THE PASSION AND THE NOT-KNOWING

God is too important to be left to the religions and the theologians

The comedian Jack Dee was recently on Desert Island Discs and told KirstyYoung that he was a person of faith but had less and less time for religion. He also talked about going and sitting in a church on a Sunday afternoon.  Many of us would have some fellow-feeling with him on this: we might indeed avoid churches altogether, or attend early morning BCP communion with a dozen others to experience the peace, the grandeur and the 400-year tradition. Or we may love the stained-glass windows or the ancient architecture. Or we may even, like Philip Larkin in his

poem Church Going, gravitate to empty churches and holy ground, ‘which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, if only that so many dead lie round’.

Yet the Anglican Dean of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, Frances Ward in Why Rousseau was wrong: Christianity and the secular soul suggests that:

‘Religion can offer … a different understanding of what it means to be human. One which takes virtue seriously, and looks for trustworthy and responsible character as the bedrock of the soul who is responsive to God and its neighbour’.

In her attempts (as a good senior priest in the Church of England) to persuade people to go to church – if only so that they will know what they are rejecting, which is not a bad reason – she also says of faith that it does not have all the answers, that it ‘offers fruits in life that are not immediately obvious’, that it requires us ‘to be open … to some of the deeper questions and to some of the most profound art and music, allowing the aesthetic to  move us and prompt us to wonder if there is more to life than we previously thought.’

In Chapter 5 of our current theological launching-pad, philosopher John Caputo seems to agree with these sentiments, about being open, about the relevance of virtue, about not seeking certainty but being ready to respond.  Contrasting the misguided pursuit of “one true religion” with the “virtue” of what he calls ‘being genuinely or truly religious’, he takes up a metaphor offered by the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida that ‘religions are rafts that sail on an endless sea’.  Says Caputo: ‘God is more important than religion, as the ocean is more important than the raft, the latter bearing all the marks of being constituted by human beings.’  

The religious element in us all: religion without religion

A repeated theme in Caputo’s book is that religion is a human practice, but also that the religious sense is not something we acquire or weigh up or reject, but rather something we recognise in ourselves. ‘I am arguing that there is a fundamentally religious quality to human experience itself,’ he says.

He has taken us through a broad history of ideas from medieval to modern to ‘post-modern’ and his main thesis thus far has been that contemporary thought about God or religion should be ‘de-capitalized’ – by which he means ‘the willingness to get on as best we can without capital letters and without final authoritative pronouncements’. Religious truth is not like scientific truth. At the same time as Nietzsche rubbished the claims of the moderns, he also dug the ground from under his own feet. If we think we have unmasked the medieval viewpoint of metaphysical reality, then we should recognise that the Enlightenment view of Reason and Objective Truth has also been unmasked – and so have Marx and Freud and Nietzsche himself and statements like ‘God is dead’.  

Love is a how, not a what

What we have left (‘having passed through modernity’ to ‘a more enlightened Enlightenment’), he says, is ‘the passion and the not-knowing’.  Only the driest, most bovine human creature does not believe in love, and, in Caputo’s view at least (and that of the writer of a New Testament epistle), “everyone who loves is born of God”.  And what do I love when I love my God? (St Augustine's phrase) Well, loving God is not a formula but a deed to do. In fact Caputo would have liked to be a medieval copyist and slipped in the word ‘how’ in place of the word ‘what’.

Rather than looking for the one true religion we should seek religious truth, or, dare one say it, to be religious, in the sense that the New Testament writer talked about ‘loving God in spirit and in truth’. The medieval meaning of religio was ‘virtue’ and from the Old Testament prophets (eg Amos) to contemporary philosophers (eg Derrida) the pursuit of justice has figured large in most decent people’s beliefs:

‘But let justice roll down like the waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.' 

