1. Introduction
‘Nothing can come out of nothing, and it is impossible that anything that there is, can perish.’
Although Timothy Sprigge described idealist philosophy as the stage beyond religion, there is much in his writing to suggest that his own form of pantheistic idealism stands in a long philosophical tradition which is sympathetic to a religious perspective – perhaps even a Christian perspective – in which religion is seen not as dogma and doctrine, but as an ethic and a way of life. For Sprigge's own metaphysical position, like that of his predecessors in this tradition, does link an ethical and value position to a specific conception of God and the place of humans in the universe. Indeed, Sprigge is one philosopher of whom it could rightly be said that his metaphysics underlay not only his ethical theory but also his practical ethical and philosophical views, and particularly his positive advocacy on behalf of non-human animals and the environment. Where others saw these practical issues as needing an intellectual and ethical justification in essentially utilitarian terms, Sprigge, notwithstanding his own qualified acceptance of utilitarian theory, started his search for an answer to questions about the appropriate human response to nature, animals, and the environment from a point of view which was more metaphysical than ethical because it had to begin, he believed, by making a reasoned assessment of the possibility of attributing ‘mind’ or consciousness to non-human entities.
Later, Sprigge's exploration of the moral standing of animals and other living creatures extended to other aspects of the natural world, including its non-animate aspects, as his concept of the mental moved away from the approach to the philosophy of mind and language engaged in by such twentieth-century philosophers as Ryle (1900–76) and Wittgenstein (1889–1951), and back towards the idealist metaphysics of nineteenth-century thinkers such as Bradley (1846–1924) and McTaggart (1866–1925). Indeed, it is possible to think of Sprigge as essentially belonging in thought and spirit to that century, despite his actual temporal location in the twentieth – something also noted by Richard M. Gale who writes: ‘He does philosophy like someone who has just arrived in a time machine from Cambridge of the 1890s.’Footnote 1 This was not intended as a slur, and Gale goes on to congratulate Sprigge for his courage and conviction in swimming so strongly against the prevailing philosophical tide. Nevertheless, Sprigge did in fact owe much to the philosophy of his own century – to the analytic tradition, to logical positivism, and to the standards of rigour in meaning and truth that they demanded. And while he rejected the verification principle and the behaviourist theories associated with it, he acknowledged that he owed a debt as far as method is concerned to the philosophical influence of A.J. Ayer, whose work he saw as having the redeeming feature of not in fact denying consciousness or, as Ayer sometimes put it, ‘feigning anaesthesia’.
Nevertheless, the influence of the earlier metaphysicians was in the end stronger, even though Sprigge's own idealist position, as he developed it, could be seen as having some affinity to the phenomenalist view that the object of our perceptual experience is a succession of bare particulars – the sense-data or quanta that feature so prominently in the work of philosophers such as Moore and Carnap and indeed of Ayer himself. But where Ayer looked back to Hume (1711–76) for his inspiration, Sprigge looked back to Berkeley (1685–1753), whose impeccable logic he appreciated even while recognizing its limitations. He attributed his original interest in Berkeley to his pre-university days, when the limitations of an army camp library where he was doing his National Service offered him just two philosophical books, one of which was Berkeley's Principles and Three Dialogues, the other Herbert Spencer's First Principles. Sprigge recorded his reaction to these texts in this way: ‘Puzzling out the challenge posed by these I concluded that the inner being of the whole of nature must be somehow psychical, for I accepted Berkeley's arguments that the physical world of our ordinary experience can only exist for an observer and thought Spencer right that ordinary phenomena are the appearance of something mysterious “behind” them, called by him “the Unknowable”.’Footnote 2 In the end he claimed Spinoza (1632–77), and later Bradley and William James, as probably his greatest inspiration. But his own ontological inquiry, if seriously pursued, in reality starts more than two millennia earlier, with the metaphysical world-view of Parmenides. The focus of this paper, however, is necessarily narrower in scope than this, and it should be read simply as an exploration of the way in which philosophy and religion reach out and touch each other in Sprigge's personal exploration of what there is and who we are.
