Time Magazine, Easter 1966

You can hear a recorded podcast of the following piece by clicking this link

My personal commitment to a version of Christian atheism began in the mid- to late 1970s during my early teenage years. One year, as I listened to the unfolding of the Holy Week narrative from my place in the choir, when we reached the horrific moment when Jesus, just before dying, cries out “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? — My God, my God, why did you forsake me?” (Matthew 27:46) I found myself suddenly waking up to the shocking implications of what I had just heard. To appreciate my surprise you need to remember that, like all conventional Christians, I had been taught that Jesus was God. So, that year, as Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why did you forsake me?, and then died, I found myself thinking, “Hang on, did I just hear that properly? God has abandoned God, yes? God has let God die! Is that right? My God!” 

Not surprisingly, no priest or Sunday School teacher ever lingered over this extraordinary moment because they were already rushing us ahead to what they thought was the joyous good news of Easter Sunday and the Resurrection. But, from that day on, Easter Sunday itself began more and more to feel to me as merely the moment which revealed that, for Christianity, the apparently theologically profound and shocking moment of God’s death on Good Friday was no more than a fairground magic trick, something along the lines of the famous sawing a person in half illusion where, as a magician-entertainer, God (and Christianity along with him), says to us, “Ta-Da! Only kidding!” 

But the shocking impact of that realisation has never faded and it has continued to haunt all my thoughts about religion since then. Indeed, over the years, it has only served to make me feel that Easter Sunday of Christianity was simply a betrayal of the message of the cross. But with whom could I talk about this? No one it seemed, certainly not the faithful, rather evangelical Christians in my own church nor my secular parents, teachers or school-friends.

Fortunately, however, in my late-teens in a second-hand bookshop in Ambleside, I stumbled across the “Letters and Papers from Prison” by the German Protestant pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), and, at last, found myself reading words by a well-known, respected Christian theologian, which said something real about the theological and ethical implications of that shocking moment on the cross. Here is what quickly became for me one of the most important passages in the book: 

God as a working hypothesis in morals, politics, or science, has been surmounted and abolished, and the same thing has happened in philosophy and religion (Feuerbach!). For the sake of intellectual honesty, that working hypothesis should be dropped, or as far as possible eliminated. . . . Honesty demands that we recognise that we must live in the world as if there were no God. And this is just what we do recognise — before God! God himself drives us to this realisation. — God makes us know that we must live as men who can get along without Him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34)! We stand continually in the presence of God who makes us live in the world without the God-hypothesis (Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Letters and Papers from Prison”, SCM, London 1971, p. 360).

These words became central to my own theological reflections because they helped me see that I, too, now had no choice but to “live in the world as if there were no God”. But, because Bonhoeffer insisted we needed to recognise this “before God” this drove me not to adopt a secular, nontheological form of atheism, but to seek out a theological form of atheism. I eventually found this in the work of those theologians whom I discovered had bravely followed the implications of Bonhoeffer’s highly allusive prison writings and, for me, the most important of them was Thomas J. J. Altizer (1927-2018). Altizer’s work was famously featured in the two Time Magazine articles of October 1965 and April 1966, the latter edition, published at Easter, dared to put the question “Is God Dead?” on its cover in bold red letters on a plain black background, a decision which has made it one of the most iconic, and controversial, magazine covers in the history of modern publishing. The year 1966 also saw the publication of Altizer’s book “The Gospel of Christian Atheism” and so was born what became popularly known as “Death of God theology.” 

It is impossible here to unfold the rich and strange fullness of Altizer’s thinking as it unwinds and develops over the next fifty years but all of it continues to relate back to a passage found in the short Epistle to the Philippians (2:6-8):  

          “Christ, though in the image of God,

          didn’t deem equality with God

          something to be clung to—

          but instead became completely empty

          and took on the image of oppressed humankind:

          born into the human condition,

          found in the likeness of a human being.

          Jesus was thus humbled—

          obediently accepting death, even death on a cross!”

The key theological idea at work in this passage is “self-emptying” (in Greek, “kenosis”) and Altizer took this to mean that on the cross the transcendent creator God of monotheism truly died and, wholly and irrevocably, had self-emptied into the world. Now, Altizer remains unusual in thinking that this quite literally occurred on the cross, but most people who follow his lead, including me, take that moment on the cross to be a mythopoetic expression of the basic idea that whatever the word God can mean for us today, it is a word which can only speak of God as totally present as absent; or, to put it slightly differently, that absence is the presence of God. In turn, as one of Altizer’s colleagues, Mark C. Taylor, puts the matter, this means “the disappearance of God turns out to be God’s final revelation.” (Mark C. Taylor in the introduction to “Living the Death of God” by Thomas J. J. Altizer, SUNY Press, 2006, p. xv).

Now, in the context of the Easter season and Christian thinking, the important thing to grasp is that, mythopoetically speaking, everything, but everything of theological and philosophical importance happens at the moment of Jesus’ death on Good Friday with the self-emptying death of God. This means that there was, is, and can never be a Resurrection as imagined by the later Christian tradition. Such a resurrection, as already indicated, — were it to have occurred — would reveal the events of Good Friday to have been a mere fairground illusion of death which would only serve to leave the world unchanged or, at least, leave our perception of the world unchanged. In short, the Christian Easter Sunday encourages the world to go on as if nothing of any real importance had occurred on Good Friday. But to the Christian atheist the “good” of Good Friday is truly good because it was on that otherwise dark and apocalyptic day that the divine and the sacred was no longer experienced as being “out there” in some transcendent, supernatural being and/ or realm (such as heaven) but was now fully immanent in the endless, self-emptying, natural material fluxes and flows in which all things are now understood to live, move and have their being.

Therefore, for the Christian atheist, Easter Sunday can only ever be symbolic of the “first day” upon which humanity, consciously and unreservedly, was able joyously and creatively to begin to live the death of God, to live, in other words, in a wholly naturalistic way, fully in this world. As such, I am, of course, happy to celebrate on the day — but I am most certainly not celebrating the Resurrection!

As his career developed, Altizer explored this basic idea in various ways but most fruitfully through its appearance in the writings of William Blake, Dante, Milton, Hegel and Nietzsche. But in addition to finding it in these radical Christian, or post-Christian, European writers, he also found the same idea at work within Buddhism and, in consequence, he began a long and creative dialogue with the work of the Kyoto School of philosophers, particularly Keiji Nishitani (1900–1990), and especially in connection with Buddhist ideas relating to “absolute nothingness” (zetti mu) and “emptiness” (śūnyatā). Today, thanks to the now decades-long dialogue between Altizer, Nishitani and the Kyoto School in general, there now exists a way meaningfully to be both a Christian atheist and a Buddhist.

Now, as I was finishing writing some preliminary notes for what you have just heard, I received a welcome telephone call from the British radical theologian and philosopher Don Cupitt to catch up a bit with life, the universe and everything. He asked me what I was up to and so I told him the outline of my planned address/podcast. For reasons which will become clear this led us to talk about one of the wholly naturalistic, materialist images of self-emptying that Don has been using since the mid-1990s, the sun. 

It’s helpful to introduce this image at this point because in our own, increasingly secular age, the kind of traditional, mythopoetic religious language I’ve just been using, whether Christian or Buddhist, doesn’t always easily connect with people who have had no religious upbringing or education. It can on first hearing all sound like gobbledygook. It’s not gobbledygook, I hasten to add, but, like all such nuanced, technical languages, it has to be slowly learnt and imbibed before its richness can fully be appreciated. 

Anyway, recognising this difficulty, in 1995, Don published a short but important book called, “Solar Ethics”, in which he suggests that one of the most apt modern, secular metaphors for how we should be living life after the self-emptying death of God is that of the sun. He gives the reason for this under six basic headings.

Firstly, the sun is always already beyond the living/dying distinction. It lives by nuclear reactions and consequently lives by dying. The sun’s way of being is self-emptying which is both a creation and a destruction because life always already involves both. It is a felicitous coincidence that in the mythopoetry of the Christian atheist the death of God as Jesus, the son of God (s-o-n), is analogous to the wholly naturalistic living by dying of our local star, the sun (s-u-n).      

Secondly, the sun is always already all action, it only is what it is because it does what it does, here and now. For the sun there is no distinction between noun and verb; in other words, it does not separate what it is from what it does. 

Thirdly, the sun is always already everything that it can or should be. It is constantly giving everything it can, and cannot do anything more than this. 

Fourthly, the sun is always already beyond distinctions between inner and outer being, it constantly shines and makes a complete exhibition of itself without feeling guilty — it turns itself, quite literally, inside-out. In other words, there is no inner-self or inner-soul to be saved, only a self or soul constantly being poured out or given away in the act of living.

Fifthly, the sun is always already indifferent to conventional religious and moral distinctions between good and bad, the saved and the lost, the respectable and the dirty. As Jesus reminded us, the sun rises on the evil and on the good (Matthew 5:45). 

And, sixthly, the sun does not distinguish between the way and the end, between journey and destination, between method and purpose, because life is always already what is happening now.

Don suggests that after the self-emptying death of God we, too, should consciously live life in the same self-emptying way, fully aware that it is the only life we have and that we can properly fulfill our potential only by shining in our celebration of life as it is poured out in us. As, after the self-emptying death of God, God is only totally present as absent so, too, are we, when, sun-like we become totally present only in our own self-emptying which, inevitably will end in our own absence at our death. For Don, this means we should simply equate the ethical with life’s own spontaneous and joyful affirmations of itself – “life’s solar outpouring.” 

It is vital to see, as Don notes, that such a secular, solar ethics and solar living is only something that has become possible for our culture after the end of metaphysics and after the death of God.

And, before concluding it’s worth pointing out that, along with Altizer, Don sees here a profound connection with Buddhism, in his case particularly with the principle of “anatta”, the idea that there is no permanent self. As Don notes, by embracing this notion and shining brightly like the sun in a process of constant self-emptying we find the most creative and positive way fully to accept the constant changing of life where, as Lucretius once observed, omnia migrant, everything, but everything is always already, moving, in motion.

To conclude. It seems to me that the Christian Resurrection of Easter Sunday simply blocks access to, and ultimately betrays this profound insight into the way the world is and our place in it. It doesn’t bring us more life, it diminishes life by stopping it from flowing, freely, fully, creatively and self-emptyingly into the world. The Resurrection of Jesus and his later Ascension into heaven is merely an attempt to hoard life like a miser hoards gold, locking it up in a dark, heavenly safe hidden well away from the world for some as yet to be defined later day of judgement. On the other hand, Good Friday, when understood in the fashion just explored, as the moment of the death of God, is the ecstatic, apocalyptic mythopoetic moment of divine release when the golden richness of self-emptying creative, love and light is for us fully and irrevocably allowed out into the world to shine. 

I hope you can see why my subscription to the resurrection is now permanently cancelled and why, in the gentlest way possible, I’d encourage you to think about doing likewise. 

As Jesus once said: 

“You are the light of the world. You don’t build a city on a hill, then try to hide it, do you? You don’t light a lamp, then put it under a bushel basket, do you? No, you set it on a stand where it gives light to all in the house.” (Matthew 5:14-15).

In the mythopoetry of Christian atheism, that self-emptying light was put on a stand on Good Friday; Easter Sunday has always been the bushel basket that hides the real good news of this season.

—o0o—

If you would like to join a conversation about this podcast then our next Wednesday Evening Zoom meeting will take place on 7th April at 19.30 GMT.  Link below.

Topic: Cambridge Unitarian Church, Evening Conversation

Time: April 7, 2021 19:00 London

Join Zoom Meeting

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Here’s the timetable:

19.15-19.30: Arrivals/login

19.30 - 21.00: Questions to, and conversations with, Andrew James Brown moderated by Courtney Whalen Van de Weyer

21:00: Event ends

Within my own local community, the Cambridge Unitarian Church, I'm trying to encourage a conversation about how, in the current and post-pandemic environment, we might better work with civic organisations who clearly share so many of our own values. My preferred candidate is The Alternative UK which has its roots in Denmark. As a long admirer of many things Danish this project naturally caught my attention when it was launched a few years ago. So, as an introduction to them, here are their current six, guiding values. If you like what you read then do please follow the links. I really do think it's a project worthy of becoming properly involved with.

 THE ALTERNATIVE: SIX VALUES

Courage: Courage to look problems in the eye. But also courage about the future we share.

Generosity: Everything which can be shared will be shared with anyone interested.

Transparency: Everybody should be able to look over our shoulders. On good days and on bad.

Humility: To the task. To those on whose shoulders we stand. And to those who will follow us.

Humour: Without humour there can be no creativity. Without creativity there can be no good ideas. Without good ideas there can be no creative power. Without creative power there can be no results.

Empathy: Putting yourself in other people’s shoes. Looking at the world from that point of view. And creating win-win solutions for everyone.

* * *

The values are not just there to be brought out on special occasions. The six core values must be constant indicators that are visible in our daily political work – in the way we think, speak and act. From debate, to political initiatives and to the way we campaign.

Atop a sand dune on the beach at Wells-next-the-Sea

You can hear a recorded podcast of the following piece by clicking this link

Wittgenstein famously warned against letting words “go on holiday” (PI 38). By this, he meant allowing words to say things outside the immediate context in which they were actually being used for this or that  situation. The reason for his concern was that he had begun to see how so many philosophical problems only arose when we succumbed to this temptation. To illustrate this let’s briefly consider Jesus’ teaching found at Luke 6:46-49 (see also Matthew 7:24–27) often called the “Parable of the Wise and the Foolish Builders”. 

Jesus begins by asking his audience a rhetorical question, namely, why, although they claimed to value him as a wise teacher, they then didn’t put his teaching into practice? He then proceeds to tell a story about what he thought those who had heard his words and were putting them into practice were like:

“They are like the person who, in building a house, dug deeply and laid the foundation on a rock. When a flood arose, the torrent rushed against the house, but failed to shake it because of its solid foundation. 0n the other hand, anyone who has heard my words, but has not put them into practice, is like the person who built a house on sand, without any foundation. When the torrent rushed upon it, the house immediately collapsed and was completely destroyed.” (Luke 6:46-49, Inclusive New Testament, Priests for Equality, 1994)

As the gospel writers present him to us Jesus was clearly a teacher capable of uttering the most memorable, sparkling and striking parables ever known but, alas, this one is not amongst them. What we have here is a straightforward example of commonsense wisdom. Jesus, confident that what he is teaching is good and solid stuff, chooses to illustrate what he thinks are the consequences, good and bad, of following or not following his words, by employing a conventional metaphor that almost everyone could understand. In the context Jesus employs it it’s a metaphor that is really rather unremarkable. For, even today, with our advanced engineering techniques and materials, it remains prosaically true that if a building’s foundation sits on soft or filled-in sandy soil, the whole building is always in danger of collapsing.

Now, although we may agree or disagree that Jesus is correct in believing the great worth of his own teaching and the value of building an ethical practice upon it, what we can all agree upon is the appropriateness of his everyday metaphor if, and this is vitally important, if we don’t let the words of the metaphor go on holiday. When they stay at home in this world we can say with confidence that building on sound foundations (aka rock) is good; building on infirm foundations (aka sand) is bad. 

But the trouble is that within Christian circles Jesus was very early on transformed from being a wise, human teacher — a rabbi — into very God of very God and it was this process that allowed the words of the Parable of the Wise and the Foolish Builders to pack for what has now become an extended, two-millennia long holiday which allowed an interpretation of the parable to develop that turns out to be highly misleading about what seems to us today to be the fundamental nature of things. 

For the Christian believer, once Jesus had become God, Jesus became the very foundation of everything that ever was, is, or will be. Reading this parable with this belief in mind, Jesus’ metaphor became not simply a straightforward, everyday one rooted in the practical knowledge of in what consisted the best foundation for an actual building or a certain kind of ethical practice but, instead, it became a metaphysical metaphor about the ultimate nature of things. In short, the parable began to be understood in Christian circles as saying that ultimate reality — whether God or Jesus, Jesus or God — was also to be thought of as being rock-like, super-stable, eternal, fixed, immovable, unmovable, static and so on. As the author of the Epistle of James has it, when it came to ultimate reality there was to be in it “no alternation or shadow of change” (James 1:17).

By extension, of course, the quickly developing and overlapping early-Christian communities which eventually became the highly plural and complex entity known as “the Christian Church”, that took on the mantle of rock via the story of Jesus’ renaming of Simon the son of Jonah as Simon Peter, where the name “Peter” is derived from the Greek word for rock, “petros”. You will recall that in Matthew 16 Jesus is made to say that “on this rock (petra)” he would build his church which even the “gates of Hades” would not overcome. It was to Peter that Matthew has Jesus give the keys of the kingdom of heaven saying “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:13–19). In consequence, the Church’s authority over all things on earth came to be thought of as eternally secure and “rock-like” because it was believed to have been built on the firm, eternal foundation of the metaphysical rock of God and Jesus, Jesus and God.

Given all this, it should come as no surprise that, once the words of Jesus’ parable had gone on holiday in this fashion, the Christian mind found it impossible to take seriously the idea that upon the ever-shifting, transient, sand-like nature of our natural world any decent, self-respecting philosophy and/or religion could ever be built.

However, as the two millennia have unfolded since the foundation of the Christian Church, alongside the now widespread loss of belief in God, and Jesus as God, in our European and North American culture, and thanks to the discoveries of the natural sciences, there has come an increasingly widespread recognition of the truth, pithily noted by the Roman poet Lucretius, that ‘omnia migrant’ (DRN 5.830), everything, but everything, moves. 

No one knows how long ago this was first intuited as a fundamental or foundational aspect of the nature of things but we can trace it back to at least five hundred years before the birth of Jesus and to the thinking of Heraclitus of Ephesus. Many of you will recall it was Heraclitus who insisted “everything flows” (panta rhei), that all things are in “flux” and, therefore, always-already “becoming”. This idea was summed up most famously in a saying of Heraclitus’ as quoted by Plutarch: “It is not possible to step twice into the same river” (B91[a]). However, some scholars think the more authentic form of the saying has been preserved by Cleanthes which reads: “On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow” (B12 — potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei). This is a much more subtle and interesting saying than the popularly remembered one because it helps us see that any river can only continue to exist over time as the same river it has always has been, in so far as it consists of changing waters. As Daniel W. Graham says in the “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy” article on Heraclitus “if the waters should cease to flow it would not be a river, but a lake or a dry streambed.” In turn, this means “There is a sense, then, in which a river is a remarkable kind of existent, one that remains what it is by changing what it contains.” So, Graham continues, 

“[o]ne kind of long-lasting material reality exists by virtue of constant turnover in its constituent matter. Here constancy and change are not opposed but inextricably connected. A human body could be understood in precisely the same way, as living and continuing by virtue of constant metabolism”. 

As Graham finally observes, on this reading, 

“Heraclitus believes in flux, but not as destructive of constancy; rather it is, paradoxically, a necessary condition of constancy, at least in some cases (and arguably in all).”

Today, thanks to extraordinary progress made in disciplines such as fundamental particle physics and quantum foundations we are beginning ever more fully to understand this truth and that even the most apparently solid and immutable of things is something always-already dependant on matter-energy in constant motion. In consequence, at the fundamental, foundational level, this means the apparently solid rock of Jesus’ parable is something as constantly in motion as much as is sand.  

