Session 4: Cultivating Hope and the Role of Religion

Session 4: Cultivating Hope and the Role of Religion
Chair: John Hochheimer

Cultivating Hope: Simone Weil, mextaxu, and the Literature of the Divine
Christine Howe

Department of Creative Writing, University of Wollongong, Australia

What is hope, why is it important, and what can we do to engender it? The work of Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic and social activist of the 1930s and 40s, addresses these questions and provides a platform from which to stage a discussion about the contemporary need for hope in personal relations, relations between the person and the nation state, and relations between nations globally. In L’Enracinement (The Need for Roots) she emphasizes the power of a living cultural heritage able to provide people with links to what she terms the ‘reality beyond the world’, or ‘absolute good’. These connections, according to Weil, enable the growth and nurture of a form of hope that has the potential to affect human relationships on all levels. Central to this is the Greek conception of metaxu: the existence of things that act as mediators, or bridges, between earth and heaven. Certain forms of literature, according to Weil, form metaxu, enabling people to reach out and touch the divine. This connection with the ‘reality beyond the world’ enables people’s relationships with others to be governed by an attitude of hope rather than coercion or fear. So how is such literature written? What is the process an author undergoes in order that his or her work may be illuminated by hope? This paper suggests that as writers draw on those elements of their own heritage that form bridges between this world and the other, and focus their attention and desire on that good which transcends them as human beings, they experience, and subsequently express in their work, a form of hope that is able to illuminate the present and provide the impetus for positive change and growth in the future.

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Religion Beyond Religion: A. N. Whitehead and the Advancement of Civilization
Kenneth Masong
Higher Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

The English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead ( 1861-1947 ) argues that the “great social ideal for religion is that it should be the common basis for the unity of civilization. In that way it justifies its insight beyond the transient clash of brute forces” (Adventure of Ideas, 172). Religion is a potent “transforming agency” (Religion in the Making, 15) that nurtures the fermentation of the ideals of civilization—truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace (AI 275), ideals that constitute the reasonable hope for things to come despite the “transient clash of brute forces” of the immediate present.
This paper aims to show that in Whitehead an intrinsic link exists between the role and place of religion and the hope of civilization. Far from providing an apologetic of religion, Whitehead himself is critical of religion, arguing that religion itself is “by no means necessarily good” (RM 17) and that “religions are so often more barbarous than the civilizations in which they flourish” (AI 171). Nonetheless, the religious spirit, despite the deposition of critics and distortion by fundamentalists, remains present in humanity’s pilgrimage to a better world to come. The realization of religion’s role, however, necessitates reflexivity to its own inherent dynamism as fomenting the hope of adventure of the human spirit. It is in this context of reflexivity that Whitehead famously remarked that “[r]eligion is what the individual does with his own solitariness” (RM 16).
This paper will also argue that “dogmatism”, the reification of religious intuitions, lies at the root of the prevailing decadence of religious influence. Ultimately, religious dogmatism stifles the spirit whereby religion contributes hope for a better world. This is central to Whitehead’s critique of religion. In order to compound and extend Whitehead’s critique, the thoughts of contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (1936-) will be subsequently introduced, especially his ideas on kenosis and weak thinking (Credere di Credere, 1996, After Christianity, 2002). These are concepts that undermine the “fallacy of dogmatism” in religion. In conclusion, a strengthened reflexivity and a cautioned appreciation of religious intuitions that do not reify into dogmatism bring to bear the dynamism inherent in religion; that it needs to go beyond itself in the adventure of the religious spirit: a religion beyond religion.

In an era in which meta-narratives have collapsed, nothing seems to be very important, nothing is considered to be worthy of putting faith into. Hopefulness towards a better future has been replaced with hopelessness in the present time due to disillusionments in various aspects of life. Besides the revolutionary transformation offered by the ideologies, the role of religions as faith systems have also lost their importance considerably while being unable to answer the needs of the modern lonely individuals. However, human beings need to have divinity in order to give satisfactory answers to ontological questions and hope to put faith into an unknown future in order to exist actively and consciously on earth. The collapse of such meta-narratives have left many people in despair as the meaning of life remains to be unanswered. Therefore, I suggest that the need for divinity providing an ontological answer can be traced in intimate relationships, namely romantic love relationships, as a way of constructing hope.
The narrative quality of romantic love creates a “hope for escape” from the mundane reality. In this type of narrative discourse, people, mostly women, perceive themselves to be “half of the apple” as the traditional metaphor goes, and look for “the right man/husband” in order to complete it to a “whole”. Hopefulness towards future is offered through a romantic love relationship which elevates the person to a higher level and changes the everday reality into a sacred time and space. Romantic love is proposed against the despair and resignation that modern life creates as offering a means of escape from the desolate, obtuse and grey chores of life and giving strength to hope for a satisfactory life.