Innateness

One way to understand the idea of deep desires is in terms of rootedness in human nature: on this view a desire is deep when it is innate to human beings (i.e. when it is ‘hardwired’ into our nature), as opposed to being an acquired disposition. For instance, desire for nourishment, rest, affection, and security can be described as being innate and thus ‘deep’ in this sense. But what about the desire to be at one with God, is it also innate? And is this how we should understand the idea of having a deep desire for God? There are a number of theists who seem to answer ‘yes’ to both questions. For instance, Eleonore Stump writes:

Here Stump seems to write about the depth of a desire in two senses: one sense having to do with being innate or ‘hardwired’ (it is our ‘deepest core’, our ‘deepest, inbuilt hunger’), which is thus not subject to choice, and the other having to do with what we self-consciously see as being at or near the centre of our web of desires, which is subject to the will (hence she says ‘a person takes God as her deepest heart's desire’, which is a matter of commitment). We will come back later to discuss Stump's second sense of a deep desire, but here I want to focus on the first sense. We don't need to debate whether Stump's interpretation of Augustine, Aquinas, and the medieval tradition is correct. We can allow that a number of theists hold such a view (including Stump herself). But what should we make of this view of a ‘hardwired’ desire for God?

It seems strange to think of a new-born child desiring to be at one with God, whereas it is not strange to think of him or her desiring nourishment, rest, affection, and security. This is because the former presupposes the attainment of conceptual thought (particularly, the complex concept of God), whereas the latter do not. Thus, it seems that the desire for God does not come about without some form of ‘second nature’, i.e. acquired abilities, dispositions, and sensibilities. Language is obviously key here. As John McDowell puts it:

Such initiation into a linguistic community emancipates ‘a human individual from a merely animal mode of living into being a full-fledged subject, open to the world. . . . Human beings mature into being at home in the space of reasons or, what comes to the same thing, living their lives in the world.’Footnote ⁹ McDowell uses ‘world’ here in a sense that contrasts with a ‘merely animal’ mode of living in an ‘environment’.Footnote ¹⁰ We, as mature human beings, have a ‘world’ that is disclosed to us through language and is laden with meaning for us as we actively live out our lives within it. Thus, the space of reasons can also be understood as the ‘space of meaning’, or as ‘having a world’ that is open to understanding.Footnote ¹¹

So the desire for God, on the view I want to advance, operates within the space of reasons (or space of meaning), where being at one with God is seen as something we have compelling reason to desire, and which is made possible by our second nature, especially our initiation into a linguistic community. Most theists of course want to affirm that there is in some sense a ‘natural’ desire for God (whether understood in first or second nature terms), where one can say to God (as Augustine did): ‘You stir [us] to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.’Footnote ¹² Indeed, I think part of the attraction to saying that the desire for God is innate is that this ensures that God matters for everyone. One might worry that if the desire for God depends upon second nature, i.e. upon something acquired through a particular path of formation, then it would be completely contingent and we could not show that God matters for everyone.Footnote ¹³ However, I believe we can still say that God matters for everyone by appealing to the structure of the space of meaning, which our second nature abilities bring into view. Later I will consider how this might be, particularly with regard to making sense of MacIntyre's claim that ‘the deepest desire of every [human] being, whether they acknowledge it or not, is to be at one with God’. But for now, we should note that there are two important ways that the desire for God can still be seen as relating to our first nature (i.e. our innate capacities or tendencies), even if we deny that this desire itself is innate.