So, does this mean Jesus’ parable can now be seen to be wrong-headed? Well, no, not really. Or at least it’s not wrong-headed as long as his words are not taken out of their everyday context and allowed to go on holiday to be used to talk about the fundamental nature of things. In the everyday context, as Jesus wisely if prosaically suggests, one should continue to build on the firmest foundations possible (aka rock) and not upon infirm foundations (aka sand). One important, obvious lesson to learn here is strongly to resist the urge to turn everything that Jesus says into metaphors about the fundamental nature of things and, therefore, to keep the language of Jesus’ teachings firmly where they belong, namely, in the everyday world of practical ethics.

OK. But here’s the interesting thing. Were we tempted to use the words “rock” and “sand” to talk about the fundamental nature of things as the contemporary sciences are now beginning to understand it, for those words to work, we’d have to turn Jesus metaphorical use of them upside down and encourage people to see that the wise person must come to understand that everything is, ultimately, built on moving sand and not static rock. To put this in an apparently paradoxical way the wise, modern person needs to find ways fully to appreciate and live out of the knowledge that everything, but everything rests or depends upon motion!

It is this thought which brings me to a poem that beautifully and accessibly unfolds this idea. It’s called “Dunes” and was written by the twentieth-century American poet A. R. Ammons: 

Taking root in windy sand

    is not an easy

way

to go about

    finding a place to stay.

A ditchbank or wood’s-edge

    has firmer ground.

In a loose world though

    something can be started—

a root touch water,

    a tip break sand—

Mounds from that can rise

    on held mounds,

a gesture of building, keeping,

    a trapping

into shape.

Firm ground is not available ground.

In his poem, Ammons offers us a beautifully succinct, modern parable which reminds us that all our ways of finding a place to stay and be in the world, all our human making and building, whether of actual buildings or of culture in the form of our arts, natural and human sciences, ethics, religion, politics and so on, all of it only occurs because everything is always-already in motion. Firm ground, when understood in the mistaken way our Christian forebears did, is simply something that never has been, is not, and never will be available to us.

However, miracle of miracles, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Ammons and the contemporary sciences show in abundance that in our sand-dune-like-ever-moving-loose-world something can always be started. Roots do touch water, tips do break sand, and following this mounds do rise on held mounds. Across the generations and geography in countless human and non-human gestures, there is building, keeping, and a trapping into shape. We can and do build both buildings and cultures, and, in so doing find a place and a particular way to stay in the world.

But, and this is vital, we need to see clearly that all that is made and all that we make, will in time pass and unfold itself back into fluxing, folding and fielding matter-energy to be reassembled into something different and new. There is no eternal rock, no available, ultimate firm ground upon which to build a definitive, final world, philosophy or religion. Omnia migrant, everything moves. 

Given this, from now on, might we not begin to lead better, more humble and creative lives, were we able fully to understand the implications of being material migrants always-already dwelling on sand-dunes even when, at times, we still recognise the timeless wisdom of building on everyday rock?

—o0o—

If you would like to join a conversation about this podcast then our next Wednesday Evening Zoom meeting will take place on 24th March at 19.30 GMT.  Link below.

Topic: Cambridge Unitarian Church, Evening Conversation

Time: Mar 24, 2021 14:00 London

Join Zoom Meeting

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Meeting ID: 851 1221 5249

Passcode: 036110

Here’s the timetable:

19.15-19.30: Arrivals/login

19.30 - 21.00: Questions to, and conversations with, Andrew James Brown moderated by Courtney Whalen Van de Weyer

21:00: Event ends

The inside of the Cambridge Unitarian Church as it currently appears  At present, only occasionally being used for socially-distanced ballet classes & fencing

As we approach the first anniversary of the closure of the Cambridge Unitarian Church for face to face meetings due to the Coronavirus pandemic I thought it might be worthwhile recording for you the last address I gave in the building to see if I said in it anything of interest or worth that might help us better gauge where we are now. Well, let’s see. Also, since it seems unlikely we’ll be returning to our old ways of doing church, the historian in me feels it is not inappropriate to make a verbatim, aural record of what may well have been the final address given in a church service setting. The address was preceded by a reading of a short, extremely allusive extract from the Fifth Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke (Trans. C. F. MacIntyre). Don’t worry if it does not fully connect with you on a first hearing as I so return to it later on in the address.  

So, let’s now go back to Sunday, March 15th, 2020 at about 11am, GMT. 

          Angel, if there were a place we don’t know, and there

          on some ineffable carpet, the lovers who never

          could bring off their feats here, could show

          their bold lofty figures of heart-swings,

          their towers of ecstasy, their pyramids

          that long since, where there was no standing-ground,

          were tremblingly propped together — could succeed

          before the spectators around them, the innumerable silent

                         dead:

          would not these then throw their last, ever-hoarded,

          ever-hidden, unknown to us, eternally

          valid coins of happiness

          before that pair with the finally genuine smile

          on the assuaged carpet?

Given our current situation, with all the worries it naturally brings, it seems to me impossible at the moment to give any address which does not, in some fashion, directly relate, in the most positive and meaningful ways possible, to the current situation. To do otherwise would be, at least in my opinion, merely to stick one’s head in the sand — a foolish strategy at any time, but especially at this moment of time.

Naturally, I do not wish to diminish the very significant, and possibly huge, dark downsides to what may transpire in the coming weeks and months, but I do wish to emphasise here the possible and, at times, perhaps actual important and necessary upsides, even though, at the moment, they may seem to be extremely limited and apparently insignificant. I think it’s [also] worth remembering the old proverb that the darkest place is at the bottom of the lighthouse, i.e., even as it shines a saving light out into the gloom, right where we are standing it is as dark as dark can be.   

Given this fact it is vitally important always to remember another proverb, namely, that great oaks from little acorns grow and so my strategy for today, and for the next few weeks, will be to consider, as best as I can, the ‘little acorns’ wherever I find them, in the hope that they may, in time, truly turn into great oaks.

So, for the first of my possible little acorns, I want to turn again to someone whose work has had a profound and positive influence over my own thinking during the last decade, the Italian philosopher, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. 

In this address, for your own ease of access later on, I concentrate only upon what Beradi says in a short, twenty-four-minute filmed interview made in 2011 to accompany his then-new book, ‘After the Future.’ 

I should also add that, although this address starts with a rehearsal of some dark but important (if very sketchy) genealogical notes about how we got where we are today, they are there simply to help us better grasp the message of hope Berardi wishes to bring us. So hang in there.

Berardi begins by pointing out that, for our own Western European and North American culture, ideas of in what the future consists have for a long, long time now been tied closely to the hope and desire for more energy, more speed, more strength, more consumption, more things and, alas, more violence. Simply put, the idea of the future has all been about more and more and more.

Berardi feels that the early twentieth-century Italian Futurist movement can be seen as our final step into this modern, futurist age.

Futurism (Italian: Futurismo) was an international artistic and social movement that originated in Italy and which delighted in wholly rejecting the past, primarily by embracing speed, technology, youth, violence, war and the, what were then, very new, material objects such as the car, the aeroplane and the modern, industrialised city.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), the movement’s founding figure, brought all these things together in his Futurist Manifesto of 1908 which was to prove highly congenial to the nascent Italian Fascist movement. It’s a nasty document that exalts violence and particularly despised anything to do with women or what it thought was feminine because, for the Futurists, the woman/the feminine was the epitome of weakness and sensuousness, in short, everything that modern energy wanted — and still wants — to forget.

Berardi feels, and I agree with him, that Futurism played a key part in bringing the world to its current state of despair because it helped deliver up to us a futurism without a future. Modern capitalism is, of course, a child of Futurism and we can see this particularly in its obsession with more and more speed and more and more growth which, in turn, has led to the destruction of our world in the name of the future — or rather, it has led to the world’s destruction in the name of its idea of the future.

By 1977 — the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee — many people like Berardi were beginning to intuit that if this was the future then, as far as we were concerned, there was no future. Indeed, for my generation, Generation X, nothing, but nothing, summed-up this nascent feeling better than the Sex Pistols’ single of that year, ‘God Save the Queen’, which contains the oft-repeated refrain, ‘no future, no future for you.’

Consequently, as the decades have passed, retrospectively, 1977 has become for many of us the symbolic watershed moment when we were first forced to begin to seek ways to articulate something beyond the future because, for us, the future was over. Here, of course, is the origin of Berardi’s book title ‘After the Future.’

There have been many responses to this feeling and not all of them have been positive — after all the Sex Pistols were themselves far from being noted purveyors of hope — but some responses have been, including that suggested by Berardi. Berardi was amongst those who became aware that, because our very possibility of joy was being destroyed by capitalism and growth, we needed to find ways to live in a post-futurist fashion.

A key act of rebellion was to find more and more time to live in the present and to choose what he calls the slowness of pleasure. In this he reveals some very strong Epicurean tendencies, the only philosophy which seems to me to offer us a genuine way out of our current malaise. Anyway, at this point in his interview, Berardi quotes Jesus’ teaching about the birds of the air and flowers of the field because, for Berardi, they are unparalleled examples of creatures who don’t work in order to accumulate or possess things but are, instead, creatures who never cease to live in time (in season) and to find their pleasures in time. Bifo’s basic point here is that unlike most other things, time is not something you can accumulate as you can with, for example, gold, money and material things. When it comes to time you can only live in it, taking pleasure in the becoming other of yourself, being yourself without protecting yourself. This, for Berardi, is post-futurism.

To live like the birds of the air and the flowers of the field requires what Berardi calls ‘ungrowth’ — an ugly word that he admits is only an approximation to a better concept we still need to invent. However, essentially, it’s a word that helps us see the need for our society to let go of its obsession with growth and to encourage the kind of responses we begin to make when we realize, truly realize, that we do not need more money and more things and that what we most certainly need is more time, more joy.

Berardi notes that ‘ungrowth’ seems to some people to hint at something ‘less’ but this is not at all the case. It’s a word that seeks to remind us that what we need is not less life or less pleasure. No! Not at all. It’s a word that reminds us we need more life, more pleasure. But this, in turn, does not imply more consumption, more merchandise or more work. Berardi is insistent that we are dying because of the huge bubble of work and that we have all been working too much over the past 500 years. Berardi’s call, delivered straight to camera is, therefore:

“Stop working now, start living, please.”

It is in this context that Berardi reads the extract from Rilke’s Fifth Duino Elegy that you heard earlier. I realise that on the surface it’s an allusive and apparently obscure text but in the context of Berardi’s discourse I think it’s actually a fairly straightforward one.

What we have is (were it possible) a poet asking an Angel what would it be like were we, who are utterly obsessed with the future — that imagined future of more and more gain and more and more material goods — what would it be like if we (and the dead of countless generations around us) could see, actually see, two lovers consummate their love on that beautiful carpet, both fully in the moment, both fully in time, both fully taking the slow, bodily pleasure and joy in their becoming (each) other? In other words, it is to be asking something akin to what would it be like were we able to live like the birds of the air and the flowers of the field?

What might seeing a couple like this make us do? Well Rilke suggests, it would make us willing to cast on to that carpet everything, but everything we had accumulated, even our last, ever-hoarded, ever-hidden, even unknown, eternally valid coins of happiness, and that act of giving would, finally, bring to our lips and our whole being, perhaps our first genuine, smile.

Seeing this conjunction (co-mingling or intra-action) of bodies also serves to remind us we, too, have a body and that the deep joys and pleasures this body can bring us can only be had in the moment, in the now, in the encounter and embrace of (becoming) others. For Berardi this is all about becoming what he calls a singularity, that is to say becoming ourselves in the act of being slowly, pleasurably, joyfully intermingled with the other. This intra-active way of being in the world is in stark contrast to the modern, capitalist obsession with individuality and which has continually encouraged only accumulation and the separation of the self from the world.

Berardi wants us to see that the way we have been in the world for far, far too long has caused us to forget both our body, our place in time, and the expressions of love which cannot be accumulated.

But our capitalist world — until only a few weeks ago — wanted only our fragments of time (think here of the gig economy with its zero-hours contracts and no sick- or holiday pay); it most certainly did not want us as true embodied, social human beings.

I fully realise that current events are deeply frightening and worrying and what transpires may (in fact I’m sure, will) bring us real suffering. I cannot pretend otherwise. But, notice this. In the twinkling of an eye, our capitalist world no longer needs (or can now have) our time and we now simply have to find another way of being together that is not directed at gain, at accumulation, at getting more and things, but which is directed at being together, like Rilke’s lovers on the carpet, lovingly, compassionately and supportively in this moment now.

Shocking and difficult though this moment is, and will remain for a good time yet, it does offer us an opportunity to come back together, lovingly embraced, one with each other on the ineffable, assuaged carpet of this moment now. Given that this is a flu pandemic this embrace cannot be a literalistic one but it can be a philosophical, religious, spiritual, artistic and social one through the sharing of story, poetry and song, perhaps something akin to that presented by great Italian Renaissance author, Boccaccio (1313-1375), in his famous work, The Decameron, set, you’ll remember, in 1348 whilst a terrible plague running unchecked in Florence. Boccaccio’s response to this was to begin to articulate a simple, civil humanism of neighbourly love which is able confidently to act upon the maxim: “It is human to have compassion for those in distress” (Umana cosa è aver compassione degli afflitti). [I’ve written about this in another context at this link.] 

It strikes me that Berardi (and, indeed, Epicurus) offer us powerful resources to do this in our own time. But this moment of loving embrace and togetherness that Berardi and I are advocating cannot be accumulated for the future — it can only be expressed in the now and in every consecutive moment hence because there is no such thing as love but only acts of love. In the end, as our own religious tradition’s central exemplar, Jesus, always knew, only love displayed to our neighbour in the present moment will ever be sufficient to save us all. 

—o0o—

If you would like to join a conversation about this podcast then our next Wednesday Evening Zoom meeting will take place on 10th March at 19.30 GMT.  Link below.

Topic: Cambridge Unitarian Church, Evening Conversation

Time: Mar 10, 2021 19:00 London

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83791025180?pwd=eWptaWtnblFIaEc5WU1uREJ1N2lvQT09

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Here’s the timetable:

19.15-19.30: Arrivals/login

19.30 - 21.00: Questions to, and conversations with, Andrew James Brown moderated by Courtney Whalen Van de Weyer

21:00: Event ends

Fire in LA during 2020

The words I reproduce below by George Monbiot in a Twitter thread of 1st March 2021 hit me very, very hard yesterday. Working and moving, as I do, in liberal/progressive religious and political circles — where one would like to think there was some real hope that one would be among a group of people willing to pay regular, concentrated attention to, and talk seriously about, the dire seriousness of the present situation facing humanity (and indeed the whole planet) — like Monbiot I regularly find exactly the opposite. In my own circles, frantic triviality also all too often reigns supreme and I repeatedly encounter both a shocking determination not to know and a strong desire to shy away from any kind of thinking/conversation that is even slightly difficult and challenging. I will frankly confess that, at times, the situation is utterly depressing and enervating. But what else can one do except keep trying to put “out there” stuff which genuinely attempts to impart some kind of useful knowledge or understanding about our world and our place in it and which may, just now and then, help start some kind of non-trivial conversation? As Monbiot concludes his thread, so I conclude this preamble to my own vanishingly tiny number of readers: Hurry up please, it’s time.

Why do we collaborate in our own destruction? a short thread by George Monbiot

1. Why do we collaborate in our own destruction? One of the answers, I think, is our determined commitment to irrelevance. We face massive, unprecedented challenges, but when you tune in to the most popular radio shows, you hear people talking all day about … nothing.

2. As climate and ecological breakdown happen at stupendous speed and scale, as democracy is hollowed out, as a handful of oligarchs accumulate massive economic and political power, we ensure that our heads are filled with meaningless noise.

3. If alien spaceships started incinerating our cities, and we turned on the radio, we’d be told “so the hot topic today is: what’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to you while eating a kebab?”.

4. The great majority of what we listen to imparts no useful knowledge or understanding about our world. It feels like a defensive reaction: a determination not to know. I’ve come to believe that this frantic triviality is as dangerous as any propaganda.

5. It forms a loop. As our heads fill with determined irrelevance, it becomes socially impossible to talk about anything else. The mental shift required to discuss serious, crucial issues is too great.

6. Let’s not pretend this empty prattle is the preserve of the music stations. Most “political journalism” is court gossip: who’s in, who’s out, who said what to whom. It studiously avoids what lies beneath: the dark money, the corruption, the shift of power away from democracy.

7. Even the literary pages of the newspapers are committed to gossip: highfalutin celebrity culture. The 23rd biography of a member of the Bloomsbury Set will get blanket reviews, while crucial books — such as The Good Ancestor and The Patterning Instinct — are completely ignored

8. It’s the kind of cultured small talk that T. S. Eliot, picking up the lyrics of a song, satirised in The Waste Land (“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag”). It fills our hours while time closes in.

9. So one answer to the question of why we collaborate in our own destruction is that we deliberately turn away from knowledge and understanding, and fill our heads with insistent chatter. It’s a subtle and insidious form of reactive denial.

10. Perhaps the denial reflex is inevitable in a species that's aware/not aware of its own mortality. But we have ramped it up in the 21st-century to the point at which it both dominates and threatens our lives.

Hurry up please, it’s time.

A misty late winter lockdown early morning on Christ’s Pieces Cambridge fujifilmx100f

All photos taken with a Fuji X100F

Just click on a photo to enlarge

My double-bass ready for action in the manse in Cambridge

You can hear a recorded podcast of the following piece by clicking this link

Every so often I get asked about the last line in a paragraph which appears towards the end of the liturgy surrounding the time of mindfulness meditation I currently lead every Sunday morning on Zoom. I originally put together this religious naturalist liturgy some six years ago for use in the Cambridge Unitarian Church’s evening service and the words in question were written by a friend, co-author and colleague of mine, the now retired American Unitarian Universalist minister, John Morgan. They read as follows:

And, in the end, it will not matter how much we have, rather how much we have given. It will not matter how much we know, but rather how much we love. And it will not matter how much we profess to believe, but rather how deeply we live the few enduring truths we claim as ultimate. All the rest is discipline.

That last line, “All the rest is discipline”, can puzzle or even disturb many modern liberals because “discipline” has become narrowly understood only to mean something externally imposed upon a person which will severely limit their freedom and openness to the world. This painfully attenuated understanding of the word is, I think, well illustrated by the fact that on the website of the American Unitarian Universalist Association, John Morgan’s paragraph has not only been significantly re-arranged overall but it has also lost the last line altogether. Hmmm.

All this serves to remind me that, as far as I’m concerned, one of the great tragedies of the, alas ever-declining, liberal religious tradition is that it has forgotten that the freedom and openness to the world it desires for its members, and bring about for others, is not something fully formed and accessible at a person’s birth, nor is it something which can immediately be possessed after merely intellectually adopting certain, off-the-shelf, liberal beliefs but, instead, it is something only very slowly made and then daily embodied over the course of a whole lifetime by following some liberal religious discipline. The best way I have of illustrating this in accessible, non-religious and, perhaps, even attractive terms, is through music. 

As many of you will know, before I entered the ministry I worked professionally as a jazz and rock bassist and, at least before the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit decimated the British music scene, I still occasionally found the time and opportunity to play, record and teach music. 

My two key, early role models in learning how to play jazz — a music characterised, remember, by its own kind of freedom and openness to the world — were, on the double bass, Chuck Israels (especially his bass playing in the trios led by the pianist Bill Evans between 1961 and 1966) and, on the electric bass, Steve Swallow (especially his playing with the John Schofield trio in the very early 1980s). 

The moment I heard Israels’ and Swallow’s playing, a passion was ignited within me and I finally had in sight — or rather in ear-shot — clear models I wanted to imitate which would eventually help me to become a jazz bass player myself. 

