The book is in four movements. The first three loosely cover some of the philosophical, psychological and ethical elements of human spirituality. The fourth is about endings, the ending of traditions and the ending of human life itself in death. Reading it over, I can see that this is a very personal book. For better or for worse, it is one man’s account of what he has seen after a lifetime spent looking in the distance.
1
STILL LOOKING
All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance. VASILII ROZANOV
For years I have been haunted by that aphorism from Vasilii Rozanov. Indeed, I could claim to have lived its meaning in my own life. I was drawn into religion as a small boy from the back streets of an industrial town in the west of Scotland. The religion I encountered there was of the high romantic variety, heavy with incense and laden with mystery. I had no clear sense about what it meant except that it suggested heroic adventure, an endless quest after an object flying from desire. Years later I recognised myself in A.S.J. Tessimond’s poem ‘Portrait of a Romantic’:
He is in love with the land that is always over
The next hill and the next, with the bird that is never
Caught, with the room beyond the looking glass.
He likes the half-hid, the half-heard, the half-lit,
The man in the fog, the road without an ending,
Stray pieces of torn words to piece together.
He is well aware that man is always lonely,
Listening for an echo of his cry, crying for the moon,
Making the moon his mirror, weeping in the night.
He often dives in the deep-sea undertow
Of the dark and dreaming mind. He turns at corners,
Twists on his heel to trap his following shadow.
He is haunted by the face behind the face.
He searches for last frontiers and lost doors.
He tries to climb the wall around the world.1
I gave my life to that search. I became a priest, then a bishop, then a primate. Now, forty years and many battles later, it has passed and I am left sitting in the chair looking in the distance.
What remains is the innate compulsion to go on asking the unanswerable question of life’s meaning. And it is the fact of its unanswerability that makes the question so compelling. We find ourselves as conscious beings in an apparently unconscious universe and wonder what it means. We know quite a lot about how we came about, but there is no satisfactory explanation as to why we came about. I know, of course, that many confident explanations have been given to the question Why? The shorthand term for one of these explanatory systems is ‘a religion’, complete with indefinite article, though the really confident ones always claim the most definite of definite articles for themselves: theirs is the Religion, the really true set of answers to life’s questions. Many people find one or other of these answer systems satisfactory. They don’t like living uncertain lives with the big question permanently unanswered, so they go for closure by opting into one of the religions. Then they can get on with building up the rest of their lives with that big hole in the foundations filled in. If you can manage that arrangement there is much to be said for it. Apart from anything else, it can bring distinct psychological advantages. I remember reading years ago about a well-being scale that claimed there was a distinct correlation between faith and psychological health. This may be why Nietzsche thought that religion evolved to help us fight depression:
The main concern of all great religions has been to fight a certain weariness and heaviness grown to epidemic proportions . . . This dominating sense of displeasure is combated by means that reduce the feeling of life in general to its lowest point. If possible, will and desire are abolished altogether . . . The result, expressed in moral-psychological terms, is ‘selflessness’, ‘sanctification’; in physiological terms: hypnotization – the attempt to win for man an approximation to what in certain animals is hibernation, in many tropical plants estivation, the minimum metabolism at which life will still subsist without really entering consciousness. An astonishing amount of human energy has been expended to this end.2
Nietzsche seems to be referring to one side of religion here, its use as a suppressant of or antidote to the nagging discontent that characterises the human species in highly developed societies. Buddhism is probably the most successful exponent of this kind of practical religion: it has little doctrinal superstructure, but it is rich in methods of self-suppression that help to purge us of those incessant desires that bite at us like wolves. Most religions retain elements of this kind of therapeutic self-culture, but many of them, particularly in the West, have also developed along heavily theoretical lines. Rather than concentrating on inculcating in their followers methods for coping with the pressures of the world, they set out to explain its meaning and origin. The trouble with the explanatory side of religion is that its theoretical usefulness is invariably of limited duration and is inevitably overtaken by the emergence of new knowledge. That is why for many people religions work for a time, then go on to lose their plausibility. The Sufi Master and poet Hafiz observed that:
The
Great Religions are the
Ships
Poets the life
Boats.
Every sane person I know has jumped
Overboard . . .3
That may be why Rozanov does not say that religion will pass, but that religions, in the plural, will pass. We may abandon particular ships, preferring the intimacy of the life-boat or the exhilaration of swimming in the sea to the routinisation of life on one of the great explanation-tankers of organised religion. But even if we choose to go overboard and swim alone, we have not necessarily abandoned the religious quest; not if we think of it as the name we give to humanity’s preoccupation with its own meaning or lack of meaning. There are any number of metaphors we can use to capture this insistent concern we have about ourselves. Hafiz used the image of swimming alone in the sea, others talk about life as a search for the great unknown, Rozanov described it as looking in the distance. Following the Rozanov metaphor, I want to do a bit of distance gazing. I want to sit in the chair and describe some of the conflicting things I have seen. I shall not attempt to weave them into an explanatory package, to make them continuous with each other. That would not be honest to my own experience of the mystery of life, which has been disjunctive and contradictory rather than seamless; so I shall leave things jagged and disconnected, just as I saw them.
But before I settle myself in the chair to start describing what I see, let me affix a health warning. Religion, even without the definite or indefinite article in front of it, is dangerously volatile stuff. The root of the difficulty lies in the nature of the claims religions make about matters that are beyond any verification. This uncertainty, which lies at the heart of all religious systems, famously produces compensating protestations of absolute certainty about matters that are intrinsically unknowable. This is