LE11 2BY PAGE 2 SPRING 1991 SEA OF FAITH MAGAZINE CUPITT AND ART John Florance "The fabulous complexity and variety of the world's religions, cultures and languages is evidence enough that we human beings are artists and mythmakers. We have a seemingly unstoppable productivity in generating stories and symbols, meanings and values."(1) Don Cupitt's most recent thought (as represented by Radicals and the Future of the Church and Creation out of Nothing) has seen the emergence of an art-model of religion. One of the chapters in Radicals is significantly called "We are Grateful to Art" and the sense of 'creation' explored in his latest book is clearly closely related to the kind of creation artists do all the time. It is interesting that when Cupitt was asked about his feelings towards Jesus, his answer was focused and illustrated with reference to two painters. "There isn't one person there any more. When we read the Gospels today, we find four very different Jesuses. But I especially like, as I've often said, the parables, the reversal-sayings, the Jesus of Luke, the Jesus of Rembrandt, the Jesus of Stanley Spencer and Jesus who just symbolises the needy fellow-human and the persecuted Jew.
Am I making this clear ? Invisible persons and objects of faith have all been dissolved away by our modern and historical ways of thinking. But we still have the whole rich tradition that we have received. Different bits of it may mean a great deal to us, as I for example admire Spencer's images of Christ in Cookham." (2) The historical Jesus has been swept away : the (re)invention of `Jesus' by Rembrandt and Spencer nevertheless has a validity and authenticity. Cupitt's engagement with language and the arts is, I think, a real growing point in his thought.
Nevertheless, Cupitt's foremost allegiance is to the thought of certain key philosophers - a fact those of us not philosophically trained find decidedly daunting.
Against this I would like, very briefly, to suggest some of the fascinating resonances between Cupitt's thought and the work of two great artists ; one a proto-romantic poet, the other a youthful composer in his eighties : William Blake (1757-1827) and Michael Tippett (1905- ). In doing so I hope to suggest that Cupitt belongs as much in an art tradition as he does in a philosophical one.
Blake's religious radicalism is at least as startling as Cupitt's - perhaps more so. If Jung sees God as an archetype in the self-regulating psyche, Blake locates him in the human imagination. The great Blake scholar Geoffrey Keynes sums it up like this : "He [Blake] was a philosopher-poet, putting Imagination above Reason, and so seemed to upset what is usually regarded as the foundation of the doctrines propounded by his predecessors, such as Bacon, Newton and Locke. They placed God above and separate from Man, whereas Blake regarded human imagination as the essential divine quality by which God most manifested himself in Man. This was almost equating Man with God and Art with Christianity. Blake had, therefore, reached the extremity of humanism, an attitude which seemed to his contemporaries, startled by so revolutionary a mode thought, to be explicable only as a form of insanity. So complete an artist was quite beyond their comprehension." (3) As Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven "Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast." Already we can see a link with the present Dean of Emmanuel.
The central thrust of Blake's thought, as defined by Keynes, the idea that Poetic Genius is identified with God, was operating as early as 1788, and virtually all his later poetic explorations are an organic growth from this. The appearance of a species of non-realism so early on is extraordinary but not altogether unprecedented. The amazing ferment of political and religious radicalism which constituted the English revolution of the Seventeenth Century produced another kind of near-non-realism in the works of the True Leveller, Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1676).
Christopher Hill sums up Winstanley's religious thoughts as follows : "We should read Winstanley as we read a poet, SPRING 1991 PAGE 3 SEA OF FAITH MAGAZINE as we read William Blake, and as Winstanley himself read the Bible : concerned not too pedantically with the letter, but with the spiritual content which the myths have, or can be given.
For Winstanley, Cain and Essau the elder brothers become symbols for great landlords, the propertied classes ; the younger brother, Abel or Jacob, 'hated, persecuted and despised, ... will rise up in you that are trod underfoot like dust of the earth ... His time is now come.' All the prophecies in the Old and New Testaments relating to the calling of the Jews and restoration of Israel refer to 'this work of making the earth a common treasury'.
Even more remarkable is Winstanley's attitude towards the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation.
These were generally thought to describe the battles which would precede the setting up of Christ's kingdom. Many radicals believed - with Milton - that this kingdom would come on earth in the near future. Winstanley coolly treated these prophecies as referring to conflicts within the minds of individuals as Christ rose in sons and daughters, overcoming Antichrist, the Beast, selfishness, and convinced men and women of the necessity of a communist society. So Christ's kingdom ceased to be other-worldly ; it's coming meant the destruction of private property, of selfishness and the setting up of true community : not the end of history but it's beginning." (4) Blake was a more subtle and sophisticated writer than Winstanley and he was a conscious mythologiser. In this he most notably differs from Cupitt. Blake's exploratory-creative endeavour issued in an extraordinarily developed personal mythology, which draws centrally on a critically subverted Christianity, but which incorporates ideas from a bewildering variety of sources, including the Bhagavad-Gita, the Koran, alchemists, Plato, the Gnostics, Jewish thinkers and others - all galvanized by a visionary energy which is unique in literature.
His religion is all inclusive ('everything that lives is holy') and his reconciliation of warring philosophies is one of the most remarkable things about his thought.
In this he differs from Cupitt, who instinctively separates the philosophical sheep from the goats.
Cupitt's thought is a process of rigorous refining and redefinition ; Blake's is one of creative elaboration and incorporation. Blake from his earliest poems sees that the happiness of man is the glory of God and further sees that this is heaven (cf Cupitt's Lifelines).
Both men see freedom as essential to their endeavour. For Blake, Liberty (Jerusalem) is the central inspiration of all mankind.
