Postsecular Sacred

THE POSTSECULAR SACRED
‘The issues with which this book deals have been attracting increased interest for several
decades, and this seems set to continue for the foreseeable future. The question of the
place of the sacred in predominantly secular cultures is unlikely to be resolved one way
or the other anytime soon.’
– Roderick Main, University of Essex, UK;
author, The Rupture of Time
In The Postsecular Sacred: Jung, Soul and Meaning in an Age of Change, David Tacey presents
a unique psychological study of the postsecular, adding a Jungian perspective to a
debate shaped by sociology, philosophy and religious studies. In this interdisciplinary
exploration, Tacey looks at the unexpected return of the sacred in Western societies, and
how the sacred is changing our understanding of humanity and culture.
Beginning with Jung’s belief that the psyche has never been secular, Tacey examines
the new desire for spiritual experience and presents a logic of the unconscious to explain
it. Tacey argues that what has fuelled the postsecular momentum is the awareness that
something is missing, and the idea that this could be buried in the unconscious is dawning
on sociologists and philosophers. While the instinct to connect to something greater is
returning, Tacey shows that this need not imply that we are regressing to superstitions
that science has rejected. The book explores indigenous spirituality in the context of the
need to reanimate the world, not by going back to the past but by being inspired by it.
There are chapters on ecopsychology and quantum physics, and, using Australia as a case
study, the book also examines the resistance of secular societies to becoming postsecular.
Approaching postsecularism through a Jungian perspective, Tacey argues that we should
understand God in a manner that accords with the time, not go back to archaic, rejected
images of divinity. The sacred is returning in an age of terrorism, and this is not without
significance in terms of the ‘explosive’ impact of spirituality in our time.
Innovative and relevant to the world we live in, this will be of great interest to
academics and scholars of Jungian studies, anthropology, indigenous studies, philosophy,
religious studies and sociology due to its transdisciplinary scope. It would also be a useful
resource for analytical psychologists, Jungian analysts and psychotherapists.
David Tacey is Emeritus Professor of Humanities, La Trobe University, Australia. He is the

author of many books, including The Darkening Spirit: Jung, Spirituality, Religion (Routledge).
THE POSTSECULAR
SACRED
Jung, Soul and Meaning
in an Age of Change
David Tacey
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2020 David Tacey
The right of David Tacey to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tacey, David J. (David John), 1953– author.
Title: The postsecular sacred : Jung, soul, and meaning in an age of
change / David Tacey.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019008201 (print) | LCCN 2019019978 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780429260872 (Master eBook) | ISBN 9780429522994 (Adobe
Reader) | ISBN 9780429551161 (Mobipocket) | ISBN 9780429536465
(ePub) | ISBN 9780367203214 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367203221 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Postsecularism.
Classification: LCC BL2747.8 (ebook) | LCC BL2747.8 .T33 2019
(print) | DDC 200.1/9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008201
ISBN: 978-0-367-20321-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-20322-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-26087-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements and note on referencing vii
Introduction 1
The postsecular condition 11
1 The postsecular landscape 13
2 The mystical turn 36
Secularism under pressure 57
3 A secular country 59
4 The Aboriginal gift we will not accept 80
Reanimation of the world 97
5 Ecopsychology and indigenous cosmology 99
6 Physics and reanimation 116

vi Contents
Postsecular religion and atheism 129
7 God after God 131
8 Derrida: emissary of the postsecular 151
Violence and the sacred 169
9 Return of the sacred in an age of terror 171
10 Epilogue: sacrifice and the future 184
Index 193
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND
NOTE ON REFERENCING
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of Chapter 8 was published as ‘Jacques Derrida: The Enchanted
Atheist’, in Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology (London: Sage
Publishers), 110(1) June 2012, 3–16.
An earlier version of Chapter 9 was published as ‘The Return of the Sacred
in an Age of Terror’, in Murray Stein and Thomas Artz, eds., Jung’s Red Book for
Our Time, Vol. 2 (Wilmette, Illinois: Chiron Publications, 2018), 33–51.
Note on referencing
All references to the works of Jung in the Collected Works are to paragraph num-
bers, not page numbers. References to the Collected Works will be indicated by
the essay title, original date of publication, followed by CW and the volume
number. Such references are to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, translated from
the German by R. F. C. Hull, edited by Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Ger-
hard Adler and William McGuire, and published by Routledge in London and
in America by Princeton University Press, 1953–1992.
INTRODUCTION
First there is mystery, then there is no mystery, then there is. This is the three-fold
pattern I will explore in Western societies. The first two phases span centuries,
and yet some of us have experienced all three in a lifetime. Like others of the post-
war generation, I believed in religion as a child, under the inf luence of a religious
family and a community of believers. I lost much of this in adolescence and early
adulthood, inf luenced by an enlightened educational system. But, again like oth-
ers of my generation, I returned to a sense of the sacred once I outgrew the values
and assumptions of secularism. Secularism is too limited to contain the enquiring
mind and searching heart. But for all its limitations, it is still the dominant para-
digm in Western societies. At least, it is officially dominant, but a new, third force
is emerging, and this is what I want to explore in this book.
The new phase, the postsecular, looks to some like a return to the first,
because it affirms a mystery that secularism denies. Secularism tends to regard
the postsecular as a regression, but this is not the case. The postsecular is a cul-
tural and personal reorientation that presupposes disorientation, and loss of the
naïve faith of phase one, and the reductive rationality of phase two. It comes
after the collapse of belief, after the ‘death of God’, and looks to new ways of
experiencing the world, self and ultimate reality. As Derrida put the postsecular
formula: ‘if [belief ] does not go through a number of atheistic steps, one does not
believe in God’.1 Atheism becomes reframed as a crucial ‘step’ in the paradoxical
recovery of God.
Most of our Western institutions are still in the second phase: ‘no mystery’.
But there are individuals and groups in institutions who have moved beyond
it. Derrida grew beyond it, but most of his fans and followers clung to the out-
dated image of him as a reductive materialist.2 Secularism is under pressure from
within, and tries to deny or ignore the new impulse that is rising in individuals
and societies. It is true that the emerging culture has many things in common
2 Introduction
with the premodern or traditional past, and that is why secularism views it as
anachronistic. Secularism seeks to perpetuate itself and regards itself as the pin-
nacle of social evolution. But it has suppressed so much that is basic to the human
condition that it was bound to be critiqued and reconfigured. In particular,
the human craving for the sacred, to be related to something beyond the mun-
dane, could not be suppressed indefinitely. The problems that face the return of
mystery are not new, but typical of any major shift of thinking, as mapped by
Thomas Kuhn.3
As a university student in the early 1970s, I enrolled in a philosophy course
and one of the units was devoted to the existence of God. The unit concluded
that God did not exist, never could and never will exist. At the time, there was
much interest in such matters, summarised under the phrase, ‘the death of God’.
This idea had already been around for two hundred years or more – Nietzsche
was not the first to make this pronouncement. Any intellectual interest in the
reality of God in the 1970s would have been seen as anachronistic or naïve. And
yet we are at the beginning of the third millennium in a different intellectual
and existential milieu, where the best minds in many fields are entertaining the
return of the sacred.
The term ‘postsecular’ has been in use since the 1960s. At that stage, it was
used by Catholic and Jewish theologians who argued that the failure of secular-
ism to provide meaning had created a vacuum that could only be filled by a
revival of traditional religions.4 But by the 1990s and beyond, the meaning of
the term changed. It was no longer a reactionary term calling for the revival of
dogmatic orthodoxies, but a progressive term calling for the renewal of the reli-
gious enterprise from the resources of contemporary theology, science and phi-
losophy.5 The postsecular became an outgrowth of the postmodern, not a way of
ignoring the postmodern by insisting on the virtues of tradition.6 It pointed to
a new sense of the sacred that had more in common with lost or forgotten mys-
tical traditions than with dogmatic orthodoxies. The editor of The Postmodern
God, Graham Ward, celebrates the postmodern for making possible ‘postsecular
thinking’.7
The term has remained controversial across five decades, and there are
numerous volumes and articles on the topic.8 In recent times the sociologist
Jürgen Habermas has taken the lead in championing the term. At this point,
Australia is not discussing the meaning or value of the postsecular turn,9 per-
haps because my country is terrified that this could imply a return to what are
perceived as defunct religious institutions. One Australian, Simon During,
has sounded the alarm: he ‘responds with disquiet [to the idea of the post-
secular], since the argument that religion needs to be taken more seriously
in cultural critique and that it’s at work even where we don’t expect it, will
increase the amount of religion in the world’.10 This is somewhat typical of
the anti-religious attitude of Australian intellectuals, who view the idea of the
postsecular with some suspicion. Just when enlightened minds thought they
had got rid of religion, it raises its head again.
Introduction 3
Scholars continue to complain: Does postsecular mean citizens are rejecting

rationality and f lirting with the idea of going back to obsolete religions? Does it
mean that some want to forego the stability of our democratic systems and allow
religious perspectives more sway in the governance of nations? Is postmodern
f luidity and relativity causing people to seek solace in the apparent stability
of the past? Such fears bring up spectres of absolutist institutions, oppressive
moralities, theocracies and fundamentalisms. The earlier, reactionary meaning
of ‘postsecular’ continues to cast a shadow over the term, instilling resistance.
When scholars eventually understand that the postsecular is part of the progress
of civilisation, and not a regression, there will be less fear and loathing. The
emissary of the postsecular is none other than Jacques Derrida, the deconstruc-
tionist. He turns out to be not the doyen of nihilism, but the philosopher of a
new sense of the sacred.
Jürgen Habermas is another major figure commonly associated with dry
rationality, but who has been leading the debate on postsecularism. He writes:
A ‘postsecular’ society must at some point have been in a ‘secular’ state.

The controversial term can therefore only be applied to the aff luent soci-
eties of Europe or countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand,
where people’s religious ties have steadily or rather quite dramatically
lapsed in the post-War period.11
In what sense, then, are these countries ‘postsecular’? Habermas says the term
does not indicate that traditional religions are being revived, nor even that they
are slowing their decline. Rather, he points to the restlessness in these societ-
ies, the sense that the search for meaning is on in earnest, that ‘spirituality’ in its
many and varied forms, often found at the individual level and not always visible
to social theorists, suggests that such societies are moving away from the primary
assumptions of secularism.12 It has rightly been said that Habermas’ postsecular-
ism ‘is not a matter of objective reality, but of public perception and individual
subjectivity’. ‘It is a change in consciousness that signifies a revision of a previously
overconfidently secularist outlook, rather than a return of religion to a stage on
which it had once been absent’.13
Habermas says what is missing from secular life is an awareness of how expe-
rience points beyond itself, and how we access this dimension of transcendence.
He points to shifts taking place in the key disciplines of the Western canon. This
same awareness made Jacques Derrida announce that ‘secularisation is only a
manner of speaking’.14 What lies behind the secular persona of Western societies
interests many. The cultural unconscious is breaking into view, and the explosive
impact of 9/11 has served as a powerful reality and metaphor for this dramatic
unveiling.
Many disciplines are now concerned with the ‘postsecular’, especially philoso-
phy and science. It is ironic that the very disciplines that undermined religion
a few centuries ago are central to the rehabilitation of the sacred in our time.
4 Introduction
Today leading philosophers are more interested in the re-emergence of the sacred
after atheism. Jean-Luc Marion claims that the whole polemic about the death of
God ‘is now outdated’. We are ‘passing from the death of God to the death of
the death of God’. ‘We are no longer in an atheist society but a post-atheist one’.15
‘That’s the new situation’, he says, and ‘all serious philosophy agrees on that’.16
The most important philosophers of recent times: Heidegger, Derrida, Kearney,
Caputo, Vattimo, Levinas, have all thrown their hats in the ring, even while some
choose to remain identified as atheists. This is a return to mystery with a differ-
ence: suspicion and critique have not been dismissed or overcome, but subsumed
by a new interest in the return of mystery. Some choose not to use the word
‘God’, since it is overburdened and carries baggage from the past. This harks
back to ancient times, when many refused to give a name to ultimate mystery,
especially in Jewish tradition.
Science has followed suit. In physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics and
ecological science the sacred is being rediscovered.17 Although the person in
the street might cling to the belief that science and religion are in conf lict,
this belongs to a former era. Naturally it takes time for new discoveries in sci-
ence to filter through to the wider community, so that the postsecular condition
becomes part of general knowledge and shared heritage. In the social sciences
too, there is a time-lag between what the leading sociologists like Habermas
and Peter Berger are saying about the return of spirit and what is still being
taught in schools, colleges and universities. University culture is wedded to
secularisation theory and unlikely to give it up lightly. Much of what is taught
in departments of physics, biology, philosophy and sociology is inconsistent with
leading thought in these disciplines. Nietzsche said that his announcement of the
‘death of God’ was too early to be understood by the majority, and we might say
the same today of the ‘death of the death of God’.
I am a multidisciplinary scholar who works in several areas: philosophy, soci-
ology, religious studies and Jungian depth psychology. ‘Depth psychology’ refers
to any tradition of psychology which is based on the study of the unconscious.
For years I attempted to bring the Jungian field into the university but it is
based on assumptions that the academy finds hard to accept. One of Jung’s core
assumptions is that we have never been secular; or rather, the psyche, as distinct
from the ego, is not secular and has never conformed to secular values. It com-
pensates and contradicts the norms and values of the ego and society. Although
this is the first work to explore the postsecular from a psychological perspective,
depth psychology has always been concerned with the postsecular. The term
‘postsecular’ has not been used, but the discipline has assumed that the search
for the sacred has continued as one of the primary activities of the personality.
This has taken place in spite of, not because of, the spirit of the times. Jungian
psychology has been off-campus due to this fact. It has been deemed unscientific,
fanciful and plagued by what Freud called a ‘fairytale forest feeling’.18
But now that the leading edges of major disciplines are becoming postsecular,
the Jungian project, and its exile from academia, can be seen in a new light.19
Introduction 5
Jung can be released from his century-old exile and shown to be relevant to
mainstream knowledges, especially to sociology, philosophy and religious stud-
ies. Jung was not ‘wrong’, but out of step with his time, and I would anticipate a
recovery of interest in Jung as one of the pioneers of postsecular thought. Indeed,
the thesis of a recent major work, A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, arrives at con-
clusions that are close to Jung’s: that the indwelling soul of the individual was
never secular, even if the age itself was secular.20 Moreover, Taylor claims that
the divide between secular and religious was always exaggerated, to the point
of being false, and that, surprising as it may seem, religious developments in
the West made possible the secular condition. Secular and sacred were always
permeable to each other, not opposites or opponents as has been believed. This
position was central to Jung’s project.
In The Red Book Jung claims his work discovered another spirit apart from
that which rules the time, and he called it the ‘spirit of the depths’.21 Depth psy-
chology, so-called, specialises in the unlived life of people and nations, and has a
lot to contribute to the new debate. The disciplines of psychoanalysis and depth
psychology exist to see through surface appearances to what lies beneath. There-
fore it seems timely to marry the psychology of the unconscious with the insights
of sociology and philosophy. As we move toward a postsecular era, the psyche
breathes a sigh of relief. The secular state is not being abolished, as the work of
John Milbank would imply,22 but secularism as an ideology is being challenged
by previously suppressed forces that are rising with new values and priorities.
The secular state, in my view, is in the process of being modified rather than
eliminated. There is a transformation taking place, and new visions of humanity
and our relation to the world are replacing utilitarian and materialistic models.
One could say that the secular is giving birth to a new version of itself, one that is
not shut off from the sacred or hostile to the transcendental strivings of the soul.
The global ‘eruption’ of archaic and destructive forms of religion in terror-
ism, fundamentalism and violence has thrown the religious into stark relief, and
has pointed to the potency and demonic capacity of the religious impulse. When
this impulse is repressed, society places itself in danger of being taken over by
atavistic and regressive forces of the unconscious. It is the explosion of religiously
inspired terrorism and violence on the world stage that has woken the secular
mind from its torpor and indifference toward the spirit. The tragic events of
9/11 marked a reminder, if we needed one after two world wars, that liberalism
had limitations and could not contain the destructive forces in humanity. Now
everyone needs to know about the life of the spirit, and what happens to it when
conditions are unfavourable. After 9/11 religion and spirit could no longer be
relegated to the private realm and kept out of public discourse. The secular order,
based apparently on common sense, may seem ‘natural’ to many but cannot hold
out against archetypal forces if they are pushing toward realisation and trying to
overturn conventions.
All of these disruptions and trends give the term ‘postsecular’ more weight,
urgency and meaning than what may be implied by the boredom or restlessness
6 Introduction
of aff luent populations. There is cause to reconsider the role of religious activities
.
and spiritual impulses across the global scene, and review the thesis of seculari-
sation and its assumption that modernity, wealth and education generates a
disbelieving society with no interest in the life of the spirit. The United States
was for decades viewed as the exception to the developments in the modern
world. Sociologists pointed to the vibrancy of its religious communities and the
unchanging proportion of religiously committed citizens, but when the ‘hidden’
life of other modern societies is revealed, the United States looks less anomalous
than it did fifty years ago.
What we are seeing across the globe is the passing of a series of assumptions
about modernity and secularism, which by definition cannot generate any val-
ues beyond an indifferent tolerance of all forms of belief. ‘Despite the f lurry of
controversy over a recent spate of books extolling the virtues of atheism in the
wake of Islamist terrorism, the more interesting issue by far is the emergence of
postsecular modernity’.23 Habermas argues that modernity no longer implies the
march toward secularism. ‘This undermines the secularistic belief in the foresee-
able disappearance of religion and robs the secular understanding of the world of
any triumphal zest’.24 My concern in this book is not the future of institutions
of religion as such, but the future of the religious or spiritual impulse in nations
and individuals. It is the psychology and sociology of religious experience that
interests me.
The critic already quoted raises an important issue: it is hard for secular
intellectuals to know what they are dealing with in the postsecular, what to
criticise and what to tackle: ‘We are badly prepared for postsecularity’, writes
Simon During:
Our methods of analysis and critique falter when it comes to religion, mainly
because they were developed in the enlightened critique of supernatural-
ism. Hence many postsecular questions remain unsettled. For instance,
What’s the difference between religion and other forms of nonsecularity,
in particular a securely philosophical sensitivity to intimations of transcen-
dence and the sacred?25
Secular critique is prepared to do battle with religion’s metaphysical claims and

supernatural content. But During rightly suspects that the postsecular explores
a different kind of terrain, one not so much miraculous and theological as
philosophical and poetic. The postsecular vision is indeed one which could be
described as ‘a philosophical sensitivity to intimations of transcendence and the
sacred’. It is as critical of unreconstructed religion as secularism itself. It adopts
some of modernity’s assumptions, and exhibits a deconstructive approach to the
grand narratives of religion. Although moving beyond atheism it maintains some
of atheism’s suspicion, and seeks a vision of spirit that is not so much supernatural
as ultra-natural, the deepest part of the natural.
If secular critique is unaware of this new spiritual landscape, it is not going
to be able to do battle with it in the usual way. Because the new sense of the
Introduction 7
sacred emerges as much from philosophy and science as it does from theology,
the secular arsenal is rendered incapable of dismissing it in the way it would
like. Indeed, even this critic seems to have a sneaking regard for postsecularity
as he strives to attack it. Religion has morphed into something other than what
it was; heaven is not a place in the sky but a metaphor for a transcendence found
in creation, God is not a magisterial being out there but the incarnational spirit
of the world, the cosmology of religion has been deconstructed, and a mystical
vision of the closeness of the sacred has replaced the distant divinity of the past.
Religion is not what it used to be, and critique emerges within itself as well
as from outside. As Derrida and others have commented, when postsecularity
posits the ‘return of the religious’, it is by no means clear what it is that returns,
because the cultural forms are not established. We are dealing with a nascent,
pre-formed phenomenon.
-----------
Chapter 1 attempts an overview of the postsecular landscape, exploring differ-
ences and similarities between religion and spirituality, and tensions between
secularism and the postsecular. It offers a global perspective on the return of the
sacred and how this is impacting societies, human identity and political life. This
chapter questions the popular assumption that spirituality and religion should be
completely separated, but agrees that a parting of ways is evident at present and
may continue for some time. Eventually, however, the postsecular will need to
draw on the traditions currently repudiated, even as it reconstructs them for its
purposes. The chapter attempts to recover the true meaning of religion, as dis-
tinct from institutional participation, and explores the phenomenon of religious-
ness rising in nations that have been committedly atheist. It argues that when
the religious is banned or suppressed, it emerges with virulent force and secular
ideologies assume quasi-religious forms with often disastrous results.
Chapter 2 explores the nature and impact of the sacred as it arises in secular
conditions. Due to the internalisation of the sacred in secular societies, the sacred
has become psychological and intertwined with psychological problems and dis-
orders. The postsecular sacred is distinguished by its emphasis on wholeness and
the reunification of body and spirit. It is a sacredness unlike the disembodied
spirituality of former times, which is why religious traditions find it hard to
appreciate. Postsecular spirituality owes its experiential dimension to the impact
of science; if something cannot be tested against experience it is rejected. This
has led to a mystical bias in the postsecular. The mystical speaks directly to post-
secular conditions because it is non-clerical, immediate and transformative. The
mystical is not dogmatic or assertive but receptive and open to the sacredness of
the ordinary.
In Chapter 3 we turn to secularism under pressure, using my country,
Australia, as an example of a nation that has no conscious desire to become
postsecular. However, various aspects of cultural and individual experience are
urging it in this direction. In Jungian terms, the situation is referred to as the
frustration of archetypal intent: the psyche points to a new orientation, but
8 Introduction
entrenched attitudes attempt to preserve the status quo. Links are made between
the absence of meaning and the rise of mental health issues, especially depres-
sion and anxiety.
In Chapter 4 we explore the spiritual question in a postcolonial context:
Western society has imposed itself on indigenous land and cultures. The colo-
nisers see themselves as having won the battle, but indigenous cultures exert an
unexpected impact. They are urging the secular toward a postsecular attitude,
and this is occurring in every postcolonial nation. Majority Australia is unsettled
by the Aboriginal sacred, by its powerful reality and connection with place.
There can be no sense of belonging without coming to terms with indigenous
cultures. There is a generalised anxiety of guilt and a sense of being inauthentic.
Aboriginal elders offer the gift of belonging, but guilt and anxiety paralyse the
colonisers. They are unable to accept the gift because it is a spiritual endowment,
and secular society struggles to understand it.
The focus then shifts to the idea of the reanimation of the world. Secularism
has disregarded the sacredness of the earth by viewing it as an object to be used
and abused. All indigenous cultures have believed that the earth is animated and
alive with spiritual powers. It is difficult for us to take on these ancient beliefs,
given that our consciousness has been conditioned by rationality. We cannot
turn back to the past and disregard what science has taught us. But now science
and psychology are making inroads into the reanimation of the world. Having
deprived the earth of its spirit, these disciplines are moving to make the earth
sacred again, by showing that the world is a holographic cosmos and not merely
a collection of objects. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the relations between ecopsy-
chology and indigenous cosmology, physics and matter. We trace the attempt of
psychology and physics to move beyond the prejudice that spirit in nature is a
projection of the human mind.
The next section turns to postsecular religion and the role of atheism in the
new sense of the sacred. Chapter 7 explores the death of the ‘death of God’, and
new approaches to ultimate reality through the lens of negative theology, mys-
ticism and symbolic thinking. The postsecular God is a God who comes after
Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’, after the collapse of outworn beliefs and old forms
of theology. It signals a radical departure from traditional ideas of the sacred and
points to a religious renaissance that has hardly begun. Teilhard de Chardin and
Thomas Berry are pioneers of the new image of God. Significantly, as God is
rediscovered, ecology arises as a dominant force in the emerging consciousness:
these two major developments occur at the same time and are interrelated.
Chapter 8 focuses on the figure of Jacques Derrida as the emissary of the
postsecular. Although widely regarded as the leader of nihilistic postmodernism,
Derrida was a theological philosopher, albeit a ‘negative theologian’, who had a
strong sense of the sacred. He said he never once used the term ‘postmodernism’.
He believed the sacred was an unfathomable mystery and religions were naïve
to claim that they know God’s nature or will. Derrida described himself as an
atheist, and it was this that led the academic world to style him as a materialist.
Introduction 9
But he tricked most of his followers, because he wrote incessantly of God, the
holy was always on his mind and he knelt to say his prayers every night. He com-
plained that he had ‘been read less and less well over almost twenty years, like my
religion about which nobody understands anything’.26 Derrida’s faith makes us
aware that the postsecular sacred can be obscure, hard to identify and ‘can come
as a surprise at any moment’.27
Chapter 9 explores the harsh irony and synchronicity of the sacred returning
in an age of terror. What sense can we make of the sacred rising in this context?
The chapter argues that terrorism is a demonic parody of the way in which the
sacred is ‘exploding’ into consciousness. Terrorist cells and cults make use of the
initiatory model as they induct adherents into their cause. This too is a parody
of the way in which the sacred calls us to participate in its emergence. What we
are witnessing are distorted and malign forms of the sacred, and discernment is
required as the world experiences a new encounter with the holy. Both Derrida
and Jung anticipated that the religious would return in violence because it had
been suppressed with violence. The religious, Derrida prophesied, would ‘inter-
rupt history’ and ‘tear history apart’.28
Finally, an Epilogue sketches the challenge of the postsecular: sacrifice. The
sacred is returning, but the sacred makes claims on us and we must respond.
Postsecularism is not just another fad or fashion; indeed, it is not primarily about
us. It is the return of an original consciousness in which the self is displaced by
the Other, the human by the infinite, the profane by the sacred. This occurs in
a historical context in which the self has usurped the role of the divine, and we
have become insensitive to the claims of the Other. Therefore, many expressions
of the sacred in our time are perversely inverted or reversed. The challenge of
the postsecular is to discover what sacrifice could mean in our time, and how and
why the world is full of the old religious virtues gone mad.
Notes
1 Jacques Derrida, ‘Epoché and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Yvonne
Sherwood and Kevin Hart, eds., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (2000; New York:
Routledge, 2005), 46. As far as I know, Derrida did not use the term ‘postsecular’, but
then again, he did not use the term ‘postmodern’ either.
2 This will be explored in Chapter 8.
3 Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 4th ed. (1962; Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2012).
4 Andrew Greeley, ‘After Secularity: The Neo-Gemeinschaft Society: A Post-Christian
Postscript’, Sociology of Religion, 27:3 (1966), 119–27; Eugene Borowitz, ‘The Post-
secular Situation of Jewish Theology’, Theological Studies, 31:3 (1970), 460–75; Philip
Morris, ed., Metropolis: Christian Presence and Responsibility (Notre Dame, IN: Fides Pub-
lishers, 1970).
5 This shift in the meaning of the term is argued in Umut Parmaksiz, ‘Making Sense of
the Postsecular’, European Journal of Social Theory, 21:1 (2018), 98–116.
6 The earlier use of the ‘postsecular’ was subsequently criticised as a ‘misappropriation and
misuse’ of the term, Anthony Smith and Daniel Whistler, eds., After the Postsecular and
the Postmodern (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 14.
10 Introduction
7 Graham Ward, ed., The Postmodern God (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), xxi.
8 A useful survey of this field is Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, John Torpey and
Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Soci-
ety (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
9 An exception to this is Wayne Hudson, Australian Religious Thought (Melbourne: Monash
University Publishing, 2016).
10 Simon During, ‘Toward the Postsecular’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language
Association of America, 120:3 (May 2005), 876.
11 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Notes on Post-Secular Society’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 25 (2008), 17.
12 The invisibility of much contemporary spirituality is discussed in José Casanova, Public
Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
13 Christian Bryan S. Bustamante, ‘From Secularism to Post-Secularism: Jürgen Habermas
on Religion in a Secular State’, Scientia: The International Journal on the Liberal Arts, 3:1
(June 2014), 9.
14 Derrida, ‘Epoché and Faith’, 32.
15 Jean-Luc Marion, in Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmermann, eds., Reimagining the Sacred
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 177.
16 Ibid., 190.
17 Stuart Kaufman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (New
York: Basic Books, 2010); Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New
York: Basic Books, 1999); Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1984); Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry
(London: Coronet, 2012).
18 Sigmund Freud, letter to Jung, April 22, 1910, in William McGuire, ed., The Freud/Jung
Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 310.
19 Christine Gallant, Tabooed Jung: Marginality as Power (New York: New York University
Press, 1996).
20 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press,
2007).
21 C. G. Jung, The Red Book, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, trans. Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and
Sonu Shamdasani (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), 229.
22 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwells, 1990).
23 Editorial Note, ‘Secularism’s Crisis of Faith’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 25 (2008), 17.
24 Habermas, ‘Notes on Post-Secular Society’, op. cit., 20.
25 During, ‘Toward the Postsecular’, op. cit., 876.
26 Jacques Derrida, ‘Circumfession: Fifty-Nine Periods and Periphrases’, in Geoffrey Ben-
nington and Jacques Derrida, eds., Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 27.
27 Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits
of Reason Alone’, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (1996; Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998), 17.
28 Ibid.
The postsecular condition
1
THE POSTSECULAR LANDSCAPE
Creativity and instability

Ours is a time of enormous religious and spiritual upheaval; one can almost feel
the continental plates moving beneath our feet. There is widespread instability
and it is hard to make any definitive statement that cannot be contradicted. But
what is clear throughout the chaos is the failure of the modern world to provide
an adequate account of human meaning and purpose. As Jürgen Habermas put
it: the secular hypothesis has failed.1 Even the most sophisticated of French intel-
lectuals, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida, both atheists, were forced to concede
that the West is caught in a profound spiritual crisis, and the meaning of our lives
is no longer apparent. These philosophers somewhat reluctantly had to make
room in their theories for spirit, soul and faith. Both recognised the failures of
secularism to address individual and social needs.
At the height of modernity, many believed religion was coming to an end,
to be replaced by science and reason. But this has not happened. Kristeva argues
that we are forced to speak ‘once again’ about religion, but in a critical, recu-
perative way. While it is undeniable that traditional religions remain in steady
decline in the West, there is a great deal of movement in the spirit. Kristeva says:
‘I see a new religious revival’, but she is not talking of religion in the narrow,
institutional sense, which she claims died in France more than two centuries
ago.2 She says conventional religion ‘no longer speaks to us’, and yet the spirit of
religion longs to be reborn. It is curious that intellectuals speak in the abstract
about religion, distinguishing it from ‘religions’, while in the general community
‘religion’ remains fused with institutional religions, and ‘spirituality’ is the pre-
ferred term for what is newly rising in our civilisation. The shifting meaning of
these terms is part of the instability of the present.
Like Kristeva, Luce Irigaray argues that we need to ‘think anew a religious
dimension when many believe we have put an end to it’.3 She advocates a mode
14 The postsecular condition
of being that is becoming; our lives should look toward the infinite with hope and
anticipation. The human being needs to be oriented toward a divine goal, as
this is what inspires us toward continual transformation. Irigaray reminds us that
rethinking religion does not mean abandoning religion, but submitting it to rig-
orous cultural critique. Even Slavoj Žižek, a leading figure of the academic left,
has announced that the present is characterised by a ‘Messianic longing for the
Otherness that is forever to come’.4 Not many scholars in Western universities
realise that our leading intellectuals are having these thoughts, thinking deeply
about religion. Religion is clearly more than institutional religiosity, but a mode
of being, an existential attitude to the world. It is, said Tillich, whatever directs
our attention to ultimate concern. The spirit today is pushing ahead regardless of
the state of institutions and should not be identified with collapsing forms. It
will move through and beyond them to shape a new landscape. Although much
of this activity does not always look coherent, it is not going to disappear.
What the new forms will be is difficult to say, but we do know that the sacred
is returning, however amorphous it may appear at present. Ironically, science and
philosophy, the key players in getting rid of the sacred in the Enlightenment,
seem to be leading the charge. New physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy,
mathematics and ecology are showing signs of openness to the sacred.5 There is a
mystical sense emerging in psychoanalysis, psychology, therapy and counselling.6
We see an upwelling of spiritual interest in the wider community, especially in
young people and popular culture.7
Sociologists have announced that we are living in a postsecular age,8 and are
consulting leaders of religion about ‘what is missing’ in secular society.9 In a sense
the ball is back in the religious court, but the religions don’t know it. What is
emerging does not tally with what they understand as ‘religion’, and they are not
very interested. The religions are still in defensive mode, a stance consistently
adopted in the modern era. They are temperamentally inclined to view what is
emerging from the secular domain as an antagonist or opponent. Their defen-
siveness is making them incapable of seeing what is before their eyes: a religious
revival is at hand, and they could be part of it if they used their imagination and
were prepared to experiment with existing forms. Not only this, but they do not
understand what sociologists take for granted: religious institutions do not have
a monopoly on the sacred.
Truth and change

Ever since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, poets, philosophers and
thinkers have been speaking of the ‘death of God’, the decline of religion and
the collapse of tradition. In 1855, Matthew Arnold wrote that he was
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head.10
The postsecular landscape 15
Such crises occur at critical times, whenever traditions stop speaking to the con-
temporary world. A new social consciousness arises which no longer makes sense
of the old meaning system. These times generate disruption in institutions, exper-
imentation in the arts, and anxiety in individuals and culture. But even in such
times, the religions are not necessarily ‘dead’, even if they languish; they may seem
to be dead because they are no longer in dialogue with society. In truth, they
retreat into cocoons of their own making, in which the new forms are developed
and eventually released into the world. Sometimes, however, religions are unable
to make the necessary adaptations. If religious truth presents itself as fixed and
absolute, unwilling to reinterpret itself for a new era, the ‘old guard’ will have
their way and ensure that transformation does not occur. Although styling them-
selves as ‘conservatives’, they are not conserving tradition, but merely prolonging
conventions. As such, they may ensure the demise of their tradition.
In order to survive, every tradition must learn to remake or give birth to itself.
It was Picasso who said that tradition is having a baby, not wearing your father’s
hat.11 Unless creativity is allowed to overcome the forces that resist change, there
can be no future for an institution. If a tradition continues to wear its old hat, this
is the triumph of convention and the collapse of tradition. In this case, people
reject it, look elsewhere for guidance and adopt other traditions. The capacity
to give birth to emerging forms is a difficult one, and cannot be controlled by
functionaries of the old guard, but only by the creative minds of the new. Inevi-
tably, tensions emerge between the priestly class which seeks to preserve the old
and prophetic thinkers who want to build a new dispensation that can satisfy the
demands of a new cultural awareness. Jung put it this way: ‘Eternal truth needs a
human language that alters with the spirit of the times’.12
Truth may be ‘eternal’ in the abstract, but as we experience it in the human
sphere it must change like everything else. Religion cannot stand like a change-
less beacon; it has to adapt to prevailing conditions, otherwise it is shunted aside
as irrelevant. Then it appears as an obstacle to truth. Religion loses its spirit when
it is rigidly codified in creeds and dogmas. The paradox of religion is that ‘All
true things must change and only that which changes remains true’.13 The East-
ern philosophical traditions seem to have grasped this early in their development,
but the West continues to have difficulty understanding this paradox. It tends to
believe that ‘eternal truth’ must remain the same.
The process of handling truth in times of upheaval is fraught with danger. If
we invent new gods to suit our needs, conservatives claim that we are creating
a designer religion that has no authority apart from our whims and fancies. The
conservatives have a point, but so do the progressives; in fact both positions have
to be dissolved to arrive at a solution. Before the sacred can be reconstructed, old
positions have to be deconstructed. The ‘death of God’ has come and gone, and
to continue with this discourse is to persist in an outdated stance. It might be
some time before we can agree on a new concept of God. We must not expect
that the present phase of turmoil will be over soon. Even as the new image of
God is worked out, some will still be involved in tearing down the old. Our
time is too late for the old God and too early for the new. Nevertheless, we have
to let go and let come. The enigma of our time is captured by Samuel Beckett’s
Endgame: ‘Something is taking its course’.14
Spirit as ineradicable
Modernity began as an experiment in getting rid of the sacred, and has ended
with the awareness that this was a mistake. By the end of the nineteenth century,
almost every enlightened thinker expected religion to disappear in the twenti-
eth. Even in the 1970s, when I was a university student, most of my lecturers
assumed that religion would become extinct. I believed this for a semester or
two, but realised it was an error. The secularisation theory that universities pro-
moted, believing that religion and spirituality would be replaced by a new soci-
ety based on reason, has been rejected by sociologists. Social scientists were not
reading the landscape correctly for a century. Although traditional forms were
disintegrating, they were not taking into account the spiritual impulses that pre-
cede these forms. They were looking externally at our disruption, and not seeing
beyond the surface to the underlying forces.
Even as old forms were disintegrating, there were signs in the arts and music
that new energies were rising that would not be put back into the old structures.
These energies would seek forms of their own, and it was only a matter of time
before they would reach into culture and remould it to express the primordial
religious urges. The difficulty was that scientists could not see into the depths,
but in recent times they have become more humble before the situation in
which we are embroiled. For instance, Grace Davie has said: ‘We do not live
in a secular society. We live in a society in which belief is drifting away from
orthodoxy to no one knows where; in which belief is f loating, disconnected
without an anchor’.15
No one speaks anymore about the triumph of secularism, or of how science
will defeat belief. In The Myth of Disenchantment, Josephson observes that ‘today
in neither Europe, nor America, nor the rest of the globe can one find the disen-
chanted world anticipated by the major theorists of modernity’.16 In 1965 Harvey
Cox wrote The Secular City, in which he argued that secularisation would see the
end of all forms of religion, and yet three decades later he was forced to admit
that ‘it is secularity, not spirituality, that may be headed for extinction’.17 From
the 1960s to the 1980s, no one could conceive that a major secular thinker like
Kristeva would write This Incredible Need to Believe.18 Today we are postsecular in
spirit, if not in form. All the signs point to a revival ahead.
Spirituality and religion

The need to believe that there is more to reality is a primal impulse that appears
to have been awoken by the starvation conditions of modernity. The sacred and
the spiritual now appear as the unlived life of the West. Throughout this book
I will refer to a three-fold historical process: first the West is religious, then it
is not religious, then it is. The postsecular religious, however, is perhaps better
known as ‘spirituality’. Spirituality has emerged as a new cultural category in its
own right.19 It is much larger than religious traditions, but overlaps with them
insofar as they were once the containers of spirit in our culture. Spirituality used
to be an elite and rare activity fostered by those who were very religious: monas-
tics, mystics and saints. Those who wished to go beyond the aims and directions
of conventional religion strove for a spiritual life, and thus it was a small area
held and contained by the larger field of religion. Now their situations have been
reversed: spirituality is the larger field and religions are now ‘options’ or path-
ways within the spiritual environment.
Spirituality is the inward, personal connection with the sacred, and religions
attempt to organise the spiritual and offer it a tradition, history, language and
community. When religions function properly, the spiritual is contained in them.
But when they lose their effectiveness, the spiritual separates from them and is
born as a new star on the horizon. This confuses and worries a lot of people. The
religious see spirituality outside the religions as illegitimate. The secular find it
hard to believe that the spiritual has invaded their realm, which is supposed to be
devoid of the ‘religious’. As mentioned, the relation between spirit and religion
is problematical at this time. It is as if the spiritual heart of religion has left the
body and moved to a new location. It is no longer held by the old forms, but let
loose on an unsuspecting world. Spirit in this condition is wild and free, perhaps
dangerous insofar as it lacks containment. It is ‘religious’ but no longer under the
authority of the religions.
Scholars argue that we need to recover the original meaning of religion. Reli-
gion, from the Latin religio, means to ‘reconnect’ or ‘rebind’, and the reconnec-
tion is to the sacred, the numinous. Institutions appropriated this activity, and
codified, dogmatised and ritualised it. But as the institutions lost authority in
an increasingly secular world, this impulse to connect to the sacred became the
‘new wine’ that could no longer be held by ‘old wineskins’. It is this impulse that
has awoken in psyche and society, and is now rediscovered as part of our psychol-
ogy, anthropology and sociology. This is the new category that many disciplines
are now exploring, some for the first time. Some progressive churches are aware
of what is taking place, and reshaping themselves as places of spiritual exploration
rather than of dogma and conventional belief.
Spirituality as scientific experiment

The shift of spirit from being contained to lacking containment has a great deal
to do with the scientific revolution. Science urges us to doubt what has been
handed down from the past; it asks us to question tradition and not to follow it
blindly. Above all, science demands that we experiment with human experience
and arrive at new conclusions based on experimentation. This scientific attitude
is now being explored in the realm of faith and belief; the new attitude is no lon-
ger to accept the precepts of the past but to find out for ourselves if we are con-
nected to anything infinite or not. This is why science is leading the charge in
the new exploration of spirituality. It is science that has the inquisitive attitude,
that views old truths in a new light, that reformulates what religious tradition has
set in hardened patterns that no longer speak to us.
The scientific attitude to the world has altered our experience of religion.
People want something more than what the traditions have been offering. Not
only the majority who have abandoned churches, but many of those remaining
in them want more than God-talk and ritual. They want experience of God and
to experiment with their lives, to ‘connect’ personally with the sacred. Only
experience is valued, not inherited systems or traditional verities. It is no longer
enough for authorities to tell us to believe in creeds or perform rituals; we want
to know for ourselves whether God exists, not rely on this from secondhand
sources. So arising from this attitude emerged a different set of demands that the
vast majority of churches were unable to respond to. In the 1960s and 1970s there
was a tendency for people to turn East, since the East has long understood the
importance of personal experience above abstract instruction. The West has been
in an ‘Eastern’ moment since the 1960s, and is still today. We have much to learn
from the East, but my hope is that Western traditions too can pick up the expe-
riential aspect of religious life.
The lack of emphasis on spiritual development is a major reason for the decline
of the religions. However, there are other reasons. One is that religions in the
West are unbelievable by today’s standards. Too many of its claims are super-
natural and impossible for modern people to believe: miracles, wonders, angels,
an interventionist God who supports one community and destroys others. My
previous book explored this territory and suggested that the old religions do not
have to be rejected but read differently.20 The modern mind can perhaps tolerate
these ancient sources if we read them metaphorically rather than literally. This
does not mean they are false or untrue, it means they are spiritually true if we
manage to understand them as a metaphorical language. The gospels contain
some historical facts, it seems to me, but the spectacular moments and interven-
tions are written in the ancient mode of mythos, or sacred story.21 We need to
learn that language if we are to appreciate them in a postsecular context. A post-
secular age will not be able to support a return to supernaturalism.
Another problem is the dualistic nature of Western religions, which no longer
suits the spirit of the age. The dualism between spirit and matter can no longer be
tolerated by the new consciousness. Today we aim for holistic understandings of
reality, and are not drawn to hierarchies which place masculine spirit at the top
and feminine matter and nature at the bottom. The Western domination of man
over woman, adult over child and human over nature are products of the spirit-
versus-matter dichotomy. The problem is larger than religion, and goes back
before Christianity to Greco-Roman civilisation. Our age is not hierarchical but
democratic, not patriarchal but holistic, not interested in dominating nature but
in forming an ecological relationship with it, which involves the spiritual life.
There are so many things wrong with orthodox dogma and belief, one wonders
how the traditions will accommodate these changes without collapsing in the
process. But I remain vaguely hopeful that changes can occur, even if it means
lifting the traditions from their medieval worldview and placing them on a new
psychological and philosophical platform.
Jung as postsecular psychologist

Jung saw all these changes ahead of schedule. More than a hundred years ago
he said the religions could no longer afford to remain patriarchal, but had to be
challenged and transformed by women and the feminine. He saw that the mas-
culine Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit had to be transformed into a Quaternity
that would include the Feminine. He recognised that the supernaturalism of the
religions had to be dispensed with and seen through for what it is – superstition
caused by misreading the myths and stories as historical acts of an interventionist
God. This image of God had to be abolished, and the ‘death of God’ movement
was a necessary historical attempt to get rid of a false image of the divine. Much
had to be thrown out, overturned or changed, and yet something would remain
if we returned to religion as experience rather than dogma and instruction.
Many writers argue that Jung created the new appetite for spiritual experi-
ence, and journeys to the East. He was obviously inf luential, but in my view he
was one of the first to report on a transformation that was already taking place.
In the Red Book, he saw the soul was ‘returning’ in our time, and this would
generate change and disruption. The soul, he said, would bring gifts and dangers,
but among its gifts would be ‘the gift of religion’. By religion, Jung does not mean
membership of a church but ‘the attitude peculiar to a consciousness which has
been changed by experience of the numinosum’.22 He means an encounter with
the numinous in its most powerful and existential aspect. This ‘gift’, Jung wrote
in 1914, ‘is still to come, but it will become evident’. Those who did not know
that religion is one of the most powerful impulses of the psyche thought Jung
crazy. Why would religion come back, and how could this happen in a scientific
age? Jung was an explorer of the depths, and saw this shift happening before it
became felt as a worldwide movement.
Postmodern philosophers such as Kristeva, Derrida and Vattimo have ignored
Jung’s thought, but what they are saying in their writings is identical to his work.
He wrote that it would take time before the ‘spirit of the depths’ would be rec-
ognised by the ‘spirit of the times’. Modern sociology may have invented the
term postsecular, but Jung was enacting the postsecular in his life, writing and
research a century earlier. Jung was viewed as oddly unfashionable, but a hun-
dred years later the very fashionable Julia Kristeva would be writing This Incred-
ible Need to Believe, and the most inf luential philosopher of our time, Jacques
Derrida, would feel impelled to say:
Whatever side one takes in this debate about the ‘return of the reli-
gious’ . . . one still must respond. And without waiting. Without waiting
too long.23
Jung, Kristeva and Derrida shared the modern distaste for religions and a
resistance to dogmatic belief, and yet all three were persuaded that something
was emerging which could no longer be denied. Spirit was not overcome, as sec-
ularism believed, but asleep. The ‘secular turn’ put spirit in a state of suspended
animation, and the intelligentsia thought humanity had entered a new world.
But this was not the case; spirit has been comatose but is now returning. The
modern mind has had its taste of egotism and free will, but now it has to contend
with archaic realities of the soul that demand new expression.
Religion, in the original sense, not only has a future, but an explosive future,
according to these thinkers. Indeed, as I will explore in Chapter 9, the explo-
siveness of resurgent religion, is central to our age of religious terrorism. While
‘religions’ come and go – and in our time we are more aware of their going –
religion itself, as an existential need to rebind to the sacred, will intensify and
strengthen, even as institutions operating under its name grow weaker. Jung said
it is impossible to imagine that religion, which has meant so much to so many
across millennia, could disappear without a trace because secularism has appar-
ently taken over. He 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’.24 This instinct would return, like everything unconscious, with
considerable force as soon as conditions allowed. It would not only return with
power, but in distorted forms, since psychic contents take on disruptive aspects
when repressed. Here Jung and Derrida are in agreement.
Postsecular spirituality in the political landscape

What is evident is that the progressive left and religious right dislike the new
spirituality for different reasons. The left wants the West to become more secu-
lar, and attacks the spiritual in all its forms, since it threatens its assumptions.
Secular materialists refer to spirituality as escapism, fantasy, illusion. They don’t
like religion either, but see it as so deeply in decline that it is not much of a worry.
But a new social movement in which grassroots spirituality is rising is of concern,
and they discredit it wherever possible. The left has no explanation or rationale
for the life of the spirit, and this is due to its origins in the ideas of Marx, Lenin
and Engels, all of whom were aggressively atheistic.
Marx declared religion to be ‘the sigh of the oppressed, the opium of the peo-
ple’, and this led the movement for radical economic revolution into an inevitable
dead end.25 There could be no end to religion, since it is ineradicable, and any
ideology that left it out would not last. Some left thinkers are trying to reconnect
with spirit, but they are isolated cases who have little historical support for their
efforts.26 As such, the left is losing some traction in the postsecular context, since
it has nothing to say to the reality or movement of spirit. Unless it is able to fac-
tor spirituality into its equations, it faces the possibility of becoming irrelevant in
a postsecular age. Simon During admits: when it comes to the postsecular, ‘the
left, with its secular heritage, starts under handicap’.27 It has been argued that
the left needs to revisit the early work of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer,
Adorno and Benjamin), since it argued that progressive politics can benefit from
a sympathetic engagement with religious thought.28
The right is gaining ground because it acknowledges spirit, even if it is in
outdated and absolutist forms that are contrary to the spirit of the time. Fou-
cault refers to the politics of the right as a ‘political spirituality’ in which reli-
gious principles and ideas are fused with political strategies that are far removed
from the true values of religion.29 Habermas said ‘orthodox, or at least con-
servative, groups within the established religious organizations and churches
are on the advance everywhere’. 30 Until the left can revise its understanding
of the world, the right will continue to gain momentum, as people search for
religious bearings and frameworks. It is as if the left is trapped in an outdated
worldview, or the intuitive hemisphere of its brain is unable to function. Either
way, there are political and social consequences to ignoring the spiritual in
times such as these.
The religious right is hopeful of a return to traditional verities. It supports
communities which are God-fearing and evangelical. It protests that the new
grassroots spirituality is undisciplined and feral. It views deregulated spirituality
as a gnostic revival, to be debunked.31 The progressive left and religious right are
strange bedfellows in this regard, as they share the same antipathy to grassroots
spirituality and both use the phrase ‘New Age’ to denigrate it. Whenever spon-
taneous movements of spirit occur, it makes social establishments feel nervous
because they are made aware of what lies beyond their control. We need only
think of how the Jesus movement was attacked by Jewish and Roman authori-
ties in the early centuries of our era. Whether or not it is aware of itself as such,
grassroots spirituality is a political activity which represents a challenge to the
hegemonies of the left and right. It does not fit into categories they understand
and thus represents a wild space and something to be resisted and feared.
Consuming spirituality
When the soul is starved, it makes demands that people can barely understand.
This is especially so in a secular culture that knows nothing of the sacred, and as
a result many are lost and confused. In this environment, many wolves are roam-
ing the packs of lost sheep, making capital by offering ‘solutions’ to our problems.
Many of these industries are products of consumer society, and have no connec-
tion with any forms of wisdom, traditional or contemporary. The exploitative
industries are giving a bad name to the search for spirituality, since they are
selling spirituality as a commodity. However, there are activities and movements
that are trying their best to bring peace to the disturbed soul, and offer avenues of
transformation. There is a common perception among church communities that
all spirituality outside religions is ‘New Age’. This is a misreading of our situa-
tion, and I have written elsewhere on the topic.32 Not everything new is New
Age. New Age is a cluster of industries that package and sell ideas and modalities
that claim to liberate the spirit and soul. They sometimes steal ideas from indig-
enous cultures and esoteric systems, taken entirely out of context.33 New Age has
developed a reputation for preying on the spiritual emptiness of people and being
a virulent branch of consumer capitalism.
The phenomenon of the rising tide of spirituality ought not to be confused
with the ‘New Age’. New Age can be exploitative and superficial, while there is
much that is authentic in the emerging spirituality. Sometimes the New Age can
be a doorway through which people begin their journeys, and it can serve this
purpose. For the secular majority, grassroots spirituality is not a rebellion against
churches, which is to attribute too much authority to old religions, but a rebel-
lion against reductive materialism. The spirituality movement is an upwelling of
spirit in a postsecular age.
The new spirituality is as alienated from the religions as it is from the secu-
larism it is opposing. So instead of religion-versus-secular, we have an emerg-
ing third entity, spirituality, which may eventually become more powerful than
traditional religions or secular humanism. Many sociologists and psychologists
have been mapping this third force for some time. There are many books and
countless articles and dissertations on the topic, but despite the potentially huge
impact of non-affiliated spirituality, these studies are not widely known. As yet,
I cannot tell if the ground is being prepared for the emergence of a universal faith
with a global ethics that might bring together elements of various traditions. Or
it could be that forces are gathering for the renewal of religions that maintain
their distinct identities in a postsecular, pluralist world.
Green politics is gaining momentum worldwide, and is less wary of the sacred
than the progressive left from which it has broken away. Because the greens are
concerned with conserving nature and its resources, this brings out the ‘conser-
vationist’ elements in the liberal and conservative parties. But since spirituality
is moving in a holistic and organic direction, it would not be surprising to see
more connection between spirituality and the greens. The sense of the numinous
in the natural world is part of the political attractiveness of green politics and the
idea of nature as sacred is implicit in most ecological programs. Having said that,
I am aware that right-wing fascist parties, such as Hitler’s National Socialists,
encouraged a spirituality of nature.34
Grassroots spirituality: vital and vulnerable

Instead of seeing non-institutional spirituality as a conspiracy or fraud, I see it
as an upwelling of spiritual life in a time of darkness. Oliver Robinson sees it
as ‘religion’s unconventional and inquisitive younger sibling’.35 It could be the
harbinger of new things to come and ought not to be categorised in negative
terms. It remains difficult to square with established religions, but what we find
in grassroots spirituality may be closer to the mystical sources of Western reli-
gion. In A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor argues that Christianity has
been leading to, and preparing the ground for, a secular, non-churchy spiritual-
ity.36 He believes secular spirituality is the kind that Jesus modelled in his life
and ministry. Jesus did not support hierarchical, ecclesiastical religion but sought
to bring about a spiritual awakening in people in their ordinary lives. He also
sought to create communities of spirit, if not institutions as such. Taylor believes
that grassroots spirituality ought to be taken seriously, and not seen as a fashion
but a revival of our culture.
One of the early advocates of non-churchy spirituality was Walter Lippmann,
who referred to it as ‘the religion of the spirit’:
In an age when custom is dissolved and authority is broken, the religion of

the spirit is not merely a possible way of life. In principle it is the only way
which transcends the difficulties of the time. The religion of the spirit does
not depend upon creeds and cosmologies; it has no vested interest in any
particular truth. It is concerned not with the organization of matter, but
with the quality of human desire.37
Lippmann argues that the duality of religion versus spirituality needs to be

reassessed in light of a highly individualised and changing society. Lippmann
was a humanist opposed to authoritarian regimes, secular or religious, and so
for him the idea of a free-wheeling spirituality is appropriate for our time. My
problem with this advocacy is that it overlooks the fact that we live in com-
munities that have to be built by sharing our experiences of spirit. In indig-
enous cultures, spirit is the core thread that binds people together and turns
collections of individuals into meaningful communities. Much writing about
spirituality seems to omit or overlook this dimension, and ignores the fact that
privatised spirituality is not necessarily good for the health of the individual or
community. Although an advocate of the return of the transcendent to society,
Jürgen Habermas is highly critical of religious life that has withdrawn into the
subjective domain. This to me is one of his limitations, because how can people
connect their spirituality with institutions that are perceived to be moribund,
corrupt, anachronistic? To me, we need patience with personal spirituality for
the time being, understanding that it is not a perfect scenario, but it represents
the early stages of a renaissance that will, hopefully, develop a social conscience
and communal identity.
Jonathan Rowson understands the value of personal spirituality but also
appreciates that spirituality must develop social responsibility and communal
representation. In Revitalising Spirituality to Address 21st Century Challenges, he
wrote: ‘Many recognise that the world’s major problems have “spiritual” ele-
ments that are not adequately acknowledged or addressed, partly because we
don’t seem to know how to conduct the debate at that kind of fundamental
level’. Any serious attempt to advocate spirituality must take it out of the realm of
fuzziness, so it can be inserted into the bigger parts of our public conversations.
Rowson continues:
This spiritual perspective matters now because the challenge of finding

a more substantial and grounded public role for the spiritual arises in
the context of weakening of public institutions, acute ecological crises,

and widespread political alienation and democratic stress. And yet, as
things stand, without the forms of tradition and institutional support
afforded by religion, it is hard to see how the spiritual could be any-
thing other than a private matter. With only a shallow engagement in
the subject, we risk ‘branding’ the spiritual as something insubstantial
and completely distinct from religion rather than something important
that stands in critical relation to it. Our collective understanding of
spirituality is oblique and nebulous when we need it to be fundamental
and robust. 38
This is an astute diagnosis. Spirituality has broken from religion because reli-
gious traditions are unable to hold it, due to theologies and practices that are
not receptive to the spiritual elements of the secular situation. But its exile
from religion means it has no support and no shared language to express itself.
When the spiritual heart is taken out of the body of religion, both suffer. Spiri-
tuality needs to make something of itself, develop social organs and institutions
so it can acquire visibility and a public voice. Unless spirituality becomes sub-
stantial, it will be unable to withstand the assault of dangerous and regressive
political forces.
The global scene

The developments I have been outlining are unique to Western Europe and
Westernised nations. Religions are declining and individualistic spirituality is
rising in Britain, France, Germany, Holland and Scandinavia, as well as Aus-
tralia, Canada and New Zealand. But these defy non-Western trends, which
show that traditional religions are increasing in popularity and inf luence in East-
ern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. In countries where
concerted efforts have been made to get rid of religions, such as Russia, China
and India, there have been staggering increases in religious practice. Academic
sources suggest that ‘by 2030 there will be more Christians in China than in
any other country on earth’.39 It seems as if the stronger the political efforts are
to eradicate religions, the more intense are the reactions from resurgent popula-
tions, who practice religion under the radar of atheist regimes. As Hugh Mackay
put it: ‘prohibition and persecution inevitably stimulate and reinforce the very
attitudes, beliefs and practices they seek to suppress’.40
Observations we make about the West are not confirmed by the global
picture. If anything, religion is stronger globally than it was a century ago. In
God is Back , we are told that ‘the proportion of people attached to the world’s
four biggest religions – Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism – rose
from 67 percent in 1900 to 73 percent in 2003 and may reach 80 percent by
2050’.41 But the idea that ‘God is back’ is a Western perception or prejudice,
and sociologists have been confused or misinformed. An example of how their
views have been challenged, or reversed, is found in the work of Peter Berger.
In 1968 he wrote:
By the twenty-first century, religious believers are likely to be found only

in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.42
Thirty years later, in 1999, this sociologist said:
The assumption that we live in a secularised world is false: The world

today, with some exceptions . . . is as furiously religious as it ever was, and
in some places more so than ever.43
By the turn of the century, social scientists realised they had to take seriously the
ability of the religious impulse to revitalise itself in the face of vigorous ideo-
logical opposition. There was not just one trend, but several. Formerly atheistic
countries were rejecting atheism and reaching out to religions old and new,
while formerly religious countries, such as those of Western Europe, were reject-
ing religions and inventing new forms such as that referred to as SBNR, ‘spiritual
but not religious’.44 Everyone seems dissatisfied with what they have, and the
search for meaning in whatever shape or form is on in earnest.
Questions come to mind: Is the West out of step with the world, as some
research is claiming? Or is the West ahead of the rest and foreshadowing the
global future? Will countries like China, Africa, Central and South America
lose interest in orthodoxies once they achieve higher education and better living
conditions? Nigeria, for instance, has the world’s highest rate of church atten-
dance, but also the world’s highest rates of illiteracy, poverty and corruption.
Is adherence to institutional religions necessarily tagged to low levels of social
development? Will such countries, with further development, complain that the
old religions are cramping their individualistic style? Will they, at a later date,
find that their spiritual lives are presenting challenges that the old solutions no
longer satisfy? Will they find they have new wine that cannot be poured into
old wineskins? Will the increasing individualisation of global societies result in a
preference for a more personal and existential style? Or will the traditions adapt
to this demand better than Christianity has done in the West? There are lots of
questions, but the issue is whether collective forms can keep pace with the spirit
of the time, which demands a more personal encounter with the divine.
An intriguing example of Christianity improving its situation outside Europe
is that of Chinese Christian practice. Chinese Christianity does not adapt
orthodox forms in a routine or mechanical way, but ‘Orientalises’ Christianity
by blending it with Eastern inf luences. According to Jung Ha Kim, an Asian
sociologist:
Chinese Christianity . . . privatizes spiritual quests by cultivating the

desired state of consciousness through personal meditation, indeed, through
individually catered lists of how to sit still, empty one’s mind, maintain a
sense of tranquillity, and so forth. Chinese Christian spirituality is, then,
made to be ultimately anti-institutional and highly individualistic.45
Although some reports suggest that the Chinese have appropriated Christianity
uncritically, here is a suggestion that what is taking place in China is close to
what Christianity might wish to develop, but has yet to develop, in the postsecu-
lar West. Jung Ha Kim indicates that Chinese experience is turning a Western
religion into the ‘interiorised’, ‘privatised’ experience that might have f lourished
in the West had the churches had the foresight to adjust to what people wanted
before the mass defection.
But as experimentalism takes place internationally, in Western Europe the
religions continue to dwindle. In Britain and Australia, religions appear to have
little in the way of spiritual vitality. Over the last fifty years, religious participa-
tion in Britain and Australia fell from 33 percent of the population to a mere 7
percent, but in Germany, Holland and Italy those who attend churches are down
to between 1 and 3 percent. In some Western nations, the churches are expected
to be empty within a generation.
Is America still the exception?

