The Eclectic Cleric

Stephen Batchelor interviews Don Cupitt

Don Cupitt may be the most radical Christian theologian alive today. Yet his work is hardly known in the United States. Born in England in 1933, he is an Anglican priest, a lecturer in the philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow and former dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Author of more than thirty books, he is the founder of the Sea of Faith movement, which calls for a radical rethinking of our faith traditions. He has been accused of being a heretic by the more conservative wings of the Church, and has been described as being closer in his thinking to Buddhism than to Christianity. In Emptiness and Brightness, Cupitt writes: “Of our religions, only Buddhism offers a serious and disinterested attempt to understand human unhappiness, diagnose its causes, and propose a therapy that, if persevered in for long enough, actually has some chance of working.” Risking It All and Wrestling with Life, a two-volume study of Cupitt’s life and work by Nigel Leaves, will be published in 2004 by Polebridge Press. Tricycle contributing editor Stephen Batchelor interviewed Cupitt at Emmanuel College in April of this year.

In 1980 you published a book entitled Taking Leave of God. For some this must have seemed a shocking idea for a theologian and Anglican priest to propose. It would seem to threaten the very foundation of Christian religious life.

Although I’ve been temperamentally religious all my life, my philosophy of religion turned critical with the publication of Taking Leave of God. I argued that we should regard God not as a metaphysical being, an infinite spirit, but rather as a guiding spiritual ideal by which to orient one’s life. This idea of God was explicitly put forward by Kant, and arguably has always been present in the Lutheran tradition.

The older realistic understanding of and language about God leads to impossible intellectual difficulties. How can a person be infinite, timeless, simple, and immutable? It seems to be essential to most Christians’ idea of God that God should somehow be thought of as personal, as having dealings with us, but the philosophical attributes of God make that unthinkable. To me it makes more sense to see God as a spiritual ideal. And perhaps the best way to interpret Christianity is to say that Christians see in Christ that ideal embodied in a human life. So I demythologize the idea of an incarnation of God in Christ into the idea of embodiment of Christian values in Christ, in his teaching. I see Christianity as a spiritual path in which one pursues various values, tells certain stories, follows examples that in the end go back chiefly to Jesus of Nazareth.

To what extent was your taking leave of God a movement toward other faiths, in particular Buddhism?

Yes, that was the time when my path and [author] Iris Murdoch’s crossed. She was getting very interested in Buddhism and was taking instruction in meditation. Both of us were beginning to feel that the metaphysical side of Christian belief was coming to an end. We were attracted to Buddhism because Buddhism has always known how to bracket the metaphysical questions, and to put the following of the path first. Christians have a maxim, lex orandi lex credendi: the way you pray should give you the general shape of what you believe; the way you practice your religion should come before the ideological form you later cast it in.

I’ve always liked Buddhism. I like its phenomenalist side, its desire for a unified conception of reality as something like a flux of minute events. The self is indissolubly part of that, so the self is not a spirit that peers into the world from the outside. The self is itself a cloud of minute events and as such is part of the world.

In my religious thought I don’t try to save our immortal soul from a wicked world but rather to realize my complete immersion in this one world of ours. I want to get myself into harmony and into step with the world we’ve actually got. I don’t believe we should look to any metaphysical order on the far side of experience nor to any metaphysical subject on the near side of experience but simply, as it were, to life. We are our lives. If we give ourselves wholly to our own lives, we’ll find the best happiness that we as human beings are capable of. I strongly oppose religions that ask us to distance ourselves a bit from life.

Surely Buddhism has a long record of distancing itself from life. At times it can appear almost life-denying. Buddhism arose at a time when in India, as in Greece, there was a feeling that the development of a state society required a disciplining of the passions, some distancing of oneself from one’s own passions. For me, though, the problem now is rather the other way ’round. Ever since the Romantic movement began, we in the West have been struggling for an integral life of the body, the emotions, and religion. We want to get our values, our feelings, our senses, our bodies all singing from the same hymn sheet.