Similarly ‘faith’ – as we have discussed before in our group – used to mean ‘being committed to’ and if we testify (cf Greek martyreo) to the love of God, this must mean doing something about it.  Old St Paul in one of his letters (little knowing that he would be quoted to death and out of context in sentimental modern weddings) goes on about love (or ‘charity’) at some length and concludes that of the three ‘passions for the impossible’ (as Caputo calls them) – faith, hope and love – the  latter is definitely the greatest.  

  

Three steps to a passionate life

When Wychwood Circle first met a little over two years ago, the book which we discussed over a period of months was called Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by former nun Karen Armstrong. As Caputo argues for passion, for a ‘restlessness with the real’ and a response to ‘something that has swept us away’ at some time or other, it feels a bit like we are coming back to where we started, but with more vigour. We debated 

the meaning (and appropriateness) of the word ‘compassion’ at the time, wondering whether it meant pity, or mercy, or just sympathy (‘feeling with’, ‘with-passion’), but on balance we agreed with Armstrong that our discussions had to lead to action, to doing the deed, and not worrying too much about the formula.  

Armstrong got us there in 12 steps, like Alcoholics Anonymous; Caputo concludes his final chapter with 3 axioms of a 'religion without religion', each one leading to the next.  ‘I do not know who I am or whether I believe in God’ - to settle for ‘radical undecidability’, which he recommends as a step in the right direction, is fine but too academic, too cognitivist, even complacent.  To ask, ‘is what I believe in God?’ is better because then we are beginning to talk about commitment and a quest which might lead to action. But the third step has to be: ‘what do I love (when I love my God)?’, in other words how do I love, or even how do I choose to live.  This for Caputo reveals the passionate side in us and leads him on to quote contrasting examples of passionate people from Dietrich Bohnhoeffer and Mother Teresa and others who started out within a traditional religion, to all those outside religions who have done great things, ‘because there is no safely secular sphere where we can be so sure that no religious fires burn’.  

On being human

It is hard (even though the final chapter could be said to be a little long-winded) not to be swept along by Caputo’s enthusiasm, indeed his passion.  He has after all admitted at the outset that ‘lovers of God’ are ‘a little unhinged’, and that one idea of the word “love” is that it represents ‘a giving without holding back, an “unconditional” commitment, which marks love with a certain excess’. Not very English, but maybe very human, if only we dared. 

A serious house on serious earth it is, // In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, // Are recognised, and robed as destinies. // And that much never can be obsolete,  // Since someone will forever be surprising // A hunger in himself to be more serious, // And gravitating with it to this ground, // Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, // If only that so many dead lie round. 

 Church Going (final stanza) by Philip Larkin

We discuss Chapters 4 (Impossible People) and 5 (On Religion: Without Religion) of John D Caputo's book On Religion (click to read online) in the series Thinking In Action (Routledge 2001) at our next meeting at Wychwood Library on June 1st at 7pm. Anyone is welcome to join the discussion, preferably having read the relevant chapters. 

AN ESSAY ABOUT BEING HUMAN

ON RELIGION - WITHOUT RELIGION

On Sunday June 1st at Wychwood Library we discuss the last two chapters of John Caputo's book On Religion, which are the culmination of his argument. Chapter 5, borrowing from Jacques Derrida, is entitled: On Religion - Without Religion. 

Caputo says this: 

This essay on religion is also an essay about being human. ... The distinction between theism and atheism, religion and unreligion, is beset by confusion ...

The book is available in its entirety to be read online - click on this link. A summary of chapter 2, a vital step in his argument, can be obtained from davidwychwood@gmail.com 

SUNDAY ASSEMBLY

How the secular world became post-secular

Last week someone called Eleanor Mottram posted a blog which is both topical and very readable.  She has just moved from being Festival Producer of Greenbelt, which she describes as ‘a space hosted by Christians’ and ‘a collision between the arts, faith and justice’.  Her new job? Working for The Sunday Assembly which she describes as ‘a godless congregation that celebrates life’ but is ‘not anti-religion’.  Have a look at the website and you’ll see that it is ‘a global network of people who want to make the most of this one life we know we have’. (Hands up if you know anyone who disagrees with that mission)

Eleanor Mottram tells of feeling ‘a bit like I’m coming out when I say, “I’m an atheist”’ and goes on to describe her devout Catholic parents, 'whose faith is an integral part of their lives'. At Wychwood Circle we’re beginning to feel we’ve been here before: there are few in this (Western) world who haven’t been through the fire of parents and various shades of religious upbringing, or Sunday school, or faith school, you name it - and spent the rest of their lives wondering just how to deal with the legacy. 

