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The
word ‘religion’ means different things to different people. At one extreme
it represents everything primitive and superstitious that we have struggled
to eradicate over the last three hundred years, and at the other extreme
it represents a quiet joy of recognition and
warmth in the heart for everything we hold most precious. Hence, to use
the word properly is to recognise the spectrum of its reception. The word
‘postsecular’ on the other hand represents little to anyone, because it
is recently coined and not much in circulation. The term implies that
there might emerge, or already be emerging, a quality of thought that
goes beyond the secular, a thinking that celebrates our hard-won democratic
rights and freedoms, but which is more open to the spiritual than the
secular mind has generally been. In the late 20th century an
increasingly casual atheism became central to Western culture, if not
to Western society. This casual atheism was a precocious and extraordinary
part of Marx’s thought in 1860, but by 1960 most Western schoolchildren
would be culturally impelled to adopt it, almost without question.
The
origins of the secular mind in the 17th century are complex.
It is useful to think of Western thought as following a presecular form
up to the 17th century, and then, over a three-hundred year
period, developing into the secular form familiar in the middle-late 20th
century. The emergence of a possible postsecular mode of thought has to
be dated from about 1980, and its origins, rather ironically, may lie
in science. In the 1980s Fritjof Capra in ‘The Tao of
Physic’ and Gary Zukav in ‘The Dancing Wu Li Masters’ popularised the
parallels between mysticism and quantum theory. Commentators from
a wide spectrum of thought began to see quantum holism and quantum indeterminacy
– which these books explained to a lay audience – as undermining the classical
mechanistic view of the universe, and allowing new modes of thought to
surface. This is ironical because it was physics that underpinned the
Age of Enlightenment, and which led to the secular, even atheistic, late
20th century outlook. It looks like physics is again underpinning
a transition, this time from the secular to the postsecular.
I
shall quote just one recent notable event in support of this idea: the
award of the million-dollar Templeton prize for progress in religion to
the British physicist Paul Davies in 1995. Davies won the prize on the
basis of a series of books including ‘God and the New Physics’ which ends
with the proposition that ‘science is a surer path to God than religion.’
This ought to be considered remarkable, at the very least prompting the
reflection that religion must be rather unsure of itself to reward such
a statement with such a prestigious prize (other recipients include Mother
Teresa of Calcutta and the Rev. Dr. Billy Graham). It is also part of
the irony previously raised when one considers that Giordano Bruno was
burned at the stake in 1600 for his views on science and religion – these
views, when compared to Davies’s statement, now look mild indeed. (Many
consider Bruno to have been condemned to death for his Copernicanism,
but it now looks more likely that it was merely his heterodoxy and quarrelsomeness.
However he could never have conceived of anything as radical as the above
statement by Davies.)
We
might sum up the religious trajectory of the last four centuries in the
West as follows: in the middle of the 17th century thinkers
were all theists with a few deists appearing; in the middle of the 18th
century thinkers were mostly deists with a few agnostics appearing; in
the middle of the 19th century thinkers were mostly agnostic
with a few atheists appearing, and in the middle of the 20th
century atheism dominated Western thought. This atheism ranged from casual,
as in Marxism, to vituperative, as in writers like Richard Dawkins and
Gore Vidal. Indeed it is often surprising how vehement the rejection of
religion can still be today, when our secular freedoms have been so long
guaranteed in the West. What the postsecular begins to question is the
assumption that the spiritual impulse itself has to inevitably create
the presecular religious hierarchies that we so rightly reject as inimical
to freedom and democracy. It is an accident of history that religion is
associated with feudalism, and a Western accident in particular that it
is associated with spiritual intolerance and persecution. Neither is a
rejection of the spiritual a necessary outcome of the scientific worldview
but rather an accident of a parallel historical process that had falsely
identified religion as a repository of knowledge.
We begin to see the Western prejudice against the spiritual as arising
out of a series of accidents, and not as an inevitable process. This opening
up of thought is what we are characterising as postsecular.
To
say that the spiritual life of the new millennium has to some extent found
an ally in science is to state only part of the current dynamic however.
