Faith, Skepticism and Philosophical Understanding

By D. Z. Phillips (1967)

 

The relation between religion and philosophical reflec­tion needs to be reconsidered. For the most part, in recent philosophy of religion, philosophers, believers, and non-believers alike, have been concerned with dis­covering the grounds of religious belief. Philosophy, they claim, is concerned with reasons; it considers what is to count as good evidence for a belief. In the case of religious beliefs, the philosopher ought to enquire into the reasons anyone could have for believing in the existence of God, for believing that life is a gift from God, or for believing that an action is the will of God. Where can such reasons be found? One class of reasons comes readily to mind. Religious believers, when asked why they believe in God, may reply in a variety of ways. They may say, `I have had an experience of the living God', `I believe on the Lord Jesus Christ', `God saved me while I was a sinner', or, `I just can't help believing'. Philosophers have not given such reasons very much attention. The so-called trouble is not so much with the content of the replies as with the fact that the replies are made by believers. The answers come from within religion, they presuppose the framework of Faith, and therefore cannot be treated as evidence for religious belief. Many philosophers who argue in this way seem to be searching for evidence or reasons for religious beliefs external to belief itself. It is assumed that such evidence and reasons would, if found, constitute the grounds of religious belief.

The philosophical assumption behind the ignoring of religious testimony as begging the question, and the search for external reasons for believing in God, is that one could settle the question of whether there is a God or not without referring to the form of life of which belief in God is a fundamental part. What would it be like for a philosopher to settle the question of the exis­tence of God? Could a philosopher say that he believed that God exists and yet never pray to Him, rebel against Him, lament the fact that he could no longer pray, aspire to deepen his devotion, seek His will, try to hide from Him, or fear and tremble before Him? In short, could a man believe that God exists without his life being touched at all by the belief? Norman Malcolm asks with good reason, 'Would a belief that he exists, if it were completely non-affective, really be a belief that he exists? Would it be anything at all? What is "the form of life" into which it would enter? What difference would it make whether anyone did or did not have this belief?1

Yet many philosophers who search for the grounds of religious belief, claim, to their own satisfaction at least, to understand what a purely theoretical belief in the existence of God would be. But the accounts these philosophers give of what religious believers seem to be saying are often at variance with what many believers say, at least, when they are not philosophizing. Every student of the philosophy of religion will have been struck by the amount of talking at cross purposes within the subject. A philosopher may say that there is no God, but a believer may reply, `You are creating and then attacking a fiction. The god whose existence you deny is not the God I believe in.' Another philosopher may say that religion is meaningless, but another believer may reply, `You say that when applied to God, words such as "exists", "love", "will", etc., do not mean what they signify in certain non-religious contexts. I agree. You conclude from this that religion is meaningless, whereas the truth is that you are failing to grasp the meaning religion has.' Why is there this lack of contact between many philosophers and religious believers? One reason is that many philosophers who do not believe that God exists assume that they know what it means to say that there is a God. Norman Kemp Smith made a penetrating analysis of this fact when commenting on the widespread belief among American philosophers in his day of the uselessness of philosophy of religion.

... those who are of this way of thinking, however they may have thrown over the religious beliefs of the communities in which they have been nurtured, still continue to be influenced by the phraseology of religious devotion - a phraseology which, in its endeavour to be concrete and universally intelligible, is at little pains to guard against the misunderstand­ings to which it may so easily give rise. As they insist upon, and even exaggerate, the merely literal mean­ing of this phraseology, the God in whom they have ceased to believe is a Being whom they picture in an utterly anthropomorphic fashion.2

 

The distinction between religious believers and atheis­tical philosophers is not, of course, as clear-cut as I have suggested. It is all too evident in contemporary philo­sophy of religion that many philosophers who do believe in God philosophize about religion in the way which Kemp Smith found to be true of philosophical non­believers. Here, one can say either that their philosophy reflects their belief, in which case they believe in super­stition but not in God, or, taking the more charitable view, that they are failing to give a good philosophical account of what they really believe.

