The Threefold Gaze
A Spiritual Lens for a Flourishing Life
What if...? & As if...
Constructing Transcendence Through Faith
What if...??
William James, Pascal’s Wager, and Live Options for Faith
Recommended Book: Full text online: The Will to Believe
William James (1842-1910) was trained as a medical doctor but never actually practiced medicine. He made major contributions to both philosophy and psychiatry. He taught undergraduates at Harvard for many years, teaching across multiple disciplines. Among his students were major figures in American life, including Teddy Roosevelt, George Santayana, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Gertrude Stein. James’ students found him to be kind, humble, personable, and witty. All these traits come through clearly in his lectures published as essays in collections like The Will to Believe. Even though James did not affiliate with any particular religion, he had a deep respect for religious and spiritual experiences in a time when most scientists and academics were treating such things with scorn. He had a deep concern that the elite undergrads in his classes were closing themselves off to the possibility of belief in what he called “Something More,” capitulating to the cockiness of the scientific revolution burgeoning around them. Consider this, from the opening of his address to Harvard students on the possibility of faith: "I admit, then, that were I addressing the Salvation Army or a miscellaneous popular crowd it would be a misuse of opportunity to preach the liberty of believing as I have in these pages preached it. What such audiences most need is that their faiths should be broken up and ventilated, that the northwest wind of science should get into them and blow their sickliness and barbarism away. But academic audiences, fed already on science, have a very different need. Paralysis of their native capacity for faith and timorous abulia in the religious field are their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion, carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence by waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in regard to truth. But there is really no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or of believing too much. To face such dangers is apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the measure of our wisdom as men." When it comes to faith (or belief), James argued that there were Live Options and Dead Options. A “live” option, he explained, is one that is truly possible for you. For example: To believe in Santa Claus is probably not a “live” option because you simply could never do it. But to believe in a deity, or to become an agnostic or atheist, may all be “live” options for you. Next, James poses the question: Is it possible to change what you believe simply by willing it? For example: •Could you choose to stop believing that Abraham Lincoln ever existed? •Could you choose to believe you felt well even if you were sick with a migraine and a fever? •Could you choose to believe the one dollar bill you were holding in your hand was really a five-dollar bill? Of course not. Facts and Truths consist of things we “know” to be true/factual, and we cannot simply decide to believe differently. Enter: Pascal’s Wager James critiques the famous “Pascal’s Wager” in the following passage: “In it he tries to force us into Christianity by reasoning as if our concern with truth resembled our concern with the stakes in a game of chance. Translated freely his words are these: You must either believe or not believe that God is—which will you do? Your human reason cannot say. A game is going on between you and the nature of things which at the day of judgment will bring out either heads or tails. Weigh what your gains and your losses would be if you should stake all you have on heads, or God's existence: if you win in such case, you gain eternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose nothing at all.” James concludes, “It is evident that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in masses and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a living option.” In other words, unless belief in the Christian message and the Christian God is a “live option” for you, just choosing to lay down Pascal’s wager is not going to work. A “scientific age” rejects religion entirely because it’s associated with the level of logic invoked by Pascal’s wager. James quotes Aldous Huxley, who wrote: "My only consolation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend [the word 'pretend' is surely here redundant], they will not have reached the lowest depth of immorality." Huxley (rightly) did not have any respect for the kind of “belief” Pascal’s wager pointed toward. We believe lots of [invisible] things without even knowing why. In our society, we believe in “molecules, and the conservation of energy; of democracy and necessary progress…” just because we do, James writes. "Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case." In summary: For those who are already conditioned and inclined to believe in God, Pascal’s wager is a compelling argument. For those who have had no prior conditioning or model, Pascal’s wager is not a “live” option. They cannot simply decide to believe in something that is completely foreign and irrelevant to them. This is the point James is building up to in this essay: “The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, ‘Do not decide, but leave the question open,’ is itself a passional decision,—just like deciding yes or no,—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.” Faith is not Certainty James concludes with a caution against demanding certainty; certainty is the opposite of faith. Here, James notes, both the religious and the scientist make their errors. Religions claim to have “absolute truth” and to have “absolute certainty” of that truth. This leads to dogmatism. It is a belief that closes off options rather than opening them up. The scientist demands “empirical truth” and only believes what can be observed and tested “empirically.” This leads to arrogance and lack of imagination. It, too, closes off options rather than opening them up. James observes, “There is this,—there is that; there is indeed nothing which someone has not thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false.” He goes on: “But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think…Not where it comes from but what it leads to…” Finally, James offers this advice to those who resist “belief” simply because they’re afraid to “believe” wrongly and be duped by faith: “…. It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.” James’ Wager For those of us for whom some kind of belief or faith is a “live option,” to refuse to believe out of fear of being “wrong” is to lose out on a life of imagination, mystery, and possibility. If we are able to believe in Something More, James urges, we had better do so! Because “…faith in a fact can help create the fact.” Finally, James defends those who choose to believe against the attacks of those who remain skeptical: “No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricism's glory; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things.”
