a picture held us captive

“The truth was that life is meaningless.” [link to full text]

A Confession by Leo Tolstoy is perhaps the ultimate existential crisis kind of book. It is so blunt, so simple.

I will die, am forgotten. Life is only meaningful if it has an infinite meaning, if my life matters for the whole of time.  Therefore: nothing matters. All my acts crumble into the nothingness of time.

Given these conditions of life, the only options are suicide, for which Tolstoy seems luckily not to have had the nerve, or religious faith.

But faith means relinquishing reason, and he only reached the conclusion that faith was needed by being rational. Therefore: having faith on purpose is hard.

Reading this starter pack on the meaning of life is a fantastic thing. It is the perfect characterisation of the argument, the chasey of a big clunking error, the pitfalls for all to see.

“What meaning has my finite life in an infinite universe?”

Well none at all Mr Tolstoy, but what meaning does the infinitude of the universe have to a finite human life? Only that which it is given, surely.

So when Tolstoy says:

Where there is life there is faith. Since the day of creation, faith has made it possible for mankind to live.

he is both right and wrong.

Because it is true that the objective mind-independent world is devoid of meaning. It just is. And it is true that we create meaning ourselves as human beings by a process which you could call faith, although the term is probably misleading. Our lives are only meaningful because of the narrative, culture, relationships, society we live within, and all these are supported only by our taking them to be so.

But it is also true that religious faith puts life in the context of infinity, of an endless life after death, of the ultimate right and wrong thing to do. Religious faith creates these ideas, and without religious faith they would not exist. You can see it either as a foundation or as an opiate, but to assume the context is an error. There are obviously other options than faith or death.

Where Tolstoy is right is when he warns us about the fragility of faith. For as hard as you try you cannot teach yourself faith. It requires a forgetting of the origin of the story, and who can forget a tale they have made up themselves?

If I were not so frightened it would be amusing to observe the pride and complacency with which we, like children taking apart a watch, pull out the spring and make a toy of it [faith] and are then surprised when it stops working.

…

It is both valuable and necessary to have a solution to the contradiction between the finite and the infinite…the one solution…is the solution that has been passed down to us from times we have lost all record of.

It is such a difficult solution that we would be unable to devise anything like it. It is a solution that we casually destroy so that we may yet again pose the question that confronts us all, and for which we do not have an answer.

The concepts of an infinite god, the sanctity of the soul, he relationship between god and the affairs of man, of moral good and evil, are all concepts that have been worked out in history, through the life of a humanity that is hidden to us.

…

To know god and to live are one and the same. God is life.