A Critique of "After God: The Future of Religion" by Don Cupitt (Harper Collins 1997)
I often wonder what happened to Chris Farlow. There was a whisper that he had a little place down Kingston Arcade flogging military regalia and that he was one of the first of the nameless victims of political correctness. That would be a pity, as I thought that Chris had the authentic mod voice of all time. As I cruised the bright lights and wet streets of Hounslow on my Lambo TV 175 (backrest, foglights, crash-bars, aerial, fur seat, no side-panels), that larnyx strained through the paleolithic gravel terraces of the Thames and growled around my head. I only ever knew the one song, "Out of Time", but it never stopped growling in my skull. That was because, although I was, on one level, with a Number Six in the corner of my gob, cruising the streets of Hounslow in my parka with 'West London Mods' inscribed in biro on the back and worrying if the bits of garden wire round the float chamber would hold out, on another I was really riding Trotsky's armoured train, leading the charge of the New Model Army at Marston Moor, or breaking out of the gladiatorial school alongside Spartacus. I was the most out of time person in all of human history. At least that's what I thought until I came across Don Cupitt...
Don Cupitt categorically denies the fundamental beliefs of the Church of England. He is not echoing Nietzsche, who said that God is dead. For something to be dead it must have been alive at some stage. Cupitt is saying that God never existed in the first, last, or any other place. Although a theologian, Cupitt is from a background in the Natural Sciences and is a positivist.
Positivism claims to be 'empiricist' -- that is, it holds that only what can be put into a test-tube and analysed according to the Chemical Table has any claim to reality. This rules out the interior life, the emotional and reflective capacities of human beings, which amounts to the lion's share of human experience and which has resulted in everything of any value in our history. Positivism is not only outstandingly primitive -- it is also, I believe, deeply unrewarding and self-destructive.
Fortunately it is also Out of Time. It is predicated upon a view of the universe -- the mechanistic, so-called 'Newtonian' view (which Newton, good Alchemist as he was, would have violently abjured) of absolute space and time -- which has stood discredited by quantum physics for the past century . Now it constitutes an archaic scientific paradigm with uncanny resemblances to the theological paradigm it replaced. Unfortunately at the moment all the key players in our global market place play by its rules. For, in the market place, God is a distinct embarrassment. It was, after all, in the market place that Nietzsche's madman elected to announce the death of God.
Postmodernism takes Postivism a step further. Postivism says there is nothing but 'facts' (of the test tube variety). Postmodernism says there aren't even any of them. With the death of absolutes (of which God was the fundamental) all meaning, all identity disappears. All we are left with is a mess, albeit, according to the postmodernist theorists, a 'playful' and 'ironic' mess.
Cupitt sets out his stall: "I shall propose that if we can't beat postmodernity, we should embrace it". In so doing he immediately dissociates himself from such concepts as the transcendental and metaphysical, which are to Postmodernists as the Cross is to vampires.
The reason for this renunciation, he says, is that he just woke up one day and saw that his previous beliefs, particularly in a transcendent deity, were all bollocks.
The problem with Postmodernism is that it is impossible to pin down. It refuses to enter into dialogue with anybody but itself. There is, and can be, only one reality. History is over. Capitalism, 'Liberalism', and 'Democracy' have triumphed and no other versions of reality will be tolerated. Ever. In philosophical terms, Postmodernism has replaced Paracelsus' "I imagine therefore I am", Pascal's "I think therefore I am", and Sartre's "I do therefore I am" with its own "I shop therefore I am". It is the philosophy of retail victims.
For Cupitt, the multinationals have created "a flourishing human society" which is "morally superior to our old locally based national and religious identities". And culture? "Hollywood has several times retold the western myth, injecting new values into it". Like Francis Fukuyama, Cupitt proclaims that This Is As Good As It Gets.
One wonders what they put into the Senior Common Room port these days. It has become a truism not only that capitalism is incapable of delivering the psychic or the material goods, but also that it is in the throes of a spectacular unravelling.
As befits an ideology in denial, Postmodernism is deeply disingenuous. The high priests of deconstruction surround themselves with an aura of mystique far more impenetrable -- and infinitely more meaningless -- than ever did the guardians of the temples of antiquity.
And Cupitt prostrates himself before that great idol of the Twentieth Century, language, before which we must all remain silent. It took Wittgenstein a whole lifetime to realize that he was up a gum tree and then there was nothing left for him to do but die.
Cupitt speaks of 'symbols', just as other Postmodernists speak of 'Logos' and 'Icons'. It is odd how a self-proclaimed High Priest of Language should contribute to this semantic devaluation. For how can icons and logos be said to exist when there is no possibility of transcendence? How can there be signs where there is nowhere to go? And how can symbols -- which are keys to meaning and transformation -- be said to exist in a universe in which neither meaning nor transformation are possible?
But Cupitt is guilty of what might be termed the advertising copywriter approach to philosophy, for he takes terms, strips them of all meaning and then deploys them as catchphrases whose function is purely Pavlovian. Breathtakingly, he even rolls out the terms 'Microcosm' and 'Macrocosm' in a desperate attempt to lend gravitas to his his lightweight theories, no doubt hoping the notion in traditional cosmologies, being the very embodiment of the concept of a meaningful, purposeful , and magical universe. The cosmos which Cupitt posits is a cosmos without values, without meaning, without identity, a cosmos in which there is nothing to believe, other than shopping. His Sea of Faith is no more than a puddle.
