A Phenomenology of Religious Forms of Life: The Glorification of the Divine and Self-Interest

Abstract

In this article, I aim to briefly examine the ontological structure of religious life from a phenomenological perspective. By this, I mean how what the subject thinks and does reveals certain principles and patterns of religious life. The first step is to identify the guiding principle. We ask ourselves what the ultimate motivation of the religious human being is. After this, the main thing is to determine how they think of themselves, what image they have of themselves as human beings with regard to the divine. This points to a greater configuration of their consciousness. Next, we look at their habits and the ritualization of their lives. And finally, we examine the relationship they have with their community. Furthermore, we inquire about the implications of being part of that community. The findings are that religious subjects can only be happy as part of their community if, paradoxically, their desire is to abandon their ego (self-interest and desires) and devote themselves to the glorification of their god. However, although we can use the term “religious” to describe the form of life where subjects maximize the glory of the divine, other historically and sociologically constituted religions are moved by a different ontological principle.

1. Introduction

In this article, I aim to briefly examine the ontological structure of religious life from a phenomenological perspective. By this, I mean how what the subject thinks and does reveals certain principles and patterns of religious life. The first step is to identify the guiding principle. We ask ourselves what the ultimate motivation of the religious human being is. After this, the main thing is to determine how they think of themselves, what image they have of themselves as human beings with regard to the divine. This points to a greater configuration of their consciousness. Next, we look at their habits and the ritualization of their lives. And finally, the relationship they have with their community. Furthermore, we inquire about the implications of being part of that community.

There is a phenomenological distinction to be made here that will help to understand better what I mean: consciousness, as Sartre argue, can be taken in relation to a transcendent intentional object—which could be consciousness of itself as an object—and is then called positional consciousness (being conscious of something); or it can be taken as the enabling consciousness of particular acts, that is, the non-positional consciousness [la conscience non positionnelle] which is maintained in the background and which is the condition for there to be positional consciousness [la conscience positionnelle], both of which Sartre also calls pre-reflective and reflective or actual consciousness, respectively (Sartre 1956, p. lii). Thus, the pre-reflective consciousness is from which emerge my particular consciousness of this keyboard I am using as well as the consciousness of myself using it. Without pre-reflective consciousness there is no possibility of being conscious of an object or of relating to it intentionally. In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, this pre-reflective consciousness is the background in which and by which the object of our perception appears: “The perceptual ‘something’ [le quelque chose perceptif] is always in the middle of something else [au milieu d’autre chose], it always forms part of a “field” [champ]. A really homogeneous area [une plage vraiment homogène] offering nothing to be cannot be given to any perception [ne peut être donnée à aucune perception]” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, p. 4).

The pre-reflective consciousness will be assimilated to what constitutes our consciousness as totality, which I call “anthropical image”, and from which will emerge the concrete actions as the objects that it posits in the world while becoming reflectively conscious of itself. We cannot posit the totality, and therefore we cannot get acquainted with it directly but only through our acts by reducing them to their guiding principle, a sort of epoché—which I have grasped it as a dialectic process of negations or suspensions of necessary possibilities (Rueda Garrido 2021)—that brings us from the actions to their condition of possibility in our constitutive consciousness or anthropical image. This means that we cannot be conscious of it except by means of our reflective activity and action in the world, and yet we are that consciousness, for it is the consciousness of our consciousness; without it we could not be conscious of any object, including ourselves. It is the consciousness that allows us to maintain our identity and to know that it is we who are acting when moving an arm, reaching for an ashtray, or solving a mathematical problem.

My consciousness, as a pre-reflective or non-posited one, is the being that expresses itself in my actions; my consciousness acting in the world or as Merleau-Ponty put it: “behavior, far from being a thing which exists in-itself (en soi), is a whole significative [est une ensemble significatif] for a consciousness which considers it; but it was at the same time and reciprocally to make manifest in ‘expressive conduct’ the view of a consciousness under our eyes [le spectacle d’une conscience sous nos yeux], to show a mind which comes into the world [un esprit que vient au monde]” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, p. 209). Therefore, my being is grasped both through my actions and my self-consciousness, which makes the former possible. Both make up a particular way of being and acting, or what is the same, a form of life.

To be is to be according to that form of life. Moreover, since this form of life is taken as the expression of the essential way of being human—every form of life is posited as the only one—, we have to say that the subject, in order to realize it, expects others to realize it as well, for it is an intersubjective image in essence; that is, I cannot consider myself human, as a species, if I am the only one or if others do not express my same essential way of being and acting. In Fichte’s words: “The human being (like all finite beings in general) becomes a human being only among human beings [Der Mensch…wird nur unter Menschen ein Mensch]; and since the human being can be nothing other than a human being and would not exist at all if it were not this—it follows that, if there are to be human beings at all, there must be more than one [sollen überhaupt Menschen sein, so üssen mehrere sein]” (Fichte 2000, p. 37). Going beyond Fichte, the form of life as an ontological unit adds a sense at once communal and at the same time exclusionary. On the one hand, it refers to the way of being and acting shared by a community of subjects, who are so precisely insofar as they share it; and on the other hand, by referring to a particular community, it excludes all others by definition. This means that the form of life as an ontological unit reveals not only the anthropical image shared by a community of subjects, but it also means that the actions in which it is realized distinguish them from other, equally exclusive, communities. This intersubjective constitution of the subject as a member of a community has been claimed by the phenomenological tradition with Max Scheler at the forefront in this regard: “the essential character of human consciousness is such that the community is in some sense implicit in every individual, and that man is not only part of society, but that society and the social bond are an essential part of himself; that not only is the ‘I’ a member of the ‘We’, but also that the ‘We’ is a necessary member of the ‘I’” (Scheler 2017, pp. 229–30; for the constitution of a community or We, see also Zahavi 2019; 2021; Szanto 2018).