John Caputo, our current author with the task of providing a springboard to discussion, says that he prefers to talk, not of religious people, but of the religious in people:

And once again, we need to remind ourselves, the religious sense of life would never mean just one thing for everybody, as if it had some sort of common ahistorical, universal, transcendental structure.

And, in answer to those who want to celebrate ‘this one life we know we have’, we can quote him a few pages later:

If the religious sense of life is sometimes thought of in terms of eternity, under the influence of Plato, my advice is to rethink it in terms of time, as a temporal way to be, a way to ride the waves of time, trying to catch its swells while trying not to end up like a drowned rat.

A more enlightened Enlightenment

After arguing for a sense of the religious as ‘a restless stirring with a passion for the impossible’ (ch 1), Caputo moves in chapter 2 to the task of describing how western civilisation has moved over time from the medieval, metaphysical way of seeing things, through ‘modernity’, to what is variously described now as the post-modern, post-industrial, post-critical, or, as he prefers, post-secular.  But his argument is not that we have moved on in the sense of leaving the ‘modern’ perspective behind, so much as moved through it to ‘a more enlightened Enlightenment’, ‘one that is enlightened about the limits of the old one’.

The Independent on Sunday reviewer commented that Caputo had ‘put Marx, Nietzsche and Freud in their historical places’ and Nietzsche in particular is taken up by Caputo and then, as he claims, hoist with his own petard:

Nietzsche had argued for the historical contingency of our constructions, the revisability and reformability of our beliefs and practices, all of which, as he said, are “perspectives” that we take on the world and that have emerged in order to meet the needs of life.  … But Nietzsche thought that science was one more version of Christian Platonism, that the death of “God” implies the death of “absolute truth”, including the absolutism of scientific truth; physics too is a perspective.

But Nietzsche’s critique, says Caputo, is also a critique of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche and their critiques of religion: 

Enlightenment secularism, the objectivist reduction of religion to something other than itself – say, to a distorted desire for one’s mommy, or to a way to keep the ruling authorities in power – is one more story told by people with historically limited imaginations, with contingent conceptions of reason and history, of economics and labor, … of God, religion, and faith.

Philosophy in a humbler, uncapitalised condition 

What is perhaps most pleasing (at least to one who has already decided that the way forward lies in breaking down boundaries) is the implication of such post-modernism for our twentieth-century habit of categorising and separating thought into non-overlapping disciplines, as also of arriving at pseudo-objective conclusions.  The ‘more enlightened Enlightenment’ of Caputo ‘will have a post-critical sense of critique that is critical of the idea that we can establish air-tight borders around neatly discriminated spheres or regions like knowledge, ethics, art and religion.’  Post-modernists realise that

there is no such thing as an undistorted perspective and try to correct for that. … There are many different and competing beliefs and practices and we should make every reasonable effort to accommodate them, to let many flowers bloom.

So whether in Canberra, Chicago or Chipping Norton, our own version of a ‘Sunday Assembly’ should follow Eleanor Mottram and Greenbelt’s example: 

As for being an atheist in a religious setting, it didn’t matter to Greenbelt and it didn’t really matter to me. What Greenbelt stands for is more in line with my personal philosophy than a lot of organisations and the fact that it actively believed in making the world a better place made it an organisation I could be part of. 

On June 1st we go on to discuss Chapters 4 and 5: On Religion - Without Religion.

