Summa Anti‐Theologica

Abstract

Summa Anti‐Theologica Peter Heinegg This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. By Martin Hägglund (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2019), 450pp. $29.95. Despite the fairly widespread readership of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al.), they have also been widely panned in Academe as crude, arrogant, and superficial. In any case, the debate over their position has been muddled by the fact that most of them, save for Daniel Dennett, are non‐philosophers, and their opponents have frequently been slow‐moving targets like televangelists and right‐wing Evangelicals. Martin Hägglund isn't, technically speaking, a philosopher either, but a Swedish‐born professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale, who has not only read his way through the corpus of western European philosophy, but doesn't hesitate to quarrel with major figures like Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Marx, when he catches them in inconsistencies or failing to take their own positions to the logical limit. His book is a dense, passionate, fiercely abstract case for atheism, but it scores its points more against religion as traditionally defined than as concretely lived. The key word in Hägglund's argument is “secular,” meaning of this world, finite, evanescent, death‐bound, fragile (and, he might have added, tragic). Religion for him comprises every kind of doomed attempt to escape the secular. He defines it as “any form of belief in an eternal being or an eternity beyond being, either in the form of timeless repose (such as nirvana, a transcendent God, or an immanent, divine Nature.”) Cue John Lennon singing “Imagine.” Hägglund goes to work, deconstructing and devastating any mode of such notions, because on close inspection they're unthinkable, incoherent, and futile exercises in mental gymnastics. If we were somehow freed from time, we'd have no shape or identity, no past, present, or future, no story, no goals, no relationships, and on and on. We'd be trapped in a shapeless, colorless ether that could neither be perceived, grasped, or moved in any direction. If we could completely achieve the Stoic ideal of apathia (total painlessness and emotional quiescence) or Buddhist nirvana, we would no longer be human. So, are religious people deceiving themselves, or just hopelessly sloppy thinkers? (What would a daily schedule in Paradise look like?) Hägglund suggests believers don't literally mean their blissful term “forever”; it's just a very long time or on and on. (How could you talk meaningfully about something you've never experienced and can't really explain?) He doesn't bother to address the juridically impossible problem of eternal Hell for time‐bound evil acts. And Hägglund seems to ignore the curious paucity of details supplied about the afterlife in the New Testament, which has much to say about Judgment and separating the righteous and wicked, but precious little about what happens next. Is it an accident that St. Paul, who was never at a loss for words, wound up describing the next world so vaguely: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2.9—and half that line was borrowed from Is. 64.4). There are, of course, graphic images of heaven as a city made of jewels, the New Jerusalem, at the end of the Book of Revelation; and the Qur'an paints sensuous pictures of Jannah; but these are mythic fantasies and tell us nothing about Hägglund's chief preoccupation: time. It's easy enough to depict scenes of thunderous celebration (the Hallelujah chorus), but in the only world we know these moments are always followed by the return to gray everydayness. So, perhaps believers are a kind of absurdists, who refuse to accept the world and life as they are, and chase after transcendent visions that they know, at some level anyhow, are blind leaps of faith. More to the point, they ignore rigid theological constructs (the geometry of faith) and embrace its poetry instead. In other words, believers probably care a lot less about eternity than Hägglund thinks they do. In classic existentialist fashion, Hägglund says the...