AFTER THE CHURCH Don Cupitt Don Cupitt called his lecture "After All", the title of his next book, from which the lecture was an extract.
We have retitled it to draw attention to Don's new pessimism about the Church, which seems likely to re-energise the stay-in-or-get-out debate among SoF members. The lecture ended the Conference. We make it the starting point of our report.
Here's a paradox: the cultural resources and the wealth of knowledge about everything that are freely available to us today are far greater than ever before - and yet most people live in a fog. The culture has no common core, no spine any more. Indeed, it is very disorderly. We haven't got any unifying, reasonably rational and communallyheld vision of life such as our ancestors had, in the days when everyone who knew everything, and therefore nothing.
The sort of world-view we have lost commonly took the form of an authoritative representation of the whole scheme of things and our place in it, laid out in a way that also showed us how we should live, towards what long-term goals our life should be directed, and what final good we might hope to attain. It thus fell into two main parts, cosmos and ethos, metaphysics and ethics, Creation and Redemption, but (more importantly) it held them together. If you wondered how human beings, who live not at the end of history but in its midst, and who occupy only one small corner of the whole, could hope to achieve such overall vision of the human condition, religion and philosophy gave slightly different answers. Religion claimed that its teachings had been revealed by God, and philosophy held that there were objectively reliable and uncontaminated sources of knowledge, such as pure a priori reasoning, and the data of sense-experience.
Reason in particular was a source of objective knowledge, because human reason was more than just human. It was our participation in an objective Order of Reason or Logos that pervaded all things. We could attain the god's eye-view, our thought could be godlike, because the human mind was made in the image of the divine Mind and could be illuminated by Eternal Reason.
Until the eighteenth century philosophy by and large maintained this theological conception of Reason, and while philosophy and theology remained closely allied Christendom held firm. But during the nineteenth century it was established beyond reasonable doubt that a human being is not an angel in a house of clay. We are merely clever animals who have invented knowledge in order to help ourselves survive. The old belief that we could somehow rise above the limitations of our human senses and faculties, and see the human situation as if with God's own absolute and perspectiveless vision, finally broke down. We are always animals who live in time, we always see things from a standpoint inside our own human languages and cultures, and we are always conditioned by our place and historical period. Every philosophical system that tries to rise above these limits and achieve finality soon finds itself made into a quaint period piece just by the passing of time. In attempting a still representation of reality as a whole we are like a person trying to draw the landscape seen from a moving railway carriage. The great historicist systems of Hegel and Marx made huge efforts to incorporate and to take full account of historical change: but by a neat irony it has quickly, and in Hegel's case I think lethally, dated them too. Any philosophical system that attempts to incorporate history would be wise to remain unfinished.
What is more, during the nineteenth century there was a very rapid proliferation of new sciences, natural, biological, social and historical. Each became professionalized, setting out to create its own "methodological community", a society of people committed to an agreed subject-matter, standard definitions of terms, agreed methods of working and agreed procedures for testing truth. Professionalization worked like a dream: knowledge grew at a prodigious rate, and the older metaphysical and religious belief-systems suddenly began to look windy, amateurish and primitive by comparison. Much genius had gone into constructing them, but they simply didn't meet the new standards. Were their terms clearly defined, did they have agreed test-procedures for detecting and expunging errors? No, no, no, no.
By the end of the century metaphysics and systematic theology were dead in the water. Twentieth century theology's concerns have subsequently been chiefly defensive: theology has worried about its response to biblical criticism, to the problem of evil, to secularization and to religious pluralism. It is at present impossible to imagine it reasserting its ancient sovereignty over all the newly-independent sciences and professions. It is said that when in 1979 Khomeini's followers took over in Iran they planned to reform and Islamize the intellectual content of such subjects as physics and medicine, which were taught in the country's Western-style universities.
But how do you do it, what would it take, and what would be the cost? The project was shelved; and if even they in the moment of unfettered power were daunted, then we would be too. Old-style realistic systematic theology of the sort that prevailed for a thousand years after Augustine is no longer attempted by anyone. Not by Karl Barth, who rejected philosophy and limited himself to expounding the Church's internal jargon. Barth's theology sounds very confident, but it is resonating inside an enclosed space that few now wish to enter.