2. The problem of believing
Religion for Sprigge, as for most people brought up in Britain at this time, could be presumed to be the Christian religion, although he came to be profoundly interested in other world religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism. Later he found a congenial spirit in the Unitarian tradition – a movement which has a strong philosophical base reaching back to the Socinians in the sixteenth century. It was established as a denomination by the scientist and philosopher of religion Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) and its then aim was to restore early Christianity and get rid of accretions of distortion and dogma built up over centuries – an aim shared by James Martineau (1805–1900), author of The Seat of Authority in Religion (1890), who argued that only reason and conscience, not faith or belief, should be the ground of religion. While the doctrinal aspects were unlikely to have been central to Sprigge's interest in the movement, he drew inspiration from the contribution of the philosopher and environmentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) who held that that God was to be found in nature as a whole, and whose influence took the Unitarian movement in a more nature-based direction.
Most forms of the Christian religion, however, pose problems for philosophers schooled in the empiricist tradition. Belief is not subject to the will, and the empiricist is a natural sceptic. Christianity, however, unlike some other world faiths, seeks adherence to a creed and has traditionally hated heresy. Sprigge's leaning towards the idealist philosophers was combined with what is perhaps best described as a personal search for an understanding of religion that does not depend on unverifiable factual claims but can nevertheless be supported by rigorous philosophical reasoning. This sets him apart from those philosophers who believe it is impossible for philosophy to provide a metaphysical underpinning for Christianity, amongst whom he places Descartes, Kierkegaard, William James and John Macmurray. His list also includes Pascal (1623–62), but the prominence he gives to a long passage from that thinker in the introduction to The God of Metaphysics, suggests that he had more sympathy than he cared to admit – perhaps even to himself – with the personal and inspirational, even mystical, terms in which the God of Christianity is described in Pascal's posthumously published Pensées:
The God of Christians does not consist of a God who is simply the author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements: that is the job of the pagans and Epicureans. He does not consist simply of a God who exerts his providence over the lives and property of people in order to grant a happy span of years to those who worship him: that is the allocation of the Jews. But the God of Abraham, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation; he is a God who fills the souls and hearts of those he possesses; he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy, who unites with them in the depths of their soul, who makes them incapable of any other end but himself.Footnote 3
This personal God, and this personal form of Christianity was, it seems to me, one that Sprigge abandoned, if at all, only with reluctance. Indeed, I believe that his exploration of the metaphysicians' god was a quest for the God that twentieth-century analytic philosophy had made it so difficult to reconcile with respect for the pre-eminence of reason. Pascal himself had been obliged to abandon the attempt at such a reconciliation as he contemplated the effect of living in a world without the refuge of religion: ‘When I consider the short span of my life absorbed into the preceding and subsequent eternity, … the small space which I fill and even can see, swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which knows nothing of me, I am terrified.’Footnote 4 His solution was to accept the religious authenticity of simple uneducated belief, relying ultimately on his famous wager: ‘If there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension … We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is, or if he is. …Who will then blame the Christians for being unable to provide a rational basis for their belief, they who profess a religion for which they cannot provide a rational basis? … ‘God is, or is not. … How will you wager? Reason cannot make you choose one way or the other.’Footnote 5 Pascal's conclusion from this was that, if what Christians believed was true, the gain to be won by believing was far in excess of the loss that would result from not believing, while the loss involved in wrongly believing what might turn out not to be true was disproportionately great.
