The Double Refuge ❇️ Aims & Terms

The Battered Caravanserai

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In The Double Refuge I explore the relationship between doubt and belief. I argue that each can help in understanding the other, and also that each can be a refuge for the other. As Omar Khayyam said 900 years ago, the world’s a rough and dizzying place, a “battered Caravanserai / Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day.” To live in this world, it helps to be flexible, one moment measuring it like an astronomer, the next rotating with it, like a dervish among the spinning stars. A hundred years after Khayyam, another Persian poet, Mawlānā Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, puts it in this way:

We came whirling out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust. The stars made a circle and in the middle we whirl.

The wheel of heaven circles God like a mill. If you grab a spoke it will tear your hand off. Turning and turning, it breaks asunder all attachment. Were the wheel not in love, it would cry “Enough! How long can this go on?”

Every atom in its turning is bewildered. Beggars circle tables, dogs circle carrion, the lover circles his own heart, ashamed. 

I circle shame, a ruined water wheel. Whatever way I turn is the river.

If the old sky creaks to a stop, I will continue to turn. It is only God who circles around Himself.

Rumi gives us a profound vision of unity, yoga, communion, annihilation of self, nirvana, or whatever we want to call it when someone feels they’re living simultaneously in the real physical and the metaphysical divine. Like Walt Whitman, Rumi is “Both in and out of the game, watching and wondering at it.”

Khayyam’s state of mind is equally intriguing, perhaps because it is more divided and skeptical. Khayyam’s state makes sense, given that he was a great mystical poet and also a great mathematician and astronomer. One might say that he was sometimes a mathematician and sometimes a poet. In this, he gets close to the double sensibility that I write about in this study, The Double Refuge. For we aren’t always in a mystical state where we can unite the physical and metaphysical worlds. Like Khayyam, many of us sometimes doubt and sometimes believe. Others are convinced that we must remain skeptical about everything, and still others are convinced that the spiritual world is the ultimate reality, and we must stress this in every moment of our lives. But for many of us it’s not either one or the other. It’s alot of both.

In Either / Or Søren Kierkegaard suggests that we can live either an aesthetic life or a moral life, and that we should make a leap of faith from materialism to spirituality. In The Double Refuge I argue that we can either doubt or believe — and we can do both. Either / and rather than either / or. We leap back and forth all the time, away from Kierkegaard’s dichotomous world to the unified realm that religion promises, and then back to the material world, where we see real sky, without the image of angels, idols, or imagination.

I’ll argue that we can straddle the gap between the mystical and the real, even fasten ropes from one side to the other. And we can lay down planks in the air, to make it easier to walk, given that few of us are tightrope walkers.

Sooner or later, we line the walkway with windows, and gaze dumbfounded at the yawning gulf below. We’re in China now, in Hunan Province, on the Zhangjiajie Glass Bridge. We’re looking down at the yawning gulf, the one that Pascal says is an infinity that only God can fill. We see the stone and trees, the jagged rocks leading up to the horizon, where the bright clouds magnify the blinding sun, which is now lost behind the blue sky, floating out there, somewhere beyond our perception in outer space.

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Rather than an eternal dichotomy or a desperate leap from doubt to faith, I suggest a balance (as inMontaigne), or a pivot (as in Zhuangzi), or a negative capability (as in Keats), or any other concept that allows us to pass freely to and from the realms of doubt and belief. I doubt that God is worried about the exact percentage on either side, or about the exact way we define one or the other. I suspect the only two things that He (She or It) cares about are 1. love and 2. truth.

In The Double Refuge I argue that there's nothing wrong with doubt. Even in terms of religion I think doubt is both inevitable and beneficial. Why else would a popular Christian like Peter Enns write a book called The Sin of Certainty? While I go further into doubt than Enns does, we both assume that the only God worth worshipping is benevolent and reasonable. Such a God isn’t likely to punish us for exercising rationale thought, or for wanting things to be experienced before we believe them.

Nor would He want to strike from human record the lessons of astronomy, geology, archaeology, philology, comparative religion, and Assyriology. Assyriology is the study of the Mesopotamian civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria. These civilizations are largely condemned or condescended to in the Bible, and yet they predate and influence the Bible, even though we may not be aware of it: the Akkadian language is the basis for Hebrew; the story of Noah and the Flood dates back to the Sumerians; the complex legal codes of Ur-Nammu’s Sumer and Hammurabi’s Babylon are approximately 4000 years old; letters and numbers themselves were developed over 4000 years ago in Sumer; etc. (I look at these influences, and at Enns’ view of Mesopotamian religion, in ♒️ The Currents of Sumer, starting with Introduction & Overview).

