All posts by Robert M Ellis

About Robert M Ellis

Robert M Ellis is the founder of the Middle Way Society, and author of a number of books on Middle Way Philosophy, including the introductory 'Migglism' and the new Middle Way Philosophy series published by Equinox. A former teacher, he now runs a retreat centre in Wales, Tirylan House, and is in the process of creating a forest garden there.

Middle Way Thinkers 6: Jesus

Great Thinkers, Myth, Religion, The Arts,

Was Jesus a Middle Way Thinker? Largely not. His beliefs seem to have included many absolutes, and he has also been interpreted since in terms of those absolutes. Yet in this series I also want to encourage incremental thinking. I want to suggest that there are some important ways in which Jesus moved forward from the dogmas of his time, which amount to some specific instances of Middle Way thought. I’d suggest that it is due to these new ways that he addressed the conditions of his time that he gets much of his power. Particularly for those of us from a Christian background (which includes me), I think it’s important to re-examine Jesus in a critical way: one that tries to separate out the dogmas of Christian tradition from those elements that might helpfully speak to our experience.

However, this is a loaded subject, so I’d better start with some clarifications. On the one hand, I’m not interested in supporting any of the dogmas of the Christian tradition about Jesus: either that he was the Son of God, affirmed as some type of supernatural status, or that everything he uttered was ‘true’ and the Word of God. But nor, on the other hand, am I interested in historical revisionism, which seems to be the opposite trap for those interested in re-examining Jesus. I don’t want to make any claims about what Jesus “really” was, or believed, or meant to say. I’m content to work with the Jesus accepted by Christian tradition, and depicted in the four canonical gospels, because that is what ‘Jesus’ effectively means to most people today. I’m looking for insights or symbolic inspiration, rather than historical revelation, in this traditional depiction of Jesus, without getting swallowed up by the various scholarly quagmires of Biblical Studies. The third extreme I’d also want to avoid here, is the mere rejection of Jesus as a source of insights or inspiration. For me, and I suspect many others in the West, Jesus is a powerful archetypal figure, both because of his role in Western art and culture and because of his influence through the Christian churches (very much associated, for me, with childhood experience as a minister’s son).

Let me also briefly note some of the aspects of Jesus that I think are pretty unhelpful. There’s the virgin birth, the idealised childhood, and the sense of divine destiny as the son of God. There are the miracles: at least where these are presented not as acts of compassion but (as particularly in the gospel of John) as signs of divine status. There’s the self-sacrificial aspect: he appears to have basically offered himself up as a sacrifice, aware that he was walking into a trap that would result in his death in Jerusalem, but still doing it. In his trial before Pilate he also seems guilty of false modesty, not offering even a moderate defence to draw people’s attention to his innocence. It seems possible that he believed God would save him from the cross (accounting for ‘My God! Why have you forsaken me?’), because of his profound belief in cosmic justice and an imminent doomsday. Finally, if we follow the role of Jesus in Christian tradition, there’s the interpretation of Jesus’s death as an atonement for human original sin, and the belief in his resurrection as a further sign of divinity and a proof of eternal life for the saved: all these are damaging dogmas by which the moral complexity of our experience is overlaid with crude diagnoses and crude magical solutions.

But, if we can manage to leave all that stuff aside, let’s try to focus on some of the ways that Jesus can be inspiring and insightful – corresponding also to ways that he moves towards the Middle Way. I’d suggest that these fall into two categories: one of these is helpful elements in Jesus’s moral teaching, and the other is helpful archetypal interpretation of the meaning of Jesus as the Son of God.

