Hilary Weeks on Tractarian Spirituality

Dr. Hilary Weeks, Course Leader in English at the University of Gloucestershire, gave the latest seminar in our Bible and Spirituality series (31 October 2012): ‘Storied Mysteries’, Victorian Spiritualities: Isaac Williams, The Cathedral (1837-38) and Tractarian Poetics. ‘Mystery’ gives the clue to the topic: how do we know anything about the nature of the universe, and how express it in life and worship? The C19 Oxford Movement, which featured John Keble, and for a time Henry Newman, had a distinctive approach to such questions, and Isaac Williams made an individual contribution to it. In The Cathedral, a work consisting of 119 poems, Williams offered a poetic treatment of the cathedral building, designed to articulate a Tractarian view of reality. In it, poem and building are intertwined, so that the poem becomes a ‘textual representation of external form and space’. Key concepts in this conception were a) analogy, concerning ‘the manifestation of God’s will in the visible world’, or the making visible of things unseen (after Romans 1.20), so that nature is known by grace (Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion, 1736); and b) reserve, which demands restraint of both emotion and expression in religion, in the belief that God too had shown such restraint in his self-disclosure to the world. The cathedral building is a text that expresses divine truth by such means as allegory and typology, which can unlock the relations between natural and spiritual worlds. The cathedral can thus teach the enquirer mysterious things. The Middle Aisle, standing symbolically for Holy Scripture, becomes a guide, at whose hand ‘ethereal doors/Fly open, answering to the wondrous key’. The reader may be reminded of the biblical ‘celestial guides’ of apocalyptic literature, such as Daniel and 1 Enoch, who conduct the reader through the mysteries of heaven. Yet poetry, including biblical poetry (such as Hosea), can express a more complex relationship between natural world and heavenly reality. For HW, Williams ultimately disappoints, because The Cathedral turns out to be a puzzle that church members could solve if they chose to do so. She regrets particularly that Williams does not take up Ruskin’s metaphor of the quarry, by which he enables the stones (The Stones of Venice) to take on ever new meanings. In Williams, the meaning is all given in advance. For HW, the potential of Tractarian poetry is better represented by Keble, with his deep appreciation of Wordsworth. For myself I found this meditation on the relationship between poetry, Scripture and the symbolic possibilities of a building made for worship, highly stimulating for reflection on the project of biblical spirituality: to think about and practice forms of biblical engagement in which the unknown may become known, while the ‘knower’ remains open to new avenues of faith and understanding.

John Cottingham on philosophy, psychotherapy and religion

Professor John Cottingham, of Heythrop College and Reading University, was the latest speaker in the ongoing Bible and Spirituality series, sponsored by Bible Society. His title was: Spirituality, Self-Discovery and Moral Change, a version of which is forthcoming in C.C.H. Cook (ed.) Spirituality, Theology and Mental Health (London: SCM Press). The burden of the argument was that the practices associated with religion and spirituality have an actual impact on the values and moral lives of the practitioners. He began with the claim that religion has in common with both philosophy and psychoanalysis the shared goal of the integration of the person. Central to this claim was his insistence, in contrast to the impressions of secular critics of religion, that religious belief is not primarily cognitive, but that it is marked by the ‘primacy of praxis’. Far from being a ‘hypothesis’ (as in Dawkins’ ‘God-hypothesis’), it is a ‘focused and morally oriented reflection’ rooted in regular practice. The effect of such religious praxis, in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic spiritual legacy on modern society, was underestimated in much contemporary discourse.

The ‘praxis’ of religion was exemplified by the use of Psalms in Christian traditions such as the Benedictine, involving what he called a ‘polyvalence’ in the kind of apprehension that such praxis entailed, that is, a fusion of the intellectual and pre-rational, the moral and the aesthetic, the communal and the physical. The processes of spiritual praxis, indeed, could even ‘bracket’ (though not delete) the doctrinal content of religion. Religion shares with psychotherapy the requirement of self-surrender. In psychotherapy, this is entailed in the notion of the unconscious, the rejection of narcissistic fantasy and autonomy, and the readiness to be seen as we are, before a benevolent other (or Other). Moral growth and maturity can take place in such contexts.

For me, the argument was extremely helpful in highlighting the specifically religious claims about the nature of knowledge. If God is knowable, it is because it is in the nature of human beings to know God, in a way that involves all their faculties, as well as corporate memory and ‘forms of life’. I liked too the answer given to a question whether there was such a thing as a ‘stable self’, a question prompted by (post)modern notions of the self, and perhaps by JC’s own use of psychoanalysis. His answer was to think of the individual as ‘an enduring subject of change’, this being indispensable to any account of human growth.