As-If...
Imagining Faith in the "Space Between"
“We have no space of our own except as it is defined in relationship to other spaces, the multiple and interpenetrating spaces of our unconscious life, our life together in society, and our life in relation to Being itself, to what we call God.”
What follows is a way of conceptualizing spirituality in terms of a particular kind of space. Plato called it “Khora.” Donald Winnicott called it “Potential Space.” Heinz Kohut described it as “intersubjectivity.” Each conceived of a “third area,” or a “third thing” that emerges in what I will simply call “the Space Between.” Some of what follows is drawn from Way to Water, a book by Callid Keefe Perry on Theopoetics, which is its own kind of “third thing.” I will be borrowing a definition of faith drawn from The Grace of Playing by Courtney Goto. Goto writes that faith is living “as if…” In the face of something unknowable and unprovable (like the claims religions make about the Divine), an individual can choose to live “as if” certain things were true. Goto defends this practice based on Winnicott’s theory, which will be described in more detail below. Plato’s Khora Plato’s khora refers to an empty space – a void or an interval between the intelligible realm (the forms) and the sensible realm (this world where only copies of the forms exist). Plato’s khora is like a womb – a space between “there” and “here.” It is a space where new things are incubated. Neoplatonist Christianity incorporated Plato’s idea of khora, defining it as the space between God’s transcendence (unknowableness) and God’s immanence (intimate presence). According to neoplatonists, we live in that time and space of paradoxical tension between God’s distance and nearness, God’s presence and absence. Certainly, this is the “location” of faith! Winnicott’s “Potential Space” Child psychologist Donald Winnicott studied the relationships of infants to their mothers. He was particularly interested in that early developmental stage when an infant begins to realize that its mother is not an extension of itself, but rather is a separate person whom the child cannot control like its own arms or legs. When the infant realizes the mother is not part of itself, the first instinct is to feel existential terror, hence the panicked crying when the mother leaves the room. But early in this stage, an almost universal phenomenon occurs. The infant latches on to an object – perhaps a blanket or a stuffed animal – and suddenly that object is the most important source of comfort to the infant. Any parent knows, a baby can fall asleep without its mother in the crib, but once that “security” object is identified, the baby cannot fall asleep without it! Winnicott named the space between the “me” (infant) and the “not me” (mother) “Potential Space,” because it is the space in which the child’s first “Not Me” object is imbued with its particular significance and power. Whether that significance is “discovered” or “invented” is irrelevant not appropriate to ask. It simply “is.” Winnicott extended his theory of Potential Space to suggest that it is in this same space that other acts of imagination and “finding / making” occur. We see it in children’s make believe and play. We see it when an artist creates a sculpture or a novelist writes a book. We see it when religions are practiced. In religion and spirituality, something is found/made, which is of tremendous existential and emotional significance to the individual but may or may not have any significance to someone else. Years before Winnicott proposed his theories, William James would defend religion’s validity from a scientific perspective based on the fact that “religious experiences” themselves are real phenomenon that can be observed and documented (see Varieties of Religious Experiences by William James). Just like no one would deny the “reality and efficacy” of an infant’s security object, no one can deny the “reality and efficacy” of people’s individual religious experiences in providing them comfort and support. These are things that do not need to be universalized or explained. In each case, an individual is simply choosing to live “As if…” Kohut’s “Selfobjects” Heinz Kohut theorized that none of us is purely an individual self. Each of us is a self “in