READINGS 

The text foud on postcards that were distributed to first time attenders to the Unitarian Church in Cambridge during the late 1950s and early 1960s 



Guide by A. R. Ammons

          You cannot come to unity and remain material:
in that perception is no perceiver:
    when you arrive
you have gone too far:
          at the Source you are in the mouth of Death:

you cannot
    turn around in
the Absolute: there are no entrances or exits
          no precipitations of forms
to use like tongs against the formless:
    no freedom to choose:

to be
          you have to stop not-being and break
off from is to flowing and
    this is the sin you weep and praise:
origin is your original sin:
          the return you long for will ease your guilt
and you will have your longing:

    the wind that is my guide said this: it
should know having
          given up everything to eternal being but
direction:

how I said can I be glad and sad: but a man goes
    from one foot to the other:
wisdom wisdom:
          to be glad and sad at once is also unity
and death:

    wisdom wisdom: a peachblossom blooms on a particular
tree on a particular day:
          unity cannot do anything in particular:

are these the thoughts you want me to think I said but
the wind was gone and there was no more knowledge then.


During the last few weeks I’ve been exploring with you some of the implications of a phrase that was first used by our own Cambridge community on its publicity during the late 1950s and early 1960s, namely, the freedom, or right, to be tomorrow what we are not today. It was a phrase that, in part, helped me to the ideas which became my long piece for the Sea of Faith with a similar title which outlines what it is in general terms I’m trying to do here as your minister. In the terminology of my piece in a nutshell it’s an attempt to help create appropriately and genuinely free, religious spirits who not only claim the freedom or right to be tomorrow what they are not today but who, following any encounter with persuasive new evidence from the natural sciences and/or good, rational, philosophical thinking, also have the courage, wherewithal and opportunity actually to change their minds about various things, including their once deeply held ultimate premises.

Traditional religious communities and church traditions are rarely, if ever, concerned to encourage such an open-ended way of being because they are generally concerned to defend an ultimate truth which they believe has been revealed to them via some form of scripture, tradition or the insight of certain individuals; more often than not it’s a combination of all three.

The Unitarian movement has been no different in this respect. As a form of Radical Reformation Christianity its ultimate premises, its basic doctrines if you will, were first articulated in Poland and Hungary during the mid-sixteenth century. They were that “God is One” and that Jesus was fully human (albeit uniquely and divinely inspired and given a divine commission by that One God to act as the Messiah of the kingdom of peace). As the centuries have unfolded this doctrine of the strict unity of God has, particularly from the middle third of twentieth century onwards, allowed us to expand our thinking beyond its original, obviously Jewish and Christian beginnings into more pluralistic and universalistic expressions of religion and this is why Cliff Reed begins his book “Unitarian? What’s That?” with these words:

The historic Unitarian affirmation God is One is what gave the movement its name. Today, this stress on divine unity is broadened. Now Unitarians also affirm: Humanity is One, the World is One, the Interdependent Web of Life is One. But while Unitarians may share these affirmations, we do so in an open and liberal spirit. And there is a lot more to us than that.

Understood in the way Cliff does, the traditional Unitarian doctrine of the unity of God (our unquestioned answer) is such a beguiling and attractive idea that I’ve been utterly in thrall to it for most of my adult life. However, although I am still beguiled by the idea of an interdependent web of life the bewitching power over me of the idea of the unity of God has slowly waned.

But this is to get ahead of myself.

What I can say at this point in my address is that Wittgenstein speaks profoundly to my situation vis-a-vis the doctrine of the unity of God — and, I imagine, to many of you — when he says: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (PI §115).

In a Unitarian setting the unity of God lays deep in our language and, in one way or another, it repeats itself to us inexorably as all our hymns today have revealed. To all intents and purposes this mantra is an essentially a Platonic claim that underlying the endlessly changing and diverse appearance of the material world, there lies an eternal, immutable and undivided ultimate unity. Though it need not be, it is often the case that this  ultimate unity is believed also to be perfectly moral and good.

OK, hold on to this thought while I briefly turn to the most important historian of our religious movement Earl Morse Wilbur (1886-1956). In 1920, in his influential lecture/essay “The Meaning and Lessons of Unitarian History”, he realised that, at first sight, “the principal meaning of the movement has been a purely doctrinal one and that the goal we have aimed at has been nothing more remote than that of winning the world to acceptance of one form of doctrine rather than another.” This doctrine was, of course, that “God is One” — with all its corollaries about the humanity of Jesus etc..

But, as Wilbur dug more deeply into the ebb and flow of our history he felt sure that the “doctrinal aspect” of our churches was, in truth, only “a temporary phase” and that Unitarian doctrines were, therefore, only “a sort of by-product of a larger movement, whose central motive has been the quest for spiritual freedom.” Indeed, his essay begins with a clear statement that, “the keyword to our whole history . . . is the word complete spiritual freedom.” The conclusion he delivered to his own day was that, thus far, we had hardly done anything more than remove certain “obstacles which dogma had put in our way” and had only just begun to “clear the decks for the great action to follow.”

These words reveal that Wilbur was a far-sighted man but, as all people necessarily are, his vision could only stretch so far. The limits of his vision didn’t allow him to do in his own time two important things that he could not see were implied by the general trajectory of his own work.

The first was that he was not able to envisage consistently operating, nor see the need for us to operate, outside a generally liberal Christian framework. Here are the very last sentences of his 1920 essay:

Our vital task still remains, in common with that which falls to every other Christian church, the task of inspiring Christian characters and moulding Christian civilization, the task of making men and society truly Christian, the task of organizing the kingdom of heaven upon earth.

Of course, you must yourself decide whether such a description still works properly for you in our own highly pluralistic and scientifically informed age and context but, for me, it doesn’t. Along with an American philosopher called James W. Woelfel (for whose work I have a quiet admiration) I have to say that “in my own ongoing struggle to make sense of the Christian context of life- and world-interpretation [that I have inherited], I find basic elements of that context which I simply cannot render coherent any longer, and I earnestly wonder how other persons manage to” (The Death of God: A Belated Personal Postscript). In a nutshell this all means I simply cannot any longer, with a clean heart and full pathos, put my shoulder against the same exclusively Christian wheel to which Wilbur was able to put his own.

The second important thing Wilbur couldn’t do due to the natural limits of his own vision was to ask the perhaps shocking, difficult and, for a Unitarian (Christian), almost heretical question towards which his own work seems to me to be inexorably heading when he said that Unitarian doctrines were only “a temporary phase” and therefore, only “a sort of by-product of a larger movement, whose central motive has been the quest for spiritual freedom.”

So, with the title of this address firmly in mind, that “more dangerous than an unanswered question is an unquestioned answer”, here’s the potentially heretical question:

Is the doctrine or dogma of the unity of God which has held Unitarians captive for four-and-a-half centuries, in fact, now an obstacle to us and do we, therefore, need to clear our decks of it if we are to enable the “great action” to follow?

Before beginning to address this huge question the first thing to say at this point is that it seems to me we are only being true to “the keyword to our whole history . . . complete spiritual freedom” in so far as we can freely and without fear ask this question and if, in principle — were the evidence to be persuasive enough, of course — to change our minds about the doctrine and let it go in favour of something more plausible. Although I’ve been intimating that, within the Unitarian context, my question might be perceived as being heretical in fact it’s not. Here is the great Unitarian Christian theologian, minister and scientist Joseph Priestley writing in a sermon of the 1770s (“The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry in Matters of Religion: A Sermon” in P.Miller, ed., Joseph Priestley: Political Writings, Cambridge: CUP, 1993, xxiv).

