Looking back, the philosopher John Caputo (1940 – ) writes that some of his earliest, strongest, and most visceral memories as a child were looking up at the vast, starry night sky and feeling a creeping suspicion arise within him that, “No one knows we are here.” But he kept those doubts to himself since, as a pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic, he was taught that all the answers—and all the questions!—he needed to ask could be found in the Baltimore Catechism (Hoping Against Hope, 1-2).
But as he grew older, similar to the intersection of religion and philosophy that I described in yesterday’s post on Religion & Truth, Caputo’s first serious academic work was a comparative study of the German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and the 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (26). An insight from that early work that stayed with Caputo decades later is a short verse quoted by Heidegger:
The rose is without why; it blossoms because it
blossoms;
It cares not for itself, asks not if it’s seen. (26)
For those of us drawn to the big questions —Who am I? What is the meaning of life? Why is there something rather than nothing? — What might a rose have to teach us (27-28)?
Keep in mind that first line of Heideggarian verse, “The rose is without why.” Caputo says that despite his childhood inkling of looking up and thinking, “No one knows we are here,” he says that if someone had told him then that there was no “why”—no absolute, unchanging reason or purpose for human existence—then he would have left religion immediately. He had been taught that you behaved in order to be rewarded in the heaven and/or to avoid punishment in hell—that was the why (69). But in the same way that Derrida riffed on both his Jewish heritage and Augustine’s Confessions to gesture toward a paradoxical, postmodern “Religion without Religion,” Caputo—who spent so much of his early life in Roman Catholic private school—has come to have a sense of what he calls “the emerging of a God who would have landed me in public school” (64).
As a philosopher, his starting point is the love of wisdom that we can speculate about based on what we have observed for ourselves. And for Caputo one consummate example is the “evidence of the rose” (107). From a certain point of view, one might suppose that it would make sense for nothing to have ever existed. Think about it: for anything to exist, there would need to be something pre-existing before that to create it, and something before that to create it, causing an infinite regression. (These are the sorts of things that young philosophy and religion majors talk about a 3:00 a.m. Full disclosure: it’s what they talk about at 3:00 p.m. too!) But it is not the case that nothing exists. Quite the opposite: the world — the universe— is a whirling, buzzing wondrous spectacle. (Did you see the recent photos of Jupiter from NASA’s Juno mission? Incredible!)
For Caputo, the “evidence of the rose” is the proof that there is not merely “not nothing,” but that the something of this world is so often breathtakingly beautiful, even as there is also immense pain and suffering. Caputo’s next step shifts from philosophy toward religion, which will be a step too far for some of you. But his intention is a Derridean “Religion without Religion” — a recapitulation of the “God” of his childhood, but with a critical “difference.” To adapt a famous quote from Derrida, if what you mean by the word “God” is an old white man in the sky—some combination of Santa Claus and Zeus—then both Derrida and Caputo would “rightly pass for an atheist.”
In that spirit, Caputo’s clever turn of phrase is that, “God does not exist. God insists” (114). Remember that he’s trying to take the inherited tradition that has built up around the word “God” in Western Civilization— then creatively extend it with a critical, postmodern difference/différance. So instead of asking the question of whether a Supreme Being with the name “God” exists, Caputo would instead invite us to open ourselves to the possibility that there is an “event” that is “getting itself done under that name” God (118). This event is more subjective than objective, more experiential than intellectual, more a verb than a noun, more becoming than being.
Let me give you another repetition with a critical difference, this time on that young Caputo who grew up looking up at the night sky with a closely guarded secret of wondering that perhaps “No one knows we are here.” He grew up to have a two sons. When his older son with seven, they were watching tv and a beloved character on that show died. He son turned to him and asked, “Dad, does everyone die?” Caputo confesses that, “His question threw me into a panic. I wanted to disappear into thin air, even though, in a way, that was my field of specialization!” He writes,
I did not say I have spent my life starting into this abyss, that when he heard me upstairs tying in my study, that is what I was writing about. I have never written about anything else than death, God and death, whatever difference between those two spectral companions may turn out to be, if there is any difference at all.
Eventually, in response to his son’s question, “Dad, does everyone die?” he managed to say one word “Yes.” But in the way of young children, another question followed: “Everyone?” Caputo says: “I could feel his reply rising from a disbelief that an abyss so immense and inescapable could be so commonplace. My God, was there no way out of this question, no way to escape from this room?” Eventually Caputo writes, that he said, “‘Yes,’ still keeping my composure, but knowing that his life was about to change” (156).
Here in the early twenty-first century, we know that this blue marble on which we find ourselves — floating in orbit amidst the inky blackness of space around our fiery sun—this planet is not the center of the universe. We are merely the third rock from the sun. We are but a tiny part of a much larger universe story that has been evolving for more than 13.8 billion years, across more than two trillion galaxies. But Caputo’s “religion of the rose” invites us to consider that so much beauty is nonetheless possible. Like a rose, anything we create or achieve (individually or collectively) will not last forever, but that makes it all the more valuable and precious in the meantime (182). May we embrace, cherish, and celebrate one another and this life in time that we do have together on this Earth.
Normally, I might end at this point. But given the events of last week, there are a few more words that I feel compelled to add. President Trump’s announcement that he plans to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord is a world-historic act of hubris. In the scope of the known universe, this planet — and the biodiversity on it — are rare and precious. But here’s the truth, in the words of the contemporary environmental prophet Wendell Berry: “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.” Some cynical politicians, seeking their own short-term gain, may deny that climate change is real — they may try to convince us that climate science is “Fake News” or “Alternative Facts” — but as the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick used to say, “Reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.” May we instead come as a species to respect the preciousness of this life and this world in all it’s beauty, fragility, and finitude—shown to us through the evidence of the rose.
For Further Study
- If you are interested in learning more about John Caputo’s “Philosophy of Religion,” the most accessible starting point is his philosophical autobiography Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim (Fortress Press, 2015).
- A more straightforward introduction to his philosophy that is still quite accessible is his book Truth: The Search for Wisdom in the Postmodern Age (Penguin Books, 2013).
- A more scholarly starting point for his philosophy (that remains fairly accessible, especially compared to many other philosophers) is The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Indiana University Press, 2013).
The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg is a certified spiritual director, a D.Min. graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary, and the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, Maryland. Follow him on Facebook (facebook.com/carlgregg) and Twitter (@carlgregg).
Learn more about Unitarian Universalism: http://www.uua.org/beliefs/principles
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