The exception to this was always the United States, which continues to have
relatively high rates of religious participation. Despite the fact that the United
States is a secular nation insofar as its constitution forbids the establishment of a
state-based religion, religious activity has always been high, religious communi-
ties vibrant and national identity has been infused with a religious enthusiasm
which dates back to the Pilgrim Fathers. But now that spirituality is emerging
in most Western nations, out of the closet of private experience, the United
States looks less like an anomaly than it did in the past. The difference is that
the United States has managed to hold much of its spiritual life in institutional
containers, whereas the rest of the West lost this containment. Harold Bloom
has suggested that the vibrancy of institutional religious life in America is due to
the fact that much of it is unlike the formal religious practices of Europe. There
is enthusiasm and personal engagement in religion that makes Bloom think that
what is called ‘Christianity’ in America has much in common with Gnosticism.46
According to some reports, while only 1 to 7 percent of some Western nations
are engaged in religious participation, up to 75 percent are interested in, and pur-
sue, spiritual experiences. These figures are emerging from many sources: soci-
ologists, psychologists and statistical surveys. The BBC conducted a life-survey
called the ‘Soul of Britain’,47 which confirmed that unconventional spirituality is
becoming the new normal in Britain. The project found that 76 percent of peo-
ple in the United Kingdom admitted to having had a spiritual experience, which
contrasted radically with statistics showing the decline of church attendance in
all Christian denominations.48 Summarising this report, David Hay and Kate
Hunt concluded that the new style of spirituality was set to become the dominant
religious force in Britain. In the same vein, Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead
authored The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. They
speak of a ‘hidden revolution’ which is more widespread than is generally under-
stood. Based on statistical research, their work argues that unregulated or free-
wheeling spirituality is escalating in Britain, and such spirituality has already
eclipsed the size and inf luence of formal religions.49
Their book was published two years after my work, The Spirituality Revo-
lution, and the similarity of the titles was a coincidence.50 But it showed that
scholars in different disciplines, and on opposite sides of the globe, are reaching
agreement on the emergence of a new spirituality. The difference between our
books is that mine holds out the hope that traditions will regenerate by adapting
to the new appetite for experience, whereas Heelas and Woodhead pronounce
the last rites on traditions. They are coming from a secular position, and seem
not to be aware that the traditions have resources of mystical spirituality to draw
on to meet the postsecular needs. More recently than Heelas and Woodhead’s
research, surveys published in The Guardian show that the number of people
who say they have no formal religion significantly outweighs the Christian
population in England and Wales. On the other hand, personal spiritual experi-
ence continues to escalate.51
In the United States, we have similar kinds of findings. Robert Forman wrote
Grassroots Spirituality,52 based on his interviews with Americans about their reli-
gious lives. He conducted his research in New York and Boston, a region which,
unlike the Bible Belt of the Midwest and South, is not overtly religious but
more like Europe and Australia. Forman concluded that about 75 percent of the
population is interested in spirituality or some kind of spiritual activity, broadly
defined. America presents us with a complex situation; on the one hand the
religious institutions are in much better shape than in Europe, but here too we
discern a gradual weakening of the institutions as personal spirituality becomes
more pronounced.
In this regard we see the inf luence of the baby boomer generation on Amer-
ican religious life. Baby boomers make up more than a third of the nation’s
population at present. In A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby
Boomer Generation, Wade Clark Roof writes that as Sunday school children of
the 1950s arrived at their adolescence in the 1960s, they became unchurched
in record numbers, thereby fundamentally altering the religious landscape in
America. By the 1980s, however, some of the unchurched population had turned
to evangelical and fundamentalist faiths; some had embraced New Age beliefs;
and some defected from organised religion.53 Jung Ha Kim comments:
As this generation of un-, re-, and postchurched reached midlife in the

1990s, they placed more emphasis on creative and eclectic spiritual projects
that are characteristic of the re-emergence of spirituality and religious and
cultural pluralism on America’s spiritual landscape.54
Here again we discern a three-fold pattern: belief, unbelief and recovered

belief. But recovered belief is by no means the same as the belief that was dis-
carded in the 1960s. Instead, we see a move away from institutional belief to per-
sonal experimentation that we find in other Western societies. It seems that the
closer we look at the American situation the less ‘exceptional’ it is, and instead it
follows a universal Western trend – although starting from a different base, due
to the strength of the American Dream.
In Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual
Awakening, Diana Butler Bass conducted interviews and surveys in numerous
regions of United States.55 She found that it wasn’t only California that preferred
spirituality to religion, but many inside the churches were critical of conven-
tional religiosity and wanted more emphasis on spirituality, or personal experi-
ence of the divine. In its appetite for spirituality above religiosity, the United
States shows itself to be not so dissimilar to Western Europe. The World Values
Survey conducted at the University of Michigan found that in some US states up
to 70 percent of populations self-define as ‘generalised’ spirituality in contrast to
traditional religions.56
These and other researchers argue that religions are no longer entrusted with
the task of discerning our spiritual orientation, and are linked in the popular
mind to a range of unsavoury and negative elements: patriarchy, misogyny, colo-
nialism, hypocrisy, piety, homophobia and moralism. More recently, the epi-
demic of child sexual abuse unearthed across the globe – and broadcast by an
anti-religious media – has further reduced the credibility of religion. Religious
extremism is linked with violence, terror and warmongering fundamentalism –
and all of this is forced upon us by celebrity atheists.57
But the most damaging thing of all is that formal religion is perceived, even
by those inside it, as boring. William James described church attendance as a
‘dull habit’.58 He felt church was about dogma and God-talk, not the experience
of God. All sorts of unsavoury elements, plus boredom, have served to tarnish
‘religion’ in our time. As a result ‘spirituality’ has been awarded the task of
doing what was once assigned to religion: connecting us to the sacred and cir-
cumscribing the purpose of our existence. There is enormous optimism around
spirituality, but like any new cultural development, it is buoyed by an exagger-
ated idealism.
Institutional puzzlement
The churches remain puzzled by these changes. It is difficult to possess a monop-
oly on the sacred and lose the monopoly so quickly. As Sandra Schneiders reports
in the United States:
Spirituality has rarely enjoyed such a high profile, positive evaluation, and
even economic success as it does among Americans today. If religion is
in trouble, spirituality is in the ascendancy and the irony of this situation
evokes puzzlement and anxiety in the religious establishment, scrutiny
among theologians, and justification among those who have traded the
religion of their past for the spirituality of their present.59
Schneiders is eloquent in her analysis but disagrees with the separation of religion
and spirituality, and says it is misguided. As a member of a religious order, she
calls for the reunification of the two:
Religion as tradition is the most appropriate context for the development

of a healthy spirituality that is both personally and societally fruitful.60
I agree with this in principle, but we are not there yet. I am surprised that such
an astute observer of society is unable to recognise that a ‘healthy spirituality’ is
not in abundant supply in the churches, and the idea that all spirituality belongs
inside religious institutions is unrealistic in a secularised culture. At the present
time people are ahead of institutions, as the spiritually empty institutions look
bleak compared to the dynamic lives of many individuals.
The Bishop of London recently admitted that the churches do little to inspire
people. He said the trouble with the Church is not so much its retrograde social
attitudes, but that its spirituality is poorly developed.61 We need a good deal of
negative capability to cope with the current environment. Many things are in
transition, and we can’t put the genie back in the bottle so soon after it has escaped.
Diana Butler Bass says many religious people thought the spirituality boom
was a fashion of the 1960s and 1970s. They have been proved wrong in this
assumption, as she makes clear:
At first, many religious leaders hoped such experimentation was a pass-

ing fad; a spiritual search on the part of a restless baby-boom generation.
Now that half a century has gone by and the baby boomer’s grandchildren
are even more discontent [with religion] than their elders, it is increas-
ingly difficult to dismiss spirituality as a sort of cultural phase. To speak of
‘spirituality’ simultaneously signals discontent with religious institutions
and longing for a new, different, and deeper connection with God, one’s
neighbor, and oneself.62
Bass admits that in the 1960s and 1970s, the New Age appropriated the term
‘spirituality’, and it became, for a while, identified with this movement. How-
ever, despite its earlier associations, the term spirituality ‘now has a broader and
more inclusive meaning’.63 Bass is right to associate the cry for ‘spirituality’ with
a critique of institutional religion and a longing for meaningful connection.
In Canada, John Dourley, a Jungian analyst and Catholic priest, grasped the
stark realities of religion and spirituality as separating continents of experience:
The term ‘spirituality’ has gained its current widespread currency in the
wake of the failure of institutional agencies to provide their constituencies
with the resources needed to nourish and sustain the human spirit. The
paradox at the heart of this situation is that spirituality is now a growing

personal and social concern because its traditional sponsors and mediators
have lost their ability to fulfil this role.64
Dourley, recently deceased, belonged to the Catholic Church and yet appreciated
the longings of modernity. He disagreed with Schneiders that the secular constitu-
ency ought to be recalled to the traditions it has repudiated. Dourley recognised
that people are not being disrespectful or wayward, but the traditions have failed to
nourish the spiritual needs of a modern people who can no longer believe in mira-
cles and wonders. The crisis is perhaps not so much one of faith as it is of language
and form. Dourley argued in this and other works that the churches have a great
deal of work to do before they catch up with the modern appetite for experience.
In the United Kingdom, Jack Dominian considers his country’s situation:
We live in a time of transition when the certainties of the past are melting
and society has, to a large extent, given up the religious practices focused
on the local parish church which sustained it for centuries. Nevertheless,
society remains spiritually hungry and awaits a renewal that it can neither
see nor find in its experience of the traditional churches.
In my view all the churches recognise the decline of traditional Chris-
tian practices, but neither realise nor appreciate that we are witnessing the
end of an era. We need to place Christianity in a radical new perspective,
but all we are doing is chasing our tails with evangelising efforts that are
clearly failing and are bound to fail because they are based on a type of
religious thinking that is largely obsolete.
The population at large has expressed a ‘Yes’ to God and a ‘No’ to the
church. The rejection this implies is a very hard concept for the traditional
Churches to accept and so they live, in psychological terms, in a world of
fantasy and denial.65
Over the last thirty years, I have been invited to address religious schools and
colleges on spirituality and have seen much denial at play. There is curiosity
about the changed meaning of ‘spirituality’, but many are bemused that spiritual-
ity, as a concept and practice, has been ‘hijacked’ from the traditional context in
which it was born. Some believe that by tinkering with this or that aspect of lit-
urgy, putting in guitars and pop songs instead of organs and hymns, people will
return. With this lack of comprehension of our crisis, it is hard to move forward
to a creative future. It will take more than tinkering at the edges to urge people
to reconsider the traditional expressions of sacred life.
False gods after God

Finally, it seems to me that if we do not get the religious situation right, we end
up with a procession of ideologies parading as pseudo-religions. Ultimately, ‘no
religion’ is not an option, because we find ourselves unconsciously acting out the
religious urge in a variety of dehumanising ways. Personal spirituality is not a

lasting solution to our crisis; it is merely a holding pattern while our civilisation
tries to work out what to do with this incredible need to believe. The religious
impulse is like a hydra-headed monster; when one head is lopped off a prolifera-
tion of others replace it. In post-religious Europe, Russia and China a procession
of false gods emerged to fill the void left by the eradication of belief. The Italian
philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The present cultural crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dead
and the new has yet to be born; in this interregnum arise a great many
morbid symptoms.66
High on the list of symptoms would be the political ideologies that modernity
has been made to endure: socialism, communism, fascism and consumer capi-
talism. Each purports to offer ideals that were found but not realised in the old
religions, including promises of redemption through the adoption of rigid and
often terrifying manifestoes. Much of Marx’s Communist Manifesto appears to
be similar to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, although he was seeking to destroy
religion and replace it with ideology. Marx argued that the religions offered
illusory happiness, whereas his philosophy would deliver true happiness: ‘The
abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their
real happiness’.67
Each political ideology contains distorted versions of the religious quest and
offers a paradise that can never be realised. Each takes metaphysical ideals and
forces them into materialistic programs. The desires of the spirit cannot be con-
verted into financial or economic goals; whenever we attempt to do so we end
up with the zeal of the religions but without any of their humanistic features.
Daniel Bell remarked:
It does not appear to be an accident that the modern world, having

delimited the authority of religion in the public sphere, has been the
first to create ‘total power’ in the political realm – the fusion of beliefs
and institutions into a monolithic entity that claims the power of a new
faith.68
Consumer capitalism is the most successful of the ideologies because we no

longer see it as an ideology. It has normalised itself to such an extent that it has
become synonymous with everyday life in Western countries. Even the young
no longer attempt to resist it, as they did in my day when protest against capi-
talism was standard. Consumerism is self-perpetuating in that it leads people
to believe that life is improving under its authority. This is not the case, as
mental illness, depression, anxiety and suicide are increasing under the inf lu-
ence of a consumerism that promotes social isolation and atomised existence.
Consumerism tells us that we have never had it so good, and yet the quality of
life is deteriorating as we digest this fake news. When we look at the increasing
mental health disorders, violence and terror, one recognises that the restraints
and safeguards placed on life by religions are missed. Obviously I am talking
about reformed religions with a humanistic focus, not the theocracies that ter-
rorise nations.
Critics of American religiosity have argued that Christianity in the United
States has been as much ideological as religious. The United States managed to
find a way to manipulate the religious spirit so that it supported capitalist indus-
try and greed, despite the teachings of Jesus. In America there was no perceived
difference between progress, enterprise and religiousness, which Max Weber
argued was the result of the triumph of the Protestant ethic.69 Consequently,
American Christianity has been said to be a ‘prosperity gospel’ which distorts
the message of Christianity. It is too political and compromising, such that its
radical social teaching is lost and it becomes indistinguishable from consumer
capitalism.
To the list of symptoms I would add egotism, obesity, grandiosity and nar-
cissism, which are attempts to ward off the emptiness created by the collapse of
ultimate value. We try to fill the God-shaped hole with a pantheon of movie
stars, sporting heroes and media personalities who try and fail to be the new gods
for a secular age. All materialistic projects, whether political, social or commer-
cial, carry distorted religious longings, with dehumanising results. Jung argued
that ‘the various -isms . . . are productive of nothing but anarchy and destruc-
tion because inf lation and man’s hubris between them have elected to make the
ego . . . lord of the universe’.70
The human cannot replace the divine, the material cannot stand in for the
spiritual, and we are forced to deal with the discomforting presence of the sacred,
even though it upsets and overturns our values. The modern era has been a failed
experiment in getting rid of the sacred and elevating the human to the value
once occupied by the gods. The idea of the nation-state is a supreme case in
point. As one theologian put it:
The sovereign state has usurped to itself the prerogatives that were tradi-
tionally assigned to a sovereign God. Being ‘human, all too human’, when
the sovereign state deifies itself and treats itself as sovereign, as above the
law except the laws it gives to itself, all hell breaks loose – quite literally.71
The human cannot replace the gods because the divine demands to be respected
as that which is other than human. The message of the modern is that if we do not
work toward creating good religions, we end up with a succession of bad ones.
I have tried to present a variety of views in this survey of the postsecular
landscape. I am aware that I have said contradictory things about America and
China, for instance, because these countries are complex and contain many posi-
tions and perspectives on religion and spirituality. I am an advocate of grassroots
spirituality, because I see it as the harbinger of things to come, but at the same
time I am a critic of spirituality, because if it remains private it does not build
community and can add to the alienation in society. Although unpopular for
good reasons, the religions need help from ‘spiritual’ leaders and inspired others
to change their direction and focus. But rebranding traditional ritual and belief
as ‘spirituality’ is unfair because the recovery of mystery involves pain, suffering
and letting go of convention. The reorientation of the postsecular presupposes
disorientation and loss.
Notes
1 Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age
(London: Polity, 2010).
2 Julia Kristeva, in Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmermann, eds., Reimagining the Sacred
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 98.
3 Luce Irigaray, Key Writings (London: Continuum, 2004), 147.
4 Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting for?
(London: Verso, 2000).
5 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1980); Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and
Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The
Greening of Science and God (New York: Bantam, 1991); David Hay, Something There: The
Biology of the Human Spirit (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2006).
6 David Tacey, The Spirituality Revolution: The Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality
(London and New York: Routledge, 2003); and Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead,
The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Black-
wells, 2005).
7 Robert Forman, Grassroots Spirituality (Boston: Academic Imprint, 2004).
8 Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing.
9 Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and
Religion (New York: Ignatius Press, 2007).
10 Matthew Arnold, ‘Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse’, in Kenneth Allott, ed., The
Poems of Matthew Arnold (1855; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), 285–94, 288, lines
85–7.
11 Aphorism attributed to Picasso, in Margaret Silf, The Way of Wisdom (Oxford: Lion
Press, 2006), 183.
12 C. G. Jung, ‘The Psychology of the Transference’ (1946), CW 16, § 396.
13 C. G. Jung, ‘Mysterium Coniunctionis’ (1955–1956), CW 14, § 503.
14 Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London: Faber, 1958), 17.
15 Grace Davie in The Observer, November 1993.
16 Jason Ananda Josephson, The Myth of Disenchantment (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017), 18.
17 Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 6.
18 Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009).
19 Boaz Huss, ‘Spirituality: The Emergence of a New Cultural Category and Its Challenge
to the Religious and the Secular’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 29:1 (2014), 47–60.
20 David Tacey, Religion as Metaphor: Beyond Literal Belief (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 2017); and published as Beyond Literal Belief: Religion as Metaphor (Melbourne:
Garratt Publishing, 2015).
21 This argument is clearly expressed in Karen Armstrong, The Case for God: What Religion
Really Means (London: The Bodley Head, 2009).
22 C. G. Jung, ‘Psychology and Religion’ (1938/40), CW 11 (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1969), par. 9.
24 C. G. Jung, ‘Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Con-
cept’ (1936/1954), CW 9, part 1, § 129.
25 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844), ed. Joseph
J. O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
26 Here I am thinking of the work of Michael Lerner, Joel Kovel and Andrew Samuels.
27 Simon During, ‘Toward the Postsecular’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language
Association of America, 120:3 (May 2005), 877.
28 Umut Parmaksiz, ‘Making Sense of the Postsecular’, European Journal of Social Theory,
21:1 (2018), 110.
29 Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York and
London: Routledge, 1988).
30 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’ (2008), located at: www.signand-
sight.com/features/1714.html
31 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of
Secular Thought (Leiden, New York and Köln: Brill, 1996); Mitch Pacwa, Catholics and
the New Age: How Good People Are Being Drawn into Jungian Psychology, the Enneagram and
the New Age of Aquarius (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Press, 1992).
32 David Tacey, Re-Enchantment (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2000); and Jung and the New Age
(London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
33 Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion
(London and New York: Routledge, 2005); also Mel D. Faber, New Age Thinking: A
Psychoanalytic Critique (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1996).
34 Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
35 Oliver Robinson, Paths between Head and Heart: Exploring the Harmonies of Science and
Spirituality (Winchester, UK: O-Books, 2018), 6–7.
36 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap
Press, 2007).
37 Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (Boston: Beacon, 1960), 327.
38 Jonathan Rowson, Spiritualise: Revitalising Spirituality to Address 21st Century Challenges
(London: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce,
2014), 7.
39 Report of Purdue University’s Center on Religion and Chinese Studies, quoted by
Jamil Anderlini, ‘The Rise of Christianity in China’, Financial Times, February 7, 2014.
40 Hugh Mackay, Beyond Belief: How We Find Meaning, with or without Religion (Sydney: Pan
Macmillan, 2016), 5.
41 John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith Is
Changing the World (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 3.
42 Peter Berger, in The New York Times, 1968; cited in Phil Zuckerman, Society without God
(New York: New York University Press, 2008), 148.
43 Peter Berger, The Desecularization of the World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing,
1999).
44 Robert Fuller, Spiritual, But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York:
Oxford, 2001).
45 Jung Ha Kim, ‘Sources Outside of Europe’, in Peter H. Van Ness, ed., Spirituality and the
Secular Quest (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1996), 66.
46 Harold Bloom, The American Religion, 2nd ed. (1992; New York: Chu Hartley Publish-
ers, 2006).
47 Gerald Heald, The Soul of Britain (2000), located at: The Tablet at this address: www.
thetablet.co.uk/page/special-reports03
48 David Hay and Kate Hunt, ‘Is Britain’s Soul Waking up?’, The Tablet (London), June 24,
2000, 846.
49 Heelas and Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution.

50 David Tacey, The Spirituality Revolution: The Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality (Syd-
ney: Harper Collins, 2003; London and New York: Routledge, 2004).
51 Harriet Sherwood, ‘People of No Religion Outnumber Christians in England and
Wales’, The Guardian, June 2016.
52 Forman, Grassroots Spirituality.
53 This is Jung Ha Kim’s (op. cit.) summary of Wade Clark Roof ’s argument in A Genera-
tion of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boomer Generation (New York: Harper-
Collins, 1993).
54 Kim, ‘Sources Outside of Europe’, 62.
55 Diana Butler Bass, Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New
Spiritual Awakening (New York: Harper One, 2013).
56 I am indebted to Diana Butler Bass for this information; see www.worldvaluessurvey.org
57 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006); Christopher Hitch-
ens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hatchette Book
Group, 2007); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004).
58 William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (1911; London and New York: Penguin,
1989).
59 Sandra Schneiders, ‘Religion and Spirituality: Strangers, Rivals, or Partners?’, The Santa
Clara Lectures, 6:2 (2000), 1.
60 Ibid., 19.
61 Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, in an interview found at: http://philosophyforlife.
org/the-bishop-of-london-on-christian-contemplation/
62 Bass, 88.
63 Ibid., 93.
64 John Dourley, On Behalf of the Mystical Fool: Jung on the Religious Situation (London and
New York: Routledge, 2010), 10.
65 Jack Dominian, Living Love: Restoring Hope in the Church (Toronto: Novalis, 2004), 1–18.
66 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans.
Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 276.
67 Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
68 Daniel Bell, ‘The Return of the Sacred: The Argument about the Future of Religion’,
Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 31:6 (1978), 38.
69 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1905;
London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
70 Jung, ‘Psychology and Religion’, CW 11, paras. 144–5.
71 Merold Westphal, ‘Theism, Atheism, Anatheism’, in Richard Kearney and Jens Zim-
mermann, eds., Reimagining the Sacred (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016),
119.
2
THE MYSTICAL TURN
The activation of soul

First there is mysticism, then there is no mysticism, then there is. This is a pattern
discerned in the West’s spiritual history. In Greco-Roman times, and in the
early Judeo-Christian tradition, the mysticism of the indwelling soul was much
discussed and explored. Plato and Aristotle believed in spiritual interiority, and
wrote extensively on anima or soul.1 The ancient Jews and Christians believed
that God spoke to and directed the soul, and in the Gospel of Luke Jesus says,
‘The kingdom of God is within you’.2 The discourse of mystical experience was
carried forward by a small number of mystics, often marginalised or declared
heretical by religious councils and churches. As the Christian tradition was
dogmatised and codified, the mysticism of the soul was banished and declared
off-limits. In particular, the establishment of the doctrine of original sin made
interiority a place of sin and corruption, no place to commune with the divine.
But in our time, with the collapse of church authority and the decline of its
decrees, the indwelling soul has returned to command our attention and respect.
It is once again a doorway to the divine, an opening to the sacred. With the
emphasis today on experience of the divine, the soul has suggested itself as
the first and most accessible portal to the source. We are drawn to what Aristotle
called ‘something within that is divine’. 3 This is largely due to the starvation
of our spiritual needs by secularism. Since external tradition is no longer serving
our needs, the soul has opened like a mysterious organ of the spirit at the core of
our lives. The spiritual questions have shifted from outside to inside, as well as
from head to heart, and this is to be expected since intellect and reason have been
hostile to spirit in the secular age. But the urgency of our situation has managed
to circumvent the authority of the churches as well as the limits of reason, to
open a new locus of the sacred and a new era of spiritual discovery.
The mystical turn 37
When the spirit is deprived of living water, it will make efforts to assuage its
thirst. In scripture we read, ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for . . . they
will be filled’.4 And we read: ‘My soul thirsts for you, my f lesh yearns for you, In
a dry and weary land where there is no water’.5 Perhaps this was the unintended
meaning of the secular experiment: it would alienate people from traditions to
such an extent that they would have to turn within to discover a more intimate
relation to the sacred. Secularism could never have realised that it was invol-
untarily setting the scene for the widespread emergence of mysticism, because
that is what happens when the soul is activated in a starving and thirsting world.
Nothing will suffice except direct, firsthand experience of the sacred, which is
virtually a definition of the mystical path.
For centuries the soul was seen as worthless and a useless place to begin the
spiritual journey. The stain of original sin had cast a shadow over the soul, and
the highest spiritual value was placed on Jesus, who had to be emulated and ide-
alised. Jesus was said to be God incarnate, and the divine imprint on the human
soul was eclipsed. Genesis says we were made in the image of God,6 but theology
insisted that this was cancelled by sin. This alienated people from their souls, as
spirit could only be found outside, in projection upon Jesus. This is why Alfred
North Whitehead, among others, said that Christian theology is ‘one of the
great disasters of the human race’.7 The disaster was in attributing perfection and
virtue to an idealised figure and losing the vital connection to the divine trace
that could still be found in the soul, if only people were encouraged to find it.
But people were discouraged, and only a few hermits, heretics and mystics man-
aged to salvage the soul from disrepute and follow its lead to spiritual life. Today
the soul has awoken from its slumber and is experiencing a profound revival as
people recognise that this tabooed part of human personality can be explored as
a pathway to spirit.
The inward turn

All this has taken place as the world outside the soul appears more secular and
devoid of meaning. This is such a widespread phenomenon that sociologists have
had to take an ‘inward turn’ in their assessment of the spiritual climate of our
time. In The Desecularization of the World, sociologist Peter Berger admitted:
Secularization on the societal level is not necessarily linked to seculariza-

tion on the level of individual consciousness. Certain religious institutions
have lost power and inf luence in many societies, but both old and new
spiritual ideas and practices have nevertheless continued in the lives of
individuals.8
It has become evident that secularising trends in society do not account for
what has been happening in individuals. To understand society, it has become
necessary to take account of the depths of subjectivity. It was the clash of social
theory with experience that revealed the cracks in the edifice of secularism. Its
weakness was exposed when attention was paid to the elements of human experi-
ence that it could not explain. As the world became more secular, the subjective
life, often revealed to therapists, counsellors and psychologists, became more
spiritual, but almost none of this activity impacted the life of the churches in
a positive sense. Churches often referred to this activity as a ‘gnostic revival’,
and this was meant as a criticism, but it nevertheless described what was hap-
pening; a previously forbidden path was opening up. ‘Secularization can never
be entirely successful’, writes Ira Helderman, because an ‘indomitable spirit in
human beings, a will toward the numinous or transcendent, can never be totally
repressed despite efforts to do so’.9
The history of spirituality in the West is like a game of snakes and ladders.
The churches constructed the ladders that would lift us out of our wretched
condition and enable us to reach for heaven. This may have worked for some
time, but came unstuck in the modern era. The ladders have collapsed, and
instead, the snake seems to be the symbol that governs our time. We have
reached a point where the rungs of theological and moral ladders no longer assist
our upward climb, and we are sliding down the backs of serpents, into the pits
below. As well as being a source of light, the soul is at first a dark and cavern-
ous place, and we have to familiarise ourselves with its darkness before we can
move forward. Jung says the first glimpse we have of the psyche or soul is the
shadow, which carries our darkness. The shadow has to be integrated before
we can move toward the light. Perhaps this is why the churches barred the way
through soul, because they did not want us to encounter this darkness, in which
some can get lost.
This is what many find exhausting about our time; it is almost as if we are
starting again, and the spiritual journey has to begin from scratch. In his last
poem, Yeats said that since his ladder had been taken away, he would have to lie
down where ladders start, in the rag and bone shop of the heart. For Yeats the
‘ladder’ referred to literary techniques, skills and symbolisms that carried him to
poetic heights. Toward the end of his career, he felt bereft of these techniques, as
if plunged into an inchoate abyss below. I believe the same can be said of our situ-
ation. The theological ladder has gone, and the emulation of Christ has proved
too difficult. Besides, even those who tried valiantly to emulate Christ, includ-
ing our clergy and bishops, have ended up wallowing in darkness, as can be seen
from the international scandal of clerical sexual abuse. We can no longer aim so
high, but are forced to deal with our darkness.
But the majority of people outside the churches, who do not attempt the
imitatio Christi, are now forced to examine their shadows and sit in the rag and
bone shop of the heart. The loss of the religious ladder, the vertical pathway
to the divine, will not be replaced in the short-term by a new ladder, and so
we have to endure the ‘dark night of the soul’. This is the imperative of our
time, and undoubtedly long overdue as a way to overcome the projection of the
shadow upon others, a major source of interpersonal and international conf lict.
After the collapse of religious community and the so-called death of God, we
find ourselves having to deal with psychological experience.10 Destiny has con-
demned us to this activity, since we have been thrown into the heart – or what
psychology calls the unconscious – against our will and not from our choosing.
We need a new way of connecting with the divine, which is not an upward path
to perfection, but a deepened path toward wholeness.
The path through the heart

The ladder gives way to the snake; we slide down its scaly back into the realm
of our forgotten interiority, which for some can be a kind of hell. Spirituality is
not about swimming with dolphins or looking at sunsets, as the New Age would
have us believe. It involves gutsy and time-consuming work, and has driven
many to counsellors and therapists to find out what is going on inside them.
Today faith requires an inner life as a precondition, whereas in the past, religion
asked us merely to accede to a set of propositions and creeds. Today the mind
won’t accept what the heart has not intimated.
The heart has long stood as a symbol for the soul, but a particular kind of
soul, a soul which is discovered through experience and incarnated in the body.
The spirituality of the soul is one which is close to earth and the body, close to
the mundane and the everyday. It cannot take wing from the top of a ladder,
but has to stay close to the ordinary. This is a humble place to be, and for some
it can be humiliating. Yeats implied a degree of humiliation in his fall into the
heart. For religion, it means putting the dogmas and doctrines to one side, and
focussing on how the person can find connections to the divine in his or her
own experience. This is indeed a fall from grace, a collapse from metaphysical
heights to depths, from carefully honed theology to pastoral care and human
development.
But although the heart or soul is no panacea, no realm of perpetual bliss, it
contains the imprint of the divine, and this we can take seriously. Our souls, our
hearts, are not only foul and murky but potentially sacred, to the extent that we
search within them for what the gospels call the pearl of great price. It is worth
attending to our souls, not only to put our lives in order, but to rescue the sacré
cœur from its imprisonment in darkness. This is why the alchemists saw their task
as transmuting darkness into light, lead into gold and base substances into the
philosopher’s stone. To work on the soul is an alchemical labour, a slow, difficult
and at times dangerous opus which searches for the symbol of transformation.
The East has long known of this profound work, but the West has been blind to it
because the redemptive factor, the opus or treasure, has been personified in Jesus
and institutionalised in the church. It is time to de-institutionalise the sacred, so
the many can participate in the gift of grace.
In his master work Psychology and Alchemy, Jung made it clear that what moti-
vated his search was not the refinement of technique or scientific exactitude, but
the quest for supreme values in the soul:
Were it not a fact of experience that supreme values reside in the soul,
psychology would not interest me in the least, for the soul would then
be nothing but a miserable vapour. I know, however, from hundredfold
experience that it is nothing of the sort, but on the contrary contains the
equivalents of everything that has been formulated in dogma and a good
deal more, which is just what enables it to be an eye destined to behold
the light. This requires limitless range and unfathomable depth of vision.11
The idea of original sin has clouded the perception of the interior self, so that we
have been unable to see its sacred potential. The idea that the interior self is an
eye destined to behold the light, as he puts it, has been kept from us, withheld from
knowledge. We have to win back this knowledge, claim it as our own, and if
our guides are not available in public institutions, we have to find them in the
mystical traditions.
A new psychology based on the exploration of the unconscious becomes the
locus for the recovery of wisdom in a postsecular age. Depth psychology pro-
vides the subjective dimension of the new philosophy of religion that we need to
negotiate our way out of the wasteland. This new path will not seek moral righ-
teousness, but psychological and spiritual wholeness. It seems that the quest for
perfection is an antiquated idea, because how can we enter the foul rag and bone
shop and not be sullied by its darkness? How can we enter Freud’s unconscious
and maintain the illusion of purity? We need a new way of connecting with the
divine which is not a pathway to perfection, but a path to an integration of body,
mind and spirit. As Jung wrote: ‘The utterances of the heart, unlike those of the
discriminating intellect, always relate to the whole’.12 The leitmotif of the new
spirituality is wholeness.
Holistic spirituality of the soul

This is what is revolutionary about postsecular spirituality. In the past, much
spirituality was disembodied; it led the devotee away from the body and the
physical into a rarefied state. It was inspired by a spirit that wanted to shake off
the constraints of embodiment, and there are doubts today about whether it was
truly incarnational and therefore Christian at all. Saints, martyrs and monastics
often engaged in the mortification of the f lesh, as a way of putting to death the
sinful nature as part of the process of sanctification. Ascetic practices such as
f lagellation, abstinence and kneeling were often used as pathways to the light.
Today we have questions about this kind of spirituality. If God seeks unification
of body, mind and spirit in the whole person, was this self-f lagellating practice
fulfilling God’s need or ours? Was it satisfying the human disgust with the body
and our desire to slink back to the uncreated source? Views about what is holy
and what is not have swung around in recent times.
In our day, ascetic practices are more likely to be seen as sadomasochistic,
rather than as pathways to God. Besides, in our psychological era, the burden of
sin, for those who still believe in sin, has shifted from the body to the ego. It is
the ego that often stands in the way of God’s grace and will, and it is the ego that
has to suffer, be displaced or defeated in order for us to live in alignment with the
divine. We still realise that something has to be sacrificed to achieve wholeness,
but it is our selfishness and narcissism, rather than f lesh and body. It is the false
self that has to be set aside so the true self can take the lead. This is the essence
of Thomas Merton’s mystical teaching: his work charts the journey from false to
true self and is psychological as well as mystical. It is this mix of psychology and
mysticism that appeals to the postsecular appetite.
Soul is an ideal vantage point to consider the pathway to wholeness. As the
chalice or grail in Western symbolism, soul is the vessel in which spirit is held,
so that it becomes connected with life and brought into time and space. In hold-
ing spirit in this way, spirit is transformed or incarnated in the body. Soul is the
vessel that contains spirit and makes it personal. Soul is the middle term between
spirit and body, and participates in both worlds. Soul is the bridge that allows the
body to rise to spirit, and spirit to descend to matter. It is like Jacob’s ladder, with
its ascending and descending angels. The soul invites and encourages two-way
traffic between heaven and earth.
According to some traditions, philosophical and literary, soul is not a given,
like mind or body, but a potential that has to be realised in our experience.
Soul is ‘made’ as a result of the interactions between mind, body and spirit. The
nascent soul ‘draws down’ spirit into itself, like manna into a vessel. When it
is inseminated in this way, it grows and develops like an embryo in the womb.
We ‘give birth’ to soul, and the experience transforms our lives. Or as Meister
Eckhart would put it, we give birth to God by nurturing the seeds that he put in
us in the beginning. In this sense, as St Bernard of Clairvaux says, all souls are
feminine in relation to God. D. H. Lawrence often spoke of soul needing to be
‘built’ through lived experience. John Keats, too, emphasised the making of soul
when he wrote: ‘Call the world, if you please, the vale of soul-making, then you
will find out the use of the world’.13
Soul is the link that holds eternity and time together, enabling us to experi-
ence what has been called the eternal present. The mystical quest is a quest for
soul in the here and now. Soul holds the person together, ennobling the body
and grounding the spirit. In the past, spirit often drifted off into transcenden-
tal heights, and the body was frowned upon as a burden. But the direction of
spirit has changed; instead of taking f light to another world, it now seems to be
heading earthward. A kind of ecological correction has taken place in the life
of the spirit.
According to Jung, perfection is ‘a masculine desideratum’, whereas whole-
ness is ‘the feminine ideal’.14 This accords with the perception that the new
spirituality is not only postsecular but post-patriarchal. For centuries spirituality

was governed by the desire for perfection, but in our time we see spirituality
operating in a new key, where the direction is toward wholeness. Spirit is mov-
ing away from patriarchal forms which according to Jung are ‘hopelessly sterile’
and ‘incomplete’.15 The new image of God, he says, is at home on the earth,
befriends earthly mysteries, sexuality, nature and matter. The feminist theology
of embodiment has had a profound inf luence on our relations with nature and
the organic world of creation. This has given a spiritual direction to the new
sensitivity to nature, the biosphere and environmental concerns.
The more I ref lect on ecology in our relations with the environment, the
more I realise we have an internal ecology as well. The call to wholeness is a
call to a psycho-spiritual ecology, in which body, mind and spirit are held in
relationship. Just as we have endangered the ecology of the world, and brought
it to imbalance and crisis, so we can say the same of our internal relations. In the
world we have privileged progress and development above care and nurturance,
and in the internal world we have privileged spirit above soul, transcendence
above embodiment. It seems significant that our awareness of the need for eco-
logical balance in our relations with the environment comes at the same time as
we are urged to make changes to our quest for spiritual fulfilment.
Thus we could say that a new ‘ecology of the soul’ is emerging at spiritual
and environmental levels. The problems of humanity and nature mirror each
other, and both have arisen as a result of debilitating dualisms. We look forward
to a spirituality which strives toward the integration of the opposites, and of the
whole person with the whole of nature. Peter Van Ness is right when he defines
spirituality as ‘the desire to relate oneself as a personal whole to reality as a cos-
mic whole’.16 Ecology becomes the keynote of our internal and external lives.
Is ‘spirituality’ the right term?

Given the historical association of spirituality with perfection, some are won-
dering if the term ‘spirituality’ is the right one. Should we get rid of it and find
another? It is the term that has caught on in the public domain, but it carries a
background that is not in accordance with the strivings of the soul in our time. If
we look up the dictionary meaning of spirituality it points to ‘that which is other
than physical’, that which is not of this world. The Collins Dictionary refers to the
spiritual as ‘the fact or state of being incorporeal’,17 and the Macquarie Dictionary
defines spirituality as ‘pertaining to the spirit or soul as distinguished from the
physical nature; non-material’.18 Either these dictionary definitions are out of
step with current usage, or the spirituality movement has identified itself with
the wrong term. It seems odd that a movement that strives toward wholeness and
aims to overcome the dualism of spirit and body should have settled on a term
that carries a dualistic legacy. Is this dualistic background likely to reemerge in
ways that subvert the project of wholeness? Is there some other term that might
express the aspirations of our time?
Depth psychologists in the United States, such as James Hillman and Thomas
Moore, have been trying to promote alternatives to ‘spirituality’. Following
Keats, they have preferred the term ‘soul-making’, and, following ancient prac-
tices, have employed the term ‘care of the soul’ (cura anima), hoping this might
generate a more embodied feeling to the quest for transformation. But none of
these terms have caught on, and we seem to be stuck with ‘spirituality’, despite
its dubious legacy. Still, we have to use it advisedly. It can evoke ideas of piety,
devoutness and righteousness, which were aspects of spirituality in the past. The
biblical term ‘spirit’ stood in stark contrast to the body. St Paul’s letters oppose
spirit ( pneuma) and f lesh (sarx), and in the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola
the opposition between spirituality and materiality is evident. In seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century France, ‘spiritualité ’ referred to ascetic and body-denying
practices.19 Scripture says, ‘Be therefore perfect, as your father in heaven is per-
fect’,20 and many took this literally.
‘Spirituality’, admits the French philosopher and classicist Pierre Hadot, is not
such a good term for us today, but ‘it is nevertheless necessary to use this term’.
‘None of the other adjectives we could use – psychic, intellectual, thought, of
the soul – covers all the aspects of the reality we want to describe’.21 So we might
have to keep using it, but we have to define it as we do. The transpersonal psy-
chologist Ken Wilber feels obliged to qualify the term by using appellations such
as ‘embodied spirituality’ so that people get the message that his psychology is
not about perfection or disembodiment.
Not only philosophers and psychologists, but theologians have joined the cho-
rus of voices questioning the term ‘spirituality’. The feminist theologian Sandra
Schneiders writes:
The term ‘spirituality’ no longer refers exclusively or even primarily

to prayer and spiritual exercises, much less to an elite state or superior
practice of Christianity. Rather, from its original reference to the ‘inte-
rior life’ of the person, usually a cleric or religious, who was ‘striving
for perfection’, for a life of prayer and virtue that exceeded in scope
and intensity that of the ‘ordinary’ believer, the term has broadened
to connote the whole of the life of faith and even the life of the per-
son as a whole, including its bodily, psychological, social, and political
dimensions. 22
She goes on to say that if people claim they are seeking spirituality this does
not mean they are wanting to be holy, saintly or even ‘good’ in the conven-
tional sense. It means they are seeking to be authentic, legitimate and whole. It
means they are wanting to recognise every aspect of their lives, no matter how
shocking or perturbing these might be. The background idea, borrowed from
psychotherapy, is that the recognition of our various parts has a healing effect. If
the dark side is expressed rather than repressed, it loses some of its autonomy and
is brought into the light of consciousness.
The Jewish scholar Boaz Huss has said, ‘The contemporary definitions and
applications of spirituality are significantly different from its pre-modern uses’.23
He goes on:
In the second half of the twentieth century, the term spirituality under-
went a major shift. The opposition of the spiritual on the one hand and
the f leshly and material on the other, which was central to the earlier
perception of spirituality, became blurred; instead, a new defining dichot-
omy emerged, juxtaposing spirituality with the category it was previously
closely related to, namely the religious.24
One of the questions that come to mind is whether this new spirituality has any
historical continuity with the Judeo-Christian tradition, or whether it is entirely
new. How many saints can we name who integrated body, mind and spirit? If
St Paul defines Christianity for us, we do not arrive at a holistic spirituality. He
wrote in Galatians:
Live by the spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the f lesh. For
what the f lesh desires is opposed to the spirit, and what the spirit desires is
opposed to the f lesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you
from doing what you want.25
Is there any evidence of a holistic, body–soul–spirit ethic in the Christian tradi-

tion, or has this emerged from postsecular modernity, with a debt to psychother-
apy? Or is this another way in which Western spirituality has been inf luenced
by the East, which does not share the West’s squeamish disregard for the body?
This is the view of Colin Campbell, who argues that contemporary spirituality
exchanges the dualistic Western understanding for a monistic Eastern one.26 The
inf luence of the East is significant, especially those traditions that feature yoga
and physical health as important elements in spiritual wellbeing. However, some
Eastern pathways are just as dualistic as Western ones, so we cannot generalise
in simple terms.
There is a connection between spirituality’s new direction and the decline of
traditional religions in Western societies. As the religions waned, some of their
frames of reference and values collapsed. The 1960s was a crucial decade in this
regard. It began to think of spirit as a vital force that was connected to sexual-
ity and creativity, and to suppress bodily desires was linked to the suppression
of spirit. Due to the conditions of modernity, the sexual revolution, the new
awareness of the body and religious decline, a new understanding of the human
emerged. When the spirit began to rise again like a phoenix from its ashes, it
could no longer aspire so high.
My sense is that psychotherapy has played a major role in shifting spiri-
tuality from perfection to wholeness. The point of therapy is to bring all
parts of the self together, no matter how discordant or conf lictual they are.
Freud discovered that many contemporary neuroses occurred as a result of a
life ethic that aimed too high, so that parts of the self, especially sexuality,
went underground and caused symptomatic disturbances. Then came C. G.
Jung and Carl Rogers who argued that the religious ethic of perfection was
persecutory and could no longer be sustained. It put too great a strain on the
psyche, such that a ‘shadow’ built up in the unconscious that had deleterious
effects on the ecology of the psyche.
Wholeness is critical of what is called ‘spiritual bypassing’, which means
avoiding emotional issues in a bid to aspire to transcendental heights.27 While
perfection seeks to transcend the dark side, using spirituality as a defence against
the body or sexuality, wholeness seeks to embrace these elements in a larger
totality. This was seen not only as psychologically desirable and hygienic, but as
spiritual in its implications. By becoming whole, it was felt that a person became
authentic and more likely to be able to stand before the holy in his or her fullness.
Mysticism as postsecular resource

After this excursion into the holistic spirituality of the soul, I want to return to
mysticism. Why is mysticism so important in our time? It is clear that mystics
place a great emphasis on experience and that is what the postsecular seeks. Mys-
ticism is the felt, inward experience of spiritual life. We have to turn within to
the soul, to find the God who beckons us from the depths. As we read in Psalms:
‘Deep calls to deep’.28 The new universal interest in meditation and contem-
plative activities relate to this hunger for direct experience. But we should not
think too literally about this word ‘experience’; we should not necessarily expect
a miraculous event, or a supernatural happening that will convince us of the
existence of other worlds. No visitations from angels, no opening of the clouds
to reveal divine light, no wonders from beyond that could be photographed or
recorded as ‘evidence’ for the in-breaking.
Mystical experience does not have to be tremendous or overwhelming; it can
be subtle, quiet, assured. That is all we need to set us on our way. In 1 Kings,
Elijah thought he might encounter God through some cataclysm or apocalyptic
event. He heard a strong wind in the mountains, and rocks breaking beside him,
‘but the Lord was not in the wind’. After the wind, he witnessed an earthquake,
and then a raging fire, ‘but the Lord was not in the fire’. After the fire Elijah
heard ‘a still small voice’, and immediately he recognised he was in the presence
of the holy. He wrapped his face in his mantle and communed with God.29
When I was a boy, most of us thought of mystics as eccentric people who
devoted their lives to the pursuit of the divine. We imagined isolated people liv-
ing in caves or deserts, engaged in ascetic practices and deprivations – all part of
the context of traditional mysticism. Nowadays, many aspire to mystical experi-
ences, because this is what happens when spirituality becomes a demand of the
soul. David Steindl-Rast said:
Mysticism has been democratized in our day. Not so long ago, mystics were
those who had visions, levitations, and bilocations and, most important,
those who lived in the past; any contemporary mystic was surely a fake
(if not a witch). Today, we realize that extraordinary mystical phenomena
have little to do with the essence of mysticism. (Of course, genuine mystics
had told us this all along; we just wouldn’t listen.) We’ve come to under-
stand mysticism as the experience of communion with ultimate reality.30
All these ancient practices are coming down to earth, down to ordinary folk
and everyday experience, but in different ways. We are so bereft of the sacred,
that we can now say that common experience is filled with uncommon desires
and practices.
When Evelyn Underhill wrote Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal
People (1915), she believed that the collapse of conventional religion had estab-
lished the conditions for a spiritual renaissance based not on creeds but mysti-
cal experience. Although she was writing for a ‘practical’ English audience, she
felt there was nothing more practical than establishing a relationship with the
spirit. The absence of effective religion had left a vacuum, she argued, and it was
natural to turn inward to discover the hidden forces of spirit in human nature.
True mysticism, she claimed, is not as remote or abstruse as its reputation might
suggest. Mysticism ‘does not wrap its initiates in a selfish and otherworldly calm,
isolate them from the pain and effort of the common life’. Rather, ‘it gives them
renewed vitality; administering to the human spirit not a soothing draught, but
the most powerful of stimulants’.31
She spends great effort trying to change the common conception that mysti-
cism is for the elite, the monastics or ‘cosmic’ types. She emphasises not only
its practical features but its essential elements in building a stable foundation in
an increasingly hollow and irrational world. The fact that she published this
inf luential work at the beginning of the Great War encouraged her to emphasise
the pragmatic, life-giving aspect of mystical practice in the midst of the world’s
chaos and brutality. The mystical life ‘is not a special career, involving abstrac-
tion from the world of things. It is a part of every man’s life; and until he has
realised it he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of
all his powers’.32
If spirituality could be described as an active seeking after the sacred, mysti-
cism is a further step along the way. It operates at a more subtle level, and is not
just an expression of human desire. It is the awareness that, even before we set
out on our quest, something is already seeking us. The mystic is the one who
becomes aware that, beyond personal striving, and deeper than aspiration, there
is a hidden movement toward us. To become aware of this in-breaking of the
divine is a source of joy and contentment; it is why mystics are associated with
ecstatic experiences, and why they have become figures of interest in our world.
The publishing industry reports interest in such mystics as St Teresa of Avila,
Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich and St John of the Cross. Years ago they
would have been cultural oddities, of little popular interest, but now many want
to know how their lives were transformed.
Many of us realise that what we call ‘spirituality’ has limitations: it can be

about seeking, doing, questing. This can become exhausting and run out of
energy. Many of us seek but do not find, and why? Because to find we have
to allow ourselves to be found. The mystery that searches for us has to be
admitted into our lives, we have to allow ourselves to be penetrated by its
love, beauty and terror. Why terror? Because when something truly Other,
outside the will, seeks to connect with us, we have to renounce control and
allow ourselves to be taken. There is an old saying: ‘Let go, let God’, and this
is the secret of mystical experience. The essence of meditation is to be taken
into a will which is not one’s own, and yet, paradoxically, the basis of one’s
true identity.
It was Freud who said the ego is the seat of anxiety. Mysticism is a process that
takes place away from the ego and its control. When the ego loses control, the
person often takes fright, and fears that he or she is losing their mind. Then the
adrenalin kicks in, the survival instinct, and we hold ourselves close and tight.
In this moment, we lose the possibility of giving ourselves to the Other, which
is a form of surrender, a sacrifice of will. As Jesus put it: ‘Nevertheless, not my
but thy will be done’.33 This is the secret of mystical experience, and it is not a
practice that our ego-based society knows anything about. That is why we often
have spirituality without mysticism, striving without finding, seeking without
arriving, because we are unable to let go to the extent that the Other is able to
take us into its everlasting arms. Mysticism is a cure, a tonic, for our ego-driven
age, and it is little wonder that publishers report considerable sales of books on
mysticism and the mystical life.
In her work on Mystics of the Church, Evelyn Underhill wrote:
Mysticism, according to its historical and psychological definitions, is the

direct intuition or experience of God; and a mystic is a person who has, to
a greater or less degree, such a direct experience – one whose religion and
life are centered, not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that
which the person regards as first hand personal knowledge.34
It is ‘first hand personal knowledge’, or perhaps ‘experience’, that people want.

