As a person whose professional responsibilities include the preparation of worship services, I am always looking for hints and examples of how other people have created meaningful and moving experiences of this sort. Some examples are more useful for my purposes than others; sometimes they are merely, for various reasons, impressive. I could not help but be struck, for instance, by the following account from American scholar Noah Webster of a ritual that took place in Paris, at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in the fall of 1793.

A grand festival dedicated to reason and truth was yesterday celebrated in what was hitherto the cathedral of Paris. In the middle of this church was erected a mount, and on it a very plain temple, the facade of which bore the following inscription; A la Philosophie. Before the gate of this temple was placed the Torch of Truth in the summit of the mount on the Altar of Reason spreading light. The convention of Paris (the members of the government then in power) and all the constituted authorities assisted at the ceremony.

Two rows of young girls dressed in white, each wearing a crown of oak leaves, crossed before the Altar of Reason, at the sound of republican music; each of the girls inclined before the torch, and ascended the summit of the mountain. Liberty then came out of the Temple of Philosophy towards the throne made of grass, to receive the homage of the republicans of both sexes, who sung a hymn in her praise, extending their arms at the same time towards her. Liberty descended afterwards to return to the temple, and on re-entering it, she turned about, casting a look of benevolence on her friends. When she got in, every one expressed with enthusiasm the sensations which the goddess excited in them, by songs of joy, and they swore never to cease to be faithful to her.

The Cult of Reason was a pretty short-lived proposition, even by the standards of revolutionary France. Besides the festival just described, its other notable accomplishment seems to have been to alter the inscription above the gates to the Paris cemetery to read "Death is only an everlasting sleep", and to erect a statue of personified Sleep on the grounds. It wasn't long before the shrewd Robespierre decided that the government needed more powerful sanctions than sheer impersonal philosophy, and began promoting the Cult of the Supreme Being. This enabled him to retain the property and valuables confiscated from the Roman Catholic churches, without having to dispense with the useful fiction of god.

Webster goes on to comment on his report:

How little men see their own errors! All this ceremony and parade about reason and liberty; at a time when the governing faction were wading to the altar through rivers of innocent blood; at a time when the tyranny, imprisonments, and massacres of a century are crowded into a single year.

Now I acknowledge that I come at this with the peculiar perspective of a practitioner of the art, but I can't help wondering - how, exactly, did they create this mountain in the middle of Notre Dame? Hundreds of workmen, heaping wheelbarrows of dirt in the middle of the chancel aisle? And who cleaned it all up when they were done?

I am reminded of these speculations regarding the ill-fated cult of the Goddess of Reason by a book I read this summer, authored by the neurologist Dr. Donald Calne, entitled Within Reason. Calne is concerned to understand the nature of reason as a function of human biological and evolutionary development, and in so doing to correct some of the romantic misconceptions with which reason has, from time to time, like in revolutionary Paris, been invested. Reason as a human capacity was called into existence by the pressures of evolutionary selection, in facing which homo sapiens was not well equipped in terms of brute force, speed or defensive hardiness. The advantage for our species lay in the ability to figure out a better plan, faster, than either our would-be predators, or the prey we hoped to consume. And almost more than this direct benefit of reason, its usefulness was seen in our ability to construct, and operate within, complex structures of social cooperation. The capacity for imaginative mutuality, to be able to 'put yourself in another's shoes', so to speak, and for flexible hierarchy, to be able to recognize differing kinds of authority and changes in an individual's status, were keys to the social evolution that created a decisive advantage for the human species.

Yet neither the brain structure development that makes extended reasoning a physiological possibility, nor the relational pressures that taught us its use, ever required of the emerging capacity for reason that it be able to determine the goals of its own functioning. In evolutionary terms, the object is a given; reproductive success. Reason as a human ability came into being, like language or the opposable thumb, because it made that objective, reproductive success, easier to attain. But unlike many other human characteristics that also arose in response to the quest for survival and progeny, reason has not infrequently been seen as something outside the realm of mere physical evolution. Especially among those of us who have drawn what we believe to be reasoned conclusions about the improbability of a personal, self-conscious creator/sustainer of the universe, there is always a temptation to shove the capacity for reason into the empty space left by the removal of god.

Dr. Calne would argue that this is a mistake, as would I. It was clearly what the French 'dechristianizers' were attempting to do by way of their theatrical pageant to the Goddess reason, with its hodge-podge echoes of ancient Greece, feudal honors, Catholic settings, and philosophical personifications. Webster, in his essay on the effects of the French Revolution, goes on to say this about the enthronement of reason in place of the traditional trinitarian god.