First, the desire for God might represent a more developed manifestation or a higher analogue of a desire that is originally innate. Freud takes this position in his account of theistic longing as being ‘infantile’.Footnote ¹⁴ In other words, it is a more developed manifestation of the innate desire for security or protection in the face of helplessness. Whereas the young child seeks protection through his or her parents (especially the father, according to Freud), the infantile theistic adult seeks protection in the face of continued human vulnerability by projecting a supreme parental figure: namely, God. In describing the religious person as ‘infantile’, Freud clearly means this as a critique and as a contrast to the properly adult stance of courageously facing up to the harshness of reality without any form of existential consolation (the idea here is that we should ‘live without appeal’, as Camus put it in The Myth of Sisyphus). But seeking existential consolation – or cosmic security (e.g., in the faith that ‘all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well’Footnote ¹⁵) – is an adult rather than infant activity and it is only improper if we think that all such existential consolation is illusory. That it is illusory in Freud's view is suggested by his talk of projection (or ‘personification’ or ‘wish-fulfilment’). But this does not resolve the question of whether God is merely a projection, since after all there may be an objective correlate to the subject's projection of an external source of existential consolation. As Cottingham says in response to Freud: ‘a religious believer can equally maintain that since our true destiny lies in union with our creator, we will naturally feel insecure and restless until we find Him’.Footnote ¹⁶

These remarks also give indication of how the desire to be at one with God can be seen as a higher analogue of the innate desire for rest, where this is understood as ‘spiritual rest’ (i.e. ‘resting in God’), and which can be sought, for example, through the practice of the Sabbath. We can say something similar about the innate desire for nourishment, which has a higher analogue in the ‘hunger’ for ‘spiritual nourishment’ that fills up our spiritual lack. Likewise, the innate desire for affection finds a higher analogue in the desire for communion with God. However, all of these higher analogues require second nature abilities (especially for conceptual thought) and are typically connected with a concern to orient one's life towards something of incomparably higher value, i.e. something holy or numinous (I will say more on this later).

The second important way that the desire for God can be seen as related to our first nature is that it arises out of the realization of our innate human capacities. What is especially significant is our innate capacity for language acquisition, since, as mentioned above, with initiation into a language we enter the space of meaning. Once we enter into this domain and become reflective, we can then come to form a desire for God, and I will argue that it is ‘natural’ to do so (in a sense that pertains to the structure of the space of meaning).

In sum: the desire for God is more properly a matter of second nature (even though it is not disconnected from first nature), as it does not come about without some acquired abilities, dispositions, and sensibilities, which depend upon an upbringing or formation in a particular culture or form of life. I will argue further that the idea of a deep or deepest desire should also be understood primarily as a matter pertaining to second nature, at least insofar as one appeals to a deep desire as part of an ethical and spiritual life-orientation.

The space of meaning

The crucial point is that the idea of a deep desire needs be understood within the space of meaning that our second nature brings into view. In exploring this, I want to begin by discussing one problematic account of the space of meaning and how it can inform an understanding of deep desires: namely, a subjectivist view.

I have in mind something like Harry Frankfurt's account of the importance of what we care about, where this is a matter of mere contingency; i.e. it is a matter of how we happen to have developed, both in evolutionary and cultural terms, as the particular persons we are, as opposed to being based on some desire-independent normative standards for what we ought to care about. It is in virtue of our caring about certain things or persons – especially to the point of love – that we shape our sense of self and that things or persons matter to us.Footnote ¹⁷ Bernard Williams also endorses something like this view when he appeals to D. H. Lawrence's dictum: ‘Find your deepest impulse, and follow that’.Footnote ¹⁸ There is a kind of subjectivist ideal of authenticity here of being who you are, i.e. who you happen to have become as the result of evolutionary and cultural processes. Williams went on to develop this in terms of the idea of ‘ground projects’ or ‘categorical desires’, of which he writes: ‘an individual person has a set of desires, concerns or . . . projects, which help to constitute a character’ and which are the basis of ‘having a reason for living at all’.Footnote ¹⁹ Examples of such ground projects include the desire to be an excellent artist or scientist or philosopher, or to succeed in one's business career, or to be a good family member and friend, etc. So we have a conception here of a desire (or care) being ‘deep’ insofar as it structures our character or sense of identity and what matters to us.

There is certainly an important connection between the idea of a deep desire and our sense of identity that I want to affirm. However, I think the subjectivism of Frankfurt's and Williams's accounts ends up being problematic. If we come to think that the things, persons, or projects we care deeply about don't really matter, i.e. they don't stand independent of our desires as that with which we ought to be concerned, then this can have a deflationary effect on our caring and it can induce a kind of identity crisis or existential vertigo.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, this seems to occur in the common phenomenon of a midlife crisis, where one comes to realize that the projects around which one has structured one's life do not really matter.