The religious form of life is one of the forms that have attracted the greatest amount of scholarship. If Max Weber (2005) and Emile Durkheim (1995) took a sociological approach concerned with concrete communities and rituals, and Heidegger (2004) or Jean-Luc Marion (2008) take an intended universal approach although disconnected from the empirical level, I believe in the importance of putting together the three levels, namely, the transcendental, the empirical and the phenomenological. The phenomenological approach means to bridge the driving principle of our consciousness (transcendental) and the way we act in the world (empirical). The individual experience is assumed to be similar to that of others because they shared an ontological principle, which is the inner logic and driving force of their consciousness as configured by an image of being human. Thus, according to our available experience, the guiding principle of the religious form of life can be rendered, for the time being, as that of maximizing the glory of the divine (God). This seems to be the driving force of the religious subject, or at least this is a phenomenological assumption that we are to test at the same time through the examination of the experience and expectations of the subject and through its contrast with sociological and textual sources. In this sense, we take that for the religious subject the aspiration is that every action be an act of glorification of the divine, as conveyed by Paul: “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (New Testament, 1 Cor. 10:31). This convergence between life and principle was precisely the origin of the Latin expression ‘forma vitae’ or form of life according to Agamben; that of identifying the life of the monks with the rule of the monastic order by which God was served, so that life and glorification were one and the same thing through timeless ritual and liturgical office: “writing and life, being and living become properly indiscernible in the form of a total liturgicization of life and a vivification of liturgy that is just as entire” (Agamben 2013, p. 82). This was also the motto of the Jesuit order Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam and the principle of life that members of Calvinist, Puritan and Methodist Protestant congregations will follow, as Weber wrote: “The social activity of the Christian in the world is solely activity in majorem gloriam Dei” (Weber 2005, p. 64). For the religious form life, evil and hell are a life lived out of self-interest and thus without glorifying God. This is how Augustine understands it with the opposition he made between the city of God, as that community of those who glorify God, and the city of men, constituted by those who glorify themselves by pursuing their own self-interest—he calls it ‘amor sui’ (Augustine 2008, Book XIV, sec. 28, p. 410). The state of the city of men is that of continual sin precisely because they live for themselves instead of for the glory of God.

2. The Glory of God and Human Self-Interest: Constitutive Negativities

This ontological principle constitutes a form of life directed to the increase in the Glory of God through worldly affairs and profits. It is not reduced to economic profits, but these are equally promoted as a connotation (Stuart Mill 1846) of the main principle, connotation being a subordinate principle. The subordinate principle manifests itself as activity governed by a main principle. Thus, a distinction can be made between the form of life of individual economic maximization and the activity of economic maximization under another principle. In short, the connotations refer to that praxis proper to a form of life which is nevertheless transmuted in its meaning by being absorbed by another ontological principle. For example, philosophy as an activity is not the same as philosophy as a form of life, thus, as an activity, it can be at the service of other principles. Back to the issue at hand, economic profit would thus be one of the subordinate principles of the maximization of God’s Glory. But the same could be said of any other connotation, as long as its quest was guided by the principle of maximizing the Glory of God. Maximization here refers to increasing, so this form of life promotes actions that produce the greatest o highest possible profits for the Glory of God. The denial of this principle would be the denial of maximization for the Glory of God, that is, its constitutive opposite would be a life unconcerned with the Glory of God. Actions would not be motivated by benefits for the divinity. This latter form would be driven by the principle of humanist secularism. The motivation of the action would be the self-interest of the human agent. He will seek to maximize wealth, health, self-development, etc., in short, all aspects considered to be human goods.

This secular humanism could be one of the counter-positions to the capitalist principle, that is, the exclusive maximization of economic profit. By imposing this principle as a necessity, humanism would have become one of the possibilities that are obliterated. For, in the principle of capitalism, no good other than economic profit is understood to make sense (any other principle makes sense when subordinated to this one). But the same can be said of the principle of maximization for the Glory of God with regard to the principle that is born of it as one of its connotations: the principle of economic maximization for the Glory of God (or the maximization of the Glory of God through economic profit). This means that the connotations of the forms of life can be made independent and constituted as a main principle. By setting itself up as the main principle of a form of life, it presents the form of life from which it is separated as a different form, i.e., as a blocked possibility. This connotation, by being constituted as a form of life, creates its own original possibility, that is to say, it emerges with it its own constitutive negativity.

The negation of the capitalist principle of life is not the negation of the form of life principled by secular humanism. The latter would have its constitutive negativity precisely in maximizing benefits for an abstract entity like God, rather than for the agent himself. This relationship between the forms of life and their negativity is only possible because of an ontological structure but by following this structure we can also understand these very forms of life. For, we must not forget that these antagonistic relationships that we are dealing with are constitutive of the very being of each of the forms of life. The constitutive negativities emerge together with the forms of life as their original possibility. The will, in imposing the being, imposes its possibility. The original possibility that that negativity represent constitutes being in a negative way, that is, as the non-being from which being emerges: A necessary being that does not stop being non-being. That is, a contingent necessity, which, as a consequence, maintains its non-being in the very heart of being. The form of life could not be without its negativity. Therefore, it is not possible to think of maximizing benefits for the Glory of God without maximizing the benefits of the subject (self-interest). Thus, all maximization in order to celebrate the Glory of God is haunted by that negative principle of maximization of personal gain.

From the field of psychology and in particular the formation of religious consciousness, Starburks showed in his study that “the instinct of self-enlargement and the delight in self-expression do not cease even in maturity. There is, however, a transformation in the quality of the impulse” (Starburks 1911, p. 394); which means that self-interest is pervasive in religious experience beyond the ego-centric years of youth—when religion is self-interested seeking of favours from an abstract entity: “In youth these have grown into the organic feeling of the sense of sin; and in adult life they still persist in the abstract ideal of self-abnegation” (1911, p. 394). Under the influence of that self-abnegation, “the impulse toward self-expression and self-enlargement [becomes] refined in maturity into a craving for righteousness, a desire to be all and do all for the glory of God and the service of man” (1911, p. 394). In short, self-expression and self-enlargement can be read as an expansion of self-interest -of the will-to-be- which Starburks shows that, contrary to what might be expected, evolves by becoming more subtle but does not cease. Even against the supposed self-abnegation, such self-interest persists during the subject’s progressive integration into his totalization of maximizing the Glory of God.

This leads to a self-analysis of one’s own will and conscience (what is the principle that governs my actions, or what is the intention of my actions). Thus, in the Muslim religion there is also this antithetical dialectical relationship between acting for the glory of God and acting for one’s own individual glory and benefit. It is reported that the prophet of Islam (called the messenger of Allah), said the following:

“The first of people who will be judged on the Day of Judgement will be a man who has died a martyr. He will be brought and Allah will make known to him His Favors and he will recognize them. (Allah) will say: And what did you do with them? He will say: I fought for you until I died a martyr. He will say: You have lied. You did but fight so that it might be said (of you): He is courageous. And so it was said. Then he will be ordered to be dragged on his face until he is cast into Hell-fire.

(…)

(Then) will come a man whom Allah had made rich and to whom He have given all kinds of wealth. He will be brought and Allah will make known to him His favors and he will recognize them. (Allah) will say: And what did you do with them? He will say: I have left no way in which You like money to be spent (sic) without spending for your sake. He will say: You have lied. You did but do so that it might be said (of you): He is generous. And so it was said. Then he will be ordered to be dragged on his face until he is cast into Hell-fire”.

(At-Tahan 1999, pp. 4–5)

As can be seen in the quotation, there is in the religious form of life that permanent state of vigilance against the subtle and not always easily recognized self-interest that tarnishes a life supposedly placed at the service of the glory of the divinity. And so it is when the principle of self-interest through the development of all human aspects and the attainment of all possible goods is inescapably challenged by the need to live for something more than one’s own good, and especially by the need for the individual to have his life bound up with the service of an abstract entity on which he depends, be it God, Nature, Society or the State. What is decisive in this phenomenological structure is that one cannot be without the other, and that by completely negating one of the opposites, both come to an end. For this reason, the demand to live only and exclusively for the glory of God, as it appears in the quotation, is a discourse which seeks to serve as a reinforcement of the will of the religious subject, but at no time can it be taken as a possible real experience, because necessarily the subject who directs his will to live only for the glory of God and not for his own, in living for God, finds his own interest. In a word, to live to serve God absolutely and exclusively is not possible insofar as it presupposes the self-interest from which one voluntarily flees to the interest of God; the flight requires that negative element from which one flees, and which, as long as one flees from it, is necessary in order to continue to advance on the path imposed by one’s own will. The will to be religious is at the same time the will to win oneself against one’s opposite self, namely the self that seeks its own glory and self-interest.

3. Imitatio Dei. Rituals, Mortifications and Penance vs. Forgetting God

The human image of religious people presents variations related to the realization of its reflective image in the world. That is, the human image is the same, while what changes is the image that each community takes of itself as distinguished from the others. The religious image of the human being would be the one that roughly corresponds to the one that emerges from the discourses of the philosophia perennis. The Christian image of the human being, while drawing on the former, nevertheless differs in that it takes a particular model to imitate, namely Christ as the perfect religious human being (imitatio Christi). As Agamben informs us, in a text entitled the Askētikai diataxeis or Ascetic Constitution (attributed to Basil, father of cenobitic monasticism, in the 4th century AD) we can already find “the idea of the life of Christ as model and image of life”. There we can read that “the Savior proposes to all those who want to live fully a form and a model of virtue [typon aretēs kai programma]… and gave to those who want to follow him his own life as image of the best way of life [eikona politeias aristēs]” (Agamben 2013, p. 99). In line with Basil’s text, a spiritual trend to imitate Christ’s started with the passing of the first millennium, according to Rachel Fulton (2002). Thus, the Franciscan order will end up identifying the life of Christ with the life of its founder, namely St. Francis and the latter, with the monastic rule, in such a way that “through the concept of ‘form’, rule (forma regulae) and life (forma vivendi) enter into a threshold of indistinction in the monk’s practice” (Agamben 2013, p. 60). It was in a much later text, The Imitation of Christ (or Imitatio Christi) by Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471), that the idea of imitating Christ in order to attain a certain perfection in the religious way of being and acting found its most popular reading (Molina 2013, p. 26). The beginning of this book reads as follows:

“He that followeth after Me walks not in the darkness”; thus saith the Lord. These are Christ’s words, and by them we are told how far to imitate His life and ways, if we would be truly filled with light, and from all blindness of our hearts be set at liberty. Therefore our study above all must be upon the life of Jesus Christ to ponder.

(Kempis 1895, p. 3)

Of course, that imitating Christ implies a glorifying of God, for as his son, Christ lived and died to maximize God’s glory in the world, to incarnate his image is to live in his honour, for, to take a mercantile analogy which announces the Calvinist twist, “a spirit simple, pure, and firm, is never wasted in a multitude of business. Because its business is in all to honour God” (Kempis 1895, p. 8). This end of religious life as of any other form of life requires the sustaining of the will in the direction indicated, the will to be the incarnation of an image of being human that is considered to be the best possible one, the one that expresses our essential nature. Thus, the religious will to live for the service and will of God, once again evidences its constitutive opposite, namely, the life governed by self-love or self-interest that procures profit and glory for the self. This is the essential stumbling block in a religious form of life, for as chapter XXVII puts it, “self-love especially keeps people back from what is best” (Kempis 1895, p. 220). Union with God, his perfect incarnation is augured only by the subject’s renunciation of self, as God tells the soul in The Imitation of Christ: “My son, the more you can go out of self, the more you can pass over into Me” (Kempis 1895, p. 287).

The same ontological structure presides over other religions such as Judaism. The imitation of the image of divinity is governed by the principle of the glorification of divinity. If in Christianity, the life of Christ is proposed as a model for the life of the Christian, so that he lives for the glory of God and not of himself, the Jew also has as his ultimate goal to incarnate the image of God with perfection, although this is no longer that of a historical man who carried out specific acts, but that which the Jewish community, its rabbis and sages interpret as God’s way of acting:

Creating life as a work of art in the image of God entails cultivation of the moral virtues (middot) like love, justice, humility, compassion, repentance, and acts of loving—kindness actions that emulate the ways of God. Through performing God-like actions one can articulate one’s God-like nature. Analogies of action and ontological analogies thereby merge. Through what a person does, he or she can graduate from “walking after God” to becoming Godlike, from imitatio Dei to imago Dei. As a midrash puts it, “God says: All those who do as I do become as I am”.

(Hutt et al. 2018, p. 7)

In the end, what remains is the principle of living not for oneself but for the glory of God, since, according to doctrine, man is made in the image of God, so that his ultimate aim is that in our actions we should realize this image in the world for his glory, so that he may be exalted thereby, “following the will of the Lord, and not one’s own happiness” (Simhah Zissel cited in Hutt et al. 2018, p. 31). Thus, the following passage from Jeremiah condemns those who, instead of God’s glory, pursue their own glory: “Thus said the Lord: let not the wise man glory in his wisdom; let not the mighty man glory in his might; let not the rich man glory in his riches. But let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord, exercising loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. For in these I delight” (Jeremiah 9: 23–4). Maimonides, commenting on this passage, clarifies first the way in which the Jew must act and secondly the ultimate principle to which this way of acting must point: “The way of life of such an individual, after he has achieved this apprehension [the apprehension of God], will always have in view loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness, through assimilation to His actions, may He be exalted” (Hutt et al. 2018, p. 23). This is the Jewish religious form of life, which after all is also its ethos: “Ethical living, that is, living in the image of God, entails the enhancement of God’s word, God’s world, and the divine image implanted within each human person” (Sherwin 2000, p. 10). This divine image implanted in the subject somehow refers to that image of being human which, together with the actions that emerge from it, constitute a form of life.

For Weber, all behaviour proper to religious ethics could be reduced to two categories: retaliation against an enemy and fraternal assistance to friendly neighbours. Within these categories, he discusses the prohibition against usury, family piety, the obligation of giving alms, and so on. What is significant for my purpose is that according to the German social scientist, all religious ethics can be understood in terms of behaviour directed towards one’s own community, i.e., those subjects with whom one shares a form of life, and those directed towards one’s enemies, i.e., those who can be considered non-subjects. In a word, religious ethics impels one to act voluntarily to strengthen the bond with those who glorify God (Weber 2005, pp. 113–14) and to fight against those who do not or resist doing so (the enemies, thus to be considered as diabolical), for originally “any infraction of the ethic constitutes sin’ and historically, the systematization of such a religious ethic will lead ‘from the rational wish to insure personal external pleasures for oneself by performing acts pleasing to the god, to a view of sin as a unified power of the anti-divine (diabolical) into whose grasp man may fall. The good is the envisaged as an integral capacity for an attitude of holiness, and for consistent behaviour derived from such an attitude” (Weber 1965, p. 44). All religious behaviour ultimately seeks to fight against forgetting one’s god or gods, for it is in this forgetting that is at stake the crucial issue of whether one lives for the divinity (pleasing to the god through and attitude of holiness) or for oneself (the anti-divine). For as we read in the Hadith compiled by Ibn-Arabi, not remembering God is to be unfaithful to him: “God, ever mighty and majestic is He, says: ‘O child of Adam, when you remember Me you are grateful to Me, and when you forget Me you are unfaithful to Me’” (Arabi 2008, p. 14). To remember God is to have him present in every act performed. This is where the religious habits that make up a ritualized life come in. Rituals constitute the life of the religious subject and therefore include what we call mortification and penance, that is to say, the latter are also rituals in charge of not forgetting God or renouncing his oblivion.

