Subplot

  Subplot 

I had an email from Gaspar Stephens: “What do you believe in (believe into, pisteuei=n ei)v) these days? I find it hard to tell.”
     “You mean besides Jesus?” I wrote back.
     “Yes, let’s say besides Jesus.” And he went on:

If you can, tell me what is real (as it can be), and what is delusional. Assuming you can make that distinction though, I assume that most of our religious belief is self-delusion. But is that a bad thing? Delusion can be beneficial; there are times when it is not, clearly: we meet a bear in the woods, and we think we can take him on mano a mano (mano a pata?). But let us say we are sane and not courting death. We delude ourselves. We don't think of death as inevitable. We put off thinking about it. We even construct a belief that will allow us to put off ever thinking about it, life after death. And so we go from day to day and from the next day to the next. and so forth.
     Do you know Tyler Cowen? Economist. Occasionally, I listen to his podcast. And I listened to him recently on Honestly, Bari Weiss’s thing. You listen to that now and then, right? Did you catch that interview? If you didn’t, listen in. Or go back and listen again to the last fifteen minutes or so. Toward the end of the interview, Bari asks Cowen why he thinks the culture and its institutions seem to be imploding. And a primary reason, he says, is our decreasing detachment from religion. She then asks him about his own faith, and he identifies himself as a non-believer, but one who believes that Western culture has benefited enormously from religion and is foolish to throw it all away. (I was reminded of what you wrote about Graham Greene as a Catholic agnostic.)
     Cowen is right. I think. What religion brings at its best, a constant sense of mystery, tends to keep the mind humble.  Yes, there are a lot of pompous asses in the church, more than any institution deserves but no more, I am pretty sure, than any other institution on average. But for all that (or all of them), I think you see Christianity, for example, generating more humility than arrogance. Most, because they are still on this side or they are in the middle of or they have just pulled themselves up on the other side of the Slough of Despond, most, believing they are standing before God, don’t have to be told to be humble; they don’t have to be told to wonder. They do without being told.
     Maybe I am off the point I began with. Still, tell me what you think.

I wrote back:

I tend to agree. Even if religion is only a subplot, offering light relief, the relief comments so trenchantly on the plot, the play cannot be understood without the light it sheds. Greene, yes, I learned a few weeks ago at my book group, called himself “a Catholic agnostic,” which, as one of us ventured, is quite different from calling oneself an agnostic Catholic. Yes, too, your friend, Tyler, seems to be onto the same thing: we should hold religion to be of crucial importance even if we cannot believe its story is true in any literal sense. Any kind of belief, even sincere attempt at belief — maybe even insincere attempt at belief — can keep us humble, whatever temptations come our way. Today, for example, as in my faux “confession” I enumerate the so-called deadly sins, seven of the many-many characters in the busy-busy subplot, I am aware of how many of them lead away from humility. Pride, of course, but also anger, greed, gluttony, lust, and sloth (if only because it doesn’t care one way or the other). I’m not sure envy leads anywhere. And I continue to think it is the saddest of the sins for that reason. Wherever they begin, the other sins (even sloth when we nod off) can take us out of ourselves, but envy begins in us and will not come out to take us anywhere at all.
     Maybe I’m wrong. I know that for me just this kind of exercise (shuffling through the sins as through index cards) — this exercise, however abbreviated, even facile, convinces me that Tyler Cowen has a point. Ways to think about ourselves, what we do and who we are, ways that have a long history of leading us to humility — we shouldn’t throw them away; we shouldn’t carelessly, ignorantly let them go. Despite all the pompous asses in the church, who tempt us to.

 

 04.29.22