Embracing The Mind’s Two Tracks: Faith, Reason, and Absurdism

My two favorite buildings on Fordham’s campus are the University Church and the Walsh Family Library. I see these structures as interactive monuments that, in some small way, stand for what is most needed by the human psyche to live and to thrive: love and wisdom. This is a dramatic statement. However, I use such hefty language for a reason: the magnificence of the church and the vastness of the library have contributed to some of the most profound insights I’ve encountered in life so far.

In my admiration for the church and the library separately, I’ve come to understand that they complement one another. One would lose some of its utility to me if the other did not exist.

My time spent in both has proven to me that the well-being of one’s mind generally unfolds along two parallel tracks: there’s the strictly cerebral, intellectual, rational, and empirical track, and then there’s the emotional, purpose-driven, restless, and deeply human track. From the moment we gain consciousness, each of us finds ourselves on these distinct paths, and we employ various means to traverse them.

The interplay between these two facets of life has sparked some of the world’s deepest connections and most fervent divisions. Yet, I think this duality also forms the foundation of what it means to be human. I have found that the first path often provides guidance on how to live, while the second path offers explanations about why life is worth living. It is crucial to philosophize about both the “how” and the “why” in concert, rather than in isolation. We must ride both tracks, together, at the same time. The jarring violence of monarchies in Medieval Europe and the contemporary Western embrace of scientism both underscore the potential dangers of delving into either domain alone. When our ties to either reason or faith are severed, the once dynamic and brilliant portrait of life’s beauty abruptly transforms into a somber and incomplete tableau.

Here’s an example:

In Homer’s Iliad and other works of Greek mythology, the figure Sisyphus is known as the founder and ruler of Ephyra, which is now known as the city of Corinth. Sisyphus, having cheated death twice, angers the Greek God Hades, who condemns Sisyphus to the eternal task of pushing an enormous boulder up a hill, only to watch it repeatedly roll back down just before reaching the summit. This never-ending, arduous task has since become synonymous with any endeavor perceived to be laborious or futile.  

In the last one hundred years, the popularity of the Sisyphus story has been revived due to its metaphorical applicability and endurance in contemporary literature. The Algerian-French writer Albert Camus made Greek mythology cool again by publishing Le Mythe De Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) in 1942. Subtitled “Absurdity and Suicide,” his essay used Sisyphus’s eternal punishment as an attempt to prove the inherent absurdity of life. (Absurdism is the philosophical theory that the universe is irrational and meaningless.) Camus holds that we must revel in–and rebel against–life’s absurd nature by finding a way to fill our hearts with enough meaning between life and death. There is no God. There is no inherent meaning to life or to the universe. In short, there is no point … except to rebel against life’s absurd condition in hopes we may find happiness. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” is the last line of Camus’s essay. 

Camus concludes that Sisyphus finds happiness in acknowledging the absurdity of his rock-pushing task, embracing the engagement because, as Camus states, “the struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.” The meaningfulness of this struggle remains unclear. Earlier, Camus theorized that “nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given” provides an answer to the question of “[w]hat does life mean in such an [absurd] universe.”  While he defines life’s absurdity as something to be persistently indifferent toward, he simultaneously identifies honor, goodness, salvation, and redemption within a life that is defined to be foundationally void of purpose. This might be Camus’s greatest contradiction. If life is truly devoid of any universal or shared meaning, why would any values matter?

And so the paradox arises: how can one choose indifference to the meaning of life while still detecting meaning within life? Is this not intellectually dishonest? Or, at least, metaphysically incomplete? Thinking about the story practically makes Sisyphus’s happiness seem as monotonous as it is empty. Evidently, Sisyphus’s love for the task, for life itself, or the joy found in pushing the boulder back up persists in his will to persevere. It seems only rational to think that something larger than him is pushing him to keep pushing. 

To a religious person, the presupposition that life is absurd (or that Camus’s interpretation of Homer’s tale can prove that notion) may itself seem rather absurd. If one believes that God designed the universe and tailored all of creation into an intelligible order, including the heart, mind, and soul of every being, then life becomes relatively easy to understand. Logic, reason, science, and faith fill in the blanks. If, say, Camus’s atheism were to be disproven, then it seems his argument becomes, well, absurd. Absurdly wrong.

By this I mean to say that life only seems to become absurd if there is no conception–no connection to, or acknowledgement of, or attempt to understand–the divine. How could we enjoy a life that is epistemically condemned to futility and meaninglessness? This does not sound fun. Or possible. The undertones of misery also feed into the stereotypically contemporary philosophical attitude that finds “only pain intellectual,” and  “only evil interesting,” a phenomenon articulated by Ursula K. LeGuin in her brilliant story “The Ones Who Left Omelas” as “a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”

This is why we must ride both tracks, together, at the same time. Camus’s frigid apathy toward transcendence is a prime example of the annihilation of the mind’s second track. The distaste towards divinity stands in stark contrast to the rich cultural heritage, profound wisdom, and intellectual legacies that have emerged from all parts of the world. From Athens to Jerusalem, Mecca to the Indus River Valley, Northern China to East India, and everywhere throughout Earth, individuals across the human family have embraced a myriad of  religions and spiritual traditions–all of which have offered great wisdom to the world. These beliefs have flourished throughout a complex and extensive global history, and have comforted their adherents with a sense of purpose, goodness, and truth.

For example, The Cloud of Unknowing is a late fourteenth-century work of Christian mysticism. Among many things, its anonymous author speculates that “by love [God] can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held.” Any major religion would dispute that God (or, in some cases, the ultimate meaning of life) can be known or understood utterly in this life. 

To that end, absurdism’s greatest mistake is its failure to acknowledge there may be something greater than the universe that itself provides meaning to all creation. Indeed, this is the true absurdity of life–one that is more paradoxical and mystifying than any human reflection could deduce. I posit that riding the enigma of existence, and observing the beauty of how various religions and cultures have sanctified life’s mystery, embraces the mind’s two tracks more completely. And makes us happier people.