The Spirit Giveth Life

Between Life and Death: On Religious Reform(ers)

Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed!

Lk. 11:47

IT IS OFTEN the case that the profoundest differences are contained in the subtlest distinctions. There is something about what religion is—or better, what it gestures toward—that we, especially in modernity, are at risk of losing the language to articulate the more we lose our grip on a particular nuance. Divinity, properly conceived, does not easily lend itself to diagram or chart, but rather evokes the need for poetry, symbolism, and all other modes of habitual transcendence. Theology looks to annunciate something that often defies precise language, but can at the very least be spoken of in negative (‘apophatic’) terms, clarifying what it isn’t so as to know that (not ‘what’) it is. Divinity is not (at least exclusively) anything intelligible, limited, finite, conditioned; anything we can hold in our hands or thoughts, a conceptual or physical tool to master and wield. It is that which envelops, sustains, and pervades all such phenomena, something inexpressible in itself, for which ‘something’ is hardly even an appropriate designation because it is really no thing at all, only the pure precondition for ‘thingness’: the unnameable water in which a world of nameable fish do swim.

Reflecting upon this analogy, we see we must take care. It is all very well to take note of the river, but this does us no good if we subsequently reduce it to terms intelligible to us; if we insist that, because of the creatures we see in the its water, the river must be understood to move and function like a fish. Such an error highlights both the intricacy and enormity of the distinction at hand. We are dealing with a truly infinite gulf in an exceedingly fine margin, residing between the ‘inner’ (spiritual) and ‘outer’ (abstract) worlds in such a way that one cannot traverse these poles with even the most painstaking instructions, just as an abundance of images cannot ever hope to replicate what is imaged. Hence the difference between iconography and idolatry: in the one case, a motion to relinquishment, to gesture, to transcendence; in the other, a foreclosure, a possessiveness, an arrogant arrogation of what is not properly its own. Religion done well respects this distinction and reverently knows its limits; its concern for the ‘water’ of life ensures an adamant rejection of its conflation with the inhabitant ‘fish’. Following various traditions which affirm the inherent Divinity of humanity, we can also approach the issue via the philosophy of mind.¹ Subjectivity implies many things, perhaps chief amongst them the fact that it is my subjectivity that is experienced alone: it cannot be known by any means other than the subject’s own experience, by means of being alive. Any ‘objective’ analysis presuming the cosmos to be nothing more than an array of discrete facts and atoms would be about as capable of accounting for consciousness as, once again, the discovery of water through an exclusive analysis of the anatomy of a fish.

But this error cannot easily be blamed: objective analysis is frightfully useful, as any honest reflection on the advancements and remunerations bestowed by the Scientific Revolution will tell us. We cannot be tempted to reduce this to a facile ultimatum between the two: subjective ‘or’ objective, spiritual ‘or’ material, ineffable ‘or’ intelligible. There is no inherently good or bad option out of the two; both are valuable and necessary features of human life and knowledge. Acknowledging this, however, leaves us between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, abstract, objective, third-person methodologies must be employed to organise and direct our lives. It would be difficult and impractical for the politician to attempt to cater to the disparate subjectivities under her authority, so she is far better served treating people as manipulatable units to be arranged in a given order so as to reap a certain (economic, cultural, electoral) result. This is common sense: it is the pragmatic option, needed to maintain the daily comings and goings of human beings, without which the basic elements of society would come loose. On the other hand, however, we must also reckon with the fact that—despite the misleading seductions of modern materialism—the world, and especially its sentient inhabitants, are not a set of tools to be wielded or materials to be fashioned in a certain shape. To treat the subject as object, however practically utile it may be as a coordinator of peoples or even just an individual in a social fabric, is to fundamentally misunderstand what—or, again, that—a subject is.

However valuable it may be, in speaking one language for too long we risk forgetting another. The more wholly we deal in utility, the more thoroughly we neglect reality. When such an attitude seeps into religion, the result is a trading out of that integral distinction—between the river and the fish—for a false and altogether misleading alternative—between the fish themselves. The ‘spiritual’ sense of inner and outer (which, however, onerous the task may be, pays continual heed to the mysterious reality of subjective life and how it interacts with the outside world) is replaced with a far more institutionally hospitable counterfeit, one which divides between those within the private club and those remaining outside. This is the kind of division that, unlike what sound intuitions of Divinity recommend, can be recorded neatly on graphs and censuses, catalogued by confession, sorted by shibboleths. This line is drawn not between the ineffable and the intelligible, the sacred and the profane, but rather between ‘my’ tribe and ‘your’ tribe: two conditioned, worldly identities abstractly distinguished, each trembling with chauvinistic shrieks which, with increasingly militaristic intonations, insist that they alone are in possession of life and truth. Here we have abandoned the spiritual for the abstract, rather than preserving their healthy tension. This is a categorical leap of deadly subtlety that repurposes all the same terminology and symbolism of faith with little initial indication of change; a ‘soft coup’ whose change in leadership hardly registers a tremor on cultural Richter scale, whose effects can only be gradually realised. The best analogy might be that of an instant death: at first, the body appears to be sleeping soundly, but only in time do we perceive a festering stench and a flesh turned a necrotic green and black.

To be clear, before proceeding: there are two types of distinctions I am presenting. One is proper to religion, and the other is not. The former lies between the ineffable inner life and the intelligible outer forms which inevitably flow from it, both of which are good when kept harmonious and disjunct. The latter lies between two intelligible outer forms, which are pitted against one another as false substitutes for the old distinction. The transition from one to the other is disastrous.

