A few years ago, following a few decades wastefully spent consuming no other mind-altering substance than alcohol (which I quit for good in 2020), I began to experiment with psilocybin. Not long after, I found myself attending Catholic mass every week. What, I have been trying to figure out ever since, is the relationship between these two developments?
Almost immediately after the first experience with mushrooms, I found my faith in modern secular institutions, mostly unexamined up to that point, was rapidly crumbling. The world we moderns had built for ourselves suddenly looked something like the courthouse in a ghost town: filled with spiderwebs, and plainly no longer fulfilling the purpose for which it was conceived.
I was still reeling from this disenchantment when I began noticing how impressed I had become with those men in robes with their incense and their inscrutable chants and untimely sermons, still just doing their thing more or less unchanged since before anyone had the idea of a secular public sphere. It was starting to look like they had figured something out, something that might enable them to keep doing that same thing long after the idea of a secular public sphere has disappeared in turn, either as a result of a wholesale return to religion, or because society ceases to run even on the fumes of theology that throughout the modern period have continued to inform our thinking about rights, freedom, dignity, and law. Thinking in centuries, as the Church does, rather than in election cycles, or five-year plans, or fiscal quarters, or any of the other shorter timescales we have set up to pattern our modern lives, was starting to look rather wise.
I remained aware that 2,000 years is not a particularly long time. San hunters in Namibia transmit oral knowledge across the generations, elements of which may be more than 50 times as old as Christianity. I cannot deny that after finding my way back to church, I found myself more than ever wanting to understand other traditions, to work my way into them through comparative study of language, ritual, cosmology. But affirming the truth of Christianity seemed to require me to grant that truth can be revealed in history, and therefore that those born later might have access to dimensions of truth that their ancestors did not have.
This went directly against a long-held conviction, one that I had always considered necessary in order to have respect for, say, San representations of reality. I had assumed that we know more or less the same truths, the San and I, but only have different ways of expressing what we know. Now I had to consider the possibility, which still smelled of arrogance to me, of saying: You all are my equals, with respect to our humanity; with respect to our access to the ultimate truth of things, well, I’ve got something you don’t.
I was desperate not to embrace this conclusion, at least not without a thorough consideration of whether historical precedent and theological correctness require me to do so. Historically, Christian missionaries served as the vanguard of what would later become the scholarly discipline of ethnography. For every missionary who quickly dismissed indigenous practices as deviltry, there was another who went so deep in the work of what would later be called participant-observation as practically to forget that he had come to teach these people something in turn.
This flexibility and liberality of spirit extend all the way from the Jesuits in 18th-century China, who during the so-called rites controversy defended traditional ancestor reverence among Chinese converts against the Vatican’s hard-line incompatibilism, to the remarkable Indological and comparative-religion scholarship of the Jesuit Francis X. Clooney today. How does one become like these Jesuits? I wanted to know. How does one remain assured of the special relationship of one’s own beliefs to the truth, while at the same time valuing other beliefs as incalculably rich repositories of human wisdom and ingenuity? How does one simultaneously value the human beings who hold these beliefs both as eminent teachers and as people still in need of the Good News?
One way to manage the problem is to find one’s way towards a rigorous compatibilism, on which the prior unfamiliarity of a group of people with the revealed truths of scripture does not necessarily exclude them from possession of the sort of divine truth required for salvation, as they may in principle arrive at this by means of natural theology as well. One may think here of the 12th-century Muslim writer Ibn Tufayl, who in his novel Hayy ibn Yaqdhan describes a child who has been raised by antelope, never exposed to any of his conspecifics let alone to the truths of the Qu’ran. He still has what it takes, the author thinks, to be blessed, as he is surrounded by abundant signs of the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence of a creator God. This idea will resurface in the European Enlightenment, and will attract many nominally Christian thinkers, such as David Hume, who find the prerequisite for salvation of familiarity with revealed truth far too stringent.
