Infidel Piety

While refusing to permit himself the least ambiguity in matters of faith, a man may nevertheless find that some kind of religious language, both in its traditional form as we find it...in the 90th Psalm--and in spontaneous outbursts, now blasphemous, now desperate, is emotionally more adequate for him, more of a relief for an overflowing heart, than any other idiom he commands. If he could compose a first-rate poem, that might be still more adequate; but he cannot, and in his present quandary he addresses God. He does not believe anything about God and accepts no dogma of any sort. He does not feel more tolerant of the theologians than before. He turns to God as one might turn to a Shakespearean outcry or a Negro spiritual or a walk up a mountain, without belief.

You may ask how this differs from reading Lear, or even seeing and hearing Lear, without constantly reminding oneself that one really does not believe the story. The difference parallels that between reading, seeing, and hearing on the one hand, and crying on the other.

The dialogue without belief is not a matter of witnessing a spectacle, however sympathetically. It is an explosion of the heart, a bursting of its walls, a breakdown of inhibitions. One does not relax one's honesty; on the contrary, one does not permit one's beliefs or disbeliefs to get in the way of an honest expression of one's inmost heart. And if, more rarely, one should feel addressed, one listens first and asks questions later.

Surely, questions must be asked later on; else one invites self-deception. We can keep questioning, making absolutely everything subject to critical reflection, without necessarily sacrificing our emotional life and becoming intellectual shadows. We need not choose between thinking and feeling. Nor is it true that those who think most feel least. Men like Plato and Sophocles, Goethe and Nietzsche, show how the most impassioned thought and emotion can grow together.

There are those who, without belief, find themselves addressing and addressed spontaneously, now often, now rarely, and reflect on these experiences instead of arbitrarily limiting themselves to the more usual forms of sense experience. They are not trying to use these experiences to bolster up a preconceived system, but simply feel that in all honesty they must seek to do justice to them...

Even [for the people who would call themselves "Israel" the notion] that God is one was originally less a formula that had to be believed than a summary rejection of all polytheistic objectifications of the divine. The one God was the crucial term of a common language, but no effort was made to define God, and the way was left open for a multitude of different ideas. The intolerance of the Old Testament concerned practices rather than beliefs.

This antitheological piety may well have a future. Today [i.e., the late 1950's, when these lines were written; the situation appears quite different in early 21st century America] the many want theology and Socrates, too. Infidel piety is for the few whose beliefs are not dictated by their emotions and whose emotions are not shriveled by their unbelief. Later, others may fall in with it and make of it what the many have always made of every kind of piety: something that is either superstitious and possibly also fanatical or, more likely in this case, shallow and complacent.

--Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (1958), 285-287.

Because I began to read Kaufmann while still an undergraduate, "infidel piety" has never struck me as strange or self-contradictory. Indeed, it has long fit me like a well worn pair of Levis.

Van Gogh would have approved these hanific observations. The Mazeppist approves them as well.