Theoretically, religious institutions should be present in society in order to remind us of the first distinction, our ‘first language’. Knowing that our forgetfulness flows naturally from the pragmatic proclivity of physiological and psychological habit (our bodies are inclined first toward survival, not sanctity), religions are supposed to draw our attention to this arduous and elusory distinction between what can and cannot be said, to forge a space for reflection on the numinous meaning of things, cultivating a literal or symbolic ‘day of rest’ in our lives to prevent us completely smothering our inner silence with the careless prolixity of common concern. But, of course, this hope is naive: religion suffers from all the same habitual oblivion as any other social entity, and which is more, history reveals it to be often the very worst offender. It has been the source of such a vast farrago of sectarian hatred, being a site where humanity’s rawest emotional fixations are precariously concentrated; where grand notions of God and life, heaven and hell, right and wrong may be cited with sweeping rhetorical gusto to send cavalier men flying into mutual death at disagreement over a creed’s single grapheme. This frequent capitulation to superstition and violence emerges from the very nature of the binary that religion embraces—the hazardous tightrope it walks between life and death—and the subtlety with which we tumble into tribalism at the loss of our vigilance.

Perhaps we might be better served considering religion not as a place where humans go to ‘be good’ at remembering God—usually those who believe this to be the case are the most alarmingly forgetful—but rather where we are able to contemplate most keenly a pattern that occurs throughout all life. Triumphalist narratives about the infallibility of one’s own tradition, text, or institution are invariably deeply partial and narrow in their historical citations, and almost always make their claims at the expense of the voice of a persecuted Other. A far more honest appraisal of what religion has historically done and shall continue to do will more freely perceive not an impeccable record, which is never honestly to be found, but rather an enlightening agon between two helplessly conflicting obligations: the need to stoke the fires of the spiritual life, and the need to maintain the cohesion of community and tradition.

Perspicacious readers will note that this is an impossible ordeal from the first. After all, if religion were capable of any real equilibrium between these two it would already be false, and have traded out its proper distinction for the spurious ectype, presenting merely another worldly choice between two fish, the river forgotten. One pole of this binary (‘God’, ‘subjective life’) must be disruptive, even to the extreme of sheer irreverence: this is the property of its nature, its default transcendence of any graspable structure that might abstractly designate it. Thus to strike a placid concord between God and world is to sound the death toll of the spiritual life: their intelligible harmony is not an appealing aim, but a symptom of sickness. To easily identify a normative division of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in religion is to have quietly forgotten the meaning of being religious.

Hence we can often—contrary to certain disturbing reveries of Christendom, caliphate conquest, or the like—surprisingly trace an inverse proportion between the total political hegemony of a religion and its true spirituality. Though there are possible exceptions, I would wager that it is at the zenith of human authority that a faith is often most thoroughly devoid of its inner Spirit, precisely because it is obliged to give itself over wholly to worldly concerns.² Once the sacred symbols are unravelled on martial insignia, it is only a matter of time before doctrinal questions are artlessly contorted from genuine metaphysical queries to tactical ploys for the sovereign suppression of rebellion. Little wonder the inspired figures who come to found the major faiths so often emerge in conflict with the prevailing religious order, perceiving with God-given acuity the dry rot nested amidst the pageantry of canonical ritual and dogma, bewailing it all as a heap of ‘whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within… are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness’ (Mt. 23:27). That is: beguiling at surface, but bereft of substance; an appearance devoid of authenticity.

In history, the tension between prophets and traditions ebbs and flows in an essentially cyclical fashion. To employ a Nietzschean nomenclature, if an overly Apollonian form of organised religion bears political autonomy at a given moment in history, from its midst a particular movement—often spearheaded by one inspired individual—irrupts with untamed Dionysian frenzy, proclaiming at once (and this is always the curious paradox in such figures) both the desperate need to reform the faith and their own fidelity to the true tradition, which invariably surpasses that of the Apollonian bureaucrats who merely flaunt the garb. Often these figures are unsuccessful, but sometimes they effectuate real change—even despite execution, such as in the cases of Jesus, Mani, and the Báb. Disciples, awed and allured by the spectacle of a life imbued with God (prevailing even unto martyrdom), initiate the vital work of collating and sustaining their wisdom for contemporaries and descendants. Rites, doctrines, and institutions ensue, and in time—in an ironic twist as inevitable as any tragic tale—this inherited doctrine, once glowing with the igneous embers of spiritual zeal, slips into the ossified frame of Apollonian legalism. Not long, then, before some plucky new luminary rises before them, professing radical piety and calling for an overhaul of the old dogma. At last, the very name of the original reformer is cited to guard an unwavering orthodoxy and anathematise those who might, moved by the divine elixir, dare demur from the prim and proper.

There is almost a rhythm to this decline and ascent of spirituality in civilisations; the periodic infrigidation of religion into stabile glaciers and its reactive calefaction into thunderous deluge.³ Knowing the disruptive nature of one pole in religion’s proper distinction, combined with the potentially fatal quality of social dominance, we might even dare to welcome an intermittent iconoclasm of our traditions as reflective of a higher dynamism at play. This is not a suggestion remotely palatable to the doctrinaire: indeed, it can sound only blasphemous. After all, the common presumptions surrounding religion and its figureheads all too happily measure their value in terms of the power that sees a given identity or dogma prevail over and against others. The relevance and triumph of the prophet is presumed to lie the number of their devotees, the percentage of global population carved up by their confession. This is the two distinctions conflated: the outer form of religious identity mistaken for its inner spirituality. As such, the suggestion that there may be something higher than the articulated doctrine of faith—to which that doctrine is in fact only gesticulating—invokes a domain whose legitimacy most religious people simply do not have the ability to recognise, the language to speak. When the Dao is lost, the rites are ascendant.⁴

And yet, in order to understand the very inspiration behind the prophetic vocation (which is what I would like to reflect a little on below), I believe that we must acknowledge their rebellion against such static, quantitative measurements, the binaries of ‘in’ or ‘out’ by which we so frequently record the value or even truth of a religious tradition. In our worldly concerns, we unthinkingly take prophets to be mere heralds of a given tribe or creed. But what if they were fighting an altogether different battle? What if—despite our audacious claims that we understood them perfectly—they were actually speaking an altogether different tongue; one that we are, with our stubborn monolingualism, at risk of slowly losing the ability to speak ourselves?

