Every year, the Divinity Faculty participates in the Sutton Trust Summer Schools programme. The Sutton Trust Summer Schools are competitive, week-long residentials aimed at giving students a taste of Cambridge life. This year's course was organised jointly with the Faculty of Philosophy, and all the sessions were held online. On the second day, students were joined by doctoral candidates Charles Prempeh and Steven Toussaint, who led an engaging session on the nature of belief.
What is belief? Perspectives from Postcolonial Ghana
Charles Prempeh
In my discussion today, I will focus on how the indigenous Akan concept of belief survived colonialism to inform how religions, in general, are practised in postcolonial Ghana. I will attempt to answer the questions: What is belief? How does the Akan concept of belief (re)shape the worldview of Christians and Muslims in post-missionary Ghana? And how does the concept of belief shape the mundane aspects of life in Ghana?
Belief remains a cardinal aspect of religion. Religious devotees must affirm a litany of beliefs to be confirmed into any particular religious tradition. This is particularly true of institutionalised religions like Christianity and Islam. But belief has a different implication and application in non-institutionalised religions, like Akan indigenous religions[1]. This is precisely because, in Akan indigenous religions, there is no categorical distinction between belief and practice. The two are mutually inclusive categories that shape the totality of life of religious adherents. The mutual inclusivity and bridging of gaps between belief and practices reflect the non-binaries between the "sacred" and the "secular/profane".
Since the advent of Western European missionary proselytization in Ghana (then Gold Coast) in the fifteenth (and rejuvenated in the nineteenth) century, many Akan people of Ghana have “converted” to Christianity. Some have also converted to Islam, which made its first appearance in the Northern Territories of Ghana in the fourteenth century. But regardless of the conversion narratives of the people of Ghana, indigenous religions continue to shape the religious trajectories of most Ghanaian religious devotees. To be more specific, the idea of belief in indigenous religions tends to inform how Christians and Muslims appropriate their respective religions. Religious experts and functionaries in Christianity and Islam invoke the indigenous concept of belief to enforce their respective teachings. I shall return to this in the course of my presentation.
Among the Akan, the largest ethnic group in Ghana, the rendition of belief is “Gyi di” to wit, “Receive and eat”. “Gyi di” is also used for faith. The Akan concept of "Gyi di" implies that one must accept what one is told without any reservation. But this is not the same as religious gullibility or uncritical acceptance of a religious idea. It rather reflects the constitutive ontology of indigenous religions as lived religions that shape the totality of the life of the religious devotee. Consequently, what is considered “gyi di” is based on a collective acceptance of aspects of life that affirm collectivity and mutuality in practice to affirm the common good of humanity on earth. This flows from the fact that “gyi di” among the Akan is not about believing to attain a serene and untroubled place in the hereafter (precisely heaven). For the Akan indigenous religions, life is about the here and now.
The idea of belief that articulates salvation is expressed in terms of material blessings on earth. It, therefore, reflects the concept and essence of truth (“nokware” – speaking with one mouth – [epistemology] – and the idea of beauty (aesthetics). For example, truth among the Akan is not an abstract or arid theological category, as it is about how one’s moral consciousness affirms the importance of consistency, collective living and material blessings. In the same breath, beauty – which reflects on how aesthetics is constructed, is primarily a social construct that conflates Akan metaphysics and praxis. Belief among the Akan, therefore, has a totalising effect. The Akan indigenous concept of belief has expressed profound resilience in shaping the prosperity gospel, which emphasised material prosperity, of the neo-Pentecostal churches in postcolonial Ghana. It also reflects on daily lived realities in Ghana, such as political discourses, greetings, friendship, conjugal love, and food and eating culture.
The discussion points to some key features of Akan indigenous religions that must be discussed. First, the Akan indigenous religions are non-revelatory. Unlike the so-named Abraham Religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – the Akan religions is a natural religion. It is a natural religion in the sense that there the cardinal beliefs about God, the spirits, human beings, the material environment are not based on any special revelation through a particular person. Impliedly, there are no founders and sacred text for Akan indigenous religions.
