Faith & Fleabag
07/26 2021
"Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour." --- Henry David Thoreau
Faith is something which intuitively seems exclusive to the religious sphere. It is something that is distinctly separate from the realm of knowledge, it is the realm of the soul, of the ideal. Yet does it necessarily need to be so? Whether or not faith is something that is necessary for us to be satisfied as humans is a discussion for another day, but let's assume for a moment that it is. If it is then we need first to define what it actually is. Schopenhauer writes that "Faith and knowledge do not go well together in the head: they are like the wolf and a sheep in the same cage" I don't think that Schopenhauer is correct here, because he's attributing faith as the exclusive property of organized religion. Who ever said that it must be so? What if we play with the idea that faith, as a concept is something intrinsic to the human condition. That it is, fundamentally, a human characteristic that only can show itself through human expression. Similar to how Alan Watts says:
"“Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on."
Defining faith as such, as a state of openness, a sense of trust in yourself and others, seems to me to be able to encompass both faith in the religious sense, as well as any agnostic or atheistic idea about the concept. Of course, we use the expression in this way in ordinary speech all the time: "I have faith in you" etc. That definition is already clear; however, what I aim for here is redefining the metaphysical aspect of it. Faith, as a kind of unconditional trust, and not as simply a linguistic expression.
This is something that I saw beautifully portrayed in the second season of Phoebe Waller Bridge's 'Fleabag'. Now I won't spoil much (But seriously, if you haven't watched it, watch it before reading on. It's just that great that you will regret having spoiled any of it), nor will I attempt to explain what the show is about. I'll just present the relevant aspects so that it makes sense in the context of the discussion. In the fourth episode of the second season we see Fleabag in a confession stand, confessing her "sins" to the priest. In it she states that she is afraid. Afraid of being in ultimate control of ones actions, of being responsible for all of the things in ones life: what to wear in the morning, what to eat, what to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about, what to believe in, who to love and how to tell them. She wants, as she herself puts it "I just think that I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I've been getting it wrong." Then she goes on to say that: "But I know that's why people want people like you in their lives, because you just tell them how to do it. /.../ And I know that scientifically nothing that I do makes any difference in the end anyway. But I'm still scared. Why am I still scared? Just tell me what to do, Father." To which the priests just responds with "Kneel."
Fleabag shows us this need for faith beautifully, this angst we feel in our everyday lives where our decisions are difficult because we believe in ourselves so little to necessitate that our courage comes from someone outside of the human experience. That this faith, like when we pray for something, must originate from a point that is not inherently flawed and human. In other words that our decisions are not our own, and that therefore we don't need to feel fully responsible for the consequences, or that things in the end will be okay because we have faith that they will. This makes things easier, surely, but it doesn't make them right. Once we realize that the concept of faith is as human that we are, but that it at the same time possesses one property that we can't consciously or rationally explain we can begin to dissolve that fear of being held responsible of our actions. If we simply have faith in ourselves as flawed individuals pointing towards something good, that is.
If we return to the role of religion for a little bit, how while it is interconnected with the concept of faith at the same time destroys the concept it is trying to establish. Because, if faith is something that we need in our lives to be able to be happy, and faith is not something that we can ever fully trust in because it isn't human, then how can we ever hope to achieve it? I agree with Schopenhauer here that religion holds that very awkward role of being the "metaphysics of the masses", meaning that while religion rightly aims toward this metaphysical explanatory gap in our psychology (what I've referred to as our need for faith), it only does so in an allegorical way. Like he puts it in his essay 'On Religion':
"But he is still in his childhood who can think that superhuman beings have ever given our race information about the aim of its existence or that of the world. There are no other revelations than the thoughts of the wise, even if these --- subject to error, as are all things human --- are often clothed in strange allegories and myths and are then called religions. To this extent, therefore, it is all one whether you live and die trusting in your own thoughts or in those of others, for you are never trusting in anything but human thoughts and human opinion."
/.../
"Yet the weak point of all religions remains that they can never dare to confess to being allegorical, so that they have to present their doctrines in all seriousness as true sensu proprio; which, because of the absurdities essential to allegory, leads to perpetual deception and a great disadvantage for religion."
What I'm really getting at here isn't necessarily an attack on organized religion. I think that it can, and has, and will help a lot of people. Most people, I think is reasonable to assume, will remain satisfied with their explanation for the concept of faith; however there are some, me included, that aren't. I mean it's always been kind of obvious to me that the things that they are speaking of, like the resurrection of Jesus or what have you, are spoken in an allegorical way. Most people in my vicinity would say that too, I think; however not many, at least not that I've met, would both deny all divinity while at the same time try to keep the concept of faith intact purely through human means. It seems that the concept is just too entwined with religion to ever hope to detach it. As I've hopefully shown you I don't think this necessarily needs to be true. Yes, we are all --- to some degree --- afraid of being responsible of all our choices, and we all --- to some degree --- just want to be told what to do. There's comfort in that, comfort that I think everybody on some level desires, me included. But we can appease that through human, flawed, means. If we just keep on swimming, stop trying to grab a hold of the rocks or twigs hanging over us, if we have faith, then the fear will decrease. It won't ever disappear, of course, but that's just what it means to be human.