Episode 57 - Writers For Whom Religion Just Made Matters More Complicated

I had an interesting exchange a little while back about an author whose works I really like, and who I went through a “reading jag” phase, you could say, where I was reading my way through as many of his works as I can get my hands on, and that was Graham Greene. Now, it was back in graduate school when I first got into his work, and it was not through one of his, you know, considered to be “best” novels. I’d heard his name, I picked up, I think it’s called A Gun for Sale, and it was really good! And I was like, “Oh, I’ve got to read more of this guy.”So in any case, I had this exchange with somebody who was talking about how they were reading Graham Greene, and we got to talking about different circles that we moved in. And this guy was saying that typically, the people who like Graham Greene are going to be lapsed Catholics. And I thought, “Well, that’s a weird thing to say.” Although, you know, certainly that’s what I was when I was reading him; I’d left the church a long time before, actually back when I was in Catholic high school, and hadn’t come back at that time. But I really enjoyed Greene.And Greene was one of those Catholic writers himself who winds up being a convert, and never is entirely at ease. He’s always got some controversies going on, the characters who are conflicted about that sort of thing. And so, we got into this conversation online, and I said, “You know, that’s not really my experience. I know a lot of practicing Catholics who like Graham Greene, I know a lot of atheists who like Graham Greene. I suppose that if you are a person of faith who’s struggling with faith, maybe Greene would be an interesting person for you to read, both in terms of his characters and in terms of his own viewpoints. But, you know, he’s not all that unique in that respect.”And then I said (here’s where we’re actually going to get to the main point of this) something that I’ve said many times before in AMA sessions, and when I’m asked about these sorts of things: I like reading religious authors for whom being religious doesn’t simplify things. It actually makes things more complicated. And in some respects conflicted, but also rich. It reflects a world, a universe, a cosmos in which there’s greater depth and complexity than a nice, simple, straightforward one.I think that there’s a lot of people who are religious in different ways for whom, we’ll just take Christianity, you know, meeting Jesus suddenly cleared up all of their doubts and gave them the rule of life that they’re going to follow and boxes that everything can fit into. They understand exactly who the sheep and the goats are, or the wheat and the chaff.And when people say stuff like that, I’m usually a little bit suspicious of their epistemological stance, not least because in those Gospels, it’s not up to them to decide! We see so many cases where the person who we think is definitely going to be the good guy turns out not to be so, and vice versa, or mercy is shown to somebody who you wouldn’t expect is going to receive it. There are all sorts of paradoxical statements. And we’re cautioned in quite a few places about making absolute judgments as if we have a God’s-eye view.Nonetheless, a lot of people, and not just in Christianity, but all sorts of religions, will say, “Oh, everything is now clear to me.” Usually what that results in is a kind of impoverished world.And I’m actually going to draw upon another convert Catholic thinker whose conversion also made his life quite a bit more complicated: G.K. Chesterton. In his book Orthodoxy, which is a really great short little work, he talks about the insane person, the madman. And he says that the real problem with the madman is that his world actually is logically consistent, but it’s able to be so because it is impoverished. It is a world that, in certain respects, is too small.So that’s a very interesting observation. He doesn’t say they’re wrong. He says that you can’t really deal with the madman without going into their crazy world. And I think this is the case for oversimplified worlds, not just in religion, but I think also in politics, I think in philosophy, I think in a lot of different areas of life. Which isn’t to say that some things aren’t black and white at times, or cut-and-dry as we say, but less things tend to be than we give them credit for.So the notion in philosophy that you’re either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, or a rationalist or an empiricist, or an idealist or a materialist, if that’s really how you divide up the cosmos, your world is really too small, too shrunken-in on itself. It doesn’t have enough complexity and categories to it.Now, coming back to religious thinkers, I said the people who I enjoy the most (and I think it’s worth coming back to that sense of enjoyment and what that actually looks like) are the ones for whom religion has actually made things more complex. Having God in the picture didn’t answer every single question, solve every doubt. Now there’s more on their shoulder, more weight, because they need to get things right, and maybe they feel a little bit out of their depth, but they also know where they can turn.I will actually say, Anselm of Canterbury, who a lot of people frame as if he’s this arch-rationalist, mainly because they haven’t actually read his works, or they weren’t paying close enough attention, or they read in somebody else’s history of philosophy or Christian thought or theology that he’s a rationalist, they construe him that way. But he’s actually quite concerned about getting things right, and calling upon divine grace to help him use reason to figure out these matters that he says, “These are tricky! These are complicated! I’m not just going to give you some nice argument about why God became man and now problem solved, or whether God exists in the nature of God, or how you get out of the mire and abysses of sins that you’ve placed yourselves in.” No, he is really working things out in dramatic ways, even in his philosophical or theological treatises.And then when we get to people like novelists, man, it gets even more tricky, more complicated! So I’ve already mentioned Graham Greene and G.K. Chesterton. Somebody else I would bring up is Flannery O’Connor. She writes amazing short stories, but she also writes some really interesting letters to people who wanted to consult her about various matters in life and religion, and she shows a real depth and understanding of the trickiness of things. And that’s what makes her work so valuable.I’ll also say in philosophy, thinkers like Blaise Pascal or Søren Kierkegaard, I would also say Michel de Montaigne and Miguel de Unamuno, and other people like that who kind of waver back and forth and might not actually be committed religiously, but can take religion seriously enough to grapple with it, fit into that spectrum. In our own last century, I think Gabriel Marcel is a great representative of this (what do we want to call it?) tendency or secret fellowship of those who try to work out complicated matters in complicated ways.Now, I said that I would talk a little bit about the enjoyment that comes with it. And it’s not the enjoyment of solving a puzzle, which I think is what a lot of people are looking for. You just complete the crossword or the word search and now you can hold it up and say, “Aha! I won!” That’s not the way it works in reading theology or philosophy or literature, or even history. Things are trickier, more complex than that. And I think there’s a different kind of enjoyment that comes with appreciating that, and trying to go part of the way along with people who are intelligent, but don’t think that they are of God-like intelligence, who are trying their best to make sense out of these different matters that they think really do matter.So to come back to Graham Greene, I’m actually going to recommend one of his stories that manages to do this within a space of not too many pages, so you don’t have to read an entire novel. And it does so from the perspective of a narrator, ultimately, who is not religiously committed. Sort of like Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments are in the pseudonym of somebody who’s not religiously committed, but can kind of get what’s going on there.It’s called “The Hint of an Explanation.” And I think it’s a really wonderful little story. You might say, “Well, just tell me the moral of it right away. Is it, well God exists? Or the Eucharist is where you meet Jesus?” It’s not that straightforward and simple. There’s like the title says a hint of an explanation, but not a full explanation. And it’s requiring you, the reader, to enter that world. You don’t actually have to be religiously committed to appreciate and to consider what’s happening within that narrative space, just like you don’t need to be a Platonist to enter into Plato’s dialogues and follow along with some of the ideas.I think there’s a similar dynamic at work there that might give you pleasure, joy, but also perplexity, however you want to think about it. But it’s valuable to engage in that sort of reading.So, I’ll draw this to a close here, these reflections. I might take this up at greater length down the line, but I think that’s probably enough to throw your way right now as something you might consider.Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe