegaard has argued that the essence of faith is in the paradox of what Abraham must have been feeling at that point: he had to simultaneously believe that he was going to murder and lose his son, and while God’s promise would be true, and he would not lose the promised son. If that doesn’t make sense, then you understand it. That is the core of faith, Paradox. Something incommunicable to reason-this is likely while the wise of the world are said to be unlikely to be persuaded of the Gospel-it is foolishness to those that are perishing as Paul says. 



 

These two parts-the harrowing and the heart-warming are intertwined in faith. For every example of faith moving people to great charity, to fight oppression, to give up their possessions for others to act in humanely to go beyond what is really our instincts and forgive rather than seek revenge, to give rather than seek to secure-for the unlocking of what it means to be human, Faith also unclogs a cruelty that no animal can ever carry out-it fuels hatred of people who live differently to us, has prevented progress, licensed genocides and called them holy crusades, looked at the world as a place to be conquered rather than enjoyed , has allowed power hungry men to Amass wealth, convince people that their lives here are but auditions for everlasting life. 

 



In truth, we would do both these things I believe whether we veiled in God or not, but the belief has historically been a reason, a license for these things. People do all the above in the name of rationality, and in the same of being humane. 


 


I still think I am a person of faith-not that I discard reason completely, but I understand the limits of reason and allow myself to believe without evidence, where the belief itself is the evidence in the utility in being loving, in trying to be decent. Whatever religion or lack thereof people have, I’ve found his to be a human activity. 


 


I am not opposed to faith; I am for the rightful application of it, and I no longer believe that this is a preserve of the religion.



 

On Christianity

 

There are many things to be said for the faith and many thinkers whose work on it has given me great perspective ranging from the conservative and very religious-Augustine, Weir, Aquinas, Chesterton. Lewis, Orombi, Dostoyevsky: to the strongly atheistic, anti-theistic - Bertrand Russel, Marx, Camille Paglia, Schopenhauer, Sartre , De Beauvoir; to the unorthodox - Hegel, Kierkegaard, Niringiye . Rather than go over my feelings and agreements and disagreements with them, I’ll just pick the two that most clearly represent where I am now

 

I am a Christian, but an atheist Christian. 



 

Now for my people of faith, allow me to explain-remember I said the paradox at the heart of the faith is for me the essence of it? Well, this is what I mean: 

For me , much like Hegel , the heart of Christianity is the fall not of man, but precisely the fall of God from transcendent to pedestrian , to come from heaven, be dethroned and die so that man may live. 


 


Nietzsche is often credited with referring to the death of God, but it was Hegel. And as someone now coming to fully appreciate Hegel, there’s a concept necessary in his logic for this to make sense and the best way I know how to express it is in the idea of perfection. 

 



Think of something perfect, like a circle. This is a highly abstract concept, in reality there are no perfect circles, but still, we have the concept of a perfect circle. Where does that come from? For Plato, the ream of mathematical forms is the highest pure realm and reality is but an imperfect instantiation of the perfect in the material world. The Platonic ideal says that this world is a messy version of something perfect, and that perfect can be attained by reason. It’s no wonder early Christians combined the Platonic ideal to their theology of God, as they needed an apologetic that was compelling to reason and make way for faith. Therefore, Nietzsche referred to Christianity as Platonism for the masses. 



 

As brilliant as Plato was, the Hegelian critique of his idea is that this is the wrong way around. It is not that we know in our hearts of a perfect world and a perfect creator, and this world is a fallen version of that is a subtle and tempting illusion. It is the lack, the seeming messiness of reality that gives birth to the abstract idea of perfection. It I’d not that perfect exists, but it is an idea borne within the material world. Rather than stepping out of Plato’s cave of illusions to see the light, it is precisely the greatest illusion that the cave creates and perhaps it is the idea that makes the endurance of the cave possible. 



