Many people speak of our culture as having become too “secular,” or having experienced a “loss of faith.” Others contend that faith unleashes too many negative consequences on the social order or it presents a potential disastrous conflict between religious groups in their antiquated and inhuman claims. So their answer is that faith must be restrained by civil law—not the ideas or ideals of faith, but the actions of the believers.15 Some think that the uncivil or antisocial actions of religious people stem spontaneously and apparently naturally from their articulated beliefs or sacred documents, so it would be better that the whole specific religion or perhaps even all religions, come to an end, however that would happen.16 Perhaps to continue to speak of “faith” does carry too many negative overtones from the past inhumane doctrines and postures, even as the idea of a “personal God” is confusing because it is so easily taken literally, and at that very point becomes less than ultimate, even as some theologians have said, becomes idolatry. But the secular world has not yet cleansed itself of atrocities and inhumane programs either. Both religious and secular institutions involve ambiguity. So it is not a simple either/or—either to be religious or to be secular—since humans are humans, as James Madison noted, not exactly “angels.” But ideals and reality can be related meaningfully only if the communication involves the intelligible world, not just imagination or myth.
If we utilize the word “trust,” however, it may be possible for it to embody the most positive elements of “faith” as mutual self-discovery, and thus vitally sponsoring self-integrity while separating it from inherent negative meanings and connotations of “faith” as blind or nonrational leaping without thinking or any reflection at all. In the most social sense, faith as trust lies at the heart of all religion but also all human life and institutions, certainly including the secular. So while certain mythological, partisan, crude, and violent understandings of faith should come to an end if humanity and civil society are to continue, no human existence will be able to function without trust, as the acceptance of the risk and potential reward of mutual self-realization within all interdependent human relationships. Real trust, however, is always mutually autonomous and presently personal; it cannot be forced on one by another, nor is it about trusting something that is past and done, which cannot be changed. Those are crucial differences.
Whether Reverend Wilmot maintained his “self-integrity” through his “demission” and reduction to an ineffective and lost personality, unable to escape self-pity, or whether in that process he really lost himself, and allowed the problem of heteronomy/autonomy to dissolve him from the inside out, is perhaps moot. One thing is sure, he was never a fully integrated self as a minister nor after, once he began extensive reading that created doubt in his mind since something within him seemed to demand absolute certainty. The same overpowering desire of Absolute certainty has continued to drive much modern and postmodern Christian theology through its nineteenth century Absolute idealism into existentialist or phenomenological ontology into a primary focus on difference and otherness in which one can even ironically distinguish actuality from factuality, which is still driven by the apparent felt need for Absolute certainty.17 Was there something in Reverend Wilmot’s own background that prevented him from exercising thorough autonomy from the very outset of his ministry or even in the days of his theological training? Was the picture of the ministry at first so connected in his mind with the Absolute that the positions given at seminary had to be readily accepted en toto without his own personal examination and tailoring or qualification? Was he so concerned to please others that he simply would never “rock the boat” if possible, and when he finally did, he was the first to drown? Or was it all a personality quirk? Or was there something very sinister about authoritarianism and heteronomy?
Consider the question about heteronomy or authoritarianism: When the philosopher Immanuel Kant defined “enlightenment” in 1784 as a moving beyond our “self-incurred tutelage,” or “self-caused immaturity,” he defined this “immaturity” as “the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.”18 It was “self-incurred.” He blamed that condition not on a lack of intelligence but rather a lack of courage, a comfort and security people find in allowing others to do their thinking for them, whether that other is a parent, pastor, book, doctor, politician, or an alleged god. It is difficult for an individual to find the courage to trust himself or herself to think independently rather than depend totally on others. Or is that really true? Or is it a fact that children learn of the right of the “other” to make decisions for it, and if it is not encouraged at young ages to make many of its own decisions, it will be stunted in its process of becoming a responsible adult? The problem occurs when other authorities not only do not encourage the individual to make his own decision, but explicitly demean his ability and right to do so. The individual somehow has to learn that he has a voice even within the legal structures whose authority he cannot defy but can affect by voting legislators in or out of office. However, in the realm of religion, the individual often has almost no voice, and the “authorities” stand on a received tradition or text that they teach is not challengeable, while they themselves warn of how difficult and dangerous such independent thinking would be, as well as the uncertainty as to where such thinking could lead. Sometimes that mentality is still encountered even in seminaries as they prepare or indoctrinate potential clergy. Otherwise, why would Reverend Wilmot have thought he was “losing” his faith rather than improving his faith? That is the Absolute that causes the “earthquake” in the quotation from Susan Jacoby we earlier gave, “an earthquake in which the ground never stops shaking.”
Kant admitted that the private use of one’s reason may need to be restricted, but it can be without threatening the public use of reason. If a soldier, given an order by a superior, began to argue with that order in his private capacity as one instructed to obey, that would be the “private use” of reason. It would be inappropriate and could not be allowed. In order for civil structures of society to function, there must be limits on this use of reason. On the other hand, Kant insisted, as a scholar who wants to argue the issue at hand in the public forum, subjecting the whole question to public judgment, this “public use” of reason should and must be available and exercised to assure that civil life can continue and that the public reason itself be reasonable.
This public use of reason is obviously required of all true science. Scientific positions are given credibility only if and when they disclose their method and evidence publicly so that it can be tested or replicated by others who can thereby independently confirm or negate the conclusions. The question we have seen in Updike’s novel is whether Reverend Wilmot must operate under a heteronomy or can be autonomous. The conflict between the two became so intense that he could not even seize upon the possibility suggested by his superior of realizing that the “official” position of the church was perhaps not as narrowly brittle and conservative as he had painted it. No, there was no option for him but to resign from the ministry, really a self-imposed exile, but produced by an image of the institution or what was supposed to be the real authority.
Kant answered that, as a clergyman, in that role, he certainly was obliged to “teach his pupils and his congregation according to the doctrine of the church” since this was the very condition upon which he was ordained. That was his “private” obligation or responsibility as a clergyman, not an obligation assumed by just anyone belonging to a religion as a lay person. However, Kant continued,
as a scholar, he has full freedom, in fact, even the obligation, to communicate to the public all his diligently examined and well-intentioned thoughts concerning erroneous points in that doctrine and concerning proposals regarding the better institution of religious and ecclesiastical matters. (135)
But as the clergyman continues to preach the church doctrine,