What is spirituality?
A response to Sam Kahn
I left a comment on Sam Kahn’s post on The Tragic View Life v. Spirituality, challenging this dichotomy and suggesting that some sort of “ironic spirituality” is indeed compatible with a recognition of the absurdity of existence. On reflection, this is a infelicitous term, conjuring up images of Catholic regalia at the Met Gala. Perhaps “agnostic spirituality” is a more apt description of what I was trying to get at.
What Sam describes as spirituality (“a sense that there is an intelligence [note the singular] guiding us just as it guides the entirety of the universe”) can, I think, more accurately be termed “monotheism”. I don’t think it’s simply a matter of semantics. I’d suggest that it is useful to think of spirituality not as a set of concrete metaphysical beliefs, but as a sense (however inchoate) that there is something to existence that goes beyond the merely material.
We don’t have to reach up to Heaven to get this sense — our own subjectivity is as good a starting point as any. Contra Hume and the Buddhists, Mary Midgley reminds us that the self is not an illusion: just because scientists are unable to observe the self under the microscope does not invalidate one’s feeling of oneself as a self.
This simple recognition takes us halfway to spirituality (to go no further is to embrace solipsism). The next step is the recognition of the existence of other selves, as Weil put it, ‘not only with our intelligence, but also in the imaginative part of the soul’.
For everything that lives is holy.1
We all have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that the world we inhabit is full of awe and wonder and joy and grief and love and heartbreak and hope and fear and tenderness and cruelty and humour and horror. This process of reconciliation (or to put it in Jungian terms, integration) is at the core of “spirituality”. It can also be described as the ultimate aim of art. I don’t think the overlap is coincidental.
I recently had the privilege of seeing the yet-to-be-completed La Sagrada Familia from the outside.2 The spiritual inspiration behind Gaudi’s artistic vision struck me as undeniable — an attempt to reconcile the natural world with the Christian message of Faith, Hope and Charity — even though my neopagan heart felt more at peace in the little oasis of the Plaça de Gaudi opposite the sacred monument.
Can beauty save the world? Solzhenitsyn defended Dosteovesky’s enigmatic statement in his Nobel lecture:
So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through – then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?
Weil put it even more forcefully in Forms of the Implicit Love of God:
Today, one could believe that the white race has nearly lost its sensitivity to the beauty of the world and that it took upon itself the task of making it disappear in every continent where they took their armies, their commerce and their religion. As Christ said to the Pharisees: “Woe to you, you have removed the key of knowledge, you have not entered and you have not allowed others to enter.”
Yet, in our epoch, in the nations of the white race, the beauty of the world is nearly the only way we can allow God to penetrate us. For we are even further removed from the other two ways. True love and respect for religious practice is rare, even in those who are diligent, and is almost never found in the rest. Most cannot even conceive of the possibility. Concerning the supernatural use of affliction, compassion and gratitude, are not only rare, but have become almost unintelligible today for nearly everyone. The very idea has nearly disappeared; the significance of the words has become debased.
Instead of a sense of beauty, something mutilated, deformed and irreducibly defiled resides in the human heart as a powerful motivation. It is present in all the preoccupations of secular life. If it were made authentic and pure, it would transport the whole of secular life to the feet of God and would make the total incarnation of the faith possible.
Sam admits that the strident atheism of the existentialists have fallen out of favour, but wonders whether there is a future for New Age spirituality when so much of it “collapses into platitudes, if not charlatanism”. I think it is a mistake to focus too much on the veracity of any specific New Age belief, just as debates around transubstantiation have little to do with the essence of Christianity.
In her seminal essay Existentialists and Mystics, Murdoch contrasts two kinds of responses to the death of God:
The existentialist response is the first, an immediate expression of a consciousness without God. It is the heir of 19th century Luciferian pride in the individual and in the achievements of science. It is, or tries to be, cheerfully godless. Even its famous gloom is a mode of satisfaction. From this point of view, man is God. The mystical attitude is a second response, a second thought about the matter, and reflects the uneasy suspicion that perhaps, after all, man is not God. One might connect this with our gradually changing consciousness of science. Science today is more likely to make us anxious than to make us proud, not only because we are now able to blow up our planet, but because, oddly enough, space travel does not make us feel like gods. It makes us feel rather parochial and frightened.
Nature abhors a vacuum. The human imagination has not stopped populating this vast empty space with gods. An important aspect of what some have called “the new romanticism” is a reactionary form of spirituality: both literally (see the Orthodox Christian convert Paul Kingsnorth’s rage against the Machine) and more literary (John Pistelli cites Tao Lin and Ottessa Moshfegh as examples in this conversation with Daniel Oppenheimer and Ross Barkan).
Ash del Greco, the iconic hero(ine) of John’s own romantic realist novel Major Arcana, saw to the end of everything and “at the end of everything she had found absolutely nothing”. But that is not the end of the story. Perhaps the single most important lesson that I’ve learned from John is viewing literature itself as a more-or-less esoteric tradition from which we can draw not only emotional and intellectual but also spiritual sustenance.3
Life is tragic, yes. But it isn’t only tragic. Thank God for the mystics and artists who continue to remind us of this.
Taking inspiration from another Blake, here is some awful gay poetry to drive home the point (Footnote to Howl by Allen Ginsberg):
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel! The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy! The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy! Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels! Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas! Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums! Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets! Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles! Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul! Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch! Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss! Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!
In the spirit of be here now, my travel companions and I did not book a ticket in advance and were therefore unable to see the inside.
The fact that John continues to generously link to my review even after his breakout success is a testament to the magnanimity of his public persona, whether or not he is willing to call himself Christian.
Very smart and very interesting Mary Jane. I really appreciate the exchange and agree that the dichotomy I'm proposing may well be too narrow. Nice post.
Thanks, this is great! Occultist comics writer Alan Moore (one of the distant models for Simon Magnus) has a good anecdote from one of his magical workings that stresses the importance of the "ironic" in spirituality and echoes Murdoch on pride. (The context of his anecdote is a public correspondence in the '90s—including much discussion of William Blake, Kabbalah, etc.—with a self-published Canadian cartoonist later famed as a men's rights type misogynist pundit, but that's another story...) One reason I prefer literature as my esoteric tradition is because its creators seem likelier to understand the following than many prophets, preachers, gurus, etc., whether monotheist, secular, or spiritual:
"In Tiphareth [the sphere of Kabbalah where Moore locates Blake] the virtue is "Dedication to the Great Work," which would take too long to explain, and the vice is "pride."
"My probably imperfect understanding of what is meant by pride in this context came during a magical exploration of the sixth sphere, undertaken as usual with one of my similarly minded associates, in this instance a musician. At one point during the event, I got carried away with a self-serving monologue on how special and wonderful creative people were, completely opiated by my own marvellousness. At this point, my glazed and trancing companion spoke for the first time in twenty minutes, making a single, gnomic utterance: "A gold pig."
"As soon as he'd said it he looked puzzled, told me that the phrase had just popped into his head, and advised me to ignore it as meaningless, which of course I was unable to do. It struck me, at the time, as a perfect image of the pride of artists: a gold pig. Flashy, brilliant. and valuable, but also vaguely squalid, absurd. and tasteless. It seemed to me that creators should not confuse themselves with whatever light comes through them. At best, they can take comfort in the clarity and lucidity of the window that their work lets the light into the world by. They can try not to block the light with their own shadow, they can try to widen their window or aperture, and they can take satisfaction in their success at this. But they are not the light."
https://momentofcerebus.blogspot.com/2015/09/correspondence-from-hell-part-2.html