What do those who call themselves secularists seek thereby to reject or rule out? What should they reject?
And those who retain some ‘loyalty’ or 'allegiance' to religion ... what do they want thereby to hold on to? And what should they hold on to? And the proper measure for either decision?
It is well known that there is no straightforward symmetry between what the one party rejects and the other holds on to and that some of those who are sympathetic to religion share the secularists’ rejection at least of particular theologies, dualisms, supernaturalisms (which some secularists take to be the thing itself)—and have for that reason been criticised by more full-blooded religionists as really secular humanists with a nostalgia for traditional religious language.
But this is a nostalgia that is worthy of further exploration since it concerns what we conceive as properly to be abandoned and what we are in danger of losing. If the ‘apparent world’ goes out of the window with the ‘real world’, as Nietzsche might have said, so that we are left ‘merely’ with the ‘natural world'—well, what counts as the ‘natural world’?—and in what ways might our conception of nature be enriched or impoverished, and by what measure do we form these judgments?
I shall try (in the first person because we are talking about the forms of our own subjectivity here) to reflect on this difficult conceptual terrain between what we call the secular and what we call the religious, with a view to elaborating an idea of transcendence or spirituality that at least accords with some notion of naturalism. I shall try to do this through an attempt to test the adequacy of particular conceptions of the moral life against the language of its interior conditions which is embedded in some of what we would call religious language .... I think I have in mind the sort of difference everybody notices between Plato and Augustine. Plato is profound, of course, but it is only in Augustine that you get the sense of inner struggle which is inseparable from the winning of wisdom. Religious language, or at least some of it, at least embeds such ideas as that he who would find his life must lose it, or that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it will not bear fruit. Death and transfiguration ... a language of inner experience forged by those who know that this is what the territory looks like ... know or seem to know ... and this is where the trust in the teacher becomes important: you trust their knowledge but they may let you down, and if they do ...
And those who retain some ‘loyalty’ or 'allegiance' to religion ... what do they want thereby to hold on to? And what should they hold on to? And the proper measure for either decision?
It is well known that there is no straightforward symmetry between what the one party rejects and the other holds on to and that some of those who are sympathetic to religion share the secularists’ rejection at least of particular theologies, dualisms, supernaturalisms (which some secularists take to be the thing itself)—and have for that reason been criticised by more full-blooded religionists as really secular humanists with a nostalgia for traditional religious language.
But this is a nostalgia that is worthy of further exploration since it concerns what we conceive as properly to be abandoned and what we are in danger of losing. If the ‘apparent world’ goes out of the window with the ‘real world’, as Nietzsche might have said, so that we are left ‘merely’ with the ‘natural world'—well, what counts as the ‘natural world’?—and in what ways might our conception of nature be enriched or impoverished, and by what measure do we form these judgments?
I shall try (in the first person because we are talking about the forms of our own subjectivity here) to reflect on this difficult conceptual terrain between what we call the secular and what we call the religious, with a view to elaborating an idea of transcendence or spirituality that at least accords with some notion of naturalism. I shall try to do this through an attempt to test the adequacy of particular conceptions of the moral life against the language of its interior conditions which is embedded in some of what we would call religious language .... I think I have in mind the sort of difference everybody notices between Plato and Augustine. Plato is profound, of course, but it is only in Augustine that you get the sense of inner struggle which is inseparable from the winning of wisdom. Religious language, or at least some of it, at least embeds such ideas as that he who would find his life must lose it, or that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it will not bear fruit. Death and transfiguration ... a language of inner experience forged by those who know that this is what the territory looks like ... know or seem to know ... and this is where the trust in the teacher becomes important: you trust their knowledge but they may let you down, and if they do ...
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