The Language of Spirituality: A universalist Quaker looks at religion, science, and spirituality

By Alan York

This is a fascinating, short book on spirituality and religious language. As the first part, ‘The Allegory of God’, makes clear, the author holds that all religious language is allegorical, existing ‘to enable humans to talk and think about the spirituality they experienced’. Equally fascinating is part two, ‘Mind, Brain and Spirit’, which expounds the later theories of the physicist Roger Penrose and the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff. These suggest that ‘the Quantum structures’ which facilitate consciousness ‘are the very structures of the material of which all the stuff of the universe is made’. But as the author adds, this tells us little about the nature of subjective experience itself, or thus about spirituality.

So we return, towards the book’s close, to its depiction of the transformed consciousness that gives us a sense of the eternal and of ‘oneness with all people and all things’. York is happy with people talking about God, or Nirvana, or redemption, for these are all ways of referring to the eternal.

Some of York’s best evidence for his allegorical interpretation of religious language lies in the way that most modern believers treat biblical language about the devil. This is usually regarded as expressing something about evil tendencies or temptations, and not about a personal agent.

But perhaps ‘allegorical’ is the wrong word for language of one kind that really concerns something else. A good example of an allegory is found in the Parable of the Sower, where each item in the story stands for something in the real world. The word needed may rather be ‘figurative’, which includes metaphors, similes and parables.

Yet even figurative language is intended to convey a deeper meaning. York claims that all religious language exists to enable us to talk and think about spirituality. But this is not usually the intention of users of religious language. Those who talk about God often believe that God is the universal creator, for example, even if no kind of human spirituality is intended.

Perhaps York’s claim is that religious language functions to express spiritual experiences, even in the absence of any intention that it should do this. And so it sometimes does, for example among some Quakers. But more often it functions in other ways, telling of possibilities of forgiveness, of deliverance, or of praise. 

What is the relation between religious language and mystical experience? Certainly a minority of users of religious language employ it mainly to express (or to foster) pantheistic spiritual experiences. Yet there are other experiences and activities (like praise) that depend on religious language being understood as expressing truths. Awareness of our own dependence on God (and thus of our transitoriness) depends on this understanding. And awareness of our co-creatorship with God, and the work we are called to do in the world, depends on this too.

George Herbert’s words ‘Teach me, my God and king In all things thee to see’ could, for some, foster a sense of unity with the universe, as York’s stance envisages. For others, they address God, our creator, as present throughout the creation, expressing a quite different spirituality.

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