Dream On

Don Cupitt is an academic, a priest and an atheist. “After God,” his new book, is a wild attempt to apologize for this impossible trinity. Cupitt, who teaches divinity at Cambridge University, seems to shed intellectual skin almost seasonally. In the 1950s, he believed in the existence of a supernatural God and in Christ’s claim to be God’s unique embodiment on earth. He had been, after all, ordained in the Church of England. But then he read the later Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty and decided that nothing really exists outside language. Religion is a rather noble language game. As he italicizes in “After God”: “We made it all up. We evolved the entire syllabus.” In time, Cupitt became a post-structuralist, a “Kingdom Christian” (someone who believes that God’s kingdom is not in heaven but here on Earth) and a Christian Buddhist. He now preaches something he calls “solar living.”

In the sherry-fed, intellectually relaxed world of the Anglican Church, Cupitt is seen as a fiery thinker, and he likes to see himself this way. His writing is slick with self-satisfaction and carries its atheism as if it were a rare fruit that the ecclesiastical tradition has been too doltish to pluck. “The way the Church got God wrong,” he writes, referring to the long theological obsession with the concept of an actually existing God, “was closely related to and tied up with the way it got Christ wrong. (In both cases, something light and dialectical was turned into something heavy and lumpish).” But viewed against the great tradition of skeptical and atheistical philosophies of David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus, Cupitt, not Christ, seems “light and dialectical” and, more often, only lightweight.

Cupitt begins his argument with a hasty sketch of our theological age. Post-structuralism has triumphed, he maintains. Most of us now see that God is merely a powerful word and not a “really-existing, all-powerful Being out-there.” There is no absolute truth anymore, just the truths which we construct within our man-made language. Global capitalism has accelerated this process by reminding us that there are many cultures and many religions. Indeed, Cupitt gets quite hoarse in his praise of unfettered capitalism: “Everything nowadays is beginning to float on a free global market--not only money and prices, but also linguistic meanings, religious truths, and moral and aesthetic values.” Cupitt thinks that “if we can’t beat post-modernity, we’d better embrace it.”

Though Cupitt’s picture is sketchy and overlooks many details, and his Postmodern flag has only primary colors, most readers will recognize the world he describes. Surely, most will agree with him about the disappearance of God. Though millions, of course, still believe in the literal existence of a God who created the world, Western elites do not, calling upon the idea only rhetorically or in desperation. But Cupitt is unwilling to extend the implications of his atheism. The world was not created by God, he believes; but we should keep the “idea” of God and pray to this idea whenever we feel like it. (Cupitt confesses that he does pray to this figment at times.) Since God does not exist, Jesus was not a divinity but a Jewish Socrates, yet it would be a shame to jettison his teachings. In place of the savagery of truly disillusioned knowledge, Cupitt prefers the serenity of partial illusion. If we pretend to believe, he appears to say, things will go better for us.

Cupitt’s frail, faux theology offers three advantages, or states of being. They sound like David Hockney paintings: the “Eye of God,” the “Blissful Void” and “Solar Living.” To see ourselves “as if under the eye of God” is “to assess oneself and one’s lifeworld as from the standpoint of eternity.” In other words, it is good for us to up the metaphysical ante, to see ourselves in the highest terms. In the Blissful Void, we enjoy the self-cancellation and self-enlargement that the great mystics experience; contemplation even of the idea of God crumbles the petty ego. Solar Living, as far as Cupitt is comprehensible here, is the duty to burn with a hard, gem-like flame; to live as passionate vehicles of life’s eternal transience. It is how one might live like D. H. Lawrence in a nice university town. Cupitt often sounds like the Lawrence of his apocalyptic writings--incoherent, eager, pagan, preachy.

The difficulty of reconstructive humanisms like Cupitt’s is that they have no power of command as religion does, because they can have no believers. Christ tells us that we must believe in him or we are lost. Clearly, much flows from a belief that we were created by an “actually-existing” God. By contrast, we can take or leave Cupitt’s theology. His suggestions are scribbled, as it were, on an internal memo, and all he offers us is rapid promotion. Cupitt knows this and labors to sell this new job to us. To be in the three states that he offers is to expand one’s self: “I am saying only that it is a valuable and interesting form of consciousness, worth preserving and cultivating. It is only an option--but it is a good one.” By retaining the pretense that God exists, we gain “a new and much needed way of getting our life into perspective.” But much needed by whom? We have only Cupitt’s assurance.

