gratitude, prayer, and Godly vision

 

I'd like to take my lead, today, from some extracts from a very nice paper by Michael Lacewing:

In existential gratitude, it is existence itself that is the gift. But then who bestows it? To whom do we owe gratitude? For many theists, God, as personal creator and sustainer of all that exists, fills the role perfectly. Thus it is clear that the theist may feel existential gratitude, given that it is directed towards a personal God. ...

[Lacewing's existential gratitude-feeling atheist, by contrast, avers that the] only part of the ‘bigger picture’ one need appreciate in gratitude is that there is goodness that originates outside oneself. If one can sit comfortably with this thought, which requires one to overcome envy and narcissism, then it is liable to inspire humility and modesty ...

[An important note now on gratitude: P]ersonal gratitude is a recognition of the goodness of the gift, and the goodness of others in freely giving it. In accepting the good as undeserved, gratitude is also a recognition of the ‘otherness’ of others, i.e. their psychological separateness, their decisions and existence beyond one’s control. A failure of gratitude marks a lack of recognition of the nature of a gift, and may mark a reluctance to acknowledge one’s lack of self-sufficiency. ...

[Coming back now to the theist:] For the theist, existential gratitude is simply an instance of personal gratitude, and so we can understand its appropriateness in the same terms: existence per se, one’s life, or the circumstances of human life are understood as gifts of God, and existential gratitude is an appropriate recognition of this fact.

What follows uses the word 'theist' in ways that depart a little from Lacewing's. I shall, that is, be distinguishing the theist (not only from the atheist but) from a further character I'll call the believer. Both the theist and the believer direct thanks and praise for life and its goods to God. To whom are prayers offered up? Well, to God. To whom is thanks for one's life, and for all that is good in it, owed? Still God, they both say. So what's the difference between them?

It's this: the theist thinks he understands what "God" means independently of his disposition to pray and  to experience and give voice to existential gratitude. It's precisely because he thinks he first knows what "God" means that he then takes himself to be reasonable in suggesting God to be the proper object of his praise - and of his thankful and other prayers. The believer, by contrast, thinks that if you want to know what "God" means, then understand that He is that to which one inter alia offers prayers and existential gratitude. The believer finds her way to belief in part in and through such acts and attitudes; she doesn't take a living faith to involve a prior intellectual assent (with whatever degree of affective involvement) to the existence of 'a deity' followed by the direction toward that 'deity' of their prayers and gratitude. The theist's belief is, it might be said, a rather philosophical matter. Theism is, if you like, a kind of theory: There is a God you know! A what? An omniscient omnipotent creator of all which is love itself. Oh really? Yes. I mean, look around you: what else could explain all this? ... The believer, by contrast, is playing a different game. Nature is not explained by, but seen as, creation. And attitudes of awe and wonder and repentance and existential gratitude and humility and openness to love themselves help give meaning to religious belief. Where by 'give meaning to' isn't (or isn't only) meant: provide a point for, but rather: make for the very intelligibility of, the belief. None of what the believer says is intended to cast doubt on the theist's notion of an omnipotent omniscient all-loving creator; these are important and essential characterisations of God. What's at issue though is how such a notion so much as comes alive for us. Is it first apprehended 'intellectually', as we might put it? Or is it apprehended through an 'encounter' essentially animated by the aforementioned existential attitudes?

The Dominican friar Herbert McCabe once took a stance similar to what I'm calling the believer's when discussing prayer:

People feel that if only they could be a bit clearer about who or what God is they would see more sense in praying to him. Now I am afraid it is going to have to be the other way round. The problem of God is the problem of prayer. … I am saying that maybe we understand God as ‘whatever makes sense of prayer’. I would say: we understand God as the other end of the personal relationship which is prayer. (McCabe, God Matters, p.217)

I'd like to suggest, from the point of view of a believer now, that something analogous may be said regarding existential gratitude: that 'the problem of God is the problem of existential gratitude'. Except I'd not want to say that God 'makes sense of' prayer or of existential gratitude, if to say that is to imply that these as yet made no sense by themselves. The reverse is nearer to it. I'd say that, if you want to know what "God" means, then understand that He is that to which our hearts reach out in prayer and thanks - when what we pray and give thanks for is our life and all the good in it.

Lacewing's theist thinks of "existential gratitude [as] simply an instance of personal gratitude ... so we can understand its appropriateness in the same terms: existence per se, one’s life, or the circumstances of human life are understood as gifts of God, and existential gratitude is an appropriate recognition of this fact." (This rather reminds me of: 'Praying is just like having a conversation with someone except that, in this case, the someone is God!' - contrast Peter Winch: ‘Making requests of x’ … is not a function which retains the same sense whether ‘God’ or some name or description of a human being is substituted for ‘x’.') The believer, by contrast, is not committed to the appropriateness of this notion of appropriateness. If we could first understand in its own terms what God is - a "supreme person" perhaps? - then we could, let's imagine, see why a personal relationship as found in prayer is possible and appropriate with Him. The believer, however, thinks otherwise. The believer thinks that we only really understand what it means for God to be a personal God through seeing how we reach out to Him in praise and prayer. It's not that these 'methods' can be seen to be apt to their independently characterisable 'object', but instead that our concept of this 'object' gains its substance in part from our 'methods'.

