As you know, I’ve been researching the Welsh revival of 1904 and, more broadly, the place of ecstasy in modern culture. On Tuesday, I drove to Cwmbran in the south of Wales, where something called the Welsh Outpouring has broken out. I wondered if the Outpouring was the beginning of a new Welsh revival, so off I went to Cwmbran, like a storm-chaser.

The Outpouring is happening in the Victory Church, which is a breeze-block warehouse in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Cwmbran. There was a small queue of people outside, waiting for the doors to open for the 7pm service (they hold services every day since the Outpouring began in April). I went in and found a seat, in this windowless cavernous warehouse, filled with I guess 400 people, with the band already blaring out the Christian rock. ‘Come on!’ shouted the podgy singer. ‘Don’t hold anything back!’

Then the preacher came on stage. ‘This is day 62 of the Outpouring! Hundreds of people have turned to Jesus!’ There was a sort of large plastic paddling pool on the right, where the baptisms took place. ‘And there have been incredible miracles – just yesterday somebody was watching the service online, and their abdominal pain was healed! Amen?’ ‘Amen! Praise Jesus!’ a woman shouted behind me. ‘Pray in your own words’ said the preacher-man. ‘Shadappa shadappa shadappa’ babbled the woman. ‘Shadappa yourself’, I thought.

Then he asked if anyone wanted to be healed today, and a forest of hands shot up. ‘Now is the time! Amen?’ said the preacher-man. People went forward and the ministry team prayed for them. And many of them keeled right over. Timber! And they were immediately covered up with a blanket, very efficiently. ‘We also have some cloths we have anointed with oil’, said the preacher-man, putting a bucket on stage. ‘You can take them home and use them for healing’. There was a mad-rush for the cloths.

Well, after half an hour I’d had enough. I felt filled with contempt and intellectual snobbery for the scenes I’d witnessed. Is this what Christianity has come to, I thought. Buckets of oily cloths and ignorant popular emotionalism. Perhaps it had only been redeemed by its long association with Greek philosophy, and now it had reverted its initial primitive miracle-working. And a voice in me asked, ‘what did you expect?’

2. Wednesday

The next day I drove on to Pembrokeshire, to attend a four-day conference near Fishguard, at a Christian retreat called Ffald-y-Brenin. A Christian friend had recommended I read a book called the Grace Outpouring, by Roy Godwin. He and his wife Daphne had moved to Ffald-y-Brenin in 2000, and since then, all kinds of miracles have been happening there, apparently. I read the book two weeks ago, and it piqued my curiosity with its tales of people turning up at their door, saying ‘what’s going on here?’ then suddenly being knocked out by the Holy Spirit, like it was Magnumopus hiding behind the door with a club (obscure Asterix reference for you there). So on I drove to Pembrokeshire, like a storm-chaser.

I checked into a lovely hotel in Newport (not the big Newport, this is a little village also called Newport on a beautiful stretch of the Pembrokeshire coast), then I drove to a nearby village hall for dinner with the other conference delegates. They were all over 55. I found a place at a table, feeling a little self-conscious, and introduced myself to the two old ladies sitting there. ‘So’, I said breezily, ‘what can we expect from the conference?’ ‘You can expect to be invaded by God’, said this rather prim-looking old lady, as if I’d asked a crushingly-obvious question.

After dinner we all drove to a nearby church, with very uncomfortable pews. There was a lot of worship, with the old pensioners raising their hands in the air and some of them jumping up and down. Jesus is clearly a good retirement plan, I thought. Then Roy Godwin took the mike. He’s a small man, with a tanned balding head, glasses, a quiet voice and a twinkling sense of humour. He spoke of the 1904 revival, of how Wales is the land of revivals, of how the first drops of a new revival were just starting to be felt, in Cwmbran and elsewhere. ‘But we want more. Come on Lord. Bring it on. We want another revival, in our own time. Come on Lord. Turn all of Wales into a house of prayer. Not just for Wales, but for all the nations.’ Yeah, I thought. Right! Aim low. Start with Wales and go from there.

Roy Godwin

The next day I attended the morning worship and the talks. I realised everyone there were absolutely passionate Christians, looking to start up missions or houses of prayer or what-have-you. Not only was I the youngest, I was clearly the only ‘seeker’. I kept this quiet, and when people asked ‘what church do you go to?’ I felt like an escaped POW being asked for their papers. ‘Er…Holy Trinity Brompton!’ I’d say, and their faces would relax with relief. Phew!

In the evenings I retreated from the retreat, and locked myself into my hotel room. What was I doing here? What kind of a stupid holiday was this? What kind of an idiot goes on holiday, on their own, to a Christian conference? Well, it was research, I told myself. So I carried on my research into ecstasy in my hotel-room, reading books on how Enlightenment thinkers defined religious ecstasy as a medical pathology called ‘enthusiasm’ (from the Greek word entheos, meaning God within). Enthusiasm, the historian JGA Pocock has written, was the ‘anti-self of the Enlightenment’, that which had to be contained and cured, just as Pentheus tried to lock up Dionysus. I’d sit in my hotel-room researching modern ecstatic movements like Pentecostalism, then I’d go back to the church and watch the pensioners being filled with the Holy Spirit, a few of them laughing and twitching and even being ‘slain’ in the Holy Spirit. I’d take notes like a zoologist.

3. Saturday.

On Saturday, the talks were interesting. A pastor (and former GP and psychotherapist) called Richard Roberts gave a very funny talk, and he mentioned that he’d returned to the blues guitar as a hobby to get him through his winter melancholy. He’d started a band, with  some Christians and some non-Christians, they played weddings and so forth, and some of the guests had ended up coming to his church, ‘which must be the first time Honky-Tonk Woman has been a tool of evangelism’. He said: ‘There’s Spirit in there, in rock and roll. You know Jerry Lee Lewis was part of a Pentecostal church, until they kicked him out for playing the piano with too much syncopation? The song Great Balls of Fire was partly inspired by the Pentecostals’ experience of the fire of the Holy Spirit’. How interesting, I thought. Just what I’m researching.

I went up and said hello after his talk, told him I was a drummer – his son is as well, at an HTB church in Battersea (I didn’t tell him I’m drumming in an atheist church!) I told him I also thought the Holy Spirit was there in rock music, perhaps more than in Contemporary Christian Music. There’s more Spirit in U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For than in most of the bland major-key bubblegum-pop of worship music. That’s because the latter lacks the despair and brokenness and lostness you sometimes get in rock and roll. ‘Yes’, said Rich. ‘The Church isn’t very good at the dark side. But read the Psalms, it’s all there.’

In the afternoon, I sat in my hotel trying to write this newsletter, but it kept on turning into this long and rambling history of ecstasy in modern culture. I decided to leave it for a bit, and go and check out the famous Ffald-y-Brenin. I parked my car at the bottom of the hill and walked up the steep path. At the top is this enclave of little hobbit-houses nestled in a garden, high above the most gorgeous valley like an eagle’s nest. In one corner is a small round chapel, where apparently people often have a direct experience of God. In I went, feeling slightly wobbly, but the Spirit didn’t bonk me on the head with its club. Inside it was like a Russian bath-house, with about ten of the conference attendees sitting in a circle in silence, soaking it in.