Insufficient attention has been paid to the question of what kind of philosophical enquiry the concept of divine reality calls for. Many philosophers assume that everyone knows what it means to say that there is a God, and that the only outstanding question is whether there is a God. Similarly, it might be thought, everyone knows what it means to say that there are unicorns, although people may disagree over whether in fact there are any unicorns. If there were an analogy between the existence of God and the existence of unicorns, then coming to see that there is a God would be like coming to see that an additional being exists. `I know what people are doing when they worship,' a philosopher might say. `They praise, they confess, they thank, and they ask for things. The only difference between myself and religious believers is that I do not believe that there is a being who receives their worship.' The assumption, here, is that the meaning of worship is contingently related to the question whether there is a God or not. The assumption might be justified by saying that there need be no consequences of existential beliefs. Just as one can say, `There is a planet Mars, but I couldn't care less,' so one can say, `There is a God, but I couldn't care less.' But what is one saying here when one says that there is a God? Despite the fact that one need take no interest in the existence of a planet, an account could be given of the kind of difference the existence of the planet makes, and of how one could find out whether the planet exists or not. But all this is foreign to the question whether there is a God. That is not something anyone could find out. It has been far too readily assumed that the dispute be­tween the believer and the unbeliever is over a matter of fact. Philosophical reflection on the reality of God then becomes the philosophical reflection appropriate to an assertion of a matter of fact. I have tried to show that this is a misrepresentation of the religious concept, and that philosophy can claim justifiably to show what is meaningful in religion only if it is prepared to examine religious concepts in the contexts from which they derive their meaning.3

A failure to take account of the above context has led some philosophers to ask religious language to satisfy criteria of meaningfulness alien to it. They say that religion must be rational if it is to be intelligible. Certainly, the distinction between the rational and the irrational must be central in any account one gives of meaning. But this is not to say that there is a paradigm of rationality to which all modes of discourse conform. A necessary prolegomenon to the philosophy of religion, then, is to show the diversity of criteria of rationality; to show that the distinction between the real and the unreal does not come to the same thing in every context. If this were observed, one would no longer wish to con­strue God's reality as being that of an existent among existents, an object among objects.

Coming to see that there is a God is not like coming to see that an additional being exists. If it were, there would be an extension of one's knowledge of facts, but no extension of one's understanding. Coming to see that there is a God involves seeing a new meaning in one's life, and being given a new understanding. The Hebrew­-Christian conception of God is not a conception of a be­ing among beings. Kierkegaard emphasized the point when he said bluntly, `God does not exist. He is eternal.' 4

The distinction between eternity and existence has been ignored by many philosophers of religion, and as a result they have singled out particular religious beliefs for discussion, divorcing them from the context of belief in God. Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out the importance of recognizing the need, not simply to discuss specific religious utterances, but to ask why such utterances are called religious in the first place.

 

Those linguistic analysts who have turned their attention to theology have begun to examine in detail particular religious utterances and theological con­cepts. This examination of the logic of religious language has gone with a great variety of religious attitudes on the part of the philosophers concerned. Some have been sceptics, others believers. But what their enterprise has had in common is an examina­tion of particular religious forms of speech and utter­ance, whether such examination has been presented as part of an argument for or as part of an argument against belief. What such examinations may omit is a general consideration of what it means to call a par­ticular assertion or utterance part of a religious belief as distinct from a moral code or a scientific theory.5

 

In his more recent work in the philosophy of religion, MacIntyre has said that the above distinction buys a position at the price of cmptiness,6 but I think his earlier view is the correct one. It stresses the artificiality of separating the love, mercy, or forgiveness of God from His nature. One cannot understand what praising, con­fessing, thanking, or asking mean in worship apart from belief in an eternal God. The eternity of the Being addressed determines the meaning of all these activities. One implication of this fact is that philosophers who do not see anything in belief in God can no longer think of their rejection as the denial of something with which they are familiar. Discovering that belief in God is meaningful is not like establishing that something is the case within a universe of discourse with which we are already familiar. On the contrary, it is to discover that there is a universe of discourse we had been unaware of. The flattering picture that the academic philosopher may have of himself as possessing the key to reality has to be abandoned. The philosopher, like anyone else, may fail to understand what it means to believe in an eternal God.

