This month sees a remarkable publishing event: the publication by SCM of The Old Creed and the New by Don Cupitt. It is five years since his work was published in this country.
Meanwhile we are fortunate that Polebridge Press have continued to publish his books including this brilliant little book The Great Questions of Life. Don’s output is prodigious. Since the 1970s he has written over forty books. This year sees the publication of three. But then that has always been his strategy: to lay down a body of writing, that in the fullness of time, like a rich mineral deposit, will fire the imagination of a generation to come.
Of course, seasoned Cupitt readers will find many familiar themes – but then that is true of the 48 Preludes and Fugues of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier.
It was Schumann that said that the 48 should be the pianist’s daily bread. Those seeking to create a credible faith for today will find this book an equally rich source of meditation. They will discover new themes and new twists to old ones.
For the newcomer to Cupitt, this is an excellent introduction. It’s important for them to begin at Chapter One. For them, I would always suggest reading the introductions last. That’s where the latest book is placed in the context of the others. It’s where one discovers little nuggets of personal biography. It’s where some of the writer’s thinking behind the book is uncovered. But it’s often more difficult. Hegel, existentialism and L’Ancien Régime may not immediately grab the lay person’s attention.
So plunge straight in to Chapter One, into the world of Homer – Homer Simpson, Ned Flanders and the Springfield of Middle America and Cupitt’s personal creed. It has also been part of Cupitt’s strategy to work out a faith and philosophy for our age and to leave the context of that faith open.
Interestingly, in this first chapter, he lists several of the vocabularies in which this faith could take root: in ordinary language, as Philosophy’s Own Religion, as a ‘kingdom’ form of Christianity, as a form of Japanese Buddhism. Cupitt is not hopeful of such a faith finding root in Christian vocabulary and there is a passionate account of his struggle against the ‘neoconservative power-men’.
But why has Don returned to the Great Questions?
Because for some twenty-three centuries, religion and philosophy have turned a cycle through the highest degree of institutionalisation and objectification only to return to its origins in everyday human life and language.
The great disciplinary institutions have lost much of their old power, and the old supernatural world is gone.
Above us now, as John Lennon excellently put it, there is ‘only sky’.
We are innocent and emptied – and we are therefore able to meet the great questions of life, the founding questions of philosophy, with a clarity and head-on directness that have been impossible for over two millennia.
We are now in the same sort of position as people were in early-Greece, from the time up to those preSocratic philosophers – yes, did you see the joke coming? – from the time of Homer.
As with the Life books, in the appendix, Cupitt lists and classifies all the great questions of life, citing them in the form that we are most likely to have heard people use and invites us all to fill in any glaring omissions. It’s startlingly simple and novel.
How do you explore the meaning of life? By looking at the way the word life is used. How do you discover the great questions of life? By looking at the questions people actually ask. The questions – well, of course, they are mostly the ones we might expect – Why are we here? Is there a God? Is death the end? Is that it? The answers, given in the last seven chapters are refreshingly frank. And I’m not going to give away the answers here! You can order it through Sea of Faith!
Some of the answers I know will frustrate readers of this magazine. Other will tease and provoke us into answering them ourselves. For fuzzy, irritating, and badly worded though they may often seem, the popular great questions are important to us. In many ways a person’s spiritual biography remains the story of how she personally appropriates the great questions, and how lifelong reflection on them gradually changes her and shows her ‘who she really is’.
Stephen Mitchell is a member of SoF Steering Committee.
His book,God in the Bath,is published by O Books in October.
This book is available through SoF, from All Saints Vicarage, The Street, Gazeley, Newmarket. CB8 8RB. £10 including p & p.
The Great Questions of Life by Don Cupitt. Polebridge Press (Santa Rosa, USA), 2005. £10. 106 pages. Pbk. ISBN 0944344569.