Knowing and waiting
On following the inner light
There is a silence in the beauty of the universe which is like a noise compared with the silence of God.
— Simone Weil
Evil is the most persuasive evidence for the existence of God, friend-of-the-blog
responded in a koan-like fashion to my New Year’s Day musings. I’ve been riffing on this provocation to arrive at an aphorism of my own: evil is not to be shunned, or to be fully integrated, but to be digested.Let me explain.
Naïve attempts at shunning evil ignore the fact that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, as Solzhenitsyn memorably put it. All too often, this results in a pyre or a pogrom. I’ve quoted Freud before:
After St Paul had made universal brotherly love the foundation of his Christian community, the extreme intolerance of Christianity towards those outside it was an inevitable consequence.
When one becomes a bit more spiritually aware, things can often take a rather Gnostic turn.1 Friend-of-the-blog
’s admission of an earlier “fairly serious Gnostic phase” strengthened my belief that while the gnostic is often a necessary step, one should be careful not to tarry. ‘s admirably erudite Substack series on the subject has not managed to shift my priors (as our rationalist friends like to say).In Part I A New World, Bacon reveals that Gnosticism promises “liberation from the human condition through mystical insight into one’s divine nature.” This sounds lovely, but in my experience it can be difficult to distinguish between the recognition of one’s divine nature and the tyrannical demands of a yet-to-be-socialised toddler.2
In Part II A World of Pure Imagination Bacon prophesies that the dawning of the Age of Gnosticism is all but inevitable after the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason, since Gilles Quispel, a Dutch historian of Gnosticism, has identified these as “three major strands of Western culture”. But isn’t there something missing here?
Part III Gnosticism: Origins provides a succinct history for those unacquainted with the Demiurge. Part IV Gnosticism: Inversions provides plenty of examples of how Gnosticism is to Orthodoxy what Wicked is to The Wizard of Oz (make of that comparison what you will). Part V Gnosticism: Convergences notes some interesting parallels between gnostic and tantric traditions. All of this supports the idea that, again speaking broadly, Gnosticism represents the permanent shadow of the dominant culture. The Shadow taking over from the Ego is nothing new, so we should know the fruits of antinomianism by now.3 To quote from an old essay by Tara Isabella Burton entitled The Carnival We Need:
The best subversions are those that do not merely reduce the extant to the profane, but which instead reveal how we might transcend, and even spiritualize, the corporeal nature of custom. They break down visions of gender or nationality not to reduce us to free atomized selves, but rather to creatively reimagine us as members of a moral rather than genealogical corpus; they bring low kings not to endorse anarchy but rather to evoke the political possibilities of love.
In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Iris Murdoch considers whether the self-mythologising Gnosticism of Jung can offer a plausible alternative to traditional religion, admitting that “presocratic cosmic Taoism, can, it seems, energise and renew the Christian myth as well”. Yet she remains unconvinced:
Jungian therapy certainly uses myth in ways which can command the co-operation of patients and help their condition. But Jung is not just offering a therapeutic tool, he is offering what he feels to be a relevant and necessary metaphysic. This Gnostic monism cannot be taken as a plausible account of morality. A relativistic view of good supports a relativistic view of truth, and vice versa. Self-contained soul-experience obscures, and is no substitute for, the struggle with an alien reality which engenders and imposes and develops absolute distinctions between good and evil and truth and falsehood. The idea of transcendence cannot be dissolved by enclosing it inside a soul distended by mythological archetypes.4
I’ve noticed that my writing on Substack could be read as a rather agonising process of auto-re-evangelism,5 trying to find something vaguely God-shaped, but still believable, to fill the hole my Calvinist forebears have seared into my soul. Under the influence of Murdoch, especially, it seems that I have come to believe not so much in the existence of a Higher Power, but in a Higher Principle: the Sovereignty of Good, as she put it. She conceived of religion as the connecting tissue between the mystical and the moral. She was hoping for a “Buddhist-style survival of Christianity” with “a mystic Christ who is the Buddha of the West”.6
Perhaps we all need to become mystics:
I would say (persuasive definition) that a mystic is a good person whose knowledge of the divine and practice of the selfless life has transcended the level of idols and images. (Plato’s noeisis. Eckhart.) This may or may not accompany belief in a personal deity. Julian of Norwich’s showings are for all humanity. The condition of course remains exceedingly remote from that of ordinary sinners. (Needless to say, the word ‘mystical’ is often, in a degraded sense applied to Gnostic beliefs and power-seeking magic.) It is true that we may at times, in various situations, experience loss of self, or intuitions of a beyond. Such experiences may ‘do us good’. We are also continuously aware of standards of good conduct which we continuously ignore. But someone may say, what can we do now that there is no God? This does not affect what is mystical. The loss of prayer, through the loss of belief in God, is a great loss. However, a general answer is a practice of meditation: a withdrawal, through some disciplined quietness, into the great chamber of the soul. Just sitting quiet will help. Teach it to children.7
Thanks in part, perhaps, to the unconscious influence of friend-of-the blog
, I attended my first proper Quaker meeting this past Sunday.8 It was as advertised: two dozen people gathering in a small room for an hour of silent contemplation. The silence was broken only once when a young man read a line from a little red booklet called Advices & Queries:Attend to what love requires of you, which may not be great busyness.
