Refuge and Absinthe
🍏
Most of the time life flows and we flow with it. We find meaning in the things we do, the people we love, and the things we hold dear. Yet sometimes we can’t find intrinsic value in our world. We admit to ourselves that we don’t see a way through. We’re a tiny spark in a fiery universe of ten trillion suns. We don’t know 🔺 if the universe is tightly controlled by a Greater Plan, 🔺 if the Plan allows free rein for Chaos, or 🔺 if Chaos is the dominant Force. Our world becomes a bewildering puzzle of ifs, our blue and open skies blanketed by cloud or shrouded by night.
Sartre’s nausea — where he sees a black chestnut root beside him as an alien presence — lies in the pit of our stomach. Unable to change ourselves, we reach out to Some Greater Power, whether we call it Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, or just plain God:
The clouds part, the night breaks into dawn, and we see things differently. It’s not some psychotic break from one to the next, but rather a natural movement of the battered caravanserai from dark to light, from doubting about Everything to believing in Something. The flip-side of the same coin. It’s the movement toward intrinsic Meaning, even Universal Meaning, even though our rational minds remind us that we’re only a small part of the universe and we really aren’t qualified to make grand conclusions.
This dawn or possibility isn’t a rational thing. It isn’t born from the Renaissance of Greek thought or from the rational triumph of the Enlightenment. Rather, it’s born from the Romantic sense that we live in a world of facts, yet we feel in a world of poetry. One might call it a special type of poetical reason, where we think and feel simultaneously, as in T.S. Eliot’s unified sensibility. This reason subsumes and transcends the glorified rationality of the Enlightenment of the 18th century. It imbibes reason and moves forward with it to a more deeply emotional centre, even as the sciences come together to offer a more convincing vision of material evolution.
We see this fusion of thought and emotion in the poetic visions of Shelley, Keats, and Camus. Shelley writes in “Mont Blanc” that “The everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind.” Keats writes in “Ode to a Nightingale” that “the dull brain perplexes and retards,” and that “here there is no light, / Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown / Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.”
In “Noces à Tipasa” A hundred years later, Camus employs this Romantic mode, flowing from the existential to the essential. Camus moves from things as they exist in their scientific neutrality — with their electrons swirling and the wind blowing them randomly here and there — to things as they are in their poetic intensity, fine as the finest senses, like the essence of absinthe fermenting in the sun:
Au bout de quelques pas, les absinthes nous prennent à la gorge. Leur laine grise couvre les ruines à perte de vue. Leur essence fermente sous la chaleur, et de la terre au soleil monte sur toute l'étendue du monde un alcool généreux qui fait vaciller le ciel. Nous marchons à la rencontre de l'amour et du désir. Nous ne cherchons pas de leçons, ni l'amère philosophie qu'on demande à la grandeur. Hors du soleil, des baisers et des parfums sauvages, tout nous paraît futile. Pour moi, je ne cherche pas à y être seul. J’y suis souvent allé avec ceux que j’aimais et je lisais sur leurs traits le clair sourire qu’y prenait le visage de l’amour.
After several steps the absinthe takes us by the throat. Its grey wool covers the ruins from view. Its essence ferments under the heat, and from the earth to the sun, and into the whole stretch of the world, rises a generous alcohol that makes the sky wobble. We walk toward an encounter with love and desire. We don’t look for lessons, nor for the bitter philosophy that we ask of greatness. Apart from the sun, kisses, and wild perfumes, everything seems meaningless. As for me, I don’t look to be alone here. I’ve often come with those I love, reading in their looks the bright smile that is the face of love.
Elsewhere, Camus writes in-depth about meaning and suicide; in Noces à Tipasa he allows existence to slide into essence. He soaks himself in the sunlight, in the warm breeze, and in the smell of absinthe, which is itself soaked and fermented in the sun. He reasons that it’s a good thing to set aside the rationality of the philosophers, and he reverses Sartre’s dictum that existence (and existentialism) comes before essence (or essentialism).
This type of reason can take us beyond conventional reason into a world of beauty and meaningful order, one that we hope for but can’t prove to our rational minds. Its frame may be bound by electronic and magnetic forces, by genetics and evolution, yet its body is hope transmuted into belief — in a Force beyond all material forces; in a God or Being, transcendent or immanent, unifying everything and full of otherworldly Grace. We might call this Force the Good, God, the Mother, Allah, Vishnu, or Dao. Yet whatever we call It — He, She, or It — we imagine It as Something greater than we can imagine.
