THE GENERATION AND CELEBRATION
OF A FREE AND ETHICAL COMMONWEALTH
According to the
Systematic Philosophy of Immanuel Kant
By Rev. Richard
Mapplebeckpalmer
Preface [A summary of the whole essay]
Kant understood religion as the celebration and nurture of a universal and ethical commonwealth. This paper describes the application of this vision to a traditional parish in California. I hope to demonstrate by this example that not only has Kant pointed the general way forward in all issues religious and ecumenical, but that his vision can easily be put into practice.
Following Kant’s method of exposition in terms of arranging material in sets of twos, threes, and fours; I have arranged this paper in two Parts.
PART 1: KANT’S VIEW ON RELIGION
In the first set of three chapters I consider the general outlines of a religious community when referenced by Kant’s philosophy. I take note of features of his philosophy that balance prophetic religion by folk religion; and ground both in morality. Thirdly, I consider the options for establishing such religious communities without lapsing into ideological cults or separatist sects.
Chapter I The
Theory and Practice of Religion
I summarize Kant’s vision of what
may properly count as religion, especially in relation to his 1793 book, Religion
within the Bare Bounds of Reason.
Here he outlined an archetypal sequence for all possible religious experience.
Since religion that is not free or liberating cannot count as religion in
Kant’s eyes, I begin with a brief overview of the universal metaphors for
freedom and oppression. This demonstrates how the primacy Kant places on being
free, accords with human experience. I argue that such freedom should therefore
govern the way religious communities deliberate. I cite two primary Hebrew metaphors,
the Virgin and the Prince, that govern the story of Israel. And I
show how this story substantiates Kant’s own archetypal story.
Chapter II How the Experience of Nature Shapes Logic
and Religion
I summarize the metaphorical source of
Kant’s method for logically presenting his insights – a method he
called his Architectonic.
I demonstrate that this architectonic is built on natural and universal
metaphors that root his system of logic in the great landscapes and rhythms of
nature. I argue that this explains the power Kant has always exercised on the
imagination of those who have studied him. For this reason Folk Religion
remains more than ever the ground of Universal Religion.
Chapter III A
Copernican Revolution in Religious Government
I consider how to implement Kant’s
vision in a way that is appropriate to a globalized world in need of a moral
method to energize its local communities. I reframe two familiar virtues, the true chastity
of the virgin and the
true celibacy of the
prince. By relating them to how we cherish freedom in a local religious
community, I demonstrate a practice that could transform our attitude toward
the congregations to which we belong. Finally I consider how the inevitable
transformation of hierarchical and denominational structures may impact the
spirituality and freedom of human behavior on a global scale.
PART 2 KANT’S VISION AT WORK
As a traditional parish priest of more
than four decades experience, I lay out a set of four chapters. Each considers
a specific aspect of traditional parochial ministry. I show how a consistent
regard for Kant’s vision of an ethical commonwealth can reframe how these
ministries are understood and performed.
Chapter IV The
Practice of a Princely Community
I consider how a virgin parish may be covenanted and governed in
such a way that the relative sovereignty of each voice is chastely honored. This includes how autonomy
within a congregational polity may be moderated and celebrated without a loss
of freedom or creativity.
I consider the prophetic ministry of free yet grounded
philosophers and I argue that the celebratory ethos of freedom must govern
every aspect of their preaching.
Chapter VI The
Practice of a Pastoral Community
I consider the necessity for listening to
all souls and to
extending an unrestricted pastoral care toward a whole neighborhood and to sets of social
issues. This listening ministry is the beginning of the fourth and missionary stage of
Kant’s understanding of religion: the establishment of an ethical
commonwealth. This
mission must be non-proselytizing, celebratory and catholic with a small c. A
quite opposite ethos to that of the old denominations, sects and cults.
Chapter VII The
Practice of a Priestly Community
In this final chapter I reframe the
traditional rites de passages
of folk religion in the light of the prophetic and ethical concerns of a global
commonwealth. This is the conclusion of Kant’s fourth stage. I emphasise the celebratory nature
of religion as it dances on the stage of moral concern. By the very energy and
extravagance of these folk celebrations, moral freedom can be felt as a lightness
of being.
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The generation and celebration of a free and ethical commonwealth
[Main
text of the essay]
PART 1: KANT’S VIEW ON RELIGION
In this set of three chapters I consider the general outlines of a religious community when referenced by Kant’s philosophy. I take note of features of his philosophy that balance prophetic religion by folk religion and ground both in morality. Thirdly, I consider the options for establishing such religious communities without lapsing into ideological cults or separatist sects.
Chapter
I THE THEORY AND PRACTICE
OF RELIGION
I summarize Kant’s vision of
what may properly count as religion, especially in relation to his 1793 book, Religion
within the Bare Bounds of Reason.
Here he outlined an archetypal sequence for all possible religious experience. Since
religion that is not free or liberating cannot count as religion in
Kant’s eyes, I begin with a brief overview of the universal metaphors for
freedom. This demonstrates how the primacy that Kant places on being free
accords with human experience. I argue that such freedom should therefore
govern the way religious communities deliberate. I cite two primary Hebrew metaphors
that govern the story of Israel, the Virgin and the Prince, and I show how this story substantiates
Kant’s own archetypal story.
Freedom is lightness of being. Weightless. Or at least not carrying so
much weight that we fall backward or forward; fall to one side or the other, or
collapse altogether. Freedom from is
always freedom from
too much weight or from
any other impediment to our passage. Freedom for is always freedom for moving. Particularly forward. That’s how the metaphors for
freedom operate in all languages I know of.
If I am free there is nothing to weigh against me in any direction. I move freely. To set me free you lift a burden from me or in some way remove an impediment, such as opening a closed door or removing a bar at a window. When I am free I travel light; a leaf or a feather on the wind. Perhaps a sliver of bark upon the water. Many of us carry too much baggage. It weighs us down. Can we walk without wobbling? Can we balance, moving freely with joy and grace? Dancing, are we poised in the lightness of being?
Walking
in the realm of morals or religion or politics, no less than in any other walk
of life we can find ourselves
carrying too much weight. Sometimes it is imposed upon us. More often than not
we take it upon ourselves. Seeing everyone else carry a heavy weight, we feel
obliged to do the same. We forget to cherish the lightness of being. So we
carry too much weight and lack the courage to throw it way. Because we
don’t cherish weightlessness we sink beneath our burden into slavery. Yet
when we carry only our own weight we never seem to notice it, unless of course
we start to throw our weight around. Then we are in danger of losing our
balance. But when we lose our balance we lose our freedom also. Yet on finding
it again our freedom returns. So it is an issue of balance; of governing our
own weight and that of others, so that we dance without falling; sing without
shouting; hear without becoming deaf; celebrate without going over the top
– or under the table.
Such
ways of describing what is happening when our bodies move freely across a landscape
become metaphors for describing and explaining more complex ways of moving in
community. We follow not only literal paths, but also the many metaphorical
paths we call ways of life. Yet
all ways are shadowed by weights
that, nevertheless, can be dissolved into weightlessness. If you only trusted
the path ahead of you, said Jesus, you could tell the biggest mountain on your
shoulders to take a jump and it would do so. Religion, as a walk in the
lightness of being, restores our
freedom. Yet another related metaphor for oppression is darkness and shadow.
Slavery is a heaviness of being.
Historically, in the story of Israel, it is the experience of slavery under the
shadow and weight of the pyramids of Egypt and the hierarchy of Pharaoh. A
slave community is not free to make decisions and generate its own economy. And
a slave morality is one where souls cannot, as Kant advocated, freely choose
the maxims by which their decisions will be governed. (In this, Nietzsche
followed Kant).
But
the way to this lightness of being, as Immanuel Kant, following King David,[i]
reminded us, passes, sooner or later, through the valley of the shadow. A
shadow that Kant called Radical Evil
and for which the psalmist’s metaphor was simply death.
Other metaphors, for events that occur to
prevent us from freely following our path, draw their logic source not from
solid objects but from elemental weights: water, air, and fire. Imagery of
wave, storm or violent conflagration suggests overwhelming phenomena flinging
to one side the burdens we’ve grown used to. Suddenly our journeys come
to a disastrous end. If by grace we survive, we speak about finding ourselves
in a landscape stripped of all familiar landmarks.
Epochs in history, where social structures are violently changing, are frequently described by such metaphors. One such epoch covered the last decades of the 1700s, when storm and tempest and the fiery smoke of guns jolted Western history in a new direction. It found a certain German professor of slight build, Immanuel Kant, lecturing and writing in the cosmopolitan East Prussian University town and port of Konigsburg. It was situated beside the Gulf of Danzig on the Baltic Sea where shipping routes from the Atlantic coasts of Europe, the British Isles and the Americas converged with the great land and river routes that crossed the continent from as far afield as Asia.
During the 1770s, when Kant was preparing and writing the opening volume of his system of critical philosophy, the yearning for political and religious freedoms throughout Europe and Northern America was moving to a crescendo. Under the weight of an increasing cultural complexity over recent centuries, western civilization was being brought to its knees. In the 1400s there had been a Renaissance of science and the arts. In the 1500s Reformation began to change the institutions of religion. In the 1600s Colonization had begun the Europeanization of the Americas, both North and South. Now in the 1700s the weight of four centuries proved too much for the stability of traditional religious and political institutions.
Kant would have been familiar with the
1776 American Declaration of Independence. By 1788 the text of the new
Constitution for the United States would surely have also found its way to his
desk. A year later, 1789, the whole of Europe would be reeling with the
after-effects of the French Revolution. And in the same year, the globally
respected George Washington became the first President of the now successfully
United States of America. Then in 1790 Benjamin Franklin, for whom Kant had
enormous respect, and whom the whole of Europe regarded as an archetype of the First
American[ii], was buried in Philadelphia; setting a
kind of seal on that whole incredible eighteenth century transatlantic
experiment in political and religious freedom.
In such a changing world Kant asked three
questions whose standpoints never change, namely “What can I know?”
“What may I hope?” And “What ought I to do?” Put in
another way they are the three questions human beings have always asked in
connection to their past, their future and their present:
Where do we come from?
Where are we going?
And how do we live with one
another?
Kant claimed the latter as the most
urgent and primal of the three questions.
Whatever our circumstances, moral living (some
would call it holy living), is of more consequence than either origin or
destiny. For this reason he gave the primacy to moral (practical) reason that prescribes what ought to be, rather than to theoretical (pure) reason that explains what is the case. Our path may lie midway
between the horizons
of our past and of our future. But Kant saw clearly that it is the immediate
intersection of our path with the moral vertical ahead, that either balances us or throws
us askew. The demand for an ethical response to all situations cuts across
every other concern that spreads before us on the path.
In that last decade of the 1700s it was
imperative for Kant to put his system of critical philosophy to the test, by
using it to chart a way that would lead us to a place where a true religious
ethos could flourish.
When applying Kant’s insights to our own
congregations and religious practice, we should remember that Kant’s
vision of people living in a free moral community came from shaving away
centuries of distortion that have obscured Jesus’ own vision of the
Kingdom of Heaven. Our two millennia long history of the Gospel tradition is
the sorry tale of how the congregations of ‘King Jesus,’ spread throughout the world, have been seduced by empires and denominations.
Kant was a Protestant because,
like all true Protestants, he was primarily a Catholic. He protested against
all that would make the catholic community less than catholic. For it is the
prophetically Protestant contention that our local communities, together with
their clergy, have been hijacked. State Governments have monopolized the
councils of the people that properly belong to each local neighborhood. They
have made themselves deaf to the protests of those they have hijacked. Little
wonder that prophetically religious protest movements have often been so
radically political.
Yet in the midst of all this babble of conflicting
voices we can hear the voice of Immanuel Kant, perhaps the most influentially
protestant catholic who ever spoke, telling quietly how free our life in the
Spirit could really be. True religion, unlike the sects, does not disconnect us
from our fellow humans. Re-ligio ‘reconnects’
souls to one another, kata holou,
‘according to the whole’.
[a reference to Kant’s explanation
of catholic +
ref. from the close of his Swedenborgian study should be added here].
Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason
Kant tells the perennial story of the soul’s
encounter with the one who, guiding his path, encourages her to overcome the
impassable mountains by the lightness of being. He sets out the archetypal
pattern of the turns in this path in his book, Religion within the Bounds of
Bare Reason, (published in 1793 and
immediately banned by the King of Prussia).
This route to the center of our human being follows
the universal, four-fold sequence that all souls undergo repeatedly. In the
stages of this journey it is as if
our moral life mirrored the rhythm of the seasons of our natural life. From the
long darkness of winter,
we emerge into spring. Then following the long work of summer, we come at last
to the joyful harvest.
