Heresy and Borders in the Twentieth Century

Karina Jakubowicz, Robert Dickins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000359169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book explores the shifting and negotiated boundaries of religion, spirituality, and secular thinking in Britain and North America during the twentieth century. It contributes to a growing scholarship that problematises secularization theory, arguing that religion and spirituality increasingly took diverse new forms and identities, rather than simply being replaced by a monolithic secularity.

The volume examines the way that thinkers, writers, and artists manipulated and reimagined orthodox belief systems in their work, using the notion of heresy to delineate the borders of what was considered socially and ethically acceptable. It includes topics such as psychospiritual approaches in medicine, countercultures and religious experience, and the function of blasphemy within supposedly secular politics. The book argues that heresy and heretical identities established fluid borderlands. These borderlands not only blur simple demarcations of the religious and secular in the twentieth century, but also infer new forms of heterodoxy through an exchange of ideas.

This collection of essays offers a nuanced take on a topic that pervades the study of religion. It will be of great use to scholars of Heresy Studies, Religious Studies and Comparative Religion, Social Anthropology, History, Literature, Philosophy, and Cultural Studies.

1 The concrescence of dissent
Whitehead as religious, scientific, philosophic heretic

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s career can be glimpsed through trinities: Cambridge,¹ London, Harvard; mathematician, philosopher of science, metaphysician; and, dispersed through these, the trinity that is Anglican, agnostic, heretic. Further still, his heresy covers the tripartite of religion, science, and philosophy. In order to fathom the transition Whitehead made from his family Anglicanism, to his agnosticism, through to his mature heretical systematic cosmology, we shall first look at the environment in which he was raised and educated. We shall see how his rejection of the Church was in concurrence with the ideological flow of the times, and congruent with his adventurous yet critical questioning spirit. This antithetical rejection of religion lasted for only two decades. Due to personal tragedy and rational insight, Whitehead emerged from his agnostic chrysalis to new heights of metaphysics, a new philosophy yet in the old grand style – a philosophy that would make the Church look stagnantly infantile, science superfluously blind, and contemporary philosophy trivial and dry. This transition into metaphysics was, by this stage, not concurrent, but counter to the cultural current. Whitehead did not oppose religion, science, and philosophy; he rather presented their greater potential. He was not an unbeliever in any of these three modes of thought, merely a heretic with regard to them through his refutations of their stifling dogmas. Opposed to dogma, Whitehead chose free choice.

The word ‘heresy’ derives from the Greek word for ‘choice’, αἵρεσις, antedating its meaning of choosing a school of thought, that is, a religious or philosophical sect.² In English versions of the New Testament, the word is variously translated as ‘heresy’ or ‘sect’ – always in a derogative manner as all Christians were to be considered as one body: the Church as the body of Christ (John 17:20–3; 1 Corinthians 12:12–14). The concept of heresy, however, predates Christianity as can be witnessed by reading Plato’s late tome, The Laws, which prescribes imprisonment and death for heresy against state-ordained polytheism, ‘forbidding religious activity without the blessing of the laws’.³ Contrasting Plato and the Church, we see that the concept of heresy is relative to an orthodoxy: that is, relative to a set of opinions deemed by an authority as correct.⁴ Milton espoused this relativism, decrying that:

Men whose life, learning, faith and pure intent

Would have been held in high esteem with Paul

Must now be named and printed heretics…⁵

Beyond religion, we encounter orthodoxy in science and in philosophy, and in his tilting rather than rejecting of these cultural pillars, we shall see Whitehead as the arch-heretic, the hæresiarch of the twentieth century.

Part I: life

Whitehead was born in 1861 in Ramsgate, Kent, in Isle of Thanet, a stretch of land now joined and jutting out at the south-east of England. In its close proximity to the continent, this isle acted as the entry point for invading Romans, Teutons, and an assortment of other pagans and Christians, sinners and saints, through the ages. Whitehead was raised within a strongly Anglican family. His father and grandfather were both priests in the Church of England, as were two uncles, one of whom was a follower of the theologian and founder of Christian socialism, F. D. Maurice. Whitehead was the youngest of four siblings; his brother Henry became Bishop of Madras, an important diocese in India – first as a strict Tractarian, then as a more welcoming and open Ecumenical.^{6, 7} In Whitehead’s brief ‘Autobiographical Notes’ (1941), he speculates that his family came from the Quaker George Whitehead, who lived in Kent on the Isle of Sheppey in the mid to late seventeenth century.⁸ Bertrand Russell, Whitehead’s Cambridge student, collaborator, and friend, quipped exaggeratedly that Whitehead’s ‘family came from Kent and had been clergymen ever since about the time of the landing of St Augustine in that county’.⁹

