Is Religion Necessary to Make Life Meaningful?
Philosopher Zena Hitz attempts to build a case for the value of religious commitment on the rubble of secular accounts of the meaning of life itself.
A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life
by Zena Hitz
Cambridge University Press, 150 pp., $12.99
IS RELIGIOUS COMMITMENT PHILOSOPHICALLY defensible? That ancient question receives a fresh but somewhat overreaching treatment in Zena Hitz’s A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, the latest entry in a Cambridge series of short “personal and philosophical” reflections by professional philosophers on topics that have previously included “sport,” “work,” and “digital communication.”
Hitz is a tutor at St. John’s College and a writer who is making a home for herself in the “personal reflection” genre. Her previous book was a meditation on the life of the mind, and her latest expands her view to address not only intellectual matters but the entire gamut of “the religious life.” The term refers to special forms of intense dedication to religious practices marked off by promises or vows like poverty, chastity, and obedience—the lifestyle of a faith’s devotees who are in some way set apart from ordinary life. Monks and nuns, so-called active religious orders like Pope Francis’s own home Jesuits, and lay communities are examples of the kinds of Christian religious life that Hitz has in mind. Each must negotiate its relationship with the wider secular world, which opens the question of how religious communities might justify themselves in the eyes of those who do not share their basic commitments. Such, at least, is the expectation a reader might bring to this book, and it’s one that Hitz plays on to great rhetorical effect by turning it on its head.
As Hitz acknowledges, religious life in her sense spans religions and philosophies. It can be found in Buddhism and Hinduism, Judaism and Islam. It is an essential part of the human story. Hitz narrows this wide aperture to bring the various Christian expressions into focus because they’re the ones she knows best: She once belonged to a Christian religious community and remains a devoted Catholic.
She is interested in two main clusters of questions. First, why would someone enter religious life at all? What, a skeptical reader might ask, could possibly motivate that choice, and can that motivation be justified philosophically? Second, she asks, what are we to make of the specific practices of religious life—practices like penance, celibacy, silence, and so on? Do they help those who practice them live better lives? Or, as David Hume states in a contrary passage printed on the back of Hitz’s book, is it because such practices “serve to no manner of purpose” that they are “everywhere rejected by men of sense”?
The first set of questions here sets up the argumentative and rhetorical move that gives Hitz’s book its most interesting feature: her account of the meaning—or rather meaninglessness—of life itself. Here as in her earlier book, Hitz makes wide use of historical, personal, and fictional examples to provide a grounding for an argument that otherwise risks floating away into abstraction. We can get a handle on her approach by considering her discussion of Doña Casilda, a Spanish noblewoman who entered a convent in the sixteenth century. One evening, following a happy day spent in the company of her fiancé, Casilda was overwhelmed by a wave of sadness. The day had ended—and so, likewise, would all days. Pondering this, the noblewoman resolved to break off the engagement and enter a convent.
Hitz believes we can understand Doña Casilda’s reaction only if we follow the noblewoman’s example and grapple with the same sobering philosophical truth that drove her to end her happy relationship: our mortality destroys the possibility of a life that is immanently meaningful.
“Our contemporary theorists of the meaning of life,” Hitz writes, “have failed us.” A meaningful life, she says, is a “satisfying one, a life that is worth the trouble.” Secular writers who have variously contributed to accounts of life’s meaning—she names Thomas Nagel, Kieran Setiya, and Sam Scheffler—all fail to adequately account for the way that transience and mortality destroy any prospect we might have for a life of this kind, notwithstanding the fleeting satisfaction one might derive from this life in a given moment.
Everything, Hitz notes, will eventually be annihilated: Everything we create will fall into nothingness; everyone we love will die; every bid for greatness and every attempt to be remembered will necessarily fail. If that isn’t enough for you, she also offers a reminder that the universe itself will one day become a structureless oblivion through heat death. “All the goods a person might dream of or strive for,” she observes, “including the most meaning-laden activities and experiences, turn to dust.” It is quite a picture of the human situation: Time, the very thing that makes possible every human love, joy, and pleasure, is also the means of their destruction.