Cupitt, like so many other theologians, has got God wrong. They have set him/her/it up as an omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate deity. But if God is all-powerful, then why did he find it necessary to create us? And if he is the alpha and omega, beyond the space and time he created, then everything in creation, including our lives, is not only utterly contingent, meaningless, but also predetermined.
It says something about western rationalism that it should take, not two minutes, but two thousand years, to appreciate this. The tragedy is that, in a fit of infantile pique, it should then go on to throw out the concept of God in its entirety. Cupitt fails to mention the work of twentieth century theologians such as Teilhard de Chardin, Carl Gustav Jung, and Leszek Kolakowski, who have made great advances towards a more mature view whereby God and Man are seen in terms of a reciprocal relationship -- a notion which not only makes more sense and promises more for our future as a species but which, funnily enough, is backed up the very developments in modern physics upon which Cupitt, essentially a nineteenth century thinker, is silent.
Stuck as he is an archaic Positivist paradigm, Cupitt finds it necessary to submit the thinkers he quotes to Protean distortions. It cannot be said too often that nowhere did Nietzsche speak of the "devaluation", but rather of "the revaluation of all values". For him the dissolution of all fixed points was merely a prelude to the establishment of a new set of values. Anybody who has taken the trouble to read any of Nietzsche's books or to find out anything about his life cannot fail to be struck by the fact that here we have a romantic who is horrified by the mediocrity, banality and loss of the possibility of genuine transcendence in the 'modern' world of materialism. Nietzsche, like Heidegger, is constantly contrasting our 'civilization' with that of Fifth Century BC Greece; the latter is celebrated for its for its beauty, gravitas, and sense of the sacred, the former deplored for its comprehensive denial of these qualities.
Likewise it is inconceivable that anybody who has actually read any Jung should say that he was concerned with "the psychological history of the God idea in the human imagination", as if "the God idea" is simply a projection of the mind. This is a not just a case of simplification; it a case of standing Jung on his redoubtable head. The basic conclusion of Jung's work is that what he termed "Archetypes" (which would include God) have a existence autonomous from (and greater than) the human mind and/or psyche.
A similar inversion takes place in Cupitt's reference to Eckhart; when Eckhart says that "the eye with which we look at God is the same eye as the eye with which God looks at us" he doesn't mean that we are just looking at ourselves. The Dominican's ghost must be guffawing at the crudeness of Cupitt's interpretation.
Statements of breathtaking cheek are also made about vast swathes of history (or prehistory). We are told that religion "first became constituted as a distinct sphere of life around 3800BC". We are lectured on the gradations of "the God image" during the Bronze Age. But perhaps the prize goes to - "The paleolithic hunter called this thing that guided him a spirit, Plato calls it a Form, and I call it just a word".
If Cupitt expects the punters to gather round cheering when he announces the death -- or fatal downsizing -- of the Sacred, then he's got it badly wrong.
There is every indication that people, despite the ever increasing proportion of GDP devoted to hype and spin (used to be known as 'propaganda'), are profoundly dissatisfied with the state of things.
They desperately yearn for something else. They yearn for a society which works, which is fair, which doesn't tie them up in knots and leave them exhausted, empty-handed, and angry all for the sake of staying in the same place on the treadmill. For the vast mass of people in the West who have to run faster and faster just to stay where they are (let alone those in the rest of the world), the suggestion that "we must learn to be mere happenstance, felicitous, froth, carefree" is not merely imbecilic: it is downright insulting.
By stating that the human psyche is incapable of taking the weight, Cupitt aligns himself with Dostoeyevsky's Grand Inquisitor whose contempt for humanity -- no better than cats and dogs, he says -- is unbounded.
What does Cupitt offer us? A psychic hot water bottle (the cover embroidered with ironic Zen motifs or scenes from the Lake District). A 'religion' of comfort, of consolation.
Then, at the very last moment, Cupitt seems to undergo his own Reverse Reverse Road to Damascus Experience. Speaking of his own 'religion' he warns:
"Unless something new is launched quickly, I fear that the process of postmodernization will have gone too far, and will have become so destructive, that it will be too late".
Better late than never. Forget the rest of the book - just turn to that last sentence.
And, oh yeah - Chris Farlow... For me the authentic mod voice was not Hush Puppies and Fred Perry. It was the Small Faces singing "All Or Nothing". It was being Doomed. But it was also that wild ecstasy which only those who confront Life in all its all its tragedy, all its intensity will ever know. As a town it was Brighton, which has damnation and salvation running together in the veins of its rock. And, as a religion -- and Cupitt missed out on this one too -- it could be Christianity -- true Christianity - which is unique in its embracing of the agony and ecstasy of this life, unique in its insistence that this world is not an illusion or a karmic penal colony, but is sanctified by the incarnation of God and, as the coming together of spirit and matter, is the crucial point of the whole fucking business.
"Out of Time" was helped by a feature right at the end. As the record fades an impossibly hip voice ejaculates in the tones of the Surrey Delta: "Is everybody ready?" Word was that it was Mick (Jagger).
The next few years are going to be rocky. We are going to see the fatal depletion of Western hegemony, the destruction of one way of looking at the world, and its replacement by another which is both from the future and from the past. Jus' hope everybody's ready.
