On Meetings With Old Men

Every Thursday at 2:30 I meet with former professor emeritus of psychology at Upenn Henry Gleitman. We discuss, well, really most anything, but have both shown a particular interest in ‘religious experience.’ Henry is a pleasant old man, clearly sophisticated, but not pretentious by any means. You might say that he, at 87, knows himself very well, and is content with his talents and weaknesses. He is, as he put it, “a staunch agnostic,” unbending in his conviction concerning the explanatory power of empirical science. Clearly, he's comfortable among the modern materialists, though thankfully not a sentimentalist like so many during his time.

I liked him immediately after meeting him. Agnostics tend to be my favorite brand of people. They have a similar temperament to my own, never taking one particular idea more seriously than another. Once you’ve read enough, been exposed to the world, as it were, academic hero worship vanishes, as does the sensation arising from a new and possibly true philosophy. All philosophies are possibly true to the agnostic, and he feels it.

It’s interesting, I think, that Henry and I have such similar psychological propensities considering we fall into two very different camps of agnosticism. When after only just meeting him he said, “moral ambiguities, despair, the inevitability of death: you know, the usual things,” I knew I had found a comrade. “Yes, the usual things,” I thought. He is 87, myself 25, yet both of us have concluded not only that hope and absurdity lie at the essence of human experience as important issues, but that they are “the usual things.” There’s a kind of indifference toward the whole procedure of internal dialects once you’ve gone through them enough. A kind of ‘worn out-ness’ on the cyclical nature of what is probably unknowable, in the epistemological sense anyway.

To say with this in mind that I have lived on the fringe of Christian belief over the past 3 years would be a dramatic oversimplification. I have not and will not commit the intellectual fallacy of assuming that because most Christians I have known have a certain bland naivety—even the most intelligent among them—concerning despair (and all it entails) that Christianity is false. Christianity, whether true or false, at the very least functions therapeutically to remove that despair, and perhaps the very possibility for that despair; that function is of its essence. (Of course, no worldview, not even that of Absurdism—however hard it tries—,can successfully avoid the narrative of hope. It may change the object of hope and thus the character (and value) of hope, but not the impulse to hope). That most people are naïve about this aspect of their own psychology, and theology, does not sully the truth or falseness of those beliefs. It does not even remotely suggest sullying. Totemism is not false because its adherents are too emotionally attached to a giant stick in the ground. It is false probably if for no other reason than worshiping giant sticks as opposed to Omni-attributed Beings is silly. I thus reject the popular sentiment that because normal Christians are naïve that the creeds of Christianity are naïve. In any case, who could accuse Dostoevsky or Kierkegaard of being naïve? Yet they certainly believed.

The questions up here in the stratosphere of being are, in my view, the most significant of the bunch. Those down to earth quibs over the minutia of some theological point, over types of baptism or denominational differences, even of heaven and hell, I leave to the experts. What concerns me and what has always concerned me is a Christianity which leaves none of the data out, now matter how upsetting, and yet, somehow, by some roads—familiar or foreign—demonstrates itself to be at the very least tenable.