Reality check: Neil Morgan unpicks a knotty subject

‘Quaker pilgrimage is a searching but also a recognition.’

We sometimes get ourselves tied up in knots with arguments over God language in Meeting. People start to sigh, and can become uncomfortable. I want to try to offer some unknotting, so that we might get along better, by concentrating attention on the words ‘real’, and ‘really’.

One sense of real is a thing really existing, in space and time. We can then ask: Is a unicorn real? If God were real, in this sense, God would have to be a thing in the world. Many people hold this view. It seems to be the common-sense one. But this sense was one that John Robinson, in Honest to God (1963), wanted to move away from, towards a more difficult sense of ‘real’ as in God as ‘really’ being ‘the ground of our being’. This begins to put God outside of space and time. We are moving towards mysticism. Mystics find things at ‘the edge of words’, or even ‘beyond words’, but they sense they are still ‘real’ – a feeling or intuition that they are trying to put into words. 

If the experience is ‘real’, in this way, there is the question of where this experience comes from. Is it from inside the person (the immanent) or outside (the transcendent)? Some Quakers accept the immanent is real, but they question the experience of the transcendent. Being ‘inside’ convinces others that the immanent is human-made. Then: ‘Once we have recognised that all religion is man-made, instead of repudiating it… we might still choose to affirm religious activity [in other words say it is ‘real’] as something which enriches our lives…’ as Graham Shaw writes in God in Our Hands (1987). The snag is that, now, for those of other ‘real’ traditions, this makes God a paler version, and so ‘unreal’. Maybe we could get out of this dilemma by arguing that ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ vary from context to context. On this view, the sense in which God is ‘real’ is given in the language and practice of religion itself. DZ Phillips, following Wittgenstein, has written about this. 

Going even further, some people ask: ‘Is there “really” a separate “reality” outside language at all?’ Perhaps words do not refer to The World, as common sense tells us, but only to other words. Reference becomes a horizontal movement within language, rather than a move beyond it. We enter the dizzy world of post-modernism at this point.

Fortunately, we do not have to solve any of this. What we have are not answers, which stop further searching, but much deeper questions. We can use them to open up these mysteries. We can grasp that what matters most is not knowledge, philosophy or words, but the very experience of our spirituality, as it informs our lives. That comes first. All the rest follows, if at all, later.

Quaker pilgrimage is a searching but also a recognition.We recognise a common feeling, and sense that a ‘reality of supreme value’ underlies all human life. We could call it God, or the meaning of life. To share that journey together spiritually is the key thing.

---

Comments

This is a great help. Another way of getting into this topic is to consider, first, the starting point of Quaker faith. George Fox was clear that “there is one, even, Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition” (1694/2007). Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically. Jesus was a real man. Second, Richard Rohr has recently worked out that “Christ is the Christian codeword for reality”; the Christ existed from the moment of the Big Bang (2019). Third, The process theologian John B. Cobb Jr, in a superb book entitled ‘Jesus’ Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed’ (2016), describes Jesus - and here I paraphrase - as the human being who most fully accepted that call forward to goodness that we all feel within us. It’s just that most of largely ignore it, most of the time. If only we didn’t!

By markrdibben@gmail.com on 3rd December 2020 - 9:26

---

Illuminating article, Neil. Thanks for this. I’ve a quotation for you from Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, a book which Graham Shaw put me on to many years ago - “to speak of ‘religious language’ as something specialized, supposed to be expressive rather than referential, is to separate religion from the truth-seeking struggle of the whole of life.”

“Praise and worship are not just expressive attitudes, they arise in very various cognitive contexts and are themselves a grasp of reality.”

Seems to redeem religious language from the reductions of scientistic thinking.

Wonderful to find Graham’s God In Our Hands being referenced. More please. I see this little book as a practical guide to the future of religion. No less.

By Jonathan Wooding on 12th December 2020 - 11:37

---

Thanks for your comment , Mark . I will try and read these . Jonathan ,many thanks for yours .  I am deeply interested in Murdoch , but perhaps she was hampered by her training in linguistic philosophy ? She , despite your quotation ,struggles to find a naturalistic account of the Good ,having rejected God . When and if the non-naturalistic backing is taken off value and the good ,can either trully make sense ?or are we left with emotivism?.  People ,in this dilemma tend to move the transcendent to the plane of (just?) the immanant , and then they emphasise the importance and primacy of love ( eg Emmanuel Levinas ) . But without the love of God -or whatever you want to call it - does our own love have a meaningful foundation , or (do you think) this is this a silly question .

By Neil M on 25th January 2021 - 16:08

---

Hi, Neil. Hope all well. I think IM was more ‘comfortable’ with ‘the void’ and Boehme’s ‘Ungrund’, if that’s helpful. And that character in The Philosopher’s Pupil, who talks of the God beyond God, etc. She once wrote in a letter that the ‘taking leave of God’ man (Cupitt) was her ‘hero’! Very detailed knowledge of the Book of Common Prayer in The Philosopher’s Pupil, by the way - whether one’s doing away with ‘G-d’ or not, keep praying. [Some wonderful stuff about Buber in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, but I don’t see why she felt she had to disagree with him about using the word ‘God’. At the end of Graham Shaw’s God In Our Hands, of course, there’s a re-affirmation of the continuing use of the word God. No call for a moratorium. Excuse me wittering.

By Jonathan Wooding on 7th February 2021 - 13:59

---

Dear Jonathan ,
Thinking of you ,I am reading Donna J . Lazenby’s ; A mystical philosophy : Transcendence and Immanence in the works of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch .
also Richard Kearney’s treatment of Woolf in his book : Anatheism [returning to God after God ]One of his epigrams is a few lines from Fanny Howe’s poem The Lyrics ” Sometimes the guest must leave the host , in order to remain a guest ” .
Warm wishes

By Neil M on 16th August 2021 - 16:10

---

Thank you, Neil. These look fascinating. I’ll try to get hold of them. And I look forward to seeing what you make of them. I’ve been wanting to re-read The Waves for some time. I’ll be interested to see if Lazenby takes a good look at some of IM’s novels. (And whether she considers Quaker roots.) In my brief time as an academic I remember consulting J P Manoussakis’s After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy; also, MacIntyre’s The Religious Significance of Atheism. Fair turned my head, they did! All very best.  Jonathan

By Jonathan Wooding on 29th August 2021 - 10:24

---

Thanks Jonathan , I had ordered Manoussakis before sending you my message . It does look a bit dense .  Another good chapter, though,  on Iris Murdoch in Fergus Kerr’s Immortal Longings ( 1997) [ Chapter 4 Back to Plato with Iris Murdoch . Do you know it ?] You would again like it ,I think .
in Friendship,
Neil

By Neil M on 29th August 2021 - 12:42

---

Please login to add a comment