In saying that one must take account of the concept of the eternal if one wishes to understand various religious activities, I realize that I am laying myself open to all kinds of misunderstandings. Some religious believers, when they have wanted to turn aside the philosopher's questions, have said, `Finite understanding cannot understand the eternal,' or something similar. This is not what I am saying. There is a proper place to say such things, that God is the inexpressible, for example, but that place is within religious belief. These are religious utterances whose meaning is seen in the role they play in the lives of believers. Sometimes, however, the utterances are used as a form of protectionism

against intellectual enquiry. They began as religious utterances, but end up as pseudo-epistemological theories.' When this happens, the philosopher's censure is deserved. In saying that human understanding cannot fathom the eternal, the believer is claiming that there is some higher order of things that transcends all human discourse, that religion expresses `the nature of things'. In saying this, the believer falsifies the facts. Such a position involves upholding what John Anderson calls `a hierarchical doctrine of reality'. Anderson has a power­ful argument against this brand of religious apologetics. He says that to speak in this way

 

... is to speak on behalf of the principle of authority - and so again (whatever the actual power may be that is thus metaphysically bolstered up) to support a low way of living. It is low, in particular, because it is anti-intellectual, because it is necessarily dogmatic. Some account can be given of the relation of a particular `rule' or way of behaving to a certain way of life, but it can have no demonstrable relation to `the nature of things'. To say that something is required by the nature of things is just to say that it is required - to say, without reason, that it `is to be done'; and, as soon as any specification is attempted, the whole structure breaks down. If, for example, we are told to do something because God commands us to do so, we can immediately ask why we should do what God commands - and any intelligible answer brings us back to human relationships, to the struggle between opposing movements."

 

I should like to make it quite clear that I agree with Anderson in the above criticism. In speaking of religion as turning away from the temporal towards the eternal, I am not putting forward any kind of epistemological thesis. On the contrary, I am referring to the way in which the concept of the eternal does play a role in very many human relationships. I am anxious to show that religion is not some kind of technical discourse or esoteric pursuit cut off from the ordinary problems and perplexities, hopes, and joys which most of us experience at some time or other. If it were, it would not have the importance it does have for so many people. By con­sidering one example in detail - namely, eternal love or the love of God - I shall try to show what significance it has in human experience, the kind of circumstances which occasion it, and the kind of human predicament it answers. By so doing I hope to illustrate how seeing that there is a God in this context is synonymous with seeing the possibility of eternal love.9

Let me begin by speaking of a distinction with which we are all familiar : the distinction between mine and yours. The distinction is relevant to the concept of justice. If I take what is yours, or if you take what is mine, justice is thereby transgressed against. Our rela­tionships with other people are pervaded by a wide range of rights and obligations, many of which serve to emphasize the distinction between mine and yours. But all human relationships are not like this. In erotic love and in friendship, the distinction between mine and yours is broken down. The lovers or the friends may say, `All I have is his, and what is his is mine.' Kierkegaard says that the distinction between mine and yours has been transformed by a relationship in which the key term is ours. Nevertheless, he goes on to show that the mine/yours distinction is not completely transformed by such relationships, since the ours now functions as a new mine for the partners in the relationships. The distinguishing factor in the mine/yours distinction is now the relation of erotic love or friendship as opposed to the self-love which prevailed previously. Mine and yours now refer to those who are within and to those who are outside the specific relationship.

Now, Christianity wishes to speak of a kind of love which is such that no man is excluded from it. It calls this love `love of one's neighbour'. What is more, it claims that this love is internally related to the love of God; that is, that without knowing what this love is, one cannot know what the love of God is either. An attempt to elucidate what is meant by love of the neighbour will therefore be an attempt to elucidate what is meant by the love of God.

If one considers self-love in its simplest form - namely, as the desire to possess the maximum of what one considers to be good for oneself - it is easy enough to imagine conditions in which such love could be thwar­ted. War, famine, or some other natural disaster might upset the normal conditions in which rights and obligations operate. Even given such conditions, the self-lover's ambitions may be thwarted by the greater ingenuity of his competitors. Sooner or later he may be forced to realize that the minimum rather than the maximum is going to be his lot. Self-love might be called temporal love in so far as it depends on states of affairs contingently related to itself. If a man's life revolves around self-love, it is obvious that he is forever dependent on the way things go, since it is the way things go that determines whether his self-love is satisfied or not.

It might be thought that erotic love and friendship avoid the predicament of self-love outlined above. The lovers or the friends may say to one another, `Come what may, we still have each other.' such reliance shows that this love too is temporal; it depends on certain states of affairs being realized. To begin with, the point of such love depends on the existence of the other. Often, when the lovers or the friends love each other very much, the death of the beloved can rob life of its meaning; for what is love without the beloved? Again, erotic love and friendship depend on the unchangeability of the beloved. But the beloved may change. Friendship can cool, and love can fade. If the relationship is such that it depended on reciprocation, then a change in the beloved or in the friend may rob it of its point. So although erotic love and friendship are far removed from self-love, they too are forms of tem­poral love in so far as they are dependent on how things go.

