BY RYAN CROKEN

In print | Published March 24, 2005

Swarthmore, in case you haven’t noticed, is not a very mystical place in itself. There is a serious lack of visible spirituality fluttering about our public sphere — a notable absence of what I’ll herein define as “faith.” Maybe I’ve been tuned out to the Swat sacred scene thus far, but it seems to me that issues of belief beyond the brain are relatively taboo in most classroom or lunchroom settings on campus. I’ve learned, unfortunately, that faith isn’t exactly the savvy liberal liberal-arts thing to do, unless one is speaking largely in terms of a theoretical tolerance for those who are silly enough to fall for something as un-empirical and Republican as God.

Part of the reason for this, I think, is that we think a lot at this school. This isn’t unusual: We’re at college, we think. It’s what we do; we’re above average at it. We analyze, challenge, interrogate and critique the idea of everything from a myriad of imagined intellectual angles. This is important, wonderful fun: a responsible and necessary activity that can keep us open-minded, alive and cognitively aware of our selves and the selves around us. The problem I want to address in this column is not merely an issue of thinking, but of thinking too highly of thinking — an unholy fanaticism of neurons bound in the shaky tabernacle of our brains. At our worst, we worship a godless god in our own skull cavities, a disembodied intellectual object: the thing that thinks in a hard wood chair in McCabe. At Swarthmore, God is not dead, God is on Blackboard.

The fundamental danger here lies in confusing thinking with knowing, and letting that mistake interfere with other things — like hoping, feeling, praying and even loving. The danger lies in an ultimate reverencing of your own ability to deduce an “answer” from your questions so much so that you are not open to the idea that the “answer” might lie in the questions themselves, or, it is possible, like death, outside of your abilities to conceive of it.

This academic solipsism is a profane worshipping of thought as an object in itself, an object with coffee inside of it and no life behind it. It’s the force that makes some people on this campus “think” offense for an other on some intellectual level based on a theory they recently read, rather than feel a genuine eruption of compassion on an essential human level, which is something we would all be capable of accessing if we weren’t so caught up in the illogical buzz of rationality that is supposed to help us determine what is or what should be politically correct. This is an empty faith of the brain, an atheism of life, an extremism that can become just as fanatical in its egoistic misdirection as any praying person’s. I wish I did not have the examples of Maoism, Nazism or the Soviet purges to bring to light the fact that the act of thinking without a nod to something beyond yourself — spiritual or otherwise — can become just as dogmatic as worshipping a higher being.

(I’m sorry I compared you to Hitler. I don’t mean to insult you, just to freak you out a little.) So, then, what exactly do I mean by this “faith” thing? The type of faith I’m preaching is a sane reverencing of our own inabilities to arrive at the truth through our current reasoning faculties. It is the type of faith that allows me to say, “It will all get done; it will all work out,” without being able to rationally see how this will happen from my current perspective. It is the transcendent acknowledgement that this is both reasonable (because often it is the case that we can’t see how we’re going to get through the tunnel before seeing the light,) and unreasonable (because, if my eyes are all I’ve got, and I ain’t seeing no light, then how the hell are you going to convince me that there is a light?)

Faith is a humble recognition — or perhaps even a gratitude, perhaps even an ecstasy — of the essential myopia of the human intellect. It is the profoundly nebulous and luminous mental activity that requires us to imagine something in the future that we cannot imagine imagining in the present. It may be counterintuitive to take comfort in our own inabilities, but I think that, sometimes, it is exactly this resignation of ourselves that allows us to have faith in ourselves, and then to go about our business with confidence, or at least, with less despair.

Faith should be challenged by thought. Perhaps it needs to be challenged in order to exist at all. But when we ask questions, no matter how urgent, let them be humble questions; let them be questions that do not purport to know better than the answer; let them be holy questions — with or without an “Om-God-Shiva-God-Amen” accompaniment — that stand in awe and respect of the horrible and gorgeous mystery that surrounds us and always will surround us, no matter what any science says. There is a way to put our heads together with our hearts, and thus our challenge here, at this institution of thought, is both to think and to believe.

Ryan Croken is a senior. You can reach him at rcroken1@swarthmore.edu.

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