Read part 1: Stephen Law on the allegiance of philosophy in the battle between science and religion.
Read part 2: Anglican theologian John Milbank's forthright response to Stephen Law.
Read part 3: Law argues that Milbank's defence of religion is little more than pseudo-profundity.
Many thanks indeed to Stephen Law for his temperate and measured reply to my initial response. We can agree at least on the Confucian need to maintain our humanity – the quality of Ren!
However, I must reiterate my views that first God is not subject to evidence and second that it is not after all so easy to disentangle God and the Good.
First, Stephen claims that my desire to distinguish religion at least partially from magic (and the issues here are more complex than many think) applies only to the question of whether we can influence or manipulate God. However, occult influences cut both ways, as any decent magical practitioner will tell you! Magicians may be able to affect the weather, and even the stars if they are advanced in their art, but the influence of the weather and the stars on us also counts as magical. Indeed the former instance of natural magic remains both apparent and mysterious – just how does material weather affect our spiritual mood? Reverse magic whereby things move minds would seem to be all too real, while, inversely, the complex effect of our minds on our bodies (ranging from moving our limbs to moods affecting physical well-being) would seem possibly to fall within the instance of primary natural magic exercised by mental influence.
I mention these things just to establish, perhaps to Stephen’s relief, that I am not so naïve as to wish to preach the usual pious sermon about religion being completely different to magic. To the contrary, anthropologists have long shown that magic can be regarded as sometimes tantamount to the practical side of religion, or even its dark side when common spiritual goods are manipulated to personal ends. And it is even the case that prayer, ritual and sacrament in their aspect of ‘effectiveness’, as opposed to the gratuitous offering back of glory to the source of glory, are not entirely free of a positive taint of ‘magic’, either in oriental or western understanding. Western tradition, Platonic and Christian, has here often spoken of the ‘theurgic’. To perform certain gestures or to utter certain words, like the Eastern Orthodox mantra of the ‘Jesus prayer’, is to attract to oneself and one’s surroundings not just angelic forces but even divine power itself – not by altering the minds of spiritual realities, or by pulling them towards one by force of uttered formula, but by so attuning oneself to their ultimate nature that we can become open to their influence, can become channels of their eternally good and beneficent nature.
Indeed Confucius, invoked by Stephen, also thought in these terms – but what was interesting about him was that he thought that the appropriate religious performances for attuning oneself to heaven (tian) were everyday, civic and ordinary, rather than being rites of nature and capable of extraordinary transformations, as much more in the case of Chinese Daoism.
Issue 44, 31st January 2016
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