Bob Schwartz

“Far from providing false or unverifiable answers to our questions, the religions provide no answers at all. On this basis, one explanation for the proliferation of belief systems at the edges of the great religions is that they provide a shield against this absolute openness, a protection in advance against what might lie just beyond the horizon and so far unseen, or even imaginable.”

James P. Carse (1932-2020) taught at New York University for thirty years, where he was Professor of the History and Literature of Religion and Director of the Religious Studies Program. Among his many books is the masterpiece Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (1986).

A brief and groundbreaking book, Finite and Infinite Games is hard to summarize and understand without context. Carse closes with this:

The myth of Jesus is exemplary, but not necessary. No myth is necessary. There is no story that must be told. Stories do not have a truth that someone needs to reveal, or someone needs to hear. It is part of the myth of Jesus that it makes itself unnecessary; it is a narrative of the word becoming flesh, of language entering history; a narrative of the word becoming flesh and dying, of history entering language. Who listens to his myth cannot rise above history to utter timeless truths about it.

It is not necessary for infinite players to be Christians; indeed it is not possible for them to be Christians—seriously. Neither is it possible for them to be Buddhists, or Muslims, or atheists, or New Yorkers—seriously. All such titles can only be playful abstractions, mere performances for the sake of laughter.

Years later, Carse expanded on his vision with The Religious Case Against Belief (2008). In it, he distinguishes between religion and belief systems. The conflation and confusion between them has led to damage and tragedy, and to religion being devalued or dismissed.

As with Finite and Infinite Games, summarizing the book is impossible. Here in the final part, Conclusion: For the Recovery of Wonder, Carse tries to put religion in its proper place—as a source of inspired questions and wonder and not as the absolute source of (often weaponized) answers:

The question remains: if religion is at its core so antithetical to belief, why does it happen that belief systems gather so persistently around genuine religious expression? Recent critics of religion may have been mistaken in thinking that it was religion they were attacking and not the isolated beliefs with which they mistakenly identified them, but they have a point, inasmuch as believers do regularly represent themselves as truly religious—or impute to their beliefs an aura of pseudo-religious validation. Put another way, we might ask, What is it about religion that causes believers to reject it? Why are some Christians so certain in their understanding of the resurrection of Jesus, or Muslims so convinced that the Quran justifies a violent form of jihad, when it should be perfectly obvious to both that these are issues that have been unresolved after centuries of animated and learned debate?

Any answer to this curious fact must be speculative at best. We can at least say that whenever we turn to religion for answers to the questions that press all of us for our simply being human (what happens at death? why is there evil? where did it all come from? how will it end? why is there something rather than nothing?), instead of answers we are offered a deepened expression of the same question. When the dying Buddha assured his grieving friends that his body would decay like any other earthly object, he was asked whether he would live on after death. He answered in effect: we cannot say the Buddha lives on; we cannot say he does not; we cannot say he both lives on and does not; we cannot say he neither lives on nor does not. On the one hand, he emphasizes the reality of his death, on the other, the utter impossibility of understanding it. This open-ended, or what I have called horizonal, way of thinking then penetrates every aspect of Buddhism. It cancels the claim that anyone, even the most accomplished Buddhists, or bodhisattvas, can say what Buddhism is truly about.

By virtue of the ignorance inherent in its long conversation with itself, each religion can behold another only with wonder. That they are rivals, or that they have contradictory views of God, or that they cannot exist in the same time and place, or that one endangers the other—none of this comes to mind among the religious. The great danger of belief systems is that the opposing sides are sure they do understand each other. When Christians fault the Muslim idea of God, calling Islam a false deity or a satanic creation, they have done more than reveal their flawed understanding of Islam, they have severed themselves from their own faith. They are no longer Christians, but willfully ignorant ideologues.

Far from providing false or unverifiable answers to our questions, the religions provide no answers at all. On this basis, one explanation for the proliferation of belief systems at the edges of the great religions is that they provide a shield against this absolute openness, a protection in advance against what might lie just beyond the horizon and so far unseen, or even imaginable. Believers, in short, are terrified by genuine expressions of religion, and respond to them by vigorously ignoring them. They take refuge in agreement, solidarity of membership, and the sense that they belong to something that exists independently of their participation in it. Thus it was when Urban II saw a loss of fervor in Christendom, he initiated in the year 1095 what was to become several centuries of costly, savage, and ultimately failed crusades against the Saracens. It was far more reassuring for medieval Christians to battle Islam than it was for them to inquire unrestrictedly into the learned and thriving Islamic civilization. In the meantime, of course, it was a way of escaping any inquiry into the great uncertainties of Christianity itself. As much as it was a declared war against infidels, it was an undeclared war against their own poets.

The poets, of course, are not at war with believers. They do not meet the authority of sword and crown with armies of their own, but only, like Galileo, with a continuing attempt to reimagine the universe. And like Galileo, they are easily brushed aside by the powerful. Those who share their vision are small in number compared to the masses attracted to belief systems in general. Without their disturbing presence in the communitas, however, the communitas loses its integrity and if it survives at all it is by surrendering its authority to the civitas. As a result, the civitas itself will become hollow and brittle, finally sharing the fate of Soviet Marxism, or Italian fascism, or Argentine despotism, or American exclusivism.

In laying out the religious case against belief, it may seem that I have privileged the former over the latter. It must be said, however, although I can offer no statistical basis for it, that the world is far more attracted to belief systems than to religion as I have described it. Nonetheless, poets will always rise in their midst, even in the most severe, knowing they lack every form of worldly power, hoping only that their singing will outlast them. But if it does, even if it is long remembered, finally there is only oblivion. Why then do they continue to sing? They have no choice. They know they are ignorant.