relation to” another. In a healthy relationship, two people’s lives overlap at a point, and they-together form something more than each of them alone. They “shore each other up” in a relational symbiosis, each supplying something that the other lacks. This is not codependence. It’s interdependence, and Kohut argues it is essential to human thriving. Theopoetics One might say Theopoetics is the selfobject formed where spirituality and poetry meet. Theopoetics suggests that rather than trying to “get at” the divine through a scientific theory of theology, perhaps the divine (or transcendence) is better reached by poetic or creative means. This is the Third Area – a meeting ground between Me and Something More (Divine) where, between us, we get to decide (1) what the space looks like, (2) what language is used to describe it and to communicate within it, and (3) what objects and images are sacred or imbued with tremendous symbolic significance. We decide our liturgy, our practices, our disciplines. We decide what formation looks like and what we are seeking to form into. It's a place of possibility, not certainty. It can shift or change form over time. Metaphors, icons, and practices can be added or removed, desacralized or enshrined. It is both private and permeable. It is my own “inner sanctuary,” yet it is also an atmosphere around me that shapes my perception of the world. And whether they know it or not, others enter into it when they interact with me. If I think of it as something that surrounds me and envelops others when they come near me, part of my disciplines and practices aim at making that atmosphere a refreshing, revitalizing aura for others to experience. This way of envisioning Potential Space makes the task of my imagination more concrete. I choose to furnish this space with a tree because trees are objects that hold tremendous spiritual and metaphorical significance for me. I choose to see this space as a tree for me to sit under. Beneath me, under the soil, is a vast network of roots, stabilizing and nourishing the tree (and by extension, me). Above me, I choose to see a luscious canopy of fruit bearing shade. Sitting under it is a place to engage in the practices that are significant to me. I think, read, write, draw, and have conversations with intimate friends. What else is around the tree? What else is in this space? What else should I imagine that is “Something More”? Am I a part of the tree while sitting under it, like branches on a vine? I choose to employ Kohut’s intersubjectivity, which means I am the tree and I am also separate from the tree. An onlooker will see two objects, a person and a tree. But I am aware of my selfobject – I know myself as one with the tree. It gives me something I cannot give to myself, and I also do something for it that it cannot do. I can move from this place into the world. I can carry its fruit. It gives me life (spirit). I give it life (body). Living As-If… Not playing pretend It’s important to distinguish between “choosing to live as-if” and purely inventing a fiction. When George R. R. Martin invented the world that became Game of Thrones, he was inventing what he knew to be straight-up fiction. As brilliantly imaginative as this work was, it was clearly a commercial venture not a spiritual one for Martin. In contrast, in the mid-19th century, when George MacDonald wrote his fairy tales and fantasy stories, the creations of his imagination reflected his own deeply held faith. In the pages of his words, we can see his choice to live “as-if” the natural world were alive with faerie-like spirits, and a golden thread connected all living and nonliving things. The spiritually alive world of his stories was the same world he lived, worked, and raised his family in. His life was spent in the neo platonic Khora, if you will. That “space between” seen and unseen realities. A space pregnant with God. We can use our imagination creatively without living “as-if.” We can also use our imagination in service to faith, resulting in living “as-if.” One is not superior to the other. They are just different. Remember the baby blanket… The power of what emerges from the Potential Space is in what it has come to be and to mean to you. It is found more than made. And above all, it is completely and entirely your own.
