Dominic Kirkham asks what comes after Religious Fundamentalism?
Substantial works have analysed how cultural and scientific change takes place; a whole industry has grown up around how to manage change. But while leaders look forward to new horizons the groundswell of dissent prefers to look back to the familiar. This resistance to change and preference for looking back is associated with fundamentalism, a word perceptively restructured as ‘founder-mentality’ – the desire go back to authoritative figures of the past for guidance in the modern age: Moses, Jesus, Mohamed, Nanak. Look no further: their teachings were enough.
The irony here is that such figures were invariably prime examples of agents of change in their own times. An early criticism of Christian radicalism (by the pagan philosopher Celsus) was of its novelty. We don’t have to be paid-up Marxists to concede that economics and social change promote changes of understanding – Marxism itself was the product of such change. Similarly with the discovery of new or anomalous facts: as the economist J.M. Keynes once said, ‘When the facts change I change my mind.’ A once discarded stone can become a corner stone of a new edifice of belief. This Pauline metaphor exemplifies the true ‘founder-mentality’; of looking into the depths of things and being prepared to reshape ones identity.
If opening up to change is refreshing it can also be portrayed more threateningly as betrayal. Ever since Zarathustra – perhaps the first truly innovative religious thinker – was stabbed in the back by a member of the traditionalist hierarchy things have never been easy for the reformer. The standard criticism of the convert is one of untrustworthiness – why trust someone who got it wrong before: having changed once he will change again. Both St Paul and Newman were subject to such criticism. Yet, if anything, it disguises a deeper illusion: that to have changed once is sufficient. Had St Paul owned up to the fact that his newly coined eschatology was wrong (there would be no Second Coming in his life time), his ethical precepts would have been more realistic; had Newman perceived that his doctrine of development failed to grasp the real meaning of evolution, his theology would have become more radical. In a nutshell, their failure was in that having changed they failed to change further.
Perhaps the role model that religious institutions most lack is of the founder who changed again; of the founder who lives on the move, for whom there are no final solutions. The inspirational pope, John XXIII became such a person, as his famous death-bed testimony shows. St. Augustine – a man who had undergone much change – gave some inkling of it in his exhortation, ‘Linger not by the way, always press on, always advance.’ Such a view is not dissimilar to the idea of the Church as a ‘pilgrim people’. But the implication here is of a clear goal, to which there is but one road. The change of which we are speaking has neither goal nor road: rather it’s the art of the surfer, breasting the resurgent waves. A transience that leaves no trace.
This is an altogether more alarming notion – a dizziness, hovering on the brink of chaos. The idea of primeval chaos is a threatening, chthonic darkness against which the light of religious reason (or revelation) has always defined its cosmologies. Today we understand things differently. Chaos is now viewed positively, as the underlying feature of complex systems. The science of complexity – of which Chaos Theory is a part – shows how very small random changes lead to new systems, totally disproportionate to their origins and organised in a state of dynamic equilibrium. Everything is marvellously balanced on the edge of chaos, but constantly reordering and renewing itself – like the ecological systems of the Earth.
This is how we have come to understand reality.
As cosmologist John Barrow writes, ‘The science of how complex systems organise themselves is currently one of the great frontiers of scientific research’ (Theories of Everything). It has implications for everything about us: economics, ecological balances, weather systems, even the workings of the human mind. Life has taken on the aspect of an emergent, self-organising drama that embraces the universe. Thanks to the work of modern cosmologists, we can now see that the elements of life are common to our part of the universe in its current phase, and could only have appeared after the collapse of a previous generation of stars. 7 sofia 87 March 2008 All Change!
Dominic Kirkham asks what comes after Religious Fundamentalism?
But if life itself has such a vast and arbitrary context the theological pre-eminence of humanity in the universe also begins to look arbitrary. Soteriology (theories of redemption) centred on ourselves and our own rather insignificant planet, look rather parochial.
The great religious and ethical systems as we now know them have all assumed, rather innocuously, the centrality of humanity in their grand theandric dramas, just as pre-Copernican man assumed the centrality of the earth in the cosmic order. In this scheme of things nature provided the peripheral backdrop, or (as the Franciscan theology of St.
Bonaventure) the amphitheatre, of a divine drama.