If Pascal's solution was lacking in intellectual appeal, it may have been for this reason that Sprigge's own interest in the question led him to devote more time to the response of another philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), who had struggled with the same difficulty in reconciling reason and religion: ‘Thus to be a Christian demands that we make the leap of a doubly (at least apparently) irrational faith. It is irrational, first, because it is only through having faith in it that we discover it to be certainly true, and secondly, because the very content of our belief is apparently logically absurd.’Footnote 6 Kierkegaard concluded that a passionate commitment to the absurd is in fact the essence of Christianity. In contrast, Sprigge describes his own position as a synthesis of two more rigorous philosophical systems, Bradley's and Spinoza's, and he disowns any interest in defending a personal God, preferring to follow Bradley on this point. He writes: ‘Whether we think the Absolute can reasonably be called ‘God’ or not, Bradley is surely right that it is not a person.' Nevertheless, he does go on to make a concession to an at least quasi-personal perspective, when he says that there could be a sense in which, whether called Absolute or God, it includes in itself all persons. The difference between this and the God of Christianity, he says, is simply that ‘it did not create, but is, the universe’.Footnote 7
He moves closer to an explanation of what this must mean in his account of the philosophy of T.H. Green (1836–82) in The God of Metaphysics. Green's name for what Hegel had called the ‘Absolute Idea’ and which others called the ‘Absolute’ was the ‘Eternal Consciousness’ and its essential characteristic was that it consists in a single eternal mind, in which our minds are in some way included.Footnote 8 Whether or not Green's ‘one spiritual self-conscious being’ is the God of the Judaic religions is not crucial to this broad thesis, and Sprigge acknowledged that idealist philosophers have differed in their views about Christianity and even about the existence and nature of God. But he believed that in claiming that what we think of as the natural world is in some way or other dependent on mind, these philosophers had provided ‘the best purely philosophical case for a religious view of the world of any metaphysicians’.Footnote 9 Green himself, who was the son of an Anglican clergyman, was 23 when Darwin's evolutionary theory plunged the scientific and theological worlds into controversy. It is not unreasonable to suppose, then, that Green's motivation was indeed, as Sprigge suggests, a desire ‘to save a religious view of the world from developments in natural science and biblical criticism which threatened traditional Christianity.’Footnote 10 Indeed, Sprigge later repeats this assessment even more emphatically: ‘ … while the whole idealist movement of that time provided cheer to those who feared that their religious outlook was under threat from history and science, it was Green above all, together with Edward Caird and his brother John, who offered a form of Christianity claiming to be intellectually, morally, and emotionally sustainable. Thus there can be no doubt of the religious, and more especially Christian, relevance of Green's God.’Footnote 11 And Sprigge then goes on to recall that, in a novel of this period (Robert Elsmere, 1888) its author, Mrs Humphrey Ward, paints a picture of Green's own inner conflict when he appears, under the name of Grey, as the saviour of a clergyman who could no longer believe in many of the historical claims of the Christian religion.
Sprigge's own rejection of the idea of a personal God might seem to distance him from the God of these philosophers. But Christianity includes other important elements apart from belief in a personal God, some of which it is easier to accommodate within Sprigge's philosophy, if only as metaphor, and it is clear that some bringing together of the essence of the Christian religion and abstract philosophical reasoning was indeed an important aspect of his philosophical quest. For he undoubtedly had a deep understanding of something he described as an unarticulated yearning – a ‘cosmic longing’ – for what the great religions, but especially Christianity, can offer to their followers. It is here, then, in the credence he gave to the phenomenon of religious consciousness, that the key to understanding his commitment to absolute idealism may well be found. Absolute idealism, however, comes in a variety of forms.
3. Varieties of Idealism
In Theories of Existence, which was published in 1984, Sprigge wrote:
‘The main message of absolute idealism … is that we are each aspects of a larger whole which has its own larger life, and that if we follow the leadings which come as from the deeper levels of our being, which are dimly continuous with the whole to which we belong, we will gain the sense that our strivings to fulfil our own potentialities play a part in some deep, if largely hidden, significance possessed by the universe as a whole.’Footnote 12
This is another way of putting something that Spinoza had once expressed in a letter to a contemporary in terms of a simile. Imagine, he said, a parasitic worm living in the bloodstream and trying to understand and interpret its surroundings. The worm would see each drop of blood as an independent entity; it would not be able to recognize the part played by individual drops in the bloodstream as a whole – nor could it understand that the more significant unit is the bloodstream as a whole, rather than the droplets of which it is constituted. But even the bloodstream taken as a whole is inadequately understood until it is seen in relation to all the other fluids in the body and to the body as a whole. If we see our physical selves as separate independent entities, our understanding is limited, Spinoza suggested, in the same way as that of the worm.