Kant observes that only after an experience of great
stress do we come to a vivid sense of the radical oppression that enshadows us
and all our kind. From the weight of this oppression we all need deliverance if
we are to stand once more upon our feet. Then in answer to our quest, in the
wintry depths of this shadow, we discern a movement in our soul that motivates
us to oppose this heavy evil with the lightness of being. Across the darkness
of chaotic floods a presence breathes: “Let there be light.”
To our amazement we discover the archetype within our
soul of a new and better order for human living. It resides already in our
heart like a seed waiting for spring. As this inner power and focus for our
will ascends in the heaven of our soul, we find ourselves turning toward it for
enlightenment and motivation.
But the weight of oppression, like a giant Egyptian
pyramid, enshadows not just our individual soul but the whole of humankind.
Therefore our determination to shine in the darkness requires us to associate freely with others in ‘a union of men under moral
laws.’ National and denominational laws are necessarily coercive.
But the community we seek can only be established without
coercion. It is what Kant called, in
contrast to all other societies, ‘an ethical commonwealth.’
“Woe”, he wrote, “to the legislator who wishes to establish
through force a polity directed to
ethical ends!”[iii] Only in a
community of souls freely dedicated to the freedom and welfare of all their neighbors, can an effective religious
standpoint even be said to be established, let alone begin to operate. Until we
have found such a congregation we cannot even talk about religion without a
betrayal of the very ethos it alone can generate.
But once we come together in a
non-coercive, yet ethical fellowship, the end of this sequence of experience,
according to Kant, is the harvest of a free, joyous and outgoing service to the world, by every member of this
truly free congregation. As we have learnt to rejoice in the light that shines
in the darkness of our own soul; so we now, in friendship with a community of free souls, go forth
to shine in the darkness of the world. Such a network of congregations is
universal. “We have a duty which is sui generis, not of men toward men, but of the human
race toward itself. For the species of rational beings is…destined
for…the promotion of the highest as a social good (which) requires…a
system of well-disposed men in which, and through whose unity alone, the
highest moral good can come to pass.”[iv]
Such a bare description of the seasons of the soul
depicts as it were,
beneath the variety of clothing with which specific religious traditions invest
us, the universal moral
body of mankind. This is the common ground of all religious souls throughout
the world. The more we tread this common ground together, the more our local
communities of grace can serve in common cause and celebrate with extravagant
friendship. In such a light interfaith fellowship becomes not a possibility but
a necessity.
As
a prophetic minister of universal religion, preparing our various
denominational traditions to undergo a complete baptism, Kant has undressed us
and led us to the font of grace. Within the catholic boundaries of bare reason, we may refresh our will to build afresh a
commonwealth that runs counter to the oppressions of society.
Religion Within A Local Congregation in Berkeley,
California
Accordingly,
it is my purpose, in the second part of this paper, to describe how one
particular and very traditional congregation in Berkeley, California, has
seriously framed its understanding of itself. It has revised its bylaws to make
its polity more in accord with the mission of an ethical commonwealth. But
before I describe this polity and its practice in more detail, I find it
necessary to demonstrate how, following Kant, our understanding of religion is
clarified by seeing where he locates it on the logical map of his
architectonic. For in Kant’s unfolding description of the processes of
human reasoning, a reasonable religion is the fourth standpoint of a logically coherent philosophy. Only
from this point of view can the
practice of religion be truly free from the oppression that weighs down the
whole human race. The freedom proclaimed by the prophets is rooted in our
celebrations of both the earth and of all her folk.
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Chapter
II HOW THE EXPERIENCE OF
NATURE SHAPES LOGIC AND RELIGION
I summarize the metaphorical source of
Kant’s method for logically presenting his insights – a method he
called his Architectonic.
I demonstrate that this architectonic is built on natural and universal
metaphors that root his system of logic in the great landscapes and rhythms of
nature. I argue that this explains the power Kant has always exercised on the
imagination of those who have studied him. For this reason Folk Religion
remains more than ever the ground of Universal Religion.
For many students of
Kant, let alone those encountering him for the first time, the many references
to his architectonic seem obscure and rarely explained in a
way that makes sense or feels right. But this was Kant’s term
for the a priori logical system he used in order to arrange his
conclusions; and to plot the points of view from which those conclusions had
been observed. Without an understanding of this logical structure, it is well
nigh impossible to understand him. Yet it was
precisely the pattern of this logic that first excited and attracted me when I
began to study Kant during my ministry as a country parson in the Diocese of
Oxford in the 1980s.
Much earlier, when I
was a 19-year-old gunner in the Royal Artillery, in 1951, I had found myself
posted to a field battery of the Depot Regiment of the School of Artillery in
Larkhill on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. From my barrack window I looked out on
Stonehenge, that Jodrell Bank of Neolithic mathematics and astronomy. It was
the fruit of an affluent culture of continental scope; its construction
contemporary with some of the pyramids of Egypt.[1]
Basking in its shadow
and wandering in the extensive orbit of grasslands it commanded, I felt I was an
undergraduate in a primal university that spread its Neolithic laboratory and
library across the whole landscape. Those Hanging Stones2 were exquisitely
located to record what cognitive linguists would now call the ‘source
domain’ for the complex conceptual metaphor that Kant called his Architectonic.3 Any
deviation from their precise latitude would render inoperable their
registration of the exact movement of the sun between the solstices.
Over the eighteen
months I dwelt on this ancient and open ‘European University,’ the
elemental architectonic of earth and sky vividly impressed itself upon my
observations and imagination. And as, over the months and seasons, I opened my
teenage sensibilities to these massive rhythms, I became aware of two sets of
markers on the expansive horizon of the Plain.
First, of course, was
the summer solstice that I experienced twice, in 1951 and 1952, when the sun
rose directly above the Heel stone on the northeastern horizon. There was a second
dawn point in the mid-east, coinciding with the two equinoxes. Finally there
was the southeastern most point of the winter solstice. This marked the moment
of dawn from which our ancestors reckoned the beginning of ‘Sun
Return’ and the ironically lengthening days of winter. 4
I felt the countless
millions of years over which our ancestors (human and non-human) must have
observed these dynamic points on the horizon long before Stonehenge was ever
built. I had often wondered why, in dreams, the number three appeared as the
symbol of dynamic unity. Tuning in to the massive solar pendulum swinging
slowly across some 70o of the horizon every six months, I could feel this dynamic arc
curving through the equinox from solstice to solstice. As clearly as a child
learns by building and taking apart a pile of bricks that up is a metaphor for more and down is a metaphor for less, I learnt the
metaphorical connection between regular, dynamic movement and the number three.
Babies are born with the innate hardware up and running by which they can
distinguish between single objects, sets of two and sets of three. It is called
infant subitizing.5 This is the kind of a priori knowledge that Kant,
without the benefit of modern cognitive science, intuitively recognized that we
are all born with. So the standpoints of Kant’s fundamental set of three
Critiques are rooted in millennia of our cognitive registration of the rhythms
of earth and sky.
The second set of
invisible markers I became aware of was the four cardinal points on the
horizon. Salisbury and Old Sarum were south; the Marlborough Downs were north.
London lay to the east and Bath and Bristol to the west – places I
visited regularly by thumbing a lift in uniform. Our pre-civilized ancestors
were masters of this compass. There are many languages where the prepositions before,
behind and beside
never occur. Instead people refer to the side of an object in terms of
its compass bearing. Whether they are standing before or behind a tree they
refer to the side in question as north or south &c. of the tree. And
everyone in that common linguistic community understands the reference.6 Their awareness of
their orientation in any setting is so acute that their reference system is completely
stable. This explains why it feels appropriate to associate quaternities of any
kind with stability. A four-legged table or chair is more stable, than a
tripod. Animals move better on four legs than three. Kant stabilized his analysis
of the dynamic standpoints by adopting four perspectives on each.
Our Paleolithic
ancestors experienced the landscape as a living creature basking in this play
of a trinity in heaven with a quaternity on earth. For this reason their
combination in the numbers 7 and 12 became a fundamental metaphor for
completeness and integration.7 The stable diversities on earth
embraced by the dynamic unity of heaven.
These are the universal number metaphors that Kant inherited
cognitively as a member of the human race and by which he mapped his system of
three standpoints and four perspectives. There is nothing arbitrary about these
numerical metaphors. They are grounded in our everyday bodily experience,
albeit an experience that is now, for most of us urbanites, less vivid than it
was during the millennia in which our cognitive neural networks were forming.
Nevertheless our language preserves the semantic frames which generate these
metaphors. So the metaphors of this architectonic are not Kant’s. They
are human and universal like the compass. Only his particular use of it is
Kantian.
Kant’s first
critique (1781/87) was written as if the way we think theoretically (pure reason) were
mapped from the standpoint of a solstice. His second critique (1788) swung, as
it were, to the opposite solstice. It was as if he mapped the way we
think morally (practical reason) on the opposite solstice. In his third
critique (1790) he struck a balance, as it were a synthesis and
viewed the feeling process by which we balance the pros and cons of judgment,
as if it were mapped upon the dynamic standpoint of an equinox.8
Yet every equinox is
an echo of the other. As Jung, an avid student of Kant pointed out, the way a
third figure so often hides a fourth, is a feature of how our cognitive
unconscious shapes our associations. Jung was always, as a matter of
philosophical method, bidding us ‘look for the hidden fourth.’ The
hidden ‘standpoint’ of Kant’s system is, of course, his book
on Religion. Judgment (1790) and Religion (1793) are the spring
and autumn that balance his account of the complete way our human cognition
operates. Before we consider this fourth standpoint, we need, briefly, to
summarize, as it were, the compass points of Kantian
cartography. Imagine, therefore, all that we think we know as
if it were a great Plain spread
around us.
We can imagine what we think we know
(from our immediate, testable experience) as if we were considering
it from a particular corner of the compass. This would be what Kant calls the empirical point of view, let us
say the eastern perspective of sunrise.
But we can also
imagine the western perspective of sunset. From this
perspective we can consider the possible conditions in our mind that allow us
to know things in the way we do. It is the task of philosophy to think about how we think; a
mirror perspective that Kant called the transcendental point of view. This
is the perspective that generated his ‘Copernican Revolution’ in
philosophy. Empirically it would seem that the world we see is out
there; like the sun revolving around the earth. But
transcendentally, the world we see is in here; like the earth
revolving around the solar mind. This is a shift in perspective, as it were, from an earth point
of view to a solar point of view. The world we think we know is generated by
our mind in here, not out there, as it seems. Like
our hands, our brains evolved to handle the future by making it, not the past by
understanding it. From this transcendental perspective, Kant saw
clearly how our minds creatively and preconsciously edit our experience and shape our knowledge.
The Hypothetical Perspective
But to complete the
cardinal points of this logical mapping there is a second set or pole of
perspectives running counter to the first, as north and south run
counter to east and west. A complete map of cognition requires
all four perspectives. We need to use our knowledge to predict options that may lie
ahead. Only from this hypothetical perspective can we
work out, from our insights from the other two perspectives, what could or ought to be the case. And, of
course, according to which of the three dynamic standpoints we are adopting,
there are, for example, three different kinds of hypothesis. What could be the case. What ought
to be the case and what we creatively choose to be the case.
If we are thinking scientifically from the first
standpoint (of what Kant calls pure, theoretical reason) what could
be is what logically follows from the predictions we make
according to our theories and the data they require us to collect. But if we
are thinking from a moral (practical) standpoint, then our
hypothetical thinking about what ought to be the case will work
quite differently. And if we are thinking aesthetically, from the dynamic
standpoint midway between these other two, what we choose to be the case must satisfy
yet another set of criteria. For the way we think about each set of issues,
scientific, moral, or aesthetic is quite distinct – as if our standpoints had
moved from one side of the horizon to the other; each standpoint generating its
own distinctive hypothetical perspective.
The Logical Perspective
Finally, just as the empirical perspective needs the
complementary reflections of the transcendental perspective; so the
‘southern’ hypothetical perspective needs the
‘northern’ perspective of integrated logic, both analytical and
synthetic. In this way we bring rigor and consistency to whatever predictions
we make about what could, ought, or we will to be the case.
Continually checking our bearings against this architectonic is itself an
example of operating cognitively from this fourth, last and logical perspective. If our
thinking is to be effective it must be empirical and transcendental;
hypothetical and logical – all at once.
Logic is an Extension of our Embodied
Standpoints and Perspectives.
Long before I ever
picked up a book by Kant, therefore, I had encountered the source domain of his
metaphorical perspectives for logic in my experience of Salisbury Plain. As I
observed that landscape from every perspective of the compass and from the
standpoint of every season I was, without consciously knowing it, impressing
the logic of naturally changing standpoints and perspectives on my
imagination in a way that could be metaphorically extended. As I reflect on the
feeling quality of those eighteen seminal months in my life, I now
realize that I was in fact digesting this landscape from Kant’s aesthetic standpoint. This
explains my acute sense of delight in the balance of the seasons and the
religious awe I felt in the presence of the broad expanse of the Plain in all
directions.
