Tag Archives: Andrew Copson

Antinomian?

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Antinomianism (Ancient Greek: ἀντί [anti] ‘against’ and νόμος [nomos] ‘law’) is any view which rejects laws or legalism and argues against moral, religious or social norms (Latin: mores), or is at least considered to do so. The term has both religious and secular meanings…

The distinction between antinomian and other Christian takes on moral law is that antinomians believe that obedience to the law is motivated by an internal principle flowing from belief rather than from any external compulsion, devotion, or need.

Wikipedia

All human beings have a constitution which suffers when it sees the suffering of others . . . If people catch sight suddenly of a child about to fall into a well, they will all experience a feeling of alarm and distress . . . Because we all have these feelings in ourselves, let us develop them, and the result will be like the blaze that is kindled from a small flame, or the spring in full spate that starts with a trickle. Let these feelings have a free rein, and they will be enough to give shelter and love to us all.

Mengzhi (c. 371 – c. 289 BC)

A commenter on a recent post of mine suggested that membership of some kind of religious organisation (albeit a non-dogmatic one like The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)) might be a necessary defence against “isolation, individualism, even a form of antinomianism.”

This set me thinking. As I have said often enough on this blog, I am more than happy with what some might feel to be isolation; I am, I suppose, some sort of individualist, and always have been; but antinomian? Well, yes, perhaps – guilty as charged, I guess. One of the problems I have had all my life with religious systems and their organisations has been their insistence on adherence to some kind of law, some sort of list of dos and don’ts, of things to believe and beliefs to assent to, rather than reliance upon inner transformation, or simply upon straightforward ethical thinking.

Alice Roberts and Andrew Copson, in The Little Book of Humanism, p. 94:

Considering others is fundamental to our biology. But there’s always room for improvement. We can get better at being good people by thinking about what being good really means, reflecting on the needs of others and ourselves.

Humanists don’t believe in any supernatural source of commands or rules for being good. Instead, humanists hold that we need to think for ourselves about what sort of person we want to be and about the consequences of our actions.

Even people who say they’re taking their morals from religious authority, sacred doctrines or holy books mostly have a very selective approach to this – carefully choosing parts that chime with what they already believe to be moral and ignoring other parts. So, they’re not really learning moral lessons from scripture – rather, imposing their own morals on those archaic texts.

And this seems to me the key point: however much we may ascribe our being good to evolutionary biology’s drive to intraspecific cooperation, to what I called “inner transformation” (really, just the inevitable effect of mindfulness on one’s own unthinking selfishness), or to Scripture, it is actually no more than common sense: thinking through the consequences of our own actions in the light of the needs of others and of ourselves, and doing it thoroughly enough that it becomes second nature.

If this is antinomianism, and it rather looks as though by any accepted definition it is, then sign me up! The contemplative path cannot but be pathless; in itself it is a deeply moral thing to realise our intrinsic emptiness of a separated self; to add to it a layer of doctrines and strictures, from whatever source, seems to me like the gilding of lilies. Leave me the open ground, and the loveliness of the wild flowers, and I will take the risk – if risk it be – of wandering where there is no circumscription, no metalled road.

Invisible

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For a long time, since in fact before I formed any kind of regular contemplative practice, and was still very unsure of the relations between philosophy, spirituality and religion, I have been drawn towards being somehow invisible among my peers. And of course, over the years, my contemplative practice has only deepened that longing. The effects of practice on life are sometimes subtle, and they are not always obviously connected to any subjective experience on the part of the one practising. All this tends inevitably towards the eremitic.

As I have said here before, I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct personality type in themselves. I don’t mean by this a literal loner, nor a hermit in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but a contemplative who finds that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship; perhaps even for the commitment of active membership in some political or social movement. This may seem austere to a detached observer, but it doesn’t feel that way from the inside, as it were. It may even be a necessary discipline.

Oddly enough, I can’t seem to detach this eremitical instinct from an acute sense of the moral necessity of equality. It has never made sense to me that – often in religious just as much as in political contexts – some people were disadvantaged, often for reasons over which they had no control themselves, compared to their fellows. That the fact that someone was a woman, or Black, or poor, or gay, would have anything to do with the opportunities life presented has increasingly seemed to me morally obscene. In an interview with Andrew Copson, published in the recent What I Believe collection from Humanists UK, Kate Pickett says,

I’m always quite impressed by the way Quakers talk about it, they have a testimony towards equality. I think that’s the way I think about it as well. People get a bit bent out of shape when they talk about equality, saying things like: ‘We can never have equality, and can never truly be equal, it’s utopian.’ And to a certain extent, that’s true, but we can have more equality. And we can work towards reducing inequality gaps in various aspects. So we can think about working towards reducing gender pay gaps, for example, and that’s improving equality. And even if we don’t get to exactly the same level, then we’re still making progress.

Organisations – even sometimes the Quakers! – have inequality gaps. It’s inevitable: the mere organising of people into structural groupings has this effect. Maybe the radical inward equality imposed by the contemplative life cries out against even this; perhaps that is why the longing for stillness and solitude seems somehow to include a longing for equality?

Certainly this instinct – and it is an instinct far more than a decision – for Einsamkeit feels like a healthy instinct for a wholeness, a completion, that I have far too often neglected. The inwardly eremitic life doesn’t, it appears, have necessarily to involve physical isolation or any experiment in extreme living: it is a solitude of the heart, a calling to a necessary quiet.

Why shouldn’t it hurt?

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We are all finding, all the time, a kind of core. We hope it’s resilient. And if it isn’t resilient – well, equally, I’m always saying to people that strength is an overrated virtue. There’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘I can’t. I really can’t cope with this,’ and turning to whoever or whatever it takes to get through. Although I suppose that resilience and strength are not quite the same. Resilience is being able to get up again, and strength is probably standing there while the rushing brook hurls around you – and there, the point is, you don’t have to get into it. You don’t have to be there. You don’t have to just survive. But I suppose for me – and this is just personal to me, only advice and not a tenet, ‘This is how it should be’ – there is something about that gathering of yourself every day, that regathering, too, which sets you up for the day to come.

Janet Ellis, in conversation with Andrew Copson, in What I Believe: Humanist ideas and philosophies to live by

There is an old Buddhist truism, often quoted and often misattributed, to the effect that “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”. It can sound unfeeling – smug, almost – to one in the midst of real distress; but I have found, strangely, that it is true in the end. We are frail, impermanent, like all living things. Of course change and decay happen to us, and of course they hurt. The problem arises when we are either gripped by the longing for the pain to stop, or paralysed with fear of the reasons for the pain, of its possible outcome. The answer to this is practice.

Practice? How can that work? Surely we cannot sit calmly in meditation when our hearts are broken, when pain knots our guts, or fear steals our breath. Almost certainly we can’t; probably the best we can do at times like this is remember – and often enough that in itself will be too much. How often do we expect from ourselves things the human frame cannot sustain?

Practice, hour after hour, day after day, when all is well, or when there are only little irritations, little twinges: that is the practice that will stay with us when things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold; when all we had hoped for has failed, and the cliff edge slips from under our feet. It is then that we realise that as Janet Ellis says, “You don’t have to just survive.” That, beyond belief almost, “[t]his is how it should be.” That, weirdly, it’s all right. Why not? Why not me? Why shouldn’t something dreadful happen to me? Who else should it happen to, for goodness’ sake?

What practice does, I think, is allow us to accept. Finally, radically (in the original sense of “at the root”) accept what is, even if what is happens to be terrible. Pain, loss, grief: these are inevitable parts of being alive, as is the fear of them. The “suffering”, in the sense of the old Buddhist saying, comes from thinking they shouldn’t be – from trying to make them stop. One can’t, of course: they stop when it is time for them to stop, and not before. Certainly not to order. And it is this realisation that brings the suffering, the craving for it to be otherwise, to an end. The pain may well be as bad as it ever was; but it’s okay. Really. It’s okay. It is part of what is; what, in some unfathomable way, is “how it should be”. The wind-torn wave is just a part of the river, just water, still flowing.