Love and Other Conversions

Sometimes individuals change not only their belief systems but their deepest selves and life orientations.  Conversion, in the empirical sense, usually refers to a person’s newfound acceptance of a religion, either from unbelief or from a different religion.  Conversion, in the normative sense, which we owe to Plato, refers to the turning of the soul “toward the truth.”  Not all spiritual transformations are conversions in the empirical sense — some initiate personal paths or start new movements rather than joining pre-existing religions.  And not all are conversions in the normative sense — there being no guarantee they move toward “the truth,” however that is defined.

Four conversions are described in Alasdair MacIntyre’s book on the philosophy of Edith Stein, hers and three close contemporaries.  Stein and Adolf Reinach, both students of Edmund Husserl, were philosophical companions.  Husserl was Jewish and a theist.  Reinach and Stein, though Jewish, had been raised in secular households.  Reinach had always had a speculative interest in concepts of God but, before dying on the fields of the First World War, he had, MacIntyre reports, “experiences such that he found himself unable to withhold trust in God, as being, not as concept.”  Another contemporary, Franz Rosenzweig, was an observant Jew but strongly drawn toward Christianity.  He was in fact on the verge of converting when he attended Yom Kippur services and discovered, as if for the first time, the Jewish vocation.  He was converted, one might say, from Jewish to Judaism.  Georg Lukasz, whose family no longer identified as Jewish, was an atheist from beginning to end and, in his politics, a bourgeois liberal, disdaining the violent methods of the Bolsheviks.  Suddenly, however, in 1918, says MacIntyre, in “a deliberate act of faith,” not in God, of course, but in a Utopian future, Lukasz made a choice that required him, in an unusual use of the Kierkegaardian “teleological suspension of the ethical,” to set aside what he came to see as “his selfish regard for his own moral integrity” and join the Communist Party.

About Edith Stein, her good friend and fellow philosopher Hedwig Conrad-Martius writes, “we were in the midst of a religious crisis.”  One day, Stein picked up the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila and read it straight to the end.  By the time she finished, she had decided she must become a Catholic.  What, MacIntyre asks, might that reading have taught her?  Teresa “understands the experience of God’s presence as something that in those who undergo it has a history, the history of a life of prayer.”  At the same time, she is alert to “the possibilities of delusion and illusion” and insists on “what Stein would have recognized as a version of the discipline of phenomenological attention” to experience as it presents itself.  Stein was converted, not from Judaism, but from atheism and, in fact, came to appreciate Jewish rituals that had previously meant little to her.

The reason for a conversion, in MacIntyre’s view, is that “you can see something from the new standpoint that you couldn’t see before.”  That is a broad comment that applies to any change in viewpoint orientation, but is most apt when considering change in comprehensive world-views, when, as it were, the scales seem to fall from one’s eyes and one sees everything as if for the first time.  Converts, he writes, “now perceive and understand something that previously they were unable to perceive and understand, both about themselves and about the world.”  There is now an urgency to such questions as:  “What new light has been cast on my past life?  What power was it that transformed me?  And what new direction must my life take, given that I now perceive and understand as I do?  The claim made by such converts is, to put matters in Augustine’s terms, that, because they now believe, they are now able to understand certain things.”  “[O]nly from a particular standpoint,” he says, “can some things be perceived … only a certain kind of transformation of the self, which it was not in the convert’s own power to bring about, has enabled her or him to attain that standpoint.”

How does a conversion come about?  Something causes what psychologist James E. Loder calls, in The Transforming Moment, “a rupture in the knowing context.”  Subsequently, “an insight, intuition, or vision appears on the border between the conscious and the unconscious, usually with convincing force.”  This epiphany prompts new patterns of thought and action.

Although psychoanalysis is normally a lengthy process with several stages, William R. Miller and Janet C’de Baca report in Quantum Change that, in their clinical practice, some of their clients had their lives transformed quite suddenly.  Sometimes it happened in a single epiphany, sensed either in words or in felt understanding, such as “You don’t need to drink any more” or “You need to leave that man.”  Some transformative moments came with a religious halo or even a divine voice but most just happened.  Still, the authors report, “This quantum kind of insight involves the whole person … and in some ways represents a change in the personal sense of self.”

