From sounding line to lamp wick — faith in the body of the universe
(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)
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Towards the end of his life, some eleven years ago, one of my most important, personal, philosophical mentors and friends, Jonathan Harrison, began repeatedly to ask me why I rarely, if ever, talked directly about religious faith.
At
the time, I answered that one reason was because I wasn’t sufficiently
clear about the difference between the meaning of the words “belief” and
“faith” and you can read what I said about that here. But, looking
back, I now realise that another reason I was uncomfortable talking
about it was because faith was always something that could never be
sufficiently, let alone fully, evidenced. It seemed to belong too much
to the realm of personal sentiment, opinion and pure conjecture and, in
an age when these were
increasingly being allowed to trump good, verifiable evidence, well, it
seemed best to avoid it.
But the problem with this way of
proceeding is, and I suspect will always remain, that to be human is to
live, move and have our being in a profoundly deep and mysterious,
sustaining sea where securely verifiable, final evidence about how the
world is and our place in it is not only clearly lacking, but is
something which seems to be structurally, and therefore permanently,
inaccessible. As
the poet, John Keats, recognised, this truth requires us to develop
something he called our “negative capability” which would help us learn how to become
“capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
This was also recognised by the philosopher, John Locke, who reminds us to be like the sailors of old who, when close to the shore knew that, although their evidence-seeking-sounding-line was long enough to touch the sea-bed and could help them safely to navigate shallow sandbanks and submerged rocks, out in the middle of the ocean it was never going to be long enough to touch bottom and that they had no choice but to journey on in faith, without any secure, verifiable evidence of what was, or was not, going on below their hull. And, whilst it is true that for a modern sailor on an actual ocean, the development of sonar now means they can gain secure evidence of what is going on below their hull, the ultimate bottom, the very ground of their being — indeed, all being — remains something beyond all evidence-seeking-sounding-lines and, therefore, all final, human knowing.
Well,
over the eleven years I’ve been thinking seriously about it, Jonathan’s
provocative question about faith has slowly helped me to see that
someone like me — and perhaps someone like you — deeply rooted as I am
in the European Enlightenment tradition, has too often been chasing
after the unfulfillable illusion that it was possible eventually to find some kind
of verifiable, ultimate “bottom” which we could assuredly know, and
upon which we could assuredly stand without the need for something as
doubtful and ethereal as religious faith. In other words, I slowly came
to realise that the metaphor by which I have lived most of my life —
namely, that there could exist, in principle, an empirical
evidence-seeking-sounding-line which could touch the final bottom of all
things — has, frankly, ceased to seem plausible.
OK, let’s now
move on but, for the moment, let’s do this while leaving my apparently useless sounding-line waving around in the unfathomable
depths of existence, or as Keats beautifully named it, the “Penetralium of mystery.”
This summer, whilst doing some background reading in connection with my
ongoing work of translating Imaoka Shin’ichiro’s essays and studying
his own creative, inquiring, free and liberative spirituality (jiyū
shūkyō), I began to read the scriptures of the Japanese “new religion” founded in 1859 called Konkokyo (see HERE and HERE) that can be described as being a kind of reformed, liberal and free Shinto. As an advocate of free-religion, Imaoka-sesei was very appreciative of the insights of the founder of Konkokyo, Konko Daijin,
who, after a series of spiritual experiences, began to have a profound
faith in something he called “Tenchi Kane No Kami” which, to use
Konkokyo’s own current words about this, is understood as “the spirit
and energy that flows through galaxies, planets, air, earth, and life”
continually giving “birth to new galaxies, winks out brilliant stars,
gracefully opens the dew-moistened petals of a flower in spring, whisks
away the last remaining leaf from a bare tree in winter, enables our
hearts to beat” and which “sustains and nurtures the cycle of life.”
Another way of putting this is to say that for Konko Daijin and
Konkokyo, the whole universe, or the whole of nature, is perceived as being
the “body” of Tenchi Kane no Kami in whom we are always-already living,
moving and having our being. Now, to my ears this strongly resonates
with aspects of Spinoza’s idea of “deus sive natura,” namely that God-is-Nature, Nature-is-God, the kind of pluralistic pantheism put forward by William James in his “Pluralistic Universe”, Jane Bennett’s recent ideas about vibrant matter, and Philip Goff’s current articulation of panpsychism.
But
be that as it may, as such, Tenchi Kane no Kami, although always
everywhere present, is akin to a fathomless sea, the bottom of which no
empirical evidence-seeking sounding-line will ever reach. And at this
point in proceedings we can return to my apparently useless
sounding-line waving around in the unfathomable depths of
existence and to ask whether the purpose of my line, at least when being
used in the middle of the ocean, can be reimagined so as to give me — and perhaps you — a
new and helpful metaphor?
This possibility became a reality when I came across the following story found in the “Konkokyo Kyoten,” the scriptures of Konkokyo:
“To
have faith means to have your heart directed toward Kami. Even though
the children of Kami are in the midst of the divine virtue, without
faith they do not have the divine favour. A lamp filled with oil cannot
be lit without a wick. If a lamp is not lit, the night remains darkness.
Without faith, the world becomes darkness.” (Gorikai, “The Understanding”)
Now,
in my old guiding metaphor, the sounding-line went down into the
darkness and was supposed to bring back up to the surface empirical
evidence about the nature of the ultimate bottom of all things. But, as I
have already noted, in the fathomless ocean of existence, the
deployment of this kind of line can simply never bring back evidence of
this.
But beginning to use the metaphor of the lamp, our sounding line
can suddenly be transformed into a lamp wick, not something to bring back to the
surface secure empirical evidence of an ultimate bottom, but, instead,
something to bring up to us the creative and energising natural fuel that sustains
and nurtures the cycle of life, and which, when ignited in the heart of
a faithful person, helps to light up our everyday world in profoundly meaningful, wonderful and creative ways.
Sailing
on this sustaining sea of fuel — and whether I choose to call it by the
name of Tenchi Kane No Kami, God-or-Nature or vibrant matter — I find I really do have
faith in its reality. And I think it is no coincidence that since my
final conversations with Jonathan back in 2014, I’ve returned many, many
times to contemplate alone, and sometimes with you, some words of the
important religious naturalist philosopher, Henry Nelson Wieman,
Whatever
else the word God may mean, it is a term used to designate that
Something upon which human life is most dependent for its security,
welfare and increasing abundance. That there is such a Something cannot
be doubted. The mere fact that human life happens, and continues to
happen, proves that this Something, however unknown, does certainly
exist (Religious Experience and Scientific Method, Macmillan, 1926, pp. 9).
And,
of course, not only human life, but all life. Can I absolutely prove
this using my old empirical evidence-seeking sounding-line? No, of
course not. But with the wick of faith dropped into the bottomless and
mysterious ocean of life I find I can quote once again from the
“Konkokyo Kyoten” with a clean heart and full belief (pathos), and say that,
“If you would see [Tenchi Kane No] Kami, step out into the garden. The sky above you and the earth beneath you is Kami.”
And so, suddenly, I find I am grounded in the process of life in an unexpectedly new and more faithful way. Close to the shore, my line dropped into the sustaining sea of life can still bring back important, empirically verifiable evidence about the nature of the world, but now, out in the deepest parts of the sea of life, I find my line is no longer uselessly swinging about, because it has become the wick which brings back to me the very fuel of life and light itself.
And with this statement of faith I close my talk, and look forward to hearing your own thoughts on this very vibrant matter . . .
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