A renewal of the spiritual life as a genuinely 21st century
phenomenon, as opposed to the embattled survival into the secular world
of presecular religion, emerges in a variety of contexts. We can list
these as:
1.
the 'new' sciences of quantum mechanics, relativity and
chaos (complexity) theory, which challenge the deterministic, mechanistic
and reductionist worldview
2.
the emerging field of consciousness studies
3.
transpersonal psychology from Jung to Wilber
4.
sections of Postmodern thinking including Heidegger and
Levinas
5.
sections of Christian theology, in particular the 'Radical
Orthodoxy', inspired by Postmodernism
6.
the creative arts in the 20th C, for example artists from
Constantin Brancusi to Bill Viola who have explored a wide range of conventional
and unconventional spiritualities in their art
7.
Deep ecology and ‘ecosophy,’ mystical approaches to Nature,
from Thoreau to Dillard.
Let us examine
each of these contexts in turn.
Physics The relationship between physics and mysticism is a contentious
one, and my own contribution to this debate (“Against Scientific Magisterial
Imperialism” published in Network,
April 2002) argues forcibly against the idea that physics directly supports
the mystical worldview. (We noted too that Ken Wilber was one of the first
to point this out in his book ‘Quantum Questions’.) However as a cultural
phenomenon, there is no doubt that the stream of writings begun by Capra
and Zukav has had an enormous impact in terms of a new receptivity to
the spiritual. And there is no doubt that the parallels between the ‘new’
physics and mysticism deserve close scrutiny, though a postsecular interpretation
– which makes the spiritual a more equal partner in this debate – may
yield quite different insights. What the ‘new’ sciences carry in common
is what Stephen Hawking has called the ‘end of physics,’ that is, by analogy
with Gödel’s theorem in mathematics, an implication of the limits to understanding
as pursued by science. Beyond this is what Tipler and Barrow have called
the ‘anthropic’ principle, a quality in the new physics that refers us
back to ourselves, indeed which raises what to the philosopher is the
spectre of solipsism, but what to the mystic is the bread and butter of spiritual experience.
Consciousness Studies The emerging field of consciousness studies
has taken these ideas as a starting point, and become a broad discipline
drawing from physics, biology, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive studies,
philosophy and even art. While some outside the field would reject its
status as a science, and some within it reject any spiritual implication
in its enquiry, it seems that the majority engaged with it are sympathetic
to the spiritual, whether connecting the discipline to presecular religious
tradition, or interested in what we are calling a postsecular openness.
Even if one is sceptical of its achievements as a science, there is no
doubt again that as a cultural phenomenon it has considerable momentum
and influence.
Transpersonal psychology The transpersonal tradition of Jung, Hillman,
Grof, Maslow and Wilber pursued a vision embracive of the spiritual quite
different to the previous two strands. Its origins, ironically, are with
Freud, one of the 20th century’s most sceptical voices on religion.
His immediate disciple and successor, Carl Gustav Jung, took most of Freud’s
psychoanalytical insights, but shed the aversion to the language of religion,
finding instead important psychological insights in the Gnostic, Hermetic,
Neoplatonist and Alchemical traditions. True, this was not mainstream
Christianity, but this opening in the 20th century for presecular
spiritual insights has been a significant route for the spiritual, enabling
it to bypass the secular extremes of that age and emerge into the 21st
century with clear voice.
Postmodernism Amongst postmodern philosophers the hospitality to the
spiritual is mixed. In general the postmoderns, while rejecting most of
the Enlightenment project – including the remnants of religious thinking
– created small intellectual spaces where the spiritual could flourish.
This is because they also rejected the modernist insistence on a scientific
description of a ‘given’ rational universe. These lacunae were permitted
as long as they did not arrogate themselves to the status of a system,
and as long as any central spiritual discourse was near-buried under the
weight of postmodern terminology. We can better understand this phenomenon
if we look back to the 17th century. At its dawn stood the
sobering spectacle of Giordano Bruno’s murder by the Church, a warning
to the thinkers of that age. Descartes’s ideas were banned, Newton kept
his heretical Arianism a secret, and Spinoza was unable to publish at
all. It is perhaps Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ that best demonstrates the lengths
that these thinkers had to go to in order to hide their ideas. They firstly
avoided any direct expression of their religious insights, and secondly
were seduced into using the emerging language of maths, physics and reason.
As a result the postmoderns inherited an intellectual tradition of extreme
circumlocution – Derrida is one of its most eloquent practitioners. The
phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas offers many opportunities for spiritual
discourse, and the exchanges between Levinas and Derrida are a unique
encapsulation of an ancient creative tension between the Hebraic and the
Hellenic in Western culture and spiritual thought.
