Religion by Leszek Kołakowski

First published: New York: Oxford University Press, 1982

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Critical analysis; didactic treatise

Core issue(s): The Deity; God; good vs. evil; morality; problem of evil; sin and sinners; truth

Overview

Czesław Miłosz, the 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, once described Poland as a land of “faith in the impossible.” Leszek Kołakowski, the 2003 winner of the first John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences, a million-dollar Nobel-like award, has often tackled impossible ideas in his life and in his many works on history and philosophy. In the Polish phase of his life, as a Marxist, he became convinced of the material and spiritual devastation caused by Stalinist Communism, and during his later career in North America and England, he has emphasized such themes as human freedom, tolerance, and the quest for transcendence in his ardent defense of individual dignity. In Religion, his aim is to explore the philosophy of religion, but since neither he nor, in his opinion, anyone else truly understands what religion and philosophy really are, his task is daunting. Nevertheless, because God, if he exists, and the world, if humans can actually comprehend it, are important subjects, Kołakowski thinks that an examination of the ideas of those who sought to justify their belief or disbelief in God will help clarify a pivotal issue of human existence.

After the introduction, Religion contains five chapters on the following subjects: theodicy, the God of reasoners, the God of mystics, immortality, and religious language. Though his book is not without humor and irony, Kołakowski, a critic of dogmatic absolutizing in religion and science, seriously tries to understand the philosophical and religious approaches to God before concluding that true communication between rationalists and believers is all but impossible and that both are “illusion hunters.” However, the clash between the sacred and profane is real, not illusory, at least in a cultural sense. Kołakowski admits that when people speak about the sacred, they may be saying something about their social context or psychological state, but throughout his book his basic assumption is that religious and rational people mean what they say. This in turn illustrates his “law of the infinite cornucopia”: There exists no shortage of arguments to support whatever a person wishes to believe for whatever reason.

From pre-Christian times to the present, various thinkers have tried to reconcile God’s goodness with the many evils in the world. Theologians such as Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas Aquinas developed privative explanations, asserting that evil is the absence of good rather than a thing in itself. Augustine and Aquinas also attributed evil’s entrance into the world to the “Original Sin” of the first humans. Kołakowski is critical of this traditional doctrine because it contradicts a basic moral principle that the innocent should not be punished for the sins of others. Kołakowski also disagrees with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who introduced the term “theodicy” to describe his defense of God’s goodness in the face of the world’s evils. Leibniz was forced, by a consideration of God’s omniscience and omnipotence, to conclude that God created “the best of all possible worlds.” To make human suffering and even the sufferings of animals an inescapable part of the world’s harmony is for Kołakowski, as for Voltaire before him, a nefarious trivialization of human pain and anguish. Nevertheless, the sin that brought on all this suffering is called, in traditional Christian theology, “a happy fault” (felix culpa) because it led to the redemption of humanity by the God-man Jesus Christ. Though rationalists see the story of redemption as preposterous, Kołakowski thinks that the crucifixion of God’s Son to save humankind from its sinfulness is “neither self-contradictory nor inconsistent with empirical knowledge.” Rationalists simply cannot understand it, but if people believe, then they can understand it.

In his chapter on the God of reasoners, Kołakowski argues that religious truths never arise from analytical reasoning and require no scientific proofs for their veracity. Indeed, the five proofs of God’s existence given by Thomas Aquinas are logically flawed, and even if they were not, they would fail to convince an atheist of God’s existence. Nevertheless, these proofs, though invalid, have religious meaning because they help believers discover traces of God’s handiwork in the world he created. For Kołakowski, no sound experiential or logical way exists of moving from the finite world to the infinite God. A leap of faith can convince the believer that God exists, but this believer has no way to convert the skeptic.

Mystics claim to have a direct experience of spiritual realities, and Kołakowski, through their writings, has come to admire the extraordinary authenticity of the great Eastern and Western mystics. Historically, religious authorities have been uncomfortable with mystical experience, since mystics, with their direct communication with God, had no real need to use a temporal institution to experience eternal being. Occasionally this led to problems, when mystics felt free to ignore traditional moral norms. Protestant churches in particular have tended to view mystical experience as delusional. Rationalists, too, explain mysticism through self-deception, but Kołakowski insists that mystical truths can never properly be squeezed into rational categories. Rationalists can point to contradictions in mystical beliefs, for example, that God cannot be both absolute being and a loving father, but Christians continue to hold that God is both, and that God even guides the godless.