It must be borne in mind that the behaviours proper to every form of life are ultimately delimited by each of the religions as independent totalities of the same totalization. Thus, there is a certain sense of family among the behaviours dictated by the different religions as forms of religious life. But, guided by the original anthropical image (Urbild), the behaviour is co-determined by social and material conditions as much as by each community’s reflective self-image. This means that while behaviours emerge from a similar image of the human being and thus with the same goal, namely to realize the same ontological principle in the world, the ways of doing so vary. Glorifying god or gods—and fleeing from glorification of self—is the image that the religious subject seeks to incarnate with progressive perfection in the world. This flight from the constitutive opposite is what constitutes widespread religious behaviour such as rituals, mortification and penance. The purpose of penance is to restore the lost bond, that is, the separation from God and the ‘communitas’—as a rite of passage—. For Turner, “communitas is a relationship between specific, historical, and idiosyncratic individuals” (Turner 1991, pp. 131–32), which, in my opinion, does not sufficiently emphasize the shared intentionality of its members. That is why I prefer to speak of community as that formed by all individuals who share a form of life, namely their anthropological image and principled behaviour. Leaving the community means not sharing the same basic assumptions about what it means to be human, including the ultimate motivation for action. Failure to meet the community’s expectations derived from that principle and the feelings, actions, and values that stem from it can be corrected through penance and mortification. On the one hand, as Foucault points out, in early Christianity (second to fourth centuries), penance was a complex institution that required the approval of the ecclesiastical authority after certain rites and liturgies and could only be administered once in a lifetime (Foucault 2021, p. 81). Mortification, on the other hand, is the individual way in which the subject self-imposes his form of life, winning himself over and progressively integrating himself into his totalization through the reinforcement of his will and the sacrifice of the constitutive Other; living in a way that glorifies God at the expense of self-glory—meaning self-interest—when the former cannot be separated from the latter, if only for the hope of future benefit. Unlike penance and mortification, rituals do not seek to repair faults but to avoid them by constituting a habitus by which this image of the human being (a version of the divine being) is continuously and progressively realized in the world.

In every form of life, the social acts of a community are ritualized in such a way that it is in them that the image and the principle that governs them are realized. There is nothing beyond the actions that are nevertheless the form of life in the world. Catherine Bell has advocated a notion of rituals that differs from that of Durkheim (1995, p. 41). Rituals are not the implementation of a belief (a theory, doctrine or discourse) but the social act itself, for “ritualization is a strategic way of acting in specific social situations” (Bell 2009, p. 67). This means that, as Merleau-Ponty’s quote reminds us, our expressive behaviour is nothing more than a mind coming into the world. It is not the application of a doctrine, nor the moment after a thought. Rather, our meaningful and ritualized actions are our consciousness before our eyes. If this is true of any form of life, it is even more true of religious life. In this ritualization lies its ethics and its ideology, the former from the point of view of ethical discourse, the latter from the necessary realization of the merely possible. This is clearly evident in Hinduism, where the fusion of life and ritual is its mark of identity. This seems to be attested to by the author of the book Homo Ritualis, in which Hindu rituals are understood as “a path to perfection”—or what I have been referring to as the progressively perfect incarnation of its anthropical image:

The sacrifice [ritual] was regarded as an achievement of perfection, something that is without any harm. One of the many Sanskrit terms for “sacrifice” is ma-kha, which the Gopathabrāhmaṇa explains to be a compound of mā and kha, that is, “without any hole”. After all, gods make the ritual. Everything within the ritual is consecrated, thus nonhuman.

(Michaels 2016, p. 127)

The perfection sought in the incarnation of the religious anthropical image is progressively realized through rituals (which are habits insofar as a ritual is performed spontaneously and with meaning for the subject). Such perfection is the closest thing to being that impossible god in which all its possibilities are actual. He who has attained a certain perfection through ritual removes the evil of forgetting divinity and turning only to his own benefit. However, no matter how much one dedicates oneself to the glory of God, one will always find some selfish act, some sin -especially when one has reached a certain perfection- for in fact the more one integrates oneself into the religious form of life, the more one becomes aware of its constitutive negativity, that is, its ‘imperfection’. This again shows the impossible disconnection between love of God and self-love, for in the will to deny oneself for the glory of God, there is still a will-to-be, which paradoxically becomes more intense the more it mortifies and annuls itself (Huxley 1947, p. 115). For in the end, what is denied is not oneself but a certain version of oneself, in order to affirm the one that opposes it, without one ever being without the other. Thus, in all penance, mortification and self-denial, the subtle festering of self-love can be seen, as Teresa of Avila wrote: “Once, when I was grumbling over being obliged to eat meat and do no penance, I heard it said that sometimes there was more of self-love than desire of penance in such sorrow” (Cited in Huxley 1947, p. 115).