Radical Orthodoxy A number of Christian theologians, including Rowan
Williams – the current Archbishop of Canterbury – have adopted strands
of postmodern philosophy to invigorate 21st century Christian
theology. The group of theologians following this investigation based
in Cambridge are developing a line of thought sometimes known as the ‘radical
orthodoxy,’ a term that underlines the possible contradictions. In the
terminology adopted here these thinkers and writers (which also include
Don Cupitt, founder of the ‘Sea of Faith’ movement) are giving a postsecular
slant to presecular religious thought, and it is an open question as to
which era the end result belongs to. Nevertheless the radical orthodoxy
belongs with interfaith initiatives and other recognitions of the democratic
and pluralistic world of today, and hence form an important part of the postsecular context which derives
from the presecular.
Art The arts are one of the few areas in the 20th century
where the cultured elite were ‘permitted’ to some degree to retain an
interest in the spiritual. The contemporary composer John Cage and video
artist Bill Viola have no difficulty in airing their commitment to Buddhism,
while it seems that the Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi has reached the best-seller
lists in the US, and is read by many thinkers and media figures including
the popular singer Madonna. Looking further back we find strong spiritual
interests amongst the American Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s, and
before WW1 many abstract painters were drawn to new spiritual movements
such as Theosophy, Anthroposophy and the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
Deep Ecology The terms ‘Deep ecology’ and ‘Ecosophy’ were introduced
by Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Professor Arne Naess in 1973,
and attempt to convey something beyond ecology as a branch of the biological
sciences. At the same time there has been a history of nature writing
since the mid-19th century that either verges on the mystical
or is explicitly spiritual, including Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, John Muir, John Burroughs, Richard Jefferies, Aldo Leopold,
Jiddu Krishnamurti and Annie Dillard. More recently the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis,
as put forward by scientist James Lovelock, has had a wide influence.
Journals like ‘Resurgence’ edited by Satish Kumar promote the spiritual
aspects of ecology, while the lesser-known ‘The Trumpeter’ provides a
forum for deep ecology and ecosophical thinking. All these strands can
find a common ancestry or debt in the pioneering work of John Muir (1838-1914),
credited with being the founding father of the ecological movement (he
set up the National Park system in the USA in response to his perception
of the wilderness as under threat). Less well understood is his profoundly
spiritual vision of the natural world, a spirituality
perhaps inherited from his pastor father, but at the same time in revolt
against the constraints of Victorian Christianity. While conventional
ecological thinking today bases its arguments on survival of the biosphere,
and can be reduced to a utilitarian philosophy, the spiritual or holistic
impulse in Muir and his modern-day inheritors speaks of an additional
imperative: a transcendent vision of nature. This transcendence can only be understood
by drawing on mystical traditions, or by examining Buddhism, or through
the ideas of transpersonal psychology, or by pitting the rational mind
against the limits of science, or by engaging with the aesthetics of the
sublime in art. In other words by engaging thoroughly
with the whole postsecular context.
With
these seven contexts I am suggesting that the postsecular is emerging
from the secular in a patchy way, with elements contributing to it that
run at different speeds and over different timeframes,
and that they include science, art, and postmodernism. But what of the
relationship between the presecular and the postsecular, that is between
the religions of old and the emerging spiritualities? We have to observe
that parts of this even larger picture run with still greater variation
of speed, there being entire sectors of contemporary society that are
untouched by modernity and postmodernity, let alone the postsecular. There
are estimated for example to be 70 million Christian fundamentalists in
the US today. The presecular survives in great swathes into the secular
world, but the fact is that it contributes very little to popular or highbrow
culture. We might say that religion
flies below the cultural radar of the West, largely due to the intellectuals
of the West having poured their energies into less problematic projects,
such as science and politics. It is also rather shocking that Eastern
ideas have been known in the West since the mid-18th century,
but, with the exception of Schopenhauer, they have been ignored by almost
all important thinkers, whether modern or postmodern. The presecular religions
of the West have therefore been largely insulated both from modern and
postmodern thought, and from exposure to the East. Yet religion up to
the 17th century – and Eastern religion prior to its contact
with the West – has historically shown itself to be remarkably adaptable
and even an engine for progress and change. By contrast, in the secular
world of the 20th century it has been ghettoised and insulated
from the crucibles of change that have forged the contemporary worldview,
making the adherence to it almost as embarrassing today as frankness in
sexual matters was in the Victorian era. The result is that presecular
religion may not be able to make the transition to a postsecular world,
rather that entirely new forms of spirituality may emerge, perhaps the
most promising arising out of deep ecology / nature mysticism.
