Many people have found that solid reality has led them to a religious faith. ‘I begin through the grass once again to be bound to the Lord,’ wrote the Irish poet AE, anapaestically. Abbé Suger, inventing Gothic architecture as he flooded the basilica at St Denis with light and colour, explained, ‘The dull mind rises to the truth through material things.’ Diotima, as reported by Socrates in The Symposium, also suggests that love of physical beauty is the first rung on the ladder leading to the ultimate perception of ‘divine beauty, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life.’ Do I, with Henry Vaughan, discern ‘bright shoots of everlastingness’, and
in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity?
Well, yes, I think so, now and then, but I have no conclusive evidence to convince even myself that I believe them, and certainly I would not swear that the everlastingness or immortality were specifically mine. [Footnote: Look at that constipated phrase: ‘I have no conclusive evidence to convince…’. I am the child of a reductivist age and culture, and therefore mistrustful of my own intuitions when they are either contradicted or ridiculed by the sceptical voice of the Zeitgeist. All intimations of immortality, hints of transcendence or even beauty, I have been conditioned to suspect as illusions, jiggery-pokery, ‘mere’ subjectivity, nothing more than chemical reactions in my brain. It’s a wearisome timidity, and a struggle, like Vaughan’s, to recapture ‘th’ enlightened spirit’ of innocence.] There must be a greedy egotism behind a desire for the persistence of one’s own personality after death when, if that personality were housed in another body, we might not give it the time of day, let alone demand that it merited endless bliss.
William James (unlike AE) doubts that any merely nature-based perspective can get us far: ‘there are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other,’ he writes with uncharacteristic assertiveness. I suspect there is a unity rather than this suggested polarity. Anselm and Einstein only had an inkling of their super-sensory beliefs in God and relativity because the things they experienced in the world suggested the thoughts to them, and they could only begin to comprehend those beliefs because they verbalised them in analogies drawn from daily life. At the beginning of his letter to the Romans, Paul says: ‘For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.’ The divine, he suggests, can be approached through the material things of the world. And the story of poor Doubting Thomas, who only believed in the resurrection once he had seen and felt Jesus’s wounds, does imply that even the plodders reliant on physical evidence can get to a Dominus meus et Deus meus eventually. Why, after all, would God make an unreliable, entirely illusory world?
But that is a wildly inadmissible question, based on entirely unproven surmises. The essence of STA is not, anyway, transcendence. It is fulfilment. It is not an attempt to annihilate our individuality so that we can merge into the unity of the universe. We’re there already. Our haecceity is precious, unique and does not detract from the unity of the universe one jot. Nor is STA dependent on everlastingness and after-lives. It is a revelling in the sufficiency of all that already is. Other worlds for other times maybe, but for now, STA. ‘You don’t paint souls. You paint bodies; and when the bodies are well-painted, dammit, the soul – if they have one – shines through all over the place.’ (Cézanne) STA is so satisfying and seemingly sufficient a philosophy that I am deeply relieved and grateful to have come upon it. Without any annihilation of self, to be at one with all that evidently is seems a sufficient ambition. Fulfilment of this kind may seem like peanuts to those who claim to have achieved a spiritual transcendence. But they know no more of my experience than I of theirs.
STA is experience plus thought plus ineffability. It feels the solidity of the good ground beneath its feet all the way to the cliff-edge, and celebrates it. It gazes with wonder and untroubled, because insurmountable, ignorance into the great blueness before it. It does not pretend it can step off the edge and fly, nor does it grumpily deny the existence of that inaccessible beyondness. It just lays out the picnic-blanket and settles down to enjoy the rich fruits of the earth (mmm, strawberries!) and the hazy panorama.
Those of us ‘of a sky-blue tint’, as William James calls us (Whitman and Chesterton would qualify, and Traherne is the most cerulean of all) – those who, neither oblivious nor immune to suffering, live instinctively guided by the beauty of creation and a sense of its fitness, can look a bit inadequate, even suburban, next to the greater glamour of, say, St John of the Cross, whose kred-dhehl was high-fired in a crucible of agony and apocalypse. Ours was just baked in the sunshine. [Footnote: there is a notable absence of C20-21 writers in the sky-blue corner. Is this modish sophistication? the delusion that miserable events are more profound than happy ones? a fear that simplicity will be derided by critics? that joy is an insult to the suffering? Whatever the cause, it is sad that so few recent writers convince us that the sheer fact of existence is something glorious to be relished. When we have so little excitement about the world, is it any wonder we don’t look after it?] James (following Christ, of course) thinks we need to be ‘twice-born’ to attain a deep spirituality: he may be right, but I don’t know that the melodramatic implications of painful ‘birth-trauma’ are necessarily helpful, and I would be wary of the common assumption that pain runs deeper, and is more real and serious, than joy. Christ and I (if you will forgive my presumption) suggest that we, as adults, need to see the world like little children. This may entail a painful recalibration of one’s life, or it may not: the important thing is the vision, not the pain.
I am happy that we are all instruments in the orchestra which goes on playing. I do not demand that I should play every note myself. That busy insistence on being involved and taking charge of everything is found only in humans, I suspect. I remember fetching Ipsy and Heeks (her late, immensely lovable sister) from the Cats Protection League for the first time. They sat in their basket, looking curiously out of the car windows at the flashing trees and hedgerows, but made no attempt to escape (let alone to commandeer the car, set a new course, and remodel the world to their own satisfaction in a grand Ailurocene Age) and after ten minutes, they curled up happily to sleep.
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