At this point, it seems important to recognize that, with the exception of Hinduism, the other religions I have referred to are Abrahamic. Could it be said that Daoism and Buddhism also seek the glorification of the divine? It seems not, because although both are forms of life, and therefore maintain the same ontological structure, their principles and content vary. Daoism is complex to define. Here, I merely wish to acknowledge that there is at least one philosophical form of Daoism, whose principle is harmony with the Dao, and one religious form of Daoism, whose guiding principle is individual immortality, which implies the pursuit of the individual’s physical and spiritual well-being through techniques such as meditation (internal alchemy), physical activities such as Qigong, and elixirs (external alchemy) (Komjathy 2013; Robinet 1997). Although the Daoist tradition of the Celestial Masters had a pantheon of gods, among whom Laojun or the divine Laozi stood out as a model to follow in order to achieve immortality, there was no glorification of divinity at the expense of the individual, at least not in a structural way (Kleeman 2016; Bokenkamp 1999). This implies that, although life was ritualized, the guiding principle of Daoism is not equivalent to that of the so-called Abrahamic religions. The same can be said of Buddhism, for which nirvana or liberation from suffering seems to be the guiding principle (Keown 1996, p. 44), a principle that, perhaps like philosophical Daoism, could be equivalent to harmony with the universe (Dao) as the dissolution of individuality (Keown 1996, p. 52). This complexity calls into question the idea that the religious form of life is only that whose guiding principle is the glorification of the divine and whose constitutive negativity is the pursuit of individual self-interest and welfare.

This is not to say that there is no perception of a certain glorification of divine figures in both Daoism and Buddhism, which are the cause of a certain dialectical tension, as in the case of the individual with respect to Laojun/Buddha; the path of Laojun/Buddha requires the desire not to desire, or Wu-Wei (Slingerland 2003; Santideva 1997, p. 21). In fact, in the case of Daoism, what we see is perhaps a reversal, whereby the glorification and imitation of the divine is the means to the ultimate goal of welfare and immortality. The latter is already an assimilation and embrace of the constitutive negativity (the principle of glorification). In any case, what they have in common is the ontological structure of forms of life. And perhaps the way to maintain their distinctive features would be to speak not of a religious form of life but of a form of life of glorification of the divine, a form of life of harmony with nature, and a form of life of maximizing individual welfare and health (immortality on earth). Whether or not it is considered a religion may be a historical and sociological question rather than a philosophical one, at least from the ontological structure employed here, whose principle of glorification is understood to constitute some of the historically recorded religious movements, such as Jesuitism and Calvinism, as explored below. This allows us to avoid the mistake of considering the experience of Christian life as the core of the religious form of life.

4. Jesuitism and Calvinism

Let us give an example that makes more illustrative this ontological structure of the relationships between these particular forms of life. This structure leads us to relate succinctly the form of life of Ignatius of Loyola and his Society of Jesus to Calvinism and especially the Puritanism that was sustained in some churches of Protestant Christianity.

Explaining what has been said, it must be maintained that the motto of the Society of Jesus, leaders in the Catholic Counter-Reformation movement (Coupeau 2008), perfectly translated the principle of maximizing the Glory of God through worldly affairs. That is, the successes and profits of the order were always destined for the greater Glory of God, as the unofficial motto still expresses today (Jesuit Institute 2017; Worcester 2008, p. 1): Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam (AMDG): “not wanting nor seeking any other thing except in all and through all the greater praise and glory of God our Lord” (Loyola 1914, p. 94). This was and is the true principle of every Jesuit’s life. In Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, it can be read “that the motive for desiring or having one thing or another be only the serving, honor, and glory of His Divine Majesty” (Loyola 1914, p. 11). Their negative form or antagonistic is the forgetting of God as the recipient of the benefits of the religious order. The greatest sin and hell itself is presented in the Spiritual Exercises as the state of disarray in which God is forgotten and that to him alone all the benefits are due, for we were created to serve Him: “because first we have to set as our aim the wanting to serve God,—which is the end” (Loyola 1914, p. 85). And the latter fits the characterization of the secular and lay life proper to Renaissance humanism, by which the subject-agent is the only responsible and beneficiary of his actions. Now, we take it that within that principle of Jesuitical life, as mentioned above, were the economic profits. That is, maximization of the Glory of God through earthly riches. In a letter to his brother, Ignatius does not reject earthly riches, but recommends using them to earn God’s favour: “I urge you out of reverence and love for God Our Lord to try with all your strength to win honour in heaven, with reputation and fame in the sight of the Lord who is to judge us. He has entrusted you with an abundance of earthly goods, so try to earn with them eternal goods” (Munitiz 1914, pp. 9–10. Italics are mine). And again, in Deliberation on Poverty (Deliberación sobre la pobreza), Ignatius says that it is better to have fixed financial resources for the survival of the Society of Jesus and, therefore, for the greater glory of God: “It seems that the Society, by retaining part or all of it (fixed income), would be better preserved”. (Loyola 1963, p. 297) The retribution and wealth of the Jesuit colleges scattered since the sixteenth century all over the world were motivated by the maximization of the Glory of God on earth. Following the ontological structure announced in the body of this article, integration into the form of life and thus the progressive subjectivization of the individual requires the universalisation of the principle that governs it, that is, the proselytization and assimilation of the Other (that others are like me guarantees my way of being human). Economic maximization is one more way of glorifying God, because it is one more way of expanding totalization from the subject and the community to potentially the entire globe. Placing oneself at the service of God as the subject’s form of life implies the assimilation of the Other. This corresponds to the intuition expressed in a study of the relationship between the form of religious life offered by Jesuitism, although I argue that it is not exclusive to Jesuitism, and its proselytizing efforts: “Intimate rituals of self-formation linked to a global vision of a triumphant worldly Christianity underpin my argument that care of the self-propelled Christian into the world” (Molina 2013, p. 3). A step further would be taken by certain Calvinist puritanical communities, through the notion of the calling (Kristanto 2012, p. 138), which, as Max Weber masterfully put it, saw in material success a sign of having been chosen by God (Weber 2005, p. 40), that is, the attainment of certitudo salutis:

Testament and in analogy to the ethical valuation of good works, asceticism looked upon the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself as highly reprehensible; but the attainment of it as a fruit of labour in a calling was a sign of God’s blessing .

(2005, p. 116)

According to Weber, the idea and meaning of the calling “is a product of the Reformation” and it means “the fulfilment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world” (2005, p. 40). To be sure, Calvin himself promoted the idea of glorifying God as the ultimate principle of the Christian life: “Since we are not our own, we must seek the glory of God, and obey his will. Self-denial recommended to the disciples of Christ. He who neglects it, deceived either by pride or hypocrisy, rushes on destruction” (Calvin 2006, p. 689). He also saw the calling as a way of glorifying God: “the Lord bids each one of us in all life’s actions to look to his calling (…) that no task will be so sordid and base, provided you obey your calling in it, that it will not shine and be reckoned very precious in God’s sight” (Calvin 2006, pp. 724–25) However, it was his Calvinist followers, especially in the United States. who popularized the idea of achieving salvation through material success in one’s calling (Chmielewska 2017, p. 86). Thus, the spiritualization advocated by the reforming process paradoxically ended up in the maximization of material wealth and professional success as the only way to prove the salvation of the subjects. For such spiritualization had rejected deeds and rites and affirmed the sole faith of God to obtain salvation. Such faith could be strengthened by a feeling or emotion of being predestined for eternal life, but only through material success and economic results could it be secured: “It is held to be an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen, and to combat all doubts as temptations of the devil, since lack of self-confidence is the result of insufficient faith, […] in order to attain that self-confidence intense worldly activity is recommended [meaning integration in the form of life] as the most suitable means. It and it alone disperses religious doubts and gives the certainty of grace’” (Weber 2005, pp. 66–67). Emotions are indicators of my faith or hope in my form of life, which is the same as to say that the lack of will to continue living as I intended is evident in my feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem. If this was Calvinism, its form of negativity was the austerity of the damned. However, as a form of life, it draws from the Jesuit (and medieval) AMDG form; Calvinism, in its ascetic Puritanism, abandons the latter as a possibility, that is, it certainly rejects it as one of its forms of negativity, insofar as the only way to glorify God is through material success in the work or calling, for only the chosen ones spread His Glory (effort equals material and spiritual rewards). “Religiousness was supposed to be expressed through activity in the world and was meant to show the glory of its Creator” (Chmielewska 2017, p. 77). Its principle of economic maximization (in worldly affairs) for the Glory of God is the one that drives every action in that form of life.

Then, from maximization for the Glory of God, proper to counter-reforming Jesuitism, there was thus constituted a form of life whose fundamental principle was that of economic maximization for the Glory of God. Its form of life excluded any other sign of relationship with the divinity. It was only the economic success that drives their form of life, for in economic success itself God was glorified. A connotation of that Jesuit maxim had thus become the principle of a form of life by itself. The denial of this new principle is economic austerity. In austerity, God is not glorified, but rather it was the worst state imaginable, from which it was a matter of fleeing as if it were hell itself (equal to a lack of success in a calling). For it must be remembered that the absence of signs of economic success was tantamount to not having been chosen by God, and, therefore, showed the sure condemnation of the subject. In short, from the Jesuit AMDG we can explain the economic maximization of the Calvinist Puritans. The latter would have made possible as a form of life what was only a connotation of the Catholic form of life of the Jesuits, who inherited and developed this religious form of life from monastic tradition (2005, p. 73). But, although the step is that of a connotation to a principle, the transformation is enormous. For the principle emerges with its own constitutive negativity as an original possibility. So if for the Jesuits the negative form from which they fled was one in which they did not act to glorify God, that is, forgetting God as the ultimate beneficiary of their worldly success, on the contrary, for Calvinist Puritanism, the negative form was an austere economic life understood as a sign of condemnation to hell: “Calvinists did not distinguish economic and moral motives. Poverty was treated as a result of misfortune or laziness. The remedy was work. Calvin recalled in this context the words of Saint Paul stating that: ‘The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat’” (Chmielewska 2017, p. 86). The reader, for the time being, is suggested not to overlook the fact that both this Calvinist puritanical form of life and the capitalist form of life share not identical but similar negative forms. That is, the original possibility of both is austerity, although in one case experienced as the absence of salvation and in another as the absence of individual economic maximization.