But
the postsecular lays a potential trap for new spiritualities as they emerge,
and we can anticipate this from the seven contexts suggested above. Each
one extracts a price for allowing its practitioners the new freedom to
engage with the spiritual. These include the scientisation, the psychologising,
the philosophisation, the theologising and the ecologising of the spiritual,
in other words a dynamic that requires the spiritual to be interpreted
by each discipline, to be given a language from each discipline. It is
science of course that poses the greatest danger, and hence my article
“Against Scientific Magisterial Imperialism” mentioned above. However
the psychologising of the spiritual is just as big an obstacle to recovering
a genuinely spiritual language and a genuinely spiritual sense of self,
indeed the ‘self’ is almost entirely understood today in psychological
terms. (It was not always so.) Not that science and psychology do not
have a great deal to contribute to the new spiritualities, far from it,
and not that imperialisms of one kind or another are not being questioned:
the logical positivism of the last century is for example less of an influence
today. But the spiritual needs to assert its own language again, independent
of the past, and independent of science and psychology, and even for that
matter, philosophy. Possibly the simplest way to do this is to make sure
that the postsecular impulse does not draw on one of the seven contexts
alone, but cross-references each one of them. Art – by which I mean all
the creative fields, including poetry – is a great corrective to science,
and the creative fields, where they have explored the spiritual impulse
in the 20th century, yield many insights. For example the series
of paintings by Mark Rothko, the American Abstract Expressionist, which
were hung for many years in the ‘Rothko room’ at the Tate Gallery in London,
point to a non-verbal language of the spiritual which invoked spiritual
insights for generations of gallery visitors.
With
these points in mind I have set up a Centre for Postsecular Studies at
London Metropolitan University. Its focus will be to support research,
including Doctoral studies, from a range of disciplines in such a way
as to foster an open enquiry into the spiritual. It is fitting that a
University should be the setting for this. In the Middle Ages Universities
supported the intellectual efforts of religious Scholasticism, in the
Modern period Universities defended the secular freedom to question authority,
and in a postsecular spirit, perhaps the University setting can restore
the creativity and vigour of intellect to spiritual questions. The key
to the work of the centre will be interdisciplinarity, which is always
a challenge to traditional subject divisions. Yet the very word ‘university’
originated from a perception that a universality of mind was required
to study any specialism, for unless one knew the topology and boundaries
of other disciplines and the nature of the intercourse within and across
them, one could not claim to have a rounded university education, or any
proper insight into the world. I have suggested that the postsecular emerges
from the seven contexts listed above, but these are not exhaustive and
only a guide. Debate and research in postsecular studies will undoubtedly
take many new turns and draw from unexpected sources. However, it will
be characterised by a respect for what I have called ‘epistemological
pluralism.’ We are seeing this broader respect for different forms of
‘knowledging’ in Universities in the example of the relatively new practice-based
Doctorate in Fine Art. This allows art practitioners to submit a body
of work which encapsulates their research, and is examined, usually in
conjunction with a written contextualisation, by experts who can ‘read’
the artwork as well as the dissertation. This would have been unheard
of 20 years ago when positivism held sway within University research degree
committees.