In his penultimate chapter, Kołakowski scrutinizes the idea of immortality. He is critical of attempts to explain immortality as arising from the fear of death, and he is sympathetic to those who integrate this belief into their quest to find meaning in history. Armed solely with empirical tools, Marxists and other atheist humanists cannot make sense of “the gigantic rubbish-heap of history” in a way that religious believers, who hold that God is history’s “purpose-giver,” would find convincing. The Christian belief in immortality is rooted in God’s promises and Jesus Christ’s resurrection, not on rational arguments or pseudoscientific séances.

Finally, Kołakowski deals with religious language and its struggle to “speak of the unspeakable.” The language of religious belief and moral conviction cannot be judged by the standards of scientific tests, but the unverifiability of these religious statements does not deprive them of meaning because no compelling reasons exist for equating the meaningful solely with the empirical. The language of the Sacred is the language of worship, of believers who understand the world as members of a community of God. Religious ideas and values can be grasped only from within a group committed to the sacred, and sacred language cannot be translated without distortion into the language of the profane, whose practitioners have striven to expurgate all value-and goal-oriented language from empirical science. Kołakowski therefore thinks that it is highly improbable that a rational ethics will ever be formulated without basing it in some way on divine authority. As he puts it, moral taboos reside in the kingdom of the sacred. If God exists, he provides humankind with standards of good and evil; if God does not exist, humans freely decide on moral standards, whether they are Nazi thugs or secular saints. Hence Kołakowski’s book confronts its readers with a stark choice: a meaningful world guided by God or an absurd world, originating in emptiness, going nowhere, and ending in nothing.

Christian Themes

Faith in God and commitment to a religious community are central themes of Christianity. Christians believe first, then they understand. However, Kołakowski approaches these themes not from the perspective of a personally committed Christian but from that of a philosopher. Once a Marxist, then a liberal Socialist, Kołakowski came to see that all secular ways of ordering the world, be they scientific, Marxist, or Freudian, are not epistemologically superior to religious beliefs in a divine order. Furthermore, the God of the philosophers—René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Leibniz—is not the Christian God, who is both absolute being and eternal love. Granted that paradoxes exist about how providential divine grace and passionless natural laws coexist, Kołakowski still urges faithful Christians to trust their God, whose existence cannot be scientifically ascertained and whose attributes and relationship to the world seem contradictory. Christians must also admit that their religion, which teaches the depravity of humankind, is opposed to Enlightenment humanism, which teaches human self-perfectibility apart from God.

Kołakowski, who has been praised as a preeminent man of reason, nevertheless believes that humankind does not live by reason alone. In his former works he has manifested a profound interest in the Christian foundations of Western civilization, and in this book he expresses his admiration for Christians who are able to overcome the meaninglessness of the world through their belief in an eternal reality who is the source of purpose, who provides principles of good and evil, and who saves humankind from nothingness after death. Although the distance from finite creatures to the infinite God can never be bridged, Christians place their trust in Jesus Christ, who was sent by his Father to span the gap between contingent human existence and the endless fullness of divine love.

Sources for Further Study

Frankenberry, Nancy K., ed. Radical Interpretation in Religion. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Ten scholars offer several new interpretations of religious belief, which some contrast with Kołakowski’s radical separation of religious and rational approaches to God. Index.

Kołakowski, Leszek. God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Kołakowski’s critical analysis of Pascal’s influential attempt to solve the problem of evil. Notes and index.

Pierson, Stanley. Leaving Marxism: Studies in the Dissolution of an Ideology. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. The author of this work on the decline of Marxism devotes an entire chapter to Kołakowski.

Roberts, Richard. Religion, Theology, and the Human Sciences. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. A collection of essays exploring the religious consequences of the so-called triumph of capitalism and the end of history. Like Kołakowski, Roberts is concerned about Marxism and Christianity. Index.