Abstract
In this paper, I explain the thought of Don Cupitt as a response to the crisis in traditional religions in the secularised, globalised, scientific worldview and freedom-loving morality of our world today. Intellectually, the forms of traditional religious worldview are no longer viable contributors to our view of the world and have to be eschewed. Further, the increasing marginalisation of institutional religion in the West and the dual cultural influences of globalisation and secularisation render traditional religion culturally insignificant and its decline all across the globe heralds its eventual disappearance. In contrast to this, Cupitt considers the religious (and philosophical) impulse in human beings to be deep and strong and, in any case, worth protecting and ‘updating’ in a form of a religious posture towards the world that can be appealing and defensible to people in conditions of post-modernity, globalisation and secularisation. Cupitt defends a version of the ‘great questions of life’ regarding meaning and grounds for hope in suffering, pointlessness and death as a basis for a “new religion of everyday life”. In particular, I situate the place of mysticism in this sensibility that he advocates. I explain the main lineaments of “the new religion of the everyday”, as an alternative to Interfaith dialogue and New Religious Movements; and I explore its relationship to Buddhism.
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Notes
- 1.
For a brief though helpful and insightful account of this debate and Cupitt’s impact on British theology, see Pickstock, C. “Theology and Postmodernity: An Exploration of the Origins of a New Alliance,” in Hyman, G. (ed.) New Directions in Philosophical Theology (Abingdon, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), chapter 4, section I.
- 2.
See, for example, Astely, J. “Religious Non-realism and Spiritual Truth” in Hyman, G. (ed.) New Directions in Philosophical Theology (Abingdon, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), chapter 1.
- 3.
“The Human Condition: Diagnosis and Therapy” in Cupitt, D., Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002) essay 6.
- 4.
This in itself is important at a time when theologians explore the possibilities of dual-belonging and when other Western religious philosophical writers confess allegiance to Buddhism, though often in ways importantly different to Cupitt’s, for example Paul Knitter in Knitter, P. & Haight, R., Jesus & Buddha: Friends in Conversation (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 2015); Michael McGhee, Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as a Spiritual Practice (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 2000); and Spirituality for the Godless: Buddhism, Humanism and Religion (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2021).
- 5.
Don Cupitt, Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), xv.
- 6.
A designation also found in Cowdell’s reading of this book: see Scott Cowdell, Atheist Priest? Don Cupitt and Christianity (London: SCM Press, 1988), 18.
- 7.
Though Cupitt describes himself as a “left Kierkegaardian”: Is Nothing Sacred?, xviii.
- 8.
Don Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity (Blackwell: Oxford, 1998) chapters 1 and 2.
- 9.
Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, chapter 2, pp. 41–45; chapter 4.
- 10.
Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, chapters 3 and 6.
- 11.
Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, pp. 125–131.
- 12.
Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, pp. 111–114.
- 13.
Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, pp. 142–143:
That the words ‘God,’ ‘All,’ and “Nothing” are more or less interchangeable has often been noticed by religious writers. An excellent example of a thoroughly ‘non-cognitive’ or ‘non-realist’ mystical writer is the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a small English treatise of the fourteenth century. He is entirely serious about the title. He really means his Negative Theology. God is loved, not known. ‘The highest and next way to heaven is run by desires and not by paces of feet’ (chapter 60). As for the object of religious aspiration, it is nowhere and nought (68). It makes us nowhere and nought, too, indeed: our wits cannot reason about it—but that only makes us love it all the more. God’s emptiness has the effect of purifying and intensifying religious feeling to the highest degree. That is to say, for the author of the Cloud, the very fact that God isn’t out-there and doesn’t literally exist is necessary if we are to learn a truly religious, non-objective, solar, disinterested and divine sort of love.
But if a God who isn’t really there has taught that kind of love for the first time, it is as if our soul has been blinded by the intensity of our feeling, blinded ‘for abundance of ghostly light’ and we may then call the religious object All.
Thus the words ‘God,’ ‘Nothing,’ and ‘All’ are equivalent and the Cloud author does indeed present a non-cognitive and purely e-motive view of religion ….
… for the negative theologian, realism must involve a form of ‘idolatry’—idolatry meaning the fixation of religious feeling upon an object, this and not-that. Genuine faith is not fixated at all ….
- 14.
See Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, chapter 9.
- 15.