REUNITING RELIGION, MYSTICISM AND SCIENCE

Next discussion forum: May 4th 

How the secular world became post-secular

Join us on Sunday, May 4th, at Wychwood Library, as we discuss the first two chapters (but mainly the second) of John Caputo's ON RELIGION - available online by clicking this link.  The blurb describes it as "a thrilling and accessible exploration of religious faith today".  John Caputo is a Professor of Religion and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus who has published widely on Heidegger, Derrida, Aquinas, and ethics and wrote The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion. 

You can read a preliminary discussion of the first two chapters, and join in with your own comment, in the next post. 

On June 1st we will discuss Chapters 4 and 5: On Religion - Without Religion.

THE VOICES OF THE MIND

Religion? "Don't listen to its mad voices," says former Bishop

Is there anybody there?  We recently discussed Richard Holloway who in the epilogue to his candid, soul-bearing Memoir of Faith and Doubt, says this: ‘I wanted to keep religion around … because it gave us space to wonder and listen within’ (see also another post on this site: The silent centre of our spirit).  In his equally honest Unapologetic, Francis Spufford described ‘turning to a space where there is quite possibly no one’, but where he eventually becomes aware of ‘something that had been going on unremarked, so steady and continuous that we had never picked it out of the general background roar of the world’.  Rowan Williams has described the Christian religion specifically as ‘the space that has been cleared in human imagination and self-understanding by the revealing events of Jesus’ life’. 

Advocates of religion would seem to be telling us that we are missing something if we do not make, or find, that space and open ourselves to … something.  Significantly, Holloway also urges us not to abandon religion, but not to listen ‘to its mad voices’.  In our April reading  for our Wychwood Circle discussion (for once a mere 16-page essay) we listen to the voice of a Princeton University psychologist whose lecture was presented to a 1983 Symposium on Consciousness.  Speaking of an era which he dates before ‘consciousness’ (as he defines it) dawned, Julian Jaynes  says:

Whenever a significant choice is to be made, a voice comes in telling people what to do. … These voices are called gods. 

The period he describes is based on the oldest parts of the Iliad (eventually written down in about 800 BC), times when ‘auditory hallucinations’ were really quite common and seen as a normal part of life. Indeed:

Verbal hallucinations are common today, but in early civilization I suggest they were universal.

The bicameral mind

The mentality in this time was what he calls ‘the bicameral mind’, which means, if I understand it correctly, that there was a decision-making part and a follower part, but neither was ‘conscious’.  The importance of this mentality was that it had to exist in the sort of society that then prevailed, ‘ one rigidly ordered in strict hierarchies with strict expectancies organised into the mind so that hallucinations preserved the social fabric’.  He cites a number of examples of such societies from 9000 BC to 3000 BC (when writing provides even clearer evidence). He also goes on to say that ‘every person had a personal god’, as suggested by evidence in Mesopotamia and Egypt.  And he links – perhaps provocatively – this personal god to evidence from modern research (including his own):

It is possible to suggest that a part of our innate bicameral heritage is the modern phenomenon of the ‘imaginary’ playmate. … In the rare cases where the imaginary playmate lasts beyond the juvenile period, it too grows up with the child and begins telling him or her what to do in times of stress.

Divination

The implication is that this is one way the idea of the personal god might have started in ‘bicameral times’ before being developed into shared gods and idols.  Eventually we get to the development of a variety of ways of ‘discerning messages’.  He notes that one of these methods is still around, astrology. Significantly for our broadly theological Wychwood Circle discussions, such divination must apply also to the early prophets in the Hebrew Testament (our Old Testament) and he refers specifically to one of the oldest books, The Book of Amos (around 800 BC): 

I suspect that such prophets as Amos were those left-over bicameral or semi-bicameral persons in the conscious era who heard and could relay the voice of Yahweh with convincing authority.