Another way of managing this problem is simply not to think about it. I had anyhow been longing, from the beginning of my conversion, to arrive at something like what the French call la foi du charbonnier—faith such as you might find it embodied by the neighborhood coal-carrier. Think here of Madame Cibot, the working-class porter-woman in Balzac’s Cousin Pons, who is confused when told that the Jewish art appraiser Elie Magus has sworn to respect the terms of his initial offer in a business transaction. Sworn? How does a non-Christian swear? On what do they swear? Her vision of the world is too underdeveloped to be deemed anti-Semitic; it has simply never occurred to her before that there could be any way to ground a promise than through shared commitment among the two parties to the same moral and theological order.
I could never go back to that degree of purity, nor would I want to. I would just like to find a way of living with my faith, of cherishing it and protecting it from what I now see as the mostly bad habit of subjecting everything to which I commit myself to endless scrutiny and doubt. I would just like to try to love everybody indiscriminately, and, if I ever end up converting anyone as a result, to do so only by example, and not by persuasion.
It was in part the limits of my own power of persuasion, whether directed at myself or others, that had initially made faith attractive to me. I wanted to acquiesce, to admit I don’t know, to circle around the mystery of it. What Heidegger called ontotheology—the effort of the philosophers to prove God’s existence, as if it were Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster we were talking about—came to seem deeply misguided to me. The analytic philosophers of religion who write books about faith’s “epistemic warrant” and so on seemed to me engaged in a project utterly antithetical to the nature and promise of faith properly conceived. Once you start furnishing proofs, you’re already operating on the playing field of the skeptics, who therefore have full home-team advantage. I had been a philosophy professor for over 20 years when I began feeling my way toward Catholicism, and while I didn’t know quite what I wanted yet, I knew I did not want any more argument.
I would come to learn that my story is relatively unusual among adult converts arriving from a background in philosophy. I know one such person whose conversion happened as follows: She read St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, found its arguments convincing, and committed herself there and then to the truth of the faith these arguments were defending. I mean, I like St. Thomas, but I like almost everything I read, especially while I’m reading it, and if I were to let my enthusiasm about my reading shape my deepest commitments, I would by now also have become a Quaker, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, and indeed a neopagan worshipper at the temple of the magic mushroom. But our deepest commitments are not shaped by comparison shopping, or through comparative reading. They are shaped by what Heidegger calls our “thrownness”: All that is true about us, about our plight in the world and our fate, before we’ve had a chance to make any choices at all.
I have at times over the past few years descended into a hot-headed anti-intellectualism. If reason is of no use to faith, I thought, then reason is of no use at all. I wanted to be like Nicolaus Steno, the Danish paleontologist, anatomist, and polymath who, upon converting to Catholicism, dropped all his scientific research projects, and even refused to have any further contact with his old friend, the philosopher and natural theologian G. W. Leibniz. But I was even more drawn to the example of Leibniz, who believed not that faith and reason are “non-overlapping magisteria,” as biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it, but rather perfectly overlapping magisteria, constituting, in their manifestations as grace and nature, what he described as a “world within a world.” If I was still a long way from reaching any real conviction as to this vision of harmonic containment, I assumed that this was simply because I’m not nearly as smart as Leibniz was. Even so, I could follow his example by attending to questions of reason without worrying about what faith might have to say about them, and to live my faith without worrying about building rational foundations for it.
A few years ago a Dominican priest, one of the spiritual advisors who did much to orient me on my way back to the Catholic Church, told me something that I still think about nearly every day. Faith, he said, will not, in the ideal situation, replace the attainments of the secular intellect, but will only cast these attainments in a new light. Of course, the intellect can still lead one astray. It is so easy, when focused upon the dazzling variety of natural forms, to enter into a disposition that feels awfully close to the worship of nature. Steno understood this. He had to stop studying sharks’ teeth, since doing so had the power to send him into something close to idolatrous revelry.
It is possible to feel such a surge of power when we avail ourselves of the tools for accessing nature—be it the scientific method, or the ingestion of any number of psychedelic compounds— that one doubts the experience can be easily harmonized with a faith that counsels at least a certain wariness about nature’s enticements, and a sharper attention to all that lies behind them and that does not change.
The truth is that for most people in most places and times, the question of religious commitment has not hinged on being provided adequate empirical evidence or knockdown logical deductions. More than this, for many of the subtlest theologians across the Abrahamic faiths, commitment to the existence of God is categorically unlike commitment to the existence of any non-divine external entity. God is not an entity among others, and it only belittles the divine nature to conceive the matter in this way.