To examine this notion, we might look more closely at Christianity’s relationship to its prophet in chief. Amongst the most sophisticated theological reflections on this topic comes from Christos Yannaras, whose Against Religion thoroughly dismantles any conception of Christianity and Church as mere entities to which we do or do not belong. He reminds us that ‘The Greek word ekklesia (ecclesia in its Latinised form) was chosen to express not a new religion but a social event—a mode of relations of communion’, that is, ‘a mode of human existence and coexistence’.⁵ In its pre-Christian context, this term referred to the management and direction of the polis, which was ‘not a settlement that had grown to quantifiable size’ but rather ‘a common struggle, the struggle aimed at attaining life according to truth’.⁶ Likewise, when Christians reflect on the person of Jesus, we must recognise that ‘He never declared or even hinted that he was the founder of a new religion’, but instead ‘in his own person he embodied and outlined for humanity a new mode of existence’.⁷ Yannaras continues:

The mode of existence that Christ embodied and to which he called humanity had no elements or marks that were characteristic of religious demands. It did not lead to atomic convictions; it did not presuppose meritorious atomic virtues; it did not lay down prescriptions about observing the law, about conforming to types of worship. In all these fields Christ’s teaching overturned and reversed the rules and presuppositions of religion. In the language of his place and time, Christ spoke of the mode of existence and life “according to truth” as the kingdom of heaven. And he preached that those who guide us toward this mode are not pious religious people, those who find satisfaction in being virtuous, those who shore up their ego by keeping some kind of law.⁸

Take care so as not to misread Yannaras here. Yes, Jesus was thoroughly concerned with Torah, and considered the maintenance of (an unusually demanding) halakha an indispensable feature of comporting oneself to the coming ‘Kingdom of God’. But this alone would not set him apart from any Pharisee. Whilst Jesus (along with every prophet) certainly took stances on particular views, whether religious, social, or political, we risk serious error if we believe that truly responding to his call lies simply in obediently agreeing with such stances. As stated above, the ‘outer’ abstract forms of thought which we necessarily engage for practical life are a wholly positive feature of human existence: we should, as show the prophets, have particular viewpoints, stand by certain morals, and function under a given set of beliefs. But if we take this alone to be the nature of the religious life, we have lost that life altogether. There is something else here of which prophecy is supposed to make us aware: in the phrase of Yannaras, a ‘mode of existence’ to which we are called, not a particular belief system.

As a case study, we might take Jesus’ own penchant for distinctions, perhaps most famously seen in Matthew 25. This is a chapter frequently cited to justify Christian exclusivism, and the most common interpretation of Jesus’ message runs something along the lines of: ‘When the Day comes, you’d better be a Christian’. However, what if we pushed ourselves for a marginally more sophisticated reading? What if distinguishing ‘sheep and goats’ (32-33) (or, in John the Baptist’s image, ‘wheat and chaff’ (Mt. 3:12)) were read not as an admonition to undertake the correct sacraments and pledge allegiance to the correct creeds—these proceeding from the filter of later theological development—but rather something more contiguous to life itself: to the way in which people live, rather than the labels they wear? Such is certainly implied by the passage, which clearly distinguishes between those who gave food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, hospitality to the stranger, clothing to the naked, company to the sick, care to the prisoner (35-40), and those who neglect such things, not between those who happen to profess one religious creed rather than another. Indeed, read in the vein of Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees, it would be just this identitarian approach to salvation and damnation that he is looking to usurp, acerbically criticising those who think that their religious identity justifies a disregard for genuine compassion; who pass by the dying for the sake of ritual cleanliness (Lk. 10:31-32), who meticulously observe the minutiae of the Law whilst falling lax in their duty to justice (Lk. 11:42). The ‘factionalist’ interpretation of this passage becomes all the more absurd when we take note of Jesus’ clarion call that simply being Jewish would not guarantee passage into the Kingdom.

Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free”. They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to any one. How is it that you say, ‘You will be made free?’” Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not continue in the house for ever; the Son continues for ever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me, because my words find no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.” They answered him, “Abraham is our father”. Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would do what Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from God; this is not what Abraham did. […] If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires (Jn. 8:31-44).

…echoing what Matthew and Luke record from John the Baptist:

Produce then fruit worthy of your repentance. And do not presume to say within yourselves, “We have Abraham as our father”; for I tell you that God is able, out of these stones, to raise up children to Abraham. And already the axe is laid at the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not produce good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire (Mt. 3:8-10; cf. Lk. 3:8-9).

Jesus’ solicitude for Israelite identity is confirmed by much recent scholarship; the moronic anti-Semitic interpretations of such passages, which ignorantly attempt to pit Jesus versus Jews, will not do.⁹ The national unity of Israel is central to the realisation of the Kingdom in his teaching, and we must not forget that his ministry is directed almost exclusively to Jews, predicated upon the moral restoration of the Chosen People through his role as a Davidic messiah, the ‘Son of Man’ of the Book of Daniel (Dn. 7:13), perhaps conceived in the vein of Melchizedek the high priest and king (Hb. 7:15-28).¹⁰ The real force of Jesus’ teaching here is manifestly the realignment of religious conviction away from a division of identity and toward one of spirituality and ethicality. In an ingenious image for such a topic, he inverts the common presumption by presenting a ‘different lineage’ that pays no heed to religious association, a lineage of spirit rather than blood.

