Reading and Teaching Hope in a Secular Age
I assigned David Newheiser’s Hope in a Secular Age in my class on religion in the public sphere. This class has had different foci in past years, but this time around it was focused on the ways in which religion undergirds, shapes, and is present in purportedly secular spaces. For me it was an opportunity to think through some of the strange dynamics in recent American politics. Newheiser uses a pairing that drives the arguments throughout the book—Dionysus and Jacques Derrida—to argue that religion neither can, nor ought, to be sealed off from the political sphere. It cannot because—as Talal Asad, José Casanova, and Charles Taylor have argued—the secular as a category is a historical development of a particular form of Protestantism, a category in turn that generates the modern category of religion (a differentiation Casanova makes explicitly).
This is a point that is easy to make in general, but difficult to flesh out in the specific forms. One of the great values of Newheiser’s book is just such a fleshing out of this point, which is true for worse and for better. On the worse side, for example, is Newheiser’s discussion of Derrida’s argument that Christian hegemony shows up in the modern period in the secular Enlightenment drive for universalism (115–116). On the better side is Newheiser’s arguments against readings of Dionysus and Derrida that try to force a religion/secular binary on them that fits neither. Both Dionysus and Derrida, on Newheiser’s readings, hold negation and affirmation in tension. “[M]ystical negativity complements the prophetic pursuit of justice” (104–5). If we let go of the latter we fall into despair. If we let go of the former we foreclose the critique that “opens the imagination to a future that has not yet come into view” (131). The book is full of interventions into secondary literature that cannot seem to bear the tension sustained in Dionysus and Derrida. Jack Caputo reads Derrida as very far on the negativity end of the spectrum, downplaying his commitment to “affirmation without assurance” (37), his commitment to justice in the here and now while justice is always to come (31). The latter is the idea that what we take to be justice here and now must be both struggled for and critiqued. Downplaying Dionysus’s negative side, Jean-Luc Marion argues that Dionysus does negate predications made of God but affirms God in the end through a discourse of praise (95). For Newheiser, Dionysus and Derrida stay in the tension, which gives us the hope that is needed in our political as well as existential situations: “[H]ope constitutes a resolute persistence in the face of uncertainty, and for this reason it incorporates both affirmation and negativity” (64).
One of the great pleasures in this book, for me, is a different tension that Newheiser holds elegantly throughout. His explications of Dionysus and Derrida, two thinkers I admit to finding mind-numbing and whom I tend to avoid, are crystal clear. I wish Newheiser had been my teacher years ago when I took (mandatory) classes on medieval theology. And yet, he wields erudition deftly and effectively. There are examples all over the book; one of my favorites comes in Chapter 4, when Newheiser distinguishes different significations of the Greek prefix hyper (“above and beyond,” and/or “in violation of”). When Dionysus writes “Since the unknowing of what is beyond being [hyperousiotētos agnosia] is something above and beyond [hyper] speech, mind, or being itself, one should ascribe [anatheteon] to it an understanding [epistēmēn] beyond being [hyperousion]” (97). Marion emphasizes the first signification of hyper in hyperousion, in which case Dionysus is saying that one can attribute speech to God, but in a higher sense. Language remains stable. But if one keeps in mind the second signification of hyper (“in violation of”), then Dionysus is saying something quite different. Created categories of speech are in violation of God’s being. Language is not grounded by a divine being, and Dionysus is insisting on a radical unknowing.
So how does Derrida read Dionysus? Newheiser traces the Thomistic understanding of hyper (“above and beyond”) found in the standard French translation of Dionysus, used by Derrida and by Maurice de Gandillac (who was Derrida’s teacher). Newheiser cites a lecture of Derrida’s on différance in which Derrida shows that he appreciates the alternate reading of hyper, in which the beyondness of God is not higher but “impenetrable hiddenness” (98). That’s just beautiful scholarship. Part of my agenda in assigning this book to graduate students was to give them an example of both what level of detail and sensitivity to language is necessary for good scholarship, and an example of how to write with simplicity and grace, without hiding behind dense obfuscation, even when discussing writers as opaque as Dionysus and Derrida.
The Discipline of Hope
One of the conversations I would most like to continue with Newheiser concerns his most basic argument, that hope is located in the will. It is not a cognitive or epistemological category. It does not necessarily function as a “pacifying fantasy” (63), as many have argued, and it is not a rational act in which one formulates an object that is at least possible and knows that the formulation advances your aim towards that object (79). Nor is hope located in the emotions, where Spinoza put it (78). Rather, hope is located in the will. “In my understanding, hope constitutes a disciplined resilience that enables desire to endure without denying its vulnerability” (2). That feels right. In a world that seems to be going to hell in a handbasket, despair is a copout, but lack of clarity about the enormity of our problems and the very likely failure of any attempts at action is an abdication of our responsibility as critics (all of us, not just the academics). Hope, while necessary, is not something one can talk themselves into with reason or count on to feel when it is most needed.
I want to spend a little more effort on the word “discipline.” If hope is both necessary but near impossible, locating it in the will does not mean that I can simply choose hope if I muster enough will power. And so the idea of discipline is of primary importance. The book ends with an anecdote related by Thomas Merton: “It was said of Abbot Agatho that for three years he carried a stone in his mouth until he learned to be silent” (155). Newheiser describes hope as an ethical discipline (143), the ascesis Derrida suggests is necessary to maintain an attitude or disposition of openness to the unforeseeable through continual self-critique (38-39). Ascesis, Newheiser reminds us, comes from the Greek for “training” or “exercise” (39).
It is hard to think of ascesis without thinking of Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life. Hadot writes that for ancient philosophical schools, for example, the Stoics, philosophy was an exercise. Not theory or interpretation of texts, but the art of living. And exercises, spiritual exercises, were required to transform “the individual’s mode of seeing and being” (83). One needs to be formed into a certain kind of subject to be in a position to see or do certain things. While reading Newheiser’s book I kept thinking, I would like to have hope. I would like the “bold humility” (155) that held at the same time realism and self-critique together with a space for imagining and acting for a better future. What are the spiritual exercises? Do I need to meditate more?
There is one suggestion for a form of discipline that runs throughout this book: reading. Newheiser’s own thinking that “unfolds through the interpretation of particular texts” (11), a kind of “reparative reading . . . guided by pleasure and improvement” (36, citing Sedgwick), the kind of generous “close reading” (94) Newheiser practices in this book, is surely one kind of discipline that can sustain hope. It is another good reason to assign this book to students. But beyond academics, at a more personal level, a level perhaps not appropriate for this beautiful book, I found myself wishing for Newheiser to act with what Foucault calls parrēsia, a “virtue and technique which could be found in the person who spiritually directs others and helps them to constitute their relationship to self” (43). What are the practices that lead to creative engagement in the face of climate change and White nationalism and the intractability of race and patriarchy and all the things that are so daunting? This is too heavy a weight for this small book that already does so much, but a question I suspect, though I do not know him well, about which Newheiser has read and reflected and has some insight. I am looking for suggestions for stones to carry in my mouth.
