READINGS:

Making Peace by Denise Levertov

A voice from the dark called out,
             ‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
                                   But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
                                       A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
                                              A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
                        A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.

(From Breathing the Water, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1987)

Remembrance Sunday by Malcolm Guite
November pierces with its bleak remembrance
Of all the bitterness and waste of war;
Our silence tries but fails to make a semblance
Of that lost peace they thought worth fighting for,
Our silence seethes instead with wraiths and whispers
And all the restless rumour of new wars,
For shells are falling all around our vespers,
No moment is unscarred, there is no pause.
In every instant bloodied innocence
Falls to the weary earth, and whilst we stand
Quiescence ends again in acquiescence,
And Abel’s blood still cries from every land.
One silence only might redeem that blood;
Only the silence of a dying God.

(From Sounding the Seasons, seventy sonnets for the Christian year, Canterbury Press 2012)

—o0o—

For the Unknown Enemy by William Stafford

This monument is for the unknown
good in our enemies. Like a picture
their life began to appear: they
gathered at home in the evening
and sang. Above their fields they saw
a new sky. A holiday came
and they carried the baby to the park
for a party. Sunlight surrounded them.

Here we glimpse what our minds long turned
away from. The great mutual
blindness darkened that sunlight in the park,
and the sky that was new, and the holidays.
This monument says that one afternoon
we stood here letting a part of our minds
escape. They came back, but different.
Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life.

This monument is for you.

Autumn leaves outside the church on Emmauel Road this morning

Today we mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the ending of the First World War which was supposed by some to be “the war to end all wars.” As we know, it was not and it appears that even during the First World War itself it was a phrase which was far from being believed. Indeed, the Prime Minister of the time, David Lloyd George, is even reputed to have said, “This war, like the next war, is a war to end war.”

Given the continuing failure of war as a way to end to wars I imagine that there will be no one here who thinks that wars will ever succeed in ending war and that, therefore, peace must, in some fashion, be the answer. But, in affirming this very general notion, we must be careful not to be idealistic or naïve about peace because it is clear that, so far, neither has peace succeeded in ending war.

The truth of this was powerfully illustrated in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference and its highly punitive Treaty of Versailles which simply sowed the seeds for the rise of the Nazis and the beginning of the next war to end war, the Second World War. As Archibald Wavell, a future field-marshal and viceroy of India, said on seeing what was going on in Paris, “After the ‘war to end war’, they seem to have been in Paris making the ‘Peace to end Peace’.”

This thought has haunted me for a long, long time now because although it is completely clear to me that war will never end war Wavell’s words have often made me wonder about the rôle our understanding of in what consists peace has on the seemingly endless continuation of war.

Put plainly, one hundred years on from the ending of the First World War, it seems to me that there is as much of a problem with our conceptions of peace as with our tendencies to war.

To help tease this thought out a bit it’s perhaps helpful to do something similar to that which I did a couple of weeks ago in connection with our ideas about “The Future” and make today a distinction between “Peace” with a capital “P” and scare quotes and peace with a lowercase “p” and no scare quotes.

By “Peace” with a capital “P” and scare quotes I’m referring to any kind of idealised utopian and absolute understanding of “Peace”, a “Peace” all the qualities and parameters of which you somehow know about long before you get there. For a culture such as our own, inexorably shaped by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, most capital “P” Peaces can be traced back to Isaiah 11 in which the author presents us with a vision of what has become known as the “Peaceable Kingdom” (6-9):

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
   the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
   and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
   their young shall lie down together;
   and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
   and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
   on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
   as the waters cover the sea.


This passage inspired the famous Quaker artist, Edward Hicks (1780–1849), to paint sixty, quite extraordinary versions of this utopian Peaceable Kingdom, one of which I have reproduced in your order of service (see picture on right). The problem is, of course, that such an utopian Peaceable Kingdom simply does not, nor can exist because, being the kind of beings they are in the kind of world this is, humans, wolves, leopards and lions simply do not live peaceably with lambs, kids and calves and it’s always insane ever to let your child play near the hole of an asp or an adder’s den. We may not like it, but hurt and destruction of all kinds — moral and natural, deliberate and accidental — is woven through the very fabric of our world. But, despite this, visions of capital “P” total “Peace” similar to those imagined by Isaiah continue to hold captive huge swaths of humanity who feel strongly that nature should, somehow, not be as it is and that, therefore, nature must either be changed or, given that it doesn’t exist on earth, their utopian vision must exist in some other, supernatural realm such as the kingdom of God. 

But, as someone who thinks we should always be following some strong precautionary principles and proceeding with the greatest of caution when considering changing any aspect of nature’s present way of naturing and who also can no longer believe in the existence of supernatural deities and their perfect, utopian other-worldly kingdoms, I take it as given that all such capital “P” “Peaces” are an illusion and that believing in them and trying to make them real only serves to take our eyes off the possibility of creating much more modest but, ultimately, genuine and realistic examples of lowercase “p” peace in this our natural world.

For me no one has better or more succinctly indicated what is required to create such a modest lower case “p” peace than the Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov (1923–1997).

She is completely clear that, just like a poem, “peace . . . is not there ahead of itself”  — it is not some pre-existent, ideal capital “P” thing towards which we hope, even believe, we are moving — rather it is always and only a possibility embedded the present that needs constantly to be evoked and gently brought into being like a poem.

To help you grasp what I am trying to say a little bit more firmly let me say the same thing about friendship. I am absolutely convinced that capital “F” friendship does not exist; but what assuredly does exist are acts of lowercase “f” friendship. Friendship needs to be evoked and gently evoked into being again and again otherwise it is non-existent. As with friendship, so with peace — they really only **are** where there are found living and ongoing acts of friendship and peace.