Much of Jesus’s moral teaching involves a struggle with the Pharisees, who were a sect of Jewish legalists, and the Sadducees, who were conservatives associated with the priestly elite at the Jerusalem temple. Jesus is excoriating about rigid observance of tradition or adherence to the letter of the law, instead urging awareness of motive and the spirit behind the law. For example, when his disciples plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath (against the laws that forbid harvesting on the sabbath, which would be work) and were criticised by the Pharisees, Jesus said “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). He also emphasised motive in urging people not to be showy about giving alms, “Your good deed must be secret” (Matthew 6:4). From today’s perspective, to merely emphasise motive in ethics is not enough, because our motives vary so much along with our unintegrated desires. However, this emphasis was a major step forward in a context where people were thinking of ethics only as an extension of law, in the form of rigid social rules. On the other hand, Jesus seems to be trying to strike a Middle Way in relation to the Jewish Law, because he does not reject it either: “Do not suppose that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to complete” (Matthew 5:17).

Jesus is also well-known for his teaching of ‘turning the other cheek’ – the apparent pacifism of “Do not resist those who wrong you. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). The key insight here is the necessity of avoiding fruitless conflict. Rather than offering one rigid position in response to another, we need to find ways of reducing (an not acting on) the narrow egoistic identification we may have with ‘winning’ when someone challenges us. However, I also think that the Pacifist interpretation of this verse develops another kind of dogma. If we read it as forbidding violence in all circumstances whatsoever, then we rule out the possibility of violence addressing conditions in some circumstances where it might be the best response.

Jesus also offers what might be regarded as a brief equivalent to the Kalama Sutta in Buddhism, offering the suggestion that we need to consult experience when confronted with a conflict between different dogmatic claims. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you dressed as sheep while underneath they are savage wolves. You will recognise them by their fruit. Can grapes be plucked from briars, or figs from thistles? A good tree always yields sound fruit, and a poor tree bad fruit” (Matthew 7:15-17).  Here he seems to be suggesting that verbal claims are not enough, and one of the ways we can judge the justification of conflicting claims is by their integration, evident in people’s behaviour. Again, we could take this to another extreme, by rejecting a person’s view whenever there is a shade of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy does not necessarily make people’s claims untrue, but it is a useful warning sign.

Much more could be said about Jesus’ moral teaching, but I must keep this post brief. More broadly, too, I think Jesus’ symbolic role should also be mentioned. His traditional position in Christianity as ‘Son of God’, both wholly human and wholly divine (according to the Nicene Creed) does not have to be merely rejected as a dogmatic belief, because its meaning can be separated from such beliefs. That meaning is one I encounter very frequently in Renaissance art, where I encounter Jesus as what sometimes seem to be an attempt to represent the Middle Way in human experience. The symbolic richness of Jesus’s status as both divine and human is one way of confronting the profound ambiguity of the relationship between perfect ideals and imperfect experience, the ‘truth on the edge’, or necessity of maintaining a robust conception of truth without claiming to possess it. Jesus is full of contradictions: he is both vulnerable and powerful, wise and foolish, alive and dead, but these contradictions are only damaging as objects of incoherent belief. As symbols, on the other hand, their ambiguity can help us to recognise both the conflicts in our own experience and the ways we can work with those conflicts.

Orozco_Christ_cuts_his_CrossWestern art often depicts Jesus in three particular forms: as an infant, in his crucifixion, and in his resurrection. All of these, I think, can be appreciated as offering evocations of that symbolic richness. As an infant he represents the incarnation, that strange ambiguous middle way between divine and human. On the cross he represents the unbearable and unjust suffering of the human condition when understood in relation to divine perfection. When resurrected, he shows the perseverance of hope: that the good can still come through human experience even when we least expect it, when we have come to terms with the conditions of human life. The picture here is an intriguing one by the Mexican artist Orozco. There are many ways of reading it, either as a symbol of resurrection, or as an anti-theistic statement in which mere humanity triumphs.

I have passed through a number of stages in my response to Jesus. As a child and teenager, I mainly had a negative reaction to the idealised figure I was presented with, who was being foisted on me, but didn’t at all seem to represent the qualities I would have chosen to idealise or to worship. At times, however, I also tried out that idealisation, though I had great difficulty making it my own. I then started to see Jesus primarily as a swindle: an attempt to magically jump across the difficulties of human life. Now, however, I’m quite clear about rejecting a lot of the religious claptrap that surrounds beliefs around Jesus, but at the same time I think I am beginning to develop  a relationship with him both as a man and as an icon. As a moral teacher, he can be inspiring, but does not seem to me as hugely significant as he is often cut out to be, and a lot of contextualisation is needed to see how he was moving towards the Middle Way. As an archetypal symbol, though, he means a lot more, and that meaning develops a little almost every time I step into an art gallery.