Ffald-y-Brenin

I sat there for a bit. I found myself thinking about the incarnation. I had a sense of the physicality of it, even the sensuality of it. How different to Greek philosophy, to Platonism, where the Logos is imprisoned in the body. In Christianity, the Logos loves the flesh, it became it, it delights in it. So I got into that for a bit. Then I strolled around the garden and looked out over the valley, purring as its back was stroked by the wind.

4. Saturday evening

At the evening session, a pastor from Vancouver called Eric gave a talk, where he quoted an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes -
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

This nice old fella called Malcolm, to whom I’d admitted I wasn’t a Christian, gave me a nudge in the ribs. ‘That’s for you!’ he said. ‘Too much plucking blackberries!’ Then Roy took the mike and was speaking, the music was playing and we were standing up. And this thought came to me, ‘yours are the gifts, Lord’.  I’d been researching charismatic Christianity – the word charismatic comes from the Greek charis, meaning gifts. So I was sort of internally dedicating my life and my work to God. And I felt my chest fill with a painful joy, a powerful energy, which pushed my head back, further, further, until it almost hurt my neck muscles. It took a real effort to push my head forward, then another wave would sweep it back. It was like the pleasure was bursting from my chest, lifting it up, pushing my head and body back so I was rocking on my heels. Sinner that I am, I can only compare it to MDMA, like coming up on a really strong pill, when it’s almost too powerful, it takes your breath away, and you’re just feeling this intense sensual pleasure coursing through you. I remember reading about the 1904 revival, and someone in the congregation saying ‘too much!’, like he was afraid the Holy Spirit would overwhelm him. Well, it was a bit like that.

Rich took the mike, moved by the Spirit and talked about this idea in Orthodox Christianity of the song of God holding creation together, and that triggered another wave of ecstasy in me. This went on for…I don’t know, three quarters of an hour. Then we sat down, and I shakily went and got a bottle of water. I offered some water to the guy next to me – it really reminded me of a rave, when you’re like, whew, that was a strong wave but I appear to be still on the surf-board, and you want to share your joy and your possessions with the people around you. Eunoia, the Greeks call it. Goodwill. Malcolm came up, full of joy for me, and said ‘I take it you’re done with blackberry picking?’ And he hugged me – he was more excited for me than I was for myself. So I drove home, luckily it wasn’t very far and I made it without crashing into a ditch. I lay in bed and I could still feel the joy licking my limbs like flames.

On Sunday I went to the morning session, there was some worship, then Roy spoke again, and once again I felt completely filled with ecstasy, more than the night before, I was standing up but my body was pushed right back, luckily the pew supported my shaking legs. I remembered Roy saying at the start of the conference, ‘we’re going to lean back into God’s love’. A tiny part of me wondered what everyone around me must think of this oddball standing there with his head pushed back and his mouth agape, although I wasn’t making a noise (it was a very reserved, English sort of rapture) then I thought, it’s OK, they’re all nutters too! I also remembered my Quaker ancestry and thought, I have an excuse: I’m descended from mentalists. This was what they were talking about. This was why they quaked.

Roy was speaking to God, saying we wanted another revival, we wanted more of the Spirit, that Wales needed another revival, for itself and for the nations, we wanted the kingdom here on Earth. He was almost demanding grace to pour out, like a lamb stubbornly demanding milk from its mother. He said we’d all been commissioned to work for this revival, to pass on the flame however we could, including online, which I thought was pretty weird considering it was a church full of pensioners. ‘Imagine an online revival’, he said. ‘Imagine an email where people opened it and felt filled with the Spirit’.

His wife Daphne got on stage, she’d had a word from God. She said: ‘I hope this doesn’t offend, but God says that some of you are going back to museums. He says, the museum is closed, but the garden is open.’ I got my breath back, and the service ended. I went up to thank Roy – I hadn’t spoken to him the entire week. He said, almost immediately, ‘don’t take this the wrong way, but God says to you that at some point you have to decide: you can stand on the outside analyzing, but He is here and open for you.’

So then I left, hugging some of these dear people I’d met, like Mary, this sweet cockney lady who I’d met on the first evening, who lived in Cyprus. ‘I’ve adopted this one’, she said, hugging me. I’d given her a copy of my book the evening before. ‘I’ve got as far as Aristotle’, she said. ‘He’s alright, old Ari, isn’t he?’ I drove back, the fire still in me, the fire survived the M4, survived the Long Delays from Junction 8 to Junction 4, survived through the fields and suburbs of the United Kingdom back to London. While I was driving, I got an email from BBC Radio 3 – I’m one of their ‘New Generation Thinkers’ this year – inviting me to speak at their Free Thinking festival in October. The theme of the festival, the email said, was ‘Who’s in Control?’ Who indeed!

******

In other news:

If like me you’re interested in the connection between Pentecostalism and rock & roll, check out this excellent article on that, although it’s behind a pay wall alas. Also have a listen to this fantastic NPR story about Brother Claude Ely, the Pentecostal Holy Roller guitarist who was a huge early influence on rock and roll.

This afternoon I interviewed Bernd Bosel, who is a historian of enthusiasm. I’ll post it later this week. And tomorrow I’m interviewing Brian Eno! He has some very interesting thoughts on ecstasy and surrender in music and religion – and he should know all about it, having produced some of the great ecstatic anthems of pop, like David Bowie’s Heroes, U2’s Streets Have No Name and Talking Heads’ Once In A Lifetime. So look out for that later this week too.

It’s funny how little science and psychology has got to grips with ecstasy, though it’s beginning to do so – Jonathan Haidt discusses it in his book, The Righteous Mind, but he is very much standing on the outside analyzing, like Durkheim did, with their clipboards, nodding, and saying ‘yes, it’s all very good for social cohesion’. Haidt criticises utilitarians for their over-rationalism, but he also has a utilitarian view of ecstasy, seeing it as socially useful, which to me misses the mystery and awe of being invaded by God. But still, at least he’s exploring these experiences in a positive and non-pathologising way.

Another interesting avenue of scientific research is recent stuff on Autonomic Sensory Meridien Response (ASMR), or brain-tingling. There’s even an ASMR online community, where people try to trigger brain-chills by watching YouTube videos of women whispering lovingly, for all those lonely YouTube babies out there. To me that’s taking a mechanistic view of ecstasy, missing the theos in enthusiasm, but still, worth a look.

How strange that the experience of spine-tingling etc – such a core human experience – should be so little researched by science. I guess that’s because the Enlightenment has a fear of ecstasy, has kept it locked up and pathologised. And now it’s beginning to research it and to try and find the mechanism that triggers it – whispering or grooming or certain chords or chemicals, so that science can say ‘it’s not God, it’s these neural mechanisms’. And it’s true that you can trigger a sort of ecstasy with chemicals. But there are varieties of ecstasy, surely, and some are better than others. The fire isn’t the point – it’s what the fire motivates you to do.

Anyway, I urge you to go visit Ffald-y-Brenin, or go see Roy and Daphne talk, they’re doing a talk in Norwich on the 26th of June, and in Nottingham sometime in July. Or read Roy’s book. I am quite a sceptical person (as I hope regular readers know) but I think they’re the real thing, genuine people of God.

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

Then I’m going to Ffald-y-Brenin, a Christian retreat in Pembrokeshire, and a place where people have often said they’ve experienced miraculous visitations from the Holy Spirit. It is known as a ‘thin place’ – in Celtic Christianity, there are supposed to be certain places where the border between the sacred and the secular is particularly diaphanous.