Scripture, certainly, does not dwell on the reasons and evidence for God’s existence. It says, rather, that “God is love” (1 John 4:8); but because we human beings are capable of loving, it follows that each act of love is a proof, by substitution, of God. And Scripture says: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). It invites us to see God as socially constructed in the literal sense—as instantiated ever anew through the bonds of men. This is not a second-rate sense of existence, and that it easily appears so today is only a result of the fact that we have allowed scientific discovery, over the past four centuries, to define the terms in which we articulate our commitments in all other domains of life. This allowance has been as arbitrary as it is unfounded, and it practically condemns to failure any defense of religious commitment articulated in its terms.
For my part, I have come to think of the existence of God somewhat on analogy to the existence of the luminescence in a lightbulb that has been attached to an exercise bike, and that only continues as long as you are pedaling. That “pedaling” is striving, each day, to produce God through the practice of Christian charity. If I stop pedaling for a day or two, I get reabsorbed in myself and in the world, and in the same measure my belief in God flags as well. It is not that the external evidence for God’s existence comes to appear weaker, but rather that I myself fail at such times to produce the evidence. If God seems not to exist, that is entirely my fault.
And the fact that I am capable of such a fault as this serves, for me, as a fairly compelling demonstration of the doctrine of original sin. The soul’s descent, Plotinus taught, begins when it turns its gaze away from the intelligible realm and towards the sensible, and in this way begins to forget what it really is. But it never entirely forgets. The classicist Walter Burkert has argued that rituals of offering or sacrifice in traditional societies already serve as a form of propitiation for what is experienced among hunters as a profound guilt: guilt at being, necessarily, simply as a condition of existing, mixed up in the muck and blood of this world. Christianity replaces this much older system with a sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and to deliver universal redemption. But for as long as we’re in this earthly life there simply is no way out of the muck and blood, nor does secular modernity seem capable of extricating us. Consider the billions of animals now slaughtered each year in shame and in secret, without so much as a thought that these might be creatures worthy, in their death, of some sort of ritual reverence, or at least gratitude.
Given the stains in the record of our supposed moral progress, I do not see how the human condition is anything other than fallen. Almost everything I have ever done has been driven by vanity, greed, ambition, amour-propre, and it is only by the grace of God that I have occasionally been able to see that this is sinful. How little have I known my true nature! It is precisely because I am, I think, morally unexceptional, neither particularly good nor particularly rotten, that my own way of operating, and my own lack of self-knowledge, frightens me. Multiply such an instance of low and self-centered human ambition by eight billion or so, and you can really start to see why our world is, quite literally, damned.
I take it that the difficulty of coming by such self-knowledge, of knowing what we are in the profoundest sense, has much to do with the fact that our secularism, properly understood, is in fact a species of paganism, and it is seductive as hell. As a teenager in suburban California in the 1980s, I attended house parties at least as decadent, if not as well-connected, as anything that ever happened at Andy Warhol’s Factory. Surrounded by young people engaged in wanton and licentious indulgence, entirely unaware of their true natures, I could hear an inarticulate inner voice trying to convince me that all of this was alright now, that this was just who we are now, as the old cosmic and moral order that used to regulate such things has collapsed. The inner voice didn’t have the language for all of this, and perhaps accordingly I never fully believed it. But it is a significant fact about me, and about many of us, that the way we were thrown into history should have caused such a voice to pipe up in us, and to try to convince us that it was our own.
Most of the entities that make up the ontology of our modern paganism are, in any case, no less flimsy than any of the traditional figures of religious veneration. Do soulmates exist? Do credit ratings exist? Do bro hugs exist? Do casual Fridays exist? Do the United States exist? Yes, for now, surely, but only because interested parties keep insisting they do. And for that matter the very entity that has been proposed to anchor the philosophy of liberal individualism for the past few centuries, to wit, the “individual,” turns out to be anything but. Entirely dependent for its existence and its definition on the total web of its relations, literally constituted internally by a vast microbiome of non-human organisms, and externally by the food it eats, the air it breathes, the plants, animals, and humans it encounters, an “individual” person is patently at least as eliminable as, say, God, if we should wish to eliminate every entity about which we must acknowledge that our own narrative and pragmatic comportment towards it helps to sustain it in existence. But why on earth would we wish to do that?
