Paying Attention To The Sky

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.

1 Corinthians 10:31

THERE IS A SNIPPET from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that, with admirable concision, discloses the odd, counterintuitive logic at the heart of Christianity. The Apostle tells his little church at Corinth:

“Whether you eat or drink — whatever you do — you should do all for the glory of God.” Your whole life, he implies, should be ordered to the end of glorifying God and not your own egos. Now what precisely does Paul mean by “glory”? Behind the English term are the Greek word doxa (used, for example in the prologue to John’s Gospel, “we have seen his glory”) and the Hebrew word kabod (used to describe the glory of God that inhabits the temple in Jerusalem).

The literal sense of both kabod and doxa would be something like “shine” or even “reputation.” Therefore, to give God the glory is to allow God’s light to shine, to advertise God, to draw attention to him — and away from ourselves. But how difficult this is! From the time we are infants, we study the subtle art of glorifying ourselves, and over time most of us become quite adept at it. Most of our thoughts, moves, actions, and desires are subordinated to the great purpose of highlighting our own egos, drawing the spotlight selfward. And most of us, I imagine, would identify at least one feature of the good life to be doxa, that is to say, fame and good reputation.

Paul is telling his company of fellow Christians that if they want to be disciples of Jesus, this tendency has to be reversed. The saint must live his life in such a way that his thoughts and actions draw attention to God’s thoughts and actions. He must be, in accord with the metaphor of John of the Cross, a clear pane of glass through which the divine glory can shine.

Having heard this message, however, we face a dilemma, a conundrum that in fact was instrumental in the development of modern culture. Doesn’t this principle articulated by St. Paul awaken in the human heart a sense of resentment? After all, why should God get all the glory? Are our achievements worth nothing? -Do our legitimate accomplishments — moral, intellectual, technological, and scientific — not deserve at least some notice? Doesn’t this talk of glorifying God at all costs indirectly denigrate the human project and lead in the direction of a sort of universal low self-esteem?

Many of the philosophers of the modern period wrestled with these questions and, under their weight, began to conceive of God as a rival to human flourishing, a reality that must, consequently, be marginalized or even eliminated altogether.

Thus Deist thinkers such as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Isaac Newton conceived of God as a power that, spatially and chronologically distant from the present world, allows the human project to unfold on its own, with only minimal interference. This Deist God, withdrawn into his radical transcendence, opened up a secular space, a playing field on which human beings could garner some glory of their own.

Now in time, even this diffident and distant God came to be seen by some theorists as a threat to human freedom. Ludwig Feuerbach, the greatest and most influential of the distinctively modern atheists, summed up his philosophy as such: “the no to God is the yes to man.” Since, for Feuerbach, God is nothing but a projection of man’s idealized self-understanding, humans will be liberated once they shake off the delusion of religious belief. Once the phantom of God gets none of the glory, then human beings can bask, rightfully, in the glory of their own heroic project.

Feuerbach’s most famous disciple was Karl Marx. As a young man, Marx was so impressed by Feuerbach’s atheist philosophy that he said, ‘All of us must be baptized in the Feuerbach” (in German, “the fiery brook”). Furthermore, he insisted that all valid social and economic criticism must be preceded by Feuerbach’s brand of religious criticism, for until men and women shake off the fundamental alienation of religion, they will not, he felt, be capable of dealing with more concrete forms of oppression. With his customary verve and pith, Marx gave voice to a fundamentally Feuerbachian sensibility when he famously commented, “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” a drug that induces a dehumanizing stupor.

Another massively influential thinker standing in the Feuerbach line was the founder of psychoanalysis. In his numerous writings on religion, Sigmund Freud characterized belief in God as an infantile illusion or a wish-fulfilling fantasy, a dream from which the human race ought to awaken.

We want so desperately for there to be final justice, eternal life, a paradise where all human longing is satisfied, that we effectively invent the character of God, who will ground these hopes. Though comforting, this delusion effectively blocks real human progress. For Freud, as for Marx and Feuerbach, as long as we are giving God the glory, we are, in the most radical manner, undermining ourselves.

But this characteristically modem dilemma is born of a fundamental misunderstanding. The gods and goddesses of the pagan religions were indeed our rivals, for they needed something from us — our praise, our obedience, our flattery. But the God of the Bible stands in need of nothing, precisely because he is the creator of the universe in its entirety. The world neither adds nor subtracts anything from the perfection of God’s being, and this means that God is utterly incapable of using, abusing, or manipulating the world for his purposes.

In one of his videos Fr. Barron relates the story of the Christian on a quest to the Himalayans dragging himself over the last cliff to ask the wise guru the meaning of Christian life. He gets this: “God doesn’t need you.” While the story and slap in the face is intended to be humorous, many don’t get the joke: “Well of course God needs me, He LOVES me.” is a common response.  And that is precisely the point of HOW God loves us, by not being in competition with us and loving us completely for ourselves. It is the secret of Christ’s nature as proclaimed by the Council of Chalcedon wholly man and wholly God and yet not a mixture as some pagan divinity might be.

As a consequence, God is something like a mirror which, upon receiving light from creation, reflects that light back for the illumination of the universe. To shift the metaphor: whatever we give to God breaks against the rock of God’s self-sufficiency and returns to our benefit. This is why, if God has no need, it follows directly that God is love. Love is willing the good of the other as other. Since God has no need of anything, whatever he does and whatever he wills is purely for the sake of the other. The world, accordingly, is not a threat or rival to God — it is something which, in the purest sense of the word, has been loved into existence.

The god imagined by Freud, Marx, and Feuerbach is indeed involved in a desperate zero-sum game with the world: the more the god is elevated, the more the world is put down; the more the world is enhanced, the more the god is denigrated. But the true God, the “I am” who spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, the Lord who in overwhelming power confronted Isaiah in the temple, the God and Father of Jesus Christ — this God is not party to such petty and pathetic competition with his creatures. Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel would have seen right through Feuerbach’s fantasy and called it by its proper name — idolatry. And they would have gleefully turned Feuerbach’s smug formula around: “the yes to God is the yes to man, and the no to God is the no to man.”

Authentic humanism does not negate God, but seeks relation to the true God, the one who needs nothing from us and can therefore use the glory that we give to him for our glorification. One of the greatest ironies of our time is that disciples of Feuerbach — Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, to name the most notorious — were the ones who, under the guise of freeing humans from their oppression, opened the door to the worst violations of human dignity in the history of the race.

Therefore, if you want real joy and authentic human flourishing, look not to the bitter scholarly arguments of modern atheists, but rather to the simple formula found in the first letter to the Corinthians: in all that you say and do, give God the glory!

This post is derived in great part from Fr. Barron’s wonderful little book and video The Word on Fire.