Just by how much the old ambitions of theology have nowadays been given up is not often admitted; but in the case of philosophy there was an open revolt. Russell and Moore, for example, explicitly rejected large woolly edifying philosophy at the beginning of the century. It slipped away, and has never been fully reinstated. Philosophy may still be metaphysical in the sense of being revisionist. Ordinary language often seems to generate too complicated a world-picture and philosophy may try to tidy things up by reducing mathematics to logic, the world to atomic facts, experience to sense-data, mind to behavioural skills and capacities, and so on.
All that makes a lot of sense, for many of the best modern knowledge-systems owe their success precisely to their determined effort to bring everything down to one level. Nowadays, surely, explanation has to be naturalistic. But by the same token modern philosophy must be opposed to metaphysics, if by metaphysics is meant the science that gives us access to some higher and hidden reality, truth or wisdom. The later Wittgenstein is a good exponent of the point here. Much though he had diverged from Russell in other ways, he still detested the flabby, useless language of large-scale Meaning-of-Life philosophy. He had no patience with any sort of occultism: "Nothing is hidden," he insisted.
It was enough to stay with the ways language is used in the most routine situations of everyday life. There, at least, what you hear seems to be intelligible, and there ought to be a chance of giving a purely-immanent explanation of it. And if we can achieve a transparent account of how language works on its home ground and in the most ordinary situations, then we'll be cured of metaphysics. We won't feel and need to think that life's wires are pulled from some point outside life, and we won't dream that there's an occult Answer to life's question hidden away somewhere Above. We won't even feel that there is a question.
So during the present century both philosophy and theology have largely dropped out of their former public role. Theology, presupposing faith and articulating the content of faith, is now internal to the Church - or perhaps rather to a very small circle of people within the churches. Philosophy has become professionalized and academic. Neither philosophy nor theology can quite claim to be providing society as a whole with a coherent set of common-core convictions about how things are, how we live, and in what direction we are together heading.
Does this matter? Not everyone thinks that either public life or private life should any longer be rooted in a shared world-view. Many have argued with Wittgenstein that no such set of common-core convictions is needed. They have held that it is sufficient to be an uncommitted artist, or to live without ideology, or to seek happiness in love and work, or simply to immerse oneself in the present and in ordinariness.
Until recently I might have agreed with this. But there are one or two doubts. First, the end of metaphysics and the return of everything into ordinariness and the here and now is a great, and even catastrophic, religious event. It is (arguably) tantamount to the end of the Church and the coming of the Kingdom. It is the end of the old sacerdotal and other-worldly Church-Christianity, and the arrival of a world in which "organized religion" seems no longer to be needed. If Wittgenstein's work is done, if I am completely content with this, here, now, then I no longer need an authoritative Voice from Above to tell me "Now, hear this!" I can live the Sermon on the Mount directly, because - as must already be obvious - Jesus was not a Christian, but a post-Christian. Post-Christianity, the Kingdom, preceded the Church and will also succeed it.
A note about words is needed at this point. Recently, we have come to add the prefix "post" in cases where a cultural movement, by criticizing itself, has gone beyond itself into a different and more advanced state of itself. Post-modernism and post-feminism are examples. It is worth applying this notion to Christianity, because people often forget that the only sort of Christianity they have met, orthodox ecclesiastical Christianity, originally came into being as a second-best, and has always thought of itself as existing only for the sake of a greater reality yet to come, into which it hopes to pass over. This greater reality appears here and there under various names in Christian language. It is the Kingdom of God on earth, originally promised by Jesus. It is the Second Advent, the Millennium and Heaven. I'm using the term "post-Christianity" by way of getting a new angle upon what this greater reality may be. The idea that our age is now post-philosophical and post-theological is associated especially with Heidegger. See, for example, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Harper Torchbooks, 1972). In the present text I want to keep some scraps of old vocabulary, even while also trying to think in a new way.
The religious implications of this line of argument need to be explored; but there is also a second anxiety. If neither philosophy nor theology is reaching the public with a 'normal' and reasonably-rational picture of the human situation and the good life, then there is surely a danger of a spiritual vacuum. Do we not already see an enormous range of fundamentalisms, cults, fringe fads, nationalist excesses and whatnot rushing in to fill it? Again, until recently I would have said, 'Let a hundred flowers bloom'; but as the late-media society is succeeded by the information society I begin, as we all begin, to feel some doubts. The disorder, the excess, becomes unendurable.