Following his time with Bill Evans, Israels went on to become a respected teacher and, in an essay called “An Unpopular Perspective on Jazz Education”, he summarised an experience many of us working in the field of jazz education have had:

Over the years, as I have assumed the role of “Jazz Educator”, both within and outside of “institutions of higher learning” . . . I have learned to ask [of students] a revealing question. “Who is your favourite musician?” It is remarkable that more often than not, I get no clear answer. There is sometimes a period of uncomfortable silence broken by occasional throat clearing noises, while the prospective student searches for a name or perhaps tries to guess what name might create the most effective impression. Sometimes an embarrassed silence yields nothing and occasionally there is an equally uncommitted claim to have listened to and liked “everything”.

Like Israels, every year I would find a number of such students standing before me. So what was going on here? Well, despite the obvious negative aspects of this state of affairs, Israels believes (and I agree with him) that most students are at least motivated by something very worthwhile, namely, the “idea of the potential pleasures of performing with and for other people, with the attendant rewards of attention and shared activity” and, of course, with the desire to experience a certain kind of musical freedom and openness through improvisation. These are, he notes:

. . . worthwhile values and have served as a part of the motivation of many artists. But this is a broad image which is insufficiently concrete to serve as a focus for attainment. There is no clear place to begin and the mentor is reduced to helping the applicant to find something to love. Get a model. Find a prototype. Without this there is no image and no passion (ibid).

After twenty-one years of ministerial experience I know intimately that most people who find their way to the Cambridge Unitarian Church are also motivated by many worthwhile things. For example, the belief that here they might be able gain a certain sense of mental and spiritual stability and insight, a sense of belonging to a liberal religious community with a venerable, four-hundred-and-fifty year old radical and progressive history and lastly, but not leastly, the hope that here they will be helped to develop, in conversation and exploration with others, a personal, creative, confident and improvisational religious freedom and openness towards our wonderful, plural, complex and contingent world. 

But, as good as all these things are they form such a broad canvas that, alone they are wholly “insufficient to serve as a focus for attainment.” Consequently, as a liberal religious minister, I quickly came to realise my primary role was simply to offer up to people certain liberal religious images, prototypes or models whom they could love and about whose example they could become passionate.

In the case of my music students I introduce them to some classic jazz or rock recordings and then, when they finally find a particular bass player they actually like, we can begin to get going by imitating that model in a disciplined way so as to figure out how he or she is playing the things they are. To the disappointment of many of my students this discipline turns out to be harder work than they imagined and so, every so often, I had gently to remind them that this is why they needed role models about whose playing they were truly excited because, without such an energising or motivational image and genuine passion, what was already a hugely challenging task quickly becomes far too difficult to see through to the end. Again and again I saw that when they remained without an image and a passion my students continued to be directionless players who could get no deep or substantial grip on how actually to play jazz or rock themselves. At best they went on to become mediocre players or, at worst, to become players who only experienced constant feelings of frustration, disappointment and failure. 

Now, it seems to me that all that I have just said about jazz is also true in liberal religious circles. Any person who enters into a liberal religious community but who then, either due to the fault of the community itself or their own personal unwillingness, fails to find, follow and imitate in a disciplined and passionate way a liberal religious prototype or model of what that faith in action looks and feels like, will never get a real grip on what it is actually to become a liberal religious person themselves. In short, everything will remain for them terribly unfocused and unfulfilling; there will be no attainment and no progression. At best they will be mediocre in the matter of living a liberal religious life; at worst they will experience feelings of utter frustration, disappointment and failure. 

In the liberal religious context of the Cambridge Unitarian Church — and, indeed, the Unitarian tradition more widely — the two classic, overlapping models or prototypes unashamedly on offer are, as this blog/podcast series has made clear in various ways, the human Jesus and Socrates. As I’m sure you realise I stress the adjective “human” attached to the name of Jesus because it’s important for me to be clear I am not talking about the God-man of Christianity but, as the contemporary atheist Julian Baggini says in his new book “The Godless Gospel”, I’m talking about a fully human, moral teacher whose “words amount to a purposeful and powerful philosophy, which has much to teach us today.”

Of course, it is true that there are other religious and philosophical models or prototypes a person might follow other than Jesus and Socrates, and it’s important to say here that I’m not making some claim for their absolute uniqueness and value over all other great religious and philosophical teachers — that would be nonsense. All I’m saying is that one has to start somewhere and the liberal religion and philosophy on offer in the context of the Cambridge Unitarian Church where I am minister simply starts with the human Jesus and Socrates. However, in the same way that, after seriously imitating Chuck Israels and Steve Swallow for a few years I began to explore aspects of the playing of dozens of other bass players, it is both possible, and highly desirable, that a person who has actually got going as a liberal religious person by imitating the human Jesus and Socrates then goes on to explore something of the work and examples of other religious and philosophical teachers.   

Nevertheless, despite all the foregoing words, I am fully aware that some religious liberals will continue to seek to resist the basic message of this piece because of a fear that such a disciplined, concentrated process of imitation of one or two primary religious and philosophical figures is actually illiberal and, in the end, will only serve to tie a person down and dangerously limit their freedom and openness to the world. 

But I hope you can intuit — and perhaps even directly glimpse — that the disciplined and passionate imitation of a model only ties down and represses when the model followed is understood as being something merely slavishly to be repeated ad infinitum, without any variation or play according to certain orthodox rules, creeds, beliefs and pre-determined end points. But, as Gilles Deleuze realised, in truth, repetition always produces difference. The disciplined, repeated imitation of role models is always potentially capable of radically freeing us because it is only through this process of firstly imitating something tangible that a person is enabled genuinely to push out into the world in the first place. Only then, with increasing confidence at the basic efficacy of the models being imitated, can a person slowly begin to take the risk of going beyond the models to test and experience reality themselves at first-hand. And then, miracle of miracles, in certain special moments, a person can discover genuinely new possibilities of being and acting in the world that help them become the unique, nuanced beings they are and ever wish still to become as they walk the pathway of life. To pick up a line of the poet A. R. Ammons from the regular introduction to this podcast, it is precisely this discipline which ensures that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

To my music students I try to make it clear that it was only by, in the first instance, engaging in a repeated, disciplined imitation of Chuck Israels and Steve Swallow that I was able to learn how to move from a vague idea or theory about how to play jazz to actually playing jazz myself, as me. By extension, when I then go on to play for my students I can also show that, despite all my disciplined attempts at imitating Chuck Israels and Steve Swallow, I don’t — and never could — sound exactly like them but only like me, Andrew Brown — whose double bass-playing you hear a snippet of in the theme tune to this podcast. 

What is true in the world of jazz is also true in the world of liberal religion. And, in my ministry here in Cambridge I try to make it clear that it is only by, in the first instance, engaging in a disciplined imitation of some basic liberal religious models, that people who belong to this community have been, and I hope still are, able to learn how to move from a vague idea or theory about how to be a liberal religious person to actually being a genuinely free and open liberal religious person themselves with all their own distinctive, individual demeanours and styles of walking the liberal religious path of life.

As I have already indicated, in my opinion, liberal religion’s tragedy has been to forget this and to have started thinking that the freedom and openness to the world valued by it is either something which passively and “naturally” flourishes without any kind of educational discipline and repetition in play (either in our own lives or those of our children) or, alternatively, it  is some kind of off-the-shelf, one-time purchasable life-style product that requires no life-long discipline to come into, and remain in, being.

Because of this modern liberal religion has all too often become fatally shallow, sloppy and ill-disciplined and it is no wonder it is declining because, for the most part, it simply doesn’t any longer offer people a life-long religious and philosophical discipline to follow that will actually gift a person with a sense of attainment and so help lead them into the living of an actual, confident, liberal religious life characterised by genuine freedom and openness to the world. 

So, my final plea to any liberal religious listeners out there is please, please, please heed Chuck Israels’ words to his students and make sure you, and your local religious community, has on offer basic models and prototypes and that you are prepared to encourage and embody a passionate imitation of them. Because, without offering ourselves or the world such a living, liberal religious discipline, it’s really all over bar the shouting — or, what is more likely, all over bar the long, sullen, silence of disappointment and failure.

So, let me now end where I began with the words of my friend, John Morgan:  

And, in the end, it will not matter how much we have, rather how much we have given. It will not matter how much we know, but rather how much we love. And it will not matter how much we profess to believe, but rather how deeply we live the few enduring truths we claim as ultimate. All the rest is discipline.

—o0o—

If you would like to join a conversation about this podcast then our next Wednesday Evening Zoom meeting will take place on 10th March at 19.30 GMT. Details in the next blog/episode.

A crucifix grave marker slowly being incorporated back into the good earth

You can hear a recorded podcast of the following piece by clicking this link

For many years now one of the central theological and philosophical questions I’ve been trying to address and, perhaps, answer in the context of both liberal religion and wider, liberal, civic society is how one might best overcome, and move beyond, many of the problematic, supernaturalistic theological ideas which still attach themselves to our culture’s inherited, underlying religious tradition, namely Christianity; ideas which, often in hidden and obscure ways, continue to influence our European and North American culture’s worst, but also very best, ways of being in the world?

This question is more pressing than it has been for a long time because, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, all of us, in nearly all areas of life, are being forced to think very hard about how we might best overcome and move on from our past ways of doing things. 

In connection with this I’d like to start today by noting that the liberal religious, freethinking Unitarian tradition in which I work as a minister continues, in the UK anyway, mostly to be be made up of people who have been shaped by the majority Christian culture but who are, nevertheless, trying to move on, leaving properly behind what cannot be retained. It’s important to realise that this was as true at the movement’s birth in sixteenth-century Poland and Hungary as it is today. Indeed, it’s worth reminding ourselves at this point that a key eighteenth-century, British Unitarian minister and scientist, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), writing in a sermon of the 1770s, said:

‘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’ (“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).

Although I’m sure Priestley himself would have been deeply disturbed to discover that, thanks to free inquiry, many Christian claims about the nature of the world and our place in it have, indeed, turned out not to be true, I trust that he would still willingly acknowledge that we, the modern beneficiaries of free inquiry, have no choice but to take him at his word and continue to move on beyond his and, indeed, our own, former beliefs. 

One popular way of attempting this moving on has been to try to bring about an immediate, wholesale, revolutionary replacement of the old, problematic ideas with a complete set of new ones and, in so doing, effectively setting up a new orthodoxy that fits more or less snugly in the footprint of the old. One of the most famous examples of this approach occurred after the French Revolution of 1789 when an attempt was made to replace Christianity and all understandings of God, firstly with the ‘Cult of Reason’ (Culte de la Raison), and then the ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’ (Culte de l'Être suprême).

Drawing on Heidegger’s terminology, the contemporary Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, calls this hard and forcible way of overcoming an example of überwindung. But, as history reveals, überwindung never really properly overcomes and moves us on because by stamping down forcibly into the footprint of the old it always leaves in play all kinds of irreducible remainders, outlines and shadows of the old orthodoxies, whether in the shape of unresolved questions or in the ghosts of ideas which continue to haunt, taunt and threaten to overturn (or undermine) the new orthodoxy. In revolutionary France the speedy collapse of the Cults of Reason and the Supreme Being, and the subsequent return of Roman Catholicism and belief in God within popular culture, reveals this well. The most recent large-scale example of this was seen following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. This was a society which had forcibly attempted to overcome all ideas about God, the divine and the sacred by putting in place, even more vigorously than was attempted in the French Revolution, a new, secular orthodoxy (see some Soviet posters connected with this at this link). It’s worth recalling that before the fall of the Soviet Union the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) wrote that 

‘Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy. It is not a side effect, but the central pivot.’ (‘Men Have Forgotten God’: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Address). 

But, in the end, the Soviet Union’s attempt at moving beyond Christianity by employing the methods of überwindung failed properly to overcome God and religion just as the French revolutionaries had failed before them and, today, the Russian Orthodox Church is once again, an extremely powerful and highly influential social and political force in Putin’s post-Communist, and far from liberal, freethinking or democratic, Russia. 

As one recent commentator on the return of religion to the public sphere, Peter Thompson, notes:

‘What all of these things show . . . is that religion as both debate and way of life has not crumbled in the face of an apparently inexorable rationalist, scientific, modernising Enlightenment and the globalisation of the market economy, but retains a potency and strength which remains far in excess of its ability to explain’ (Introduction to Ernst Bloch’s “Atheism in Christianity”, Verso Press 2009, p. ix).

Thompson’s and my own basic point here is that, when it comes to God and religion, the divine and the sacred, forcible overcoming — überwindung — simply hasn’t worked. In the end it is has proved to be an approach which simply creates as many problems stresses and strains as it claims to have solved. Anyway, surely there must be a better way of proceeding, of truly becoming ourselves a mostly Christian derived culture that really has been able to move on into a post-Christendom and more religiously plural and open way of being in the world?

This is why I follow Gianni Vattimo in preferring to seek out ways to overcome many of Christianity’s problematic supernatural beliefs and practices that proceed not by überwindung but by verwindung. Verwindung literally means ‘twisting’ (as in the twisting of overlapping fibres to produce a rope) but, in the context of philosophy and religion, it has the sense of ‘going beyond’ or ‘winding out’ the old ideas in ways that allow them to be creatively transformed and incorporated, or woven, into new ways of thinking and new directions of exploration and travel. As Heidegger memorably insisted, here ‘[o]vercoming is worthy only when we think about incorporation’ (Martin Heidegger: ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’ in the ‘End of Philosophy’, trans J. Stambaugh, Harpur and Row, New York 1973, p. 91). Vattimo called this whole approach il pensiero debole, weak thought.

However, the term ‘weak thought’ can sound very unattractive and off-putting to many people — especially to those enamoured of, and tempted by, the language of strength that practitioners of überwindung love to use. But, in the sense that counts for us, it’s important to be clear that the ‘weakness’ of ‘weak thought’ is its very strength. Water is the obvious analogy here as the ancient author of Tao Te Ching knew well (Ch. 78, Addiss and Lombardo):

          Nothing in the world is soft and weak as water.

          But when attacking the hard and strong

          Nothing can conquer so easily.

          Weak overcomes strong,

          Soft overcomes hard.

Although this idea has always been marginal in the Christian tradition it is important to remember that it is not entirely alien to it as St Paul memorably, if allusively, suggests in 1 Corinthians when he wrote that ‘God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.’ (1 Corinthians 1:25).

All the foregoing serves, I hope, to indicate why I advocate keeping in liberal religion and liberal religious language a great deal that we might be tempted to overcome in a strong way. It seems to me to be almost self-evidently true that any attempt at the strong overcoming or replacement of problematic, practices and supernaturalist ideas simply will not work — it’s a process that will leave in play too many shadows and ghosts which, eventually, will come back to haunt and harm us. 

So, instead, I continually try to encourage the practice of employing ‘weak thought’, il pensiero debole, to affect this overcoming of Christianity by verwindung — that is to say to promote a transformative, incorporating, rather than destructive, way of ‘going beyond’ Christianity.

As I see it, the religious and civic project I’m trying to promote in my own work is one centred on a shared, free conversation that is designed to help us unwind our culture’s old (mostly Christian) ideas and stories about God, the divine and the sacred, in ways that gift us new interpretations of what is meant by these terms, and to do it in a fashion which, at the same time, doesn’t contradict the knowledge and understanding gained in other spheres of our life especially, but not exclusively, in the human and natural sciences.

We need to do this because, as Peter Thompson’s words quote earlier remind us, experience has taught us that it is highly unlikely human religion and ‘God talk’ is ever going to be entirely got rid of. Religion, and words associated with it such as ‘God’, the ‘divine’ and the ‘sacred’, will never ‘be reduced without remainder’ for they remain ‘simply too rich, too multifaceted, too plural’ in their expressions ‘to allow for such a reduction’ (James W. Heisig, “Tanabe Hajime’s God”, Nanzan Institute for Religion & Culture, Bulletin 38, 2014, p.40)

If you feel that this is the case — and, of course, I accept that you might not — there seems to me to be a real need to create the kinds of public, civic religious and philosophical spaces in which people have the opportunity genuinely and freely to ask, and make attempts at answering, the same kind of question James W. Heisig thought the twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962) was forced to ask throughout his life, namely:

‘How can I, who feel no need to believe in an other-worldly divine being, recover the impulse to such an idea and describe it, to my own satisfaction, in language that preserves the truth of that impulse without having to compromise my own philosophical impulses?’

Today, more than ever, we badly need places where we can freely explore together what other kinds of stories do indeed help us to move on and live different and better lives which remain true to the truth of our impulse to talk about God, the divine and the sacred but which do not require us to compromise our own philosophical impulses that push against belief in any supernatural things, realms or beings.

As many of you will know, my own twisting, verwindung-like lines of free inquiry suggest to me that the community to which I belong might creatively and compassionately become made up of Christians who have moved on by better articulating and then living out some form of ecstatic or religious naturalism. I explored with you something this position in episode 17 of this podcast.

You may well, of course, have your own alternative preferred, twisting lines of free enquiry that will share and echo some of my own lines of enquiry but run in different directions to others. But that’s fine because our twisting conversations had together about these connections and differences are, themselves, at their best anyway, going to be examples of verwindung and ‘weak thought’ under way, and will, in modest ways I think, play their part in moving us on beyond Christianity. 

Consequently, I wish to conclude today simply by expressing my hope that the gentle call to engage in the practice of verwindung is heard and heeded, not only in my own local church community’s conversations about God, the divine and the sacred, but also in our wider public, civic contexts. 

—o0o—

If you would like to join a conversation about this podcast then our next Wednesday Evening Zoom meeting will take place on 24th February at 19.30 GMT.  Link below.

Topic: Cambridge Unitarian Church, Evening Conversation

Time: Feb 24, 2021 19:30 London

Join Zoom Meeting

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19.15-19.30: Arrivals/login

19.30 - 21.00: Questions to, and conversations with, Andrew James Brown moderated by Courtney Whalen Van de Weyer

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To create a community that, self-consciously and confidently, takes a stand on a very small number of minimal assertions which gives it its distinct flavour and shape, one which stands in meaningful, historic continuity with its liberal religious and philosophical forebears.

Firstly, it’s basic practical, ethical/intellectual stance is based on a minimal, religiously humanistic understanding of:

a) Jesus: who is understood to have been a person who encouraged us to dissolve all of religion’s former supernatural, superstitious and apocalyptic ideas into a simple, if always challenging, existential, ethical demand for justice and love for all creation, right here, and right now — including love of enemy.

b) Socrates: who is understood to have encouraged us conversationally to challenge any and every form of speech which, by pretending to offer a completely coherent and contradiction-free blueprint for living, reveals it is really only seeking to stop people from seeing that the world is, in fact, a highly puzzling, complex, plural and always moving domain, and that to negotiate it as well as is possible, it is always necessary for people freely to be exercising their faculty of reason in seeking out new intuitions, clues and empirical evidence about how the world is and our current place in it.

