Ecstatic Humanism

I confess that I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness--in a landscape selected at random--is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern--to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal...I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 139, 297.

The urge and impulse to worship ("worth-ship") arises not from a failure to understand the nature of things but from its successful apprehension. A healthy (i.e., creative) emotional response to that successful apprehension is an ecstatic awareness of the human condition; poetically articulated (i.e., evoked), such a response may yield an ecstatic humanism constructed upon a Nabokovian "thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern."

(Recall the poetic witness of Kabir).

Religion, on the other hand, is (as Feuerbach taught) a kind of projection outward of personal hopes and fears upon the blank screen of human destiny. Religion is organized magic, institutionalized wishful thinking, communal "whistling past the graveyard."

Poetry evokes; science explains. In making possible the scientific study of human religiosity, Feuerbach also made it possible to distinguish religion (the struggle to come to terms with fate) from ecstatic evocation. The ability to make this distinction does not support an inference that human religiosity and ecstatic awareness of the human condition are necessarily incompatible--far from it. Historically speaking, the two modes frequently coexist and even complement one another. Religious institutions and practices may underwrite ecstasy. But where poetry tends to evoke, religion tends to invoke. The former is a confession of helplessness in the face of natural facts; the latter is an assertion of the will-to-power over natural facts (magical/wishful thinking).