Here is a paradox. A moment ago we described the religious optimism which sees the secular City as a fulfilment of biblical promise. Now we invoke the culture-pessimism of those who see it as Pandemonium.
For some, our modern secular belieflessness, and the decay of the old intellectual structures of Philosophy and theology is like the coming of the Kingdom of God; for others it is 'the time of the angels', when demons are abroad. How are we to arbitrate between these very sharply conflicting responses to our present condition?
The answer I am proposing here is that although we do need something like a reinvention of metaphysics, it cannot take the form of a reinstatement of one of the old systems. The huge growth of modern knowledge has taken place, and cannot be reversed. But precisely because of that, we do need to come to terms with the now-extremely-detailed cosmic narrative offered by modern science. Has it wholly displaced the earlier cosmologies; and anyway, what's its status?
Secondly, one of the reasons for the proliferation of cults nowadays is that there are major fissures within the culture that we have developed. In particular, there's a split between the science-and-technology side of the culture which is rationalistic and wants to bring everything down to numbers and to mathematical models of tiny scattering packets of energy, and the arts-andcommunications side of the culture which wants to bring everything down to the mystery of language - not numbers, but ambiguous, elusive, tantalizing, signsin-motion.
These are two excellent reductions but they seem incompatible. Some sort of mediation between them is urgently needed. So in various places I have elsewhere suggested that a powerful metaphor might be a means of bridging the gap. The metaphor I proposed was that of a ripple moving across the surface of a pond, or, as it might be, a tremor moving across one of the sensory surfaces of the body. The ripple is a sense-datum, or a sign. The underside of the ripple, down in the water-body, represents our feeling-response to an impingement upon a sense-organ, and it represents also the material 'body' of the sign. The upper surface of the ripple, in the air, represents the objective cultural world, and it represents also the public meaning of the sign. Around this metaphor I tried to build a text that would weave together the Word and the flesh, biological feeling and cultural meaning, into a continuous story.
The present suggestion, following up that idea, is that a new metaphysics might take the form of a network of such unifying metaphors. Not old-style pseudo-rigorous metaphysics, which was a fantasy, but just a network of metaphors; and not any sort of extra information about another realm, but just ways of connecting up things you already know. With the help of these metaphors we might be able to develop a very simple and clear picture of the world and the human situation. It will need to include an account of the scientific world-story, and to show what sort of status we should ascribe to it. With it will be associated accounts of ethics and of the forms that active and contemplative religion may take in the future.
In short, I'm attempting not a revival of old-style dogmatic metaphysics, but only a sketch - metaphorical, admittedly, but clear, as I hope - of the anti-realist vision of life that follows the end of the old metaphysics and the old systematic theology. I'm asking what view of life is reasonable just now. I'm trying to describe a new sort of natural theology and natural religion, and ending by suggesting that in different parts of the world different faith-traditions may if they wish supplement it in various ways.
So, to repeat, I'm after a minimal creed, a postpostmodernist attempt at reconstruction, and I want it to be as simple and clear as possible. But there is a problem.
Modern culture is so capacious that in one corner of the market the scientists are reciting their prodigious new Grand Narrative cosmology, in complete confidence that it will function in future as the story we'll live by, and innocently unaware of the questions raised about all such stories by post-structuralist and post-modernist thought; while in the opposite corner of the market those same up-to-date literary and cultural theorists take it for granted 'Until recently I would have said "Let a hundred flowers bloom", but I begin to feel some doubt. The disorder, the excess, becomes unendurable...
So I'm after a minimal creed' that all the Grand Narratives are dead, and that science may be disregarded anyway.
But this is very odd. In the familiar scientific narrative 'Man', the primate, creeps onto the cosmic stage only at the very end of the story. So who's told the earlier chapters of the story, and from what authorial standpoint?
Whose is this godlike intelligence that roams free across billions of light-years? Surely it can't belong to that poor chattering hairless ape that just slouched in? It seems inconceivable that the sign-vocabulary of this latest and least important of creatures is suddenly able to go sweeping back and encompass the Big Bang and the birth of the galaxies.
