The Return of the Sacred: Grace or

Apocalypse?

‘Whatever side one takes in this debate about the “return of the religious” ... one still must respond. And without waiting. Without waiting too long.’

– Jacques Derrida

‘Modern man sought for answers within his soul. Enigmatic powers awoke out of the religious spirit; the force of the numinous impinged itself directly upon the human spirit, either from within the spirit or from the world at large. Not only was the numinous beneficent but also bewildering, even destructive in its impact.’

– Romano Guardini

Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 38.

Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World (1957; Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 1998), pp. 48-49.

As novelist Christopher Koch puts it: ‘The spirit doesn’t die, of course; it turns into a monster’.

Christopher Koch, The Year of Living Dangerously (London: Michael Joseph, 1978), p. 236.

The spirit behaves like any psychological organ when it is denied and mistreated. In favourable conditions, it brings out the best in humanity and culture, but when it is suppressed it turns into a demonic power, threatening psychological and social stability.

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote of the ‘return of the religious’ and defined this as the ‘coming of the other’, where the ‘other’ is a term for everything that is different from the ego.

The ‘explosive force’ of the religious, he said, can ‘interrupt history’ and ‘tear history apart’. In this interruption to ‘the ordinary course of history’, we have to ‘be prepared for the best as for the worst, the one never coming without the possibility of the other’.

Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 2 and 18.

Derrida had predicted religion would return with violence, because it had been suppressed with violence. He spoke of religion rising like a tumour in society, because so much had been ignored about our relation to ultimate reality. An energic pressure builds up in the soul, which is liable to explode at any point:

‘Religious resurgence imposes itself upon us to suggest the redoubling of a wave that appropriates even that to which, enfolding itself, it seems to be opposed. It gets carried away, sometimes in terror and terrorism. Allying itself with the enemy, hospitable to the antigens, bearing away the other with itself, this resurgence grows and swells with the power of the adversary.’

The philosopher associated with nihilism was a prophet at the end of his life. How strange, he said, to find ‘the return of the religious … not without relation to the return of radical evil’.

Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’ (1996), in Gil Anidjar, ed., Acts of Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 82.

Depth psychologist Carl Jung claims modernity encourages us to live in the narrow confines of the ego, and the psyche or soul, excluded and ignored, arraigns itself against us ‘as something which thwarts our will, which is strange and even hostile to us, and which is incompatible with our conscious standpoint’.

He said the soul ‘wants something different from the ego and we are at war with ourselves’.

Jung claimed that ‘when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate’. To what extent, then, is the scourge of terrorism an externalisation of an internal conflict?

Jung says ‘the world must perforce act out an inner conflict and be torn into opposing halves’.

Jung, ‘The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man’ (1928/31), The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 10, § 160.

Jung, ‘Christ, A Symbol of the Self’, in Aion (1951), CW Vol. 9, part 2, §126.

According to Sufi texts, the notion of a ‘holy war’ applies more to the inner than the outer realm. The true meaning of jihad, according to Hazrat Inayat Khan, refers to the psychological strife ‘to overcome the false ego’. When returning from battle against the infidels, the Prophet Mohammed said: ‘We have come back from the lesser Holy War to the Greater Holy War’. His companions asked: ‘What is the Greater Holy War?’ Mohammed replied: ‘The war against the ego’.

Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message, Volume 1 (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers), p. 21.

M. Lings, What is Sufism? (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975), p. 27.

Shahid Athar explains that in Sufi tradition, the ego is the enemy of spirit and conquering the ego’s ascendancy is the best form of jihad, allowing the Sufi to be at peace with himself and close to the Creator.

According to Islamicist Thomas Cheetham, terrorists have misunderstood the symbolic nature of their quest and the call for jihad, and are falsely externalising this internal battle.

Shahid Athar, ‘Inner Jihad: Striving Toward Harmony’, The Sufism Journal 10:3, 2010, available at: www.sufismjournal.org/practice/practicejihad.html

Jung likened the religious impulse to an instinct, and, ‘like every instinct, it has its specific energy, which it does not lose even if the conscious mind ignores it’. This instinct would return, like everything unconscious, with considerable force as soon as conditions allow. It would not only return with explosive force, but it would return in distorted forms, since psychic contents take on archaic/disruptive aspects when they are repressed.

Jung, ‘Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept’ (1936/1954), CW 9, part 1, § 129.

Jacques Derrida’s Italian colleague Gianni Vattimo wrote:

‘In spirit, something that we had thought irrevocably forgotten is made present again, a dormant trace is reawakened, a wound re-opened, the repressed returns and what we took to be an overcoming is no more than a long convalescence.’

Gianni Vattimo, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 79.

Scientists thought Jung was mad when he announced in 1929 that ‘the gods have become diseases’, and there would be hell to pay in psyche and society for the loss of religious life. But three generations later, Jacques Derrida, the most influential thinker in recent decades, felt that the ‘return of the religious’ was welling up in the collective unconscious. Religion, said Derrida, is not something we do, but something that is done to us. It arose from a mysterious source which we will have to explore with commitment. Sounding very much like Jung, Derrida wrote:

‘How can one account for this “return of the religious” without bringing into play some sort of logic of the unconscious?’

Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’ (1996), in Gil Anidjar, ed., Acts of Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 89.

C. G. Jung, ‘Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower’ (1929), Collected Works, Vol. 13, § 54.

Without respect for all, without tolerance of difference and acceptance of plurality, the future of civilisation is doomed. Upon this platform we can build a new understanding of religious life, in which there are many pathways to the sacred, and none of them can claim absolute priority or knock out the others.

Conservatives call this relativism and dislike it; but I call it the hallmark of civilising morality.

It was on this point that I was banned as a speaker in the Catholic church, as outlined in the article by Vincent Maire. For a full description of this conflict, see my essay ‘The Light of Faith in a Dark Time’, in John W. H. Smith and Rex A. E. Hunt, eds., New Life: Rediscovering Faith (Melbourne: Mosaic Press, 2013), 123-131.

‘Secular’ derives from the Latin, secularis, meaning ‘to make worldly’. In its original usage, it did not imply hostility to God or religion, but merely a departure from ecclesial authority. It was best understood not as anti-religious or atheistic but as religiously neutral, making possible the separation of church and state.

We might distinguish between secular and secularism. Secularism is an ideology, a product of a materialist mentality, and has been defined as ‘a worldly attitude or tendency, especially a system of political or social philosophy which rejects all forms of religious faith and worship’.

Secularism, as defined at: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/secularism

The Abrahamic traditions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are not against the world: ‘God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good’ (Genesis 1:31). The idea that God and world are opposed, that the sacred is otherworldly and this world profane, is an aberration. Secularisation in the sense of making worldly is in my view not opposed to a religious sensibility. We might have supposed dualisms where there were none.

William Blake wrote ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. In all the mystical traditions we read that the eternal is flooding into creation, wanting to participate in it and fructifying its life.

William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (1973), in Geoffrey Keynes ed., The Complete Writings of William Blake (Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 151.

One of the greatest exponents on this new, holistic and non-dualistic vision is Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote of the increasing sense of the holy in creation. For him, evolution is an expression of incarnation.

In numerous contemporary fields of thought, including eco-theology, the natural sciences, emergence theory and the study of consciousness, spirit is seen as coming from within creation, not being imposed on matter from above, as in the medieval notion. The old idea of spirit coming from ‘above’ is metaphorical, not literal.

Heaven is not a distant place but the abode of a spirit that infuses all creation. Earth is ‘crammed with heaven’.

Instead of seeing secularity as a movement opposed to religion, Harvey Cox sees it as a movement within Christianity itself. It is a movement, he says, in which the incarnational thrust of the divine is carried a step further. Cox says:

‘Christianity has entered into its most momentous transformation since its transition in the fourth century into the religious ideology of the Roman Empire.’

That’s a big call, but he expands on it in The Future of Faith. He says the future of faith is to be found in a new awareness of humanity’s relationship with the world.

Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 2.

Charles Taylor, the philosopher who was a leader of the John Main Seminar in 1988, could see a time when there would be a secular-friendly religion. If today’s citizens are engaged in a secular spirituality, it has not come out of the blue, according to Taylor, but has a long background. Taylor speaks of the

‘sanctification of ordinary life which … has had a tremendous formative effect on our civilization, spilling beyond the original religious variant into a myriad secular forms. It has two facets: it promotes ordinary life, as a site for the highest forms of religious life; and it also has an anti-elitist thrust: it takes down those allegedly higher modes of existence, whether in the church or in the world. The mighty are cast down from their seats, and the humble and meek are exalted.’

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2007), p. 179.

The irony is that the sanctification of ordinary life leads to the loss of didactic expressions of religion. In a re-reading of the Book of Revelation, I was astonished to find that in the New Jerusalem there were no churches. John of Patmos felt that if and when everything was holy, and there would be no need to build holy dwellings. Things were already infused with the holy. It made me look upon the world today with new eyes, less mournful and more hopeful. I am not suggesting we are heading into a New Jerusalem, but I am saying we might think again about the so-called ‘ordinary’ world. As Harvey Cox put it, the historical process ‘is making the borders between the religious, the spiritual, and the secular more permeable’.

Les Murray writes that the divine presence is hidden to ordinary awareness:

‘Almost beneath notice, as attainable as gravity, it is

a continuous recovering moment. Pity the high madness that misses it continually ....’

Les Murray, “Equanimity” (1983), in Collected Poems, Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1994, pp.179-181.

I will give this same poet the last word, which is like an anthem of post-secular religious awareness:

‘What we have receivedis the ordinary mail of the otherworld, wholly common, not postmarked divine.’ – Les Murray

Les Murray, ‘First Essay on Interest’, in Murray, ed., Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1986), p. 193.