Obviously, I feel like a bit of a spiritual tourist. Am I going for my own advancement as a writer, or am I going with a genuinely open heart to see what is ‘out there’? I hope the latter, but as a writer there’s always some ego mixed in.

When writing on religious group psychology, you have to decide how much you should ‘go with it’ and give yourself to the experience, and to what extent you should stay objective and detached. When Jon Ronson, one of my heroes, went on the Alpha course in 2000, he felt he couldn’t switch off his journalistic mind during the Holy Spirit session of the Alpha weekend:

James rests his hand on my shoulder. “Oh Jesus, I pray that Jon will receive Your wonderful spirit. God. Please come and fill Jon with … ” It is not working. The spell has broken. I tell James again that I’m sorry, but I’m a journalist.

I’m also a journalist, although I happen to believe in God and was helped to overcome Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder through a near-death experience which felt like an experience of grace. So I’m more open to the value of ecstatic experiences. But there are aspects of charismatic Christianity that I find off-putting. When an entire church gets ‘slain’ by the Holy Spirit, when people fall over, roll around on the ground, bark like dogs and so on, is it a visitation by God, an outbreak of mass hysteria, or some kind of learned cultural practice?

When it comes to Welsh religious revivals, Welsh Christians think of them as both a supernatural experience and a learned cultural practice. They are very aware of the history of Welsh revivals, and this knowledge creates expectations of future revivals. Wales is known as ‘the land of revivals’ – previous revivals include a Methodist revival in 1735, when congregations would shake, weep, faint and jump for joy, and a cross-denominational revival in 1859, when historians suggest 100,000 people – a tenth of the population of Wales – converted, and services were so ecstatic that ‘people were carried out of chapel unable to move hand or foot’. Both revivals were intensely musical – hymn-singing plays a central role in Celtic ecstasy.

The most famous Welsh revival was in 1904-5. It was started by a preacher called Joseph Jenkins, after he had a vision of being wrapped in a blue flame. His sermons started to inspire great excitement among his congregation, particularly young women, one of whom followed him home one night, then stood up at church the next day and declared ‘I love Jesus with all my heart’. This set others on fire, and the normal order of service gave way to spontaneous testimonials, conversions, moans, fainting and hymn-singing.

The fire spread to a 26-year-old miner called Evan Roberts, an intensely religious young man who had prayed for a revival ‘for 10 or 11 years’. He was dramatically filled by the Spirit during a service, bending his knees and crying out. The next nights, he had a series of visions, of hell, of Christ’s victory over Satan, of an enormous religious revival that would save 100,000 souls. Although not a priest and not very educated, he became the de facto leader of a revival that swept through Wales ‘like a hurricane’ as David Lloyd George put it.

A journalist who covered the revival, WT Stead, was struck by the unplanned spontaneity of the services, though in other ways, the scenes closely followed the cultural script of previous Welsh revivals – melted hearts, tears, joy, fainting, spontaneous hymn-singing, public confessions, testimonials, mass conversions, the sense of ‘a country aflame’. All of this was repeated from previous Welsh revivals. What was new in the 1904 revival was that young people, particularly young women, played a leading role, singing and giving testimonials, in a break with religious tradition. And the mass media also played a central role in the revival, helping to spread the fire through their reports – one historian calls it ‘a newspaper revival’.

A postcard of ‘the revivalist’ Evan Roberts and some of the young ladies of the revival.

As Roberts predicted, there were scores of conversions – perhaps 100,000 or so. Many alcoholics gave up drink, and supporters of the revival said the entire moral climate of the country was improved, with pubs emptied, crime down and industrial unrest quelled.

Then, after a year or so, Roberts became more and more exhausted and erratic. He would dramatically stop the singing during the services, declaring there were obstacles to the Holy Spirit’s visitation, naming people in the congregation who were obstacles, including priests. He emphasized there must be total obedience to the Holy Spirit among everyone present. He became uncertain about when it was the Holy Spirit prompting him to speak, or the Devil. He eventually retired from public life, publishing a book six years later warning of the rapid approach of the Apocalypse.

What are we to make of it all? It’s a sensitive subject, particularly for an English journalist (although as my name suggests I have a lot of Welsh blood in me). For the Welsh, the 1904-05 revival was and is a source of national pride, evidence of the country’s special relationship to God, Who speaks to their warm Celtic hearts in a way the mechanistic English could barely appreciate. The academic historian, meanwhile, might look for social or cultural causes of the revival, and interpret it as some sort of mass psychic reaction to the advance of scientific rationalism and the demands of industrial civilisation.

A colleague of mine at the Centre for the History of the Emotions, Rhodri Hayward, has written an excellent book on the question of how to interpret mass ecstatic experiences like the 1904 revival, called Resisting History: Religious Transcendence and the Invention of the Unconscious. He looks at how the unconscious was invented in the late 19th century, as a way for the new secular discipline of psychology to provide a naturalistic explanation for ecstatic religious experiences like trances, automatism, visions and mass revivalism.

Rhodri traces this invention from Frederick Myers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research, who posited a subliminal self to explain the behaviour of spiritual mediums, to William James, who developed this naturalistic explanation of religious experience in his Varieties of Religious Experience, to early explorers of the unconscious like Janet, Charcot and Carl Jung, all of whom were keen to explain spiritual experiences through the naturalistic idea of the unconscious. The unconscious was a crucial device in a broader move to disenchant supernatural experiences and fit them into a naturalistic historical narrative.

What’s interesting is that the early pioneers of psychology remained very ambivalent about whether religious experiences were supernatural or not. The border between natural and supernatural explanations of ecstatic experiences remained rather thin, or diaphanous. Myers, at the end of his life, decided that some spiritual mediums really were communicating with the dead. Jung came to view much unconscious phenomena as genuine communications by spirits. William James was also convinced that some mediums were genuine and remained open-minded about whether religious experiences could be genuinely supernatural. He wrote: ‘The notion of the subconscious self certainly ought not at this point in our enquiry be held to exclude all notion of higher penetration.’

Right at the birth of psychology as a rationalist discipline, there’s uncertainty about whether the unconscious is a trash-heap of primitive impulses, or a cave of hidden treasures.

This uncertainty about apparently supernatural experiences exists for Christians too. Even during the 1904 revival, Welsh people wondered if Roberts was simply a ‘neurotic youth’, if his fits weren’t manifestations of pathology rather than divine ecstasy. One church minister wrote to the Western Mail suggesting there were, in fact, two revivals going on, a genuine revival, and a ‘bogus revival’ being led by Roberts. Roberts also became uncertain whether his visitations came from God or the Devil, and this uncertainty and sense of a cosmic spiritual war being waged in his own person eventually exhausted him.

Speaking for myself, I remain uncertain about the religious experience which healed me of years of trauma and suffering. Was it an experience of the Holy Spirit, or a moment of religious mania prompted by a near-death experience after several years of depression? If it was some sort of supernatural visitation, from who or what?

William James, who helped to invent the psychological concept of the unconscious, remained unsure whether religious experiences were supernatural or natural

William James suggested that, even if we can’t know for sure where such experiences come from, we can still empirically weigh their effects: ‘What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience…Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods.’