All Jesus’ descriptions of damnation and salvation patently reside along the lines of a certain inner disposition and the outer works which emerge symptomatically from it—not from association with an institution, dogma, rite, or even person.¹¹ Failing this, we implicitly suggest that Christ is doing nothing but supplanting one religious identity with another; that the emergence of Christianity from Second Temple Judaism was little more than a feat of soteriological shirt-swapping. At present, I fear our understanding of salvation is distorted so greatly as to render Jesus merely the ‘man to know’ before we shuffle off this mortal coil, whose friendship might ensure a handy nepotism when standing before a particularly temperamental judge on the Last Day. Yet, lest we thought he were only disavowing those clinging to ethnic inheritance, Jesus parses even between his own self-proclaimed followers, those ‘within the club’; explicitly rejecting the idea that creedal profession alone might serve as a free ticket to the Kingdom: ‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven’ (Mt. 7:21).

That even this phrase is wielded by sectarians against one another is sadly predictable, and once more elucidates the evasiveness of the problem. When we allow ourselves to fall into worldly distinctions, we project these back onto Jesus’ words and read little more than advocation for yet another religious identity—which, in reality, he most certainly does not inaugurate. On that note, this also makes far more sense of the claim that the Church is to be built on the rock of Peter (Mt. 16:18). We ask ourselves once again: is Jesus a mere founding father, establishing a constitutional pedigree and bestowing its responsibility upon his most trusted acolyte? Or might he rather be initiating a revolution in the heart of humanity, not an imperium to rival Rome but a Kingdom that is neither here nor there but ‘within you’ (Lk. 17:21)—a Kingdom thoroughly at odds with the partisan preferences of the world, wishing to follow God alone? Must belief in Jesus Christ as God, as ‘The way, the truth, and the life’ (Jn. 14:6), be a base indication of tribal allegiance, or might it instead be devotion to one whose life lucidly tells of God, who invites us to leave our prejudices behind, ‘follow him’, and so have life ‘to the full’ (Jn. 10:10; cf. Mt. 16:25)? This is not simply a call for greater piety, but something upon which I believe the entirety of Christian faith hinges. When the spiritual distinction is exchanged for its worldly counterpart, we lose the language to articulate what makes Jesus Godly, what makes him worthy of veneration and worship: what makes him Divine.

I confess that it is for this reason that I find vast swathes of contemporary Christian discourse to be entirely unhelpful. Liberals and conservatives alike are often evidently more concerned with their beliefs about God than God himself; the advancement of private ideas about what is good rather than the hard labour of opening ourselves up to be changed by ‘the Good itself’, which naturally demands a far greater humility and patience with other people than we would prefer. (Much is made of speaking in the life of the prophet, and not enough of their persistent and far more substantial listening to their Creator). Thus debate is reduced to a competition over who can quote more of the gospels in their favour; scripture and tradition are rendered a common lot to be plundered for personal gain, comprised of credits to strengthen the stock of respective opinions over and against one another. Theological disagreement becomes little more than a tussle between two separate and utterly irreconcilable ‘Jesuses’ who, of course, would assuredly vote Republican, or doubtlessly vote Democrat. Even scholars who do the good work of retrieving something closer to ‘what Jesus meant’, either by a close reading of the original text or a study of his historical milieu, are prone to forgetting what makes him remarkable in the first place, falling prey to a bland historicism presuming the value of his words to be found only in a steady reconstruction of its social locale. In all cases, the essence of prophethood is lost, and the more comfortable abstractions which surround it become the fool’s gold to beguile our attention and energy.

That followers frequently devolve into hopeless partisanship after a prophet’s death is symptomatic of that pesky language barrier at play. Confronted with the dichotomies of left and right, progressive and conservative, the prophet poses something of a headache. Rather than succumbing to one of these apparently irreconcilable antitheses, they instead ramify across the two, committing themselves with complete devotion to both poles. In figures like Muhammad and Jesus, reform and recuperation find a striking unity: these men strove to maintain and promote fidelity to the old traditions (primarily Torah) and yet did so in the form of radical rebellion against them. That this is a contradiction from our perspective results from ‘reading’ the life and teaching of the prophet in a purely abstract fashion, lapsing back into worldliness when we should persist in our proximity to the ineffable. Bearing our respective stances, we ask the prophet which of the two fish are better, and they respond ‘The one that swims’. This answer is frightfully enigmatic, not half as easy as we’d like it to be, and so we walk away proclaiming that ‘My fish swims, yours doesn’t, so I have the favour of the prophet and God’. What seems to us to be an insuperable disagreement between opposing attitudes is for the prophet a singular, undivided motion that rises above all immanent disputes to abide in the God who transcends and encompasses them; the river that does not belong to either fish. Peering in from the outside we behold a paradox, but when fully suffused by the Divine, such dichotomies appear thoroughly misguided. Again: there is something else the prophet is trying to show us, to which they are calling us.

If we are capable of seeing it, and are bold enough to attempt to truly become a ‘disciple’, our understanding of ‘left’ and ‘right’ undergoes change. We are prompted to cling less—ideally, not at all—to our views, no matter how righteous we believe they are; daring to allow ourselves to be transfigured by the pattern of these saintly lives rather than merely adducing their words to win our own parochial spats, skimming the cream of their established authority for the sake of our own stockpile. We are moved to a faith and trust that virtuous views will come from God rather than from following ‘the devices and desires of our own hearts’. No longer ‘trusting in our own righteousness’,¹² we allow beneficent beliefs and deeds to crystallise in our being as they shall. In short, that is, we abide in the river, and relinquish our inordinate attachments to the fish. We no longer ask which creature we prefer, but assess them depending on whether or not they tell of their aquatic Source: whether or not they ‘do the will of my Father in heaven’.

