From: Richard Ridge (richard_ridge@tao-group.com)
Date: Tue Jan 08 2002 - 03:48:31 MST
> To quote the headline of a fine article in the Guardian last week by
> the Reverend Don Cupitt: 'We need to make a clean break with
> heritage religion and create something better suited to our own
> time.'
Don Cupitt
Guardian
Thursday December 27, 2001
Twenty-odd years ago, it was Tolkien and CS Lewis's Narnia stories that one
read to the children. I got through both cycles, complete, twice. Today it
is Harry Potter and Philip Pullman: but the older books are far from dead,
and the Tolkien film is now out.
I've been attending carol services and noting as usual that dons who
wouldn't dream of taking any of it seriously themselves are nevertheless
quite determined that their children shall have been exposed to it. Indeed,
they very often want to send their children to church schools.
Why is it that people continue to feel such intense nostalgia and longing
for the old magico-religious view of the world? Even Philip Pullman, who
puts a death-of-God spin on the old myths and whose better world is not the
kingdom of heaven but the republic of heaven, invokes all the old
supernatural apparatus even as he is trying to show us that we are going to
have to learn to live without it.
This is crazy. The old sacred and pre-scientific universe passed away long
ago. It was given up by degrees, very slowly and reluctantly, between about
1500 and 1900, Erasmus to Nietzsche. Today it is irrecoverable, and nobody
seriously thinks of returning to the view that earthquakes are acts of God,
that sickness is a divine visitation, or that a human being may wield
supernatural powers.
Since about 1880 the old world-view has been finally dead. But still we
cling to it - in fact, more determinedly than ever. The carol service, a
classic example of popular supernaturalism, may pretend to be medieval but
it dates in fact from 1918 - after the birth of modern physics! It is as
young as fundamentalism, which it resembles in its rejection of biblical
criticism and its passionate affirmation of the old enchanted world.
Part of the blame for our present religion of nostalgia-for-religion must
lie with the Romantics. They created a culture and a literature of childhood
that sees the child as recapitulating in its development the spiritual
history of the entire race. Accordingly we still think of the youngest
children as living in the mental world of the childhood of the human race,
and give them an environment in which the lives of humans and animals are
interwoven, and animals can speak. The primary-school child is still given a
medieval Christian world-view, and only in the secondary school is the child
finally inducted into the truth of our modern, secular science-based world.
This educational development has taught us all to associate religion with
the lost paradise of childhood - like Christopher Robin leaving his wood, we
look very regretfully back at it as the day comes to grow up and leave it
behind.
If, like me, you are a member of the clergy, you will have met some of the
incongruities that result: harvest festival in an inner-city church, for
example, with people setting out in the church tinned foods that they have
purchased in the local shops. More generally, the clergy spend most of their
energies in staging re-enactments of the old sacred world-view, and devote
their sermons to explaining its symbolism and commending it. In fact, we are
so busy trying to market our heritage-religion that nobody has time to think
what kind of religion we'd come up with if we threw out all the nostalgia
and the sentimentality, and tried to keep strictly within the parameters of
today's world.
[Nobody? :-) -RR]
In their own way, Christians resemble the Jews in that the past weighs too
heavily upon us. Our souls are poisoned by too much hopeless yearning,
regret, grief, victimhood, loss. We have the feeling that the modern world,
as Blumenberg put it, lacks legitimacy. We are exiles in a strange land.
Somehow, at the beginning of modernity, we walked out of the sacred world
and into the fallenness of modern history, and now we can't find our way
home again.
It's time to throw off the nostalgia and the illusions, and make a fresh
start. Fantasies of wielding supernatural power are not of much help to
children, and the belief that unseen powers will look after us and make sure
that nothing very bad ever happens to us doesn't do adults much good,
either. If we could see the old pre-scientific culture more clearly we
wouldn't really want to go back to it. If we weren't so weighed down by
false nostalgia, we might be able to create something very much better, and
more suited to our own time. The very fact that we call literature about the
old supernatural world's continuing imaginative hold over us "fantasy" is
surely a warning that we need to make a clean break with it, for our own
good.
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