Loss of faith

O faithless and perverse generation (Matthew 17:17)

I was talking to someone the other day who said that he had stopped going to a particular church because of a scandal within that church generally (i.e. the broader institution rather than the specific congregation).

One often encounters people who lose faith in God and the Other Realm because of things they do not like that happen here.

These are commonplace responses but utterly perverse and betray a faith that was not faith at all but a trust in man and a trust in a god (lower-case 'g') who is a servant of man—and who failed to serve man as man saw fit.

In the first case, the choice to abandon a spiritual path (which seeks firstly to transcend the material realm and seeks secondly to transform the material realm through that transcendence) on account of failures in that material realm, however gross, is perverse for the following reason: sin and scandal are not the exclusive preserve of religious organisations. To side with materialism on the grounds that the religious are at times sinful and scandalous hardly places oneself in a less sinful and less scandalous environment.

Abandoning Latin because your Latin teacher is a fool, a fraud, or a jerk is not the action of a person so piously devoted to Latin that the teacher's failures are terminally offensive, unless, of course, the perceived nature and value of Latin had been inferred the teacher's qualities or due to credence given to the teacher's statements about Latin. This may be the real reason for the apostasy: there had been no faith in Latin, no love of Latin: there had been faith in and love of the Latin teacher, with Latin the mere vehicle for the discourse; the baby of the Latin is then thrown out with the bathwater of the mountebank teacher. Latin—the mysterious force and commodity—could not be apprehended directly, only through the glass of the teacher, and, as that glass darkened, so Latin, itself, is recast as a chimera or rot.

The irony is that the moral standards against which sin is classified as such, if properly apprehended, should renew the individual's vigour, not snuff it out. Yet snuffing is precisely what happens. It is this that suggests that it is not offence against moral standards prompting the renunciation of faith but plain old human frustration: the self that loses his bishop and sweeps all of the pieces from the chessboard.

Regarding the second ground for faithlessness: the ills of the material world are indeed offensive. With this I have full sympathy. The perversity lies in this proclamation: The material world is so offensive to me that I will hunker down in it ever more intensively, eschewing any attempt at all to transcend it.

Would I have developed a relationship with God if religious institutions themselves provided everything I needed? Absolutely not. I'd rely on the institution. Would I have developed a relationship with God if everything went my way? Absolutely not. I'd be basking in myself.

Seeking God is very hard on one's own. Extremely lonely, plus no map, no compass, no nothing. I now understand why every culture has a religion. And those where there are broad tracts of little or no religion proper (the exceptional case of Western civilisation) develop their own: political, religious, and social ideologies pursued with the same blind, merciless, and irrational fervour of the most wicked religionists of the ages, and systems, rituals, hierarchies, structures, observances, superstitions, and schisms that provide no more room to breathe and thrive than the most tightly controlled theocracies of history.

It is impossible to live without values. There must be a basis. There must be a voice to listen to, as the personification of those values. If not God, if not everything that goes with the pursuit of God in terms of a fully fledged and through-through ethical system, philosophy, and cosmology, then what?

The loving arms of capitalism? The sensuous embrace of hedonism? The tinpot empire of the self with its endless trauma and grievances?

Thoreau on the matter:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

I have run, and continue to run, as fast as I can in the opposite direction. And I do not regret my choice for one moment. The country here is splendid as it shoots past, and I am moving at a speed I never imagined possible.