The ‘whole’ in Spinoza's simile has no immediate religious significance, but Sprigge himself is ready to make a fairly direct connection between a holistic and a religious account of the universe. He writes: ‘A not strictly philosophical question is whether the existence of the Absolute has any real religious significance. I suggest that it does, if only because it justifies a certain cosmic emotion which we sometimes feel towards the Whole of things and through which we conceive the idea that in spite of all its horrors the world is essentially worthwhile and good.’Footnote 13
The Canadian philosopher William Sweet, in an essay on Sprigge's philosophy, is prompted to challenge this attempt to forge a link between absolute idealism and the philosophy of religion. He asks: ‘What does it mean to have an idealist theory or philosophy of religion? … Is an idealist philosophy of religion useful or satisfying – does it fit, for example, with religious orthodoxies, or does it help to account for the phenomena of religious experience or to resolve the putative conflicts between science and religion?’Footnote 14
Sweet himself suggests as a minimal interpretation of idealism the belief ‘ … that there cannot be an adequate account of any aspect of reality without including a reference to mind or consciousness’.Footnote 15 But he finds it difficult to categorise Sprigge's idealism either in personalist or absolutist terms. Personal idealism is distinguished by the fact that it retains the notion of separate minds, and so reserves a place for the distinctiveness and uniqueness of each individual. Absolute idealism, in contrast, involves the dissolution of the dualism of whole and parts, and so is unable to do this.Footnote 16 But while admitting that Sprigge's conception of the Absolute is closer to this second kind of idealism than the first, Sweet doubts whether his philosophy really fits neatly into either of these categories. The question remains, then: What sort of idealist was Sprigge?
Sprigge's own preference was to be recognised as a ‘pantheistic idealist.’ Is it possible, I wonder, to read the choice of that term as a signal that, having in the end declared himself neither an atheist nor a humanist, he did not intend to abolish God, or even the monotheistic hypothesis? For, paradoxically, a pantheist for whom the apparent variety of the universe merges into a single whole that can be described as god, is necessarily a monotheist. Nevertheless, Sprigge does accept the loss of the individuality of human persons that characterizes absolute idealism – the kind of idealism represented by Spinoza in which God and nature come together in a broader cosmic consciousness which knows itself – is capable of being self-aware. But it is hard to reconcile this with Christian doctrine, which seems deeply dependent on a conception of God as set apart from the world of individual human beings – in theological terms, as transcendent rather than immanent. Sprigge argues, however, that to conceive of God as an all-encompassing consciousness that coincides with nature itself is not to lower our conception of God, but to raise our conception of nature.Footnote 17 This remark, and the general position it indicates, may well be enough to place him in that long line of thinkers he so clearly admired, who wanted to open the way to a richer account of the core elements of Christianity and to overcome, in the words of another commentator on Sprigge's work, ‘the dualisms of this world and the next, of body and spirit, and that of our minds and god's’.Footnote 18
4. Religious consciousness and mysticism
But these dualisms are difficult to bridge. In particular, there is a heavy price to pay for the loss of the personal God of Christianity and of everything that is implicit in that conception: a comforter, someone to whom prayer can meaningfully be addressed, a source of guidance and inspiration, the ‘kindly light’ that gleams in the darkness of many human struggles. But while reason may struggle with the idea of personal contact with a loving God, religious sensibility of the kind Sprigge so clearly understands recreates and reformulates it. Indeed, it may well be that this reformulation is in the end the only way to overcome a problem that continues to challenge religious believers: how to reconcile the reality of evil, pain and suffering with belief in God's foreknowledge, goodness, and omnipotence.