Secondly, in terms of our historic commitment to being a free and inquiring, rational, liberal religion that does not express any (maximal) absolute certainties based on intuitions/assertions that go beyond the currently available evidence from the natural and human sciences, we are a community that is prepared, at present (given the very limited knowledge humans still possess, being a species that is only a few hundred thousand years old), to keep open for exploration, contemplation, thought and discussion three lines of enquiry about a still possible religious reality which, to avoid the problematic limitations of theistic/poly-theistic, god language and thinking, may be more inclusively and minimalistically called “divine” (or, perhaps “sacred”). Gratefully borrowed and adapted from J. L. Schellenberg, “Evolutionary Religion”, p. 94:

a) It remains possible that there may exist a reality which is a more fundamental fact than any (currently) identifiable natural fact and which may in some fashion meaningfully (if poetically) be given the name “divine”. This includes the possibility that this more fundamental fact, even though given the name “divine” may turn out to be a special kind of natural fact. This may be called our willingness to entertain — but not yet finally affirm — the possibility of metaphysical transcendence (“metaphysics” is the branch of philosophy which examines the fundamental nature of reality).

b) It remains possible that, if it exists, divine reality’s splendour and excellence exceeds that of anything found in nature alone. This may be called our willingness to entertain — but not yet finally affirm — the possibility of axiological transcendence (“axiology” is the philosophical study of value).

c) It remains possible that, if it exists, divine reality will make for more well-being, fulfilment, wholeness, and the like for creatures than can be naturally attained. This may be called our willingness to entertain — but not yet finally affirm — the possibility of soteriological transcendence (“soteriology” is the study of religious doctrines of salvation).

In the absence of conclusive evidence one way of the other, our own liberal religious community’s jury remains out on these latter three areas and so keeps them publicly available for further free and open inquiry. However, there exists enough practically derived, humanistic evidence for our jury to have pronounced in favour of the efficacy of us continuing to follow faithfully the teaching of the human Jesus and Socrates when understood minimally in the fashion outlined above. If any further evidence, pro or con, to any of the above becomes available it will, of course, be taken fully into consideration and new decisions may be taken and lines of enquiry pursued. 

A portrait of a woman on a fresco in Pompeii & thought to represent Sappho

You can hear a recorded podcast of the following piece by clicking this link

I begin this podcast for Valentine’s Day by reading two fragmentary love poems written by the Greek poet Sappho (c. 630 BCE – c. 570 BCE). Throughout antiquity she was held to have been one of the greatest lyric poets and, according to Plato even, perhaps, the “Tenth Muse” herself. Both these fragmentary poems were translated by Willis Barnstone.

Afroditi and Desire

It is not easy for us to equal

the goddess

in beauty of form   Adonis

desire

and

Afroditi

poured nectar from

a gold pitcher

with hands Persuasion

the Geraistion shrine

lovers

of no one

I shall enter desire

Return, Gongyla

A deed

your lovely face

if not, winter

and no pain

I bid you, Abanthis,

take up the lyre

and sing of Gongyla as again desire

floats around you

the beautiful. When you saw her dress

it excited you. I'm happy.

The Kypros-born once

blamed me

for praying

this word:

I want

—o0o—

 Sappho’s time-scissored work—A new-materialist meditation for Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is a day which, since the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century, and to the delight of florists, restauranteurs, sparkling-wine, card and chocolate manufacturers everywhere, has become ever more indelibly associated in the public imagination with romantic love. However, despite the day’s current pervasiveness in our culture its origins are extremely obscure. For a while some scholars thought that the day’s roots might be found in an attempt to Christianise the pagan fertility festival of Lupercalia which was celebrated in ancient Rome between 13th and 15th February but, despite the attractiveness of this idea, no real evidence to support this has ever been found. As to St Valentine himself the situation is hardly any better and it remains unclear whether he is to be identified as one saint or is a conflation of two saints of the same name.

But, today, what we do know for sure is that time has cut-up the day’s sources into all kinds of fragments which, over the centuries, have slowly been woven and rewoven together in many complex and utterly contingent, ad hoc (‘to this’) ways. As it is celebrated today, like all our ancient festivals such as Christmas and Easter, St Valentine’s Day is a rich, sometimes beautiful, sometimes grotesque weave of incomplete and endlessly recycling and transforming fragments. In short, it remains a day full of actual and potential meanings — and, in this sense, it is incredibly meaning-full — but it is a day within which we can find no single abiding, stable, simple, essential, complete, central meaning.

For many people this is tantamount to saying that, in truth, a festival such as Valentine’s Day is deeply meaning-less. The thought silently in play here is that true meaning, that which is truly meaning-full, can only be found in something that is, from the beginning and in its unchanging essence, something through-designed, wholly-planned, coherent, complete and in order. However, following the lead of the contemporary Cambridge political philosopher, Raymond Geuss, it has long seemed to me that the world in which we live ‘does not on the whole conform to the patterns, which we think it would be good for it to instantiate. There is a discrepancy between how we perceive the world to be and how we think it would be good for it to be’.

Indeed, as we, through the natural and social sciences, have continued to explore the question of how our world is and our place in it we have found, again and again, that ours is a world which seems characterised, ‘all the way down’, by movement, instability, insecurity, indeterminacy and uncertainty. This means that whatever meaning we do find in the world it is dependent upon, not some underlying stable, independent grid-like structure against which everything can (in principle if not always in practice) always be accurately measured but, instead meaning is dependent upon a reality that is characterised by constant, creative motion. As the Roman poet Lucretius once pithily observed, ‘omnia migrant’ (DRN 5.830), everything moves.

Anyway, with all the foregoing thoughts in my mind, as we headed towards our first locked-down Valentine’s Day I couldn’t but help recall the strange story about how many of the fragments of the sensuous and lyrical love poems of Sappho came to survive into our own time and which continue to inspire and intrigue us some two-thousand-five-hundred years after her death.

As with St Valentine (or the two St Valentines), very little is known about Sappho’s life but, as you heard earlier, what we do know is that her poetry was admired throughout antiquity and was included in the later Greek’s definitive list of lyric poets. Alas, despite her fame, and like so many other ancient authors, nearly all of her poetry has been lost to us and of the more than five hundred poems that she wrote, only two complete poems and about two thousand lines which fit into intelligible fragments have survived into our own day.

Although a few fragments survived in Greece itself, in 1879 in the Egyptian oasis of Fayum in the Nile valley, a great deal of new material was discovered. Now, as you might expect, in Egypt, Sappho’s poetry was written on papyri and papyrus was also the material used to make the papier-mâché with which they wrapped their iconic mummies. When the archeologists working on this site came carefully to unwrap these mummies, to their amazement and delight, they discovered that Sappho’s poetry (along with the work of other ancient authors) had provided much of the raw material. As one of Sappho’s modern translators, Willis Barnstone, puts it, by cutting the papyri upon which the poems had been written into thin strips:

‘The mummy makers of Egypt transformed much of Sappho into columns of words, syllables, or single letters, and so made her poems look, at least typographically, like Apollinaire’s or e. e. cummings’ shaped poems. The miserable state of many of the texts has produced surprising qualities. So many words and phrases are elliptically connected in a montage structure that chance destruction has delivered pieces of strophes that breathe experimental verse. Her time-scissored work is not quite language poetry, but a more joyful cousin of the eternal avant-garde, which is always and ever new. So Sappho is ancient and, for a hundred reasons, modern’ (Sweetbitter Love by Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone, Shambhala, 2006,  p. xxix).

But can a great poet, as Sappho undoubtedly was, still be considered great when her work is, from one point of view so mangled? I think the answer is not only “Yes”, but, in certain respects, this mangling process may have helped her texts become greater. Now how on earth might that be the case? 

Well, in relation to the greatness of texts and their possible meanings, you may remember something I have occasionally brought before you for consideration, something that was suggested by the contemporary philosopher Iain Thomson:

‘. . . what makes the great texts ‘great’ is not that they continually offer the same ‘eternal truths’ for each generation to discover but, rather, that they remain deep enough — meaning-full enough — to continue to generate new readings, even revolutionary re-readings which radically reorient the sense of the work that previously guided us’ (Figure/Ground Communication interview).

What I’d like us to think about here is that the greatness of Sappho’s texts, or perhaps it is better to say that the second greatness of Sappho’s texts, is dependent, not on their completeness, but on their very incompleteness, on their fragmentary nature, and that this greatness — their meaning-full-ness — is something that is made possible precisely because of a creative, material reality in which ‘omnia migrant’, everything is always-already moving.

And when you come to think about it isn’t all of human love and life itself just like this too? We know in our heart of hearts that we can never completely know either ourselves or another person. This is because we are all ourselves always-already made up of moving, shifting, contingent, entangled fragments of memory constantly being woven, unwoven and rewoven intra-actively together to create all kinds of new meanings and re-orientations. In other words we are not so much ‘be-ings’ as ‘always-be-come-ings’ and this is only possible because of a creative, material reality in which, thank the ever moving heavens, ‘omnia migrant’, everything moves.

And even at the moment of death, when a life might be said to be as finished and complete as it can be, this same life’s story can still only ever be known incompletely by those of us who remain. At the death of a loved one we all carefully try to gather up the fragments that remain so that nothing is lost because we know that these fragments, like Sappho’s words, can always go on to gift our present and future imaginations with new insights, orientations, stories and poems and, indeed, whole new, meaning-full worlds of possibility.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, it strikes me that one lesson we might take from celebrating St Valentine’s day with these dynamic, kinetic thoughts in play is that we need not be frightened by the fragmentary, ever-moving nature of ourselves, our stories, our poems, or of reality itself, because it is precisely thanks to this endless, time-scissoring movement that we are always being gifted with the freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today and so have the chance to give and receive love again and again until, one day, we ourselves are woven back into the creative, ever-moving stuff of life. 

Drawing on Lucretius it was this insight that allowed the English poet, A. E. Housman, to write his own touching love poem of sorts and with it I end this meditation for St Valentine’s Day. It is poem no. XXXII of ‘A Shropshire Lad’:

     From far, from eve and morning

        And yon twelve-winded sky,

     The stuff of life to knit me

        Blew hither: here am I.

     Now—for a breath I tarry

        Nor yet disperse apart—

     Take my hand quick and tell me,

        What have you in your heart.

     Speak now, and I will answer;

        How shall I help you, say;

     Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters

        I take my endless way.

—o0o—

If you want to get a detailed overview of new-materialism then click this link to read Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan & Thomas Nail’s excellent paper on the subject.

If you would like to join a conversation about this or any other podcast then please note our next Wednesday Evening Zoom meeting will take place on 24th February at 19.30 GMT.  The link will be published on this blog and in the notes to the podcast for that week.

A few photos taken in Cambridge over the past few days . . .

All taken with a Fuji X100F

Just click on a photo to enlarge 

Castle Hill

St Peter’s Church, Castle Hill

St Giles’ Church, Castle Hill

Fair Street

Fair Street

Icicles on ivy outside The Waterman pub on the corner of Victoria Road & Chesterton Road

Icicles on ivy outside The Waterman pub on the corner of Victoria Road & Chesterton Road

The east end of the Cambridge Unitarian Church from the church hall

Icicles on the awning of Graham’s Fruiterers, Fitzroy Street

Taken from Histon Road Cemetery looking across French’s Road to St Luke’s Church

Histon Road Cemetery

Because I have a public-facing religious role I often find myself in situations where, suddenly, people want to know, in a nutshell, just what kind of religious person I am and what it is I believe; they want a label and they want it now! Although I generally resist offering people a label when I have the time and opportunity to be a bit more expansive, it remains the case — especially in our “too long; didn’t read” (tl;dr) age — that the demand for them is likely to continue for a good while yet. Given this, it has long seemed to me that the “best” labels to use are those which encourage, not an easy acceptance of the label that’s proffered, but, instead, those which cause a certain puzzlement and which go on to elicit further questions about what on earth might be meant by it.  

Now, those of you who know me well will know that, when forced to offer such a label, I generally reply by saying I am a “Christian atheist” or, at least, that I have strong sympathies towards a Christian atheist perspective. As a label it has a couple of immediate and obvious benefits. 

The first is that it’s basically true because I am a kind of a-theist whose a-theism is almost wholly a product of a radical and heretical liberal Christian tradition which has long displayed a relentless truth-seeking drive and skepticism. It is this drive which, although it has led people like me legitimately to come to doubt the actual existence of any kind of supernatural entity who could meaningfully be called God, it has also left us with a deep appreciation of the value and worth still to be found in certain religious practices and in many aspects of religious language use and theological thinking. In short, I am both a child, and a very critical friend of the modern theological school of thought known, rather dramatically, as “Death of God theology.”

Just to clarify this a bit before moving on; being this kind of a-theist does not stop someone like me from continuing to use the word “God” because, to cite the contemporary, existentialist philosopher, James W. Woelfel, in the poetic, mythological language of the Christian atheist, God is understood as-if he has died “completely to his transcendent status and [now] identifies himself entirely with humankind and our world” (The Death of God: A Belated Personal Postscript). Consequently, for the Christian atheist, the “only revelation of God” is that to be found in “the faces of [we] unlikely human beings” and in the natural world in general (of which, of course, humans are part), and God’s “only worship” is found in “our compassionate devotion to one another and to the needs of our earth” (ibid.). Indeed, I would argue that this is basically what the historical Jesus seems to have been doing in his own teaching where everything is always being dissolved into the call to show justice and charity, love, to one’s neighbour, which includes, of course, one’s enemy. Naturally, Jesus was not, himself, an atheist, but his tendency to see God primarily in examples of this-worldly, ethical action, sets a general direction of travel which, having passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the subsequent rise of the natural sciences, leads directly to the door of a twentieth and twenty-first century Christian atheist like me.   

The second benefit of the label Christian atheist is, as I have already indicated, that it has the singular benefit of being able to surprise and puzzle people and, therefore, provoke from them further questions as they want to know how on earth anyone can be both a Christian and an atheist. 

But it will come as no surprise to most of you to hear that one important question often put to me at this point is, “Since you claim to be atheist, why on earth bother keeping the label Christian at all? Why don’t you call simply yourself an atheist and be done with it?” 

Well, for me, the answer is rooted in a historically contingent truth that, as Woelfel notes, Christianity remains “the religion which has decisively shaped and permeated our Western culture” and, whether we like it or not, it is the religion which “still dominates the world of religion by its sheer numbers and influence.” In consequence, because “it is the religion whose origins, history, and ideas the American or European religious thinker is ordinarily the most well-versed”, it is the religion “with which most religiously perplexed people must come to grips with in a special way, since it has both created our problems and will probably offer the most natural resources for our groping solutions” (“Borderland Christianity”, Geoffrey Chapman, 1974, pp. 16-17). 

Woelfel’s points are, perhaps not surprisingly, echoed in my own ministry here in the UK within the liberal Christian and Unitarian tradition and, in consequence, most of my time is spent trying to help those who, for good or ill, have been shaped by Christianity, genuinely to come to grips with it so that they may, a) better understand key aspects of our own culture’s particular present difficulties and problems and, b) be able more freely and creatively than before, to use Christianity’s still undischarged resources and energies to encourage new, just and loving conversations and solutions more appropriate to our own, post-Christendom, pluralistic, multi-faith age to emerge.

However, despite my willingness to continue to use the label Christian atheist myself, I recognise that the aforementioned context means that it’s a label which clearly cannot suit, or even vaguely resonate with, everyone I meet — not even everyone in the local church where I am minister! This has meant I’ve always been on the lookout for other labels to describe my basic religious and philosophical perspective in a way that might make better sense, or at least be more generally amenable, to those outside the Christian tradition. The three labels I most often use these days are “religious naturalist,” “religious humanist” and the related one which concerns me in this piece, “ecstatic humanist,” borrowed from an essay published in 1973 by the aforementioned philosopher, James W. Woelfel called “Ecstatic Humanism with Christian Hopes” (“Borderland Christianity”, Geoffrey Chapman, 1973). 

It’s important to note at this point that nearly all quotations in my piece today are gratefully borrowed from this essay even when, as in the podcast of this piece, they are silently made for the ease of the listener. If you want to check where my words end and Woelfel’s begin, please take a look at the text either on my blog or in the transcript accompanying this episode.

Ecstatic humanism, Woelfel tells us, is “a humanistic perspective which transcends or goes beyond purely secular forms of humanism”. This should make it clear that he is using the word “ecstatic”, not in its everyday sense, but in its etymological sense of “transcending” or “going beyond.” Woelfel uses it in order to help make it clear that he is encouraging a humanism which remains “sensitively open-minded about the possibility of dimensions of experience and reality beyond our present knowing” and which remains “constantly aware of the limitations of the human situation and human knowledge” (“Borderland Christianity”, Geoffrey Chapman, 1974, p. 22) 

Like the label Christian atheist, the label ecstatic humanist has the benefit of not only being true for me but also a label which is able to provoke surprise and puzzlement and, therefore, often elicit further questions from people who want to know how on earth anyone can be both a humanist and ecstatic, i.e. being aware of, and sensitive to, aspects of the world that lie beyond the human. In this brief piece I can’t, of course, fully unfold the implications of the label but, drawing on Woelfel, I can at least give you a general, broad, brush-stroke picture. 

The project I’m outlining here is humanist because, as Woelfel points out, it is dedicated to encouraging “the growth of humane and scientific knowledge and its application to the rational solution of human problems, the alleviation of human oppression and suffering, the enlargement of individual human rights and freedoms, the widening of educational, social, cultural and economic opportunities — in general, to the enhancement of human life” (ibid. p. 19).

It’s a humanist project because it seeks to encourage people to base their lives and decisions upon the best knowledge we have of humankind and the world “especially through the sciences, and to seek thoughtful, reasoned solutions to human problems.” 

It’s a humanist project because it looks to human criteria in our thinking and living and because it strongly believes “that this is all we have to go on in any solid and public way” (ibid. pp. 19-20).

But it’s also an ecstatic and, therefore, a religious humanist project, because unlike other, purely secular humanisms, it’s not “truncated” (ibid. p.21). As Woelfel points out, truncated humanisms turn out not to be “fully humanistic because”

“. . .  they are not open to all that man [sic] and his encompassing universe possibly are. They are not sufficiently sensitive either to the range of and depth of the human spirit or to the limitations of our situation or knowledge. They tend arbitrarily to draw boundaries around human experience and the world and presumptuously to declare that the matter is closed, the reality completely described and circumscribed” (ibid. p.21).

As Woelfel notes, truncated, purely secular humanisms in the end simply reveal an “insensitivity to data, to ‘the facts,’ and [an] overconfident reasoning — both of which are aberrations of the humanist approach to knowledge” (ibid. p. 21); they are, to put it another way, humanisms which have forgotten that there will always exist for us not only known unknowns, but also unknown unknowns. 

Consequently, for Woelfel and, indeed, for me:

“A truly whole and adequate humanism is one which, precisely in its absorbing preoccupation with [hu]man[ity], is sensitively open to the possibility that man himself [sic] may be more than we think at any given time — that he [sic] may, for example, be a creature involved with dimensions of reality of which our knowledge either is ignorant or has only scratched the surface” (ibid. p. 22).

I hope you can see that it is precisely this openness to self-transcendence, to dimensions of reality which it can never access, or of which human knowledge is ignorant or has only scratched the surface, is what gives this project its religious dimension.

All in all, it has long seemed to me that what Woelfel is describing in his essay is, in general terms, what, at its best, the Unitarian tradition has been trying to offer people for the last four hundred and fifty odd years. Because of this, I have no hesitation in continuing to offer up for consideration a liberal Christian flavoured species of naturalistic, religious or ecstatic humanism in my own ministry with the Cambridge Unitarian Church. But, questions of meaningful historical continuity with my forebears aside, I increasingly feel a pressing need to offer up this basic religious and philosophical stance because, as we seek to recover from the worst effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and also try to deal with the increasing climate emergency, to get through this well — or even at all — we will clearly need to draw upon the fullest range of human resources and experiences available to us, both scientific and religious and philosophical. 

