If we were vampires and death was a joke
We'd go out on the sidewalk and smoke
And laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn't feel the need to hold your hand
Maybe time running out is a gift
I'll work hard 'til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn't me who's left behind
Jason Isbell
I know the reason why you think you gotta leave
Promises of future glory don't make a case for me
I did my best and all the rest is hidden by the clouds
I can't carry you forever, but I can hold you now
Vampire Weekend
Both of the songs referenced above focus on the relationship between finitude and the possibility of love. If we were eternal, would we truly care about anything? If our lives were a never ending groundhog day, where time is not a concern and everything remains the same—how would we live? Would it be possible to love? This is the focus of Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. He opens the introduction by talking about the conditions of his own life conditioned by geography and family history, and at the same time open to an uncertain future. It is a life framed by death—the things we care about are fragile because our life has an end.
For Hägglund this isn’t something to escape from, it is a reality to be embraced. Finitude establishes the conditions for love, beauty, and goodness even as it opens us to the inevitability of suffering and loss. In fact, these are necessarily two sides of the same finite life—there is no love with suffering. For many people, religious faith is an attempt to short circuit the inevitability of death and loss. For the religious, faith in the eternal or a belief in an afterlife is what gives life meaning. The flow of temporal time that causes change and loss is mitigated by a belief in eternal life or an eternal state beyond this life. In This Life, Hägglund refutes this, arguing that such an appeal to the eternal does not give meaning, it strips is away. It prevents us from fully experiencing what it means to love something or someone, as we are able to hold back. We assure ourselves that we will see our loved ones again, which means we don’t have to fully commit—we don’t have to fully grieve. Hägglund writes,
An eternal life is not only unattainable but also undesirable, since it would eliminate the care and passion that animate my life…Concern presupposed that something can go wrong or can be lost; otherwise we would not care. An eternal activity—just as much as an eternal rest—is of concern to no one, since it cannot be stopped and does not have to be maintained by anyone. (4)
He goes on to argue that eternity is what renders life meaningless because our actions have no purpose. He argues that the fundamental question about what we should do with our lives “presupposes that I understand my time to be finite.” Thus, to truly embrace life, to care about this life, is to commit to finitude. This commitment is what he calls “secular faith”. He sets this version of faith over and against “religious faith” that grounds meaning and purpose in a transcendent eternity. He writes:
Form a religious perspective, our finitude is seen as a lamentable condition that ideally should be overcome. This is the premise with which I take issue. I seek to show that any life worth living must be finite and requires secular faith. (p.6)
In This Life Hägglund takes on Augustine and Kierkegaard, while exploring how the thinking of such figures as Heidegger and Marx create the conditions for secular faith as a foundation for political life. For now, I’m intrigued by his premise that only secular faith can provide foundation for meaning and care in this finite life. What draws me to his version of secular faith is the way it pushes us back into our material, finite, lives. He calls us to embrace our weakness and fragility as we embrace the anxiety that comes with not knowing where life will lead. In many ways, his critique of religious faith is a familiar one—an over emphasis on transcendence causes us to abandon created life for some abstract eternity somewhere out there. This version of religious faith sees salvation as an escape from finite life in that it frees us from true concern. This can be seen in the way religious faith can short circuit our grief when we lose something or someone important. Thus, Hägglund’s argument for “secular faith” is an affirmation of this finite, material, life.
At the same time, as a Christian, I wonder if faith in God (as opposed to religion) is really at odds with this type of love and concern. Is it possible the religious faith he describes, though very real, is a distortion of Christian faith? What if the transcendence at the heart of Christian faith isn’t eternity in the Platonic sense, but something grounded in relationality and personhood? To explore this further I need to bring various theological perspectives into conversation with Hägglund’s work. Two in particular: St. Francis of Assisi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In doing so I hope to show how love and concern for human finitude radiates with traces of the God revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.