The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance by Erik Varden
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Faith in Faith

When Pandora’s Box in the ancient Greek myth was opened, all the evils that we experience in the world escaped and had humanity at their mercy. But something important remained in the Box, whether as divine compensation or practical remedy is open to interpretation. This residue was hope, the human ability to have expectations despite the trials and traps encountered in life. The central point of the story, therefore, seems to be not that the world has become evil through the hapless action of opening the Box, but rather that human beings have a way of dealing with those evils.

This Greek appreciation of hope as not just a virtue but also a skill for human survival and well-being was all but lost with the arrival of the Christian religion in the world. Paul of Tarsus, a cosmopolitan Jew of the Diaspora had a revelation. This revelation was not simply that a certain Jesus of Nazareth was the messiah - an opinion which Paul felt had been justified by certain Hebrew Scriptures. Even more significant than Jesus, whom Paul had never met, was the revelation of the paramount importance of the human attitude, virtue, or capacity that he called faith.

For Paul, it is faith, not the Greek (or for that matter the Jewish) idea of hope on which the fate of humanity depended entirely. Nothing in the Scriptures supported this view in the least. In fact, the Hebrew Scriptures are chock full of cases in which disobedient doing rather than inadequate believing provokes divine displeasure from Adam & Eve onward (Lot’s wife is an extensively analyzed example in Varden’s Chapter 3 which blatantly contradicts the doctrine of faith which he is trying to establish). So Paul simply asserted his idea of faith with no further justification.

The Pauline idea of faith caused profound theological problems during his lifetime, throughout the entire history of Christianity, and into the present day (right into Varden’s Chapter 2). Faith, according to the doctrines of all Christian sects is not something that can be achieved by good works, or prayerful techniques, or by simply living an ethical life. Faith is an unaccountable gift from God which is given without reason, that is to say arbitrarily, to some people but not others. Since faith is the only attribute necessary and sufficient for salvation, the question of who has it and who doesn’t is obviously central to one’s existence as a Christian. Strict Calvinists and Jansenist Catholics are among the many groups for whom Pauline faith, not Jesus, is the paramount religious doctrine.

It is with this background that I read The Shattering of Loneliness, which is in large part a first person account of faith - what it is, how it is experienced, and what it has meant to one’s life. I am sure that Varden’s account of faith has many unique features determined by his history and life-circumstances. But I am also confident that his story is typical in its essentials as what is generally termed a conversion. In fact I have a suspicion that Varden’s story is not merely an instance of the reception of Pauline faith; it is in fact an enactment of the Pauline script of faith, a script which sought to replace the Greek myth of hope but which doesn’t do nearly as good a job at promoting human well-being.

My suspicion is based on several things recounted in his book. Varden, like many of us, is, through either nature or nurture, a spiritual seeker in the specific sense that he noticed the presence of evil in the world around him and it bothered him. He has encountered the worst evil second-hand through anecdotes and reading about Nazi occupied Norway. But he is aware that the problem of evil is much more pervasive than any particular set of circumstances. For him, evil is the central human issue.

Varden makes this explicit. Evil, in good Christian theological tradition, is an absence, an inadequacy which creates a very personal problem for him:

“I crave a completion no created thing can give. I walk this earth as yearning incarnate. I am at home, yet a stranger, homesick for a homeland I recall but have not seen.”

I suspect that both psychological attributes - the moral sensitivity to one’s environment and the urge to do something about either it or oneself - are common among those undergoing the conversion experience. Certainly it had been the case with St. Paul himself who had been an enthusiastic follower and enforcer of Jewish law before being knocked from his horse on the road to Damascus.

Varden’s ‘peak experience’ (the modern jargon seems appropriate in the context) occurred while listening to Mahler’s Second, or Resurrection, Symphony in which Mahler sets some German folk poems and songs. One of these, The Boy’s Magic Horn, Varden found arresting, particularly the verses:

“Have faith, heart, have faith: nothing will be lost to you.
What you have longed for is yours, yes, yours; yours is what you have loved and fought for.
Have faith: you were not born in vain. You have not lived or suffered in vain.”