For Sprigge, it is religious consciousness that provides a chink of light in this darkness – something that in its deeper and more intense form is recognised by some religious thinkers or commentators as mystical experience. These would no doubt include C.S. Lewis, whose work Sprigge admired. Is it possible that Lewis' thinking was an influence here? Did Sprigge recognise, in the stories Lewis wrote for both children and adults, the presence of a sensibility that responds to such things as aesthetic awareness, poetic imagination, the appreciation of nature, love or empathy for others, in a way that strikes the person who experiences it as a sudden brief insight into another world, a gateway into another reality? Did he perhaps have in mind something like William James' conception of religious awe as ‘the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge’?Footnote 19 In sum, is the implication here that religion is ultimately grounded in religious experience – a claim from which it might, perhaps, be reasonable to conclude that someone incapable of having such an experience, even in the indirect form of aesthetic awareness or human love and affection, is cut off from the possibility of encountering what some people have called the divine, and that Pascal did not hesitate to call God? If so, this might suggest a sympathetic endorsement of Pascal's dictum: ‘We know the truth not only by means of the reason but also by means of the heart.’Footnote 20
I raise these only as questions. However, Sprigge's position was both broader and less theological than Pascal's and he expressed it by saying simply that ‘our deeper feelings are our best clue to what reality is really like’ and that it is ‘something tragically beautiful’.Footnote 21 He was also more prepared than most twentieth-century philosophers to give weight to the reports of religious mystics. Commenting on Schopenhauer, he writes that ‘the more general aspects of his viewpoint accord here with the reports mystics give of what they believe has been revealed to them, and also with the occasional intuitions of many more ordinary people.’Footnote 22 In Spinoza, too, he finds ‘… something of a more mystical nature, some rapturous sense of one's oneness with the cosmos at large, and of its essential oneness in all its varying phenomena.’Footnote 23 Nor is he without approval of the physical and sexually directed mysticism of D.H. Lawrence, saying that it coheres with Bradley's philosophy, and with the idea of deep sexual experience as the core of significance in human existence.Footnote 24 On this particular aspect he undoubtedly admired, too, the work of Santayana, who recognised in sexual experience something common to all living creatures: ‘… if the beasts could speak they would give us, no doubt, endless versions of the only joy in which, as we may fancy, the blood of the universe flows consciously through their hearts.’Footnote 25 Sprigge is willing to give the accolade of truth to the ‘cosmic longing’ described by these writers and philosophers, even if it is only, as he puts it, the faltering adumbration of a truth.
Sprigge finds a model – a path to this faltering awareness of a hardly definable truth – in a variety of sources, not only in philosophy, but in the inspiration of creative artists such as musicians or painters, who recognize the necessary coming together, in a symphony or painting, of discord and harmony, dark and light. As Sprigge writes in The Vindication of Absolute Idealism: ‘the best image of the unitary totality of things is that of a vast symphony which experiences itself in one single specious present of colossal extent and complexity.’Footnote 26 Later, however, he sought to forestall a possibly Panglossian interpretation of this view, saying: ‘There is much beauty in the world but I am not prepared to look favorably on every horror because it is a necessary element in something beautiful. So although I think it a helpful initial suggestion I cannot quite accept the idea that the universe is like a work of art. I suggest, rather, that it has a certain kind of completeness, such that the existence of any element of it, requires all the immense rest of it just as it is for it to be a unitary many in one. So my conclusion is, not that the horrors contribute to the beauty but that nothing that is good in our world could have occurred without them.'Footnote 27
But this hardly meets the Panglossian challenge, for it remains very close to the view that Leibniz asserted, and Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss lampooned – that this is the best of all possible worlds. Nevertheless, Sprigge sees his own formulation as at least a tentative solution to the problem of evil. For, whether for orthodox theists, or for pantheists who see the universe itself as a kind of divine unity, the solution is to be found, he says, ‘in holding that in some way, probably beyond us, everything is so bound up with everything else that the evils are essential elements in a universe to which it is still proper to take a positive attitude, and even think of as best grasped by those who love it.’Footnote 28 This thought could, perhaps, be taken further than Sprigge himself chose to take it. For, since on this account the universe is a whole, no meaning can be attached to the idea of a ‘something’ that is outside that totality. This means that the Absolute itself – whether called God or, as Sprigge prefers, Eternal Consciousness – is not above the world's suffering, but shares and participates in it. So the traditional image of an external being whose willingness to witness and permit extreme pain and evil strikes some as inexplicable, vanishes in the different and more sympathetic image of a suffering God – something that is, for Christians, the essential message of the suffering and death of Jesus.Footnote 29
