The Agony of Misplaced Ecstasy

In this concise essay, Daniel Dennett questions the connection between faith and morality.

Daniel C. Dennett: OnFaith on washingtonpost.com

Mother Teresa's agonies of doubt are surely not all that unusual. What is unusual is that she put them in writing and now they are being revealed to the world, in spite of her explicit wish that they be destroyed.

Dennett refers to letters from Mother Teresa published in a new book, profiled here in Time Magazine.

Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God -- tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'"