Much later, in a
course in somatic philosophy at a school called ‘Parklands’, in
Cheshire, in the early 1970s, I came to learn the logical perspective of this aesthetic standpoint through bodily
exercises. Our metaphors are rooted in the source domain of our bodily
experience. Therefore this logical architectonic was taught by actually walking
the students around the points and across the diagonals of an enormous zodiacal
yantra painted on the classroom floor.9 In this way we could feel the perspectival
irony of the structures generated by the four triangles and the three crosses.
Threeness in fourness and fourness in threeness. The Yantra, already itself a
metaphor, became a source domain for further complex metaphors. A unique
cognitive exercise.
All this was already
in my body and my mind when I was introduced in Oxford a decade later to this
phenomenon of Kant’s architectonic. I recognized it at once as a familiar
and well-loved logic. Kant’s obvious love for this same logic rooted him,
in my perception of him, not only in the tradition of eighteenth
century history and philosophy; but much more archaicly in the long eons of our
cognitive evolution. The fact that he grounded and rounded the logical
structure of his thought by such a primary and basic landscape metaphor is a
window itself into the a priori way conceptual
metaphor shapes the human cognitive unconscious, especially in this case its
logical perspective.
The Logic of the Seasons Becomes the
Logic of Religion
I doubt whether Kant
himself was completely aware of the roots of his architectonic. But I have no
doubt that unconsciously he felt these global cognitive rhythms and it explains
why his thought remains not only powerful but universal. The way he thought
recapitulated the cognitive development of the human brain itself. Nowhere was
this clearer than in his understanding of what religion must be like if it were
to fulfil its function of reconnecting the whole human species.
Unlike so many intellectuals Kant’s intelligence was not
schizoid. He cut through the delusions generated by millennia of imperial
conquests and returned home to the basic moral and natural order of our human
being. For this reason his four fold way of understanding the religious cycle
is the only way that makes logical sense of how spiritual experience must run
its course for every soul and every community of souls. It must be rooted in
the logic of the seasons: winter, spring, summer and autumn – the source
domain for a logic that inspires the Gospel of Nature. When it is winter we must hold on to our hope for
Spring. This non-metaphorical, direct experience of endurance followed by
enjoyment, becomes a way of encouraging us metaphorically to hold on in any difficult situation. It is the ground of our all hope.
Folk Wisdom
So all folk wisdom arises from this logic of the seasons, including the
logic of the Gospel. (And all Torah begins in Gospel – “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of
the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”) When Kant argued for a
religion stripped bare of revelation he was arguing for a refreshment of our
moral concern for freedom through a return to the source domain of all metaphors.
Yet just to dwell in this source domain fires our imagination:
After
the way down: the way up;
after
the darkness: light;
after
the winter: spring;
and
after the death: birth.
Such folk wisdom is the stuff of fairy tales. It is also the stuff of
philosophy and religion.
The Princess in Search of her Prince: The
Prince in Search of his Kingdom
The accelerated pace of global communication and complexity is
reconnecting our brains to one another in ways that intensify the moral
pressure upon us. It is as if the world were in search of a true way of being
governed, free from imperial domination; where the local and the global are in
some kind of dynamic equilibrium. We need to liberate the way neighborhoods
have for millennia been oppressed. Only by a spirit of competitive cooperation
between local communities can they ever order their relationships from the
ground up instead
of from the top down. Such a liberation cannot be achieved by coercion. There can never be
one centralized monopoly of control.
Specieswise, the Commonwealth of Human
Being is a Complete System
There are no papal or imperial neurons monopolizing the control of our
brains. Our neural system acts as a whole, integrated with all our other bodily
systems. So does the human race when it is working globally. Kant’s
vision of a worldwide network of communities, religiously covenanted to work
for the common wealth and weal, is a real and rational dream. When it is
finally established, the old imperial hierarchies will simply run out of steam
and wither. The connectedness of the human race will iterate the connectedness
of the human brain. This is the vision that Teilhard de Chardin, in his Phenomenon
of Man, called The
Noosphere.
It is my contention in this paper that a simple reframing of two
familiar virtues, chastity and celibacy, in association with a familiar metaphor and
metonymy10, the Virgin and the Prince, paves the way to the realization of Kant’s
ethical commonwealth. A non-coercive and spontaneous network of local
congregations who are free to govern themselves for their own good and for the
common good.
I end Part 1 of this paper with a summary of Kant’s Second
‘Copernican Revolution.’ This asserts a congregational autonomy
that will transform all our inherited ecclesiastical structures and
expectations.
In Part 2, I spell out the way this has been put into effect in one particular parish.
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Chapter
III A COPERNICAN REVOLUTION IN
RELIGIOUS GOVERNMENT
I consider how to implement Kant’s vision in a way that is appropriate to a globalized world in need of a moral method to energize local communities. By reframing two familiar virtues and relating them to how we cherish freedom in a local religious community, I demonstrate a method that could transform our attitude toward the congregations to which we belong. Finally I consider how the inevitable transformation of hierarchical and denominational structures may impact the spirituality of human behavior in a way that furthers freedom in the future.
In the last chapter I demonstrated how Kant used a logical
structure derived from the universal human experience of the seasonal movement
of the sun across the horizon. I contended that this logic was not invented by
Kant but inherited by him, and all of us, from our Paleolithic ancestors whom
we despise at our peril. This logical structure was further developed by our
nearer Neolithic ancestors. Of the constructions with which they clothed this
logic, the Zodiac is probably the best known.
We
can open and close a circle at any point. One ancient tradition of Egyptian
philosophy opened the Zodiac at the house of the Virgin, (known to the Greeks
as Parthenos) and closed it at the
house of the Lion, a symbol of the King and of the Sun). From this perspective,
the first house was governed by the Virgin, and the twelfth was King Sol, the
Lion. So the Sphinx became a philosophical figure that symbolized the door from
the end to the beginning. The august body of the Lion that governed in
mid-summer bore the head of the Virgin who governed the eve of the autumn
equinox. These two figures, the Virgin and the Prince, were adopted by the
prophets of Israel as the twin motifs governing the tale of a people on the
path to develop their own political virginity and freely submit it to solely to
the sovereignty of God.
Chastity: the Virtue of every Virgin Community
In this tale, virginity is used as a metaphor for spiritual
integrity. It denotes the soul and those communities of souls who have learnt
(after much wandering in a wilderness) to resist the weight of evil and to
submit (islam) only to
that which sets them free. In accordance with the way this political metaphor
of the virgin is used, it follows that chastity should properly be understood as that political virtue which guards the political freedom
and boundaries of a virgin community. When chastity is taken literally to refer
to sexuality, the metaphor is collapsed into its source domain. It no longer
points to political freedom and integrity. By collapsing the metaphor we avoid
thinking about our political integrity in terms of our responsibility and
agency.
Thus a metaphor intended by the prophets to inspire us to work for
liberty is corrupted into a tool by which we collude with our own
self-enslavement. We actually enslave and deny our own affections! If all below
the abdomen of the human body must be denied, it follows that the upper classes of the body politic must
inevitably silence the critical voices of the lower classes. The preachers that Kant heard
all around him in the ecclesiastical establishment were hardly listening to and
nurturing the voices of a free people.
Chastity: the Virtue that Guards Autonomy
The autonomy of a freely convened congregation must forever remain
the distinguishing characteristic of any virgin community of grace. By
reframing the concept of chastity in terms of a virtue in the political domain
of governance, we can now use it, metaphorically, to denote the strength of
soul we need if we are to resist coercion by those both outside our
congregation and within.
A Covenant is not a Metaphor
“A
Church….as the union of many, requires a public covenant.1”
In these words Kant makes it clear that the obligation that ties a religious
community together is not Credal, but Covenantal. The
distinction is crucial for any understanding of what makes a free community
free. There is a world of difference between a Confession of Faith and an Act
of Commitment. The story of Israel and Jesus are stories of fidelity to
covenants undertaken freely, in the way we understand free association to be
necessary to make marriage true and legally valid.
In the next chapter I shall argue that
the Congregational tradition of ecclesiastical polity is the only polity
possible for religious congregations. It is what is logically called for by
Kant’s understanding of freedom and religion. Whereas agreement to hold
to a Creed is an act of submission to an ideology, a Covenant is an agreement
to act together for
a purpose. In Kant’s vision (modeled on Jesus’) this purpose is the
establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven.
All social reality is based on social
agreements to be obligated to one another in certain enterprises. Furthermore,
Covenants are local
obligations; whereas Creeds are confessions supporting a global ideology. Creeds are fine as
metaphorical meditations but disastrous when substituted for Covenants. In Religion, Kant made it abundantly clear that
there can be no substitute for the uncoerced coming together of morally motivated
souls in a freely covenanted commitment to work together for the Kingdom of
Heaven.2 A Covenant is not a metaphor,
though it may be metaphorically expressed. It is an act of will, usually sealed publicly by the body
language of a handshake.3 In the case of
a religious covenant it is an act of will in which the covenanting parties
agree to submit their will to the will of God: “Thy will be done on
earth, as it is in heaven.”
Such covenants lay no ideology upon the
local community. They simply bind us to start together from where we find
ourselves in our local situation. Cults cast an illusion of global salvation
that always devalues the local. They globalize by de-localizing. They offer
‘knowledge’ in a way that excludes the life-giving unknown.
Covenants, however, localize, but not by de-globalizing. They recognize the
journey cannot but involve a quest for justice. This involves laboring hard to
build an ethical commonwealth. The Kingdom of Heaven cannot be achieved by
violence or coercion. The way to it can only be governed peaceably.
The Primacy and Agency of Friendship
Lastly, it is the nature of both the way
and the end alike to gather friends. If a virgin congregation be not governed
by a royal spirit of friendship it cannot be religious. A local community of
grace is a gathering of friends. Although Covenants are not creeds, they radiate faith and
rich sets of beliefs that can be shared by all rational people. They are not denominational,
but local, and they can be entered into by folk of all ‘faiths’ and
of none.
The Royalty Inherent in a Virgin Community
The story of Israel is the story of a
community set free to find the moral law within her. This moral law is obeyed,
according to Kant, as if it were a royal command. Sphinxlike, the journey begins in
virginity and ends in royalty. By refusing to submit to external coercion and
by choosing to fulfil our obligations as if they were royal commands we enter into
a moral order of friendship where affection becomes the natural tie that binds.
And this bond of free love between the covenanted parties becomes the model for
all human cooperation.
The guiding metaphor for Jesus was the Kingdom of Heaven. So the metonymy of a
prince governs the dynamics of the narrative as much as the metaphor of a
virgin. But this prince does not dominate. His throne is behind the power of the community, as a center
is behind a
circumference. So his law issues from the mouth of the virgin community as
if it were hers. He
speaks through her, not over or against her. This is the standpoint (the hidden
4th ) of royal
power, preserved in the Neolithic symbolism of the sphinx. True creative power
remains, metonymously, in the background, divinely waiting for its influence to
work on the community. The romance of Israel and Jesus is the everlasting folk
story of how one day the community’s true prince will come. On that day
her freedom will be sealed in his support and light embrace.
Celibacy: the Virtue that Cherishes the Decisions of a
Sovereign Community
But the history of monarchy in human society has been quite other
than that commended in the story of King Jesus.4 Monarchy
has been bedeviled by the monopoly of power. The taxes collected by King James,
for example, on the translation of the Bible he authorized, were called royalties. Yet in contrast, the ‘royal
priesthood’ of a soverein community professes only to submit to the king
who is crucified. For his Spirit speaks to us not in monopoly and tyranny, but
in friendship, enjoyment, endurance and creativity. There is no coercion among
friends.
The true role of a monarch and a priest is metonymous. Each
represents the royal priestliness of every soul. Without political celibacy that
metonymy is compromised and collapsed into a monopoly. It is the whole
community that is both sovereign and priestly. The only valid role for governor
and priest is to enhance the priestliness and sovereignty of each soul, both
within their community and beyond.
Chastity,
then, is the political virtue of those who guard their virgin vocation to be
freely governed by the Spirit within and among them. It follows, therefore,
that celibacy is the
political virtue that governs the attitude of those entrusted with presiding,
metonymously, over the people as the people make their decisions. In a free and
moral community every voice must be cherished and heard. So whoever heads the community must refrain from making
decisions. He or she must be politically celibate.
Their role, as head, requires them not to vote when
the community assembles in its various Meetings. As it has evolved, the British
Monarchy, for example, is vastly different from the Prussian model of
Kant’s day. For the modern monarch is politically celibate. The
Queen’s role denies her power to make decisions for the British people.
