Session 7B: Hope, Faith and Human Nature

Session 7B: Hope, Faith and Human Nature
Chair: Iris Meyer

The Divine Experience in Lagerkvist’s Works as the Embodiment of the Quest for Hopeful Existence
Anna Zebialowicz
Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Zygmunt Bauman in his book Life in Fragments compares modern life to pilgrimage: “We are all pilgrims whatever we do, and there is little we can do about it even if we wished,” adding that “for pilgrims the truth is elsewhere, the true place is always some distance, some time away […]” Par Lagerkvist’s characters are such pilgrims wandering forlorn among the empty eternities in a search for man’s place in the world, universal truths and all those things which make human life meaningful. It is a yearning for hopeful existence as confronted with man’s spiritual exhaustion, metaphysical nihilism and mayhem like reality, and above all it amounts to finding some kind of divinity or God that would reply to one’s existential quandaries and anxieties.
With these ideas in mind, I would like to elaborate upon Lagerkvist’s tetralogy: The Sybil, The Death of Ahasuerus, Pilgrim at Sea and The Holy Land – works highly marginalized and shamefully neglected. Lagerkvist’s sparse prose, bizarre characterizations yoking together the need for man’s finding the divine spirit with hostility towards the long-honoured images of God, make his works often misunderstood and forsaken. Thus, my intention is to expand upon Lagerkvist’s vision of God who according to Jeff Polet: “may not after all be dead, but only silenced by our Promethean crisis; and God may yet again speak, if we became silent.” Furthermore, I would like to focus on Lagerkvist’s philosophical ruminations related to exploring the issues of hope, hopelessness, sense and senselessness of life as constituting the focal point of human existence behooving man to delve into the substance of being since as Leif Sjoberg claims: “Par Lagerkvist more than any other professional writer explored religious concerns of both the modern heretic and the modern brooder-searcher, an alienated outsider, desperately wanting to believe in traditional values. Persistently he came out as nonbeliever, yet always with other possibilities open.”

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The disabled man as a Christlike figure is a much used symbol in literature, and Owen Meany is identified in such messianic terms in this novel.  Indeed, the novel’s title indicates the centrality of religion and hope from the outset.  This paper considers the different approaches towards belief as shown by the viewpoints of the characters, the novel’s structure, and other literary techniques.
The novel offers polar attitudes towards belief, as embodied in two religious leaders, Revs Merrill and Wiggin.  One has blind faith in God and absolute hope; the other has belief beset by doubt and hope that is underwritten with cynicism.  Irving shows that belief and hope are not necessarily found in an orthodox religion, nor does religious identification always come with a hopeful outlook.  It is with this paradox that the narrator, John Wheelwright, struggles throughout his life; he chooses a false idol, Owen, over traditional beliefs.The novel engages with many aspects of religious faith, such as the existence of a preordained divine plan, the Fall from God into language, and false idolatry.  This paper considers how these issues can inform and confuse the characters’ belief systems.  It also analyses the performativity of language in the text and its resemblance to the Bible.  In as much as knowledge of the Bible influences a reading of this novel, the novel itself has a comment to make upon the role reading has upon religious conviction.

Some utopian theorists have wanted to make a sharp distinction between the desire for (or anticipation of) utopia, which they want to encourage, and the mere facticity (or psychology) of hoping, which has no intrinsic merits at all. Is this a useful distinction? The hypothesis I want to explore here is that hope is a fundamental human capacity that is crucial for positive self-relations over time. My point of departure is the thought that just as human beings need positive self-relations of recognition to realize their capacity for autonomy (a claim made good eg by Axel Honneth), they also need to be able to relate to the future as a horizon of social possibility. To be completely without social hope is a pathological state, I want to suggest, analogous to the damage to self caused by the absence or withdrawal of recognition. If so, the development of a philosophical anthropology of hope could cast much needed light on a question that is often neglected in theories of justice and democracy: what sources of motivation are available for people to remove obstacles to social progress so that human hopes might better be realized?