Protestantism and Repression, Religion and Desire
In the early 1980s, after having earlier rejected his faith of origin and, then in turn, having rejected the self-identified “dualism” or “new fundamentalism” expressed in his liberationist faith, Alves decided to take a detour. He would revisit that fundamentalism of his youth as an academic task, and he would write a bit of an alternative to these dueling dualisms. The first task he tackled in his book, Protestantism and Repression. The second emerged subtly in What is Religion?
In his 1981/1984 (Portuguese/English) work What is Religion?, Alves offers a presentation of religion that is both anti-dogmatic, as well as un-dogmatic, to the core. Here, for Alves, faith and hope are nearly one in the same. Hope, again, has to do with desire. Yet there is a departure from Alves’ first works.
In 1972, Alves held that hope “is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress is not the last word. Itis the suspicion that Reality is much more complex than realism wants us to believe; that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual, and that in a miraculous and unexpected way life is preparing the creative event which will open the way to freedom and resurrection.”
In this sense of hope, there is in Alves a conviction and even a defiance tied to emotion—and still something (if only traces) of belief. Further, faith here is to be moved (emotionally and physically) by such convicted, believing, and defiant hope: “Hope is to hear the melody of the future, and faith is to dance to it.” There is something contained in faith of premonition, conviction, and rebellion. But in What is Religion?, faith for Alves appears to become less of a convicted belief, and more of a desiring risk: “And the reader, perplexed, in search of a final certainty asks, "But does God exist? Does life have a meaning? Does the universe have a face? Is death my sister?” to which the religious soul could only reply: “I do not know. But I ardently desire that it be true. And I make the leap unreservedly. For it is more beautiful to risk on the side of hope than to have certainty on the side of a cold and senseless universe.
“It is more beautiful to risk on the side of hope than to be certain on the side of a cold and senseless world.” It is subtle, but by the 1980s, as he slowly trades in the theological for the theopoetical, presentiment for the moment (the not quite certain hunch) becomes outweighed by the wager (that which we bet on—and live by—not because we fear risking hell with Pascal, but simply because we wish the contents of faith to be true, because to us it is beautiful). Belief in gods is traded for the desire that a god might exist and that the world might be kind. “Prayer is the sacred name that we utter before the Void.”
In Protestantism and Repression, after hundreds of pages of describing what Alves sees as the problem with fundamentalism in Brazil, Alves finally concludes, “Is there a way out? I don’t know. [It seems to me that] those who already possess the truth [those who claim to be certain] are destined to become inquisitors. Those who have only doubts are predestined to tolerance and perhaps to burning at the stake. That is why I see only one way out. We must consciously and deliberately reject truth and certainty before they take possession of us. We must make our own the sentiments of Lessing: [choose striving toward truth and never truth itself].”
Alves becomes anti-dogmatic and poetic not because of a disdain for theological constructs. They had helped him survive some very difficult years. Rather, he becomes anti-dogmatic because, in his experience, rigid theological constructs were quite literally harmful to the bodies of believers, and became weapons in the hands of corrupt (and even well-meaning) authorities. Ultimately, they led not to freedom, but instead became the opium den of the enslaved. They encouraged that even the most persecuted become “saved” and thereby better adjusted to the feeling of their chains, believing that their prize was in the blessed beyond.
~Thomas R. Gaulke, "Hope in the Key of Saudade," An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021), 65-67.
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