But should free inquiry lead to the destruction of Christianity itself, it ought not, on that account, to be discontinued; for we can only wish for the prevalence of Christianity on the supposition of its being true; and if it fall before the influence of free inquiry, it can only do so in consequence of its not being true.

For Priestley, Christianity was made up of a system of claims about the world whose truth could only be determined by a preceding phase of genuinely free and open-minded religious and philosophical debate and the gathering and analysis of verifiable, empirical data.

In short Priestley was committed to the possibility that his own ultimate Unitarian Christian premises may, in time, turn out to be false. Indeed I think that, in an age and a time when our forebears’ belief in the existence of a morally good, omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient unitary god is becoming less and less plausible to more and more of us we need to emulate the same radical open-minded spirit of enquiry once showed by Priestley and ask ourselves whether or not the evidence and our contemporary experiences indicates we should, at last, let our commitment to the unity of God completely go?

In one sense this address is finished because the primary thing I want to do today is simply to get this question, which Wilbur could not ask, openly out on our common table for consideration and discussion and to show that in asking this we are being entirely consistent with the Unitarian tradition understood as an historical whole.

But, in another sense, it would be unfair were I to finish without giving you at least a brief indication of the “great action” I think which could well follow were we able to let go of the old, Platonic doctrine of the strict unity of God. As you know I’m perfectly capable of running through the various philosophical arguments and scientific evidence for this — and doing it in great detail — but I have only a couple of hundred words left so I turn, instead, to poetry in the form of Ammons’ poem, “Guide”.

In it I understand Ammons strongly to be suggesting that the “great action” which Wilbur dimly intuited in 1920 is courageously to move away from our original sin of believing our origin and end is in the static unity (of God, or the Absolute, or the Platonic Really-Real) and to move, instead, towards an understanding that everything is always-already in complex movement, is always-already interconnecting, interpenetrating and highly plural; it is to see that there is no single origin, no divine single being or particle at the end of the universe; it is to see that where there is no movement there are no things, no materiality, no life and so no knowledge. Ammons’ words (and for me the contemporary natural sciences and Lucretius’ wonderful poem the De Rrerum Natura) suggest to me we should think long and hard about stopping believing in and yearning for this Absolute Being and so finally to “break off from is to flowing.”

This is what the wind teaches Ammons and teaches me — it’s what every flux and flow of nature teaches — that in the static unity of God as our Unitarian forbears understood it and our Christian Platonic culture in general has understood it, we cannot turn around, there are no entrances or exits, there are no precipitations of forms to use like tongs against the formless, no freedom to choose. In that capital “S” Source we find we are really in the mouth of of capital “D” Death.

This strongly suggests to me that by continuing to hold to a doctrine of the unity of God we are not only fundamentally at odds with the apparent nature of things, but we also threaten our other great historic commitment to the freedom and right to change our minds on the basis of good evidence and reason and to become tomorrow what we are not today.

So, to conclude, here’s the question once again followed by Ammons' poem

Is the doctrine or dogma of the unity of God which has held Unitarians captive for four-and-a-half centuries, in fact, now an obstacle to us and do we, therefore, need to clear our decks of it if we are to enable the “great action” to follow? 

Guide by A. R. Ammons

          You cannot come to unity and remain material:
in that perception is no perceiver:
    when you arrive
you have gone too far:
          at the Source you are in the mouth of Death:

you cannot
    turn around in
the Absolute: there are no entrances or exits
          no precipitations of forms
to use like tongs against the formless:
    no freedom to choose:

to be
          you have to stop not-being and break
off from is to flowing and
    this is the sin you weep and praise:
origin is your original sin:
          the return you long for will ease your guilt
and you will have your longing:

    the wind that is my guide said this: it
should know having
          given up everything to eternal being but
direction:

how I said can I be glad and sad: but a man goes
    from one foot to the other:
wisdom wisdom:
          to be glad and sad at once is also unity
and death:

    wisdom wisdom: a peachblossom blooms on a particular
tree on a particular day:
          unity cannot do anything in particular:

are these the thoughts you want me to think I said but
the wind was gone and there was no more knowledge then.

Readers who are in any way sympathetic to my feeling that we (Unitarians) should let the doctrine of the unity of God go might be interested in reading the following essay by Thomas Nail called The Ontology of Motion and also a preview of his forthcoming book for OUP called Being and Motion. He strikes me as someone whose work can really help us clear the decks for the great action to follow . . .

This morning I took a spin up the Gog Magog Hills to the Beechwoods Local Nature Reserve on my trusty Raleigh Superbe to enjoy the splendid autumn sunlight and colour.  It was as perfect an autumn day as one could imagine and, as always, I took a few photos along the way. All photos taken with my Fuji X100F.

Just click on a photo to enlarge it.

The cover art here is entitled Brownian Motion

READINGS

From Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

STONE TELLING IS my last name. It has come to me of my own choosing, because I have a story to tell of where I went when I was young; but now I go nowhere, sitting like a stone in this place, in this ground, in this Valley. I have come where I was going.
          My House is the Blue Clay, my household the High Porch of Sinshan.
          My mother was named Towhee, Willow, and Ashes. My father's name, Abhao, in the Valley means Kills.
          In Sinshan babies’ names often come from birds, since they are messengers. In the month before my mother bore me, an owl came every night to the oak trees called Gairga outside the windows of High Porch House, on the north side, and sang the owl’s song there; so my first name was North Owl.

From A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

No one knows a man’s true name but himself and his namer. He may choose at length to tell it to his brother, or his wife, or his friend, yet even those few will never use it where any third person may hear it. In front of other people they will, like other people, call him by his use-name, his nickname—such a name as Sparrowhawk, and Vetch, and Ogion which means “fir-cone”. If plain men hide their true name from all but a few they love and trust utterly, so much more must wizardly men, being more dangerous, and more endangered. Who knows a man’s name, holds that man’s life in his keeping. Thus to Ged who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given that gift only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.

From Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought (ETHNOS, Vol. 71:1, March 2006 (pp. 9-20) by Tim Ingold

The Primacy of Movement

The animic world [i.e. in worldviews in which every natural thing in the universe is perceived to be living in some fashion] is in perpetual flux, as the beings that participate in it go their various ways. These beings do not exist at locations, they occur along paths. Among the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic, for example, as the writer Rudy Wiebe has shown, as soon as a person moves he or she becomes a line. People are known and recognised by the trails they leave behind them. Animals, likewise, are distinguished by characteristic patterns of activity or movement signatures, and to perceive an animal is to witness this activity going on, or to hear it. Thus, to take a couple of examples from Richard Nelson’s wonderful account of the Koyukon of Alaska, Make Prayers to the Raven, you see ‘streaking like a flash of fire through the undergrowth’, not a fox, and ‘perching in the lower branches of spruce trees’, not an owl. The names of animals are not nouns but verbs. But it is no different with celestial bodies, such as the sun and the moon. We might think of the sun as a giant disk that is observed to make its way from east to west across the great dome of the sky. It could be depicted like this:


But in the pictographic inscriptions of native peoples of the North American Plains, it is depicted like this:


or this:


where the little nick at the end of the line indicates sunrise or sunset. In these depictions the sun is not understood as an object that moves across the sky. Rather it is identified as the path of its movement through the sky, on its daily journey from the eastern to the western horizon.


Spiritus fumans libavii (fuming liquor of livabius) gets its name from the fact that the colourless liquid fumes on contact with air and from the name of its discoverer, the German alchemist and physician Andreas Libavius (c. 1555–1616) who used it in his alchemical experiments during the sixteenth-century.

