Читать книгу The Fountain - Don Cupitt - Страница 10

Suppose that we were to feel the need to make an entirely new beginning. We would have to set aside all our received religious traditions and ideas, and begin instead with a universal and purely rational account of the world and the human condition. We aim to be as strict, as up-to-date and illusion-free, as well-informed and as clear-eyed as it is possible to be. Then we ask: Is it possible to join up all the various strands in this account by bringing them under a great unifying symbol that will both make us happy just to be parts of all this, and also will show us how we should live?

Yes, I answer. In modern thought, especially since the 1960s, people’s outlook has become almost completely non-metaphysical. Our life does not rest upon or within any fixed framework, whether of metaphysical principles or eternal values. There is only all this’ - and all this is just an ambivalent stream of appearances, continually pouring out and passing away. Everything is on show, and there is only the passing show. Everything is contingent, everything is temporal, everything is interconnected, everything is ‘relative’, everything is mediated to us by, and remains suspended within, the endless shifting movement of our language, and everything is transient. We humans are simply part of the general flux of all things, ourselves continually pouring out into expression and passing away; but our speciality is that our creative outpouring feeling, as it mingles with everything, continually strives to interpret the world by reading it, turning it into language and evaluating it. Around ourselves we generate a value-rich communal human life-world, the house of meaning that we live in, but it is never quite as stable as we might wish, because we are continually debating it, revaluing it, and renegotiating it as we go along. In my own jargon I call our life thus viewed ‘the fray’, and insist that most of us love it - and quite reasonably so, there being nothing else. For us, our world has to be the world - for which the slogan is: ‘All this is all there is’.

The world in which we human beings live today is thus a post-metaphysical world in which there is no eternal, enduring and objective Being, no objective and unchanging Truth, and no objective and finally authoritative standard of Value. Everything is permanently in flux, pouring out and passing away - and yet also on the table, being negotiated. Everything is always on the move, loved by some and contested by others.

How has all this happened? Until after the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution, most of us (at least in Christendom, Jewry and Islam) thought in terms of a metaphysics of substance. We tended to think of everything first and foremost as a noun, and only secondly started to think of it as doing a bit of verbing. Our assumption, derived ultimately from Greek (and perhaps before that, from Bronze-Age) thought, was that reality is an ordered array of real things, things that are relatively independent, with stable and unchanging natures. Both in the case of being and in the case of truth, we tended to equate objectivity with independent reality and with timelessness. Real being was unchanging, and the idea of time only came in when one was forced to consider something as getting mixed up with other things, and so becoming liable to corruption. Meanwhile, time was on the back burner, in obscurity. If we wanted to think about temporality, we took up something we pictured as ready-made, and mentally dropped it into flowing time just as one drops a stone into a river. Its being in time was just a contingent extra fact about a thing. Especially in the case of human beings, our life in time was like a short period of service overseas. I was my simple and immortal rational soul. Then for a lifetime I was united with a body that was subject to time and - ‘therefore’ - to corruption. Then it was time for me to be demobbed, and I came back home to eternity with much relief. I was back with God and the angels, in the blessed state of timelessness and eternal life. Soma sema, the body is a tomb, they said: bodily life here below is a state of ‘temporary temporality’, a state of alienation and institutional entombment, such as I knew when I was a numbered man, a young National Service officer serving his term overseas from 1955 to 1957. Have you noticed in modern English that the word ‘time’ is used to mean ‘a stretch, a term of imprisonment? That is how the old metaphysics of substance led us to think of time. It gave us the idea of life after death as a consolation and a release; but this life? - this life was a drag, a burden. One would be glad to be freed from it.

When did everything change? Nothing is certain in the history of ideas, but roughly speaking it was during the eighteenth century that the great discovery of time took place. People gradually began to think that Moderns like Sir Isaac Newton had surpassed the achievements of the Ancients, and therefore that human beings generally might be capable of superseding their own past. The ideas of a universe in ceaseless motion, of historical change, of historical period, and of an evolving ‘climate of opinion’ or ‘spirit of the age’ soon followed. More and more, we begin to think of ourselves as being embedded not in eternity but in our own historical period. Looking back, I recognize that the 1950s Cupitt was still orthodox, eternity-oriented and unreconstructed. In world-view he was even a Neo-Thomist, and quite different from the questioning Sixties Cupitt, who was learning fast from Kant and Hume, Mansel and Kierkegaard. And so on, until by the mid-Nineties I was coming into my own final outlook and trying to draw all the threads together. I was beginning to understand that although my own ideas seem final to me, in the sense that this is as far as I am ever going to be able to take them, they will not seem final to other people. Not even the statement that ‘Nothing is final’ is final. If anyone ever does look at what I have done, they will in appropriating it all take it up into a different totality, and perhaps develop it in a new direction of which I can have no prevision. Philosophy, too, is only an ever-changing process, endless talk. I cannot hope to do more than make a small contribution to the ongoing conversation.

So I come to understand that I am my own transience, I am my own living of my own life, I am just this historically embedded process and not any kind of substance. I am a chain of events and exchanges. I am not an immortal soul, I am a human life towards the end of its eighth decade. I am a verb, not a noun, and I am nearly over. Soon, the play will end - for me, at least. At this stage of the game, talk of there being any ‘more’ for me is absurd. I’d better start counting my blessings and living in and for the Now, because my future prospects are negligible. Looking around me, I observe that nearly all of my contemporaries have similarly given up any thoughts of‘life after death, because they too know that the very idea is now absurd. Everything is transient, including me, and you, and including even the doctrine stated in this sentence. (Compare the Buddhist doctrine of‘the emptiness of Emptiness’.) Nothing can be pinned down firmly or permanently any more, because there is no firm substance or Ground out there to pin it to.