However, in order not to succumb to the temptation to over-extend or exaggerate our religious and philosophical resources and experiences it seems to me that we always to need consciously and diligently to be weaving them together with a humanism that is not truncated. This is why, along with Woelfel, I continue to feel that it’s vital to articulate a modern, ecstatic humanism that can still take us “out of ourselves” to behold with wonder and awe “the mysteries surrounding our existence” — mysteries which include, of course, “religious experience, love, art and beauty, the devoted search for truth” (ibid. p. 24).

Although I realise many of you will not share my willingness to adopt and use the label Christian atheist if, like me, you feel that you are ‘a skeptic with a naturally religious mind’ (à la Ronald Hepburn) or an open-minded ‘reverent’ humanist (ibid. p. 14), then I hope you will at least spend a little time considering the case for an ecstatic humanism and perhaps, too, even now and then, using the label yourself. At the very least it might start an occasional, interesting conversation.

—o0o—

If you would like to join a conversation about this or any other podcast then please note our next Wednesday Evening Zoom meeting will take place on 10th February at 19.30 GMT.  The link will be published in the blog and the notes to the podcast for that week.

Leszek Kołakowski (Source)

A few weeks ago I pointed readers of this blog to what seems to me to be a fine essay by Timothy Garton Ash called The Future of Liberalism. In this essay he writes:

In the half-jesting spirit of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski’s celebrated 1978 essay “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist,” I propose that we should be conservative-socialist-liberals.

Not surprisingly, Ash’s words sent me back to my bookshelves to read Kołakowski’s essay again. It’s to be found in the collection of pieces called Modernity on Endless Trial (University of Chicago Press, 1990) — and I thoroughly recommend getting hold of a copy, or indeed anything by Kołakowski. Having reflected on it for the past month it strikes me as worth explicitly encouraging you to read it (as well as, indeed, Ash’s essay) because it articulates well — and incredibly briefly — not simply the general political-theological place I seem to be in at the moment but, perhaps more importantly, the general political-theological place in which a regular reader of this blog might also find themselves . . . But, in all cases it’s worth a few moments of anyone’s time.  

—o0o—

“Motto: “Please step forward to the rear!” This is an approximate translation of a request I once heard on a tram-car in Warsaw. I propose it as a slogan for the mighty International that will never exist.

A Conservative Believes:

• That in human life there never have been and never will be improvements that are not paid for with deteriorations and evils; thus, in considering each project of reform and amelioration, its price has to be assessed. Put another way, innumerable evils are compatible (i.e. we can suffer them comprehensively and simultaneously); but many goods limit or cancel each other, and therefore we will never enjoy them fully at the same time. A society in which there is no equality and no liberty of any kind is perfectly possible, yet a social order combining total equality and freedom is not. The same applies to the compatibility of planning and the principle of autonomy, to security and technical progress. Put yet another way, there is no happy ending in human history.

• That we do not know the extent to which various traditional forms of social life–families, rituals, nations, religious communities—are indispensable if life in a society is to be tolerable or even possible. There are no grounds for believing that when we destroy these forms, or brand them as irrational, we increase the chance of happiness, peace, security, or freedom. We have no certain knowledge of what might occur if, for example, the monogamous family was abrogated, or if the time-honored custom of burying the dead were to give way to the rational recycling of corpses for industrial purposes. But we would do well to expect the worst.

• That the idée fixe of the Enlightenment—that envy, vanity, greed, and aggression are all caused by the deficiencies of social institutions and that they will be swept away once these institutions are reformed—is not only utterly incredible and contrary to all experience, but is highly dangerous. How on earth did all these institutions arise if they were so contrary to the true nature of man? To hope that we can institutionalize brotherhood, love, and altruism is already to have a reliable blueprint for despotism.

 A Liberal Believes:

• That the ancient idea that the purpose of the State is security still remains valid. It remains valid even if the notion of “security” is expanded to include not only the protection of persons and property by means of the law, but also various provisions of insurance: that people should not starve if they are jobless; that the poor should not be condemned to die through lack of medical help; that children should have free access to education—all these are also part of security. Yet security should never be confused with liberty. The State does not guarantee freedom by action and by regulating various areas of life, but by doing nothing. In fact security can be expanded only at the expense of liberty. In any event, to make people happy is not the function of the State.

• That human communities are threatened not only by stagnation but also by degradation when they are so organized that there is no longer room for individual initiative and inventiveness. The collective suicide of mankind is conceivable, but a permanent human ant-heap is not, for the simple reason that we are not ants.

• That it is highly improbable that a society in which all forms of competitiveness have been done away with would continue to have the necessary stimuli for creativity and progress. More equality is not an end in itself, but only a means. In other words, there is no point to the struggle for more equality if it results only in the leveling down off those who are better off, and not in the raising up of the underprivileged. Perfect equality is a self-defeating ideal.

 A Socialist Believes:

• That societies in which the pursuit of profit is the sole regulator of the productive system are threatened with as grievous—perhaps more grievous—catastrophes as are societies in which the profit motive has been entirely eliminated from the production-regulating forces. There are good reasons why freedom of economic activity should be limited for the sake of security, and why money should not automatically produce more money. But the limitation of freedom should be called precisely that, and should not be called a higher form of freedom.

• That it is absurd and hypocritical to conclude that, simply because a perfect, conflict-less society is impossible, every existing form of inequality is inevitable and all ways of profit-making justified. The kind of conservative anthropological pessimism which led to the astonishing belief that a progressive income tax was an inhuman abomination is just as suspect as the kind of historical optimism on which the Gulag Archipelago was based.

• That the tendency to subject the economy to important social controls should be encouraged, even though the price to be paid is an increase in bureaucracy. Such controls, however, must be exercised within representative democracy. Thus it is essential to plan institutions that counteract the menace to freedom which is produced by the growth of these very controls.

So far as I can see, this set of regulative ideas is not self-contradictory. And therefore it is possible to be a conservative-liberal-socialist. This is equivalent to saying that those three particular designations are no longer mutually exclusive options.

As for the great and powerful International which I mentioned at the outset—it will never exist, because it cannot promise people that they will be happy.

Modernity on Endless Trial (University of Chicago Press, 1990)

The Nativity at Night (c. 1490) by Geertgen tot Sint Jans

You can listen to a recording/podcast of this piece by clicking on this link

Today is Christmas Day when we remember another day, two thousand years ago, on which many Christians (but not all) believe the only definitive solution to a perennial human question was given. Put in its simplest form, that question asks how our everyday world of individual, finite things, including ourselves, relates to the whole or, indeed, whether there is anything that can meaningfully be called the whole? As the Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák (1933-2020) wrote, this question raises 

“a problem with which much earlier Christian thought struggled as it sought to affirm both the awesome majesty of God, so utterly transcendent that his name cannot even be spoken, and his intimate presence among us, breaking bread and walking alongside us to Emmanus” (Erazim Kohák, “Jan Patocka: Philosophy and Selected Writings”, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 132). 

Of course, the figure Kohák mentions, who broke bread and walked alongside us to Emmaus is Jesus, whose traditional birthday we are celebrating today. 

Now, for the orthodox, believing Christian, the solution to the problem is given in the birth of Jesus because, for them, that is the moment of the “incarnation of God” when, according to the famous verse in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, the Word (logos), i.e. God, “was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, AV). What the underlying Greek actually strikingly suggests is that the Word “became flesh and pitched a tent among us” (trans. David Bentley Hart). This dwelling, or tent-pitching, among us is why Jesus is also sometimes called, as he is in the Gospel of Matthew, “Emmanuel”, or “God with us” (Matthew 1:23). 

However, during the first four centuries following Jesus’ birth these beautiful, rich, allusive, mytho-poetic stories were slowly changed into the reified, immovable foundations upon which was to be built the Christian Church’s technocratic solution to the problem, namely, the doctrine of the Trinity. In this doctrine the individual human Jesus is, somehow, now to be understood as being the Whole, or God himself, “very God of very God” as the Nicene Creed puts it. By the same token the Whole, or God is, somehow, now to be understood as being also the individual human Jesus. Following Jesus’ death and putative resurrection and ascension back into the Godhead, the third person in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, also comes, somehow, to be understood as being the Whole, or God, still pitching his tent among us.  

But, as many people over the centuries have pointed out, — including my own Unitarian forebears, many of whom lost their lives and liberties by challenging this doctrine — although the Trinity may be presented by the Christian Church as being the solution to the problem of how our everyday world of individual, finite things, including ourselves, relates to the whole, it really doesn’t provide a solution at all but, instead, merely restates the problem in what has always been a most confusing and, frankly, obfuscatory way. 

As we know, despite many brave protests against this doctrinal, technocratic solution, within the Christian tradition as a whole, the doctrine of the Trinity prevailed and, in consequence, Christianity has, for some sixteen-hundred years, inevitably continued to look at the Christmas stories as being a narrative (and also often also pictorial) representation of what it thought was the solution to the problem.   

However, as we all know, in Europe since the mid-nineteenth century, firm belief in Christianity, especially in its doctrinal, Trinitarian forms, has considerably waned in the population as a whole. Given this, it might have been thought, even hoped, that this would mean the question of how our everyday world of individual, finite things relates to the whole, could, and would, be asked anew. But we can see that, generally speaking, this is not what occurred. As Kohák observes: 

“Having lost the solution, which Christian thought expressed in the doctrine of the Trinity, we have lost sight of the problem” (ibid, pp. 132-133).

Kohák makes this point in his philosophical biography of his fellow Czech philosopher Jan Patočka (1907-1977) who is now generally regarded as one of the most important central European philosophers of the 20th century. Kohák is interested in him because, although Patočka was a secular, atheistically inclined thinker who rejected the Christian solution, he did not, at the same time, also reject the problem it thought it had solved. Patočka was able to acknowledge that with the loss of this Christian solution humankind risked losing its “distinctive ability to raise the problem of the meaning of the whole amid its preoccupation with particulars, giving up the responsibility of the care of the soul in favour of a greed for things” (ibid, p. 133). 

Patočka’s philosophical work remains important because in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century it has become clear that the world’s dominant, modern, post-Christendom, individualistic, consumerist, neoliberal culture is one that has given up the responsibility of the care of the soul in favour of a greed for things and it has become fatally preoccupied with particulars rather than the whole. Consequently, the problem of our individual relationship with the whole (howsoever the whole is conceived) has, today, become incredibly difficult to raise and explore vitally and meaningfully in the public, civic sphere. That this is so can be seen in our current inability to articulate any kind of shared national, let alone global, approach to how we should best respond to the challenges posed by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the ever-increasing climate emergency.

All in all, it is clear to me that, somehow, we need to find some kind of non-technical, moving and poetic way to get the question of our individual relationship with the whole plainly back into view within our culture so that people can intuit again that there exists a real and extremely pressing problem which needs urgently to be addressed. Patočka’s work is important because he was a person who, in a sustained and vital fashion, attempt to ask, and tentatively answer, the question anew for our own age. 

This brief piece is not the place to explore Patočka’s questions and lines of research, but reading him over the last few months of 2020 encourages me to suggest that, at this darkest time of the year, it remains possible for us to read the Christmas stories, not as picturing the solution to the problem of how our everyday world of individual, finite things, including ourselves, relates to the whole, but rather as stories which help us raise the question anew. 

It makes me as what might happen to our own and our wider culture’s thinking were we able to find a modern, scientifically literate but still religious, mytho-poetic way to stand at the crib-side of the baby Jesus this Christmas morning and, with a clean heart and full belief (pathos), look deeply into the shining eyes of this representative, new-born child as-if it were, somehow, speaking to us also of God, the Whole? Were we able to do that again, even if only for a fleeting moment, would we not be forced, like his mother Mary, to ponder (Luke 2:19) how on earth this could be so, and to ask again, how does our everyday world of individual, finite things, including ourselves and this child, relate to the whole? 

Remember, like Mary and Jan Patočka, we can accept this problem and ask the question without necessarily accepting the ancient Christian solution. 

But what we cannot do is to allow ourselves ever again to lose sight of the problem and of the need, again and again, to ask the question of how it might best be solved in our own times. The future of our species, and indeed huge swathes of life on our planet, depends on the solutions we come to propose and then truly live by. 

The nativity scene in the Cambridge Unitarian Church

A podcast/recording of this piece can be found by clicking this link

The four-and-a-half century old Unitarian tradition to which I belong has, at times, consciously been able to understand itself as attempting to be a ‘church of the free spirit’ and we, as individual people, have seen ourselves as attempting to become brothers and sisters of the free spirit. For example, the founder of the modern Religious Society of Czech Unitarians, Norbert Fabián Čapek (1870–1942) said of it’s building in Prague, 8 Karlova Street:

‘The house is of great historical value. In 1404 it was occupied by a sort of liberal Christian body. They called themselves “Brethren & Sisters of the Free Spirit.” They were accused of laying more stress on a Christian life than articles of faith. They believed more in the “inner light” than the letter of the Bible. Further they did not believe in the Trinity and were accused of pantheistic tendencies. I regard these people as the first Czech Unitarians’ (Norbert Fabián C̆apek: A Spiritual Journey by Richard Henry, Beacon Press, 1999, pp. 195-6).

In these disorientating and unhealthy times this identification as a church, or simply a brother and sisterhood of the free spirit, is something to which I often wish we could consciously return because I think it may help us find a new way forward into a certain kind of genuinely healthy, this-worldly living, the possibility of which this podcast will conclude.

But as a liberal religious tr adition we have rarely articulated, either to ourselves or to others, any relatively clear, basic process through which a person needs to go in order to become a genuinely free spirit.

Well, in this second podcast during the season Advent I want to remind you that the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) offered us one such process, a process which comes in four phases.

We start with (i) the comfort found at the family hearth. Drawing on Nietzsche’s book, ‘Human, All Too-Human’ (subtitled ‘A Book For Free Spirits’) the philosopher Gordon Bearn notes that:

‘Those who will become free spirits do not begin by being sick, but by being healthy, they are in fact bound by “what fetters fastest”: by their dutiful reverence for their elders, their country, their teachers, and for “the holy place where they learned to worship”. They are fettered by all those ideals that warm one to the family hearth. These ideals are normally taken to be of the highest value, and so Nietzsche can write of those who will be free spirits that “their highest moments themselves will fetter them the fastest, lay upon them the most enduring obligations”’ (Gordon Bearn: “Waking to Wonder”, SUNY Press, 1997, p.4).

Advent and Christmas is a season full of many things we have felt to have been of the highest value and which have been celebrated before the family hearth or its modern equivalents, the gas or electric fire. This hearth is the holy place where many of us first learnt to worship, a place where God, or at least the Good, was perceived to be with us. (“God with us” is, by the way, the meaning of the Hebrew title “Emmanuel” that is given to Jesus and most memorably repeated in the well-known carol “O come, O come, Emmanuel.”) Before this hearth, family and friends still gather to exchange gifts, drink, and to eat in convivial ways at the darkest time of the year and, for many of us, Advent and Christmas has been one of our life’s ‘highest moments’ (especially when we were children). This is why, of course, it ‘fetters us the fastest’, that is to say, keeps us captive, and lays upon us an enduring obligation not to let this traditional way of believing and doing things go.

But so much has happened in our own lives and culture over the last two centuries which (ii) has ensured we, our hearths and our holy festival, have succumbed to the sickness of nihilism in which there has been a ‘hateful assault on everything that had seemed so comforting.’ It comes upon most of us at one time or another that this festival is now empty — merely pasteboard and fillagree. The natural sciences and philosophy have quietly been at work persuading many (if not most) of us that the God/gods of old are mere illusions; historical-critical research has persuaded us that the Christmas stories contain, not neutral, objective, historical facts but are, instead, creative, uneven and inconsistent human myths and legends; the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism and, more recently, neoliberalism, have created pressures that have contributed greatly to the fracturing of extended family networks and have simultaneously turned the equal and free-exchange of modest gifts into a multi-billion pound industry concerned, not with exchange, but only with unequal competition for market share and profit; also much of the food and drink we consume in this season has been effected in the same way and, today, we share together not so much the fruits of local fields tended by local farmers but the products of globalised and highly mechanised factory farms whose workers and livestock are utterly unknown to us and about whose welfare we often care little or nothing. All in all, if you are anything like me, these things (and many more besides) have often meant that I have expended most of my energy, not in preparing happily for Christmas, but in warding it off until the very last minute when, utterly exhausted by the defensive effort, I have finally given in to the pressure and spent the twenty-four hours of Christmas Day forced to pretend that all is well and that the old hearth burns as brightly, warmly and meaningfully as it once did.

Sometimes it has felt as if this sickness were going to be one unto death but a real hope, an educated hope (docta spes), has always remained alive deep in my being that there might, just, be a way to move beyond this awful state of affairs to a much better state of being. Thanks to Nietzsche, I have discovered that, if a person is able to survive the long, deep and painful nihilistic assault then, miracle of miracles, it becomes possible (iii) to for us to begin to convalesce. This period of convalescence can be divided into two.

The first convalescence is a cool one, one in which Nietzsche suggests that ‘the convalescent lives without any love but also without any hatred. The cooler convalescent — neither dead nor alive — floats above the earth.’ This seems to me to describe well the moments I’m sure we have all felt when we have been able to detach ourselves from the whole sorry show and begin to look at the season as if from a great height. As Bearn says, in this state:

‘Everything is small. Everything is flat. Nothing matters. This is the mood equally of a scientist sure ours is a world of valueless facts and of those literary characters who float through a world from which they have been estranged and which they look on with a species of tender contempt’ (Bearn, p. 8).

I can certainly remember many years of my life spent in this period of cool convalescence in which I have walked through shops and Christmas markets, through family and church gatherings, feeling utterly detached, looking on everything with no love nor any hatred but, instead, with a species of tender contempt. One way of putting this is to say I began to experience Advent and Christmas as if I were a detached, knowing, cynical historian, sociologist and/or anthropologist, scientist even.

However, though it is absolutely necessary to pass through this period of cool convalescence, it is obvious that it can hardly bring full health because, although there is sunlight to be seen — it’s  a kind of clear, enlightening light — it is the kind of light found only in the highest and coldest altitudes of detachment. After a while it becomes apparent that if we wish to continue convalescing (and not merely catch one’s death of cold) we must come back to earth ‘where the sun warms.’ Here’s how Niezsche beautifully puts this return to earth in ‘Human, All-Too Human’:

‘It again grows warmer around him, yellower, as it were; feeling and feeling for others acquire depth, warm breezes of all kinds blow across him. It seems to him as if his eyes are only now open to what is near. He is astonished and sits silent: where had he been? These near and nearest things: how changed they seem! what bloom and magic they have acquired!’ (‘Human, All-Too Human’, Preface, par. 5, quoted in Bearn, p. 8).

Coming back down to earth in this second, warmer, period of convalescence it becomes possible for us to see and feel amidst the shops and Christmas markets and in family and church gatherings, ‘spots of [warming] sunlight’ in which begin to appear the ‘bloom and magic of things that are nearest’ (Bearn, p. 14) things that, before, had been obscured from our sight. Warmed in these occasional spots of sunlight our eyes begin to open, and we begin to see so many people near at hand trying their hardest to be good, kind and decent human beings despite being cast adrift amidst the horrible pasteboard and fillagree that makes up so much of the modern, neoliberal world.

And, lastly, it is these periods of convalescence which gift us with a genuine hope of, at some point, being able to enter into (iv) the final great health in which, as Bearn says, the ‘spirit freed from the tradition that seeks metaphysical comforts is surprised by a new happiness and a new love for all that is delicate. The great health is a life attuned to what is near’.

