The great 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard spoke of three stages that one passes through on the way to spiritual maturity: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. During the aesthetic stage, a person is preoccupied with sensual pleasure, with the satisfaction of bodily desire. Food, drink, sex, comfort, and artistic beauty are the dominating concerns of this stage of life. The ordinary fellow drinking beer at the baseball game and the effete aristocrat sipping wine in this box at the opera are both fundamentally enjoying the aesthetic life in Kierkegaard’s sense. The pleasures of this stage are pure and intense, and this is why it is often difficult to move to the next level, the ethical.

At this second stage, one transcends the preoccupation with satisfying one’s own sensual desire and accepts the moral obligation which ties one in love to another person or institution. The young man who finally abandons his bachelor’s life and enters into marriage with all of its practical and moral responsibilities is passing from stage one to stage two, as is the soldier who lets go of superficial self-interest and dedicates himself to the service of his country.

But finally, says Kierkegaard, there is a dimension of spiritual attainment which lies beyond even the ethical. This is the religious. At this stage of life, a person falls in love with God, and this means that she falls unconditionally in love, since she has found the infinite object which alone corresponds to the infinite longing of her heart.

For the religious person, even the objects of deepest ethical commitment—family, country, business, etc.—fall into a secondary position. When Thomas More said on the scaffold, “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first,” he gave evidence that he had passed from the ethical to the religious stage of life.

This famous account of the stages on life’s way came to my mind as I was watching Woody Allen’s recent film “Vicky, Christina, Barcelona”. Like most of Allen’s movies, this one concentrates on the mores and behaviors of the cultural elite: wealthy business executives, artists, poets, and writers. Vicky and Christina are two young New Yorkers who have resolved to spend a couple of summer months in Barcelona. While enjoying a late meal at an elegant restaurant, they are propositioned by Juan Antonio, an infinitely charming painter, who invites the women to join him for a romantic weekend. Despite Vicky’s initial hesitation, they accept. Juan Antonio is a consummate bon vivant, and he introduces Vicky and Christina to the pleasures of the Spanish good life: the best restaurants, vistas, art galleries, music, etc. And then, of course, he seduces both of them. In order not to spoil the movie for you (and to keep a PG rating for this column), suffice it to say that they become involved in a love triangle—and eventually quadrangle. None of the lovers is capable of a stable commitment, and all make appeal continually to the shortness of life, the importance of enjoying the moment, and the restrictions of conventional morality.

What they all do—to varying degrees—is to reduce sexual relationship to the level of good food and music and art, something that satisfies at the aesthetic level. And what makes this reduction possible is precisely the disappearance of religion. All of the players in this film move in the world of the sophisticated European high culture, an arena from which God has been rather summarily ejected. Kierkegaard thought that the three stages are ordered to one another in such a way that the highest gives stability and purpose to the other two. When a person has fallen in love with God, both his ethical commitments and aesthetical pleasures become focused and satisfying. But when the religious is lost, ethics devolves into, first, a fussy legalism, and then is swallowed up completely by the lust for personal satisfaction.

This film is a vivid presentation of precisely this declension. And the end result of this collapse is deep unhappiness. What struck me throughout Woody Allen’s film was just this: how unhappy, restless, and bored every single character is. So it goes when souls that are ordered to God are bereft of God. There is, however, a sign of hope. As in so many of Allen’s movies—“Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors” come to mind—religion, especially Catholicism, haunts the scene.

At the very commencement of their weekend together, Juan Antonio showed the two young women the sculpture that, in his own words, “inspired him the most.” It was a medieval depiction of the crucified Jesus. It’s as though even this postmodern bohemian, this thoroughly secularized sophisticate, realizes in his bones that his life will not hold together unless and until he can fall in love unconditionally. The joy that none of them finds can be had only when they order their aesthetic and ethical lives to the divine love made manifest in that cross of Jesus.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Hiper Cultural)

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that “just as important as the truth, and of the two the even more important one, is the mode in which the truth is accepted, and it is of slight help if one gets millions to accept the truth if by the very mode of their acceptance they are transposed into untruth.”

God hides himself so we will come to him in the right mode. He is not an object. He is not an old man in the sky, available to our observation, nor a slight grease on the surface of all things, available to our scientific probing. God is love. What merit is it to know of God’s existence as a man knows the existence of his right foot? God doesn’t want our observation, nor our pitiful attempts to “prove” his existence — he wants our love. He wants to be known in truth, as he is, as love, which is only known in the act of loving.

If we’re going to speak of “knowing” God at all, we must mean to know him in such a way that we infinitely strive for him, in which our knowledge and our panting after him are one in the same, for love is not known disinterestedly, rather, love is interest. We cannot know God cooly, as an object is known.

The knowledge of this tree or that apple sets myself and the object apart. I and the tree are divided into the categories of observer and object, because all knowledge is knowledge of something – some thing we refer to — apart from ourselves. But God is not a thing. God is love, and love will tolerate no separation.