Postscript (2018)

This article was written in 2014, and since then I have written a whole book, The Christian Middle Way, that is now being published. In that book I give a much more detailed interpretation of Jesus with rather more reference to the gospels. Although this article gives an idea of the direction I was heading in a couple of years before I wrote the book, the view of Jesus that I arrived at subsequently is in many respects more positive than this one.

Robert M. Ellis

Book Launch: Migglism

There will be a book launch event for Robert M Ellis’s new introductory book, ‘Migglism’ in Birmingham UK on 25th September. Robert will introduce the ideas, there will be time for discussion, and books will be available at a discount.

Venue: Friends Institute, 220 Moseley Road, Birmingham, B12 0DG (parking available)

Time: 7.30-9.30 pm, Thu 25th September 2014

Aphorisms

Middle Way Philosophy

Aphorisms are short, pithy sayings that can be used to communicate a key idea in a short space. They have the big advantage of being easy to engage with and remember, and the big disadvantage of being open to a wide variety of interpretations.

Some thinkers that I have been inspired by to varying degrees, such as Nietzsche, Blake and Sangharakshita, have made interesting uses of aphorisms, and they can be used as the seed of a practice of reflection. The whole point is that they are not fully explained, but one is invited to do the explaining for oneself, by turning it over and seeing how it relates to one’s own experience. Whatever they are, aphorisms are not ‘truths’, and I cringe when people put aphorisms on Facebook and others writeMSW4 ‘so true’ underneath. Rather they are concentrated distillations of generalised experience, which may possibly relate to your own.

So, I thought I would try my hand at some aphorisms about Middle Way Philosophy. I will be interested to know if they are at all useful. Some of them may err on the side of stating the obvious, others by being over-provocative. Perhaps a few will hit the middle!

 

There is only one Middle Way, but many middle ways.

 

There is no such thing as extreme scepticism, only selective use of it.

 

Love the truth, but do not swear by it.

 

Truth is like a spouse: we need robust commitment without complete possession.

 

Relativising truth is like chopping up your beloved.

 

Art is an integration of meaning.

 

Metaphysics, like an offensive term, should be mentioned but not used.

 

Your metaphysical beliefs are only one type of tree in your mental forest.

 

There is no justification without ignorance.

 

Compassion is not adequate unless it is equally wisdom.

 

Every utterance is a metaphor.

 

There are no meaningless symbols.

 

To be good is to be adequate.

 

The fulfilment of every ethic requires the Middle Way.

 

Every fact is also a value, and every value also a fact.

 

The macrocosm resembles the microcosm in composition, not in substance.

 

There is only one cognitive bias.

 

If God was really dead, Nietzsche wouldn’t have needed to tell us about it.

 

If you can’t incrementalise it, you haven’t understood it.

 

Aphorisms are lozenges, not truths.

Middle Way Thinkers 5: John Stuart Mill

Great Thinkers, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, , ,

“It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves…unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement….In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you were looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.”

This is how John Stuart Mill, writing in his autobiography, tells us about the great crisis in his life: what we might now call a nervous breakdown. Mill is one of philosophical history’s great infant prodigies. Urged by his pushy utilitarian father, he was also intended as a living demonstration of the power of a rationally ordered way of life in pursuit of utilitarian objectives. Famously, John Stuart Mill started to learn Ancient Greek at the age of three. By the time of his breakdown at twenty, he had already been through a high pressure education and become a utilitarian campaigner. We can guess, however, that in this pressurised environment a great many other feelings were repressed. As repressed feelings tend to do, they made themselves unexpectedly, distressingly and disruptively manifest.