This attitude is seen most clearly expressed in the epigraph by one of our own Unitarian tradition’s great figures, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), that Nietzsche chose to grace the first edition of his ‘Gay Science’:

‘To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine’ (Emerson: History).

So, to draw to a close, I can now turn to the traditional Christian focus of the Advent and Christmas season, namely, the Christ-child, the baby Jesus.

From the foregoing I hope you can see that for Nietzsche ‘the great health’ can only come after we have gone through, and slowly recovered and convalesced from, the sickness of nihilism. At that point we are finally able to accept ‘the value of this world, the earth, of the little things that are nearest to us’ and to begin to live ‘as neighbour to precisely the things that the metaphysical tradition only found valuable as indictors of another metaphysical world’ (Bearn, p. 32).

But, alas, most of us are aware that the Christ-child spoken of in orthodox, believing, Christian circles remains firmly an ‘indictor of another metaphysical world’ and this means that a genuine free spirit cannot, with a truly clean heart and full belief (or pathos), celebrate Advent and Christmas in these circles. The Christmas Carol service, and the traditional services held at midnight on Christmas Eve and on Christmas morn, undeniably beautiful though they often are, remain for many of us highly conflicted and deeply uncomfortable events.   

But all is not lost for the aspiring Nietzschean free spirit because, thanks to their sickness and their consequent cool and then warm kinds of convalescence, they can now begin to see that the answers to the meaning of life that traditional Christianity has sought for two millennia in another world and its supernatural Christ-child are, in truth, only to be found in the bloom and magic of the things near and nearest to us in this world, most notably and memorably in every new born human child. It is precisely this insight that inspired the twentieth century Unitarian minister and hymn-writer John Andrew Storey (1935-1997) to write a hymn we often sing in our churches during this season. It is called ‘The Universal Incarnation’:

Around the crib all peoples throng

In honour of the Christ-child’s birth,

And raise again the ancient song:

‘Goodwill to all, and peace on earth.’

But not alone on Christmas morn

Was God made one with humankind:

Each time a girl or boy is born,

Incarnate deity we find.

This Christmastide let us rejoice

And celebrate our human worth,

Proclaiming with united voice

The miracle of every birth.

Round every crib all people throng

To honour God in each new birth,

And raise again the ancient song:

‘Goodwill to all, and peace on earth.’

Today I find cannot sing this carol without noticing how it brings me exactly the kind of feelings Nietzsche describes in ‘Human, All-Too Human’: Everything grows warmer around me, yellower, as it were; feeling and feeling for others acquire depth, warm breezes of all kinds blow across me. It seems to me as if my eyes are only now open to what is near. I am astonished and sit silent: where had I been? These near and nearest things: how changed they seem! what bloom and magic they have acquired! 

A few photos from a late afternoon, autumn walk along the River Cam into the Paradise Local Nature Reserve

All photos taken with a Fuji X100F

Just click on a photo to enlarge 

The altar table at the east end of the Cambridge Unitarian Church

A podcast of this piece can be found by clicking on this link 

From my childhood on, one of the great pleasures in life has been to visit ruins of any kind, but the ones which have brought me the greatest pleasure are religious ones, especially those of chapels, churches, the great abbeys and priories. 

Along with the poet Peter Levi, they have always caused me to “consider what these ruins are, / desolate spirits in the air / singing in their stone languages / what religion is not and is”. 

As I have sat in their “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” (Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXIII) it is obvious that they no longer function in the way their builders and original users once thought they should and that, therefore, in one way, they may be considered religiously dead. 

But is this true? Thanks to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Romantics, it is possible to see the ruination of these buildings, not only as a continuation of their original religious function, but as a nuanced, heightening and broadening of it. Like the human soul spoken of by the poet Edmund Waller (1606–1687), though “batter’d and decay’d” they are now more able to let “in new light through chinks that time has made”. (“Of the Last Verses in the Book”) In short, in the clear, open spaces delineated by these ruins — with their roots in the good dark earth, now open to the bright sky and which still speak of the gods and mortality (cf. Heidegger’s “fourfold”) — the Romantics found themselves suddenly able to understand creation and encounter the divine and the sacred anew in the form of Nature. Along with Spinoza, who coined the memorable phrase “deus sive nature” — God or Nature — the Romantics attempted (and for some of us succeeded) to divinise the natural and naturalise the divine, God was nature and Nature was God. As the historian Frederick C. Beiser notes, following Spinoza’s dictum meant that “a scientist, who professed the most radical naturalism, could still be religious; and a pastor, who confessed the deepest personal faith in God, could still be a naturalist” (Frederick C. Beiser, “After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840-1900”, Princeton University Press, pp. 4-7). Anyway, thanks to this it has become possible for someone like me to feel that these ecclesiastical buildings in their ruined state entered into a new and different kind of religious fullness. 

These memories and thoughts have been very much in mind during the COVID-19 pandemic because the church where I am the minister has been closed since March 2020. As a student of religious history, I am acutely aware that a sudden closing of a church during a time of significant political and social turmoil has often been the prelude to a building’s abandonment and eventual ruination. I say “abandonment” but, although this is true at the moment for the vast majority of the regular congregation, because my wife and I live next door to the church, and my study in which I wrote and am recording this piece is attached to the church itself, I have daily been haunting the nearly always empty buildings for some eight months now. Inevitably, as I walk through the equivalent of its own bare, but not yet ruined, choirs, I find myself considering once again, though now literally very close to home, what this building is, this desolate spirit singing in its stone languages what religion is not and is?

It continues to strike me that the idea of openness lies at the heart of it all and this is true whether that openness is spoken of in terms of actual skies or to a sense of how the transcendent can break into and illuminate the darkness of our earth and help us meaningfully still to speak of the gods and our mortality. Does a religious building have to fall into decay in order for this openness to be manifested or displayed by it? 

I don’t think so and, to illustrate this, I can turn to the strange case of the altar-like, communion table situated in the fine classical apse at the east end of the Cambridge Unitarian Church. If you follow the link to the blog in the notes to this podcast you’ll be able to see a photograph of this arrangement. 

Since becoming the minister here in 2000 I have continued to use the table in exactly the same way it has always been used; then, as now, it has upon it flowers and two candles and, following the collection, the small collection bag is put there as well. It is important also to know that since the church was built in 1927 no cross has ever been placed upon it. 

Now, I’ve been involved with churches in one way or another for my entire life — I was born an Anglican and at one point nearly began the process of training for its priesthood — so, when I first saw this table, it’s placement, and how it was being used, I took it to be, quite unproblematically, an altar. Indeed, even the light switches in the vestibule for turning on the lights above it bore, and still bear, a little label upon which you can find, quaintly misspelled, the word “alter” (sic).

But one Sunday, only a week or so into my ministry, in the presence of a very elderly and senior member of the congregation (who'd joined in the mind-1940s), I had occasion to refer to this table as an altar. He fairly bit my head off and, in no uncertain terms, informed me that it “was not an altar but the table for the flowers”.

His vehement, even angry, response led me to wonder why on earth a dissenting, liberal Protestant church such as this, re-founded in only 1904 (although its history goes back into the eighteenth-century), and with bespoke buildings dating from 1923 (the hall) and 1927 (the church), had decided to place an altar table in, what is for us a very unusual and controversial, Catholic pre-Vatican II position, and then never to place upon it a cross or to use it as an actual communion table? I was suddenly struck by how odd this was in a Unitarian context.  

A couple of years later (perhaps 2003/4) we were visited by an architectural historian, alas I do not know their name, who was researching the work of the architect of this building, Ronald Potter Jones (1876-1965). Given my earlier experience I asked the historian why he thought this   Unitarian congregation had decided to commission and build a church with what looks so much like a conventional, high altar? His answer was as follows. 

Following the end of the First World War many liberal churches were literally reeling with shock and disappointment for, not only had they lost many members in the conflict (as had, of course, all churches) but also their liberal, optimistic, late-nineteenth century theology which (in the language of the time) expressed a belief in “the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the progress of mankind onward and upward forever”, had begun to appear to them and others as no more than a mere whistling in the wind. It was a time when Matthew Arnold’s “sea of faith” could be seen to have withdrawn even further than its lows of the 1860s, and the “death of God”, first publicly proclaimed by Nietzsche in 1882, had become ever more plausible to more and more people. However, despite this, it is in 1919 that we first  read of the Unitarian congregation’s plans to build a hall and church on Emmanuel Road.

The historian suggested that the trauma of the war led to a number of congregations, like Cambridge, to decide to build churches which, architecturally speaking, deliberately harked back to safer, more conservative and apparently secure times. At their most ineffective, these buildings enabled a congregation merely to pretend their outdated theology wasn’t in real trouble, and that their liberal God was not dead and still dwelt on the altars in their holy places. However, at their most effective, they gave a congregation some real time and breathing space slowly to work through, and come to terms with, both the withdrawal of the “sea of faith” and the shocking death of their liberal God.

Over the intervening years this interpretation has encouraged me, now and then, to look a little closer at the history of the congregation I have slowly discovered that, from the very start, a powerful tension was always being expressed in and through our altar-table. 

It turns out that between between 1908 and 1914, the influential founding figures of this congregation who drove the project to build this hall and church actively tried to employ a controversial Unitarian minister called the Revd J. M. Lloyd Thomas who, in 1907, had published a book called “A Free Catholic Church”. In such a church Thomas believed, would “ultimately be found an Ideal which, if courageously worked out, will transcend or reconcile the oppositions not merely of Anglicanism and Dissent, but of Romanism and Protestantism” (p. 3). In short, Thomas desired the development of a church tradition which could combine in some fashion, Catholic (or Anglo-Catholic) liturgy and practice with the kind of liberal, rational, non-doctrinal approach to belief and theology favoured by liberal Protestants, including the Unitarians. However, it proved impossible to persuade Thomas to leave his congregation in Nottingham and so, instead, they eventually obtained the services of Revd Edward William Lummis from Leicester, Great Meeting there, who shared Thomas’ Free Catholic position and who stayed, off and on, until the start of the First World War. 

What is important to see here is that their protracted attempt to hire someone like Thomas strongly indicates that the founders of this congregation were predisposed to building a church with a high altar dedicated in some fashion to a liberal God who would “transcend or reconcile the oppositions not merely of Anglicanism and Dissent, but of Romanism and Protestantism.” In an ancient university town such as Cambridge which then, as now, values both the practices of traditional religion and the active seeking of new light and truth, such a mix, were it possible to concoct, would have been a highly attractive proposition.   

But, as we know, in 1914 the First World War begins and the minute books clearly reveal that the congregation struggled greatly during this time, not least of all because its leading figure and inspiration, Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick John Marrian Stratton DSO OBE TD DL FRS PRAS (1881–1960) (and who later became Professor of Astrophysics here at the University of Cambridge between 1928 and 1947) he  left to join the fighting in France with the British Expeditionary Force. By July 1919 Stratton is finally back from the war and this seems to be the immediate trigger for the aforementioned plans to build a church with an altar table at the east end, a project which comes to final completion in 1927.

I don’t think it is too much of a stretch of the imagination to say that, following the unimaginable horrors of the First World War experienced by Stratton and his generation, our altar table powerfully encoded for us the trauma and paradox of twentieth- and now twenty-first century liberal Christianity; a trauma that played out in, on the one hand, in a strong desire to continue to believe in the reality of a transcendent, good, loving and just God and to raise up for him an altar where one could go, like the Psalmist, with exceeding joy to give praise with the harp and, on the other, the need to raise up an empty, memorial table, a grave even, upon which to place flowers of remembrance to acknowledge the death and absence of the very same God.

It has become apparent to me that since those traumatic post-First World War days the temptation to collapse this paradox to one of its poles has always been present in this local community. Even in my own, short, twenty-year ministry here, I have seen some members continue vehemently to insist it should be seen as an altar to a living, liberal Christian God, whilst others have continued vehemently to insist that, because God is dead, it is a simply a table upon which to place flowers, candles and the collection. The basic, and to me false, binary question being asked all the time is: are we still some kind of liberal Christian church or, instead, simply an association of free-thinking humanists/atheists? 

But, as I see it, our altar-table should continue to express the paradox. This is because, theologically speaking, when the paradox is consciously maintained, our altar-table seems to me to be working just like the ruined religious buildings with which I began this podcast. It offers us a unique open, clearing at the heart of our building because, at the same time as it’s clearly a ruin of an old liberal Christianity — for following the violent horrors of the twentieth- and twenty-first century the God of liberal Christianity is assuredly dead — it is precisely this same ruin which now helps us to notice and frame a new kind of openness to that which transcends us — to the possibility of the appearance of a new God suitable to our own, much more sceptical and disbelieving age. In short, when held up as the paradox it is, our altar-table is for me a beautiful, ruinous, open clearing in our midst which encourages us freely to re-ask and re-answer, again and again, the perennial question of “what religion is not and is”. 

Personally, I consider myself to be fortunate that my own species of Christian a/theism allows me to approach this unique altar-table without ever feeling the need to collapse it’s foundational paradox because before it, like the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), I come before it each day to “prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god” (Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger, 1966). And, like the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), I stand “in the presence of God who makes us live in the world without the God-hypothesis” (“Letters and Papers from Prison”, SCM, London 1971, p. 360). For this challenging gift I daily give hearty thanks.

To conclude. For various good reasons I do not think that the current pandemic is the first step to the abandonment and eventual ruination of our present buildings. But, even as I say this, these reflections on our altar-table helps me sense that, whenever inevitable ruination does come — be it in the next few years or a few centuries hence — it will not necessarily spell the end of the living religious significance of our building but, instead, may well “open up access to [even] richer and more relevant ways for us to understand creation and for us to encounter the divine and the sacred.” (Mark W. Wrathall’s introduction to “Religion after Metaphysics”, Cambridge University Press 2003 p. 1). But in the meantime, this opening is with us in the paradoxical clearing that is our altar-table.

—o0o—

WEDNESDAY EVENING CONVERSATIONS

If you would like to join a conversation about this or any other edition of this podcast then please note that our next Wednesday Evening Zoom meeting will take place on 2nd December at 19.30 GMT. The link will be posted in the notes to the next podcast.

Here’s the timetable:

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19.30 - approx. 20.00: Streaming of the latest edition of "Making Footprints Not Blueprints"

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21:00: Event ends 

Those of you who have already listened to the podcast and who only wish to join in the conversation are invited to login to the meeting at about 19.55.

A podcast of this piece can be found by clicking on this link 

I begin this podcast containing a few thoughts related to Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day with a short poem read by Susanna Brown called, “For the Unknown Enemy”, written by the American poet and pacifist William Edgar Stafford (1914-1993):

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. 

(William Stafford: “The Way It Is—New & Selected Poems”, Graywolf Press, 1998, p. 217)

—o0o—

At this time of year when the nation remembers some — and it has only ever been some — of the allied soldiers who were killed in the Two World Wars and many conflicts since, I often turn to Stafford’s poem because in it, heeding the call of Jesus to love our enemies, Stafford explicitly calls upon us also to remember those who were and, perhaps, still are, our enemies. It’s a poem which helps us think about our common humanity even as we find ourselves in a national moment which foregrounds, as Rabbie Burns memorably wrote, “Man’s inhumanity to man” that “Makes countless thousands mourn!” (Robert Burns: “Man was made to mourn: A Dirge”, 1784).   

To many people the power of Stafford’s poem can seem to be reliant upon the reader believing it is possible for us, even if only for a moment, to stand outside, or at least very high above, our everyday, local world of minute particulars so as to see something eternal, trustworthy and good which our culture has liked to believe must be “universal” — i.e. that which, behind the scenes, unifies our world despite its many real, or perhaps, only imagined, divisions. 

However, we live in an age and culture where all appeals to a transcendental universal — whether it is called ‘the Good’ or ‘God’ — no longer have the persuasive, energising power they once had. We now doubt, with great and justifiable doubt, that ‘the Good’ or ‘God’ exists, or ever existed. We also now live in a world which our natural sciences are strongly suggesting is not dependent upon the existence of something supernatural, static and eternal like ‘the Good’ or ‘God’ but in a pluralistic universe that is always-already constantly in motion, intra-active and indeterminate. Not surprisingly these changes in our basic world-view might seem terminally to undercut the universalist tenor of Stafford’s poem leaving it as a mere whistling in the wind. Poignant and beautiful, yes; but true? No.

However, or so it seems to me, in order meaningfully to reconnect with the energising power of Stafford’s vision and others like it, all we need to abandon is the idea that those things we liked to call universal, such as ‘God’ or ‘the Good’, were ever existent things at all. A certain kind of examination of the ideal or idea of the universal suggests that it might better be thought of as being nothing (a no-thing), not any thing at all but rather that which helps us talk about, and draw certain conclusions concerning how our life ought to be lived. The ideal or idea in this understanding is, then, a kind of moving, groundless ground which makes this, and perhaps all, conversation possible. 

Surprisingly, and importantly I think, this rather more fluid, processual and conversational way of understanding the idea or ideal doesn’t rule out of play a poetic, rhetorical appeal to ‘God’ or ‘the Good’, even though it becomes an appeal to a ‘God’ quite unlike that envisaged within the theistic traditions or ‘the Good’ envisaged by the Platonic traditions .

To show you what I mean I need briefly to return to the naturalistic, even atheistic, definition of God proposed by the philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952). In his influential short book from 1934 called “A Common Faith” he wrote: 

“We are in the presence neither of ideals completely embodied in existence nor yet of ideals that are merely rootless ideals, fantasies or utopias. For there are forces in nature and society that generate and support the ideals. They are further unified by the action that gives them coherence and solidarity. It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name ‘God’. I would not insist that the name must be given” (John Dewey: A Common Faith, 2nd ed., Yale University Press, 2013, p. 47).

At least as I now read it, Stafford’s poem is an encouragement to, and a place where we can, start to bring together the ideal and actual in active relation and so set going anew in our own doubtful and sceptical time the slow, human process of trying to build a better world for all, for friend and enemy alike.

On the one hand the ideal is that friend and enemy are, in important and recognisable respects, fundamentally the same and that all people contain ‘the Good’ no matter how hidden from us it may be. It’s an ideal which for us finds its most iconic form in Jesus’ summation of the law and the prophets (Mark 12:28–34), namely, that before anything else, we are called upon to love God (or ‘the Good’) and our neighbour (which includes our enemy) out of our whole heart, soul, reason and strength. As Jesus says,  “There is not another commandment greater than these.”

On the other hand, Stafford’s actual includes the recognition that, in other important and fundamental ways, we and our enemy were not, nor ever could be, exactly the same — identical and indistinguishable from each other. The truth of this is shown by the fact that we can only begin to bridge the differences that exists between us when, through the power of imagination, we find the courage to let our minds escape and join our enemy in their evening songs and their party in the sunny park on the following day as if we were ourselves, in fact, the enemy. We also know, as did Stafford, that our wholly contingent, different, general background contexts, upbringings, experiences and understandings about how the world is (or should or shouldn’t be) are often very different even from those of our friends, let alone our enemies. Yes, we and our enemy do all sing songs in the evening and, on the day after, under a common new sky and sun we are all inclined to carry the baby to the park for a party. But let’s be absolutely clear about this, we know full well that our songs could be as different from each other as is the ‘Internationale’ from the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, and our toasts at the party could be as different in hope, content and intent from those raised to Socialism on the one hand, or to Fascism on the other.

