Rediscovering Reverence: The Meaning of Faith in a Secular World by Ralph Heintzman (review)

Ralph Heintzman addresses a profound misunderstanding that persons in modern secular cultures have concerning the essential nature of religion, a misunderstanding that lies at the root of the tendency to characterize religion as irrational and, indeed, to even deprecate its legitimacy. Rediscovering Reverence is an extended argument against this characterization or, better, an argument in favour of the rationality and legitimacy of religion – properly understood.

The modern propensity to regard religion as irrational, if not anti-rational, is in large part the result of the dominance of the basic human propensity for what he calls the ‘virtue of self-assertion,’ together with the denigration of another basic human virtue: reverence. Nonetheless, Heintzman does not pursue a comparable denigration of modernity. His thesis is that human beings are essentially self-assertive and reverent.

Self-assertion is exhibited in the various forms that it takes, especially in secular modernity. Among these is the dominant valuation of the autonomous and rational individual, with scientific reason taken to be paradigmatic. Generally it is the basic human propensity to resist being assimilated into anything that would deny the power and scope of one’s own autonomy and rationality or negate self-seeking and self-expression. While the virtue of self-assertion has always been present in human nature and life, it seems to be dominant in the modern world, including various ‘religious’ distortions of the fundamental nature of religion: reverence.

The author argues that reverence is also a basic human need: to experience and participate in something greater than our individual selves, actively acknowledging a transcendent ‘more’ to which we belong and within which we live. Whereas self-assertive individualism separates us, reverence brings us into that which unifies us with one another and with the world of nature, which itself points to an all-embracing spiritual presence. The reverential attitude is to see and treat all this as sacred.

Heintzman points out that while there is a tension between the two virtues, they involve different ways of thinking and understanding, and they therefore address two different kinds of human needs and questions: the one kind seeking to understand the physical world and ways of using this knowledge in better technologies and the enhancement of life; the other seeking answers that lie beyond the scope of science, questions of meaning and purpose, questions of what Paul Tillich called ‘ultimate concern.’ Building upon the medieval view – and contrary to the supposition of modern scientific secularity – Heintzman argues that authentic religion has always insisted that both kinds of questions and the kinds of answers they seek are legitimate and necessary. Reason and revelation are not incompatible; they are complementary virtues.

If the modern malady is the loss of reverence, the cure is rediscovering it. The key is reverential activities that engage us with the communality of persons and that of persons with the rest of nature and beyond; but important also are religious activities such as praying, participating in acts of worship, and coming to appreciate religious language and symbols as expressions of the sacred. As Heintzman points out, premodern cultures supported and encouraged living a reverential life. However, because the secular culture discourages such ventures of faith, they require more of an effort today.

Rediscovering Reverence is an extended apology for religion (or spirituality), but not for any particular religious tradition. Heintzman’s point has to do with what it is that lies at the heart of all of them: reverence. Thus not only is his book non-sectarian, if anything it is anti-sectarian, criticizing the substitution of objectifying, self-assertive, and sectarian beliefs for active reverential faith.

He provides many references to outstanding representatives of all the major religious traditions, and philosophical thinkers from the classical through the modern ages, as well as enlisting – and criticizing – viewpoints from sociology and psychology. While acquaintance with those thinkers will enhance one’s appreciation of the points he makes, this is by no means necessary...