Temporal love, then, is marked by certain characteristics: it depends on how things go, it may change, and it may end in failure. Eternal love, it is said, is not dependent on how things go, it cannot change, and it cannot suffer defeat. One must not think that this contrast presents the believer with an either/or. He is not asked to choose between loving God on the one hand and loving the loved one on the other. What he is asked to do is not to love the loved one in such a way that the love of God becomes impossible. The death of the beloved must not rob life of its meaning, since for the believer the meaning of life is found in God. The believer claims that there is a love that will not let one go whatever happens. This is the love of God, the independence of which from what happens is closely bound up with the point of calling it eternal.

The object of Christian love is the neighbour. But who is the neighbour? The neighbour is every man. The obligation to love the neighbour does not depend on the particularity of the relationship, as in the case of the love which exists between parents and children, lovers or friends. The neighbour is not loved because of his being a parent, lover, or friend, but simply because of his being. In relation to the agent, the love takes the form of self-renunciation. In this self-renunciation, man discovers the Spirit of God. Consider how love of the neighbour exhibits the three characteristics I men­tioned earlier: independence of the way things go, unchangeability, and immunity from defeat. Kierke­gaard brings out the contrast between love of one's neighbour on the one hand, and erotic love and friend­ship on the other, in these terms.

The beloved can treat you in such a way that he is lost to you, and you can lose a friend, but whatever a neighbour does to you, you can never lose him. To be sure, you can also continue to love your beloved and your friend no matter how they treat you, but you cannot truthfully continue to call them beloved and friend when they, sorry to say, have really changed. No change, however, can take your neighbour from you, for it is not your neighbour who holds you fast - it is your love which holds your neighbour fast.10

For someone with eyes only for the prudential, and common-sense considerations, the love which Kierke­gaard is talking about seems to lead inevitably to self-­deception, and to a kind of foolishness. On the contrary, Kierkegaard argues, eternal love is precisely the only kind of love which can never deceive one. After a certain stage of unrequited love, no one could be blamed for saying, `The lover has deceived me.' It becomes intel­ligible and justifiable to say this because the love in question does not have much point without some degree of reciprocation. At first sight it looks as if the same conclusions apply to love of one's neighbour. But eternal love believes all things, and yet is never deceived! Ordinarily speaking, we say that only a fool believes all things; only a man who ignores the odds could be so stupid. Yet, Christianity says that eternal love cannot be deceived, for if a believer is wrong about a man but continues to love him, in what sense is he deceived? True, one can enumerate all the ways in which obvious deceptions have taken place: loans unreturned, pro­mises broken, trusts betrayed, etc., but the believer continues to love the neighbour despite all this. Those who see little in the love of the neighbour will say, especially if the believer is reduced to a state which many would call ruin, that the believer has lost all. On the contrary, Kierkegaard tells us, the believer, in the act of self­ renunciation, possesses all; he possesses love. To possess this love is to possess God. Indeed, the only way in which the believer can be deceived is by ceasing to love. Ordinarily, when we say, `I shall show no more love towards him,' we envisage the loss as suffered by the person who is the object of one's love. But if the believer says, `I shall love the neighbour no longer,' he is the victim of deception, since the loss of loving is his loss too. Kierkegaard brings this point out very clearly:

When someone says, `I have given up my love for this man,' he thinks that it is this person who loses, this person who was the object of his love. The speaker thinks that he himself possesses his love in the same sense as when one who has supported another financially says, `I have quit giving assistance to him.' In this case the giver keeps for himself the money which the other previously received, he who is the loser, for the giver is certainly far from losing by this financial shift. But it is not like this with love; perhaps the one who was the object of love does lose, but he who `has given up his love for this man' is the loser. Maybe he does not detect this himself; perhaps he does not detect that the language mocks him, for he says explicitly, `I have given up my love.' But if he has given up his love, he has then ceased to be loving. True enough, he adds `my love for this man', but this does not help when love is involved, although in money matters one can manage things this way with­out loss to oneself. The adjective loving does not apply to me when I have given up my love `for this man' - alas, even though I perhaps imagined that he was the one who lost. It is the same with despairing over another person; it is oneself who is in despair.11

In this way, Kierkegaard illustrates the truth that for the believer, love itself is the real object of the relation­ship between himself and another person. This love is the Spirit of God, and to possess it is to walk with God. Once this is realized, one can see how love and under­standing are equated in Christianity. To know God is to love Him. There is no theoretical understanding of the reality of God.