Frankfurt's and Williams's subjectivism also clearly does not fit with how a traditional theist understands the desire to be at one with God, since he or she believes that this does really matter. Consider again Eleonore Stump's work. Stump has developed an account of what she calls ‘the desires of the heart’, which has a lot in common with Frankfurt's account of the importance of what we care about and Williams's account of ‘ground projects’ or ‘categorical desires’, but it also differs in significant respects. Stump writes:

There are obviously echoes of Frankfurt and Williams here.Footnote ²² However, Stump also wants to affirm that there can be an objective side to our heart's desires, where we can speak of what is their suitable object. The desires of the heart, she thinks, can be understood merely on a subjective scale of value in terms of their ‘depth’ or ‘superficiality’, i.e. how central they are to one's web of desire (and so, we might add, to one's identity). But their value can also be understood on an objective scale of value by which we measure human flourishing or fulfilment, ‘where what is best is highest and what is worst is lowest’.Footnote ²³ In particular, Stump believes that our deepest heart's desire should be correlated with that which is the highest good on the objective scale of values, which she thinks is ‘shared union in love with particular people’. She writes: ‘Anything can be the deepest desire of a person's heart, in the sense that a person can take it as the center of his web of desire. But only persons ought to be the deepest desire of a person's heart’.Footnote ²⁴ Moreover, as we have seen already, Stump suggests (following Augustine and Aquinas, as she reads them): ‘not only are human beings constructed in such a way that they hunger for the love of other persons, but in fact their deepest, inbuilt hunger is for God. . . . [U]nless a person takes God as her deepest heart's desire, her heart will always have at its deepest core a yearning that is both inchoate and unsatisfied’.Footnote ²⁵ Thus, a person should ‘take as her deepest heart's desire the very thing that is also her greatest flourishing – namely, God and shared union with God’.Footnote ²⁶

I have already argued that such an appeal to an innate or ‘hardwired’ desire for God is problematic because the desire for God presupposes the attainment of conceptual thought. Thus, to have such a desire requires that we first enter the space of meaning via an acquired second nature. From within this space of meaning what we need is an account of why God is worthy of our deepest love, which also means specifying why God is the highest good. This means engaging in ‘strong evaluation’, which contrasts with ‘weak evaluation’, where something is judged to be good – a ‘weak good’ – simply in virtue of being desired (or happening to care about it). In strong evaluation something is judged as good – a ‘strong good’ – in light of qualitative distinctions of value in terms of higher and lower, deeper and more shallow, admirable and contemptible, noble and base, sacred and profane, and so forth, which are seen as normative for our desires rather than being merely contingent upon them.Footnote ²⁷ In other words, strong evaluative meaning, as an aspect of the space of meaning, involves normative demands that are seen as being ‘there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them’.Footnote ²⁸ To describe a desire as ‘deep’ or the ‘deepest’, as opposed to being shallow, is thus to say something about its normative importance: it is something of profound significance for our human fulfilment about which we ought to be concerned, and it is correlated with the normative ‘height’ of the object of desire. It is in light of this normative understanding of our deepest desire that it should be seen as being at the centre of our web of desire and integral to our sense of self, and as connected to our deepest fulfilment (as we have seen Cottingham maintains).

We in fact often evaluate human beings as deep or shallow depending on whether their lives are guided by desires that are viewed as being deep or shallow. We can bring this out by considering two modes of sexual desire: lust and erotic love.Footnote ²⁹ The latter can be seen as a deep desire in comparison to the former because it has a higher object – namely, sexual communion with the beloved, as opposed to mere sexual gratification – and because it constitutes a greater mode of human fulfilment. The profound significance of this sexual communion – which can have a sense of being ‘sacramental’ – is also related to the perception of the profound significance of human sexuality itself. As Elizabeth Anscombe puts it:

She goes on to say that the perception of dishonour here is a ‘mystical perception’, which I would call a strong evaluative judgement with regard to the sacred or the holy, i.e. the reverence-worthy. I would further add that the sense of the sacred or the reverence-worthy here can relate not only to the connection of sexuality with the origination of human life (as Anscombe suggests), but also to the way sexuality is intimately connected to our personhood and its special dignity. This comes out not only in the horror at sexual violence, where we have a sense of something sacred or profoundly precious having been violated, but also in what has traditionally been seen as the most profound form of sexual union: namely, ‘holy matrimony’. Indeed, it can be argued that erotic love has an ‘inherent nuptiality’,Footnote ³¹ i.e. it tends towards exclusivity and permanence in a ‘sacred bond’. When we really love someone erotically we do not want to live without the person (she or he is regarded as irreplaceable), we want to bind our lives together, and this also demands exclusivity as proper to the profound intimacy of the erotic loving relationship (and hence jealousy can be an appropriate response to threats to this intimate relationship). Thus, erotic love finds its proper fulfilment in the vow (or sacred bond) of marriage and this is regarded as a deep mode of human fulfilment.Footnote ³²

I think this account of erotic love as a deep desire can help us to understand the desire to be at one with God as a deep desire, and how it can be our deepest desire.Footnote ³³ As I have suggested, on a theistic view the desire to be at one with God should be regarded as our deepest desire because God is the highest object of our love and the source of our deepest human fulfilment. As the ultimate creative source of every finite thing, God answers our fundamental existential questions as philosophical, meaning-seeking creatures: Who am I? How ought I to live? Does my life have a purpose? Why is there anything at all? And so on. And describing God as the highest object of our love involves a strong evaluative judgement: God is most love-worthy because of God's perfect goodness as the fullest ‘actuality’, being perfect in every way (including in love for human beings).Footnote ³⁴ Therefore, we experience the greatest human fulfilment (or ‘fullness’) through communion with God. The perfect goodness of God can also be described as supreme holiness, where God is seen as most reverence-worthy: such holiness has a numinous or transcendent quality and makes the strongest normative demands upon us for love, worship, and devotion. Hence MacIntyre says: ‘finite beings who possess the power of understanding, if they know that God exists, know that he is the most adequate object of their love’.

Desiring God, whether we know it or not

MacIntyre continues by saying that ‘the deepest desire of every such being, whether they acknowledge it or not, is to be at one with God’ (my emphasis). The interesting suggestion is that we can have an unacknowledged desire for God, i.e. we have a desire for an object that is in some way hidden from view. Can we make sense of such an idea according to the account of deep desires given so far?

On the face of it, it seems strange to have a desire for something if we don't recognize ourselves as desiring the thing in question. Desire seems precisely to depend upon responsiveness to some recognized object. However, we might say that we desire something captured under a general concept – such as when someone desires a spouse – but not yet know what or who is the proper object of this desire. It is along these lines that Aquinas makes the case for thinking that an unacknowledged desire for God is present in our desire for happiness:

I don't think it is right to say that there is an innate desire for happiness (if this is what Aquinas is saying), since ‘happiness’ (understood as equivalent to ‘human fulfilment’) itself is a concept that requires that we have entered the space of meaning via an acquired second nature. However, all mature human beings do of course desire ‘happiness’ (or something equivalent captured under another term that denotes the ultimate end of human action), and so in this sense we can say that it is ‘natural’ (i.e. this desire is inevitable once we have entered the space of meaning). In any case, the point here is that we can desire many things (riches, pleasure, etc.) under the guise of desiring happiness, but what will really fulfil this desire for happiness is God.

We see this illustrated in the life of Augustine, as described autobiographically in his Confessions and recently discussed by Talbot Brewer in his book The Retrieval of Ethics. In his pre-conversion life, Augustine pursued various objects – e.g., sexual pleasure, public honour, friendship, and philosophical understanding – under the guise of desiring happiness, but he eventually came to realize that true happiness is found in God; in other words, he came to realize that ‘our hearts are restless until they rest in God’. Brewer writes:

It is important to note here that, when properly understood, the desire for happiness leads us to seek an object that is most worthy of being loved for its own sake but which, when so loved, is also constitutive of our fullest happiness.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, we do not simply desire happiness, but rather we above all desire that which is the source of our fullest happiness, viz., God. Such is the position of Augustine and Aquinas. As the latter puts it: ‘[T]he thing itself which is desired as end, is that which constitutes happiness, and makes man happy; but the attainment of this thing is called happiness. Consequently we must say that happiness is something belonging to the soul; but that which constitutes happiness is something outside the soul’.Footnote ³⁸ Brewer comments on Aquinas's view as follows:

These remarks fill out what was said in the Introduction about how the relational good of being at one with God is predicated upon and inseparable from a prior affirmation and appreciation of God's goodness.