It seems to me that God would want us to understand as much of our religious tradition as possible, even if it challenges our cherished exclusivities. I imagine that God would want us to question all of the historical, cultural, and geographical definitions which limit Him / She / It, even if this questioning led to 1. radically altering our present views, or 2. syncretism.

Purists see a great danger in syncretism, the fusion of different religious traditions. Yet do those who believe in God really believe that there is one universal omniscient God for one group of people in one place, and then also one universal omniscient God for a different group of people in another place? In the cloud-banks of Heaven, do the angels and saints refuse to stand next to the gods and bodhisattvas? Would Michael not still fight evil, side by side with Shiva and Rama? Would Christ not combine his love and compassion with that of Krishna and Guanyin? Is God too weak to hold together such an alliance?

Purists often condemn syncretism and doubt, yet I suspect that God would take an interest in whoever looks for Universal Meaning yet can’t quite find It, yet are still willing to consider that God has hidden It well. Conversely, God is unlikely to punish believing people who question their faith, and who struggle with things like evolution or comparative religion (as my Parisian novice does in 🇫🇷 The Priest’s Dilemma, starting with Rivers of God).

This is where The Double Refuge comes in: it focuses on the close relationship between agnostics who are open to belief (often referred to as open agnostics) and theists who are open to doubt (I call these open theists). One one might call such ‘open theists’ critical-minded, liberal, non-denominational, ecumenical, or mystical, depending on the type of doubt they entertain. For instance, many mystics believe in God yet doubt all definitions and doctrines that try to define God. 

Personally, I go back and forth between open agnosticism and open theism. I have great respect for all traditions of free thinking and I make consistent reference to Christianity, Hinduism, Daoism, Judaism, and Islam. I might note here that the poets I cited above, Khayyam and Rumi, are very much in the Islamic Sufi tradition, especially as explored by Farid ud-Din Attar in his 12th-century Conference of the Birds. I foreground the relation between Khayyam’s science and Attar’s religion in 🇮🇳 The Fiction of Doubt, starting with Rise of the Simurg.

In dealing with Christianity, my aim is to liberate it from the compulsion that has often dragged it down and made it into a doctrine of belief rather than an exploration of love and truth. Jesus said (in Matthew 5:17) that he came to fulfill the old Jewish Law. Yet in ‘fulfilling’ it he changed it radically — from a focus on judgment and mercy to a focus on forgiveness and Grace. The message of Jesus might be complementary to the Law of Moses, but perhaps more so in the way that parole and rehabilitation is complimentary to verdicts and incarceration. They’re complementary, but so is yang to yin.

The God of Moses displayed mercy on occasion, but He also displayed a great deal of justice and punishment, much of which was based on an exclusive cultural and historical code of rules and customs, as well as an exclusive contract which favoured one particular people. Jesus steered this tradition from exclusion to inclusion, and suggested a liberation from compulsion and fear. While fire-and-brimstone preachers still tell the Old Testament stories about evil-doers and divine vengeance — as in the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah — I prefer a more forgiving and inclusive Christianity, a global faith that’s open to all religions and mysticisms.

This is the version of Christianity urged by Transcendentalists in the 19th century, most notably the essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and the poet Walt Whitman. (I compare Whitman’s inclusive religious vision to that of Zhangzi in 💫 Believing in the Mystery, starting with Introduction: Daoism & Whitman’s Transcendentalism). More recently, this type of open Christianity has been promoted by the likes of Thomas Merton, Raimundo Panikkar, and Richard Rohr. Rohr’s idea of the universal Christ is particularly interesting in the context of inclusive religion. Rohr argues for a cosmic Christ of love, forgiveness, and Grace, one that has existed since at least the Big Bang. This cosmic force of Love flowers in the historical Jesus yet also in any being who acts with charity, compassion, and love.

In 🌎 Many Tribes: (starting with Overview & Six Versions of Infinity) I explore the history of exclusive vs. inclusive Christianity, and in ⏯ Systems (starting with Christianity 2.0) I argue for an inclusive Christianity, even for a Jesus 2.0. This Jesus isn’t burdened with being the only way to God, but is unfettered in the encouragement of love, inclusion, forgiveness, and sacrifice. This Jesus honours this religion or that religion, as long as it furthers inclusion, equality, respect, and love. Any religion of Either / And. I imagine this Jesus as a bodhisattva on the Jordan.

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My hope is that the more the agnostic and the theist remain open, the more likely they are to understand each other, to get along, perhaps even to merge in the infinity that both see as the dominant feature of reality.

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Next: ❇️ Overview

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