Few of us are trained in monasticism or ascetic practices and are not prepared to
engage in traditional forms of mysticism. But we are hungry enough to seek such
experiences and our desperation to connect with forces beyond the self can and
does lead us to the doorway of mystical encounters.
Thomas Merton’s works are exemplary in this regard, and he is never con-
cerned with the abstractions of theology, but always with something more
urgent. He wants to know, as many of us want to know, how to become more
intimate with the divine:
There exists some point at which I can meet God in a real and experimen-
tal contact with his infinite actuality.35
This resonates with contemporary need. People do not want to recite creeds or
take on dogmas of belief, but want to discern the presence of the sacred in their
experience. What attracts the modern seeker to the masters of mystical life is that
the great masters start the quest from within, not from without.
If some theologians claim that the contemporary interest in interiority is New
Age or a sign of narcissism, they have forgotten the mystical heritage of their
tradition. We need only cite two of the classic mystics in the Christian tradition:
Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart. Teresa writes in The Book of Her Life:
Within oneself, very clearly, is the best place to look for God . . . and it’s
not necessary to go to heaven, nor any further than our own selves; for to
do so is to tire the spirit and distract the soul, without gaining as much
fruit.36
In a similar vein, Meister Eckhart wrote:
If we are to live in God, then God must become our own inner self and
we must act from our own inner self. Just as God effects all things from his
own inner self, in the same way we too must act from our own inner self,
which is God in us.37
These words were written eight hundred years ago, and yet speak a language that
resonates with present need. The mystics are a tremendous source of inspiration
for today’s world, because they are grappling with the same issues that concern
us. The postsecular person says: ‘If God is real, I want to know this in my life. I
want to experience it for myself ’. It sounds egotistical and bold to conventional
religious taste, but there is plenty of traditional foundation for that need. Indeed,
one need look no further than the scriptures to find this mystical interiority:
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was
coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with
things that can be observed; nor will they say, “Here it is”, or “There it is”,
because the kingdom of God is within you’.38
What Jesus says is one thing, but what Christianity says is another. Jesus had a
profoundly mystical sense of the presence of God, but this has been erased or
little understood by the tradition that carried his teaching into the world.
What Merton, Teresa, Eckhart and other visionaries and mystics have been able
to discover for us is the presence of an other life within the self. This sounds con-
tradictory, but there is an otherness within our subjectivity which is the imprint
of God upon the soul, our original blessing. What mysticism shows is that the self
is more than the ego, with its purely personal concerns. There is a divine spark in
the self, and that spark is important in our time, as people turn within to search
for the God dimension. Merton called this the true self, and it is largely unknown
in conventional Christianity, with its resistance to interiority. Merton was aware

of the tension between his vision and orthodox tradition, which is why he said
the mystical experience of God ‘is not and can never be a narcissistic dialogue of
the ego with itself ’.39 He can assert this because he is confident that the self, in its
deeper reaches, is more mysterious than orthodoxy has grasped.
Another feature of mysticism is that mystics begin with a sense of emptiness.
Here Louis Dupré is illuminating:
Precisely this sense of emptiness accounts for the strange attraction mysti-
cal literature holds for our contemporaries. For most mystical writers have
at one time or another expressed the emptiness that in some way corre-
sponds to the sense of religious absence that so many feel today. The mod-
ern person is justified in turning to the masters of spiritual life by the fact
that in his emptiness he has nowhere to turn but inwardly. The contemporary
person is forced to start the spiritual journey from within, even though that
is the place where he/she most grievously encounters a void as silent as the
secular world that has ceased to speak in sacred tongues.40
No matter how much the mystics assert God’s presence in the world, they
emphasise the need to empty oneself of the familiar images and to search for
God in the darkness of the soul. Classic mystics such as St John of the Cross and
Teresa of Avila, and modern mystics such as Simone Weil and Thomas Merton,
teach us to invest our very godlessness with religious meaning. Merton writes:
The whole meaning of our life is a poverty and emptiness which, far from
being a defeat, are really the pledge of all the great supernatural gifts of
which they are a potency. We become like vessels that have been emptied
of water that they may be filled with wine.41
The loss of divine presence assumes a positive significance, and the dark night
of the soul is seen as a sacred night, in which we hope to meet the creator who
transforms us in our desolation. Merton says: ‘God empties Himself and comes
down to us to be empty in our emptiness, and so fill us in His fullness’.42 This
emptying, or kenosis in Greek, speaks directly to the destitution of our time. The
idea of starting with nothing, having nothing and not possessing props or bag-
gage, has genuine appeal to our postsecular taste. Dupré again:
The emptiness of one’s own heart may turn into a powerful cry for the One
who is not there, yet still present by his absence. As in the night of St. John
of the Cross, absence, intensely experienced and accepted, may become the
meeting place between the soul and the transcendence of God.43
Classic mystical writings have a non-denominational and universalist aspect,

and that is something that appeals to contemporary taste. In an age that is weary
of religious strife and conf lict, and of one tradition claiming that it has the abso-
lute truth while the others are caught in illusion, mystical writings are free of
this kind of sectarian interest. Whether we refer to the meditations of the Hindu
Kabir, the Islamic Rumi, or the Catholic Merton, the fact is that mystical writ-
ings speak to all human beings, regardless of their background, natal faith or
current beliefs.
Mystical writings transcend dogma, and avoid sterile theological disputes by
speaking directly to the spiritual longings of the heart. That is why, if we are to
achieve peace in the world, it will most likely occur only if we take the mystical
traditions into account, for these are speaking to the existential plight of the indi-
vidual, rather than waving f lags for one kind of doctrinal system over another. I
doubt whether peace could ever be achieved by theologians sitting down to talk
out their differences, because such meetings always run up against long-standing
barriers and irreconcilable differences.
The feminine connection to interiority

It is important to observe that all the elements of our discussion: soul, interiority,
wholeness and rebirth come under the sign of the feminine. The soul is feminine,
and has been seen in that light by the Greeks, who called the soul psyche, and
the Romans, for whom soul was anima, also feminine. To discover the interior
soul is a feminine mystery, and to give birth to the spirit in the soul is a miracle
of the feminine aspect of the divine. Needless to say, in our patriarchal culture,
these feminine mysteries have been sorely absent. One might almost say that the
absence of spirituality in mainstream Christianity is due to the neglect of the
feminine, without which no interior life can be found. We have constructed a
man’s religion, for men and by men, with a Holy Trinity which is predominantly
male. The feminine elements of personal spirituality, interiority and mysticism
have been frowned upon or relegated to the margins of patriarchal orthodoxy.
In the history of the West men have been suspicious of the feminine and have
often demonised it. The feminine has been associated with the body, feeling,
emotion, sexuality, nature, creation. These are precisely the elements that are
crying out for attention today. Western religion has been primarily extraverted –
everything has been constructed as outside: Christ, God, Holy Spirit, Heaven.
History, and not interiority, has been regarded as the locus of the sacred. This is
why our time, which demands a deeply personal and internal spirituality, is not
finding much solace in the Christian tradition. Priests implore us to consider the
Jesus of history, the God of the universe, the rituals and sacraments, but none
of this is providing an immediate experience of interiority. We want to give
birth to the spirit in our lives, and for this we require interior space, a womb in
which the new can grow.
Unless unusually gifted, clergy don’t know what people are talking about
or what they want. They are too masculine to comprehend these issues. Not
that only women can understand present need, but they have more success in
negotiating it. We are, of course, talking of the archetypal feminine, or the femi-
nine principle, which is found in men and women, but most often in women.
Some men do have this dimension, but even they have difficulty expressing
their feminine side in a patriarchal culture and religious tradition. The interior
soul has been downgraded, just as women, the feminine and sexuality have been
downgraded. The East, however, has kept the feminine alive with possibility
and promise. In Eastern cultures the feminine ‘yin’ has been able to balance the
strivings of the masculine ‘yang’. This is probably because the East did not allow
the masculine principle to dominate its culture to the extent that it has in the
West. There was more chance of these principles achieving a balance, instead of
one dominating the other.
Despite this, some of the greatest exponents of mystical interiority have been
men. Meister Eckhart is the master of this interior process:
God ‘must’ give birth to himself in us fully and at all times. He has no
choice in the matter; this is simply his nature. If we do not receive the
spiritual benefits of this birth, then that is because we are not content to
allow God to act in us.44
We continue the incarnation of the divine, which is not limited to the man Jesus,
by allowing the spirit to be born in the human soul. Eckhart ran counter to
church teaching in this regard, since orthodoxy wanted to limit the incarnation
to Jesus, which consolidated its power and authority. Eckhart fell afoul of the
church in his day, and there is some suggestion that he may have been murdered
by the Vatican army. His spiritual teachings were banned by his Dominican tra-
dition, and even today the ban still holds. This is an indication of how far tradi-
tion has to go to recover its soul.
If every human heart must give birth to the spirit, as Eckhart proclaimed,
then the spiritual experience is a journey of conception, gestation and matura-
tion. Every spiritual seeker must be like Mary, giving birth to the Jesus within.
For Eckhart, God was not purely masculine, as ‘he’ appears in mainstream
tradition. God is feminine and masculine in this mystical vision:
God is not only the father of all good things, but he is the mother of all
things as well. He is father, for he is the cause of all things and their creator.
He is the mother of all things as well, for when creatures have acquired
their being from him he still stays with creatures to keep them in being.
If God did not remain with creatures after they had started their own life,
they would most speedily fall out of being.45
God as mother rules over the mystical domain, and we are embarking on a femi-
nine mystery even as we talk about spiritual rebirth. The continuing incarnation
is the ‘natural’ order of things; there is nothing supernatural about it. There is no
need for an ‘interventionist’ masculine God above, because the living God in the
soul and creation is revealing itself constantly and for all time. If God is not born
in the soul, says Eckhart, it is because
we obstruct God with our false notions of self and the determination to
cling to the nothingness which is the true reality of our own creaturely
being.46
It is ‘false notions of self ’ that Western tradition suffers from as a whole. It does
not comprehend the depths of the self, and continues to think of it as ego, as
personally, biologically and socially conditioned. The divine endowment that
comes with the self has been tragically forgotten.
The feminine is about listening rather than telling, being subtle and discern-
ing rather than giving orders and directing traffic. It is often the still small voice
that announces the divine, and this can be missed if we are operating at a wilful
level. Listening for the still small voice is a feminine art that is the basis of spiri-
tual counselling and direction. It is a quality that all women seem to possess in
some measure, that some men have to some degree, and that all men and women
need to cultivate if we are to mature spiritually. Feminist scholars have for some
time been exploring the feminine face of the divine, as in Merlin Stone’s When
God was a Woman.47 The ascendancy of spirituality today is the equivalent of the
elevated status of women in the socio-political sphere. Just as the feminist move-
ment is exploring history and literature for the lost or buried feminine treasures
of the past, so the new spirituality is seeking to uncover the hidden spiritual
riches of the ancient world. The new spirituality is feminism on the inside, win-
ning back the feminine soul to our culture.
Feminist scholar Riane Eisler argues that the new spirituality, which she sees
as a phenomenon linked to the rising feminine principle, is part of the ‘the
reinstatement of feminine values’ to their rightful place in the social order. She
claims that ‘the resurgence of a “new spirituality” is neither radical nor new’. It
is a matter of ‘reclaiming our hidden heritage: the lost knowledge of millennia-
long spiritual traditions’.48 This spirituality is ‘new’ to us, but in the trajectory of
history it is not new. It is a rediscovery of the interiority of religious tradition,
which got lost during the high period of patriarchy. This is important, because
if it were entirely new, conservatives could justifiably claim that it is spurious,
rootless and invented.
Ref lecting on the rupture between patriarchal religion and ‘feminine’ spiritu-
ality takes us back to the twelfth-century debate between Bernard of Clairvaux
and Peter Abelard. St Bernard, mystical by nature, fought for the integration of
spirituality, prayer and contemplation in the training of priests. He wanted to
place the affective domain at the centre of theological concern. Peter Abelard,
however, advocated a more scientific and efficient approach to theology. Even-
tually, the authorities took up Abelard’s view, and theology secured for itself a
scientific footing, free from the affective life. This had huge ramifications for the
training of priests and for religion and religious education, which began to be
streamlined in the way that is characteristic of the modern world. Religion felt
it had freed itself from the fuzzy and difficult domain of interior life, but it had
begun to lose its feminine soul. Religious faith without a transformation of the
heart is not likely to stand the test of reality. But the West moved along this path,
believing that we could have spirit without soul, light without darkness, intellect
without emotion and faith without transformation.
Today, we have to listen again to Bernard’s side of the argument, which has
come back to haunt us. Bernard warned that there is no convincing induction
into religious life without the education of the heart and care of the soul. To
educate the head or intellect is not enough, we need a thoroughly convinc-
ing experience of the mystical interior. We have ignored the interior dimen-
sion of religion at our peril, and for want of this the edifice is crumbling.
In recent times, Bernard’s argument about the need to link theology with
experience has been put by a host of theologians and philosophers, includ-
ing Tillich and Bultmann on the Protestant side, and Rahner and Lonergan
on the Catholic side.
Karl Rahner, who was inf luential at the Second Vatican Council, said:
The future Christian will be a mystic or he [or she] will not exist at all.49
When I first read this, I thought it was a tall order, and I could not imagine
ordinary folk becoming mystics in order to achieve faith. But knowing as I do
the obstacles to faith, and the impossibility of blind belief, I agree that unless
people struggle to find an authentic connection with the sacred, they might
never achieve faith at all. Rahner added this trenchant remark:
By mysticism we mean a genuine experience of God emerging from the

very heart of our experience.50
Each person will have to find his or her own way to the soul, and this isn’t an
easy task. It requires a journey to the depths and an awakening of the person to
the spirit. If we want God in our lives, this demands far more work and toil than
has hitherto been the case. If we can recover religion as a spiritual pathway, and
not merely as an external ethical code, we might win back its power. Something
more primary than morality has to be stirred and awoken. This is the spirit of the
person, which has to be searched for, encountered and experienced.
William Johnston, who spent decades studying Zen Buddhism in Japan and
finding parallels with Western tradition, believed that the Christian prejudice
against the mystical needs to be overcome. He writes:
Today we are face to face with a new world that is attracted by mysticism
and is impatient of irrelevant and wordy speculation. Now we are entering
into dialogue with the mystical religions of Asia. In these circumstances
a revival of Christian mysticism will certainly come. Indeed, it is already
with us. Will the much neglected mystical theology become the centre of
all theology? Surely this is the way of the future.51
The most creative and inf luential mystics of recent times, such as Thomas Mer-
ton and Bede Griffiths, like Johnston himself, spent much of their lives trying to
understand Eastern mysticism and why it exerted such a mesmerising inf luence
on Westerners.52 Each of them realised that Western religion was in a crisis of
relevance and the East could provide help in recovering the interior dimension.
West and East ought not to be constructed as spiritual competitors: both are
trying to access the same reality, but from different sides. It is simply that the
West took the extraverted route – the presence of God in history and tradition –
whereas the East took the introverted route – the presence of God in experience,
subjectivity and consciousness.
When Iris Murdoch posed the question: ‘Must all “religious” people now be
mystics?’ she was not only thinking about Jung, psychoanalysis and the impact of
the discovery of the unconscious. She was thinking about the East, and added,
‘Eastern religion has seen mysticism as something close to the ordinary religious
consciousness’.53 This is precisely the point I have been making. If there is to be
any religious future in the West, the ‘mystical’ must become ordinary, the new
normal. There can be no religiousness without mystical interiority. We have
arrived at an ‘Eastern’ moment in the West, and as an alternative to turning
literally to the East and abandoning our Western culture, we might consider
cultivating a more introverted pathway to divine reality.
Notes
1 Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), c350 B.C., trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London:
Penguin Classics, 1986); and trans. J. A. Smith, MIT Internet Classics Archive (1931), located
at: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.html
2 New Revised Standard Version, Luke 17:21.
3 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, X. vii. 8.
4 New Revised Standard Version, Matthew 5:6.
5 New Revised Standard Version, Psalm 63:1.
6 New Revised Standard Version, Genesis 1:27.
7 Dialogues with Alfred North Whitehead, recorded by Lucien Price (Boston: Little, Brown
and Co., 1954), 171.
1999), 3.
9 Ira Helderman, ‘Descriptive Disenchantment and Prescriptive Disillusionment’, in
Thomas Cattoi and David M. Odorisio, eds., Depth Psychology and Mysticism (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 91.
10 David Ray Griffin, ed., Spirituality and Society: Postmodern Visions (Albany, NY: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1988).
11 C. G. Jung, ‘Psychology and Alchemy’ (1944), CW 12, par 14.
12 C. G. Jung, ‘On the Tale of the Otter’ (1932), CW 18, par 1719.
13 John Keats, letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February 1819.
14 C. G. Jung, ‘Answer to Job’ (1952), CW 11, paras. 620, 627.
15 Ibid., par 620.
16 Peter Van Ness, ‘Introduction’, in Van Ness, ed., Spirituality and the Secular Quest (New
York: Crossroad, 1996), 5.
17 Collins National Dictionary (London: Collins, 1966).
18 The Macquarie Dictionary (Sydney: Doubleday, 1983).
19 William Johnston, Recent Reference Books in Religion (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity
Press, 1996), 131.
20 Matthew 5:48.
21 Pierre Hadot, ‘Spiritual Exercises’, in Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwells,
1995), 81.
22 Sandra Schneiders, ‘Spirituality in the Academy’, Theological Studies, 50:2 (1989), 679.
23 Boaz Huss, ‘Spirituality: The Emergence of a New Cultural Category and Its Challenge
to the Religious and the Secular’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 29:1 (2014), 50.
24 Ibid., 47.
25 New Revised Standard Version, Galatians 5:16–17.
26 Colin Campbell, The Easternization of the West (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007).
27 ‘Spiritual bypassing’ was a term coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1984.
28 Psalm 42:7.
29 New Revised Standard Version, 1 Kings 19:11–13.
30 David Steindl-Rast, located at: http://csp.org/Steindl-Mystical.html
31 Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People (New York: E.P. Dut-
ton & Co., 1915), 8.
32 Ibid.
33 Luke 22:42.
34 Evelyn Underhill, The Mystics of the Church (1925; New York: Aeterna Press, 2015), 9.
35 Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1961; New York: New Directions, 1972), 37.
36 Teresa of Avila, ‘The Book of Her Life’, in The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila, Vol. 1,
trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriquez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite
Studies, 1976), 279.
37 Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings, ed. Oliver Davies (London: Penguin,
1994), 190.
38 Luke 17: 21.
39 Merton, 52.
40 Louis Dupré, ‘Spiritual Life and the Survival of Christianity: Reflections at the End of
the Millennium’, Cross Currents (New York), 48:3 (1998), 5.
41 Merton, 264.
42 Ibid., 40.
43 Dupré, 5.
44 Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, xxix.
45 Meister Eckhart, ‘Saying 14’, in David Steindl-Rast, ed., Meister Eckhart, from Whom God
Hid Nothing: Sermons, Writings and Sayings (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1996), 10–11.
46 Ibid.
47 Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (1976; Dorchester: Dorset Press, 1990).
48 Riane Eisler, ‘The Feminine Principle in our Past and Future’, in Shirley Nicholson,
ed., The Goddess Re-Awakening: The Feminine Principle Today (Wheaton, IL: Theosophi-
cal Publishing House, 1989), 36–7.
49 Karl Rahner, ‘The Spirituality of the Church of the Future’, in Cornelius Ernst, ed., Theo-
logical Investigations, Vol. 20 (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1981), 149.
50 Ibid.
51 William Johnston, Mystical Theology: The Science of Love (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 58.
52 See Bede Griffiths, A New Vision of Reality: Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and Chris-
tian Faith (London: HarperCollins, 1989).
53 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Vintage, 1992), 139.
Secularism under pressure
3
A SECULAR COUNTRY
The soul down under

Australia is a defiantly secular nation, and appears to be in no hurry to usher in
a postsecular consciousness. Nevertheless, I would like to use my country as an
example of secularism under pressure, and for signs that a new consciousness is
gradually emerging. There are indications of a postsecular momentum in the
arts, music and literature, in attitudes towards nature and ecology, and in public
attitudes and values. As in other secular nations, the postsecular often emerges
where the official attitudes are found wanting or inadequate. The deeper levels of
human experience cannot be confined to the secular template. In secular nations,
everything related to the sacred is pushed away, hidden from sight, which is why
it is of interest to artists and writers.
Artists dig up what has been buried and express in symbolic terms what is
below the radar of everyday awareness. This, at least, is what happens in the
serious or visionary arts. The visionary arts, as distinct from arts that seek to
entertain and celebrate the known, can never be popular because they reveal to
a nation what it does not want to know about itself. In a secular country, the
serious arts are almost bound to be spiritual, because this is the dimension of
experience that cannot be closed down by any ideology. The visionary arts do
not express the spirit of the times, but the spirit of the depths, a distinction made by
Jung in The Red Book.1 The visionary arts put forward visions of experience that
are ‘in spite’ of the times, or ahead of the times, insofar as such depths are bound
to surface sooner or later.
There are two quite different Australias: a predominantly secular, multicultural
society perched precariously on the ancient land of an indigenous people. Secular
society seems godless and proud of it, while the indigenous people, historically
deprived of a voice and given no part in official Australian identity, understand
themselves and the world through a cosmology called the Dreaming. Aboriginal
60 Secularism under pressure
people refer to the land as ‘country’, and their country is anything other than
secular. ‘New’ Australia is modern and free of mystery; ‘Old’ Australia is steeped
in mystery and the sacred. It seems to be the perfect setting for the breakthrough
of a postsecular consciousness, given the longevity and resilience of the indig-
enous people and their refusal to be fully assimilated to the secular values of the
dominant culture.2 The nation is a snapshot of the bicameral brain: a rational,
logical, analytical left hemisphere that thinks it is in charge and superior, and a
symbolic, communal, mystical right hemisphere that is mistreated and reviled but
keeps breaking through with visions of spiritual power and human community.3
Not surprisingly, artists were the first to see that the indigenous people repre-
sent the soul of the country, and unless the dominant culture makes some kind of
treaty or covenant with the indigenous it will never rest easy, understand itself or
achieve a sense of integrity. Nevertheless, at the same time as majority Australia
is attempting to assuage its guilt and striving to ‘bridge the gap’ between indig-
enous and non-indigenous, the repressed spirituality of the nation is beginning
to emerge. The sacred will emerge from below, from what we have ignored and
mistreated, what we have pushed ‘down under’. The postsecular will arise from
the inadequacies and insufficiencies of the secular veneer that is being worn
down by the indigenous, the land and the demands of the soul. In countries like
this, the spiritual is political, and the postsecular is intimately tied up with the
progress toward a postcolonial society.
Gradually, another Australia is being revealed in the concern for indigenous
people and their wellbeing, in indigenous and non-indigenous art, in music,
meditation and contemplation. Another Australia is found in the warmth of
human relationships, in the experience of nature, in volunteerism and humane
activity in the face of adversity. This other country is beneath the surface much
of the time but nonetheless real. It is coming up from below and emerging
through the cracks.
Australia is meant to stand for what is modern, enlightened and free of super-
stition; spirituality, on the other hand, evokes the mists of the past and a sense
of connection with the cosmos that modernity has relinquished. This does not
mean that the sacred does not exist, only that it is kept out of mind. Australia
is not and perhaps never will be a ‘religious’ country, but that doesn’t mean
its cheery persona isn’t disturbed from time to time by spiritual thoughts and
feelings. My contention is that at a deeper level we are not so godless, but full
of yearning and alive to the mystery of being, whether we choose to call this
‘God’ or not. ‘God’ is not the preferred term for the mystery that underpins and
sustains our lives. For the majority of Australians, ‘God’ is a leaden term, heavy
with the past, moralism, patriarchy and righteousness. Although the mystery that
God points to may be alive in this country, the term ‘God’ is in serious decline.
In his work Australian Religious Thought, Wayne Hudson writes:
Many Australians are uncomfortable with traditional religious language,

but have not yet developed a vocabulary of their own. Indeed not being
able to affirm religious statements is almost a national style.4
A secular country 61
Hudson implies that Australians have feelings for the sacred, but we don’t know
how to express them. We are a modern people who do not feel happy using a
language which is felt to be medieval. We are perhaps waiting for a postsecular
language to express our deeper sense of reality. Many feel that there is something
more to our lives that secularism cannot discern, but the old religious language
does not quite do it for us. We live between two worlds, between an old religion
that has been rejected and a secularism that has been outgrown. This generates a
sense of discomfort and uncertainty in the Australian psyche.
Not only is the term ‘God’ problematical, but ‘spirituality’ is as well. In its
original meaning it points to a separate world above and beyond this one, and
that does not appeal to most Australians. We are a practical and pragmatic peo-
ple, which is true to our rugged, colonial origins, where people from Europe
had to scratch out a new society in a difficult and recalcitrant landscape. But if
spirituality is defined as the art of making connections with the inner self, others,
nature and cosmos, then the otherworldliness of the term disappears. Spiritual-
ity has been newly defined as ‘the desire to relate oneself as a personal whole to
reality as a cosmic whole’.5 This means spirituality is making sense of the world
we live in, and finding a personal relation to what we encounter. This kind of
spirituality is a given in human nature, part of our psychology, and present in our
lives regardless of our beliefs.
The idea that Australians are practical does not rule out a spiritual life, since
there is nothing more practical than establishing a relationship with the foundations
of one’s existence. In many ways it seems impractical not to do so, given the
effects and sense of wellbeing that can arise from a vibrant spirituality. While
Australians remain dismissive of the abstractions of dogma, they – we – are
interested in spiritual exploration if spirit can be brought into the range of our
personal experience and ‘verified’ at that level. There is a new hunger for spiri-
tual experience in the Australian psyche, a desire to find out for ourselves and
not receive truths secondhand through sermons and catechism. Australians value
what is existential, but don’t value what is abstract or propositional. If spirituality
can be shown to have benefits and applications to real-life situations, it will pros-
per in our culture. Spirituality lifts people out of their shells and into relationship
with the world. Without spirituality we withdraw into cocoons and live narrow
lives, which will destroy the fabric of community. Spirit is the glue that binds us
to each other and to creation.
We are seeing increasing signs of what might be called a non-specific spiritual
longing, and this is ref lected in the arts. In a recent novel by Amanda Lohrey, the
central character ruminates on a burning question:
What was this lack, this something missing? And how did I know it was
missing if I didn’t know what it was? Did others feel this absence or was it
only me? And if the latter, where had I acquired this pathology? And then
it occurred to me that there was a logic at work here: if there was lack, it
followed that there must somewhere be fullness. But how would this full-
ness, were I ever to find it, manifest itself? What would it look like?6
Australian culture is so strongly secular, and apparently secure in this position,

that people feel there must be something ‘wrong’ with them if they long for
something more. This longing is found in everyone, but some are more success-
ful than others in suppressing it. Those with an artistic or sensitive temperament
are less likely to be able to join the cheerful secular mainstream and ignore our
innate spiritual promptings.
Ancient and modern Australia

Australians may never become explicitly religious, but we are not beyond the
call of the sacred. This existential calling might eventually make us a nation
of mystics and prophets, because we will not be content with any pat or stan-
dard religious formula. We may push propositional faith aside because it feels
like an imposition, but we will still want to know whether there is anything
‘more’ to reality. I have found that the sense of ‘more’ is often encountered in
nature, in our response to land. After all, this is how the first Australians, the
indigenous people, developed their rich and life-sustaining spirituality. It was,
from the beginning, a spiritual response to land. Non-indigenous Australians
were not attuned to nature when they first arrived. We found the land hard to
understand and difficult to master. But instead of ‘mastering’ it in a typically
colonial style, there is a new tendency, promoted by ecological movements
and those sensitive to indigenous plants and animals, to listen to the land and
discern its spirit.7
This new postcolonial movement is bringing us closer to Aboriginal peo-
ple and their spiritual values. One of the paradoxes of Australia is that for the
European-descended mainstream almost nothing is sacred, whereas for indig-
enous cultures everything is sacred. White and black Australia are mirror images
of each other, and one can only hope they will eventually get together and offer
each other what the other lacks. White Australia has technological development
and but little development of the soul; black Australia has a highly developed soul
but little in the way of material development. Aboriginal cultures can show the
colonial and migrant mainstream how to desecularise and open to the mysterious
dimensions of life that bring spiritual and moral renewal.
As mentioned, the soul is ‘down under’, and my sense is that spirituality is
entering our lives from below. This intuitive, earthy awareness of spirit will
play a far more important role than the educated intellect, which can find many
reasons to denounce, decry or ignore the spiritual claims of the soul. A degree
from an Australian university is a qualification in a rationality that can find no
place for spirituality, and hence the rise of spirituality in this country is entirely
off-campus, in the wider community, and especially in those who commune
with the natural world. In Australia, spiritual feeling enters us, as it were, from
the feet, travels along the legs, through the trunk of the body, and if we are
lucky, it ignites a life in the heart. But it rarely reaches our heads, or is expressed
through the voice, or articulated by the intellect. It operates below the level of
normal rationality, which is why so few people in this country can express their
spiritual experiences.
The main spiritual language in Australia is earth-language: walking over the
body of the earth, touching nature, feeling its presence and its other life and
attuning ourselves to its sensual reality. Aboriginal culture is of the land, and
Aboriginal religion is a spirituality of place. The sacred songs and chants are sung
to gigantic rock formations and vast expanses of red earth. The sacred dances
are earth-dances, where the celebrants gather to ‘sing up’ the spirits of the earth.
Aboriginal dance and celebration are concentrated on the movements of the feet.
Elder David Mowaljarlai said that when he is engaged in attunement in the bush,
he performs movements with the feet to create greater spiritual intimacy: ‘You
feel you want to get deeper, so you start moving around and stamp your feet – to
come closer and to recognise what you are seeing’.8 Stamping the feet gives con-
nection to land, spiritual quickening and focus to the mind.
In traditional dance, the feet are raised, and strike the earth with energy and
vigour. At the climax of the dance, the feet hit the ground with great force, as if
to draw the spirit out, to raise fire out of rock, to cause the spirit to f lame up from
below. Often the arms are limp or immobile, as the feet do the communicating.
Aboriginal visual art, as well, is governed by the feet. The so-called dot paint-
ings are not entirely abstract, but are experiences of the land as seen from above
and felt through the feet. The feet register the contours of place, the proportions,
lines, dots and rhythms of the landscape.
Some years ago I wrote Edge of the Sacred, in which I expressed the view that
Australia is at the edge of a new experience of the sacred.9 But the country is
also ‘on edge’ because it is not sure of the way forward. Many want to deepen
their lives, but don’t know how. Little by little, we are taking small steps toward
a more spiritual society, but it is happening at the grassroots level, and not mak-
ing headlines, and most likely never will. The media is not receptive to anything
that appears mystical, non-rational or non-empirical. One only hears of anything
‘spiritual’ if an extremist sect or cult has committed some atrocity or terrorist act.
Double vision
It seems to me that there is a fault line in the national psyche between private and
public domains. Through one lens, it looks as if some are interested in spiritual
matters. There is a lot of private searching, ref lection and discussion about spirit
and soul. I hear such discussion on public transport and in restaurants, and thera-
pists tell me there is much reflection on the meaning of life in the clinical setting.
Our artists explore the spiritual in their creative works. Novelists, painters,
poets, musicians are always building soul. But publicly the situation is different.
In the public arena the spiritual is an area of silence, if not a taboo. What
governs the mainstream style is an attitude of gritty realism, which generates an
ironic debunking attitude. Our realism, and the cynicism that often attends it,
is a defence against the sacred in a culture that strives to put the physical above
the metaphysical. It is this stance that is starting to grate on some people’s nerves,
because it is inhibiting our growth as a culture.
The debunking, ironic persona is starting to fray. There is an inside life
that rarely gets a chance to be heard, and some are burdened by the disconnect
between inside and outside. This can produce despair and discontent. The soul
is sometimes defined as a middle term between the spirit and the body, and it is
the middle term that is missing. It is culture that builds soul, and our artists have
been trying to do this, but society has not been receptive to their visionary pro-
ductions. We have been held captive by the seductions of consumer capitalism,
to such an extent that soul has not been allowed to build its bridge to the spirit.
This is what artists and philosophers mean when they say that Australian society
is ‘soulless’; they mean that the values of spirit are not being channelled into the
social arena. The spirituality of the soul festers and chokes, leading to personal
confusion and anxiety.
We call ourselves the lucky country, but we are not happy.10 There is wealth
but not contentment, and nor can there be until we build links between our inner
and outer lives. When we walk across the line separating the personal from the
public, we enter a different reality. A split runs through the lives of many people:
in private, some are sympathetic to the spiritual, but in public the same people
can turn against it and declare it to be illusory. I have witnessed this duplicity
many times, and it used to astound me. But I have seen it so often I am no longer
surprised. Spirituality is like a secret that is pushed away from a persecutory public
consciousness. Statistical surveys bear out this fault line: while attendance at reli-
gious institutions is at an all-time low, at 7 percent of the population, recent social
research shows that 67 to 70 percent of Australians believe in a ‘higher power’,
but this is not expressed in public.11 The split in our lives could hardly be more
starkly expressed. What this is saying is that there is a gap in the national psyche
and nearly three-quarters of us are isolated in our spiritual experience.
There is a longing for something more, a willingness to be persuaded. But this
hardly survives the light of day. Educational institutions and government agen-
cies do not share this interest, but find it counter-modern. The nation is divided
against itself, producing a cultural dissociation. The secular dislike the new spiri-
tuality because they fear it will subvert the modernist enterprise. Some refer to
it as ‘New Age’, hoping to discredit it as escapist and nonsensical. However the
new spirituality that interests me is a postsecular movement that may have little
to do with the New Age.12 An astute visitor to these shores, the Indian writer
Makarand Paranjape, wrote this about the Australian sacred:
When it comes to Australia, the terrain of the sacred is ambiguous and

difficult. The Australian sacred remains internally fragmented, disturb-
ingly contradicted, and painfully wounded. This impacts the psyche of the
nation and calls for urgent attention and healing.13
He is right about our national psyche being fragmented and in need of heal-
ing. His book on Sacred Australia is subtitled, ‘Postsecular Considerations’. This
Hindu writer concludes that if we are to reach a postsecular destination, we first

have to listen to the indigenous people. Aboriginal cultures would like to invite
majority Australia out of its critical condition, but we would first have to listen
to them. This cultural problem is the focus of the following chapter. The unfor-
tunate feature of Australia is that our light, the spirit, the force that illuminates
our lives, is in the dark. This is the price paid for secular materialism, but the
redemptive feature is that the light still glows in the dark.
The cultural elites are out of touch with the majority of citizens. I found this
while working in the university system for over thirty years. Those who claim
the limelight and speak for the intellectual world tend to be atheistic, agnostic
and/or humanist. Germaine Greer said recently that God is a stupid idea, and
it is little wonder that most have abandoned it.14 She is partly right, of course,
in that organised religion has been rejected and its language questioned. But
what does she have to say to the 70 percent of Australians who still believe in a
‘higher power’, according to statistical research? The gap between intellectuals
and ordinary citizens is the result of a leftist ideology that has ruled the intel-
lectual roost for some time. Most progressive social agendas are indebted to the
socialist cause, whose founder declared religion to be ‘the opium of the masses,
the sigh of the oppressed’.15 The left have nothing to say about the spirit and are
more inert than the right on this issue. If the left can’t capture the postsecular
mood, the right is happy to take advantage of the hunger of the times and lead
us, not to the postsecular as such, but to a pre-secular era in which antiquated
religious attitudes are reinstated.
The popular religion of Anzac

The astonishing popularity of Anzac Day and the revival of the Anzac legend
is an example of this.16 The left has often been silenced by the media regard-
ing its views on Anzac Day, because of the Day’s growing prestige. However,
whenever allowed, the left tries to temper the high enthusiasm by asking criti-
cal questions about the new authority of Anzac Day. The left notes how it has
become a quasi-religion for the nation state, in the absence of confidence in
our national identity and a democratic system that people can believe in. The
right and centre-right speak openly about the ‘sacredness’ of the Anzacs, and
describe Gallipoli in Turkey and Villers-Bretonneux in northern France as
‘sacred places’ for all Australians. The Unknown Soldier is virtually a god in
the secular pantheon, along with sporting heroes and film stars. Each year,
many make the journey to the foreign theatres of war, in which thousands of
Australian lives were lost. The journey is now referred to as a ‘pilgrimage’,
and it is astonishing how Christian hymns and prayers have slipped into these
ostensibly secular ceremonies. References to God are kept to a minimum, but
there is a huge emphasis on sacrifice. But for the left, ‘the past is not sacred’,
and these wars are regarded as futile military disasters.17 The left does not view
them as noble tragedies or nation-building achievements, but as a sheer ‘waste
of lives’.18
This too has been described as a culture war between the intellectuals and the
people. People appear to be instinctively drawn to the sacred dimension of war-
time losses, whereas some intellectuals keep arguing that the military exercises
were in vain, served no purpose and Australia was duped by Britain into fighting
European wars. The left despise not only religion but British imperialism, and
the fact that thousands of lives were sacrificed in these theatres of war does not
incite a spiritual response. For the left, the social-political realities, and the fact
that Australians were used as pawns in British military blunders, dominates their
response, as can be seen in Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’, What’s Wrong
with Anzac?19 Intellectuals on the right like to claim how out of touch the ‘elites’
are on the left, as in this editorial from The Australian: ‘The best advice we can
offer is that [we] ignore the tortured arguments of the intellectuals and listen to
the people, the true custodians of this occasion’.20
Anzac Day appears to be the most important day of the year for Australian
nationalism, far more important than Australia Day, which marks an historical
if controversial event, namely the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet of British ships
at Port Jackson, New South Wales, and the raising of the f lag of Great Britain.
Anzac Day is the one day of the year that secular Australia drops the taboo
against sacred feeling, and allows people to openly grieve for the dead and those
who gave their lives in military service. It is the motif of sacrifice that raises reli-
gious passion, since in Latin ‘sacrifice’ (sacrificium) means ‘making sacred’. The
day allows an outpouring of grief for those who sacrificed their lives, but the left
seems correct in arguing that the sacrifice was not for God or Christianity in this
case, but for the nation-state. Although using the rituals of religion, and bor-
rowing some of its hymns and prayers, close inspection reveals that the nation-
state, not God, has become the new functional sacred reality. In this sense, the
irritated response of the left serves to remind us that the religiousness that had
once substantially shaped Australia as a Christian country has been supplanted
by secularism, and it remains the duty of the left to ‘see through’ to the political
manipulation of this phenomenon.
I have mixed feelings about this national ‘religion’. As a child, I was inf lu-
enced by my father’s commitment to the Anzac legend, and he took me to many
dawn services throughout my formative years. He had fought in the Pacific
theatre of the Second World War, and my grandfather had fought at Gallipoli –
having survived the slaughter of the beach landing – and later served in Egypt.
At university I was inf luenced by the so-called left elites and their critique of the
wars. When I was a student my peers would protest against Anzac Day. I could
never join these protests, but nevertheless found the arguments of the left com-
pelling, as put by Reynolds:
The desire to remember the war dead and respect their sacrifice is seem-
ingly free from any consideration of the politics of any given conf lict. But in
the ubiquitous material provided to schools there are more portentous mes-
sages. In order to lend greater meaning to the loss of life in the Great War
children are assured that the diggers died so that Australians would be free.
Or more commonly that the nation was born, or was made, on the shores
of Gallipoli. The implications f ly off in all directions: nations are made in
war not in peace, on battlefields not in parliaments; soldiers not statesmen
are the nation’s founders.21
Reynolds goes on to say that these ideas are ‘dangerous’ and produce a ‘distinc-
tive Australian twist to the current widespread disillusionment with parliamentary
democracy’. ‘The prestige of the warrior rises as that of the legislator falls’.22 Torn
between the political acuity of the left, and the legend-making proclivity of the
right, Australians have to make their choice about the Anzacs. And they clearly
have made their choice: the Anzac legend is sacred, and fills a gap left by the
absence of effective religion in this country. However compelling the factor of
sacrifice, the political realities cannot be denied. So my own response to the
Anzacs remains divided: I am moved by the sacrifice and yet remain critical of
the values and assumptions that are being asserted by this nationalistic religion.
My father and his mates would argue that Anzac is not a celebration of war,
but a solemn remembrance of a brutal and dehumanising campaign. However,
despite veterans telling us that war is terrible and not to be idealised, the nation
idealises it all the same. Australia is obsessed with the remembrance of war,
and militarism is invested with national pride and honour. War is the defining
national experience and ranks higher than any other national activity, perhaps
on a par with elite sports.
What is needed is an authentic Australian spirituality that is not controlled
by political ideologies of the left or right. The quasi-religions of the nation-state
and the market economy, on the right, and the ideals of social enlightenment
and political progress, on the left, do not satisfy the needs of the spirit. Cut off
from a living experience of the sacred, and the nourishment it can provide, the
nation lives a half-life and is need of something more. It is this desire for more that
characterises a secular nation under pressure, aware of its insufficiency. With this
as a prevailing sentiment, we cannot be satisfied or reassured.
Frontier wars and the cult of forgetfulness

Given the divided and conf licted nature of the Australian soul, it is profoundly
significant that while we can fully and openly mourn the loss of lives in the
Anzac campaign of the Great War, we have scarcely begun to acknowledge the
loss of Aboriginal lives as a result of the British colonisation of this country.
Indeed, when I was a student in secondary school, I was taught that there had
been no wars fought on Australian soil, and all our battles were fought in foreign
places. However, as a result of recent academic research on the impact of coloni-
sation, scholars are now aware that a great many indigenous lives were lost in the
‘frontier wars’ waged against Aboriginal people by British soldiers and settlers.23
This history of massacre and onslaught has remained mysteriously hidden in the
Australian consciousness, such that some have begun to suggest that the early
colonial period can be viewed as a history of genocide.24
In 1968, anthropologist Bill Stanner delivered a lecture, ‘The Great Aus-
tralian Silence’, in which he argued there was a ‘cult of forgetfulness on a
national scale’, concerning the brutal theft of land and massacres. 25 It has been
convenient for national identity and pride that this history has been lost, and
yet it could be said that we are stricken by shame in our being, as a result
of this omission. Reynolds summarises the alarm that many feel in the title
of his book, Why Weren’t We Told? 26 We seem unable to admit to atrocities
that occurred in our own country, which would force us to face the Jungian
shadow of our national identity. It was left-leaning historians who first made
us aware of this disconnect, and who insisted that British Australia has a dark
past. Prime Minister John Howard epitomised our inability to integrate the
past when he announced that Australians should reject what he called ‘the black
armband view of history’.27 Sister Veronica Brady put a religious perspective on
the national situation:
I suggest that to see the sufferings of Aboriginal Australians in terms of

the biblical figure of the suffering servant is to discover a deeper and richer
sense of where and how God may be speaking to us in this country today.28
It is by the confession of wrongdoing that we prepare ourselves for the healing

force of truth. It is by sacrificing some of our national righteousness that we pre-
pare ourselves for the possibility of new self-awareness.
If majority Australia sees Gallipoli as sacred because of the lives lost there,
why not Australia itself as sacred as we learn to mourn the suffering and deaths
of indigenous people? It is shocking and sobering to discover that the number
of Aboriginal people estimated to have been killed by soldiers and settlers was
the same as the total number of Australians killed in the battlefields of the First
World War, namely, sixty thousand.29 We feel reverence for the sixty thousand
who died in the Great War, but are yet to grieve the indigenous lives lost in our
early history. The savage and daunting mirroring of numbers suggests that the
future development of Australian spirituality might lie in the overcoming of our
repressed history. If we could recognise those killed at home, as distinct from
those on foreign soil, we might tread differently on this land. We might realise
that ‘The destruction of Aboriginal society was not merely the consequence of
British settlement but its price’.30 Instead of seeing Australia as the land of oppor-
tunity, we might be forced to admit that it is the land of the dead, full of unquiet
spirits that have not been put to rest.
Embarrassment and shame

A culture of shame prevents us from accepting the truth of our history and
prevents us from turning to the sacred with openness and honesty. We are a
shame society, and this is a stumbling block inhibiting the movement toward a
postsecular consciousness. It is acceptable to be privately interested in spirit, but
not publicly, unless in the company of like-minded friends, or under the banner
of nationalism. It’s a free country, we like to say, but how free is it when parts
of ourselves, especially the heart and its longings, cannot be expressed? We are
ashamed to speak what’s in the heart because secularism only accepts what it
dictates to us. We are ashamed if we cannot support the national persona in the
way it ignores and denies the sacred.
Writers and artists point to the sense of shame that arises when Australians
break the taboo against the heartfelt questions. Novelist Helen Garner and car-
toonist Michael Leunig have ref lected on this matter:
GARNER: ‘Why are Australians so embarrassed by soul and religion?’

LEUNIG: ‘About everything, so why not religion?’ . . .
GARNER: ‘I’ve always thought that embarrassment is a key thing in the Austra-
lian consciousness. It’s very profound’.
LEUNIG: ‘I reckon embarrassment is a moment of being confronted with some-
thing. It’s a deeply uncomfortable feeling. One is being reminded of something
which one doesn’t want to be near or associated with. One is disowning some-
thing when one’s embarrassed. In a moment of embarrassment there’s a truth
present. . . . The embarrassing moments are when control is imperfect, when
other people see that there’s some big force’.31
Leunig indicates that we are embarrassed by the sacred, the possibility of ‘some
big force’. We are embarrassed by the idea of an invisible presence greater than
ours. Apparently if we acknowledge such a presence we are admitting the
limits of our freedom and will. In secular society we have been conditioned to
believe that the acknowledgement of a greater force is a defeat. We shy away
and prefer not to know about it. Garner goes on to suggest: ‘There’s shame
about who we are, the truth of ourselves. Maybe there’s great shame in Aus-
tralia’. Leunig replies: ‘Yes, maybe embarrassment is too weak a word – maybe
shame’.
In my view we experience both embarrassment and shame. If God does not
exist, as our education system teaches, then to feel the presence of a sacred Other
is embarrassing and shameful. It is to betray the secular order in which we have
been shaped, and, at the same time, protected from the sacred. Leunig makes a
good point when he says that embarrassment arises when other people see there
is some big force. It’s not just about what we perceive privately, but what is per-
ceived publicly. If others notice that an individual is under the inf luence of the
sacred, we become ashamed. Patrick White put it well when he said that many
Australians do have a spiritual life, ‘but are afraid that by admitting it they will
forfeit their right to be considered intellectuals’.32 Unlike Americans, who feel
no such embarrassment, Australians put up defensive barriers and invest a lot of
energy keeping the barriers intact.
In America, the acknowledgement of a ‘big force’ makes many citizens feel

good about themselves because they see themselves sharing the greatness of the
God in whom they trust. They revel in the glory of their Creator. But Down
Under we have the opposite response. Colonial America began as an attempt to
found a new nation in which those who were persecuted in Europe could live
in peace and all religions would be tolerated. Colonial Australia, on the other
hand, had no such lofty origins. We began as a dumping ground for convicts
from the overcrowded prisons of Britain and Ireland. An Australian spirituality
was certainly not on the minds of those who founded the nation. Indeed, due
to the fusion of church and state in Britain and its colonies, the churches were if
anything reviled by those who had convict origins, since they were seen as agents
of oppression, alongside the legal authorities which had incarcerated them. In the
minds of early European Australians, and in many minds today, churches and
prisons were in league.
One way to understand the difference between Australia and America is to
ref lect on the two hundred–year gap between the founding of these nations. In
the two centuries that separate them, Europe became less religious and more
mercenary. The years between the founding of these new worlds, 1620 to 1788,
coincide with the age of Enlightenment, in which European culture emphasised
scientific discovery rather than religious belief. Those two centuries saw Europe
change from a hotbed of religious ferment, which characterised America, to a
place in which religion was unseated by science and reason, which character-
ised Australia. America was founded before, and Australia immediately after,
the Enlightenment. Australia bore the marks of a society that was no longer sure
about religious truth or the existence of God. The decline of religion in Australia
over the last two hundred years is identical to the rate at which it has declined
in Europe. America remains the exception, still linked, if precariously, to its
founding vision.
I lived in the United States in the early 1980s, and noted that there are several
Americas, but two of them interested me in particular. There is still the tradi-
tional America which traces its roots back to the Pilgrims and Puritans. This
community is marked by its positive, upbeat attitude, its complete lack of embar-
rassment about God, even after the so-called death of God, which it ignores as
intellectual hogwash. I found this community especially in Texas and the Deep
South. But on the East and West Coasts, the populations are far removed from
the mentality and attitude of the ‘Bible Belt’. In New York, and in San Francisco,
I felt at home as an Australian who had grown up in a milieu in which the death
of God was taken for granted.33
However, on the East and West Coasts there is an openness to the ‘new sacred’ –
as it were, God after God – that one does not find in Australia.34 Whether this is
the residue of early colonial attitudes or something which is new in the American
psyche and linked to the postsecular, I could not decide. But what impressed me
about America was that almost no one felt any shame about admitting the reality
of a sacred Other. Whether in the company of a shopkeeper in the Bible Belt, or
a psychotherapist in the enlightened East and West, I felt a spiritual freedom that
I do not experience in my country. This was my first experience of living in a
society where I did not feel any shame in being a spiritual person.
Both America and Australia are technically secular, in that the nation-state
is not formally aligned with any established religion. However, in Australia the
meaning of ‘secular’ changed over time. At the time of the federation of states,
1901, secularity meant religious beliefs were not to control the political life of
the nation. The so-called separation of powers did not mean that religion or
spirituality were banned, merely kept away from the decision-making process.
Decisions were to be made not based on sectarian interests, and not to favour
Catholics over Protestants or vice versa, but on social and economic criteria
alone. In fact, some religious leaders favoured the secular system, arguing that it
would deliver fairness to all.
But over time secularity hardened into secularism, an ideology inimical to the
sacred. ‘Deep secularism’ is a term used by contemporary philosophy, and refers
to a materialism in which the transcendent is shut out. ‘This secularism is deep’,
say philosophers of the postsecular, ‘because we are not explicitly aware of it, as
its assumptions function in the background of our conscious life’. 35 In Australian
secularism spiritual matters were kept out of the political arena and pushed into
the realm of the unacceptable. It became unnatural to discuss the sacred, except
in the most circumscribed contexts. The churches were allowed to discuss it, but
the churches didn’t matter because they were not deemed to be part of the main
national discourse.
Secularism views itself as humane and progressive. But insofar as it denies
the spiritual, and as this separates us from the civilising forces in humanity, it
could be said that secularism is dehumanising. Indeed in Aboriginal cultures it
is believed that human nature without the civilising force of spirit is barbaric. In
indigenous cultures, it is the spirit that makes us human, as we read in Deborah
Bird Rose’s classic Dingo Makes Us Human.36 It is ironic that indigenous and non-
indigenous Australians have described each other as barbaric. The indigenous
see the invading cultures through this lens because their destructive behaviours
are not regulated by any apparent ethics. Some Westerners viewed Aboriginals as
barbaric because in their proximity to the natural state they did not enjoy the
comforts of material prosperity. Non-indigenous do not appreciate their high
level of spiritual sophistication, and the indigenous do not understand the secular
condition.
Secular Australia resists the sacred, just as it resists engagement with the indig-
enous, because it fears its security will be threatened. However, the paradox of
spiritual development is that it is not until such a risk is taken that life begins to
open and expand. Unless secular Australia is prepared to break down its barriers
and open to the sacred, which Aboriginal cultures are willing to demonstrate
for us, there can be no maturing of the national consciousness. Scripture puts it
in stark terms: ‘Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses
their life will preserve it’.37 In a similar vein, Iris Murdoch wrote: ‘Tragedy, like
religion, must break the ego, destroying the illusory whole of the unified self ’. 38
It is only when this disruption occurs, when the self surrenders to what Leunig
refers to as a ‘big force’, that life begins to thrive.
Secularism in Australia has been beneficial for politics and economics, and has
produced one of the most stable democracies in the world. It has been success-
ful in keeping the peace and denying rival religious denominations the right to
tyrannise over the nation and its people. The most unstable nations of the world
are those in which theocracies have reigned supreme, unchecked by the demo-
cratic process. But the cultural and spiritual price of secularisation is something
we have to confront. One cost is that the spiritual impulse was pushed out of the
public arena into the inner lives of individuals. Churches complain that modern
people are too private and anti-social in their spiritual lives, but this is not the
fault of the people, since secularism forced this upon us. As churches dwindle
and are no longer the focus of our social lives, the religious impulse is blocked
in its public life and bottled up inside individuals. Secularism promoted the pri-
vatisation of the sacred, and it will take time before this legacy of secularism is
overcome. Going back to unreconstructed churches is not a likely prospect, but
public expression of spiritual life will be needed.
Health, wellbeing and spirit

