Am I a nontheist...?
Part 3: Religions, horizons, and communitas
Religious and political belief systems offer society the illusion of stability, order, and continuity. They do so because people either comply with or are overcome by the power hierarchies that maintain social boundaries. At their best, belief systems can stir much creativity—so long as they point people toward the sacred and allow enough space for invention, healthy change, and spiritual growth.
Frequently, though, belief systems tend to substitute for innate creativity, heart-level connections between people, and devotion to the sacred. Instead, people who subjugate themselves to belief systems devote themselves to the systems themselves and to the authorities who enforce them. This subjugation is the price they pay for the assurance that they belong.
And the great tragedy is that they never own that assurance. They only get moments of it which then fade, requiring them to prove their compliance over and over again. We see this in both religious and political realms. Any ambivalent thought or word or action can bring down accusations of back-sliding or heresy. And others are eager to make such accusations, if only to prove their own “faithfulness.” This suits those who are actually in power.
So what alternative do we have? In The Religious Case Against Belief, James Carse asks us to turn from the Roman civitas, society ruled by law, toward communitas, “a spontaneous gathering of persons who identify themselves and one another as members of a unified body.”
Communitas cannot be created. It evolves spontaneously out of the desire of its participants to get to the bottom of the very mystery that brings them together….
Communitas, because it is spontaneous, organizes from the bottom up, its structure accidental, its future open, its beliefs unformed.
It has no civitas of its own, although it will always be found in one civitas or another. Because its identity is not established within boundaries, it remains untouched by the surrounding civitas.
For example, Judaism was a presence in the civitas of Rome for all seven of its centuries…. When Rome disappeared, the Jewish communitas was hardly affected; its members were no less Jewish, nor did they ever think of themselves as Romans.
The history of the Christian communitas in Rome is more complicated. For two centuries it thrived through episodes of savage persecution. Then Constantine, converted to the faith in the year 312, sought to make the empire Christian.
The favor was returned by Christians when they made of themselves an empire, under papal rule. Rome, it seems, was strikingly successful at tempting Christians into belief systems that cohered with its imperial designs.
Nonetheless, the genuine Christian communitas, though severely diminished and endangered, never compromised its identity.
To the present, however, many Christians are still tempted by dreams of social and political rule. It is not unthinkable that in time some of Rome’s successors will absorb them all, effectively creating an imperial Christendom, and erasing the historic communitas. (84-85)
Carse reclaims the term religion when he writes of “the desire [of a communitas]…to get to the bottom of the very mystery that brings them together.” Real religion, he says, is not about belief, but about this unbounded desire.
Whatever outward forms people may use to guide or frame their search, what they seek is deep, experiential sharing of truths that are beyond words. Participants come together to be—for a moment at least—in the presence of what they know innately to be the ground of their being.
And whereas civitas maintains itself by prescribing boundaries, communitas is most alive when it seeks after horizons. Carse writes that “boundary and horizon are not incompatible but they have very different characteristics.”
Unlike a boundary, a horizon does not have a fixed outer edge. It is not a line drawn by someone else, but the limit of one’s own vision. If we walk to the point where our vision was thought to end, the horizon will only have extended itself. Everything within a boundary has its identity, its definition, its proper place only because there are immovable limits. Nothing within a horizon can have a fixed definition.
Every step taken alters the horizon, changes the field of vision, causing us to see what had been thus far circumscribed as something quite different….
Because horizon is the end of vision, and because every move we make gives the field an aspect we couldn’t have noticed before, what lies beyond the horizon cannot be known…. [There] is no control over what comes into our vision. We know only that if we shift our location, something new will come into view.
So to shift is indeed to risk, or leap. And not everything that results is either desired or desirable. There are experiences and new information that will show the familiar as strange, the comforting as dangerous, the adjacent as distant. It can disturb as well as edify….
And yet without that shift, we begin to lose our vision altogether: what is seen over and over again ceases to be seen. What doesn’t appear in a fresh way will be thought changeless and ordinary, no longer a stimulus to thought.
Learning is reduced to mere repetition and can only confirm what has already been known. Friendships become static, empty of expectations for the future. The outcome of all our efforts becomes predictable. All mysteries can be explained. All dimensions and measurements hold. To be aware of our horizons is to live in wonder. (80-81)
Carse writes that horizons and belief systems are not opposites but occur simultaneously.
The operative principle here is that if vision is restricted to a belief system, or if it is divorced from all belief systems, it ceases to be vision. What is necessary is that it not restrict itself to a belief system but that belief systems always fall within the scope of poetic horizons. (83)
In my next post we will start to explore how these distinctions come into play today. We are in a global era of chaotic transition, when old belief systems have become ossified yet are violently clinging to power. How does the alternative of communitas open the world to new growth, both religiously and politically?
And what does all of this have to do with my original title question? A hint. When someone asks me if I am a theist or a nontheist, my bemused reply is usually, “I don’t know. What time is it?”
Image Source
“Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge,” by Mike Shell (10/6/2024).