Their representatives in parliament properly make these. Her role as Governor
is to moderate the realm simply by being a royal presence while denying absolute
decision making power to any member of the government. She opens parliament and
rehearses the policies of Her Majesty’s Government. It is then the patriotic duty of Her Majesty’s Loyal
Opposition to critique her Government’s policies. The doctrine of His
Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was already forming in England during Kant’s time. And although
he never invokes the epithet, Kant’s whole emphasis, that Kritik is an obligation laid upon us as if by a sovereign will, implies that such
freedom to criticize is necessary if freedom is to reign. “Opposition is
true friendship.” Celibacy is the positive neutrality of the referee who
knows the rules but cannot play on one side or the other. It is the virtue of
the judge in the judge and jury system. Twelve good souls and true make the
decision. But the judge, as No. 13, makes no decision. He simply pronounces the
consequences of the verdict passed by the jury.
All communities are at risk of being
hijacked by those who want to monopolize power. But ‘power belongeth unto
God.’ If we are serious about paving the way to implement a
transformation of religion according to Kant’s vision, then political
celibacy is the only way to preserve the freedom needed for every voice to be
heard. And what is true of the lay head of the congregation should be true also
of the clergy. Clergy are called to serve celibately the sovereignty that
inheres in a virgin people.
Kant saw clearly that the coercive
ecclesiastical and monarchic governments of his day oppressed the true lightness of being inherent in a
natural, rational, and universal religion. If virginity could be seen as the virtue of every congregation;
and the celibacy of the lay head
of the congregation and its clergy as the guarantee that every voice would be
given due hearing and consideration – then a Copernican Revolution would
take place in the practice of church government. The clergy would revolve
around the laity, and not vice versa.
Such a transformation of the ecclesiastical scene,
with power rising from the local level and radiating abroad in a non-coercive
way, is in strict accordance with Kant’s vision. It quietly floods the
top-down structures that dominate us, submerging them in the rising tide of a
global ethical commonwealth.
Far from refuting the traditional roles and virtues
of clergy and lay leaders, I am simply reframing them. These two celibate roles
of Moderator and Clergy, conforming to the archetypal figures of the Prince and
the Priest, level the ground between all communities of grace in whatever
denomination of religion they are practiced. Celibacy of the clergy, in this
political sense, would dissolve ‘clerical power’ and remove the
clergy from positions such as those they have seized in Iran. If all those
clerical energies poured, in a celibate manner, into the encouragement of local
communities to govern their own fellowship and mission, a transformation of the
world’s religions would take place.
It is primarily a matter of lay expectations. Congregations should expect to choose their lay head who will moderate their meetings like a judge
moderating a jury. They should expect their clergy to be celibate in this political sense. Only such clergy
would meet Kant’s expectations in the last book of Religion. The ‘Princes’ of the Church can no
longer be cardinals assembling at the Vatican; but men and women of goodwill
the world over. They should be expected to patiently moderate local communities, resolutely pointing them
toward the ethical commonwealth of the planet. As a meme, reproducing itself in
the body politic of the world, people who cherish the virginity of their
congregations and who expect their clergy to be celibate, can iterate and
amplify this process from any location in the world. Like a supersaturated
solution the planet is ready for such autonomous, local crystals of freedom to
precipitate in ever-abundant numbers.
I envisage such a transformation sweeping
over every local neighborhood across the globe, where congregations become
known for the unconditional service they offer their neighbors. So the
processes of globalization, which began with the expansion of the great
historical empires, will finally evoke an enantiodromia5
in which localization restores the balance of the world. Think globally, but act
locally.
Nor would it be the task of such local
communities of grace to set up parallel civic, regional or other international
bodies to bring pressure on governments. Religious communities must be celibate
in their own neighborhoods. While encouraging their members to band with any
interest group or secular government as their own decision, congregations as a whole should remain celibate toward the world,
as their moderator and clergy are to them. In this way they cannot be
manipulated, no matter how worthy the cause. For in a virgin community every
member is virgin and is free to act according to their conscience without
reinforcement from the congregation.
The tendency of mother church, no matter how well intentioned, to become
smother church must always be resisted. Our mission is never ‘in the name
of the church’; but in the name of those we serve – our
conspecifics. Call the phenomenon with Jesus, the Kingdom of Heaven; or with Kant, an Ethical
Commonwealth, the end
result is the same. Human beings are evolving to meet new challenges in their
environment. And the challenge now addresses more than one local tribe that
might respond imperially by dominating its neighbors.
In this new millennium all are challenged
and all are neighbors. The only response that will enable us to survive will be
the letting go of the weights of social coercion in favor of a new kind of travelling
light in which the
creativity of every soul and every group of souls develop within a global
network of iterating communities. This will happen not by attacking the ecclesiastical
superstructures but by liberating the local parish structures. The will to
govern oneself is genetically inscribed in our genome. So is the moral will to
reverence and cooperate with the spirit within us and within our neighbor. The
new Jerusalem, radiant with the lightness of being, is on its way6.
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PART 2: KANT’S VISION AT WORK
In this set of four
chapters, I consider how Prophetic Religion and Folk Religion, integrate in a
free, rational, and comprehensive community of grace, using the practice of
Grace North Church in Berkeley
as a case history.
I consider how good order can be so managed that freedom is celebrated. How moral character can be evoked without moral coercion. How compassion can be exercised without collusion and co-dependency; and finally, how extravagant celebrations of traditional Folk Religion must ground our ethical commonwealth. When free from submission to cult or sect, the natural bonds of kinship and stewardship that characterize our communities as members of one species, become the means to the rational and universal religion that Kant commended.
CHAPTER IV THE PRACTICE OF A PRINCELY COMMUNITY
How, as a local community of grace, does a congregation so govern itself that each soul is effectively free to be an agent of attitudes and decisions that order and inspire both the life of the whole community and simultaneously that of each member thereof?
The freedom, for which Kant felt so
concerned, was primarily a moral freedom for which religion must be the servant
and not the master. This freedom begins when we assume responsibility for our
own moral government, building upon the rock of good will and not upon the
sands of ill. Religion only begins, according to Kant, when a company of people
commit themselves to working together for the common good. Such free
associations have always been persecuted through the ages. Yet even where such
associations have been able to find relative freedom from persecution, as in
America, they themselves indulged in prohibiting others of whom they
disapproved. Their service of God, according to Kant, degenerated into a pseudo-service.
Politically, the most influential religious tradition in
Anglo-Saxon North America, was that of the Congregationalists who were linear descendents
of the particular protest of Robert Browne, a Corpus, Cambridge graduate.[v]
In his devotion to the gospel of liberty and to ‘the Lord’s Free
People,’ Browne asserted the obligation laid upon all believers to
associate together without let or hindrance by any bishop or monarch. According
to Browne’s reading of the gospel (‘wherever two or three are
gathered in my name, there am I in their midst’) a true congregation was
marked not by some agreed assent to a particular creed, but by a mutual consent
to bind its members in a specific covenant. Such a gospel covenant must of its
nature be freely made, like the covenant of marriage that men and women make
when they bind to one another in a new household.
For all social reality is a network of agreements, formal and
informal, by which communities conspire to make themselves. So those freely
associating communities of the early Brownists cherished their covenants and
were scrupulously autonomous. In later years, as Independents, as they came to be known, they were as
vigorously active in England as they were in New England. (Later still, the
name, Independent,
morphed into Congregationalist. Sociologically their independent ethos suited that of small,
independent businessmen. The kind that undoubtedly would be found on the
eastern seaboard of England, where the Independents flourished, and who surely
traded across the North Sea with ports like Konigsburg.
Kant would have been well aware of their distinctive polity of
self-government, especially as it was practiced in their town meetings, (a
Saxon political tradition that had been repressed by the Normans after their
conquest of England). For more than a century and a half these meetings had
been the norm of local government in New England. But in the residually
totalitarian ethos of Europe, such independence in religion threatened the
political status quo. Heresy became tantamount to treason. Theology, in effect,
had long been hijacked in the service of ideology and the great ideas generated
by religion had been reduced to a kind of turf that evoked a territorial
defense response and not an ethos that worked for the common good of all.
Kant set out to disinfect religion from these turf wars. The
‘Promised Land’ is only a religious metaphor to guide our thinking
toward a moral domain. The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is localized only in
those communities where our duty to love our neighbor and our enemy is
deliberately embraced. Since a single glance in the mirror will reveal the face
of the neighbor and the enemy we are required to love, the first concern of the
moral life is the exercise of tough love toward our own soul. But like Jacob
beside the brook Kedron, we must first seek a place of solitude and there
wrestle with our own shadow. [Gen. 32:22-32] This is what Kant saw
as the first stage toward becoming religious.
So it is not without significance that Robert Browne’s
college of Corpus Christi, with its festival on the second Thursday after
Pentecost, enjoyed a second dedication to the Blessed Virgin Mary and
celebrated a second college festival on the Feast of the Purification of the
Virgin, (Candlemas is the 2nd day of February when the 40 days of
Christmas are completed.[vi]
)
A Congregational polity is the fruit of a healthy catholic
devotion to the virginity of every community of free souls. Yet the chastity of
the virgin is but the private face of freedom. There is also a complementary
public face of freedom. For if the virgin is a political metaphor; so, too, is
Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ. For Christos is the Greek word for one who is anointed King. As a metaphor for
government, the figure of a religiously crowned king confirms that the virgin
community is indeed royal – empowered to legislate for itself. As the
Sphinx suggests, a wheel has come full circle.
The body politic is, and belongs to, the whole community. A virgin
community is the body of a sovereign people. The traditional ‘royal
we’ used by royalty in a democratically evolved monarchy, such as
Britain’s for example, is a metonymy. We are governed by ‘we the
people.’ The Brownists submitted to no Tudor monarch who, in their eyes,
ecclesiastically monopolized the God given freedom of their soul.
At this stage in our argument we need to remember with Kant that,
historically, not even the so-called Independents have successfully resisted
the temptation to control and manipulate. One has only to read the intemperate
language of Browne and most of the Reformers to be appalled at the way they
succumbed to control and manipulation. It is not enough for a community to be
self-governing. The ease with which congregations can degenerate into cults and
sects under the influence of a dominant personality has always been an argument
against the Independent Congregation. Yet hierarchical denominations in their
very attempts to counter this inevitable tendency descend the same path of
ideological control. This is where we must begin to acknowledge our bondage to
the perennial oscillation of idolization and demonization.[vii]
It is as perilously easy to reduce the gospel to an ideology called
Christianity as it is to reduce the Torah to Judaism. Jesus was never a
Christian. Moses was never a Jew. Therefore religion can only be universal and
rational.
So the challenge we face is how to legislate for an open and free
community where the virginity of every soul is honored and the door is ever
open to those who hunger and thirst after righteousness rather than the
security of a cult or a sect, now matter how well established.
The
Independent Parish of Grace North Church in Berkeley
The purpose of this paper is to describe how one quite particular
parish has risen to this challenge. Over
the last decade of the 1900s in Berkeley, The Grace Institute for Religious
Learning, of which I have been the
director, has been a laboratory in which Kant’s philosophy has been
proved among the congregants of Grace North Church, a City of Berkeley Landmark
parish. The parish was built primarily, like all
Congregational Churches, on the covenant of its founding parishioners. On June
28, 1892, 24 adults freely convened in a rented shop in north Berkeley where
they solemnly made this covenant:
“We are united in striving to know the will of
God
and our purpose is to walk in the ways of the Lord,
laboring for the progress of knowledge and justice,
the reign of peace, and universal friendship,
trusting as did our ancestors
in the continual guidance of the Holy Spirit
to lead us into all truth. Amen”
Partners
in the Quest
Although this Covenant is not a Creed,
it is governed by one powerful and universal metaphorical belief. Life is a
journey and there are entailments to the logic of a journey that can be applied
to life. In this covenant the entailments are: a path, a people who walk
together, a destination, and a guide. The journey is a quest and the
destination is an ethical and global commonwealth where peace reigns and
friendship is universal. There is a simple four-fold architectonic that frames
what is to be sought, namely, knowledge, justice, peace and friendship. A
pretty Kantian objective.
There are also other entailments to the
metaphor of a quest.. The way is not easy. (Yisrael is Hebrew for ‘He who strives with God’, the name given to Jacob
in the dark by the angel at the riverside) The search will involve hard labor.
There is no claim to knowledge: only a commitment to learning. Lastly, there is
the universal belief that we do not walk alone. We walk the same path as our
predecessors in the way. Our guide was their guide and he can be trusted. Guide
and God are not only homonyms, but also synonyms.
When we considered the entailments of
this Covenant as we reaffirmed it and made it our own, we found ourselves
questioning whether self-government could be effectively accomplished and its
skills learnt if the whole congregation only gathered once a year for an Annual
Meeting. We needed more. But plenary sessions once a month seemed too much. So
in our revision of the by-laws in 1995 we settled for once a quarter. Those of
us who were familiar with the Methodist tradition felt satisfaction that in
some way the whole congregation had become a Quarterly Class Leaders Meeting.