The object only is varied; the principle eternally the same. The principle springs from the passions of the mind, and cannot be annihilated without extinguishing the passions, which is impossible.

Superstition and enthusiasm are beaten down; reason is exalted upon a throne, temples are erected to the goddess, and festivals instituted to celebrate her coronation. Then begins the reign of passion; the moment reason is seated upon her throne, the passions are called in to support her. Pride says, "I have trampled down superstition, that foe to truth and happiness - I have exalted reason to the throne. I am right - everything else is wrong."

"Obey the goddess reason," is the great command: and woe to the man that rejects her authority. Reason is indeed the nominal prince, but the passions are her ministers, and dictate her decrees. Thus what begins in calm philosophy, ends in a most superstitious attachment to a particular object of its own creation. The goddess reason is at last maintained by pride, obstinacy, bigotry and to use a correct phrase, a blind superstitious enthusiasm.

I rather imagine that Dr. Calne would find Webster's statement in sympathy with his own work. Later in his volume he writes:

"Philosophers from Socrates to Santayana have proclaimed that we should each try to hold on to a life of reason. This book echoes the sentiment that we should strive to be as rational as possible, but it also sounds a cautionary note - that irrational forces drive motivation and underlie the quick responses we call "gut reactions." The purely rational human being, whose thought and behavior are the crystallization of absolute reason, is a fictional character who can never exist in the real world."

We of the nearly 21st century are not so literal-minded as to try to build the temple of philosophy in the halls of the cathedral, and inhabit it with ballet dancers in white robes and oak leaves, personifying Reason and bestowing expressions of benevolence upon her devotees. Yet the impulse remains, it seems to me, to believe that somehow, if we are willing to be disciplined enough, we can substitute for the irrational traditions of the past a confidence in reason itself that is all but religious faith. Calne argues that this will not work, because reason will not bear the weight of such an expectation of ultimacy.

Simply, reason cannot answer the question, What constitutes human good? And it cannot tell us what it is that we most deeply want. It can tell us a great deal about how human good might be attained, once we know what it is. And it can be a powerful tool in our quest for what we most deeply want, but it cannot tell us the name of our heart's desire. Part of what has motivated the cultural reaction against reason and science has been this century's incontravertible demonstrations that reason can be used with equal effectiveness as a tool for pursuing fanatically unreasonable and inhuman aims. The Nazi death camps and Hitler's 'final solution' were examples of rationally structured and scientifically designed horrors; the devoted application of reason to questions of how best to achieve his ends never called the appropriateness of those ends themselves into question.

Are we to say of reason, then, that it is 'nothing but' a tool? Just one element in humanity's bag of tricks for coming out on top of the survival sweepstakes, like aggression, or pain-avoidance? Have all those philosophers, from Socrates to Santayana, been wrong in proclaiming the importance of the life of reason? If we are not to turn it into something dangerously like a god, must we relegate reason to the status of fire and hammers and fishing nets - something handy to have around, but morally neutral and not to be prized in and of itself? I would like to suggest a third alternative.

I submit that in our existence as human beings, we encounter motivations, and tools, and satisfactions. By motivations, I mean those self-authenticating urges that concern survival and reproduction; that grow out of fear or pain or need or primal pleasure. We are motivated to eat, to sleep, to stay warm, to stay safe, to seek sexual engagement, to avoid want. These needs are elementary, almost preliminary to what we think of as genuinely human life, but they demand our attention. They must be responded to, usually, before we can deal with anything beyond them. Tools help us in that project; tools like language and social structure enable us to get the food and shelter and partners we need, and reason unquestionably is one of those tools. It evolved for that purpose.

Periodically, a voice will be raised in the on-going dialogue of religion and philosophy - usually late at night in some college dorm room - to suggest that those evolutionary motivations are in fact our only criteria, whether or not we are willing to confess it. We would all be better off, allegedly, if we simply accepted them, spoke of them straight-forwardly, and quit pretending that we actually desire anything else. This position is sometimes offered in the name of reason, claiming that it is unreasonable to suppose that we really do want anything more than the greatest possible amount of pleasure and the smallest possible amount of pain.

