David Brooks' shock of faith

Some suggested improvements

David Brooks' personal account of coming to faith is a stunningly good piece of spiritual autobiography. Brooks’ personal spiritual journey makes an inspiring case for faith that is intellectually searching rather than dogmatic, and deeply interior without becoming solipsistic. Refusing the choice of spiritual or religious, he presents a faith that is spiritual and religious—always deepening by turning inward, but shaped and extended by careful reflection on religious tradition. It was probably my favorite part:

Just as being religious without being spiritual felt empty, being spiritual without religion doesn’t work for me. Vague spirituality seduces me to worship a state of my own mind, rather than the source of love itself. It lures me to a place outside history, with no overarching direction. Mere spirituality invariably teaches me the easy lessons that I already wanted to learn.

Religions, by contrast, enmesh your life in a sacred story. They provide the sacramental symbols that point to ineffable truths and rituals to mark the transitions in our lives. They give us peoplehood, a tradition of music, emotion and thought, an inheritance of spiritual treasures.

Most inspiring, though, are Brooks’ telling of his moments of spiritual illumination: suddenly realizing the strangers on the subway have precious souls; being grasped by a Puritan poem nicely picking out the “paradox that the way down is the way up”—making me wonder which Puritan divines used the word “paradox.” But these moments of illumination demonstrate how Brooks’ spirituality has been shaped by religious mediation of a profoundly Christian nature.

Yet he also remains indebted to his Jewish upbringing, particularly in his emphasis on moral virtue and on being a co-creator with God. Both of these reflect modern ideas more than classical Judaism. But if Brooks’ faith is markedly Jewish by these emphases, it’s just as much markedly Jewish by some of the Christian emphases that he leaves out: a sense of sin, both personal, social, and cosmic; and the value of liturgy, the passive acknowledgement of God’s grace in joint worship and prayer. While embracing “religion,” Brooks means by this primarily conversation partners from relgious tradition—really, we’re talking books.

The comments made online are worth mentioning—some 900 when I perused them. (Returning to my previous post, I had to reflect on what it is like to write a weekly column that draws 1000 comments.) A good handful represented the reliable responses to anything on religion in the Times: it’s all fairytales and pie-in-the-sky, an immovable opinion that demonstrates that the rigid atheists cannot overcome their own dogmatism about religion enough to listen to what Brooks actually says. A majority of the comments expressed sincere appreciation and gratitude. But just a few churlishly recalled Brooks to the sin (as they saw it) that he left out of his account of virtue and upward desire—a messy divorce that included a divorce from his Jewish identity; a new Catholic bride half his age inspiring his new-found faith. (While he doesn’t name “sin,” I do like this statement by Brooks: “Faith has radically widened the gap between my actual self and my desired self.”)

I have no opinion about that. I will only note two theological moves Brooks makes that I myself would not make. He reasons from his experience of people having souls of infinite value back to a “soul-giver,” and from the felt confidence of a moral order in the universe to a “lawgiver.” These are classic, and metaphysical, theistic moves. Noble things about the world imply a transcendent cause. God is assigned as the cause, but a cause beyond the chain of worldly causes. (See Aquinas five-fold proof for God’s existence.)

I don’t make that move. The metaphysical reasoning to an original divine cause is both unavoidable as well as unsatisfying. In contrast, the God who acts in Scripture points at least as much forward to the world divinized as the Kingdom of God as backward to an ultimate origin in God’s preexistence of the world. (And Aquinas understood that cause runs both backward and forward.) The most I can say for the theist soul-giver/lawgiver in my work is that affirming the theist God is an option, not a requirement of faith.

And surprisingly alongside of this theism in Brooks is his embrace of Paul Tillich’s “ground of being.” Brooks experiences God as a “pervasive presence,” as “an underlying source of love pervading everything.” (Not exactly what Tillich meant, I think, but close enough.) He has not yet reached a personal sense of God to whom one can conversationally pray and practice spiritual disciplines. (Actually, you don’t need a personal God to practice spiritual disciplines, but I’ll leave that one alone. I should mention how impressed I am with Brooks’ profound theological wrestling, for a non-theologian.)

So it seems Brooks’ God is a transcendent cause who is nonetheless non-personal. I wonder if Brooks avoids a fully personal God because such an image heightens the problem of evil. A non-personal Ground of Being perhaps gives enough abstraction to allow this fuzzy causal agent who/that can’t be expected to determine everything as an omnipotent Person might do.

And I sympathize with that sensitivity to the problem of evil. Again, that’s the main reason theism is unsatisfying, whether Christian, Jewish, or just generally theist. My recommendation is to locate God not as a purely transcendent Being, nor Ground of Being—although perhaps God is something like these as well—but in and through the Christ, and through Christ also present as the Spirit. We have a personal God because we have a personal Son of God, even while the Father (or Mother) remains invisible, unimaginable. I do no better than Brooks at praying to the invisible Father. But through Scripture and the sacraments of the Church (Christ’s risen Body), setting my soul in motion towards divinity, I have access to the very substance of God in person.

Just some suggestions—and to be honest, ones that unsettle some assumptions of traditional faith. I would not blame Brooks or anyone for finding my cure worse than the disease. That he has made such progress with the wisdom he has acquired is testimony to his authentic desire for God—something theology cannot easily inspire. Rather, that full-bodied personal desire is what most inspires us all.