Mystics and the contemporary world: conference

In Bristol, on March 6th. See the programme here. McGinn and Oliver Davies will be speaking.

Can trust be distinguished from fideism?

‘Because Christians believe that God is a God of love and power, and that God’s creation partakes of these qualities, they trust in God and the real goodness of the world.’ (Eugene McCarraher ‘The Enchantments of Mammon: Notes toward a theological history of capitalism.’ MoTh 21:3 July 2005, 429-461).

Trust is also a major theme of the theology of Rowan Williams. In the Orthodox Church, and for a lot of Christian tradition, the saint has knowledge of and access to God that the rest of us don’t. So when a saint tells us something about God we tend to trust it as true, since they know God better than we do. This is not to say we cannot ask questions, or that what they say is completely opaque to reason. It is more like they have seen something we haven’t and so we have only their word to go on; though of course we have seen something of the same thing as them and so have some sense of what we might expect or what to find outrageous. This sense is by no means infallible. Neither is the saint or their knowledge infallible.

If that is a basic way in which we approach knowledge of God, we may reach times at which the saint says x is true, and the rest of us either must choose to believe it or not, but cannot prove it in any way. Of course, a lot of things are like this. We can give reasons for and against, but they may be equally good arguments on both sides (think of Kant on arguments for God’s existence). The decision to believe the saint or not then depends on what we already know and think, any of our own mystical experience, exposure to tradition, exposure to other Christian lives. If we are believing theologians, we will tend (again, various caveats) to have the posture of faith seeking understanding. If we are more sceptical, we will take the more usual philosophical approach of doubt and questioning. The point at which we possible begin to verge into fideism is if we say, which I think the majority of the tradition has done, that to know what is true about God requires knowing God, and that this only comes through experiencing God, and this is evidenced in lives of love and holiness. The latter is frequently a vague term, but there are some people whose lives have an effect on us, who make it difficult to say, ‘so what?’ in the way we can to arguments about God. This may be because of a brave action, a miracle/s performed, or just some inchoate and difficult to pin down sense we have.

Now fideism is often the academic equivalent of name calling, and/or a term for which each person has their own understanding so that people talk past each other rather than to each other. I take it to be an approach to Christianity (I think what I’m saying may be generalisable to other religions (and that in turn raises questions about what we are experiencing and the social formation of experience) but let’s keep it simple for the moment) that says we can only know about God from our experience of God. I’m not sure if anyone has ever said that. I think most theologians have admitted a mixture of experience/revelation and just thinking about what’s around. Yet even if we allow that people can know a lot about God without knowing God, I still wonder if, in saying that one must meet and love God, in order really to know God, Christianity has a kind of irreducibly fideistic element. That is not necessarily bad or wrong, it just makes for awkward conversations with philosophers. It puts the theologian in a difficult position because, on the one hand, they are saying, ‘I can’t really explain this to you, you’d need to experience it yourself,’ which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising, it is what we say about love, sex, marriage, all major metaphors for divine-human relations in the tradition. On the other hand, it is possible to show that belief in God is not completely ridiculous, or that what Christians say about x seems true or useful or good or beautiful.

Another question raised here is, why do people interpret religious experiences differently and how could one decide between interpretations? Christianity has means for judging interpretations within itself, but it hasn’t until recently spent as much care on working out how to judge between, say, a Christian’s claims to experience the Trinity in prayer, and a Muslim’s claims to experience a monistic God in prayer.

A pattern emergeth

Rupert Shortt’s excellent God’s Advocates is a series of interviews with 18 theologians, including Williams to Milbank, Hauerwas, Insole, Coakley, Marion, Burrell and other big names. What’s interesting is how many of them have had mystical experiences and/or been transformed through the practice of contemplative prayer (Coakley is excellent on this). For some of them, this changed their trajectory from liberal Protestantism to positions more robustly traditional positions (i.e. taking the older tradition more seriously). As Coakley points out, the importance of prayer and its effects on theology are still perhaps underrated. I think this is due to academic theology existing in environments of ‘secular reason’. Not that I’m complaining about theologians, just pointing out an affect of their environment. I suppose this is one consequence of the shift from most theologians being bishops or monastics to being university employees.