We should also see that Brewer's appeal to an ‘evaluative picture’ (where desires are viewed as ‘apprehensions of actions, ends or persons as good’) to understand how God might be said to be the most adequate object of our desire or longing for happiness (i.e. ‘deep or permanent satisfaction’) is in alignment with my second nature approach to understanding the idea of God being the proper object of our deepest desire and source of our deepest fulfilment because of being the highest good, where ‘deepest’ and ‘highest’ are understood in strong evaluative terms as that which is normative for our desires. However, Brewer ends up offering a view of ‘deep desires’ that is separable from such an evaluative picture, insofar as the concept of ‘depth’ is not used as an evaluative concept (as it is my account). He writes: ‘To say that a desire has depth is to say that its object exceeds the desirer's explicit articulation of it, and this affords the desirer with an occasion to perfect the desires by arriving at a fuller articulation of them’.Footnote ⁴⁰ This is certainly one way to understand the idea of ‘deep desires’, and it can be seen to apply to the desire for God because the nature of God always in some way exceeds our capacity for explicit articulation. Nevertheless, I don't think this should be the primary way of understanding the idea of ‘deep desires’ insofar as one appeals to deep desires as part of an ethical and spiritual life-orientation. There are many things that may exceed our capacity for explicit articulation that have no importance for such a life-orientation.

Appeals to ‘deep desires’ as part of an ethical and spiritual life-orientation should be understood, as I have suggested, in strong evaluative terms. And thus to explore how there might be an unacknowledged desire for God in our desire (or longing) for happiness (or fulfilment), we need to explore a strong evaluative picture of how God can be seen as the most adequate object of this desire (or longing). At the end of the last section I tried to sketch an account of how God, if God exists, should be seen as the highest object of love, i.e. as most love-worthy and reverence-worthy, and the source of our deepest human fulfilment. This is the case, on the standard theistic view, because of God's perfect goodness or supreme holiness. Once human beings enter into the space of meaning and possess concepts like ‘the sacred’ and ‘the holy’ and seek after the attainment of their deepest fulfilment, we can see how they are ‘naturally’ drawn to orient their lives towards an ultimate object of love, devotion, reverence, and even worship, for which God, according to this standard theistic view, is the most proper object.

On this point, consider the following passages from Dostoevsky's novels. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov says: ‘I'm tormented by God. Tormented only by that. What if he does not exist? . . . I keep thinking about it. Because whom will he love then – man, I mean? To whom will he be thankful, to whom will he sing the hymn?’Footnote ⁴¹ In The Adolescent, the ‘holy peasant’ Makar remarks:

Likewise, at the end of Demons, Stepan proclaims:

We can see this in various ‘God-substitutes’, such as the ‘Religion of Humanity’, or ‘Progress’, or ‘Utopia’, or the ‘Ubermensch’, or whatever else is taken to be the ultimate object of love, devotion, reverence, and even worship. But for Dostoevsky, and on the account I have given, these are all forms of idolatry precisely because they seek to substitute for that which really is the ultimate object of love, devotion, reverence, and worship: namely, God.

Of course, it could also be that human life is a ‘useless passion’ (to borrow a phrase from Sartre) in that our deepest desire is for something that does not exist. It has not been my purpose in this article to argue against this possibility. The aim here instead has been to show how best to understand the idea of deep desires within a theistic life-orientation and to show how we should affirm the claim that ‘the deepest desire of every [human] being, whether they acknowledge it or not, is to be at one with God’. Despite any doubts we might have about God's existence, this line of argument suggests that we should indeed affirm that God still matters.Footnote ⁴⁴