One cannot underestimate the cost to personal and social wellbeing of living
in a dissociated world. It can be disorienting to be told by society that that we
are consumers in an economic system, and to discover in one’s personal experi-
ence that we have spiritual longings that have the potential to disrupt our lives,
confuse our relationships and overturn our personal and social identity. As reli-
gion has declined, the therapeutic industries have soared, because people come
to therapy to sort out their spiritual confusion, identity and equilibrium. The
statistics speak for themselves: although we see ourselves as a stable democracy,
internally we are racked by mental health disorders. Over the last few years, the
incidence of anxiety and depression has soared, despite our prosperity. When I
began to explore the health of the nation, one in five Australians was suffering
from an anxiety or depressive disorder, but when I looked recently the crisis had
escalated to one in four. We have an astonishing 25 percent of the population
plagued by mental health problems.
Epidemiologists such as Richard Eckersley in Canberra are now saying that
the population suffers from what he has called an ‘epidemic of meaningless-
ness’.39 This is remarkable, coming as it does from the field of scientific research,
which is being forced to move beyond the boundaries of secularism to under-
stand the health and wellbeing of the nation. To me the link between the absence
of spiritual sustenance and mental health seems clear. If we have spiritual needs
that are being suppressed, as well as historical truths that are being ignored, this
must impact on society. If we did not notice this before it is because we did not
bother to ref lect on it.
It will take time for this to become accepted, especially in a scientific world
based on Enlightenment principles. If the spiritual is the deepest part of our
nature, and if we are made in the image of God, or made of God as Julian of
Norwich said, then to live in denial of this depth is to bring on the possibility
of ill-health and disequilibrium. Despite our systems of denial, including intel-
lectualism and cynicism, the spiritual will emerge either in a transformative way,
or negatively in a destructive way. These issues are going to loom large in the
future, and the healing professions will become more aware of the role of spirit
in individual and public health.
In a secularised culture, it is no longer apparent why we live or what gives our
lives meaning. People are losing their bearings, and we have one of the highest
rates of suicide in the world.40 Not only adults, but increasing numbers of young
people are experiencing suicidal ideation, mental disturbance, personal disori-
entation and uncertainty about identity. There is much research to be done on
the relation between spiritual outlook and mental health, and the mental health
professions are beginning to explore this question.41 But with their roots in ratio-
nality, these professions are struggling to understand what’s going on.
The spiritual can be important in times of crisis, breakdown, adversity, or any
time in which we are transitioning from one identity to another. When people
are socially adapted and healthy, the sacred goes out the window, but when
things don’t go well, they call upon the sacred for healing and strength. Chap-
lains and pastoral carers often speak of this phenomenon in critical situations.42
Even if those they care for do not hold beliefs as such, people often remain open
to the possibility of sacred presence, or say they would like to have an experi-
ence that confirms the possibility. What we have to understand is that ‘belief ’ is
only one aspect of our relation to the sacred; it is more foundational than ideas or
dogmas that we might hold in our minds.
Paul Tillich argued that at the end of an historical or cultural period a gener-
alised anxiety is often found in society.43 He designated three kinds of anxiety:
the anxiety of death, guilt and meaninglessness. At the end of the modern period,
with its faith in science and reason shaken, it is the anxiety of meaninglessness,
or what he called ‘spiritual anxiety’, that is evident. Spiritual anxiety expresses
itself as existential disorientation, emptiness and the threat of non-being. ‘This
anxiety is aroused by the loss of a spiritual center, of an answer, however sym-
bolic or indirect, to the questions of the meaning of existence’.44 Tillich describes
spiritual anxiety in these terms:
A belief breaks down through external events or inner processes: one is cut
off from creative participation in a sphere of culture, one feels frustrated
about something which one had passionately affirmed, one is driven from
devotion to one object to devotion to another, and again on to another,
because the meaning of each of them vanishes and the creative eros is
transformed into indifference or aversion. Everything is tried and nothing
satisfies.45
This could describe a prevailing pattern in Australia today. The spiritual urge
or impulse is a desire for more meaning in life, but consumer society answers
the need for ‘more’ in purely material terms: more goods, foods, drugs, alcohol,
entertainment, technology and sport. When we fill up on such things, there is
a sense of fulfilment for a while, but as Tillich says, this ‘vanishes’, and we are
left with the same emptiness as before. Veronica Brady referred to this as the
‘God-shaped hole’ at the centre of Australian culture, and Patrick White called
it the ‘Great Australian Emptiness’.46 Our anxiety finds an outlet in buying up,
but it does not last. We know we are incomplete and yearn for more, but are not
satiated by these substitutes. The deeper aspect of our malaise is tacitly affirmed
by the ironic manner in which we refer to our obsessive consuming as ‘retail
therapy’. We realise that the habit of consumption is inherently unsatisfying, but
we go on with it anyway.
The drug and alcohol epidemic in this country is more transparently a spiri-
tual problem than shopping. Increasing numbers of people are trying to change
their consciousness by using drugs, and thus bring harm to themselves and
others. We are desperate to change the state of the self, shift our identity, by
becoming something ‘other’ than the normal self. There is a recognition that the
mundane self is not the true self, and people hope to break through to a different
consciousness by exploding the frame of the normal self. One of the party drugs
is ‘ecstasy’, and this word, from the Latin ek-stasis, means to stand outside oneself,
a removal to elsewhere. This is the spiritual impulse expressed in chemical form,
often leading to pathological behaviour, sickness and death.
When the spiritual impulse is unconscious, it can wreak havoc, and the more
unconscious it is, the more dangerous are the consequences of these ersatz meth-
ods. Spirit longs to break free from the mundane, but if we have no resources
to make this happen in creative ways – finding transcendence through spiritual
methods – the temptation to break out of our mental cocoons can lead to disaster.
Alcoholics Anonymous is one of the most successful of all the rehabilitation pro-
grams, precisely because it recognises that what the alcoholic is actually looking
for in ‘spirits’ is something that is life-transforming and spiritual. Spiritus contra
spiritum (spirit against spirit) was Jung’s Latin formula that helped initiate the AA
movement, and the claim was that it takes an experience of spirit to counter the
addiction to spirits.47 Jung wrote to the founder of AA: ‘The craving for alcohol
is the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness,
expressed in medieval language: the union with God’.48
It is this crisis that the religions should be addressing but are not. It is as
if the religions are under a spell, and seem to be ineffective in facilitating the
much-needed experience of transcending the mundane. Again, the Latin helps
us understand what effective religion ought to be doing: religio, meaning to ‘bind
back to’ or ‘reconnect’ to the holy. This reconnection or binding assumes that
the mundane has to be ruptured or broken in some way, so that the sacred can
be admitted into one’s inner sanctum. We resort to a drug epidemic because we
have lost the art of natural transcendence, and the answer to the problem is not
to stamp out drugs and increase law enforcement, but to rediscover the methods
and monastic techniques that will enable us to break the ego without destroying
our lives. In a postsecular culture, we will need to bring the monastery to the
street so people can experience safe, genuine methods of ego-transcendence. The
more desperate the needs of spirit are, the more we will be embroiled in a drugs
and alcohol epidemic.
Any viable religion of the future must start with the awareness that people are
desperate for release from the ego, and society and its materialism only make the
ego more pronounced and difficult to overcome. The religious institutions seem
oblivious to the fact that their role and duty is to dispense ecstatic, releasing
experiences, not dogma, doctrines or sermons. My sense is that religious ritu-
als once provided ecstatic, releasing experiences to those whose worship was
sincere, but the modern mind gets in the way of this, and today we have rituals
that are conventional, routine and ineffectual. Religion does not seem to realise
that its sacred beliefs count for nothing unless people have had an experience of
a transcendental kind.
If the Judeo-Christian traditions cannot attend to the needs of the individual
that have arisen in our time, many will continue to do what some are already
doing: abandoning the West and turning to the East for spiritual guidance. Aus-
tralia, located geographically in the East and at the foot of Asia, is perfectly
situated to take in the Eastern traditions, adapt and revitalise them. Buddhism is
the fastest-growing religion in Australia, mainly because it is able to navigate the
inner life in ways that many Australians find satisfying. But there is also much
interest in Hinduism here. Christianity in its orthodox expression is too external
to the soul, and that is its continuing crisis. The mystical traditions of the West,
however, have yet to be explored as to how they might meet the spiritual needs
of the present.
Regardless of whether one identifies as ‘religious’ or not, we each have to deal
with the spiritual, which is part of our human psychology. There is something
in the human that reaches for connection to forces beyond itself, and asks for
healing and renewal. The spiritual impulse is strongly activated when our lives
are challenged or turned upside down. Many have noted that when relationships
are broken, jobs lost or health compromised, Australians go into reverse gear:
our secular adaptation is weakened and the buried sacred comes to the fore. It is
as if the secular persona has to be shattered before the interior spirit is enabled
expression and new life.
A demand for spirituality is appearing because we have become aware of
the God-shaped hole. Sooner or later, society will have to respond, but it is
doing its best to avoid it. Secularists hope the new spiritual interest will fade
away, like a fad or fashion. Many associate it with the 1960s, but it has out-
lasted that vital decade. Our society has entered a phase in which the values
we live by are unclear, mental health is no longer stable or guaranteed and the
‘privatisation of meaning’ no longer works. Australia considers itself to be a
rational country, but in forming its identity it has left out a huge part of our
experience. Once this is understood, we will realise that secularism is irratio-

nal and needs to be modified.
According to recent medical research, it is often the suffering patient who
brings the question of spirituality into the clinical setting.49 Spirituality has
arisen as an item on the agenda of the health professions, not because professors
of medicine have had conversion experiences, but because clients want to bring
this concept into the therapeutic setting. Today we can speak of a client-led or
grassroots recovery of the spiritual in health and healing.50 This is now a bur-
geoning research area in Australia, as in other nations.51 A person suffering from
a neurosis, mental illness, addiction or compulsion, often expresses the view that
a lack of ‘spiritual’ meaning in his or her life may have something to do with
their malady or despair. People don’t yet have the language to express this sense
of absence, but grope toward it, using intuition and whatever resources they can
find in popular culture, music, movies or conversations.
Australians are going to be drawn kicking and screaming into spiritual aware-
ness. It is not something we will invite, but something that will assail us as we
are forced to deal with the consequences of living in a ‘f latland’ society. I believe
the fields of health and wellbeing will be the discourses at the forefront of this
debate. If we leave things to the healthy, socially adapted secular ego, there will
be no need to encounter God or the metaphysical. But as soon as the ego is bro-
ken and something new is allowed to rise in the person, we have the possibility
of growth. Then the ego senses its fragility and invites forces greater than itself to
bring about healing. When misfortune strikes, we are forced to move to levels of
being that are hidden from view. Or perhaps, deeper levels come up from below,
through the cracks that appear at the surface.
The Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White said his awareness of the spiri-
tual was instigated by a mishap. Until December 1951, he described himself
as a ‘lapsed Anglican egotist agnostic pantheist occultist existentialist would-be
though failed Christian Australian’. Then he had this experience:
During a season of unending rain at Castle Hill I fell f lat on my back one
day in the mud and started cursing a God I had convinced myself didn’t
exist. My personal scheme of things till then at once seemed too foolish to
continue holding.52
I lay where I had fallen, half-blinded by the rain, under a pale sky, curs-
ing through watery lips a God in whom I did not believe. I began laughing
finally, at my own helplessness and hopelessness, in the mud and the stench.53
This moment brought on a conversion-like experience; a recognition that the

worldview he held was too small. After this, he said, ‘faith began to come to
me’.54 This is perhaps paradigmatic of the Australian experience. Spirit is rel-
egated to the margins when things are going well. But many enter the spiritual
life through difficulty and suffering. To this extent, White’s falling in the mud at
Castle Hill in Sydney is a foundation story of Australian spirituality.
Our lives move along relatively smoothly while secular values and stories
keep us bound to the status quo. To fall out of our comfort zone requires a
shock, trauma or loss, and we descend to a deeper place, where we ask differ-
ent questions and face new realities. This can be frightening or even terrifying,
especially if done alone. One can feel alienated from society and uncertain of
the way forward; such falls can precipitate disturbing upheavals. But this can be
a felix culpa, a fortunate fall, if we are able to break through to the spirit which
brings renewal. Thus, the fall can lead to conversions and new purposes. Down
and out one moment, an individual can find him or herself hurled back into life
with verve and gusto. It might sound pessimistic, but I think the way of suffering
is the royal road to the spirit in strongly resistant societies.
Notes
2 Indigenous Australians are estimated to represent 3.3 percent of the total Australian
population.
3 This understanding of the working of the brain hemispheres is drawn from Iain McGil-
christ, The Master and His Emissary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
4 Wayne Hudson, Australian Religious Thought (Melbourne: Monash University Publish-
ing, 2016), 15.
5 Peter H. Van Ness, Spirituality and the Secular Quest (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 5.
6 Amanda Lohrey, A Short History of Richard Kline (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2016), 4.
7 See Amanda Lohrey, ‘Groundswell: The Rise of the Greens’, Quarterly Essay, Issue 8, 2002.
8 David Mowaljarlai (with Jutta Malnic), Yorro Yorro: Spirit of the Kimberley (Broome: Maga-
bala Books, 1993), 53.
9 David Tacey, Edge of the Sacred (Sydney: Harper Collins, 1995); revised international edi-
tion published as Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon,
2009).
10 Donald Horne, The Lucky Country, 6th ed. (1962; Melbourne: Penguin, 2008).
11 See Ann Evans, Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (Canberra, ACT: Australian National
University, Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, 2009), located at:
https://ada.edu.au/social-science/01189-release1jun2011; see also Hugh Mackay, Beyond
Belief: How We Find Meaning, with or without Religion (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2016), 149.
12 I began to differentiate these two kinds of spirituality in Jung and the New Age (London:
Routledge, 2001).
13 Makarand Paranjape, Sacred Australia: Post-Secular Considerations (Melbourne: Clouds of
Magellan, 2009), xii.
14 Germaine Greer, in Brilliant Creatures: Germaine, Clive, Barry and Bob, a 2014 BBC Four and
ABC television documentary series written and presented by Howard Jacobson: www.abc.
net.au/tv/programs/brilliant-creatures-germaine-clive-barry-and-bob/
15 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844), ed. Joseph
J. O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
16 For international readers, the acronym Anzac refers to the Australian and New Zealand
Army Corps. The First World War soldiers in this army were called Anzacs.
17 For ‘the past is not sacred’, see, http://theconversation.com/the-past-is-not-sacred-the-
history-wars-over-anzac-38596
18 Ibid.
19 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, eds., What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of
Australian History (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2010).
20 Editorial, The Australian, 26 April 2013.

21 Henry Reynolds, ‘Militarisation Marches On’ (25 September, 2014), located at: http://
insidestory.org.au/militarisation-marches-on/
22 Ibid.
23 Henry Reynolds, Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders (Sydney: Allen &
Unwin, 1996); Henry Reynolds, Frontier (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996).
24 Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Mel-
bourne: Viking Penguin, 2001), and Robert Manne, in Introduction to Manne, ed., W. E.
H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2009), 14–16.
25 W. E. H. Stanner, The Boyer Lectures 1968: After the Dreaming (Sydney: Australian Broad-
casting Commission, 1969), 22–5.
26 Henry Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told? (Melbourne: Penguin, 1999).
27 John Howard, ‘The Liberal Tradition: The Beliefs and Values Which Guide the Federal
Government’ (1996), Sir Robert Menzies Lecture, Sir Robert Menzies Lecture Trust,
located at: www.menzieslecture.org/1996.html
28 Veronica Brady, The God-Shaped Hole (Adelaide: Australasian Theological Forum Press,
2008), 4.
29 Robert Orsted-Jensen, The ‘Great War’ Was Never the Greatest War in Australian History
(2014), located at: https://orsted-jensen.weebly.com
30 Robert Manne, op. cit., 12.
31 Michael Leunig and Helen Garner, ‘A Kind of Reality’, Art Monthly Australia, No. 56,
Summer Issue, December–February 1991–92, 4.
32 Patrick White, Patrick White Letters, ed. David Marr (Sydney: Random House, 1994),
363.
33 See Roy Williams, Post-God Nation: How Religion Fell Off the Radar in Australia (Sydney:
Harper Collins, 2015).
34 See Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 2009).
35 Michael Staudigl and Jason W. Alvis, ‘Phenomenology and the Postsecular Turn: Recon-
sidering the “Return of the Religious”’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 24:5
(2016), 592.
36 Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
37 Luke 17:33.
38 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Vintage, 1992), 104.
39 Richard Eckersley, Well and Good: How We Feel and Why It Matters (Melbourne: Text,
2004).
40 Ibid.
41 Robert A. Emmons, The Psychology of Ultimate Concerns: Motivation and Spirituality in
Personality (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 1999).
42 Jackie Ellis and Mari Lloyd-Williams, ‘Palliative Care’, in Mark Cobb, Christina Puchalski,
and Bruce Rumbold, eds., Oxford Textbook of Spirituality in Healthcare (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
43 Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, 2nd ed. (1952; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
44 Ibid., 47.
45 Ibid., 47–8.
46 Brady, The God-Shaped Hole.
47 See New York Times editorial, ‘Jung’s Insights Formed Basis of AA’, located at: www.
nytimes.com/1993/12/03/opinion/l-jung-s-insights-formed-basis-of-a-a-101693.html
48 Ian McCabe, Carl Jung and Alcoholics Anonymous: The Twelve Steps as a Spiritual Journey of
Individuation (London: Karnac, 2015), 2.
49 Simone M. Roach, Caring from the Heart: The Convergence of Caring and Spirituality (New
York: Paulist Press, 1997).
50 John Swinton, Spirituality and Mental Health Care: Rediscovering a ‘Forgotten’ Dimension
(London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley, 2001).
51 See David Tacey, Gods and Diseases: Making Sense of Our Physical and Mental Wellbeing
(Sydney: HarperCollins, 2011; London and New York, 2013).
52 Patrick White, in Thelma Herring and G. A. Wilkes, ‘A Conversation with Patrick
White’, Southerly, 33 (1973), 137.
53 Patrick White, Flaws in the Glass (1981; London: Random House, 2013), 144.
54 Patrick White in David Marr, Patrick White: A Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 281.
4
THE ABORIGINAL GIFT WE WILL
NOT ACCEPT1
Desecularising society
Indigenous people in Australia, as in all postcolonial societies, have an impor-
tant role to play in the development of the postsecular sacred. They have the
capacity to offer secular societies the gift of spiritual awareness, if only we had
the strength of character and courage to accept it. They know we live without
a sense of the sacred, and our life-experience can be shallow and unrewarding.
Although Aboriginal people have traditionally lived what might be called a
pre-secular sacred, there is much in it that can be adapted to contemporary
conditions. Aboriginal people live in two worlds, and this is difficult; some
do not manage it, as it can be too traumatic. The indigenous need to maintain
their connection to the traditions of the past, because these define who they
are and provide continuing spiritual sustenance. They also live, along with
others, in a modern world which is governed by the market and has little
understanding of the sacred. We are moving in the opposite direction but
across the same bridge: from the profane to the sacred, about which we know
little.
There is so much that we can learn from indigenous cultures, and yet many
remain uninterested in Aboriginal people and unreceptive to their wisdom. As
we ref lect on what a postsecular spirituality might look like, I don’t believe any-
one can become ‘spiritual’ in this country without acknowledging the original
people who have a prior claim on the spiritual life of Australia. However, in their
extraordinary generosity toward those who took their land, Aboriginal elders
wish to share their understandings with newcomers. As David Mowaljarlai, an
elder of the Kimberley region, put it:
We Aboriginal people do not have a monopoly on spirituality in this coun-

try; we have just been practising it a bit longer.2
The Aboriginal gift we will not accept 81
In a conversation in 1996, Mowaljarlai said:
Spirituality is coming back in Australia. This is spirit country. We will all

have to face the sacredness of the land.3
It was clear from this that ‘we’ included the non-indigenous. Unfathomable as it
seems to many, those who have been ‘conquered’ want to share the spirituality
of the land with their erstwhile oppressors. But here we encounter an obstacle,
and realise that the Aboriginal gift, as elders have called it, cannot be accepted.
For non-indigenous Australians, almost nothing is sacred, and we don’t know
how to respond to their gift by including us in the spirituality of the land. So
this aspect of Australian culture gets placed in the too-hard basket, where it sits
and festers.
Nietzsche said that the purpose of great art is to reveal the metaphysical
dimension of life, a surprising announcement from a philosopher who was better
known for announcing the death of God. In The Birth of Tragedy he wrote:
The purpose of art is to express timeless realities and see the present under
the aspect of eternity. In this way our experience becomes desecularized
and the metaphysical meaning of life is revealed.4
What Nietzsche says about art can be said about indigenous people, and their
impact on the non-indigenous. Aboriginal people want others to see ‘timeless
realities’, and want them to view the present ‘under the aspect of eternity’. We
get this at a visual level, as tourists when we gaze at the teeming galaxies of stars
in central Australia, beside the monolith of Uluru. But we don’t understand this
as a daily aspect of all experience, not just in ‘magical’ moments when we are
touring the Outback. The indigenous encourage us, in a secular age, to desecular-
ise our experience, and are in Nietzsche’s terms artists of the metaphysical.
Permeability to the sacred

Growing up as I did in Alice Springs, central Australia, I had a sense that the
consciousness of Aboriginal people was closer to the sacred than that of my
European-descended culture. It was an odd reversal of the usual perspective,
because the environment in which I grew up was racist and Aboriginal people
were perceived as inferior. One of the books we were invited to read in school
was Daisy Bates’ The Passing of the Aborigines,5 which argued a crude Darwinian
line that the indigenous were destined to die out to be replaced by our more
advanced civilisation. Europeans were seen as occupying the top rung of the
evolutionary ladder, and the indigenous would have to make way for progress.
As an adolescent I found it repugnant to read this literature, because many of
my peers were Aboriginal and were being asked to believe that they should
accept their inferiority and roll over. It was a genocidal fantasy dressed up as
anthropology.6 The best we could do, said Daisy Bates, was to smooth the pillow
of a dying race.
It seemed to me that the Western view that these people were uncivilised and
poorly adapted was ill-informed. Aboriginal cultures were to be commended
as examples of successful adaptations to the environment. They were highly
sophisticated in their understanding of land and ability to read country.7 We were
looking for the Western markers of success: technological advancement, material
progress and scientific knowledge. But because we could not find them, we con-
cluded we were dealing with an inferior people. However, our scientific approach
to the world had brought a host of ecological problems in its train, and it seemed
that we might be the ones destined for extinction, due to our lack of understand-
ing of ecological principles. Aboriginal cultures were more sustainable than ours,
and had survived in this land for sixty thousand years or longer. We had only
been here two hundred years, and already we were making a mess of it. By what
standards, then, were we judging one civilisation failed and the other successful?
It was difficult for Europeans to appreciate Aboriginal sophistication, because
it was based on a life-world founded on spiritual rather than material principles.
Not that this led to otherworldliness; rather, it led to an entirely practical inter-
action with the environment based on the spiritual agencies perceived to be at
work in it. For Aboriginal people, everything was spiritual, and to realise this
made practical life and social adaptation possible. We in the West worked in
reverse: the spiritual was relegated to irrelevance, and we believed we did not
need spiritual knowledge to survive as a species. How wrong this has been is now
becoming clear: not only in our ecological devastation of the world, but in the
loss of our mental wellbeing and equilibrium, the ecology of the soul. It seems
that we have much to learn from indigenous cultures about how to form our
identity, and how to live in relationship with the world and ourselves.
The European enlightenment brought the benefits of scientific, technical and
medical progress, but it came at a cost. We became rich in knowledge and poor
in wisdom. When the British arrived in Australia in the late eighteenth century,
a technologically advanced but spiritually limited culture came into contact with
a spiritually advanced but technologically limited one. It was a collision of worlds
on a grand scale, and the culture with the material development believed it won
the battle. It defeated the first peoples, but lost its soul and the soul of the land,
which was known to the people of the land. Now we have to win soul and integ-
rity back, and this is hard to do when all we know and value is material success.
We have a lot of learning to do, and a lot of unlearning of old attitudes and values.
We are beginning to realise what we have lost and need to recover. Many of us
realise we cannot continue with business as usual, and are uncertain how to pro-
ceed. I think we need to begin with an apology to indigenous people, and this has
been officially given,8 but now we need to act on it and make it socially and politi-
cally effective. In addition to the apology to the indigenous, we need to apologise
to our souls for dismissing them so thoughtlessly, for regarding the spiritual aspect
of ourselves so disrespectfully. These two events belong together, in my view, a
new respect for the indigenous and a new respect for the spiritual; perhaps they
are two sides of the same thing. The indigenous embody the spiritual side of life
that we have mistreated; what we have done to them, we have done to ourselves.
What fascinated, even haunted me as a child was that indigenous cultures had
deliberately chosen not to develop the ego at the expense of the soul. I felt that
ego development had been available to them in the historical process, but they
had chosen not to take it. Instead, they had developed the soul and maintained
a permeability to the sacred. Indeed, indigenous cultures encouraged the dis-
lodgement of the ego and foregrounding of spirit. That is what their initiations
were about. They put the ego to ritual hardships in initiatory ceremonies. In
such rites, the ascendancy of the ego was terminated and the image of the sacred
enthroned in the soul. This was supported by elders and tradition, whereas in the
West our spiritual traditions had faded and been discredited.
Indigenous cultures practice the art of advancing the soul and diminishing
the claims of the ego. This is what the Greeks called metanoia, a transformation
of personality in which the ego’s dominance is relativised and the sacred is put in
its place as the central authority. Metanoia is what Jesus called for in his ministry.9
Ironically, Christian missionaries sought to ‘convert’ Aboriginal people to this
perspective, but the missionaries did not know who or what they were dealing
with. This inability has been highlighted by numerous elders, notably by Wad-
jularbinna Doomadgee of the Carpentaria region:
Our people, before the white man came were very spiritual people. They
were connected to land and creation through the great spirit, there was
a good great and a great evil spirit. . . . So the sad thing about it all was
the missionaries didn’t realise that we already had something that tied in
with what they’d brought to us. They saw different as inferior, and they
didn’t ask us what it was that we had. And it’s very sad because if they had
asked . . . things may have been different today.10
It was a case of failing to see beyond cultural differences, or to recognise spiri-

tuality when it was staring them in the face. Christian principles were more
pronounced in indigenous cultures than in those who came here evangelising
under Jesus’ name. This reminds me of the remark attributed to Gandhi: ‘I know
of no one who has done more for humanity than Jesus . . . but the trouble is with
you Christians; you do not begin to live up to your own teachings’.11 While the
early missionaries saw a fallen people in need of redemption and God, the indig-
enous they encountered looked back at them with similarly incredulous eyes.
Some elders saw the Europeans as spiritually empty and devoid of metaphysical
substance. In his field trip in the Daly River region of the Northern Territory,
anthropologist W. E. H. (Bill) Stanner encountered an elder who said:
White man got no dreaming,

Him go another way.
White man, him go different,
Him got road belong himself.12
Stanner said these words were uttered ‘with a cadence almost as though he had
been speaking verse’.13 These hypnotic, memorable words are the poetry of the
soul, or the soul’s perspective on the plight of the modern world and its moral
and spiritual emptiness. The indigenous feel our hollowness, and have suffered at
the hands of it. The land Down Under is a place of reversals, and there is no more
potent reversal than the fact that there was more spiritual life in the indigenous
than in those who sought to win their souls for European religions.
The gift
Some elders feel our spiritual void so acutely that they have begun to talk about
giving a gift to settler, immigrant and non-indigenous Australians. In the Kim-
berley region of Western Australia this gift is called wungud, the spirit that
connects all things and makes everything come alive.14 In the top end of the
Northern Territory, the gift is dadirri, or deep listening to country.15 Urbanised
indigenous people seem to be in a different position; they do not, as far as I know,
speak of the gift. Or at least, I have only heard such language from the more
remote parts of the country. As a result the concept of the gift hardly gets any
traction in mainstream society. I would suggest that the majority of Australians
have never heard of it.
But why would traditional elders want to bestow a gift at all? It does not make
sense using our logic, and that is because it belongs to traditional Aboriginal
law. According to anthropological studies, gift-giving is part of the settlement
and peacemaking process that has been used by Aboriginal tribes for thousands
of years.16 If a tribal region is trespassed or invaded, the elders confer and work
out a strategy to incorporate the invading element, often by offering a gift. It is
believed that the gift will bring out the humanity of the trespassers and cause
them to set warlike behaviour aside. This method of dealing with conf lict is
almost unknown in the Christian West, despite the fact that Jesus advocated
precisely this method of dealing with conf licts: ‘Love your enemies and bless
them that curse you’.17
For indigenous cultures, sharing is a healing force, and acts as a way in which
tensions are resolved. In Aboriginal protocols, strangers are welcomed to coun-
try in the understanding that they will become reciprocally bound. Often West-
erners do not understand this protocol. It is not just permission to walk on land,
but an invitation to participate in an ancestral life-world which involves ethical
and spiritual considerations. The ‘welcome to country’ comes with obligations,
and chief among them is to do no harm. There is much written on this subject,
but to enter country in Aboriginal law is to enter a system of visible and invisible
relations, involving much more than what casual observers are able to appreciate.
Aboriginal cultures speak to us from a life-world we can barely comprehend.
Secularisation and modernisation have taken us far from a sense of the sacred
based on nature and the cosmos. The call of the elders to accept their gift is a
call to reconciliation and peace, but also a call to return to the sacred bond with
creation from which we have departed. It is a call to an ego-based culture to

remember the sacred foundations of life, and the ethics that f low from this orien-
tation. It offends progressive society to be made to realise that it has lost so much
in the course of its development and there is considerable ambivalence about the
Aboriginal gift. To accept the gift means that we accept and acknowledge the
damage that colonisation has done to indigenous people. Some would prefer to
keep this far from mind. What is powerfully redemptive is that Aboriginal elders
want to alleviate the exile and alienation that aff licts the non-indigenous in their
land. But there is a great deal of complexity to this situation.
Returning good for evil

Aboriginal elders believe that the non-indigenous are in denial of their need
for a spiritual belonging to place. They can see we don’t have it, and want to
show us how to develop it. They understand that we do not have roots in this
country, and want to help us grow them. Aboriginal people do not think we
have departed so radically from the original condition that we have no need of
spiritual connection to place. What they want to share with us is that we, and all
beings, are not isolated fragments in a cold, unfeeling world, but are part of the
universe and need to restore our sacred bond to it.
Tribal communities achieve this in ceremony, rites of passage and medita-
tive practices. We, however, think of such activities as antiquated and a waste
of time. We have no cosmology that would make sense of the idea of restoring
our relationship to the whole. All indigenous cultures know that when our con-
nection to the mystery of the world is strengthened, our identity is renewed and
we are able to move on with our lives in meaningful ways. ‘When I experience
dadirri’, says Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr of the Daly River people, ‘I am made
whole again’:
I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close
to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness. There
is no need of words. A big part of dadirri is listening.18
What spiritual experience teaches is that our deeper identity, our inmost self, is
given to us by something other than the ego: ‘There is something else that makes
you become who you really are. Find that spirit within you, we all have it but
you [Western people] were not taught about it’.19
Miriam-Rose refers to dadirri as ‘inner deep listening and quiet still aware-
ness’, and says ‘it is something like what you call “contemplation”’.20 She says her
people have developed and ‘passed on dadirri for over forty thousand years’.21 It
is most likely the world’s oldest contemplative practice. Deep listening has given
Aboriginal people their spirituality, law and belonging. Miriam-Rose belongs
to the Ngangikurungkurr tribe, a word that can be broken into three parts:
ngangi means ‘sound’, kuri means ‘water’ and kurr means ‘deep’. So the name
of her people means ‘Deep Water Sounds’ or ‘Sounds of the Deep’. She makes
use of these associations in her teachings on dadirri, which she refers to as ‘the
sound of the deep calling to the deep’.22 There is an allusion here to Psalm 42:7:
‘Deep calls to deep’, and by using these allusions she hopes to show that the
truth revealed in the Judeo-Christian tradition was always already present in her
indigenous culture.
Many Australians think of deep listening as listening intently to the sounds of
the bush. It includes that, but goes beyond it. Listening is meant as attunement to
nature and the forces within it; the echoes of place and deep time. It is ancestral
listening, or attunement to spirit. Miriam-Rose invites non-indigenous Austra-
lians to join her in the art of deep listening. This is what we lack, she says, and
what we need:
We know that our white brothers and sisters in this land carry their own
particular burdens. We believe that if they let us come to them – if they
open up their hearts and minds to us – we may lighten their burdens.
There is a struggle for us too; but I believe we have not lost our spirit of
dadirri. It is the way that we strengthen and renew our inner selves.23
She writes that this depth of spirit needs to be brought to the surface in this
country, and when it does her culture will ‘blossom and grow’, and new life will
come to ‘the whole nation’.24 It almost sounds like a folktale; the land is blighted
and under a spell, and if we perform certain activities the spell can be lifted. This
is what has astounded me about Aboriginal cultures; even though they have been
seriously damaged by colonisation, they turn toward us, the colonisers, and want
to help us in our plight. They can see that we are exiled from land and locked up
in ourselves, and want to liberate us.
Miriam-Rose admits that Aboriginal people have suffered a great deal and
continue to suffer. But despite having lost so much, the foundations of their
spirituality are intact, and those who suffer can turn to deep listening and be
renewed. But she insists it cannot just be Aboriginal people who listen and attend
to the sacred:
We all have to try to listen – to the God within us – to our own country –
and to one another. . . . My people are used to the struggle, and the long
waiting. We still wait for the white people to understand us better. . . .
Learning and listening should go both ways. We would like people in
Australia to take time to listen to us. We are hoping people will come
closer. We keep on longing for the things that we have always hoped
for – respect and understanding. 25
Aboriginal people do not proceed from a Western ethic of conf lict and divi-
sion, but from an indigenous ethic of integration and sharing. Across millennia,
their strategy has been to incorporate the foreign element and grow through
it. It is by understanding others that progress can be made and reconciliation

achieved.
Miriam-Rose says there is a gift that Aboriginal people want to give to the
newcomers to this land:
Deep listening is a special quality of my people that I believe is the most

important. It is our most unique gift. It is perhaps the greatest gift we
can give to our fellow Australians. This is the gift that Australians are
thirsting for.26
It is hard for Westerners to understand such generosity, although we might try

looking at the Sermon on the Mount for a parallel. As a nation, I don’t think we
have been able to comprehend their unselfish attitude, as we are too far removed
from such radical ethics. It is not what we recognise, and we don’t know how
to respond.
Ignorance and disrespect

The filmmaker John Pilger said there is a vast area of silence around what he
called ‘the genius [of Aboriginal people] for survival and generosity and forgiv-
ing’. This extraordinary gift, he went on, ‘has rarely been a source of [national]
pride’.27 Pilger closed his speech for the Sydney Peace Prize by imploring Austra-
lians to recognise that Aboriginal people ‘are what is unique about us’. They are
‘the key to our self respect’, he said. Prime Minister Paul Keating made similar
statements, but they got lost as subsequent national governments paid less atten-
tion to the indigenous situation.
A similar view to Miriam-Rose’s was put emphatically by David Mowaljarlai,
a lawman of the Ngarinyin people of the Kimberley region. In an ABC radio
address to the non-indigenous of his country, David Mowaljarlai said he felt
sorry for white people because we do not have a meaningful relationship with
the land. He said he had a gift that he would like to give us, but he keeps getting
blocked by politics, media and social barriers. He described the gift of his people
as connectedness to land, to spirit and natural ecology.28
By ‘pattern thinking’, Mowaljarlai meant the interconnectedness of things, a
vision of unity and oneness. This is close to dadirri, although Mowaljarlai and
Miriam-Rose never met and did not know of each other’s work. This is the
problem of distance and lack of connection in Outback Australia, but the simi-
larity of their vision makes it all the more remarkable. Mowaljarlai’s gift is the
pattern thinking that connects us with the One behind all manifestation. There
was a tone of desperation in Mowaljarlai’s voice because he felt he was running
out of time.
Indeed, two years after this speech, Mowaljarlai died of a paroxysm after he
learnt of the suicide of his son in police custody.29 What concerns me, and what
should concern all of us, is that tribal elders like David Banggal Mowaljarlai are
disappearing from the world, and the rising generations are, understandably, not
as connected to traditional teachings and ancestral customs as their predecessors.
Elders are dying, ceremonies are ending and the culture is under threat. Anthro-
pologist Bill Stanner once said that indigenous youth are caught between the
ancestral Dreaming and the contemporary market.
However, hopeful voices are calling for old traditions to be revitalised: ‘We
are looking for a new way of using the old way in the new world’.30
Elders such as David Mowaljarlai and Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr never advo-
cate violent protest or rebellion, because that is not part of their vision. Their
approach to integration and peacemaking is a hallmark of their civilisation.
Antagonism and rebellion are integral to Western notions of marginality and
disempowerment, but for indigenous people the only thing that can work is to
make the intruders similar to them, to give the colonisers the gift of belonging,
as then the demonic impulse might be arrested, and colonisers extend respect to
the original inhabitants.
In his book The Aboriginal Gift, inspired by Miriam-Rose, archaeologist and
Catholic theologian Eugene Stockton writes that the gift of dadirri is being
offered, but we are unable to accept it.31 We cannot accept it because we are rid-
dled with guilt and do not see ourselves as worthy of the gift. Moreover, due to
secular conditioning, we do not see ourselves as possessing spirits or souls which
might respond to their gift. Only the indigenous have ‘souls’; we have egos: this
is in the national imaginary. To receive the Aboriginal gift, it would be neces-
sary for the colonising cultures to open to the spiritual dimension, because it is
a spiritual gift. Here is where our secularism is an obstacle and sticking point;
the secular is embarrassed by the sacred, and cannot turn to it with openness
and warmth. It is left to what remains of Australia’s depleted religious cultures
to accept the gift on behalf of the nation, but these traditions seem as lost and
confused as the political culture.
The cultural politics of the gift

Why are Aboriginal elders so insistent on us accepting their gift? They are gener-
ous, as Pilger says, but they know that if we accept their gift, their future is more
secure than otherwise, because we would respect their pact with the land and
claims on it. To accept the gift is to become reciprocally bound. The gift is given
in the hope that it would release a new spirituality in the recipients, which would
cause them to respect the life-world of the indigenous and act with compassion.
But the non-indigenous majority are bemused, don’t know how to respond and
Australia’s development is arrested. I might put the conundrum this way: Giving
us the gift we will not accept is their last chance at survival.
In The Gift, the French sociologist of religion, Marcel Mauss, throws light
on the strategic diplomacy of gift-giving. Basing his studies on the cultures of
French Polynesia, he argues that gifts ‘are in theory voluntary, disinterested and
spontaneous, but are in fact obligatory and interested’.32 He claims that the act
of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on the part of

the recipient. Mauss says that not to reciprocate means to lose honour, and the
spiritual consequences of this can be dire. In South Pacific cultures, failure to
reciprocate means to lose mana, the source of one’s life and authority. In this
context, he explores the question: ‘What force is there in the thing given which
compels the recipient to make a return?’33
For us, however, the question works in reverse: what is there in the gift
that compels the intended recipient to reject it? First, many Australians are too
involved in their own lives to notice there is a gift on offer. An element of racism
remains in our culture, but self-interest, complacency and insularity are hall-
marks of all modern cultures that do not understand the gift economy. Second,
those who claim to care about Aboriginals are mostly secular people who are
embarrassed by the intangible and spiritual nature of the gift. For the cultural
elites, the spirituality of the gift and the awkward politics of receiving a gift from
the colonised, serve as barriers to this process. The highly educated who claim
to have the interests of Aboriginal people at heart feel nervous when indigenous
people come to them with gifts. Discourses such as those of Mowaljarlai and
Miriam-Rose threaten established boundaries such as those between material
and spiritual, white and black, colonisers and colonised.
The cultural elites are the first to claim that they are on the side of indigenous
Australians, but in refusing to engage Aboriginal people they are perpetuating
the misdemeanours of the past. What Aboriginal people want at this stage is
engagement, and disengagement brings sorrow and isolation. The elites have the
impression that the indigenous want to be left alone, because they never talk to
them about what they want. ‘Leave them in peace’ is the prevailing attitude of
middle-class Australia. It is a tragic situation where uneducated racists and edu-
cated elites adopt the same hands-off attitude which is promoting a condition of
cultural apartheid. The same people who once abhorred the apartheid policies
of South Africa are now supporting a soft but real apartness in Australia. We
have moved from killing indigenous people brutally to killing them softly, with
political correctness.
Political correctness as roadblock

Political correctness is a righteous and self-justifying ideology, well established in
government, law, media and education. It claims that any interest in Aboriginal
cultures is guilty of theft and spiritual appropriation. It finds almost any dialogue
or exchange offensive, because all white people want is to steal what they find
attractive in these cultures and leave them depleted. Suspicion, self-loathing
and hatred of our own culture has come to this. A conquering colonial culture
soaked in shame and dishonour can no longer believe in its own goodness, or sup-
port its own motives. PC ideology has arisen from cloistered, inner-city campuses
that have no relationship with indigenous communities and do not know what
elders are calling for. The ideology is a product of materialism and has vested
interests in protecting itself from spirituality. It began as an attempt to defend the

interests of marginalised groups, but when it comes to Aboriginal cultures it back-
fires and subverts the indigenous desire to bring both sides together on spiritual
ground. Thus, while masquerading as a righteous attempt to protect endangered
cultures from further exploitation, it actually participates in their tragic demise.
Sometimes the contrast between the white ‘protectors’ of indigenous inter-
ests and Aboriginal people can become stark, even absurdly contradictory. We
might turn to the case of the momentous archaeological discoveries of James
Bowler at Lake Mungo in New South Wales. White defenders of Aboriginal
interests are suspicious of any non-indigenous involvement in these internationally
significant findings. There is distrust in the interests of scientific research,
archaeology and national and state governments are seen as exploitative and
appropriative. However, science has become sensitised to cultural issues and
favours collaboration and exchange. Moreover, the Mutti Mutti tribal elder
of the region, Alice Kelly, said that the discoveries at Mungo are ‘the heritage
of all Australians. This is not about any one race but the human race’.34 But
because this does not fit with the combative and separatist conceptions of
political activism this sentiment is glossed over or ignored by white commenta-
tors. They argue that the discoveries are owned exclusively by the indigenous
communities. But this concept of ‘ownership’ is a Western construction, not
Aboriginal. ‘We want to share our heritage’, said elder Alice Kelly, 35 but this
generosity is lost on the culture of shame.
Kathleen Kemarre Wallace, an Eastern Arrernte elder of Alice Springs, said
this to her non-indigenous biographer:
Come, listen to us, we will tell you our culture. Learn from us. That way
we will all survive. We share this country. We need to work together and
learn from each other. We must do things together: respecting, listening,
thinking together.36
The key Aboriginal word is ‘together’, while the keynote of the white ascen-
dancy is ‘apartness’. We are not listening to what Aboriginal people are saying.
There is a cultural complex at work, in which a sanctimonious ideology is block-
ing growth. There are numerous ways in which our self-loathing is holding
us back. The logic of the gift cannot be understood by our current political
discourse. Les Murray says that all the chatter in educated Australia is against
the possibility of accepting the gift. He says there is a possibility of convergence
between white and black, but ‘it lacks the force of fashion to drive it; the fashion
is all for divisiveness now’.37
Spiritual consumerism
On the other side of the social spectrum, we have the New Age spiritual move-
ment, which is in a hungry, consuming mood. Any talk of a spiritual gift is
irresistible and attracts immediate attention. Political correctness and New Age
consumerism are two aspects of the one cultural pathology which makes Aborig-
inal reconciliation difficult or impossible. The impulse in the New Age is not to
befriend the indigenous or encourage dialogue, but to become the indigenous by
identifying with them. This is sometimes called the ‘new feralism’, and represents
a disenchantment with the West so profound that some want to shed their iden-
tity and become what the West once reviled and denigrated.38 A series of books
by American writers has described, or indulged, the new feralism, portraying
Aboriginal people as a hearty meal upon which the spiritually bereft can feed.39
Having perhaps exhausted the possibilities of their own indigenous American
cultures they now travel to Australia to fill up on Aboriginal Dreaming.
But due to poetic justice, their consumerist fantasies are often frustrated. An
example is Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia by Harvey Arden,
former writer and editor for National Geographic.40 This book tells the story of
how a ‘hard-bitten journalist’s soul [was] smitten by the spiritual notion of the
Dreamtime’. Arden set out to collect Dreaming stories that he could devour and
make his own, but the indigenous people of north western Australia were not
too keen to give away their heritage to such a person. They had seen this before:
Americans and white Australians begging to take on their stories, and they were
distraught. In fact, the first Aboriginal person whom Arden encountered said:
‘Get your own Dreaming. Don’t take ours’. One critic remarked that Arden was
‘burnt by a demand for reciprocity’, a demand he had not anticipated.41 Such
grasping, parasitic behaviour is not liked by indigenous cultures, who see this as
the new colonialism. The indigenous will only give the gift if they sense sensi-
tivity to and awareness of their plight. They will only give if the recipient will
give back.
This is a worldwide phenomenon, as American Indian writer Joel Monture
puts it: ‘the dominant culture will not stop short of acquiring even our spiritual-
ity for eventual mutation into a New Age pantomime’.42 Canadian Indian writer
Loretta Todd said such people are ‘image barons, story conquistadors and mer-
chants of the exotic’.43 She elaborates:
By fetishizing us, we become mere objects of consumption, which initi-

ates a production of desire: we become commodity. Having taken our
land, attention is then turned to the interior realm of our territories and
powers.44
Indigenous people worldwide are alert to the problem of spiritual consumerism,

and fearful of the parasitic behaviour that drains them of integrity and reduces
them to a commodity. It is partly because of this phenomenon that cultural elites
are hyper-sensitive to all contact with indigenous cultures, but the elites use this
abuse to justify their standoff and defence against the spiritual.
I can imagine all kinds of white consumers must have come to Mowaljarlai
and Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr keen to devour their gifts. But the elders are not
pushovers; that’s why they not only invite our hunger but call for something to
be activated or stirred in us. Miriam-Rose says ‘the gift comes with obligations’.45
There is a spring within us, and it’s in everyone; it’s not just an Aboriginal
thing. . . . Everybody’s got it, it’s just that they haven’t found it yet, and
hopefully one day people are able to touch on dadirri.46
This is a polite, diplomatic warning to bounty hunters and those who want
to snatch the gift and run. The gift involves digging within ourselves for the
‘spring’ that will bring renewal. It involves deepening our own story, and find-
ing resources in it to meet the Aboriginal challenge. Herein lies the rub: secu-
lar society doesn’t have spiritual resources to draw on; or rather, it once had
resources but opted to abandon them. Many of us realise that we have to develop
a spiritual awareness that is parallel to the Dreaming in some ways. But we have
to do this in our own way, from our own resources.
If, as a youth, I showed too much interest in Aboriginal spirituality, I was
sometimes confronted by an Aboriginal person who would say: ‘What is your
own Dreaming? Tell us your sacred story and we will be able to sit down and
talk’. It was this challenge that made me more involved in my Judeo-Christian
heritage than I otherwise might have been. This is what is at stake: the sacred
does not belong to anyone, but it is a universal aspect of humanity that Western
civilisation has attempted to deny. Our intellectual enlightenment has brought
on the pathologies I am outlining: parasitic behaviour and cultural consumption
on the one hand, and intellectual denial, spiritual refusal and political para-
noia on the other. The cultural task ahead is to negotiate a way through these
unprofitable extremes.
Inspiration, not appropriation

There is a fine line between being inspired by other cultures and appropriating
property that does not belong to us. We can draw on indigenous traditions for
inspiration, but the content of our cosmologies will have to be found in our cul-
tures, whether they be Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu or others.47
If these traditions have dried up and lost meaning, we have to dig up the ancient
well-springs and make them available again. This is another sense in which ‘deep
calls to deep’ can be understood. The ancestral depth in Aboriginal people calls
to the ‘ancestral’ indigeneity of the non-indigenous. Their cry from the depth is
a ‘sounding’ to the buried depth in ourselves. When I first met David Mowal-
jarlai and spoke to him about his cosmology, he turned to me sharply and said:
What is in your ancestral background that you can awaken in yourself, to

activate the spirit?
He suggested I might have to look at the cultures of my European ancestors,

and go back in time (not necessarily in space) to when the spirit of the earth was
alive. This might be to go back a long way, in ancestral memory. This heritage
may be dormant in your culture now, he said, but there is the possibility of going
back to awaken it. This made a great deal of sense to me, and I learnt much
from him that shaped my life. I thought, for instance, of my grandfather’s Celtic
Christianity, and of the profound connection with place that is still evident in
some parts of Celtic Ireland. For me, the writings of John O’Donohue were a
thrilling introduction to this area.48
But I realise that not everyone is religiously oriented as I am, and for them
religion won’t do the job in any of its forms. There are a range of new traditions
which are engaged in the art of re-enchanting the world, which is at the core of
postsecular spirituality. I am thinking of ecological psychology, ecofeminism,
deep ecology and philosophical animism.49 Although at times running perilously
close to New Age interests, these areas can avoid the problems of the New Age
as long as people go deeply into these fields and do not linger at the surface. It is
superficiality and slickness which is the bane of all new attempts to re-enchant
the world. The New Age thinks it can overcome dualistic thinking, and enter
non-dual reality by waving a magic wand. Needless to say, this is sheer fantasy.
Aboriginal people are generous and want to help, but as I read the situation they
want to challenge us to find something similar to their land-based spirituality in
our traditions and interior lives.
The best way to avoid predatorial behaviour is to see the gift not as a thing
but as a perspective on things. The gift is an invitation to awaken what already
exists within us. It is just that this awareness of the interconnectedness of things
has been overladen by dualistic consciousness and alienation. The connections
between ourselves and things are still there, but we need to become aware of
them through attunement. As Miriam-Rose says, ‘To listen deeply is to con-
nect’. Once we experience this connection, the desire to impose our ego upon
the world and triumph over it is overcome and we can see ourselves as part of an
earth community. A philosophical rather than a literal approach to the gift might
prevent us from turning it into an object to be devoured.
Liberation movements of the spirit

The Aboriginal gift is an invitation to the erstwhile oppressor to discover a
responsible ethics that must follow from an activation of spirit. There are parallels
between the cultural politics of the gift, and the non-violent resistance strategies
of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. Gandhi, Man-
dela and King wanted to return good for evil, and stop the sources of oppression
by showing compassion to those who had harmed them. These were similar to
the non-violent politics espoused in the Sermon on the Mount.50 Martin Luther
King said:
We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Be ye assured that we
will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win free-
dom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and
conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a
double victory.51
In the Aboriginal situation we find a similar strategy at work. Darkness will not
drive out darkness. By offering the gift that demands a response, indigenous
people appeal to the heart and conscience of their oppressors. Miriam Rose says:
‘We keep on longing for the things that we have always hoped for – respect and
understanding’.52 Like Dr King, they hope for a double victory: cultural dig-
nity and freedom for themselves, and moral and spiritual transformation for the
colonisers.
I can’t avoid the sense that a sacrifice is required before Australia can achieve
this transformation. Something in us has to die before the new can be born. We
can’t generate cultural reconciliation because we think it’s a good idea. There is
something that has to be let go of at a deep level, before we can be renewed.
Our alienation from nature and our deep selves has to be overcome before we
can move on. In religious terms, there is a paschal element here, a need to die
before rebirth can occur. But neither the popular consumerists nor the secular
mainstream wants to die; both seek to preserve their identity and perpetuate
what they know. The dualistic consciousness that sees us as living subjects and
the world as inert objects has to be sacrificed. We have to throw out a bridge
between soul and world, and this will be the subject of the following chapters.
The elders who bear the gift of listening and pattern thinking seem like voices
crying in the wilderness, and yet despite their lack of visibility and the muted
response their work is in the spirit of the great liberation movements of the last
hundred years. The gift shares with Gandhi, Mandela and King the idea that
only an activation of spirit will set people free. I will close with a final ref lection
from David Mowaljarlai:
What we see is, all the white people that were born in this country and
they are missing the things that came from us mob, and we want to try
and share it. And the people were born in this country, in the law country,
from all these sacred places in the earth. And they were born on top of that.
And that, we call wungud – very precious.53 That is where their spirit come
from. That’s why we can’t divide one another, we want to share our gift,
that everybody is belonging, we want to share together in the future for
other generations to live on. You know? That’s why it’s very important.54
What Mowaljarlai is alluding to was noted in the late-nineteenth-century

anthropology of Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen. They reported meeting
Aboriginal elders in 1896–1897 who told them that it is not possible to usurp
foreign territory, because in it dwell ancestor spirits who reincarnate themselves
in the new-born.55 I don’t know what to say about this, except that it is an
extraordinary idea that Western thought finds hard to assimilate. But it gives a
completely new meaning to the idea that we are one in this land.
Notes
1 This chapter is based on a talk delivered as The Tasmanian Peace Trust 2016 Lecture,
Hobart, November 6, 2016. An earlier version was delivered at Westminster Cathedral,
London, September 6, 2016. The original concepts were presented at the ‘Edge of the
Sacred’ conference in Alice Springs, July 21, 2016.
2 David Mowaljarlai, ‘An Evening of Australian Spirituality’, together with Michael
Leunig, chaired by David Tacey; University of Melbourne, 22 March 1996.
3 David Mowaljarlai, quoted in David Tacey, Re-Enchantment: The New Australian Spiritu-
ality (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2000).
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside (1872; London: Pen-
guin, 1993), 111.
5 Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines (1938; London: John Murray, 1966).
6 The genocidal impulse in the colonization of Australia is clearly outlined in Henry
Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Melbourne:
Viking Penguin, 2001).
7 For international readers, Aboriginal people refer to land as ‘country’.
8 Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’
(2008), located at: www.aph.gov.au/house/Rudd_Speech.pdf
9 Matthew 4:17; the Greek word metanoia is poorly translated as ‘repentance’ in the English
Bible. A better translation would be ‘transformation’. The spiritual call is always to ‘turn
your life around’.
10 Wadjularbinna Doomadgee, Gungalidda Leader from the Gulf of Carpentaria (1996),
quoted on the Australian Museum website: http://australianmuseum.net.au/indigenous-
australia-spirituality
11 Mahatma Gandhi, in James E. McEldowney, ‘My Visit with Mahatma Gandhi’, located
at: http://people.virginia.edu/~pm9k/jem/words/gandhi.html
12 Aboriginal elder, quoted by W. E. H. Stanner, ‘The Dreaming’, in Robert Manne, ed.,
The Dreaming and Other Essays (1953; Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), 57.
13 Stanner, ibid.
14 See David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic, Yorro Yorro: Everything Standing up Alive: Spirit
of the Kimberley (Broome: Magabala Books, 1993).
15 See Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, ‘Dadirri: Inner Deep Listening and Quiet Still Aware-
ness’, located at: www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/about-us/about-dadirri
16 Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
17 Matthew 5:44, King James Version.
18 Ungunmerr, op. cit.
19 Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, in a seminar presentation on Dadirri in Alice Springs, July
23, 2016.
20 Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, ‘Dadirri’, in Eugene Stockton, ed., The Aboriginal Gift: Spir-
ituality for a Nation (1988; Sydney: Millennium, 1995), 179–84, 179.
21 Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, in a seminar presentation on Dadirri in Alice Springs, July
23, 2016.
22 Ibid.
23 Ungunmerr, in Stockton, 184.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 182–3.
26 Ibid., 179.
27 John Pilger, ‘Breaking the Australian Silence’ (2009), an address at the Sydney Opera
House as he was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize. Available at: www.serendipity.li/cda/
breaking_the_australian_silence.htm
28 David Mowaljarlai, ‘Address to White People in His Country’, ABC Radio Broadcast, the
Law Report: Aboriginal Law (1995), located at: www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/lawrpt/
lstories/lr311001.htm
29 ‘David Mowaljarlai Obituary’, Australian Archaeology, No. 45 (1997), 58, located at:
www.library.uq.edu.au/ojs/index.php/aa/article/viewFile/971/969
30 Aboriginal elder Rene Kulitja, in Kim Mahood, ‘The Man in the Log: Tjukurpa Wati
Minyma Kutjaratjara’, The Monthly, Issue 151, December 2018, 53.
31 Eugene Stockton, The Aboriginal Gift: Spirituality for a Nation (Sydney: Millennium,
1995).
32 Marcel Mouss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian
Cunnison (1925, 1954; New York: Martino Fine Books, 2011).
33 Ibid., 1.
34 Alice Kelly in John Lyons, ‘40,000 Years Ago, Our Garden of Eden: Our First Paradise’,
The Australian (Weekend Magazine), February 20, 1988, 1.
35 Mutti Mutti is one of three tribal groups that share traditional ownership of the Wil-
landra Lakes region.
36 Kathleen Kemarre Wallace, located at: www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/dotted-layers-
of-tradition/story-e6frg8n6-1225841075285
37 Les Murray, ‘The Human-Hair Thread’, Persistence in Folly (Sydney: Sirius, 1984), 27.
38 See Denise Cuthbert and Michele Grossman, ‘Locating the Indigenous in the New
Age’, Thamyris, 3:1 (Spring 1996), 18–36; and Julie Marcus, ‘New Age Consciousness
and Aboriginal Culture’, Thamyris, 3:1 (Spring 1996), 37–54; both articles can be found
in Nanny M. W. de Vries and Jan Best, eds., Thamyris: Mythmaking from the Past to Present
(New York: Najade Press, 1996).
39 For the New Age appropriation of Aboriginal spirituality, see for instance Anne Wilson
Schaef, Native Wisdom for White Minds (Sydney: Random House, 1995); Lynn Andrews,
Crystal Woman: The Sisters of the Dreamtime (New York: Warner Books, 1987); Robert
Bosnak, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming (New York: Delta, 1997); and notoriously,
Marlo Morgan, Mutant Message Down Under (New York: Harper Collins, 1994).
40 Harvey Arden, Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia (New York: Harper
Perennial, 1995).
41 Mitchell Rolls, ‘Black Spice for White Lives’, Balayi, 1:1 (2000), 160, located at: http://
eprints.utas.edu.au/3565/1/Black_Spice.pdf
42 Joel Monture, ‘Native Americans and the Appropriation of Cultures’, Ariel, 25:1 (Janu-
ary 1994), 114–21.
43 Loretta Todd, ‘Notes on Appropriation’, Parallelogramme, 16:1 (Summer 1990), 30.
44 Ibid.
45 Personal communication, July 24, 2016.
46 Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, in a 2010 video recording with Eureka Street TV, retrieved
at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2YMnmrmBg8
47 Members of all of these traditions are found in contemporary, multicultural Australia.
48 John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (New York: Cliff Street Books,
1997).
49 For an illuminating discussion of a new philosophical animism, see Deborah Bird Rose,
‘Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World’,
Environmental Humanities, 3 (2013), 93–109, located at: http://environmentalhuman
ities.org/arch/vol3/3.5.pdf
50 Matthew 5:38–48; Mark 5:1–20; and Luke 6:6–11.
51 Martin Luther King, Jr., speech delivered Christmas 1957, Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church, Montgomery, Alabama, in Keith Miller, ed., Voice of Deliverance: The Language
of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources (Athens and London: The University of Georgia
Press, 1998), 91.
52 Ungunmerr, in Stockton, 182–3.
53 Wungud, a Ngarinyin word meaning spirit or divine energy.
54 Mowaljarlai, ‘Address to White People’, op. cit.
55 Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia (London: Mac-
millan and Co. Limited, 1899), uploaded to internet as: https://archive.org/stream/
nativetribescen00gillgoog#page/n15/mode/2up
Reanimation of the world
5
ECOPSYCHOLOGY AND
INDIGENOUS COSMOLOGY
Reaches of the soul