We may desire that the poets — and also philosophers, theologians, politicians and diplomats, too — should give us finished visions or “imaginations” of some future, capital P “Peace” to oust “to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster” but this has never truly been possible because, as Levertov knows, peace “can’t be imagined before it is made, can’t be known except in the words of its making [with its] grammar of justice [and] syntax of mutual aid.”

The most we can hope for, beforehand, is that we can begin to learn to evoke and gently nurture “A feeling towards [peace], dimly sensing a rhythm”, and it is only when we have begun deeply to internalise this movement that that we can then hope to “begin to utter its metaphors, learning them as we speak.”

As I have said at other times in other contexts, it seems to me that before we even think about making new policies (including peace policies) we need new metaphors — not least of all because the old metaphors of capital “P” Peace have failed to bring real, ongoing, lower case “p” peace. We need a “re-story-ation” of peace.

Any meaningful “re-tory-ated” metaphors for such a peace must be very different from that employed by Isaiah and Hicks. They were imagining a finally finished, perfect state but Levertov imagines it as an ever unfolding sentence in which “A line of peace might appear / if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, / questioned our needs, allowed / long pauses . . .”.

If we could do this then she says, perhaps, just perhaps “A cadence of peace might balance its weight / on that different fulcrum”.

But what does Levertov mean when she says a “different fulcrum”? Different to what? Well, from where I stand, the “cadence of peace” I see and hear performed year after year in nearly all the official, big public, political remembrances is one which leads us, not from war to peace, but always from peace to war. This is because the official public, polical cadence (no matter how moving it can be) is designed subtly to reinforce the basic idea that, actually, wars do create peace and this, in turn, means that the putative peaces we create in public are still balanced on a fulcrum of war.

To illustrate the truth of this I need say nothing more than to note that as our world’s state officials have gathered together in various places this week solemnly to remember the ending of “the war to end all wars” the fulcrum upon which their power balances (the military/industrial complex) continues to allow people and companies knowingly and willingly to sell billions of pounds worth of missiles and bombs to countries like Saudi Arabia for use in places like the Yemen.

This fact alone — repeated every generation so far — surely helps us see more clearly that we need a cadence of peace which balances not on a fulcrum of war but on a fulcrum of peace and our old-school nation-state orientated businesses and politics will never be able to provide us with this.

According to Levertov the fulcrum of peace we both need and seek is “a presence, / an energy field more intense than war” and it is one which can only come into being amongst people who, for whatever reason, have become committed both to restructuring the sentence their lives are making and who are also prepared to allow long pauses  out of which can come (re-story-ative) new metaphors and poems.

Is not Levertov suggesting here that real, lowercase “p” peace, like any word in a sentence or poem is the one properly required only for this sentence and poem, not for the next, and that, like acts of friendship, for evermore and until the end of time we are daily called upon to be writing new poems of peace, letting the rhythm of peace enter into us and vibrate every atom of our body and soul?

The war to end all wars has never, nor will ever come except, perhaps, through a war that destroys the whole world. But the same seems true of all our capital “P” “Peaces” and that they, too, will never end war.

But were we able to live as poets we might still have a chance to bring into being a more modest, lowercase “p” peace, that can energise us and might just “pulse then, / stanza by stanza into the world, / [with] each act of living / one of its words, each word a vibration of light—facets / of the forming crystal.”

I realise that for some this might sound wildly impractical but consider this, what is more likey: that the world could ever come to look like the capital “P” Peaceable Kingdom as depicted by Isaiah and Edward Hicks or that the world could, word by word, stanza by stanza each act of living by act of living, could re-story-ate our world and bring about real, modest, but still powerful lowercase “p” peaces that are much, much more than merely the absence of war.

READINGS: A résumé of the film The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

When I was perhaps ten or eleven I was utterly captivated by a film made in 1965 (the year I was born) called “The Flight of the Phoenix” which starred James Stewart as Frank Towns, the captain of a twin engined Fairchild C-82 cargo plane.

Whilst Towns and a dozen or so other men are flying across the Sahara desert en route to Benghazi in Libya they encounter a sudden sandstorm which shuts down the engines and forces them to crash-land in the desert and those who were not killed instantly or badly injured necessarily quickly turn their attention to the question of how to stay alive until rescue comes. Although they have a large quantity of dates on board they quickly work out that, at best, their water will last for only a couple of weeks. When help doesn’t immediately come three of them attempt to walk to an oasis. Days later, one of them returns alone to the crash site and very near to death. Despair threatens to set in. However, one among them, an aeronautical engineer called Dorfmann (played by Hardy Krüger), has the crazy idea that perhaps they can build another, smaller aircraft from out of the wreckage and fly themselves to safety in that. It may be a crazy idea but it helps them all begin to focus their remaining energy and hopes on something positive. However, as they proceed with the new plan, Towns and his navigator Moran (played by Richard Attenborough), discover that Dorfmann designs model aeroplanes and not, as they had initially assumed, full-sized aircraft. Although Dorfmann insights that the principles are exactly the same Towns and Moran are, perhaps understandably, horrified at the idea of flying an aircraft made by a man who, as they say, works with “toys”. However, without any other plan to follow Towns and Moran decide to press on without telling the others of their discovery. As you might imagine much of the film’s impact is to be found in its exploration of the wild ups and downs felt by the protagonists. All of that I leave aside for you to discover yourself and I’ll simply skip to the end of the film when the aircraft is finally finished. With an explicit nod to the ancient Greek legend, they christen the ramshackle ad hoc plane, “The Phoenix”. After a few more tense moments as they try to start the engine — they only have seven starter cartridges the first four of which fail — the plane does succeed in taking-off and the survivors are able to fly to a near-by oasis where they experience both the ecstasy that comes with having survived something so potentially catastrophic and also, for Towns and Dorfmann, the consummating joys of reconciliation.