So from ancient texts about earlier civilisations to modern sufferers of schizophrenia, we have evidence of a bicameral mind, and we have a new angle on human nature. What is left of the voices of the gods are remnants which are all around us of ‘a mentality that we no longer have’.  The remnants of course include – in addition to ‘hallucinations heard particularly in psychosis’ and problems with identity – our modern-day religions and the observed need for religion, and ‘our search for certainty’.  All excellent themes for a Wychwood Circle discussion.

[Jaynes ‘ final idea must be kept for another day, viz his ‘neurological model for the bicameral mind’. This bears significantly on the concept of the ‘divided brain’, and in particular the neglected right hemisphere of the brain which has only attracted the interest of neuroscientists since the 1960s. We came across this idea when reading Jonathan Sacks last year (see under Instances of the number 2: THE DIVIDED BRAIN). We may well return to it.]

On April 6^th at Wychwood Library (7.00 – 9.00 pm) we will explore in discussion the significance and the implications of these ideas, led by Ian Cave who suggested the piece. The meeting is, as always, open to anyone to come along and join in.  If you cannot open the link, please email david.soward@gmail.com for the pdf of the 16-page Lecture. 

'Poetry, Place and Faith' at Christ Church, Oxford

Nicola Slee has cancelled

We are sorry to have to announce that NICOLA SLEE has cancelled her visit to us on March 9th, due to pressure of work. 

Instead we are suggesting a trip into Oxford to attend the After Eight series at Christ Church cathedral on the same evening at 8pm, where poet Jeremy Hooker will talk about the importance of place in his work. 

There will be two car-loads going from West Oxfordshire. For a place, please call Michael Waring (Charlbury 01608 810663) or Ian Henderson (Enstone 01608 678348). 

RELIGION'S POETRY

RELIGION'S POETRY COULD STILL TOUCH US

A page from the Epilogue of Richard Holloway's Leaving Alexandria - A Memoir of Faith and Doubt:

Like other human enterprises, religion grew out of the human predicament. We are thinking animals. We may even be the only thinking creature in the unimaginable vastness of the universe, which means that in us the universe is thinking about itself, maybe for the first time! And we can’t stop doing it. It comes with these big self-conscious brains of ours from which also come science and philosophy. And art! Art is what our imagination has conjured up to express the wonder and terror of life; the stories we have told ourselves, the dreams we have dreamt, the longings and fears we have woven together. And the great gallimaufry we call religion is one of art’s great imaginings.

Don't abandon it, ... but don't listen to its mad voices 

Religion is human, and like humanity it is both a glory and a scandal. It is full of pity and full of cruelty. Just like us. So is the Bible. If only we could stop using it as if it had any more authority than Shakespeare or Proust or Elgar or Gauguin or Tolstoy or Nietzsche! It belongs with them, with its yearnings and crucifying certainties. It was human, all-too human.  Don’t abandon it, any more than we ought to abandon the other flawed cruel epics of the human imagination: but don’t listen to its mad voices. 

 A space to listen and wonder in 

In my walks I discovered my real dilemma. I wanted to keep religion around, purged of cruelty, because it gave us a space to wonder and listen within.  Purged of the explanations that don’t explain, the science that does not prove, the morality that does not improve; purged in fact of its prose, religion’s poetry could still touch us, make us weep, make us tender, and take us out of ourselves into the possibility of a courageous pity.

March 9th [NOT at Wychwood Library]

.

Richard Holloway's book was the subject of our February discussion at Wychwood Circle, which left some intriguing questions still to be answered. 

On Sunday, March 9th, we were due to welcome Dr Nicola Slee to the library in Milton under Wychwood (OX7 6LD) to address the topic of POETRY AND FAITH, but she has had to cancel. A poet, theologian and author of such books as Faith and Feminism, Nicola Slee had promised us "a consideration of the contribution of poetry to Christian faith and life, illustrated by reference to the work of 20th and 21st century poets". 

Please see the next post for an alternative venue on the same date.