The Death of the Philosophers’ God

Some Personal History

I have the sense that my reflections are sometimes a bit too autobiographical, but I also think that they might reach people for whom they’ll resonate, and who might find them helpful. I promise that there will be some conclusions at the end of the wandering. Also, this whole piece is too long, and I’m sorry.

Christ found me in the depths of despair after the death of my father almost 40 years ago. I may still always be waiting for a “road to Damascus” moment, but in retrospect, I actually had one. Then an unbeliever — a young man with a typical trajectory for modern adolescent seekers that had taken me through Crowley, psychedelics, Zen Buddhism, Be Here Now, and a vague neopaganism — I bent my head in solitude and cried and prayed to the Unknown God: “I don’t know who you are, but if you don’t help me, I’ll die.” And, typically in my experience of such prayer, the darkness did not lift immediately, but it did lift; and never again, in the throes of all life’s tragedies thus far, have I ever found myself in a like pit of darkness (though I have come close).

The way forward that presented itself was faith in God, in the One God of the world’s personalist Semitic monotheisms. Of course, raised in the fading cultural ambience of Christian faith in middle-class 1970s America, a monotheism was my first resort for serious religion once it was a matter of existential survival and not just youthful spiritual flânerie. Serendipity brought me first to Islam, but I got to Christianity eventually, and soon to a living ancient form of it, Orthodoxy. (I never gave Catholicism a fair shake at that time, but later I remedied that oversight.)

However, I was dogged at every step by problems with the philosophical theism that seemed to comprise one essential strand of Orthodox (and broadly, mainstream classical Christian) tradition. This tradition presented me with two distinct worlds or themes, which, though it gave them as inseparably linked, or even as merely different expressions of the same truth, I could never reconcile without a tension so great that it seemed to strain my mind and my soul to the breaking point. These worlds were, on the one hand, the world of affective faith and simple-hearted religious belief, the spiritual world especially of Russia’s unlettered ancient startsi, or elders, the beautiful-souled, wilderness-dwelling exemplars of repentance, humility, and silence; and on the other hand, the world of philosophical reflection on and distillation of that world into philosophically shaped dogmatic assertions about the metaphysical truths underlying it. (The Nicene Creed that we Orthodox sing every Sunday is one such distillation, though Orthodox hymnography in general is so freighted with theology that it’s a bit overwhelming sometimes.)