This is the second bog inspired by my reading of Alister McGrath’s recently published book Why We Believe. Chapter five, What Difference Does Believing Make? leads me to explore an element of understanding that has become increasingly important to me but is rarely explored in the Church today and about which I think Alister is largely unaware. But let’s begin with his text.
Hierarchy of needs, self-actualisation and self-transcendence
Alistair opens with the influence of Freud in the twentieth century, a lingering influence that “has until recently discouraged attempts to study the phenomenon of belief empirically, or try to understand ‘normal’ belief, as opposed to its ‘pathological’ manifestations in various psychiatric disorders.” I’m not sure the chapter clarifies or has an opinion on what ‘normal belief’ as opposed to ‘pathological manifestations of belief’ can be categorised and distinguished.
He jumps to the second half of the twentieth century and the American psychologist Abraham Maslov whose Motivation and Personality (1954) proposed a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs – a hierarchy of needs. Maslow stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to ‘abnormal psychology, treating people as a ‘bag of symptoms’. Fulfilling our hierarchy of needs could or would culminate in self-actualization, a term coined by the theorist Kurt Goldstein to describe the basic drive providing the motive for a person to realize their full potential after the more basic needs of the body and the ego have been met. Later, Carl Rogers wrote of "the curative force in psychotherapy of a person’s tendency to actualize themself, to become their potentialities and express and activate all the capacities of the organism." Maslow himself later added the category of self-transcendence, an element which, strictly speaking, extends beyond one's own particular, personal "needs".
Human flourishing
In 1998 Martin Seligman introduced the discipline of positive psychology, a science of human flourishing. This is a discipline I was conscious of and was integrating into my Christian ministry and practice long before I began psychotherapy training at the Chiron Centre at the end of the 1980s. There human flourishing was integral to the work. [I must note here the book of essays recently published in honour of Elizabeth Baxter and her work at Holy Rood House: Theology and Human Flourishing’. Elizabeth’s work, rooted in the creation of human flourishing to provide sanctuary and healing, continues to be a rare and deeply valuable model for Christian ministry.]
In the context of positive psychology Alister says we regularly speak of human ‘reason’, ‘emotions’, or ‘imagination’, these three interconnected within the sense-making apparatus of the human brain, inseparable. But reason, emotions and imagination are not activities of the brain alone. We live in a very head-centred society (and a head-centred Church). The activity of the brain in making sense of human reason, emotions and imagination cannot be separated from organic activity in the rest of our bodies - the whole of our bodies, every limb, organ, surface and element are involved in communicating and interpreting our experience of being alive, our reason, emotions and imagination.
The assumption that the brain, independently from the rest of our bodies, ‘processes’, makes sense of experience and is responsible for our human flourishing also affect the way in which human believing and faith is understood, or rather misunderstood: ‘that belief is something distinctively religious or spiritual and thus is of no interest or relevance to people who are nonreligious or generically clerical.’
Re-imagining Reality: Seeing things in a New Way
The experience of sight and vision are often used in Western religious and philosophical traditions as metaphors of truth and meaning. In Mindsight (2004), philosopher Colin McGinn draws a distinction between perception and imagination, arguing that imagination is a unique mental faculty pervading our mental life. Philosopher Hannah Arendt notes that thinking has often been thought of in terms of seeing. Recent studies suggest that our evolutionary development allows us to see things or solve problems through imagining alternative ways of thinking or acting. Throughout or childhood and education we are given mental maps of life and knowledge that we learn to trust implicitly, with the result that they often have the effect of controlling, limiting and subjugating us to conform to family, social, cultural or religious norms. The ‘map’ of our religion is often vitally important, integral to our identity, wellbeing and self-understanding. As a child, provided with what I assume was a very orthodox, traditional map in Sunday School, awareness of my sexuality opened me to the conviction that the Christian map on offer wasn’t congruent with my emotional, sexual and physical attractions. Alister suggests we can gain a deeper understanding of ‘what the world outside is telling us’ by using a series of different maps, each grounded in a different intellectual discipline. It depends on which maps we are offered or stumble across. I suggest that we can gain a deeper and richer understanding of ourselves and our life and a more enriching world view, by exploring a whole variety of theologies and philosophies, including other religious and philosophical maps and traditions. Indeed, I think it’s essential.
Metanoia
I think Alister sees the process of choosing to use a variety of ‘maps’ to develop our world view as a somewhat logical, slow, developmental process, and indeed it can be and perhaps normatively is for the majority. In contrast to that idea, he considers religious conversion as a more striking way in which people’s beliefs and the way they see the world can change. The Greek word metanoia is used in the New Testament to refer to this re-imagination of reality, a rational and imaginative transformation in which we see things in a new light, experience them in a new way and reappraise them accordingly.
‘Metanoia calls for a fundamental change in human reality through a holistic “change of mind” . . . a reshaping or “re-forming” of mental structures which is at the same time a new “form” or “shape” of a human life.’ Metanoia denotes the ‘reconceptualization on an intellectual as well as an emotional plane of an individual’s relationship with God.’
Whether we experience a sudden moment of metanoia, an event that transforms us emotionally and spiritually, or whether our lives are one long developing transformation of experience, broadening and deepening our worldview, if the result is that we feel more alive, more positive, more “self-actualised”, more in touch with ourselves and our bodies, more grounded - then this is a good thing. Whether or not it also results in a new awareness of our relationship with God, as Alistair seems to assume, is another matter. As I’ve written before, my awareness of God has always been intuitive, experiential, emotional, felt, in marked contrast to the head-centred dependence on scripture, tradition and reason required by advocates of Anglican orthodoxy and tradition.
Experience
Alistair surprised me at this point by introducing Richard Dawkins as someone who recognises the importance of the
‘feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe – almost worship – this flooding of the chest with epiphanic wonder, that modern science can provide’ (Is Science a Religion?’
(The Humanist 57, 1997)
Alistair comments that:
“this experience is neither ‘religious’ nor ‘scientific’; it is simply an experience, until and unless it is connected with a conceptual framework, a network of beliefs that illuminate its nature and endows it with meaning. Psychological accounts of an experience of awe can easily be given.”
Dawkins has described exactly what I experience, in my body as much as or more than in my head, when I meditate every morning, opening my body consciously to the ‘energies’, physical sensations of divine, sacred presence, the effects of ‘a sudden moment of metanoia’ in which we can (and I do) “seen things afresh in a new light and experience them in a new way.” Such an experience is universal and transformative, whether or not you believe the origin of the experience is ‘God’, a divine sacred other. Alister thinks this experience is neither religious nor scientific but “just an experience”. For him it has to be rational, connected with a conceptual framework, a network of beliefs, before it can be endowed with meaning.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) William James’ says it seems as if there is ‘in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call “something there,” more deep and more general than any of the special and particular “senses” by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.’ Truth is something that needs to be felt, that needs to resonate with our experience of life. These experiences would include the exquisite sense of longing for something undefined and apparently unattainable. These liminal experiences hint at a new world beyond a limiting threshold of human vision.
Epiphanies and the relation between belief and experience
Did Richard Dawkins have an ‘experience’ or an ‘epiphany’? Alistair says an ‘epiphany’ is a term more recently used for moments of an ‘overwhelming existentially significant manifestation of value in experience, often sudden and surprising,’ which ‘feels like it “comes from outside”’ and allows us to grasp something new.’ You cannot be said to have had an epiphany unless you have processed the experience in a cognitive way that ascribes it to an origin outside ourselves. He cites Sophie Grace Chappell (Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience. 2022), who says epiphanic moments seem to “allow us to understand things.” Here lies the essence of the problem, for me, of believing and its relationship with experience in today’s Church. If I experience being gay and act on the experience, I cannot be an orthodox, traditional, Bible-believing Christian. As a priest, I cannot have sex, cannot be sexually intimate, and cannot have a faithful, stable relationship sanctified by marriage. I cannot have had an epiphany. But I experience myself as having had epiphanies from the age of eleven. What, then, do such epiphanies, such experiences, mean? Is this deep sense of longing a genuine response to something that lies, dimly glimpsed and partially apprehended, beyond the world of appearances or is it a massive error on my part, a betrayal of God, a misguided, sinful error? The rational, head-centred world of conservative constructs of the Christian faith tell me my personal feelings and intuition are categorically wrong, not to be trusted. I should trust the “experience” of those authorised to delineate the boundaries of Christian faith and practice. Their heads know better or best.
But experience is internal as well as external. Indeed, it is in one sense entirely internal. It is nothing without us, our bodies, our body chemistry, our evolved mechanisms for sensing and interpreting the world around us. Transcendent reality ‘exists’ within us as much as it ‘exists’ beyond us, is more knowable within us if we can but find the courage to trust our intuition. I am at odds with both Alistair and Richard Dawkins, who suggests that religious experience can be explained reductively by anyone with ‘the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings.’ I disagree. The brain is but one element in our bodies that is interpreting and processing experience. The brain can’t process experience unless our body is having experiences, and they are being communicate by our neural networks. I’m going to conclude this blog here. There is more to come, but this is quite enough to be going on with.
If you would like to invite me to come and talk to a group or meeting about “life in all its fulness” based on these and other ideas or if you would like to come and have a one-to-one conversation with me once I’ve moved to London, please DM or email me using the contact form at the top right of the blog home page.