By: Simon Brooke :: 14 June 2023
I don't write about religion.
I don't write about religion because I believe profoundly that one should not write about religion.
So let's talk about words, instead.
'Gnosis' is from a root which literally means knowledge. Knowledge of what?
A claim to gnosis — to be gnostic — is a claim to have knowledge, through direct experience... of what?
Yes, this essay is occasioned by listening to Manda Scott's Accidental Gods podcast. I urge you strongly, if you do not listen to Accidental Gods, listen to Accidental Gods. Week after week it challenges my thinking. Let it challenge yours, too.
'Divine' is from a root which means godlike; and the ability to perceive what is godlike implies gnosis: it implies knowledge that such a concept as 'god' exists.
'Numinous' is similar in root to 'divine', but has been used as a term of art to mean something closer to 'mysterious, unknowable'. It seems to me that, now, in the modern context, to talk of 'the divine' is to say that it pertains to a god, and thus admits the possibility of a god, and to the possibility of the knowledge of a god; to talk of 'the numinous' is to say that it pertains to something that cannot be known.
That there is something that these words map on to, a referent for them, is something that I perceive; and it's something that I observe that others perceive. My belief is that it is a single something that all of us, like the blind men who sought to describe the elephant, commonly perceive.
The root of 'blasphemy' is something like 'hurtful utterance', but it is commonly understand to mean 'something said against [the speaker's] god'; I'd like to use it in a different way, a way slightly closer to its original meaning: as something which it is harmful to say — or, indeed, even to think.
So that is 'knowledge'? The sense of 'knowledge' I wish to use here is 'justified true belief'.
I'm going to take the meaning of 'belief' as self evident, as being well understood, as being consensual; not because I'm certain that it is any of those things, but that trying to unpick 'belief' into simpler, more primitive building blocks leaves us in a very uncharted ocean. To believe that it is possible to communicate with other beings, one must first believe that there are some landmarks that are held in common between the self and the other. One must believe that the concept 'other' has a referent. And one must believe that some basic words are understood consensually. For the purposes of this essay, I'm going to treat 'belief' as one of these.
So, again, I'm going to rule out solipsism as uninteresting; not because I have, or can have, evidence that it is false, but because a world in which solipsism is true is an uninteresting world. I reject it, then, on purely aesthetic grounds. I do not know — and cannot know — whether a world external to myself, containing others, exists, but I choose to believe that. I choose to believe the bird singing in the tree outside my window is real, is another, is part of the world. In doing so, I'm choosing to believe that concepts like 'real,' and 'referent,' and 'world' have meaning.
And again, I'm going to treat those words as axiomatic: I'm simply going to assume, to believe, that you understand what I mean by them. Not because I see any of them as unproblematic, but because seeking to explain them simply leads into a dark maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I treat 'justified,' of a belief, to mean that the holder of the belief can produce a rational argument from credible and ideally consensual axioms which, at least probably, support that belief; I treat 'true,' of a belief, to mean that that belief maps on to a referent in the real world.
I was brought up a Quaker, because my mother converted to Quakerism in my childhood, having previously been a high church Anglican. Quakerism has greatly influenced my thought, has given me a large part of my vocabulary to think about those things about which it is impossible to think.
Quakerism is at root a gnostic faith. It holds that the individual's direct personal experience of... something... trumps what is written in dusty books. Of course, Quakerism has, over the years, created its own dusty tome: what used to be entitled, in my childhood, 'Christian Faith and Practice', and is now, somewhat more modestly, 'Quaker Faith and Practice.' The current revision opens thusly:
Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of God whose Light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life.
Bring the whole of your life under the ordering of the spirit of Christ. Are you open to the healing power of God’s love? Cherish that of God within you, so that this love may grow in you and guide you. Let your worship and your daily life enrich each other. Treasure your experience of God, however it comes to you. Remember that Christianity is not a notion but a way.
Do you try to set aside times of quiet for openness to the Holy Spirit? All of us need to find a way into silence which allows us to deepen our awareness of the divine and to find the inward source of our strength. Seek to know an inward stillness, even amid the activities of daily life. Do you encourage in yourself and in others a habit of dependence on God’s guidance for each day? Hold yourself and others in the Light, knowing that all are cherished by God.
Emphasis mine.
There's a tension here: take heed of the promptings of love and truth in your heart, yes, but only if you take them as being the leadings of something called 'God', and, having taken heed of them, then bring your life under the orderings of something else called 'Christ'.
I was brought up a Quaker; I resigned from the Society of Friends in my late thirties over the Bosnian war. Not because I thought we should fight in Bosnia, I was still, at that time, a very convinced absolute pacifist, but because I believed that we should do more, non-violently, to resist the war and to bring succour to its victims. I resigned, but I felt that rather than me leaving the Society of Friends, the Society of Friends had left me, retreating from being a radical force in the world to being a comfortable middle class Sunday morning coffee club.
I was brought up a Quaker, because my mother was one, and took me with her to meetings. But my father was always strongly and determinedly agnostic, and as I grow older I find myself more and more following in his footsteps.
My mother was a Quaker, but she believed in judgement; she believed in an afterlife, and she believed — she feared — that in that afterlife she would be judged, and judged harshly. In her last months she converted to Catholicism, because in Catholicism she could confess her sins, and be absolved. But still, she faced death, and the threat of judgement, with great fear, and her last weeks were a period of great distress for her.
I've no idea what she perceived her sins to be; the worst I know of her is that she had an affair with my father, then a married man, that led him to divorce his previous wife. But, and of this I am certain, she was far from being the first (or the last) woman with whom my father had been unfaithful.
Our superpower, as human beings, is to see patterns. We're so good at it, we see patterns even where none exists. And we have strong confirmation bias: we find it much easier to assimilate new information which seems to confirm our existing beliefs than that seems to undermine them. We also have a strong tendency to believe in agency: if something happens, we've a strong belief that there is a reason that it happened; and 'random chance' or 'quantum effects' are not reasons we easily accept.
I listen in the silence for the voice of God, and hear a bird, singing.
If we go looking for a god, it is pretty certain that we will find evidence of that god.
I have a very close friend who is an extremely sincere Sikh; I have many friends who are Buddhists; I (still) have many friends who are Quakers — some, indeed, whom I personally converted to Quakerism; I have friends who are several different denominations of Christians, including Presbyterians and Catholics. I have many friends who are pagans of different kinds, including one with a very sincere commitment to the Mór-Ríoghain, which, yes, is something which, from experience, I walk warily around.
Of course, the fact that our inbuilt cognitive biases make it very easy for us to discern gods is not in itself evidence that no god exists. I'd go further: the claim that no god exists, to atheism, is much a claim to gnosis as the claim that any particular god exists.
I know of nothing which entitles me to criticise anyone else's attempt to discern, to approach, to find language to talk about, the... something. The mysteries. The unknowable. The numinous, for want of a better word.
Note, too, that I would not describe anyone's commitment to a particular religious practice as evidence of gnosis. Many people sincerely believe in certain creeds while acknowledging the imperfection of their own understanding: they believe it possible that they may be mistaken. Nothing I write here should be taken as criticism of any such people.
So, what is a 'god'? 'God,' if the word means anything at all, is an actor. Something with agency, and will. Something with consciousness. Something, in fact, made in our own image: we have taken our own image, and projected it onto the unknowable; and that reification, that enpersonation of the unknowable has become a powerful mechanism of hegemony.
If god has agency, has will, it must be possible for someone with perfect gnosis to discern that will, to come down like Moses from the mountain with tablets of stone.
We all of us, I think, inevitably try to understand the unknowable; it gnaws at the edge of our consciousness. I think that different people probably have more or less confidence in their interpretation. I think that, probably, some people are sincerely very confident in the truth of their understanding.
Some people find some ideas about what the will of their particular imagined god might be to be powerful tools with which to manipulate the less confident. Are these people also sincere in their beliefs? They may be. I cannot prove that they are not. I cannot prove that they are cynics, or charlatans, or hypocrites. They may honestly and sincerely be reporting their own interpretation of their own experience of that something with which we all struggle, and their experience, their interpretation, is as valid as mine.
And yet there is one acid test.
As the carpenter from Nazareth said, "by their fruits shall ye know them".
Things which result in harm are harmful things.
Things which result in harm when said are harmful to say. That is to say, it is something which is blasphemous.
So what things are harmful to say?
I believe that any strong claim to gnosis is harmful to make: to say 'my god is the one true god, therefore your beliefs (to the degree that they differ from mine) are false' is necessarily a blasphemy, a sin. No matter on behalf of which god, of which creed, it is made.
But more broadly, that any claim to sure knowledge about the nature of that... something... that we are for convenience calling the numinous, is also, by the same definition and by the same reason a blasphemy. Is also a sin.
These are the claims which enable pogroms, which justify crusades, which justify hatred or persecution or othering of particular faith communities, or, in the extreme, hatred or persecution or othering of anyone who is not a member of some particular faith community. These things are harmful. Therefore, the claims are harmful. Therefore they are blasphemies. Sins.
By their fruits shall ye know them.
And I'm perfectly aware that the claim that the numinous is something about which it is harmful to have strong claims to knowledge is, in itself, a strong claim about the nature of the numinous.
To say, then, that this is true, to say I have certain knowledge of this, would be a blasphemy; a meta-blasphemy.
Nevertheless, I urge you to think on it.
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