PHOENIX (Gr. φοῖνιξ), a fabulous sacred bird of the Egyptians. The Greek word is also used for a date-palm, a musical instrument like a guitar, and the colour purple-red or crimson.

According to the story told to Herodotus (ii. 73), the bird came from Arabia every 500 years, bearing his father embalmed in a ball of myrrh, and buried him in the temple of the sun. Herodotus, who had never seen the phoenix himself, did not believe this story, but he tells us that the pictures of it represented a bird with golden and red plumage, closely resembling an eagle in size and shape.        
According to Pliny (Nat. hist. x. 2), there is only one phoenix at a time, and he, at the close of his long life, builds himself a nest with twigs of cassia and frankincense, on which he dies; from his corpse is generated a worm which grows into the young phoenix. Tacitus (Ann. vi. 28) says that the young bird lays his father on the altar in the city of the sun, or burns him there; but the most familiar form of the legend is that in the Physiologus, where the phoenix is described as an Indian bird which subsists on air for 506 years, after which, lading his wings with spices, he flies to Heliopolis, enters the temple there, and is burned to ashes on the altar. Next day the young phoenix is already feathered; on the third day his pinions are full grown, he salutes the priest and flies away.
    
The period at which the phoenix reappears is very variously stated, some authors giving as much as 1461 or even 7006 years, but 500 years is the period usually named; and Tacitus tells us that the bird was said to have appeared first under Sesostris (Senwosri), then under Amasis (Ahmosi) II., under Ptolemy III., and once again in A.D. 34, after an interval so short that the genuineness of the last phoenix was suspected. The phoenix that was shown at Rome in the year of the secular games (A.D. 47) was universally admitted to be an imposture.

The form and variations of these stories characterize them as popular tales rather than official theology; but they evidently must have had points of attachment in the mystic religion of Egypt, and indeed both Horapollon and Tacitus speak of the phoenix as a symbol of the sun.


As I mentioned in the readings, I first saw the film “The Flight of The Phoenix” over forty years ago but it is only in the last ten years of my ministry that I have come to interpret its basic story as a parable for something I think always needs consciously to be going on in any religious or philosophical tradition for it to be considered healthy and genuinely trustworthy.

Let me explain.

Although the fact that being a minister of religion with an official rôle in both a local and national church community might suggest otherwise, I’m not, in truth, someone who likes formally joining any kind of group — least of all religious or philosophical ones. They mostly give me the willies — urgh . . .

All in all this means I’ve always been very careful to look into the ins and outs, and the general historical shapes and trajectories, of any group I’ve been thinking about joining. I’m clear that I need to be able to see in them something that allows me to say with a clean heart and full pathos, “OK, I might not agree with everything that has, is or will be going on in this group but if, on balance, their general direction of travel and vibe seems to me to be something I can get loyally behind then I’ll take the risk of joining them for what I hope, and intend will be, the long term.”  

This is one of the reasons why, some five or six years ago, I introduced into the morning service “The Tradition”. It’s so you, too, can get a similar sense to me of this radical, free-thinking, liberal philosophical and religious tradition’s general direction and vibe over the four-hundred-and–fifty years of its existence.

As far as these things go I think it’s a genuinely remarkable and honourable tradition to be associated with and, despite it’s many significant historical and present faults (of which I realise I may at times be a representative example), I can’t imagine being involved — as a minister anyway — in any other kind of religious or philosophical community except, perhaps a generally Epicurean or Lucretian inspired one . . .

Anyway, this mention of “significant faults” is not something I’ve done merely as a piece of rhetorical self-deprecation designed to make the Unitarian tradition (and me for that matter) appear more humble and trustworthy than it actually is. Instead, I mention its less than perfect nature because it helps me point to something much more primordial and structural that is almost never mentioned nor noticed by most religious or philosophical traditions — including, alas, even our own.

Now, before I go on, be warned that in a moment I’m going to present you with a picture, the substance of which is in my opinion, ultimately illusory, but I need to present it to you because it can seem highly plausible and, consequently, it can and often does hold us problematically captive. It’s certainly held me captive at times. But, let me follow the advice of the philosopher J. L. Austin who once said, “There’s the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back” (Sense and Sensibilia, p. 2). Let me begin by saying something that, in a moment, I’ll be taking back.

When, in our culture at least, a person decides to seek out a religion and/or philosophy to follow I’ve noticed many (most?) people generally start out by looking for one which has an established stable theory about the ultimate beginning, end and ethical and physical underpinning of the world with which they agree and which can, simultaneously, also provide them with a gleaming, efficient flying “machine” (i.e. buildings, doctrines, practices, rituals and a hierarchy — pilots and cabin crew if you will) safely to take them on a single-leg, long-distance flight to that ultimate end — some capital “F” Future (see last week’s address), already known ultimate destination often called “The Kingdom of God”, the “Golden City on the Hill”, “Nirvana”, “Enlightenment” or whatever.

Now, in a messy, chaotic and confusing world seeking out this kind of thing is a perfectly understandable activity to engage in. It should come, therefore, as no surprise that, historically speaking, most religions and philosophies (at least those of the old metaphysical kind) have been in the business of assuring us that they do, in fact, provide us with just this kind of gleaming, efficient flying “machine” capable of taking us to the desired ultimate destination and we, in turn, have often proven only too willing to believe what they tell us is assuredly true.

But are religions and philosophies really like this?

Well, once upon a time I certainly thought they were and in my teens and early twenties when I did my first careful looking around and research into philosophy and religion I now realise I was most certainly looking for what I thought was the best gleaming, efficient flying “machine” which could take me
on the best single-leg, long-distance flight to the ultimate end. I read the travel and technical brochures available about various traditions and then chose to book a seat on the gleaming Anglican machine. Having taken my seat I very quickly realised it had what looked and felt like too many significant faults and that I had, in fact, boarded a terribly rusty and ramshackle aircraft which strongly resembled some old,
immediately post-Soviet era Aeroflot turbo-prop — i.e. it was the kind of aircraft which, the moment it begins to taxi to the runway, makes you want to get off, right now. I

Fortunately, in this instance, I was able to get off before I reached the end of the runway and found myself committed to becoming an Anglican priest.

