They did not come.
What is the source of the sacredness of a personal promise – or any nonchalant ‘yes’ that can be construed as a promise? I am searching for God. He is not in the church, the clergy is shipwrecked on a dead ocean of rituals. What replaces the pews and the holy, non-negotiable authority of the father-priest? I have to – have to want to – replace it with another sacred relation to the future, a sacredness I attach to my promises. The phrase ‘I will do everything in my power to make it’ has meaning to me beyond the convenient. Everything is everything. It includes taxi rides and helicopter flights, skipping tv shows and hotel nights. The only problem is a conflict with another ‘priest’: another sacred promise such as a funeral.
None of them was going to a funeral.
You cannot find God in human promises. It is a vainglorious exercise that creates an unsustainable and very uncomfortable assymmetry. Like Luther who saw that the promise of Heaven was foul and had become a device for the Catholic Church’s own enrichment and comfort, I turn my back to the institutional layer and long for a direct link to G_d.
But here is the problem. Where in Christianity the institutional layer could be peeled away to reveal an imaginary direct link to a god, what remains of humanism without institutions (habits, rituals, culture) is unclear. Humanism is the Holy Spirit with no resort to the Father or the Son. It is the belief in the ‘glory’ of the community of humans without One to anchor that glory to. It is fragility and vanity all the way down. Humanism is inherently nihilistic. It is nihilism turned on its head.
A misanthrope is a consequential humanist. He protects the idea of a strong, dependable (meaning sacred) humanity by strongly criticising (hating) human behavior that does not meet the highest standards.
There is a dialectic of love and hate. The hatred of morally half-baked behavior is inspired by a deeper love for an idea of humanity. But that love can only come from our experience of other, older fallible behavior.
Not all can be bad. For the misanthrope, there is worth in expressing misanthrope ideas. She finds there a grounding of her ideas, the stark contrast with disappointing reality of broken promises, vengefulness, shortsightedness, egoism, convenience. The expression of misanthropy, indeed the stronger the better, is inspired by a robust belief in human potential.
But she mourns the chasm between that potential and reality.
Misanthropy doesn’t need to be aufgehoben in a grand unified insight. It does become self-aware but instead of a grandiose synthesis, it seeks epistemological modesty and continuation of play. Not closure. All we know and pattern comes from our experience.
History is unending. The best we can do it play with our ideas and with each other. A misanthrope surely has a bias in human interaction, but that bias allows for the hope that she will be surprised.
And she is surprised when she listens to music, for example. She does not suffer the contradiction (‘I should unequivocally love all humans because Bach has existed’). She is intensely happy because her experience shows her the fallibility of our conceptual thinking. It tunes in to a negative dialectic that keeps returning us to an invitation to play.