Varden’s response was immediate: “At these words, something burst. The repeated insistence, ‘not in vain, not in vain’, was irresistible. It was not just that I wanted to believe it. I knew it was true.”

What I find most significant about his report is, first, that this belief which has overcome him has no immediate content. It is a sort of ‘oceanic’ feeling of excited repose, of being suddenly complete and connected with the universe. It is not about Jesus, nor God, nor any divine presence in the world. It is solely an intense experience of... well something finally responding to his spiritual emptiness. So this emptiness was no longer ‘in vain;’ it had a reason in the feeling of completion. Simultaneously, he experiences this contentless revelation as ‘the truth.’ The truth concerning what is not immediately clear, even to him. What is clear is that he has an intense drive, which he calls faith, and which must be satisfied (contrasting accounts of a similar musical experiences but ones not interpreted in terms of religious faith my be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...).

He then continues, “... at that moment, my consciousness changed... I was aware of not being alone... I could no more doubt the truth of what I had found than I could doubt that I existed. The sense of it has never left me.” He diagnoses himself as having had a spiritual metanoia, a fundamental change which he equates to an ontological shift, that is, an alteration in his mode of being. This then, much like the story Paul tells of himself on the road to Damascus, is the first substantive belief as contents of his faith - he exists differently now than he had before, or at least that he realised before.

This new state of existence is not merely new, it is objectively better. Varden reports in fact that he has been given a “privileged insight, provoked by the music, I had found my deep intuitions confirmed.” He has been given something, a privilege, which not everyone else has; and whatever his incipient beliefs about the world have been before his experience are now confirmed. He is validated, vindicated by his revelation. He could now understand the music in a very different manner. It too had become ‘truth’ as a second component of his faith. He has become inherently superior, not only to what he was, but also to others who have not received the grace of faith. But there is more. His faith-experience had shown to be true things that he he had suspected all along. And what was that?

The insight that had been validated was in fact his long-standing suspicion that the world was a very inhospitable place and that what he had been reading had in fact been: “the chronicle of man’s presumption against man, [which] corresponded to the world as it was, the world I inhabited. Its reality had seeped into me. I saw before me as a suffering mass overshadowed by death.” It is highly significant, it seems to me, that Varden is overcome not by the inherent goodness and splendour of the created world as recounted in the book of Genesis (which Varden does not mention), but by the very gnostic view of creation as irreparably evil. This is the third component of his faith; yet he has yet to reach anything approaching the divine.

There is an interesting inversion which Varden, like many of his co-religionists , adopts at this point in a strategy of transparently faux humility. The proximate cause of much human misery is the power exercised by others. So Varden is keen to abjure such power by insisting on the fundamental insignificance of human beings. They are merely dust and they have no real power. All power is God’s alone. It is God who freed Israel from Pharoah; and it is God who delivers humanity from its oppressed state. Only by renouncing individual pretensions to power can the world be healed.

However, Varden also makes it clear that by renouncing power, power is acquired by the faithful believer. The faithful becomes agents of divine power. The paradox is obvious to all but the faithful: God, not his servants, is accountable. Individual minions are simply following divine orders, as interpreted by either themselves or by their churchy superiors. Power is not a abjured, but rather given a seal of approval, an imprimatur, which simultaneously justifies its use by those who claim to be worth nothing, and diverts human attention from those exercising power to an abstract and remote divine entity. To the extent made necessary by circumstances, evil is thus transformed into the pursuit of good - Gnosticism by the back door it might be said. I don’t think this is a pose. It is a real article of faith. One might call it faith in faith, the fundamental principle of Christianity and the contents of the Christian equivalent of Pandora’s Box, the tool for coping with evil. It is this faith in faith which makes the Christian religion so impenetrable as well as do dangerous.*

There is much more which flows from Varden’s experience that could be used to extend the analysis (See the postscript below for an outline of some further material), but the above is sufficient I think to make some meaningful suggestions. My overall conclusion is that Varden’s story is straight out of St. Paul’s playbook. It’s not a distortion of Varden’s narrative to appreciate that he has a point for point experience of Pauline conversion. Such an event would have quite literally been impossible for ancient Greeks and Hebrews. Paul’s story has become a model for ‘how to do it’ and has become assimilated, no doubt largely unconsciously, into personal explanations for what such experiences mean over millennia. There is a vocabulary and a sequence which is almost standardised.