If anyone thinks he is a Christian and yet is indifferent towards his being a Christian, then he really is not one at all. What would we think of a man who affirmed that he was in love and also that it was a matter of indifference to him ?12

`But, so far,' the non-believer might complain, `you have simply concealed the advantage entailed in religion, namely, God's love for the sinner. Is not this the reason for love of the neighbour? Unless one loves the neighbour, God will not love one.' There is truth in this unless, but not as conceived in the above objection. The love of the neighbour is not the means whereby a further end is realized - namely, one's own forgiveness. On the contrary, there is an internal relation between forgiving another and being forgiven oneself. I cannot hope to emulate Kierkegaard's analysis of this religious truth, so I must ask the reader to forgive a final quota­tion of two passages where his analysis is particularly forceful:

When we say, `Love saves from death,' there is straightway a reduplication in thought: the lover saves another human being from death, and in entirely the same or yet in a different sense he saves himself from death. This he does at the same time; it is one and the same; he does not save the other at one moment and at another save himself, but in the moment he saves the other he saves himself from death. Only love never thinks about the latter, about saving oneself, about acquiring confidence itself; the lover in love thinks only about giving confidence and saving another from death. But the lover is not thereby forgotten. No, he who in love forgets himself, forgets his sufferings in order to think of another's, forgets all his wretchedness in order to think of another's, forgets what he himself loses in order lovingly to con­sider another's loss, forgets his advantage in order lovingly to look after another's advantage : truly, such a person is not forgotten. There is one who thinks of him, God in heaven; or love thinks of him. God is love, and when a human being because of love forgets himself, how then should God forget him! No, while the lover forgets himself and thinks of the other person, God thinks of the lover. The self-lover is busy; he shouts and complains and insists on his rights in order to make sure he is not forgotten - and yet he is forgotten. But the lover, who forgets himself, is remembered by love. There is one who thinks of him, and in this way it comes about that the lover gets what he gives.13

And again :

`Forgive, and you will also be forgiven.' Meanwhile, one might nevertheless manage to understand these words in such a way that he imagined it possible to receive forgiveness without his forgiving. Truly this is a mis­understanding. Christianity's view is: forgiveness is forgiveness: your forgiveness is your forgiveness; your forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness : the forgiveness which you give you receive, not contrari­wise that you give the forgiveness which you receive. It is as if Christianity would say: pray to God humbly and believing in your forgiveness, for he really is compassionate in such a way as no human being is; but if you will test how it is with respect to the for­giveness, then observe yourself. If honestly before God you wholeheartedly forgive your enemy (but remember that if you do, God sees it), then you dare hope also for your forgiveness, for it is one and the same. God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive your trespassers. It is only an illusion to imagine that one himself has for­giveness, although one is slack in forgiving others. 14

My purpose in discussing the Christian concept of love was to show how coming to see the possibility of such love amounts to the same thing as coming to see the possibility of belief in God. As I said earlier, to know God is to love Him, and the understanding which such knowledge brings is the understanding of love. Belief, understanding, and love can all be equated with each other in this context. There are, however, certain objections which can be made against this conclusion. Before ending, I want to consider one of the strongest of these made recently by Alasdair MacIntyre:

And if the believer wishes to he can always claim that we can only disagree with him because we do not understand him. But the implications of this defence of belief are more fatal to it than any attack could be. 15

One of the fatal implications of identifying under­standing and believing, according to Maclntyre, is that one can no longer give an intelligible account of a rejection of religious belief. MacIntyre says that the Protestant who claims that grace is necessary before one can possess religious understanding is soon convicted of paradox.

For the Protestant will elsewhere deny what is entailed by his position, namely that nobody ever rejects Christianity (since anyone who thinks he has

rejected it must have lacked saving grace and so did not understand Christianity and so in fact rejected something else)."

Does MacIntyre's point hold for any identification of understanding and believing? I suggest not. To begin with, there is a perfectly natural use of the word rejection which is connected with the inability of the person who rejects to make any sense of what is rejected. I can see no objection to saying that the man who says that religion means nothing to him rejects the claims of religion on his life. Apparently, when Oscar Wilde was accused of blasphemy during his trial, he replied `Sir, blasphemy is a word I never use.' Wilde is rejecting a certain way of talking. Similarly, the man who says, `Religion is mumbo jumbo as far as I am concerned,' is making a wholesale rejection of a way of talking or a way of life. That way of talking and that way of life mean nothing to him, but this does not mean that he cannot reject them.