To keep these difficulties out of sight, the scientific community requires in scientific papers a strict and systematic effacement of the personality of the author. In addition, scientists usually assume the perfect transparency of language, so that the observation that they are always operating inside their own natural and mathematical sign-system does not seem to them to be worrying.
By these devices the problems are kept out of sight. But they remain real, and. they present an obstacle to us, because to an arts person who cares about words language cannot be perfectly transparent. For the physicist, everything can be mathematically modelled, and everything happens in the cosmic space across which energies radiate and scatter. For the writer, everything happens in the weird multidimensional space of linguistic meaning. How are we to think the relation between these two sorts of space? How for this matter is one's nearest and dearest able to be both a flesh-and-blood animal like oneself, and a person, a communicator, a positive fountain of signs?
How can the space of the body be also the space of linguistic meaning?
How can science take the linguistic turn? A far-fetched question, which shows why it is hard to be quite as simple as I'd like to be about the present human situation and its religious possibilities. But we'll do our best. We need to try, I'm suggesting, because if it is true that we can no longer hope to frame reasonable common-core conceptions of the world, the self and the good that people might agree to share, then there must be a danger that the culture will be entirely dissolved away by the flood of infotainment technologies.
I need to deal with the scientific world-picture because I am that very unusual sort of animal, an antirealist who loves science. I shall suggest that an antirealist view of science has religious possibilities. And I'm also suggesting a certain convergence between post-Christianity and post-philosophy. The old theology, in alliance with platonism, posited two worlds - this world, and a Better World above, which was a World to Come. Nowadays, as everyone knows, both philosophy and theology want to I think during the Eighties I underestimated the difficulties...
Talk about the end of realism is in effect talk about the end of ecclesiastical Christianity... the end of the Church' posit only one world. It seems a straightforward ambition, but the philosophical difficulties have proved great.
Post-modernism was a mood of doubt about whether any reasonably stable and coherent world-picture could be formed at all. Here I propose a new role for religious thought: to propose unifying and totalizing metaphors which will help us to view the world as a unified field on which the religious life can be lived. I call such a world 'the Kingdom', alluding to the ancient hope that one day the state of religious alienation will come to an end.
Why the philosophical difficulties? Looking back, I think during the Eighties I underestimated the difficulty of explaining what the old realism in philosophy and theology amounted to, why it has broken down, and how we can learn to be happier without it. Realism envisaged the Universe as a great institution, class society on a cosmic scale, disciplinary, hierarchically-ordered, with a modest place prepared for you and expectations about your behaviour. People love that, and will not readily give it up. When you live in an institution you know where you belong, and what is required of you. Outside it, you would feel utterly lost and disoriented.
Now, for various historical reasons the Church has in the past identified itself completely with the realistic vision of the Universe. It was too paradoxical of me to suggest that the Church could and should move out of her old and now-decaying world-picture, and learn instead to live by a non-realist interpretation of her faith. In fact, as Church leaders know well, ecclesiastical Christianity is realistic by definition. Talk about the end of realism is in effect talk about the end of ecclesiastical Christianity and the arrival of post-Christianity. One would scarcely expect Church leaders to be enthusiastic about that.
Yet, ironically, by their own lights they ought to welcome the end of the Church. For as they know, the Church only came into being in the first place as a temporary stop-gap and a second-best. Jesus had originally preached the Kingdom, and the Kingdom was not at all a lowly state of exile from a better world Above: the Kingdom was itself to be a condition of final and unsurpassable fulfilment.
But because the promised Kingdom failed to arrive, the Church had to develop to maintain order in the interim.
That's why the Church is realist through and through. The Church is based on the idea that our present state of existence is very imperfect, but only transitory. Doctrine is needed, to tell us on good authority that a better world is to come; and a disciplinary structure and sacraments are needed, because we are on probation and must purify ourselves in preparation for the New Age. In the Church, as in other faiths, the task of priests and other religious professionals is to mediate between this world and the spiritual world. This gives them an interest in maintaining the condition of religious alienation, because they make their livelihood out of it. So, as the Church settled down in time, and the Kingdom receded into the future, the better state of things for in Kirk and Raven's numbering) and Nietzsche, the two teachers of the metaphysics of conflict. Everything flows, everything is produced by the interplay of conflicting forces, everything burns out and yet in its passing away contributes to the world's renewal.
