There is no question more ultimate than the question of the ultimate. This is the question of God. Non-philosophers may well be willing to grant this claim. They may even expect philosophers to come to their assistance. But we philosophers have long listened to the voices of suspicion, voices that when they do not make us hostile to the question, paralyze our thinking on the ultimate. We have become embarrassed by the question.
This is something astonishing. The most important question, the most fascinating question, the most enigmatic question, makes us squirm – squirm though we wear the unmoved mask of agnostic indifference. How make sense of this shame? Can we mark some of the way stations on this path of shame? And when we have passed along it, can we then ask: What then?
We in the West are heirs of a number of religious traditions, but as descendants we have turned our inheritance into hostility to itself. We emerge from religious traditions, notably the Jewish and Christian, but certain developments of just those traditions have made trouble for any untroubled living of those traditions. I mean that certain forms of theism are not to be absolved from atheisms that seem to be their opposite. Godlessness emerges from our being in relation to God. We think of ourselves as at the end of a “good” progress, even when we debunk progress. We are enlightened even when we pour scorn on Enlightenment. We see our scorn as our light – but suppose we are freaks, How freaks? Freaks because the natural condition is to be religious: it is unnatural to be atheist. This crime against nature arises from nature as we interpret it.
We open our eyes, we smell, we breathe, we touch, we are touched, by rock, by the satin of a flower petal, by skin. We are amazed, even delighted, we attend on a certain music of things. When much seems rough and repulsive our horror is the shadow of our astonishment. What is strangely there is strange because it intimates an other – in and through its very own otherness. There is no shadow of a question, yet: the divine is there, though there as also not there, for there is nothing to which one could point univocally and say: That is God. But what that means one does not know.
Or say, one hears one’s breath, in the quiet of sitting still, or in trepidation as if trailed, and one hears oneself in an intimacy idiotic to every conceptual objectification, and one does not know what the soul is, beyond knowing that one does not know. There is hinted a depth to selving beyond self, and the haunting of self by an other that slows one into uncertain expectancy. Is this then our being, this uncertain expectancy? But we do not yet know what this means.
Or again, another stirs delight and disquiet in us. We behold a beautiful boy or girl, woman or man, and the beauty can lift one up unbidden and yet also be unbearable, almost. It flows over one, and away from one, though one reaches to it, but it is always in excess and gone. It comes forward to meet one, and yet is fugitive in its forwardness.
A gift has been offered; it seems everywhere and nowhere; and one might be surprised into asking: Is this gift a sacramental sign? But what this all means, one does not know and perhaps may never know.
But – knowing or not-knowing – there is nothing contrived about the question of God. It is elemental and enigmatic – elemental because of the givenness of self, other, nature; enigmatic because one is struck into an as-yet-uncomprehended astonishment by the givenness. The astonishing gift perplexes us about what offers it, or who. And our question is not something to which history determines us, even when it is historically mediated. It is not something grammar imposes on us, even when our speaking is grammatically conditioned. It is not the sly unconscious that presses it on us, though its roots go down deeper than the conscious or unconscious. It is not something to which our social status condemns us. It is not something insidious metaphysics imposes on us, though we cannot escape metaphysics, twist and turn as we will. The question is elemental and inescapable. But we have to be with the elemental, and face what cannot be evaded, to know what this means. Nor will we “overcome” the question, when we have baptized our chains as historicist chains, grammatological, psychoanalytical, socio-political, philosophical chains. There are other fetters, harder to unbind, for instance, the lie in the soul, not to mention vices not always dignified with names in philosophy.
Why has the face of being come for many to seem void of communication of God, when everything within and without seems to press on us the question? The changed attitude to being marking modernity has much to do with the matter. This has been recognized by many, and with many different emphases.1 My emphasis falls on our reconfiguration of the primal ethos along a particular line of response to the equivocity of givenness. This produces a certain devaluation of being stripped of signs suggestive of divine transcendence. This is coupled with a culture of autonomy which, tempted to absolutize itself, eclipses transcendence as other, though behind the mask of autonomy is a will to power usurping absoluteness in a world said to be void of absolutes. The specter of nihilism, now expressed, now recessed, in which all other-being is instrumentalized haunts our claim to mastery, finally inverting into an outcome in which it all seems to come to nothing.