Now, alchemy was a complex phenomenon that cannot — nor ever should — be reduced merely to being an early form of chemistry. We mustn’t do this because it was a discipline which brought into play various ideas and practices concerning what, today, we might call spiritual growth and development. However, for all this, it is also clearly a meaningful part of the genealogy of modern chemistry.

But the trouble with alchemical names like spiritus fumans libavii is that they are not clear — not “clear” in modern chemical terms that is — they do not make clear the chemical structure of things and it took a figure like Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794) over a hundred years later to develop a system of naming which helped us see that spiritus fumans libavii was better — again “better” simply from the point of view of the developing science of chemistry — better understood as being an inorganic compound of tin and chlorine gas and named SnCl4 or tin tetrachloride. Clarity with regard to its chemical makeup helps a chemist more easily understand and predict how it can be combined with other substances to produce this or that new substance.

But, from another perspective, Lavoisier’s naming system succeeds in obscuring from us three important things, that it is a liquid, that it fumes and also the name of its discoverer. In the mind of a knowledgeable chemist, the first two things may well be implied in the modern chemical name, but for those non-chemists amongst us it can be said that the name spiritus fumans libavii remains, from a certain point of view, a better description of the stuff than the name tin tetrachloride.

My use of the phrase “from a certain point of view” indicates the importance of context and so please don’t hear me as suggesting that one name is more desirable, better or more accurate and clear than  another; all I want to do here is point to the fact that the same thing can have very different meaningful names that are born out of very different needs and ways of naming.

Some names can and do remain in use together — as is the case with spiritus fumans libavii and tin tetrachloride — but some names, such as phlogiston — which was used to name a fire-like element once thought to be contained within combustible bodies which was released during combustion — have completely gone out of use as our scientific understanding of the world radically changed. In the case of phlogiston, once we understood the role of oxygen in combustion the idea of the existence of phlogiston simply made no sense any more and the name needed, gently, be let go. 

This is one of the basic points I wish to introduce in this address, namely, that the naming of things and the parts of things is something which is constantly in flux and flow. Names both come and go as contexts, and viewpoints from within contexts, change as we open up new horizons of disclosure thanks to our endless scientific, poetic, philosophic and religious journeyings through, and entanglement with, the world. As I proceed through this address please keep in mind this idea of journeying through the world because walking and pedesis (from the Greek πήδησις “leaping”) or, Brownian motion, is central to what I want to say today.

So to return to Tal for a moment.

In the context of this service, along the path which she is travelling and from within the horizons of disclosure now available to her she has bravely and gently let go of her earlier names and let come to her the new name and life which, to quote Tal herself, she feels “is characterised by youth, freshness, joy, strength, freedom, creativity, rootedness in the past and hope for the future — a little girl, dancing by a gentle river flowing through a sheltered valley, in the sunlight.”

But, walking on together and changing our perspective and horizons of disclosure once more, with our Lavoisierian inspired scientific hats on, we can also see that, in certain contexts, it would be better to name her — identify her — not by the name Talitha Hope Annan, but by the phenomenally complex name that is her own unique genetic code.

(Get Tal up to unfold chart — at some point in the next day or so I’ll post a photo of this.)

As with spiritus fumans libavii and tin tetrachloride each of her names — Talitha Hope Annan and the complex name that is her unique genetic code — both reveal certain important things even as they obscure others — indeed, rather marvellously and visually very much to the point, the poster of the human genome is so large it is actually capable of obscuring all but Tal’s extremities and Tal, in turn, can obscure the poster! All names reveal, all names obscure.

And so now we begin to see, I hope, that no single system of naming, whether scientific or otherwise, can ever fully and completely name any thing — animate or inanimate. This, in turn, serves to introduce to us the thought that, as we walk through and entangle ourselves in new creative ways with the flux and flow of a world endlessly in motion, it would be wise always to have available to us a variety of namings (public and private, informal and formal etc.).

This additionally reveals, at least to me, the need for a variety of systems of naming which, together, are able continually to remind us that we are ourselves ever-moving, ever-dancing fluxes and flows of Brownian (pedetic) motion and lines of movement and that there exist no eternally fixed entities which could ever be wholly defined, or whose meaning (or potential meaning) could wholly be exhausted by, reductionist nomenclatures whether derived from the natural sciences, systematic theology or analytical philosophy and so on.

At this point I want to turn to some insights offered by the anthropologist Tim Ingold who in his paper, an extract from which you heard earlier, notes that in the animic world everything “is in perpetual flux, as the beings that participate in it go their various ways. These beings do not exist at locations, they occur along paths” — beings do not exist at locations, they occur along paths.

Now in animic worldviews, where this last idea is taken to be the case, the names of beings are often clearly no longer those of fixed static entities found at this or that location — nouns — but, instead, expressions of movement that occur along paths, expressions which speak in some fashion about the activity, motion and movement of those same things — verbs. So to the Inuit of the Canadian Arctica a fox is not a fixed thing but a “streaking like a flash of fire through the undergrowth” and an owl “is perching in the lower branches of spruce trees” — remember, of course, that the perching of a raptor such as an owl is always an alert, active state and never simply a static one; even in the apparent stillness of the perching owl there is perpetual flux and flow. Let’s also remember the written names given to the sun by peoples of the North American Plains which are absolutely concerned to present us with the sun as a line of movement through the world rather than as a discrete object (noun) in it.  

Although I am not myself an animist but, instead very much a Lucretian inspired modern materialist, I do myself accept and daily live by what seems to me to be the truth of the idea that beings do not exist at locations but occur along paths. Not least of all I live this way because, as contemporary physics powerfully seems to reveal, at the sub-atomic level even in the most apparently static and stable of things, there is always-already occurring the perpetual flux and flow of matter.

All these things — and many more besides — as they tumble, bump and interact together in endless pedetic, Brownian motion surely encourage us all to take time to consider the consequences of the endless and eternal flux and flow of matter, most importantly that, as material beings ourselves, we do not exist at locations but occur along paths. And, if this is the case, it may further encourage us to ask whether our own static, fixed and seemingly stable given and/or adopted names, are really always doing the best job they might? We may find that it is worth thinking about letting some of them go and adopting other, parallel and interweaving names that can better tell the story of our own Brownian, pedetic movements of becoming as we travel the path of life.

Such a reflection may not bring upon us the overwhelming need actually to let go of our birth names or self- or other given descriptions as Tal has — I certainly feel no need to change my own — but it can surely do us no harm to walk and to dance Brownian-motion-like around our own current names and descriptions to see what new things and horizons of disclosure appear. Indeed, I feel it’s a creative, therapeutic activity that may well do all of us a great deal of good. I would also like to add that this kind of pedetic reflection about names is as true of the name and self-description of our own free-religious, free-thinking community, Unitarian. Does this name still do the job it once did or is it now rather like phlogiston, something with very little modern meaning that should gently be let go in favour of another name? I don’t know, I really don’t know but it’s surely worth asking because, like other kinds of beings, living institutions and communities do not really exist at locations, rather they always-already occur along paths. As Heraclitus once famously said (quoted by Plato in Cratylus, 402a), “All is flux, nothing stays still”, “All flows, nothing stays” and it is precisely in this movement that we can always claim our birthright freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today.

And so, with these thoughts in mind lastly, Tal, I simply want to celebrate with you the fact that your own creative, pedetic, walking and dancing line of motion has entangled with our own community’s interweaving lines in this celebration of nature’s many harvests.

Talk 1—Losing our fear of the gods

(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 18 minutes into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death.

