John C. McDowell

[This was part of a lecture given in theological ethics in late 1998, at a theological college in Lincolnshire]

Defining Type 2.[1]

This type covers an approach to ethics that uses the names ‘Christian’ and ‘theological’ in a very loose sense: the status of the ethics in question is undertaken with only a lip-service being paid to the ethics done by the Christian traditions.[2] Indeed, in the case of Cupitt one wonders how his self-styled "solar ethics" are in any sense even generally religious.

Don Cupitt’s Objective

Pinning Cupitt, former dean of Emmanuel College in Cambridge, down long enough to be able to describe his thinking is not an easy task. As he himself has admitted on numerous occasions, his thoughts are constantly in a state of development and transformation - some would argue, flux and confusion.[3] Nevertheless, from his earliest writings onwards, certain motifs have been clearly traceable, albeit varying in the nature of their development at different times.[4]

The admitted focus has been his dissatisfaction with his earlier experience of ‘traditional’ forms of Christianity.[5] This style of theology and ethics has become no longer tenable, according to Cupitt. Hence he attempts to provide a more feasible alternative that relates more adequately to a modern (or rather, postmodern) environment. What that alternative has been identified as, since 1990, is a form of thinking that takes note of the postmodern critique of modernity and the Christian theologies that have both provided the intellectual context from out of which modernity has sprung, and have subsequently reinvented themselves somewhat in order to stem its offspring’s drive towards secularity. Into this apparent vacuum of modernity’s ‘death of God’, and the death of traditional Christian values, Cupitt has inserted his own distinctive brand of non-realist theology.[6] "Today, Christians non-realism offers the churches their last chance of a rational future".[7]

A brief description of Cupitt’s ‘non-realism’ needs to be given in order to explain the nature of his ethical strategy, especially since in his The New Christian Ethics Cupitt announces his aversion to theological ‘realism’ without providing any definition of what that target is.

Defining Non-Realism

Philosophically speaking, ‘realism’ is the view that there exists, in some form or another, objective absolutes, an objective world that can be known and described by the human subject.

In religious terms, Cupitt describes ‘Realism’ as assuming that God is "an actually-existing independent individual being".[8] However, Cupitt assumes that this style of thinking is no longer possible:

Moreover, the belief in an ‘objective’ God - the God of the realists - is not only surplus to religious requirements, but serves, in practice, to undermine them. "An objective God cannot save."[1980, 126] Indeed, "the claims of theological realism and religious seriousness now pull in opposite directions".[9]

‘Non-realism’ critiques this notion of the ‘real’, and provides its own alternative, through various identifiable steps:

Against the realist belief in Truth Out There, Cupitt’s constructivism stresses that our knowledge of the world is more a matter of making than discovering. Language does not function as referring to a ‘reality’ beyond language, but instead refers to other words, and their meaning and interaction cannot be foreclosed since they are in continual slippage. Religious language does not refer to any beyond outside of the language that creates it. Both language and the world are radically outsideless, and any question of a Beyond is meaningless.[15]

What is ironic is the fact that Cupitt maintains the deferment of meaning, the finiteness of human thinking, and the fact that we cannot step outside our linguistic cultures, and yet he appears to be making statements and assertions reminiscent of a style of thinking that is precisely absolutist and metaphysical in form. Hence Trigg, for example, asks

As Norris notices, narrative philosophies can only claim to be "just one story among many", otherwise they self-destruct. But in practice they claim to be

Cupitt asserts

The only ‘real’ for Cupitt, if such a word may be used meaningfully at all, is our inhabitation of this world through the language that constitutes our being, experiencing, and interpreting of it. In a manner resembling Nietzsche, Cupitt argues that

Nihilistically Cupitt maintains that

But instead of this nihilistic vision reducing him to Schopenhauerian-style pessimism, Cupitt argues that this void must be faced and celebrated. One must thoroughly accept the fact of one’s transience and death.[1995, 4] Whereas all interpretative frames of reference are human creations that attempt to "overcome nihilism by imposing some structure upon and injecting some value into our life-world", Cupitt intends to acknowledge the existence of this void, becoming aware that all frames are human constructions, and reinvent these frames in order to serve one’s living better.[18] Hence, in Solar Ethics Cupitt emphasises the joyful acknowledging of life’s contingency:

Consequently, "religion", and therefore the thought-forms that derive from it, "is completely human, bound up with the cultures and the histories that it creates".[19]

Consequently Cupitt can announce,

The naturalistic alternative - described in that context as ‘expressivism’, or ‘subjectivism’, and more recently as ‘energetic Spinozism’, ‘poetical theology’ or ‘solar (i.e., expressivist) ethics’ [see 1997, 20] – is characteristic of what has subsequently become named Christian non-realism:

A Non-Realistic Ethic

This non-realism provides the framework for Cupitt’s deliberate undermining of ‘traditional’ Christian ethics, with the latter’s belief in an eternal realm of unchanging values that are objectively real and thereby exist as absolutes that demand submission and obedience. Cupitt advances a number of reasons why the ethics of the Christianity’s realist past need to be replaced, although in so doing he rhetorically exaggerates a certain form of belief (then easily knocking down this straw man) without fairly discussing any other theological alternatives.[20]

(1) Questions of ‘ultimate’ importance: he proposes in The New Christian Ethics that people imbued their reasons for acting with more than what was appropriate.[21] Ethics was felt to be too important to be relative and subjective, hence certain values were objectivised, reified, absolutised and eternalised within a mythological theological framework.