It was a Method that had been well tried.
The
Role and Duties of a Moderator
Since the Quarterly Meeting of the whole
congregation needs to be governed well there is a need for firm but wise
Governor. The American Congregational tradition seems to be pretty universal in
its use of the term, Moderator, for their chairpersons, since their function is to
moderate discussion and to remind all present that they are ‘in the
presence of their guide.’ For us, it seemed serendipitous that our
moderator at the time was called Royal, for he epitomized for us the sense of
providential guidance as we reframed, under his guidance, our bylaws.
A key bylaw governing the conduct of the
Parish Meeting, that Royal and one of our lawyers helped to write, set down our
purpose to be peaceful and friendly in this way: “It is the prayer of the
Parish that all proposals to be decided upon by the Parish in its meetings
shall be arrived at in a godly consensus. The parishioners will, after a vote
has been taken, proceed to a further discussion in which the majority seriously
considers that the minority may represent the will of God and their decision
should prevail. Similarly the minority should seriously consider that the
majority may represent the will of God and that their decision should prevail.
After such a discussion the Moderator shall call for a second vote to see whether
a consensus has been secured…”
Chastity
in Debate
By means of this rule the moderator and
the clergy have been able to encourage people to voice their concerns without
fear of being silenced. The proven result has been a high level of courtesy and
reverence for the virginity of each soul. And when decisions have finally been
made, even people who disagree have valued the fact that their disagreement had
been truly heard.
Essential to the maintenance of this
ethos has been the political celibacy of both the moderator and the clergy. Our
voices are given due weight, but at the end of the day the whole congregation
knows that we shall not vote. The decision is theirs, not ours, because they have called us to minister to their assumption of local sovereignty This
fact alone makes for a quality in the discussions which I can only describe as chaste.
Chastity
Among Teenagers
What makes this even more significant is
the bylaw that extends voting at the Meeting to every young person over the age
of 13. This gives teenagers a voice and a vote. They appreciate this and even
more when they realize they can vote whereas their pastors and their moderator
cannot. So they learn the values of chastity and celibacy as political virtues against the background of a community
exercising its God given virginity. This not only initiates them into adult
responsibilities but affords them the opportunity to question those
responsibilities with a community that expects them to critique the adults. If the
adults are His Majesty’s Government; then the teenagers are His
Majesty’s Loyal
Opposition.
Not all the bible knowledge, nor prayer
and worship times, can compensate for the absence of such an experience of
community decision making. It becomes the model for all decision-making. We all
learn that decisions ethically made are done only after careful deliberation
and that essential pause, like the pause of a cat before it pounces, that makes
room for a transconscious monitoring to operate. A process that religious
people call Providence and for the engagement of which there is no substitute
for patience and a readiness to abide at the center of conflicting voices. So
the very silent listening role of the moderator and the clergy together point
to the transcendent presence of Emmanuel in whom all Calvaries are present, a Lion King who only speaks through the consensus
of all the people in a covenanted virgin community. So the process of community government is the practice of Christ – an experience of the sovereignty of the Spirit.
Immunity
Against Cultic and Sectarian Attitudes
Our defense against becoming reduced to a
cult holding to an ideology, or a sect cutting ourselves off from a demonized
world, is our deliberate openness to whoever may want to associate themselves with
our congregation. There is no rite of membership, not even baptism. If someone
has settled into a regular participation in our activities and he or she
requests their name be included in the roster, they are included. Children do
not have to repeat their parents covenant before they become members of the
family. And in relation to the Divine Presence among us, we are all children.
All our Quarterly Meetings are open to
any friend, neighbor, or stranger who happens to pass by. We remain a circle of
friends and our only bond is friendship. The only membership worth enjoying is
that of belonging to friends who are members one of another and so members of
the human race. The tie is forged the heart alone. The only limitation in the
Parish Meeting is that when a vote is taken, only those registered in the
roster may vote. But in my experience the congregation listens very carefully
to any comment made by a visitor as they do to the moderator and the clergy.
To anyone immersed in denominations, who
feels that their group’s identity must be stood up for, this way of
community-making evokes anxiety. But the religion of an ethical commonwealth is
about reconnecting with all
souls. So we shun such distinctions as believer and unbeliever.[viii]
Kant believed that in the end the Gospel of Jesus would prevail throughout the
world; a gospel that announces that ever in our midst is one who is crucified.
All are in his presence.
An
Open Table
When therefore we issue the invitation
at Holy Communion there is no restriction to those who are baptized. We are not
a sect that requires a neophyte to undergo initiation. Nor do we demand any
form of belief. We are not a cult that requires the embrace of an ideology. It
is enough that our ethical way of friendship is attractive. We simply invite
all who are hungry and thirsty; because we are a community of those who have
nothing in common save their own thirst and their own hunger. After all, the
waters that quench our thirst flow from him who cried, “I thirst.”
True religion cannot coerce the flow of the river of freedom. So we do not
speak of ‘Christian’ or ‘Jew’, ‘Muslim’ or
‘Hindu,’ but simply of Tom, Dick and Harry; Mary, Jane, and Betty,
whose virginity of soul we know ourselves to be called to cherish. This is what
a religious community is like after Immanuel Kant and other prophets like him
have removed the prison bars.
Nitty
Gritty Details
In terms of our being a legally
incorporated non-profit organization registered under State Law, our Board of
Trustees is the legal Board of Directors and its chairman our Chief Executive
Officer. As such he or she votes and exercises executive leadership. This is a
vital role, and not inhibited by the celibate ministers.5
The Board of Trustees, like all the other boards that oversee the various
ministries and responsibilities of the community, reports once a quarter to the
whole membership. There is, appointed by the Trustees, a Board of Managers that
looks after the parish property. It, too submits a quarterly report on its
stewardship. Then, to complete the tally there is a report from the Board of Deacons, who are the stewards of
the educational, pastoral, liturgical and outreach programs and who are
entrusted with the pastoral care of the clergy. And finally the Presbytery also
makes its report. Significantly the bylaws expect there to be more than one priest working
together. Like the moderator the clergy are chosen by the whole parish and may
be ordained by and within the parish.
Where there are nearby parishes who are friendly;
then issues of common concern can be raised by one parish summoning a Vicinage
Council for discussion of that issue. Such a council appoints its own moderator
and secretary and when its business is done, dissolves itself. This is the Congregational
tradition. No hierarchy is allowed to perpetuate itself. We are drawn to
whatever end may call us by love and the relationship between communities of
grace are free and friendly. In this way we complement the inevitable coercion
involved in civic life and institutions. But what is not inevitable is coercion
in religion.
To summarize the key concept in this description of
how we may best established religion that celebrates the lightness of being I
emphasize that it is the celibacy of the moderator and the clergy, as leading
voices in the local community, that sets them free from any manipulation by
anyone, inside or outside the congreation, who may seek to lever ‘their
power’ to manipulate activities behind the scenes. Celibacy means that
those with ultimate authority, like the King on his cross, have no power other
than to moderate by the quality of their presence. Political celibacy liberates
them to maintain the freedom of the community. Reframed in this way, celibacy
is truly “God’s gift to the Church and to the world.” As we
have practiced it in this parish, it augurs the eventual emancipation of humans
from the hierarchical weight of coercive ecclesiastical structures. Only when
religion itself is free, globally and locally, can the multitudes of small
religious gatherings begin to influence the civic structures in which we all
have to work and live.
I now turn to the second issue of Prophetic
religion. How may moral character be evoked without coercion. We move from the
role of the moderator to that of the preacher who must be a disciplined
philosopher – a lover of wisdom and therefore a lover of souls and their
freedom.
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Chapter
V THE PRACTICE OF A PROPHETIC COMMUNITY
I consider the prophetic ministry of free
yet grounded philosophers and I argue that the celebratory ethos of freedom
must govern every aspect of their preaching.
If the Gospel of Freedom by Grace
involves the practice of the Governance of Heaven, that practice involves
speaking graciously in the context of a conversation of grace. Just as the
institution of monarchy is a metonymy denoting the sovereignty of every soul in
the realm; so the Hebrew use of Debar, ‘The Word,’ is a metonymy denoting the
conversation of the Spirit voiced through the whole community. Every baby is
gestated in a womb of sound and is born with its cognitive circuits already
modified to recognize the language in which the conversations around it are
voiced. “In the beginning is the conversation and the conversation is with
God and the conversation is God.” Jn. 1:1 Our worlds begin
with the sounds of human conversation vibrating in the darkness of the waters
in which we gestate. Gen. 1:1-3
This is the context in which all
ministers of the gospel preach. And if those of us who are called to preach do
so in the tradition which Kant believed was destined to best serve an ethical
commonwealth, we must remember that Jesus, whom we christen ‘The
King,’ is also called ‘The Word.’ For by his death he destroyed
the perverse reduction of social metonymies to monopolies. Even in our Modern
English ‘a royalty’ is still used for a monopoly payment – a
hangover from the days when the monarch collected a payment on every bible
printed. This is the historical experience of monarchy. The Gospel of Jesus the
King, however, proclaims that he has once and for all, on behalf of true
catholic sovereignty renounced all monopolies. Royalty is returned to the
people and all governors can now be seen for what they truly are: metonymies
for the royalty of every soul. So too with the metonymy of the Word. The
conversation of the Spirit is restored to the whole community. And not just to
one specific linguistic community, but to the multitude of tongues that form
the chorus of the whole human voice.
As in the past monarchs have monopolized
the people’s wealth; so preachers have monopolized the people’s
speech. They have reduce the Word from a conversation to a monologue and the
melody of tongues to a monotone. By obscuring the soft texture of felt gestures
with the rigid lines of inflexible text they have ironed flat the rich irony of
speech. The wonderfully attractive humor and irony of Jesus is often altogether
missed. There is, for example, an ironic twinkle in his eye when, looking at
the Pharisees, he tells them that their very condemnation of adultery blinds
them to the hidden springs of love. Yet this text is used to condemn all
episodes of conversation in the flesh that are unrestricted by the severe
limits of social protocols.
Jesus is lyrical in his use of speech
that is rooted in those four primary cognitive operations of our mind:
perspective, irony, metonymy and metaphor – features that are
spontaneously understood and used playfully by little children the world over.
Unless we can become like little children we cannot even speak like human
beings, let alone enter the realm of the ethical. Preachers, therefore, must
become like little children if what they say is to evoke a natural love for the
ethical commonwealth of human being.
When members of a community of grace, (as
I now call that third stage in Kant’s analysis of the sequence that leads
to morally liberating religion), convene to call a minister to serve them, what
must they look for and what must they guard against?
The congregation is a ‘royal
priesthood’ Quotation from Peter and I assume it already has a
well-established and celibate Moderator. The institutional role that represents
the royalty of the whole community must be well in place. The congregation, therefore,
is looking for one who will primarily reinforce that celibate voice of
moderation in the councils of the people. The preacher must see and serve the
Moderator and the congregation from this perspective of metonymous royalty.
Every soul to whom he or she ministers the ‘conversation of God’ is
a sovereign soul, and therefore a voice that commands the ear of the preacher.
So although the sermon appears to be a monologue, it must in truth be a
dialogue. It must be preached as if
the preacher could hear a multitude of replies. The prophetic voice points
always to the indwelling moral sovereignty of the people in community. Such
preaching cannot reinforce a national or denominational perspective. It must be
catholic. A local voice expressing a global viewpoint. A voice calling its
hearers, not out of the world, but into it.
Framing all the stories that a preacher
might tell is the four-fold sequence that Kant has described. This is precisely
the structure of the story of Israel; from oppression in Egypt to deliverance
at the Red Sea. Then from the community preparation in the Wilderness, where
the moral law is learnt on the mountain, to the second great water crossing
into the Promised Land. When the people fail to keep their promise the sequence
recycles with Exile and Return, Rebuilding and Re-occupation. Into this same
cycle the story of Jesus inevitably falls.
Here is an inexhaustible spring of
narrative streams, all following the same water cycle of rain falling to river
and ocean rising to cloud. Told in a celibate tone of voice, this universal
story informs and excites our imagination. It guides and empowers our will. The
fruit of preaching such a catholic story is not some speculative
‘belief’ but the empowerment of our will to entrust our own
specific and local way ahead to that which is guiding us globally. Hence we
bind ourselves in a covenant, not a creed. It is for this reason that no
community of grace should call its preachers without hearing them preach
several times. Nor should the preacher serve alone. Jesus sent his preachers
out in pairs: brothers, sisters, and spouses.
The bylaws of Grace North Church make it
clear that the congregation expects to be served by at least two ordained
ministers working together in a presbytery. At every quarterly meeting the
clergy make their report and hear the feedback of the congregation. If for some
reason they fail to satisfy their calling in the eyes of the congregation, the
Meeting can call another minister to serve alongside them in the presbytery.