Discovering this was terribly disappointing but, alas, my disappointment failed to stop me from continuing to seek out that gleaming, efficient flying “machine” and I next thought I had found it when I discovered the Unitarian tradition. I carefully checked it out via books in the library — this was all pre-internet remember — and also by making a few, low-key visits to the local church in Suffolk which eventually encouraged me to commit to boarding it for the long flight. Alas, it was only when I had been in the air for quite a while — and well on the way to becoming one of its ministers — that I discovered it too was a terribly rusty and ramshackle aircraft with significant faults and that neither was she going to complete the journey I thought I was on. After finishing my training I, like the passengers and crew of the Fairchild C-82 cargo in the film, suddenly found myself, figuratively speaking, on the desert floor still, thankfully, alive but now not sitting in a gleaming, efficient flying “machine”, but lying in the midst of its ashes and scattered wreckage.

Having recovered from the profound shock of this crash I began to realise, like Captain Towns, Moran and Dorfmann and the other passengers, were I to survive I needed to put behind me all ideas about making a grand, single-leg journey to some ultimate destination in a gleaming, efficient flying “machine” and immediately get to work on a much more mod
est but still absolutely vital task, namely, that of putting together in an ad hoc way all the available still-working resources around me in such a fashion that I could simply find a way to fly me and the members of the local congregation to the next oasis. Although the aircraft — the Phoenix — we, together, have been fashioning since 2000 from out of the ashes and wreckage is never going to be either obviously gleaming or super-efficient it could still be one which did the required, and beautiful life saving job of getting us all out of the desert and to a place where life we can, once again, live a supportable and genuinely happy and fulfilling religious life together.

Now, having told you this story, here’s where I begin to take much of it back.

This is because, as I have told it so far, the story relies upon the captivating picture that there did, in fact, once exist a real, gleaming, efficient flying “machine” capable of flying to some known ultimate destination. But over the eighteen years of my ministry, as I have got used to trying daily to make with you our own ad hoc philosophical and religious Phoenix from the wreckage/ashes of previous philosophies and religions simply so as to be able to get to the next oasis, I have begun to see more and more clearly that this is really what has always and only ever been being done every day by every religious tradition, church and person. The gleaming, efficient philosophical or theological “machine” never really existed and there never has been some known ultimate, already known destination towards which we are assuredly travelling.

At this point it’s worth consciously recalling the meaning of the latin tag “ad hoc” which I’ve just used — it simply means “for this”. Consequently, in English, it signifies a solution designed for a specific problem or task that is non-generalizable and is not intended always to be able to be adapted to other purposes.

In truth, is this not always the case with all philosophies and religions? Seen in this fashion philosophy and religion’s limited, modest task — though still absolutely vital — has always been simply to help us find in the current context, and using the currently available bits and pieces around us, appropriate, poetic and scientifically satisfactory and supportable ways to go on so that we may reach the next oasis where we hope to be able to rest up a bit, drink a few cold beers, have a good meal and begin to take stock once again before together building (with hopefully always new and honed insights) the next Phoenix in the effort to get through the next day?

As Robert Pogue Harrison (b. 1954) puts it (Gardens—An Essay on the Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 94-95), we need to recall that our condition is “for the most part an affair of the everyday, not of the heroic, and our minimal ethical responsibility to our neighbour . . . consists not in showing him or her the way to redemption but in helping him or her to get through the day.“

Of course, there remain many religions and philosophies that will continue to tell you that they are offering you a flight on a shiny, efficient machine heading heroically towards assured redemption in some already known ultimate destination. But, in the light of my foregoing words, I’d caution you to treat this claim with the greatest skepticism.

As far as I can see, the only philosophies or religions that seem to be truly worth trusting and following are those where everyone involved is completely aware that they are, in fact, engaged in the incredibly modest, un-heroic but still satisfying and beautiful ad hoc task of making the next “Phoenix” to take as many people as they can to the next available oasis and, as best and joyously as possible, to get through next day.

Usually the Phoenix is understood as being, in the end, a purely mythical bird but, at least in my parable, I want to say that, in fact, it may be the only real bird available to any of us and that it is — when looked at aright — far more gleaming, beautiful and colourful than any of the apparently gleaming, efficient machines you’ll find advertised elsewhere in the religious and philosophical marketplace of ideas.

READINGS: Matthew 6:33-34

From Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (Verso Books, 2017, pp. 2-3)


In 1937 Henri Bergson published the article ‘Le possible et le réel’ (The Possible and the Real) in the Swedish magazine Nordisk Tidskrift. In this text, later included in the book La pensée et le mouvant, the French thinker answers the question: what is the meaning of the word ‘possibility’?

We call possible what is not impossible: obviously, this non-impossibility is the condition of its actualisation. But this possibility is not a degree of virtuality, is not ideal pre-existence . . . From this negative sense, we shift unconsciously to the positive sense of the word. In the first definition, possibility means absence of hindrance; but we are shifting now to the meaning: pre-existence in the form of an idea.

‘B is possible’ means that B is inscribed in A and nothing is preventing B from deploying from the present condition of A. Bergson speaks of pre-existence in the form of an idea, but I don’t want to use the word ‘idea’, preferring to say that a future state of being is possible when it is immanent or inscribed in the present constitution of the world. However, we should not forget that the present constitution of the world contains many different (conflicting) possibilities, not only one.
       Extracting and implementing one of the many immanent futurabilities: this is the shift from possible to real. Futurability is a layer of possibility that may or may not develop into actuality.
    Bergson writes:

Why is the Universe ordered? How can the rule impose itself on the irregularity, how can form impose itself on matter? . . . This problem vanishes as soon as we understand that the idea of disorder has sense in the sphere of human industry, in the sphere of fabrication, not in the field of creation. Disorder is simply an order that we do not seek.