🍏
As far as I know, there isn’t a philosophy that champions a free and easy flow between doubt and belief. So I refer to this way of thinking and feeling as the double refuge. By this term I mean both doubt and belief, and I mean the easy manner in which we might go from one to the other. Seeing both as the same safe harbour, 🔺 we don’t need to worry that we’re slipping into a strict dogma when we believe, and 🔺 we don’t need to worry that we’re slipping into a grim positivism when we doubt. This allows us to go either way, at any time, in the manner of Keats negative capability, which he defines as “the ability to be in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Behind this double refuge principle lies two other principles. First, there is no such thing as rational religious certainty. In the realms of theology, we can only aspire to belief, not to knowledge in the rational sense. Second, we can only define God as the ultimate Mystery. Those who define God narrowly and dare to speak for Him only demonstrate their limitations, often bound by their particular history, geography, culture, and frame of mind. Yet we can experience the mysteries of our human existence and we can experience the Mystery of divine communion, whatever form or shape that takes. Neither is exclusive. Together, they allow us a double freedom. Either / And.
In The Double Refuge I argue that 🔺 doubt allows us freedom or refuge from dogma and exclusivity, and that 🔺 belief allows us relief or refuge from endless exploration and from the darker corners of doubt. In this scheme of things, belief is the second refuge, when the endless exploration of agnosticism is either too tiring or too vexing. It’s what we look for when “Nous ne cherchons pas de leçons, ni l'amère philosophie,” when “We don’t look for lessons, nor for the bitter philosophy.”
This second refuge isn’t a place we need to believe in or live in all the time. We’re creatures of the moment and in some moments we doubt. But it’s a place we can live in all the time if we want to, because agnosticism doesn’t care if you remain in doubt or if you embrace the Mystery of a spiritual dimension. The only thing is that if you decide to commit yourself irrevocably to belief, and leave aside doubt altogether, you’re no longer an agnostic, and you no longer avail yourself of the first refuge. Perhaps you don’t need it any more, or perhaps you’ll come back to it later. It’s always there. There’s no pressure either way. But as long as you doubt, you can go back and forth freely, and needn’t worry about any permanent stance or definition.
🍏
Key to this double refuge is the philosophy of agnosticism, which lies between belief and disbelief. It’s an attitude toward life that doesn’t shy away from doubt. Agnostics accept their doubts, which makes it easy for them to be skeptical, yet they also doubt their doubts, which opens a path to belief.
For agnostics, doubt isn’t a form of inviolable truth. It’s more a method, in parallel with the scientific method or an open-minded mysticism. It’s less a way of life than a way of going with life’s flow, less an explanation and more an exploration of what’s true.
The 12th century Persian poet Omar Khayyam approaches the skeptical side of agnosticism when he writes, “I will divorce reason and religion, / And take to wife the daughter of the vine.” Like Khayyam, the agnostic distances himself from being married to any one idea or system, whether in the realm of religion or reason. The agnostic prefers to drink the wine of life to the dregs and to be intoxicated by the world that lies before us. He doesn’t want to be slowed down or stifled by conventions, by pre-determined ideas, or by fixed categories of thinking or belief. If he were trapped in a metaphoric marriage to religion and reason, the agnostic would opt for a momentary separation rather than a divorce. A suspension rather than a rupture. And instead of marrying the daughter of the vine, he’d spend some time with her, get drunk with her friends, and ask if Sister Moon was free Friday night.
While Khayyam distances himself from the doctrines of religion and reason, he gets ever-closer to what I think of as their essence: exploration, curiosity, wonder, and connection. He rejects the grand cosmic scheme of religion, yet he articulates cosmic harmony in a mystical way: instead of explaining how the diurnal cycle is divided in parts, he writes of “this battered Caravanserai / Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day.” He says that we are “the puppets and the firmament is the puppet-master,” and he soberly notes that “For a time we acted on this stage,” and then “one by one” we went back “into the box of oblivion.” And while he professes to reject reason, in real life he was an expert in cubic geometry and solar calculation. Even in his poetry he has the realistic mind of the naturalist, who looks at the world and doesn’t superimpose on it some other world: “This reason which seeks the way of bliss / Says again and again to you, / ‘Seize this moment which is yours: You are not that herb which is cut down only to flourish anew.’”
Khayyam’s point isn’t that ideas and systems are dangerous in themselves; as scientist and poet he took full advantage of both. His point is that we shouldn’t be captive to fixed systems and categories of thinking. We shouldn’t be captive to the nice distinction, at least not while life is all around us to be lived:
When Khayyam says he’ll divorce religion and reason he’s making a poetic point about living for the moment, entering the current of life rather than losing ourselves in the arid fixities of dogma. Likewise, when agnostics take religion and reason to task, they don’t aim to dispense with either. They aim to shake them up, to re-configure them, and to question their separation. More than anything, they aim to reconnect with experience and with a sense of freedom and wonder, which can get lost if we stick too doggedly to a single conclusion about the meaning of life.
It’s this free and open attiutude which makes it possible for agnostics 🔺 to doubt as much as they want yet also 🔺 to believe as much as they want.
🍏
Next: 🍏 Overview