THE BEAUTIFUL COUPLE

[Guest guest]

"And the  knot tightens in a memorable formula, which we encounter

in the  Aitareya Brahmana."

THE BEAUTIFUL COUPLE   

- Advice regarding the words faith and reason: use in small doses   

  Roberto Calasso  

     

   Gustave Doré's illustration of Paradiso, Canto 31   

     

What our world urgently requires is that operation which, according  

to Confucius, ought to precede all others: the rectification of  

names. As we read in his Analects, once a disciple asked him: "If  

one day a king were to give you a territory to rule according to  

your ideas, what is the first thing you would do?" Confucius  

replied: "I'd rectify the names." And then he explained to his  

student: if names are not correct, language is without an object.  

When language is without an object, no affair can be effected. Hence  

all human affairs are disrupted and managing them becomes futile and  

impossible. So the first task of a true statesman is to rectify  

names.  

If we try to apply these words to our world, we would be seized by a  

feeling of paralysis. For it would be very hard to find even one of  

the fundamental words that may be said to be used in a way that does  

not require rectification. If we take a look around any part of the  

world, we will come across swarms of people who rally under the  

banner of the word faith - and sometimes brandish it menacingly.  

But, if we think that the word faith ought to have something to do  

with the divine and the sacred, we are immediately assailed by  

perplexity on a grand scale. For many of those who flaunt their  

faith seem to have no precise notion of either the divine or the  

sacred. And, what's more, if the word faith should to some extent  

correspond with the densest definition given it up to the present  

day - the definition we encounter in Dante's Paradise and the  

translated passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews: "Faith is the  

substance of the things we hope for/ And evidence of those that are  

not seen" - it would seem eminently reasonable to doubt whether  

large numbers of those countless people who profess to be "faithful"  

actually follow the lines of that definition. If only because few  

people seem to share a precise perception of an invisible reality,  

which is the assumption underpinning Dante's words. What is  

immediately noticeable is that, in all the four quarters of the  

globe, the word faith has become the most efficient of social  

cements, the only one that provides an inexhaustible reserve of  

certainties, on the basis of which the most diverse actions can be  

carried out, the most benign but also the deadliest, with no need  

for any further justifications. And this already makes any action  

potentially lethal.  

The sense of Gemeinschaft, or the "community", imagined by certain  

outmoded sociologists such as Tönnies and rendered inapplicable by  

the development of the technical world, has thus been reactivated  

and recovered by using the word faith, which at this point no longer  

has any need to refer to the perception of an invisible reality, but  

contents itself with the animal warmth given off by the community of  

the faithful. This leads us to a very bitter realization: that the  

true ecumenical religion of our time tends to be society itself, the  

"great animal" that Plato wrote of - and that Simone Weil recognized  

around her in the Europe of the Thirties.  

It is no insignificant irony of history that a parallel discourse  

can be applied to the word reason. In a certain part of the  

scientific community the word reason continues to be used as a sort  

of universal remedy. Those who do this are the legitimate heirs of  

those late-19th-century positivists who maintained that  

consciousness and mind were epiphenomena to be traced back to the  

mother of all certainties and of all reason: matter. In the  

meantime, matter has become the locus of a progressive explosion of  

paradoxes, at first sight rather unreasonable ones. An explosion  

that does not seem to be over yet. Consequently, no one more than  

the physicists who must daily make their way through those paradoxes  

has become diffident, if not even downright sarcastic, about the  

word reason.  

At this point a wise silence would seem advisable - or at least a  

little pharmacological advice regarding the two words faith and  

reason: use in small doses. If, however, we wished to seek an  

example in the opposite sense, a case in which the two words faith  

and reason acted together, it would be advisable to turn back  

towards a point that is almost three thousand years behind us. I am  

thinking of a Sanskrit word - sraddha - which is frequently found in  

the Brahmanas, texts on ritual which go back to the Vedic period.  

Mauss observed that sraddha corresponds to the Latin credo. Dumézil  

suggested translating it as "quiet confidence". But what was this  

Vedic faith? First of all a conviction about ritual acts. Without  

sraddha, that is to say "faith" in the efficacy of the act being  

carried out, the sacrifice is in vain. And, for Vedic thought, if  

the sacrifice is in vain then all is in vain. Hence sraddha is the  

confidence, not demonstrable but implicit in every act, that the  

visible may act upon the invisible and, above all, that the  

invisible may act upon the visible. The Brahmanas devote the boldest  

speculations to this word. And they also try to answer an insidious  

question: in the event of nothing tangible being available, how  

could the sacrifice be made? The answer comes to us through the sage  

Yajñavalkya. Even if the milk and the fire in which to pour it were  

lacking, then that most elementary of sacrifices, the agnihotra,  

could nonetheless be celebrated. But how? "By offering as a libation  

truth - satya - in faith, sraddha", said Yajñavalkya. Sylvain Lévi  

translated satya not as "truth" but as "exactitude". This makes us  

feel how the most tenacious aspiration of reason - the adaequatio  

rei et intellectus - may be conjoined with a ritual act. And the  

knot tightens in a memorable formula, which we encounter in the  

Aitareya Brahmana. This is how Lévi translated it: "Faith and  

exactitude; this is the most beautiful couple."  

But is there anything in the West that vaguely resembles this  

formula? Perhaps there is - and we can find it in Musil's Man  

Without Qualities, where we read that Ulrich had imagined the  

establishment of a "General Secretariat of Exactitude and the Soul".  

Even more than the United Nations, it is perhaps this Secretariat  

that we need. And never as in this moment have we been so far from  

it.  

  © ROBERTO CALASSO  

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060507/asp/opinion/story_6187420.asp