I’m looking for a more unified selfhood. I like the more integrated, this-worldly humanism that Christianity has always wanted but has very seldom consistently pursued. Evangelicals like to say how horrible secular humanism is, but in Christianity you might say that God is a secular humanist. God becomes man in the world; the human being is the best miniature of what the world is. We shouldn’t try to split ourselves into different bits or separate ourselves from the world.

Nowadays I’m a bit of an emotivist. I define religion as cosmic emotion: a feeling for it all, a desire to place oneself in relation to everything. To understand what we are, how we should live, what we can hope for, how we should orient our lives, where we belong in the whole scheme of things. I stress the priority of the passions and would say that our emotional health is the fundamental precondition for personal happiness. This, I know, is rather different from some traditional Buddhist teaching, but I’ve noticed how many younger Buddhists in the West are not too keen on Buddhist asceticism and don’t think that sexual asceticism is necessary for personal happiness at all.

What do you think precipitated this radical shift in your thinking? Was it the natural scientific understanding of reality that forced you to cast aside old metaphysical certainties?

Yes, that’s right. But I emphasize history nowadays. Our life is not controlled by a timeless order or standards. It is profoundly historical. I’ve always been historically minded. I’ve always thought I could only be the person I am in the particular historical period in which I live. So I now see religious belief systems and practices and values all as historical. We ourselves evolve within the historical process and the standards by which we measure ourselves and our lives. We shouldn’t see ourselves as hooked up to an extra-historical order. For me, critical history is even more important than natural science in requiring us to go over to a thoroughly this-worldly, humanistic kind of religion.

In Emptiness and Brightness you speak of the need for a totally fresh start in what you call “pure religious thinking.” You argue that it is the responsibility of each person to take on the task of thinking for themselves in a new religious way.

My correspondence indicates to me that almost all people of my generation and younger are aware that their whole lives are spent in a personal religious quest. People feel the need to begin all over again. I think we are becoming detraditionalized very quickly. I now feel that we need a religious version of the scientific method.

I’ll put it this way: The only religious convictions that are of any value to you are ones you have formulated yourself and worked out and tested in your own life and in debate with other people. In 1993 I came very close to death, and my own convictions and beliefs were tested. Not only was I going through a very severe period of poor mental health, but I also had a burst cerebral aneurysm. Surgery left me with severe head pain, and for a time it seemed I would never write or work again. I managed to survive that period. But I asked myself afterward how I had got through such an extreme time and how it was I had known moments of great happiness in that period. Out of the self-questioning that began early in 1994, all my later thinking developed. It reflects a complete break with dogmatism and a desire to make a fresh start in the religious life.

Isn’t there a danger that this approach might lead one to become rather self-centered? Christians have always emphasized the importance of being part of the Church while Buddhists speak of belonging to the sangha.

They both stress that religious life must be grounded in a sense of community. I like community, but I’m always afraid of the extent to which religious communities bully and pressure their own members into conformity, and tend to fall under the control of dominant personalities for whom the religious community is a theater in which they enact their own power fantasies. The Sea of Faith has always tried to be a completely free religious society in which people can debate and argue with each other, develop their vocabulary but also find their own voice, develop their own views. Most religious communities emphasize obedience and deference to religious superiors and vows as if they’re trying to stop individuals thinking freely for themselves.

I’d like there to be a much greater degree of religious freedom than we have yet known. I’d like people on the whole to hold fewer dogmatic beliefs. I’d like people to know a lot about the Christian tradition but be largely independent of orthodox Christian religious commitments, for they seem to inhibit thought and stop people from responding spontaneously to life. I’m looking for postdogmatic religion, led by the individual’s personal quest, the search for values and practices that really do help us survive when life gets tough.