Further, this idea of Pauline faith shows itself in Varden’s descriptions as exactly what it is: a very powerful psychological urge which initially has no clear object. Faith exists before the object of faith has even been encountered. This is the case with Varden. It was also the case with Paul who spent several years contemplating what his experience required of him before he went on the road spreading not so much the good news of Jesus (of whom he says almost nothing) but the good news of faith. Faith, in other words, appears to create its own object. The drive of faith is to find something with sufficient content to satisfy the need it creates. The ultimate consumer product perhaps. The fact that faith in faith destroys every principle of epistemology and thus inhibits distinguishing the Good News from fake news is dramatically illustrated by American Evangelicals.

It is certainly possible to argue that hope can as easily produce similar self-serving nonsense to that created by faith. Business, political and academic idealists do it continually. Just as faith is directed toward an abstraction called the divine, hope is equally directed to an unspecified abstraction called the future. And indeed this latter abstraction is often stuffed with as much self-serving, delusional, wishful idiocy as that of faith. Much obsessive idealism can be classified as faith in hope. However the difference is that hope has not be divinised by the Christian Church. Although it is considered a ‘theological virtue’ (a subtle slur on Greek thought which ignores the bottom of Pandora’s Box), it does not have the doctrinal status of Pauline faith. And hope is much easier to discuss, compromise about, and combine than the quite rigid matter of faith in faith.

Finally, Varden’s memoir demonstrates the more or less total victory of Pauline faith over Greek hope. It is not an exaggeration to note that Varden’s faith in the divine is inversely proportional to hope in his fellows. Faith is a personal capacity; Hope is a communal trait. The world for Varden is lost, literally hopeless. Just as for Paul, there is no ‘us’ except those who share faith. Faith not hope defines community. Varden’s faith not only relieves him of the pressures of dealing with the things that are wrong in the world, it also creates, quite literally, an alternative reality in which his new being exists. There exists already in the minds of the faithful a “new heaven and a new earth”. Christian faithfulness is a tribal mark. Hopefulness designates an open community and demands a bit more courage.

* The practical consequences of this paradox of faith in faith are visible most notably among Varden’s own monastic brethren. Monks tale a strict vow of personal poeverty. But their monastic establishments - priories, abbeys, churches, schools etc. - do not. Historically, these establishments have grown wealthy and powerful, in large measure because of the enforced poverty of their members, thereby encouraging less than abstemious monastic life-styles. This has provoked a need for periodic ‘reform’ of monastic groups, of which Varden’s Cistercians are but one example.

[For more on the Pauline concept of faith, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
For more on a positive theology of hope, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...]

Postscript: Varden’s concern about ‘loneliness’ is, if I am correct in my analysis, one of the great ironies of Christian culture. Christ was lonely, Paul was lonely, Augustine was lonely, Luther was lonely, more recently Karl Barth was lonely. Pope Francis seems particularly lonely at the moment. Vox clamans in deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness, as the Gospel of Matthew quotes the prophet Isaiah. Christianity destroys natural community with intent (cf. Mark 10:29). Perhaps loneliness is an inherent characteristic of a religion which insists on the absolute importance of something called personal faith of which the person concerned can never be certain. I offer it as a thought rather than a conclusion.

What Varden means by ‘Remembrance’ is also another euphemism for ‘having faith in faith.’ It’s use in the text is solely to explain the relevance of things ‘remembered’ in Christian doctrines of faith - the Resurrection, The Real Presence, The Holy Trinity, Miracle-working, etc. His underlying message is clear: if you are a victim of loneliness, it is likely because you do not appreciate these sorts of doctrinal realities. The cure for your loneliness is your participation in a community which professes these doctrines (even if neither you nor they understand fully what these doctrines mean). Your willingness to make the required doctrinal professions will assure you of the good-fellowship of any number of other believers. And, who knows, God might just share some of his saving grace with you along the way - a variant on Pascale’s Wager in which the currency is emotion rather than ready money. This of course is another speculative offering rather than a conclusion.

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