Breathing in the Presence of the Question Mark
When one can articulate something, it’s important to do so. This is necessary for dialogue and for understanding and for authentic self-appraisal. But what if one lacks the capacity to do so, or resists doing so? And what if the attempts to do so trivialize the ineffable?
Rule one of intellectual engagement is that all parties must sincerely attempt both to understand others and to make themselves understood.
It has become evident to me, however, that many people, especially the religious, suffer from a kind of conceptual claustrophobia. Their beliefs are of their essence somewhat vague and they are terrified of being pinned down. Although critics often leap on this and claim that this betrays woolly thinking, evasion or obscurantism, I think that there are times when such a refusal to commit is justified.
I remember, for example, an impassioned talk I once heard by the recently sainted Giles Fraser. Recounting the story in Exodus of Moses going up the mountain to meet God to get the Ten Commandments, Fraser said: “The higher he goes up the mountain, the more the mist comes down. The closer he gets to God, the less and less he is able to see.” Meanwhile, at Sinai’s foot, the idolatrous masses are “running around building a golden calf, making God into a thing”.
It is always possible to think there is a fog when really it’s just that your glasses have steamed up. But I’m not only prepared to allow that an intelligent religious faith might have a big fat mystery at its heart, I think it must have. Only the most juvenile gods are like super-humans we can truly understand. If there is a God, it must surely passeth all understanding.
But embracing this mystery comes at a price. If, like the archbishop of Canterbury, your faith is a kind of “silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark”, then think very carefully before you open your mouth. Too often I find that faith is mysterious only selectively. Believers constantly attribute all sorts of qualities to their gods and have a list of doctrines as long as your arm. It is only when the questions get tough that, suddenly, their God disappears in a puff of mystery. Ineffability becomes a kind of invisibility cloak, only worn when there is a need to get out of a bit of philosophical bother.
– Julian Baggini, ‘You just don’t understand my religion’ is not good enough
And this is the problem, as well as the hint of a solution. Divinity does not really ever translate into theology (lit. words about the divine), even clever negative theology or poetics of the mystics (and I don’t know any better approaches than these). The ineffable is a presence – and an absence – that resists possession, capture, ownership. If you can even point in a general direction of an experience of the sublime, you might have a tiny hope of someone else having an independent connection with it, but it can’t be called to attendance.
Breathing in the presence, breathing out the absence of the “question mark” – or the reverse?
In the fog it’s not always foggy, exactly.
But that’s just the kind of evasion that he’s discussing.
For the misled, for the idolator, their eyes will remain closed, always mistaking the symbol as a literal representation for what it attempts to suggest.
For the seeker, for the lover, the articulations will never be enough.