We stare at the chaotic intricacy of matter, of events, of flows, and seek for a possibility of order, a possible organization of chaotic material. We extract fragments from the magma then try to combine them, in an attempt to reverse entropy: intelligent life is this process of local, provisional reversal of entropy.

You Reading This, Be Ready
William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?


Although it is in fact way more complicated and nuanced than this, Halloween, the night of 31 October on the eve of All Saints Day, was, once upon a time, a night when the ghosts and spirits of the dead were believed to be abroad in our world. By extension, especially in more modern times, it has become an evening upon which people enjoy scaring the wits out of each other through stories, plays and films.

However, although now and then I greatly enjoy hearing or watching a good ghost story — finding in them what M. R. James calls “a pleasing terror” — the possibility of being scared witless by an actual, rather than a fictional, literary or filmic demon, is something I feel is vanishingly unlikely. For me, and I imagine for most of you, these supernatural demons simply don’t exist.

Those of you who know me will know my interest in the ghost story is long-standing and very real but it is driven by purely historical and anthropological concerns. One can learn a great deal about what was going on in the social psyche of different periods and cultures by looking at the kinds of ghost, spirits and demons that were once believed to be abroad in their midst and so I unhesitatingly recommend Roger Clarke’s “A Natural History of Ghosts” and Susan Owens’ “The Ghost: A Cultural History” as introductions to this study. What we find is that every age is haunted by, and fearful of, some spectral something or other and our own age, as you will see, is no different. 

But our age, influenced powerfully by the natural sciences, is a significantly less metaphysical and superstitious one than its predecessors and so it should come as no surprise that we are, today, generally much more frightened by various, this-worldly phenomena and, thanks to many conversations with you and my other friends and colleagues, at the moment I know there are currently two which are quietly scaring us witless.

The first is the increasing feeling that liberal social democracies are beginning to feel very vulnerable and under threat from the various forms of national populism that are springing up at the moment. It is revealing to us that many illiberal “demons” are now clearly out of their jars and they seem unlikely to be going back into them any time soon. In short, we find we are haunted daily by the loss of the hope that liberal social democracies were inevitably moving us towards an ever more open, just, inclusive, democratic progressive and global, cosmopolitan society.

The second fear is caused by our increasing recognition that we are well and truly on the way towards a global, catastrophic environmental crisis and so we find ourselves haunted, not by actual ghosts and spirits of the past (as were our more metaphysically and superstitiously inclined forebears), but by the imaginary ghosts and spirits from a future we feel the world may well now never have.

All in all, in my book anyway, national populism and climate change are way more frightening phenomena than any Halloween tale told to me about putative supernatural beings.

To reiterate, what I’m suggesting here is that the particular kinds of ghosts and spirits which haunt us today are not of the traditional kind, i.e. the souls of those who have died in our past, but spectres of a more modern, even post-modern kind, namely, the souls of ghosts and spirits of imaginary people and possibilities which we feel will now never have the chance to come into being. We find, to our quiet horror, that we are now living in a world in which we can no longer, with anything like clean heart and full pathos, believe in the progress of humankind onward and upward forever and, consequently, we find ourselves haunted by this loss of “The Future” — spelt, please note, with capital letters and surrounded by scare quotes.

But what to do about this state of affairs?

Well, there might be many things one could do and today I’m only going to offer you one very general way to proceed but, before I do this, please be warned about three things. Firstly, it is a somewhat counterintuitive way to proceed and, on first hearing anyway, it might be something that will frighten you as witless as national populism and climate change; secondly, it’s a way to proceed that requires a person to adopt a really long-term view of history and; thirdly, it doesn’t provide any big, simple answers to what we will actually be doing in the future because it’s a way of proceeding simply designed to give us in the present a reasonable educated hope that positive, alternative ways forward are always-already potentially there to emerge and unfold.

So, the alternative positive way to go on can be summed up with one word “futurability”, and here’s the potentially scary bit because, in order to get to this “futurability” we need firstly consciously to rid ourselves of any residual belief in “The Future”. (I mean who wants to be told in the midst of all the aforementioned fears that there’s no “Future”! But those of us — like me — who grew up through the age of punk-rock were already primed to think this thought in 1977 when Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols sang to us the utterly startling and unforgetable lines, “No, future, no future, no future for you.”)

Now what do I mean by “The Future”? Well, “The Future” is a short-hand term that has long been used to evoke the widespread utopian idea which has lain at the heart of our platonic inspired Judaeo-Christian culture for over two-millennia, namely the thought that, despite the occasional setback, somehow we really were on an ongoing and ever upward march towards a future in which all people were, across the board and according to all measures, better off.

Of course, I realise that all talk about being “better off” or “worse off” than previous generations always needs to be taken with extreme caution because these are a highly slippery and problematic terms that  depend on just what and how one choses to measure this or that aspect of the world. It’s important to be clear that, using certain reasonable metrics, it seems many things have got better and have remained so. I’m not disputing this but what I am saying is that “The Future”, the utopian ideal place — the Golden City on a hill — where everything is always guaranteed to be better and more secure for everyone, is simply something in which, like supernatural ghosts and spirits, many of us can no longer even vaguely believe.

And where the “The Future” once was there is now the highly contested open space where our new breed of demons are being offered the opportunity to proliferate like rabbits.

But, according to my own understanding — and to Berardi’s — this contested open space has, in fact, always been there and in operation and that “The Future” has never existed, just as ghosts and spirits and all kinds of other supernatural beings — including god/gods — have never existed. 