Neither the Moderator nor the clergy can veto such a call if it is arrived at
by a reasonable consensus of the members of the Parish Meeting. Such a strategy
takes the sting out of those who would call for the minister’s resignation.
In the experience of Grace North Church, those lay and clerical persons who are
uncomfortable with the way celibacy denies their ability to monopolize their
role, decide sooner or later to quit the community without the community ever
needing to coerce their departure.
Another safeguard of the prophetic voice
of the whole congregation is the recognition of the metonymy involved in the
preacher’s role. Every soul is a preacher as well as a prince. We practice
a royalty and a prophecy of all souls. Lay Sunday once a quarter, on a fifth
Sunday of the month, is an opportunity for a lay parishioner to preach the
Sunday sermon. Clergy cannot monopolize the pulpit. Yet by the same token the
by-laws make it plain that whoever preaches must enjoy the ‘freedom of
the pulpit’: “By their preaching they are to awaken and nourish the
conscience of the community. In this vocation they are to be granted in the
Parish the freedom to voice the vision that is given to them by God.” By
their willing service in the Presbytery the clergy are “expected to work
as partners.. (and).. representatives of the ministry of the whole congregation
of the Parish.”
Having thus considered the complete
ministry of a community of grace under the celibate roles of the Prince and the
Prophet, we can now logically proceed to consider those of the Pastor and the
Priest. Understood in the light of a morality that is truly free and
liberating, these roles ground our ethical being in our natural setting as the
children of earth.
Mapped on the simple architectonic of a
compass, we have looked at the prince and the prophet as denoting the
stewardship of the moral dimension of the congregation. It is as if we mapped
them on either end of the vertical pole of Prophetic Religion. But no vertical pole is stable
without a balancing horizontal. In the architectonic I am using here, the
horizon anchors the two corresponding roles of Folk Religion. In the past prophets have tended, in
the name of an ungospel like and coercive morality, to despise ‘the
folk’ as a dirty four-letter word. Yet no ethical commonwealth can stand
unless grounded in the very soil of a common and global humanity. Humus,
humility, humanity and humor are all cognate in meaning. Before we can feel for
Jesus as the child of heaven, we must first feel for him as the child of earth.
So the next two roles and the questions we pose about them are essential to the
dissolution of coercive ideologies that destroy our freedom by corrupting the metonymic
and metaphoric dynamics of our language.
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Chapter
VI THE PRACTICE OF A PASTORAL COMMUNITY
I consider the necessity for listening
to all souls and to extending an unrestricted pastoral care toward a whole
neighborhood and to sets of social issues. This is the fourth and missionary
stage of Kant’s understanding of religion – but a mission that must
be non-proselytizing, celebratory and catholic with a small c.
We cannot speak the language of God until we have first learnt to hear it. If the prophet is the speaker; the pastor is the listener We cannot speak to people unless we truly hear for ourselves what they need to say to us. (With Ezekiel, we must ‘go and sit where they sit.’) Yet one aspect of that radical shadow Kant talks about is the way it distorts our hearing. It causes us to edit out, from all that we hear, those aspects that disturb us. Yet at the same time we may calmly repeat those very aspects that should disturb us. Somehow our conscience becomes deaf to the sound of our own nastiness. We must realize that true listening, ethical listening, the kind of listening that is properly expected of a pastor, is more challenging and requires more experience than most of us can or muster.
Kant makes the reason plain. To listen we
must first hear the sound of the shadow – the first stage in our
pilgrimage toward and with the soul of the other, who is so oppressed by the
weight of her distress that she cannot even hear herself. To listen well,
therefore, is to wait without expectation. To trust that over the darkness a
spirit is moving and that when that spirit is ready we shall hear the first
sounds of what may become a voice. But the temptation for the pastor is to
peddle glib words of pseudo-religious ‘faith’ and comfort. Such
glibness is like setting up a picnic table beneath the cross. It is Christianity itself that most seductively quenches
the voice of the Spirit.
For the celibate pastor, cherishing the
chastity of the virgin voice, the other is all. There is no creative listening
without the ear of faith; faith that the voice of the other will, in
God’s good time, make itself heard.
This is a primary reason why the resident
preacher has an advantage over the itinerant. For the stranger cannot know the sheep.
But the shepherd knows them because he or she has taken time and pleasure with them. There is no alternative to
sabbatical leisure if a pastor is to hear the sheep. An ordained minister
should be a Sabbath person
whose restful and listening presence can cast a calm over restless waters, such
that a parishioner may find courage to hear within their own soul what they
most need to hear. Parishioners should be on their guard against a busy pastor;
and Meetings must also be on their guard to protect the sabbath chastity of their pastors.
Pastoral chastity involves the
recognition that the purpose of pastoral listening is not to inform the pastor.
His or her understanding of the situation is beside the point. What matters is
to be such an ear that the other soul can hear her own tale. And so by finding
the courage to tell it, find also the courage to trust this new momentum of her
own story- telling. Trusted, it will move her forward to that better place that
seems to be calling her.
Much of a pastor’s visiting time is passed transconsciously recording all that he hears. This is what can give his sermons the quality of resonance not possible for the itinerant preacher. In those subtle pauses that a preacher makes during a sermon, there is a real transconscious feedback that leads the preacher to say things way beyond any conscious intention. A parishioner may say: “Ah pastor, you hit the nail on the head this morning,” and the pastor can honestly say he hadn’t a clue what the reference could be. This kind of listening can only take place when the pastor has let go of all ‘beliefs’ save that of a simple trust in being guided. All ideology has evaporated in the sunlight of grace.
But if there is a residual proselytizing bent, then the pastor will leap into the anxious place with exhortations that in effect divert the subject away from the soul’s concern. The shadow is avoided and the challenge evaded. In psychological terms, the defenses have been re-assembled, the vulnerability devalued, and a possible transformation exchanged for a return to the previously defended position. The cross is far more demanding than the TV evangelists suggest. Issues of soul are not resolved in the pseudo illumination of the head. That can be no more than a trick of Lucifer. Only in that deep struggle with Jacob in solitude along the darkened banks of the heart, far from any pastor, is that second stage that Kant described accomplished. The most a pastor can do is to encourage the soul to trust that the process she is suffering is working for her and not against her. Such courage is communicated mostly in silence. The pastor has to trust grace working through his silence rather than in his words. Above all, he must beware of seeking some ‘achievement’ that could count as a ‘pastoral success.’ For that would be a loss of his own freedom by colluding with those very oppressive demands for results from which the counselled soul needs deliverance.
Having taken all these issues into consideration, perhaps as demanding as listening to someone’s woe is listening to their joy. For many pastors there can be a subtle temptation to consider that dealing with problems is their ‘real job.’ Somehow, sharing in the joy of others is not quite so spiritual. But this is the weight of the shadow once more. For although souls need encouraging to survive, they need just as much encouragement to prosper.
Consider the waves of survivor guilt that we have inherited from the Flood. That catastrophe that flooded an ancient glacial meltwater fresh lake, seven and a half millennia ago. It raised the level 400 feet to the present surface of the Black Sea. A whole Neolithic lakeside culture was completely submerged with only remnants escaping up the river valleys to the higher grounds of Europe, Asia and beyond. This is the seminal archaic survival experience of Eurasia. Somehow the courage had to be found to survive that all-engulfing shadow. But even more it required courage to move on to prosper and to take delight once again in the new earth that opened up to the remnant of survivors. It is never enough to endure. We need to learn afresh how to enjoy and celebrate our life ‘under the rainbow of the Everlasting Covenant.’ A pastor must learn to enjoy and demonstrate, by his own example, that it is really OK to delight in folks as folk. A pastor needs to remind himself or herself that they have the best job in the world. They are required to enjoy people and get paid for it! And if they cannot enjoy, then they must endure.
According to Jesus, Lk. 15 the Ethical Commonwealth is a series of parties celebrating the return of lost resources. Pastoral partying is simply another occasion for listening to the joy of others. This leads me, finally, to consider the role of a catholic priest as a master or mistress of those ceremonies that ground us in what Folk Religion has always done, when it has not been weighed down by the guilt of survivors and placators. Namely, allowing the earth itself to put spring into our steps so that we may dance in the lightness of being.
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Chapter
VII THE PRACTICE OF A PRIESTLY COMMUNITY
In this final chapter I reframe the
traditional rites de passages
of folk religion in the light of prophetic and ethical concerns. I emphasise
the celebratory nature of religion when it dances on the stage of moral
concern. By the very energy and extravagance of these folk celebrations,
freedom can be felt as a lightness of being.
I’ve already quoted the party
stories told by Jesus and collected by Saint Luke (ch. 15). It is worth
remembering what we are learning from evolutionary anthropology and cognitive
science at the beginning of this new millennium.
Cognitive functions evolved to cope with
a play of perspectives in which alternative courses of action could be compared
by acting them out. All hunting mammals play tag in infancy. It is the earliest
game. Cognitively, it involves brain activities of a very high order, from the
evolution of mirror neurons to skills in the earliest forms of make believe. It
is the introduction of As If[ix] to the mental equations of learning. It
is the beginnings of imagination and what we now call virtual reality. All
virtual reality is rooted in the meditation of alternate strategies acted out
either in play or in the theatre of the mind.
Watch any young animal or human playing
tag and you will observe the origins of irony in shifting perspectives. The
roles of hunter and hunted turn and turn about while the players learn the
skills they need for finding food. The action is playful. They are not really
hunting and escaping. Only imagining it so. But it is tremendous fun. Without
that pleasure there would be no incentive to learn essential skills. Unless the
moral life is fun and duty our delight we can never make an ethical
commonwealth. The celebrations of a religious community are conducted as if everyone were free and in love with all,
friend, neighbor and enemy alike. The extravagance of the celebration is a
compensatory weight of glory[x]
In Jesus’ account of the party thrown by the father for his returning
son, the lightness of being proves too expensive for the unforgiving older
brother. He cannot afford to put aside his weight of resentment. So he excludes
himself from the celebration of all around him. But the loss is his. The more a
community is based on forgiveness and creativity the more exuberant its
celebration will be. Extravagance and generosity are the index by which we can
measure the freedom being experienced by a community of grace.
The path to holy living is both a higher
order hunt and a higher order escape. We are escaping from the shadow of
coercive societies and hunting for a community of grace and freedom. In such a
commonwealth of grace our evolved mental and moral skills can generate new
fictions as splendid as any plumage, fur or hide that clothes the most bizarre
of animals. Just to look at the creatures around us is to tune in to an intense
sense of fun and to learn how to party.
Yet coercive groups and governments
always feel such a sense of fun as threatening. Such an unfun lid on human
being, however, cannot hold down the lightness of true human living and
creativity. For all its illusory stability coercion is no more than sand. The
true rock is humor, grounded in the irony of switched perspectives. The sinner
who comes to himself roars with laughter along with the angels because his
perspective suddenly switches, his point of view shifts, and he sees that he is
found and not lost. He is free and no longer a slave. Your enemy is really your
friend and opposition is true friendship. Metanoia, repentance, is a switch in mental
perspective when we acknowledge the power of our mind to make or destroy.
Forgive, said Jesus, and everything will be as if it were new on the first day
of play. Refuse to forgive; and everything you build will collapse like a house
on a foundation of sand.
This is my answer to why the celebrations
of an ethical commonwealth must be extravagant. A truly free community
liberates the power of our mind to imagine, and then implement, a free, moral
and creative community. Such a community must be rooted in the humus of both
the soil of the good earth and in that cranial bowl of neuronic oatmeal between
our ears and behind our eyes. Moral religion is rooted in our animality and
flourishes in celebration, playfulness, and fun. No wonder Kant enjoyed his
parties. So where do we begin our priestly celebrations in any local community
of grace? With the elemental rites de passages, of course, that humans have celebrated
since ritual and language began. With birth, growth, marriage and death. With
the celebration of the solstices and the equinoxes. With the weekly quarters of
the moon. This is the horizon of
folk religion that must always be integrated with the vertical of moral religion.
But first we must liberate our
celebrations from the imperial ideologies of denominational religion that would
monopolize these moments for their own purposes. For example, ideologues are
always disturbed if the meaning of Hanukkah or Christmas be not read into the
celebration of the winter solstice. The good news of Sun Return at the
beginning of the winter frost must be ignored as pagan! After all, peasants in the countryside
do not deserve to make their voice heard among the gentry in the towns or the
nobility in their castles. But in the lightness of being that governs the
kingdom of heaven, our inherited denominations with their synods laying down
what is or is not liturgically kosher in our festivals, will melt as snow
before the Easter Equinox. After all, Passover is a spring festival; Pentecost
a summer; Tabernacles a harvest; and Hanukkah a winter. The ground and source
domain for all these metaphors lies in the rhythmic experience of our bodies as
they flourish on the body of the turning earth.