Spirituality and evolution

Spirituality and evolution both make claims, in their way, to embrace all of life. But can they co-habit? Apparently so, according to more than one of the speakers in our Bible and Spirituality lecture series. Mark Vernon argued that evolution might have explanatory power in relation to human beings’ ‘higher flourishing’. And a similar line was taken by Ursula King in the preceding lecture on 1 December 2011. Professor King showed that ‘spirituality’ (though variously defined) represented a self-aware life that aspired beyond the merely bodily and material, and that such awareness characterized all human societies. Humans were therefore united in such aspirations, which were not limited to the individual’s life, but embraced all human endeavour, including science, technology, the arts and the human relationship with nature. The ‘deep spiritual oneness of the human species’, beyond culture and history, called for a ‘world-ethic’ (Küng) aimed at overcoming divisions among humans. This last had come to the fore in recent times in a new ‘earth-consciousness’.

This unity, she argued, was inseparable from an evolutionary account of reality. She pointed in particular to the work of Teilhard de Chardin, and his belief in the evolutionary progress towards greater human unity, or as she put it: ‘the rise of the noosphere, taking shape in a globally interdependent web of interaction and interthinking, a global human sphere that covers the entire planet and includes a spiritual membrane of extraordinary strength and energies.’ The spiritual challenges facing the world demand further human evolution in order fulfil the human dream of a flourishing, life-loving humanity, capable of sharing equally and unselfishly in the world’s resources.

It is a strikingly positive take on evolution in relation to a spiritual or religious account of the world. Others take the rather different view that evolution has great explanatory power in the realm of biology, but is highly dangerous when it becomes an explanation of reality in general. I don’t think we have heard the end of this in our series, and I look forward to seeing how it plays out from here.

Ursula King’s latest book is  Teilhard de Chardin and Eastern Religions: Spirituality and Mysticism in an Evolutionary World (Mahwah: NJ, Paulist Press, 2011). Among her other books may be mentioned  The Search for Spirituality: our Global Quest for Meaning and Fulfilment  (Canterbury Press, 2009).

Gordon McConville

Mark Vernon lecture

Picasso, on seeing the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux in France, is said to have said that art had learned nothing since. This was Mark Vernon’s opening gambit when he spoke to a full house in the Bible and Spirituality series on 18 January, on the subject What has Religion to do with Philosophy? It was a way into the question whether religion arose as the result of an evolutionary mistake. That is, did religion serve some evolutionary purpose, even though it was based on a mistaken assumption, namely that certain unknowns could only be explained by postulating God (a ‘domain violation’). In answer, he offered arguments to suggest that evolution might have led to religion in ways that were not based on miscalculations, but rather accorded with aspects of human nature. Illustrations came from studies of the brain (holistic cognition), and language (the literal and metaphorical are equally intrinsic to language and work inseparably together to produce meaning). Humans are essentially ‘meaning-seeking’.

A second line of argument considered the modern tendency to believe that we do not need God to behave in morally responsible ways. Here Mark showed how, in their different ways, the Greek philosophers, Christian theology and Freud all postulated some concept of sacrifice for the human being to attain a ‘good life’ (as variously understood). For example, Mark cited Terry Eagleton on the Christian doctrine of salvation through the death of Christ as a contradiction of evolutionary accounts of human progress. Is the good simply a projection, or is it a reality that attracts and draws us on towards a wider horizon? Iris Murdoch was cited for her criticism of self-focused ‘rights’-language; and Virginia Woolf on Shakespeare as paradigm of self-forgetfulness through absorption in his art – the reason, perhaps, why we know so little about Shakespeare himself.

Finally there was immortality. The discussion took in the Hebrew concepts of nephesh and Sheol, New Testament resurrection, and Greek and Latin language of soul and body. A uniting thread was that soul and body belong together inextricably. The Latin ‘anima’ was useful, because of its sense of the soul ‘animating’ the body, though this led to difficult questions about how this might be conceived. Was ‘thought’, for example, necessarily ’embodied’? On resurrection, while it depended by definition on the likeness of the new body to our present bodies, it was also portrayed in the New Testament as qualitatively different.

Lively discussion followed on all three of these areas. Mark has a way with book titles (wit. his Plato’s Podcasts). His latest is How to be an Agnostic, and (in a neat twist) he promises us two books this year on God!

Gordon McConville