The Double Refuge 🍷 Prologue

The Bridge

🍷

In approaching religion and metaphysics, I assume that they’re inseparable from science and the practical physical world in which we live. And yet they aren’t quite the same.

Khayyam highlights the relation between spirit and sense throughout his Rubaiyat, especially in the physicality of the wine that turns into metaphor. The most obvious aspect of Khayyam’s poetry is its sensuality, which constantly urges us to drink wine and seize the moment while we can:

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust Descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and — sans End!

Yet here’s where Khayyam gets tricky: the wine blurs Khayyam’s vision and he then strays deeper and deeper into the symbolic world of mystics like Rumi:

What time, my cup in hand, its draughts I drain,
And with rapt heart unconsciousness attain,
   Behold what wondrous miracles are wrought,
Songs flow as water from my burning brain.

To-day is but a breathing space, quaff wine!
Thou wilt not see again this life of thine;
   So, as the world becomes the spoil of time,
Offer thyself to be the spoil of wine!

There’s an ancient debate about whether Khayyam is a hedonist who merely drinks to get drunk, or a mystic who drinks to get divinely drunk — as in Mahfouz’ short story “Zaabalawi,” where drunkenness merges with self-annihilation, the Sufi pre-requisite for mystical union. Personally, I think Khayyam is a prime example of a double refugee, that is, a person who finds refuge in wine from the rigours of math and logic, and also from the rigidity of religious dogma.

Khayyam also implies the question, What if reason and religion aren’t mutually exclusive? What if one can live in this physical world of wine and crispy baguettes, and also in the metaphysical world of divine intoxication and the bread of angels?

From doubt to clear assurance is a breath,
A breath from infidelity to faith;
Oh, precious breath, enjoy it while you may,
'Tis all that life can give, and then comes death.

Khayyam’s dual vision makes even more sense when we remember that he was a famous mathematician and a renowned astronomer, and yet also a brilliant poet and a subtle mystic. One might say that he was sometimes a mathematician and sometimes a poet.

We can see these two sides of Khayyam in the way Edward Fitzgerald translates his Rubaiyyat as hedonistic poetry, while others, like Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, translate the Rubaiyyat as mystical poetry. In his preface to their translation, Omar Ali-Shah criticizes Fitzgerald and his famous translations (which Fitzgerald called transmogrifications). Ali-Shah argues that the Persian poet was more “Sufic” than hedonist, and that “whatever Omar Khayaam was, he was no atheist”:

Edward Fitzgerald is not the only Westerner for whom the meaning of the Rubaiyyat has seemed too obscure for accurate translation into English; yet E. H. Whinfield, as a Khayaam expert, dismisses the possibility that it contains any secret Sufic doctrine. He states, though unhistorically, that ‘this symbolism was not formulated in Omar's time'. On a previous page, however, he has conceded that 'most of the verses probably bear a mystic meaning'. He refrains from suggesting what sort of mysticism this was, but leaves himself room for tactical retreat; and has at least been generous enough to admit that whatever Omar Khayaam was, he was no atheist.

The question of whether Khayyam was a hedonist or a mystic seems to me an odd one. Why couldn’t he be both? Why insist Khayyam is always a believer or always a positivist when it seems more likely that he was sometimes one and sometimes the other?

Hard-core atheists and hard-core agnostics are convinced that we must doubt everything all the time. Hard-core theists on the other hand are convinced that the spiritual world is the ultimate reality, and that we must stress this in every aspect of our lives. They often go so far as to suggest that God abhors doubt.

Yet for ‘double refugees’ it’s not necessary to either doubt or believe. It’s not either one or the other. It’s alot of both.

In Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard suggests 🔺 we can live either an aesthetic life or a moral life, and 🔺 we should make a leap of faith from hedonistic materialism to moralistic spirituality. In The Double Refuge I argue that we can either doubt or believe — AND we can do both. I argue for either/and rather than either/or.

The double refugee leaps back and forth all the time, away from the chaotic world to the unified realm that religion promises, and then back to the material world, where we see real sky, without the images of gods and angels hovering in the air.

Double refugees straddle the gap between the physical and the metaphysical. They fasten their ropes from one side to the other. They lay down planks in the air, to make it easier to walk (few of us are tightrope walkers). They line the walkway with glass plates, and gaze dumbfounded at the yawning gulf below. They’re in China now, in Hunan Province, on the Zhangjiajie Glass Bridge.

They look down at the yawning gulf, the one that Pascal says is an infinity that only God can fill. They 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 their perception in outer space.

Rather than an eternal dichotomy or a desperate leap from reason & doubt to emotion & 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 way we define doubt and belief, 🔺 the exact way we go from one to the next, or 🔺 the exact percentage on either side. I suspect He cares far more about LOVE, TRUTH, PEACE, JUSTICE, COMPASSION, and REDEMPTION.

🍷

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.

From doubt to clear assurance is a breath,
A breath from infidelity to faith;
Oh, precious breath, enjoy it while you may,
'Tis all that life can give, and then comes death.

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 leads 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, 🔺 whoever can’t quite find It, and 🔺 whoever is still willing to consider that God has hidden It well. By the same token of Love & Mercy, God isn’t likely to punish believers 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 latter open theists, although they might also be called critically-minded, liberal, universalist, 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 critical thinking, and I make consistent reference to Christianity, Hinduism, Daoism, Judaism, and Islam. For instance, the poets I cited above — Khayyam and Rumi — reflect the mystical Islamic tradition of Sufism. In 🇮🇳 The Fiction of Doubt, starting with Rise of the Simurg, I foreground the relation between Khayyam’s science and the poetic mysticism shared by Rumi and Farid ud-Din Attar. I explain how Attar’s 12th-century long poem Conference of the Birds provides the dominant extended metaphor (a flight of birds to the king of birds, the Simurg) in Rushdie’s first five novels. I also illustrate how Rushdie uses this metaphor to argue for critical thinking and for a free and open society.

In dealing with Christianity, my aim is to loosen 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 that he came to fulfill the old Jewish Law (Matthew 5:17). 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 is complementary to the Law of Moses, but more so in the way that parole and rehabilitation is complimentary to verdicts and incarceration. They’re complementary, but so is yin to yang.

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 (I supply a humorous take on Moses and his covenant in 🍎 The Apple-Merchant of Babylon, starting with The Genealogy of Mortals). Jesus steered this Jewish 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, we see today a movement toward a more forgiving and inclusive Christianity, a global faith that’s open to all religions and mysticisms. Yet this is also a very old tradition, spanning centuries and continents. For instance, an open version of Christianity was urged by Transcendentalists in the 19th century, most notably by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. It was also current in India and China, as I explain in 💫 Believing in the Mystery, starting with Introduction: Daoism & Whitman’s Transcendentalism. In this chapter I highlight the similarities between the cosmic mysticism of Whitman and that of the Daoists Laozi and Zhuangzi.

In the 20th century, open versions of Christianity have 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. This Jesus operates within a framework of either/and, not either/or. I imagine this Jesus as a sort of bodhisattva on the Jordan.

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, truth, inclusion, compassion, forgiveness, sacrifice, and redemption. This Jesus honours this religion or that religion, as long as it advocates peace, love, and understanding.

🍷

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.

🍷

Next: 🍷 Refuge and Absinthe

Back to Top

Contents - Detailed Contents - Core Beliefs - Overview