Belief in “The Future” has played a dangerous and damaging rôle in making us — and by us I now mean those of a general liberal Enlightenment, social democratic, progressivist bent — forget that the real future (lower case “t” and “f” and no scare quotes) was never a fixed and foregone conclusion upon which we were closing and that, therefore, we always — without ceasing — had to keep working and working hard at bringing our preferred possible future into being. But we believed it was like this and this encouraged us to take our eyes off the ball and, in so doing, we failed to see that as a whole the liberal Enlightenment, idealist social democratic project  was leaving too many people behind by enabling and encouraging, amongst other things, increasing massive disparities in wealth and security and, through a wildly unchecked capitalism, was also seriously degrading the very planet up which everything depends.

Faced with this more and more people who felt left behind by liberal social democracy and it’s unchecked version of capitalism have come to see quicker than “us” something much more primordial and certainly more real than “The Future”. What they have seen is futurability.

As Berardi notes “[f]uturability is a layer of possibility that may or may not develop into actuality” and it’s important to see that this layer of possibility is and always has been present in our world. It helps us see that the real future (lower case “t” and “f” and no scare quotes) is never closed and so at absolutely no point were we, or are we, inevitably heading to this or that exact iteration of “The Future”.

Berardi also notes, however, that “we should never forget that the present constitution of the world contains many different (conflicting) possibilities, not only one”. Given this, in shifting from the possible to the real, our task is always-already to be finding ways to extract and implement one of the many immanent futurabilities inscribed in the present.

This is yet another reminder that the real future (lower case “t” and “f” and no scare quotes) is never fixed. But, but, but . . . keep to the forefront of your mind the truth that there are always going to be people in the world who see their task as being that of extracting and implementing an immanent futurability that we ourselves may loath and detest, for example making real a national populism and/or a way of being that continues to degrade the environment in utterly catastrophic ways. We may be tempted to get on our high horses and say that, in doing this, “they” merely want to bring disorder but that’s not true. We need to see clearly that what they are doing is attempting to bring an order that we do not seek.

As Berardi realises, all of us — including national populists and climate change deniers — are always forced to “stare at the chaotic intricacy of matter, of events, of flows, and seek for a possibility of order, a possible organization of chaotic material.” All of us — including national populists and climate change deniers — are forced to do the same long-term hard work of trying to “extract fragments from the magma [and] then try to combine them, in an attempt to reverse entropy: intelligent life is this process of local, provisional reversal of entropy.”

The local, provisional reversal of entropy is a task never finished and, no matter who might claim otherwise, the real future is never sealed and fixed no matter whether “we” or “they” are in the ascendent or in decline and whoever “we” or “they” are.

It’s yet another reminder that the possibility for different, real futures is always to be found inscribed in the here and now — indeed there is nowhere else it could be and it is in the way we choose to behave in the here and now — whether we perceive we are “winning” or “losing” — that we can find genuine hope and engage in real, meaningful action.

Which brings me back to William Stafford’s poem, “You Reading This, Be Ready” in which he boldly states that there is no greater gift than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around and get to work once again in the never-ending process of local, provisional reversal of entropy.

The future is not fixed no matter how it may seem right at the moment and there is clearly a great deal of work to be done, right here, right now . . .

You Reading This, Be Ready
William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

Alas, as a piece it was spoken for but he assured me that, in due course, he was going to make a few affordable copies of it in resin and he'd keep me posted about when one was available. He was true to his word and just this morning with Susanna I went up to his workshop to pick it up, shoot the breeze about letter-related things and, naturally, to say hello to Wittgenstein and my friends once again.

The photo at the head of this post was taken when I got home and the ones below were taken in Eric's workshop this morning.

Eric with the inscription holding up his Albertus typeface tea-towel

Eric and his current apprentice Matt Loughlin with the menu of the Erania Restaurant of "blessed" memory above lettered by Jon Harris

One of Eric's carvings of some of his own words

Wittgenstein's grave recently restored by Eric

Grant Snider's excellent page can be found at this LINK

READINGS:

From Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura [On the nature of things] (1st century BCE) trans. James I. Porter Lucretius and the Sublime in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 173)

A puddle of water no deeper than a single finger-breadth, which lies between the stones on a paved street, offers us a view beneath the earth to a depth as vast as the high gaping mouth of heaven stretches above the earth, so that you seem to look down on the clouds and the heaven, and you discern bodies hidden in the sky beneath the earth, marvellously. (DRN Book 4:414-419)

From Epicurus’ Principal Doctrines (3rd century BCE) trans. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson

11. If our suspicions about heavenly phenomena and about death did not trouble us at all and were never anything to us, and, moreover, if not knowing the limits of pains and desires did not trouble us, then we would have no need of natural science.

12. It is impossible for someone ignorant about the nature of the universe but still suspicious about the subjects of the myths to dissolve his feelings of fear about the most important matters. So it is impossible to receive unmixed pleasures without knowing natural science.

13. It is useless to obtain security from men while the things above and below earth and, generally, the things in the unbounded remained as objects of superstition.

From Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura [On the nature of things] (1st century BCE) trans. Walter Englert

Therefore this fear and darkness of the mind must be
                              shattered
apart not by the rays of the sun and the clear shafts
of the day but by the external appearance (species) and inner
                             law (ratio) of nature (naturae species ratioque)

(DRN Book 1:146-148, 2:55-61, 3:91-93, 6:35-41)
 
Naturae species ratioque

This can be translated as above or, as I am coming to prefer, following Thomas Nail (in his extraordinary book (Lucretius 1: An Ontology of Motion, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, p. 67) “the material conditions for nature as it appears.”

Shadows in the Water by Thomas Traherne (1636/37–1674)


We are now firmly in the season of autumn and, with the coming of autumn, there comes the rain, and with the coming of the rain there come puddles.