Having explored the role that indigenous cosmology plays in the possibility of
a postsecular experience of spirit, I want to explore links between depth psy-
chology and indigenous thought. Spirituality is the discovery of the animat-
ing force of the world, which is connected to the animation of the spiritually
alive individual. One of the important recent developments in depth psychol-
ogy is the notion that psyche is not confined to the human, but is a quality
or property of the world. This is a recognition that allows the postsecular
mind to make links with ancient peoples. It allows us to make links with the
depth dimension of the world, which the Platonic tradition calls the soul of the
world, or anima mundi.
It is often said that the soul is inside us, but in view of the writings of Jung and
Hillman, we are invited to question this claim. It can lead to the illusion that we
can work on our salvation in private and forget the world. The idea that the soul
is within is a metaphor for the sense of interiority that the soul engenders when
awoken. We feel soul in our depths and core, but this does not mean it resides
spatially in our interior. The soul is larger than ourselves and has non-human
reaches. Contemporary depth psychology has thus reversed the usual perspec-
tive: the soul is not inside us, but we are in the soul. With this reversal, we have
moved a step closer to the indigenous worldview, which has been so difficult for
Westerners to grasp until now.
The soul ‘inside’ is a metaphor for the passageway into the world soul. As we
experience it, soul is like an inverted funnel, and our way into it may be narrow
at the start, but as we move forward, it broadens and becomes infinite in exten-
sion. ‘Soul’ in Latin is anima, and anima animates what it touches. As we enter
soul, the world becomes animated, not only our personal lives. We become filled
with a spiritual aliveness, which means we have found an access, a doorway,
100 Reanimation of the world
into anima mundi. Personal and universal merge in the soul and we need to stop
thinking of it as a personal possession. In Aboriginal cultures, no elder would
ever imagine that the Dreaming is private. The way into it may be personal, but
the Dreaming is communal and shared; it is the spiritual thread that holds the
world together.
James Hillman said that the soul of the world and the human soul are aspects
of the same thing. What we do to the one impacts the other. He said, ‘the soul
of the individual can never advance beyond the soul of the world, because they
are inseparable, the one always implicating the other’.1 Hillman continued: ‘Any
alteration in the human psyche resonates with a change in the psyche of the
world’.2 In the realm of soul, it is not possible to make a definite cut between the
interiority of the world and the individual. If we neglect the soul of the world,
it is only a matter of time before this impacts on our interiority, because these
dimensions are related. This is a long-standing belief in tribal and animistic soci-
eties, and it seems that in our society too we are being forced to recognise the
ecology of the soul.
Spirituality as the basis of ecology

The secret of indigenous spirituality is a different way of knowing, which I
would describe as non-dualism. There is no separation between spirit and mat-
ter, because spirit is felt to imbue the whole of reality. This vision of one world,
or unus mundus, is imparted to young adults at the time of their initiation. In the
ceremony they are taught that the spirit that animates their lives is the same spirit
that animates the world. Unlike Westerners, they do not live in a dualistic world,
where spirit is found in some things but not in others, making the world purely
physical and objectified as a realm that can be exploited by the human subject.
As we make our way to a postsecular sense of the sacred, we need to observe
with care and sensitivity the non-dualistic vision that can usher in a profoundly
ecological consciousness. We seem to believe that an ecological layer of aware-
ness can be ‘added’ to our existing consciousness, which divides the world into
the sacred and the profane. But unless we aspire to a non-dual awareness there
will be no ecological revolution.
While living in central Australia as a young adult, I was moved by the cos-
mology of the Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara and Pintubi tribes. These people have used
myths of ancestor spirits to facilitate the animation of place, transforming the
world from a collection of objects, as it appears to dualistic perception, into
a communion of subjects, as it appears to indigenous perception. 3 Rocks,
trees, mountain ranges, gullies and gorges are not just material objects in space,
but sacred traces of the movements of ancestral beings. Nature is personified as
mother and experienced as an elaborate and complex family network, a field of
transpersonal relations that defines the lives of individuals and the tribe. Their
world is alive and speaks to them because the spirit which animates their lives
animates the world. Aboriginal author Vicki Grieves has made freely available
Ecopsychology and indigenous cosmology 101
her comprehensive and insightful account of Aboriginal spirituality.4 She quotes

Aboriginal elder Silas Roberts saying: ‘Our connection to all things natural is
spiritual’.5
The efficacy of this ecology of the soul can hardly be underestimated seeing
that it has sustained and kept alive these cultures in harsh landscapes and arid
conditions for millennia. Political commentators often pay lip service to the ‘spe-
cial relationship’ between Aboriginal people and the land, and praise them for
their ecologically sustainable cultures, but without grasping the vision. It is their
cosmology that is responsible for their ecological intelligence, and in my view we
will not achieve ecological integrity unless we resacralise our relationship with
earth.6 In his Apology to Indigenous Peoples, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said
that Aboriginal peoples are ‘the oldest continuing cultures in human history’.7
He did not, however, point out that their survival and longevity is due to their
spiritual pact with the world.
The Aboriginal Dreaming encompasses the visible and invisible in a unity
which cannot be appreciated by a dualistic consciousness. This primal bond
with nature is not to be dismissed by rational minds as a remnant of a use-
less or unscientific way of viewing the world. Their vision is to be respected
as a psychological and cultural achievement with real survival value. It is the
survival value of their vision that needs to be emphasised, whereas the scien-
tific worldview, which encourages the despiritualisation of nature, has a highly
questionable record.
The things that are regarded by secular modernity as irrelevant, such as
spirituality and cosmology, prove to be the vital elements for wellbeing, longevity
and ecology. I do not want to sentimentalise indigenous people or suggest they
did not harm the land or have an impact on it. Anthropological studies have
shown this is not the case.8 Their impact was considerable, but they were aware
of the ecology of the whole, the rhythms of nature and the earth’s need to recover
from human impact. Their awareness was not just the result of natural science
or farming technique but based on a vision of the interconnectedness of things.
We need to reanimate the world by discovering its sacredness. Once we manage
to do this, we will act differently toward it. Spirituality in this sense is political
and has real effects.
Our attempts to become ecologically sensitive are modest and largely ineffec-
tive because they are based on a defective consciousness. The point is that it is
not only our conscience that has to be activated; only a change of consciousness
can usher in the ecological awareness that the world requires. I am in favour of
green politics and environmental laws, and support these wherever I can. But
they do not go far enough, and many in the environmental movement are aware
of this. In her analysis of the green movement, Groundswell, Amanda Lohrey sug-
gests there is a spiritual underpinning to much of this activity, but it is nascent,
and often unexpressed.9 We need something more solid upon which to base
our vision of the environment. This is why some environmental groups and
researchers are looking for something more than politics. As Fritjof Capra put it,
‘Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected, because deep ecological

awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness’.10
Ecological philosophers and theologians have become aware that the model
they are searching for is already demonstrated for us in the pre-secular cosmolo-
gies of indigenous peoples. Ecotheologian Thomas Berry wrote:
Just now one of the significant historical roles of the primal people of the
world is not simply to sustain their own traditions, but to call the entire
civilized world back to a more authentic mode of being.11
I dislike the word ‘civilised’ in this context, suggesting indigenous people are
somehow uncivilised. I experienced them as having more wisdom than my cul-
ture, in that they recognised the unity of humans and nature, a unity that gave
them an innate, not a forced or guilt-driven awareness of ecological realities.
Ecopsychology as postsecular animism

The work of Hillman and Jung is important because it offers a bridge to the
indigenous world. Their notion of psyche in the world is at least a beginning to
healing the split between inside and outside. ‘Ecopsychology’ has emerged from
their work, and has been elaborated and developed by many others. Ecopsy-
chology, as presented by Theodore Roszak, brings together insights from depth
psychology, ecology, theology, philosophy, sociology and the natural sciences.12
It cannot be pursued through the lens of a single discipline, but requires a cluster
of disciplines to approach its totality. Ecology cannot be broken down into con-
ventional departments of knowledge, because it urges us to look at the whole of
life and explore it in its entirety. For this reason, it is difficult to find an existing
academic discipline which might provide a home for ecopsychology. One of the
closest disciplines might be religious studies because ecopsychology assumes a
spiritual view of the world. As Bill Plotkin writes in Nature and the Human Soul,
most psychologists would dismiss ecopsychology out of hand, since the idea of
soul has been viewed as marginal or eccentric to science. As he wryly puts it,
‘soul has been demoted to a new age spiritual fantasy’.13
It is a sign of our time that the soul and its poetics are banished from official
discourses, despite the fact that efforts have been made by thinkers such as Hei-
degger and Derrida to reintroduce gods and spirit into our thinking. Soul and
spirit are still treated as archaisms in mainstream knowledge, and many scholars
cannot use these terms without embarrassment. We have to overcome embar-
rassment if we are to find the psychological depth in ourselves which can help us
overcome our alienation from the world.
The basic premise of ecopsychology is one that established science finds dif-
ficult to accept. The premise is that all of us, even city-dwellers, have a deep-seated
layer of the psyche at which we remain ‘at one’ with the world. In his essay
‘Archaic Man’, Jung wrote: ‘Every civilized human being, however high his
conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche’.14
Jung postulated a phylogenetic component of the psyche based on the theories
of evolutionary biology. He argued that the unconscious stores all the previous
forms of psychic functioning that have operated in the course of history, which
has been criticised as a form of Lamarckism.15 Nevertheless Jung believed that
although consciousness has strayed from nature and can barely recognise its
kinship with it, the earlier forms of consciousness which facilitated our relations
with the world for thousands of years have not disappeared but have fallen into
the unconscious.
‘All those factors . . . that were essential to our near and remote ancestors will
also be essential to us, for they are embedded in the inherited organic system’.16
Jung refers to this forgotten vestige as the ‘two million-year-old man that is in
all of us’.17 It may not make exact science, but it makes good sense, especially at
this time where we need to believe there are resources within the self that can
be accessed to revitalise our relations with the world. Speaking in conversational
style, Jung said:
Together the patient and I address ourselves to the two million-year-old

man that is in all of us. In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come
from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wis-
dom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old man in
us? In our dreams.18
Jung argued that dreams ref lect the continued existence of this ancient layer
of experience. Whereas our conscious minds speak the language of logos and
rationality, the unconscious still speaks the ancient language of mythos, sym-
bol and primordial image. This is why we have such difficulty understanding
dreams, because they speak from a layer to which we are no longer related. We
not only fail to understand our dreams, we often fear them as well, because they
speak from a depth that we are unwilling to explore. At a deep level, the mind is
still at one with nature, because, in Jung’s view, the archaic or primordial mind
is nature and has not yet been disconnected from it. ‘We have been that [archaic]
mind’, Jung wrote, ‘but we have never known it. We got rid of it before under-
standing it’.19 He believed the primordial mind could be awakened under certain
conditions, and when it becomes activated we might be amazed at our changed
experience of the natural world, which would then be seen as an animated field.
This theory inf luenced a number of the ‘altered states of mind’ investigators
of the 1960s, including Charles Tart, Stanislav Grof and Timothy Leary. That
wave of investigation into drugs and mind has come and gone, but neurosci-
ence has taken up the project in our time. Harvard neuroscientist Gregg Jacobs
has written The Ancestral Mind, which concerns itself with ancient sources in
the psyche that connect us to primordial nature.20 James Hillman believes that
this layer of mind is inherently animistic; that is, it experiences the world as an
extension of psyche or soul and as animated by personified figures. Hillman’s
thesis is that the environmental catastrophe is prompting us, indeed forcing us,
to reawaken the perception of the world as a living, animated field. In his many
works, Hillman is advocating a postsecular animism.
Oxford biologist Anthony Stevens has taken seriously the science underpin-
ning this theory. In The Two Million-Year-Old Self, Stevens claims that the notion
of the ‘two million-year-old man’, although a metaphor, is no less scientific than
any of the key metaphors of science. He says ‘Jung applied it in the same spirit
as Neils Bohr, who referred to the atom as a “miniature solar system”: both are
valid attempts to create a working image of what cannot otherwise be seen’.21
According to Stevens:
By personifying this phylogenetic component of the psyche as an archaic

being, or ‘the two million-year-old man that is in us all’, Jung lay himself
at the mercy of any beady logician wishing to accuse him of falling into a
homuncular fallacy – namely, that he believed he had a little old man in
there sitting at the controls.22
Stevens claims that Jung’s metaphors are unfairly dismissed as implausible, whereas
the metaphors of other scientists are taken in the right spirit, as models pointing
to what is beyond our perception. According to Stevens, the reason Jung’s theory
was rejected was because it advocated ‘innate’ or intrinsic structures during a
time in which cultural relativism reigned supreme. Jung was a structuralist in a
time when structures, especially evolutionary ones, were viewed with suspicion.
Some indigenous writers have taken this view on board. For instance, the
African writer Malidoma Somé has advanced the notion of an indigenous
‘archetype’:
There is an indigenous person within each of us. The indigenous arche-

type within the modern soul is in serious need of acknowledgment. A
different set of priorities dwells there, a set of priorities long forgotten in
Western society.23
Somé is aware that there can be no fixed or predetermined shape to the

appearance of the indigenous archetype. It can express itself differently in dif-
ferent contexts, and there can be no ‘stereotyping’ of an archaic vestige in the
psyche. Somé is aware that this is at odds with mechanistic science, but says the
‘indigenous person’ within each of us is a useful metaphor to describe elusive but
profound dimensions of the real.
Doorways to the unconscious

The reason I find this theory compelling is because I experienced something sim-
ilar to this in central Australia. Perhaps living alongside indigenous cultures is an
example of how the primordial mind can be awakened under certain conditions.
Although as a non-indigenous outsider I did not understand the Dreaming, the

idea of world-animation seeped into my psyche. I had intimations, intuitions and
dreams of a living landscape, of ranges and mountains as sentient beings, of plains
and gullies as sacred places. None of this tallied with the precise theriomorphic
symbolism of the indigenous people, and just as well, as then I could have been
justly accused of stealing cultural property. But it was apparent that my imagina-
tion had been inspired and activated by their animism.
Some Aboriginal people noticed that my relationship with land had changed,
and I experienced it as f luid, living, spirit filled. They are extremely attentive
to the way non-indigenous people respond to their land. Some told me in their
characteristic half-serious, half-joking fashion that I had begun to ‘think like a
blackfella’. The anthropologist Daisy Bates claimed to be able to ‘think black’,24
and thinking black meant, above all, developing an animistic feeling for place,
country, objects and stones. But in Alice Springs terms such as ‘thinking black’
or ‘going native’ were used in a derogatory sense, referring to drunks, derelicts
and ferals. Rarely was it used in the positive sense of seeing the world as the
indigenous see it, as a field which is transparent to sacred energies.
In a way that I have never quite understood, my own indigenous archetype
had come to the fore. Jung and Hillman helped me see that my psyche was
resonating to the animism of central Australia. Something archetypal was being
activated by the geographical and cultural context. This was the Aboriginal gift
to me: they invited me to enter the deeper layers of the psyche in which animistic
perceptions could still be experienced. Years later, I was stunned to read these
remarks by the English biologist Grant Watson after he had immersed himself in
the cultures of central Australia:
As I came to fall under the spell of [the indigenous] people, so many thou-
sands of years distinct from our European conventions, so did those same
European conventions suffer from an objective devaluation. The process
went so far during [my time spent] amongst the Aborigines . . . that I only
just snatched myself back in time to be able to half-believe ever again in the
conventions of Europe. I had entered the animism of the savage mind, and
found within those mystical, sympathetic identifications the open door-
ways to the unconscious. It was in a way a unique experience, not so much
understood and valued at the time, but valued and partly understood after-
wards. It has lifted me, or perhaps sunk me, above or below the orthodox
horizon of vision.25
This is a powerful example of the way in which such experiences awaken the
‘indigenous person’ and involve us in an animistic field. It may seem at first as if
he has appropriated cultural property, but when he speaks of finding ‘open door-
ways to the unconscious’ we recognise that this is not cultural theft. It is not even
an act of will; it happens to him. We would not speak of a ‘savage mind’ today,
but in the 1940s, the time of this memoir, this was conventional.
As a student, I studied in universities in South Australia partly to under-

stand what had happened to my life in Alice Springs. I chose subjects that might
have given me knowledge of the strange awakening that took place. This quest
was largely in vain, because my teachers had no way of appreciating Aboriginal
knowledge. I hope things have changed since the 1970s, but I remain uncertain.
New courses on Aboriginal studies and indigenous epistemology are hopeful,
but how are these to be explored if we use the typically dualistic mindset to
explore them? During my time as a student, the Aboriginal animation of the
world was seen as a product of a primitive and superstitious mind that the West
had rejected.
My psychology lecturer referred to the Dreaming as a case of ‘projection’; the
philosophy tutor called it ‘anthropomorphism’; my literature tutor said it was
‘personification’; and my art history class discussed it in terms of the ‘pathetic fal-
lacy’, where feeling is foisted upon inanimate things. Each had, in turn, assumed
that the world was dead and the only living thing was the human subject. I
was disappointed by these responses, and found the cultural assumptions of my
teachers oppressive. In those days, the bearers of knowledge seemed to have little
awareness of the hegemonic nature of Western knowledge, the need to remain
open to other, non-Western epistemologies.
My teachers were labouring under the burden of Cartesian dualism, the
notion that mind or spirit is confined to humans, and the world is matter without
mind. Anything spiritually alive in the world was ‘put there’ by our imagina-
tions. The idea of the Aboriginal sacred as ‘projections’ went hand in hand with
the racist belief that they were primitives compared to our evident sophistication
and superiority. I would have none of this, and spent years looking for ideas that
might present Aboriginal experience in a different light. I have written else-
where on the changing status of ‘projections’ in depth psychology, and will only
provide a sketch of this here.26
Beyond projection
Apart from the biology of Grant Watson, the psychology of Jung and Hillman
provided me with an alternative. Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology opened new
perspectives, especially his chapter ‘Personifying or Imagining Things’. This
essay dealt with animism, anima and animation.27 His work on anima mundi was
helpful in enabling me to build a conceptual bridge to indigenous thinking.28
Inspired by Jung, Hillman found a level of the psyche which corresponded to
animism, the modality lived by all indigenous peoples of the world. This level,
he said, was still alive in Westerners, but suppressed, undervalued or ignored.
Hillman placed emphasis on world-animation, because he knew that Jung
initially had an ambivalent attitude to the idea. The clinical side of Jung’s work
was concerned with the ‘withdrawal of projections’, and one could say this was
the foundation of psychoanalytic theory. If psychic contents were found in
the world, these had to be ‘owned’ or ‘integrated’ by the individual who had
presumably ‘put’ them outside him-or herself. Jung wrote: ‘The world of gods
and spirits is truly “nothing but” the collective unconscious inside me’.29 ‘In
remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the
main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman objects:
it was projected, as we should say now’. He said: ‘Through the withdrawal of
projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed’.
This side of Jung is indistinguishable from Freud, and the idea of the ‘with-
drawal of projections’ was central to Freud’s theory. In The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life, Freud said the primal or indigenous view of an animated universe
‘is nothing but psychology projected into the external world’.30 This showed
Freud’s affiliation to Descartes and Enlightenment. Psyche was only found in
human persons, and the best and most hygienic practice would be for people to
introject their projections and disburden the world of their psychological con-
tents. Over time, as Freud’s inf luence waned on Jung, he became critical of the
view that all ‘projections’ had to be withdrawn. Jung said in 1937: ‘The individual
ego is much too small, its brain is much too feeble, to incorporate all the projec-
tions withdrawn from the world’.31 What caused him to change his mind was
his discovery of the idea of synchronicity, which required psyche in the world as
well as psyche inside us. After he delivered his lecture on synchronicity in 1951,
he announced ‘now the concept of projection should be revised completely’.32
Synchronicity was not only Jung’s idea, but encouraged by his collaborative
research with Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist. As quantum
physics began to review its concept of the physical world, and saw it as possess-
ing ‘mind’, intentionality and spirit, Jung was able to adapt the discoveries of the
new science to his own vision of an expanded psycho-spiritual universe. Psyche
was larger and more encompassing than his early psychology would suggest. He
wrote about anima mundi and soul of the world, later developed by Hillman. Jung
began to regret the way in which his psychology had contributed to the disen-
chantment of the world.
He was forced to differentiate between personal and transpersonal pro-
jections. The first need to be withdrawn, the second are universal and need
to remain in the world. While ‘projections’ come from inside, some may
be archetypal rather than personal, in which case they represent attempts to
express the animating spirit of the world. Wordsworth recognised this when
he said that the spirit that ‘rolls through all things’ is something we perceive
in the world, but at the same time we ‘half-create’ this spirit. 33 The experi-
ence of the sacred is a co-creation of imagination and reality, which was a
theme of William Blake. The most profound ‘projections’ speak of the nature
of ultimate reality.
Paul Tillich made this point when countering Freud’s notion that God is a
projection. Tillich said, ‘the realm against which the divine images are projected
is not itself a projection’. That realm, he said, ‘is the experienced ultimacy of
being and meaning; it is the realm of ultimate concern’.34 Tillich brings a theo-
logical perspective to the debate. Reductionists and atheists like to say that every
image we construct of the holy is an invention and of no significance. But there

are forces in the world of which our imaginings are the most approximate rep-
resentations. To announce that all images are ‘made up’ is a delight of materialists,
but they are only looking at the human side of this dialogue we have with the
divine. From the other side, religions are trying to bring finite and infinite
worlds into relationship, and our efforts are not in vain but the best possible
attempts to shape images of that which remains unknown. There can be no
absolute representation of the divine, but there are ‘good enough’ representations
that serve cultural purposes.
In his work on anima mundi, Hillman claims the concept of projection is a
‘defence’ against anima mundi, and as such it ‘needs reversing’. ‘What psychology
has had to call “projection” is simply animation . . . [in which] the soul of the
thing corresponds or coalesces with ours’.35 ‘The idea of projection’, he says, is
‘one of depth psychology’s denial of things as they are so as to maintain its view
of the world’.36 Hillman probably goes too far in these statements, as some of our
projections are definitely personal and in need of being withdrawn. If I suspect
my neighbour of being the devil, this is a projection of my evil upon another, and
hardly contributes to an understanding of the world. But Hillman felt the need
to attack the concept of projection because it had done so much damage to our
experience of anima mundi and contributed to our undermining of indigenous
cosmologies.
Dreaming and archetypes

I have long felt that depth psychology can shine a light on the Aboriginal Dream-
ing that an anthropological or historical appraisal cannot achieve.
‘Dreaming’ is an English approximation of the Arrernte term alcheringa and
the Warlpiri and Pintubi term tjukurrpa. Early anthropologists translated these terms
as ‘Dreamtime’, which caused problems, because it suggested to elders that their
sacredness was fixed in the past, lost to the clouds of prehistory. By implication,
it suggested that Aboriginal people, as participants in the Dreaming, were not in
the same space and time category as the West, but trapped in a time warp. The
terms alcheringa and tjukurrpa, however, refer to a field that exists simultaneously
in the past, present and future; it exists in time but participates in eternity. This
is what Jung is claiming for the psyche; it too is in the present, but reaches into
the past, and anticipates the future. Moreover, the royal road to psyche is the
dream, and for Aboriginal people personal dreams give access to, and allow for
the development of, the Dreaming. Psyche and Dreaming are borderline con-
cepts which are partly empirical, grounded in experience, and transcendental,
grounded in the metaphysical.
The psychologist Craig San Roque put it this way:
The essence of Tjukurrpa is a multidimensional pattern of connected-

ness . . . somehow very like the neurological system externalised and set
into the geography of the country. It is a poetic calculus . . . organised to

produce and sustain life, animal beings, food, knowledge and relationship.37
The Dreaming is a continuum, and the West can hardly understand it, certainly
not by concepts of empirical science. One of the nearest concepts in the West
is found in the Christian prayer, the Gloria Patri: ‘As it was in the beginning, is
now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen’. This points not so much to
time as to eternity; however it is not a static eternity, removed from time. It is
eternity as it impacts on time and exerts a pressure and demand at every moment.
The tjukurrpa could be conceived as the point where time and eternity intersect,
where eternity enters time and becomes one with it, as a parallel reality that runs
alongside time but is not exhausted by it.
Anthropologist Bill Stanner designates the Dreaming as ‘everywhen’, and says
it is ‘a continuing highway between ancestral and living man, between the life-
givers and life, between subliminal reality and immediate reality’.38 The same
could be said of the archetype or Platonic Idea, these too are highways between
ancestral and living humanity. Jung refers to archetypes as ‘ancestral traces’, and
says ‘the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the
ancestors’.39 Referring to Aboriginal cultures, he says ‘the mythical world of the
ancestors – for instance, the alchera or bugari of the Australian aborigines [is a]
manifestation of the unconscious and its archetypes’.40 The ancestors were felt to
come from below the earth, which is an indication of their chthonic nature as
forces of the unconscious. Jung’s inf luence on theology is evident in the work of
Paul Tillich, who writes:
If we enter the levels of personal existence which have been rediscovered

by depth psychology, we encounter the past, the ancestors, the collective
unconscious, the living substance in which all living beings participate.41
These words from Tillich and Jung show that the gap is gradually being bridged
between Western understanding and indigenous wisdom. Anthropologist Lynne
Hume writes: ‘The Ancestors rose up from beneath the earth and sank back
down after their travels, but their inf luence is still felt, and their past actions are
still vital in the present’.42 If we replace the word ‘ancestors’ with ‘archetypes’ this
could serve as a definition of archetypal forces.
Where the ancestors came from no one knows. Jung says the same of
archetypes – like Plato’s Ideas they are ‘just there’, and we have no way of know-
ing how they came into being. According to anthropologist Ted Strehlow, a
more precise translation of alcheringa is ‘eternal, uncreated, sprung out of itself ’,
and he further translates it as ‘originating from eternity’.43 When we are told that
ancestors speak to humans in dreams, do not obey the laws of time or space, and
appear in symbolic form in ritual, dance and ceremony, we realise we are looking at
something almost identical to Jungian archetypes. These links have not been lost
on modern anthropologists. Bill Stanner said the Dreaming could just as easily
be called ‘the unconscious’.44 Lynne Hume said the Dreaming is ‘cognate’ with
‘Jung’s collective unconscious’.45 She suggests that if Jung’s concept of the col-
lective unconscious had been available to early anthropologists such as Spencer
and Gillen, ‘misconceptions about the nature of the Dreaming might have been
somewhat less problematical’.46
This is one reason why I have been a student of Jungian psychology, an area
that seems removed from indigenous Australia, and yet is in the same territory.
Jung’s is a philosophy of life that builds a cosmology similar to that of Aborigi-
nal cultures. Jung takes us into the past and toward the future by developing a
post-scientific model that throws light on pre-scientific animism. The emergent
self in Jungian thought is an aspect of a totality greater than the person. It is
an expression of the intelligence of the world soul. In India, this has long been
known as the birth of the Atman. In Aboriginal cultures, the rite of initiation
gives birth to something beyond the person, and this is personified as an ancestral
spirit. Although Jungian thought does not speak of ancestors, what is happening
in individuation is similar to the initiation ritual in which the ego is eclipsed by
an intelligence greater than itself.
It is this interior authority, the ancestor spirit, psyche (Greek) or anima (Latin)
that lifts the individual out of his or her personal existence into a communion
with the past, present and future. It is anima that animates the world and makes
reality come alive through the universality of spirit. The veil between human
and ancestral, time and eternity is rendered permeable, and there is an interplay
between the worlds that we can only guess at today. Thus animism serves as a
source of happiness and wellbeing. It is a system of belief that makes possible the
interconnectedness of things and has practical benefits, including ecological sen-
sitivity to a world that is experienced as a communion of subjects.
Initiation into an ecological self

Aboriginal people are not, in my view, ‘born into’ a state of ecospiritual aware-
ness. Such awareness is an achievement, bestowed in the ceremony of initiation
that terminates the normal ego and opens initiates to a new life-world. My pur-
pose is to show that all cultures, including our own, will have to go through an
initiation into a new awareness, one that will require reorientation and sacrifice.
It is apparent that Westerners see Aboriginals as living in a ‘natural’ state.
This is a projection of the image of the ‘noble savage’ that has preoccupied the
West for centuries. We have Rousseauian fantasies of Aboriginal people liv-
ing the natural life, based on instinct, unscathed by culture, but nothing could
be further from the truth. Aboriginal people distrust the natural state and
attempt to terminate it in the trials of initiation. They adore children, and this
is evident to the casual onlooker, but they distrust the state of youth, and try
not to prolong it, due to its egotism. Egotism is a danger to the cohesion and
efficiency of the tribe, and to the identity with the ancestral life-world that is
the goal of initiation.
For them, the natural state has to be broken in ceremony. The natural person
cares for him- or herself, and what impinges on his or her self-interest. This
‘first self ’, as it were, has to be dislodged, so that a ‘second self ’ can be awoken.
When this takes place, not only is the individual reborn to a new life, but the
tribe experiences a renewal of its ancestral core and an affirmation of its integ-
rity. The first self is the childhood ego-state, of which they are suspicious. They
do not indulge the childhood condition and seek to terminate it as soon as pos-
sible. Young people are sent to the initiation fields and put under the control of
ceremony leaders as soon as they show signs of sexual maturation. The second
state is the spiritual self, which is highly regarded. In this sense they are in reverse
gear to the West, where the childhood ego-state is valued, and the spiritual state
is ignored or dismissed.
We are content with the natural state, and don’t see anything wrong with
it. But that is part of our cultural and ecological crisis. Goethe put it well when
he said: ‘And if you don’t know this dying and birth, you are merely a dreary
guest on earth’.47 In every wisdom culture there are two states, predicated on the
need to be twice-born. This idea has been cheapened by fundamentalism, and
is difficult to understand in its true meaning. In a context in which tradition is
respected and nature revered, indigenous cultures cannot countenance a selfish
life. Young people enter the initiation process with their birth-name, but are given
a new name to symbolise the transformation that has taken place. They are
subject to trials and tests, many of which are painful. Young members enter the
initiation ceremony as children and emerge as adults. Adolescence as we know
it does not really exist.
The key feature of initiation is that elders reveal to the neophytes that they
are reincarnations of ancestral spirits. Individuality is something of an illusion, at
best a variation on an ancestral theme. In rituals of the Arrernte tribe of central
Australia, elders hand the novice a sacred stone, or churinga, and say, ‘Here is your
body, here is your second self ’.48 The idea is that they live henceforth from this
new centre of authority. Identity shifts from ego to spirit, and this shatters the
narcissism of the child. True identity is a gift from the tribe, acting on behalf of
the ancestors, or in modern terms, archetypes. Poet and essayist Les Murray gets
it right when he says:
Some of the immense dignity of traditional Aboriginals, when seen outside

of degrading circumstances, obviously comes from their sense of being the
present forms of eternally existing beings. A man who owns a certain cer-
emony or set of verses belonging to a sacred site does so because he is the
supernatural being who indwells in that site.49
I witnessed this ‘immense dignity’ in central Australia: Aboriginal schoolmates

would suddenly be taken by elders to the initiation fields, and return to society
as different people. They had a new sense of happiness, stability and content-
ment that they did not have before. It is little wonder that detribalised youth
experience enormous disorientation and stress as they try to assimilate to West-

ern society, because their ancestral experience is about being reconstituted as the
‘present form of an eternally existent being’.
The West has no concept of this transformation and sees no need for it.
Because initiation necessitates the death of the former self and rebirth of a new self,
the epidemic of suicide among young Aboriginal people can be seen as an abortive
attempt to continue this ancient process, but with utterly tragic results. The call
to initiation is a call to death, not physical death, but a symbolic termination based
on a cosmology of dying and birth. The tragedy of youth suicide is in essence a
desperate call for the ritual of transformation that has formed the basis of these
cultures for millennia. When ceremonies are lost, so too are the lives that were
based on them.50
Young people who turn against themselves and inf lict self-harm through
drugs, glue-sniffing, cutting and risk-taking behaviour can be seen as unconsciously
enacting ceremonial law. When culture disintegrates, the religious impulses
continue, but in destructive ways. Mircea Eliade says that indigenous initiation
entails a ‘violation’ of the first condition: ‘In archaic societies, one does not
become a complete man until one has passed beyond, and in some sense abolished,
“natural” humanity’.51 ‘To become a man in the proper sense one must die to
this first natural life and be reborn to a higher life, which is at once religious and
cultural’.52 In the experience of tribal humanity, it is ‘natural’ to be egocentric
and ‘cultural’ to be woken from this state.
In indigenous cosmology, spirit is part of nature, but a part that is prepared to
turn against the natural order to be released. It is natural to hide from spirit and
inevitable that spirit should seek us out. Young members of the tribe are often
terrified of the initiatory process, and try to avoid or delay the experience, but
eventually become aware that the ancestor being is their true nature, and they
must submit to being overpowered. The danger of Western attempts to describe
indigenous religions is that we tend to see spirit as a force operating outside the
natural order, as ‘supernatural’, rather than a transforming agent within nature, as
ultra-natural or the deepest force in the natural order.
While tribal societies understand the conf lict between spirit and matter, this
is contained in one world. Spirit is that aspect of nature that seeks its transforma-
tion. There is no dualism if we understand that they see nature as a self-overcoming
system. The natural state seeks its abolition and replacement by a higher authority.
There is a parallel with Christian theology, where Paul writes: ‘We know that
all creation is still groaning and is in pain, like a woman about to give birth’.53
Nature groans to give birth to spirit.
I have spent some time on the initiatory model to indicate that humanity is
not naturally ecological and it takes the intervention of culture to steer it toward
a holistic orientation. The West has lost the sense of needing to be reborn to
a second life. It is this assumption that will have to be challenged if we are to
survive. We cannot make a transition to an ecological condition without under-
going a shift of identity. Modernity has progressed too far down the path of
individualism to enable us to return to a structured society in which initiations

are imposed on the young by elders. We are too wedded to our freedoms, liber-
ties and right to disagree, but obviously none of this would have been tolerated
by pre-contact indigenous societies.
We have rejected ancestral ways to such an extent that everything has gone
into reverse. Now prolonging the egoic state is the norm, and it is counter-
cultural to overcome the ego in a bid to forge connections with others, nature
and world. We cannot turn things around by good intentions alone. We need a
new compass, a new sense of the sacred, a return of the sacred as a guidepost to
what matters. Liberal humanism and secularism won’t get us there, but to safe-
guard the future, we have to think in terms of an initiation into a new kind of
consciousness. We need an alternative vision about how to live and an environ-
mental spirituality, or what literary culture would call a New Romanticism. I am
heartened to see many new ways being put forward in an effort to change our
consciousness. There is environmental philosophy, ecotheology, ecofeminism,
social ecology, panpsychism, new animism and the field I have considered here,
ecopsychology.
Each of these is an initiation into a different way of being. Roszak admits that
ecopsychology is an attempt to bring the wisdom of indigenous cultures back to
life and available to modern people: ‘I have been calling ecopsychology “new”,
but in fact its sources are old enough to be called aboriginal’.54 He is using the
word ‘aboriginal’ in its generic sense, not as a proper noun. I remain convinced
that the root of the ecological problem is spiritual, in which the need to sanctify
creation and experience the earth as holy is the foundation of a viable ecology.
If only what is sacred matters, and if matter doesn’t matter, the resanctification
of the earth is the only way forward. Moving forward means adapting ancient
visions to the contemporary context.
Notes
1 James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (Dallas: Spring Publica-
tions, 1992), 105.
2 Ibid.
3 This is a paraphrase of Thomas Berry’s statement in Berry and Brian Swimme, The
Universe Story (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1992), 243.
4 Vicki Grieves, Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy: The Basis of Aboriginal Social
and Emotional Wellbeing. Discussion Paper No. 9. (Darwin: Cooperative Research Cen-
tre for Aboriginal Health, 2009). This work by an Aboriginal writer can be downloaded
at: www.crcah.org.au/publications/downloads/DP9-Aboriginal-Spirituality.pdf
5 Silas Roberts, quoted in Vicki Grieves, op. cit.
6 This is the argument put by David Suzuki and Amanda McConnell, The Sacred Balance:
Rediscovering Our Place in Nature (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 1997).
7 Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’
(2008), located at: www.aph.gov.au/house/Rudd_Speech.pdf
8 Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People
(New York: Grove Press, 2002).
9 Amanda Lohrey, ‘Groundswell: The Rise of the Greens’, Quarterly Essay, Issue 8, 2002.
10 Fritjof Capra, in his cover endorsement of Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1995).
11 Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), 4.
12 Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen K. Kanner, eds., Ecopsychology: Restoring
the Earth, Healing the Mind (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995).
13 Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul: A Road Map to Discovering Our Place in the World
(New York: New World Library, 2008), 6.
14 C. G. Jung, ‘Archaic Man’ (1931), CW 10, paras. 104–7.
15 This evolutionary biological view of the psyche is expounded by Anthony Stevens in
his work Archetypes: A Natural History of the Self (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1982).
16 C. G. Jung, ‘Analytical Psychology and “Weltanschauung”’ (1928/1931), CW 8, par.
717.
17 C. G. Jung, ‘The Two Million-Year-Old Man’, in William McGuire and R. F. C. Hull,
eds., C. G. Jung Speaking (1936; London: Picador, 1980), 100.
18 Ibid.
19 C. G. Jung, ‘Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams’ (1961), CW 18, par. 591.
20 Gregg Jacobs, The Ancestral Mind (New York: Viking, 2003).
21 Anthony Stevens, The Two Million-Year-Old Self (College Station, TX: Texas A & M
Press, 1993), 3.
22 Ibid.
23 Malidoma Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community (Portland: Swan Raven, 1993), 34.
24 Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines, 2nd ed. (1938; London: John Murray, 1966).
25 Grant Watson, But to What Purpose: The Autobiography of a Contemporary (London: Cres-
set Press, 1946), 108.
26 David Tacey, The Darkening Spirit: Jung, Spirituality and Religion (London and New York:
Routledge, 2013).
27 James Hillman, ‘Personifying or Imagining Things’, in Re-Visioning Psychology (New
York: Harper and Row, 1975).
28 James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (Dallas: Spring Publica-
tions, 1992).
29 C. G. Jung, ‘Psychological Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead’, CW 11,
par. 525.
30 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 6 (1901; London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), 258–9.
31 Jung, ‘Psychology and Religion’, par. 144.
32 Gilles Quispel, quoted in Robert Segal, June Singer, and Murray Stein, eds., The Allure
of Gnosticism: The Gnostic Experience in Jungian Psychology and Contemporary Culture (Chi-
cago: Open Court, 1995), 19.
33 Wordsworth writes: ‘all that we behold / From this green earth; of all the mighty world /
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, / And what perceive’, ‘Tintern Abbey’, lines
106–8.
34 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 13.
35 Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 102.
36 Ibid., 99.
37 Craig San Roque, ‘Coming to Terms with the Country: Some Incidents on First Meet-
ing Aboriginal Locations and Aboriginal Thoughts’, in M. T. Savio Hooke and S.
Akhtar, eds., The Geography of Meanings, Psychoanalytical Perspectives on Place, Space, Land
and Dislocation (London: The International Psychoanalytical Association, 2007), 121.
38 W. E. H. Stanner, quoted in Nancy Williams, The Yolngu and Their Land (Canberra:
Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1986), 25.
39 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963; London: HarperCollins, 1995), 216.
40 C. G. Jung, ‘The Psychology of the Child Archetype’ (1940), CW 9, part 1, par. 260.
41 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 212.
42 Lynne Hume, Ancestral Power: The Dreaming, Consciousness and Aboriginal Australians
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 26.
43 T. G. H. Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971), 614.
44 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘Some Aspects of Aboriginal Religion’, in Max Charlesworth, ed.,
Religious Business (1976; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8.
45 Hume, 36.
46 Ibid.
47 Goethe, quoted in Otto Sharmer, Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges (San
Francisco: Berrett and Koehler Publishers, 2009), 20.
48 Carl Strehlow, The Aranda and Loritja Tribes of Central Australia (1907–1920), quoted by
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949; Princeton, NJ: Princ-
eton University Press, 1973), 289.
49 Les Murray, ‘The Human-Hair Thread’, in Persistence in Folly (Sydney: Angus & Rob-
ertson, 1984), 10.
50 For more on this theme, see David Tacey, Gods and Diseases: Making Sense of Our Physical
and Mental Wellbeing (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).
51 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (1957; New York: Harcourt Brace & Company,
1987), 187.
52 Ibid.
53 Romans 8:22.
54 Theodore Roszak, op. cit., 5.
6
PHYSICS AND REANIMATION
Approaches to the one world

After ref lecting on depth psychology and the Dreaming, I began to wonder what
the new physics might add to this debate. I felt inclined to peer into the area of
quantum physics, as a way of making connections with ecopsychology and the
indigenous life-world. There are, as one might anticipate, astonishing parallels
between the vision of quantum physics and those conceived by indigenous cul-
tures and Jungian psychology.
In the previous chapter, Anthony Stevens was quoted as saying that metaphorical
models of reality are just as important in physics and biology as they are in
psychology. Stevens said: ‘Jung applied [metaphorical models of reality] in the
same spirit as Neils Bohr, who referred to the atom as a “miniature solar system”:
both are valid attempts to create a working image of what cannot otherwise be
seen’.1 The link that Anthony Stevens makes between the psychology of Jung and
the quantum physics of Neils Bohr is salutary. Both scientists went beyond the
accepted boundaries of their respective disciplines, both were controversial and
rejected by conservative colleagues, and attempted to make parallels between the
nature of matter, psyche and the unitary structure of the universe.
Both were dismissed as ‘mystical’ for suggesting that matter and psyche
are connected to a universal mind or world-spirit. It is for this reason that I am
interested in them, since they contribute to the construction of a bridge between
contemporary science and the unitary life-world of indigenous knowledge. Some
say the bridge they have built is rickety and unreliable, and we should not walk
on it, but I think we should be willing to take the risk and see what happens.
Beyond dualism
I will brief ly outline what I understand as the breakthrough in modern physics
which has to do with the potentiality of an innate harmony between subject and
Physics and reanimation 117
object, consciousness and world. Science as we have known it, and as still taught
in most schools and universities, is or has been a dualistic tradition, based on the
separation of mind and matter. Just when we need it most, the new physics has
proposed a different model of reality, which has still not been widely accepted
by the physics discipline, but which offers us much to ref lect on, as well as hope
for the future.
Classical physics was reductively materialistic, in which everything was
explained in terms of moving material particles. Isaac Newton said these particles
were ‘solid, massy, hard, impenetrable particles . . . so very hard as never to wear
or break in pieces’. The new physics has turned this upside down and dissolved
the very idea of solid substance. Max Born discovered that when an electron
enters an atom it ceases to be a material particle and becomes a wave. Werner
Heisenberg said ‘The elementary particle of modern physics is not a material
particle. Atoms don’t exist as simple material objects’.2 Erwin Schrödinger found
that the waves in atoms have no mass or energy, but are only information on
numerical relations. Schrödinger coined the term ‘entanglement’ to describe the
relation between particles, when they cannot be seen as separate but can only be
described as acting as a whole.3 Niels Bohr indicated that subatomic waves pos-
sess an almost infinite potentiality. In Atomic Physics and the Description of Nature,
Bohr wrote:
The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought to light
the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a conse-
quence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation
of observation was based.4
These quantum scientists wondered whether they had arrived at the mathematics
of creation, and perhaps the mathematics of the Creator.
The links with Western mysticism are astonishing: Nicholas of Cusa, echoing
Plato, said, ‘number was the first model of things in the creator’s mind’. Hun-
dreds of years later, we find the most sophisticated scientists on earth ponder-
ing the existence of a universal mind, a mental process at the foundation of the
universe. Physicists willing to risk a move toward spirituality have seen quan-
tum theory as a possible basis for what ancient traditions referred to as Cosmic
Mind. Could it be that a metaphysical mathematics lies at the basis of reality as
its original plan or spiritual foundation? There was no telling how mysterious or
deep this non-material substratum might be, how vast or extensive, or whether
it equated with the theological idea of God.
Max Planck and Albert Einstein were the originators of quantum mechan-
ics in 1900. Planck discovered that the energy of heat radiation is not emit-
ted continuously, but appears in the form of ‘energy packets’. Einstein called
these packets ‘quanta’, which gave quantum theory its name. But by the 1920s
the scientific research of Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Born and Bohr had radi-
cally changed this theory from its mundane origins. Planck and Einstein could
hardly recognise the field they had discovered. Einstein was critical of the
transformation, in which quantum theory became more mystical and less

empirical. He described the quantum waves as ‘f ields of ghosts’. 5 Einstein
could not accept the idea that the universe has a mind or mental process, and
said there was something wrong with the theory, something missing. Physicist
Lothar Schäfer responded saying ‘the problem isn’t that the theory is incom-
plete, but that the visible surface of things is incomplete because it has little to
say about the nonempirical realm’.6
Quantum physicists have tried to defend their theory by claiming that,
although it is impossible to understand by logic and the evidence of the senses,
the world is based on a non-empirical substratum. They recognise that it sounds
like mysticism, but wave forms, as Heisenberg called them, underwrite the vis-
ible order of reality. Waves dictate what molecules can do and how they interact
with each other. As Brian Greene put it in The Elegant Universe, ‘Matter has been
dematerialized’.7 According to Schäfer:
The universe is an ocean of waves, not waves of matter or energy, but non-
material, invisible waves in the realm of potentiality. There are indications
that these waves are hanging together like the water waves in an ocean, so
that the nature of the cosmic potentiality is that of an indivisible wholeness:
some call it the One, in which all things and people are interconnected.8
Quantum theory reaches the limits of science when physicists conclude that
the non-empirical world acts on us and shapes our reality. Molecules are guided
in their actions by the wave forms of empty states, as if by inner images. We are
more impacted by this hidden code than science has been able to discern. The
implications are far-reaching and have yet to be absorbed by scientific or cultural
awareness. Quantum physics is arguing that the dualism between mind and mat-
ter is obsolete, and matter at its most minute level is a wave-like function which
can be philosophically conceived as mind. I said in the previous chapter that Car-
tesian dualism is the insignia of modernity, but this dualism has been destroyed
by the new physics. Fritjof Capra writes:
The Cartesian partition between the I and the world, between the observer
and the observed, cannot be made when dealing with atomic matter. In
atomic physics, we can never speak about nature without, at the same time,
speaking about ourselves.9
Cartesian logic has been destroyed by these discoveries and consciousness is

now viewed as a cosmic property – not as a reality that confronts the universe
as something alien. We can never speak about nature without speaking about
ourselves. Western science meets indigenous spirituality in its conception that
the universe is mind as well as matter. This is a classic example of how the
postsecular is rediscovering insights that were, and continue to be, essential to
the premodern.
All of this was intuited by D. H. Lawrence a century ago:
Our road may have to take a great swerve, that seems a retrogression. . . .We
must make a great swerve in our onward-going life-course now, to gather
up again the savage mysteries. . . . But this does not mean going back on
ourselves. We can’t go back.10
His metaphor is perfectly suited to our situation: we must embark on a ‘great

swerve that seems a retrogression’. It seems regressive because we are revisiting
the past, but ‘this does not mean going back on ourselves’ because we must recre-
ate the ancient forms in ways that accord with our understanding. The path is not
linear but spiralic; we take the swerve only to find that we are moving forward.
The spiral of progress curves back toward our origins, and knows the place for
the first time.
The first stage of world-animation, in which anthropomorphic or therio-
morphic spirits appear in nature, is not available to us because it conf licts with
science and philosophy. We need to experience the primordial mysteries, but we
cannot go back to the primordial formulations of those mysteries. The return
of animation will be brought about by science and philosophy in a new way.
Throughout these discoveries our consciousness has been reconceived as part
of the mind of the universe, and consciousness is the universe becoming aware
of itself, a perspective that connects theoretical physics with the cosmogonic
theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and other creation theologians. Bede
Griffiths, a mystical Benedictine based in India for many years, was quick to
seize upon the religious possibilities of quantum physics, especially in terms of
the biblical promise of a ‘new heaven and a new earth’. Griffiths wrote that:
Modern physics helps us to realize that this whole material universe is a

vast ‘field of energies’ that is in a continuous process of transformation.
Matter is passing into life and life into consciousness, and we are waiting
for the time when our present mode of consciousness will be transformed
and we shall enter the new creation.11
Griffiths links the developments in physics with St Paul’s vision of the world, as
one in which the world ‘groans’ for its own transformation: ‘We know that the
whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the
present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit,
groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship’.12 Griffiths argues
that this ‘groaning’ is cosmogonic and theological, and now it has become sci-
entific as well, as science explores the long and arduous process whereby matter
gives birth to the consciousness inherent in creation.
Science, and theology, have returned to the mystical vision of the world known
to the sages of the past, as found in Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus in the West
and Vedanta and Hinduism in the East. The Vedic scriptures describe essential
reality as ‘that which is inconceivable but by which all things are conceived’.
The paradox of the world is that the known emerges from the Unknown as its
intelligent source. We are thinking beings because the cosmos thinks through us.
Western dualism is at least theoretically overcome, at this deeper level.
The unity of the world and the possibility of a universal mind runs through
the quantum literature. As Capra put it:
Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows

that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest
units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated
‘basic building blocks’, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations
between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the
observer in an essential way.13
Once again the ultramodern harks back to the ancient cosmologies of the past.
This ‘basic oneness’, which is alive, creative and seemingly intelligent reminds
us of the Neoplatonic notion of anima mundi, soul of the world. That which has
anima is animated. Schrödinger in particular paid attention to the philosophi-
cal aspects of science, and to ancient and oriental concepts and religion.14 He
made several attempts to construct a ‘unified field theory’, based on the insights
of quantum mechanics, but was disheartened by Einstein’s repeated criticisms.
Schrödinger claimed to be an atheist, but only because he felt that Western
notions of a personal God were naïve. But his was the kind of atheism that clears
the way for a new or deeper conception of the divine.
Schrödinger was sympathetic to the Hindu concept of Brahman, by which
each individual’s consciousness is only a manifestation of a unitary conscious-
ness pervading the universe, which corresponds to the Hindu concept of God.15
He began to think of his work as an approach to the godhead in a metaphori-
cal sense.16 He rejected the idea that the source of consciousness should perish
with the body because he found the idea ‘distasteful’. He believed that there
was a common pool, or ancestral mind, to which consciousness returns. He did
not support the idea that individual souls were ‘saved’, or that we maintain an
individual existence after death in a plural mind, because ‘what seems to be a
plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing’.
In addition to the German, Austrian and Danish scientists who pioneered this
field, mention should be made of the singular figure in the English-speaking
world, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington. Eddington, an astrophysicist, idealist and
Quaker, self-identified as a ‘spiritual scientist’. Like many pioneering scientists of
modern times, he tried to break down the long-standing conf lict between sci-
ence and religion, and argued for a deeply rooted philosophical harmony between
scientific investigation and religious mysticism. Supporting Schrödinger, even
while explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity to English audiences, Edding-
ton postulated that the background of atoms is thought-like. In The Nature of
the Physical World, he wrote: ‘The stuff of the world is mind-stuff ’. Lest he be
misunderstood as suggesting that this mental substratum is identical with what

we conceive as ‘mind’, he said: ‘The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, some-
thing more general than our individual conscious minds’. This thought-like
background is different from yet continuous with our psychic being. He contin-
ued: ‘Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness; and
beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with
our mental nature’. In a classic understatement he said: ‘It is difficult for the
matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is
of a mental character’.17
I have only glossed the early years of quantum physics from 1900 to the late
1920s, but since then there have been major contributions, in particular from
David Bohm.18 Bohm introduced a new model of reality to account for the
relation between the many and the one. He called the deeper, unified level
the implicate order, while the world of manifest differences was termed the
explicate order. ‘In Bohm’s model, every manifest form that we perceive arises
from an implicit unified background: the implicate order’.19 The implicate
order conceals by enfolding within itself structures of the explicit physical uni-
verse. Paul Davies has acted as populariser of the territory that is often dubbed
‘God and the new physics’.20 This can be misleading, because although the
mind-stuff of the new physics has much in common, for instance, with East-
ern notions of universal mind and Western ideas of anima mundi, it has little in
common with conventional ideas of a supernatural deity. Only if ‘God’ is seen
through Eastern eyes does the new science seem to arrive at something similar
to metaphysical reality.
It is significant that during the same decades in which quantum theory was
being developed in physics, Jung was engaged in parallel developments in psy-
chology. In the essay, ‘Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and the Spiritual
Mind: A Mystical Vision of the Twenty-First Century’, Ponte and Schäfer write:
It is no accident that the development of psychology as a science took a

quantum leap after 1900, when the era of classical sciences came to an end
and the quantum era began. Jung’s view of the human psyche presupposes
a structure of the universe that is in perfect agreement with the quan-
tum universe, but impossible in Newton’s world. Jung’s assumption that an
invisible part of the world exists, which doesn’t consist of material things,
but of forms – the archetypes – is unacceptable in a Newtonian universe,
in which all phenomena depend on the properties of matter.21
Ponte and Schäfer argue that there is an uncanny similarity between the quan-
tum physics of Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger and the psychology of Jung.
In the same way that Schrödinger believed that immaterial and invisible waves
determined the visible order of the world, Jung argued that archetypes, also
formless, invisible and empty, had a powerful effect on shaping the nature of
human experience.
‘It makes sense’, say Ponte and Schäfer, in introducing Jung’s psychology to
physical scientists,
to think that all of reality is like the reality of the atoms. That is, behind the
visible surface of things there is a realm of invisible forms, which have the
potential to appear in the empirical world and act in it. The appearance of
the archetypes in our mind shows our connection with a transpersonal order.
They continue:
Jung’s archetypes and the wave function of quantum states are so similar
that we could think of the archetypes as the virtual state functions of our
mind; and we could speak of the virtual quantum wave functions as the
archetypes of physical reality.22
I have written elsewhere on the model of the wave and particle, as it can be
applied to psychology.23 In Jung’s model of personality, the self is composed of
several elements or structures, in particular a conscious and unconscious struc-
ture. In the same way that the readily observable elements of matter can be
discerned as particles as Newton described them, so the readily observable
elements of the personality, the conscious mind and ego, can be described as
having relatively solid form or continuity. However, the least discernible
structure of the psyche, the unconscious, is not solid, not predictable and not able
to be conceptualised using normal logic. The invisible forms of the unconscious,
the archetypes, can be conceptualised as waves, in some ways similar to the wave
formations in physics.
How do we know that these invisible forms exist? They have the potential
to intrude into the empirical world of human experience, shape and control our
lives and act in discernible ways in society and culture. In my experience as a
teacher, even getting to this point in the debate involves a significant suspen-
sion of disbelief on the part of students, and some are, perhaps understandably,
not prepared to engage in the ‘leap of faith’ that is required. If students can
go no further, there is little point in continuing with the debate, because all
fruitful avenues are closed. Imagination and intuition have to become activated,
otherwise the logical mind blocks everything. Certainly the developments in
physics have to do with the in-breaking of intuition into the scientific project.
Heisenberg himself said in the early 1920s, people had to ‘get into the spirit’ of
quantum mechanics before they were able to formulate it.24 This sounds mystical
and unscientific, but from a neuroscience point of view, the 1920s witnessed the
activation of the intuitive right brain in these established disciplines. Although
intuitive himself, Einstein wasn’t able to accept these developments at the time.
Einstein’s resistance to quantum mechanics was in this sense similar to Freud’s
resistance to Jungian psychology. The geniuses in physics and psychology were
unable and unwilling, let us say, to take the ‘leap of faith’ that some of their
associates were taking at the time. Those refusing to take the leap became tow-
ering figures of intellectual history, and those who took the leap were regarded
as suspect. Just as Einstein dismissed Schrödinger’s unified field theory as ‘fields
of ghosts’, so Freud dismissed Jung as a mystic who was caught up in a ‘fairytale
forest feeling’. As soon as our rationality puts up these barriers, the possibility of
connecting with the ancestral mind is lost.
As with the concept of matter in physics, we live simultaneously as waves and
particles, as psychological and physical beings. As particles, we are distinct, sepa-
rate and discrete, each with our own ‘particular’ makeup. As waves, we are not
so individual; we are similar to each other, and participate in the cosmos in pre-
determined ways. As particles, we are material beings, concerned with our mate-
rial welfare, and forced to adjust to social, familial and economic conditions. As
waves, we are capable of spiritual experience, f luid, open-ended and able to link
up (religio) with universal forces and the sacred. ‘The suprapersonal or collec-
tive unconscious’, writes Jung, ‘is like an all-pervasive, omnipresent, omniscient
spirit’. It represents ‘an extension of the man beyond himself; it means death for
his personal being and rebirth in a new dimension as literally enacted in certain
of the ancient mysteries’.25
The human being is paradoxical, in the way that matter is paradoxical. Our
socially adjusted egos are miserly and worried about scarcity; they also make us
feel lonely, separate from God’s abundance and isolated. But our deeper natures
are wave-like in their capacity for f lowing movement and self-transcendence.
This is why we are such contradictory beings, acting one moment as selfish egos
desperate to promote our interests, and in the next showing signs that we are
capable of generosity and forgiveness. The ego fights for all it can win, and finds
the soul fanciful, unrealistic and prof ligate. If it is not disciplined or reined in,
the ego will destroy the soul and try to annul its claim to a valid point of view.
As Rabbi Heschel put it: ‘We are citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a
dual allegiance’.26
This is where psychology, physics and spirituality share common ground.
‘Jung’s teaching is more than psychology’, write Ponte and Schäfer, ‘it is a form
of spirituality’. They continue,
By ‘spirituality’, we mean a view of the world that accepts the numinous