What, then, does it mean nowadays to have a religious identity in the traditional sense, to think of oneself as a “Christian” or “Buddhist”?

I’m keen on religious and political eclecticism. Traditional identities are a bit of a mistake. I don’t want to go back to any supposedly pure, original, and exclusive religious identity. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, it was usually believed that at the beginning of the Christian tradition the faith was pure. So if you went back you’d find that everyone agreed, everyone held a pure and simple form of the faith. What modern historical critical scholarship has shown is that in the New Testament period there was the most appalling jumble of different ideas, out of which something which considered itself orthodoxy did not develop for about four hundred years. There never was an original, pure, primitive identity. Dreams of purity are almost always a complete mistake. I don’t see why one shouldn’t be highly eclectic. Notice how the most gifted revolutionaries, intellectual and artistic, always know their tradition very well and are quite happy to borrow from the most unexpected places. I approve of the modern religious supermarket and the huge artistic, religious, and cultural wealth that is available to us nowadays to choose from and explore. I want to encourage people to find their own way.

I suppose I am about half Christian and part Jewish. I’ve always liked Jewish humanism, conviviality, and the tradition of locating religion in the family rather than in a monastic order. I like Buddhism because of its independence and intellectual purity of mind. There is a simplicity and clarity in Buddhist thinking which I approve of. Buddhism is cool, and that coolness is a great relief from Christianity’s often overheated personalism. Perhaps a quarter of me is Christian, a quarter Jewish, and a quarter Buddhist, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t be eclectic nowadays. Our societies are becoming multifaith, and our culture global.

In your book you propose an “empty radical humanism.” What do you mean by that exactly?

By “humanism” I don’t mean that the world is human-shaped and I certainly don’t want to deify “man,” although I recognize that consciousness develops because the world takes definite shape—and becomes beautiful and bright—only in our language and in our theory. There’s a certain sense in which we can’t avoid anthropocentrism, but I also want to demythologize our sense of ourselves. I don’t want to say that man is the crown of creation. So it’s an “Empty Humanism.” Here I refer to the traditional no-self doctrine of the ways. For one thing, we’re conscious of the imaginary reader, whom we want to admire us. So the ego exhorts us: Sound smart, sound fascinating, sound sensitive and deep. This gets in the way of letting the language itself speak, which it will if we can get out of the way and just listen. That’s when we can surprise ourselves into saying things we didn’t know we knew. I think this is close to what happens in zazen. When the mind finally stops filling the space around it with its own noise, it can hear everything else that occupies the silence.

How was writing The Ghost of Eden different from later writing The Snow Watcher, which was written during the first few years of Zen practice?

In The Ghost of Eden, I was aware from early on of the book’s “subject”—“subject” is in quotes because of course one never really knows where one is going (or shouldn’t). But at the same time, I knew that until then I had been avoiding poems that touched on the matter of our poor stewardship of our planet. Ecology poems were everywhere, and I thought most of them were covertly sentimental, and I also feared my own anger, which was significant.

It made me reconsider Robinson Jeffers, who I think is a great poet. His extremity seems to me entirely appropriate to his passion. Of course he upsets people; they think he hates the human race (which he did say was “a botched experiment that ought to be stopped”). I shared his outrage and distress, and knew that my own poems would probably carry some of the same freight.

As I worked, though, I came to see the primary force of the book as one of grief, not anger. The anger was a shield. In retrospect, this is obvious, but I had to write the book to figure it out. The lesson, then, was not in detachment (which feeds anger, I think) but in passing through the emotion and out the other side. It turned out that “the ghost of Eden,” which I’d initially intended to be a description of our ruined paradise, was in fact me. I was the permeable specter, the inconstant thing. The world was just the world. This discovery was the beginning of my study of Zen.