The non-revelatory nature of Akan religions means that it is based on experience and lived realities. The individual and collective experiences of Akan condition what constitute belief. belief must, therefore, necessarily correlate with daily realities. This links to the fact that the practices of devotees constitute the sacred text of the religion. Belief must therefore have a utilitarian value – solving the challenges that undermine the quality of life.
It is for this reason that the Akan consider any belief that does not inure to the benefit of human beings as "gyidi hunu" – "useless/empty belief". "Gyidi hunu" can have all the philosophical sophistication but if it does not solve the challenges of life, it is not considered worth accepting.
The constitutive nature of the Akan cosmos – bridging the material and immaterial worlds – is also key in understanding the concept of belief among the Akan. In the Akan cosmogony, there is an unbroken and fluid connection between the two spheres of existence – the material and the metaphysical. The world of the spirits – including benevolent spirits like the ancestors – tend to influence the material world. This is because the fluid and constitutive nature of the cosmos ensures the transgression of boundaries by the spirits. This means that making sense of events in the material world must necessarily integrate the influence of the spirit world. Consequently, an authentic belief must be able to answer the “how” and most especially the “why” questions of life.
For many Akan people in history and in recent times, they believe that science and technology answer the "how" questions of life and not the "why" questions. In many cases, they tend to emphasise the "why" answers. This partly explains the extensive rituals of divination to explore the will of the divine about the mundane world. Usually, when calamity occurs, most Akan people will consult the religious functionaries to know the "why" of the calamity. This has found an important expression in the episodic moment of the coronavirus (COVID-19). When Ghana recorded its first two cases of COVID-19 on March 12, 2020, most Ghanaians interpreted the pandemic as part of God's caution to a world is thought to be spiralling out of its moral compass. To this end, some of the clergies invested in prayers. Indigenous religious functionaries also performed rituals that they believed would avert the potential dangers associated with the virus. Investing in prayers to ward off the virus happened in some of the Western, “secularised” countries, including the United States of America.
In the quest of the "why" answers, scientific responses may only trigger an intense reason and curiosity of Akan religious devotees to explore the mind of the divine. Let me share a story from my family to exemplify what I have just said. On December 13, 2008, my father – Anthony Prempeh – passed on. He died at home at the age of 65 years without showing any visible signs of illness. We conveyed his remains to the Ghana Police mortuary in Accra, where an autopsy was performed. At the end of the autopsy, my family was clearly informed about what had killed my father. But some members of my family were still not satisfied with the result of the autopsy. My paternal aunt particularly asked the questions: "why now?" "Why that illness?”
After explaining the autopsy report to her, she still felt it was inadequate to answer her "why" questions. In the end, she, alongside other family members, concluded that someone might have used evil spirit – most probably witchcraft – to kill my father. At that point, I realised that my aunt, a thorough-bred Catholic, was engaging her Akan worldview to make sense of existential reality. The autopsy report answered her "how" questions of my father's death. But the "why" questions needed to be answered through an appeal to the metaphysical world. It could be gleaned from the reaction of my aunt and some of my family members that the belief in the world as a constitutive unity was at the heart of their understanding of inevitable issues like death. It also demonstrates the indigenous understanding that nothing happens by accident. There is always a mystical causality – that explains the “why” events of life.
The nature of belief among the Akan is also such that it provides some form of a duality of identity for the Akan Christian and Muslim. This is precisely because the indigenous worldview was not radically transformed or replaced by the worldviews of Christianity and Islam. The Akan belief of a constitutive world continues to shape the prisms through which Akan Christians and Muslims view the world and interpret reality.
