It was natural, therefore, that the various positions of Hellenistic philosophers should both rival and offer support to religion. Hägglund’s argument here is aided by Hegel’s thinking about religion. But Hägglund’s central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn’t know itself as such. For it’s not enough to claim that religious values can be subsumed by secular ones. It is the same when Augustine, in the “Confessions,” mourns the loss of a close friend-of a friendship that was “sweet to me beyond all the sweetness of life that I had experienced”-only to remind his readers that, as a good Christian, he should not have loved someone who could be so easily lost, rather than loving God, who can never be lost. Hägglund examines writing by C. S. Lewis, Augustine, and Kierkegaard with a generous captiousness, fair but firmly forensic. Hägglund puts forth his eloquent case: “Rather than making our dreams come true, it would obliterate who we are. For Hegel, as Hägglund reads him, a religious institution is really just a community that has come together to ennoble “a governing set of norms-a shared understanding of what counts as good and just.” The object of devotion is thus really the community itself.

He begins with Lewis’s memoir of mourning, “A Grief Observed,” which the Christian writer and apologist wrote after the death of his wife of four years, Joy Davidman. It is the same when Martin Luther, grieving the death of his daughter in 1542, reminds his congregation after the funeral that “we Christians ought not to mourn.” And the same when Kierkegaard, in “Fear and Trembling,” praises Abraham for being ready to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command, sure in the knowledge that God will redeem his loss. Serfdom did not end everywhere and lingered in parts of Western Europe and was introduced to Eastern Europe only after the Black Death. An eternity based on what Louise Glück calls “absence of change” would be not a rescue from anything but an end of everything meaningful. “By analogy,” he observes, “there is no C. S. Lewis for Joy Davidman in heaven and no Joy Davidman for C. S. Lewis.” Lewis loved Davidman as an end in herself, Hägglund thinks, only to exchange that love at the last moment for a love of the eternal, making Davidman a means to an end.

When we ardently hope that the lives of people we love will go on and on, we don’t really want them to be eternal. It was a late and unexpected love affair; the book is notable for Lewis’s frank admission of his inconsolable grief, in the course of which he seems to grant that God’s eternal consolation could not be adequate to the loss of this particular worldly loved one. Bible. We recognize the Bible as God’s inspired message to humans. In the Vedas, in the hymns recovered for us by the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, whether Accadian or Semitic, and in all other ancient religious poetry, we find these powers ascribed to different beings; in the Bible alone Elohim is one. One year ago, he infuriated the nation during a Friday prayer session by insisting that Muslim girls should cover themselves from head to toe, and neither wear perfume nor go to the hairdressers if they want to have any chance of going to heaven.

He says that Heaven is the real God of man: it is Heaven we are really after. They thus believe storytelling is a “new variable” for economics, since “the mental frames that underlie people’s decisions” are shaped by the stories they tell themselves. In “The Essence of Christianity” (1841), Feuerbach proposed that when human beings worship God they are simply worshipping what they themselves value, and are projecting those values onto the figment of objectivity they choose to call God. “The specifically maternal happiness must be written off,” Lewis allows. People also need to integrate their many components to make up a self. When Christians say, “If there is no immortality, then there is no God,” they are actually saying, “If I am not immortal, then there is no God.” They make God dependent on them. From the early to mid-1950s, and again in 1960, he was assigned by Armstrong to live in Britain to form congregations for the Church there. Whether or not you’re superstitious, if you decide to change the name of your boat, fellow sailors consider it good form to perform a perform a purging ceremony and re-naming ritual.