Cupitt’s account of religious language that satisfies these constraints is his theory of the Abstract Sacred. Though it would be a digression, this element of Cupitt’s philosophy of religion is important. It takes its lead from certain aspects of the religious art practice of van Gogh in pieces like Agony in the Garden (1889) from which van Gogh omitted all the human figures, depicting the suffering in the contortions of the olive trees; Raising of Lazarus (1890) from which he omits Christ, and 1885’s The Potato Eaters painted as a rendition of the resurrection story of the supper in Emmaus from Luke’s Gospel; and finally, Still Life with Open Bible in 1885, which depicts Zola’s gritty secular novel Joie de Vivre as the modern counterpart of the messianic passage of Isaiah 53. Cupitt explains:
Van Gogh was saying then that, paradoxically, if a modern work of art is to be authentically religious today, it cannot be religious in the old sense. It must look secular. The agony of the olive trees, the peasant meal, and the afflicted woman of the drawing Sorrow must be enough for us. And this is what I mean by the Abstract Sacred. After the Enlightenment, we found that the very moves by which we had made the old religious iconographies intelligible to ourselves also made it impossible for us to continue them as religious. (“Is Anything Sacred?” essay 5 in Is Nothing Sacred?, 72)
That is, it is what is not there that interprets what is there: the old iconographies do not communicate religiously to us. So, to be authentically religious today, we cannot be nostalgic for the past—believers in heritage religion—or utter historicists locking religion into the past with no grip on the present. Rather, the notion of the abstract sacred learns the lessons of expressivism and the negative way, empties out subjectivism and romantic nostalgia and historicist urbane condescension towards the past, and instead communicates spiritual values authentically for us.
- 16.
Don Cupitt, The Great Questions of Life (Farmington MN: Polebridge Press, 2005), chapter 7.
- 17.
In A New Great Story (Farmington MN: Polebridge Press, 2011) he argues that religious ideas have historically made us what we are, humans-in-a-world because we are homines religiosi. The account in this book is incomplete, however, as an argument for sustaining religiousness without motivation such as that in the text.
- 18.
See The New Religion Of Life in Everyday Speech, The Meaning Of It All In Everyday Speech, both of 1999, and Kingdom Come in Everyday Speech and Philosophy’s Own Religion both of 2000.
- 19.
See especially Don Cupitt, The Religion of Being (London: SCM Press, 1998); The Revelation of Being (London: SCM Press, 1998); and Philosophy’s Own Religion (London: SCM Press, 2000).
- 20.
Don Cupitt, Emptiness and Brightness (Salem OR: Polebridge Press, 2001), 2ff and chapters 12–13.
- 21.
Cf Don Cupitt, Above us Only Sky (Santa Rosa CA: Polebridge, 2008) chapters 22 and 23.
- 22.
For example, see “Learning to Live without ‘Identity,’” in Don Cupitt, Radical Theology (Farmington MN: Polebridge Press, 2006), essay 5 (written 1997), 42.
- 23.
“The Human Condition: Diagnosis and Therapy” in Cupitt, Is Nothing Sacred? essay 6.
- 24.
www.doncupitt.com/don-cupitt, accessed August 27, 2022, section 3 last paragraph.
- 25.
Cupitt, Emptiness and Brightness, 34.
- 26.
Ibid., chapter 7.
- 27.
Ibid., 44.
- 28.
Ibid., 45.
- 29.
Ibid., 46.
- 30.
Don Cupitt, The Religion of Being (London: SCM Press, 1998), especially chapters 7 and 8.
- 31.
Cupitt, Emptiness and Brightness, 48.
- 32.
Ibid., 51.
- 33.
Don Cupitt, Creative Faith: Religion as a Way of Worldmaking (Salem OR: Polebridge Press, 2016) chapter 2 and “Is Anything Sacred?” especially pp. 66f: “In Christ the divine has completely and finally disappeared into the human, so that there no longer is and no longer needs to be any separate sacred realm … it must be dispersed into humanity at large.”
- 34.
Cupitt, Emptiness and Brightness, 53.
- 35.
Indeed, in A New Great Story, Cupitt argues that Jesus represents the highpoint in the evolution of religion in human society, bringing divinity into human life.
- 36.
See particularly the account of religious joy in Emptiness and Brightness chapters 7 and 14 et passim; and the account of happiness in Mysticism after Modernity chapter 9.
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https://www.doncupitt.com/don-cupitt, accessed August 27, 2022.
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Quilter, J.G. (2023). Cupitt’s New Religion of the Everyday in the Global Context. In: Shafiq, M., Donlin-Smith, T. (eds) Mystical Traditions. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27121-2_8
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