We see chroniclers of the 1904 revival trying to do just this, taking statistical evidence of the numbers of conversions in each village and town. Judged by the number of people it saved from alcoholism, the 1904 revival seems socially valuable (although Marxist historians like EP Thompson might argue that such ecstatic outbreaks put back the cause of political agitation).
It’s very difficult to empirically asses all the effects of a revival – particularly as historians can’t peer into the spiritual realm to see what might have been the effect there. Certainly, the Welsh revival had a huge impact on modern Christianity, helping to popularise a new, highly emotional form of worship which one meets on the Alpha weekend. The revival didn’t seem to have such great long-term effects for Roberts himself, though for all I know his reward was in the afterlife.

I wonder, finally, if one can combine cultural historical accounts of ecstatic experiences with an open-mindedness to the possibility that such experiences are, at least partly, supernatural.  In other words, is it possible that spirits or the Spirit really do speak to humans, but that we also interpret such experiences through pre-learned cultural scripts (such as the history of Jewish messianism, or the history of Welsh revivals)? Some of those scripts are perhaps better than others, in that they more successfully ‘run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience’. I think that one problem with the Christian eschatological script is it leads to mass Millenarian expectations that the world is about to be utterly transformed into a perfect Age of Love. History has repeatedly disappointed this ecstatic expectation, yet somehow it keeps coming back.

*****

In other news:

Talking of Millenarian expectations, the NYRB reviews a new book that looks at Millenarian expectations and the idea of the demonic enemy in fascism and communism. Behind a pay-wall alas.

The New Yorker, meanwhile, looks at a new neuroscientific attempt to measure and quantify consciousness.

I did a 5 min essay on Radio 3′s Nightwaves this week, about the 2400th anniversary of the founding of Plato’s Academy, asking whether philosophy belongs inside or outside of academia. Its 26 minutes in here.

On that theme, here’s Philosophy Bites’ Nigel Warburton, on why he’s left academia to practice philosophy outside of it. And here’s a BBC article looking at philosophy’s central role in French school education.

Here’s an New York Times article covering a successful trial of cognitive processing therapy for rape victims in the Congo.

Here’s a Spectator piece by Norman Stone looking at the political crisis in Turkey and Erdogan’s over-played authoritarianism.

Here’s a piece I wrote about the Sunday Assembly and why I don’t think God minds me playing the drums there.

Here’s a piece on how psychedelics is turning into a subject of serious academic research (man).

UCLA has a great centre for investigating mindfulness. Its website has some good free meditation podcasts.

Finally, this week I got very excited about Laura Marling’s new album. Here’s a short film she helped to make of the first four songs of the album.

See you next week,

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

I’ll tell you. I need to go back a decade. I promise I’ll keep it brief.

In my late teens and early twenties, I suffered from various emotional problems, which I’d inflicted on myself by messing around with LSD. My recovery began when I fell off a mountain, while skiing in Norway in 2001. I fell 30 foot, broke my leg, knocked myself unconscious, and when I came to, I saw a bright white light and I felt filled with love. Weird huh?

I felt, at that moment, that there is something in us that is unbreakable, that even death cannot destroy. This realisation helped me overcome my trauma and begin to heal, because I could let go of my terror at having permanently damaged my psyche. And that moment of gnosis led me to Greek philosophy, because I knew, somehow, that Socrates, Plato and the Stoics had talked about learning to honour the  ‘god within’, and had suggested that our emotional problems arise because we don’t trust the god within and instead go looking for validation in externals like public approval. This fitted with what I’d experienced on that mountain-side.

For a few weeks after my strange experience, I felt completely healed and in love with the universe. It was like I was permanently on E. I loved everyone – I literally fell in love with my physiotherapist in hospital. Then the epiphany wore off, and the old habits of anxiety and depression came back. So I did a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), as it seemed to me to offer the insights of Greek philosophy in a systematic and clinical structure. CBT helped me to turn my epiphany into habits.

I then wrote a book about how Greek philosophy still helps people today, and how it inspired CBT. I told the stories of people I had met, from 2007 to 2011, whose lives had been transformed by coming across Greek philosophy. And I also went looking for communities, for instances of people trying to follow philosophy as a way of life together.

Some members of the London Philosophy Club

There are not many such ‘philosophical communities’ around. Few academic philosophers are interested in the community organization aspect of philosophy, beyond the occasional public lecture. But there are a growing number of philosophy clubs, including a club I’ve been involved with since late 2010, the London Philosophy Club. There are also some commercial organisations like the School of Life and the Idler School, both of which I have worked with, and both of which I admire.

However, much as I love these new philosophical communities, I find I’m still unfulfilled, still yearning for more community in my life, and more love. I need help – divine assistance – to be more loving, and I think perhaps we all do.

Perhaps, I wondered, what was missing was God. Perhaps these philosophical communities were too rational and intellectual, too detached from that deep ecstatic experience of love that I felt on that mountain and that I am still trying to re-discover.

Nicky Gumbel, head of HTB and pioneer of the Alpha course

So why not look to Christianity? As a theist, I’m half-way there, and Greek philosophy and Christianity have always (or almost always) had fairly cordial relations. So this year, I’ve tried to re-engage with Christianity. I went on the Alpha Course earlier this year, and was in a group with Nicky Gumbel, the head-vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) and the man who has shepherded Alpha’s expansion all over the world.

I really enjoyed Alpha. I found HTB to be a very friendly community, and I felt honoured and welcomed. You’re high status if you’re a ‘seeker’ in a Christian community, because they have a religious injunction to try and save your soul. So you feel very welcomed and attended to, like a customer in a Turkish bazaar, though you know that, at some point, you need to decide whether to buy the carpet or not.

I felt I couldn’t buy the carpet, because there are fundamental aspects of Christianity that, try as I might, I just can’t accept. Although I really love the Christian emphasis on the Holy Spirit, in other ways I find Christianity too parochial and over-confident, above all in its insistence that Jesus Christ is the only Messiah and the only way to God. Why did God create the 80% or so of humanity who never heard of Jesus or who keep dutifully to their own faiths? Why did He create the rest of the universe if the whole cosmic point is Jesus’s life and death here on Earth?

I also can’t accept the deep apocalyptic strain in Christianity. The idea that, any day now, Jesus is going to re-appear in the sky, all the dead bodies will come out of their graves and the End Days will begin seems completely fanciful to me. So too does the idea that Satan and his minions rules over the Earth, with a complete license from God to go around misleading us and possessing us. That idea doesn’t just seem wrong to me, it seems paranoid and toxic.

So I find myself in that horribly wishy-washy position of believing in God – passionately believing in God, desperate to be closer to Him  – and yet also believing that there is not just one path to God, and that God remains something of a mystery to humanity.

The problem with this ‘spiritual but not religious’ position is that, seeing the value of various different religious traditions, you end up committing to none of them and not really doing the work. For all Christians’ over-confidence and parochialism, at least they are committing and practicing, day in, day out.

Anyway, while Alpha didn’t quite do it for me, I was hugely impressed by HTB as an exercise in community organization. Nicky Gumbel is a master community organizer, a sort of super-vicar. And the HTB churches’ many Sunday services all around London are packed, full of people singing along to the Christian worship. They are far more emotional experiences than, say, a philosophy club, and that’s at least partly because of the music (Christians would say it’s also because of the Holy Spirit).