William James had already noted the phenomenon in The Varieties of Religious Experience and quotes the following report:  “I was effectually cured of all inclination to that sin I was so strongly addicted to that I thought nothing but shooting me through the head could have cured me of it; and all desire and inclination to it was removed, as entirely as if I had been a suckling child; nor did the temptation return to this day.”

Turnings of the soul that seem to come “out of the blue” may have been preceded by experiences that, in retrospect, appear to have been preparations for a fundamental openness to truth or to a new standpoint.

In his Confessions, Augustine gives us a first-person account of his search for truth.  Unlike his fellows, he paid discriminating attention to the experience of stealing the apples, detected that it was motivated, not by a desire for pleasure or goods, but by evil or malice, and he searched for a philosophy that would account for this phenomenon.  His autobiography records that search.

Most of us are not Augustines, but we too have spiritual paths from which we can learn.  Sometimes their meaning or the spiritual lessons they teach is not obvious on their face.  That is one of the purposes of remembering, recording, and revisiting our spiritual journeys with careful attention.

I am going to offer an interpretation of my own spiritual turning as recounted in God: An Autobiography, as Told to a Philosopher (Caladium 2016).  I am going to do a careful reading as if it were a phenomenological text.  I will start with the moment of theophany and read backwards, in reverse chronology, to trace the steps that, in retrospect, appear to have been the writer’s preparations for it.  He had been a non-believer, an agnostic, his whole adult life.

Here is the scene with the theophany:

“Toward the end of a long summer day, Abigail and I were sitting on a park bench along the Potomac, across from the Lincoln Memorial.  She was writing in her journal and I was pondering the challenge of making a future together.  Without thinking about it, much less expecting an answer, I prayed again this time asking for guidance.

“Immediately a visual image appeared, like a hologram, a few feet in front of me – a rising, sparkling, multicolored fountain.  It radiated vitality and promise, an answer to my prayer.  But there was more.

“A voice spoke.  The voice did not sound particularly different from my own inner voice, but it wasn’t me talking.  I looked at Abigail to see if she heard it, but she continued writing, undisturbed.  I asked, not out loud, ‘What is this voice?  Who are you?’

“The answer came back:

‘I am God.’

‘The God of Israel?’

‘I am the God of All.’

Let’s stop there.  Now the question is:  What, if anything, prepared the writer, a non-believer, for this moment?  What equipped him, if that is the right term, to hear the voice.

He was not a believer but the text says, “I prayed again” – again – “this time” – presumably in contradistinction to other times – “asking for guidance”

Why had this non-believer already prayed?  And what were those prayers about?

On an earlier page, the text reports:

“One summer morning I felt an urge to express my thanks, to pray – to Whomever.  I did not see any reason not to express what I genuinely felt.  So I fell to my knees, as I had been taught as a child, and thanked ‘the Lord.’

“I now believed in love, but not much else.  I did not know if I was praying to the God of Israel, to Jesus of Nazareth, or, for all I knew, the Lord Krishna worshipped by Hindus.  Or simply to a benign universe.  I didn’t worry about that.  I just poured out my heart in prayer.”

So the first prayer of this non-believer was an expression of gratitude.  For what was he grateful?  The text tells us: “I now believed in love.”

So it seems that the writer had not believed in love either.  As he writes,

“… I had never really believed in love, not romantic love.  Being in love was a delusion, based on projection – even the poets call it a form of madness – the kind of thing you expect to outgrow as you get older.  I was only looking for compatibility, even had a Myers-Briggs personality profile in mind.”

The writer continues:

“Instead, I found myself so totally, deeply in love that it did seem like a form of madness.  …  I would have been in sad shape had Abigail not had similar feelings, but she too responded to what she called ‘the summons of love.’”

What does the writer learn about the nature and reality of love?