Spending a great deal of time in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden as I do, at this time of year I quite often see very small children in their new wellington boots discovering the simple delight of being able to splash about in a puddle. It’s an expression of joy that serves to make even the most skeptical, cynical, stoical of people break into an involuntary smile and, as the wonderful cartoon by Grant Snider suggests, as a good Epicurean I’ve managed to maintain my love of puddles for their pure puddliness.

But, aside from the simple joy that splashing about in them affords us, a puddle’s puddliness also offers an Epicurean a powerful reminder about what is for them a profound truth concerning the nature of things.

One of Lucretius’ central, practical pastoral concerns, (inherited from his philosophical hero Epicurus), was to free people from their superstitious fear of the gods. Lucretius could see that, in the end, belief in the reality of supernatural beings who demanded worship and who judged and metered out rewards and punishments upon humankind, in the end, always has less than optimal consequences. In his poem Lucretius offers the reader many striking examples of how people were continually being oppressed and made unhappy and fearful by such supernatural religion and, alas, how they also sometimes even lost their lives thanks to its obsession with power and control. As you heard earlier Lucretius thought this fear (along with, for example, those about death and the possibility of an afterlife) were “shattered apart not by the rays of the sun and the clear shafts of the day but by the external appearance (species) and inner law (ratio) of nature” — naturae species ratioque (DRN Book 1:146-148, 2:55-61, 3:91-93, 6:35-41).

Venus on seashell, from the Casa di Venus, Pompeii. Before AD 79

It is important to realise that (again like his intial philosophical inspiration, Epicurus) Lucretius was himself a convinced philosophical naturalist and so he understood the world to be an entirely natural complex in which all things are continuously being made and unmade as the flux and flows of matter endlessly interact. But despite his thorough-going naturalism in his poem Lucretius reserved a very special and often prominent place for certain stories about the gods — especially Venus. Now why on earth would Lucretius, who is clearly an atheist, do this? Surely this was simply to muddy the waters? Well, many have thought just this but the truth is, in fact, quite the opposite; he does it to help bring people to an even greater clarity about the nature of things than any unpoetic, purely technical and reductionist naturalism ever could. 

Lucretius was, as you may know, not only a fine and original philosopher but also a poet of genius praised by both Virgil and Cicero. As a poet, he understood well that being the kind of beings we are, we are always-already engaging with the natural world as much through our poetry and myths as through the kinds of activities which, in time, became called the natural sciences. He felt that, somehow, they were worth keeping in creative step with each other with each being allowed the space and opportunity appropriately to illuminate the other.

He understood that as we looked at the world and its multifarious phenomena such as the wind, rain, lightning, thunder, the movement of the heavenly bodies above us, the stars and sun and moon and so on, it had been a recurring natural human tendency to see in them the actions of divine, powerful beings. It was as a consequence of this tendency that the enduring myths and poems about the gods were born as too, alas, were our associated superstitious religions.

Holding this in mind we can now quietly turn back to begin to contemplate our puddle, or at least we can when all the excited, wellington boot-clad children have moved on and its surface has stilled once more.

In book four of the De Rerum Natura Lucretius invites us to contemplate this image because it helps him illustrate how the external appearance (species) and inner law or material conditions (ratio) of nature can be held together in a way that both allows us to continue to enjoy some of the poems and myths about the gods our forebears had read of the world’s surface, nature’s face or species but without, at the same time, being lured into believing that they are, somehow, actual beings.

To show you what he means, for full effect, let us now imagine ourselves in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden looking down into a largish puddle with the sun shining overhead in a white cloud-dappled blue sky and with a golden, leaf-bedecked branch over-hanging us whilst a few rooks circle high above that. As we look down into the water at the reflection below we can experience a real sense of awe and wonder at the vertiginous sight we behold as we seem to look down through a hole in the pavement into what can appears to be whole other world below.

It’s the kind of vertiginous view that has always had the power to create in our imaginations all kinds of poetic stories and images that, unless we are very careful, can easily lead us astray. I had Susanna read Thomas Traherne’s poem “Shadows in the Water” because to me — and no doubt to Lucretius were he with us today — it is a classic example of being led quite astray.

Traherne was a devout, seventeenth-century Anglican minister and theologian who was genuinely interested in the natural sciences. However, despite this interest, as his poem suggests, because science was always secondary to his strong, a priori commitment to the existence of a supernatural god he was only too willing to allow himself to read off from the world’s surface — nature’s face or species — a marvellous image which he could then beguilingly turn into what he thought was an index of an underlying (or overarching) supernatural reality, the very home of his “very God of very God.” In this poem, although it is true he brings this idea before us for contemplation in a gentle way — i.e. he doesn’t ram his belief down our throats in an obviously doctrinal or dogmatic fashion — we must not lose sight of his general desire as a clergyman to encourage us to believe in the reality of his supernatural, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent god and the existence of another, heavenly world that lies just beneath or behind the thin skin of our everyday world.
  
However, when looking down into his modest puddle Lucretius sees something very different, but to him, and to me, he sees something even more marvellous.

Now, remember Lucretius thought that the kind of fear and darkness of the mind to which Tranherne clearly fell prey would be shattered apart not by the rays of the sun and the clear shafts of the day but only by BOTH the external appearance (species) and inner law or material conditions (ratio) of nature — naturae species ratioque.

So let’s start with the inner law or material conditions of nature (the ratio). We’ll then turn to external appearance (species) and, finally, to why together they gift us something more marvellous and joyful than even someone like Traherne could have imagined.

