Andy Kemp discusses the 40th Anniversary Conference at Cambridge
The conference took place on the 1st and 2nd July 2024, a few weeks after Don Cupitt’s 90th birthday, and was hosted at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he served as Dean for many years. It is a beautiful College, with splendid grounds and the accommodation was comfortable – I found from my room that I had a similar view of Parker’s Piece to that from Don’s former study, shown on the front of his book The Revelation of Being.
There were around 75 to 80 of us, perhaps 8 or 9 members of the Network, several of Don’s former colleagues and pupils, the speakers, and a few other interested parties, one or two who had just come because of the notoriety of the TV Series and the response it provoked back in 1984.
The Conference opened with an excellent scene-setting lecture by Steven Shakespeare. Steven is Professor of Continental Philosophy of Religion at Liverpool Hope University, a former pupil of Don’s and a Kierkegaard specialist. He talked about the context into which the programmes were broadcast, a changeable sea where the Cold War was slowly drawing towards an end, where globalisation was beginning to accelerate and a new kind of individualism – both politically and spiritually – was emerging.
He showed how Don’s approach echoed some of these changes, but also illustrated how the content, the style and focus was still very much set within the spirit of ‘The Enlightenment’ and modernism, rather than the coming post-modernity. While the pace and focus of the programmes may now look somewhat dated, Don’s evident skills as a communicator, his charisma, and the richness and openness of the story he was telling, have lasted well and it remains compelling viewing. Don communicated the seriousness of the project and above all the struggle involved for so many of the protagonists with whom he dealt, as well as the struggle he was inviting his viewers to undertake.
Steven was at pains to emphasise that in many ways ‘Sea of Faith’ represents the end of the first phase of Don’s thinking arc. When we are absorbing it we are standing on a liminal shore with Don. He went on to show how it paved the way for Don’s later shifts towards post-modernism and language, away from isolated individualism, towards religious faith as ethics – specifically ‘Solar Ethics’ – and on to ‘Life’ as ‘God’, the everyday speech trilogy, and finally to addressing climate crisis and the fate of humanity.
In the plenary various voices discussed to what extent Don’s thinking, then and later, did or did not address issues of psychology, sociology, feminist and body theology, community, and the capacity of institutional religion to respond to the challenges.
The heart of the conference took the form of a series of speakers addressing the specific themes of the six Sea of Faith programmes, from their own specialisms. The first three of these followed the opening lecture.
Episode 1: The Mechanical Universe – Copernican revolution, Galileo, Blaise Pascal and René Descartes: John Cottingham.
Possibly the least satisfactory of the talks in my view, in that one sensed that Cottingham was not sympathetic with where Don took his argument, and in particular he felt Don misinterpreted Pascal.
Episode 2: The Human Animal Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung: Jeremy Carrette.
Jeremy, one of the conference organisers, gave an excellent short lecture, showing how Don developed the Freud and Jung elements in his next book ‘Only Human’, and then later in ‘The Long-legged Fly’ and ‘Creation out of Nothing’. He also introduced the notion that the amount of time Don spent talking about each thinker on screen mapped across to how far Don himself identified with them! He gave Jung 20 minutes.
Episode 3: Going by the Book – Martin Luther, David Strauss, and Albert Schweitzer: James Carleton Paget.
Paget had written a biography on Schweitzer and he expertly illustrated the parallels between Don and his subject, (pointing out that Schweitzer gets 32 minutes!) and is perhaps the thinker Don identifies with most closely across the whole series. He explored issues of ethical action, sacrifice, and a theme which would recur later: Don’s asceticism.
The celebratory dinner was very pleasant and much conversation flowed in the great hall. The late evening found us sitting choir-like, facing each other across the college chapel: dimly candlelit, and redolent of centuries of Anglican observance. Much had been made of Don’s sheer erudition, his avoidance of certain subjects in the sexuality, gender and relational nexus: earlier he had even been described as a ‘brain on a stick’! The counters to this were the four very moving accounts of Don’s humanity, his friendship and kindness to his colleagues and students, the hospitality of the Cupitt household, his various quirks and eccentricities, and the ‘Donologue’ supervisions! He is much loved and appreciated by those who know him. The contributors to this heart-warming session were: Catherine Pickstock, George Pattison, Clare Carlisle and Alison Webster.
Day 2 began with the second half of the short ‘Episode’ lectures.
Episode 4, Prometheus Unbound – Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard: was a two-hander by Clare Carlisle and George Pattison.