My hunch is that this ‘hands off’ approach, which hopes to evacuate opinion of egoistic interference, will be perfectly content with change. We must acknowledge that the process of returning to God, precisely because he is the fecund infinite, transcendent of any dogma, will result in doctrinal development according to the conditions of history’s onward march, just as the same white light will shine in a countless variety of colours as it beams through an ever-turning kaleidoscope. After all, however much it may make a certain conservative wince it should not escape our attention that the great founders of most major religions—Jesus, Muhammad, Abraham, Buddha, Zoroaster, Nanak, Mahavira, Báb, Mani, and so on (not to mention the numerous saints who inspired schools rather than whole faiths)—were reformers in an undeniable sense. Their presently revered status is born only from the temerity needed to deliberately subvert the canon as it priorly existed, to shake the foundations of the established order with a peturbative and inflammatory streak. Once opprobrium slips to history, it can all become dimly quaint: revolutionaries can come to be praised even by the very establishment which once persecuted them. We tend to laud history’s agitators whilst virulently disdaining those of our own age: the dead are far less rowdy, after all. They leave our beliefs tidy and unscathed; their words may even be twisted entirely against their original purpose.¹³ Of course, those former prophets couldn’t possibly resemble those who presently vitiate our cherished, long-held beliefs, challenging their inadverted exclusion of the marginalised (e.g. Mk. 3:1-6; Lk. 10:25-37), offending us with cutting questions about just how pious we really are….

However, we would be equally misguided in supposing this to be a sanction of unbridled progressivism, a crude endorsement of change for change’s sake. Aversion to modern liberalism is for the same reasons as to blunt fundamentalism: it puts the cart before the horse, prioritising one extrinsic feature of religious thought rather than actually following the directive of the prophet and heading toward God ourselves. Secular liberalism, lacking any transcendent index of meaning that might aid in discerning which changes are to be condoned or condemned, grasps only at the passing whims and velleities of the selfish consumer, deracinating desire from its divine horizon and reducing it to a relative preference that comes and goes with dalliant fancy. No tradition or wisdom of any real sort could possibly hold in this model; there would be no basis for discipline because there would be no knowledge of what is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ for the individual. With most changes commanding just as much agency as the last—‘Do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t hurt others’ is the typical slogan—the self is subject to a perpetual turnover, all sustained ventures to meaning moiled and churned by the destructive arrival of the new. Our aim is to locate and manifest the immutable truth in each passing age, rather than simply finding reasons to justify each pleasure our era enables: a vigilance needed especially in the time of late stage capitalism. Sacrifice remains indispensable. The conservative adage that ‘The Church married to the spirit of this age will be widowed in the next’ rings perfectly true, provided it resists the temptation to slip once more into a reactionary obstinacy opposed to all positive progression.

We are thus prompted to gravitate toward something that both ensures the validity of undeniable doctrinal development and the integrity of the tradition that ‘cartographically’ charts it. It is not a centrist middle ground that I am proposing here (and certainly not a claim to intelligibly resolve contradictory viewpoints) but rather a tertium quid, necessarily transcendent of either pole—just the same that I touched upon in my reflections on the Bhagavad Gita here. To abide in God is to produce unity and difference at once, both the unity of a preserved tradition and the difference of an open progression. In sum, that is, to capture the Spirit of the prophets’ words we must ourselves be bold enough to participate in their creativity, their attentiveness to what their particular age—and so now ours—demanded and demands in order that God be manifest. The prophetic dispensation of outward forms and doctrines is to be understood as the natural outworking of grace according to conditioned circumstance (a kind of ‘upaya’) and so not merely the revelation of certain immutable injunctions, incontrovertible for all eternity, to which we might unthinkingly acquiesce to presumably achieve total spiritual success. Repressive submission, even to the noblest of laws, results in nothing less than death. We must go beyond the law, unveil the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:6), and thereby know that true traditionalism is typified by true innovation. To be but a second in the past is to be infinitely removed from the Present. Dogma, by its nature, is late as soon as it arrives: but real tradition will know this, welcoming time’s incessant reform as the mode of its real devotion to established rite and canon. This is certainly not antinomian (Mt. 5:18, Rm. 7:12), but it is somwhere beyond the law.

When re-learning our ‘first language’ we must be honest with ourselves. No student hinders their education more than one whose pride refuses to be taught, believing that they are already learned. We might each benefit from a regular self-reflection, a line of questioning directed inward to unearth whether or not we are looking to live in God, or merely coasting by on the convenient comfort of an inherited identity, with all the reassuring regulations it bears. As suggested above, we might even push ourselves to understand this as the very nature of the religious life: a perpetual reappraisal of one’s own tradition and belief—a ‘common struggle’ toward truth—which seeks continually to replenish in us a love for Life itself rather than the phantasmic labels which otherwise beguile and distract us from it. This, at least, is what is suggested by the confrontation of the prophet, who upturns lives with earth-shattering calls, changing names and trajectories, inspiring a metanoia in the soul of humankind.

To ‘be religious’ in the sense of following in the footsteps of any one of these major religious figures, we must realign ourselves entirely. Despite our pining for a paternal reassurance, the prophet was never giving us easy instructions, and certainly never a soothing confirmation that we were right all along. They were walking in the way of light, and calling us out of the darkness. Their beckons appeal to something ineluctably elusive; the Spirit that drifts wantonly and prodigally over conceptual boundaries, even displaying a certain irreverance for the ‘literal’ content of religion required for the guidance of quotidian life. The significance of its embrace cannot be overstated: it is the difference between associating with a religion for the sake of social belonging and political power, and the real mystical inhabitation of a faith, whose singular concern is God. The former, even if professing genuine devotion to the prophet, is guilty of a superficiality that keeps its adherents incurably ‘outside’. These are they that grasp at the outer vestments (Jn. 20:17) but cannot tolerate the inner body (Jn. 6:52-65); who yearn for a sermon’s words whilst others understand the whole dharma in a flower and a wink.¹⁴

I spoke at the outset of the practicality involved in the ‘abstract’ side of life: when we as separate subjects speak to one another, language allows a sophisticated means of communicating inner states, but it is still limited to the ambiguity of extrinsic indications: words, symbols, and gestures, each of which can only be internalised by the subject that receives them. The ministry of all prophets inevitably deals in outward signs; and yet these are calls for us each to realise an inward life. Again, the gulf between these two is as subtle as it is categorical. There is even a risk that we might lose the essence of what we refer to if we do so much as take the time to write and speak about it, making it into something that might be achieved or clarified with words. But the prophet speaks all the same. We must see it to be a mystery that inspires garrulity, otherwise it would be valueless. We must stumble after it helplessly, dance madly to its tune, for otherwise its music would be without beauty.

