"Pious Impiety"

“Inasmuch as every conviction, even a negative one, and every form of free thinking is still a superstition, it is no wonder, then, that criticism always pushes its point forward.”
- Action (1893) by Maurice Blondel, pg. 294

“It is a great service to man, the greatest of all, to cause all superstitions to vanish from before his eyes successively, but in order to obtain in him the pure sense of religious expectation. How important it is not to let fall by the wayside the benefit of relentless Criticism, not to let the great flow of the mysticism that is rising again in our day deviate, not to let the effort of doubtlessly sincere generosity fall back on the emptiness of illusory satisfactions that would hold back wills and abort their élan! In the work of destructive thought, there is a profound religious sense. Hence, instead of repressing this movement, we must with all our might keep it from stopping prematurely. Nothing is more true, nothing is more necessary than to look, almost to the point of pride and naïveté, upon the metaphysician fascinated with his constructions (the Thomist/Neo-Scholastic), upon the artist in love with his work (the Romantic), the devotee of the moral ideal (the Kantian), or the apostle of action for the sake of action (the Humanist), as savage fetishists (Overt Idolaters): each instance it is the same pretention and the same presumption. All are equally persuaded they can make their god without God. To lay bare the nothingness of such human effort is to do a work of pious impiety.“
- Action (1893) by Maurice Blondel, pg. 296

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I love this notion of “Pious Impiety.” When we construe faith as somehow deciding that at some point we must stop asking questions, we fall immediately to superstition. We come to set up some object (the Bible-as-object or theology-as-propositions) as being equal to our infinite desire, to our infinite will. We burden some finite object (in the world or in thought) with the weight of the infinite, which of course it cannot bear and with which we most fundamentally will not be satisfied. This is such a common and disheartening religious superstition; it declares the infinite to be comprehended for our use and manipulation.

Furthermore, when we stop asking questions thinking we’ve reached the edge of that which can be asked about (I’m looking at you, Richard Dawkins), we also fall to idolatry and superstition. In fact, Blondel says this
His superstition is to make believe that he has none and to think he lives by clear ideas and rational practices; he is triumphant in the though that he has dislodged the old dogmas. That too is faith and how credulous and dogmatic a one!
So, we ought to pursue our pious impiety of questions to, not the limit of the knowable, but to our limit. We will find that we are powerless to answer our own call for the infinite. We are unequal to ourselves. But our knowledge of that powerlessness is also the knowledge of the possibility of that desire’s satisfaction.

So, the power of destructive though, of inquiry leads us to a question:
Will we find, through a solution that seems necessary and yet inaccessible, a salvation?

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Did I mention that I really, really like grad school?