Observation brings certainty. We see the tree and are certain of it. Our relationship is simple, call it I-thing. But with God, what’s needed is precisely uncertainty.

Uncertainties are known — not by knowledge, for knowledge attains certainty and thus eradicates uncertainty — but by belief, and belief always has the quality of hurling us upon another person.

For instance, my father calls, and before he hangs up, he says “I love you.” I do not know this to be an objective fact. I do not observe it with the certainty I observe the tree, because the words “I love you,” are an outward expression of my father’s subjective, interior life — a life I cannot know. From my perspective, his kindness to me may have been born out of no more than duty, the pressures of his surrounding moral society, or the desire to raise a child in such a manner that he does not become an embarrassment.

In short, the words “I love you” may not be true, and no objective knowledge can eradicate their uncertainty. Even if I were to add up all the constituent parts – his expression, his tone, our history, etc. — I could not arrive — with objective certainty — at the conclusion, “Yes, it all adds up to love,” and this is apparent in the fact that no one bothers to engage in such arithmetic. I cannot know love as an objective fact, existing outside of myself and available to my objective verification. I can only believe in it.

But this is the point. My believing in the love of my father and my entering into that love are one in the same, for in believing — which embraces the uncertainty precisely as an uncertainty — I fling myself entirely on him. I trust in his word. I trust him as I would myself. This blurring of he and the I in the moment of love’s expression; this taking on of the other’s hidden, subjective, interior life as if it were my own; this taking for myself as true what only he can know is true — this is love. In believing I participate in the life of the one I trust to believe. What a pitiful, boring world which elevates objective knowledge over belief! By belief I attain a greater certainty of what cannot be known than the certainty I have of those things that can.

Now we approach, with trembling hearts, the infinite uncertainty of God himself. God is invisible, and this terrible absence, this awful gap in our ability to attain certainty, and this necessary possibility of atheism is also the way in which we come to know God as he is, in truth and in right relation to him. By being objectively uncertain, yet communicating himself to us in beauty, in truth, in the goodness that inexplicably guides our lives, and ultimately in the fullness of revelation, through his only begotten Son, he offers us a qualitatively different type of certainty that would not be possible were he visible in the way a tree is visible. He gives us he opportunity to believe, to know him in such a manner that our knowledge of him is simultaneously a total reliance on him, indeed that our “knowledge” — which we should refer to as faith, for it maintains the objective uncertainty by never rendering Eternity objectively visible — is a participation in the life of God himself.

“If God had taken the form, for example, of a rare, enormously large green bird, with a red beak, that perched in a tree on the embankment and perhaps even whistled in an unprecedented manner–then [the modern man] surely would have had his eyes opened,” says Kierkegaard, but then we would not have related to him in truth, but in untruth. But since God is hidden, we must believe, and in belief we approach God in truth, as we approach love.

That this is truly the proper mode for “knowing God” seem evident in that difference between belief and simply knowing a visible something is that the former requires eternity while the latter requires a moment. Once the green bird is seen, it is known. No further effort is required. We may walk away from the embankment, close our eyes, and still know that the green bird exists. All that was required was the singular moment of perception. But when it is precisely an objective uncertainty that is being offered, an invisible reality expressed to us, the effort to know this uncertainty must be an eternal effort. At no point do we master God. At no point can we walk away. At no point do we attain a certainty by which we are “finished” with the project of belief. Belief is knowledge that comes from a participation in the life of another, and thus our belief in God only remains insofar as we, in every moment of our life, actively participate in the life of God. “I must continually see to it that I hold fast to the objective uncertainty, see to it that in the objective uncertainty I am “out on 70,000 fathoms of water” and still have faith.”

This is precisely why the Christian says he is saved through faith. To be saved means to become the self who you are, the self you are for all eternity, and only by faith do eternal selves act eternally. Only by faith do we participate in the self-offering of God, do we freely and eternally participate in the life of Love himself, do we attain that reality which, in religious tradition, is referred to as Salvation, or Heaven.

But this is hardly a distant mystery: As goes life so goes love, for there are few distinctions between the two. The words “I love you” — spoken in truth and by their very nature — tend towards relationships that last forever. Man and woman marry to express with a lifetime what cannot be expressed in a moment. The one requirement of erotic love is faithfulness, not simply in reaction to the evil of its opposite, which we call adultery, but because the very essence of love is belief in the other, a participation that renders adultery unthinkable. Theirs the eternal, theirs the ritual, theirs the belief in the other’s love that is simultaneously a participation in that love. And what lovers would prefer objective knowledge over the infinite strive of faith? What lovers would demand the singular moment that forever establishes certainty over a lifetime of active love, over the ecstatic comedy of forever proving the unprovable and rendering visible the ever-invisible?

God wants us to relate to him in love, for only by relating to God in love do we relate to him as he is — love himself — and only in this relation are our finite frames expanded and exploded with the infinite. God does not want our validation of his existence any more than the lover wants the beloved to simply say “You exist.” He wants us all swept up in love, forever and ever, amen.
 
 
Originally posted at Bad Catholic. Used with author's permission.