A Cosmos Fired and Fueled by Love

Philosophy, Plato tells us, begins in wonder. But Clare Carlisle’s Transcendence for Beginners ends there. Wondering is not a confusion to be overcome; it is an aspiration, a vocation, a calling. Not all confusions can be resolved, she realizes. (A hard lesson for philosophers to absorb; I speak from experience.) “I am learning to live with these confusions,” she confesses. As both a philosopher and a biographer (of George Eliot and Søren Kierkegaard), in this new book Carlisle explores “what it could mean for a philosopher to work from life”: “Looking at a life this way prompts us to wonder what truth – and what mystery – it embodies and transmits.” Sometimes reaching mystery is an achievement. Sometimes wisdom is found only when you learn “to consider yourself a beginner.”

There is a beguiling humility about this conclusion when you realize that this book began its life as Carlisle’s Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews. The Gifford Lectures, or “The Giffords” as they’re colloquially called, are something like a little Nobel prize in the world of philosophy and theology. You might be familiar with some of the books that began their life as Gifford Lectures: William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, to name just a few.

In 1885, Lord Gifford left a bequest to underwrite public lectures at Scottish universities that would promote and advance the study of “natural theology.” Something of a Victorian Renaissance man, Gifford’s curiosity about philosophy and theology was wide-ranging. An active churchman, he was nonetheless deeply affected by his reading of Spinoza, which, in turn, prompted him to study Hinduism. Carlisle – again, working from life – returns to the man behind the bequest. Adam Gifford, she realizes, was not trying to establish a lectureship in apologetics. By “natural theology,” Lord Gifford was not looking to bolster ecclesiastical theology by philosophical means. This vision for natural theology works from the ground up and is not covertly constrained by confessional commitments. Gifford’s intention was more capacious, more curious, maybe even a little wild. It is in this spirit of Lord Gifford that Carlisle endeavors to “envisage a new kind of Natural Theology.” Except, she adds, “of course it isn’t new – it’s as old as the hills.” It is “a desire to situate theology in a nature that is elemental, mineral, vegetal, animal, divine – a shared nature, of which our human lives, resplendent with thought and creativity, are a part and an expression.” Carlisle, we might say, is doing natural theology “from below.”

Also in the spirit of Lord Gifford, Carlisle is determined to reach beyond the academy, to speak to wider audiences, people who might never consider themselves in any way “religious” and yet know “an ache of longing” that seems to yearn for sense-making. She thinks, for example, of her own mother. When diagnosed with a terminal illness in her forties, her mother’s GP, “a stern elderly lady doctor who had a special liking for her, took her to church a few times, but she didn’t find what she was searching for. Instead, she got in her old Mini and drove up to the Isle of Skye.” She would spend hours sitting on the hillside, looking out to sea. In one of her mother’s notebooks that Carlisle found after her death, she had written: “If I had a life before, then it was here.”

“My mother,” Carlisle comments, “was the sort of person for whom Lord Gifford endowed his lectures.” In penning her new natural theology, Carlisle keeps her mother in mind:

When I think of my mother sitting on that hillside, looking out to sea, considering her life and her death, wondering where her soul had been – and, I imagine, where it might be going – I ask myself if I have anything to teach her. And when I say “her,” I also mean anyone: the part of us that is simply human, living on this earth beneath a blue or clouded sky, with some time to wonder: Who am I?

Who am I? This question – the question she imagines her mother musing upon while facing a vast sea and her own mortality – is the orienting question of Carlisle’s new natural theology. But what makes this very natural question theological?

Carlisle’s answer to that question emerges from an allusive play of voices: Spinoza, Lord Gifford, George Eliot. Carlisle braids them “from life,” so to speak: Lord Gifford reads Spinoza; George Eliot translates Spinoza; Clare Carlisle takes up all of them, in a biography of George Eliot (The Marriage Question), in a lucid exposition of Spinoza (Spinoza’s Religion), and now her Gifford Lectures. Both Spinoza and Eliot raise the stakes of the question “Who am I?” to a spiritual, even theological level. So Carlisle, the philosopher who has written a “life” of each of them, takes up “life writing” as its own frame for her new natural theology.