Educating Bertrand Russell was also something of a family tradition: Whitehead’s clerical father had been summoned in 1877 to convince a sceptical five-year-old Bertrand Russell that the Earth was in fact spherical despite the evidence of the senses.¹⁰ Within Rev. Whitehead’s parish lay the summer residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald Campbell Tait – a good friend of Whitehead’s father and a figure whom the young Whitehead admired: ‘Tait was a very great man. He should have been Prime Minister of Great Britain’.¹¹ Tait was a progressive force within the Church: a friend of science, a forgiver of Dissenters, and an opponent of the Oxford Movement which sought to ritualize the Anglican Church back to a form more traditional, more Roman Catholic, or at least more pre-Reformation English. Tait introduced the 1874 Public Worship Regulation Act that curtailed this movement, thereby making a number of enemies. Whitehead was thus raised in a religious yet liberal environment. In 1875, he moved to a public boarding school in Sherborne, Dorset, which was run by a reverend and aimed to provide ‘a liberal Education in accordance with the principles of the Church of England’.¹² When he entered Trinity College, Cambridge University in 1880 as a student of mathematics, he brought with him this particularly progressive, though nevertheless Anglican worldview.

In 1890, Whitehead married the highly-spirited aesthete Evelyn Wade and together they studied the history of Christianity for several years. He had been especially taken by the writings of John Henry Newman, who as a leader of the Oxford Movement was an opponent of Tait. Newman’s later conversion to Roman Catholicism was a shock to the high Anglican Church, and gave inspiration to Whitehead’s near conversion to Roman Catholicism at that time. Though Whitehead rejected Cardinal Newman’s religion, Newman’s ‘viewing of all religious philosophy under the category of life’,¹³ was, however, arguably influential in Whitehead’s later organic, evolutionary philosophy of religion. At any rate, contrary to expectation, the result of these years of ecclesiastical study was agnosticism, a position reached a few years before the century’s end.¹⁴

This agnosticism was not solely a product of religious exploration – it was also due to the collapse of science, or physics, as it was then understood. Whitehead’s lessons at Cambridge were mathematical, with leanings towards physics. One of his teachers had been a pupil of James Clerk Maxwell, and of course at that time the ‘Newtonian conceptions were still in full force’.¹⁵ The later psychological reaction to the superseding of Newtonianism is of note, as it relates to Whitehead’s apostasy.

This experience has profoundly affected my thinking. To have supposed that you had certitude once, and certitude about the solidest-looking thing in the universe, and then to have had it blow up on your hands into inconceivable infinities has affected everything else in the universe for me.¹⁶

The shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics inaugurated the twentieth century. Its psycho-cultural impact fostered a distrust of existing belief systems that mirrored the trajectory of Whitehead’s thought.

Along with this crumbling certainty in science¹⁷ fell Whitehead’s certainty in religion, an experience not uncommon at the time. The Church of England had been in decline from the early nineteenth century for various reasons. The theologian Rev. William Palmer, party to the Oxford Movement, claimed in 1845 that irreligion had been provoked by continental philosophers, most grievously by Voltaire, but was now ‘insinuating itself under the disguise of charity, kindness, and liberality’.¹⁸ This liberality meant a toleration of all faiths. In an Act of 1829, legal restrictions for Roman Catholics in England had been lifted. A few years thereafter, Parliament passed the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which began to shift the responsibility of caring and educating the poor from Church to State. Indeed, numerous factors contributed to this decline in faith in addition to the aforementioned anti-religious philosophy. Such factors included the scientific rejection of certain Church beliefs such as that delivered by Darwin, the philological ‘higher criticism’ of the Bible, the displacement and alienation of parishioners due to the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions, and the bitter distaste that much of the working class had for the corrupt decadence of English priests and the Church’s unwritten yet evident allegiance if not alliance to the Tory political party.¹⁹ Dissenters, such as the Methodists and Evangelicals, gained popularity because they represented the interests of the working class. All of these factors contributed to the fall in Anglican faith during the nineteenth and then twentieth centuries (with a la...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figure
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The concrescence of dissent: whitehead as religious, scientific, philosophic heretic
• 2 Edward Carpenter and early modernist heresy
• 3 Christian occultism: Charles Williams and the erosion of heresy
• 4 ‘Spilt religion’: heresy in classical modernism
• 5 Heresy in paradise: literary modernism and the Genesis myth
• 6 Experimental heresies: LSD and Christianity in Britain
• 7 The tyranny of cool: orthodoxy, heresy, and the 1960s counterculture
• 8 Immanent eschaton: discordian and Deleuzian dissimulations of the Goddess
• 9 Representations of ritual in twentieth century concert dance
• 10 Blasphemy, heresy, and liberalism in late twentieth century Britain
• Afterword
• Index