 

Similarly, humans have looked around for an explanation of what all this exists, and many have come to the conclusion that something greater, more organised crated it all. And coincidentally this thing is something in whose image we are made. We are the imperfect versions of that perfect being. But it is our judgment of this imperfection that results in our abstraction of the perfect. And when you logically try to understand perfect, you find it contradicting itself-see my series on arguments around why an omnipotent, omni-benevolent and omniscient being falls in on itself. I believe the wisest of all who believe instinctually now this and so do not even bother to explain God-God remains that which cannot be signified-beyond explanation. Even to the point that Wittgenstein would have referred to as “that of which we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence”.

 

Christianity is the expression of what Lacan might have termed the “object A"-the acknowledgment of the cause of desire which is a search to become whole. This feeling that we can be whole is a human expression to feel like we are back t being at peace to being fully integrated. It feels like a memory we have, but it is an illusion. One created after the fact, we feel fragmented and so believe we were once aggregate. Christianity provides that outlet, that recognition of the sublime. 



 

Having grown up culturally as one, it is forever a part of me, the first expression the first sign of my oppression, the first name given to my ennui. I enjoy the songs, the elaborate traditions and most important for me- the reverence of things greater than us. A roaring Pentecostal assembly is fun times, a prayer meeting is a humbling connection to others, cells are human hands doing God’s work in the world and a large empty cathedral for me exemplifies the most powerful aspect of it all-silence. The great reply from the great beyond. 



 

The fall


 


This series could be described as my fall from grace, my attempt at explaining apostasy if you will. I call it the fall because finally I see it as analogous to the fall of man from paradise. The story of the fall of man involves Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the being cast out. This story’s wisdom shows in that it is we, the fallen the humans today that refer to the Garden as paradise. The fantasy we all have had at some point is if we could escape to nature, to a simpler time we would be happy. 



 

However, this is itself a simplifying illusion. We glass over the fact that man is precisely human only in civilisation, in a polis and not “in nature”. Don’t confuse this to mean we don’t have natural habitat or that ecology is not important-it very much is. But this Fall from the paradise is through the attainment of conscious-an awareness of good and evil. The thing we prize as being core to being human is in fact what makes us feel separate from nature. It shows in how we paradoxically see the world as an object in which we subject exist-a distinction which is an illusion-but the power of a true illusion is that it works even when we know of it. 



 

The poetry of Christianity, its difference say with Judaism, is the other Abrahamic faiths have God in heaven and unreachable, unmarred, never human and we can only plead for his mercy. But the second fall of Christianity, after the fall of man, is the fall of God. The heresy of the Christian proposition is that God would become man, take on the “sinful existence” and do the most human of all things- doubt and then die. 



 

What dies on the cross was not just man but was in fact God as this transcendent idea. The message of the torn veil of the temple is not just that the veil has been opened-which would signify access but kept the distance at the same time, no…it was torn meaning that it no longer is. Where two of more are gathered, there I am in your presence the Word says. Wherever there is love, there God is. God is now no longer in the heavens, but in our communion. We are the body that acts out the highest ideals, we pray not to beseech God to act but to prepare ourselves to act in the world as the body of Christ. 



 

As Zizek says, at the heart of Christianity is the fall of God. The death of God. And it is truly a glorious thing because this death puts an end to the operation and allows us to know that our ideals are birthed from our limitations-that we can strive for but never reach. Christ lived the example but as usual the example became a religion and a way to re-affirm the old divide of heavenly kingship. Theologians will balk and say this is heresy, that this is the embracing of Godliness but denying the power thereof. I disagree and think like much as the Old Testament teachers misunderstood the law, we too have misunderstood the scripture. I by no means think it is a divine text, but rather an evolution of human interpretation of what divine means. We don’t look up to find God, but we look within each other and then make “the will “of God manifest in our action. As Chesterton said, the unique thing about Christianity is not that man needs God, but that God needs man to exist to act in the world.



 

This is my journey and relationship with the faith now. That of the fall of Man being the creation of the highest ideals of man, that the fall of God raises up our own human ability to believe and be the embodiment of God, our highest virtues in the world and my own fall which is the admission you’ve just read 



 

Anthony