John C. Merkle rehashes Abraham Heschel’s theology and covers such things as becoming aware of the divine through the sublime, the inadequacy of human perception and senses, the non-physical nature of the divine. Merkle strays from Heschel theology by introducing a non-Heschelian idea of grace into his ideas and he also uses the example of love as an example of the sublime.
Human beings have an innate predisposition to want to know about things beyond themselves; we question what is our greater meaning (Merkle 366). You could not ask questions about the world if it didn't exist, that's obvious. Heschel argues that you could not ask questions about greater meaning if a greater meaning did not exist because, “to sense the sublime is to perceive the sublime, not merely to conceive of it” (Merkle 369). The argument is not particularly strong because it makes an appeal to an abstract quasi-sensory and/or emotional feeling. Heschel, I’d imagine, would say that I am in no position to critique his claims from a scholastic point of view. In his work God in Search of Man Heschel says that religious beliefs are some what like a living being and when one tries to take them apart philosophically you lose a lot because when you do so you remove the ideas of faith from the moments of faith and, according to Heschel, if you try to study one without the other you will fail (Heschel 8).
However because I do not have access to a pious man and I am required to do so I will dredge forward but instead of critiquing Merkle or Heschel I will try to put myself in dialog with them through their work and my writing. To me the most obvious rebuttal to the argument that supposedly perceiving the sublime means that a higher reality exist is the Kantian notion of thinking you have a 100 dollars doesn't mean you have 100 dollars. And a Heschelian rebuttal would be that it is not human nature to think you have 100 dollars, but the notion that there is something greater than ourselves is a universal precept found in all cultures, at all times, and in all places (Heschel 152). And, that even people of science and reason are trying to find a greater meaning or the purpose of being human (Heschel 153). The argument is that it is an unavoidable presupposition that's part of being human (Merkle 371). But why do we have this presupposition?
The answer is the sublime. What is the sublime exactly? The sublime, according to Heschel is a silent allusion of things to something greater than themselves (Merkle 369). Of importance here is the notion of "silent allusion". Silent denotes that it is not readily perceived, and is actually not sensory at all, which is why two people could look at the same thing but only one of them would be able to perceive the sublimity of it (Merkle 369). And allusion points out that this sublimity is not an ultimate reality unto itself but instead points to the ultimate reality (Merkle 369). That is to contrast this position with a pantheism where God could be said to be "in" the sublime or creation could be a "self-expression" of God because that would imply that the sublime things share in the ultimate reality. The appropriate quote here comes from Heschel’s work Man’s Quest for God, "The world speaks to God, but that speech is not speaking to Himself”.
Heschel says that every human surrenders to an ultimate reality because there is no purpose in living without an ultimate reality (Merkle 368). We do this in one of three ways according to Heschel and Merkle: we can accept God as the ultimate reality, we can give ourselves over to a non-sufficient ultimate reality, or we can just deny intellectually that there is an ultimate reality but even if we deny it that doesn't make us immune to the fact that there is an ultimate reality (Heschel 154,155).
One of the insufficient answers to the question of ultimate reality, Heschel classifies as being false idols (Heschel 152). According to Heschel most people have false idols in their life. One of the most popular false idols, according to Heschel, is to believe that science has all the answers. Heschel and Merkle attack this notion by attacking the premise that science is based on, observation. Heschel argues that observation is an insufficient tool to use to measure reality and to prove his point Heschel makes a distinction between being the "living encounter" of reality and of "insight" (Heschel 116).
Heschel argues that the "living encounter" of reality is immediate, preconceptional, and presymbolic" (Heschel 115). An insight that may have been a few decades ahead of his time because I've recently read a book by Donald Norman that argues that our brains start to react to things on a chemical level a very considerable time before we start to make rational thinking ideas about what we're perceiving (Donald Norman's Emotional Design).
The way we experience the world through living encounters is a flood of input. Of all the things bombarding our senses at any one moment we are only processing a very small amount of that stimuli.
Of the stimuli we do process we then use that information for the "insight" part of thinking. When we conceptualize and verbalize our experiences they diminish. You can't possibly explain to another human being every detail and aspect of an experience you had. Notice too that of that experience you had you only possesses some of the stimuli of it to begin with. So the whole processes of experiencing things, conceptualizing them, and then putting them into words is a process of considerable degradation. This is why science and reason are unsatisfactory answers for ultimate reality, according to Heschel.
Another issue of faith in Heschel's writing is that of being aware of the sublime as being an antecedent, or prerequisite, for faith. But before I delve into this I think it's important to make a point here about "grace". Heschel didn't believe in the traditional notion of Christian grace, in that he didn't believe that faith was something one could tap into at any time and that it came as a "free gift" from God. Faith does come from God but people that deserve it earn it and you have to work extremely hard, for a long time, to acquire a suitable amount of it (Heschel 154). And once you get faith you must work to keep it or you can lose it. However Heschel also states that everybody has a little bit of faith that of which they cannot get rid.
Recall earlier when we covered how you only sense a small percent of the stimuli perceived is analyzed by the brain? The fact that there is so much stimuli that you are unable to perceive is an example of the sublime according to Heschel (Heschel 156). The sublime is the mystery of what we cannot perceive. The sublime is what is hidden. It is recognizing that the sublime is beyond us and not understood and not easily understood is one of the first steps towards worship (Heschel 156).
Actually the very act of thinking there is something greater than one's self is, according to Heschel, an act of worship (Merkle 369). So by merely pondering about if there is or is not a larger reality that humans are a part of or if there is or is not a god is worshiping God, again according to Heschel.
Extending to it's logical extreme even people that devote themselves over to a life of science and actively use science to discount God are still worshiping God because their career as a scientist is a testimony to the fact that there is a larger reality to the universe and they're trying to figure it out. An objection somebody could raise to this argument is that it is non-falsifiable, however I doubt Heschel and Merkle would have cared in the slightest because recall that according to them you cannot extract the religious experience from the religious claims and claim to have a grasp or understanding of the religion.
One place where Merkle and Heschel differ is over two things. Firstly Merkle uses words like faith and grace in a way that isn’t consistent with Heschel’s philosophy. Merkle argues that we become aware the sublime by simultaneously recognizing that it comes from God. However Heschel makes the distinction that you can perceive the sublime even if you do not believe in God and that you start to worship before you believe. For Heschel worship is a two-part thing, the first part is visceral and happens without your control and the second part is conscious. The visceral worship, argues Heschel, is human nature and can’t be avoided (Heschel 156,157).
Heschel’s and Merkle’s arguments are designed for people to already believe, many of the points they make appeal to one’s emotions or intuition but they make many assumptions that they assert to be plainly true. The weakest claim is that there must be a transcendent meaning to reality because we sense the sublime, although Heschel spends a lot of time and effort explaining what the sublime is, nothing effable is said about it. We know that, according to Heschel, the sublime is perceived with, through, and beyond the senses but I don’t really think that tells us anything. I think I have an idea of what Heschel are Merkle are talking about however I too am at a loss to put it in effable words.
I don’t think Heschel or Merkle would cede the point that what they claim is sublimity is something else or even worse is something that can be totally explained by neuroscience because they are making a case for the transcendent reality that is God and that all of creation is an allusion to God but is not in-and-of-itself a part of God.
Works Cited
Heschel, Abraham J. God in Search of Man: a Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955.
Merkle, John C. "The Sublime, the Human, and the Divine in the Depth-Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel." The Journal of Religion 58 (1978): 365-379. JSTOR. JSTOR.Com. 31 Mar. 2008 <http://jstor.org/stable/1201471>.
Norman, Donald. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Jackson, TN: Basic Books, 203.
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