at the foundation of the cosmic order. In the same way, quantum physics is
more than physics: it is a new form of mysticism, which suggests the inter-
connectedness of all things and beings and the connection of our minds
with a cosmic mind.27
My contention is that as soon as we experience ourselves as waves, this has a

healing effect on consciousness. When this connection is restored, we overcome
ego-bound existence and feel ourselves to be part of a larger whole.
It is burdensome to be confined to the ego and its contracted world. As Freud
observed, the ego is the ‘seat of anxiety’ and when we move outside the ego our
anxiety can fall away or be reduced. This is the purpose of meditation and con-
templation, which are spiritual arts or exercises, designed to overcome the ego
and allow us to enter into the wave-like motions of being. We enter these waves
to be renewed; the soul is soothed by the ocean of being. Freud referred to
it as the oceanic feeling. Today, in a society without religious ritual, many are
prone to seek transcendence in dangerous ways, of which drugs and alcohol are
prime examples. If we cannot overcome ourselves through spiritual exercises,
we are more likely to use artificial means to achieve non-ordinary states and
release from constraint.
The extrapolation of the wave–particle paradox is mine, not Jung’s, but he was
aware of the parallels between his work and modern physics. In his ref lections
on physics and synchronicity, he wrote: ‘It is not only possible but fairly prob-
able, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same
thing’.28 Jung himself worked with the physicist and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang
Pauli in developing his theory of synchronicity, and there have been numerous
volumes written on the nexus between psychology and physics. Of these, one of
the best is the classic by Marie-Louise von Franz, Psyche and Matter.29
Parallel movements toward an animated world have been taking place in biol-
ogy. Microbiologist Lynn Margulis contributed significant research in support
of a symbiotic theory of the earth, and her science enhanced Lovelock’s idea that
the earth can be seen as Gaia.30 In A New Science of Life (1981), Oxford biolo-
gist Rupert Sheldrake argued that the cosmos seems more like a growing and
developing organism than an eternal machine. He proposed that the idea that
the universe is machine-like, governed by universal and immutable laws, is no
longer consistent with the evidence from science. Ten years later he was argu-
ing vigorously that we must recognise nature as alive, a recognition which has
profound consequences:
As soon as we allow ourselves to think of the world as alive, we recognize

that a part of us knew this all along. It is like emerging from winter into
a new spring. We can begin to reconnect our mental life with our own
direct, intuitive experiences of nature. We can participate in the spirits
of sacred places and times. We can see that we have much to learn from
traditional societies that have never lost their sense of connection with
the living world around them. We can acknowledge the animistic traditions
of our ancestors. And we can begin to develop a richer understanding of
human nature, shaped by tradition and collective memory, linked to the
earth and the heavens, related to all forms of life; and consciously open
to the creative power expressed in all evolution. We are reborn into a
living world. 31
The mystical tone and direction of Sheldrake’s work is criticised by his oppo-
nents, but to me that is a sign that he is on the right path. The mystical turn
in science is a major characteristic of our time, and a sign of the spiritual
f lourishing of the contemporary world. We have indeed emerged from winter

into a new spring.
The only point I would disagree with in Sheldrake’s affirmation of a reani-
mated world is that I don’t think the postsecular can appropriate the ‘animistic
traditions of our ancestors’ in the way he suggests. We cannot simply ‘participate
in the spirits of sacred places and times’ and assume that this ancient animation
can be ours. We can’t do this for two political and intellectual reasons. It is not
right to appropriate the early cosmologies as if we have a right to possess them,
as if they can feed our hungry spirits. This is unfair to the indigenous cultures
that have been plundered by the West for centuries; to steal their spirituality
is the final insult in a history of dispossession. Intellectually, we cannot assume
that we have easy access to the spirits of the woods and ancient places. Cartesian
dualism has to be carefully negotiated and transcended, not circumvented or
wished away.
If we are to discover a new animism, it has to be in accord with our postsecu-
lar understanding. We have much work to do to shape an animism that accords
with the leading-edge research in our disciplines. As Lawrence indicated, we
must take a detour or ‘swerve’ toward the wisdom of primordial times, but ‘this
does not mean going back on ourselves’. We must move on, even as we turn back
to recapture the sense and spirit of living in an animated world. We have made a
good start in physics, biology, depth psychology, theology and other disciplines
but we clearly have a long way to go before we can safely assume that we have
created a spiritual cosmology that we can inhabit without any ethical or con-
ceptual false moves, misdemeanours or errors. Re-enchantment with integrity
ought to be our watchword.
The philosophical assumptions underlying the new physics, biology and depth
psychology have yet to penetrate into our wider culture, and especially into the
scientific establishment. As physicist Lothar Schäfer put it, ‘when you start to
talk about non-empirical matters in an empirical science, that is embarrassing’.32
This is candidly discussed in Heisenberg’s, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution
in Modern Science. In this work he writes:
The violent reaction to the recent development of modern physics can only
be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have
started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground
would be cut from science.33
Heisenberg concedes that the implications of the new physics are far from accept-
able to the West, as the challenges it poses are unable to be assimilated by our
existing worldview. Challenging the dated Cartesian worldview becomes an
urgent imperative, in all departments of knowledge and cultural experience.
Although depth psychology and quantum physics have been in existence for over
five generations, they have not exactly been affirmed by or integrated themselves
into our intellectual culture.
What is required is a ‘paradigm change’ in the broad intellectual and educa-

tional environment of the West. This is a problem discussed by Thomas Kuhn in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.34 Paradigm change can take a long time, per-
haps centuries, before a new vision is accepted and integrated into knowledge.
Kuhn suggests that new knowledge is at first resisted by established authorities
who deride it; Einstein and Freud were not the only dissenting voices to these
developments. But the new vision can be adopted, as a theoretical proposition,
by risk-takers in the relevant disciplines. Often, Kuhn argues, if the new vision
gets enough support it is adopted as viable knowledge, leading to its establish-
ment as the ‘new normal’. However Kuhn was writing in the 1960s, and could
not have foreseen the huge role that power would play in the production and
maintenance of knowledge in our time. In this sense his work has become dated,
even though he mapped the terrain of change in a convincing and satisfying
way. But today, existing knowledges are shored up by powerful coteries, research
cultures and orthodox assumptions that are not merely going to be worn down
by time. For this reason, the establishment of a viable spiritual cosmology may
remain at the edges of culture for some time, and we should not expect change
to happen in the immediate future.
Notes
1 Anthony Stevens, The Two Million-Year-Old Self (College Station, TX: Texas A & M
Press, 1993), 3.
2 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, ed. Paul
Davies (1958; New York: Penguin Classics, 2000).
3 See Dean Radin, Entangled Minds (New York: Parview Pocket Books, 2006).
4 Niels Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (1934; Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 2.
5 Thibault Damour, Olivier Darrigol and Vincent Rivasseau, eds., Einstein, 1905–2005
(Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2006), 165.
6 Lothar Schäfer, Infinite Potential: What Quantum Physics Reveals about How We Should Live
(New York: Random House, 2013), 9.
7 Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York: Vintage, 1999), 104.
8 Schäfer, 9.
9 Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and
Eastern Mysticism (1975; Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2010), 69.
10 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo’, in Studies in Classic American
Literature (1923; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 144–6.
11 Bede Griffiths, quoted in Andrew Harvey, Teaching of the Christian Mystics (Boston: Shamb-
hala Publications, 1997), unpaginated.
12 Romans 8:22–4.
13 Capra, The Tao of Physics, 68.
14 Erwin Schrödinger, Science and the Human Temperament (1935; London: Allen & Unwin,
2008).
15 See Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (1944; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012).
16 See Walter J. Moore, A Life of Erwin Schrödinger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 4.
17 Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928; Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1981), 276–81.
1980).
19 Andrew Lohrey, The Evolution of Consciousness: A New Science (Hobart: Rishi, 2018), 56.
20 Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).
21 Diogo Valadas Ponte and Lothar Schäfer, ‘Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and the
Spiritual Mind: A Mystical Vision of the Twenty-First Century’, Behavioral Sciences, 3
(2013), 601–18, 610.
22 Ibid., 611.
23 David Tacey, ‘The Numinous as a Source of Healing’, in Gods and Diseases (London and
New York: Routledge, 2011), 220–5.
24 Fritjof Capra on Heisenberg in Capra and David Steindl-Rast, Belonging to the Universe:
Explorations on the Frontiers of Science and Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper San Fran-
cisco, 1992), 24.
25 C. G. Jung, ‘The Role of the Unconscious’ (1918), CW, 10 (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1970), par. 13.
26 Abraham Heschel, I Asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology, ed. S. H. Dresner (New
York: Crossroad Publishing, 1990), 2.
27 Ponte and Schäfer, 602.
28 C. G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, Vol. 8 (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), par. 418.
29 Marie-Louise von Franz, Psyche and Matter (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1992).
30 Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
31 Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (London: Ran-
dom House, 1990),188.
32 Lothar Schäfer, Infinite Potential: What Quantum Physics Reveals about How We Should Live
(New York: Random House, 2013).
33 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, ed. Paul
Davies (1958; New York: Penguin Classics, 2000), 167.
34 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1970).
Postsecular religion and
atheism
7
GOD AFTER GOD
An eternally recurring idea

First there is God, then there is no God, then there is. God is an idea that went
out of fashion in the West, but is now returning, albeit in a tentative form. The
new idea of God is tentative, because it has passed through the second phase
in which the classical idea of God as all-knowing, all-wise, all-powerful, was
rejected. This magisterial view of God will most likely not make a comeback.
The new image of God will not be, and cannot be, the same as the one that was
toppled by science and philosophy. ‘He’ won’t return in the same way; in fact
the pronoun ‘he’ might be dropped altogether, since we are no longer obliged to
believe that God is a man, nor ‘masculine’ as a cosmic principle. Thus the three
phases may be characterised this way: the first was certain, confident, triumpha-
list; the second was sceptical and deconstructive; the third is reconstructive but
still unsure.
Nevertheless, God will keep on returning because God is an archetypal idea,
and such ideas are eternally recurrent. David Bentley Hart puts it this way:
The human longing for God persists from age to age. A particular cultural
dispensation may succeed for a time in lulling the soul into a forgetful sleep,
but the soul will still continue to hear that timeless call that comes at once
from within and from beyond all things, even if for now it seems like only
a voice heard in a dream. And, sooner or later, the sleeper will awaken.1
Try as we might to expunge the world of God, the idea will be rediscovered.
After the collapse of the ‘highest value’, as Nietzsche called it, it is simply a mat-
ter of time before this archetypal idea expresses itself in new ways. God is said to
be dead, and soon after God is found to be alive again. The new image of God
is often not recognised by the established religions, which continue to focus on
132 Postsecular religion and atheism
the old image, often with more gusto than before due to the increased threat
of atheism. Nor is the new image of God recognised by atheists, who are too
preoccupied with and delighting in their theocide or God-killing to notice the
return of the sacred.
Apart from anything else, the idea of God has enormous implications for
our mental health and wellbeing, since the idea of the sacred Other is integral
to the human personality. The self can only come to know itself in relation
to an Other, and without a personified Absolute Other the self lacks identity,
definition and form. When God is eclipsed, the self falls victim to insecurity,
uncertainty and doubt, because there is no spiritual guarantor of its life. The self
eventually becomes narcissistic, because it lacks an objective focus for its exis-
tence, and interest and energy, in the absence of a higher goal, falls back on itself.
The idea of God stretches the self to its full capacity, draws it out of its cocoon,
and links it to the world, others and the cosmos. No other idea has such powerful
effect or consequence, not even the idea of human love or the beloved, who, in
the last analysis, is an earthly version of the Divine Lover.
Rather than resuscitate the dead God, let us agree that the old image is buried.
The old man in the sky, the bearded presence who sits on a marble throne, taking
notes of our behaviour, is an anthropomorphic image that education, science –
and theology – can no longer sustain. Only fundamentalists and sentimentalists
want to retain that antiquated image of the Most High. The image served a psy-
chological and social purpose once, but it has become irrelevant in our age, and
we need to discover the idea of God anew. Our time is one in which a certain
creative atheism is appropriate, and we need to go through an ‘atheist’ phase to
arrive at the new image of God. As Paul Tillich explains:
The protest against God, the will that there be no God, and the f light to
atheism are all genuine elements of profound religion. And only on the
basis of these elements has religion meaning and power.2
I have much in common with atheists. The ‘God’ whom atheists reject and assert
to be non-existent is an image of deity I reject as well. I was asked to debate a
well-known atheist on television, and found myself agreeing with most of what
he said. However, he spent much of his time tearing apart a straw man. The athe-
ist tears down an impossible image to ‘prove’ there is no God, whereas I seek to
challenge a defunct God-image to reveal new and creative possibilities beyond it.
As Tillich explains: ‘The game of the atheist is very easy: he is perfectly justified
in destroying such a phantom and all its ghostly qualities’.3 The atheist dissolves
an old image and thinks he has killed God, but a poet or spiritual thinker sees
through the derelict image to the vast possibilities behind it.
The conundrum of belief

I am often asked in casual conversation if I believe in God. The question puts me
in a state of confusion, sometimes bordering on panic. It is the word ‘belief ’ that
God after God 133
I don’t like, suggesting that one’s approach to God might be random, a shot in
the dark, on the same level as guesswork or opinion. Belief seems too weak when
it comes to deciding on such important matters. Secondly, the word ‘God’ is
saturated with stereotypes, prejudices, fears. What do we mean by ‘God’? Whose
God? What image of God do we have in mind? The term is vague and woolly in
its popular usage. The questioner may have a fairytale image of God as a man on
a throne, and if I say ‘yes’ to the question, it most likely has nothing to do with
the reality of God. The question about God today leads to more questions, and
not to many answers.
That is a form of social confusion known to me in awkward moments of com-
munication. But then there is the personal, internal confusion. I feel convinced of
God’s existence at an intuitive and feeling level, and have always had this sense,
even as a child. But at an intellectual or analytical level, I find God’s existence
difficult to conceive and impossible to demonstrate or argue in a way that might
prove convincing or explicable to others. If I have to side with one response or
the other, I choose the intuitive affirmation of God’s existence, rather than the
learnt doubt. But this is odd for an academic and intellectual like myself, who
should be able to give a reasonable account of God’s existence in a rational and
discursive way. Nothing that anyone says can shake my conviction of God’s exis-
tence, but by the same token, nothing that I say or argue can have much impact
on anyone else, including my students.
As I grow older, I find myself living a paradox: my intuitive apprehension
of God becomes stronger, and my intellectual comprehension of God becomes
weaker. I feel intuitive certainty and intellectual uncertainty about God. I don’t
feel like covering over the uncertainty with affirmations for the sake of appear-
ing more ‘religious’. Fundamentalism repels me, and besides, I think uncertainty
can be a source of insight and illumination. For us, it may be the main way to
approach God.
Reason and intuition

This is the postsecular world, where contradictions abound, where the rational
and non-rational often seem at odds, where confidence in our grasp of reality
is diminishing and subjective states and internal feelings are more pronounced.
There is a great tension between what the mind can grasp in its pursuit of reason,
and what intuition can grasp in its apprehension of the depth and complexity of
reality. What is intuition? We don’t know much about it. Empirical reason seems
too shallow to grasp what intuition already knows; it seems inadequate and no
longer commands our respect in the way it once did.
Intellectuals and academics often write about how we ‘invent’ God,4 but
not enough attention is paid to how the mind intuits God. I would suggest
that without a developed intuitive function, God is not a reality that can be
thought with depth or conviction. It is not just ‘faith’ that is needed, but intuition
is the psychological function that allows us to make sense of God. Since our
educational system is not generally aware of intuition, nor encouraging of it, it
is little wonder that most university courses lead directly to atheism – not as a
rite of passage into a new way of comprehending God, but as an end in itself. In
my experience, God presents itself to consciousness via the pathway of intuition,
and if intuition is discouraged or not understood, God cannot impress itself on
our lives. God is a presence ready to be discovered by intuition, not an idea to be
invented by the intellect.
Perhaps the meaning of intuition is to discern what the intellect cannot
apprehend. That is why intellectuals often write bizarre condemnations of God,
because they lack the mental equipment to allow God to impress itself on their
consciousness. Without the experience of God through faith and/or intuition, the
idea of God lacks all conviction and can only be rejected. Reason has limitations,
and the postsecular condition is in part a recognition of this fact and a mourning
of the loss of the idealisation of rationality. With this disillusionment has arisen
increased respect for the non-rational aspects of our experience, and in some
quarters a higher regard for intuition. In philosophy and psychology there is the
hope that reason can be expanded to include elements and functions of mind that
are not merely rational or deductive.5 Reason might be able to be transformed,
so that it includes more functions of consciousness. Perhaps it can work together
with intuition to build a new body of knowledge that could lead us closer to truth.
We cannot afford to abandon reason, since it has served us well in the devel-
opment of science, technology and culture. Reason has been our guiding light
in the establishment of civilised morality and humane institutions. To expand
reason, rather than abandon it, is the best option. We need to bring reason into
a new relation with the mysterious depths of reality, and I would argue one of
the best ways to do this is through a revitalisation of story and myth. We need to
achieve a post-rational state that can lead us beyond the confines of mind, and
metaphor and symbol can facilitate this shift. Our consciousness has been shaped
by science and rationality, and we need more input from the arts and humanities,
which are based on metaphors, not facts. In drowning out the metaphorical, we
have drowned out God, and reduced the idea of God to a near absurdity. God
has become a laughingstock in some circles.
I have been speaking of reason as a function of consciousness. In a differ-
ent age, religion believed it had already dealt with the question of reason. In
the past, the churches said, ‘Do not question faith, do not try to understand
it with the mind, just believe it. It has its own logic, its own reason’. This
was a popularised version of the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, who felt that faith
was rational, and belief in God was a logical and rational position. But the
reason to which religion and the late medieval Aquinas appealed was a reason
generated in theology and based on revelation and scripture. This does not
work for us, because the reason of religion is no longer understood by the
reasoning of the world. Religion’s reason looks irrational to modern reason,
and that is why we need to expand our consciousness to include intuition as
a primary function.
Intuition is not just imagining things that do not exist, or fantasising about
desirable illusions. It is, in Derrida’s phrase, the art of discerning what is ‘always
God after God 135
already’ there. Intuition sees through borders and boundaries, and finds what the
intellect fails to see. Because the intellect fails to see certain realities, it assumes
they do not exist and are invented by the imagination. In the past, ‘faith’ was
the only word that religion had at its disposal, and it was overused to the point
where the intellect became tired of it. The exhortation to acquire faith was seen
as a way of shutting down the mind and making people submissive and dumb.
Depth psychology avoided this impasse by championing intuition as that faculty
of mind that allows us to ‘see’ what remains otherwise unconscious. For Jung,
intuition allows us to see beyond appearances and discern what is close to us but
beyond the range of reason. Today, religion needs the resources of intuition,
which in neuroscience is seen as the province of the so-called right hemisphere
of the brain.6 Left brain rationality has escalated to such an extent that the intu-
ition of the right brain is now relegated to make-believe. With this manoeuvre,
religion can hardly stand a chance against the assault of the world.
Religion comes across to many adults as a system of belief for children. Young
adults often discard religion and God because these beliefs are felt to belong to
the world of early childhood, with its tales and illusions. This is a problem which
has been explored by Miller Newton:
Over and over again, I find that young adults leave religion and religious
thinking, because they have outgrown the idea of God that might have
been conveyed to them as children, and a new, credible image of God has
not been offered to them by society or by church. They leave God, because
no image or concept of God seems credible, and they feel obliged, as indeed
they must, to slough off the naïve image of God that they held as children.7
Growing up in our world has almost become synonymous with throwing out
God, and religion can seemingly offer no resistance. It asks us to cling to a child-
like faith. But where, today, is the religion for adults? Who is going to develop
this new religious awareness? Religion needs to reinvent itself at the dawn of
every era, and the reinvention that might respond to our present age does not
seem to have arrived yet. Religion has lagged far behind the cultural, intellectual
and scientific developments in other fields.
The reasoning of the world and science is based on experience. If religion
could appeal directly to experience of a different kind, the intuitive experi-
ence of divine presence, a better future would be assured for the idea of God.
If religion could show that its appeal to transcendence affects our being, and
is not just a matter of belief but of existence, a new chapter might begin in the
relevance of religion. The problem is how to develop methods that connect
people to the depths of their lives, and in this regard we would need to turn
to the mystical traditions and their understanding of meditation, contempla-
tion and other intuitive arts. If such methods could become available to many,
a bridge could be built between experience and God. In Hinduism, God or
Brahma is accessible to people through the inner sanctum of the Atman, the
spiritual centre of the person. Spiritual practice that brings us close to the
Atman, or brings it close to us, is an existential spirituality that is based on

experience and human grounding.
To facilitate this spirituality, we need to read scripture in a different way. Not
as a series of supernatural events that happened to special people in the distant
past, but as a series of symbolic events that happen to all people at all times. All
the scriptures and religious narratives need to be interpreted at an existential,
human level, and here again intuition is needed to achieve this task. If the mind
reads scripture as a series of miraculous events that happened to a select few,
the result is that the modern person becomes alienated and cannot help but see
these narratives as unbelievable. If intuition is able to find the symbolic code that
makes the stories relevant to our experience, then we value them as guideposts
and signs for our spiritual journeys. This is a challenge I took up in a recent
work,8 and this is not the occasion to repeat what I have said elsewhere.
Suffice it to say here that if we explore God and scripture with intuition,
we stop reading them literally and view them symbolically. At this level, they
make great sense, and the mind is no longer able to reduce them to non-
sense. This intuitive dimension is found in the mental activity that the Greeks
referred to as mythos; that is, the ability to apprehend spiritual reality through
myth and story. Mythos was more highly valued in the past than it is today,
because it was considered that spiritual reality could not be known directly,
but indirectly, through narrative and poetic image. Myth and symbol are vital
as they enable us to build a relationship with the sacred, not merely entertain
it as an intellectual idea. Today myths are downgraded as lies or distortions,
but in the past it was understood that their purpose was to reveal deeper levels
of reality. Read literally the myths are seen as spectacular miracles, revered by
some believers, but read symbolically myths are seen as containers of wisdom
and guidance for spirit.
When we confine ourselves to literal readings of God and scripture, both
are dismissed by the critical intellect as fairy stories. Literalism, as I call it, has
done great damage to the religious project, and reduced the sources of spiritual
wisdom to constructions of fantasy. Intuition sees through the literal appearance
of sacred stories to their spiritual content, which is true for us today and for all
time. Intuition reads the narratives as experiences of the spirit and soul. Once
this is achieved, the credibility of religion is restored and the treasures of the past
become accessible again to modern consciousness. This redemptive impulse is
driving the postsecular enterprise.
The mystery of God

Maurice Friedman wrote of the eclipse of God and said:
In an age in which ‘God is dead’, the truly religious person sets forth across
the God-deprived reality to a new meeting with the nameless God and on
his way destroys the images that no longer do justice to God.9
God after God 137
Clinging to the defunct, lifeless images is of little use; it perpetuates the agonis-
ing state of affairs in our spiritually empty time. God must become completely
unknown, so that ‘he’ might become known. God must become nameless, so
that we can move beyond the clichés that block our perception of God’s reality.
The signifier ‘God’ is a form of shorthand, a sign that is meant to stand for
something vast, infinite and unknowable. The great theological minds of the
Western tradition were thinking metaphorically about God when they described
God’s nature. The Trinity is a case in point, as William Indick writes:
For the theologian, writing in the library of his secluded monastery or uni-
versity, the Trinity was a metaphor for the ultimate unknowability of God.
To the people, however, the Trinity represented nothing short of three
divine figures – all with personal personalities – real beings who could all
be related to individually.10
The ordinary believer conceived of God’s nature through a literal lens, because
he or she could not aspire to the heights of philosophical abstraction. Undoubt-
edly, the literal view of God and Trinity was encouraged by clergy who felt that
this was a way in which people could apprehend God. The churches unwittingly
conspired in a form of thinking about God that would ultimately end in disaster.
The name ‘God’ is not the proper noun of something or someone known.
When we use this name, we should be aware that we are casting our voices
into mystery. This mystery has presence and is not empty, but our finite minds
cannot apprehend the infinite. The mistakes we have made in the past about
God have brought the entire religious project into disrepute, so that biologist
Richard Dawkins can write The God Delusion to widespread acclaim.11 If God is
now an embarrassment to the learnt intellect, this is something we have brought
on ourselves. It was Nietzsche who insisted that we have murdered God, and one
can understand his argument when we consider how we have turned this infinite
reality into something finite and contracted. We continue to murder God, all
the time, in the way we talk about God and whenever we assume that an image we
have conjured up is synonymous with reality.
David Hay has conducted empirical research on this topic at the Alistair
Hardy Religious Experience Research Unit at Oxford University. He has been
involved in surveying the general public on religious questions, and found that
many give an initially negative response to the question: ‘Do you believe in
God?’ ‘No’, they often say, ‘I cannot believe’. However, upon ref lection, there
is often a second or follow-up thought, ‘But there is something there’. Professor
Hay has written Something There,12 based on the phrase that many are using. The
first response is typically one of denial, as people express dissatisfaction with the
term ‘God’. But this does not mean that faith in this reality has been lost. On the
contrary, many intuit a God beyond the terms that once pointed to this reality.
We live in extraordinary times. It is a time in which nothing is as it seems, and
in which a great deal of change is happening below the surface. Those who cherish
an established image of God are likely to lose it, and those who have no concep-
tions about God are likely to be besieged by intuitions of a divine presence. The
familiar image of God is being cast aside as an artefact of cultural construction,
rather than as an image that is transparent to divine reality. We are made aware
of the inadequacy of our language, and its inability to convey spiritual meaning.
This is the right moment to bring negative theology into the discussion.
Many people do not know what negative theology is, but for hundreds of years
it existed as a kind of parallel sub-stream to the mainline positive theology that
has governed the churches. Along with other religious thinkers in the world
today, I have gained a great deal of understanding from the tradition known as
negative theology, or more correctly the via negativa. It is also called apophatic
theology, from the Greek apophasis, meaning ‘not saying’ or ‘not speaking’. This
is contrasted with kataphatic theology, which is a theology that uses ‘positive’
terminology to describe God. Kataphatic theologians often say that God has
been fully revealed in the person of Jesus, and thus we have no need to assume
that God is unknown to us. Apophatic theology is found in Eastern Orthodox
tradition and has a long and venerable history in Western mysticism. Western
churches have been suspicious of it, as they suspect it undermines revelation and
is agnostic (literally, ‘not knowing’).
However, the apophatic mystic is convinced of a divine reality, but he or she
says we do not know who or what God is. Apophasis does not present God as a
literal person. In response, some say: How can we love and form bonds with an
abstract mystery? There is good sense to this, because to some extent we expe-
rience God as a ‘person’ when we form a personal relationship with God, and
when God relates to us at a personal level. The apophatic has no problem with
‘God as person’ so long as this is understood as a metaphor; an effect, let us say,
of our growing intimacy with the mystery.
The apophatic is not sentimental about God as father, but philosophical, as
in John Scotus Erigena: ‘We do not know what God is. God Himself does not
know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He
transcends being [or existence]’.13 Paul Tillich, too, became fascinated by nega-
tive theology because he saw in it a way to avoid the atheistic denunciations of
religion. Tillich deliberately sounded like an atheist to beat atheism at its own
game: ‘God does not exist. He is Being itself beyond essence and existence.
Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him’.14 But long before Tillich,
the philosopher Spinoza said: ‘If God cannot be separated from anything else, it
is impossible to say that “he” exists in any ordinary sense’.15 Tillich went on to
assert that, ‘It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it. God
is being-itself, not a being’.16
There was considerable religious outrage at these statements. But Tillich
realised that the term ‘God’ had become so heavily discounted that a radical
approach to God was called for. Tillich’s comments were not new, however,
they were borrowed from philosophers such as Hegel and Heidegger. Not to be
deterred by the outrage, Tillich went on to explain: ‘God’, he said, ‘is not just a
thing, but the power of Being in which every being participates’.17 This opened
God after God 139
up a new horizon of thought. God is not a ‘being’, but Being itself, in which
every being participates. This has inspired many to ref lect on God in a new way.
From inside out

Jung argued that we need to experience God as the ground of our psychic exis-
tence, and then we might find a new way into religious faith. Like Tillich after
him, he felt many of us hold infantile images of God that need to be discarded:
‘A mind that is still childish thinks of the gods as metaphysical entities in their
own right, or else regards them as playful or superstitious inventions’.18 Such
images have to be abandoned so that faith can move toward the real. Jung felt
that when we attack the conventional image of God, we may be attacking an idol
that stands in the way of genuine faith. The old supernatural God had become
derelict and we need to enliven the idea of God by finding him deep within
ourselves. Here the words of St Augustine may prove useful for our present pur-
poses: ‘You, O God, are deeper in me than I am in me’.19
Ours is a time of the death and rebirth of God, and a prophetic voice who
speaks to our preoccupation is the late medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, who
wrote: ‘In order to find God, you first have to lose him’.20 This epigrammatic
axiom sums up the transition from the modern atheistic to the postsecular phase.
Atheism is an important step in the recovery of God, as long as it is not indulged
as an end in itself. If atheism becomes a fixed position or ideology, it will prevent
the new God from being released into life and consciousness. Jung took many of
his cues from Eckhart, especially the idea that it is necessary to lose God as an
object-deity in order to discover God at the centre of the human soul.
Unfortunately, this is an idea of Jung’s that has fuelled much delusion and
nonsense in the New Age movement. Some people imagine they are God and
their interior lives are divine. This is not what Jung or Eckhart meant, quite
obviously. They meant that God can be encountered through human interior-
ity and soulful contemplation – which is a far cry from the hubristic assertion
that we are God. The way to God is through the interior soul, not through an
externalised pursuit of images and idols. Images can be used in this search, but
not turned into idols. They have to be regarded as sacred metaphors which point
beyond themselves to a higher or transcendental reality.
If, as Augustine suggests, God is deeper in us than we are in ourselves, this
offers a promising scenario for the rebirth of God. The fact is that we cannot
afford to be removed from God, if God is the core of our psychic and spiritual
lives. If God can no longer be known as a distant, external object, then let
us re-experience God as an intimate, internal presence. The idea of God as
the deep core of our lives is perhaps no more rational than the idea of God as
a Pantocrator in heaven. It is simply a more psychological idea, and one that
accords with the psychological temper of our times. The idea of an ‘internal
reality’ is a new form of mythology, but at present it is one in which we can
still believe, because the idea of interiority is alive for us, and filled with
expectation and hope.
The idea of a God within is a new myth and should be recognised as myth
in the best sense. The idea of a God within is what Kant would call a regulatory
ideal. It enables us to connect with God, even if the traditional image remains
unbelievable. Imagination and vision are needed to accomplish this work of inte-
riorisation, which is nothing other than the mystical revisioning of God as the
living centre of our lives.
However, once we have managed to experience God in this way, as an inside
reality, we need to reactivate our imagination for a second task. God cannot be
confined to our inner world, but is far greater than it. God may be first accessed as
an internal force, and that might be the first stage in our reconnection. God can-
not be imprisoned within the walls of our subjectivity because God is at the heart
of all things. God belongs to all beings and creation. Everything has its being in
God, which is the meaning of the Pauline concept of all in God. Therefore, to
psychologise God as interior reality may be a necessary first step for our age, but
if we stay within these confines we are injuring the concept of God by making
it too narrow. The postsecular vision of God ought not to end up producing a
narcissistic relation to the divine.
From the doorway of interior experience we have to move back into the
world and return God to the universe and all things. The internal connection is
necessary for immediacy and then we must allow the majesty and infinity of God
to assert itself. But for postsecular man and woman, the way toward this cosmic
awareness of God is paradoxically through the ‘smaller infinity’ of the psyche.
The pathway to God is narrow and intimate, and from these humble beginnings,
a resacralisation of the world is possible.
As we move from one image of God to another, we are exchanging stories.
We can never get ‘beyond’ story, because God cannot be known directly. Images
die, but the sacred never dies; it only changes shape. The spirit wants to take form
and assume image and symbol, because that is the thrust of the spirit, toward
embodiment and incarnation. The spirit loves to assume forms, but it unravels
them when they no longer serve their purpose of transporting consciousness to
the transcendent. This is a tense and awkward situation, where a great deal of
hurt and pain can take place. But such pain can be avoided and overcome by
awareness. The person who understands that religious systems are provisional is
in a better condition than the person who is caught in absolutist thinking.
I am true to my university education, which points unmistakably to the death
of God. I agree with the major intellects of the modern era that the idea of a God
‘out there’, as an ‘object’ or ‘person’ who competes with other objects for space
in the world, is a ‘projection’ of human wishes and desires (Feuerbach), a prod-
uct of ‘word magic’ (Nietzsche), an ‘illusion’ of infantile thinking (Freud) and a
superstitious construction (Marx). As Ken Wilber wrote:
The metaphysics of the religious traditions has been thoroughly trashed by

both modernist and postmodernist epistemologies. There has as yet arisen
nothing compelling to take their place.21
God after God 141
The ‘metaphysical’ God is dead, as announced by Italian philosopher Gianni

Vattimo:
We can no longer think of [God] as an object that is given before the eyes
of reason. Nietzsche’s God dies when the faithful, in order to respect his
command not to lie, unmask him as a lie that can no longer be maintained
and is no longer necessary.22
The faithful are forced to unmask the old God as a lie. It becomes an intellectual
duty to expose the fraud of the past. Not to do so is to betray the spirit of the
time, and yet the spirit of the future seems to be pointing in another direction.
The relativity of sacred images

The sacred is not synonymous with our images of the holy, and to pretend that
our images are divine is idolatry rather than religion. Religions hate to be
told by philosophers and poets that their images are relative, because religions
tend toward absolutism in a bid to make their revelations secure. Perhaps in this
regard postmodern philosophers such as Eugenio Trias are right to differentiate
between the holy and the sacred:
The holy refers to what is most profound and sublime; what cannot be
touched, even indirectly, by testimony (nor ‘looked upon’). The sacred,
by contrast, can be touched: it can be used, and in this way may even be
destroyed or consumed.23
In my language, the holy is the Absolute Other, while the sacred represents our
images of the Other, which we like to believe are absolute but which come and
go with changes in culture.
Our relationship with the sacred makes God known and visible, and this
is a major task of religion, to make known to ourselves, each other, and the
community, the covenant between ourselves and God. We have a moral and
civic responsibility to make the sacred known, and to publicly acknowledge the
sacred as the basis of community and the core of our individual lives. But
the process of making known can backfire, since religion can lose touch with
the mystery it seeks to serve. When religion serves itself, rather than mystery,
it ceases to be spiritually and socially effective, and disappears into institutional
self-concern, where some of our churches are caught, unable to move forward
into spiritual renewal.
We live in a mournful time of the passing of the gods, and mourning is
what the churches should be doing, instead of insisting on songs of praise and
attitudes of celebration and jubilation, which are forms of denial and resistance.
I find Western churches sad in their inability to mourn, and their insistence
on upbeat and jubilant services which f ly in the face of the world’s spiritual
suffering, gesturing toward a salvation that scripture proclaims, but hardly any
of us feel. If religion knew how to suffer consciously, then we might discover,
in and through our suffering, the spirit that could identify and usher in the new
image of God.
The transition from the old God who has passed to the God who is coming
to birth has much to do with a shift in our levels of awareness. As Jung put it,
it involves a shift from magical thinking about a supernatural God, to imagi-
native thinking about a God who is at home in the natural order and the core
of the real.24 As soon as the supernatural God collapses, some think God has
disappeared, whereas it is our image of God that has disintegrated due to its
inadequacy.
Frequently asked questions

For years I taught a course on contemporary spirituality and tried to introduce
the question of God in a balanced and fair-minded way. This was a difficult
balancing act for me, as some of the students were strongly religious and acutely
sensitive to any critical attitude, while others – the vast majority – were secular
or atheist and thought any discussion of God was antique and fanciful. A recur-
ring question related to the nature of God’s existence:
In what sense does God exist? Does spirit really exist in some form? Do
God and spirit have being or essence? In what way can we imagine their
existence?
Students struggled with these questions, aware that God can no longer be per-
ceived through the lens of a ‘person’ in ‘heaven’. Heavenism is no longer a myth
that appeals to our sensibility. New myths that bring the sense of God to life are
needed, and old ideas that dull our imaginations have to be discarded. Imagina-
tion is important at this point, because if we cannot imagine God into existence
then it may not exist for us at all.
Following an old saying from medieval times, I often responded to student
questions by saying, ‘God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose
circumference is nowhere’. Or using the language of the new physics I found
myself saying God is the implicate order of the explicate universe.25 Or using
the language of philosophy I would say God is the ground of being. A lecturer
who wants to affirm faith but not make it artificially bolstered by belief requires
a powerful metaphor that helps students imagine the invisible. We have to try
to conceptualise that which is irrepresentable but nonetheless real. Education
has to work to overcome the prejudice that something can only be real if it has
proportion and measurement. The role of education is to keep the imagination
alive, but not pretend that our metaphors are anything more than metaphors that
point to the unknown.
God after God 143
The educator must not instil in students a false sense of ‘reality’, and he or
she must be prepared to insist on the symbolic nature of all religious statements.
Typically, students asked this kind of question:
Are the gods, in any of the mythologies or religions, objectively real?
My first answer will be, ‘no’, they are symbolic constructions of the human
mind. There are no external deities in time and space. They are creations of his-
tory, culture and consciousness. As Napoleon Bonaparte announced to his audi-
ence, ‘All religions have been made by men’. They form part of the mythological
field of a living civilisation.
Sometimes this constructivist line of reasoning will inspire the student to
adopt a sceptical attitude. Students do not want to appear naïve or uninformed,
and their next question might announce that they are on their way to materialism:
Well, then, are the gods entirely invented by human beings, having no
relation at all to ultimate reality?
Here the student is about to plunge into the depths of nihilism. This is not
Goethe’s nothing from which the All may grow, but the common experience of
nothing, meaning the absence of meaning. It is alarming how quickly students
move from a questioning attitude to a position of nihilism. Perhaps this is why
churches have not encouraged such questioning in the past, because they were
too aware that questioning hovered at the edge of abnegation. The role of the
educator is to prevent a slide into nothingness, and to err on the side of mystery
or Keats’ negative capability.
For various pedagogical and emotional reasons, my response to the question,
‘Are the gods entirely invented?’ has to be ‘no’. Students can find this surprising.
After all, I have said that the gods are not ‘real’ in any literal or verifiable sense.
Here we have to hold fast to the power of imagination, and its ability to get us
out of a logical jam, a rational fix. Because at this point logic and rationality
might lead us directly into a sense of emptiness. Keeping the imagination alive,
and allowing the imagination to act as the handmaiden of spirit, is an impor-
tant tool in the repertoire of the educator. As Hans-Georg Gadamer said in his
religious dialogue with Derrida: ‘The surprising feature is that after all the strip-
ping away there is something rather than nothing’.26 Something endures, there is
something there, but we cannot know it in any direct way.
A ‘yes’ to the question ‘are the gods invented?’ would generate cynicism in the
class and stif le imagination. I know many colleagues would argue the reverse:
better they know the truth that there is nothing beyond the human, rather than
cling to illusions. But the gods are not entirely inventions of the mind and can-
not be reduced to social fabrication. They are symbolic forms, which means they
are ‘constructed’ by human culture, but they are responses to something real.
They are our creations in one sense, but we create them only in response to
the promptings given to us. If we invent them, it is because they have created us.
The paradox is that Feuerbach is right when he says we create the gods based on
the conditions of culture, and Genesis is right when it has the gods say, ‘Let Us
make man in Our image, after Our likeness’.27
Derrida calls the mythological forms and figures of religions responses to the
impossible.28 Derrida is widely regarded as a nihilist and materialist, but this is
a misreading of his work. As I will explore in the following chapter, his work
is a form of negative theology. One wonders how the academic image of Der-
rida could have been so wide of the mark. It could be that negative theology
was unknown to academics who read Derrida, and they saw his work as anti-
religious. But his writing is always potentially mystical, hinting at the realities
beyond language. In his view we cannot know what constitutes ultimate reality,
but culture and imagination should try to encompass it. Culture should not be
defeated by not-knowing, but should be inspired to create ever-new images of
the divine. Metaphors of the divine are all we have, and we ought not to treat
them without reverence. The real Derrida has yet to be explored by the decon-
structive industry based on his work.
Jung would say that religious symbols are ‘the best possible expressions of
things as yet unknown’.29 They are our best chance at relating to that which is
beyond time and space. For him, as for Derrida, religious symbols interpret real-
ity but do not describe it. The image of a god is an amalgam of human construction
and inspiration. Although some of the ideas of religion may seem ‘dead’ to us,
we must not forget that beneath the dead layers there can be living substances.
Hence any work of deconstruction has to be conducted with an attitude that
is receptive to the potential coming-to-life of a religious symbol that has been
declared null and void. There is a great deal of similarity between Jung and
Derrida, yet rarely are their names mentioned in the same context. Unfortunate
prejudices grew up around Jung, and misleading clichés grew up around Derrida,
but both are working in the field of religion after religion, or God after God.
The role of imagination and art

When the poet Matthew Arnold announced that the tide was out in the sea of
faith, religious authorities chose to ignore him. The traditions wondered by what
authority poets and philosophers spoke. Arnold said that the churches in his time,
the mid-nineteenth century, were in denial of his predictions that religion was
facing crisis and breakdown.30 He said the traditional concept of God would not
outlast the century, and there would be widespread religious doubt, disbelief and
confusion. Arnold was styled an atheist, troublemaker and heretic, but history
proved him right. Poets and philosophers may not say what the traditions want
to hear, but they listen to the spirit of the time in ways that produce prophetic
utterances and accurate predictions.
God after God 145
Religion needs to listen intently to poets and artists because they see the
future in ways that institutions cannot. Ultimately, religion must rely on the
poetic imagination and arts, because these are the vehicles in which ‘eternal’
truth becomes revived and made relevant to the times. Poets and philosophers
fashion the new image of God, and by so doing renew the tradition and give it
hope and meaning. The arts not only serve aesthetic and expressive needs, but
possess a spiritual function. They have the capacity to redeem the official image
of God of its tiredness and obsolescence.
Although traditionalists fear the arts will create a new religion or alternative
faith, one role of the artist is not to invent a new religion, but to award new
life to tradition. Paradoxically, it is the old that waits to be reborn in the new,
and paradox is characteristic of the realm of the spirit. Hence in our time, the
‘new’ image of God is perhaps not so new after all, but the ‘old’ or original God
is made new through the efforts of contemporary culture. It is old and new
simultaneously, and although religion makes the spirit feel old, the arts make it
feel new.
This view of the role of the arts is close to what Jewish culture refers to as
midrash, namely, the ‘making new’ of tradition, and redeeming a tradition of its
weariness by linking it to contemporary awareness. Jewish culture seems to place
much emphasis on this function in theology, but Christian culture has no obvi-
ous equivalent to midrash. Morale-boosting efforts to bolster the old are familiar
in Christianity, but evangelical strategies seek revival rather renewal. Inspired
artists and philosophers who seek to bring the new image of God to birth are
likely to be condemned as traitors or heretics, rather than revered as prophets.
The Christian tradition is wedded to form, and its focus is mainly on preserving
the past rather than preparing for the future.
Reshaping the highest value

The new image of God is being developed by the arts, philosophy and theology,
but we can make some preliminary statements about it. God is no longer seen as
a ‘person’ who ‘creates’ the world like a master craftsman. In the early depictions
of God in the natural sciences, God was the designer of a clockwork universe,
who first set the clock in motion and then deserted the scene (deus absconditus).
The emphasis in recent thought is not on God as an object or thing, but God as
a process, force or dynamism. These ideas began with the mathematical philoso-
phy of A. N. Whitehead and his process thought, which subsequently gave rise
to process theology. But from Einstein, Jung and Pauli we developed the concept
of reality as a dynamic and purposive process, and the new image of God will be
closer to Einsteinian physics, and its concepts of relativity, than it will be to the
physics of Newton or premodern science.
The God of old-style religion is remote, detached, interventionist and supernat-
ural. The God of the new cosmology, however, is intimate, intense and immanent.
This is not to say that the new God is not transcendent, but its transcendence is
imagined differently, not through miracles and wonders, but through the radical
presence of divine being. God is not conceived as an extrinsic or outside super-
reality, but as a mystery at the core of reality. In other words, transcendence is not
imagined literally as another world, a world above this one, but a deeper dimen-
sion of the real that ‘transcends’ normal perception. For the new cosmology, God
is not a supernormal being known only to prophets and saints, but revealed to all
and everyone who cares to look deeply enough, to listen deeply enough and feel
deeply enough.
The new God is everywhere and in all things, or to be more precise, all
things are in God ( pan-en-theism). While ‘pantheism’ reduces God to the shape
and size of material things, panentheism allows for the transcendental dimension
by recognising that God is greater than things, while being present in them.
Postsecular spirituality is not tortured by questions about the existence of God,
or proofs of God’s existence, as traditional theology and metaphysics often were.
The new vision does not ask for proofs, because the proof is in the experience
itself. Old-style religion is plagued by doubts about God’s existence, because it
realises that its conceptions are difficult to uphold. It tries to bury its doubts in
repeated assurances, dogmas, creeds and articles of faith. When religion is based
on belief, rather than experience, it has to summon all manner of props and bul-
warks to keep the sense of the holy alive.
God as radical ordinary presence

Postsecular spirituality does not require bolstering and support, creedal assur-
ance or incantatory magic. It is enough for it to realise that there is mystery and
presence in the ordinary world. The world itself is revelatory of God’s presence,
so that formal rituals, liturgies and chants become less important in developing
and maintaining a compelling sense of the sacred. Reality does not have to be
broken by ritual to reveal the sacred, and time does not have to be suspended to
admit the eternal. Rather, time contains the eternal as a dimension of itself, and
reality is felt to be part of the sacred, which gives a meaningful or ritual dimen-
sion to all aspects of human experience. But God reveals itself to us not only in
scripture, creation and tradition (the official sources of revelation), but also in the
minor revelations of everyday life, in our encounter with the known, which is
made mysterious and wonderful when we see the known as an analogy for the
unknown, that is, as symbolic and sacramental.
We see one thing and comprehend another, or we see a sacred reality as we
are perceiving an earthly or ordinary thing. Spirituality gives us double vision,
and at first we think we are seeing things, or making things up. But the echo
or shadow of the real is in fact the sacred drama itself, which stands behind the
real and acts as its guarantor, its benefactor, its source and support. In the future,
theology will need to develop into theopoesis, that is, a recognition of the living
God and the mystery of spirit at the very core of our universe. God speaks to
God after God 147
us analogically, that is, by saying one thing through the agency of another, and
often through something simple and ordinary.
We cannot know the Unknown God directly, for God is not a thing, idol or
figure in space, but something greater than our thought can apprehend. God is
radically present with us and closer even than our own breath, a presence that is
nearer to us than is comfortable to admit. It is apparent that the old images of God
had to be destroyed so that the deeper reality of God could be experienced. Jung
often said that it is God itself who destroys the old images, because they obscure
rather than reveal the radical ordinary presence of God. In his boyhood vision of
the collapsing cathedral of Basel, Jung bore witness to the terrible spectre of God
destroying his place of worship.31 This was a vision Jung tried to suppress, because
he knew this would turn his world upside down, as a child living in the manse of
his minister father. But after three days of trying to suppress the vision, it came in
upon him with the force of a revelation. Above all, this vision impressed on Jung
the difference between form and spirit, and made him mindful that the spirit is
breaking out of old forms and demanding new responses from humanity.
If God has fallen out of the heavens and down to earth, this turns everything
upside down, because the old world order has been irrevocably damaged. There
can be no more division between spirit and earth, no more rivalry between f lesh
and holiness, because spirit is ‘at home’ on earth and not opposed to it. This
foreshadows a radical shift in the moral compass. Spirit can no more claim supe-
riority over the body, nor can the masculine claim superiority over the feminine.
Holiness is spread out over the entirety of the universe because spirit emerges
from matter and does not reign over it like an arrogant lord. All this dualism
of the past collapses when God is revealed as the matrix from which all things
emerge. Earth, matter and bodies are nestled in spirit and this non-duality will
set us on an entirely new, intensely ecological spiritual path. Panentheism is the
key to the new image of God, and it will revolutionise our relationship to our
bodies, the earth and the natural world.
This shift in the image of God was first announced by Teilhard de Chardin. He
was the visionary theologian and natural scientist who saw that tradition had been
mistaken about the nature of God, the nature of transcendence and the nature of
nature. In his remarkable text, Toward the Future, Chardin announced that God
is not supernatural but hyper-natural, or ultra-natural: ‘God is of greater depth
than us’.32 Teilhard says that the world is not God and God is not the world, yet
God is the unlimited depth of love of all that is, a love that overf lows into new
life. In her inspiring book, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, Franciscan sister
Ilia Delio, a student of Teilhard, writes: ‘God is not the supernatural being above
but the supranatural center of everything that exists’.33
God is not divine substance governing creation but the radical subject
of everything that exists, the depth and wholeness of nature itself that
reveals itself in its hiddenness. The background of everything that exists
is another existence.34
This redefinition of God is what the religious world has been waiting for, with-
out knowing it. This new image of God gives vitality to God, and links God
with developments in the sciences, especially biology, physics and ecology. Teil-
hard was himself a scientist, a palaeontologist and geologist, who could see that
the conf lict between science and religion was false and had to stop. It was main-
tained by false understandings about the nature of God. God as triumphalist cre-
ator had to be abandoned for a humbler image of God as the suffering centre of
all creation. For all his efforts, Teilhard’s writings were censored by the Catholic
Church during his lifetime. But this indicates once more that prophetic voices in
the religious life are not perceived as such by the institutions, which only see the
trouble and disturbance that new ideas bring to the status quo.
Another major figure, the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, was a contributor to
what I am calling a postsecular image of God. Merleau-Ponty wrote:
God is not above us but beneath us – meaning that we do not find him as a
suprasensible idea, but as another ourself which dwells in and authenticates
our darkness.35
‘God is not . . . , but . . . ’ is a signature formula of the postsecular sacred. There

has to be a negation of the past, then there is an affirmation, an alternative sug-
gestion, a leap of creative intuition that accords with our experience and the
findings of science and philosophy. In the postsecular world, we take old ideas
and give them a new twist, as in Merleau-Ponty’s reworking of the idea of tran-
scendence: ‘Transcendence no longer hangs over man; he becomes, strangely,
its privileged bearer’.36 The other hallmark of the postsecular God is that the
triumphalist aspect has been sacrificed, and this is a constant theme in all the
postsecular writings I have been reviewing: ‘There is a sort of impotence of God
without us, and Christ attests that God would not be fully God without becom-
ing fully man’.37
This is a God we can embrace and uphold without embarrassment. This hum-
ble, ultra-natural God, who needs humanity to become fully God, a co-creator
of the universe, the driving force behind consciousness and evolution, is the God
who accords with contemporary science and philosophy. God as radical ordinary
presence gives new depth and luminosity to everyday experience. With the post-
secular sacred, we no longer wallow in the f latlands of the mundane. It is the
fullness and abundance of God that reveals itself to a mature spiritual awareness.
This God is not apparent to ordinary perception but only to a carefully honed
and developed intuition. As Delio put it, this God ‘reveals itself in its hiddenness’.
God is hidden in plain sight; paradoxically, it is hidden but easily found.
Spirituality notices God, whereas other kinds of perception see surfaces,
literal forms or the absence of forms. William Blake declared that the poetic
task is to melt away apparent surfaces, displaying the infinite which is hidden
behind it. God is available to poetic insight, he said, but not to the ordinary
channels of perception. Blake also said that if the doors of perception were
God after God 149
cleansed, everything would appear infinite. 38 The great poets have always
argued that if the opacity is cleansed from our perception, the living God is
revealed to our experience. Even if we only catch a glimpse of what the poets
mean by this, we have become mystics, on a path to the presence that is always
already present.
If the familiar is broken and defamiliarised, if the clichés and platitudes about
God are removed, the experience of God becomes a possibility. The task of
poetry and metaphor is to shatter the surface appearance of things, so that
the sacred depth is made manifest. The poetic imagination is a central organ of
mystical theology and the perceptual mechanism of the spirit. Sara Maitland wrote:
‘Imagination, creativity, narrative seems to be the way God is revealed in the
world of matter’.39 Then, all arguments about the ‘existence’ of God fall away
and become irrelevant. The spiritual opportunity of our time is, as Meister
Eckhart put it, to lose God so that we might find God. However, we cannot
skip over the loss of God, because this is the indispensable condition of the
rediscovery.
Notes
1 David Bentley Hart, ‘Jung’s Therapeutic Gnosticism’, in First Things (New York: The
Institute on Religion and Public Life, January 2013).
2 Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (1949; London: Penguin Books, 1963), 52.
3 Ibid., 53.
4 Jon Mills, Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality (London:
Routledge, 2017).
5 David M. Black, ed., Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Col-
laborators? (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
6 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
7 Miller Newton, Adolescence: Guiding Youth through the Perilous Ordeal (New York: Nor-
ton, 1995), 23.
8 David Tacey, Religion as Metaphor: Beyond Literal Belief (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 2017); also published as Beyond Literal Belief: Religion as Metaphor (Melbourne:
Garratt Publishing, 2015).
9 Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1955), 135.
10 William Indick, The Digital God: How Technology Will Reshape Spirituality (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland & Company, 2015), 183.
11 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006).
12 David Hay, Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit (London: Darton, Longman &
Todd, 2006).
13 John Scotus Erigena, quoted in William Indick, op. cit., 179.
14 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 205.
15 Baruch Spinoza, quoted in William Indick, op. cit., 182.
16 Ibid., 237.
17 Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (London: Oxford University Press,
1959), 25.
18 C. G. Jung, ‘Wotan’, in Civilisation in Transition (1936; London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1970), par. 387.
19 Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday,
1960), 84.
20 Meister Eckhart, in David O’Neal, ed., Meister Eckhart, from Whom God Hid Nothing:
Sermons, Writings, and Sayings (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1996), 18.
21 Ken Wilber, Up from Eden (New York: Anchor Press and Doubleday, 1981), 13.
22 Gianni Vattimo, ‘After Onto-Theology: Philosophy between Science and Religion’, in
Mark Wrathnall, ed., Religion after Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 33.
23 Eugenio Trias, ‘Thinking Religion: The Symbol and the Sacred’, in Jacques Derrida
and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 110.
24 C. G. Jung, ‘The Real and the Surreal’, in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (1933;
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).
1980).
26 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Afterword’, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Reli-
gion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 258.
27 Genesis 1:26.
28 John Caputo, ‘Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Derrida and Marion’,
in John Caputo and Michael Scanlon, eds., God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1999).
29 C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion (1938/40; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1968), par. 52.
30 Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible: A Review of Objections to ‘Literature and Dogma’ (London:
Smith, Elder & Co., 1884).
31 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963; London: HarperCollins, 1995), 52.
32 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Toward the Future, trans. Rene Hague (New York: Harcourt,
1975), 76.
33 Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2013), 69.
34 Ibid., 71.
35 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, eds., The Merleau-Ponty
Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 270.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, in Geoffrey Keynes, ed., Blake: Com-
plete Writings (1793; London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 154.
39 Sara Maitland, A Big-Enough God: Artful Theology (London: Mowbray, 1995), 189.
8
DERRIDA
Emissary of the postsecular
It is interesting to consider how aspects of the postmodern have transformed into

the postsecular. The career of Jacques Derrida is seminal in this regard. From the
1960s to the late 1980s, he was the key player and leading exponent of decon-
struction. Then, in the 1990s, a decade before the 9/11 attacks of 2001, he began
to ref lect on the return of the religious, which, he said in 1995, would return
with ‘explosive’ force, and would be ‘an experience that leaves nothing intact’.1
This was astonishing news for the academic deconstructive industry, which was
based on the notion that Derrida was furthering the non-religious cause of late
modernity. Wasn’t he dissolving presences, abolishing essences and getting rid
of metaphysics?
Some academics attempted to deny that Derrida, their Derrida, returned to
religion; or, if this is acknowledged, it is reduced to sentimentality in old age
and the degeneration of a once great mind. But Derrida’s religiosity is equally
puzzling to theologians, many of whom had dismissed him as a radical relativist,
nihilist and opponent of the holy. How could this messenger of darkness turn
around and dare to suggest that he had something to say about God? Somehow,
a ‘legend’ had built up around Derrida that was persistent, and even he could
not dissolve it. People wanted him to be the bringer of dark tidings, the mas-
ter of nihilism. Derrida complained that he had ‘been read less and less well
over almost twenty years, like my religion about which nobody understands
anything’.2 His concern for mysticism, he said, ‘is what my readers won’t have
known about me’.3
The legend of Derrida had eclipsed the reality. The intellectual world that
‘followed’ him was in denial of his transformation from what they wanted him
to be to what he had become. Tillich argued that spiritual anxiety attends the
end of every cultural or historical period.4 It seems that an atmosphere of ‘spiri-
tual anxiety’ had been unleashed by his shift from deconstruction to reconstruction –
in the sense in which he was no longer interested in dismantling culture, but in

rebuilding meaning from the fragments of a broken world. Not to bring those
fragments into a harmonious whole, but to give them new significance. One
could guess, I suppose, that when a figure of his stature turned toward religion,
the intellectual world would be seized by panic, and this would drive them to
full-blown denial.
Derrida, in turn, would deny that his deconstruction was intended as a neg-
ative force, despite the way it was utilised by the secular university. He said
his work was always affirmative, attempting to open up layers of meaning that
were latent beneath and beyond the obvious. The misrepresentation of Der-
rida reminds me of the academic misrepresentation of the philosophy of Kant.
In many departments of philosophy, Kant is taught as a godless materialist, but
nothing could be further from the truth. Kant does not deny the existence of the
transcendent, but explains that the transcendent cannot be proven theoretically,
for it is a matter of faith. Derrida adopts a similar position, but as I will show, his
faith breaks through the intellectual barriers that the academic world continues
to uphold.
Derrida became an emissary of the postsecular sacred. His religious work
was not what many had feared. He wasn’t turning the clock back to premodern
times, but moving into postsecular times. He wanted to find an opening to the
future, away from the nihilism that threatened to engulf the West with disrup-
tion and disintegration. He was not alone; Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva were
keen to move beyond established intellectual restrictions and assert the need to
develop a relation to the infinite.5
Derrida was not interested in going back to classical theism, whether Jewish
or Christian. His agenda was more radical: he wanted to move toward a new
understanding of God and faith. He assumed that the God of classical theism
had died in the West and there was no return to it. His concern was with the
rebirth of God in the light of current knowledge and the rise of transcendence
in contemporary times.6 He was interested in God after the death of God, after
theism, but also after atheism, sceptical thinking and Enlightenment. What
happens when we see beyond the death of God and the deconstruction of
metaphysics?
In his important essay, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Derrida became almost obsessed
by the thought that there is, or will be, a return of the religious in global civilisa-
tion. His talk was delivered at the Capri Dialogues in 1994, at a philosophical
summit for which Derrida had himself proposed the topic. He had been asked to
select the theme for the European Philosophical Yearbook and he replied: ‘without
whispering, almost without hesitating, machine-like: “religion”’. ‘Why?’ asks
Derrida to himself. ‘From where did this come to me, and yes, mechanically?’ 7
This is a clue to his involvement with religion, it comes to him from another
part of himself. He is not in control of this interest, it wells up and assails him
like an alien will, an authority outside the conscious self. He is compelled to
attend to religion, which is not to his liking, since he would prefer to remain a
Derrida 153
classical atheist. Instead, he is driven out of this position into one that I would
call enchanted atheism, that is, atheism with God.
Can an atheist believe in God? The answer would appear to be no, if by
‘God’ we mean the supernatural being that the atheist by definition rejects. But
if God can be reassembled after being torn apart, interrogated and rebuked,
and if something remains that survives the deconstructive process, it might
legitimately claim to be regarded as holy. In a study on this subject, Andrew
Eshelman writes:
Strictly speaking, the word, ‘atheist’ refers to one who denies only that a
certain kind of ultimate reality exists, namely the god of classical theism –
a personal deity that has created the world and is characterized by the stan-
dard ‘omni’ attributes [omnipotence, omnibenevolence, omniscience]. If,
on the other hand, one understands ‘God’ to refer to whatever it is that
exists as a sacred reality, then being an atheist in the strict sense is certainly
consistent with belief in God.8
It seems that there are different kinds of atheism, just as there are different kinds
of theism. The standard image of an atheist as one who denies all sacredness or
ultimate reality is a dated and clichéd image of popular imagination. In A History
of God, Karen Armstrong reminds us that ‘atheism has always been a rejection
of the current conception of the divine’.9 As such, it must be contextualised and
seen as a part of a history of cultural critique, but this critique does not mean that
‘other notions of the divine’10 may not be respected or upheld at the same time.
In fact, as Derrida wants to argue, an atheistic critique of faith is important to the
life of faith; it keeps faith honest, in touch with critical thinking, and able to be
appreciated all the more.
The Capri Dialogues