So, about a month ago, I thought, well, if you’re not a Christian, at least you could learn something from successful Christian churches like HTB. Above all, you could learn about the use of music in bringing people together and lifting up their hearts. Perhaps, I wondered, I could start some kind of secular soul band and gospel choir (I play the drums), and organize philosophy events with music as well, to connect with people’s emotions as well as their rationality.

Just as I was pondering the complexity of putting together a soul band and gospel choir, I saw this tweet:

The @sundayassembly is desperately seeking a volunteer drummer for 11 am June 2nd. There’ll be super songs, and lots of fun. Pls RT. Thx!

— sandersonjones (@sandersonjones) May 24, 2013

Sanderson Jones is one of the two founders of the Sunday Assembly, a new ‘atheist church’ which launched in London earlier this year, and which has attracted a lot of media attention and several hundred attendees each month. And they needed a drummer!

Well, that was synchronicitous. Could it be a sign? Does God want me to drum in an atheist band? I excitedly replied to Sanderson, and told my friends to come along. They must have thought I was a complete spiritual yo-yo, going on the Alpha course one week then drumming in an atheist church the next.

But I figured God would be OK with it, because I imagine that what He wants is for people to come together and try to improve themselves and the world, and He wants everyone to do that, not just Christians, but Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and, yes, even atheists (I imagine this is what He wants, He hasn’t expressly told me).

So last week I went along to the band rehearsal and met three lovely musicians, including Pippa Evans, the other founder of the Sunday Assembly. Then last Sunday we all met at York Hall, an enormous hall in Bethnal Green usually used for boxing events. We set up our band stuff, and watched in wonder as 600 people filed in. People are clearly really hungry for community.

The theme of the event was ‘Happiness’, there was a talk by Lord Richard Layard, founder of Action for Happiness, and the congregation sang along as the band played ‘Happy Together’, ‘Come Up And See Me Sometime’, and ‘Livin’ On A Prayer’.

Did it work? Yes and no. What I love about the Sunday Assembly is its volunteer spirit. It is funded by donations, so that immediately makes it more of a community, run by its members. The School of Life’s Sunday Sermons, by contrast, are ticketed events (the tickets cost £15) – the School isn’t making much of a profit of such events, but still, I think it creates a passive consumer mind-set in the attendees. I spoke at a School of Life ‘philosophy breakfast’ one Sunday, and when I arrived, one of the attendees said ‘you’d better be good, the last speaker was excellent’, like some spoilt hotel guest demanding their money’s worth from the breakfast buffet.

And yet it’s difficult for atheist Londoners to get out of that consumer mind-set. One friend of mine attended the Sunday Assembly, and came up to me afterwards, distinctly unimpressed.  She said ‘the sound was terrible and the whole event was ‘meh’. I can find way better things to do with my Sunday morning.’ Last Sunday she’d gone to the ‘Sunday Papers’ (£30 a ticket), where Jon Ronson and others had given a talk – that, she said, was much more entertaining. It seemed to me she was basically looking for entertaining events to be curated for her, rather than any sort of meaningful collective endeavour….which is fine, but not what I’m looking for in this instance.

As for me…I found myself missing the God bit. The Sunday Assembly was by no means aggressively atheist, but I still find that, lacking God, atheism also becomes somewhat parochial and over-confident, because it is not open to the mystery of being, to the Spirit which I believe animates all of us and which I think is sort of the best bit of us.

So where does this leave me? Just with an intention, to keep on trying to be closer to God, and to keep on trying to find ways to serve Him together. Bare with me!

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

‘Er…I had depression and anxiety about a decade ago…and I think perhaps the Holy Spirit helped me…’

Go on…

‘but funny thing is, haha, it…er….led me to Greek philosophy.’

Come again?

‘…and…I became interested in how Greek philosophy inspired modern therapy…’

Get to the Jesus bit!

‘…but I’m also interested in Christianity, so I came on Alpha…’

Ye-es?

‘…and it was fun. I met some nice people…’

And?

‘…and…er…that’s it!’

CUT! Cue a shepherd’s crook yanking me off from the side of the stage.

Not really, but the audience cheered every other testimonial, while I felt my more nuanced message failed to hit home. I sloped off stage feeling like a rapper at a country and western festival. And then I got driven off to another church, and had to do it all over again.

Anyway, this newsletter is not about that. It’s about this. While I was waiting to go on stage at HTB, the service began. The video screens around the church flickered to life, and various uplifting images came on, of people finding transcendence in the outdoors, mothers hugging their children, the stars twinkling and so on, with big lettering superimposed saying ‘Come to find MEANING’ and ‘God is MASSIVE’. The music got louder and faster, and then suddenly the band came on stage and started playing, the lead-singer was this girl with an amazing voice, and everyone got to their feet to sing along, and I swear, I nearly cried. My heart swelled with emotion. I was tired, no doubt, somewhat frazzled. Yet a few chords of Christian rock, some lights and video, and the floodgates almost opened.

An event at HTB for worshippers from Hong Kong and China

And what better proof of the Holy Spirit would there be than that? All around me, the Spirit was filling people. The second service was even more full on – it was the student service, for teenagers. Well, you can imagine. They were crying, laughing, shaking, hands aloft, on their knees, eyes closed in ecstasy. Feeling it. It reminded me of the Whirligig, the club my friends had gone to when we were 16, where we’d all taken ecstasy for the first time, except these kids were just on Jesus. Still, some of them seemed just as strung out as my friends and I back then – one kid was giggling away to himself, and I thought, in the scientific materialist paradigm of the DSM, that young fellow might be considered to have mental health issues, but here, at this church, he is loved and his eccentricity is seen as a sign of grace. (I later found out that this sort of laughter is actually quite typical of charismatic worship, so I was perhaps being a bit judgmental in thinking the boy had mental problems!)

What HTB gets is the power of music. It’s a non-cognitive form of persuasion. There I was, all ready to deliver my nuanced message of liberal ambivalence, and the music nearly swept me away. Plato best understood the power of music, how it works not by persuading our reason, but by side-stepping it, and connecting directly with our feelings. Before you know it, you’re tapping your foot, singing along, and you realise the words are ‘I Love Jesus’. Sing it enough times, and a belief or attitude is formed in your character, without you ever necessarily considering it. This is the power of music. That’s why Plato thought music should be carefully controlled in his Republic – it was too important to the formation of national character to be left to musicians, those mad prophets of ecstasy.

When I was growing up, pop music meant far more to me than anything I heard or sang in church. I had to go to church every day at school, and it left me cold. But when I listened to Otis Redding, or Public Enemy, or the Happy Mondays, or Primal Scream, then I felt something. When I played drums with my band, that meant something. The beat and the melody convinced me of the whole ideology of pop: don’t fight it, feel it, as Bobby Gillespie told me. Come together, get loaded, get higher than the sun. And when, a few weeks ago, I first saw a Christian rock band on stage at HTB, I thought: you apostates! You heretics! How dare you exploit my music to spread your religion. Stick to Onward Christian Soldiers and leave rock and roll alone!

Sweet Soul Music

What I’m belatedly realising is this is a slightly upside-down way of looking at it. Pop music – rhythm and blues, soul, rock and roll, dance – came from the church. It took the melodies and the emotions of gospel, and secularised them. It created a secular faith, an experience, a feeling, which brought people together, pink and brown, believers and non-believers, and gave us an emotional outlet and a brief feeling of unity, transcendence and power.