Remember that in our readings you heard three of Epicurus’ principle doctrines. Well, Lucretius took them with the utmost seriousness because he saw that the natural sciences (φυσιολογίας — “inquiring into natural causes and phenomena”) were particularly well-suited to stop us from being led needlessly astray by the surface appearance of nature into believing in the existence of the gods and, therefore, of easily falling prey once again to the claims of supernatural religion with all its many fears and oppressions. The natural sciences he realised gave us a powerful insight into nature’s ratio, that is to say its inward laws, workings or material conditions, which, in turn, had the power simply to dissolve — or more dramatically, shatter — our fears about the existence of the gods and remove this and other darknesses from our minds.  

Just to remind you, Lucretius thought that everything — without exception — was made, not by supernatural beings, but by the natural fluxes and flows of matter which endlessly went on to fold into atoms which then flowed together and combined to make all the things visible to us in our universe. The natural sciences of Lucretius' and our own day have showed us nature's ratio more clearly than even the rays of the sun ever could; we know that there are no such things as the gods imagined by supernatural religion and that, therefore, we also need never again be fearful of them nor bow to the demands of superstitious religion.

OK. But let’s not forget that Lucretius thinks this shattering is achieved by both the inner law (ratio) of nature and, AND, it’s external appearance (species) — naturae species ratioque.

At this point you need to recall that, as a poet, Lucretius understood well that being the kind of beings we are, we are always-already engaging with the natural world as much through our poetry and myths as through the kinds of activities which, in time, became called the natural sciences.

His own poem, the De Rerum Natura, shows us that, as a poet Lucretius didn’t want to lose all the wonderful poems and myths about the gods our forbears had constructed by reading them off nature’s face — of which the surface of the puddle is an exemplary example. These appearances were for him and us still perfectly capable of telling us all kinds of things (good and bad) about how humans are in the world, they can still entertain us, make us laugh and cry, become the subjects for songs and plays, provide us with inspiring and cautionary stories to help us explore all kinds of moral questions about how best to behave and so much more besides.

Cybele

But, as the example of Traherne shows, these wonderful and potentially helpful and beautiful surface images are often so beguiling that they always threaten to lead us astray. Lucretius was well aware of this danger as his story about Cybele — a close analogue to the goddess Venus — in book two shows. After describing her wondrous qualities as a poetic example of a fully material mother earth, a goddess of mobility, pedesis and politics, Lucretius then says:

“Endowed with this emblem [a crown — denoting her creative and sustaining power], the image of the divine mother is now carried with horrifying effect throughout the earth” (DRN 2:608-9 my emphasis).

In other words Lucretius is saying that when and wherever people have stopped understanding her poetically — as a marvellous appearance read off the surface or face of nature (species) — and have turned her into an actual goddess to whom sacrifice and praise must now be offered, stupid and horrific things inevitably followed. For Lucretius, although nature (in the poetic guise of Venus or Cyble) “is everything, the pure movement of matter; it makes no sense to sacrifice or pray to her” (Thomas Nail, Lucretius 1, p. 236), when people make her into actual goddess she is a disaster, a veritable horror.

The humble puddle is an aide-memoire which offers us a handy, simple and delightful reminder of how to resist taking this wrong turn for whenever a good Epicurean sees someone beginning to take a surface, poetic appearance of nature as being real in the wrong kind of way all they need to do is remind that person of the puddle and that all it takes to dispel the illusory image is to recall the ratio of nature, put one’s finger into the shallow water and wiggle it about. Even better, one might be able to find both a happy child and an Epicurean philosopher joyfully to jump about in the puddle to reveal the nature’s ratio. 

What Lucretius ultimately wants to show us using the puddle is that the reflection of the sky one sees in it is marvellous, truly marvellous—not as an index to another supernatural realm and its gods as it was for Traherne but as both “an appearance of nature and as an index to the wondrous truths of physics” (John I. Porter, Lucretius and the Sublime in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 173).

This morning Susanna and I thought we’d go together to visit the Beechwoods where I went last week (see this post). Our decision to go was taken whilst the morning was still decidedly overcast and grey but, but the time we were getting on the bus at Drummer Street Bus Station the sun had come out and the sky was almost cloudlessly blue changing the mood of the day considerably. On arriving at the Babraham Park and Ride we walked up the Gog Magog Hills along the footpath running parallel to Worts’ Causeway and thence on into the lovely beechwoods. The high winds of last week had brought down a lot of the golden brown leaves which thickly carpeted the wood floor but the many remaining green leaves cast upon us some wonderful dappled sunlight — something for which the Japanese have a splendid single word, Komorebi (木漏れ日).

Anyway, Susanna and I had a splendidly meditative couple of hours strolling quietly and slowly around the woods and, although we stopped for a flask of coffee on an old tree stump we could easily have sat down on a delightfully rustic bench dedicated to the memory of a gentleman called Fred Chambers (there are a couple of pictures below). The dedication underneath his name reads: “Write me as a man who loved his fellow man.” It felt sure it was a quotation so, when I got home, I looked it up and found it to be line very close to one found towards the end of Leigh Hunt’s (1784-1859) short poem called Abou Ben Adhem. I have vague memories of this being recited to me by my paternal grandmother who loved this kind of English poetry that referenced, what was for her an exotic, magical and (Sufi inspired) mystical Middle East — indeed the poem in this vein that she particularly passed on to me was the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the famous translation by Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883).

So, before we get to a few of the photos I took this morning here is Leigh Hunt’s poem for your enjoyment. Abou Ben Adhem is the same person as a certain Ibrahim ibn Adham (c. 718 – c. 782 / AH c. 100 – c. 165) who is an early Sufi saint.

Abou Ben Adhem
By Leigh Hunt

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
“What writest thou?”—The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”
“And is mine one?” said Abou. “Nay, not so,”
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, “I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men.”

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blest,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

The blue, cloudless sky reflected in the rainwater caught by an autumn leaf

The Beechwoods from the Cherry Hinton Road near the P&R

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...