The theme of the Capri meeting was to be the condition of religion in society.
Derrida describes the philosophers at the meeting in this way:
We are not priests bound by a ministry, nor theologians, nor qualified,

competent representatives of religion, nor enemies of religion as such, in
the sense that certain so-called Enlightenment philosophers are thought
to have been.11
The first issue to be discussed was what ‘religion’ could mean today. Is religion
a remnant of an earlier period, which contemporary philosophers should attack
in the manner of Enlightenment thinkers? Clearly, no, was Derrida’s response.
Religion should be approached anew, with different assumptions and expecta-
tions. This meeting was interested in the fact that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the collapse of state-supported atheism, the people of Eastern Europe seemed
to need ‘religion’. In the West, although the churches continued to empty, there
was a new spiritual need evident in the arts, culture and music.12 People seemed
to need something more than material living.
It was difficult for the Capri meeting to define what this ‘something’ was. As
Derrida approached the topic with considerable vigour, his colleagues became
anxious. Gadamer tried to act as a steadying inf luence to compensate for Derrida’s
excitement about a ‘return’. Gadamer made several statements along these lines:
Clearly ‘return’ cannot mean a return to metaphysics or to any sort of

ecclesiastical doctrine.13
It is as if Gadamer is stuttering nervously, ‘return can’t mean that, can it?’ And to
underscore his point, in case he was not understood, he added:
No matter to what extent we recognize the urgency of religion, there can

be no return to the doctrines of the church.14
Perhaps Gadamer had forgotten that Derrida, as a Jew, was never too concerned
about ‘church’. But Derrida was not in a steadying mood. He kept repeating his
theme of the return of religion, almost mechanically, in an incantatory, pro-
phetic voice:
Whatever side one takes in this debate about the ‘return of the religious’ . . .
one still must respond. And without waiting. Without waiting too long.15
He viewed this topic with a good deal of urgency, which seemed to surprise the
meeting. At this event, and precisely seven years before the 9/11 attacks, Der-
rida said religion will return with violence, because it had been suppressed with
violence. He spoke of religion ‘returning’ as if it were a force of nature that had
been repressed, in the way that Freud had spoken of sexuality breaking free from
the bounds of civilised morality. But religion might rip the fabric of society more
violently than sexuality ever could, and this is why thinking about religion as the
revenge of nature puts Derrida in such a pensive state.
Late modernity: the repressed returns

His Italian collaborator at the meeting, Gianni Vattimo, suggested spirit was like
an unhealed wound reopening in intellectual culture:
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.16
Derrida 155
Derrida’s Spanish collaborator, Eugenio Trías, spoke in a similar, urgent voice.

He kept referring to the return of the ‘religious illusion’, echoing the words of
the great atheists, Freud and Marx, but with ironic detachment:
The religious illusion . . . acts as an unconscious force. It wounds and

immobilises the body via complex mythical systems, just like hysteria. This
illusion shelters in the most intimate and private dimension of the indi-
vidual, giving rise to all the burgeoning and varied material of our com-
mon neuroses.17
This religious illusion is powerful and is returning, these philosophers claim. Its
destructive force is all the greater, in that a) we were not expecting it to return
since we thought God was dead, b) it has been repressed for so long it has become
habitual to deny the reality of soul or spirit and c) high culture is ensconced in
its favourite illusion that the world is secular and getting more secular, an illu-
sion that is being dispelled by history.18 Our educated worldview is defective and
needs to be revised. It appears that we have to make room for mystery again.
Vattimo suggests that the end of modernity might mean more than the end of
scientific positivism and the ideal of social progress. It might mean, in fact, the
end of secularisation itself:
The twentieth century seemed to close with the end of the phenomenon
that has been called secularization. The ‘end of modernity’, or in any case
its crisis, has brought about the dissolution of the main philosophical theo-
ries that claimed to have done away with religion: positivist scientism and
Hegelian-Marxist historicism. Today there are no good philosophical rea-
sons to be an atheist, or in any case, to dismiss religion.19
At the seminar Derrida keeps plugging away in his scarily prophetic mode.
Something is going on inside him, and he is not going to suppress it. It is as if
he can no longer maintain his own illusion, the illusion of his classical atheism, in
every way as difficult a mask to wear as that of religious faith. In his paper, he
keeps referring to things that we (and perhaps he) thought were dead, but which
have sprung to new life: spirit, soul, God, mystery, the Messianic, the holy, the
sacred. Derrida transposes these into his own terms and collectively he refers to
them as the impossible. The impossible is back, he wants to say. The invisibilities
have come back to haunt us. It is enough to put a shudder down the spine of the
most stoical and rational philosopher.
In his 1980s book on Heidegger, Of Spirit, Derrida had already indicated
that he was on this track. He discusses Heidegger’s thought and the legacy of his
philosophy in the contemporary context. He disagrees with Heidegger’s argu-
ment that we can get beyond metaphysics and put it to rest. In 1927 Heidegger
announced that there were key words that he was keen to avoid, and that should
be put on the black list. Among them was Geist or spirit. However by 1953, Der-
rida claims, Heidegger began to break his own rules:
Heidegger often spoke not only of the word ‘spirit’ but, sometimes yield-
ing to the emphatic mode, in the name of spirit.20
In a somewhat hilarious passage, Derrida admits that his and Heidegger’s interest
in spirit must seem ‘anachronistic’ and ‘provocatively retro’ to some readers, espe-
cially to academics. Derrida does not apologise for the way spirit has reappeared
in philosophy. ‘Spirit returns’, he writes, ‘[and] the word “spirit” starts to become
acceptable again’.21 But in this book he blasts the academic establishment for its
systematic avoidance of spirit:
Is it not remarkable that this theme, spirit, occupying a major and obvious
place in Heidegger’s line of thought, should have been disinherited? No
one wants anything to do with it any more, in the entire family of Heideg-
gerians, be they the orthodox or the heretical, the neo-Heideggerians or
the para-Heideggerians, the disciples or the experts. No one ever speaks of
spirit in Heidegger. Not only this, even the anti-Heideggerian specialists
take no interest in this thematics of spirit, not even to denounce it. Why?
What is going on? What is being avoided by this?22
In this attack on Heidegger’s followers, Derrida was rehearsing an attack on his

own. For only four years later, he complained in his Circumfession that he had
‘been read less and less well over almost twenty years, like my religion about
which nobody understands anything’.23 Kevin Hart and John Caputo, he said,
were among the few who understood what he was saying. How then, did so
many of us get Derrida wrong?
Making unknown, restoring mystery

As I read Derrida, he is saying that after the death of God, after the eclipse of
metaphysics, after philosophy has shown that presences are not supported by lan-
guage, strange and yet ancient presences seem to invade the cultural and personal
sphere. Perhaps this is some kind of revenge of nature against culture, which
has dared to defy the gods and declare the metaphysical null and void. We have
defiled the sacred order, but it is hell-bent on coming back. Heidegger prefers
philosophical to religious language, and refers to ultimate reality as Being, by
which he does not mean ‘a being’, but Being itself.24 Derrida does not call it
Being; he calls it the Impossible, the Messianic, the Beyond and various other
non-specific terms. He sees an objectless reality coming toward him, a frighten-
ing, ghostly, numinous presence, that, in accordance with Jewish practice, he
prefers not to name. This ‘thing’ is a no-thing, and he cannot give it a name. For
those who understand Buddhism, I would suggest we are in distinctly Buddhist
Derrida 157
territory. But Derrida’s reluctance to name ultimate reality should not be seen as
a sign of nihilism. This is a common misconception about him, and one he tried
to correct. According to Derrida, he has not turned suddenly toward affirmation
at the end of his life. He believes his work was never nihilistic, that this was a
misrepresentation bandied around by those who did not read him closely, or did
not read him at all. This would include, he warns in Circumfession, some of those
who see themselves as his followers and disciples.
Deconstruction, he claims, has always been affirmative, has always delivered a
‘yes’ to life.25 Despite the hysteria that arose among some quarters to his strategy
of unravelling texts and exposing gaps and inconsistencies in knowledge, he has
sought not to destroy but to open up to the realm of the impossible. Decon-
struction, he says, ‘is the very experience of the possibility of the impossible’, a
condition it shares, he believes, with ‘the gift, the “yes”, the “come”, decision,
testimony, the secret, and perhaps death’.26 Deconstruction has been conducted
not to wipe things out but to nourish them from new sources. Derrida intimates –
I am tempted to say prophecies – that we have new wine of the spirit at our
disposal, but only if we have the courage to claim it.
The new wine demands new wineskins, and if we pour the new wine into
old wineskins, he is no longer interested in our endeavour. He is full of reticence
about the ‘return of the religious’ understood as the resurgence of a fundamen-
talist truth, but he provides no comfort for the secular either, referring to secu-
larisation as only ‘a manner of speaking’.27 We have to keep our wits about us,
and move toward faith with eyes open, not by placing our doubts and questions
to one side. Derrida’s tricksterish response to religion reminds me of a similar
strategy in Lacan. Lacan wrote, somewhat wryly:
There are many people who compliment me for having managed to

establish in one of my last seminars that God does not exist. Obviously
they hear – they hear, but unfortunately they understand, and what they
understand is a little hasty.28
To discover God, Meister Eckhart wrote in one of his sermons, we first have
to lose him. I take this to mean that we have to lose our images of God before
the deeper reality of God becomes apparent. Not that we ever get close to that
reality! For Eckhart and others of the via negative, or ‘negative way’, we can never
hope to grasp ultimate reality. With the help of poststructuralism, we are now
able to put this more precisely: all we can know are interpretations of reality, and
even though we might believe we are describing reality, we are not doing so. We
are confined to the realm of metaphor and interpretation, and can never aspire to
a description of reality, ultimate or otherwise. As early as 1966, Derrida had said:
‘The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of meta-
phors’.29 This is not meant to make us feel imprisoned in fictions or depressed
about our knowledge. After we get over the shock that our discourse can never
achieve a condition of description, we are freed up and made aware that reality
is more mysterious, wonderful and complex than we were able to appreciate. In

other words, it is because of différance, slippage, the limitations of language, that
we are able to celebrate ultimate reality at all. Otherwise we would murder it
with our language and positive knowing.
This is precisely what Nietzsche’s madman says in The Gay Science: ‘Where
is God gone?’ he asks. ‘I mean to tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We
are all his murderers! But how have we done it?’.30 My answer is that we killed
God with familiarity. Our religion has made God too known and familiar, and
as a result our culture is bereft of God. We have murdered ultimate reality by
making it too human, too much like us. On this matter, Derrida, Nietzsche and
Levinas agree. So we should not get too concerned about the so-called death of
God because it too is just a manner of speaking. When our metaphors of God are
no longer seen as metaphors, but as literal descriptions, then God is dead, because
we have killed him with our words and literalism.
If our knowing is not made playful through mythos it acts destructively on
the transcendent. The divine loses its numinous power and becomes heavy, mor-
alistic and life-denying. Logos turns God into the superego writ large, whereas
mythos would return God to mystery and night. We need to loosen the chains
that bind us to our religious descriptions, and by the same act, allow the world of
ultimate meanings to speak to us again. This is why deconstruction is a liberating
enterprise for God, spirit and transcendence. At first it seems negative and then
we realise that its true motive is redemptive. In Nietzsche’s terms, it is a joyful
wisdom.
Opening to the future

We have gone through, and continue to go through, a time in civilisation where
we no longer know the face of ultimate reality, because the comforting face of
God has fallen off, revealing an abyss or emptiness behind it. The falling off of
this mask is called the ‘death of God’, but this is imprecise, and we should call it
the death of an image of God. Some try to put the familiar face back on – these
are the fundamentalists, the ones engaged in a rearguard action, who want to
go back to the past and pretend modernity never happened. Others say the abyss
has been revealed, it is appalling, and we have to make do as best we can. These
are the existentialists, the ones who admit that the face has gone and a senseless,
howling void has been exposed at the heart of creation. These voices include
those of Sartre and Camus, who owe an enormous debt to Nietzsche.
Still others seek to explore the appalling emptiness that has been revealed.
I would place Derrida and the mystical turn in postsecular thought in this cat-
egory. These philosophers invite us to find the courage to go into the moral and
spiritual void and call forth the presence that might be hidden there. ‘Every-
thing begins’, says Derrida, ‘with the presence of that absence’. 31 Derrida is
motivated by the intuition that what we see as emptiness could be a new kind
of fullness, but one we are unfamiliar with and do not yet understand. The
Derrida 159
God-shaped hole in our lives could well be God. That is the implicit suggestion
of Derrida, which is a far cry from the weeping and wailing of the existential-
ists. Again, parallels with Buddhism suggest themselves. Zen Buddhist master
D. T. Suzuki wrote: ‘Zen emptiness is not the emptiness of nothingness, but the
emptiness of fullness’. 32
Derrida is reluctant to call this new presence ‘God’, because he feels his mean-
ing would be mistaken, and everyone would assume he is going back to the past.
He refuses God-language as much as possible, although in certain moments his
defences fail and he admits that he is in search of God. In his Circumfession he
maintains the persona of an unbeliever, but it is constantly being eroded – dare
I say, deconstructed – by a different imperative. He claims that he ‘rightly passes
for an atheist’,33 but admits that he speaks increasingly of God and his secret
name was Elijah or ‘Elie’ for short.34 He is an atheist who prays all the time and
ref lects on God constantly – as often as the other great atheist, Nietzsche.
In an unguarded moment, Derrida admits that ‘the constancy of God in
my life is called by other names’.35 This critical thinker was underneath a theo-
logian, and he wanted to explore the problem of God. As a philosopher,
Derrida developed a critique of transcendence inherited from Feuerbach, Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud. But as a theologian, he seemed to be engaged in mystical
ref lections similar to those of fellow North African St Augustine, as well as
Meister Eckhart and the mystics of the Kabbalah. His mysticism also drew
from the poetic utterances of Heidegger. His theology was never orthodox; he
seemed to approach the sacred through the backdoor, so to speak, through chal-
lenge, doubt and criticism.
It seemed that the religious Derrida emerged for all to see in the late 1980s,
although Kevin Hart was one of the few to discern it at an earlier stage. Hart’s
book The Trespass of the Sign, detected the religious Derrida before Derrida him-
self had made this side of his thought explicit.36 In the late 1980s, Derrida began
to use the deconstructive method to show that mystery presses in on language at
every side, and mystery might still be found beyond language. As Hart said: ‘We
should remember that Derrida nowhere rejects the notion of presence. He argues
that presence cannot present itself ’. 37 This is the crucial recognition, I believe,
which has caused so much misunderstanding about Derrida, especially by the
‘anti-essentialist’ brigade who see him as destroying essential truths. There are
essences, Derrida is saying, but they cannot be represented in language. In ‘How
to Avoid Speaking’ he argues that language is a trespass against God, a ‘God
beyond God’, a God who cannot be named or designated, without profaning
against the holy.38 As Hart has argued, this sounds very much like the tradition
known as negative theology, although Derrida claims it is not, since negative
theology presupposes the existence of something he cannot affirm.
Derrida’s criticism of negative theology is that it is not negative enough. While
it emphasises the inadequacy of religious discourse, it nevertheless seems to have
‘God’ as a metaphysical object firmly in its sights. As Robyn Horner explains
Derrida’s objection: ‘In trying not to say anything, negative theology already
says far too much, effectively operating as a type of positive theology’.39 But in
his remarkable text ‘Save the Name’ (‘Sauf le Nom’), Derrida appears to soften
his criticism, arguing that negative theology is like the experience of deconstruc-
tion.40 I accept Derrida’s reservations, but agree with Kevin Hart and others that
‘negative theology’ is probably the closest thing that we in the West have to Der-
rida’s religious thought. Derrida seems to accept this point of view in his later
writings and interviews, but always with the caveat that negative theology cannot
be practiced with the assumption that God is already ‘there’, because then we are
only playing a game about not knowing God. For Derrida, this is not a game that
the faithful play with a transcendental signified. This is a serious engagement with
emptiness and not-knowing, a waiting on the unknown. His gospel appears to be:
blessed are those who do not believe, for they shall inherit the kingdom.
However, it could be argued that the negative character of his theological
thinking was something of an obsession. When speaking of transcendence, Der-
rida borrows Plato’s concept of the khora, a Greek word for empty space, an
interval or matrix. Derrida argues that the transcendent arises from this radical
otherness and imposes itself upon our experience. Heidegger made similar use
of the khora, and referred to it as a ‘clearing’ in which Being happens or takes
place. The khora is a term which expresses the ultimate otherness of the sacred,
and yet, in positing this view of transcendence, Derrida fails to take into account
the mystery through which this radical otherness becomes befriended by our
consciousness. That which is other becomes familiar and present through the
disciplines of prayer, meditation and contemplation. In other words, the imper-
sonal, faceless God acquires a face and becomes intimate to the consciousness that
reaches out to God. Derrida resists this aspect of religious experience because he
wishes to remain an atheist, and the impersonal transcendent is the closest he
wants to get to ‘God’ as such.
But throughout the ages, and in all cultures and religions, God acquires a face
to the human face that is turned toward it. Derrida’s negative theology would
resist this aspect of religion, and yet in resisting it in the name of the unnamable
other, an aspect of religious experience is denied. The paradox of religion is that
the ultimate other reveals itself as personable as it approaches the human subject
and is made known through the coming together of soul and Other. Theology
refers to God as a ‘person’, but obviously this is a metaphor for the fact that God
becomes ‘personal’ through relations with us. If the personhood of God is taken
literally and without critical awareness, we end up turning God into an idol of
our making. But Derrida avoids this paradoxical experience, thus preserving his
atheism and refusing a positive or kataphatic theology.
What is religion?
What is intriguing about Derrida’s late work is that although he was not a sup-
porter of religious institutions, he did not choose to abandon the word ‘religion’
in favour of the more popular term ‘spirituality’. In the wider community,
Derrida 161
‘religion’ has become synonymous with the institutions that have appropriated
this name. The popular desire is to reconstruct the old word ‘spirituality’ – which
was commonly used in seventeenth-century France – and make it stand for the
experience of the sacred, so that people might say ‘I am a spiritual person but not
very religious’.41 Derrida might have been tempted to go down this path but he
refused. Religion, as a term, was for him too good to associate with the failing
institutions that bore its name. If religions were going down, he wanted to save
religion from the pile of wreckage. He repeatedly asked:
What is religion? What is it doing and what is being done with it at present,
today in the world? . . . What is happening and so badly? What is happen-
ing under this old name?42
Derrida insists that religion – in its Latin sense of religio, ‘binding back’ – ought
to be recovered for our experience of the numinous. Hence Caputo arrived at
the signature formula: ‘religion without religion’ to describe Derrida’s concern.
Critics of Derrida think he is playing word games at this point, but I do not
believe he is. By ‘the return of the religious’ Derrida does not wish to imply
that the three monotheisms are undergoing revival. He does not believe they are
being reborn, but they are becoming more visible. Derrida speaks as a postsecu-
lar philosopher about ‘religion’.
Derrida speaks as a public intellectual who is disenchanted with secularism,
and disenchanted with religions. He realises that many educated people in the
West have become allergic to religions because they associate them with dreary
church or synagogue services, hypocrisy, moralism, piety, fascistic styles of wor-
ship and warmongering fundamentalism. These problems have almost ruined
the credibility of the religions in our time. However, for Derrida the term ‘reli-
gion’ remains a good one, despite all these negative associations. He argues that
‘the enigmatic “re”’ at the beginning of re-ligio ensures that this phenomenon
will re -turn, re -vive, re -new. ‘Religion [is] what succeeds in returning’.43 He felt
religion should be pursued in its original form of ‘binding back’ to the Other,
and he provides us with a memorable definition of religion:
However little may be known of religion in the singular, we do know that

it is always a response and a responsibility that is prescribed, not chosen
freely in an act of pure and abstractly autonomous will. There is no doubt
that it implies freedom, will and responsibility, but let us try to think this:
will and freedom without autonomy. Whether it is a question of sacred-
ness, sacrificiality or of faith, the other makes the law, the law is other: to
give oneself back, and up, to the other. To every other and to the utterly
other (tout autre . . .).44
This is a haunting and wonderful passage which rewards ref lection. There is, of
course, more than a hint of Levinas in Derrida’s definition.45 But if we want to
understand his concern with religion, we need go no further than this definition,
which says it is ‘not chosen freely in an act of pure and abstractly autonomous
will’. Religion is not something we do but something that is done to us. It is a
response to a presence, and faith is generated once this presence has been felt.
That, to me, is how we ought to understand Derrida. It is not that he is religious;
rather, something in him is religious, and he cannot shake it off. The encounter
with the numinous is an experience of the subject independent of his will. This
is mysticism in its pure form and far from dogmatic atheism. Derrida insisted on
his atheist persona as a defence against the mystical incursion that had assailed
him from within. None of us like to have our freedom stolen from us, and so
Derrida remains the ‘enchanted atheist’, one who struggles with the spirit as if it
were a spectre, a ghost.
The return to childhood faith

Intellectuals puzzle about what kind of outside inf luence turned Derrida toward
religion. My view is that they are looking in the wrong place. Some conjecture
that Derrida had an early intimation of his death, and it caused a spiritual quick-
ening. Some, like Hart, believe it was the inf luence of Levinas, especially his
work on ‘God and Philosophy’,46 which had a huge impact on Derrida.47 Others
argue that Walter Benjamin’s concern for the messianic in Jewish mysticism, or
Jean-Luc Marion’s call for a new theology was decisive. Gadamer suggests that
the passion for the infinite arose as a response to the encroaching fact of death,
and philosophers become more cosmic in their thoughts as old age approaches.48
These are interesting ref lections, but in my view only a psychodynamic read-
ing can get close to the truth. Derrida struggled between his unbelieving persona
and his mystical self, and finally the latter won out. He was a mystic all along, but
he only had the courage to reveal this near the end. Asked by Caputo why he had
turned a corner and was now prepared to speak openly about religion and God,
Derrida replied: ‘It’s probably because, growing old, I am more of a child than
when I was younger’.49 This is not a throwaway line but an important clue to
his conversion. When we look at his biography we discover that he was brought
up in a strictly orthodox Jewish family, and throughout his childhood and ado-
lescence he observed all the religious practices of his faith. As he grew older, his
early experience came f looding back. Culture was giving way to nature.
In an interview in 2000 he admitted to Caputo and Hart that he prayed
regularly; and, like a child, he prayed on his knees before going to bed. A hard-
headed rationalist might see this as a sentimental regression to early childhood,
with its daily rituals of prayer and worship. In this reading, he is not going
mystical but going soft. A more sympathetic view is that he is moving beyond
the boundaries of knowledge and advancing into the realm of faith. As Derrida
says to Kevin Hart:
The experience of faith is something that exceeds language in a certain

way. In relation to this experience of faith, deconstruction is totally,
Derrida 163
totally useless and disarmed. And perhaps it is not simply a weakness of

deconstruction.50
The man of knowledge is turning into a man of faith and this causes a crisis in
his identity. Is he still the Nietzschean denier, who was more sure than Nietzsche
that God was dead? Is he still the philosopher in the line of Feuerbach, Marx
and Freud? It seems that the man of faith and the man of knowledge are sepa-
rate selves in the person called Derrida. Faith and knowledge, however, come
together in his repeated question: ‘To whom am I praying?’51 Or as St Augustine
put it in his Confessions: ‘What do I love when I love my God?’.52 Derrida is ask-
ing this Augustinian question all along, it seems to me.
At a joint congress of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of
Biblical Literature, Derrida spoke at length about his lifelong faith, but he was
quick to point out that ‘this was something I wouldn’t have done years ago’.53 He
addressed a packed hall of religious scholars and believers about the importance
of atheism as a ‘stage’ in the development of faith:
If belief in God is not also a culture of atheism, if it does not go through

a number of atheistic steps, one does not believe in God. There must be a
critique of idolatry, of all sorts of images in prayer, especially prayer, there
must be a critique of onto-theology . . . True believers know they run the
risk of being radical atheists. Negative theology, prophetic philosophical
criticism, deconstruction: if you don’t go through these in the direction
of atheism, the belief in God is naïve, totally inauthentic. In order to be
authentic, the belief in God must be exposed to absolute doubt. However
paradoxical it may sound, believing implies some atheism, and I am sure
that true believers know this better than others, that they experience athe-
ism all the time. It is part of their belief.54
There is a performative aspect to much of this, as Derrida stands before his

adoring audience, instructing them that an atheist who reaches out to God is
coming from a more authentic place than the conventional believer who has never
doubted or questioned. He is saying that unless one has seriously entertained
atheism one cannot be said to be religious at all. He is saying that in postsecu-
lar times, any belief in God which is other than naïve or conventional has to
go through the ‘death of God’ experience that our culture, in turn, has gone
through over the last two hundred years. Derrida asserts that atheism is, in
fact, the cutting edge of religious life; it is the desolation, the wilderness, from
which true contact with spirit arises. All encrusted remnants of tradition and
dogma have to be disposed of before one can hope to have an experience of
the divine.
But Derrida is careful to avoid asserting that God ‘exists’ in the conventional
sense of the churches or synagogues. He keeps saying there is something there,
beyond discourse, beyond the realm of signifiers and the cultural sphere. It is as
if he could feel or intuit something mystical behind the realm of appearances,
which places him in the line of mystical philosophers and theologians. But the
life of the infinite is for Derrida not affirmed through revelation or tradition,
through the richness of dogma or the security of belief, but through the radical
insecurity of not knowing, of not believing, of renunciation. We are forced to live
in the presence of mystery, in a state that is akin to what the poet John Keats
called ‘negative capability’. No surety, no certainty, no tradition – or only the
tradition of not knowing. It is a kind of free fall into the arms of God, but we are
not even sure that those arms are outstretched to receive us. But we take the leap
anyway, because something beyond our reason compels us to do so.
Derrida announces that in his daily ritual of prayer, he experiences a some-
what awkward reunion of his childhood and adulthood selves:
When I pray I experience something strange. The Judaism of my child-

hood, my experience as a philosopher, as a quasi-theologian, are there; all
the texts I’ve read, from Plato to Saint Augustine to Heidegger, are there.
They are my world, the world in which my prayers are prayed. That is the
way I pray, at a given time, and sometimes anywhere, at any moment, for
instance, now.55
The inner child urges him to pray and he admits that ‘when one prays one is
always a child’. But there is another self, a ‘nonbeliever, someone who is suspi-
cious of the child, someone who asks, “To whom am I praying? Whom am I
addressing? Who is God?”’.56 This ‘layer of a more sophisticated experience’, as
he calls it, is concerned about the ‘childishness’ of his prayer and it ‘corrects’ the
moment with an injection of rationality:
When I pray, I am thinking about negative theology, about the unnam-

able, the possibility that I might be totally deceived by my belief. It is very
skeptical prayer, and yet this ‘skepticism’ is part of the prayer.57
He says his prayer involves an uneasy mixture of hope and hopelessness:
I am not expecting, I am not hoping: my prayer is hopeless, totally, totally

hopeless. Yet I know there is hope, there is calculation. There is economy,
but what sort of economy? Is it the economy of the child or my economy
now, as an old man?58
In these ref lections, Derrida emerges as a master of the art of contradiction, in

the sense that he knowingly contradicts himself and yet this is not something he
feels embarrassed about or tries to hide. He tells his audience: ‘A suspension of
certainty must take place in order for prayer to be authentic’.59 At the same time,
he says: ‘authentic is a word I almost never use’,60 but in this address he uses it
many times. He revels in contradictions, because these are the openings or lacu-
nae from which mystery is felt to appear.
Derrida 165
In this same spirit, Derrida wriggles out of categories and does not like to be
classified or put into any conventional grouping:
Although I confirm that it is right to say I am an atheist ( je pass à juste titre),

I can’t say, myself, ‘I am an atheist’. It’s not a position. I cannot say, ‘I know
what I am: I am this and nothing else’. I wouldn’t say, ‘I am an atheist’
and I wouldn’t say, ‘I am a believer’ either. I find the statement absolutely
ridiculous.61
Derrida’s is a path of negative transcendence, and he is interested in moving

toward faith, but not without the intellect, its doubts and questions. Perhaps one
could call him an unbelieving believer. This suits the temper of our times in
some ways, because our modern temper is not capable of belief, and yet we still
have a need to believe. Derrida says: ‘If I believe in what is beyond being, then I
believe as an atheist, in a certain way’.62
When challenged about his atheism by John Caputo, Derrida’s response is: ‘I
am not simply the one who says “I”’.63 There is more than one centre of author-
ity. He might have said: I am not the only one who says I. Or, with the poet
Arthur Rimbaud, he might have said: ‘Je est un autre’ (‘I is an other’).64 Or, with
holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, he might have said: ‘Something within me is
religious, but it is not I who is then religious; something within me drives me to
God, but it is not I who makes the choice and takes the responsibility’.65 He is not
a unity, not all of a piece, but a plurality of voices and fragments.
What else should we expect of the author of deconstruction? At one level, he
is the sophisticated thinker of Paris who carries forward the critical intellectual
tradition of modernity. At another level, he is the young boy of faith in North
Africa, a Jew born among Arabs, who says his prayers every night. It is the Afri-
can Derrida who emerges at the end, brushing aside the sophisticated doubt of
postmodernity and asserting the reality of faith. This is the revenge of nature
against culture, and he handled this internal crisis with decorum and poise. The
crisis was resolved in the construction of a postsecular sacred.
Notes
1 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London and New York: Routledge,
2002), 4.
2 Derrida, quoted in John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without
Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), xvi.
3 Ibid., xvii.
4 Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, 2nd ed. (1952; New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 47.
5 Luce Irigaray, Key Writings (London: Continuum, 2004); Julia Kristeva, This Incredible
Need to Believe, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press,
2009).
6 David Tracy, ‘The Spiritual Situation of Our Times’, in John Caputo and Michael
Scanlon, eds., God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1999).
8 Andrew Eshelman, ‘Can an Atheist Believe in God?’, Religious Studies, 41 (2005), 185.
9 Karen Armstrong, A History of God (London: Heinemann, 1993), 354.
10 Ibid.
11 Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, 7.
12 Robert Forman, Grassroots Spirituality (Boston: Academic Imprint, 2004).
13 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Afterword’ (1996), in Derrida and Vattimo, eds., Religion, 207.
14 Ibid.
16 Gianni Vattimo, ‘The Trace of the Trace’ (1996), in Derrida and Vattimo, eds., Religion, 79.
17 Eugenio Trías, ‘Thinking Religion: The Symbol and the Sacred’ (1996), in Derrida and
Vattimo, eds., Religion, 98.
1999).
19 Gianni Vattimo, ‘After Onto-Theology: Philosophy between Science and Religion’, in
Mark Wrathnall, ed., Religion after Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 29.
20 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989), 1–2.
21 Ibid., 23.
22 Ibid., 3.
23 Jacques Derrida, ‘Circumfession: Fifty-Nine Periods and Periphrases’, in Geoffrey Ben-
nington and Jacques Derrida, eds., Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 27.
24 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thinker as Poet’, in Albert Hofstadter, ed., Poetry, Language,
Thought (1947; New York: Harper Colophon, 1975), 4.
25 Jacques Derrida, ‘Epoché and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Yvonne
Sherwood and Kevin Hart, eds., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (2000; New York:
Routledge, 2005), 27.
26 Jacques Derrida, ‘Sauf le nom’ (‘Save the Name’), in Thomas Dutoit, ed., On the Name
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 43.
28 Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, eds. Juliet
Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan and Co.
Limited, 1982), 140–1.
29 Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in
Writing and Difference (1966; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 353.
30 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Madman’, in The Gay Science [also translated as The Joyful Wis-
dom], 2nd ed. (1887; New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1960), aphorism 125, 169.
32 D. T. Suzuki, in Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New York: New Direc-
tions, 1968), 133.
33 Derrida, ‘Circumfession’, 143.
34 Ibid., 88–90.
35 Ibid., 156.
36 Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
37 Kevin Hart, ‘Introduction to “How to Avoid Speaking”’, in Graham Ward, ed., The
Postmodern God (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997), 164.
38 Jacques Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, in Graham Ward, ed., The Postmodern God
(1989; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997).
39 Robyn Horner, ‘Derrida and God: Opening a Conversation’, Pacifica, 12:1 (1999), 18.
40 Derrida, ‘Save the Name’, 43.
Derrida 167
41 Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual But Not Religious (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
43 Ibid., 37, 39.
44 Ibid., 34.
45 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, in Sean Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (1975;
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 40.
46 Ibid.
47 Kevin Hart, ‘Jacques Derrida: The God Effect’, in Peter Blond, ed., Post-Secular Philoso-
phy: Between Philosophy and Theology (London: Routledge, 1998).
48 Gadamer, ‘Afterword’, 205.
50 Ibid., 39.
51 Ibid., 30.
52 St. Augustine, Confessions, ed. R. S. Pine-Coffin (c398, London: Penguin Books, 1961),
Bk 1, 4.
54 Ibid., 46–7.
55 Ibid., 31.
56 Ibid., 30.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 31.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., 46.
61 Ibid., 47.
62 Ibid., 46.
63 Ibid.
64 Arthur Rimbaud, ‘A Season in Hell’, in Wallace Fowlie, ed., Rimbaud: Complete Works,
Selected Letters (1873; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 305.
65 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 70.
Violence and the sacred
9
RETURN OF THE SACRED IN
AN AGE OF TERROR
The return of the sacred to a world that has become estranged from the sacred
can be a shocking and violating experience. When the sacred returns, it causes
disruption to social and personal order. In an active imagination exercise on
January 20, 1914, Jung’s soul-figure arises from the depths and asks him if he
will accept war, destruction and mayhem.1 His soul reveals images of military
weapons, human remains, sunken ships and destroyed states. Jung struggles to
integrate these images, and says he ‘could not conceive the extent of what was to
come’. ‘I felt the burden of the most terrible work of the times ahead’. 2 The soul
would bring the ‘unleashing of chaos and its power’, and ‘the binding of chaos’.
Chief among the gifts of the soul will be ‘the gift of religion’. By religion, Jung
does not mean membership of a church but ‘the attitude peculiar to a conscious-
ness which has been changed by experience of the numinosum’.3 He means an
encounter with the numinous in its most powerful and existential aspect. This
‘gift’, Jung ref lects, ‘is still to come, but it will become evident. I sat up for long
nights and looked ahead at what was to come and I shuddered’.4
We shudder too, when we survey the landscape of the sacred today and ‘what
is still to come’. Our world has grown so far from the sacred, that any approach of
this reality to us is experienced as terrifying. Not only has our resistance turned
the sacred into a hostile force, but the sacred shows its negative face at this time.
Rudolf Otto designated the holy as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.5 It is a
mystery that fascinates, but as tremendum, it evokes terror because it presents as
an ominous, overwhelming power. In a secular age in which the only authority
we acknowledge is our human will and desiring, the sacred hovers over us like a
cloud. Due to our stance, it is the darkness of the sacred that eclipses its positive
and creative elements, and this gives it the complexion of destructiveness.
Hence as the sacred returns, the psychological effect is that our world feels
under threat, and there is indeed much that the sacred seeks to dismantle. It
172 Violence and the sacred
has been said that the divine mirrors the face that is turned toward it, and if
we denounce the sacred, it will, in turn, adopt a foreboding aspect. As we run,
its pursuit of us will not be seen as loving but we will experience its anger and
wrath. We live in an age of terrorism, and this is not without significance to
our spiritual situation. Our inner and outer lives have a certain similitude at this
time, but few have pointed to this synchronicity – because the prevailing voices
are secular and do not look beyond appearances. It takes a symbolic attitude
to read the signs of the times for their inward significance. Synchronicity is an
acausal connecting principle; I am not saying that the spiritual climate is causing
terrorism, only that there is a meaningful parallelism.
The sacred today is a complex field in which anger, violence, terrorism and
conf lict are intermixed with redemptive possibilities of love, hope and transfor-
mation. The sacred is linked with war and revenge, fundamentalism, moribund
doctrines, an epidemic of clerical sexual abuse and loss of belief. Yet in the midst
of all this chaos, the sacred is returning.
When I think of the return of the sacred images arise of f loodwaters in the
bed of the Todd River in Alice Springs, the town in which I grew up. Normally
the river is dry, but after storms, the Todd becomes a swirling torrent, but the
waters that emerge are not pristine or clear. The f loodwaters are dark, muddy,
turbulent, and at its head there is a wall of sludge and debris. The waters that
emerge later in this desert landscape are less murky, but there is always a sense
that the f loodwaters remain polluted.
The rising sacred is like this river. Its waters are destined to replenish our lives,
but there is an impurity at present. The sacred is a paradoxical and ambivalent
reality, associated with as much bad as good. I can see why many have become
atheists in the face of this turbulence of violence, wrath and terrorism. Many
don’t want to be associated with the sacred, seeing it as the source of evil, as
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have argued.6 I under-
stand their point of view and through a certain lens it does seem, as they claim,
that the holy is what pollutes and gives a stench of decomposition to our lives.
The new atheists reverse the religious view that the sacred is the source of
goodness and light, and evil derives from us and our sinful distortions. Person-
ally, I have always held both views, strange as it may seem. I believe the sacred
is the source of goodness and light, but I understand that in our distorted time
the sacred is associated with the wall of sludge, debris and darkness that comes
ahead of the f lood.
In Aion, Jung wrote: ‘What is now welling up from the unconscious is a post-
Christian spirit’, and he commented that it looks anything other than holy.7 He
said the sacred had been suppressed for so long it had become contaminated with
murky contents that have washed through it during its exile in the unconscious.
When it returns, it will do so as a torrent, unruly with anger and wrath:
The opening up of the unconscious always means the outbreak of intense

spiritual suffering: it is as when fertile fields are exposed by the bursting of
a dam to a raging torrent.8
Return of the sacred in an age of terror 173
Jung wrote like a prophet when he warned of the continued defilement of the
sacred and its consequences:
No wonder the Western world feels uneasy, for it does not know how
much it plays into the hands of the uproarious underworld and what it has
lost through the destruction of numinosities. It has lost its moral and spiri-
tual values to a very dangerous degree. Its moral and spiritual tradition has
collapsed, and has left a worldwide disorientation and dissociation.9
This is what the Hebrew prophets said: if the sacred is not nurtured, the under-
world will erupt, contaminating the world with the wrong kind of spirits,
leading to a perilous situation. ‘Our times have demonstrated what it means
when the gates of the psychic underworld are thrown open’.10 Jung said that
nurturing the sacred has a therapeutic effect, and acts as a bulwark against the
destructive forces of the unconscious. Elsewhere he personifies the numinous
as a wrathful power:
Seeking revenge for the violence his reason has done to her, outraged
Nature only awaits the moment when the partition falls so as to over-
whelm the conscious life with destruction. Man has been aware of this
danger to the psyche since the earliest times, even in the most primitive
stages of culture. It was to arm himself against this threat and to heal the
damage done that he developed religious and magical practices. This is
why the medicine-man is also the priest; he is the saviour of the soul as well
as of the body, and religions are systems of healing for psychic illness.11
Religions were developed to propitiate the powers that early humanity sensed
could overwhelm life and cause destruction. Although Christianity had refined
its understanding of the sacred to emphasise its good and gentle aspects, the Jews
had a different understanding of the divine, and ferocity was part of its character.
Christianity believes that its revelation superseded the Jewish story, but it may be
that it lost something integral when it rejected the God-image of the ‘Old’ Testa-
ment. In Exodus, Yahweh says to the Jews: ‘I will send my terror before you, and
will throw into confusion all the people’.12 In Proverbs, Psalms and the prophetic
writings, we see an emphasis on divine wrath, which shocks Christians because
they lost touch with this aspect of the numinous.
Centuries before Christianity, the Greeks had a stark comprehension of the
destructive face of the divine. This aspect showed itself when people turned away
from the sacred and saw themselves as no longer obligated to express reverence to
the mystery of life. This condition, which the Greeks called hubris, was severely
punished by the gods. Greek drama and literature is replete with the terrifying
wrath which the Olympian gods delivered to those who had spurned them.13
Perhaps it is time to reclaim these ancient heritages, Hebraism and Hellenism,
which shaped Western culture. While important not to lose sight of the sacred
as the source of illumination, which is the hope of Christianity, in a darkly
turbulent time in which the sacred is returning, we have to adjust ourselves to

the paradoxical nature of divine reality.
There is, however, an alternative way to view this, which does not hinge
on speculations about the nature of the divine. Perhaps it is not so much that
‘God’ becomes evil, but that the inward figure within our being, the soul,
becomes malign when we fail to connect with the divine. The soul is the ‘third’
thing between humanity and divinity, and its job is to facilitate the connection
between heaven and earth. When we neglect to attend to this relation, the soul
as the organ of mediation turns awry and opposes our resistance. From where
we stand, it looks as if God had taken up arms against us, but it is our soul that
stares us down with wrath and terror. The soul ‘stands in’ for the divine in this
situation, and perhaps we make a mistake if we assume that this fearsome aspect
is the divine itself. We ought not assume that we can behold the face of the
Wholly Other, or ascribe to it attributes that arise from the intermediary. The
true nature of God remains an unfathomable mystery.
The soul, says Rilke, is like a towering angel that stands over against us, and
yet offers transformation if we surrender to it. The soul brings terror of a kind,
and threatens to annihilate our ego structures. Rilke writes that whoever is
beaten by the angel emerges strengthened; winning is not what we should seek,
but a decisive defeat by a greater being. This, he argues, is how we develop as
spiritual beings. In the same years that Jung began his Red Book (1913–1914), an
epic on the soul’s eruption in modern times, Rilke was writing poetry on the
annihilating and transformative forces which eclipse the ego.14
There is something in the epidemic of religiously inspired terrorism that war-
rants close scrutiny. On the face of it, terrorism has nothing to do with the return
of the sacred. In fact, it is a sign of the desacralisation of the world and the mis-
use of religious ideas to serve ideological purposes. Secular commentators offer
explanations based on politics and cultural conditions. But there is a dimension
of terrorism that is not being noticed. I do not mean that the jihadists are inspired
by God, as they believe, but that there is a symbolic element in their behaviour
which is important to understand. They are not the deliverers of divine justice,
or emissaries of the sacred, but carriers of a pathology that has its origins in the
religious crisis of our time. There is meaning in terrorism not because of their
heinous ideology, but because of what lies behind it.
Sounding like Jung, whom he did not acknowledge, Derrida wrote of the
‘return of the religious’ and defined this as the ‘coming of the other’,15 where the
‘other’ refers to 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’.16
Derrida said 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 in our relation to reality. A pressure builds up in the soul,
which can 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.17
Derrida was driven to prophecy at the end of his life. How strange, he said, to
find ‘the return of the religious . . . not without relation to the return of radi-
cal evil’. The post-9/11 celebrity atheists would argue that religion and evil are
aspects of the same thing, but this is not Derrida’s point. His point is that the reli-
gious impulse has been made evil by the conditions in which it has been violated.
Two thousand years ago, the same point would have been framed in metaphysical
terms: we have incurred God’s wrath because of our betrayal of him. Many would
reject this language today, and yet as we look at the terrorists, we see something of
our unknown face. Their evil expresses the darkness that has built up in the soul.
Europe’s leading Lacanian, Slavoj Zizek, made this point after 9/11 and spoke
of the West’s need to face up to the reality of darkness:
The American sphere of safety is now experienced by its citizens as being

under threat from an Outside of terrorist attackers who are ruthlessly self-
sacrificing and cowards, cunningly intelligent and primitive barbarians.
Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the
courage to remember the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should
recognize the distilled version of our own essence.18
A century before Derrida and Zizek, Jung was making the same pronounce-
ments. In his Red Book, Jung wrote of the terror of the First World War:
The spirit of the depths wants this struggle to be understood as a conf lict
in every man’s own nature.19
Modernity encourages us to live in the confines of the ego, said Jung, and the
soul, excluded and ignored, is forced to develop an ambivalent aspect. The soul
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 stand-
point’.20 The soul ‘wants something different from the ego and we are at war
with ourselves’. He claimed that ‘when an inner situation is not made conscious,
it happens outside, as fate’.21 To what extent, then, is the scourge of terrorism an
externalisation of an internal dynamic? Jung said ‘the world must perforce act
out an inner conf lict and be torn into opposing halves’.22 I am not claiming any
causal connection between our spiritual situation and the world crisis. In syn-
chronicity, ‘No reciprocal causal connection can be shown to obtain between
parallel events. The only recognizable and demonstrable link between them is a
common meaning, or equivalence’.23
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’.24 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 com-
panions asked: ‘What is the Greater Holy War?’ Mohammed replied: ‘The war
against the ego’.25 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 him- or herself and close to the Creator.26
According to Thomas Cheetham, terrorists have misunderstood the symbolic
nature of their quest and the call for jihad, and are externalising this battle.27
Wolfgang Giegerich points out that ‘It is so much easier to resort to resentment
and to blame others for the unsatisfactory conditions one finds oneself in . . . than
to engage in a long-term struggle, so much easier to act out by detonating bombs
than to interiorize, integrate’.28
It would seem that the misunderstanding of jihad is called forth by the West’s
refusal to engage with the sacred. The West has become the ‘infidel’ by virtue of
its profane stance. The sacred has been forced into the role of adversary, of which
Derrida and Jung speak. It is significant that the dark aspect of the holy, lost to
Christianity, is being picked up by philosophy and psychology, as if to rescue
what had been suppressed. Jung said that it is impossible to imagine that religion,
which has meant so much to so many across millennia, could disappear without
a trace because secularism has seemingly taken over. He 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’.29 This instinct would return,
like everything unconscious, with considerable force as soon as conditions allow.
It would not only return with explosive power, but in distorted forms, since
psychic contents take on disruptive aspects when repressed.
Society has accepted Freud’s theory that sexuality returns in distorted forms,
such as neurosis, hysteria and criminality, when it is not made conscious in indi-
viduals and society. We have conceded this much to his psychoanalysis, but Jung’s
theory is regarded as suspect because he is dealing with the less tangible reality of
the religious impulse. If the ‘great repressed’ was sexuality in Freud’s time, it is
religion in ours. Religion is the unlived life of modernity. Jung argues that reli-
gion will return with devastating consequences, just as sexuality returned with
shocking impact in Freud’s time. Spirit has been asleep but is now returning.
The modern mind has had its taste of freedom, and is now forced to recognise a
mystery that has returned with a vengeance.
As early as the 1950s, Italian philosopher Romano Guardini had made this
prescient remark:
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.30
This sense that the sacred can be a destructive force that has to tear apart the
secular fabric is found in philosophy, psychology and poetry. One of the most
powerful accounts of this destructivity is found in the work of the Jewish philos-
opher Levinas, in ‘God and Philosophy’, where God is imagined as an antagonist
who shreds the defensive structures of the ego.31
Some thought Jung eccentric when he announced in 1929 that ‘the gods have
become diseases’,32 but three generations later, Derrida felt that the ‘return of the
religious’ was welling up in the collective mind like a tsunami. Religion, said
Derrida, is not something we do, but something that is done to us. It arises from
a mysterious source that needs to be explored. Using the language of psycho-
analysis, he wrote:
How can one account for this ‘return of the religious’ without bringing
into play some sort of logic of the unconscious?33
Secularism had not taken the unconscious into account. There was unlived life
that would blow secularism to smithereens. Secularists assumed that if religion
could be denounced, and if science could show that its assertions were wrong,
religion would disappear and never return. However the religious urge is inerad-
icable, and ‘to the degree that we repress it, the danger increases’. 34
Today we witness the rise of fundamentalism in all the religions, Christian-
ity, Judaism and Islam, and in Hinduism and even Buddhism. We live in a world
in which religion and violence have become permanently associated, which is a
shocking irony given that the scriptures of all religions preach love and peace.35
But once the spirit is defiled, it emerges in distorted forms and nothing other
than a change of attitude, a new reckoning or covenant, will alter its destruc-
tive course. Fragments of the sacred are found in the distorted religious forms
of today, and the perpetrators of terror quote passages of scripture as they f ly
planes into the World Trade Center or attack railways, buses, hotels, concerts
and media outlets. This wrath is not entirely of political origin, but has its source
in an archetypal disposition. That is why the ‘war on terror’ can never eradicate
this violence, because we are not only talking about human carriers of evil but a
predisposition to evil in the psyche itself.
But it is not as if terrorists are targeting only non-religious people. An irra-
tional process has been unleashed, and lashes out in any direction, often against
other Islamic traditions. There is a disturbance in the world psyche, and it will do
a great deal of damage to all civilisations. The message for us is that the religious
life has become pathological. Militant Islamic groups are burdened with the task
of reminding the West, which they refer to as the ‘infidel’, of the dangers of the
sacred. This reality cannot be trif led with, and analysing the postsecular condi-
tion is an urgent priority. Extremist groups or ‘cells of violence’ are opposed
to modernisation and its consequences. It is not so much the ‘West’ that these
groups are opposing, but the field of modernity. Derrida reminds us that ‘dis-
cernment is required: Islam is not Islamism and we should never forget it, but the
latter operates in the name of the former’.36 Militant groups operate in the name
of religions but are to be differentiated from them. A commentator says ‘when
I use the phrase “religious violence”, I do not mean violence caused by religion,
but violence associated with it’.37 We are witnessing a mutant religiousness which
has more to do with violence than with worship.
However, the separation between Islam and terrorism can be taken too far.
Some Islamic leaders deny that Islam is in any way involved in these atrocities.
They claim that Islam is a peaceful religion concerned with justice and truth. In
his work defending Islam, The Secret of Islam: Love and Law in the Religion of Ethics,
Henry Bayman writes: ‘This drastic departure from what has been the Islamic
norm for fourteen centuries can only be explained by a lack or distortion – not
an excess – of Islamic sensibility’. He goes on:
Suicide attacks are not just un-Islamic, they are profoundly anti-Islamic.
Historically, they had no place at all in Islamic culture. Suicide bombing
was invented by other parties and began to be used by so-called ‘Muslims’
only during the last few decades. Its use in the Middle East is due not to a
religious but to a political dispute.38
Other apologists blatantly deny that terrorism is an Islamic problem and say it is,
instead, a human problem. I take their point but am not convinced. I don’t think
plain denial is helpful.
Contrary to those who wish to make a definite division between terrorism
and Islam, Wolfgang Giegerich of Berlin writes:
Many Islam scholars and many well-meaning people in the West warn
against confusing the acts and ideology of the Islamic terrorists with Islam
as such. True Islam, they claim, is a peaceful religion, and the ‘jihad’,
they point out, actually has a strictly religious meaning very different from
that found in the terrorists’ use of the term. As justified as this caution is
academically, it is also irrelevant in the concrete situation we are in . . .
What the terrorists do ref lects on Islam as such; maybe indeed not on ‘true
(authentic, original) Islam as it should be understood’, but certainly on real
Islam.39
Giegerich confronts the political correctness of our time and its inability to face
facts. To offer any critique of Islam in our time is dismissed as Islamophobia.40
My view is that militant Islamism is a traumatised version of Islam. This is a dark
side of Islam that has to be integrated. Every religious culture has to admit to
its shadow side, and not bury it beneath espousals of goodness and piety. Psy-
chiatrist Henry Krystal says trauma produces a regression in affect, a deficit in
the capacity for symbolic representation and an increase in fantasy formation.41

