The first Don Cupitt book I bought was The Leap of Reason. I was completing a PGCE course at Emmanuel College, and was captivated by the Dean who handed out sermon notes before preaching. It was 1976 and I devoured the book in one sitting on the day of publication. In those days, at Cambridge, you could attend any university lecture course and Don’s on The Anthropologists and Religion was a good deal more interesting than the education lectures I was supposed to be attending. When later I was accepted as a candidate for ordination, I was determined to return to Cambridge and learn more from this (then, pipe-smoking) priest who never buttoned his shirt cuffs.
The Leap of Reason (Sheldon Press) is still, I think, a remarkable book setting out Don’s agenda for the next decade, but the one sentence I took with me from the book was: ‘The self is the fundamental analogy of God’ (p 114). At that time, it chimed in with a sentence of St Augustine’s: ‘If I know myself, O God, I shall know thee.’
On Thursday 8th June (the second Thursday after Pentecost), a few churches will celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi. From its beginnings in the 13th and 14th centuries, it became one of the most popular feast days in medieval times with performances of mystery plays and village processions of the Blessed Sacrament secure in a monstrance. Many readers will be familiar with the Latin hymn celebrating Jesus’ Real Presence in the sacrament:
Ave verum corpus natum de Maria Virgine, vere passum, immolatum in cruce pro homine, cuius latus perforatum fluxit aqua et sanguine Esto nobis praegustatum mortis in examine. Hail, body really given birth by the Virgin Mary, that really suffered on the cross, offered for humanity, from whose pierced side flowed blood and water. May you be a foretaste for us when we are facing death.
Some refer to the Blessed Sacrament as the Host as for them, it is Christ, present in the bread and wine, inviting his followers to the supper: it is a celebration of the Real Presence. But how is Christ present in the Eucharist, in the Breaking of Bread, and the re-enactment of the Last Supper? How for that matter is God present in the world as believers claim? Forgive me if I don’t go into the minutiae of transubstantiation, consubstantiation, transignification, and all the other variations of Reformation theology. ‘The self is the fundamental analogy of God’. Let’s instead ask the question: How am I present in the world?
We use many expressions to suggest that we aren’t always present even in the company of our friends. Are you with us? He’s miles away. She’s day-dreaming. You didn’t hear a word I said, did you? He looked right through me. It can be a more urgent question. The King is present when the Royal Standard flies over the palace but what flags signal that the patient with locked-in syndrome is present? What are the signs of life in the terminally ill patient?
If we phone 999, we’re asked immediately Is the patient breathing? It is hardly surprising that breath is such a vital symbol in religion. In Hebrew, the word breath (ruach) is also the word for spirit. Another word nephesh meaning soul, or being, is also a word for breath and pneuma in Greek and anima in Latin can stand both for breathing and the spirit. Many hymns play on the theme:
Breathe on me breath of God Fill me with life anew . . . O breath of life, come sweeping through us . . .
In 1996 Don retired as Dean of Emmanuel and the last two years of the century saw the publication of a remarkable series of books: Mysticism after Modernity (Blackwells 1998), The Religion of Being (SCM Press 1998), The Revelation of Being (SCM Press 1998), The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech (SCM Press 1999), The Meaning of It All in Everyday Speech (SCM Press 1999). I was now a priest, still reading Cupitt’s books on the day of publication, and by now being made to realise some of the implications of post-modernity on God and the self.
Some of our expressions, written just a few paragraphs earlier, are rather misleading. We may ask Is he with us? but of course there is nowhere else he could be. To be a living human being is to be part of a world, the human world. As the present moment is always passing into the future, so we are always slipping away and our presence is sustained only by the human world we create through our language and culture. If we reject the dualisms of body and soul, mind and spirit, then we can only be part of the world described in our scientific theories and the stories we and others tell about us.
Today many embrace this through mindfulness. One website describes its aim as paying attention to the present moment. The practice includes many techniques which some will find akin to forms of prayer and meditation. Interestingly some of these are encouraged by Don himself in the books mentioned above. Bring your attention to the physical sensation of breathing. Be aware of your body and its tension and emotions. Be kind about your wandering mind. Practise observing your thoughts coming and going without reacting. Just sit and pay attention. One of the benefits attributed to mindfulness is that it improves creativity and releases the imagination. If we are indeed part of a world described in our scientific and personal stories then this faculty is key to who we are.
At its heart, imagination is concerned with images and our ability to conjure up pictures of the past, the future and the fantastical. It is very likely that this faculty enables consciousness, it certainly enables knowledge. It takes a leap of imagination to make a scientific discovery, to act in the world and set goals. It helps us to understand people and show compassion. To be driven to respond to another’s needs, we have to imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes. To ensure that our help is practical, we imagine the various possibilities open to us and their likely effect. We recreate past solutions to see what we can learn from them and what mistakes we might avoid. To be the sort of people we would like to be, we examine the images we have of ourselves, self-images we largely take for granted and yet which shape our lives, our character and responses.
Using our imagination is an essential part of what it is to be a living, conscious, thinking, understanding and responsive person. It deepens our insight, clarifies our vision and motivates our action. It’s creative, liberating, key to the exploration of our inmost desires, and central to every moment of our lives. It’s no wonder then that in Christian thought all this is characteristic of the Holy Spirit.
In Genesis, the creativity of God is seen in the spirit brooding over the face of the water. Throughout the bible, the spirit gives wisdom and understanding. Through the spirit, prophets have visions and the people dream dreams. In the New Testament, to be filled with the spirit is to give birth to love, joy, peace, kindness and goodness. To live in the spirit is to be bound together in love. In short, we are the image of the creator God. The Spirit is the presence of God in the world and the believer.
In classical theology there is an age-old question regarding God and the self, and it’s one that is addressed in Cupitt’s The Religion of Being:
Is the religious person and the religious object ‘in’ which one believes – are they numerically two or one? If they are two, then faith is trust in another, namely God; but if one, then faith is that one should be true to oneself. So which is it? (page 148).
I was well aware of this question which is traditionally answered in terms of substance. If the soul is thought of as, in any way, a part of the substance of God, or unified with God, then it would no longer be subject to God’s authority. For the church authorities that won’t do at all. No, God is an infinite spiritual substance, the human soul a finite substance. But what of faith when we don’t believe in spiritual substances?
Still, there can be something akin to worship. As traditionally the believer waited upon the presence of God and for an awareness of the movement of the Holy Spirit, so we may also wait for the sense of life, the energy flowing through us. In so doing both may experience a sense of awe. Where the traditional believer would seek to discover a calling and a task to be fulfilled, so we too may hope to find our vocation. Not a duty given to us by a divine authority, but something like the urge to create, to put forward a conviction that has formed in us, fulfil what we see as a moral obligation. As believers seek to accept God’s will for them, so we hope to accept the fragility and passing of life and our own vulnerability and mortality.
And as Don Cupitt points out, here there is a parallel with the faith of Christ and his acceptance of his mission and fate. ‘God is an abyssal mystery, and Christ’s faith is his acceptance of his destiny as the one in whom and through whom God comes forth into the human realm, in self-expression and self-revelation.’
I will be celebrating the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Feast of the Real Presence, hopefully in the company of people rejoicing in the energy and creativity of life, reminding ourselves of the need to attend the present moment, to accept the given-ness of life, to give full attention to those we meet, and making our presence felt.
We should live as the Sun does. The process by which it lives and the process by which it dies are one and the same. It hasn’t a care. It simply expends itself gloriously and in so doing gives life to all. (The Time Being SCM Press 1992).
Stephen Mitchell, a former chair of the SOF Steering Committee, is a retired vicar and occasional blogger, who enjoys making music. His Agenda for Faith is downloadable as a free pdf at: sofn.org.uk/pages/agendaforfaith.html. His God in the Bath was published by John Hunt Publishing in 2006.