And yet I would suggest to you that we know - you and I and the vast majority of people with whom we share our worlds -- that we are not motivated by a simple calculation of pain and pleasure, however 'reasonable', on one level, that might be. Instead, I submit, we are often impatient of those preliminary motivations, because in fact the tools that we have evolved to help us meet those primal needs successfully and efficiently, while they DO that, also take on lives of their own within our lives. Something enables us to sublimate those biological tools into more complex and demanding and lasting satisfactions that are valued not as instruments, but for their own sakes. The pragmata of the senses - listening for indications of danger, looking about for things to eat, or a safe place to sleep; moving quietly or boldly - these become reified into music, art, dance. The sexual impulse and the advantage of parents who nurse and protect the young become translated into the human enterprises of romance and family, taking the biological imperative to a whole different level of meaning and reward. What we value for its own sake - all play, all reverence -is the product of this process, whereby what were 'mere tools' open the doors of human consciousness to what become its nobler satisfactions. I want to suggest that the same thing is true of reason; in fact, perhaps in no case is it more true than of reason. What was an evolutionary gamble - simply a way of pursuing basic motivations efficiently, given our over-sized brains and our elaborate social identities and relationships - is discovered to make possible a set of previously inconceivable pleasures; the satisfactions of the life of the mind. From crossword puzzles to mathematics and symbolic logic, to history and linguistics, to every other field of knowledge, the capacity for reason opens the door to a whole new way of understanding and experiencing the fullness of human living. Reason, far from being a 'mere tool', is a noble tool, enlarging the universe of our experience from within by offering satisfactions that could never have existed without it.

Reason need not attempt the role of god in order for these satisfactions to be some of the most profound and precious gifts of our lives. And reason in itself cannot determine what we will experience as profound and precious. For my own part, in general I have found the complex satisfactions that lie beyond evolutionary utility to be more rewarding than the indulgence of my simpler motivations, but that is a recognition that comes from my heart and my passions, not out of reasoning. In fact, many of the best pleasures of my life are what one might call 'acquired tastes', but I do not expect that everybody, even if everybody were rational, would necessarily agree with me in them. Reason cannot persuade us to like what we do not like, or not to want what we already long for. Reason can be used to examine our choices, but not our desires. Is it somehow 'rational' to like caviar better than candy? To prefer Mozart over Lawrence Welk? To wish for honor more than safety? Reason cannot say; these choices must be made somewhere else within us.

What reason CAN do is to keep us from being naively credulous; keep us skeptical when other people claim to have special, privileged knowledge about the world, or when someone asks us to believe alleged 'facts' that fly in the face of everything else we know, or to give our loyalty to something that does not seem worthy. Then reason is in its element; this is what it was meant to do, to help us know what to believe, and what to trust. I find it fascinating, and gratifying, that when the UUA sought, for the Purposes and Principles of the Association's bylaws, to describe in a handful of words the function of the Humanist strand in Unitarian Universalism, they said that the tradition as a whole draws from "Humanist teachings, which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit." ... and warn us against idolatries... Reason is and has always been the first enemy of its own deification, for that is one of the idolatries it is designed to resist. And to venerate reason itself is no assurance that our venerations will therefore BE reasonable; indeed, we are more likely to USE reason if we are not trying to make it into an artificial god.

From its beginning in the same era of ferment that produced the French Revolution and its brief Cult of Reason, the Unitarian tradition has revealed a strand of sturdy resistance to such idolatry. In his 1836 lecture to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School, the great Unitarian philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson recalled that French experiment in these words:

I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason - today, pasteboard and filigree; and ending tomorrow in madness and murder.

I actually have some sympathy for those hapless souls two hundred years ago who designed that "pasteboard and filigree" festival of reason in the sanctuary of Notre Dame. They were trying to do something new and forward-looking, at a time of indescribable social upheaval, anxiety, and change. After literally centuries of powerful, rote tradition, they were seeking an authentic expression of the human spirit as they understood it, trying to express what it was that at their best moved and sustained them, and commanded their loyalty. That in the end that expression proved to be captive to a political agenda, and somewhat comically indebted to the very practices it sought to replace, was perhaps inevitable. That it was oblivious to the fundamental and fatal contradictions in the behavior of those who advocated it is one of the structural tragedies of the human condition.

Their mistake was not the affirmation of reason, as a source of human good and as a higher pleasure. It was, rather, very precisely what is meant by the word Idolatry. Reason is the compass, not the journey; it is the most powerful tool we have to guide us and aid us in seeking to create lives of meaning and a world of wholeness. And more than a tool, it opens to us a type of delight that immeasurably enriches our experience of what it means to be human. Yet to suppose that it can be made the object of our veneration, or that it alone can give us the answers to our deepest, most anguished, and most urgent questions, is to mistake the vessel for the drink, or the finger pointing at the moon for the moon. Reason is not, in itself, our heart's desire, or our soul's aspiration; it is not, and cannot be, what we worship. Yet when we have found, in the still center of our inner beings, what we most truly want, and at the heart of our covenant with one another a shared vision of the world we seek to build, then we have no better friend than reason in the work and the journey that is forever before us.