I still know very little about the Society of Friends,9 but I wonder if this reductio ad absurdum of Protestantism could nurture the kind of (bourgeois) mysticism that Murdoch was talking about, especially in the case of a cultural Christian with a Weil-like aversion to the Nicene creed.10
There is great love to be found in silence.
The gnostic (broadly speaking) is a major topic of discussion around these parts, of course. It plays a central role not only in John Pistelli’s forthcoming Major Arcana, but also in his previous Portraits and Ashes, whose unsparing horror is unfortunately not my vibe.
[Despite the rumours that I am “obsessed”, I have to confess that I am not (yet) a Pistelli completist.]
I’m grateful to the subtler spirits who have subsequently taught John how to properly lay on the charm(s).
I know, I know, one’s divine nature isn’t meant to refer to the Ego, but I sometimes think the theological difficulties of the Atman = Brahman equation exceed those of the Filioque controversy.
Furthermore, the risk of confusing psychological regression for spiritual progress is an ancient one. Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:3, KJV)
There’s a famous Zulu saying that goes Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other people. To understand this, you don’t have to read Girard, you only have to visit the zoo. Monkey see, monkey do. Ducklings imprint on whatever they first see move.
If it used to take a village to raise a child, it now takes a few low-wage workers and plenty of machinery (I’m exaggerating for effect). Do contemporary reactions to Nozick’s famous thought experiment suggest that we are losing the ability to think of ourselves as anything other than experience machines? Is there something to Paul Kingsnorth’s notion of the Cross as a rallying point for the human against the Machine?
[As a general rule, I am against jihads, Butlerian or otherwise, so I’m cautious about taking this neo-Luddism too far. Nevertheless, it doesn’t take an opened third eye chakra to realise that good vibes can only be shared between living beings — either in the flesh or through a medium with enough artistic quality to transmit the language of the soul.]
[[See online oracle Katherine Dee’s In&Out list for 2025]]
[[[No jokes, an In&Out list almost caused me to no longer be Mrs. Gen Z Boyfriend. But rest assured, all is forgiven now that I’m a reformed woman.]]]
I’ve written before about the disappointing legacy of the 60s.
MGM p.134-135 (emphasis in original)
Sometimes the only way out of the self is through (backwards).
MGM p.137
Why not just turn to the actual Buddha? Didn’t science prove that Buddhism is true? I suspect that the truth, if there is such a thing, lies beyond the trappings of both Western and Eastern mysticism, but since I was steeped in the language and imagery of Christianity throughout my formative years, Murdoch’s proposition holds an intuitive appeal.
MGM p.73 (emphasis in original)
I had previously attended a few sessions of a “gay men’s mindfulness group” held in a Quaker Meeting House, which followed a similar format, except that the meditation was guided by a Buddhist-style “teacher” who also advertised intimacy workshops conducted in the nude. I’m not saying it’s a sex cult, but the thought that it might be a sex cult prevented me from getting much spiritual nourishment from the experience.