The temptation to flee from this dance, to turn the lights on and music off, make it all orderly and easily understood, is formidable. But it is just this which leads to alienation from faith, especially in children. The parent is inclined to carefully marshal their child’s worldview, to ensure it follows their preconceived pattern. At its worst, when the parent is persuaded of a conception of religion that measures salvation by the metric of club membership, children often find their earliest natural intuitions of God quashed by the very instrument intended to realise him.¹⁵ For a multitude of children, church, synagogue, or mosque become sites of untrammelled boredom and disquieting menace which risk undoing a natural passion for the world’s beauty. These domains, orchestrated by adults anxious to extract the desired dogmatic confession, teach us of some imperious and ominpotent Prison Guard who peers angrily over our shoulders when we let slip the odd swear word, forget to give thanks before food, or find ourselves daydreaming about sex. He watches with panopticon eye, and his punishment is one of swift shame and threatened torment: his ways are those of a relentlessly unnerving paternalism. This is a religion expressly concerned with the extirpation of childlike wonder from childhood; the conversion of a sanctuary of abundant life to a desolate mausoleum.

This is an overreach born from an intolerance of life’s otherness; a schema referring solely to one’s own experience, falsely proclaimed to be a universal command. But this by definition must fall under the banner of the spurious distinction, precisely because demanding that another act or believe in a certain fashion remains wholly extrinsic to that life; it passes over the very ineffable subjectivity to which any decent religious education must try to draw their attention. No matter the pedagogic skill of the master, one cannot give another God. The teacher guides the student, but does not control them. We can, as the Ch’an image goes, point a finger to the moon, but we cannot reach up and pull it down. This would only despoil its beauty. So long as we believe the prophet to be one who exclusively ‘possesses’ the Truth (that is, God), and so is capable of dispensing its graces to select élites, we misapprehend the very nature of their role, and so immediately become that against which they rebel.

As such, the ‘success’ of religious education does not lie in whether or not one’s child claims the family’s religious heritage (the calculated result, what one human dictates to another), but whether or not they cultivate and pursue the spark that sees and loves God in their distinct fashion.¹⁶ Acknowledging the mystery of subjective life, we must admit that true faith is found only in affording the child a freedom to discover God for themselves, according to the conditions and exigencies of their own personality and experience. Real education, therefore, must involve a relinquishment on the part of the parent. The child’s life is their own; thus Life itself, which the parent has known in their own time and way, must be allowed to manifest with the difference apposite to the uniqueness of another human being. To coin a phrase, ‘There is no compulsion in religion’ (Q 2:256).

This serves as a microcosm of the relationship between established tradition and modernity. Not a brazen negation that stamps out any originality, but a congenial embrace of the novelty of each age’s revelation, which will be different from our own, whether we like it or not. Reactionary hostility must be exchanged for a sincere, welcoming, and appropriately critical rapport that fosters the youthful quest to find the ineffable Truth in one’s own irreducibly unique fashion. The Buddha does not shriek at his bhikkus and shake them with threats of eternal torment (even though there is a real urgency in their need to extinguish dukkha): he holds up the flower, winks wordlessly, and Mahākāśyapa understands. This patience is infectious because it is inviting, not insistent; not the frowning forbiddance of the perilous cliff edge of the commandments, but the smiling, dulcet, playful intonations of ‘ehipassiko’. It pulls upon the golden threads of what is already loved within a human life in order to draw their vision to the glorious fullness of the tapestry of divine wonder. It does not drop religion on one’s head like a sack of bricks, uncaring for the harm that might follow, desperate only to force some passion out of the brutal contact.

A true ‘evangelisation’ of our kin, whether child or stranger, is thus alien to those attempts to lure in as many possible recruits with promises of a furnished celestial abode (on condition of submitting to a complex of sinuous legalities). Religious discourse, whether internal, ecumenical, or comparative, suffers from an incorrigible handicap if it begins from the presumption that one is somehow in total possession of truth, and must only persuade others of their wrongness or ignorance. This knows nothing of the mystical Being which envelops and emerges uniquely in both lives—and so knows nothing at all about what one is actually trying to convey. By contrast, if each are aware that they and their tradition are only attempting to place themselves within a mysterious, untameable stream, the cohabitation—and mutual joy, hospitality, and compassion—of a variety of fish becomes not only possible but desirable. The guiding concern of all religious teaching is thus happily simple: to share with our fellow human beings—who may have forgotten it, or are yet to hear it—the good news (‘gospel’) that they too are alive and called to infinite love. This is to recognise that the Light is within all people and need only be drawn out, rather than a being a rarefied luxury that might only be bestowed by the scant elect.