At least a year passed before I wrote another poem. By then, I was visiting the monastery whenever I could. Practice completely derailed my old ways of working. For one thing, I couldn’t use the first person pronoun without hesitation. Who was talking, anyway? I struggled with this for months, reading mostly old Japanese and Chinese poetry: Han-shan, T’ao Ch’ien, Ikkyu, Hakuin, Su Tung-P’o, Ryokan, Li Po, Tu Fu, and of course the great haiku poets: Buson, Issa, Basho. Also the ancient, anonymous stuff and lots of poetry by Zen monks. Finally, I realized that I would have to abandon any sense of poetic authority and let that first person pronoun float, writing instead as a novice (both spiritually and poetically), full of ignorance and questions. At this point, the poems started to come again. As I got deeper and deeper into the work, I saw that all the poems were asking the same question that Zen asks: What is the self? Not who, but what. The Snow Watcher is the beginning of my struggle to answer that question.

In “To the Reader: If You Asked Me,” you conclude: “If you asked me what words / a voice like this one says in parting, / I’d say, I’m sweeping an empty factory / toward which I feel neither hostility nor nostalgia. / I’m just a broom, sweeping.” Where did this imagery come from?

I was thinking about the odd feeling that comes when a book is finished. There’s a detachment that sets in, as if your child had grown up and left home. I feel the same thing on a minor scale when a single poem is finished, but it’s stronger when it’s a whole book—four or five years of work. All those days in the factory, and suddenly I have no job!

Can you comment on the place of “self” in this poem—or in your poetry in general—and how it might mediate the anger you express over our “poor stewardship of the planet”?

Yes, the self is nothing but a broom going about the business of the moment, which happens, after the work is done, to be cleaning up. I was trying to get at the surprising realization that the poems write themselves; they use the self—by which I mean the poet’s consciousness—as a door to the world. This sounds like hocus-pocus, I know, but if you think about it, who writes the poems? The self that’s constantly mutating? Did “I” write the poems that “I” wrote twenty years ago? I certainly couldn’t write them now. It took me a long time to get comfortable with the first-person pronoun in this context. From the conventional vantage point of the song lyric, it’s a tricky part of speech because it carries the assumption of one kind of intimacy, that of the personal confidence, or confession. I think that’s why so many people assume that poetry is personal expression; in our culture, the first-person pronoun invites that reading. But I was interested in quite another kind of intimacy. When the self in a poem is seen as a door and not as the room to which the door leads, the relation between self and world is radically changed. The “I” becomes like a leaf floating down a stream. It’s not a repository for the world, nor the source of its resonance or meaning. It’s just a leaf floating, just a broom sweeping.

As for my rage about the decimation of Eden: I used to see myself as a good guy fighting the bad guys (corporate greed, corrupt governments). But guess what? The bad guys turned out to be anger, ignorance, and greed, of which I am full. So whom was I fighting? All of humanity, including myself? One line I wrote, before I figured this out, was “If humanity’s the enemy, the enemy is me.” Well, duh! So my cells are part Eden and part destroyer, the whole shebang. Anger has a hard time getting a grip on that.

It’s said that there’s nothing to learn in zazen, and therefore nothing to teach. Does the same apply to writing and teaching poetry? As soon as one begins to categorize the experience of zazen, it slips out of the net. Zen says that we are already buddhas, we just don’t realize it. Realization is seeing what’s there rather than the innumerable scrims with which we overlay it. I try to pry poetry students loose from their notions of what a poem should be, and suggest instead that they regard each poem as a chance to trick themselves into a new perception. Students at Princeton, who can be very disciplined and goal oriented, are often uncomfortable at first with the intellectual and emotional lawlessness this notion presents.

Yes, they say, but what do you want us to write about? And I say, what are you wondering about? What do you want to know that you don’t know? After a while, I actually have to take the opposite stance and try to rein them in a little, but at the beginning that’s what the work is about. I want them to be more interested in the process of writing than in its products. When Picasso was asked which of all his many works—paintings, sculptures, pottery, drawings—was his favorite, he said, “The next one."