On Reverence and its Discontents

Abstract

On Reverence and its Discontents Thomas White And we are here as on a darkling plain…swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight…where ignorant armies clash by night. Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach Reverence: the spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary …somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun…what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming In our fractured age, concerns over sectarian strife and the discords of globalization have made Matthew Arnold's complaint our complaint and Ambrose Bierce's scathing dismissal of religious reverence compelling. Meanwhile, it seems that some, having lapsed into complete despair, await their own version of Yeats’ strange creature to emerge from the wasteland of their choice to signal the advent of End Times. The crowding‐in of global strife and sorrow via our daily news feeds sorely tests the average person's hope that there is any precious light worthy of reverence not extinguished by our global “darkling plain.” Once again the world is too much with us. Considering the questions “What is Reverence?” and “What ought we to revere?” means moving away from spiritual despair, but also forward from a reputed transcendence that despite Christian protestations to the contrary still seem remote from our quotidian affairs. However, a secularist understanding of reverence as servile submission to a tyrannical transcendence, which destroys personal autonomy, is not a correct understanding of genuine reverence. A sense of something “more than human” that checks the human‐all‐too‐human's impulse toward inhumanity is needed to protect, and pay homage to, the higher ideals, including compassion, that protect humanity. Reverence is necessary to elicit the best from humans, as well as to shield against the worse (yet if reverence can be a virtue it can also be, as we shall see, a vice). An enlightened reverence means negotiating the fine line between human limitations and the blandishments of the putative Transcendent, while keeping a healthy awareness of the difference. Ignoring this, getting too confident about one's “special relationship” with the gods, is, as in the case of Agamemnon, the “sure sign,” Classicist Paul Woodruff tells us, “of irreverence.” W.B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming certainly foretold of an irreverent world—both indifferent and intense—where the reverential sensibility had become so corrupted that it could only pay homage to false, if not savage, gods: the menacing beast‐human that slouches toward Bethlehem heralds the impossibility of revering anything edifying. It is a symbol of the deformed reverence that, as this essay will argue, resonates in our contemporary world. When a 24/7 media‐drenched world diverts attention from real, fundamental alternatives worthy of reverence—or when the genuine reverential sensibility itself dies—there are only degrees of cynicism and world‐weariness: The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. “Best” and “worse” are ironical here because between these two choices there are no real differences, only shades of disenchantment But does a fresh look at reverence and its discontents mean dusting off the old saints and gods/God of lore and genuflecting before them/It anew? Summoning up the old catechisms? Renovating bare‐ruined choirs? If we cannot return to—and revere—the Divinities of yesteryear are we left with nothing more than a lonely, disenchanted universe? Therein hangs the tale, and the challenge to this essay. Reverence, secularism, and cynicism Ambrose Bierce, like all cynics, saw only the lowest common denominator. Corrupted forms of ideas, actions, beliefs, etc., become “all there is.” There is a definite strain of this in the so‐called New Atheism. Philosophy scholar Charles Kitcher, himself a strong defender of secular humanism, observes that these “Darwinian atheists” downplay the more affirmative aspects of religion preferring to emphasize its historical dark side: Darwinian atheists exult in the ferocity of religious wars, the willingness to torture in the name of the deity (or deities), the intolerant persecution of forms of...