Similarly, in this way the language of ‘battle’ endemic to various religions is no longer taken to refer to a staunch, unthinking opposition to other faiths, on whom are lazily imputed all negative attributes available in the tradition’s arsenal. Rather, this imagery is returned to its rightful place: a war waged against ‘demonic’ forces, which is to say those spiritual evils that draw us away from our proper condition, seducing us with promises that fulfilment is to be found in the acquisition of ephemera—such as religious identity. After all, when the ‘essence [of religion] is lost, and people enshrine relics of past method for a sense of personal satisfcation, righteousness, or comfort, then it is said that the medicine has become a disease’.¹⁷ Such a shift of consciousness allows us to understand religion not as yet another identity to unhealthily cling to, but a means by which we—as individuals and communities—incarnate and realise our own inherent divinity, the ‘water’ in which we fish ‘live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28), experienced exquisitely anew in each organism it sustains and loves.

---

At last we can approach a conclusion. Life is both ineffable and intelligible; the unspeakable inner life and its untold diversity of outward forms. In order to avoid mistaking worldly distinctions for divine ones we must be comfortable in treating creation as a unity,¹⁸ so as to deflect any created oppositions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ being mistaken for something truly religious. A knowledge of the oneness of all in God prevents us acting and thinking as though others lack divinity.

At times failing this can result in a simple blindspot, and at others it can nightmarishly compound until no aspect of life (religious or otherwise) can be understood except by reference to inflexible immanent designations. The society nearest to death is most consumed by bureaucracy, with its total colonisation of reality by categories and compartments, reducing humans to papers in folders, tucked away alphabetically in the apparatchik’s archive.¹⁹ Religion is in all things not an array of ossified concepts with which we adorn our identities, but a way of being, observing a wordless flow of life that carries itself through us all, perennially reaching for ever more diverse modes of self-disclosure. Religion is by nature an act of joyous resistance against any extrinsic homogenisation, any abstract designation asserting—however inspired the original formulation may have been—that a human being must be this and nothing else. Its Essence is not something that can be put in a creed. It is the very opposite of that.

It is something about folded knees on the carpet, dressing in old skirts, collecting pretty trinkets, laughing at stupid jokes, gently petting the cat, cooking for your friends, helping the elderly across the road, diving into a cold sea on Christmas, reading on a lazy Sunday, praying in your sacred building, knitting before the fireplace, learning a new skill on a whim, tearing up the dancefloor with no care for ridicule. It is something we can only say by renouncing the temptation to say clearly; something we can perceive only through the manifold, wondrous flashes of God that surround and envelop us in each instant of our lives, that we must always resist truncating into fossilised idols which would violently clamp down on all else that is not in their likeness. Better instead to remain inundated and inebriated by the marvel of life’s infinite mystery, the beating heart of a boundless Love that smiles and beckons through it all. The life of the saint does not concern itself with exhortation, at least beyond a preliminary degree: it is rather an accepting attentiveness to each and every state that flows through experience, ‘let[ting] your heart follow whatever happens’,²⁰ disabused of all egoistic assertions about what you think should and should not be, rather allowing your existence to become nothing but the expression of the Holy Spirit moving freely within you.²¹ Our aim is this: to become the artwork of God.

Insofar as the prophet looks to restore religion to its proper state, we must know their call to be one for a restoration of true religiosity. In short, religion is life; it is not other than it, not an abstraction that could be set against it as negation, sniping its natural dynamism from a conceptual ivory tower. Likewise, prophethood is not an exclusive vocation but one open to all, given the logoi within all people are infinitely beautiful, unique, and revelatory outworkings of the one Logos.²² This has nothing to do with changing history or starting a movement: we might well be at our most sacred when we are most mundane, for that is the point of utmost humility, resting in the simple purity of our being, and so when we most clearly ‘tell’ of God—even in total silence.

He has searched the world, has searched history, to find souls who will accept to be nothing, who will let him be God.²³

To be a prophet, a ‘light of the world’ (Mt. 5:14), is to empty ourselves so thoroughly of our egos that nothing but God remains, abiding in us as wholly ‘as air in light’.²⁴ We are to make ourselves blank canvases, empty pages, silent studios, on and from which the Divine artist might weave an outrageous beauty, manifest in the prosaic rhythm of our life’s course whose immeasurable brilliance we are called only to realise. No dreams of great repute are needed; just the reception of existence as an unspeakably generous gift, one of essential joy and bliss, given faithfully back to the Creator in the form of a lifelong obedience to Love. A gratuitous, endlessly compelling exchange of delight, thanksgiving, and beauty, like the creation and reception of art; which has no utility beyond its own wonder. There is no abstract reason for the making or hearing of beautiful music: it just is, and it is good.

It is not only that there is an art to living, but that living itself is art; thus it is something necessarily inscrutable, playfully fleeing from all ideological or technological muzzles. As the age of AI dawns, we must know this with an almost apocalyptic urgency: no matter what the technocrats insist, we are not machines. We can never hope to exhaustively understand what we are, and should not try to: the Word within will remain a baffling mystery to an automaton that merely registers data via pattern recognition in order to formulate an unambiguous solution. A work of art is not to be comprehended, categorised, checked off. It is to be perceived, known, pondered, adored. It is to inspire freedom, wonder, peace, beauty, and every other glorious explosion of which our souls are capable. You are That: the image of God.

There is plenty of reason to despair at present, given the political and social ascendancy of what seems to be the very worst kind of mentality: a set of people convinced of their desire and right to manipulate the world as though it were nothing more than an algorithm to run or a ‘deal’ to strike, with little (if any) regard for the immense suffering this obviously causes. But I do not think it foolish to have trust in the pattern of history and providence, knowing that it is most frequently at the time when anguish reaches its apogee that the inner Divinity of humankind is stirred into its cataclysmic, beautiful rebellion. Myriad crises loom: it is thus now, more than ever, that we should keep a hopeful ear to the ground, anticipating the foment of the vatic Spirit, rumbling in the depths, preparing for birth again (Is. 26:17, Mt. 24:8, Rm. 8:23)²⁵ In the wilderness of a barren, materialistic age, forgetful of the promises of its Creator, we hear that inner Word burst with a desperate, urgent, and expectant cry: ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord’ (Is. 40:3).

