Where does spirit hve?
Inside or out? aving taken leave of God, I meet H«: everywhere! The world stubbornly refuses to remain mere atoms and molecules, or mere agglomerations of selfish genes competing for the chance to reproduce.
It is transparent: divinity shines through, calling forth wonder, awe, joy, even worship. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”, meeting us not only in the natural world but also in human relations, in art, even sometimes in church.
How can this be? We know that our world is “outsideless”: “all this”, all that we perceive with our senses and shape with our language, is “all there is”.
Should we then seek to blind and deafen ourselves to intimations of divinity? Are they the equivalent for the nonrealist of diabolic temptation, luring us to forsake rationality and return to the false consolations of a realist faith?
For William Wordsworth the feelings that nature awoke in him gave his life its meaning and purpose: he is “well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.” At times he brings a realist philosophy to bear on his experience. In the Ode:
Intimations of Immortality, he imagines that the young child, “moving about in worlds not realised”, “remembers” a life in some kind of Platonic higher realm from which he has recently emerged, “trailing clouds of glory”. CS Lewis, in his own conservative Christian brand of Platonism, considered that the “joy” which as a boy he experienced most strongly in the Norse sagas and Wagner’s music, does indeed point beyond itself:
God uses the world of sense to create in “Through abandoning a realist faith we can appropriate the insights of Wordsworth’s peers:
Keats's ‘holiness of the heart's affections’, Blake's ability ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’.” us a “joy” which becomes an insatiable longing, never to be satisfied on earth but only in heaven, in Dante’s beatific vision, in oneness with God Himself: “But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.
While the other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter.
He who first sights it cries, ‘look!’ The whole party gathers round and stares.
But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authorities that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold. ‘We would be at Jerusalem’.” (Surprised by Joy).
Wordsworth, unlike Lewis, is not a whole-hearted Platonist. For all his sense of the transcendent he remains anchored in the world of the senses. He says disparagingly of Peter Bell, in his poem of that name, “A primrose by the river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more”, but in the end the pleasure imparted by primroses, celandines and daffodils did not need a metaphysical explanation.
After his exalted musings “a mile or two above Tintern Abbey”, he concludes that his religious interpretation of his experience, the “belief” he has arrived at, is not in the end what gives the experience its value: “If this Be but a vain belief, yet O how oft, O sylvan Wye, thou wanderer through the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee.” Wordsworth knew that the imagination enters into the world of vision. Our world is “both what the mind perceives And what it half creates”.
It is the mind which casts “the visionary gleam”. This distinctively human power is minutely depicted in the, last book of The Prelude. In the same way as a natural scene can be endued with a particular mood by moonlight or the sound of rushing water, so “higher minds” “from their native selves can send abroad Like transformations, for themselves create A like existence, and whene’er it is Created for them, catch it.” “Where does spirit live? Inside or outside?”, asks Seamus Heaney: “How habitable is perfected form?
And how inhabited the windy light?” Wordsworth, as well as nonrealist philosophy, can help us to see how the world is not, indeed, “inhabited” by spirit, but rather spirit, or God, comes into existence at the edge where the creative imagination (and not just in poets) meets whatever is perceived as beautiful or grand.
God is not out there (the world has no outside). Where then does our sense of such a being come from? If we are formed in all our complexity by a “Blind Watchmaker” using tools of natural selection to make us ever more efficient Vassily Kandinsky: Shrill Peaceful Pink machines for the perpetuation of our “selfish genes”, of what use to the genes is the “God instinct”? I recently had the opportunity to ask Richard Dawkins if he had any views about the origins of religion: has belief in God any adaptive value? His only answer was that religious people tend to live longer than unreligious. I think we can go further.
Phil Knight, in a recent brilliant talk to the Yorkshire Sea of Faith group on “pragmatist theology”, argued that a new paradigm is now replacing the one which originated with Copernicus and Galileo and was consolidated by Descartes and Kant. Within the old paradigm the mind was seen as the “mirror of nature”. But now, through insights made available by Darwin, we can see “knowledge” as essentially “adaptive”; it is a matter of “coping” rather than “copying”. It is not that the world “out there” is somehow “reflected” in our minds; our “knowledge” of how nature operates is simply another tool enabling us to survive.
How does this apply to the God instinct? Don Cupitt, in After God, makes a relevant suggestion when he writes of our hunter-gatherer forebears ascribing “spirits” to aspects of nature: it meant they could generalize, conceive of the world in terms of the type rather than the individual, and thus acquire the understanding they needed in order to have power over it. Understanding the nature of a mammoth by objectifying it as spirit might enable them to hunt it more effectively. No doubt the understanding would be reinforced by ritual, by the use of mask and dance to become “possessed” of the spirit in question, but it would be the understanding that mattered.
Presumably such an attitude to nature might be accompanied by, or might develop into, Wordsworth’s sense of the transcendent, or Rudolf Otto’s sense of the numinous.
So we may accept that the religious sense is somehow a product of evolution.
Perhaps even now it works alongside physical appetite and the sex-drive to keep us alive. Arguably, happiness, absurd as it is, would be impossible without it, and we should die out from mere misery. But we need not leave it to the selfish gene. As Wordsworth recognized, it is the essence of the God instinct that matters, not the explanation.
It remains to ask what is its importance in our lives. How far can we accept Wordsworth’s valuation? We all know what it is like to come down from the Mountain of Transfiguration and find “God comes into existence where the creative imagination meets whatever is perceived as beautiful.” ourselves unable to cope with the messy demands of everyday: we may even become more irritable and discouraged in proportion to the height of our exaltation. It is then, the realist may say, that we need the assurance of a God who is the same regardless of our feelings, a God we can know is there whether we feel his presence or not. A religion which depends on transitory feeling is hardly likely to sustain us throughout life’s vicissitudes.
But we cannot resurrect a dead belief just because a living one would be useful. We need a new kind of sustaining faith which does not depend on belief. This faith has no specific content: we go forth like Abraham, not knowing where we are going; we are committed only to the quest for the highest possible self-realisation, the fullest possible service of our fellowcreatures. This is a commitment which we can and must maintain in the absence of exalted feeling, but, as Wordsworth knew, the memory of such feelings, even if unconscious, can be of immense power to instigate and guide our quest.
We gain more than we lose. Through abandoning a realist faith we can appropriate the insights of Wordsworth’s peers: Keats’s “holiness of the heart’s affections”, Blake’s ability “to see a world in a grain of sand And heaven in a wild flower”, Coleridge’s “Primary Imagination”, even the Quakers’ “promptings of love and truth in the heart”. We need not subject these to any inquisition, internal or external: there is no doctrinal test to which they should be put, no metaphysical superstructure. Knowing ourselves to be ephemeral products of blind physical processes, we are free to use our curious human capacity for wonder, love, joy, to create a new heaven and a new earth.
Joanna Dales lives in Leeds and is a member of Yorkshire SoF group —— WISDOM LITERATURE Is SoF destined to be the voice of poetry in Christianity’s prosaic narrative, or should it offer a prophetic and subversive challenge? TREVOR GREENFIELD finds parallels in biblical “wisdom literature” and the role of the wisdom goddess Sophia...