A man without a position, but not without a direction

Cambridge Palimpsest

Occasionally I am asked what on earth holds together everything I’ve been saying over the twenty-six years of my ministry about the past and future nature of the Unitarian tradition. Well, here is my attempt at an answer rooted in the idea of free-religion. It’s one which owes a great deal to the American philosopher Paul Wienpahl (1916–1980), who in his 1956 ‘Unorthodox Lecture’ described the ideal thinker as ‘a man without a position’: 

‘As I see it, the point is not to identify reality with anything except itself. (Tautologies are, after all, true.) If you wish to persist by asking what reality is; that is, what is really, the answer is that it is what you experience it to be. Reality is as you see, hear, feel, taste and smell it, and as you live it. And it is a multifarious thing.  

‘To see this is to be a man without a position. To get out of the mind and into the world, to get beyond language and to the things is to cease to be an idealist or a pragmatist, or an existentialist, or a Christian. I am a man without a position. I do not have the philosophic position that there are no positions or theories or standpoints. (There obviously are.) I am not a sceptic or an agnostic or an atheist. I am simply a man without a position, and this should open the door to detachment.’

That phrase ‘a man without a position’ has never left me and, indeed, I still consider myself to be such a man. But it’s vitally important to understand that being without a position does not mean being directionless. Here’s how Wienpahl put it:

‘When one says that he is a man without a position, does this mean that he is without direction? Perhaps. But this is misleading. For it means too that I have a direction and that direction is my own. It will come from within rather than being imposed from without. It means that I will guide it, I will give my life its form. And consciously too. Which seems to be hoisting one by one's bootstraps, but is not. It is just difficult.’

This basic (essentially free-religious) stance may help to explain why my understanding of the Unitarian tradition is an unusual, and for some, a deeply challenging one.

So, to help you begin to get a sense of what I have been doing in various ways for twenty-six years I need to begin with two insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The first is found in his Philosophical Investigations where he likened language to a city:

‘. . . ask yourself whether our language is complete; — whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses’ (PI 18).

The second insight, found in Culture and Value, was that:

‘If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life & feels like telling himself everything is quite easy now, he need only tell himself, in order to see that he is wrong, that there must have been a time when this “solution” had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too and the solution which has now been discovered appears in relation to how things were then like an accident’ (CV 6c).

Now, every religious tradition bears some resemblance to Wittgenstein’s city. Earlier forms of it were clearly complete enough for those who lived within them to solve the problem of life. So, for example, it is clear that earlier forms of Judaism (from out of which the Christian, and then the Unitarian, traditions appeared) were complete enough too — after all, Jesus was a Jew, never a Christian, and it was clearly possible for him to solve the problem of life (i.e. to live with a clean heart and full enough faith in a certain way of being in the world) in his own time and place. This same kind of continuity stretches back to the dawn of human consciousness.

Now imagine London. Shakespeare and I were both inhabitants. We crossed it regularly — he to theatres, I to gigs — and both of us travelled out to Stratford-upon-Avon. But, of course, where the city bled into countryside was in a different place for each of us, yet London remained for us both a complete, though never completed, city, and in it the problem of life had to be, could be, and was solved.

But to live in late-sixteenth-century London is a very different thing from living in late-twentieth-century London. We have cars, tubes, buses; new boroughs, bridges, subways; neighbours from every continent bringing new words and insights. Shakespeare, resurrected, could not hail a taxi and give directions from his sixteenth-century street-map. No amount of romantic longing restores the city of his memory. Some old landmarks survive and he could visit them, but much else exists only in museums, documents, and the fading recollection of specialists.

So with the inheritance of those of us within the Unitarian tradition. Much of it has been razed or built over; new suburbs have appeared. Some ancient landmarks still stand — such as the church in Cambridge where I am the minister — and only an insensitive ignoramus would demolish them without the most pressing reason. But we do not inherit these landmarks (i.e. old structures and ideas) unchanged. How we use them in our new city differs from how they were used in the old, just as a medieval church may now serve as a concert hall or a café while remaining, in some sense, the same building.

I still live in the city of my Unitarian tradition, but it is radically different from the one known by earlier generations and it has always been in process of change. Given this, I have often been tempted to ask, must there not, then, be something common to all its old and new forms? Wittgenstein’s advice in the Philosophical Investigations, slightly paraphrased, is apt:

‘Don’t say “There must be something common, or they would not all be called [London or the Unitarian tradition]” — but look and see whether there is anything in common to all. — For, if you look at them all you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!’ (PI 66).

Now I have always had a profound faith — a faith not in myself but in what is there for anyone who looks — that there is a meaningful similarity between earlier iterations of the Unitarian tradition and what I am trying to articulate today, namely, that if what we practise today is not quite the same religious tradition as that of our forebears, it nevertheless bears to it the same kind of similarity that allows Shakespeare and me meaningfully both to be called inhabitants of the same city of London.

My job as a Unitarian minister committed to a free-religious approach rather than any -ism (even Unitarianism) is to trust that continuity can exist without identity. The twenty-first century is not the first century. There is no unchanging essence of any tradition to be handed down, no fixed theory or dogma. There is only learning — as did Jesus and all the great religious teachers such as Śākyamuni Buddha and Socrates — to trust that by relating directly to the mystery and miracle of life we can solve the problem of our own lives in our own time and place.

To be a member of a Unitarian gathering in this free-religious way is not to subscribe to any system or -ism (not even Unitarianism) but to be, in Wienpahl’s phrase, a person without a position — one who is creatively, compassionately, and alertly alive to the actual flow of life here and now by paying full attention to their own context and to what the Japanese Unitarian and free-religionist Imaoka Shin’ichirō once called ‘the Great Life of free and unobstructed creative evolution.’ Free-religion does, of course, have its Principles of Living because they are what help me to continue to be a man without a position but not without a direction; but please note that even these principles are framed as ‘provisional’, not fixed and final. 

To sum up, for the past twenty-six years — from day one until now — I have only been attempting to encourage people to follow Jesus’ example of the scribe who is able to ‘bring out of their treasure what is new and what is old’ (Matt. 13:52), and to heed his warning that new wine needs fresh wineskins (Matt. 9:16–17), otherwise they will burst and the precious wine will be lost forever to the dirt. 

However, as to whether I have done that well enough — that is an entirely different question. And my current answer, at least in denominational/institutional terms, is quite simple: I have singularly failed.