What makes Mill such an inspiring figure is the way that he dealt with this inner conflict. He neither tried to repress the inconvenient feelings further, nor did he entirely give way to them. Instead he learnt from them and modified his view of the world. He seems, in fact, to have integrated the conflicting desires, meanings and beliefs that lay behind this inner turmoil, by working through them in his philosophy. What had started off as a narrow, puritanical utilitarianism was broadened and modified in an attempt to recognise the importance of emotional and aesthetic experience. Mill became especially known for his essay On Liberty, the key founding text of liberalism and a hugely creative advance in the political thought of the time. In addition, with the collaboration of his wife Harriet, his essay On the subjection of women also became a key early text in the attempt to persuade the repressive male-dominated nineteenth-century world that women should also share men’s liberty as equal partners.

As with any other thinker one might identify as making an important contribution to our understanding of the Middle Way, Mill found a balance in some ways more than others. For example, Mill’s interpretation of Utilitarianism moves beyond the narrowness of his early mentor Jeremy Bentham, it still has the limitations of Utilitarianism in general.  Bentham wanted to reduce moral decision-making to a ‘hedonic calculus’, in which the pleasures and pains likely to result from different possible actions would be quantified and weighed up in a notionally mathematical fashion. In the scales of this calculus, Bentham argued that every pleasure weighed equally, and should be measured only by its intensity, duration and other quantitative features: in his famous phrase “Pushpin is as good as poetry” (pushpin being a fairly mindless game played in pubs at the time). After his breakdown and recovery, Mill began to argue that some pleasures were better than others. However, he did not really have a convincing account of why poetry was better than pushpin that went beyond the weight of social consensus. That poetry might have benefits in terms of the meanings it offers us is too intangible an idea to fit easily into a utilitarian framework.john mill

It is in  On Liberty that I find Mill at his best and closest to the Middle Way. The utilitarianism is nominally there, but fades into the background beside Mill’s passionate argument for the freedom of expression and action. If you allow people to express unorthodox views and behave in unconventional ways, Mill argues, society as a whole will benefit, because these people will be able to develop and test out new and better ways of thinking and acting. Adults should thus be allowed to act as they wish provided they did not harm others in the process. Mill challenged those who thought they knew the truth as to whether they thought themselves (and the socially accepted view) infallible: if not, he argued, the possibility of error needed to be tested out in a free discussion in which better justified views would become evident. Mill here gives a very practical expression to the Middle Way in the recognition of basic uncertainty, and draws out its implication of tolerance that allows people to reach their own autonomous, but justified, conclusions.

Mill goes on “Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it be suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but…the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason and personal experience.”

Mill here puts his finger on some of the key features of metaphysical dogma. By repressing alternative views, it not only prevents debate and experiment that might help us address conditions more effectively, it also represses emotions and creates conflicting psychological states that inhibit creativity and well-being. Personal experience may give rise to new ideas and beliefs, but these potential innovations must be crushed at source in order to ensure social conformity with the dominant beliefs. Unhappy individuals and rigid, fragile societies are the result. So much of nineteenth century literature is about this: the struggles of individuals to find sustenance and fulfil their vision in a stiflingly conventional society. But before the nineteenth century society was no less dogmatic and conformist. It was due to people like John Stuart Mill that awareness of the possibility of an alternative began to spread in a way it had not existed before.

Perhaps many people in the twenty-first century take this as old hat. We take tolerance of harmless individual differences for granted, at least in theory. Mill’s liberalism in its turn has now become the basis of a kind of social orthodoxy, which sometimes just goes through the motions of supporting creative individual freedom, but sometimes also genuinely does support that freedom to great positive effect. The Middle Way has now become much more a question for individuals, because dogmas can be carried around with us inside as well as laid on us from outside. But the fact remains, that without that basic degree of liberalism, our ability to find a Middle Way is severely curtailed by social pressure and control. That, perhaps, is why modernity is a much better context to practice the Middle Way than the traditional and hierarchical societies of the Buddhist East, even though these societies transmitted the Buddha’s idea of the Middle Way for many centuries.

 

Link to index of other posts in the Middle Way Thinkers series