In Stafford’s poem the ideal and the actual are brought together and, at the place and in the moment of their meeting — such as when we read the poem — we find that, although we are clearly in the presence of an ideal which is not yet completely embodied in existence, we do find that the ideal of ‘the Good’ (or ‘God’) being in everyone is not merely a rootless ideal, fantasy or utopia because around and within us we can also sence forces at work in nature and society which can generate and support this ideal. We also know from experience that this ideal can further be unified by all the conversations and actions we make which give it the chance of achieving ever greater coherence and solidarity. As I say this, remember it is only the active relation — this nothing, this no-thing — between ideal and actual to which Dewey, and I, would give the name ‘God’ (or ‘the Good’) even though he, and I, no longer insist that these names must be given. 

The intention of Stafford’s poem is not, therefore, to make a claim that the ideal of ‘the Good’ (or ‘God’) is a universal reality, and so something which can objectively be found in our enemy, no matter how hidden. Instead, his poem is simply aiming to get the relationship between the ideal and the actual started in the heads, hearts and, thence the hands, of his readers. Once this relationship, this conversation, has started, then, and only then, can the ideal begin, more and more, to connect with the forces existent in nature and society which can generate and further support the ideal and so, by degrees, stand a chance of becoming ever more actual and concrete in our everyday world.

What we see here is that although we may no longer believe there is such a universal thing as ‘the Good’ (or ‘God’), through our actions and conversations based on an encounter with the ideal there most assuredly come to exist countless, actual, concrete examples of good acts being done by people who have been and are willing to see the good in their enemy. Our primary model for what this looks like on the ground is, of course, quite literally, found in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.   

According to this reading the sacred, human task is, therefore, always to be working conversationally, processually with the forces in nature and society that generate and support our ideals so as to give them ever more coherence and solidarity. As William Blake so perspicaciously observed (Ch. 3) in his long poem mostly, written between 1804–1820, called “Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion”:

“He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. 

General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer; 

For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars, 

And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power: 

The Infinite alone resides in Definite and Determinate Identity.”   

(“The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake”, ed. David V. Erdman, University of California Press, 1982, p. 205).  

And, although many of us may no longer be able to believe that ‘God’ or ‘the Good’ objectively exists behind the scenes somewhere, we can still affirm that good acts (and perhaps acts of god, too) continue to occur. In short, it is possible still to live with full belief and clean heart in the idea and ideal that there is good in our enemy, however unknown, and that, in actual peaceful conversations and acts of peace shown between us, the Good (and perhaps God) can become ever more visible and concrete in our everyday world. 

—o0o—

WEDNESDAY EVENING CONVERSATIONS

If you would like to join a conversation about this or any other edition of this podcast then please note that our next Wednesday Evening Zoom meeting will take place on 18th November at 19.30 GMT. The link will be posted in the notes to the next podcast.

Here’s the timetable:

19.15-19.30: Arrivals/login

19.30 - approx. 20.00: Streaming of this edition of "Making Footprints Not Blueprints"

20.00 - 21.00: Questions to, and conversations with, Andrew James Brown moderated by Courtney Whalen Van de Weyer

21:00: Event ends 

Those of you who have already listened to the podcast and who only wish to join in the conversation are invited to login to the meeting at about 19.55.

A podcast of this piece can be heard by following this link

In recent weeks I’ve been trying to show various ways by which, and why, I think both our own liberal, democratic European and North American culture in general — and its liberal religious, Judaeo-Christian traditions such as the Unitarian one to which I belong — can confidently reconnect with its two major religious and philosophical fountainheads, namely, the human Jesus and Socrates. The need to do this is particularly pressing at the moment because it is clear the wise, reasonable, loving and just ways of proceeding that — at our culture’s best anyway — have both been drawn from, and watered by, these two fountainheads, are now under many, many political, religious, economic, financial, ecological and epidemiological pressures. I should add that the felt intensity of this pressure has been exacerbated by our own neglect in nurturing, protecting and promoting these fountainheads in both the private and civic domains of our culture’s collective life. 

However, I am acutely aware that the temptation in such pressing moments is to try to make any kind of “return to tradition” as thick, or maximal, as possible, in the mistaken belief that such an approach will provide us with the most effective defensive wall.

But, one of the things our culture as a whole values extremely highly is openness to new evidences and insights and the freedom to employ our faculty of critical reason on these same evidences and insights so as to be able to change our minds/opinions when we need to. 

Consequently, one significant problem is that all thick and maximal returns clearly opens up the possibility that we’ll simply end up returning to too many of the old philosophical and religious dogmas and creeds that, within Christianity and Platonism, became wrongly and problematically attached to the names, ideas and ideals of the human Jesus and Socrates. 

In short, which ever way you cut it, it is almost always the case that projects claiming to “return to tradition” — even when they are intended to protect liberal, democratic and rational ideals — are likely to imperil that same freedom and openness and, in the end, only serve to steer our culture in an increasingly illiberal, anti-democratic and anti-rational direction. 

So, to be clear, from where I am standing, any return to tradition which helps restore in a substantive, creedal or doctrinal way, the Christian religion and Platonic philosophy would, ultimately, be a disaster for us. Whatever is required must assuredly remain heretical to its open-minded and open-hearted core.

So, if the project is not about restoring Christianity or Platonism then what is it I am hoping to achieve when I suggest European and North American liberals should, with the utmost seriousness and urgency, consider making a confident return to the human Jesus and Socrates as providing them with their best models of how best to be in the world? 

Well, an important thing to note is to remind you that the project I’ve been outlining over twenty five years of professional ministry, and now, in this first series of podcasts, is an extremely minimalistic one. 

In the first instance, it is important to realise that this minimalist project does not rely, in any fashion, upon belief in God. It doesn’t doctrinally rule out the possibility of traditional belief in God — that would be to close down a still unproven, if rather unlikely, possibility way too soon — but it most assuredly seeks to make it clear that belief in God is neither central, nor necessary, to the project.     

In the second instance when I talk about returning to the traditions of the human Jesus and Socrates it is vitally important to remember it is a return only to two very minimal presentations of them as models worthy of imitation. 

With regard to the human Jesus it is to learn from him a way of being in the world which is concerned to dissolve all of religion’s former supernatural God-talk, superstitious and apocalyptic ideas into a simple, if infinitely challenging, existential, ethical demand to show justice and love to our neighbours, enemies and all creation, right here, and right now. 

With regard to Socrates it is to learn from him a way of being in the world which helps people, through the disciplined employment of the Socratic method, freely to exercise their faculty of critical reason in seeking out new clues and empirical evidence about how the world is (and isn’t) and our current place in it.

That’s it. No more, nor any less.

Naturally, individual people and local communities, to more or less greater degrees, will always make their own images of Jesus and Socrates thicker than these minimal ones. But it is vital to the success of the collective project that these thicker images should never be imposed on everyone, everywhere as being either central, or necessary.

OK. But now I need to offer you an accessible and memorable picture of how these two minimalist strands might be understood to be woven together so as to provide a defence of secular, liberal, democratic European and North American culture and which does this in a fashion that preserves for us an appropriate, sturdy, structured way of remaining open to difference and new evidences and insights.

To do this I want to turn to a short, powerful poem by the contemporary poet, essayist, and translator, Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953).

“The Supple Deer” by Jane Hirshfield

The quiet opening 

between fence strands 

perhaps eighteen inches.

Antlers to hind hooves,

four feet off the ground, 

the deer poured through it.

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

I don’t know how a stag turns 

into a stream, an arc of water.

I have never felt such accurate envy.

Not of the deer—

To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.

[This poem can be found in her wonder collection, Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011). I highly recommend it.]

Hirshfield begins by presenting, in a very minimal, almost calligraphic, brush-stroke way, the two characters who will play out before us an exquisite, miniature drama. The first is the wire fence, the second, a supple deer — a stag.

    The quiet opening 

    between fence strands 

    perhaps eighteen inches.

    Antlers to hind hooves,

    four feet off the ground 

These characters meet in the event when the deer suddenly pours through the wire fence leaving not even a scrap of hair as evidence this had occurred:

    the deer poured through it.

    No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

Now, if you have ever been privileged to see this happen you will know it occurs so fast and fluidly that, like Hirshfield, there is no time fully to comprehend how such a large and substantial creature like a stag

    turns into a stream, an arc of water. 

Like Hirshfield, in that mobile, moving moment of heightened wonder, we, too, may feel envy.

On my first reading of the poem this comment somewhat jarred because envy is strongly felt to be a problematic emotion. So why on earth, in this extraordinary moment, does Hirshfield seem to sully things by using the word “envy”? And why, too, does she modify it with the adjective “accurate”?

I think she does this to remind us of a vital human reality, that although we don’t often like to admit it, envy always exists and plays a significant role in our lives in at least two distinct ways, namely, as inaccurate (false) envy and accurate (true) envy. 

In this specific case, an inaccurate envy for me would be to envy the deer’s own particular kind of speed, grace and suppleness. Although, as a fifty-five year old, through a mix of cycling, walking and Tai Chi, I try my best to keep up my own appropriate human kind of speed, grace and suppleness, it would clearly be inaccurate to envy the kind of speed, grace and suppleness the deer is capable of expressing because I am not, and never will be, a deer. 

An “accurate envy” on the other hand would be for me to become envious of something which I am not yet like but which I both can — and perhaps should — become more like. 

So, if I cannot become like the deer, then what can, should I, become like?  

Hirschfield answers this by employing what journalists or film-makers called a delayed drop, when she suddenly, and wholly unexpectedly, tells us her envy is “Not of the deer” — something which the poem’s title might have led us to believe was the case — but, my oh my, her envy is of the wire fence’s. In particular the wire fence’s ability 

    To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.

This epiphanal moment reveals the poem is only secondarily focussed on the deer and that its suppleness and largess is primarily functioning as an aid to seeing something else, something which is usually unseen, in the poetic image this is the wire fence. And as a poetic image the wire fence stands for the many often unthought about structures which everywhere shape, define and delineate all aspects of our world and which helps make us this and not that kind of thing, creature, or culture.

OK, now I can return to a consideration of the project with which I began this piece.

I would gently, but strongly suggest that the fence we should be appropriately and accurately envying is one our culture has, and may yet still make, out of the interwoven, strong, minimalist strands of the human Jesus and Socrates I presented to you earlier. 

By appropriately and accurately envying them, and then trying to imitate their basic actions and methods in a disciplined fashion, we find there is released in us what the contemporary philosopher, James C. Edwards, has called the two “sacramental energies . . . that used to be bound up in the stories of the gods”. They are: “energies for limitation in the face of hubris and for transformation in the face of complacency” (James C. Edwards: “The Plain Sense of Things – The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism”, Penn State University Press, 1997 p. ix).

Naturally, Jesus and Socrates individually offer us examples of both energies at work. But, particularly with regard to energies for limitation in the face of hubris, we find Socrates’ dialectical method reveals, again and again, that the energy which helps drive a person towards developing an appropriately humble and truly wise manner of living is found in the moment they discover they know they know nothing, or at least when they come truly to know — to borrow the felicitous turn of phrase by the poet A. R. Ammons which appears in the introduction to this podcast — they know that there is no finality of vision, that we have perceived nothing completely and that, therefore, and thankfully, tomorrow a new walk is a new walk. 

And, particularly with regard to energies for transformation in the face of complacency, we find Jesus’ example reveals, again and again, how this energy is accessed only insofar as we learn to respond to the radical, infinite, ethical demand to show love and justice to our neighbour, our enemies and all creation right here and right now, and regardless of what our often complacent selves and culture would often have us do — namely simply to walk by on the other side of the road.

When we willingly give ourselves up to the accurate envy of Jesus and Socrates’ what we also learn is that together they have, and may yet still create for us a shared, wire-fence like, structure which helps meaningfully to shape and define how the world is and our place in it but which, at the same time, remains highly porous and open to the constant flux and flow of the world and so always capable of having “such largeness” and sacramental energies constantly pass through it to challenge our hubris and change us in the face of complacency. 

As I have noted elsewhere, and often, different cultures will, quite naturally, be able to weave their own porous fences out of different materials which they deem appropriate to their own histories and all my foregoing words simply serve to remind me — and I hope you — that own culture is clearly not the only one on the block and nor could it, and nor should it, be. 

However, having said that, I do wish strongly to claim that thanks to its very thinness and nearly-not-there-ness the minimalist form of liberal, democratic European and North American culture that I wish to promote and defend, still has great worth and, despite it’s many failings and real crimes through history, it continues to carry undischarged within it many things worth preserving and bringing to the common table and conversation of humankind. 

But, in the end — and in the spirit of Jesus and Socrates — I can do no more than simply invite you to consider this claim further and to invite you into a conversation about it.

—o0o—

LIVE EVENING ZOOM CONVERSATION

If you would like to join a conversation about this piece on Wednesday 4th November at 19.30 GMT you can join a live Zoom event. Please note that the event will be recorded. 

Here’s the timetable:

19.15-19.30: 

Arrivals/login

19.30 - approx. 20.00: 

Streaming of the most recent podcast "Making Footprints Not Blueprints" 

<https://www.buzzsprout.com/1378024/6155470>

20.00 - 21.00: 

Questions to, and conversations with, Andrew James Brown moderated by Courtney Whalen Van de Weyer

21:00: Event ends 

Those of you who have already listened to the podcast and who only wish to join in the conversation are invited to login to the meeting at around 19.50

Topic: Cambridge Unitarian Church Wednesday Evening Conversation

Time: Nov 4, 2020 07:30 PM London

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86872616081?pwd=T1pqZ2dzS2hCL3E5UUtnWDRmN3UvUT09

Meeting ID: 868 7261 6081

Passcode: 827730

With this thought in mind let me move closer to my very modest positive thought by recounting to you the basic storyline of a film made in 1965 which utterly captivated me as a child growing up in the 1970s called, “The Flight of the Phoenix”. Based on a novel written by Elleston Trevor, the film was directed by Robert Aldrich and starred James Stewart as Frank Towns, the captain of a twin engined Fairchild C-82 cargo plane.

After naming the aircraft a few more tense moments follow as they try to start the engine — they only have seven starter cartridges and the first four of them fail. Fortunately, the engines do start and the plane succeeds in taking-off by sliding down a steep sand-dune to help pick up speed. With the surviving crew tied to its wings, the Phoenix succeeds in flying to a near-by oasis where they experience both the ecstasy that comes with having survived something catastrophic and also, especially for Towns and Dorfmann, the consummating joys of reconciliation.

Now why do I tell you this story in the context of our current pandemic? Well, because it seems to me to be a parable that tells us exactly the kind of activity we need to be engaging in in connection with our various crashed, or soon to crash aircraft, and whether those aircraft are businesses or religious and philosophical communities such as our own. Many of these attempts will fail but some will succeed and, towards the end of this short talk, I will concentrate simply on what it is that I think needs to be done in this, specifically Unitarian, free-thinking, liberal religious community. However, as I do this, I trust that, in a very general way, it may stand as an example that can be applied more widely.

But let’s firstly look at three key things I think we can learn from the film. 

The first thing to note is that the Phoenix is built only by using the material and resources that are actually to hand in the wreckage lying about on the desert floor. That’s it. Nothing that isn’t already present and available to the crew can be drawn upon or used, no matter how much they would like any of those ideal things.  

The second thing to note is that the Phoenix is designed and built out of only the most important, absolutely necessary and still serviceable bits of the wreckage, and it is built only with the intention of carrying what the crew decide is the most minimal and most important payload of all, namely, themselves with all their own stories, dreams and values.

The third thing to note is that the Phoenix is not designed in their moment of crisis to be, in-and-of-itself, some permanent, beautiful, shiny, super-efficient, world-beating or new and innovative creation; it is a thing knowingly built using old, existing technology and knowledge simply to make a wholly pragmatic, short, emergency flight from out of the hell in which the crew currently find themselves so as to have a chance of finding another, temporary, but survivable abode at an oasis. It is only if and when they get there that, following a time properly to recover, regroup and rethink, they might then turn their thoughts engaging in some grander, innovative, longer-term project. 

Now, to begin to move in a modestly positive fashion towards a time of constructive conversation, let me run through these same three points but by explicitly connecting them to what it is I think our Unitarian community needs to do in this crisis.

The first thing to realise is that our own Phoenix can only be built using the materials and resources that are actually to hand and lying about us on the desert floor. This means that we need to look carefully around at all the scattered bits of our congregation’s former form-of-life to see what is actually to hand and still serviceable. We need to be aware that the shattering of our old aircraft may have brought to light certain formerly hidden materials and resources that we had either forgotten about or didn’t even fully appreciate were part of our old construction. A vitally important point to remember here is that we cannot proceed by relying on materials and resources that appear on any kind of ideal wish-list. Some lucky something or other may turn up whilst we are attempting to build our Phoenix but we cannot afford to make any plans that are completely dependent upon the turning up of that lucky something or other.    

The second thing to note is that our Phoenix can only be designed and built out of the most important, absolutely necessary and serviceable bits of our wreckage and only so as to be able to carry on a short flight what we decide is the most minimal and most important payload of all, namely, our own liberal, free-thinking religious traditions’ best and still serviceable motive powers,  dreams and values. For our own tradition they are those religious and philosophical practices which centre upon the two central figures I spoke about with you two weeks ago, namely, the wholly human Jesus and the Ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates.

To remind you:

With regard to the human Jesus it is to build with and carry out of the desert a way of being in the world which is concerned to dissolve all of religion’s former supernatural, superstitious and apocalyptic ideas into a simple, if always challenging, existential, ethical demand for justice and love for all creation, right here, and right now. (Just to reinforce something very important here — please note that following the human Jesus need have absolutely nothing to belief in God as Julian Baggini’s new book, “The Godless Gospel”, makes eloquently and very attractively clear.)

With regard to Socrates it is to build with and carry out of the desert a way of being in the world that helps people freely exercise their faculty of critical reason in seeking out new clues and empirical evidence about how the world is (and isn’t) and our current place in it.

In short, the human Jesus and Socrates are our tradition’s only available and still serviceable motive forces and pair of wings and, along with ourselves, they are also our most valuable cargo. Other kinds of crashed aircraft (whether businesses or religious communities) will, of course, have other kinds of available motive forces, pair of wings and valuable cargo. But it is their task, and not ours, to build a Phoenix out of those things. Our task is simply to build something serviceable out of the examples of the human Jesus and Socrates to help get ourselves out of the desert and to some kind of oasis for the work to come.

The third thing to note is that in this immediate moment of crisis our Phoenix need not be in-and-of-itself some kind of shiny, new, permanent, beautiful, super-efficient, world-beating or new and innovative creation. All that is required of us is to use our existing religious and philosophical knowledge to build some ad hoc form-of-life out of the materials and resources actually to hand. The question of what we might think about building later on is for later, if and when we have succeeded in flying to, and landing at, an oasis, and have had time to recover, regroup and rethink.

So, to conclude, although the form-of-life that is our freethinking, liberal religious community is highly likely to look significantly different in a post COVID-19 world to the way it looked like only six months ago, our job right at this moment is NOT to build that new thing. That’s a job for when, and if, we make it to the oasis. The job, right now, is simply to build our Phoenix, get it into the air with ourselves, the human Jesus and Socrates on board, and attempt to set a decent and ethical course that has some reasonable chance of bringing us to some kind of oasis. As to what may follow, only time and luck will tell. 

But right now, at least as far as I am concerned, we know what it is we must do: build and fly our Phoenix.

—o0o—

LIVE EVENING ZOOM CONVERSATION

If you would like to join a conversation about this piece on Wednesday 21st October at 19.30 you can join a live Zoom event. Please note that the event will be recorded. 