The idea of a created cosmic order has long been closely tied to the concept of a stable, comprehensible and unique universe. When this concept first arose amongst the Ionian thinkers of ancient Greece, it was seen as seditious. Monistic thinking – as with its surrogate, monotheism – gained ascendancy at first only as a superior type of gnosis, held by elites in the face of popular incomprehension and hostility. It could be life-threatening to those who voiced it in the face of well established public deities, as Greek philosophers and Biblical prophets found out. But now, far from being a superior idea, it looks like a distinctly beleaguered one. Even the very concept of a uni-verse has become problematic; beliefs such as that of the great Jehovah and Allah mere staging posts on a wider exploration.
The challenge now facing us is to move out of our previously ideological camps to give priority to Life, the matrix of everything that is – not just human life.
This entails a new exodus into the unknown, with its as yet uncharted thinking. In Western culture man (yes, it’s always ‘man’!) has traditionally defined himself against nature rather than as inseparable from it; a patriarchal view which regards the earth as threateningly feminine. This dualism has been reinforced by Monotheistic ‘super’-naturalism. The matter could not have been better put than by Vatican apparatchik Cardinal Martino when he recently stated, ‘Man has an indisputable superiority within and over all the rest of creation…a person endowed with an immortal soul cannot ever be held equal to other living beings.’ The alternative view, expressed by eminent scientist James Lovelock, is that it is exactly this kind of thinking – which see humanity as stewards, lording it over creation – that is at the root of our problem: ‘The idea that humans are yet intelligent enough to serve as stewards of the Earth is amongst the most hubristic ever’ (The Revenge of Gaia). We generally find it difficult enough to organise our own personal affairs properly, let alone those of the planet.
As a result we are now confronted by a remarkable sense of apocalypse of our own making. The ‘revenge’ of Gaia (Earth) is aimed precisely at us humans; a case of reality reasserting itself. Our survival is now in our own hands and depends on the cultivation of a new attitude of regard for Life in all its forms: what has been called by the naturalist E.O.Wilson ‘biophilia’.
We must change. In a religious context the kenosis (self emptying) must now be that of humanity in the face of potential disaster, becoming a simulacrum of that putative cosmic drama of redemption described by St.
Paul (Letter to the Philippians). We who shaped that great theandric drama to have such a humbling dénouement must now be even more imaginative and reshape our own. Radical new perspectives in thinking and acting are required – what may be called an ‘apocalyptic naturalism’.
Amongst others, the philosopher George Santayana presciently grappled with this challenge.
Though he recognised there was something in man that led him constantly to rebel against naturalism in favour of some kind of eternal ideal, he also recognised that hankering after the ‘denatured’ forms of old beliefs was to be like Don Quixote, tinkering with obsolete armour. For him ‘the word nature is poetical enough’ (Scepticism and Animal Faith). Modern science reveals that, outside the human sphere, all is chaotic and beyond our control: ‘no doubt the spirit and energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea that rises in every little wave. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moved’ (Life of Reason). ‘When the facts change I change my mind.’ One Life: Robin’s Oak in Sherwood Forest 1000+ years old Though the extra-human area is chaotic and purposeless, humanity can still act in the human arena to create order and satisfaction. This was also the conclusion of psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, who survived the most extreme inhumanity imaginable in Auschwitz. Whereas once we may have sought to build the meaning of life around some grandiose sense of destiny or election, the perspective has now been reversed: ‘Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognise that it is he who is asked’ (Man’s Search for Meaning). Meaning is to be found in the changing challenges made upon us; each has its opportunities which demand a response – an affirmation of life, a creative act, a kind deed. A failure of nerve, or just plain hubris, will ensure that ‘the twilight of the gods’ merely anticipated the twilight of humanity – our own Gotterdämmerung.
From a necessary kenotic humbling follows a whole new way of living, centred not on rights but respect, of a willingness to curtail our rights (of reproduction, consumption and comfort) out of respect for the natural order of things our recklessness has brought to the point of destruction. The supernatural narrative of monotheism is now replaced by the natural narrative of monozoism, one life.
Whatever religious beliefs humanity may choose to retain in the future will no doubt continue to have social and decorative value: cultural attributes derived from past traditions. But the test of their acceptability will be the measure of compatibility with the survival of the great web of Life, of which we are but a part.
Life embraces all that is changing, evolving, evanescent. To complete the words of Newman, ‘To have lived long is to have changed much.’ Dominic Kirkham is an interested follower of SoF and writes regularly for Renew (Catholics for a Changing Church).He was formerly a history teacher,then a religious and RC Priest for 25 years,he is now in his third reincarnation as a provider of home maintenance services for elderly people.