On the other hand, I agree with MacIntyre that there are difficulties involved in the view I wish to maintain if the rejection of religion in question is not the rejection of the meaningless, but rebellion against God. Camus says of the rebel:

The rebel defies more than he denies. Originally, at least, he does not deny God, he simply talks to Him as an equal. But it is not a polite dialogue. It is a polemic animated by the desire to conquer."

But if the rebel knows God and yet defies Him, how can one say that to know God is to love Him? Clearly, some kind of modification of my thesis is called for. I

agree. But what is not called for is a denial of the ' identification of belief and understanding in religion. ; The fact of rebellion makes one think otherwise because ; of a false and unnecessary assimilation of `I believe in ' God' to `I believe in John'. Belief in God has a wider range of application than belief in another person. This. point has been made very clearly by Norman Malcolm:

 

Belief in a person primarily connotes trust or faith: but this is not so of belief in God. A man could properly be said to believe in God whose chief attitude towards God was fear. ('A sword is sent upon you, and who may turn it back?') But if you were enormously afraid of another human being you could not be said to believe in him. At least you would not believe in him in so far as you were afraid of him: whereas the fear of God is one form of belief in Him.

I am suggesting that belief-in has a wider meaning when God is the object of it than when a human being is. Belief in God encompasses not only trust but also awe, dread, dismay, resentment, and perhaps even hatred. Belief in God will involve some affective state or attitude, having God as its object, and those attitudes could vary from reverential love to rebellious rejection."

I should still want to argue, however, that the love of God is the primary form of belief in God if only because the intelligibility of all the other attitudes Malcolm mentions is logically dependent on it. The rebel must see the kind of relationship God asks of the believer before he can reject and defy it. He sees the story from the inside, but it is not a story that captivates him. The love of God is active in his life, but in him it evokes

hatred. To say that he does not believe in God is absurd, for whom does he hate if not God?

Similar difficulties to those mentioned by MacIntyre might be thought to arise in giving an account of seeking for God. If one must believe before one can know God, how can one know that it is God one is seeking for? The answer to this difficulty has been given by Pascal: `Comfort yourself, you would not seek me if you had not found me.' One must not think of belief in God as an all-­or-nothing affair. Whether the love of God means any­thing in a man's 'life can be assessed, not simply by his attainments, but also by his aspirations. So even if a man does not actually love God, his understanding of what it means to love God can be shown by his aspirations towards such love.

On the other hand, it would be a mistake to conclude that in the absence of religious attainments only religious aspirations could be the sign that religion held some meaning for a person. We have seen already in the case of the rebel that belief in God need not entail a worship­ful attitude on the part of the believer. Neither need the believer aspire to attain love of God. On the contrary, he may want to flee from it. Instead of feeling sad because he spurns God's love, he may hate the fact that he cannot rid his life of God. If someone were to say to him, `You do not believe in God', he might reply, `How can you say that when God will not leave me alone?'

What, then, are our conclusions? The assertion that to know God is to love Him is false if it is taken to imply that everyone who believes in God loves Him. What it stresses, quite correctly, is that there is no theoretical knowledge of God. As Malcolm said, `belief in God involves some affective state or attitude'. I think that love of God is fundamental in religion, since all other attitudes can be explained by reference to it. I believe that Kierkegaard says somewhere that in relation to God there are only lovers - happy or unhappy - but lovers. The unhappy or unruly lover has an under­standing of what it means to believe in God as well as the happy lover. The man who construes religious belief as a theoretical affair distorts it. Kierkegaard emphasizes that there is no understanding of religion without passion. And when the philosopher under­stands that, his understanding of religion is incompatible with scepticism.

References

1. `Is it a Religious Belief that "God Exists"?' in Faith and the Philosophers, ed. John Hick, London, 1964, 107.

 2. `Is Divine Existence Credible?' in Religion and Understanding, ed. D. Z. Phillips, Blackwell, 1967, 105-6.

 3. See pages 1-5 of the previous chapter.

4. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 296.

5. `The Logical Status of Religious Belief', in Metaphysical Beliefs, ed. A. MacIntyre, London, 1957, 172.

6. See `Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?' in Faith and the Philosophers, ed. John Hick, London, 1964.

7. See ch. V.

8. Art and Morality', Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philo­sophy, XIX (December, 1941), 256-7.

9. Anyone acquainted with Kierkegaard's Works of Love will recognize in what follows how dependent I am on the second part of that work.

10. Op. cit., 76.