Today we’ll consider the fear of the gods.

Epicurus believed the gods existed but there is some ambiguity about exactly what he meant by this; one common interpretation is that he thought they were human projections of what the most blessed life would look like. But, in any case, Epicurus felt that most people were fearful of the gods because they wrongly believed them to be powerful, supernatural beings who are constantly concerned about what we do and who, in response to our actions, dispense upon us various punishments or rewards. In consequence, many people have come to believe that they must worship and sacrifice to the gods in order to win, or regain, their favour.

However, for Epicurus, the most characteristic thing about the gods was their imperishable and blessed being which allowed them to live completely tranquil lives, utterly unconcerned about what we got up to. In short, the gods (whatever they were), simply left us to our own devices and whatever happened to us was always and only the result of purely natural forces.

When thought of like this — as supreme fictions, poetic exemplars of an ideal life — the only influence the gods could have upon us was when we sought to emulate their tranquility in our own lives. Indeed, Epicurus once memorably said he was:

. . . prepared to compete with [the god] Zeus in happiness, as long as he had a barley cake and some water (Aelian, “Miscellaneous Histories”, 4.13 [text 159]).

When an ancient or modern follower of Epicurus gratefully sits down to an equally modest breakfast it is worth pondering upon the fact that they do so blessedly free from a fear of the gods.


(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 21 minutes 50 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death. 

Today we’ll consider the fear of an afterlife.

Epicurus saw in his own age, as we see in our own, that many people believed after death there will be for them another life. Uncertainties about what this will be like, and the miseries it might bring a person were, and still are, the cause of great anxiety, and this has always seriously mitigated against achieving a tranquil and fulfilling life in this world.

But Epicurus had an antidote to the fear of an afterlife. His close study of the natural world led him to the, then, radical conclusion that everything (including the gods and ourselves) was made of atoms — although today we might prefer to say the flow and flux of matter in constant motion. This means that at our death who we are is simply folded back into this same continuous material flow and flux, and it was this realization that assured Epicurus there could be no such thing as another life for us after our own death nor, of course, any afterlife about which we need to be afraid.

And, whilst it is true that followers of Epicurus firmly believe there is no other world, in a poetically sensitive way they do, in fact, see another world, namely, this natural world seen through the eyes of reason and science rather than through the eyes of ancient superstition.



(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 28 minutes 10 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death.

This week we’ll look at the fear of death itself, coming, as it does for Epicurus and his followers, without a belief in an afterlife.

Epicurus addressed this fear firstly by noting that everything which is for us desirable or undesirable, good or bad, produces in us pleasure or pain, either directly or indirectly. He then observes that our own death cannot result in us feeling pain because when we die we are no longer there to feel it. True enough our family and friends may mourn and feel pain at our death but we will not be able to. As Epicurus realised, what point is there then, in being anxious or fearful about something if we know that when it happens it cannot possibly cause us any pain, either directly or indirectly?

This is why Epicureans were widely known to say “death is nothing to us” and sometimes they wore signet rings or looked into hand mirrors with these words engraved upon them as a daily reminder that they had no need to fear death.

But, if death is nothing to a follower of Epicurus, this life, properly lived, does mean a great deal, and it is something to be fully and tranquilly enjoyed with our family and friends before fearlessly “to the wind’s twelve quarters / I take my endless way” (A Shropshire Lad XXXII) as the great English poet and Epicurean, A. E. Housman, once beautifully put it in his A Shropshire Lad.


(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 19 minutes 00 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death.

Over the past three weeks we’ve briefly considered them in turn. But once these fears had been, or were at least well on the way to being overcome, what still remained was the need for supportive, like-minded, free-thinking friends. Indeed, friendship was central to Epicurus’ thought and life and he once said that:

Of all the things that wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole person, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship (LD, 27).

On another occasion he exclaimed that:

“Friendship dances around the world, summoning every one of us to awaken to the gospel of the happy life” (VC 52).

Epicurus saw that friends helped a person to gain at least two important things. The first was that they clearly helped making the basic necessities of life, such as food, shelter and general protection, easier to get and maintain. The second was that they could help us continue to be fully awake to the benefits of the Epicurean gospel of the happy life, a life blessedly free from fear of the gods, an afterlife,  and death. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that he seems once to have said: 

Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you are to eat or drink: for feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf” (Seneca, Letters 19:10).


(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 22 minutes 35 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)


In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death and, as we explored last week, key to achieving this kind of life was friendship.

Clearly this can mean single friendships but Epicurus saw the need and value of larger communities too and he provided this in his own garden academy in Athens. Written above its entrance were these inviting words:

“Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure. The caretaker of [this] abode, a kindly host, will be ready for you; he will welcome you with bread, and serve you water in abundance, with these words: ‘Have you not been well entertained? This garden does not whet your appetite, but quenches it’” (Seneca, “Epistulae morales ad Lucilium”, Epistle XXI).

Both Epicurus’ philosophy and his garden academy provided a hospitable gate through which all people, rich and poor, men and women, slave and free, were allowed freely to come and go where, through a process of mutually supportive philosophical self-cultivation, they were helped to fashion a form of life that, being free from the fear of the gods, an afterlife, and death was, indeed, tranquil and pleasurable and a style of living that others could also behold with pleasure.)

In this kind of philosophical garden community it was — and still is — possible to nurture all kinds of virtues that, to this day, continue to offer us what we can call “the salt of existence”, namely: love, affection, tenderness, sweetness, thoughtfulness, delicateness, forbearance, magnanimity, politeness, amenity, kindness, civility, attentiveness, attention, courtesy, clemency, devotedness, and all the words carrying a connotation of goodness (this list is gratefully taken from Michel Onfray’s “A Hedonist Manifesto: The Power to Exist”, Columbia University Press, 2015, p. 49).

Talk 5—The Epicurean Garden Academy

(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 22 minutes 35 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)


In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death and, as we explored last week, key to achieving this kind of life was friendship.

Clearly this can mean single friendships but Epicurus saw the need and value of larger communities too and he provided this in his own garden academy in Athens. Written above its entrance were these inviting words:

“Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure. The caretaker of [this] abode, a kindly host, will be ready for you; he will welcome you with bread, and serve you water in abundance, with these words: ‘Have you not been well entertained? This garden does not whet your appetite, but quenches it’” (Seneca, “Epistulae morales ad Lucilium”, Epistle XXI).

Both Epicurus’ philosophy and his garden academy provided a hospitable gate through which all people, rich and poor, men and women, slave and free, were allowed freely to come and go where, through a process of mutually supportive philosophical self-cultivation, they were helped to fashion a form of life that, being free from the fear of the gods, an afterlife, and death was, indeed, tranquil and pleasurable and a style of living that others could also behold with pleasure.)

In this kind of philosophical garden community it was — and still is — possible to nurture all kinds of virtues that, to this day, continue to offer us what we can call “the salt of existence”, namely: love, affection, tenderness, sweetness, thoughtfulness, delicateness, forbearance, magnanimity, politeness, amenity, kindness, civility, attentiveness, attention, courtesy, clemency, devotedness, and all the words carrying a connotation of goodness (this list is gratefully taken from Michel Onfray’s “A Hedonist Manifesto: The Power to Exist”, Columbia University Press, 2015, p. 49).

