indefiniteness of matter is going to prove to be its fundamental indefinability.
It is intriguing that the choice of wood to designate primal matter is at least partly due to a connectedness with the forest that we do not have with water, sky, or earth: that we seem, not so long ago in geological terms, to have been covered in vegetation but are so no longer. Something akin to deforestation has happened to us, and it is the destruction of the forests that is presently so alarming us on our planet.
Quite apart from whether the human species really is Desmond Morris’s ‘naked ape’,14 whether it ever was hairy and, if so, when it stopped being hairy, what is phenomenologically of value to us is that the experience of being hairy is simultaneously inaccessible to us and very close. We can readily imagine what it would be like to be hairy, although, if we imagine ourselves hairy, it is ourselves we are seeing as hairy, our real selves except, perhaps, for our consciousness.15 The original hairy human’s consciousness must surely have been different, primal, although the primitive mind was not necessarily crude and underdeveloped, something to be despised. On the contrary, we are curious and feel it is relevant to us. We can see that in the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and in all our scientific and artistic reconstructions.16
There is no need for us, in the interests of the integrity and reliability of our work, to start vexing ourselves over whether humans were ever hairy, or speculating about the nature of primitive consciousness. What is of significance for us, though, is the presence in the human experience of primitive tribes, their presence in the thinking of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the arts, in writing (for example, in C.S. Lewis, who imagined a sweet-natured, hairy primal human being, a wise superman – the snow man in the American film Bigfoot evidently draws on Lewis), an alternative human being whom we find familiar and acceptable, who is more a creature of the forest than we are, partly because of his hairiness, partly because of his categorical refusal to fell trees, and partly because he lives in the forest.
Today’s urbanized and technologically minded people keep the forest at a distance, enjoying its wonders in measured doses that pose no risk to health: enjoying the countryside, going for a stroll in the park. The forest, however, precisely because it is pushed back, eats its way into humanity ever more vengefully and irrevocably. It is as if humankind has failed to make its peace with the forest and now it is payback time. I do not think it unreasonable to see tobacco, wine, and drugs as the forest’s revenge, tightening with its juices, poisons, and smoke the grip it has on humanity. The modern city has no escape from the forest, which reaches out after it through the power of its alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine. With these so much in evidence, we can see that the ancient religions and civilizations have lost none of their power. In using cocaine, individuals tear down the fence artificially separating them and surrender to their authentic element, the forest, to shamanism and fire. Of course, they are thereby desperately flinging themselves headlong into the fire, but that results from something that has built up over a long period during which they artificially separated themselves from the forest, from its matter.
I emphasize that we need to refrain, in the interests of good order, from any attempt to resuscitate the benign hairy human. Our focus is only on what there is today and constitutes our phenomenology. Whether we fear the hairy hominid or feel drawn to it, we are different. We are confronting a different consciousness, which it is impossible to imagine, reconstruct, or compute, but with which, in some strange way, it is entirely possible to conduct mental experiments.
What was the faith of this individual? ‘Primitive.’ The same as Michel Foucault describes in a child, a lunatic, or a poet.17 There can be no end to replies of that kind, where we say much more than we have any business saying, more than is sensible or necessary. In attempting to answer the question, we will do better to behave like good phenomenologists and make notes and take readings of what we can see here and now.
And where does that leave us? Let us suppose someone believes in God. They go to church and profess their faith, but they can see within themselves a different faith. I invite you to look, and to see that all of us live believing in two faiths. In just the same way that, without being able to step outside the consciousness in which we live, we can easily feel our closeness to that other one, the forest dweller, with his primaeval consciousness which is no different from ours in content. The Fathers of the Church see the Church as beginning with Abel. The Roman Catholic theologian Bernhard Welte always associated the Abel of the Bible with the people who inhabited caves of volcanic origin on the Mount of Olives near Cologne 10,000 years ago. Is there anything we can know about their worship of God? Welte felt himself in a eucharistic communion with those cave dwellers. How is that possible if theirs was a different faith? Or can we indeed talk about a faith we share with cave dwellers from 10,000 years ago?18
St Paul invites us to recognize Abel’s sacrifice as coming from unshakeable faith (Hebrews, 11: 4). St John Chrysostom, interpreting chapter 4 of the Book of Genesis, speaks of the right disposition of Abel’s heart, compared with that of Cain. Cain’s countenance fell because God did not respect his gift. ‘And the Lord said unto Cain, “Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.”’ This is already a matter not solely to do with the offering of sacrifices; it concerns any act a person may perform. This can be a good deed, the person ‘raises their countenance’ and God looks upon them in response; or the promptings of their heart can go awry, the person’s countenance becomes dark, confused, their eyes look downwards, and they become a prey to loneliness and are accursed. It is up to individuals to desire an open countenance for themselves and to be afraid of a fallen countenance, or to suppress that fear, as Cain suppressed the fear of his own disgruntlement and envy, and cast aside his concern about what the commentators call his ‘inner disposition’.
We can imagine a person, a child, the hairy human, without this concern to retain their portion, to stay with God, not to be bereft, not to fall from his favour; or, if they already have, not to be a prey to anxiety about that fall, to be without irritation or envy, in a state halfway between, on the one hand, the raised face and open expression, and, on the other, that other state of degeneracy. We can imagine them vacillating between Cain, who was spurned, and Abel, who cheerfully raises his countenance and meets the gaze of God.
I want now to introduce a word I have avoided so far: the law of human beings or of human nature. It is a law without limitation, fundamental, and in fact the only law, because in everything else people are unbounded and free. For every person, no matter how they frame their faith, in any situation and condition and age, this is concern about their portion, concern in the sense of Heidegger’s Sorge, their concern in terms of being endowed not dispossessed, of living in prosperity rather than wretchedness, and if in poverty, then in that ascetic poverty that is better than any prosperity.19
We are completely unable to read or articulate this law of concern, of ɛύλἀβɛια, of right thought and piety, of God-fearing. It is probably operating before we have found any definition of it. Before we have any awareness of it, it is leading us, suggesting how we should act. Everything we do, we do in obedience to it. Can we privately choose not to conform to it? No, it only seems that it can be resisted. It can neither be rescinded nor made more lenient, although the approach of Cain is open to us, to declare, ‘Then so be it: the worse, the better.’ Our freedom here extends no further than to be or not to be in a place where we already are. It is only by recognizing this level of the universal law of human nature that religion can be understood.
Religion will always be found, within its culture, language, and way of life, to be a restoration of that unwritten law, of instinct. Religion is in its essence that same law. Religious discourse is consequently a matter of only secondary importance.
The instinct of piety, the need, second by second, to choose Abel, and the ever-present threat of Cain, is an innate law, and the word ‘law’ needs to have this meaning restored to it. Discriminating between secular and religious law, between civil law and canon law, is essential if the initial law is to remain unsullied. These two parallel