“Love is not a set of psychological triggers firing off wildly.  In a sense, it’s not subjective at all, not a mere feeling.  It is an ontological fact, a bond between two people that is deep within the structure of reality itself.”

And now we find the actual moment of conversion:

“Being in love was not only a profound new experience; it shook my worldview” – it shook my worldview.  Whatever the writer’s worldview had been, it was no longer tenable.  Something had been discovered, encountered, experienced, that his worldview failed to comprehend.

And it was a moment of transformation:

“My whole life took on a new meaning,” he says.  A new meaning. 

“My life went from a collection of purposes to having a meaning.  It went from black-and-white to Technicolor.  No, more radical than that, it went from a two-dimensional universe to a three-dimensional – or, as it turned out, an n-dimensional – universe.”

The writer saw it as a blessing, quite unearned.  “I felt surprise and joy and gratitude.  I did not know whom to thank, but an extraordinary gift had come into my life.”

That is when the writer said his first prayer – to the great Whomever.

He tells us his second prayer was also an expression of thanks – to Whomever – with an addition.  “This time, to my surprise, I offered to be of service.  To a God I didn’t believe existed.  Inconsistent of course, but not insincere.”

A conversion implies a change from one belief or world-view to another, or from what is called here “non-belief” to belief.  There were two things our writer had not believed in – God was one, and love was the other.  Somehow non-belief in love had blocked the way to belief in God.

Belief requires an explanation, but so does non-belief.  Our writer had been raised in a Christian home.  But, as he reports – it is almost the first thing in the book, right on page 1 – “those beliefs did not survive Philosophy 101, where arguments for the existence of God were shot down like clay pigeons.”  Not reported in the book is that the writer had found in his freshman year that the arguments back and forth were unresolvable, at least by him.  So he decided just to postulate that there is a God and get on with his life.  But then he noticed that all he had was the word “God” and an empty category.  It did not tell him which religion had the best account of God or what any of the attributes of God were or what this postulate was supposed to mean for his own life.  It was empty, no more informative than the bare assertion, “there is an X.”  Not only was this postulate barren, so was the whole procedure of postulation.  To his young “logical” mind, postulation had seemed like a reasonable procedure, but it was based on a kind of rationality in a vacuum.  It lacked connection to the rest of his mental, moral, and emotional life.

Is logic the culprit here?  Not really.  Logic is truth-seeking or, more precisely, truth-preserving.  A fallacious argument can begin with true premises and reach false conclusions.  A valid argument ensures that, if the premises are true, then everything that follows from them will also be true.  In its proper role, logic is a powerful tool – an instrument or organon, as Aristotle calls it, useful for demonstrations that exhibit the connections in things.

In recent philosophy of science, a distinction was made between the logic of confirmation and the logic of discovery.  Some philosophers held that there is no logic of discovery.  Others found that it was possible to develop, not exactly a logic, but a heuristics – guidelines or techniques for discovering fruitful hypothesis.  In Science, Faith, and Society, Michael Polanyi speaks of the driving force of inquiry as a “heuristic passion” and, a chemist himself, notes some of the traits and tactics of what he calls scientific connoisseurship, the ability developed in the practice of science to sense what paths of inquiry are likely to be fruitful.  Imre Lakatos developed a philosophy of science according to which what he calls “research programmes” are measured mainly by their promised fruitfulness.  His teacher, the mathematician George Polya, had presented a heuristics for mathematical and other problem-solving.  Polya’s work also inspired the theory of conditioned rationality developed by Herbert A. Simon that suggests that it is not necessary or even rational to optimize, since what human beings efficiently do is to “satisfice,” that is, make satisfactory, not necessarily optimal, choices.

The problem is not with logic per se, but arises when formal logic is taken to exhaust the entire mission of reason.  Voegelin reminds us that “Parmenides had given the name nous (reason) to man’s faculty of ascending to the vision of being, and the name logos to the faculty of analyzing the content of the vision.”  Even Aristotle begins his treatises, not with a known premise from which deductions can be made, but with an exploration of what has previously been thought by all people, or by most people, or by the wise.