I will give two examples – one each from a Christian and Muslim to make my point clear. Beginning with a Christian, on May 14, 2017, I attended the funeral a friend’s mother. My friend’s family are Seventh-day Adventists (SDA), who believe in soul sleep after death until the resurrection. As believers in soul sleep, my friend’s family maintain that the soul rests after death in an unconscious state. This belief clearly contradicts the indigenous Akan belief in the consciousness of the dead in the spiritual world. It similarly undermines the Akan belief in death as a conscious transition from the material world to the spiritual world.
But as part of the funeral service, the pastor leading the ceremony kept straddling two worldviews – the Akan belief and SDA belief – when he switched languages. When the pastor – an Akan – speaks in Twi (one of the sub-languages – dialect – of the Akan language) – he says something like, “We are seeing off our mother today, as she journeys on.” But when he switches to English, he says something like “Our mother is asleep, we will see her again on the resurrection morning.” Through this practice of code-switching, the pastor consciously or unconsciously was navigating two worldviews that appeared mutually exclusive. If he said in Twi that, “We are seeing her off,” it created the impression that the soul is actively on a journey to the other-world. This chimes with the Akan belief in the consciousness of the soul after death – a reinforcement of death as a transition. But when he said, “She is asleep,” he reinforces the SDA belief in soul sleep. This is also true of a first-generation Akan (Asante) Adventist from Wiamoase (one of the earliest places where SDA thrived in Ghana) who when she was dying at the age of 95 kept saying that she was going to join her ancestors. Did she renounce the belief in soul sleep? Was she oscillating between SDA belief and Akan worldview? Was she walking a tightrope of reconciling Akan indigenous belief with SDA doctrine? Was she and the pastor struggling with cognitive dissonance about belief?
Certainly, the two worldviews at face value appear to contradict. But when it is considered because belief among the Akan is inseparable from Akan worldview, it becomes possible to explain the pastor’s oscillating beliefs. It also resonates with an observation Kofi A. Busia (a sociologist and Ghana’s Prime Minister – 1969-1972) made in the 1960s. He presciently remarked that Christianity among the Akan was either superficial, alien or both.[2] He concluded that Christianity was like a thin veneer that did not interact well with Akan traditional religion.
Now let me give an example from Islam. In April 2016, an Akan Muslim and other Akan man disagreed over money. The Akan Muslim was challenging his Akan brother over an amount of money he (Akan Muslim) was believed to have borrowed. As the two parties failed to adequately address the issue through reasoning and persuasion, the Akan Muslim asked the other Akan man to imprecate – invoking the deities and ancestors to adjudicate a matter by visiting calamity (sometimes death) on the guilty party. So, by calling for imprecation, the Akan Muslim was asking for the intervention of the spirit world – ancestors and the deities – to mediate a vexatious issue. This came as a shock to me, as I know that the Islamic Shahadah – confession of the oneness of Allah – rules out completely any chances of a Muslim appealing to any spirit or ancestor for assistance. When I asked him whether he thought his appeal to the spirit world contradicted his faith, he was quick to say that, "the spirit world is real and Allah is also real."
Again, like the SDA-Christian, some of my family members, this Akan Muslim man was operating on the Akan concept of belief – which endorses the existential reality of a mutually constitutive world of the ancestors, spirits and deities and the material world. A belief that spiritual forces can influence the mundane world.
Let me conclude with a recap and summary of what I have talked about so far. First, among the Akan belief is not abstract. It is lived through, more than thought through. This is not synonymous to saying that the Akan do not rationalise through faith. This means that belief must be experienced and helpful in solving practical challenges of life. Second, belief must also underscore the constitutive nature of the cosmos – where the boundaries between the material and the metaphysical worlds are fluid and can be easily transgressed. Third, belief and culture are mutually inclusive in the sense that belief among the Akan shapes culture and culture shapes belief. This dialectic relationship between belief and culture informs how the Akan Christian and Muslim continue to reflect their indigenous religions even when they think they have severed connections with their cultural heritage.
