Someone who posts (as I did) an appreciation of a movie like 'Henry Poole', grounded in a fairly conventional Catholic background, runs the risk of being mistaken as conventionally religious or even a religious fundamentalist. But I'm not at all. What I do have is an appreciation for faith in all its infinite variety. It seems to me that faith in this day and age has become infinitely more difficult, an infinitely more courageous undertaking, than skepticism.
All religious experience develops from central phenomenon - the collision of beings finite in time and space, blobs of mud whose fleeting consciousness is numbered from the moment it comes to exist, with infinity. Kant expressed the concept in language of marvelous economical clarity. He said there were two things that made him marvel - the starry skies above [i.e., external infinity, space without limit, time without limit, a number line that never ends) and the moral law within [i.e., internal infinity, the sense of imperishable self, independent of particular identity.] I wrote my own version of this, not nearly as elegant, and will now be so ingratious and egotistical as to quote myself (from the novel Thursday's Child, written under the name Josephine Wurtenbaugh)
“Just what are these fundamental mysteries?” she said.
He shrugged, and spoke now without any hesitation: “What you'd think. What
human beings are, why they are. Why intelligence is. Time – always changing, but
always now. Self distinct from identity – somehow you know you'd still be you, even
if you were someone else. You know some things are right, and some are wrong; it
doesn't matter whether they're useful to you or not, and you know that, but you don't
know why. Dreams about the measureless when everything you experience is
measurable – infinity arising out of finitude. Quantity and quality, wholes and sums,
that they correlate randomly, we talked about that. That such things can be, black
holes in rationality itself, mirrors of the ones in the sky.”
This sense, of an infinitely at once immediately present and beyond reach, permeates the whole of human experience. It is the raw material of all spiritual experience. Conventional religions attempt to map that sense raw sense onto a set of symbols that can be shared by a community or culture. If they are effective - that is, appeal at both conscious and subliminal level to that sense of the infinite - they become universal. This in essence describes the origin of all the major religions. To state the obvious, a set of symbols that potent are obviously subject to being misused for political purposes, hijacked politically, misused by priests, emperors, commissars - power seekers of all description. Occasionally, someone writes a book braying about this transparent reality, and ignoring (often deliberately) the reason why they became powerful in the first place.
It is my own view that we live in a pre-religious age. I think all the conventional religions of pre-history began dying150 years ago. Arnold writes of 'an outworn creed', Nietzsche more dramatically proclaims that God is dead. But God is not dead. The sense of infinity that bedevils (sic) all human activity is as alive as it ever was. All that has happened is that the iconography (sorry) with which we used to describe it is no longer effective. A new set of symbols awaits birth. The Great Beast slouches towards Bethlehem again. Such is my belief, anyway.
Attached for download is a short story I wrote, a variety of what might be called 'preternatural fiction' - science that does not exist just yet. I call it 'The Old Soul' for reasons that will be immediately apparent to anyone familiar with contemporary speculation about reincarnation. It is an interesting (at least to me) speculation about a natural explanation for the phenomenon of deja vu and visions of other lives. Click on the marked link in this paragraph to download.
The blog for Thursday's Child is also linked in the right column, if you liked the snippet I quoted.
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