Our writer’s youthful mistake was not in being logical but in being logical in a way that was narrow, premature, and ungrounded.  Insight must precede axioms and deductions.  What, at a later point, opened him to insight?

He explains that, when he first fell in love, he of course wanted to understand the phenomenon.  So he read the psychologists.  They all warned against “projection.”  Love is an illusion.  This is what the “experts” told him.

One of the most famous, Karen Horney, in her article “The Problem of the Monogamous Ideal”,^[43] indicates that the overestimation of love” – note: the overestimation of love – “leads to disillusionment ….  Disillusionment plus the desire to escape plus non-fulfillment result in a secret hostility, which causes the other partner to feel alienated. Secret hostility in one and secret alienation in the other cause the partners to secretly hate each other.”  [From “Romance (Love)” in Wikipedia]

What enabled our writer with the so-called “logical” mind to ignore those warnings?  “Conversion” is a Platonic metaphor.  Why does the prisoner in the Allegory of the Cave turned around (periagoge)?  As Eric Voegelin notes (94), he “is moved by an unknown force.”

Our writer turns from the rather frightening shadows described with such suspicion by the experts to the phenomenon of love itself, to which he willingly surrenders.

From that point on, he responds, not to logical aporia, but to realities encountered in experience.  Instead of seeing the advent of love as a random incident, he sees it as an event in a meaningful drama.  Viewed in that light, it shines as a gift.

The proper response to a gift is gratitude, and gratitude calls forth an expression, a thank you, even if one is uncertain whom to thank.

Despite this uncertainty, our writer offers to be of service, presumably just in case there is a benefactor listening to his prayers, one who would be served by some actions of his.

Finally, even though it barely makes sense, he asks in prayer for guidance from the Whomever he does not yet believe exists.

However, it is not as if a reckless disregard to logical consistency were the key to life’s deeper meanings.  Sometimes epistemic caution and keen skepticism save us from false loves and illusory voices.  But, when we are mistaken, it is probably not a logical failure so much as a failure to discern accurately what is encountered in reality.  In light of one’s best discernment, one must decide where to plant one’s feet.

Some people insist our lives are absurd – a conclusion often reached without a clear understanding of what would make a life either “absurd” or “non-absurd.”  Living out this creed, they strain to create meaning, or at least its semblance, in a meaningless world.

But suppose we explore the opposite possibility:  to view our lives, in spite of their chaotic and perverse moments, as meaningful, and then probe them, using whatever existential heuristics we can avail ourselves of, for their subtle patterns and veiled dimensions.

When what Eric Voegelin calls the “tension toward the divine” exerts its pull, even those of us with so-called “logical” minds may find ourselves responding.

References

Augustine.  Confessions, tr. Henry Chadwick.  Oxford’s World Classics, 2009.

Horney, Karen.  “The Problem of the Monogamous Ideal,” quoted in Wikipedia, “Romance (Love), accessed August 2, 2020.

James, William.  Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature.  Gifford Lectures, 1901-02.  Penguin Classics, 1982.

Lakatos, Imre.  Philosophical Papers, vol. I: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, ed. John Worrall.  Cambridge University Press, 1980.

MacIntyre, Alasdair.  Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922.  Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Martin, Jerry L.  God: An Autobiography, as Told to a Philosopher.  Caladium, 2016.

Miller, William R., and Janet C’de Baca.  Quantum Change: When Epiphanies and Sudden Insights Transform Ordinary Lives.  Guilford Press, 2001.

Polanyi, Michael.  Science, Faith, and Society.  University of Chicago Press, 1964.

Polya, Gyorgy.  How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Methods.  Doubleday Anchor, 1957.

Simon, Herbert A.  Reason in Human Affairs.  Stanford University Press, 1990.

Voegelin, Eric.  Order and History, vol. II: The World of the Polis.  Louisiana State University Press, 1957.

Presented at a virtual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society on September 13, 2020.

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