I’m reading a great book about this. It’s called Sweet Soul Music, by Peter Guralnick, and it’s about the rise of Southern Soul in the 1960s. It starts off by looking at three pioneers of soul music – Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, and Solomon Burke – all of whom took music from the gospel church into the realm of the secular and the profane. Ray Charles’ ‘I Got A Woman’, released in 1954, was a cover of a gospel song called ‘It Must Be Jesus’. Charles used the same wails, shouts, calls and response as you would find in any Pentecostal church, re-packaged it, and brought it into the white, secular mainstream. That opened the floodgates for a whole litany of other shakers and shouters, from the angelic Sam Cooke, to the screaming James Brown, to the pitiful Otis Redding.

Please, Please, Please

In their trembling voices is a plea – they’re begging, they’re pleading, they’re yearning. It’s like a Sufi singer, crying for their spiritual home. Except in soul music, it’s usually about a woman, ostensibly. But in that plea, we are all re-connected to a much older religious emotion, a longing for God, a longing for deliverance. The best soul songs show what Guralnick, quoting Hitchock, calls ‘knowledgeable apprehension’: they build, then fall back, then build again, then finally reach a moment of ecstasy, a wail, like the arch of a gothic cathedral – and just for a moment, you’re in the realm of the sacred. That’s how I feel, anyway, when Al Green wails 2 minutes 42 seconds into ‘Tired of Being Alone’. My favourite songs all have a moment of ecstasy, like when, 3 minutes 22 seconds into ‘Heroes’, David Bowie goes up an octave and cries ‘I…I will be king’.

The leap from the church to R&B was seen as scandalous in the 1950s. Singers like Sam Cooke were inspiring powerful, uncontrollable emotions in their female audience, but directing them not to God but to…sex! And when the music swept away white teenagers too through radio and TV, it provoked even more moral panic. One friend described the first time Sam Cooke played the white-only nightclub, the Copacabana: ‘man, those chicks were popping, it was almost like a sex act man, like he was beating up on them to get an orgasm’.

When Cooke was shot dead by a motel owner in 1964, apparently after trying to rape a girl, it was taken by many in the gospel community as divine judgement on his decision to leave the church and move into R&B. There was even a gospel song about the danger of being lured away from the church into pop music, for the money and power and sex, called ‘He Gained the World (But Lost His Soul)’:

He started out in church
Singing in the gospel choir
Every Sunday he sang a solo
That made the sisters shout and cry
The children danced the Holy Ghost
When he sang and played his tambourine
After church he’d tell the preacher
All about his plans and dreams…
It hurt the congregation when they found out the news
That he’d stopped singing for the Lord
And started singing that rhythm and blues…
Now he gained the world, but he lost his soul…

Some pop icons would repent, abandon rock and roll and go back to the church to become ministers: Al Green, Little Richard, Alice Cooper, even Richard Coles from the Communards. But most stayed where the party was, using music to try and get rich and get laid. Over the years, pop music perfected the mechanics of ecstasy – the art of driving a crowd wild with the beat, the break, the call and response, the dance moves, the histrionics, the lights, the props, the pageantry. For 50 years, from 1950 to 2000, pop music was the unofficial cult of western industrial societies (now it’s been replaced by the cult of technology and we’re mainly left with nostalgia).

Popular music provided a temporary community through dancefloors, moshpits, festival sing-alongs. It also provided community through being in a band. Bands are mini ethical communities, where you learn about obligations and commitments to one another – the commitment to show up to practice, to work on getting tight. This is what Roddy Doyle, was getting at in The Commitments: how bands are a form of spiritual community, albeit an incredibly fragile one, constantly on the verge of falling apart.

Well, of course there are all kinds of problems with pop music as a secular religion. It inspired and channeled religious emotions not towards God but towards the Pop Star, and this messed people up – particularly the pop stars. The drugs which fueled the religious exaltation also messed many people up – out of the four people in my first band, fatefully named Lunatic Fringe, three of us developed mental illnesses because of drugs. And, finally, something that was meant to be about community and transcendence ended up, in gangsta rap, in the glorification of money, power and violence. Hip hop has more power than any other contemporary music, but now you listen to the lyrics and think, my God, this is hateful. But at its best, soul and rock and roll gave us an outlet for emotions that were often left out of the rationalised world of modern capitalism. It let us feel broken, lost, hurt, lonely, longing for release, and let us know other people felt the same – like prisoners communicating with each other by tapping on the pipes in their cell.

Meanwhile, the church has moved from its initial condemnation of rock and roll, towards embracing its spirit and its music. In the 1960s and 70s, the Charismatic Renewal movement swept through western churches, with intense services accompanied by signs, wonders and ecstasies, and often powered by joyous rock music. In the 1970s, a musician called John Wimber left the Righteous Brothers, found Jesus and started the Vineyard Movement, which briefly converted Bob Dylan, and from which Mumford and Sons originate. The Vineyard Movement emphasised the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and rock music played a big part in its services. Wimber came over to the UK in the 1990s, and helped to inspire the ill-fated 9 O’Clock Service in Sheffield (the so-called ‘rave church’), and spread the charismatic embrace of rock to the affluent kids of HTB in Knightsbridge. HTB and Alpha is soaked in rock references: the first sermon I saw there, the preacher played a clip from Pink Floyd in the sermon! And from HTB, the rock-infused charismatic movement is gradually spreading into the entire Church of England. Who’d have thought it: the staid old Anglican Church has picked up the mechanics of ecstasy from rock and roll.

Check it out: this is a video from HillSong, a massive charismatic rock church in Australia. If you find it a bit too, er, plain vanilla, try this playlist I made of some great 60s soul tracks. Way more uplifting! And you know why? Because the soul songs go lower. They go down into the pain in a way this ultra-white preppie Christian rock never does. It’s so upbeat and chirpy, it doesn’t have any room for the possibility of failure. It has no blues.

*****

In other news:

The journalist Miranda Sawyer has been exploring similar themes to this piece in a series for Radio 6 on music and emotions. In this episode, she considers the emotion of Jubilation, and interviews Sister Bliss – who hopefully I’ll be interviewing next week!

Interesting Prospect review of Antony Pagden’s new book on the Enlightenment, which argues it was based not so much on reason as on sympathy. But did it fatally lack sympathy for the majority of the world who believed in God?

Here’s an interview I did with the Irish Times.

Nice piece by Juliet Michaelson of new economics foundation, critiquing the Justin Wolfers paper on income and well-being that I linked to last week.

This is well interesting: a cultural history of exhaustion, from the Medical Humanities Centre in Durham.

The National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) in the US, which is the main funder of mental health research in the US, has shaken up the world of psychology by rejecting DSM 5, the so-called ‘bible of psychiatric diagnosis’, as too inaccurate – before it’s even been published. Its director says NIMH is building its own new diagnostic criteria, which are alas likely to be even more biomedical than DSM.

Meanwhile, a new art show in New York is called DSM V. Can the musical be far behind?

A novelist with MS says she has a new lease of life thanks to the ‘brain enhancing drug’, Modafinil.

Look, we did a philosophy picnic on Hampstead Heath! It was fun.

