Atheistic Mystics

I first came across the term “atheistic mystic” in relation to the great psychiatrist and philosopher, Eric Fromm, whose works I have consistently recommended to you over the past few years. Fromm’s aim, in each of his many books, is to explore ways in which human beings can live authentic, happy – in his words, non-alienated – lives within the context of a prosperous industrial society which, having lost its spiritual moorings, is becoming increasingly secular and increasingly unhappy. Fromm held that the spectacular growth of material prosperity during the twentieth century had done little to lessen the force of Thoreau’s nineteenth century observation that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation”. What distinguishes Fromm from many of his contemporaries engaged upon the same task, however, is his constant reference to the great religious figures of the past – Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, Meister Eckhart – not as misguided deluders of the people, but as “Masters of Living”, people who knew, and who taught, how we might live joyous lives, how we might employ our faculties productively, how we might be “oned” to the world. (To Have or to Be, page 28)

What these figures have in common, says Fromm, is the point from which they start. None of them promises us that we will live better lives in some golden future when our politicians and economists have sorted out our problems for us; instead, they teach that authentic existence must be won, now, by the individual for him or herself, by a radical reappraisal of their own life’s meaning and a breaking down of those ego-built barriers which prevent us from perceiving our essential oneness with each other and with the world.

To this list of Masters of Living Fromm would also add Karl Marx. Although, unlike the others, Marx did believe that a change in the economic structure was a necessary step on the road to real human unity, he did not believe that a simple redistribution of wealth and resources was an end in itself. Marx’s vision was not of a consumers’ utopia in which those things once reserved for the few would be enjoyed by the many – what President Kruschev once called “goulash Communism”, and what those who would caricature Marxism call “the politics of envy” – but of a transformed society in which human beings, freed from the mania of owning things, could begin to experience “the development of human power ……the true realm of human freedom” in a truly united human commonwealth.

Whether Marx’s vision – or Fromm’s for that matter – could satisfy any strict definition of the term “mystical” can no doubt be debated, but Fromm believed that both he and Marx could loosely be placed in the mystical tradition whose exponents invariably perceive, explore and try to experience the ultimate unity of things which, they say, is hidden from us by our ego-centred devotion to the satisfaction of our carnal appetites.

However, what is really quite startling about Fromm’s brand of mysticism – at least on first acquaintance with it – is the fact that he expresses it in entirely secular terms. Although he is prepared to accept that God is “a symbol for the highest value that we can experience within us” (To Have or to Be, page 49) and, therefore, is not a redundant concept, he does not believe in an external deity such as is postulated by the religious systems of the West; and, more importantly, he doesn’t believe that leading a spiritual life – which, for him, means an authentic, examined life – needs to have such a God as its focus or its goal.

So, Fromm is a self-confessed atheist, but he is also a self-described mystic. To many this might seem like an oxymoron – two contradictory concepts locked in one. But the contradiction is more apparent than real because, strange as it may seem, there is a case to be made that, in a sense, all mystics are atheists. Or, to put it in more acceptable and less contentious terms, that all mystics repudiate the narrow, limited and, at times, almost idolatrous concept of God, which seems to characterise so much of religious thought and practice. This is the God of popular imagination, the God of “parts and passions” who, for all his supposed divinity, seems suspiciously to embody qualities which are all too human. He (and it is usually a he) is just, but jealous; powerful, but arbitrary and capricious; loving, but stern; self-sufficient, but demanding worship. This is the God whom all sectarian religionists invoke in justification of their own dogma and their own morality: the multi-faceted, contradictory God who, for Catholics, condemns contraception, abortion and homosexuality; for Jehovah’s Witnesses condemns blood transfusion; for Muslims condones stoning and beheading. This is the God who puts us to the test and, when we fail, consigns us to an eternal hell.

The mystic, William Blake, called this God of the religionists “Nobodaddy” – nobody’s father - and mystics, whatever their tradition, refuse to worship, or even to believe in, such a partisan creation of the disordered human mind, and it is probably for this reason that they have been, and are, viewed with suspicion by orthodoxy.