1. To pick one of many possible examples, ‘Whoever wants to come into the ground of God, into His innermost being, he must first enter his own ground, in his innermost being, because no one can know God if one does not first know oneself. He must enter his lowest and into the innermost being of God and must enter His first and His supreme being because there all that God can provide comes together’ (Meister Eckhart, ‘Homily 44 [Q 54b]’, in Meister Eckhart, The German Works: 64 Homelies for the Liturgical Year, vol. 1: “De Tempore”, trans. Loris Sturlese and Markus Vinzent (Leuven: Peeters, 2019), 44:5, pg. 613.

2. This, at least, was the intuition of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, ascetics and contemplatives who fled to various deserts across the Middle East in an attempt to recuperate the forgotten heart of a Christianity now enshrined with imperial dominion.

3. Crucially, again, this is not to be equated with or measured by the success of political hegemony: an unhindered theocracy can strangle faith into sterility, whilst a perilous life as a religious minority can prompt an eruption of mystical fervour. It might even be said that most religious movements benefit immensely from their initial smallness: could the vigour of the earliest Christians, huddled into their paltry domestic assemblies, possibly sustain their intensity were they spread out across land and sea? Further still, could the ekklesia maintain the ferocity of its inner flame if totally free from threat of persecution?

4. See Dao De Jing, XXXVIII.

5. Christos Yannaras, Against Religion: The Alienation of the Ecclesial Event, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2013), 21.

6. Ibid., 21.

7. Ibid., 21-22.

8. Ibid., 24.

9. See, for instance, Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (New York: Vintage, 2000).

10. See Dale C. Allison, ‘Life and Aims of Jesus’, in Cambridge Companion to Jesus (Cambridge: CUP, 2025), 20-24.

11. Verses like Mt. 11:25-27, Jn. 14:6, Jn. 17:1-2, Mt. 28:18-20) should be understood in the specific context of Jesus’ calling to the kingdom, his self-understanding , and the arid wasteland (apart from John the Baptist) of those who were not presenting what he was presenting.

12. The ‘devices’ and this quote are taken from the Book of Common Prayer. I admit it may seem odd (even confessional) to cite the Prayer Book like this. I write this on a Monday: Cranmer’s sweet poetry is still in my ears and soul. I can think of no better source to cite at present.

13. One thinks of the wilfully ignorant citations of Martin Luther King Jr. by the American right against the Black Lives Matter protests.

14. I am alluding to the famous ‘Flower Sermon’: Sakyamuni stands up before his followers, who are awaiting the words of a sermon, and merely lifts up a flower and winks. Most are perplexed, but one bhikku, Mahākāśyapa, smiles in response, indicating his understanding of the ineffable Supreme Vehicle. This serves as the tale of founding authority for Mahāyāna schools such as Ch’an and Zen. But, as Korean Master So Sahn reminds us, we cannot cling even to a tantalisingly enigmatic rite: ‘If you become attached to words and speech, then even the Buddha’s silently raising a flower or Mahākāśyapa’s wordless smile will be only another trace of the sutras. However, when you attain the truth within your own mind, even all the base chatter or elegant speech of the mundane world become[s] nothing less than this same “special transmission outside the sutras’” (Zen Sourcebook: Traditional Documents from China, Korea, and Japan, eds. Stephen Addiss, Stanley Lombardo, and Judith Roitman (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008), 212). See also, for a genuinely delightful treatment of relevant themes, Wei Wu-Wei, Open Secret (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1970). As for the Christian reference, we might allegorically (or even literally!) read Lk. 8:43-48 as a truly ‘faithful’ motion toward the outer raiment of religious form, embracing it not on its own terms, but as means to the healing balm of an inner divinity.

15. I’m not certain how accessible it is, but I came across a fantastic text which confirms my suspicions in this regard: see Edward Robinson, The Original Vision: A Study of the Religious Experience of Childhood (New York: The Seabury Press, 1983), 99-101.

16. Which, if done well, will in the vast majority of cases result in a claiming of just that heritage.

17. Thomas Cleary and J. A. Cleary, Introduction to Blue Cliff Record (Boston: Shambhala, 2005), xvii-xviii.

18. In Deleuzian terms, a ‘univocity’ or an ‘assemblage’. For the latter, see J. MacGregor Wise, ‘Assemblage’, in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. Charles J. Stivale (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2011), 91-102.

19. Kafka, for one, speaks to a certain glimmer of life spurring and kicking against an oppressive coldness, a blanket of darkness under which difference and creativity is indifferently, efficiently asphyxiated. Deleuze and Guattari read in him the quality of tearing loose, taking flight, breaking free from fixed form in order to discover the heart of things. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

20. The Book of Chuang Tzu, trans. Martin Palmer (London: Penguin Books, 2006), ch. IV.

21. As Rowan Williams writes of Thomas Merton, ‘We are to be “new words for God” in that sense. […] This life, this identity, this face, this “tonality” of being, becomes a word for God to us, a word God addresses to us.’ A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2011), 50.

22. ‘[God] is truly able to contain all things, and who, to all who are worthy of His grace, in proportion to the quality and quantity of each one’s virtue, divides Himself indivisibly in the form, as it were, of different distributions, without in any way being separated into parts among those who share in Him, for the essence of His unit is by nature indivisible. And this is true even if, owing to the different degrees of worthiness among those who share in Him, He paradoxically appears in a separate manner within the many shares, according to the ineffable union (which the Word knows).’ (Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, vol. 1, trans. Nicholas Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), Am. 10.33).

23. Ruth Burrows, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 137. She here quotes Petra, a friend and fellow mystic.

24. John Scotus Eriugena, De Periphyseon, I.450a-451b.

25. Does not Krishna incarnate only at karma’s nadir? See Bhagavad Gita IV.7-8.