George had been a colleague of Don’s and Clare a pupil of them both, and they have both written and lectured on Kierkegaard. They explored parallels between Don and the Dane, on issues of personal responsibility and freedom, attitudes to the power and reach of the church as an institution, the church as theatre, and whether the church could be reformed.
Episode 5, Religion Shock – Arthur Schopenhauer and Eastern religions: Vivekananda the Hindu missionary. Annie Besant and Anthroposophist Jessica Frazier.
Jessica is a lecturer in Theology and Religion at Trinity College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu studies. She gave a witty lecture on the ‘hippie’ aspects of this programme, and Don’s caution about finding too-easy answers in the spectrum of alternative spiritualities that may not deal adequately with metaphysics in his view. She was also amusing about Schopenhauer and the boring churches of Jane Austen’s England that propelled some towards theosophy and Eastern religion!
Episode 6, The New World – Friedrich Nietzsche and the death of God: Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The final programme was explored by Gavin Hyman, who has written extensively on Don’s thinking and most recently on its connections with ‘Death of God’ theology. This is where Don opened up the way his thinking might move into the future, of the implications of nihilistic thought, the issues involved in mysticism – of language and experience. Hyman finds Don more sympathetic to Nietzsche, perhaps, rejecting Wittgenstein as ultimately too conservative and too negative, while Don strove for a more active, creative approach to theology.
A moving surprise next: Don joined us for the coffee break. He spoke for a few minutes in his lucid, reflective style, emphasising his frailty, and voicing his appreciation that people had been moved to celebrate his work. He finished by saying that he had once aspired to write something worthy of Samuel Beckett. He wasn’t sure that he had, but ultimately he felt he disagreed with Beckett: “Beckett says ‘Fuck Life’, I say ‘Love Life’!”
In the next session the broadcaster Rosie Dawson interviewed Peter Armstrong about the making of the TV series. Peter illustrated his comments with clips from the programmes. He explained the history – working with Don on ‘Who was Jesus?’ – and his championing of Don as a relatable academic, articulate and edgy: he knew he could do it. Outside of Religious Broadcasting, the BBC budget was much more generous and enabled them to travel overseas to visit the locations associated with Galileo, Jung, Schweitzer and Nietzsche. Peter talked of Don’s consummate professionalism: only the very final sequence required more than one take, mainly due to the tide coming in over the camera tracks! The story of the music, composed and recorded specially for the programmes, was a revelation. Peter spoke about it all so well.
After lunch, Elaine Graham, assisted by Graeme Smith, spoke about their research project into the Don Cupitt archive held at Gladstone’s Library, and in particular the vast collection of letters received by Don in the three years following the series’ broadcast. Because of confidentiality issues they were not able to share direct quotes from the letters, but they showed how the responses changed over time as people absorbed the content of the programmes. Some, of course, were angry and horrified, others puzzled and intrigued. But, many more were moved and grateful for what they experienced as liberation: they wanted to share with Don their very varied religious experiences. Along the way Elaine also conveyed a strong impression of the religious and social landscape of the mid-1980s.
The final session was a lecture by Linda Woodhead, the sociologist of religion, who also spoke to SOF’s London Conference. She placed ‘Sea of Faith’ in the context of the other ‘explaining’ series’ of the time and paint-ed a picture of Don as a heroic ascetic – again making the strong link with Albert Schweitzer – a scholar-prophet urging us to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into our own life.
Linda used Weber’s comparative binaries to situate Don as a ‘this worldly, ascetic’ certainly not other-worldly and not a mystic, a man of methodical good works, of rational altruism not emotion. At the end of ‘The Sea of Faith’ he says: ‘Now it’s over to you’. Linda also pointed out that Don’s later development of religion seen as ethics, love of life, and a religion of everyday speech, whilst cohesive as an ascetic religious faith journey, is not travelling in the same direction as much modern spiritual exploration. Neo-liberal capitalism and the smorgasbord of contemporary spiritual therapeutics, along with neo-paganisms and healing-and-wholeness trends, are not heading in Don’s direction either, and more importantly are not starting from anything like the same place. Her work on traditional church attendance and denominational identification amongst the youngest generations bears this out.
The closing plenary was a wide ranging discussion of the implications of all this. It was an excellent conference crammed into a very short time period. Well done the organisers!
Andy Kemp is a member of the SOF Steering Group. He is a staunch but non-worshipping Methodist and works for two Methodist charities involved in addressing issues of poverty and deprivation.