There is a deficit of symbolic awareness and fantasy formation in the terrorists,
many of whom are inspired by the idea of unreal rewards in heaven. The Ku
Klux Klan does not represent Christianity, however it cannot be fully separated
from it either; it represents the evil, demonic face of this culture. The first rule of
psychology is not to disavow darkness when it appears: ‘This thing of darkness,
I acknowledge mine’.42
Giegerich has argued that the wave of terrorist violence is not a class struggle
between rich and poor, neither is it a battle between Islam and Christianity.
Rather, it is a battle between a modern and a medieval mindset.43 The West has
had a long battle with its traditional religious system, so that the natural tendency
of any religion to see itself as superior to others has been fought and won. That is
what makes the West ‘modern’: a long historical and philosophical critique of its
religious system, in which theological hegemony was destroyed and individual
rights emerged as a powerful moral force. ‘An equivalent development did not
take place in the Islamic world’. ‘The critical fight with, indeed against itself and
its own orthodoxy has not taken place’.44 As a result, we find premodern features
still in place: the prevalence of the ancient emotions of shame and honour in
a culture in which human rights are submerged. Shame and honour are more
important than individual lives, which is why lives can be sacrificed so readily.
The greatest sin is not to take lives but to criticise the sanctified claims of the
Islamic religious system.
This was expressed in the fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie. In 1989 the
Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie for sup-
posed blasphemy in The Satanic Verses. Khomeini’s fatwa was condemned across
the Western world by governments on the grounds that it violated the rights of
free speech and freedom of thought. However, human rights were not accepted
as a basis for justice in Iran. The issue was said to have divided Muslims from
Westerners along the fault line of culture.45 Said the Ayatollah in 1990: ‘Even if
Rushdie repents and becomes the most pious man of all time, it is incumbent
on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and wealth, to send
him to hell’. Here we have an example of the medieval and the modern rubbing
up against each other: ‘The problem behind Islamic terrorism is the conf lict
between two different historical stages of cultural development’.46
It is the modern experiment which is viewed as decadent by Islam, since it
has radically shaken the certainties of religious systems. The modern has made
the medieval mindset indignant and angry over the relativisation of values,
the annihilation of traditional structures and the arbitrariness resulting from a
free and open society. By way of defence, the medieval mindset turns against
the modern and tries to destroy it. It is rage against the modern that we are
witnessing, including anger at elements which make the medieval world feel
insecure, such as the loss of male superiority and code of honour, the decline of
patriarchy, the dissolution of fixed sexual roles and the new freedoms given to
women; all of this, together with the destabilisation of religious authority, makes
the medieval mind see modernity as decadent and perverse. What we find in the
terrorist ‘brotherhood’ is a ‘masculine protest’ against a new world that the old
world rejects.
The West has managed to suppress its own negative response to modernity’s
disregard of religion. Loss of religion in the West does not register as a trauma; on
the contrary, Westerners have been generally keen to give it away, seeing religion
as an encumbrance they can do without. According to the script of modernity,
religion is a remnant of a superstitious mindset that the West has outgrown.
Only when Westerners suffer personal or collective trauma, so that their egoic
encapsulation is challenged, does religion appear as something important that has
been lost. In this context, it is the traumatised religion of Islamism that carries
the burden that the West has been unable to accept. There is a part of us that is
shaken by the modern but this is acted out on the world stage by hostile forces.
As Goya put it: ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’.47 In its encounter with
Islamism, the West collides with its oppositional self that wants to return to the
medieval worldview. Terrorists scream ‘Allahu Akbar’, God is Greater, as they
commit atrocities, and this can be seen as the wounded religious instinct hitting
back. This instinct has turned psychotic in its terrorist form.
What we see in the terrorists is a demonic parody of spiritual initiation. As
Eliade makes clear, in the process of initiation an individual changes from an
ordinary, ego-based person to one who is, by virtue of a new link with transcen-
dent reality, transformed into a spiritual being, filled with purpose and devo-
tion. In traditional initiations, this change took place during adolescence and in
supervising this transformation elders gave adolescents ideals to strive for. The
youth dies to his old life and through ceremony, dance, music and medicines,
he or she is reborn in the spirit. The old identity is eclipsed and the person lives
from a new centre of authority.
In the case of terrorism, aspects of this process are adapted to a pathologi-
cal ideology. The community into which the youth is inducted is parodied by
riotous and lawless gangs, mobsters and cults who receive the youth into their
circle. The transcendent ideals are also distorted; instead of identifying with a
God of justice and mercy who loves humanity, the new ideal is a demonic deity
in a fantasy heaven, who offers bliss in the company of angelic virgins. Instead
of heaven as a reward for a good life, this parody of paradise encourages young
men and women to perform crimes against humanity. In traditional contexts the
youth dies symbolically to enter a new life, in these terrible parodies the youth
dies literally, willingly, causing as much damage as possible in suicide bomb-
ings. Kristeva refers to this as the kamikaze syndrome, with eternal bliss as a
reward for violence and destruction. This puts in stark terms Jung’s idea that in
modern ideologies, archetypes assume negative form and bring out the worst in
humanity.
It is a tragedy that the knowledge of initiation seems better understood by
destructive causes than by good. Humanist organisations, for instance, who seek
to do good in society, do not grasp the power of initiation to promote and sustain
the power of good, which is why so many people seeking good burn out and
opt out. As Thomas Singer has said, ‘the archetype of initiation can be related
to both creative and destructive ways without any guarantee of it being “good”
or “bad”. Archetypal patterns in themselves have no morality – they simply are’.
He gives the example of the cult of suicide bombers in the Middle East, and how
this cult relies on compelling initiatory themes as part of its appeal to young men
and women. Singer writes: ‘The call to separate oneself from the ordinary social
structure, to undergo purification, to submit to an ordeal, and to offer one’s
life as the ultimate sacrifice promise the “initiate” a transformed rebirth in an
afterlife’.48
As a student of mine put it in an essay: the baddies are better at inspiring
initiatory experiences than goodies. It seems that the archetypal patterns that
would normally sustain and nurture life have fallen into the unconscious, where
they are now polluted by darkness and appropriated by dark forces. If we don’t
actively use spiritual knowledge, we lose it to the figures and leaders of the
social and political underworld, who seem to emerge from their lairs and hiding
places as masters of initiation. The poet Yeats seems to have grasped this when he
said the best have lost conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
It is hard to know how anything can be redeemed from this situation. Psy-
chotic outbursts lead from one atrocity to another, and do nothing to offer the
possibility of healing, or a reintegration of the sacred. Terrorists present ‘God’ in
a form that has to be opposed by civilisation. This adds to the burden of despair
and confusion faced by the West. Secularists and humanists see in Islamism the
image of religion they hate most of all. They see the impossibility of integrating a
sacredness that has become hot with rage, furious with neglect and anarchic with
suppression. The rogue sacred is not assimilable by modernity, and no synthesis
is on the horizon, if we are seeing this as a drama of the world soul. The ‘war
on terror’ reinforces the stalemate and perpetuates the outlook that may have
precipitated the crisis. Thus we are condemned to going around in circles, and
so what will be the circuit-breaker? It is easier to frame the question than to find
an answer. But we know that there is more to this crisis than social or political
factors.
The modern cannot capitulate to a premodern demand that a totalitarian
expression of the sacred be worshipped. We cannot bow down before the God of
terrorists, although some alienated enthusiasts are finding this an attractive prop-
osition. Islamism presents the sacred in ways that are unassimilable by modernity.
Western consciousness is faced with a great problem, how to assimilate the reli-
gious in palatable form, in such a way that consciousness is transformed? Derrida
insisted that the religious impulse would not be fitted neatly into existing forms,
but would most likely explode them:
The said ‘return of the religious’ is not a simple return, for it comports, as
one of its two tendencies, a radical destruction of the religious. This makes
the task all the more urgent and problematic.49
The return of the religious will not fill church pews, nor run according to any
evangelical plan. What has awoken in the unconscious, Derrida felt, is more
archaic than anything traditional religion would recognise as religious. So there
would continue to be a lack of fit between existing religious forms and atavistic
urges.
Secularism is too entrenched to allow any ‘simple return’ to religion. People
will not return to traditions if it means turning away from secular freedoms,
such as doubting, questioning and dealing with religion in a critical and open
atmosphere. Only a religion that respects disbelief, atheism and agnosticism will
appeal to the West. Some will be prepared to adopt various kinds of fundamen-
talism, but this is not in accord with the spirit of the time, which searches for a
postsecular solution.
Notes
2 Ibid.
3 C. G. Jung, ‘Psychology and Religion’ (1938/40), CW 11, par. 9.
4 Jung, The Red Book, 306.
5 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (1917; Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1950).
6 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006); Christopher Hitch-
ens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hatchette Book
Group, 2007); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004).
7 C. G. Jung, Aion (1951), CW 9, part 2, par. 67.
8 C. G. Jung, ‘Psychotherapists or the Clergy’ (1932), CW 10, par. 531.
9 C. G. Jung, ‘Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams’ (1961), CW 18, par. 581.
10 Ibid.
11 C. G. Jung, ‘Psychotherapists or the Clergy’ (1932), CW 10, par. 531.
12 Exodus 23:27.
13 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
14 See Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The First Elegy’, in Dunio Elegies, trans. Stephen Mitchell
(Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1992) and Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Man Watch-
ing’, in Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Robert Bly (New York: Harper and
Row, 1981).
Stanford University Press, 1998), 2, 18.
16 Ibid., 17–18.
17 Jacques Derrida, in Gil Anidjar, ed., Acts of Religion (London and New York: Routledge,
2002), 82.
18 Slavoj Zizek, ‘The Desert of the Real: Is This the End of Fantasy?’, located at: http://
inthesetimes.com/issue/25/24/zizek2524.html
19 Jung, The Red Book, 253.
20 C. G. Jung, ‘The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man’ (1928/31), CW 10, par. 160.
21 C. G. Jung, ‘Christ, A Symbol of the Self ’, in Aion (1951), CW 9, part 2, par. 126.
22 Ibid.
23 C. G. Jung, ‘On Synchronicity’ (1951), CW 8, par. 995.
24 Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message, Vol. 1 (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers,
2011), 21.
25 Martin Lings, What Is Sufism? (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975), 27.
26 Shahid Athar, ‘Inner Jihad: Striving toward Harmony’, The Sufism Journal, 10:3 (2010).
27 Thomas Cheetham, The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism
(New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2003), 82.
28 Wolfgang Giegerich, ‘Islamic Terrorism’, in Soul-Violence, Collected English Papers, Vol. 3
(2002; New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2008), 428.
29 C. G. Jung, ‘Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Con-
cept’ (1936/1954), CW 9, part 1, par. 129.
30 Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World (1957; Wilmington, DE: ISI Books,
1998), 48–9.
31 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, in Sean Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (1975;
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
32 C. G. Jung, ‘Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower’ (1929), CW 13, par. 54.
33 Derrida, Acts of Religion, 89.
34 C. G. Jung, ‘The Practical Use of Dream-Analysis’ (1934), CW 16, par. 329.
35 Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad Publish-
ing, 1996).
37 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Oak-
land, CA: University of California Press, 2017), xiv.
38 Henry Bayman, The Secret of Islam: Love and Law in the Religion of Ethics (Berkeley: North
Atlantic Books, 2003), 56.
39 Giegerich, 418–19.
40 Chris Allen, Islamophobia (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011).
41 Henry Krystal, Integration and Self-Healing: Affect, Trauma and Alexithymia (Hillsdale, NJ:
Analytic Press, 1988), 28.
42 Prospero in Shakespeare’s, The Tempest, Act 5, scene 1, lines 274–5.
43 Giegerich, 422–7.
44 Ibid., 425.
45 Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Aftermath (New York: Mel-
ville House, 2010).
46 Giegerich, 432.
47 ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’, the title of a 1798 etching by Spanish artist
Francisco Goya.
48 Thomas Singer, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Kirsch, Virginia Beane Rutter, and Thomas
Singer, eds., Initiation: The Living Reality of an Archetype (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 2007), 2.
49 Derrida, Acts of Religion, 78.
10
EPILOGUE
Sacrifice and the future
The call to initiation

A relation to the sacred is not something that can be achieved by force of will or
good intentions. One has to be initiated into the sacred, otherwise our contact
with it is purely formal, or worse, bogus. The sacred cannot be ‘added’ to the
rational, everyday mind, and if it is we are pretending at being spiritual. If we
remain the masters and the sacred is a plaything or acquisition, we remain at a
distance from it and our lives are not transformed. In his classic Rites of Passage,
Arnold van Gennep outlined the structure of initiation based on his study of
tribal peoples, including Australian Aboriginals.1 For him there were three stages
in initiation: separation, transition and return. The second stage was the climax
of the ceremony, where the initiate is encouraged to let go of his or her former
self and take on a new identity. At the centre of the new identity is a spiritual
authority which is discovered within the initiate, often conceived as an ancestral
spirit, animal totem or sacred object.
The second stage of transition and liminality involved trials, starvations,
deprivations and the symbolic death of the former self, before induction into the
spiritual life. The natural self was sacrificed to a spiritual development. When
the transformation is complete, the initiation is deemed successful and the young
person becomes an adult, with access to laws that govern responsible and life-
giving existence. In some initiations, the person is given a new name, status and
authority. All of this was carefully regulated by tradition, tribal law and elders.
If encountering the sacred involves an initiatory experience, how can we
emulate this today, without intact codes of conduct, communities of belief, sym-
bols of spiritual authority and elders to oversee the process? The answer is that
we cannot achieve anything like the ritual coordination, artistry and controlled
environment of the ancient initiations. We have exchanged a highly regulated
social structure for personal freedom, and freedom has been interpreted as doing
Epilogue 185
what the ego wants, and forgetting about the soul. But since the call to initia-
tion and induction into the sacred comes from the soul, as interpreted by each
culture, this means we have conspired to exclude ourselves from the sacred. If
the postsecular condition necessitates an encounter with the sacred, how is this
to be achieved in an ego-based culture?
In the modern world, the call to a new life is no longer made by society or its
institutions. The exceptions are extremist religious groups who understand the
potency of the initiatory experience, often with devastating consequences. For
the most part, in the contemporary world, the call comes from within, from the
psyche or soul, or it does not come at all. This makes it difficult for the average
person to deal with, and many suppress the call or do nothing about it. We are
not taught by society or education to listen attentively to the voices within, or to
discern which voices to trust, which to follow. Unless individuals have unusual
sensitivity to dreams, intuitions and promptings, they may not know what to do
when the call is made. Moreover, they may not know how to respond to the call,
what advice to seek or to whom to turn.
Instead of structured initiations into the life of the sacred, we have to be
content with ad hoc experiences not regulated by elders or institutions but by the
indwelling psyche itself. We have to be content with ‘good enough’ equivalents
to the structures of initiation. These equivalents could involve: a certainty that
one is being called to a new life by a higher power, a commitment to renounce
old patterns and live in accord with ultimate values, as we understand them. It is
hard to do this alone, one requires a sympathetic community, a group of friends,
or at least a friend or partner who loves us and cares for our spiritual maturation.
Those whom we entrust with our transformational process must support spiritual
values and protect us against those who would belittle or cynically undermine
this process.
Perhaps today the stages could be refashioned as: awareness of a call from the
spirit; sacrifice of the egocentric life in favour of a new kind of life; and return
to society as a ‘cultural creative’, that is, one who contributes to the welfare of
others, who is prepared to mentor others through a similar process and to speak
out in favour of the sacredness of nature and the environment. The key thing in
this is to discern the nature of the call and the voice that delivers it. The call has
to have some basis in the traditional values of love, faith, charity, inclusiveness,
respect for diversity and care for others. If it is devoid of these values it is inau-
thentic and must be identified as such and rejected.
The problem, as I have intimated before, is that the initiatory process can
be followed to some extent, before the demonic face of the voice that calls us is
revealed. Terrorists, gangs, cults and criminal groups seem to have an uncanny
aptitude for seeking out the initiatory structure and encouraging others to fol-
low it to their destruction. Those who operate on the dark side and seek dark
ends have a sensitivity to initiatory experience and an ability to operate accord-
ing to some of its laws. There is often a blurring of boundaries between good
and bad initiations, for instance, ‘loss’ is part of initiation, insofar as the person is
encouraged to give over egocentrism to a greater cause. But if a new recruit to

a terrorist cell is encouraged to lose his or her life at the expense of other lives,
then the demonic aspect is revealed.
There are New Age groups who promise an experience of initiation. For
various reasons, these events often end up as parodies of the initiatory process,
because the ceremony is artificially constructed and not related to the traditional
values mentioned above that give release from the egoic life. Moreover, if the
experience is conducted in a workshop situation, there is no welcoming com-
munity into which the initiated person can be reintegrated. Instead, such experi-
ences can make one feel more isolated, having had a one-off experience that does
not make sense to one’s kinship group or community.
We have opted for personal freedom above social regulation, and I can’t see
this changing, except for those who decide to join intentional communities with
shared values and a commitment to the spiritual life. The New Age movement
often emphasises abandonment of the ego, which is the reverse side to society’s
idealisation of the ego. But this is too crude and misunderstands an important
element of initiatory process. In genuine initiations, we are asked to overcome
our identification with the ego, not get rid of the ego, which is something quite
different. We can’t get rid of the ego, as it is an archetype, and has an important
role to play in the psychic economy. The ego needs to be displaced from its cen-
tral position in the personality, but it is required to order our experience, adapt
our lives to society and others.
Jung once said that the ego makes a great servant but a lousy master. This is
the key to understanding the role of the ego. It cannot be abandoned because it
is essential, but while in profane society its role is to run the show and dictate the
terms of existence, in spiritual life its role is changed to that of servant. The ego
has to be valued for its creative role in serving the transformational process, but
to reverse what happens in society is not to create the right conditions for entry
into the life of the sacred. The soul must be the master and the ego its emissary,
and the balance between these two parts of the personality has to be fine-tuned
as the ego is relativised to allow us to admit the holy into our lives.
Sacrifice and global survival

The postsecular is not merely another fad or popular fashion. It is something
that is being forced on us by powers beyond our control. It is welling up from
the unconscious, and this is what makes the postsecular ominous, enigmatic
and dangerous. It cannot be understood from one perspective alone; we need
the combined forces of philosophy, theology, sociology and psychology to
understand it. If one of these four disciplines is missing, we have no hope of
comprehending the historical movement on which we have already embarked.
We are experiencing the return of the sacred to our all-too-human world.
Many mistakes and false moves will be made as we negotiate this transition. What
we find hard to grasp, especially for those coming from a humanist perspective, is
Epilogue 187
that the sacred is not just a human construct, but an autonomous reality in which
we live and move and have our being. The sacred is larger than us, and makes
claims on us. We cannot allow the sacred to enter our lives and remain the same.
We are fundamentally altered by an experience of a presence which is radically
different from ourselves.
Although Jürgen Habermas is carrying the torch for the postsecular at present,
it is Jung and Derrida who understood the deeper implications of the encounter
with the sacred. This encounter is not just personal, but transpersonal and col-
lective, involving the whole of humanity, whether it likes it or not. Jung and
Derrida, more than Habermas or Berger, were aware that religion could never
die out, since it is part of human experience. Religion is autonomous and not a
matter of our choosing. Sociologists Habermas and Berger see it as a choice we
make, and in part this is true. We can choose to deny or reject what imposes itself
upon our lives. But Jung and Derrida, arriving at this position from psychology
and philosophy respectively, understood that religion is autonomous. It is some-
thing that is thrust upon us rather than something we choose for ourselves.
Derrida defined religion as an act by which one ‘gives oneself back, and up,
to the other. To every other and to the utterly other (tout autre . . .)’. This act of
religion, he said, is ‘not chosen freely in an act of pure and abstractly autonomous
will’.2 Likewise, Jung argued that religio is ‘a dynamic agency or effect not caused
by an arbitrary act of will’. ‘It seizes and controls the human subject, who is
always rather its victim than its creator’. ‘The numinosum – whatever its cause may
be – is an experience of the subject independent of his will’.3 This is the mysti-
cal, depth dimension that is often missing from much writing on the postsecular.
Jung and Derrida are able to be our guides as we make this transition.
The key to a successful transition from the secular to the postsecular, or the
postmodern to the postsecular, is sacrifice, and how we can understand it today.
In the ancient past, this might have been interpreted literally, as human or ani-
mal sacrifices, or loading up a scapegoat with sins and sending it off into the
wilderness. But what we must sacrifice is nothing like that; we need to sacrifice
our ego-based orientation and move toward a larger, more open, f luid sense of
reality. We need to allow more reality into our awareness, and this has to include
respect for the mystery that underpins our existence and all creation. By sacrific-
ing our narrow perspective, we gain a lot, but it is not a gain that the ego com-
prehends. To the ego, it is just loss, and thus resisted or rejected. Hence the need
for what I have been calling a depth or mystical perspective.
The call to sacrifice, which literally means to ‘make sacred’, is not a call we
want to hear. It is only by sacrificing certain typical human traits, such as pride,
arrogance, hubris, superiority, rationality, that we can hope to be receptive to the
sacred and allow it proper sway and presence in our lives. It is only by shedding
some of our humanness that we can become more humane, caring and open to
the forces that transcend our authority. ‘Life demands sacrifice’, Jung wrote to
Sabina Spielrein in 1911. ‘Only in the course of self-sacrifice will you gain your-
self in a new and more beautiful form’.4
Not only is there a natural resistance to sacrifice, to giving something up, but
humanity has a resistance to growth and change:
Human nature has an invincible dread of becoming more conscious of

itself. What nevertheless drives us to it is the self, which demands sacrifice
by sacrificing itself to us. Conscious realization or the bringing together
of the scattered parts is in one sense an act of the ego’s will, but in another
sense it is a spontaneous manifestation of the self, which was always there.5
Or as Derrida would put it, the capacity for the transcendent, the desire for the
impossible, is ‘always already’ there. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard speaks of
the anguish and trauma that the call to sacrifice can generate, as dramatised in
the biblical story of Abraham being called to sacrifice his son Isaac, and the ‘leap
of faith’ required to transcend this trauma.
In the Red Book, Jung writes enigmatically: ‘Sacrifice is not destruction, sac-
rifice is the foundation stone of what is to come’.6 Jung saw his ego personified
in form of the hero Siegfried. In a section of the Red Book called ‘Murder of
the Hero’, Jung recounts a crucial dream in which he was called upon to track
down and murder Siegfried. Jung explains the necessity of sacrificing the heroic
ideal so that a new adaptation could be realised. He wrote that Siegfried had to
be killed because only then would there be ‘a chance for the other sides of the
personality to be born into life’. This sacrifice brings about an unleashing of
unconscious energy, a liberation of other aspects of self, in particular the psyche
or soul. In 1954 Jung took up the theme again: ‘What I sacrifice is my egotistical
claim, and by doing this I give up myself. Every sacrifice is therefore, to a greater
or lesser degree, a self-sacrifice’.7
New Age groups quote Jung as an authority for their own attempt to give up
the ego. But they misunderstand Jung, as I have explored in another book.8 Jung
is speaking about the attachment to the ego as the sacrifice, the destruction of the
heroic ideal, symbolised by Siegfried, not the ego itself which has an absolutely
crucial role to play in the psychological economy. Without the ego as support
and helper, spirit cannot incarnate into time and space. This misunderstanding
of sacrifice is widespread in the community: many do not see the difference
between attachment to the ego and the ego itself. We need to loosen the bonds
that tie us to ego, that is one way of conceiving sacrifice. As a psychiatrist spe-
cialising in psychosis, Jung had seen much of what happens to individuals when
their egos are shattered or wiped out by trauma, drugs or transcendental experi-
ences. As with most things, the key is finding a balance between ego and soul,
and respecting both as necessary members of the ecology of the psyche.
Derrida was forced to make a similar kind of sacrifice. This sophisticated
intellectual from Paris had to embrace the most uncool and unfashionable thing
of all: religion. His reputation suffered, and many in academia thought he had
lost his bearings; he had become senile. But Derrida’s experience of the sacred
was grounded in his childhood experience and family upbringing, as was Jung’s.
Epilogue 189
He found security in this upbringing, as he faced a degree of scorn and rejection

by those who once admired and even worshipped his intellect. Derrida’s spiritual
act was a sacrificium intellectus, not a loss of intellect per se, but a loss of the kind
of intellect that berates soul and spirit. Derrida found himself not scorning but
praising the impossible, and he invited the impossible into his life as a stranger,
a wanderer. To some extent he had to renounce the worldliness of the world to
find the depth that was beckoning him.
Jung too had to sacrifice his relation to what had become respectable and
normative, namely Freudian thought and the psychoanalytic circle. This was
the crisis that precipitated his mental disorientation, and which caused him to
be ‘under constant inner pressure’. But it was precisely this crisis that brought his
own, distinct kind of thought, analytical psychology, to birth. Jung sacrificed his
status as Freud’s ‘successor and crown prince’ and his ‘heir apparent’.9 This was
a traumatic sacrifice.
Although far removed from churches or synagogues, Jung and Derrida affirm
the central paradox of the scriptures:
Those who try to make their lives secure will lose it,
But those who lose their life will keep it.10
In another translation, the lines read:
If you cling to your life, you will lose it,

And if you let your life go, you will save it.11
What is most relevant today is the Gospel of Thomas, found in Nag Hamadi:
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you;
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth
will destroy you.12
Scripture is saying: If you cling to your egoic self, you will lose your life, and if
you sacrifice your egoic self to a greater reality you will find your life. All this
needs interpreting before it makes sense today, otherwise scripture is a series of
indecipherable riddles and sacrosanct unintelligibility. Hermeneutics is required.
The return of the sacred is happening whether we like it or not. Mostly we do
not want it because it makes claims on us that we would rather ignore. We would
prefer to live cocooned, egocentric lives, unencumbered by the fact that we are
not here for ourselves, but as representatives of a life-force that created us. Our
lives are not our lives, that is why we have to sacrifice them and devote ourselves
to a larger cause. But in the same way that jihad is a sacred idea that has gone
berserk, so sacrifice, a religious impulse, is enacted destructively in our time. We
might almost say that violent sacrifice, in the self-sacrifice of the suicide bomb-
ers and the slaughter of their victims, is taking place in this pathological form
because the modern world is not sacrificing effectively to the sacred.
In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard argues that the civilising role of religion
is to provide a safe container for the impulse to sacrifice, which he says is found
in all societies, most starkly and brutally, in the earliest and most ancient.13 When
symbolic containers are shattered, lost or traumatised, the sacrificial impulse that
has not been held by ritual and culture regresses to its barbaric and ancient forms.
Instead of participating in a civilised way in the ritual sacrifice of a God, such
as we find in the Holy Communion, we revert to killing each other. In his last
work, which is his most pessimistic, Girard prophesised that this kind of atavistic
sacrifice would carry off everything in its path. He argued that the world is about
to experience,
an appalling resurgence of violence in its most odious and most atrocious

forms, because the sacrificial mechanisms become less and less effective and less and
less capable of renewing themselves.14
What does not take place in ritual or symbol is acted out in the world. Girard
continues: ‘Men must reconcile themselves for evermore without sacrificial
intermediaries, or they must resign themselves to the coming extinction of
humanity’.15 Jung expressed a similar attitude when he said, ‘We are threatened
with universal genocide if we cannot work out the way of salvation by a symbolic
death’.16 These are dire warnings, and difficult to accept, but they make sense
when we realise what is at stake, and the power of what we are repressing when
we repress the sacred.
The impulse to sacrifice is archetypal and instinctual, and without the ‘inter-
mediaries’ of numinous symbols, the human race withers and self-destructs.
There is no overcoming of these religious urges, because humanity is made in
the image of God. We are innately religious whether we realise it or not; or
something within us is religious even if we are not. There is no overcoming or
growing out of our religious roots. In Christianity, God the Son, the Christos,
takes upon himself the impulse toward sacrifice, so that humanity might be freed
of ‘acting out’ this burden evermore. But as soon as our religions collapse or lose
conviction, the impulses invested in them degenerate to their most savage forms.
This is what is known as the atavistic regression to type. The archaic energies are
loosed upon the world, as Yeats saw.
The violence we are witnessing today derives from what Girard calls ‘the
primitive sacred’. When symbols of transformation become ineffective, we are
held to ransom by unconscious religious urges. Herein lies the life-giving and
life-preserving function of religion: ‘The ritualised sacred is that which holds
violence in check’, says Girard. ‘Ritual violence is that which prevents the
unleashing of violence’.17 Speaking as an anthropologist, he says: ‘Every advance
in [ritual and symbol] f lushes violence out of its lair, and represents, at least
potentially, a formidable advance in intellectual and ethical respect’.18 It is sacred
symbolism and ceremony that makes us human, and without a sophisticated reli-
gious culture we fall victim to religious impulses gone wrong.
Epilogue 191
I believe the dynamics I have explored in this book can be understood in the
context of every culture. There are universal features of religious experience
that are found in all religions but are peculiar to none. Girard’s response to the
dynamics of sacrifice are stark, memorable, even shocking, as are the ref lections
on sacrifice by Australia’s poetic genius, Les Murray. Murray arrived at the same
view as Girard, but reached his position independently:
Christ consciously took the whole deeply ancient human motif of sacrifice
on himself and as it were, completing and sealing it, so that henceforth we
might refer the whole complex impulse to his action and never again enact
it literally on a living victim.19
Murray continued:
With the decline of traditional Christian observance, things formerly

bound have a way of being loosed again on mankind. [Given recent atroci-
ties] it is surely much harder than it may have seemed before to say that
man evolves beyond highly developed religion. In perhaps a majority of
cases, he falls out of it backwards, back down into archaic practices (none
the less archaic for their modern veneer) and quandaries which had long
since been resolved.20
This is Les Murray’s Christian point of view, but these dynamics can be found
in every religion and all cultural settings. It is true that in our time the reli-
gious virtues and practices are often enacted in violent and degenerate ways.
G. K. Chesterton wrote, ‘The modern world is full of the old religious virtues
gone mad’.21
Notes
1 Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1908; Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1960).
3 C. G. Jung, ‘Psychology and Religion’ (1938/40), CW 11, par. 6.
4 Jung, letter to Sabina Spielrein, September 21, 1911, ‘The Letters of Jung to Sabina
Spielrein’, trans. Barbara Wharton, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 46:1 (2001), 180.
5 C. G. Jung, ‘Transformation Symbolism in the Mass’ (1954), CW 11, par. 400.
7 Jung, ‘Transformation Symbolism in the Mass’, par. 397.
8 David Tacey, Jung and the New Age (London: Routledge, 2001).
9 Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters, ed. William McGuire (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 104, 224.
10 New Revised Standard Version, Luke 17:33.
11 New Living Translation, Luke 17:33.
12 A. Guillaumont, Henri-Charles Puech, Gilles Quispel, Walter Till and Yassah ‘Abd Al
Masih, eds., The Gospel According to Thomas (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), Saying
70, 41.
13 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1979).
14 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978; Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1987), 150.
15 Ibid., 160.
16 C. G. Jung, ‘Jung and Religious Belief ’ (1956), CW 18 (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1976), par. 1661.
17 Girard, Things Hidden, 279.
18 Ibid., 160.
19 Les Murray, ‘Some Religious Stuff I Know about Australia’, in Persistence in Folly (Syd-
ney: Angus & Robertson, 1984), 111.
20 Ibid.
21 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), located at: www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/
pg130-images.html
INDEX
Abelard, Peter 53 between intellectuals and ordinary

abstinence 40 citizens 65; health 72 –7; indigenous
Africa 24 –5 people 59 – 60; national psyche 63 –5;
Aion ( Jung) 172 postcolonial movement 62; religious
alchera 109 participation 26; secular society
alcheringa 108 59 – 60, 70 –2; soul as ‘down under,’
Alcoholics Anonymous 74 60, 62 –3; spiritual language in 63;
Ancestral Mind, The ( Jacobs) 103 spiritual life 61–2 , 72 –7; wellbeing
anima 110 72 –7
anima mundi 108, 120 Australia Day 65 –7
Anzac Day 65 –7 Australian Religious Thought (Hudson) 60
apophatic theology 138 Australian, The (newspaper) 66
Aquinas, Thomas 134
‘Archaic Man’ ( Jung) 102 –3 Bass, Diana Butler 28, 29
archetypes 104 –5, 108 –10, 121–2 , 180 –1, Bates, Daisy 81, 105
186 Bayman, Henry 178
Arden, Harvey 91 Beckett, Samuel 16
Aristotle 36 belief 132 –3
Arnold, Matthew 14, 144 Bell, Daniel 31
art 144 –5 Berger, Peter 4, 25, 37, 187
ascetic practices 40 –2 Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint 41, 52 –3
Asia 24 Berry, Thomas 102
Athar, Shahid 176 Blake, William 148
atheism 1, 139 Bloom, Harold 26
Atomic Physics and the Description of Nature Bohm, David 121
(Bohr) 117 Bohr, Neils 104, 117, 121
attachment 188 Bonaparte, Napoleon 143
Augustine of Hippo, Saint 139, 163 Book of Her Life, The (Teresa of Avila) 48
Australia: ancient and modern 62 –3; Bowler, James 90
Anzac Day 65 –7; cult of forgetfulness Brady, Veronica 68, 74
67– 8; culture of shame and Brahman 120
embarrassment 68 –72; drug and Buddhism 24, 159, 177
alcohol epidemic in 74 – 5; emptiness bugari 109
in 74; frontier wars 67– 8; gap Bultmann, Rudolf 53
194 Index
Campbell, Colin 44 Desecularization of the World, The (Berger) 37

Camus, Albert 158 Dominian, Jack 30
Canada 24 Doomadgee, Wadjularbinna 83
Capra, Fritjof 101–2 , 118, 120 Dourley, John 29 –30
Capri Dialogues (Derrida) 152 – 6 Dreaming: as communal and shared 100;
Caputo, John 4, 156, 161, 162 , 165 indigenous people 59, 101, 108 –10;
‘Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and primal bond with nature and 101; as
the Spiritual Mind’ (Ponte and Schäfer) ‘projection’ 106
121 Dreamkeepers (Arden) 91
Central America 24 –5 dreams 103
Cheetham, Thomas 176 dualism 18, 42 , 100, 106, 112 –13, 118,
Chesterton, G. K. 191 120, 125, 147
China 24 –5, 31, 32 Dupré, Louis 48
Chinese Christianity 25 – 6 During, Simon 2 , 6, 20
Christianity 18, 22 , 24 –5, 30, 32 , 37, 44,
48 –50, 68, 75, 93, 145, 173, 176, 177, earth-language 63
179 Eastern religions 18, 75
Christianity After Religion (Bass) 28 Eckersley, Richard 72
churinga 111 Eckhart, Meister 41, 48, 51–2 , 139, 157
Circumfession (Derrida) 155, 159 ecology 41–2 , 100 –2
Communist Manifesto (Marx) 31 ecopsychology 102 – 4
Confessions (Augustine of Hippo) 163 ‘ecstasy’ 74
consumer capitalism 31–2 Eddington, Stanley 120 –1
Cosmic Mind 117 Edge of the Sacred (Tacey) 63
Cox, Harvey 16 ego 187– 8
creativity 15 Einstein, Albert 117–18, 120, 122 –3
cultural elites 65, 89 Eisler, Riane 52
Elegant Universe, The (Greene) 118
dadirri 84, 85 Eliade, Mircea 112
Davie, Grace 16 emptiness 49
Davies, Paul 121 Endgame (Beckett) 16
Dawkins, Richard 137, 171 Engels, Friedrich 20
deep listening 85 – 6 England 27
‘deep secularism’ 71 Enlightenment 14, 67, 70, 73, 82 , 92 , 107,
depth psychology 4 –5, 40 152 –3
Derrida, Jacques: on belief in God 1; Europe 24, 31
Capri Dialogues 152 – 6; Circumfession
155, 159; daily ritual of prayer 164; ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (Derrida) 152
dialogue with Gadamer 143, 154; feminine principle 51
dialogue with Vattimo 154 – 6; distaste feminine spirituality 50 – 4
for religions 19 –20; as emissary of Feuerbach, Ludwig 140, 144, 159
postsecular 3 – 4, 7, 13, 151– 65; ‘Faith f lagellation 40
and Knowledge’ 152; ‘How to Avoid forgetfulness 67– 8
Speaking’ 159; on intuition 134 –5; Forman, Robert 27
on mythological forms and figures Foucault, Michel 21
of religions 144; negative theology France 13, 24
158 – 60; reintroducing gods and spirit Frankfurt School 21
into thinking 102; on religion 160 –2 , Freud, Sigmund 4, 47, 107, 122 –3, 140,
174 –5, 177, 187; reluctance to name 155, 176
ultimate reality 156 – 8; return to Friedman, Maurice 136
childhood faith 162 –5; sacrifice 188 –9; frontier wars 67– 8
‘Save the Name’ (‘Sauf le Nom’) 160;
on scriptures 189; Of Spirit 155; on Gadamer, Hans-Georg 143, 154
transcendence 160 Galatians, Epistle to the 44
Descartes, René 107 Gallipoli 65 – 6
Index 195
Gandhi, Mohandas K. 93 – 4 Heelas, Paul 27

Garner, Helen 69 Hegel, Georg W. F. 138
Gay Science, The (Nietzsche) 158 Heidegger, Martin 4, 102 , 138, 155 – 6
Generation of Seekers, A (Roof ) 27 Heisenberg, Werner 117–18, 121, 125
Genesis, Book of 37, 144 Helderman, Ira 38
Germany 24 Hellenism 173
Giegerich, Wolfgang 178 –9 Hildegard of Bingen, Saint 46
gifts 84 –5, 88 –92 Hillman, James 43, 99 –100, 102 , 103 – 4,
Gift, The (Mauss) 88 105 – 8
Gillen, Francis 94 Hinduism 24, 119 –20, 135, 177
Girard, René 190 –1 Hitchens, Christopher 172
Gloria Patri (prayer) 109 holistic spirituality 40 –2
God: apophatic theology 138; as archetype Holland 24
131–2; ascetic practices and 40 –2; belief Holy Trinity 50
in 132–3; ‘death of God’ 2, 4, 14, 15 –16, ‘holy war’ 176
19, 39, 141, 158; discovering 157– 8; Horner, Robyn 159 – 60
false gods after 30 –3; ‘God is back’ Howard, John 68
24 –5; intuition and 133 – 6; kataphatic ‘How to Avoid Speaking’ (Derrida) 159
theology 138; made in image of 73; hubris 173
as mother 51– 4; mystery of 136 –9; Hudson, Wayne 60 –1
mystical interiority of 48, 139 – 41; on Hume, Lynne 109 –10
new image of 41–2; new vision of 145– 6; Hunt, Kate 26 –7
as outside 50; as ‘projection’ 107– 8; Huss, Boaz 44
questions on nature of existence 142 – 4;
as radical ordinary presence 146 –9; Ignatius of Loyola, Saint 43
sacred images 141–2 , 147–9; sacrifice imagination 144 –5
for 68; as stupid idea 65 Incredible Need to Believe, This (Kristeva)
‘God and Philosophy’ (Levinas) 177 16, 19
God Delusion, The (Dawkins) 137 India 24
God Is Back (Micklethwait and Indick, William 137
Wooldridge) 24 indigenous people: cosmologies of 102 ,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 111, 143 112; cultural elites and 89; Dreaming
Goya, Francisco 180 59, 101, 108 –10; gifts 84 –5, 88 –92;
Graham Ward 2 initiation 110 –13; inspiration from
Gramsci, Antonio 31 92 –3; liberation movements of spirit
grassroots spirituality 21, 22 – 4, 27, 32 –3 93 – 4; in ‘Old’ Australia 59 – 60;
Grassroots Spirituality (Forman) 27 political correctness and 89 –90;
‘Great Australian Silence, The’ (Stanner) 68 relationship with outsiders 104 – 6;
Great Britain 24, 26 –7, 68 role in development of postsecular
green politics 22 sacred 80–94; spiritual belonging
Greer, Germaine 65 85 –7; spiritual consumerism and 90 –2;
Grieves, Vicki 100 spirituality 100 –2 , 118 –19
Griffiths, Bede 54, 119 initiation 110 –13, 180 –1, 184 – 6
Grof, Stanislav 103 instinct 20
Guardian, The (newspaper) 27 interiority 36, 39, 48, 50 – 4, 99 –100,
Guardini, Romano 176 –7 139 – 41
intuition 133 – 6
Habermas, Jürgen 2 –3, 4, 13, 21, 187 Irigaray, Luce 13 –14
Hadot, Pierre 43 Islam 24, 177– 81
Harris, Sam 172
Hart, David Bentley 131 Jacobs, Gregg 103
Hart, Kevin 156, 159, 162 James, William 28
Hay, David 26, 137 Jesus 22 –3, 31, 32 , 36 –7, 39, 47, 48, 50 –1,
heart 39 – 40 138
Hebraism 173 Jesus movement 21
196 Index
John of the Cross, Saint 46, 49 Lonergan, Bernard 53

Johnston, William 53 – 4 Luke, Gospel of 36
Josephson, Jason Ananda 16
Judaism 164, 177 Mackay, Hugh 26
Julian of Norwich 46, 73 Mandela, Nelson 93 – 4
Jung, Carl G.: Aion 172 –3; appearance Marion, Jean-Luc 4
of soul-figure in active imagination Marx, Karl 20, 31, 140, 155, 159
exercise 171; ‘Archaic Man’ 102 –3; Mauss, Marcel 88 –9
archetypes 104 –5, 108 –10, 121–2 , 180; mental health 75 – 6
concept of the collective unconscious Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 148
110; cosmology of 110; definition of Merton, Thomas 47–9, 50, 54
religion 187; experience of God 139; metanoia 83
inf luence on theology 109; initiation Milbank, John 5
of AA movement 74; model of Mohammed, Prophet of Islam 176
personality 122; on new image of God Monture, Joel 91
41–2; notion of ‘projection’ 106 – 8; Moore, Thomas 43
notion of psyche 102 –7; as postsecular Mowaljarlai, David 80 –1, 89, 91, 94
psychologist 19 –20; Psychology and Murdoch, Iris 54
Alchemy 40; quantum physics and Murray, Les 90, 111, 191
121–2; Red Book, The 5, 59, 175, 188; mysterium tremendum et fascinans 171
rejection of theories 104; on religious mysticism: apophatic theology 138;
ethic of perfection 45; on return of banishment of 36 –7; feminine
religion 176; on scriptures 189; on soul spirituality and 50 – 4; as postsecular
38, 99; on truth 15 resource 45 –50
Mystics of the Church (Underhill) 47
Kabir (poet) 50 Myth of Disenchantment, The ( Josephson) 16
kamikaze syndrome 180
Kant, Immanuel 140 Nature and the Human Soul (Plotkin) 102
kataphatic theology 138 Nature of the Physical World, The
Kearney, Richard 4 (Eddington) 120
Keats, John 41, 43, 143 negative theology 138
Kelly, Alice 90 ‘New Age’ spirituality 21–2 , 29 –30, 39,
Khan, Hazrat Inayat 176 64, 90 –1
Khomeini, Ruhollah Musavi, Grand New Science of Life, A (Sheldrake) 124
Ayatollah 179 Newton, Miller 135
khora 160 New Zealand 24
Kim, Jung Ha 25 – 6, 27 Nicholas of Cusa 117
King, Martin Luther, Jr. 93 – 4 Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 2 , 4, 131, 137,
kneeling 40 140, 158 –9
Kristeva, Julia 13, 16, 19 –20, 180 nihilism 143
Krystal, Henry 178 non-churchy spirituality 22 –3
Kuhn, Thomas 2 , 126 non-dualism 100 –1, 116 –26
Ku Klux Klan 179 numinosum 19, 171
Lacan, Jacques 157 original sin 36 –7, 40

ladders 38 –9
Lake, Marilyn 66 ‘paradigm change’ 126
Lawrence, D. H. 41, 125 Paranjape, Makarand 64
Leary, Timothy 103 Passing of the Aborigines, The (Bates) 81
Lenin, Vladimir 20 Pauli, Wolfgang 107
Leunig, Michael 69 Paul, Saint 43, 44, 112 , 119
Levinas, Emmanuel 4, 162 , 177 perfection 37, 42 –5
liberation movements 93 – 4 physics: classical physics 117; quantum
Lippmann, Walter 23 physics 107, 116 –26
Lohrey, Amanda 61 Physics and Philosophy (Heisenberg) 125
Index 197
Picasso, Pablo 14 Rites of Passage (van Gennep) 184

Pilger, John 87 ritual 190
Planck, Max 117 Roberts, Silas 101
Plato 36, 109, 117, 119, 160 Rogers, Carl 45
Plotinus 119 Roof, Clark 27
Plotkin, Bill 102 Roszak, Theodore 102 , 113
political correctness 89 –90 Rowson, Jonathan 23 – 4
political ideology 31 Rumi, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad 50
‘political spirituality’ 21 Rushdie, Salmon 179
Ponte, Diogo Valadas 121–3 Russia 24, 31
postcolonial movement 62
Postmodern God, The (Ward) 2 sacred images 141–2 , 171–3
postsecular animism 103 – 4 sacred stone 111
postsecularism 14, 186 sacrifice 68, 186 –91
Practical Mysticism (Underhill) 46 sacrificium intellectus 189
prayer 109, 164 San Roque, Craig 108 –9
primordial mind 102 – 4 Sartre, Jean-Paul 158
‘projection’ 106 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie) 179
Psalms, Book of 45, 86 ‘Save the Name’ (‘Sauf le Nom’) (Derrida)
psyche 17, 19, 38, 45, 50, 61– 4, 70, 99 –100, 160
102–7 Scandinavia 24
Psyche and Matter (von Franz) 124 Schäfer, Lothar 118, 121–3, 125
Psychology and Alchemy ( Jung) 40 Schneiders, Sandra 28 –30, 43
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The Schrödinger, Erwin 117, 120, 121, 123
(Freud) 107 science 17–19, 135
psycho-spiritual ecology 41–2 scripture 136
psychotherapy 44 –5 scriptures 189
Pythagoras 119 Secret of Islam, The (Bayman) 178
Secular Age, A (Taylor) 5, 22
quantum physics 107, 116 –26 Secular City, The (Cox) 16
quantum theory 117–26 secularism 16
Sermon on the Mount 31
Rahner, Karl 53 shadow 38
reason 16, 133 – 6 Sheldrake, Rupert 124 –5
Red Book, The ( Jung) 5, 59, 175, 188 Singer, Thomas 181
religion: damage by literalism 136; Somé, Malidoma 104
decline of 18 –19; defensive mode of Something There (Hay) 137
14; Derrida on 160 –2 , 174 –5, 177, soul: in Australia 60, 62 –3; ecology of
187; dualistic nature of Western 41–2 , 100 –2; as feminine 50; holistic
18 –19; explosiveness of resurgent 20; spirituality of 40 –2; as metaphor for
extremism 28; feminine spirituality sense of interiority 99 –100; mysticism
and 50 – 4; global scene 24 – 6; as instinct of indwelling 36 –7; path through 39– 40;
20; Jung on 187; paradox of 15; role as shadow 38; as towering angel 174
of imagination and art 144 –5; sacred South America 24 –5
images 141–2; spirituality and 13 –14, Spencer, Baldwin 94
16 –17, 23 – 4, 28 –30; transformation of Spirit, Of (Derrida) 155
14 –15, 135; in United States 6, 26 –7 spiritual anxiety 73 – 4
religious discourse 159 – 60 spiritual belonging 85 –7
‘religious illusion’ 155 ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR) 25
religious right 21 spiritual consumerism 90 –2
Re-Visioning Psychology (Hillman) 106 spiritual development 18
Revitalising Spirituality to Address 21st spirituality: in Australia 62 –3; as basis of
Century Challenges (Rowson) 23 ecology 100 –2; definitions of 42 –5;
Reynolds, Henry 66 –7 demand for 75 –7; feminine spirituality
Rilke, Rainer Maria 174 50 – 4; gifts 84 –5, 88 –92; grassroots
198 Index
spirituality 21, 22 – 4, 27, 32 –3; history Unbearable Wholeness of Being, The (Delio)
in West 38; holistic spirituality 40 –2; 147
indigenous spirituality 100 –2 , 118 –19; Underhill, Evelyn: Mystics of the Church
‘New Age’ spirituality 21–2 , 29 –30, 39, 47; Practical Mysticism 46
64, 90 –1; non-churchy spirituality 22–3; Ungunmerr, Miriam-Rose 85 –7, 89,
‘political spirituality’ 21; postsecular 91–2
spirituality in the political landscape United Kingdom 26, 30
20 –1; religion and 13 –14, 16 –17, 23 – 4, United States 26 –7, 32 , 70 –1
28 –30; as scientific experiment 17–19;
in United States 6, 26 –7 van Gennep, Arnold 184
Spiritual Revolution, The (Heelas and Van Ness, Peter 42
Woodhead) 27 Vattimo, Gianni 4, 19 –20, 140, 154 – 6
spiritus contra spiritum (spirit against Vedanta 119
spirit) 74 Vedic scriptures 119 –20
Stanner, Bill 68, 83 – 4, 109 –10 via negativa 138, 157
Steindl-Rast, David 45 – 6 violence 190
Stevens, Anthony 104, 116 Violence and the Sacred (Girard) 190
Stone, Merlin 52 virtue 37
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The von Franz, Marie-Louise 124
(Kuhn) 126
Suzuki, D. T. 159 Wales 27
symbolic forms 143 – 4 Wallace, Kathleen Kemarre 90
synchronicity 107, 175 Watson, Grant 105
wave–particle paradox 124
Tart, Charles 103 Weber, Max 32
Taylor, Charles 5, 22 –3 Weil, Simone 49
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 119, 147– 8 wellbeing 72 –7
Teresa of Avila, Saint 46, 48 –9 Western religions 18 –19
terrorism 20, 174, 176 – 81 What’s Wrong with Anzac? (Reynolds and
three-fold pattern 28 Lake) 66
Tillich, Paul 14, 53, 73, 107–9, 132 , When God was a Woman (Stone) 52
138 –9 Whitehead, Alfred North 37, 145
tjukurrpa 108 White, Patrick 69, 74, 76
Todd, Loretta 91 wholeness 39 – 45, 50, 74, 118, 147
Toward the Future (Teilhard de Chardin) Why Weren’t We Told? (Reynolds) 68
147 Wilber, Ken 43, 140
tradition 14 –16 Woodhead, Linda 27
traditional dance 63 Wordsworth, William 107
transcendence 160 World Values Survey 28
transformation rituals 111–12 wungud 84
tremendum 171
Trespass of the Sign, The (Hart) 159 ‘yang’ 51
Trias, Eugenio 141, 155 Yeats, William Butler 38, 181
truth 14 –16 ‘yin’ 51
two million-year-old man 103 – 4
Two Million-Year-Old Self, The Zen Buddhism 53
(Stevens) 104 Žižek, Slavoj 14, 175

Postsecular Sacred

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THE POSTSECULAR SACRED

David Tacey is Emeritus Professor of Humanities, La Trobe University, Australia. He is the

ISBN: 978-0-367-20321-4 (hbk)

Acknowledgements and note on referencing vii

The postsecular condition 11

1 The postsecular landscape 13

2 The mystical turn 36

Secularism under pressure 57

4 The Aboriginal gift we will not accept 80

Reanimation of the world 97

5 Ecopsychology and indigenous cosmology 99

6 Physics and reanimation 116

Postsecular religion and atheism 129

7 God after God 131

8 Derrida: emissary of the postsecular 151

Violence and the sacred 169

9 Return of the sacred in an age of terror 171

10 Epilogue: sacrifice and the future 184

Scholars continue to complain: Does postsecular mean citizens are rejecting

A ‘postsecular’ society must at some point have been in a ‘secular’ state.

Secular critique is prepared to do battle with religion’s metaphysical claims and

Creativity and instability

Truth and change

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

Spirituality and religion

Spirituality as scientific experiment

Jung as postsecular psychologist

Postsecular spirituality in the political landscape

Grassroots spirituality: vital and vulnerable

In an age when custom is dissolved and authority is broken, the religion of

Lippmann argues that the duality of religion versus spirituality needs to be

This spiritual perspective matters now because the challenge of finding

the context of weakening of public institutions, acute ecological crises,

The global scene

By the twenty-first century, religious believers are likely to be found only

Thirty years later, in 1999, this sociologist said:

The assumption that we live in a secularised world is false: The world

Chinese Christianity . . . privatizes spiritual quests by cultivating the

Is America still the exception?

As this generation of un-, re-, and postchurched reached midlife in the

Here again we discern a three-fold pattern: belief, unbelief and recovered

Religion as tradition is the most appropriate context for the development

At first, many religious leaders hoped such experimentation was a pass-

paradox at the heart of this situation is that spirituality is now a growing

False gods after God

religious urge in a variety of dehumanising ways. Personal spirituality is not a

It does not appear to be an accident that the modern world, having

Consumer capitalism is the most successful of the ideologies because we no

49 Heelas and Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution.

The activation of soul

The inward turn

Secularization on the societal level is not necessarily linked to seculariza-

The path through the heart

Holistic spirituality of the soul

spirituality is not only postsecular but post-patriarchal. For centuries spirituality

Is ‘spirituality’ the right term?

The term ‘spirituality’ no longer refers exclusively or even primarily

Is there any evidence of a holistic, body–soul–spirit ethic in the Christian tradi-

Mysticism as postsecular resource

Many of us realise that what we call ‘spirituality’ has limitations: it can be

Mysticism, according to its historical and psychological definitions, is the

It is ‘first hand personal knowledge’, or perhaps ‘experience’, that people want.

In a similar vein, Meister Eckhart wrote:

in conventional Christianity, with its resistance to interiority. Merton was aware