[See this entertaining post by the great Erik Davis for a more positive perspective on Western Buddhism]
Murdoch doesn’t, as far as I know, mention Quakerism in her philosophy, but Peter Conradi notes in her biography that there were many Quakers in her extended family and Quaker characters are well represented in her fiction. I also came across an article referring to her as a Quakerish novelist.
If this makes me sound like a younger, sexier David Brooks, then so be it. There are worse alternatives, as I hope to discuss in a future post.
The contrarian in me wants to remonstrate with Dame Iris that if the transcendent reality really is "alien" then we cannot be so sure what it imposes on us is anything we would recognize as morality. But this is the side of me that produces the hideousness of Portraits and Ashes!
I only know of Quakerism as refracted through American writers like Whitman and Melville, but this jogged a memory of the other horrifying book I wrote in 2013, not P&A but my doctoral dissertation, in one paragraph of which I found myself arguing for the Quakerism of Virginia Woolf. (I had come across a pair of essays to this effect.) I quote a lightly edited paragraph of my grad-student prose—I'm sorry if your completism doesn't extend so far!—only because it makes Woolf and her own bourgeois mysticism sound a bit like what Murdoch is going for:
"Jane Marcus provocatively and famously compares Woolf to Lenin and Trotsky, but on the evidence of her metaphysical speculations, Woolf cannot simply be arrogated to the tradition of materialist critique. The ideals animating her radical politics do not, by her account, arrive to her from within the social. Marcus is on surer ground when, later in her essay, she notes that Woolf was influenced by her aunt, the Quaker theologian Caroline Emelia Stephen. According to Alison M. Lewis, Woolf possessed copies of Stephen’s work in her private library and wrote of her admiringly, 'All her life she has been listening to inner voices, and talking with spirits' (qtd. in Lewis n. pag.). For Lewis, Woolf’s privileged 'moments of being,' depicted in the epiphanic movements of affect beyond the self that Mrs. Dalloway’s Londoners undergo, are akin to the mysticism promoted by Stephen’s theology of the inner light that is part and parcel of God: 'These moments of revelation show a mystical unity to the greater whole, which brings us to the closest thing that Virginia Woolf may have had to a creed' (Lewis n. pag.). This 'mystical unity' is the force underlying the social unity Woolf’s fiction prophesies, where divisions of class, gender, and empire may be superseded in the supra-rational apprehension that 'the whole world is a work of art' (qtd. in Lewis; Moments of Being 72). [...] Thus, the itinerary for novelistic practice charted in 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' here finds its telos: the movement of affect in the presence of others—what an earlier literary tradition valorized as sentiment—produces sensations that lead individual subjects outside themselves to a communion with all life, an experience, however rare, that streams back into concrete social reality to produce heretofore- unexpected affinities, like Clarissa’s for Septimus, or Elizabeth’s for the workers of the Strand, or Septimus’s for the very trees. Aestheticism’s license of the novel to turn inward permits a doubling back from the psyche toward the social that could not be accomplished by the extrinsic and all-too-rational social criticism of the novel as Woolf found it at the beginning of her career."
I was going to say that we, too, have that line in our A&Q, and that it’s a good one. When I come to look it up, however, I see that the first word is different: “Do what love requires of you, which may not be the same as great busyness.” Now I am musing on the ramifications of the word “attend,” so important to Iris Murdoch by way of her respect for Simone Weil, who claimed that only attention could be required of a person, and not belief, since the intellect is free.
“Attend to what love requires of you” becomes a subtly different statement, in that light. Not, I think, a better or worse one, but one that draws out a slightly different set of considerations. Useful to think on.
In any case, I will admit to being pleased to hear that you attended a Quaker meeting. One of the more opinionated old ladies in my worship group is very clear that “we don’t evangelise,” but I will admit to a deep hope that Quakerism continues to exist for those who need it, and mentioning it in my writing is one way to get the word out. Whether you continue attending, or just take these reflections from the experience you had, it’s nice to think that my writing might be one influence among many that helps to keep Quakerism alive for people as an option.