In some measure one must admire that professional contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, whose mind is incandescent in its brilliance, and whose speech is preternatural in its articulateness, and who has the audacity to go after anyone, including Mother Teresa. In a recent piece in Newsweek he comments on her Dark Night of the Soul. But what are his qualifications for such commentary?
Hitchens, like the other members of the 'Dawkins Gang' as I like to call them, does not have a religious bone in his body. He simply does not understand religion, and has no sympathy for it, so much so that he must dimiss it as nonsense. There are people who lack entirely any feel for poetry and music. They lack the 'spiritual organ' to appreciate them, and so their comments on them are of little interest except as indicative of the critics' own limitations. I have met mathematicians and scientists who have zero philosophical aptitude and sense and for whom philosophy cannot be anything other than empty verbiage. These people do not lack intelligence, they lack a certain 'spiritual organ,' a certain depth of personality. And of course there are those with no inkling of the austere beauty of mathematics and logic and (let's not leave out) chess. To speak of their beauty to such people would be a waste of time. They lack the requisite appreciative organs.
Hitchens, who remains a man of the Left in his total lack of understanding of religion, doesn't seem to appreciate that Teresa was a mystic and that her dark night of the soul was not a crisis of faith, where faith is construed as intellectual assent to certain dogmas, but an experiencing of the divine withdrawal, an experiencing of God as deus absconditus. A believing non-mystic might lose his faith after applying his reason to his religion's dogmatic content and then finding it impossible rationally to accept. Although I haven't read Teresa's letters, I suspect that this is not what happened in her case. After the fullness of her mystical experience, she experienced desolation when the mystical experiences subsided. So, contra Hitchens, it was not a realization of the "crushing unreasonableness" of Roman Catholic dogma that triggered Teresa's dark night, but her experience of the divine absence, an absence that is an expression of the divine transcendence.
I suggest that an atheist like Hitchens, for whom theism is simply not a live existential option, cannot understand the spititual life of a person like Mother Teresa. He can understand it only by caricaturing it.
Curiously, despite the fact that Fraser is a bit of a Marxist, I think the position you describe in your post is similar to his. He is fond of saying that approaching faith from the point of logic is profoundly mistaken, and that, as you say, it is more a question of the right 'spiritual organ'.
I quote from Humphry's piece below.
"In hours of conversation over the kitchen table I have tried hard to pick a proper argument with him [Fraser] about theology – he teaches it – but I have failed. That’s partly because he freely acknowledges that theology is not some sort of intellectual platform on which faith can be built. He quotes Augustine: theology is “faith seeking understanding” – which means you get your faith first and then try to make sense of it. And faith is not a belief that certain propositions about the world are true. It is not grounded in rational argument and neither is there any good line of reasoning that can persuade one to believe. Belief just isn’t like that, says Fraser. So what is it like? Why does a believer believe?
What’s interesting is that you get much the same answer to that question whether it comes from a philosopher/vicar like Giles Fraser or a theo-logian/archbishop like Rowan Williams or an old lady who has never read a book on theology in her life and wouldn’t know the difference between an ontological argument and a pork pie. Why should she? Theology, as Fraser says, is not the foundation of faith.
The Archbishop of Canterbury and the little old lady might use a different vocabulary to try to explain why they believe, but it comes to the same thing in the end. They believe because they believe. This is not about intellect or learning: it’s more basic than that. It is both more profound and more simple. "
The entry might be of interest to some.
Jeffery Hodges
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Since time immemorial some people have had what might be called a Permanent Transformative Experience, oftentimes spontaneously. One striking result of this transformation is that the subject comes to regard ordinary consciousness as in some sense delusional and mistaken about the nature of reality, to the extent that the ordinary consciousness is a kind of psychic prison or hell, from which they have been liberated. This perspective is the opposite of the typical atheists’ notion that it is mystical experience that is a delusional state. But if the transformation is a delusion, the product of some neurological disorder say, how is that some of the beneficiaries of the experience are cured of genuine psychic ills such as clinical depression?
E.g., St. Thérèse of Lisieux, like Mother Teresa,
You are right. Hitchens gets it wrong. Mother Teresa did not have a crisis of faith. As you say, faith is an intellectual assent. It is a virtue akin to the courage of one's convictions. The virtue of faith is most remarkable not when one banishes doubt in a fit of religious enthusiasm but when one doggedly holds that the articles of faith are true during spiritual dryness.
When dealing with the poorest of the poor in Calcutta would at times wring Mother Teresa dry of spirit, so dry that she could not feel the presence of God, it was the virtue of her faith that kept her doing God's work. This is what Hitchens and the Dawkins Gang fail to comprehend.
I also find interesting your connection of this particular lack of understanding by certain atheists to an inability to "feel" beauty. I'll have to give this some thought.
Regards, Bill T
Malcolm Pollack responds here.
Hi, Bill, I think it would be more accurate to say that such people possess certain aspects of intelligence, but are lacking in others. As I see it, if you possess some failure of thought, which results in you persistently saying things that are false, uninformed, or unreasonable, then it reflects poorly on your intelligence in that area. I don't see why, for instance, a good mathematician who can't rationally navigate his way through philosophical concepts is more intelligent than a proficient philosopher who is lousy at crunching numbers. It seems to me that a "depth of personality" that helps you to think through some things more clearly and accurately than some others counts as a facet of intelligence.