That’s all for this week. Buy the book and give it to a friend!

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

He’s thus one of several English philosophers (AC Grayling, John Gray, Alain de Botton) currently trying to re-invent religion for a secular age. I’m not certain his attempt will be more successful than these earlier attempts, but before we criticize the project, let’s first outline his argument, because it’s certainly interesting.

1) Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology

Carl Schmitt, Nazi philosopher

Firstly, Critchley argues that all modern political ideology involves a reformulation or metamorphosis of the sacred. In this he follows the German philosopher and ardent Nazi, Carl Schmitt, who wrote in an influential 1922 essay, ‘Political Theology’, that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”.

The Age of Reason might have congratulated itself on doing away with the old superstition of Christianity and the Divine Right of Kings. But Enlightenment political philosophies simply created new ‘sacred fictions’ to put in the old gods’ place: The People (or Volk), the Fuhrer, Representative Democracy, the Free Market, the Invisible Hand, and so on.

So, for example, American democracy is built on the strange Deism of the Freemasons / Illuminati. The Invisible Hand, meanwhile, was taken by Adam Smith from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus – at the end of the play Oedipus is carried up by an invisible hand to the Gods. Sophocles took the image from the ancient fertility myth of Demeter. So an image that originally symbolised the divine power of Nature over human affairs came to be used to symbolise the divine power of the Market.

In seeing Enlightenment politics as competing ‘sacred narratives’, Critchley follows John Gray, who made a similar critique of neoliberalism as a Utopian religion in his 1998 book, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. It’s also, interestingly, in line with the recent work of the social scientist Jonathan Haidt, which has looked at how different political narratives of the sacred push different emotional buttons within our psyches. Haidt wrote last year:

The key to understanding tribal behavior is not money, it’s sacredness. The great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred. People who worship the same idol can trust one another, work as a team and prevail over less cohesive groups. So if you want to understand politics, and especially our divisive culture wars, you must follow the sacredness.

2) Rousseau’s civil religion

The Enlightenment philosopher who best understood the irrationalism of politics and the need for a conscious reformulation of the sacred was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau understood, better than most Enlightenment philosophers, that man “consults solely his passions in order to act”. The challenge of passionate politics (as Rousseau sees it) is how to transform a handful of alienated and selfish individuals into a mystically fused whole, in which no citizen is subordinated to any other, because all are united in the General Will. How can this mystical transformation happen? Rousseau writes in his Considerations on the Government of Poland: “Dare I say it? With children’s games: spectacles, games, and festivals which are always conducted ‘in the open’”. As Critchley notes, this idea “had a direct influence on Robespierre’s fetes nationales civiques in the years after the French Revolution”.

The Tennis Court Oath during the French Revolution: ecstatic politics in action

Rousseau was also the only Enlightenment political philosopher to follow Plato in seeing music as absolutely crucial to the formation of the national soul. In his ‘Essay on the Origin of Languages, Melody and Musical Imitation’, he blamed the decay of melody for the loss of political virtue, and expressed some hesitant hope that music might be revived and once again used as an organ to shape the national genius. Again, Rousseau’s Romantic nationalism was prescient, anticipating not just the importance of the Marseillaise and of national anthems in general to 19th century Romantic nationalism, but also the zenith of Romantic nationalism in the Nazi regime’s use of Wagner.

The crucial ‘fiction’ in Rousseau’s civil religion is the fiction of the legislator,  an almost superhuman Leader who will guide the people to their mystical oneness in the General Will. The Leader is a ‘superior intelligence who saw all of man’s passions and experienced none of them, who had no relation to our nature yet knew it thoroughly” – not a man, so much as a God.

Goering understood Rousseau’s call for national festivals to create the proper volksgeist

While one can applaud Rousseau’s prescience in understanding the power of the passions in politics, his plan for a civil religion is also a little chilling, bringing to mind Robespierre’s Dictatorship of Virtue and, even more, Goering’s Myth of Hitler, which likewise relied heavily on grand festivals, parades, games, music and cinema. Critchley admits: “It would seem there is little to prevent the legislator from becoming a tyrant, from believing that he is a mortal god who incarnates the General Will. Such is the risk that is always run when politics is organized around any economy of the sacred”.

Another risk of this politics of the sacred, of course, is that the politics of national ecstasy quickly turns into a bad trip of paranoia and bloodletting: Woodstock mutates into Altamont. To keep the people ‘high’, to keep the national festival going, at some point you need to start finding scapegoats to murder.

Critchley recognises the risk of bloody totalitarian dictatorship is a bit of a problem with Rousseau’s politics. He notes that the French philosopher Alain Badiou is happy to follow Rousseau and advocate violent dictatorship. Badiou writes: “Dictatorship is the natural form of organization of political will.” But Critchley, noble fellow, decides this “is a step I refuse to take”. So if a cult of the Fuhrer doesn’t appeal, what other models are there of passionate politics?

3) John Gray’s passive nihilism

Critchley’s search for what Wallace Stevens called an ‘acceptable fiction’ – some myth we can believe in even when we know it’s not true – brings him onto similar terrain as John Gray, whose new book, The Silence of Animals, also quotes Stevens heavily and is also a search for a myth we can believe in. But Critchley wittily rejects Gray’s sacred narrative:

[Gray’s pessimism] leads to a position which I call ‘passive nihilism’…The passive nihilist looks at the world with a certain highly cultivated detachment and finds it meaningless. Rather than trying to act in the world, which is pointless, the passive nihilist withdraws to a safe contemplative distance and cultivates his aesthetic sensibility by pursuing the pleasures of lyric poetry, yogic flying, bird-watching, gardening, or, as was the case with the aged Rousseau’ botany. In a world that is rushing to destroy itself through capitalist exploitation or military crusades  which are usually two arms of the same killer ape – the passive nihilist withdraws to an island where the mystery of existence can be seen for what it is without distilling into a meaning. In the face of the coming decades, which in all likelihood will be defined by the violence of faith and the certainty of environmental devastation, Gray offers a cool but safe temporary refuge… Nothing sells better than epigrammatic pessimism….

Ouch.

4) Mystical anarchism

So what form would Critchley’s more positive and optimistic politics take? He looks to medieval Millenarian anarchist movements, like the People’s Crusade of the 11th century and the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit of the 14th century. He uses Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium as a source, and notes the power of various self-proclaimed Messiahs – Hans Bohm, Thomas Muntzer, John of Leyden – “to construct what Cohn calls…a phantasy or social myth around which a collective can be formed”.

Critchley is inspired by the ecstatic movements described in Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium

Once again, there are some risks to such Millenarial movements: like the French Revolution or the Nazi regime, the fires of political ecstasy were stoked by identifying scapegoats and declaring a Holy War on them. Violence, Critchley notes, “becomes the purifying or cleansing force through which the evil ones are to be annihilated”. But Critchley hopes to build an ‘ethical anarchism’ that rejects such violence, or rather, than seeks to violently annihilate the self, rather than the Other. He looks to Marguerite Porete, a mystic and author of The Mirror of Simple and Annihilated Souls, and how she tried to annihilate herself to become one with God. He’s also interested in Christine the Astonishing, who also tried to annihilate herself: “she threw herself into burning-hot making ovens, ate foul garbage and leftovers, immersed herself in the waters of the river Meuse for six days when it was frozen, and even hanged herself at the gallows for two days”. Astonishing indeed.