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Topic: Cambridge Unitarian Church Evening Conversation

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Matthew 13:31-32 (in David Bentley Hart’s translation)

[Jesus] set another parable before them saying: “The Kingdom of the heavens is like a mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field, which is indeed the smallest of all seeds, but when it grows it is larger than garden herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the sky come and dwell in its branches.”

Matthew 13:31–32 in John Dominic Crossan’s presentation in ‘The Essential Jesus’ (Castle Books 1998, p. 51)

The Kingdom of God is mustard

 a seed small enough

  to get lost among others

 a plant large enough

  to shelter birds in its shade.

  —o0o—

In our own age, when it comes to the parable of the mustard seed, we find it very hard avoid the traditional interpretation that has become attached to it. We’re tempted to say straightaway that it’s obvious, it’s a simple lesson we can read off the face of nature about growth — namely, that things which will eventually become large and expansive begin with something very small and compact.

Of course, it is sometimes true that small things do become large and, in the case of mustard seeds, they do, indeed, become large plants and, whilst calling them tree-like is a stretch for even the most imaginative of us, they do grow to a height of three or four feet. Jesus must surely have had this in mind when he told his parable. But was that all he had in mind?

To answer this question let’s first do a little bit of what the contemporary Slovenian philosopher and all-round bête-noir, Slavoj Žižek, calls ‘short-circuiting.’ Žižek notes that:

‘ . . . one of the most effective critical procedures [is] to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion) and read it in a short circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text or conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be understood here in Deluze’s sense: not of “lesser quality”, but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a “lower”, less dignified topic). If the “minor” reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions’ (‘The Monstrosity of Christ’, Slavoj Žižek and John Millbank, MIT, 2009, pp. vii-viii).

Žižek thinks that sometimes this process doesn’t simply bring to light something new in the text or tradition, but it can also serve to make us ‘aware of another — disturbing — side of something [we] knew all the time’ (ibid. p. viii).

A fine example of the art of short-circuiting in connection with the parable of the mustard seed is offered to us by John Dominic Crossan whose translation of the parable you have already heard. The first ‘minor’ author Crossan uses as a lens through which to look at Jesus’ parable is the Roman author, naturalist, natural philosopher, naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD). Crossan reminds us that Pliny wrote:

‘Mustard ... with its pungent taste and fiery effect is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once’ (Natural History: 19.170-171).

The second ‘minor’ author, or rather authors, Crossan uses as a lens though which to look, are those who, redacted the Mishnah in early third-century CE, a text which later on came to form part of the Talmud. In the Mishnah the authors tell us that, because of its tendency to run wild, the planting of mustard seed in a garden was forbidden in Jewish Palestine (Mishnah Kilayim 3:2). There is a very high degree of probability that Jesus would have been aware of this teaching and, given this, Crossan feels, along with the historian of first-century Palestine, Douglas Oakman, that: ‘It is hard to escape the conclusion that Jesus deliberately likens the rule of God to a weed.’ Crossan, continuing to look through these lenses concludes that the point of Jesus’ parable:

‘. . . is not just that the mustard plant starts as a proverbially small seed and grows into a shrub of three or four feet, or even higher, it is that it tends to take over where it is not wanted, that it tends to get out of control, and that it tends to attract birds within cultivated areas where they are not particularly desired. And that, said Jesus, was what the Kingdom was like: not like the mighty cedar of Lebanon and not quite like a common weed, but like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover qualities. Something you would want only in small and carefully controlled doses — if you could control it’ (John Dominic Crossan, ‘Jesus — A Revolutionary Biography’, Harper San Francisco 1994, pp. 64-66).

Well, well, well. As Žižek noted thought can make us ‘aware of another — disturbing — side of something [we] knew all the time’. 

It’s something we can most easily see through the lens of an old gag I am, perhaps, overly fond of telling, namely, that although Jesus promised us the kingdom of God (or the kingdom of the heavens), what we actually got was the Christian Church. Given this perhaps we should be asking ourselves whether Jesus might have planted the wrong seed by mistake? He may have thought he was planting a seed that would  grow into a flourishing, peaceable kingdom but what actually grew was an institution with very dangerous takeover qualities indeed, and one which quickly got wildly out of hand. The Christian Church became an institution which, as it grew ever larger and became the religion of empire, began to bring with it terrible consequences as it provided branches in which too many people who desired imperial, kingly or purely personal power and oversight could settle and who were filled with an insatiable appetite for swooping down upon the common land and the common people to inflict upon them two millennia of violence, corruption, crusades, inquisitions and much more besides.

This is neither a pleasant historical memory nor thought and it may seem the best we can say in Jesus’ favour was that the Christian Church was simply not the fruit of the seed he sowed two millennia ago and that the tiny mustard seed of the kingdom of the heavens Jesus actually planted was stillborn and never able properly to germinate and flourish as he had hoped it would. Perhaps, perhaps not. 

But what happens if we bring Crossan’s short-circuited meaning of Jesus’ parable into our own age and ask whether it speaks to any thing around us today? 

Well, it seems to me not unreasonable to suggest that Greta Thunberg and her many fellow young climate activists may stand as a classic examples of mustard seeds growing in just the fashion understood by Jesus in first-century Jewish Palestine. In August 2018 outside the Swedish Parliament Thunberg began, completely alone, a ‘School strike for climate’. An action in which only two years later, and even now during lockdown, she is regularly being joined by huge numbers of students across the globe.

Again and again over the last couple of years it has struck me that the School Strike for Climate movement may well make for a better candidate for being a genuine fruit of Jesus’ mustard seed than the historic Christian Church ever was.

To see what I mean and to conclude this piece, let me walk through Crossan’s conclusion again with this thought in mind.

It’s not just that our children start out as proverbially small and grow into creatures only a couple of feet higher than mustard plants, it is that they, too, tend take over where we stick-in-the-mud, stubborn and frankly short-sighted adults often don’t want them, they tend to get out of our control and their hearts and minds, like the branches of the mustard plant, tend to attract new and swift-winged, scientifically informed ideas within areas of our lives which we adults have populated with often problematic, destructive, out-dated and outmoded ideas and practices. Of course, we adults don’t desire this kind of thing to happen because it brings with it a serious challenge to our old ways of being-in-the-world, not least of all to our selfish and excessive consumption and waste, meat-eating, fossil fuel, car and aeroplane use which are clearly destroying the basic ecosystem upon which all life on this planet depends.

It seems to me that our children’s involvement in these School Strikes for Climate is very similar to what Jesus said the mustard seed growing into the kingdom would be like: not like the mighty cedar of Lebanon and not quite like a common weed, but like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover qualities — dangerous, of course, but only to our old ways of being which we all know we must urgently change.

During the week an acquaintance of mine reminded me of a passage found in Bernard Williams’ (1929–2003) last book “Truth and Truthfulness” in the chapter entitled “Truthfulness, Liberalism, Critique” (Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 216). Williams writes:

‘Moreover, the Internet shows signs of creating for the first time what Marshall McLuhan prophesied as a consequence of television, a global village, something that has the disadvantages both of globalization and of a village. Certainly it does offer some reliable sources of information for those who want it and know what they are looking for, but equally it supports that mainstay of all villages, gossip. It constructs proliferating meeting places for the free and unstructured exchange of messages which bear a variety of claims, fancies, and suspicions, entertaining, superstitious, scandalous, or malign. The chances that many of these messages will be true are low, and the probability that the system itself will help anyone to pick out the true ones is even lower. In this respect, post-modern technology may have returned us dialectically to a transmuted version of the pre-modern world, and the chances of acquiring true beliefs by these means, except for those who already have knowledge to guide them, will be much like those in the Middle Ages. At the same time, the global nature of these conversations makes the situation worse than in a village, where at least you might encounter and perhaps be forced to listen to some people who had different opinions and obsessions. As critics concerned for the future of democratic discussion have pointed out, the Internet makes it easy for large numbers of previously isolated extremists to find each other and talk only among themselves.’

Williams’ words struck me powerfully when I first read them some eighteen years ago but they particularly struck home this week because, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, all of us have been forced to make much more use of the internet than we had before. Shopping, work, meeting people, getting our news, finding out about this or that, all is now being done more and more online.  

In terms of our local community here in Cambridge the most obvious example of this is seen in the closing of our buildings, the cessation of our face-to-face meetings and the beginning of our meeting on Zoom. In order to continue to let people know what we are currently up to, our activities are now almost exclusively advertised online via social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and our own website.

This, in turn, throws everything we publish, say, do and think into a global “machine” run according to the workings of algorithms designed, for the most part, by people who care for little else than “pure” profit and economic, financial and political influence, power and control. They have written algorithms which log all our searches/likes/dislikes and then begin to manipulate the kinds of things we will get to see the next time we go online to do anything whatsoever. 

If, like me, you’ve been keeping an eye on this over the past few years the preceding information will come as no surprise to you. However, more recently, this kind of manipulation of data has got far, far worse and we’ve begun to see very disturbing examples of how these algorithms are now regularly being used to influence elections and referenda in entirely inappropriate (and actually often illegal) ways, especially through the propagation of what has now become known as fake-news, alternative-facts and deep-fakes. Once the algorithms have logged your current passions/preferences/prejudices then you will be actively targeted to receive content that simply feeds and enflames your current passions/preferences/prejudices, whatever they are, and it won’t matter a fig whether the content you receive is true or false. 

Things are now getting so bad that even employees of a notoriously secretive company like Facebook are becoming more willing to break ranks and speak out about the dangers inherent in this way of proceeding. Indeed, I hope that all of you will have read some of the stories which have broken in the last couple of years, for example, the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal. But one story broke this week which strongly resonated both with Williams’ words and which, I think, speaks directly to what I see as a significant difficulty currently facing a community such as our own which was born out of the dissenting, free-thinking, liberal religious, Enlightenment tradition which privileged truth, truthfulness and the use of cool, critical reason in matters pertaining to religion/philosophy/politics over mere inherited hot prejudice and putative, unsubstantiated divine revelation/s.

The investigative tech-journalist Casey Newton published a piece this week which includes an interview with a Facebook engineer who has worked on Facebook groups, i.e. pages meant for users with common interests where they can share information/knowledge/beliefs on that subject. Any person or organisation can create a group about any topic, cause or event and, not surprisingly, many liberal religious communities have started such groups, some open to public view, others not.  

Casey was told by one engineer that they found the group recommendation algorithm to be the single scariest feature of the platform — the darkest manifestation, they said, of data winning arguments. Here’s what the engineer said:

‘“They try to give you a mix of things you’re part of and not part of, but the aspect of the algorithm that recommends groups that are similar to the one that you’re part of are really dangerous,” the engineer said. “That’s where the bubble generation begins. A user enters one group, and Facebook essentially pigeonholes them into a lifestyle that they can never really get out of.”’

Now, usually, when a writer like me from an avowedly liberal tradition begins to write about these subjects their concerns are mostly focused on the kinds of lifestyles being encouraged by groups that are obviously antithetical to liberals and their usual concerns. Not surprisingly I do have such concerns because it is now possible to see — both in the media and out on our actual streets — how right-wing, anti-democratic, anti-vax, COVID-denying, authoritarian, nationalistic, xenophobic, racist and, yes, fascistic groups, are currently being emboldened everywhere to make their presence known. But, as Jesus memorably and wisely reminds me, before I make any attempt to remove the speck in my neighbour’s (or enemy’s) eye, I must firstly do my level best to remove the many logs that are undoubtedly lodged in my own eyes (Matthew 7:5). And, during lockdown, boy have I found logs by the decimated forest load. 

Over the past six months, not surprisingly, I have tried my best to begin properly to think through some of many huge implications of what is going on and how, in liberal religious circles, we might best negotiate the pandemic and its aftermath. As part of this process I began to visit some of the many conversations going on in various public, liberal religious, Facebook groups in the hope that I might find there some useful pointers. Alas, what I all too often discovered were exactly the same problems as those found in right-wing groups and which were predicted by Williams eighteen years ago. I found groups that were full of mere gossip and (internal and external) virtue-signalling and which were, as Williams feared, clearly ‘constructing proliferating meeting places for the free and unstructured exchange of messages which bear a variety of claims, fancies, and suspicions, entertaining, superstitious, scandalous, or malign.’ I saw very little concern (or ability?) displayed by members of these groups gently, but firmly, to structure the conversation through the disciplined use of cool reason and evidenced-based arguments and, as I read though various posts, it was as clear to me as it was to Williams, that the chances that many of the messages already posted (or soon to be posted) will be true were low, and the probability that the system itself will help anyone to pick out the true ones was even lower. Unsubstantiated and over-heated opinion and superstitious, uncritical belief could be found bursting out all over the place and nowhere was there any proper, sustained, evidenced-based, reasoned calling out of this. On the few occasions I saw such an attempt made (alas, often clumsily made by a person clearly at the end of their tether) all too often there merely followed a collective feeding-frenzy claiming that the person being critical had shown themselves to be disgustingly illiberal by their willingness to point that idea X or Y was, actually, little more than mere superstition and arrant nonsense.

When our online (putatively) liberal religious fora cease any longer to be places where prejudice and superstition can be effectively (if always gently and sensitively) challenged through the use of cool reason and evidence, where are we, or where on earth are we heading? This is especially pressing when we cannot easily or safely meet face to face. 

In the eighteenth-century our communities became widely known as “rational dissenters” and, whilst it is true we could at times wildly overdo the rational element (after all there are obviously limits to reason as there are limits to everything else), the use of reason and empirical evidence was a sine qua non of our religious/philosophical practice. It was one of our own, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826),  who in 1787 memorably wrote to his young nephew, Peter Carr, about religion, saying:

‘Your reason is now mature enough to receive this object. In the first place divest yourself of all bias in favour of novelty and singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, and the consequences of error may be too serious. On the other hand shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. [. . .] In fine, I repeat that you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject any thing because any other person, or description of persons have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but uprightness of the decision.’

Today, not only do I not see any reason not to continue to affirm Jefferson’s basic approach (albeit with certain modern nuances/revisions), I see countless reasons why we MUST continue to affirm it. Consequently, I hope that here in Cambridge we will continue confidently to embody this practice and never allow people wishing to join our community the impression that here they have the unconditional right to believe whatever they like but, instead, to insisted that people who wish to join us fully understand and accept that, here, they only fully have the right to believe what they do on the basis of the careful use of reason and a proper, collective, peer-reviewed, critical examination of what the available evidence actually allows us meaningfully to believe about the world. 

This three-centuries-old approach means that our local community has always preferred to err on the side of displaying a healthy scepticism towards all maximal religious beliefs and to keep its own religious practice as minimalistic and practically orientated as possible. In practice for us this has meant agreeing (but never slavishly or uncritically) to follow the ethical example of human Jesus and, to set aside as being central to our community, belief in almost everything else metaphysical, up to and including belief in a deity. Naturally, individual members of this community will have all kinds of their own privately held, maximal, unevidenced beliefs about all kinds of things but, together, we need to make it clear that those same unevidenced maximal beliefs can never take a central place in our community’s collective practice/identity. Always the primary arbiter amongst us must be the cool application of reason and evidence, the only oracle that has ever been (and is likely ever to be) available to us.   

As I explored with you a couple of weeks ago in my piece entitled ‘A passionately cool political/theological meditation on Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice”’ this means that, as your minister, I continue to take with the upmost seriousness an insight borrowed from the twentieth-century English philosopher, Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990), and encourage us only to use those poetic, philosophical, religious and political tools/strategies which tend, not towards inflaming passion by giving it new objects to feed upon but, instead, those which inject into the activities of already too passionate men and women an ingredient of moderation; those which offer ways which deliberately restrain, deflate, pacify and reconcile and which do not stoke the fires of desire, but damp them down.

In our current, transmuted version of the pre-modern world which is clearly getting way too over-heated (physically and ideologically) and increasingly being driven by unsubstantiated prejudice and superstition, our job as heirs of the rational dissenters is, surely, and quite literally, to cool it.

For these and other reasons, Jonathan’s friendship and work was very much in my mind this week and on a number occasions I stopped with a cup of tea in my hand to look at the photo of him on my mantelpiece which I took in his house a couple of years before his death as we ate fish and chips together, polished off a nice bottle of wine (a glass of which you can see in the photo at the top of this post) and talked philosophy and religion on into the afternoon. In the last two years of his life this became a regular bi-weekly event to which I always looked forward and thoroughly enjoyed. 

Jonathan was born in 1924 in West Derby, Liverpool and in 1945 he gained his BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Corpus Christi College/University of Oxford (MA, 1952). He was lecturer in philosophy at Durham University between 1947-1959, senior lecturer in philosophy at Edinburgh University between 1959-1964 and, finally, Professor of philosophy at Nottingham University between 1964-1988. During 1968 he was a visiting professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, Chicago. His best known books are, Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (George Allen and Unwin, 1971), two books on Hume’s moral philosophy published by the Oxford University Press in 1976 and 1980 and, lastly, God, Freedom and Immortality (Ashgate, 1999).

Jonathan was hugely important to me in my role as a minister of religion because he helped me work carefully through the implications of being, like him, what he called “that embarrassing, but not, I think, uncommon thing, an atheist who has what appears to be [an] experience of the deity whom he believes not to exist” (God, Freedom and Immortality, p. 681).

Like Jonathan, I have continued to value hugely many aspects of my inherited liberal Christian tradition even as my belief in the existence of God has completely dissolved. Like him I continue to think that,

“Living a spiritual life may be regarded as paying attention to such intimations of the divine as one has in this world, without our having thought to any other world. Paying such attention might not suit everybody. I suspect doing so is more a matter of prudence than of morality. To love God, if I am right in thinking that it is possible to love a nonexistent God, cannot benefit him, for he does not, strictly speak, exist, but to love him may be of benefit to oneself” (God, Freedom and Immortality, p. 671).

In these difficult and discombobulating times — as I continue to explore the many, what seem to me, still undischarged energies to found in our religious tradition, even after the death of God — my paying attention to such intimations of the divine as I have in this world, without my having thought to any other world continues to help me negotiate (or at least begin to grapple with) the many significant and challenging “downs” I am currently experiencing as I view the current socio-political-ecological situation both in the UK and the wider world. I realise, of course, as did Jonathan, that “paying such attention” might not suit everybody but it might, just, suit one or two of you. Consequently, on the anniversary of his death and close to his birthday, I’d like to take the opportunity to reintroduce you to some of his thinking which can be found in the address I wrote for the congregation back in 2014 immediately following his death. You can find this at the following link:

In Memoriam: Jonathan Harrison (1924-2014) — On the religious benefits of running with the hares and hunting with the hounds and of having one’s cake and eating it

Jonathan thought — and I still, more or less, agree with him in this — that many of Christianity’s significant disadvantages might yet be overcome and he was prepared to state clearly that “the Christian ethic,” at least subject to the many criticisms he made of it, remains “a good one, though nothing in this world is perfect. It offers solace, comfort and help and the possibility of spiritual quietness, rest and solace which many sorely need and from which,” Jonathan suspected, “most would benefit” (God, Freedom and Immortality, p. 662).

But, as Jonathan also said, Christianity was not the only religion to provide such benefits and, although he hoped otherwise, he thought it was “unfortunate that these benefits are usually . . . bought, in their Christian form, at the price of accepting superstition and bad metaphysics” (God, Freedom and Immortality, p. 662).

But whatever you think about all of the above, sometime on Tuesday evening, Jonathan’s birthday, why not raise a toast to one of Britain’s unsung philosophers and a much valued member of this unusual congregation. 

Requiescat in pace, Jonathan Harrison (1924-2014)