The first talk can be found at this link

The second talk can be found at this link 

The third talk can be found at this link

The fourth talk can be found at this link

The plaque in our Memorial Garden

READING: From “The Basics of the Deep Ecology Movement” by Arne Naess (Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess, ed. by Alan Drengson and Bill Devall, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley CA, 2008, pp. 105-106 [Here is a link to a preview of the the new Penguin edition])

Supporters of the deep ecology movement refer approvingly to a diversity of philosophers, cultural traditions, and religious trends. Some authors ask for clarification: Where is the essence or core? Is there a definite general philosophy of deep ecology, or at least a kind of philosophy? Or is it essentially a movement with exasperatingly vague outlines? I do not think it is desirable to do more than tentatively suggest what might be the essential ingredients of a deep ecology theoretical point of view. In what follows, I formulate some remarks that might be considered dogmatic. They are, however, only meant as proposals for people with a background similar to my own.

In order to facilitate discussion about the deep ecology movement among philosophers, it may be helpful to distinguish a common platform of deep ecology from the fundamental features of philosophies and religions from which that platform is derived, provided it is tentatively formulated as a set of norms and hypotheses (factual assumptions). The term platform is preferred to principle, because the latter may be misunderstood to refer to ultimate premises. Furthermore, the formulations of a platform should be short and concise (as a synopsis), whereas the fundamental premises are Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, or of other religious kinds, or they are philosophical with affinities to the basic views of Spinoza, Whitehead, Heidegger, or others. Different sets of fundamentals are normally more or less incompatible, or at least difficult to compare in terms of cognitive contents. Supporters of deep ecology may have great difficulties in understanding each other's ultimate view, but not sets of penultimate views as formulated as a kind of platform they have largely in common.
 

[. . .]
 
One must avoid looking for one definite philosophy or religious view among the supporters of the deep ecology movement. There is a rich manifold of fundamental views compatible with the deep ecology platform. And without this, the movement would lose its transcultural character. The trans-cultural character of the movement makes it natural that the wording of a version of the platform cannot be the same everywhere. A term like our planet, for instance, is unsuitable where people have no clear notion corresponding to the Western concept of a planet. The discussion has four levels: (1) verbalized fundamental philosophical and religious views, (2) the deep ecology platform, (3) the more or less general consequences derived from the platform—guidelines for lifestyles and for policies of every kind, and (4) prescriptions related to concrete situations and dateable decisions made in them. The term dateable refers to the trivial circumstance that a decision is made at a definite time, even if it has taken a year to arrive at.

The plaque in our Memorial Garden

On every morning order of service, and on a plaque in our Memorial Garden, there appear words attributed to one of the principal founders of our own liberal religious movement, the Hungarian Unitarian bishop, Francis David (1510-1579), namely “We need not think alike to love alike”. I say attributed because this exact phrase can be found nowhere in the written records even though in places he does, most assuredly, echo its sentiment. The closest match to this phrase was in fact uttered by Charles Wesley (1707-1788) the founder of the Methodist Church. But one should not be partisan about such things as it’s a sentiment that should, surely, be spread abroad more widely in our fractious world.

But, whoever first uttered this saying there is a significant problem about how to interpret it today . So, as I have in my last two addresses (HERE and HERE) I’ll begin with a little history to frame the matter.

In the Hungarian Unitarian Church (HUC) during the latter part of the 16th century this sentiment could only be interpreted one way. Having asserted an ultimate premise concerning the Unity of God and the humanity of Jesus the HUC necessarily found itself in conflict with the majority of Christians who asserted the tri-unity of God and the concomitant belief that Christ was the third person of this Trinity. This was an age when such conflicts about ultimate premises were exceptionally severe often resulting in imprisonment, exile and even execution for the minority group. Faced with this possibility (which all too often became a reality) the HUC simultaneously began to preach a doctrine of religious toleration. The sixteenth-century French protestant Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563) summed up this latter issue better than perhaps anyone else when, in 1562, he stated in his Contra libellum Calvini (Against the libel by Calvin) that “To kill a man does not mean to protect a doctrine, it means to kill a man”.

On this basis — i.e. thinking alike in terms of their own Unitarian ultimate premises — the HUC turned outwards to their more doctrinally orthodox neighbour churches and proclaimed: “We (i.e. the HUC that internally thinks alike) do not need to think like you Trinitarians in order that we may all, together, love alike.” The issue we must see clearly here is that the members of the HUC did think (more or less) alike and it was precisely the corporate strength they gained from holding these shared ultimate premises which allowed them strongly to assert the truth of, and struggle for, the toleration of religious differences concerning ultimate premises in the wider, public sphere.

Now fast forward into the civic, highly plural, multicultural setting of the mid-twenty-first century where this same motto, “We need not think alike to love alike”, has, in our own church tradition — and mostly unconsciously —, been turned thoroughly inside out. For we now not only take it for granted that the wider world around us is highly diverse in terms of ultimate premises, but we also take it for granted that, internally, we mirror this plurality of belief — even if it is to a somewhat lesser degree. In our local context in this church we know only too well that, when it comes to ultimate premises, we do not think alike; this person believes in a theistic or pantheistic God, that person is an atheist; this person thinks a Buddhist ontology is correct, that person thinks a Christian ontology is correct; this person is a religious naturalist and materialist, this person is . . . well we could go on and on, ad infinitum.

Without doubt this complex internal plurality of ultimate premises has had powerful knock on effects upon the general ability of our communities effectively to gather together their resources together so as to be able to put a collective shoulder strongly against this wheel or that wheel in order to affect this or that social, political and religious change in the public sphere. These effects will be, indeed are, felt to be both good and bad and there should be no surprise that amongst us views will differ about what effects are good and what bad.

One clearly bad effect — or perhaps it’s better simply to call it a “problematic and noteworthy” effect — is that we are now very, very much slower than we once were about coming to genuinely shared positions about what kind of actions we should be doing in the wider public sphere. Public, corporate action can be put off for long periods of time while we attempt to arrive at some meaningful shared concensus. I simply note that, unlike us, right-wing, hyper-conservative, illiberal groups seem to be much more able to act very quickly and decisively through the formation of their own common platforms (such as the promotion of racist and nationalist policies) which, in turn, can often put liberal and progressive groups like us firmly on our back foot. However, today I don’t want to dwell on this aspect but perhaps we should return to it at another time.

Despite this, one of the good effects — in my opinion anyway — is that our internal plurality of beliefs means it’s now very difficult to imagine us ever again becoming a religious community which could ever become completely committed to promulgating this or that single, totalizing, religious doctrine. As a free-religious tradition we — I think — all now feel strongly that all such totalizing doctrines are, in the long-run, a curse upon humanity and not a blessing. We have come to hold the view that, for the foreseeable future anyway, there will remain in play an enormous variety of different human perspectives on the nature of things and, therefore, we need to find ways to deal with this.

The pressing question that emerges here, is whether there exists a way — a method or process — by which such differences, tensions and potential conflicts in ultimate premises can, in fact, be used to generate meaningful ways by which people holding different ultimate premises can still “love alike”?

CLICK ON THE PICTURE TO ENLARGE THIS DIAGRAM

The answer is, I think “yes” and in passing last week during the conversation after my address, I brought into play the model I borrowed from Arne Naess (1912-2009) which I have used for the last decade in my own teaching, both within this church and in my public role teaching Jewish/Christian/Muslim relations. However, after I mentioned it I realised that many of you in the current congregation won’t know anything about it because the last time I explored it properly in an address was back in 2013. So let me briefly run through it again.

We’ll start at the bottom with level 1. Here you can see just a few of the perhaps almost countless ultimate premises that exist in the world, some of which will be found here. Although many of them will overlap and interpenetrate with each other it is vital to see that none of them can be absolutely reduced to or completely comprehended by any other. Christianity is not the same Judaism nor Islam nor the other way round. Neither is atheism the same as theism or vice versa. At this level it is clear that there is always going to be a great deal of disagreement and structural difference and we need to acknowledge this and not sweep it under the carpet.