The mystic begins with the mystery – with that overwhelming sense of the unfathomable nature of the reality in which we participate; the staggering complexity, immensity and age of the universe, for example, which can only leave us open-mouthed in wonder at the grandeur of it all. This is the “mysterium tremendum atque fascinans” of Rudolf Otto, the terrifying yet compelling mystery of things, which was experienced in the ancient world, of course, but which we, courtesy inter alia of Stephen Hawking and the Hubble telescope, have been given an insight into which our ancestors could never have. I watched the recent Channel 4 series “Universe” with incomprehension and mounting incredulity (even though I, like you, have heard it all before) as an astronomer explained that there are 1,000 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy – each of them more or less like our own sun – and that there are 1,000 billion Galaxies in the observable universe. It is true to say, he went on, that there are more stars than there are grains of sand on every beach on earth. And then, of course, he speculated – quite rightly in my opinion – than countless thousands, perhaps countless millions, of these stars have planetary systems around them on which life has most certainly evolved, leaving us with a picture of an infinite universe teeming with life.

In addition there are the complexities and mysteries we find in our own small world, the mysteries of life and love and consciousness, to which familiarity has inured us, but which speak of things too deep for human comprehension. Even the existence of a mouse, says Walt Whitman, should inspire us with worshipful awe.

It is quite understandable that people with a limited conception of the universe would develop an idea of a tribal God as the creator and sustainer of everything, but is this really an option for us? Can we honestly fit together our astronomical knowledge with our theological speculations? Doesn’t theology, as it is ordinarily conceived and expressed, seem primitive, parochial and paltry when placed in a cosmological perspective?

Indeed it does, says the mystic, who, by and large, has little interest in conventional theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica is the greatest work of theology produced in the Western Church, had such a profound mystical experience towards the end of his life that he dismissed his own philosophical and theological achievements as so much straw, his thousands of well-reasoned pages not even coming close to expressing the ineffable nature of his one fleeting encounter with the divine. To try to put these things into words is, I read last week, like an Australian sheep-moth attempting to explain to its companion the nature of Australia. The infinite mystery of things defeats our conventional categories of thought and even our powers of imagination; it is beyond naming and beyond conception. “God,” writes the anonymous author of the medieval mystical work The Cloud of Unknowing, “may well be loved but not thought”.

Such insights can be found in poetic form in the 3rd chapter of Exodus in which God, who speaks from the bush which burns but which is not consumed, is revealed simply as The One Who Is. “I am who I am,” says God, or “I will be who I will be” as some translations have it. This is the God of No Name, the God who defies names because a name is always a definition and a limitation. (This is why, to this day, Jews refuse to picture God or to speak the name of God, and some will not even say or write the word “God”. On a Jewish website I accessed yesterday God was always written G-D.) The God you can name, describe and picture, the God you can assign a gender and a personality to, is not God. “God,” says the 12th century German mystic, Meister Eckhart “is nothing” – no thing, not another being who exists separately from everything else, but the very ground and source of Being itself, which cannot be contained within the narrow parameters of human description. “I pray God to rid me of God” says Eckhart, meaning I pray to be freed from this anthropomorphic creation of my own imagination which is actually impeding my ability to reconnect with the source of my existence, a source which I an only encounter within myself and not in some fancied external entity. The modern theologian, Paul Tillich, has expressed a similar idea in his phrase “The God beyond God” – the God we must seek is the God who transcends the idol we have built for ourselves from services, sermons, bible-stories, Sunday school, a God whose essence we cannot describe, but whose reality we can only experience. “There is a God. There is no God”, says Simone Weil, resting content with a Zen-type paradox, which defeats the intellect, but which acknowledges and affirms the mystery. She goes on: “I am sure that there is a God in the sense that I am sure my love is no illusion. I am quite sure there is no God, in the sense that I am sure there is nothing which resembles what I can conceive when I say the word.”

So, Eric Fromm, the atheistic mystic, is in very good company when he rejects the conventional notions of God. Our spiritual task, Fromm implies, is not to discover truths about the nature of God in order to satisfy and subdue our intellectual curiosity; this is not only impossible, it is also ultimately and inevitably divisive. Our more pressing concern- pressing for our individual sanity and our collective security – is to discover, or rediscover that sense of identity with all that is, the ultimate unity of things, by breaking down the barriers of our separateness. And this cannot be done by external speculation, but only, as the mystics tell us, by internal exploration. In this Fromm is in complete agreement with the most celebrated religious atheist of all, the Buddha, who left the whole question of God open because, he said, “it is an issue which does not tend towards edification”. Although he would not put it in quite this way, Fromm stands in the illustrious tradition of those who affirm, quite paradoxically, that atheism is actually a prerequisite for any genuine experience of God.

Bill Darlison
18th February 2001