Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.
RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY
I have
given a lot of thought recently to the two terms “religion” and “spirituality”
and how they are understood. I would say that “religion” and “spirituality” are
related concepts, but they are not the same concept.
Both terms feature now in much sceptical
and post-Christian polemic, often with the understanding that “religion” refers
to something inherited and corporate - belief systems and forms of worship, the
churches and their liturgical practices; while “spirituality” refers to
something personal, creative, individual and not organised communally. It was with
these understandings that, at a history conference in Ireland some years ago, I
heard a young Australian lecturer declare fervently, “We don’t need religion. We need spirituality!”
I am aware that these
understandings of the two terms are not the only ones. For example, I have read
older books, which refer to the “spirituality” of this Christian saint or that
Jewish scholar in the sense of how that person said prayers or conducted
devotions or organised reflections and intellectual life in relation to a God
who was believed in and who was seen as objective to the believer. In this
context, “spirituality” is a subset of “religion” and more-or-less refers to
religious “style”.
When, like a 5th Form debater, I go
to the OED, I don’t find too much help but I am pointed in a significant
direction. “Religion” derives from the Latin “religio”, meaning obligation,
bond, or reverence – in other words, religion refers to looking beyond oneself
somehow, feeling dependent upon something greater than oneself, and developing
a moral sense because of this. The OED then rather unhelpfully gives its
primary definition of “spirituality” as “spiritual quality”, but the problem
here is that we then have to ask what we mean by “spiritual”. Does it mean relating
to what is non-material, ideal or transcendent? Or does it mean constructing a
sense of selfhood and personal identity out of memory, emotions, the senses and
those things that seem personally significant to us?
I suspect it is largely in the
latter sense that the term “spirituality” is now commonly understood, and here
I have a number of problems.
If “spirituality” is a sense of
significance based upon the self, then it is a closed circuit. It is the
solipsism that refers to nothing but the self. While “religion” is other-centred,
pointing beyond the self, then “spirituality” is, in the real sense of the
term, self-centred and self-validating. It could be argued that many of those
who identify with “spirituality” do look beyond themselves and feel dependent
upon something greater than themselves. The thing they look to and depend upon
is physical nature. This is where the sense of awe at the wonders of nature –
felt as much by an atheist as by a religious believer – is often cited. But, unless we anthropomorphise nature and
give it ethical qualities, nature in itself does not provide us with a moral
basis for our lives. Matters are not helped by saying that nature itself is
God, for in the end pantheism is a playing with words that leaves us with
nothing but raw, non-ethical nature. If everything is God then nothing is God.
“Religion” can be caricatured as
blindly following rules or set forms (ignoring the immense individuality, and
indeed creativity, with which individual religious believers respond to creeds
and formulae of belief). But I believe that the caricature of “spirituality”
bears more weight – it means “whatever turns you on” or whatever feeds the
senses and ego. (Reductio ad absurdum
– some years back I recall a travel advertisement on television promising
tourists “unique spiritual experiences”
in Bali – meaning, presumably, lovely beaches and nice performances by Balinese
dancers.)
Given all this, I would find it
hard to refer to, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley or D.H.Lawrence as
“religious” writers as I have defined the term here. “Spiritual”, perhaps, but
not “religious”, for the only ethic they follow is the ego. And with the self
as the centre of the universe, other people become less important than oneself.
It makes no difference that Lawrence spoke of the “gods” in himself communing
with the “gods” in other people, for it is still the ego that is being
divinised.
I hear Shelley in Epipsychidion describing two women as “Twin spheres of light who rule this passive
Earth / This world of love, this me.” And I hear the voice of
(current-sense) “spirituality”, wherein other people exist to feed my senses
and ego.
Or I turn to the passage in Sons
and Lovers
(Chapter 13) wherein Paul Morel is reflecting after his first bout of love-making
with one of his mistresses, and I find this:
“In the morning he had
considerable peace, and was happy in himself. It seemed almost as if he had
known the baptism of fire in passion, and it left him at rest. But it was not
Clara. It was something that happened because of her, but it was not her. They
were scarcely any nearer each other. It was as if they had been blind agents of
a great force.” (Sons and Lovers,
Chapter 13)
A “great force” is mentioned, yet Paul is not fired by love,
or passion, for Clara but “something that
happened because of her… not her. ” The living woman, objective to Paul’s
ego, dissolves into his ego. She is there to feed him and his senses and
provide him with a formative experience. Her only importance is that she has
made him “happy in himself”. This
note is sounded repeatedly in Lawrence’s writings, longer fiction, shorter
fiction and poetry. I am the centre of the universe. I have rejected
transcendence and rationalism/ idealism and I have only my senses and my
emotions to guide me. I am therefore the only validation of anything. Apart
from external constraints over which I have little control (such as the law),
my obligations to others depend, in effect, only upon how I am feeling.