The whole story of the Exodus, the
Wilderness, the Promised Land, and the Exile is mapped, liturgically, upon
these folk celebrations of the solar rhythm. The lunar rhythm, too, marks our
weekly cycle. All the metaphors, for example, about the cleansing blood are grounded in the monthly renewal of
the womb. Theology and philosophy are emasculated if they become uprooted from
the soil of these primal festivals.
It is the traditional role of the priest
to preside over such ceremonies and with him or her the community of grace
offers its ceremonial services to all who feel their parish center is their festival theatre. And for those who find
their home or other locations more comfortable the clergy and the deacons
should be available to bless folks where they determine. This is what is
involved in the virgin as a metaphor for autonomy. The clergy serve and it is
for the people to say what is or is not appropriate for them, save for the
proviso that they do no harm to others. So let me briefly rehearse the annual
festivals and their corresponding life seasons in the biographies of those
whose lives we celebrate.
Bereavement is one of those events that
leave the bereaved shattered. Of all events it brings home our common humanity.
Too many churches and synagogues frame their services in terms of their own
ideology and their own congregation. “To claim our services you have to
be one of us.” But that is immoral. It arises from an institutionalized
suppression of our natural feeling for our common humanity and the obligation
to serve our neighbor and our enemy as we would ourself. Such an occasion is
the last moment to peddle a particular ideology.
Christians, for example, are tempted to
justify taking liturgical control over the situation by pretending it is an
opportunity to proclaim Christ. But these are people who are shattered at the foot
of the cross. These are people in the depth of winter. Of all the moments when
they feel shattered, bereavement is one where they need their life and their
integrity honored. There is enough survivor guilt and recrimination without
some priest coming along and making some kind of ecclesiastical capital out of
it. It may be all well and good for those who are comfortable with a particular
set of symbols and rituals. But in secular society the majority is not. And
these are the people whom our obligation, to minister to everyone in a
neighborhood, requires us to serve.
The celibate priest, on the other hand
will, through chaste pastoral listening, honor the memory of any dead soul and
craft a ceremony that appropriately remembers her in a way that connects to the
mourners. Where a community of grace over time gets the reputation from its
neighborhood that it is keen to serve with integrity in this way; then its
standing in the community is honored and it can become an influence for good.
Likewise, winter celebrations of the
solstice can be made in addition to specific Christmas or Hanukkah festivals.
The lighting of the “tree of lights’ in winter and dancing round a
‘North Pole’ are natural folk festivals. The metaphors they conjure
of hope for those who endure, speak of a primal grace that all can feel.
What can be said about the pastoral duty
to celebrate our neighbor’s death can also be said about celebrating our
neighbor’s birth. Here is a new prince or princess. To christen means to
anoint a monarch and to acknowledge his sovereignty. But to reduce this
ceremony to the initiation of a Christian into the Church is to
denominationalize a catholic mystery. The very attitude reveals an original sin
in the attitude of the church. All babies in the neighborhood are to be
welcomed and their royalty
as souls is to be celebrated. Their parents are to be encouraged. Parenthood is
a natural joy and responsibility. Here, in the creation of or addition to a new
family, is the opportunity for a catholic priest to witness that religion
reconnects and does not disconnect.
Springtime is also replete with
ceremonies that can be appropriately tailored to whatever traditions are
current or remembered in the neighborhood. The Maypole is one. At Grace North
Church we erect ours on the feast of Pentecost and celebrate the renewal of
language by the tongues of flame, with rainbow colored ribbons. Hunting the
eggs at Easter is another game of hide and seek with all the gospel meanings
associated with that metaphor.
In the context of spring we celebrate the
festivals of Passover and Easter. Release from slavery and the bonds of death
are ever living experiences of the Spirit. The particular stories of Israel and
Jesus are heard, not in isolation from the mysteries of nature, but in the hope
that resurrection and transformation is possible for all communities.
In summer the children graduate from
school at the end of the academic year. As well as special graduation blessings
we make a particularly significant ceremony for the age of 13. That young man
or woman can now vote in the Meetings of the Community. Summer brings too its
round of ceremonies, not all specifically liturgical. A community picnic is
just as much a ritual and can be imaginatively planned. It is the season of
long vacations as well as of reaping. It is nice when a family is welcoming
relatives for a holiday to invite the minister, be he priest, rabbi or imam, to
pronounce a blessing. It may be no more than the raised glass for a Kiddush.
But it connects the family to the community and sets the celebration in a wider
context.
Finally, there are the weddings for the community to celebrate. I always associate these with Autumn because the summer of young love is passing and the covenant to make a new household represents the harvest fruits of a whole generation of mature parents. In their married children parents watch as their seed is harvested and sown for a future generation of grandchildren. Of all the rites de passages this is, perhaps, the most powerful.
Couples come who may want a specifically Catholic-Jewish wedding or a Hindu-Christian, or a Muslim-Protestant, or a wedding without any explicitly religious content. To all I point out that they are making a covenant in the presence of witnesses. This archetype is universal. The ceremonies of Offering Support, Making Vows, Signing the Marriage Declaration, Exchanging the Rings, Tying the Knot with the stole or tallith, and sometimes blessing the Cup of the Covenant from which the couple drink alone – all these are accompanied with non-verbal gestures, silently acted out metaphors. There is little need for many words. The natural ceremonies themselves communicate, because the cultural form is basically universal. Weddings, therefore, are simply catholic, meaning they are John and Mary’s wedding, PERIOD. The service is about their covenant and no one else’s. Here is an opportunity to celebrate the virginity of each couple. For each must cherish the freedom of their soul to make their own worlds in the most imaginative way they can.
Love is two solitudes
which meet,
greet, touch and protect one another.
R.M.Rilke
And, of course, in an ethical commonwealth where adultery and unchastity should be shunned, it is a matter of ministerial integrity that pastoral and priestly care should be offered diligently and without discrimination for the celebration of both Holy Brotherhood and Holy Sisterhood. The enbrotherment of men and the ensisterment of women complement the espousal of a man and a woman in Holy Matrimony
When two people make a covenant it is adultery to break it. This applies as much to Brotherhood and Sisterhood as it does to Matrimony. Even to think, let alone speak about the sexual practices or orientation of those called to these Holy Estates is a severe sin against them. It has no place in a community covenanted to walk in the way of the Lord. Perhaps in no other situation of pastoral opportunity is the shadow that oppresses the virgin soul so gross as this terrible yet prevalent denial of Brotherhood and Sisterhood. A vocation is said to be the call of God – as if we had heard his voice. How desperately immoral it is, therefore, to silence the voices of those who believe themselves to have heard this voice calling them to walk in one of these other Holy Estates. Living together cannot be reduced to only one estate and marriage is dishonored when the other estates are denied.
Perhaps the difference between this autonomous tradition of an open community of grace dedicated to serving its neighbors and governed by the spirit of hospitality that I am describing, and that of congregations that have to submit to regulations issued by a synod is never more marked than on an issue like this. All friendship is holy and all ties of love are cherished when we walk in the lightness of being..
Autumn is the climax and crown of the year and the colors of harvested corn and grapes are gold and purple, the colors of royalty. “Thou crownest the year with thy goodness.” My great grandparents and cousins were all farmers and I spent 11 years in Oxfordshire as a country parson ministering to five villages, settled originally by Saxons in the centuries before the Norman Conquest. I can bear witness from experience that catholic religion is rooted in farm and woodlands. No community of grace, no matter how inner city, should pass up the opportunity to fill their place of worship with the fruits of the earth, nor the Community Hall with the partying of Harvest Suppers. In such a context our sense of kinship with all nature and particularly our own human kind should be at its ripest; our sense of obligation to be kind at its most intense. The wealth of harvest is our common heritage, our common wealth.
Christians in particular might say, “but where is Jesus in all this? It’s all just too pagan.” But before ever he is the child of God and heaven, Jesus is the child of Mary and the earth. The mother of all living is his mother too. He saw himself speaking metonymously for all the children of earth. He envisioned a day would come when it would be as if all the agents of human being were acting as one global child of earth. This would be the once and future prince, destined to ascend beyond the clouds to the far reaches of the stars. Such a cosmic vision is rooted in a sense of earth as one vast global creature, responding generation after generation to some deep reality or royalty in the universe, or multiverse, to which all occurrences must respond.
In this cosmic presence our moral sense is tested. The last month of Autumn in the Catholic Calendar, Advent, is a season for training our ears to listen to this voice of the child of earth. He is telling us the many occasions when he called for our compassion and found us either wanting or rejoicing to be akin with him. Mt. 28 The week after the solstice it is as if the little prince were born already and we celebrate Christ’s Mass – The King’s Sending – by which our own ‘sending into the world’ is governed.[xi]
But such understandings are the fruits of a lifetime of contemplation. No soul born to be free can be coerced into meditation. Yet such gospel thoughts spontaneously arise when people are encouraged to let their imaginations play around the cycle of the seasons. No doctrine or philosophy can be expressed without metaphor. And all metaphors can be traced back to expressions that take their logic from our bodily experience as beings on this earth and not another. The very health of our minds, as all native religion has observed, requires a celebration of the rhythms that still call our cognitive tunes. To meditate is to play with the metaphors. To contemplate is to dwell in the immediate presence of our bodies, the source domain of all metaphors.
As well as other special days that attract
the folk such as Animal Sunday, Acorn Sunday, various occasions of remembrance,
national and local, and many others that make the festival year of each parish
quite unique, there is the weekly round of ceremonies such as the Parish Mass
each Sunday.
In my philosophical understanding of the
Eucharist, we are acting out a metaphor of hospitality that celebrates the
recovery of our lost freedom – our lightness of being. A table is dressed
for a whole community and the invitation is issued to all who are hungry and
thirsty without regard to belief, disbelief or any other criteria of social
belonging. A thirst, conscious or transconscious, for the lightness of being in
the midst of a dark and heavy world, is thirst enough. The script for the
Communion to be acted out is given us in the scripture recording the last of
Jesus’ friendship suppers: “This body and blood of mine I offer to
you, my neighbor and my kin.” The meaning of life is found not in what is
happening to me but in those to whom I give myself, no matter what else may be
happening. It is a celebration of every human occasion of giving and receiving,
of enjoying and enduring. This is not Christian as if non-Christians were excluded. This is catholic – for all. To use a basic
biological term, it is for all our conspecifics, since the deep cognitive beliefs that
make for human freedom are there, deep in the structures of our linguistic
ability. They only need their thirst assuaging. No wonder Pentecost was a gift
that released the tongue.
Neither should baptism nor any other
initiation be required for communion. Lightness of being is the wealth that all
have in common. As one French translation of the Beatitude, “Blessed are
the meek”, aptly expresses it: “Heureuses sont les debonairs.”
For Jesus, his baptism was the cross that
followed the communion of the night before. Once the heavy obligations of
imperialised rules are lifted from the local parish, the sequence is restored.
It is communion that prepares us for baptism in the world, not the ritual of
baptism that prepares us for communion.
So from the Banquet of Heaven we move
into the Community Hall for real refreshments, not symbolic ones. It is a time
for conversation with friends, for discussions, and from time to time Meetings
of either the parish or of various boards or of other concerns. Then we move
out to bring some lightness of being to the concerns of the world. This
expresses the old folk intuition that church and people are one. Cutting across the vertical prophetic dimension is a horizontal folk dimension. Cut off from folk, the prophet is unbalanced. Uprooted he narrows the
horizon of the folk.
But properly integrated with the folk, the prophet
expands their horizon until they connect with the global ethical commonwealth
of all human being.
This account of the priestly and earthy
ministry of celebration closes my description of the experience of one parish
in California in its attempt to be faithful to the claims of the kingdom of
heaven: an ethical commonwealth where religion is grounded in the moral worth
of all souls.
To summarize my chapters in reverse: As a
Congregational Catholic parish we have found our freedom to celebrate the daily
human life around us without let or hindrance. Our festivities are as
extravagant as those for whom they’ve been arranged desire. Although the
clergy are leaders, in no way do we monopolize the initiatives or arrangements
of the laity. Festivities and Blessings are community events. Because we impose
no creed but play simply with the natural metaphors involved in our Parish
Covenant, we find ourselves free to learn with all who cross our path. Because
we are immersed in a consciously learning and listening community, we can hear
behind every conversation the deeper rhythms and structures of what are
fundamentally local tellings of a universal story. Our witness to our vision of
what Kant called an ethical commonwealth is freely given. We have no sense of
being coerced by ideological constraints or neurotic community dynamics.
Lastly and most importantly, we are free
to govern ourselves and our own congregation in a way that enhances our sense
of freedom and our reverence for one another in both agreement and
disagreement. Our decisions and our finances are ours, as they should be in any
community of grace.