Let’s move up to level 2. Despite this we are all aware that these very different ultimate premises are capable of articulating ideas that can can turn into “common platforms” designed to achieve certain things in the world. Notable well known examples of these include, the United Nations, Hans Küng's “Global Ethic”, Karen Armstrong’s “Charter for Compassion”, Médecins Sans Frontières, Greenpeace, treaties like the Kyoto Agreement, our secular democracies, the European Union, the National Health Service and many others. At the local level they might be common platforms to save a local school, building a children’s playground, organizing a better bus service or health care. At this very, very general level — where a common platform is stated in its most simple, concise way — the groups who have generated and supported supported it will, naturally, find a great deal of agreement between them.

Let’s now move to level 3. Here the various groups involved in the common platform that has emerged now have to sit down together to discuss how best to proceed in order to put it into effect. Each group, rooted in and acting out of their own ultimate premises, will have developed, often over centuries, certain deeply held norms and values which help guide them in engaging in what they consider to be appropriate “right” actions. Not surprisingly, at this level, an incredible amount of disagreement can enter into the picture as we try to decide what are the appropriate actions to bring about the shared desired end articulated by the common platform.

Naturally, during the discussions in level 3 some groups will have dropped out, but some will have arrived at a concensus about what action needs to be taken which brings us to level 4, action.

But, once the action has been agreed (whatever it is that is in accordance with the common platform) — via a journey from ultimate premises, through the articulation of a common-platform, through an intense discussion in which our norms and values are in play — the consequences of this action will later on demand a process of philosophical and theological reflection which is achieved by going back down through the levels (see arrow on right of diagram). What ever the final  action was, every group involved has to ascertain whether the action upheld their norms and values, was true to the basic aim of the common-platform and, lastly, whether it was consistent with their ultimate premises? During every journey through this process some change within a group nearly always occurs as it becomes clear that some ideas need to be held more firmly, some more loosely, whilst some may need to be modified or more subtly nuanced, and so on.

It is important to see that this process does not result in the reduction of one set of ultimate premises to another. Rather, firstly, it helps those different groups better to work together at the level of common platforms and, secondly, this better, practical working relationship (i.e. which is a kind of “loving alike”), has the beneficial side-effect of helping these very different groups sit better with their basic differences and disagreements, i.e. it helps a group see, say and mean that we need not think alike to love alike. Another way of putting it is that we learn the important lesson of being able to disagree with each other in better, and ultimately more constructive, ways.

One particular advantage of this approach is that, to use what is I hope an appropriate parallel, it keeps the genetic pool of human thought and action healthily large — different and often helpful perspectives, as well as subtle different nuances of meanings, are kept alive and, therefore, at least potentially accessible to human kind as a whole.

But, and it’s a vital and huge but, any religious or philosophical community goes seriously wrong whenever it seeks — whether consciously or not — to colonise level 2 and pretend that it is, itself, the common platform. There are countless historical examples of such attempts from obviously illiberal positions — for example Nazism, Stalinism, neo-liberalism, various theocracies and many others. But it is often forgotten that liberal religion can also often sin greatly in this regard, especially whenever it starts to believe that it has articulated some genuinely universal ultimate premises and is on the way to creating a pure, universal religion.

It's vital that even a very liberal church such as this one in Cambridge (which consciously emphasizes a certain kind of common platform over personal ultimate premises—see last week’s address) must take care to see that it always stays down at level one with everyone else and, through participating in an ongoing dialogue and general encounter with people who hold different ultimate premises to our own, to let genuinely common platforms emerge.

Naturally, not every common platform that gets put forward by divergent groups holding different ultimate premises is going to one we can support. For example we cannot get behind any kind of racist and nationalist common platform because it runs so counter to our ultimate premises and the norms and values tha come from them. But this truth simply means we are always-already called upon to find ways to work with other groups who hold different ultimate premises to our own in order to generate another kind of common platform that, in this example, is able to resist racism and nationalism and promote a genuine diversity of peoples and a certain kind of cosmopolitanism.

There’s no pancea to be found here, only the straightforward truth that groups who hold different ultimate premises can generate common platforms and so we are able to still say and mean, “We need not think alike to love alike” even though we do not (cannot) mean it in the way we did during the sixteenth-century.

This morning Susanna and I thought we’d take a quiet walk along the River Cam to Fen Ditton and sit by the river at The Plough reading in the sun. As yesterday I took some poetry by A. R. Ammons with me (this time his Collected Poems 1951-1971) and, because the day was such a bright one, it was perhaps no surprise that I found myself staying a long while with a poem called This Bright Day. As I sat with the text, looking now and then up and down river at passing rowers, swans, cormorants and ducks whilst, nearby, the last of the summer bunting fluttered in the warm breeze like Tibetan prayer flags, my phone twitched in my pocket. It was a call from the partner of a very elderly member of the congregation telling me that he had just been told she was now very close to death from pneumonia and asking whether I come to see them later on that day. I said I could and would and realised that Ammon’s poem had suddenly taken on a whole new poignancy for me on this bright day now touched by grief.

This Bright Day
A. R. Ammons

Earth, earth!
day, this bright day
again—once more
showers of dry spruce gold,
the poppy flopped broad open and delicate
from its pod—once more,
all this again: I've had many
days here with these stones and leaves:
like the sky, I've taken on a color
and am still:
the grief of leaves,
summer worms, huge blackant
queens bulging
from weatherboarding, all that
will pass
away from me that I will pass into,
none of the grief
cuts less now than ever—only I
have learned the
sky, the day sky, the blue
obliteration of radiance:
the night sky,
pregnant, lively,
tumultuous, vast—the grief
again in a higher scale
of leaves and poppies:
space, space—
and a grief of things.

This afternoon Susanna and I took a stroll across town to visit the Cambridge University Botanic Garden on a beautiful, sunny day where we took time to linger tranquilly in the sun; Susanna reading Rebecca Solnit's recent book, “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” and me reading the poetry of Lucretius and A. R. Ammons. For those interested in such things the connection between these last two writers is very real, indeed, the American poet and translator Richard Howard once said that “Ammons is our Lucretius, swerving and sideswiping his way into the nature of things.”

Anyway, as we sat in the life giving sun contemplating the beautiful garden a few lines from Book Five of the De Rerum Natura struck me as particularly apt:

Piety is not to be seen often with head covered 
turning towards a stone and approaching every altar,
nor to lie prostrate on the ground with open palms
before shrines of the gods, nor to sprinkle altars
with a profusion of the blood of beasts, nor to join vow to vow.
It is rather to be able to look upon everything with a tranquil mind.

(Lucr. 5.1198-1203, trans. Walter Englert)

Talk 4—The importance of friendship

(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 19 minutes 00 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death.

Over the past three weeks we’ve briefly considered them in turn. But once these fears had been, or were at least well on the way to being overcome, what still remained was the need for supportive, like-minded, free-thinking friends. Indeed, friendship was central to Epicurus’ thought and life and he once said that:

Of all the things that wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole person, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship (LD, 27).

On another occasion he exclaimed that:

“Friendship dances around the world, summoning every one of us to awaken to the gospel of the happy life” (VC 52).

Epicurus saw that friends helped a person to gain at least two important things. The first was that they clearly helped making the basic necessities of life, such as food, shelter and general protection, easier to get and maintain. The second was that they could help us continue to be fully awake to the benefits of the Epicurean gospel of the happy life, a life blessedly free from fear of the gods, an afterlife,  and death. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that he seems once to have said: 

Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you are to eat or drink: for feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf” (Seneca, Letters 19:10).