Notes
[1] I use “religions” to acknowledge the osmotic nature of Akan religion and its multiple expressions in different Akan communities in Southern Ghana. I also depend on the Akan for two main reasons: First, the Akan constitutes the largest ethnic group in Ghana (occupying the Southern part of the country) and second, my research is on the Akan. Third, I discuss the subject as an insider, since I am an Akan person. [2] Busia, ‘Has the Christian faith been adequately presented?’, p. 88
Charles Prempeh is a PhD student in the Faculty of Divinity, working with Dr Jeremy Morris on an ethnographic study of the encounter between Christianity and African Traditional Religion in Contemporary Akan land.
The Concept and Experience of Belief
Steven Toussaint
I want to introduce the concept of belief in the context of my own life experience. Think of this as an experiment in spiritual autobiography in which I attempt to describe how, over time, I have come to define the meaning of belief in my own thinking.
I was born and raised in Roman Catholicism, to a very Catholic family, in a very Catholic suburb of Chicago. I don’t think I knew anyone who wasn’t Catholic before the age of ten.
What did this mean? Practically, it meant weekly attendance at Sunday Mass, as well as religious education from the ages of five to fourteen.
Some of my earliest memories are set in the pews of the parish church my family attended. As a child, I didn’t understand how the liturgy of the Mass was organised or why, or even necessarily the meaning of much of the language that the priest and congregants recited. But children are highly sensitive to repetition, and the Mass repeats, with minor variations, the same structure and the same language every week. The recitation of the Nicene Creed is an especially important part of the Mass. The word creed derives from the Latin word credo, which means “I believe.” During the Creed, the congregants stand, facing the altar, and begin to recite the central beliefs of the Christian faith, beginning each discrete doctrine with the phrase “I believe.” “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty...I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ...I believe in the Holy Spirit...” and so on. As a child, I wasn’t attuned to the meaning of each, individual belief, but the Creed was extremely important to me because once the adults began repeating “I believe” I knew there was only about fifteen minutes of Mass left to go.
When I started high school, like many teenagers, I began to pay more attention to the meaning of the words I was repeating and began to interrogate my parents, relatives, and teachers about the justification for these beliefs. At least once a week since I was very young, I had claimed belief in a God who created the universe, but who also consisted of three distinct persons, the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I also claimed belief that one of these persons, the Son, became a human being, Jesus Christ, who was born, died, and resurrected from the dead at a particular point in history in order to save the world from sin and death. Did I believe these things? I wasn’t sure. Putting aside whether these claims were comforting, beautiful, or even possible, they seemed like statements that had no possibility of empirical proof. I remember having a strong sense as a fourteen-year old that the level of presumption involved in maintaining that these claims were true was overwhelming and undeserved. I had the sceptic’s sense that no assumptions should be taken for granted in advance. But what I should emphasise, looking back now, is one massive assumption that I totally took for granted: that when I said the words, “I believe,” I knew what the word believe meant. I was assuming that when my fellow parishioners and I said, “I believe,” the object of that belief is, or at least should be, a fact, and that a fact is something real and true about the world that can, at least in principle, be justified and supported by demonstrable evidence. What’s more, this fact should be rationally consistent. The fact should abide by the rules of logic, specifically, the principle of noncontradiction, whereby something cannot both be the case and not be the case. In other words, a fact shouldn’t fall victim to paradox. To say that Christ is God, to name just one example, seemed both to fail the test of verifiability and to lead one into paradox: how after all can God be his own Son?
When I said “I believe,” I wanted really to be saying: “I know.” Otherwise, I thought, belief is “mere belief” or “opinion” as opposed to certain knowledge. In ancient philosophy, the Greek word doxa was used to indicate this kind of “mere belief,” something one took to be true without good reason, as distinct from “scientific knowledge,” which the philosopher Aristotle called episteme. We find the traces of this Greek word doxa in our word paradox, whose etymology suggests something that is “beyond belief” (para-doxa). Similarly, our word orthodoxy, means “right” or “correct” belief.
