Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan by Anthony T. Kronman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Answers Lying in Wait

Anthony Kronman and I share much. We are approximately the same age so that we share the experiences, aspirations, and (perhaps) even the disappointments of the boomer generation. We did our university degrees not far from each other in New England; and although his studies were in philosophy and mine engineering, I think it’s fair to say that we shared an optimism about learning which was more personal than cultural. We had similar youthful questions about meaning - mine epistemological, his triggered by political philosophy. Both of us set these questions aside in order to make a living - in the law and business respectively. We both returned to these questions in mature life, remarkably at about the same age, he through his direction of a philosophical programme at Yale, me by completing a doctoral degree in theology and teaching at Oxford.

Most remarkably of all, we seem to have arrived at very similar answers to the questions we had posed ourselves as young adults. Kronman’s erudition and articulateness are far superior to mine, but in him I find so much of what I have been attempting to say, inadequately, for years. It seems we have by chance, fate, or cultural necessity stumbled across the same answers lying in wait as if they had been there all along. He, like me, is what has been called a ‘systems thinker,’ an accusation that simply means that we look for the largest context possible in which to explain an event or phenomenon or problem. And the largest most expansive context either one of us was able to find had a name and a history - God.

Kronman is succinct in his conclusion: “My central contention is that all our most distinctively modern beliefs and practices necessarily assume the existence of the eternal God of sufficient reason, and that none of our deepest convictions in the realms of science, art and politics can be sustained without it.” This term ‘sufficient reason’ is one coined by the 17th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (also very much a systems man) but has been in practical use since the ancient Greeks. My view is that the principle refers to the human intelligibility of the universe. Without this principle, inquiry, that is the posing and answering of questions (as well as much else), would be utterly pointless.

But for Kronman as well as for me, God is not something that exists, at least not something that exists in the manner proposed by the religion which dominates our cultural heritage, namely Christianity. God for us is not something outside of nature, that is to say the world of material things. God exists sive natura. More specifically, God exists (or does not) in the relationships within the world, particularly among human beings and between human beings and the rest of ‘creation.’ Kronman is very precise, and I think absolutely correct, in his assessment of Christianity as its own as well as humanity’s worst enemy:

“… Christianity differs from Judaism and Islam… in its theological character. Judaism and Islam of course have theologies too. But their fundamental orientation is orthopractical. Both are religions whose adherents are distinguished, first and most importantly, by their observance of certain ritual and legal requirements, rather than by the affirmation of a set of rigorously prescribed beliefs. Christianity, by contrast, has always defined itself in orthodoxical terms. To be a Christian means to hold specific beliefs about man’s relation to God.”

In short, Christianity is a literally ideological versus an ethical religion. Its faith is a matter of words not actions. Its formal doctrine is that correct belief out-weighs even the most outrageous and inhumane behaviour, in fact that belief often necessitates such behaviour.

While I would go back a bit further in history to identify the killer virus within Christianity (the idea of faith as articulated first by Paul of Tarsus), it is not misleading to place its mature form in the writings of St. Augustine. As Kronman says, “… the [modern] demise of Christian belief is brought about by tensions inherent to it and already evident in the conflict between Augustine’s doctrines of human freedom and divine grace.” Essentially: if God is omnipotent, there can be no free will; and if there is free will, God can’t be omnipotent. He shows how the attempts to mitigate this paradox have merely resulted in throwing not just philosophy, but also politics, economics and institutional culture from one pole to the other - from total freedom (liberalism) to complete incapacity (fundamentalism) and back again. He goes on to say that, “The theology of the Christian religion, with its distinctive emphasis on divine grace and its rigorous insistence on God’s separation from the world, thus simultaneously intensifies man’s rebellious wish to be God and creates the conceptual room for him to do so.” Christianity, in other words, creates its own idolatry.

Kronman looks particularly to Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Walt Whitman for help in constructing a context for understanding the world at the level of the divine. His choice of inspiration cannot be gainsaid. Each of these shares an appreciation of the world which recognises the limits of human comprehension in an infinitely comprehensible universe. All three recognise that whatever we think God to be, he is not that. But this is neither a disappointment nor a challenge. Rather it is an opportunity for endless exploration and its joys.

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