In this way, while some would see the deep impersonality of absolute idealism as necessarily a pessimistic philosophy, others, including Sprigge himself, are able to view it in a more positive light. That other Christian trinity, ‘faith, hope and charity’ may have been shaken with the undermining of its first element, faith, but in Sprigge's philosophy, love stays, and so, too – and perhaps more importantly – does hope. So how far is it possible to view Sprigge as an optimist for whom the problem of evil is no longer a bar to at least a Stoic peace of mind? As Pauline Phemister points out, Sprigge does believe that the world is improving and that this is manifested in the moral improvement of the human race, and she sees this as linked to Spinoza's ‘optimistic determinism’ explaining that ‘ … Spinoza's God or Nature is perfect, sub specie aeternitatis, but it is also improving, sub specie temporis, and indeed, it has to be continually improving if Spinoza's God is to reach full self-consciousness.’Footnote 30
Nevertheless, it remains difficult to accommodate both optimism and determinism if the future is as changeless as the past. We see ourselves as agents of change – something Sprigge himself appears to have acknowledged in his active campaigning for animal rights. The absolute idealist, on the other hand, seems doomed to inherit a new secular form of Calvinism – not, as the Calvinist holds, in the sense that a creator God has predetermined the names of the elect, but in the sense that our individual roles and destinies were, and are, always there, for good or ill, to be played out in a timeless and changeless universe. Faced with a choice, then, between the absolute idealist, whose repudiation of time is necessarily also a repudiation of change, and process philosophers like A.N. Whitehead who hold that change or process is the most basic feature of nature and that this is a world of events rather than of things, of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’, it may be that Phemister's compromise provides the best available way forward, since it implicitly offers a place for a scientific understanding of change and a philosophical conception of the underlying constancy behind that change. It is a compromise with which Sprigge might have found at least some common ground for, as he says: ‘both the process philosopher and the absolute idealist hold that the concepts of science can never do full justice to reality as it is actually experienced.’Footnote 31
Phemister is not alone, however, in holding that the idealist theory can be interpreted in optimistic terms and the American philosopher Marcus Ford suggests that another ground for doing so lies in the fact that we have a choice about what to make the focus of our attention: ‘Just as one can give too little heed to the amount of strife and destruction in the world – both intentional and unintentional – it is also possible to give too little attention to the amount of coordination and beauty in the world. The task of any metaphysics is to be equally adequate to both facts.’ Ford shares Sprigge's conviction that there is a need to recognise this aesthetic aspect, insisting that: ‘God is that factor in the world by which there is order and beauty.’Footnote 32
5. Idealist answers to the ‘hard questions’
But this leaves unexplored some matters Pascal might have described as questions raised by the heart rather than the intellect. Can pantheistic idealism really satisfy the basic elements of the Christian faith? Can it respond in any way helpfully to the questions raised earlier, meeting the need for comfort and a meaningful destination for prayer? For many people, spiritual comfort of this sort is only to be found alongside a belief in personal continuity – in not having to accept the bleakness of an irreversible ending for themselves and others whom they love. Traditionally, Christianity meets this need in seeming to hold out the hope of personal immortality – of transcending individual death. Can any philosophical system, but especially absolute idealism, offer anything to match that hope? It is clear that Sprigge did in fact hope to have offered some kind of solution to this problem. This took the form of two main refuges for those seeking reassurance – those who would believe but can't. One of these refuges is a theory of time originally proposed by the idealist metaphysician J.M.E. McTaggart (1866–1925), the other an alternative conception of personal identity.
As far as time is concerned, the theory Sprigge embraced put the notion of immortality in terms from which some humans might indeed draw comfort – as, I think, Sprigge himself may have done. If time is a purely relative concept – the apparent passage of time being relative only to our immediate ‘now’ – there is a more solid timelessness in which each of our successive ‘nows’ has a permanent place in an infinite mosaic. Leemon McHenry sums up the consolation inherent in this notion: ‘ … there is some consolation in the recognition that one's life does not pass into nothingness at death. While there is no afterlife conceived as continued postmortem existence, one's life is eternally preserved in every detail. … Consciousness absorbed in the eternal overcomes the ordinary dread of death.’Footnote 33
It is here and in this way that the notion of personal identity is subsumed under a broader all-embracing conception of what it is to be, or to exist. Admittedly, it is harder to accommodate within this picture the idea of reunion with friends or loved ones that is so often celebrated in hymns and in the Christian vision of the after-life. But the idea of reunion – the gathering together of those who pass away and those who have gone before – is not peculiar to the Christian religion. It was also voiced as an aspiration by Socrates as he faced his own death five centuries before the Christian era. Socrates said that death was either an endless conversation with those who had passed on before him, or else a dreamless sleep – something that is itself both beautiful, satisfying, and not to be feared. Despite the gap of millennia, it is possible to see within idealist philosophy another version of this idea of reunion with past, and implicitly future, people.
It is also there in the notion of the unity and ultimate indestructability of everything there is and in acceptance of the constant cycle – the making and remaking – of everything that ever has or ever will exist. And that, too, is implicit in another ancient philosophy, that of the Greek atomists, who conceived the idea of the perpetual reconfiguring of atoms. For as these early philosophers so clearly saw: ‘Nothing can come out of nothing, and it is impossible that anything that is, can perish.’Footnote 34 More solidly interpreted in some Eastern religions as the theory of physical reincarnation, the science of genetics suggests a more subtle and fascinating way of developing these early thoughts in terms more likely to appeal to the contemporary Western mind. While in no way supporting the notion that individual consciousness can persist after death, these ancient theories and their modern scientific successors have the potential to offer something in which it may be possible to find a different kind of comfort. They may not help our understanding of the physical structure of the brain or tell us anything about the ultimate matter that constitutes the universe, but they could offer, as the ancient theories were originally intended to do, the hope of finding a new way of construing the idea of immortality and of reconciling us to the apparently ephemeral nature of our own existence. In terms of today's science, this may be a matter of recognizing the role played by genetics in explaining the place we occupy in the great chain of being in which we form the indispensable link between our ancestors and our possible descendants, between our past and our future.
These aspects may not have formed part of Sprigge's own reflections on personal identity. And even had they done so, such metaphysical-scientific interpretations of time and identity still seem to leave out other important aspects of the Christian message: Jesus himself, his sacrifice, the place of love, and the hope of salvation. What is to be said of all these important features of the Christian faith?
For answer, Sprigge follows T.H. Green and other idealists in an unambiguous rejection of a literal interpretation of these aspects of the Christian religion, summing up Green's belief that Christianity can cope with this rejection in this way: ‘… the essence of Christianity can survive the abandonment of the myths with which it has till “now” been associated. Jesus performed no miracles, and was in no literal sense resurrected or born of a virgin. These are the ways in which the Gospel writers expressed the significance of Jesus's life and message.'Footnote 35
6. The role of ethics
For many Christian believers, this bold rejection of doctrine may be too strong, and even for philosophers sympathetic to the idealist conception, its rejection of the idea of the river of time – in a different metaphor, time's arrow moving steadily from past to present to future – and its recognition of nature's constant recycling of indestructible elements may not be enough to save the essence of the Christian vision. For these, however, there is another bridge between absolute idealism and practical Christianity. This is provided by ethics. Sprigge's own view of Christian ethics was that it was essentially anti-Kantian, no doubt because it is often seen as replacing a duty-based ethic with one based on love. But despite his avowed advocacy of a qualified utilitarian ethics – a ‘way of life’ utilitarianism in which care for others has its place – he was sensitive to Christianity as a source of moral and ethical consciousness, seeing this, too, as something he shared with Spinoza, in whose work he saw genuine religious feeling.Footnote 36 Describing Spinoza's friendship, notwithstanding his upbringing in the Jewish faith, with a group of liberal Christians, Sprigge represents them as holding that: ‘[t]rue Christianity … consisted in an evangelical love for one's fellow human beings and for God and an obedience to the original words of Jesus Christ unmediated by any theological commentary’.Footnote 37
But Spinoza was not the only philosopher whose possible Christian sympathies Sprigge stressed. He writes: ‘Hegel always thought of himself as a Christian (apart from a brief period in his youth). And … his mature philosophy was conceived by him as the conceptual presentation of what Christianity expressed in poetic symbolism.’Footnote 38 He insisted that Jesus taught ‘that love should take the place of the ethico-divine law, and that God was not some alien dictator but the spirit present in everything and which each human being may discover in himself.’Footnote 39 And he quotes with apparent approval Hegel's statement that: ‘Love itself pronounces no imperative. It is no universal opposed to a particular, no unity of the concept but a unity of spirit, divinity. To love God is to feel one's self in the ‘all’ of life, with no restrictions, in the infinite.'Footnote 40 Despite the mystical tone of this passage, Sprigge did not see Hegel as a mystic, but rather as a philosopher who was deeply influenced by his Christian background. He writes:
‘Any suggestion that Hegel was a mystic seems highly doubtful, but that he was in his own way intensely religious seems clear, even if his replacement of his earlier idea that it was love, cosmic and personal, which unified the world by the view that it was Reason (Vernunft) which does so, seems less religiously inspiring to many of us.’Footnote 41
Is Sprigge himself echoing Hegel when, speaking in mythical, or indeed poetic terms, he describes the idealist philosophy as the stage beyond religion? It is hard to reconcile his utilitarian ethics with this generous interpretation. But the idealist account of what we are, and of the part we play in the grand scheme of things, is not simply an intellectual exercise. It has practical implications for life choices and conduct. As Sprigge puts it: ‘we are nearer to the core of things when we partly transcend it in cooperative ethical, cultural and intellectual endeavours and in mutual aid.’Footnote 42 And writing on Bradley, he says: ‘Our personal task is to express in our lives, in ways suited to our particular situations, those eternal values which we know are somehow sustained at the heart of being by the Absolute.’Footnote 43 There is surely here also an echo of the Stoics and their view of the harmony of the universe: that the divine spark unites everybody and the moral law is the way in which the divine nature shows itself in human concerns.
So is there room here for the idealists' god? One possible response to this can be found in some reflections I once presented as the words of an imaginary ‘wise woman’ called Sophia. Her message was this:
‘You didn't think, because there is nothing separate that was mind, there is no mind. So you should not think that, if there is nothing separate which is God, there is no God; or if nothing separate which is soul, that there is no soul. It is not absurd, or ultimately incomprehensible, to say that the world is God, mind, soul; that this is the only path to immortality; and that understanding this is the only peace of mind.’Footnote 44
Although briefly expressed, this may indeed have been Sprigge's ultimate answer to the most important of what have been called ‘the big questions’. For Sprigge offered a very distinctive notion of the kind of direct and inspirational religious consciousness that brings the impersonality of a Spinozistic version of reality into relationship with another more intuitive and feeling-based conception. This, which might better be described as religious awareness and sensitivity, holds out the prospect of penetrating the darkness of failed philosophical system-building and finds its ultimate expression in an ethic and a way of life. It is, perhaps, the kind of idealist vision which Sprigge himself described as ‘ the picture of the world and of the part man does best to play in it to which I move myself when the spirit of Spinoza comes over me.’Footnote 45
These seem appropriate words with which to end what has been intended, not as a formal or critical discussion of Sprigge's philosophy, but rather as an exploration of the direction that his thinking took him on subjects that the empiricist-minded generation of philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been too ready to discount. For those ideas have a profundity which protects them against many of the facile criticisms to which this kind of philosophy has so often been exposed. They are thoughts that, in the end, we, like the philosopher Hume and no doubt like Sprigge himself, may only be able to appreciate in moments of solitude and quiet; and we may have to rely, as Hume did, on nature and the company of friends to cure us of what he saw as a philosophical melancholy and delirium, and to restore our belief in a world of particularity and individuality, in the forward march of time, and in the real existence of the solid three-dimensional objects by which we structure our perceptual experience.Footnote 46
So the underlying theme of Sprigge's project remains a challenge not only for religious belief, but also for many of the most basic of common sense assumptions. But the richness of the historic sequence of thought which occupied Sprigge's philosophical life and thinking continues to provide an intellectually stimulating perspective on Western philosophy's unended search for God. As for the ultimate outcome of that search, it is possible that Timothy Sprigge's own personal judgement is to be found in his summary of Kierkegaard's views, when he wrote ‘ … at every moment the assurance of the Christian hope is at risk from the offence it gives to the intellect; therefore it must remain a continual struggle to believe it.’Footnote 47 It is possible that this was not only Kierkegaard's dilemma, but also, whatever his personal intellectual preferences, and no matter where his own philosophical reasoning eventually took him, that of the author of The God of Metaphysics.