What I was questioning, therefore, was the orthodoxy the Creed represented, not the meaning of belief itself. This “correct belief” of my fellow Catholics seemed to lack a strong enough foundation to claim my loyalty. Part of the problem was that the people I was questioning often seemed to accept the basic dichotomy between “mere belief” and “scientific knowledge,” that I too was taking for granted. But where I was troubled by the failure of Christian beliefs to justify themselves as knowledge, my interlocutors, most often my relatives, seemed content to keep belief and knowledge in more or less separate spheres, safe from contaminating one another. Knowledge, it was true, had to do with demonstrable facts. Knowledge was the realm of doctors, scientists, politicians, historians. But beliefs were something that needed to be protected from the standards of empirical proof and demonstration. They were gifts of God, and made up the edifice we call faith. It wasn’t that the people around me didn’t believe that the things the Creed said were true. These statements still had the weight of facts, but their truth was something that one accepted on the authority of Church and Scriptural tradition. They didn’t need testing in the way, say, that the viability of a cancer treatment does. Doubt and questioning didn’t seem to have much place in the religion of my childhood because, at least it seemed to me, that religion had nothing to do with knowledge.
This kind of response wasn’t ultimately satisfying to me: it seemed naïve and uncritical at a time in my life where I wanted nothing more than to be knowing and critical. So I started drifting away from the Church, only attending Mass when my grandparents were around so as not to upset the dinner conversation afterward.
Around the same time that I was distancing myself from the Church, I started seriously reading and writing poetry. I had always been an avid reader, but there was something about the poetry of Allen Ginsberg that made me want to do it myself.
Those of you who have ever tried to learn a new art form or skill might recall that in the early phases, one is not very good. I spent years writing terrible poems, one after another. I have now been writing poetry for nearly twenty years. I have two graduate degrees in poetry; I have taught poetry and have published some of it in books. But I still routinely write terrible poems. I’ve come to believe the real difference between writing bad poems as a beginner and writing bad poems as a more mature writer is that, when you’re a beginner, you can’t tell that your bad poems are bad. If you’re lucky, you might have teachers or friends who are more experienced and can tell you that your poems are bad. But really, the only way to learn to tell when your poems are bad is to read and write hundreds, if not thousands, of them. Most of one’s maturing as a writer amounts to perfecting what a friend of mine calls the “cringe factor.” This is where, after writing a new poem, you read it back to yourself and submit yourself to one brutal question: Is there a line of this poem, or an image, or a metaphor that makes me cringe, even just a little? Beginning writers don’t feel the cringe, but experienced writers do, and, if they want to keep getting better, they’ll figure out why they are cringing and try to fix it. Very often, changing a line or an image isn’t enough to make a cringey poem good; so you just have to write another one, and then another, and then another.
Where does that cringe factor come from and why should I trust it? There’s no way to prove that a poem is bad in the way that you can prove something in mathematics. But it probably isn’t too controversial to say that poems can reveal truths about the world and about human life, that we love and return to particular poems because they capture something we intuitively understand to be true. A bad poem, then, is one that, at some level, fails to be true. But how do you know? You don’t really know. But you do feel the cringe.
Something else begins to happen when you mature as an artist. In the early days, the writing is very self-conscious and overdetermined. You’re trying really hard to “say something” true and beautiful and meaningful. And usually, in that trying to say something true, you screw it up and say something that appears to be true or is trying to be true but, at the end of the day, isn’t. But after a lot of practice, with a lot of time spent writing bad poems, you occasionally experience something psychologists call “flow state.” This is an experience of total immersion in the activity of writing, a kind of balance between control and surrender, tranquillity and vigilance, where everything you write seems to come out effortlessly and good. As the cliché goes, it seems like the poem is writing itself. Instead of second-guessing every word you write, you intuitively find your way. If the cringe factor tells you that a poem is bad, in the “flow state” you can do no wrong. Is this poem I am writing true, meaningful, beautiful? Of course it is! Or maybe a better way of putting it is that you are not particularly bothered about whether it is true, meaningful, or beautiful. You are confidently working, moving forward line by line, even though you don’t know for sure that you have any reason to be confident.