Blake, or course, did not have to undergo the trial of nihilism. No matter how esoteric his thought at first appears, it derives from a vibrant and unfractured tradition. Relativism and contingency are not yet live problems for him.
They are for Michael Tippett, who, like Cupitt, time and time again in his writings refers to historical circumstances in which he finds himself in terms of ruptured tradition and isolation. And yet it is possible to place Tippett in a tradition containing work which resonates with Cupitt's - notably that of Blake and Jung.
Tippett's book Moving into Aquarius contains a moving statement of his artistic credo called "Poets in a Barren Age". This title is derived from the poet Holderlin, who mourned his loss of function with the despairing cry of "What are poets for in a barren age? " The barrenness of the age has intensified. No longer are the triumphant affirmations of a Schiller or a Beethoven remotely possible : "0 ye millions, I embrace you. Fling this kiss to all the world." The artist has become increasingly isolated a figure. "The climax of my sense of isolation came ... when the noble Christian allies decided to put their faith in that masterpiece of technics - the atom bomb. Simultaneously, the concentration camps were opened. I found in these obscenities, as did many others, a most violent and enduring shock to my sense of what humanity might be at all. A denial of any and every affirmation which the poet might make, whether in the name of God or of Mankind.What price Beethoven now ?" (5) But if Beethovian affirmation is impossible, Tippett has learnt to work with the shards of an exploded inheritance. In doing so, he was profoundly influenced by the techniques of allusion and fragmentary quotation developed by T.S.Eliot, most notably in The Waste Land. And yet (and this is what makes Tippett so inspiring an artist) he never gives way to the despair which characterizes Eliot's poem.
The dream is broken, as it is time and time again.
The dream of the French Revolution, of the British Empire, of the 'War to end War', of the communists' Utopia. Most resounding of all for our time - Jefferson's dream of an America which accepts that all men are created equal. That dream is broken. But must I stop singing, like Holderlin, because of the fragility of all aspiration? I do not think this is what happens. We celebrate - even in outdated forms at times, because we must. The young people who sing that great hymn of affirmation, Blake's 'Jerusalem', are not so naive as to imagine that they will in fact build it, any more than all mankind will be brothers. Yet there is a momentary vision of a possibility.
PAGE 4 SPRING 1991 SEA OF FAITH MAGAZINE The illusion we have now to discard is that this Jerusalem is still to be found outside, somewhere among the glittering promises of technology. As they leave the earth, the astronauts see it from afar - flat, round, nothing so small as a man to be seen. And that flattened out picture of the earth has always seemed to me to symbolize the devaluation of the singular, minute, particular man we all are. But I am still me on earth and the astronaut is still one particular man on his moon.
And it's my task as an artist to talk to him, to find some way to speak through the space suit of the technological man to the imaginative man within." (6) The Mask of Time, Tippett's most profound 'late work' has a sense of 'summing up' so characteristic of such works. In his Preface to the published text Tippett writes : "Our century has acquired such vastly extended notions of space and time that I feel it would be an error to rely on past conceptions of the ontological and the transcendental. Thus the work I have written is neither a setting of the Mass, nor an oratorio, nor even an adaptation of the sort we find in late Romantic works like Delius's A Mass of Life or Mahler's Eighth Symphony. Inescapably, I have had to accommodate a plurality of existing viewpoints. At best, my composition offers fragments or scenes from a possible 'epiphany' for today ... The text for The Mask of Time is compounded of metaphors drawn from many sources." (7) Tippett, like Cupitt, works with the sources to hand, using his human resources to galvanize them into a multi-faceted vision. Like Cupitt, he has a sharp sense of plurality and history, seeing man as wholly (and only too) human and rejecting ideas of claims acting upon us from outside time and history ; there is no transcendent realm. And he inspiringly draws comfort, again like Cupitt, from man's seemingly unquenchable desire to tell stories, create myth and make art out of the human imagination. As Tippett puts it : "I have been writing music for forty years. During those years there have been huge and worldshattering events in which I have been inevitably caught up. Whether society has felt music valuable or needful I have gone on writing because I must. And I know that my true function within a society which embraces all of us, is to continue an age-old tradition, fundamental to our civilization, which goes back into pre-history and will go forward ; into the unknown future. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form whether visual, intellectual or musical. For it is only through images that the inner world communicates at all. Images of the past, shapes of the future. Images of vigour for a decadent period, images of calm for one too violent. Images of reconciliation for worlds torn by division. And in an age of mediocrity and shattered dreams, images of abounding, generous, exuberant beauty." (8) But this is also where Tippett and Cupitt reveal themselves as sharply differing sensibilities. For whereas Cupitt remarks the fact (most explicitly in his two most recent books), Tippett lives it, bringing forth images of beauty from the inscape of human imagination. The 'dry', 'cold' nature of Cupitt's thought is pinpointed in Scott Cowdell's useful book Atheist Priest ? : Don Cupitt and Christianity (p 73) : "Can we imagine on Cupitt's lips the words 'Come unto me all ye who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest' ?" In Tippett's works (and here I am particularly thinking of the Third Symphony) this is exactly where the composer's imaginative sympathies are played out.
Cupitt's work is always bracing, Tippett's at its best offers unillusioned solace.
But perhaps the contrast is too pat - it may just be another way of saying that Cupitt is a philosopher/ theologian and that Tippett is a supreme artist.
SPRING 1991 PAGE 19 SEA OF FAITH MAGAZINE CONTRIBUTORS JOHN FLORANCE lives in Leicester and is a freelance writer and broadcaster.