Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat

--- Leszek Kolakowski, in an essay titled “The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture” (1973), quoted by Jack Miles in "Why God Will Not Die", The Atlantic, December 2014

The Kolakowski passage quoted in Miles's essay:

Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat. That it is not an inevitable defeat is a claim that cannot be defended in good faith. One can, of course, disperse one’s life over the contingencies of every day, but even then it is only a ceaseless and desperate desire to live, and finally a regret that one has not lived. One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if one accepts that there is sense beyond that which is inherent in human history—if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred.