Overview
The Whole - Introductions, Sections, & Chapters
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The Whole
Throughout The Double Refuge I range widely in focus and approach. I go from Khayyam to Shakespeare, from Zhuangzi to Camus, from prose to poetry, from critical analysis to fiction & autobiography, from serious debate to comic diversion.
Yet I always aim to explore 1🔺 the many-sided beast of agnosticism, 2🔺 the ways that agnosticism is compatible, though distinct from, atheism and theism, and 3🔺 the way that agnosticism and theism can co-operate and even reinforce each other.
1🔺 and 2🔺 are crucial to this study, yet my goal is to sound the depths of 3🔺. This reflects my personal view that poetic mysticism, for want of a better term, connects the material to the spiritual, connects our individual experience to images and symbols which we use to get at that elusive Something Greater, which is forever beyond our symbols.
Philosophically I’m agnostic, yet theologically I’m non-dualist, more or less in the traditions of Neoplatonism and Vedanta. Thinking along these lines puts me in awe of both science and religion, in awe of the mysteries that each tries to explore. I believe that science without limits sees eye to eye with religion without dogma. Perhaps the laws of Nature emanate from a Unified Theory just as versions of religion emanate from a transcendent One.
This line of sight that goes from science to religion might be called the double vision. And yet it’s one line, just as the vision inside the head is of one Greater Reality, which for want of a better term we might call the One or the Whole. People often talk about matter and spirit as if they were separate, as if a Great Wall and innumerable traps are set along the border. They often talk as if there was in fact a solid border, 🔭🔬 impenetrable on one side because of the solid facts of space and the invisible facts of gravity and magnetism, and ✝️🕉️ impenetrable on the other side because of the solid weight of doctrine and the invisible spiritual powers of gravity and magnetism. Yet what is the difference between these types of gravity and magnetism? This is what I’ll be looking at in 1🔺 and 2🔺.
Both sides appear to have different types of gravity and magnetism, atrracting us in different ways and pulling us apart so that we see the two as completely separate. Yet what if the same gravity and magnetism operated in both? What if gravity and magnetism operate in the visible realm, and also in the realm of thought and feeling, psychology and spirit, intuition and belief? What if the border doesn’t really exist, but is just a way of dividing up the same Whole? How many ways can we divvy up what we can’t see? This is what I’ll be looking at in 3🔺.
This is also why I focus on the unifying notion of refuge, the crucial noun and subject which is modified by double. My title signals the same escape or refuge from the same trap of isolation, alienation, & exclusivity that we can fall into if we divide everything from everything.
Notwithstanding this notion of refuge, I’m still agnostic enough to admit that I don’t really know if I’m right or not. So I look as deeply as I can into the question of how the most open versions of realism and agnosticism might connect with the most open versions of mysticism and religion.
In all cases, I suspect that humility is the key: in the double refuge of open agnosticism and non-doctrinal mysticism we see that we’re only a tiny part of the universe and that we can’t claim to speak for the Great Whole, whatever that may be. Scientifically and rationally we may think of the Cosmos; poetically and mystically we may think of the One and the Good. Yet however we approach the topic, the Great Whole may well be infinite and therefore beyond definition, conception, or conclusion. We may not be able to define or lay down borders, yet we can still feel this Wholeness, this Goodness, this Mystical Union, this Yoga of body and spirit, this Holy Spirit connecting to everything.
Or, as Shelley put it, getting as close as possible to the poetic mysticism of ineffability, “Rome's azure sky, / Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak / The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.”
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Introductions
The Double Refuge begins with two wide-ranging introductory chapters, 🍏 Starting Points and 🧩 Complexities. In general, 🍏 Starting Points is more introductory, while 🧩 Complexities goes into more involved questions, like those of zero-sum philosophy, paradoxes of doubt, the philosophical implications of infinity, the practicality of Keats’ negative capability, etc.
Sections
Pathways to Doubt (8 chapters) and Currents of Religion (9 chapters) follow the two introductory chapters. Pathways to Doubt emphasizes the effect of science on religion, especially how astronomy and natural science eroded Medieval certainties, and led to the formulation of agnosticism in the late 19th century. Currents of Religion emphasizes the diverse history of religion as well as aspects of mysticism that survive the collapse of certainty. I’ll argue that this mysticism, with its open borders and lack of doctrine, can act as a conduit between agnosticism and theism — as well as a refuge from the ravages of both.
Throughout The Double Refuge I use historical timelines, yet my arguments are more about the nature of doubt and belief than about historical development. My range is quite wide and varied — from early expressions of doubt and belief in Mesopotamia, India, China, and Classical Europe to the empiricism and agnosticism of the 18th and 19th centuries, to the liberalism and existentialism of the 20th century. I highlight literature that’s especially relevant to the relation of agnosticism to belief — for instance, the proto-agnosticism of Dickens’ Christianity in Bleak House and the Modern agnosticism and mysticism of Forster in A Passage to India (🦖 At the Wild & Fog).
Chapters
The first large section, Pathways to Doubt, follows a rough chronological order. I start by looking at the revolutionary impact of astronomy (🔭 The Sum of All Space) and at the parallel rise of science and skepticism from the 16th to 20th centuries (🔬 Science & Mystery & ♒️ A River Journey). I then look at the skeptical and empirical strains in agnosticism, from the Greeks to the 19th century (❤️ Three Little Words), after which I look at 17th and 18th century empiricism in light of my personal experience while visiting Guanajuato in the year 2000 (🇲🇽 Señor Locke). I then look at the shift from pre- to post- Darwinian thinking in Dickens’ England (🦖 At the Wild & Fog), at the relation between agnosticism and theism in the 20th century French existentialists Sartre and Camus (🎲 Almost Existential), and at a mystical version of the contemporary existential heroine in the song, “A Lighter Shade of Pale” (🧜🏽♀️ The Mermaid).
Currents of Religion also follows a rough chronological order, starting with an overview of religious history (🌎 Many Tribes). I then look at the influence of Mesopotamian civilization on Judaism & Christianity (♒️ Currents of Sumer), at changing religious paradigms (⏯ Systems & ✝️ St. Francis), at a fictional Biblical & Mesopotamian scenario (🍎 The Apple-Merchant of Babylon), at religion vs. science in contemporary France (🇫🇷 The Priest’s Dilemma), at mysticism in Classical China & Whitman’s 19th Century Transcendentalism (💫 Mystery), at the battle against dogma in the Indian subcontinent in the 20th century (🇮🇳 Fiction), and at the age-old puzzle of death (☠️ Ars Moriendi).
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Next: 🍏 Tangents & Diversions