But,
looking somewhat into the future, what shape might a postsecular society
take? In essence it will celebrate a spirituality that has emerged out
of the confrontation with the scientific worldview, and as such it will
owe much to it. While the intensely secular nature of the 20th
century has involved the very real loss of provision for a fundamental
need of the human spirit – a need expressed in the etymology of the word
religion ‘to re-bind or re-connect’ – it has provided humanity with a
profound recognition of the worth of the individual. The spirituality
of the postsecular era cannot but reflect this in a
‘bottom-up’ spirituality, forms of communal spiritual practices
that listen rather than preach. More important still is the ecological
imperative, a possible doomsday clock set ticking by technology, anticipated
by science, and only resolvable by a science harnessed through a spiritual
sense of union with nature and the planet. This is an ecology that goes
beyond utilitarian survival or obligations of stewardship, but which instead
makes nature a site for a profound spiritual love. This is an ecology
that can succeed. Of course a futurology is to be avoided,
in particular a futurology of the spiritual, but one cannot help asking
also whether culture might change. The fact is that, barring the Sunday
‘godslot,’ and ‘televangelism’ – that is TV channels paid for by religious
organisations and found mainly in the USA – the cultural outpourings of
the west through TV, cinema, journals, newspapers, novels and other media,
portray an intensely secular worldview. Portrayals of the spiritual are
either through worn-out and faintly embarrassed stereotypes of the presecular
religions, or they fall into the X-Files category: a culturally permissible
indulgence in the spooky or occult, also found in a range of science-fiction
genres. Where is the cultural excitement provoked by the discovery in
1945 of the Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi excavation, comparable
to the interest taken in the human genome project? Christianity, immune
to the power of intellectual curiosity driving the rest of the world,
dismissed it as heretical, while the secular world was not even tempted
to read it. Only in the recent film ‘Stigmata’ (starring Patricia Arquette
and Gabriel Byrne) did a phrase from Thomas turn up as a central and sobering
theme in an otherwise rather melodramatic invention. Still, maybe the
film is a harbinger of more thoughtful treatments of spiritual issues
marking the shift towards a postsecular culture.
The
Network could be involved in the work of the new Centre in several ways.
It could participate in the general discussion around the concept of the
postsecular, and, more practically, members could put themselves forward
as potential Doctoral supervisors. My aim, within the Centre for Postsecular
Studies, is to form a kind of clearing house for interdisciplinary research
in this field, by providing a register of suitable and willing supervisors.
I would also be delighted to hear from any members interested in undertaking
doctoral studies themselves. I anticipate that many applicants will be
mature practitioners in their field, possibly already holding higher or
research degrees, or even amongst the so-called ‘third age.’ After all,
in the spiritual life, is this not the time when one grows closer to the
eternal?
In
conclusion I want to consider how the Doctorate in Postsecular Studies
might take shape and serve the Network. The Doctorate has traditionally
provided a period of reflection and study, structured in such a way as
to cement a community of thought through the twin tracks of consolidation
and innovation. Consolidation means that the doctoral candidate makes
an assessment of the field in both a broad sense, which may rather skim
the surface, and in a deeper sense where it homes in on the research questions
being posed. Innovation means that a substantial and original contribution
to the field is made. The doctorate also implies an intellectual or creative
rigour. While intending no criticism
of Network members, I would guess that many of us have at times read articles
or heard presentations where we felt that this rigour was somewhat lacking,
but might not necessarily be able to pin down why. I suspect that while
our training in science or medicine has given us the instinct for rigour,
our cultural lack of exposure to rigorous discourse around the spiritual
has created the context where it often goes out of the window. In other
words a spiritual literacy is
needed, a point I argued at one of the Network’s annual gatherings some
years ago. Hence my vision for this programme of doctoral studies would
include breadth, drawing on the seven contexts outlined above, rigour,
as we have learned through science (though not degenerating into a scientism),
and a spiritual literacy.
Of
central importance to the Network is the relationship between science
and religion, and this provides many potential topics for doctoral research.
In a postsecular society one of the most pressing questions would be to
re-examine the assumptions made about the origins of modern science and
thought in the seventeenth century. All the scientists of that time were
deeply religious individuals, who could not possibly have anticipated
or relished the idea that science would be held up in later centuries
as contradictory to their spiritual impulses. Even Pierre-Simon Laplace,
famous for his remark to Napoleon about God: "I have no need of that
hypothesis," is now known to have been a genuine Catholic all his
life, requesting not one but two priests to administer his last rites.
(Atheists of the less thoughtful variety still seize on Laplace’s remark
as a vindication of their secular views.) A postsecular examination of
the three great ‘rationalist’ philosophers of the period, Descartes, Spinoza
and Leibniz, also reveal not just deeply religious men, but spiritual
geniuses whose spiritual thought has never been examined or allowed to
take its rightful place in the spiritual life of the West. (Poor Descartes
in particular needs rehabilitation having been long and unfairly vilified
as the author of the mind-body ‘split.’) It is as though we still believe
that priests are the only ones allowed to contribute to religion, whereas
it is clear that great scientific minds are very often great spiritual
minds.
It
is with that last thought that I approach the Network regarding these
ideas concerning a possible postsecular society.
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