Eclipsing Mystery and the Transcendent

There is a well-known way to prevent transcendent reality from becoming a living truth, and to keep uncertainties about the ground of reality (and existential shakenness) at bay. It is to assure oneself that no such uncertainty exists.

For, despite the fact that human consciousness, whose basis is an unrestricted questioning, is inherently oriented toward central uncertainties regarding the ground of being, about the meaning of moral striving, and about the outcome of history, it is possible to replace that orientation with one of two forms of “ultimate certitude”: religious certitude, or anti-spiritual certitude.

In both cases, the narrative completeness of meaning that is the cosmos has apparently ceased to be mysterious. The whole story is presumed to be known.

(It is always salutary to recall that, as participants who have emerged within the Whole, we can, in fact, only ever have a perspectival understanding of the cosmos within which we exist. How tempting it is to assume, though, that because we are knowing participants within this Whole, and know of it, that we can know all about it!)

So, first, there is the religious presumption of final certitude. This is most obviously manifest in the attitudes of those who claim to be in possession of definitive answers concerning, for example, the being and will of God; the afterlife; how to achieve perfect attunement with being; or the historical future. Such presumption does grant consciousness its awareness of the fact of transcendent reality; but it betrays, alas, the mysteriousness of transcendence.

And that betrayal alters everything. A spiritual consciousness that presumes absolute and essentially complete knowledge of the ground and of the Whole—a “knowing,” a gnosis, that replaces genuine faith, and love, and hope, and trust, and all the forms of appreciation and insight that belong to these—cannot but involve a corruption its own nature. Somewhere along the line, it substitutes a comforting fantasy for authentic vision; or, at least, adds fantasy to authentic spiritual vision.

Religious certitude, in its most virulent and vehement modes, can lead into wars of religion—wars that, as we know, have not ceased. The fifteenth century Indian mystic Kabir put his sardonic view of the matter concisely: “The Hindu says Rama is dear to him, / The Muslim says it’s Rahim. / Then they kill each other.”

(It goes without saying, or I hope it does, that vast numbers of religious believers practice, pray, or meditate with a vibrant awareness of the mysteriousness of the ground of being and of elemental uncertainties.)

Second, then, there is the secular counterpart to the religious mystery-resisters.

Anti-spiritual “owners of ultimate truth” are certain both that there is no divine or transcendent reality, and that human mastery of ultimate meanings has already been achieved either as 1) already-known facts, or as 2) procedural methods that will undoubtedly yield final answers.

This is the province of scientistic and technocratic partisans who wave off symbols of transcendent mystery as irrelevancies or delusions.

It also includes those political “progressivists” who are certain that the perfecting of human society is possible, and that they know how to reach that goal.

These latter—let’s call them “activists of certitude”—are well exemplified by Lenin and the other leaders and early successors of the Bolshevik Revolution. They were confident that they already knew the essentials of the entire story of human history: where it’s going, how it ends—a story identical, in their view, with the narrative completeness of meaning in general, on the presumption that reality consists only of material being, and that material being reaches its utmost achievement (realization) in human life.

What was the goal of history according to the Bolshevik revolutionaries? Salvation. The Bolsheviks promised salvation from ills such as: injustice, social and political oppression, class conflict, economic exploitation, poverty, hunger, and warfare.

And they overthrew the existing order in Russia, they proclaimed, on the basis of certain, scientific knowledge of how to secure this salvation—and, indeed, the freedom and well-being of all humanity.

These facts are familiar enough.

But why, we may ask, did this revolution with its goals of universal human well-being exhibit from the start—not later on, as we often hear, but from its first days—a thoroughgoing assault on the notion of the value of the individual person? And why did it pronounce disdain for the principle of personal dignity? And contempt for the sanctity of human life?

The answer seems obvious once certain facts are linked together.

Respect for the equality of persons—of all persons, regardless of class or race or ethnicity or gender, of age or capacity—depends on recognizing that each person is a transparency for transcendent value.

The Bolshevik doctrine pronounced (in accordance with Marxist principles) that “God” is an illusion, that religion teaches only falsehoods, and that all reality is material. Thus they dismissed as unreal the mystery of transcendence and the notion of transcendent value.

But if there is no transcendent value, there can no equal “personal” value: indeed, no value to simply being a person. Only participation in transcendent value provides that.

So it is not much of a surprise to find in Bolshevik revolutionary rhetoric, and in ideas informing Soviet policies, the eclipse of divine being linked closely to the eclipse of the value of individual existence, through appreciating people only in terms of their being a “natural resource.”

The attack on individuality pervaded post-revolutionary culture, and operated on many levels. It manifested itself primarily, though, in a disdain for that most basic principle of the liberal democratic tradition: that individuals have a right to life. Many comments by Lenin and other Bolsheviks could be quoted to the purpose, but perhaps a statement of Trotsky’s—which unites contempt for the individual per se with contempt for religion—represents the shared attitude of the Bolshevik leaders: “We must put an end once and for all,” he wrote, “to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.” The individual per se was irrelevant, for him, to the meaning and purposes of human destiny, because the latter are concerned only with the mass of society conceived as a unitary whole.

Ideas about “right and wrong” as founded in personal choices, personal decisions, and personal conscience, thus had to be replaced. Someone could no longer be judged for wrongdoing or wrong-thinking as a “person,” but only in an impersonal manner: as simply “an atom” of the material labor force that is to be “judged, reorganized, redistributed” (Rosenstock-Huessy). Morality ceased to have any metaphysical or spiritual meaning, but was interpreted solely with regard to practical utility, with “utility” defined in statist terms.

Lenin summed up the matter this way: “Everything that contributes to the building of a Communist society is moral, everything that hinders it is immoral.”

Regarding the lives of individual persons, then, suddenly everything was permitted if the act or process was considered socially “useful.” People became matériel for the society coming into being through revolutionary guidance and activity. Human “worth” was the perceived contribution, physical or intellectual, to state aims and goals.

The outcome? Adding up state-ordered (often extra-legal) executions; deaths in labor camps; suppressions of peasant revolts; the state-organized Terror-Famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s; deaths resulting from forced relocations of various ethnic communities and “undesirable” elements to almost-uninhabitable regions of the country; abandonment of POWs captured during the Second World War, and their not-infrequent execution after repatriation, it has been estimated (conservatively) that the Bolshevik/Soviet system was responsible for the murder of at least sixty million citizens.

This is an extraordinarily grand-scale example, of course, of what can happen when “activists of certitude” manage to take charge of human affairs.

But it is an example that does indicate, forcefully, how principles of equality, universal dignity, and personal rights can become vulnerable when an eclipse of transcendent mystery takes hold.

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