Living completely inside the movement of the event of the search
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| The movement of starlings on Stourbridge Common, Cambridge |
One of the problems about religion, at least as it is generally practised in the European and North American context, is that so many of its leaders and practitioners end up overly focussing upon providing people with putative, final, propositional answers about how God and the world ultimately is. Right belief about these things, “orthodoxy”, to use the technical term, comes firmly to the fore. Not surprisingly, therefore, as a minister of religion, people constantly ask me what I believe, and then expect from me a list of propositional beliefs akin to the Apostles’ or Nicene creeds I long ago abandoned and now refuse to say. Not surprisingly, I am quickly revealed to be deeply unorthodox and, in turn, that reveals me as a heretic. I don’t doubt that most of you are here today because you, too, are deeply unorthodox and heretical.
As many of you will know, the word “heretic” is derived from the Greek word “hairetikos” meaning “able to choose” and, for those of us able to choose, there has always been another, free religious or, if you prefer, free spiritual path that can be followed which focusses, not upon right belief, orthodoxy, but upon right practice, orthopraxy. Such a free religion/spirituality is about how best to express our being-in-the-world. And, because context is everything, how humans best express their own being-in-the-world will always infinitely vary across history and culture and so no single answer to the question of how to affect this can ever be compressed into something so narrow as a list of fixed, propositional, creedal statements. For each individual, the answer to the question they seek is only going to emerge from their actual experience of living.
Of course, beliefs about how the world is and our place in it inevitably have a role in the living of any life, and one of my own key religious exemplars, Imaoka Shin’ichirō (1881-1988), certainly had his. But it’s important to see that for him, they are better described, not so much as beliefs in a set of fixed and final propositional certainties, but as intuitions that centre primarily on his trust and faith in the ongoing, dynamic, creative process of life. So, for example, in his, tentative, yearly statement of faith of 1970, he tells us:
“I believe in Free Religion. The nucleus of religious life must be an endless aspiration for a search after Universal and Ultimate Truth — through the medium of a particular religion. Such a process of religious aspiration, i.e., the dynamic aspect of religion, is what I mean by Free Religion” (Selected Writings, p. 84).
This dynamic aspect of religion is pointed to everywhere in his own life and work because he saw it everywhere. But, nine years later in a talk he called, “There is no graduation from the University of Life” (Selected Writings, p. 33) he ended with a quote from the great, eighteenth-century philosopher, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), that gestures particularly clearly to this idea. Imaoka sensei, writing and speaking from memory, offers an appropriately abbreviated version of Lessing’s insight, but here it’s helpful, I think, to offer you Lessing’s thought in full:
“Not the truth which someone possesses or believes he possesses, but the honest effort he has made to get at the truth, constitutes a human being’s worth. For it is not through the possession of truth, but through its pursuit, that his powers are enlarged, and it is in this alone that his ever-growing perfection lies. Possession makes us inactive, lazy, and proud.
If God had locked up all truth in his right hand, and in his left hand the unique, ever-living quest for truth, albeit on the condition that I should always and eternally err, and said to me: ‘Choose!’, I would humbly clasp his left hand and say: ‘Father, give! For pure truth is for you alone!’” (“Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings,” Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, 2005 p. 98).
I hope you can see that this is a very powerful and, within the European religious tradition, actually a very rare, expression of free religion or, if you wish, a free spirituality.
It is an idea which was also memorably expressed by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) in one of his letters written between 1902 and 1908 to a young poet called, Franz Xaver Kappus (1883-1966). In his fourth letter, Rilke wrote:
“I want to beg you, as much as I can . . . to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves . . . Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Another European thinker who understood this idea well was the philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985), who insisted we must understand that our whole existence takes place completely inside the movement of the event of the search and, therefore, the only answer to the enigma of existence which will ever satisfy us (and have half a chance of being as true as anything can be) is one that remains consciously in what he called, following Plato, “the metaxy” — i.e. the “In-Between.” Here’s how Voegelin writes about this:
“The search itself is the evidence of existential unrest; in the act of questioning, man’s experience of his tension (tasis) toward the divine ground breaks forth in the word of inquiry as a prayer for the Word of the answer. Question and answer are intimately related toward the other; the search moves in metaxy, . . . in the In-Between of poverty and wealth, of human and divine, the question is knowing, but its knowledge is yet the trembling of a question that may reach the true answer or miss it. This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and asking the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer, is the life of reason” (‘The Gospel and Culture’, 1971, in ‘The Eric Voegelin Reader’, ed. Charles R. Embry and Glenn Hughes, University of Missouri Press, 2017, pp. 248-249).
In the end, the simple point I am trying to make here, and with which I shall conclude today, is that I’m encouraging us to articulate and promote a free religion, or free spiritual community, that is able to sit confidently, but always humbly, in the metaxy, in the “In-Between.” This is because free religion, or free religious community, is something that can only
be practised “completely inside the movement of the event of the
search.” And, inside this movement the community’s central task is to hold open a place and a space where the questions of life can be lived, rather than definitively answered in the way that too many European and North American religious traditions seek to do. And, in so far as a community is able to do this, it simultaneously holds open a place and a space where what we call the divine and sacred, is allowed to show up in a wholly natural way and can be encountered face to face, without mediator or veil, in a fashion appropriate to the moment in which we are actually living, and as the actual people we are.
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