I didn't expect spiritual uplift from the magazine -- just the usual fluff. Yet there in front of me was an extraordinary article written by the Canadian intellectual Northrop Frye just before his death in 1991. Frye astounded the world with his dispassionate and erudite academic writing for half a century. But this was Frye raw, naked, utterly unlike his former public self.
The article described how Frye came to grips with the death of his beloved wife of many years. He began by mentioning the fact that, in 1936, before his academic life began, the author was ordained a United Church minister.
Yet he admitted that during his entire life he had never had faith. Even as the author of the monumental The Great Code: the Bible and Literature, Frye hadn't believed in God. It seems that, for most of his life, he was content to consider all matters of faith as academic.
Yet after his wife died, Frye could no longer sustain an academic distance from his own life. Though he had a masterpiece on the Bible to his credit, on the question of God he now felt the need to go deeper. So he put his giant intellectual motor to work.
What he could not accept was that his wife of a lifetime -- what she had meant to him, the essence of her -- could be reduced to simply a collection of cells that had once lived and were now dead. And since this belief was his strongest impulse, it followed that he must believe that she continued to live in some way. And if this latter belief was really stronger than his former academic belief, he reasoned that this was faith, perhaps not in the accepted pure sense of the word, but what he saw as a negative faith--a default faith.
It was an epiphany. If Northrop Frye believed that the concept of negative faith had merit, that was good enough for me.
After a lifetime of guilt for what I had not been able to believe, Frye's revelation was a welcome relief. Negative faith may not be a fulfilling form of faith -- because it means never really knowing the things we long to know, such as the nature of God and the afterlife. But I'll take negative faith with an open mind over the fraudulence of an atheist's claim to knowing what can never be known.
Mock on, Dawkins.
7 comments:
'Negative faith', eh? Like it.
Looks to me remarkably like Dunnoism with a sad dash of denial about his wife (since he had previously had no problems accepting that everybody else's dead wife was a collection of cells).
But I'll take negative faith with an open mind over the fraudulence of an atheist's claim to knowing what can never be known.
Except an atheist doesn't claim to know, only not to believe.
Someday Peter you will have to explain where all this spite towards athiests comes from. Its not like every believer grew up with tyrannical atheist parents.
Yes there are some rude atheists, but it goes beyond that. There's definitely a sort of ingrained spite that believers hold for the unbelieving. You can see it in the jab that this guy takes at the athiest at the momoent of his epiphany. I just thought you would be in a mood to wax philosophical about its origins.
If atheism as gotten nasty and evangelical as of late, maybe it is just because it has been only been of late, relatively speaking, that it hasn't warranted a prison term or worse for heresy. That kinda thing will put a damper on debate.
Peter:
Mock on, Dawkins.
What Mr. Mcloskey is talking about has nothing to do with Dawkins objections about religiously defined gods -- your tag line is badly misplaced.
But I'll take negative faith with an open mind over the fraudulence of an atheist's claim to knowing what can never be known.
Which reads just as well when replacing "atheist" with "religionist."
Also, it is worth noting that there is no functional difference between an atheist, and one who is comfortable only with those assertions that can be soundly based "what can never be known."
Mr. McCloskey is a card-carrying Dunnoist.
Dunnoism is neither Catholicism nor Protestantism, though many Catholics and Protestants are really Dunnoists.
Dunnoism is the acceptance that anything unknowable is indeed unknowable and really, hardly worth speculating about.
We just admit straight up that we are Dunnoists. Other people have to be pushed a bit before they can admit it.
Peter:
... and one who is comfortable only with those assertions that can be soundly based "what can never be known." is perhaps too dead pan in its irony.
That statement defines Dunnoism as a refusal to draw firm conclusions from the unknowable: it is completely ecumenical.
To suggest Dawkins' objection is just to "religiously defined gods" is to misread him badly. Did you not read his attack on agnostics?
No, I haven't read his attack on agnostics. However, having seen The Root of All Evil? I can comfortably assert that his motivation is solely derived from the certainty religions derive from cartloads of nothing, and the appalling sectarian conflict that follows in train.
Know and believe are not synonyms.
Never said they were. The religious problem is treating belief as knowledge.
The religious problem is treating belief as knowledge.
That can indeed be a problem, no doubt about it, and often a serious one.
However, the unspiritual very often err by treating the noncorporeal as nonexistent.
Sometimes knowledge only comes through belief - the "sixth sense".
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