(2) Psychological fear: another psychological motive lies behind this objectivisation, Cupitt asserts in confident fashion:

(3) Dualistic, and Greek influenced, devaluation and ressentiment of this world: echoing Nietzsche, Cupitt claims that

This denial of life is expressed in Christianity’s denial of the body, the mortification of all our desires.[see 1988, 39]

(4) Paralleling the post-Enlightenment critique of religious faith, although equally applying this critique to the ethics of the post-Enlightenment thinkers, Cupitt advances that prior ethical strategies

Christianity, Cupitt claims, did not allow for human creative activity since God had a control of all creativity. Cupitt construes this in Nietzschean language as a master-slave relationship.

(5) Flowing from this is a further problem with prior forms of Christian ethics, as Cupitt imagines them, is the fact that such moral realism encouraged pure intellectual quietism. Since there was no possibility of scrutinising the objectively existing absolute rules, and the divine author of them, one merely had to accept and confess their reality and objectivity.[see 1988, 2]

(6) Moreover, Cupitt imagines that Christian morality centres upon the self’s attempt to appease God:

Christian ethics, therefore, is the cultivation of an internal disposition of one’s relation to God.

(7) Cupitt maintains that "the old objectivism" was "used only to justify arrogance, tyranny and cruelty."[1988, 37]

Denying this objectivity in morals, Cupitt declares that "the frame is merely cultural."[1988, 2] The ethical is not sacred and timeless, but is "a mere changing human improvisation".[1988, 3] When this is grasped, Cupitt adds, "we become morally responsible in a new way." What this responsibility entails is that

This is a godlike status that we are being accorded: "we’ve got to do what God used to do for us."[24] Here, according to Cupitt, is Christian ethics’ coming of age and its "saying a fully-achieved religious Yes to life".[see 1988, 15, citation from 26]

The reference here to a constructivism ex nihilo suggests an indeterminacy of agency. Cupitt, in 1988, does qualify this:

However, Cupitt wants to mitigate certain implications that may be drawn from this. For him, meaning and value have not wholly escaped from individual control, and the individual’s creativity is not to be understood as being undermined by this fact. Objective Idealism, structuralism, etc. "can so easily be turned in a quietistic, conservative or pessimistic direction."

However, this earlier work’s modern stress on autonomy does tend to use the concept of human freedom to construct and create value and meaning too easily and loosely.[25] Even in 1995’s postmodern emphasis on the de-centred self, Cupitt speaks of the ethical as being grounded in the self’s relation to its own objectivity rather than in the ‘I’s’ relation to any ‘Thou’. A suggestion of his later emphasis can be found in the earlier work:

Nevertheless,

The ethical, according to Cupitt, is life’s own spontaneous joyful affirmation of the self and the self’s creativity (albeit that creativity is not infinite). Cupitt does not spend any time in outlining any possible form of this ethic - that would defeat its purpose as being a construction of the self. However, he does provide some hints as to the direction that he feels his non-realistic, solar ethic takes. In 1995, however, he is content to allude to the Aristotelian concept of ethics as

In this respect, then, religion for Cupitt comes close to being dissolved into ethics. Its function is not to provide answers to complex metaphysical problems, but to shape and regulate the way we live.

Religious ‘truth’ is not speculative or descriptive (describing one’s discoveries about God), but practical, existential, and necessarily subjective (providing the creative self with signs and stories through which to engage with the processes of living): what matters is not theism, but spirituality and ethics.

What is this summum bonum? In his 1988 writing Cupitt refers to ‘love’ and world transforming action, although any detailed specification of this is not forthcoming. In 1992, Cupitt implies that redemption is self-created:

In 1995, however, Cupitt is inspired by the early Nietzsche’s artistic imagination: that we are redeemed from despair at the void through art.[1995, 43f.] This relates to the comments in 1992 in that art is understood non-realistically as self-expression, and that we are free to express ourselves in this playful manner. Hence, he argues that

But what is the manner and form of our creations, of our playfulness, etc.? Certainly he intends here only to provide the framework for ethical agency, and that functions iconoclastically against many of the problematic assumptions of modernity and the forms of Christianity that fostered it. But Cupitt’s refusal to provide any hint at a possible, albeit fragile and revisable, concrete criterion leads one to assess his "solar ethics" as being both frivolous and overly general to be of any specific value.