The first talk can be found at this link

The second talk can be found at this link 

The third talk can be found at this link

Lit candle in the Cambridge Unitarian Church, Emmanuel Road

READINGS: 

The Five Points of Calvinism which both Universalists such as John Murray (1741-1815) and Unitarians such as James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) rejected are often known by the acronym: T.U.L.I.P.

TOTAL DEPRAVITY : Because of the fall, man is unable of himself savingly to believe the gospel.

UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION : God’s choice of certain individuals unto salvation before the foundation of the world rested solely in His own sovereign will.

LIMITED ATONEMENT : Christ’s redeeming work was intended to save the elect only and actually secured salvation them. His death was a substitutionary endurance of the penalty of sin in the place of certain specified sinners.

IRRESISTIBLE GRACE : In addition to the outward general call to salvation which is made to everyone who hears the gospel, the Holy Spirit extends to the elect a special inward call that inevitably brings them to salvation.

PERSEVERANCE OF THE SAINTS : All who were chosen by God, redeemed by Christ, and given faith by the Spirit are eternally saved. They are kept in faith by the power of Almighty God and thus persevere to the end.

It was this kind of pernicious and cruel theology that we, as a liberal church tradition, have consistently opposed; a opposition most famously summed up by Alfred S. Cole who, in his Our Liberal Heritage, famously imagined the spirit of the times (the zeitgeist) saying to the English Universalist John Murray:

“Go out into the highways and by-ways of America, your new country. . . . You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them, not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.”


From “A Theology of Personal and Societal Transformation: The Bicentennial Legacy of James Freeman Clarke” by Paul S. Johnson (Minns Lectures 2010)

In his history, The Unitarians and the Universalists, David Robinson asserts that James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) was “one of the most important churchmen in nineteenth century Unitarianism and may be thought of as the most representative figure among the Unitarian clergy and leadership.” (Robinson, 1985, p. 234)
    [. . .]
    In 1886 Clarke published a series of essays under the title of Vexed Questions in Theology. The lead essay, The Five Points of Calvinism and the Five Points of the New Theology, contained the five points of Unitarianism for which he is principally remembered. Clarke begins the essay by naming the five points of Calvinism . . .
    [. . .]
    Revolving around the ideas of sin and salvation, these doctrines omit, claimed Clarke, the principle truths Jesus taught—“love to God, love to man, forgiveness of enemies, purity of heart and life, faith, hope, peace, resignation, temperance, and goodness.” Truer to Jesus’ teaching are the five new points he suggests: the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the continuity of human development in all worlds, or the progress of mankind onward and upward forever. These five points, which Clarke hoped would become the basis for a universal religion encapsulate what he had preached and written in his forty-three year ministerial career and thus are very good way of presenting his underlying theology and then relating them to contemporary Unitarian Universalism.


One of the consequences of being asked to write and record the early Sunday morning reflections for BBC Radio Cambridgeshire this month in five, two-and-a-half minute pieces was how it forced me to think clearly about what positive, unequivocal philosophical religion or religious philosophy I, personally, would like to pass on to anyone listening. I realized that it could only be a modern version of the philosophical approach first offered to the world in Athens some 2,000 years ago by Epicurus and then Lucretius. For those interested in hearing or reading what I’ve been saying, you can do that here.

Now, you may wonder, why am I not bringing this message to you today? Well, it’s because the opportunity to write and present these talks had another consequence in that it helped me further clarify the basic difference that exists between the personal rôle I temporarily have on the radio this month and the week to week, year to year public rôle I have here as your minister.

Whether rightly or wrongly, here on a Sunday morning, I have no mandate to offer you only my own preferred philosophical religion or religious philosophy; instead I am required to do something different, something quite unlike that required of ministers in other church settings.

To help understand just exactly what this “something different” is one needs firstly to see that until the early twentieth century things were not as they are now. Then — were Unitarians allowed by the BBC to broadcast, which we were not — the philosophical religion or religious philosophy I would have offered people on the radio would have been exactly the same as that which I offered you week by week from this lectern. This was because then there existed, more or less, something distinctive that could meaningfully be labelled “Unitarianism” — a liberal Protestant, Christian theology which promoted what its adherents believed were the truth and consequences flowing from the unity of an essentially loving God displayed, primarily and most perfectly, in the example of the fully human Jesus.

It’s important to remember that, although our denomination has always refused to adopt creedal statements of belief it has, at times, been happy to use guiding catechisms and/or general statements of belief and the most commonly adopted such statement both in the UK and the US at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was James Freeman Clarke’s very influential “Five Points of the New Theology” which were often framed and hung up in prominent positions in our churches.

This fact serves as a reminder that, until some ninety to a hundred years ago, a person would only become a Unitarian minister and/or join a Unitarian congregation in so far as they already subscribed — albeit completely freely and with a clean conscience — to this commonly held Unitarian denominational position, this “Unitarianism”. If you chose to join a Unitarian church you did so wanting, expecting, to hear this kind of theology preached to you week by week on a Sunday; you wanted the Five Points of the New Theology, you most certainly did not want the horrors of TULIP because you wanted not hell, but hope and courage. In short you wanted Unitarianism and Universalism and not Calvinism.

So, to return to my earlier point if, as a Unitarian minister, you were ever invited on to BBC radio to give a series of Sunday morning reflections you would have known exactly what positive, unequivocal philosophical religion or religious philosophy you wanted to pass on to the world and it was going to be the same one you offered your congregation in church later on that same day — it was Unitarianism — a religion concerned to speak about the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the continuity of human development in all worlds or the progress of mankind onward and upward forever.

To be sure arguments were still had in the denomination over various theological details and emphases, and there were occasionally some more serious theological disputes but, in general, there existed a shared faith which was believed to help a person lead a good life and die a good death and able to say all along the way, as Martin Luther was reputed to have said, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” It was a religious faith — an “-ism” — which you wanted confidently to share with the wider world.

But this thing which could meaningfully be called “Unitarianism” received the first of two mortal blows, during the First World War. Think about it, given that during this conflict the total number of military and civilian casualties was about 40 million, Freeman Clarke’s five points began to strike more and more people as being hopelessly naïve and fatally flawed. Belief in the liberal Christian, loving kind of supernatural God which was needed to underpin Freeman Clarke’s five points was becoming increasingly untenable and Epicurus’ ancient and famous set of questions began to strike powerfully home once again:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

The different, but intimately related, horror that was the Second World War, with its concentration-camps and nuclear weapons, dealt the second mortal blow to anything that could be called classic “Unitarianism”.

What followed was a slow but inevitable theological fragmentation in which individual ministers, members of congregations and whole congregations were each forced to try and pick up the pieces as best they could from the liberal theological wreckage of the two-world wars and put something together that was felt to be at least half-workable.

I ought to point out here that this was just as true for all other liberal protestant, Christian churches, not just our own Unitarian ones. Conservative churches had, of course, an easier time than we all did because, remember, they still had TULIP to fall back on and, underpinned as it was by a strong belief in a malevolent and brutally judgemental God, they could interpret the two world wars as being God’s just judgement upon humankind’s total depravity. But how could, how would, we liberals interpret it? Could this interpretation be done through a continued belief in and proclamation of an essentially loving God and the Five Points of the New Theology? Whatever you feel should or could have been the case, the historically arrived at answer has proven to be “No”.