At this point an atheist may object. 'I feel very well the existential gratitude of which Lacewing so finely writes' she says, 'but I don't believe in God at all. Yet you seem to be saying I can understand what it means to speak of God simply by taking Him as my gratitude's object. I, however, simply think there's no such object. If you're struggling to 'make sense of' such an objectless gratitude, then I suggest you take a conceptual chill pill and stop trying to foist the everyday notion of gratitude's 'object' onto all its possible forms. Sure, the notion of gratitude does, in its paradigmatic applications, essentially bring with it the idea of an object. But certain attitudes which are at root interpersonal have secondary forms - so that we may now greet the day in the morning or, taking complete leave now of the idea of an object, voice an objectless gratitude for our life or for the goods in it. (What Wittgenstein called a 'secondary sense' of gratitude.)'

To this the believer should, I think, say: "But such complaints are to be lodged not against the believer but against the theist. The believer isn't motivated by the idea of 'making sense of' existential gratitude by finding an object for it. That's not because they think there is, in some suitably capacious sense of "object", no such object; they think God is that object! Their claim that "if we want to know what "God" means, then it should help to know that God is He to whom existential gratitude is offered" is not itself offered as a way to make sense of this gratitude. It's not trying to rescue or disclose its intelligibility. It's instead taking its lead from the extant if distinct intelligibility of that attitude to take us now to God. That the atheist is not moved along the same lines is what it is; it's not an argument for or against anything."

This, I think, is, or should, not be the end of the matter. For if existential gratitude doesn't simply want for sense when taken by itself, and if more generally our souls may cry out in lament or joy or contrition or hopefulness without there needing to be an object to whom these cries are directed, then doesn't our God-talk come to look rather superfluous?

Here an analogy may help. (Or: may at least help she who's already persuaded by the value of a Wittgensteinian philosophy of psychology!) When we're thinking about the relation between mind and behaviour, there are two philosophical views which we do well to avoid. One we may call behaviourism, the other mentalism. The mentalist thinks of our concept of mind - of notions like belief and desire for example - as intelligible in itself in isolation from its relation to our concepts of behaviour. In this way she's like the theist who thinks 'God'-speak intelligible independently of our disposition to existential gratitude etc. They both think of their object - God / mind - as not only independently intelligible from the soul's moments / from our behaviour, but also as standing in a sense-providing relation to the latter. The behaviourist by contrast thinks of mind as reducible to, as being nothing over and above, behaviour. 'Mind', for him, is a dispensable notion, just as 'God' is for the atheist, since we can approach our behaviours piecemeal. And how should we avoid the metaphysical excesses of mentalism or the reductive banality of behaviourism? Wittgenstein's idea is that desires, say, are neither over and above, nor reducible to, particular acts. Instead, to see an act as expressive of a desire is to situate it in a particular context of intelligibility. It's to context - the immediate context of the act's performance, of course, but also the diachronic context of his other such performances, their character and shape, his utterances, including those we style expressive of thought - not to inner cause, that we should look. Talk of an act being expressive of a particular desire is implicitly to hook it up to a whole set of other attitudes and acts in other contexts.

To turn now to matters religious: what I'm saying is that to speak of God is to speak of a distinctive ('spiritual', if you like) order of intelligibility into which a whole variety of separate acts and experiences may be severally entered. The order is not intelligible independently of its entries, but it's not reducible to them either - just as mind is neither intelligible independently of behaviour nor is it reducible to it. In offering up my prayers and thanks and praises and repentance to God I'm relating them all to each other within a singular scheme and under the direction of a particular sensibility. This scheme and conjoint sensibility is also unique in how it brings together matters moral and matters cosmic. The vision it offers of the cosmos, that is, is of it as originating from and ongoingly sustained by that to which we also offer prayers and praise. When I view my life sub specie aeternis I'm not now doing something utterly separate from when my soul pours forth its joy at life, or when it cries out in pain, or when I lodge my innermost longings before my Maker. (It is, I think, interesting in this regard that whilst we simply thank or implore or praise one another, we offer our thanks, we offer our prayers, we give praise, to God.) And so the meaning of showing our existential gratitude to God, or offering our prayers to Him, has what we might think of as a far 'broader' character than the more piecemeal offerings of the existentialist. Sure, an atheistic humanist may still insist that we should learn to live with this piecemeal character and not hallucinate a God behind it all to give it a bogus meaning. Well, they may. But with my distinction between theist and believer I hope to have dispelled at least some of the sense of plausibility that this move could be meaningfully lodged against the latter.

The complaint may surely by lodged against my approach that whereas even the most diehard eliminative materialist will struggle to not invoke belief and desire in their appreciation of behaviour's meaning - and it's not even so clear that the behaviourist even offers us a cogent notion of behaviour, as opposed to mere movement, in the first place - the atheist can get really quite a long way in living a life replete with existential meaning. We might push back against this a little. Are we really so sure, for example, that the atheist with existential or humanist sympathies is not, despite her self image, in fact simply riding along on the coat tails of the believer's vision of life? Maybe our whole putatively secular moral sensibility, for example, is in truth deeply Christian both in its origin and in its intelligible shape. (Both Elizabeth Anscombe and Tom Holland have, in different ways, suggested something similar.)  But then again we could also acquiesce a little. Sure, analogies only take us so far! The point of the analogy was, recall, to argue not that faith is inevitable, but that it is intelligible, if one engages the sentiment of existential gratitude. (To make it inevitable would rather undermine its status as faith!) And sure, a life without God needn't mean a life without existential meaning (tricksy evangelical reasoning aside)! But ongoingly and progressively living the life divine is about entering gradually and doggedly into a deeper more resonant spiritual order. It's a constant process of confession and delight and soul-searching and humility and joy and preparation for death engaged in not merely as separable moments of life but as parts of a unified, and so unifying, love-saturated vision of what a human life can be.