I could digress at this point on
the whole tension in western culture between Platonic transcendence / idealism
/ rationalism and Aristotelian empiricism, but I will shorthand such a
digression by saying that the only satisfactory approach seems to me to be a
synthesis, even if not necessarily the Kantian one of categorical imperatives. To
dismiss idealism and transcendence brusquely, and claim that all that exists is
what is physically apprehensible, is to cut off half of what human beings are,
including reverence, the ability to categorise, the ability to construct moral
codes, and reason itself. (And what is any literary criticism except a form of
rationalism?)
In a famous phrase in his Pensees, Pascal said “There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of
every man which cannot be filled by any living thing, but only by God, the
Creator, made known through Jesus”. In its complete form, this is a
specifically Christian confession of faith. But, shorn of the last six words,
it has often been précised as the “God-shaped hole” in human consciousness. (I
have seen the phrase used, ruefully but sincerely, by agnostic and atheist
writers such as Eric Hobsbawm).
Claim to reject transcendence,
but the “God-shaped hole” remains, nagging and expecting a response even in the
non-religious. So out comes “religious” imagery in agnostic and non-religious
writers (especially poets). Once, perhaps too hastily, I ascribed the use of
religious imagery by non-religious writers to their envy of religious forms and
formulations. It may not be very helpful to ascribe such base motives to other
people’s literary practice (it comes perilously close to the way atheist
polemicists routinely ascribe hypocrisy or smugness to religious believers). But
I still believe envy of the system which produces such imagery is at least part
of the mix. There is a considerable degree of intellectual inconsistency in the
agnostic’s use of religious imagery for emotional effect, given that the
religious imagery of itself denies the declared bases of materialist
agnosticism.
But, you may reasonably ask, is
it any different from the way, for centuries, Christian poets used (Greek and
Roman) pagan imagery in their works? I think there is a difference – for even
if the Christian and the pagan classical terms were different, they both
pointed to a transcendent and non-material reality. And there was the further
assumption that the pagans were right, but not right enough. (It is Vergil who
guides Dante through the Inferno, remember.)
I have seen no literary criticism
that has persuaded me it is any otherwise.
Crude summary of all
of the above: As a religious believer, I feel more kinship with the honest
atheist, who is prepared to live with the intellectual consequences of his/her
world view, than with the “spiritual” agnostic, who comforts him/herself with
unbelieved-in formulations and images.
There is more ambiguity attached to 'spirituality' than 'religion' because as you suggest, spirituality is not organised - into events, beliefs, practices and symbolic orders. Spiritualism is also suggested, which relates to parapsychology. Also, in the (hopeful) broadening of consciousness in the new century, more and more ideas are falling under the banner of spirituality, thus widening its reference. Perhaps this is because no other word appears to do the job.
ReplyDeleteConcerning your suggestion that spirituality is about something personal, creative and individual and thence a sense of selfhood, etc, I think that prior to that, the concept is identified with cosmic power as presented to us - so: the virtual domain of consciousness, something not limited to the personality.
JR Illingworth, if I remember correctly, referred to our affinity or kinship with the material world as implying spirituality behind it, so that a spiritual current is implied, something which has a passage through matter. This could equally refer, in scientific parlance, to electromagnetic energy.
Religion, while having a clearer reference re. symbols, beliefs and practices, has in its institutional forms been criticised for sometimes neglecting the spiritual flame at its centre, or at least that the flame has become obfuscated by the weight of tradition. If religion is primarily revelation, then its referent is simpler to understand - a 'soul-sight' of the infinite through the finite, and the eternal through the temporal.
Thanks Hugh. As always I value your thoughtful contributions, and I am aware that this is a vaster and much more nuanced topic than my brief and inevitably inadequate comments could hopr to cover. I am still insistent, however, that as the term is frequently used, "sprituality' has come to mean "feeding what makes me feel good' rather than "looking to something greater than myself".
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