When we leave one another’s company
and return into our various worlds we take with us a sense of being guided, as
if our sense of kinship with the earth bent us toward those contours of the
landscape most fitted to our path.. As lovers of holy wisdom, the wisdom of the
whole, we are on our way and we do not walk alone. “A great company of
those whose souls God hath touched go with us,” including Immanuel Kant.
In lightness of being we are dancing and singing. And no one shall ever call a
final curtain on our joy.
o 0 o
1 Ps.
23:4: “Yea,
though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me.” From William
Coverdale’s translation, (Cambridge, 1537) incorporated into the first
English Book of Common Prayer (1549).
[ii] The
First American: the Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, H. W. Brands (New York 2000). Cf. p. 445: ‘The
German philosopher Immanuel Kant dubbed Franklin the “modern
Prometheus.”’
[iii] p.87:
Green and Hudson’s translation. Afterward cited as G&H. Note their
translation of the title, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, is not as accurate as Religion within the Bounds
of Bare Reason. Kant’s purpose
is to use logic to strip off the misunderstandings that pervert denominations
(like nations) into instruments of repression rather than liberation. The architectonic
is the logical lever of this
liberation. Without a clear understanding of how it works it cannot be used.
Hence the 2nd chapter of this paper.
1 For
a general investigation of the astronomy embodied in Stonehenge read Gerald
Hawkins’ Stonehenge Decoded,
Collins Fontana, 1966. For the continental economic and political culture that
built the monument, read Symbols of Power at the time of Stonehenge, by Clark, Cowie and Foxon. HMSO 1985
2
Stone henge = hanging
stones.
3
The ‘source
domain’ of a metaphor is the domain of immediate bodily experience such
as walking along a path. The
‘target domain’ of a metaphor is a less tangible experience, the logic
of which is illuminated, appropriately or not as the case may be, by the logic
of the source domain, e.g. “ I could not follow his reasoning.” Over the past twenty years
cognitive linguists have produced massive empirical evidence for
‘conceptual metaphor’ as the process that governs all cognitive
reasoning. Cf. three books by Prof. George Lakoff of Berkeley:
Metaphors We Live By, 1980 with Mark Johnson
Philosophy
in the Flesh, 1999 with Mark Johnson
Where
Mathematics Comes From,
2000 with Rafael Nunez
4
Ironic, because the days
grow colder although the sun draws nearer. This is the Gospel of Sun Return: Don’t
let the cold deceive you. The Advent of the sun is nigh. This is the source domain for all metaphors of moral
and religious encouragement.
5
Evidence for infant subitizing, cf. p.15 above, Lakoff and
Nunez, 2000.
6
Even
today the parish churches of Europe and America are oriented toward the east.
They have their great doors and tower at the west, and often a south porch.
Medieval weddings were always celebrated at the north door.
7
Three times four is the number of the
tribes of Israel, the apostles, the months of the year and the hours of the
clock. Three plus four is the days of the week; the chakras of
the spine; the observable wandering luminaries in the sky: and the colors of
the rainbow when the fire of heaven shines through the waters of earth.
8
The 4 volumes that outline the standpoints of Kant’s
System of Critical Philosophy:
The Theoretical Standpoint: The Critique of
Pure Reason, 1787. (1781: 1st Edn.)
The Moral Standpoint: The
Critique of Practical Reason, 1788.
The Volitional Standpoint: The Critique of
Judgment, 1790.
The Religious Standpoint: Religion within the Bare Bounds of
Reason, 1793
9
In jnana yoga, (the philosophical yoga of seeking knowledge) there are four complementary tools for practicing
philosophical research: Mantras which
are evocatively structured sounds. Mudras, which are evocatively structured body gestures. Tantras, which are evocatively structured relationships. And Yantras, which are evocatively structured visual images,
usually some form of mandala.
The yantra on which I practiced was a
twelve spoked circle, where each hour/month on the rim was intersected by
twelve unique combinations of triangle and cross, as if one danced 4 waltzes simultaneously with 3 foxtrots
along the circumference. If we mapped the Kantian architectonic it could look
like this. I say could, because
mappings can vary.
0 1 The
Theoretical: hypothetical 1
1 2 The Moral: empirical 2
2 3. The Aesthetic/Religious: logical 3
3
1 The
Theoretical: transcendental 4.
4
2 The Moral: hypothetical 1
5
3. The
Aesthetic/Religious: empirical 2
6
1 The
Theoretical: logical 3
7
2 The Moral: transcendental 4.
8
3. The
Aesthetic/Religious: hypothetical 1
9
1 The
Theoretical: empirical 2
10
2 The Moral: logical 3
11
3. The
Aesthetic/Religious: transcendental 4.
Twelve unique combinations of one of three
standpoints with one of four perspectives.
NB. In traditional zodiacal
logic the trinities are called Qualities: Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable. The Quaternities are called Elements:
Fire, Earth, Water, Air. The traditional mapping of Quality to Trinity is as
follows:
Cardinal Fire
(0) Water
(3) Air (6) Earth
(9)
Fixed Fire (4) Water
(7) Air (10) Earth (1)
Mutable Fire
(8) Water (11) Air (2)
Earth (5)
10
Metonymy. cf. above, Metaphors We Live By, Chapter 8. Metonymies invoke one thing to refer to another, such as Jerusalem to refer to the people of Jerusalem. Or one part of a
whole to refer to the whole; as in “Many hands make light work.” Or one thing to refer to
another, as in a waitress saying, “The ham sandwich wants coffee as well.” It is my contention that
religious roles such as governors
and priests are metonymies
refering to the royal priesthood
of ‘we the people’. Political celibacy, as I use the concept in
this paper, is essential to prevent the reduction of these roles to ones that
monopolize power. Such a reduction obscures the referential nature of the
metonymy. The headship of any local community that cherishes its freedom should
refer to the decision-making sovereignty of the whole community. Executive
decisions should be made by an executive officer. Only in this way can a
community preserve its own freedom from the forces that would coerce it, both
from without and from within.
1
G&H. Bk 3, p.96 Although
the translators give the word Covenant, they add a footnote (2) to make it clear they are translating Verplichtung, which is more properly Obligation. The more usual German word for covenant, Übereinkommen, is not used by Kant. However, undertaking a public
obligation is usually sealed in a covenant of some sort. Both English and
German use the word Testament,
common to both languages, to make it clear that both the story of Israel and
that of Jesus are alike stories about fidelity to a covenant.
2 The wish of
all well-disposed people is, therefore, that the kingdom of God come. That His
will be done on earth. G&H p. ?
3 cf. “signed, sealed, and delivered” – the joining of hands referred
to in the marriage service of the Book of Common Prayer.
4 The Christ means The Anointed (One). The King who is anointed from
above with power to govern. This language of the Gospel is unequivocally
political. The story is told in the folk form of a quest for power – the
power to govern and be governed freely. It is a universal story. In
Kant’s term and in human terms (both in German and in English) it is archetypal.
In the figure of the Prince it is the archetypus that always appears in the second stage of the human
journey toward experiencing the power to act and govern our actions freely.
5 Gustav
Jung, who was an assiduous student of Kant, drew attention to the phenomenon of
enantiodromia. This is the moment when some cyclical process is thrown into
reverse, Yang transforming into Yin. “Chinese philosophy formulated this
process of..[the transformative principle at work in nature and the harmony of
opposing forces]..as the enantiodromian interplay of Yin and Yang.”
Collected Works, Vol. 1 #375.
6 cf.
Kant’s own confidence: “…if the seed of the true religious
faith, as it is now being publicly sown in Christendom, though only by a few,
is allowed more and more to grow unhindered, we may look for a continuous
approximation to that church, eternally uniting all men, which constitutes the
visible representation of an invisible kingdom of God on earth. For Reason has
freed itself, in matters which by their nature ought to be moral and
soul-improving, from the weight of a faith forever dependent upon the arbitrary
will of the expositors, and has among true reverers of religion in all the
lands of this portion of the world universally.laid down the following
principles.
“The first is the principle of reasonable modesty in pronouncements regarding all that goes by the name
of revelation…
The second principle is this: that the sacred
narrative…must at all times be taught and expounded in the interest of
morality… The Teacher of the Gospel revealed to his disciples the kingdom
God on earth only in its glorious, soul-elevating moral aspect, namely, in
terms of the value of citizenship in a divine state, and to this end he informed
them of what they had to do not only to achieve it themselves but to unite with
all others of the same mind and, so far as possible, with the entire human
race. G&H, pp.. 122-125
[v] In
1582 Browne wrote A Book which Sheweth the Life and Manners of all true
Christians and A Treatise of
Reformation without tarryinge for any,
in which he maintained that “the Kingdom of God was not to be begun by
whole parishes, but rather of the worthiest, were they never so few”.
Such gathered churches were established by a local
covenant made independently of the state. In spite of Tudor and Stuart
persecution these congregations were determined to enjoy the spiritual freedom
to govern themselves and to legislate their own order. In the next century the Independents, as these Brownists came to be called, formed the backbone of
Cromwell’s New Model Army. Because they separated themselves from the
Tudor and Stuart Church they were also known as Separatists. They were among the passengers on the Mayflower (1621).
Over the course of time their autonomous
congregational polity attracted the name Congregational, by which their tradition of polity is now universally
called. But in Kant’s time, both in England and in America, as Independents, they represented more vigorously than most the
connection between the freedom of the Spirit and the power to self-legislate.
{Kant mentions them critically in passing as ‘Independents in
Connecticut’).
Much of the new US Constitution in 1790, particularly
the structure of the US Senate, came out of the experience of the
congregational polity of Town Meetings in New England. [cf. The Oxford
Dictionary of the Christian Church: entries for Browne and Congregationalism]
[vi] The
establishment of the College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary in
1352 was the response to the Black Death in the middle of the 1300s by the
parishioners of St. Bene’t’s and St. Mary’s. It was the only
Oxbridge College not founded by Bishops or Royalty. St. Bene’t’s
was a Saxon parish founded by the Benedictine Order. The Order itself was
primarily a community of laymen whose rule imposed a fairly Congregational
polity.
The college was built as a quadrangle on the south
side of the old churchyard in 1370. In Browne and Robinson’s time St.
Bene’t’s doubled as both parish church and college chapel. (John
Robinson was the pastor who blessed the Pilgrims on their way when they set
sail from Europe in 1620).
The college story fits with Kant’s four stages for
the establishment of religion. A terrible catastrophe that enshadows everyone
with a sense of evil; that evokes a resolution to embrace the good. This
results in the banding together of a new society; followed by a mission of
service to a wounded world.
[vii] With
regard to the dynamics of idolization and demonization, consider the insight
that comes when we map the Ten Commandments of the moral law naturally on our
fingers. Sitting with palms facing up, we can see that the second and ninth
commandments map neatly on our index fingers. These are the pointing fingers
and thus the ‘index of the moral law.’ “Thou shalt not
idolize” correlates with “Thou shalt not demonize.” To
idolize any political or ecclesiastical leader is to allow our vocation to
virginity to be seduced. To demonize anyone’s resistance to such
political idols is rape their political virginity. This is the very opposite of
political celibacy.
4 Cf.
for example the opening words of Louis Aragon’s poem about the
partnership of a Catholic and a Communist in their common resistance to the
Nazis: “He who trusted in
heaven and he who did not trust; both adored the beautiful, imprisoned by
soldiers.
One climbed the ladder while the other watched below. He who trusted in heaven
and he who did not trust.” La Rose et le Réséda in La Diane Francais. Paris: Éditions Pierre Seghers, 1944.
5
As an Englishman who swore
allegiance to his Sovereign just before the ordination service began, I take
the monarchy to be the fourth order of ministry, above that of bishop, priest, and deacon. It follows, therefore,
that the Lay Moderator, as his or her celibacy suggests, is one set apart for a
peculiar ministry. The four traditional terms for such setting apart: making,
ordaining, consecrating, and anointing, suggest as much. Absolutely key to this
method of establishing a congregation is the crucial role of some wise man or
woman who is chosen by the congregation to be their Moderator.
NB: caustic reference to “the sublimated Puritan and Independent
in Connecticut” is on p.164 of G&H
[ix] In
1911 a German Kant scholar called Hans Vaihinger published a book on the
dynamic nature of the hypothetical perspective. The way the mind can picture
alternative scenarios to the one which is the case illustrates the fictional
nature of human thinking. It was seminal reading for many, including Alfred
Adler, whose psychology considered therapy as weaning people from taking their
fictions literally. He saw this mental pathology as a way of insulating the
mind from insecurity. It wrongly established an alternative reality, the
ordering and control of which was illusory. Mental health for Adler consisted
in finding the inner courage to endure a sense of fallibility without a
compensating defense.
[x]
Cf.
2 Cor. 4:17 – For
our light affliction, which is but for a moment,
worketh for
us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory…
[xi] cf.
The last words of the Latin Mass: “Ite! Missa est.” Go! It (the
Spirit) is sent.