The main tradition, by contrast, idealized a stable patriarchal order. In the beginning, in the Golden Age, everything was planned and ordered in a balanced and beautiful system by a single masculine intelligence or logos. There was no otherness, no unconscious, no exclusion: no argument, as they say. But, you will remember, Woman started asking awkward questions which we are preparing came to be identified with life after death. The Church allied itself with Platonism, and with the State. It became radically commited to realism and to a pessimistic view of the human condition in this life. We are servants, who live by standards and obey orders that come down from the mysterious realm Upstairs: but life outside the Household of Faith would be so dreadful that we are very for- 'It is time to decide that there is nothing wrong with the senses, the body, the world, time and life... It is time too to give up the old sense of exile in which all value and all true happiness is deferred to an invisible Realm above' and the divine order began to come apart. However, the hope is that one day we shall see it restored.
Perhaps every sort of theological and rationalistic vision of the world, every dream of the world as an intelligible and coherent system, is a dream of monarchy: the universal equitable rule of a single principle of order and harmony that makes everything make some sort of tunate to have our place here in it.
In talking about the end of theological realism, I was trying to break with Christianity's historic pessimism and other-worldliness. For all sorts of scientific reasons, it is time to decide that there is nothing wrong with the senses, the body, this world, time and this life, and there is nothing wrong with the standards and values that we have ourselves developed. It is time to give up the old sense of exile, and the metaphysics that defers all value and all true happiness to a higher and invisible Realm above. It is time to leave the world of 'service'.
But of course I underestimated the fierceness of people's attachment to realism, which has after all been the dominant mode of thought for two-and-a-half millenia; and I found it hard myself to grasp the implications of what I was saying. When we are talking about the end of old-style realistic philosophy and theology, when we are talking about the anti-realist vision of life, what are we talking about - Gotterdammerung, or the Kingdom? It is time for a new effort to catch up with ourselves and see where the argument has by now brought us...
The story we have told has in one vital respect departed radically from the main religious and intellectual tradition. We have sided with Heraclitus (Fragments 214-222, sense. Inevitably, such a principle is thought of as masculine.
However, I've been suggesting that not only Darwin and Freud, but the modern world-picture generally, goes along with Heraclitus and Nietzsche in seeing the diversity of the world as the product of the interplay of opposed forces. Life struggles against the non-living, every living organism must experience some conflict of forces within itself, we human beings have produced our fabulously complex cultures because of our extreme need to find catharsis through symbolic expression, and so on. At every stage of the argument I have stressed the interplay of opposed forces both in nature and culture. The Same and its Other, Conscious and Unconscious, positive and negative, male and female, life and death.
Ironically, I began by saying that we'd reinvent metaphysics as a network of unifying metaphors, the idea being to seek a view of life that might do justice both to what the Arts people are saying and to what the Science people are telling us. But we haven't ended up with even a metaphorical system: we have ended with the vision of a world, and a human life, endlessly at variance with itself.
Heraclitus was right: conflict is built-in. That was Darwin's message, and Darwin was correct too.
So there was no Golden Age in the past, and there will not be any restored Golden Age in the future. But - we have argued - we can in retrospect see that it is precisely our own internal stress and ambivalence that has led us to develop around ourselves such a prodigiously rich and beautiful world as we now have. A world that we can be glad to live in, fight for, and die into. I'm talking about a post-contemplative kind of religion, which is a Kingdomreligion in the following sense. It aims completely to integrate the human into the world, and vice versa. We are world and the world is all ours. We made it, for we finish it as we appropriate it through language. And such a complete two-way reconciliation of humanity and world may claim to be a kind of fulfilment of ancient hopes.
Which leads me to stress in conclusion that in his own Kingdom-religion, Jesus of Nazareth did not envisage a peaceful restored Eden. On the contrary, the Sermon on the Mount throughout envisages the continuation of stress and conflict, persecution and suffering. But he promises joy in affliction: no more, but no less than that.
Don Cupitt is a Fellow and former Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge DOWN TO BUSINESS Stephen Warnes expertly piloted Conference through a potentially difficult Annual Business Meeting which sought to reconcile widely different views on such practical matters as how the Steering Committee should be elected and whether the Network needed more or less organisation.