The relationship between both forms of life (i.e., Calvinism and capitalism) was already established in the last century by Max Weber. However, beyond foreshadowing as a background of eighteenth-century capitalism, and justifying in passing, the economic success of northern European countries in relation to those of the south, there does not appear to be any ontological evidence to establish such an etiological relationship. Rather, it seems that there is a concurrence of two different forms of life made possible by equally different negativities. And yet they are both split connotations of two forms of life that deny each other. That is, they arise, respectively, detached from the principle of individual maximization of overall benefits and of the maximization of benefits for the Glory of God. In this sense, they originate from opposite principles. The most that can be said is that the hegemonic influence of the capitalist form of life could have assimilated the Calvinist form of life at a certain point of contact during the eighteenth century. But the truth is that both forms of life will continue until today (Wogaman 2004, pp. 291–92). And, of course, its possibility remains perpetual. A paradigmatical case of the capitalist attitude subsumed by the Protestant, puritan way of religious life is how Samuel Smiles conceives of the relationship between wealth, effort and salvation in the Victorian Britain: “‘if the high-principled man will but hold on his way courageously, success will surely come, nor will the highest reward of all be withheld from him’” (Smiles 1872, p. 318. Italics are mine). The high-principled man is the one that put effort in self-education to respond honestly to a calling; the success is meant in economic terms, but the point is that success itself is only a byproduct of the moral and religious way of being in the world, which consists of glorification of God. The virtuous work in a calling and its accompanying success is a sign of the salvation of the soul. This type of attitude pervaded Protestantism in the United States from the early eighteenth century onwards. Examples of this are John Wesley, Philip Brooks and the American bishop William Lawrence, who preached that “in the long run, it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes… Godliness is in league with riches.” (Cited in Wogaman 2004, p. 292).

We can provisionally conclude from this analysis of the forms of life in question, that if there could be a concurrence, in no sense can a determination of one of these forms of life be based on the other. For, ontologically, both have different origins and are constituted from different negativities. Austerity remains the essential negation of the capitalist form in absolute terms, but austerity for capitalists is not a hell where one is condemned as a sinner. Success in capitalism does not mark the sign of God’s chosen for salvation. But it is a sign of integration in the system and possibly being a role model for those who aspire to integration. In capitalism, the religious argument that constitutes the being of the Calvinist form of life has no weight. In any case, capitalist ethics also justifies economic success as the good to be followed by every human being and austerity as evil, that which must be avoided (at times associates in propaganda with poverty, laziness and vices), not for religious reasons but because the necessary being imposed is that of the subject who always wants more economic income, always greater economic maximization of his activities. God does not save him. Rather, in said maximization lies his principle of being and salvation. Because in ontological terms, it is very different to fear the austerity of the condemned sinners (the sinner is thus a non-subject for the chosen ones), than to fear the austerity by itself (the austere are non-subjects for those who live in the wasting habit of economic maximization). The bad, for the former, is the condemnation to hell of the one who does not have economic success in a calling and, for the latter, living on the edge of precariousness, without having more than what is needed (in capitalism you always have to have more than what is needed, because you have to end needing everything you do not have).

5. Conclusions

It is impossible to cover the many aspects of religious life in one article, let alone develop them adequately. In the sections above, I have tried to show the ontological structure of religious life from a phenomenological approach. The question discussed in the first and second sections is whether religion has its roots in a search for self-interest or, on the contrary, its value lies in overcoming one’s own individuality. The experience gathered in various texts refers us back to what the grasped guiding principle of this form of life already conveyed to us: devotion to the divine can only be achieved through constant self-interest, which could be translated as the pursuit of individual happiness leads us to the annulment of our own individuality, towards a life dedicated to the glorification of the divine. This configuration of our consciousness and its subsequent actions make us part of a community whose members are driven by the same principle and with whom we share the same rituals and practices. These elements of the form of life of divine glorification distinguish it from other forms of life, such as the capitalist or the humanist one. They even help us to identify certain branches within that form of life, depending on which secondary principle has been assimilated or instrumentalized with respect to the guiding principle, as may be the case with the maximization of economic benefits in order to maximize the glorification of God. In short, this is an example of how the phenomenological study of a form of life can reveal its ontological structure. Only by knowing this structure can we understand who we are as members of a community and why we do what we do. It also sheds light on the relationships between different communities. In the case studied, the religious subject can only be happy as part of their community if, paradoxically, their desire is to abandon their ego (self-interest and individual desires) and devote themselves to the glorification and benefit of their god or the divine. However, as discussed above, although we can call religious the subjects of the form of life of glorification of the divine, other historically and sociologically constituted religions are moved by a different ontological principle.