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And why not push ahead into the purifying fire of Postmodernism and live without the pretense of religion? To this, Cupitt has no answer. His book dribbles away into the kind of policy language, pompously optimistic, that we know from politicians. Postmodernism has left us “highly disoriented, free-floating,” and “we may find it helpful to keep up some of our old and habitual religious practices and attitudes.” Mock Christianity is “valuably consciousness-raising and morally stabilizing, and one may usefully continue to pray to God.” “Helpful,” “valuably,” “usefully”--these are just puffs from Cupitt’s pipe dream. It is Cupitt who has decided the value of his new religion. And this late-minute promotion of Christianity sits oddly with the sarcasm he pours on the tradition throughout the rest of his book.

The shallowness of Cupitt’s atheism produces the shallowness of his solution to atheism. He never questions, for example, whether the model of self offered by Christ--self-abnegation, charity before anger, passivity before action, caring naught for the morrow--is either desirable or livable. Nietzsche felt it was not desirable, and Soren Kierkegaard lamented that it was not livable. Tellingly, Cupitt misreads these two thinkers, spinning them instead on the flywheel of his frictionless Postmodernism. He manages to make both of them sound like 19th century Don Cupitts, sowing the first seeds of his own more vulgar skepticism. He praises Nietzsche for dismantling the idea of God but laments that Nietzsche also wanted to dismantle the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Nietzsche, he charges, “is not willing to recognize that religion has been a powerful tool of self-development by enlarging the scope of consciousness, intensifying it and purifying it. . . . This is a limitation, because within the old religions, now fast slipping away from us, there are (or were) a number of valuable and interesting experiments in self-hood. . . . “

Of course, Nietzsche was not willing to recognize how valuable religion has been: He assaults precisely the “experiment in self-hood” that Christ commanded. He saw it as a disgusting, shriveled, self-punishing sacrifice of the self. And in Kierkegaard’s life, we have the evidence for Nietzsche’s animus, an intellectually productive existence to be sure, but a life of morbid masochism and narrow obsession. Kierkegaard questioned whether anyone could ever be a Christian, as Christ requested in the sermon on the Mount: “Be ye therefore perfect as your God is perfect in heaven.” He knew that he was himself no advertisement for Christianity. One must be “quite literally a lunatic,” Kierkegaard wrote in his journals, to become a Christian. Yet at no time does Cupitt wonder what kind of self might emerge from the experiments he proposes. Nor does he wonder if the Christian “purification” of the self hasn’t been a good thing but a dark torment in history.

Although skepticism cannot command us to do anything, the great atheists and agnostics surround their proposals with a certain desperation; they proceed as if they still have the power of command. The implications of their findings terrify them. What would it be like, asks Albert Camus, to live “without appeal?” Why not immediately commit suicide? These writers want to know--to know what it is to live without God, without metaphysical hydraulics, without foundations. They are in a revolt against the terms of life, this accidental prison sentence handed down to us by a deity who does not exist.

But Cupitt’s atheism has none of this desperation and, hence, no power of command or even suasion. He seems happy enough to see the world as a chemical accident without any sense that, for millions of people, it is an unpleasant accident. (In a book devoted to the abolition of God, he does not discuss the agony that is a central fount of atheism, the problem of evil and suffering in the world.) He has no obvious urge to discover the terms of existence because we know already that God is merely “a master-word.” He has no apparent need to fight the accident of life, because the view from Cambridge is rosy: “I prefer to be without identity. I’d like to belong to no ethnic group and to have no Other.” Instead, he caricatures the way in which God has been abolished in our age, as if the process were some kind of inevitable cooperation between the relativist philosopher Richard Rorty and Microsoft. His atheism is without depth because it will not see the consequences of its actual depth; and, correspondingly, his new religion is without depth because it refuses to accept the consequences of its limitations. In this, and despite his pretty-sounding proposals, he may resemble millions of ordinary people who rarely give such questions a thought: He is a nominal believer, largely untroubled by the thinness of his belief and not bold enough to admit it. Alas, his book is more representative than he realized.