Anyway, all this means that since 1945 no minister, no individual member, and no congregation connected with the name Unitarian, has been able to avoid dealing with the consequences of this situation and, at present, I see three ways forward currently being attempted.

The first is an approach which acquiesces to the fragmentary state of affairs but which simultaneously claims there exists — or can exist — a kind of new-age, inter-faith inspired universalist religious approach in which all the diverse and fragmentary religions and philosophies will be shown in truth to be ONE. It is no coincidence that, at present — and not without considerable controversy among us — more and more people calling themselves “inter-faith ministers” are seeking formal positions with Unitarian congregations.

The second is to adopt some clear, narrower doctrinal philosophical stance of some sort or another. Not surprisingly, where this is attempted, for the most part, it turns out to be the current personal religious philosophy or philosophical religion of the present minister. The spectrum of such stances runs from, at one end, to the re-adoption of a clearly defined liberal Christianity (including versions of classic Unitarianism) and, at the other end of the spectrum, to the adoption of avowedly non-religious, secular approaches akin to those found in groups such as the Sunday Assembly.

Clearly both of these approaches have their advocates and, to their supporters they will no doubt, seem to have their clear advantages. Personally, I don’t find either approach at all appealing because, in their different ways, both these options seem to me to be seeking to reintroduce something they hope will become the “new-Unitarianism”. However, I am so suspicious of all collective -isms that I’m fairly certain I will go to my grave trying to subvert them all. They seem to me to be very, very dangerous things. But, as always, in the conversation which follows this address and the musical offering, you are perfectly free to disagree with me about this . . .

However, it is this opening up of my comments to disagreement and critique that brings me to a third and way of dealing with the disappearance of classic Unitarianism which doesn’t, I hope, fall into becoming an -ism and which, for good or ill, is the one being tried here.

It is a project which is designed to do two things simultaneously which are, quite deliberately, in permanent and sometimes seemingly contradictory tension. To talk in American university terms the project here attempts to offer the congregation something in which “to minor”, and something in which “to major”. 

So, firstly, here’s that in which we “minor”.

This church community tries to offer a person some of the, thankfully, still serviceable critical and skeptical philosophical and religious ideas and tools left intact in the wreckage of post-war Unitarianism with which that same person can freely begin to hone a confident philosophical and religious position which they can hold with a clean heart and full pathos and which can ground their attempts to lead a good and meaningful life. Naturally, what this personal philosophical and religious position eventually turns out to be is going to differ from person to person and I hope, you have have found, or be on the way to finding, your own.

But, from the point of view of the public rôle of this church and my duty to it as minister, all these vital, actualized, personal philosophical and religious positions (including my own deeply held one that I am speaking about on the radio) are “the minor” subject, they are secondary to what it is we “major in” together.

This is because, in addition to helping each other to find a satisfactory personal philosophical and religious position, we are simultaneously engaging in the somtimes seemingly contradictory attempt to help each other also to commit to becoming men and women without fixed, final positions, becoming people who truly understand the supreme value of the freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today. Here we are together trying to become men and women ever open to what Henry David Thoreau called the “The newer testament — the Gospel according to this moment”. In other words here, together, we are majoring in becoming appropriately free spirits who have understood the supreme value of being able to change our mind if and when the evidence shows this to be necessary. This includes — of course — even being able to change our minds about our current philosophical and religious positions we’ve spent years honing.

Here, together, we learn that to be a completely unconditioned free spirit, never stopping anywhere at anytime to take a stand on any of important issues of our own day, is to be nothing more than an ineffectual ghost. Here, together, we also learn that to be a person dogmatically and uncritically committed only and forever to this or that -ism (whatever it is and no matter how carefully and rationally arrived at) is to be little more than on the way to demagoguery.

In this pleasant garden, somewhere in between ghosts and demagogues, here we try to grow the strange and rare free spirits which are the hoped-for fruit of the modest project underway here. What’s going on here is not, and cannot be, any kind of -ism — not even a new Unitarianism — but it can, and maybe even will, help you to find a firm enough personal faith which, to paraphrase the poet Mary Oliver, you can hold against your bones knowing your life depends upon it but which, when the time comes to let it go, you can let it go, let it go.


I tackle this same subject in a more systematic and extended way in my talk for the Sea of Faith conference in 2016 which you can find at the following link:

This morning I awoke to a pearl of an autumn day and so I set off to walk along the river Cam and across the meadows to Grantchester to enjoy a pint at the Green Man and then sit by the river to read and contemplate again the proem of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura in the light of Thomas Nail’s remarkable new interpretation of the poem. It has to be said that when you’re sitting reading Lucretius in the sun on the bank of a flowing river, with the wind in the willows, the reeds and one’s hair it’s impossible not to make “a return to the most maligned idea of Western philosophy: movement” (Thomas Nail,  “Lucretius 1: An Ontology of Motion”, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, p.22). A beautiful day in every way imaginable. As...

Talk 3—Losing our fear of death (Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 28 minutes 10 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.) In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death. This week we’ll look at the fear of death itself, coming, as it does for Epicurus and his followers, without a belief in an afterlife. Epicurus addressed this fear firstly by noting that everything which is for us desirable or un...

READING: From Leo Tolstoy’s “On Life” (1887) translated by Aylmer Maude (Oxford University Press, 1934, pp. 2-4) Let us imagine a man whose only means of subsistence is a mill. This man, the son and grandson of a miller, knows well by tradition how to manage all parts of the mill so that it grinds satisfactorily. Without any knowledge of mechanics he adjusts the machinery as best he can, so that the flour is well ground and good and he lives and earns his keep. But having heard some vague talk of mechanics, he begins to think about the arrangement of the mill and to observe what makes what turn. From the mill-stones to the rind, from the rind to the shaft, from the shaft to the wheel, from the wheel to the sluice, to the dam, and t...

 Talk 2—Losing our fear of an afterlife (Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 21 minutes 50 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.) In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death.  Today we’ll consider the fear of an afterlife. Epicurus saw in his own age, as we see in our own, that many people believed after death there will be for them another life. Uncertainties about what this will be like, a...

A statue of Nemesis READINGS: §78 “Daybreak” (1881) by Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, CUP, 1997, pp. 47-48) Justice which punishes.   — Misfortune and guilt — Christianity has placed these two things on a balance [on one scale]: so that, when misfortune consequent on guilt is great, even now the greatness of the guilt itself is still involuntarily measured by it. But this is not antique , and that is why the Greek tragedy, which speaks so much yet in so different a sense of misfortune and guilt, is a great liberator of the spirit in a way in which the ancients themselves could not feel it. They were still so innocent as not to have established an ‘adequate [i.e. appropriate] relationship’ between guilt an...

The Pashley Guv'nor at Mutlow Hill This morning, for what reason I know not, I got it into my head and heart to go and see how the only examples in East Anglia of our native juniper bushes, Juniperus communis , were fairing on the stretch of Fleam Dyke between Mutlow Hill and Balsham. I got to Mutlow Hill at about 1pm and stopped to have my lunch there in the company of Lucretius' poem De Rerum Natura, and then set off across the A11 to the south-eastern stretch of the dyke. I was pleased to see the juniper bushes flourishing and full of berries and, all along the way in the hot, early autumn sun and in the shade of the trees I found myself (perhaps inevitably) singing to myself Donovan's lovely song Jeniffer Juniper which, if you don't ...

Talk 1—Losing our fear of the gods (Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 18 minutes into the programme and finishes three minutes later.) In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death. Today we’ll consider the fear of the gods. Epicurus believed the gods existed but there is some ambiguity about exactly what he meant by this; one common interpretation is that he thought they were human projections of what the most bles...