The end of secular liberalism that we might be facing today, with the apparent rise of a machine-dominated order, could unfortunately be understood as the belated discovery that we can do that: that we can get rid of people just as effectively as, in large portions of the world, we’ve managed to get rid of God over the past few centuries. It would be preferable, obviously, to use the new discovery of this possibility to turn back and have an honest reckoning with how we got here. Once this is done, we may be able to begin rebuilding both belief in God and in human dignity in a way that avoids what has turned out to be the dead end of liberal individualism and of ontotheology together, both of which have made the huge mistake of supposing that in order to have any right to believe in something you first have to prove that it exists.
The original idea for the present essay had been to provide some further development of the admission I made at the end of my recent book, On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality. It is there that I first revealed that the experiences recounted in the book’s preceding chapters, of a midlife return to experimenting with psilocybin, in the aim of a sort of “system reset” for what had by then become a rather dysfunctional and alienated 40-something man. This ultimately landed me back in church after decades of absence. Psychedelics as a gateway drug to Catholicism, I joked.
Most of us today understand why psychedelics are difficult to harmonize with at least the main currents of the Abrahamic faiths. But most will also find puzzling the suggestion that the powers and dangers of science have much of anything in common with the powers and dangers of psychedelics. Think about it, though. Both provide a means of getting closer to nature, of burrowing into it, of having it reveal itself to us. And nature, in one prominent conception, is precisely the thing from which Christian faith is supposed to lift your gaze, reassuring you that its perishable forms are anyhow not where the deepest truth is to be found, that the hope for eternal life depends on being able to see through nature’s smokescreen. Drugs and science both, on a certain line of thinking, only thicken the smoke.
To put this point somewhat differently, psychedelics deliver “science,” in the old sense of “knowing,” but they do so by tapping into our passivity and our irrationality, rather than relying on the active deployment of our faculty of reason. To this extent, psychedelics are also like faith, in that both require us to “go limp,” to let ourselves be filled up with and transformed by them. The generic effect of my system reset, then, might be described in part as a late-coming discovery of the virtues of passivity, of no longer trying to convince myself that the shape of my life and my destiny should depend entirely on my will.
Unsurprisingly, the late-arriving plot-twist of my return to faith has generated more interest than anything else in the book. Many people have written to me saying they had a similar experience; many report a diametrically opposite result, that their own explorations with psychedelics only led to an intensified commitment to metaphysical naturalism. In the book I argue, against the excesses of many psychedelic gurus and New Age Schwärmer, that at most a psychedelic experience can furnish you with an analogy of beatific vision. You do not see the face of God—not even Moses got to see the face of God—but you may at least become aware, from the mode of consciousness that you enter into under the influence of mushrooms or acid or ayahuasca, that to yearn to do so is not at all a foolish thing. What you do see are dazzling presentations of nature—that shared object of reverence of paganism and modern science alike.
Even so, psychedelics are remarkably helpful in coming to see what an utter farce human institutions are: academia, celebrity, media, elections, prize committees, social distinction of any sort, nations, wars—vanity of vanities! “It is all ridiculous, when you think of death,” the atheist writer Thomas Bernhard said upon being given some distinction or other. He was right, of course, but he could not detect a certain significant corollary that only becomes clear when you look beyond death: that a life spent working in full knowledge of our true nature, as mortal sinners offered the infinite gift of redemption, can be a pretty wonderful thing, even if, incidentally, some prizes and distinctions happen to come our way in the course of it.
Just as psychedelics significantly weakened my commitment to the reality of human institutions, they sharpened my awareness, and not just in the brief moment of their direct influence on me, of the reality of love, yes, love, as the bedrock of all that exists, even—no, especially—in this world of endless suffering. But as we have already established, God is love. To that extent, I find I cannot put things any other way, even if I tried unsuccessfully to do so in the book, than to say that, yes indeed, praise the Lord, psychedelics made me Christian.
Justin Smith-Ruiu is a professor of philosophy at Université Paris Cité and the author of On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality.
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