Right away, the reader may object. What, for example, would Hitz say to an Epicurean who loves simple, passing pleasures—aren’t most people content with mundane allotments of happiness? Given universal annihilation, perhaps we should simply commit ourselves to the pursuit of such things.
Hitz has two responses. The first is to admit that this approach has something going for it—if you’re rich and healthy. The privileged may address themselves to mortality by making merry for a time, but this attitude cannot meet the depth and breadth of human suffering. The only approach, Hitz argues, that equips us to traverse life’s vale of tears is the following: We must receive everything that happens to us, whether good or bad, as coming in some sense from God. This providential attitude is the upshot of Hitz’s criticism of modern views of life. We can have a “satisfying life, a life that is worth the trouble” only if we accept absolutely everything as willed, either actively or passively, by God. Only if we practice this kind of acceptance, Hitz writes, which entails finding “a way to value grief and deprivation themselves,” can we safely follow the injunction to “live in the moment.”
The goalposts have moved in this response, however. We started with finitude and have come to suffering—but, as the philosopher James K.A. Smith has pointed out, the two aren’t exactly the same. Our encounter with time is marred by forms of suffering that aren’t necessary byproducts of our finitude. We can imagine a still-finite world where there are, for example, fewer wars, less disease, less pain. Conversely, we can imagine a world where everything lasts, but there is nothing to life but physical torture—a classic image of hell.
Hitz is certainly right to demand that we give serious attention to the scope of the world’s suffering. She is right, too, to argue that this suffering presents a challenge to a shallow and superficial hedonism that can only appear plausible to the prosperous. The book is convincing and successful in calling us to a more serious life, one that responds to suffering with a deeper interiority and a commitment to serving others. But all of this is different from saying that time destroys all meaning.
HITZ’S SECOND ARGUMENT for the futility of passing comforts takes aim at the nature of what we want: namely, for the people and things that we love to exist forever. Hintz takes this to be an essential part of the very meaning of human love. Like Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, Hitz thinks that “love must desire immortality.” The tragic irreconcilability of this desire for permanence with the fact of transience is what generates the existential frisson. Even leisure activities fail in this way, in Hitz’s account: Going on a boat trip into nature or playing cards with friends will awaken in us an impossible desire for those activities to continue forever. We are creatures that helplessly and ceaselessly want something we cannot have: to freeze time but not freeze experience.
Faced with the reality of death and the eventual destruction of all things, we have only two choices, Hitz argues. On the one hand, we can ignore the futility of our lives. This strategy involves “treasur[ing] the terms of our dissatisfaction,” loving things and people only a little, and agitating our affections so they continuously alight on fresh objects, only stopping when death finally catches up. It is, Hitz writes, to live lukewarmly.
The other option is to face reality squarely and explore whether there is another path to a “joy outside of time”—that is, to give ourselves over to a religious perspective that affirms the existence of a transcendent eternity that we can live towards and in light of. Joining a religious community would, then, be the most wholehearted way to live in accordance with such a perspective.
We might think that people join religious communities as a response to a good that exceeds—but does not negate or deny—the goods of ordinary life. (As Hitz’s fellow Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor has written, “For the Christian, what is renounced is thereby affirmed as good . . . the renunciation would lose its meaning if the thing were indifferent.”) Hitz puts the stress elsewhere: In her account, people make this radical decision because, like Doña Casilda, they have correctly perceived life’s meaninglessness, and the realization has pushed them to pursue a “joy outside of time”—to sacrifice the temporal for the sake of the eternal, believing that the love of God and love of neighbor alone can satisfy the soul’s terrible hunger. Instead of attempting to construct a meaningful life cumulatively through discrete experiences, Hitz argues, those who enter religious life think about their lives in the terms of a whole story. Philosophically, her assault on life’s immanent meaning depends on her claim that “since even the most wonderful experiences happen in a sequence, one after another, each coming to an end, they cannot qualify as goods that make life worth living.” We need goods that span and order the whole of life and that are adequate to our desire for eternity; in this severe picture of reality, finitude disqualifies itself.
IF WE FOLLOW THE ISSUE BACK to Hitz’s starting point we can see, I think, a problem with this second argument. To ask whether we encounter any experiences or objects that “qualify as goods that make life worth living” is to assume that life requires some kind of justification. But life doesn’t need any justification; it simply is, absolutely, better than non-life. It should be one of our most basic intuitions that it is good to exist, full stop. We can fail to live well, but never to the degree that we negate the value of our lives. At the most basic level, all life is worth living, and all life is worth the trouble.
This unity of goodness and existence is not, however, an assumption that writers for a general audience can count on their readers to share. For some of them, Hitz will be pushing against an open door in making her brief for life’s immanent meaningless and futility. Not everyone is so convinced that life is good, after all, and this contemporary alienation from life tends to lead not to a “joy outside of time” but a despair within it. Reawakening those in despair to the fact that existence as such is good is an important task forgone by this book, which overpowers its critique of shallow, enervating contemporary mores in a way that threatens philosophical collateral damage to much that Hitz presumably desires to protect.
For example, Hitz notes that when she lived in a religious community herself, she filled her free time with simple pleasures: “I walked in the woods, wrote letters, played cards, read books, had a conversation.” She writes warmly about these activities and clearly feels that they were worth doing. Enjoying such things is something we would certainly expect from an author whose earlier book, an encomium to the intellectual life, sketched its subject with a large enough boundary to include pastimes like birdwatching. But it seems at cross-purposes with one of her main theses in this book, as noted earlier: that leisure activities such as these are so devoid of meaning as to throw us back upon the meaninglessness of life itself.
Hitz seems to take these activities to have become meaningful in the context of her life in a religious community at the time, which mirrors the book’s overall argument. But here, too, is a wrinkle: Hitz does not actually think that meaning is only available to those who take up religious life. Consider her discussion of a writer named Etty Hillesum, who was held in a Nazi camp. During her imprisonment, she came to a deeper spirituality that allowed her to see the world anew in both its beauty and its horror. This sort of transformed vision of things is, for Hitz, one of the fruits of religious life, a way the world is given back after being renounced: It is brought under the aspect of the gift. But Hillesum, Hitz writes, received it on the strength of an “ordinary faith, lived in the world.” She was not a member of any religious community.
And if an “ordinary faith, lived in the world” can do this for us, then why did Doña Casilda need to enter a convent to resolve her existential dilemma, which Hitz uses to evoke our own? And what, then, actually are the prerequisites of meaning, if they are not reducible to religious life per se?
While reading Hitz’s book, I was reminded of the idea, common in religious circles, of the possibility of a morality based in “natural law”—that is, a morality that is ultimately traceable back to God, but which is available in principle to all rational creatures, whether the orientation of their life is secular or religious. On this account, morality is baked into the rational structure of our world—by God, yes, but baked in all the same. So, too, with meaning: It is not something we secure through self-invention, but something intrinsic to life that emanates from it naturally like the glow of a firefly, the prospect of our annihilation notwithstanding.
The small human moments, the consolations of living, are not everything, but they’re not nothing, either, and I do not share Hitz’s sense that the path to transcendence lies through emptying them out. I was thrown, for instance, by Hitz’s analysis of a moment from the 2013 film Ida. The title character is a member of a convent who temporarily leaves on the orders of her superior. While attending a funeral, she meets a young musician, and they spend the night together. The following day, in the excitement of new love, the musician urges her to imagine the life they could lead: They could enjoy the coming day, then get a dog, then marry, then have kids. After each step, Ida asks, “and after that?” Finally, the musician says “The usual. Life.” Hitz is not impressed by this response, calling it “an evasion of an unanswerable question.” And perhaps returning to the convent was the right choice for Ida—but the musician’s answer, so far as it goes, is perfectly put.
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