The English Romantic poet John Keats described this experience as “Negative Capability” which is “when a [person] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This experience is called “negative” because you are not certain about anything, you have not mastered some fact in your writing that you can now store away once and for all in your mental vault of facts; you are at peace with the mysterious thing that is happening. But it is also a “capability” because it is a power, an ability to do something that one has learned how to do through practice and repetition. We might even call it a kind of knowledge, in the sense of “know-how” or skill, in the same way that playing clarinet or swimming or speaking French is a skill.
I want to emphasise that after almost twenty years of writing poetry, these moments of Negative Capability are rare and fleeting. Most of the time, every word is a struggle, buffeted by doubt and anxiety and second-guessing. But it’s also important to emphasise that these two experiences belong together – both can occur in the course of writing a single poem. Personally, I have even found that the moments where I most feel “negatively capable” are immediately preceded by those of peak anxiety and uncertainty. It’s almost as if I have to throw myself into a position where I least know what I am supposed to write in order to make myself capable of such confident negativity. It is worth restating that the only way either experience can take place is in actually doing the writing. I had to go through years of terrible, boring poems in order to prepare myself for brief moments of Negative Capability. Like the knowledge involved in playing clarinet or swimming, knowing how to write poems is a habit forged in repeated action. You have to write, and then write again, and again.
This has been a very digressive way of trying to account for why I am here with you today speaking with other theologians about the concept of belief.
In an odd way, it took pursuing a vocation as a poet for me to recognise that there might be another way of defining belief apart from the way I took for granted as a teenager, which is to say as “mere belief” in contrast to certain knowledge. In describing my experience as a poet, I have suggested that in order to write something true, something that doesn’t make me cringe, I have to depend on a different kind of ‘clarity’ or ‘evidence’ than empirical proof can provide. How do I know whether a particular poem I have written truthfully represents the world? I don’t if knowledge and truth here mean “fact.” But in writing and writing and writing I am gradually cultivating a skill, a know-how, a savoir-faire, that helps me discern little by little whether I am closer or further from the mark, even though I never hit it. This is still a kind of knowledge; it is something I know how to do. But unlike a fact, I can never know it once and for all. Do I know whether or not I had a muffin for breakfast today? Yes. I did. Case closed. Do I know how to write a poem? Not entirely. But to an extent I do. Like any skill, this knowledge is infinitely open to further perfection; and it requires endless enactment and re-enactment to remain something I am capable of.
Granting this, what if the Creed that I repeated weekly as a child in Mass, and now again as an adult, is something like this? What if believing what the Creed says has as much to do with the repetition itself as it does with the particular statements it states? What if the repetition of these beliefs is a kind of practice, like writing poem after poem? If I constantly write poems to prepare myself for those rare moments of ‘negative capability’, what if I believe in order to prepare myself for something similar, for rare moments where the mysteries and paradoxes that fill those statements might not cause anxiety and a desire for certainty, but a kind of repose, a kind of dwelling in a truth not opposed to doubt and uncertainty, but caught in a kind of artful dance with it.
I mentioned before that the Greeks used the word doxa to indicate “mere belief” as opposed to certain knowledge. But the word doxa also meant “glory, manifestation, and appearance.” A prayer, for this reason, is a called a doxology, in that it speaks (logos) in order to manifest God’s glory (doxa). Perhaps we could think of the Creed in this light: when I repeat “I believe,” I am praying for the revelation of what is true and not stating something I already possess and hold on to as true. It is not that the Creed needs to justify itself according to the standards of factual knowledge, or to be protected from those standards. Instead, the Creed implicitly challenges the idea that we should define knowledge primarily as something that we already possess rather than as something we continually have to make and remake, over and over again. What if the Creed, what if belief itself, is an art form?
Steven Toussaint is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Divinity, working with Professor Catherine Pickstock. He is also a published poet.