We might simply reject such movements as Medieval nuttiness, but Critchley sees them as anticipating modern anarchist movements, particularly the Paris Commune, and the Situationism of Paris 1968. He doesn’t discuss the Occupy movement, but it also struck me as having something of the Millenarial uprising to it, not least in its occasional Woodstock-esque emphasis not on process reform but on a radical transformative politics of love. This is what Critchely is groping towards. He writes: “love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty and engage with its own annihilation”. Mystical anarchism, then, is an annihilation of the self and an attempt at the ‘infinite demand’ of love – not of God, but of one’s fellow men.

Critchely also explores St Paul’s writings at length, partly through the interpretations of Heidegger and Alain Badiou, and sees in Paul a role model of sorts for the Utopian anarchist in late capitalism, longing for another world which is not present, and suffering in anguish in a fallen world that is so alien to one’s desires. And yet Paul somehow manages to hope, to believe and have faith in the not-yet, which is an attitude that the mystical anarchist also clearly needs.

6) Critchley’s spat with Zizek

The last chapter summarises an argument Critchley has been having with Slavoj Zizek, who is supposedly one of the top ten thinkers in the world, according to Prospect magazine’s new poll (if anything exposes the limits of representative democracy, it is that assertion). Zizek sees Critchely’s politics of anarchist protest (for example, his advocation of protest against the Iraq War) as simply playing into the hands of the ruling regime. It makes the protestors feel better, and even helps the regime by giving the appearance of lively liberal disagreement.

Zizek, dreaming of cataclysmic violence

Zizek by contrast, in Critchley’s words, asserts that “the only authentic stance to take in dark times is to do nothing, to refuse all commitment, to be paralyzed like Bartleby”. Go to bed, like John and Yoko. However, Zizek also dreams of  “a divine violence, a cataclysmic, purifying violence of the sovereign ethical deed”. Yikes. Stay in bed Slavoj!

Critchley rejects this position, arguing it involves a misinterpretation of Walter Benjamin’s theory of divine violence. This seems a weird reason to reject it: surely one can reject it simply because it’s evil? Why is Walter Benjamin suddenly granted biblical authority? Critchley can sometimes get lost in critical theory’s jargon and guru-worship, and not see the ethical wood for the semantic trees. I’m glad he rejects Badiou’s call for a Maoist dictatorship, for example, but why does he still quote Badiou so reverently? He called for a Maoist dictatorship! Why quote Carl Schmitt at such length, without fully spelling out quite what a book-burning Nazi anti-Semite he was? Critchley comes across as a sympathetic and decent voice (I have no idea how the man actually lives) but the philosophers he looks to (Rousseau, Heidegger, Schmitt, Badiou, Lacan) hardly inspire confidence in the ethical authority of philosophers.  You sometimes feel Critchley is too reverent before charlatan bullshit merchants like Lacan, that he lacks common sense, lacks Orwell’s ability to see through intellectual bullshit and to recognise a scoundrel when he sees one.

7) Problems with Critchley’s politics of the sacred

My main problem with Critchley’s Faith of the Faithless – similar to my problem with Gray’s new mythology – is that, for an attempt at a ‘passionate politics’, it is far too intellectual, tepid and, well, theoretical. Take this passage, where he attempts to formulate his faith of the faithless:

Faith is a word, a word whose force consists in the event of its proclamation. The proclamation finds no support within being, whether conceived as existence or essence. Agamben links this thought to Foucault’s idea of veridiction or truth-telling, where the truth lies in the telling aloe. But the thought could equally be linked to Lacan’s distinction, inherited from Benveniste, between the orders of enonciation (the subject’s act of speaking) and the enonce (the formulation of this speech-act into a statement or proposition). Indeed, there are significant echoes between this idea of faith as proclamation and Levinas’ conception of the Saying (le Dire), which is the performative act of addressing and being addressed by an other, and the Said (le Dit), which is the formulation of that act into a proposition of the form S is P.

How is such airy-theory ever going to inspire an ecstatic popular uprising? The problem, I think, is that both Critchley and Gray are trying to construct a faith or myth and give it sacred power, but for a myth to have that power, you have to really believe it. You can’t just suspend your disbelief. This is the major difference between Critchley and St Paul or Christine the Astonishing. The latter two were perfectly happy to risk their lives for their sacred narratives, because they really believed in Jesus and in the after-life and so were happy to give up the world, even to see the world destroyed. And, crucially, they didn’t think it was possible to meet the ‘infinite demand’ of love without God’s help. They are weak, but God is strong. Critchley embraces Paul’s sense of human weakness, but is not capable of accepting the idea of God’s strength, which renders the ‘infinite demand’ of love even harder to meet. This, to my mind, is a problem with humanism in general: how to meet the infinite demand of ‘love thy neighbour’. I think Tobias Jones may be right: it is much easier to love thy neighbour when you have a common God above you and within you. Beneath modern cosmopolitanism, after all, is the Stoics’ sacred belief that we are all citizens of the City of God.

More broadly, do Critchley or Gray really believe their myths, or are they just playing? What are they prepared to sacrifice for them? Likewise, what are the followers of De Botton’s Religion for Atheists prepared to sacrifice, other than the occasional Sunday morning? It all seems very post-modern, very cafe-cosmopolitan, ironic, safe, non-committal, and a million miles away from either medieval Millenarianism or modern fascism or Jihadism. It seems like cafe chat. Talk is cheap.

Myths use us as vessels, and can destroy us

My second issue with this new postmodern embrace of religious myth is this: let’s say you succeed in creating a Supreme Fiction which people really do believe in, which pushes their sacred emotion buttons and mobilises a mass movement. How can you be sure that your new religion doesn’t veer into the orgy of scapegoat-sacrificing that previous ecstatic politics have veered into? How do you make sure your Woodstock doesn’t turn into Altamont? How do you make sure the leaders of this movement don’t start believing, as Hitler started to believe, that they really are the Messiah, the embodiment of the national genius, Wotan? As I said in my review of Gray’s book, myths are slippery things – they take hold of us and use us as vessels, like the alien face-suckers in Prometheus.

My final concern is that it seems like the Two Cultures are getting further and further apart. On the one hand, philosophy (and perhaps the humanities in general) seems to be rejecting the Enlightenment, rejecting liberal humanism, and looking to irrational and often violent religious myths for consolation and inspiration. On the other hand, the social sciences are informing a new ‘evidence-based politics’ – what Carl Schmitt would perhaps say as the deification of the Randomised Controlled Trial. The Two Cultures seem more and more incapable of talking to each other.

We need both! Critchley looks out into a bleak future likely to be characterized by “religious violence and environmental devastation”. In such a future, I am certain we will need good myths. But we also need a way to preserve scientific literacy and a respect for scientific evidence. That’s why I find Stoic and Aristotelian virtue ethics one optimistic meeting ground, bringing together both philosophers and social scientists. I think we should be wary of entirely rejecting Socratic humanism and completely embracing an irrationalist or Dionysiac politics. We are a generation that didn’t experience Nazism, and so have a more optimistic attitude to the politics of ecstasy. I like Dionysiac ecstasy as much as the next man, but I prefer it in church to a nationalist Fuhrer rally. As Eric Voegelin put it, don’t immanentize the eschaton.

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -