JOHN IZZI
Docteur de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Saint Michael’s College, Colchester, Vermont, USA
Unitarian Universalist Service
May 11, 2025
Paris, France
AFFIRMING THE UNKNOWN
Good. Morning. I’d like to start by thanking Dorcy Erlandson for putting me in touch with the UUFP and Peter Jarrett for inviting me to speak today. Although I am not qualified to deliver a sermon, I’d like, in my capacity as philosopher and educator, for us to consider the difference between faith and belief; the affirmation of, or saying yes to the unknown; and the power that animates the world.
What power, what animation, one might ask. Doesn’t the world consist of a void in which atoms are constantly being arranged and rearranged into manifold combinations. Referring to that void, Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French philosopher, writes in his Pensées “le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me). Pascal’s response is reasonable. Even so, there is another response, one that is perhaps less reasonable because it is more intuitive. In his essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New England Transcendentalist and onetime Unitarian minister, gazing at the night sky, writes “the stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.” Clearly, Pascal and Emerson respond differently to the world’s grandeur.
Intimate contact with Nature inspires Emerson. It evokes reverence. Emerson trusts in that experience; he has faith in what it reveals. The entire universe, from the subatomic to the galactic, is animated by the living power of what he calls the “Over-Soul,” that boundless and therefore infinite life, that birthless, deathless and therefore eternal life that beats at the heart of the world. The Over-Soul, as boundless, cannot be confined by definition. It can neither be comprehended by a concept nor represented by a name, including the name Over-Soul. Lying at the heart of the known, it is itself unknown. It is the nonidentifiable life that pulsates at the center of the identifiable world. As nonidentifiable, the Over-Soul is inaccessible to thought. Its presence is experienced, Emerson tells us, in reverence. At once present and inaccessible, the Over-Soul reveals what Rhineland mystics like Meister Eckhart refer to as Deus absconditus (the hidden God) in the world.
Pascal’s God is also hidden. Its existence cannot be known by the mind. “Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point” (the heart has its reasons that reason cannot understand). Pascal’s faith, like Emerson’s, is founded on the experience of living power. He memorialized the experience on a piece of paper found sewn into his clothing after his death.
“God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars.
Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.
God of Jesus Christ. . . . He can only be found by the ways taught in the Gospels.
. . . I have cut myself off from him.
They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters.
. . . Let me not be cut off from him for ever.”
Pascal distinguishes the Biblical God, who intervenes in human history, from the philosophical God. Specifically, he has in mind the philosophy of Deism, which was prevalent in France at the time. Deists believed that God’s existence could be proven by the mind and that God, having created the world, no longer interacts with it. In contrast, the God in whom Pascal believes is not an indifferent cause. Pascal’s God is alive and active in the world, much like Emerson’s Over-Soul. Yet unlike the Over-Soul, whose activity in the world is continuous, Pascal’s God intervenes at decisive moments.
The most decisive moment, for Pascal, is the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is known through, he believes, the divinely revealed and therefore absolute truth of the Gospels. The certainty guaranteed by belief in truth that is absolute produces feelings of joy and peace in him.
Pascal refers to the fountain of living waters. For both Pascal and Emerson, the world is animated by living power. Yet unlike Emerson’s Over-Soul whose power is nonidentifiable, Pascal identifies the living power as Jesus Christ. Perhaps the act of identification separated Pascal from that power and led him to believe that its intervention was needed to be reunited to it. Be that as it may, Pascal trusts the experience he memorialized on the piece of paper sewn into his clothing. In that sense, he has faith. Nonetheless, the experience Pascal trusts in is one of belief.
Belief affirms absolute truth. It offers certainty, provides an identity, and to varying degrees blocks the unknown. Belief appeals to minds that seek the assurance certainty guarantees. The greater the need for assurance the more firmly the belief is held. Belief separates believers from those whose belief is other than theirs, thereby providing each an identity. The more certainty is needed the more attached the believer is to the identity the belief provides. The belief is absolutized; the identity is privileged. Those who identify with a different belief threaten the absolute truth of the other’s belief and are often seen as enemies. Need for certainty and attachment to identity give rise to varying degrees of intolerance — from subtle, like unconscious bias, to extreme, as genocide. Examples are readily found in history and in the world today. The underlying cause, whatever the degree of intolerance, is fear of the unknown. Receptivity to the unknown gets blocked in proportion to the degree of intolerance.
Unlike belief, faith is not founded on certainty and identity. Rather than affirm absolute truth, faith affirms the unknown in a selfless act of trust. In what sense is faith selfless? And in what does faith trust? Answers to these questions may be found by turning again to Emerson’s essay “Nature,” where he describes his experience walking one winter evening.
“Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, . . . I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. . . . Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God.”
The common that Emerson crosses is bare. Like nature in winter, it is exposed, without disguise. It is seen as it originally is, prior to words that define, conceptualize, and name it. The terrain beneath his feet is not solid but consists of snow puddles, of liquid. It is fluid. The hour is twilight, neither dark nor light but that uncertain period between the two. Even the sky, which is cloudy, lacks clarity and is uncertain. In the midst of that uncertainty Emerson experiences exhilaration. Again the word bare is used to describe the ground on which he stands. The ground of Emerson’s being is stripped of interpretation. He encounters it in its nakedness. Blithe describes the air in which his head bathes, suggesting joy and indifference to rules of the road. Exhilarated, he walks freely across the common — aptly situated at the heart of town.
Emerson stands outside himself as he is uplifted into infinite space. The experience is the source of ecstasy and liberation. His ego, his sense of self, his very identity disappear. Emerson has become, he tells us, a transparent eye-ball. Nothing blocks his vision; nothing stands between him and the world. The shield of identity that protects him from the unknown has been dropped. Indeed, it is because Emerson has become nothing that he is able to see all. The lifeblood of the Universal Being flows through his veins. He breathes deep the power that animates the world. Emerson is in contact with God.
The experience Emerson describes shows why faith is selfless. It is selfless not only because it is the act of an ecstatic, liberated ego, but moreover because the ego as ecstatic and liberated is no longer identifiable. It lives in the unknown, with which it is one. It has shed its identity. Even so, an identity can only be shed if there is one intact to shed. A healthy sense of self is indispensable not only to being open to the unknown but also to living well in the world. The point is not to deny identity but to be in contact with the nonidentifiable power that animates it. Faith sets in motion a relation that supersedes the relation to identity; it establishes a relation to the nonidentifiable. Just as the power that animates is unknown, so too are we and others when experienced in that power. Unlike belief, which separates and often leads to intolerance, faith unites. It advances solidarity. One power animates the world; one lifeblood flows through each of us. Faith shifts focus from an egotistical good to the common good, which, distinct from the conduct of many believers, recalls Jesus’ words — love one’s neighbor as oneself.
Emerson’s experience walking one winter evening shows us in what his faith trusts. It trusts in the experience of exhilaration and reverence before the power that animates the world — a power that, though present, is inaccessible. To that inaccessibility faith says yes. It affirms the all-pervasive presence of unknowable power, which it beholds in wonder. Contact with that power is intimate; we and the world are animated by it. At the same time, the life that animates remains unknown. As boundless, it cannot be identified; it eludes words. The living power faith affirms beats silently at the heart of the world. Perhaps it’s for us to turn our ear toward that silence and listen.
In his essay “The Over-Soul,” Emerson writes, “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.”