By such considerations as these, modern philosophy has come to a fresh appreciation of the radical temporality of all being. All beings are ‘in be-ing’, parts of the flux. Outsidelessly, everything is passing, including us and anything we can hope to produce. Our continuing desire to find something Absolute to cling to is now not our salvation, but our problem. We need to be cured of it.

Thus the prime religious question today is about how we can find ‘religious meaning’, or ‘eternal life’, in a world in which everything - all being, truth and value - is secondary, language-mediated, contingent and utterly transient. In traditional discussions of the subject it was said that there are three main kinds of evil, namely Sin, Pain, and Death: that is, Moral Evil, Physical Evil, and Metaphysical Evil, or Finitude.1 Of these three, it was Sin, or moral evil, that seemed most important to people who lived in a religion-based culture. Then, in the more science-based and humanistic Modern period after about 1680 people’s thoughts turned more to the problem of pain and suffering: in a law-governed world created by a supposedly benevolent Designer-God, why is there so much suffering? And how far can we diminish the amount of suffering in the world by developing and introducing better technologies, and better political arrangements?

Today, the argument has moved on again. People seem to remain as capable as ever of incomprehensibly wicked behaviour, but describing such behaviour as sinful or evil and seeking religious remedies for it does not seem quite so useful as formerly it did. As for the problem of suffering, we have learnt that a great deal can be done to diminish it by modern medicine, by applied science, and by competent social administration. Already most people can expect to live a full span of life, with much more varied company and wider cultural provision than our ancestors could ever have hoped for. To quite a large extent, we can make things better for ourselves and have already done so.

However, as everyone knows, there is no immediate prospect of our being altogether freed either from the shadow of sudden personal disaster or from the certainty of our own eternal death, and my present argument is simply that the extraordinary technical and political advances of the twentieth century have for many or most people shifted the spotlight away from moral and physical evil, and towards metaphysical evil.

Everything is utterly contingent; everything passes away, and I will soon pass away. So how am I to avoid sinking into the pessimism of the very long line of male literary curmudgeons who began with Schopenhauer and are now numberless?

Several answers are given. A very common one, given by Nietzsche, is that we must say a wholehearted Yes to life now, in the present moment. We cannot now hope to make our present life bearable by appealing to some Higher World or promised future in which everything will be put right, but it is possible to feel in the present moment that one is happy, and that our life is worthwhile. There are many familiar literary examples of this sentiment - for example in Browning, and in Henry James.

A second and somewhat subtler argument aims to show us that our feelings of discontent are irrational. It says: Things are what they are. Outsidelessly, we are humans in our human world, a world of signs in motion, and therefore of change. Very well: everything is empty, in the Buddhist sense. Everything is secondary, everything is transient - but how do you suppose things could really be otherwise? In an eternal and perfect world there could be no persons and no life. Think about human life: it is often messy and prickly and it is always death-haunted, but you would rather have it than not, wouldn’t you? Therefore, as the Bible says: ‘Choose life!’2

A third argument runs as follows: most of our gloomy thoughts about transience depend upon a contrast between ourselves, thought of as stable and self-identical beings, and time, as a power distinct from ourselves that threatens us.

For example, time may be seen as a rushing railway train or coach that hurtles along carrying us aboard it, and that will at some future moment crash and kill us all. Or time may be seen as eroding us and wearing us away by its constant attrition. Or we may picture ourselves as all sitting in a huge waiting-room. Now and again a name is called out, and one of us is led away, never to be seen again.3 And so it has always been: every one of us will eventually be called and must disappear into the unknown; but we have no idea of who will be next, nor of what to expect.

And so it goes on: the three illustrations I have just given could be multiplied indefinitely by anyone with a good knowledge of literature - and especially of poetry. But they all depend upon thinking of time as extrinsic, other than ourselves, and as a threat. But twenty years ago Dogen taught me to think: ‘Wait a minute. I am the time of my life.4 I am my own being. I myself am slipping away at exactly the same speed as everything else.’ And that gave me a sudden thought of eternity-in-the-midst-of-time. A similar effect can be produced by the old illustration of Einstein’s treatment of time; for suppose that you are riding on a beam of light that is travelling away from a clock-face. Look back - and time is standing still!

Stories like these help to make a general point: the more I can learn to see myself as being just the moving process of my own life, so that I really am completely embedded in and coincident with my own temporality the closer I get to a consoling intuition of eternity in the midst of utter transience. People’s fear of time and death is a fear of being left out. But I’m not being left out. I am always in the midst of It All.

All three of the types of argument that have been quoted have some value, and the third in particular has stayed with me. From time to time in the past I have used ‘the Fountain’ as a symbol of it. Every bit of the fountain is nothing but rushing formless transience: but now stand back from it a while, and see how it becomes still and consoling, a symbol of healing, refreshment, calm, and life’s endless self-renewal.

Thus it appears that today, fully as much as in any earlier period, the contemplation of a great unifying religious symbol may give rise to intense religious comfort and happiness.

1 See G. W. Leibniz, Theodicée, 1710; and John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, London: Macmillan and New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

2 Deuteronomy 30.19, etc.

3 A story from Pascal’s Pensées.

4 See Joan Stambaugh, Impermanence is Buddha-Nature: Dogen’s Understanding of Temporality, Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1990.