This approach to a new natural theology makes sense – and resonates with Lord Gifford’s bequest – if, like Carlisle, you begin from something like the way Spinoza imagines our relation to God: we are “modes” of the one infinite substance we call “God.” The relation of mode to substance, as Carlisle puts it, “is like the relation of a smile to a face, or a wave to the ocean.” So rather than a mechanistic natural theology (as in Paley’s cold, deistic “watchmaker” analogy) that looks for “signs of intelligence” in the natural world, Spinoza offers this intimate organic model: “We ourselves are the signs.” This is a transcendence without dualism, one that “dissolves the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’” – a ripe frame for reimagining “natural theology.”

We ourselves are the signs, which also means that every other person is a mode of the infinite, a revelation of sorts. (I’m reminded of the pithy encapsulation from the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas: “Every other is wholly other.”) Every human life is capable of being seen, as Spinoza put it, sub species aeternitatis, “under the aspect of eternity.” Thus topay attention to the life of any other human being is to engage in the love that is proper to philosophy, Carlisle concludes, “reading” the flashes of the infinite in any finite life. This is the Spinozistic intuition behind the iconic (sic!) final paragraph in Eliot’s Middlemarch when the narrator takes the measure of Dorothea’s frustrated yet meaningful life:

Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

One is almost tempted to say that sub species aeternitatis, there are no hidden lives. To God all hearts are open, all desires known, and each and every life is a galaxy of infinite worth and significance. The trick – and this is the endeavor of Carlisle’s new natural theology, it seems to me – is for us to see each life under this aspect of eternity, including our own. To glimpse the infinite in the finite. Revelation is a matter of perception.

Thus, Carlisle argues that “the question ‘Who am I?’ is theological as well as biographical.” Drawing on Spinoza’s metaphysics, “biographical knowing” traces the way life is “part of nature” – how a life is a product and expression of its milieu. But that same life can be read theologically. Such “theological knowing” endeavors to see “this life’s being-in-God.” These are simultaneous movements. Like Spinoza’s nondualistic metaphysics, the two readings are noncompetitive. Both are true. But we – in a “post-Christian,” secularized age – are less adept at, even allergic to, the theological reading. And yet when we contemplatively wonder, Who am I?, a vast indifferent sea undulating below us, it seems that something like this theological reading of our lives is what we’re yearning for. This is what Carlisle’s natural theology offers her mum on the Isle of Skye coast: There is another way to look at your life. It could even change how you live your life.

To read “a life as at once natural and theological – at once human and divine – means receiving it as an incarnation.” To make the point, Carlisle returns to Eliot, this time her later novel, Daniel Deronda, penned after Eliot spent the 1850s immersed in Spinoza’s Ethics. Carlisle sees in this novel an “alternative logic of incarnation”:

If Gwendolen’s apparently insignificant life expresses not just a vast cultural and psychological world – an intensely rich human milieu – but also a deep, possibly divine or cosmic goodness that impels souls to search for it, then every life might be ‘read’ in this way. Every life might be, as Spinoza put it, a manifestation of God. Gwendolen’s ordinariness and her averagely flawed character are theologically crucial. Even here, Eliot seems to be telling us, there is transcendence – a stretch of soul, a glimpse of something shining, perhaps not far away at all.

It is no mistake, I think, that in Carlisle’s argument and analysis, it is the novels of Eliot and Proust and the paintings of Celia Paul that calibrate the eye for such perception. There is something about the condensed attention of the arts – whether a novel, a poem, a film, or a sculpture – that angles our perception to see the human sub species aeternitatis. Not all art, of course, but art in its best, most evocative modes. It is the same artistic and literary sensibility that Carlisle brings to her own writing. She brings a biographer’s heart and a novelist’s eye to attend to even unnamed human lives in a way that makes them shimmer, each “a sign that love flows through us because it is an element of reality itself: like water, like air, like fire.” In her new natural theology, she invites us to see little incarnations everywhere, each a sign that the cosmos is fired and fueled by love.