Ego-theism
August 30, 2019 § 12 Comments
Ego-theism
I have come across a phrase that I think aptly describes what modern liberal Friends are doing when they interpret the phrase “that of God in everyone” to refer to a divine spark in everyone. The phrase is ego-theism. The phrase was coined by William Henry Channing in the 1820s to denote the blurring of “the distinction between the self as a partaker of divinity and divinity itself” and the understanding of God as “the human spirit writ large”. The quote is by Gary Dorrien, author of The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900 (page 48), which I’m reading right now.
This idea was the germ of American transcendentalism as espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who prefigures liberal Quaker thinking by three quarters of a century. I would love to know whether Rufus Jones, who gave us the divine-spark understanding of Fox’s “that of God”, was a fan of Emerson. I have always thought he got this idea from the neo-Platonists, but maybe Emerson and Jones drank from the same well.
Darrien quotes Emerson, and might be quoting Jones: “God in us worships God,” and “God must be sought within, not without,” and “Make your own Bible”. Emerson “[identified] God with consciousness or the world spirit” (Darrien). “[T]he simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God,” wrote Emerson. (Darrien, p 62) “[Christianity] is a rule of life, not a rule of faith.” And most tellingly: “The highest revelation is that God is in every man.”
Channing was an early eighteenth-century Lewis Benson, a sharp critic of this emerging Transcendentalist idea who strongly believed in God as a supreme and transcendent being who had nevertheless created humans in his image. It was this image, the attributes of divinity we have been given, that makes it possible for humans to understand God. It allows us to project onto infinite divinity qualities we had been given in finite measure.
This is close, I think, to Rufus Jones’s own theology. He believed in God as a supreme being, also, if I’m not mistaken. But a divine spark is a big leap from qualities given us by virtue of having been created in God’s. Liberal Quakers have taken that leap and then left that gulf between the human and God behind. We have walked on into a new neo-Platonist spiritual landscape and no longer see the divine-human gap, but only the enticing and self-satisfying idea of our own micro-divinity. Hence, ego-theism.
As I’ve said many times in this blog, I’m not saying this interpretation is not true. I’m saying that we can’t know whether it’s true or not. It’s pure speculation; it’s just theology. Unless one can express with integrity one’s direct experience of the divine spark in every human, one can pose the idea as attractive, maybe even as reasonable, especially as it mostly does away with the very difficult proposition of a supreme being. But it remains what Fox called a “notion”, an idea. We cannot establish it—with integrity—as the foundation of our faith.
Did Emerson directly experience his neo-Platonist divine spark? Or was he, too, speculating, having found the idea of a supreme being hard to justify but still keen to understand religious experience somehow?
Through the Flaming Sword 
Nice post!
About Rufus and Waldo: Emerson was a powerful influence on Jones, and I have been told (by an actual Quaker historian) that Rufus’s undergraduate thesis was on Emerson.
By the way, Emerson was a big fan of the Quakers — we know he read at least Fox’s Journal and Sewell’s History, and was close friends with a Friend (Edward Stabler, I believe) from Rhode Island. Frederick Tolles wrote an article about Emerson and Quakerism…
For more on Emerson, Friends, and other matters, some people might enjoy a blog post of mine from a couple of years ago:
Thanks, Brian, and thank you for the tips on Emerson. I’m gonna follow that link up.
Thanks, Brian. I look forward to reading your post on Emerson.
This is from Richard Tour’s email newsletter:
First, there is a “light in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable” [1]: unconditioned, universal, deathless; in religious language, a divine core of personality which cannot be separated from God. Eckhart is precise: this is not what the English language calls the “soul,” but some essence in the soul that lies at the very center of consciousness. As Saint Catherine of Genoa [1447–1510] put it, “My me is God: nor do I know my selfhood except in God.” [2] In Indian mysticism this divine core is called simply atman, “the Self.”
Second, this divine essence can be realized. It is not an abstraction, and it need not—Eckhart would say must not—remain hidden under the covering of our everyday personality. It can and should be discovered, so that its presence becomes a reality in daily life.
Third, this discovery is life’s real and highest goal. Our supreme purpose in life is not to make a fortune, nor to pursue pleasure, nor to write our name on history, but to discover this spark of the divine that is in our hearts.
Last, when we realize this goal, we discover simultaneously that the divinity within ourselves is one and the same in all—all individuals, all creatures, all of life.
That might be read as terribly egoistic. The Self! Yet I don’t think it is, the apparent egoism is merely an unfortunate result of the language used to attempt communication of the ideas. I feel such communication is useful to reassure me that I am not alone in my spiritual searching. I may be egoistic now, and stumble into God!
Rohr’s. Autocorrect, sorry. Would you amend my comment to correct it?
To answer Steven: For me the experience is a vivid, here-and-now awareness of the “divine” or “spirit” or “light”. It is all encompassing and sometimes like a web of energy. It is not in the realm of rational or intellectual, it doesn’t fit, it is a bigger and different experience, often fleeting. Words are tricky and I do not trust them to convey what that experience is. When I first read Emerson many years ago, I thought, wow, he IS describing it. Many writers describe it in their own ways, or in ways that seem to me to be the same, or similar experience. When I came to Quakerism I finally found a faith community that leaves enough room for me to live well with these experiences and to flourish.
Jane, apparently, your experience among liberal Quakers is a common one. I so related to your words, as well as Don’s. It is a common theme that comes up in my meeting’s messages during meeting for worship and during our meeting’s Circle of Friends (adult sharing time) before meeting for worship.
Just last week the following was in our meeting’s weekly online newsletter when it was relaying an explanation of liberal Quakers that is provided on our meeting’s website:
“. . . In the sub-tab of our web site, “More about Quakers”, liberal Quakerism is explained as a faith that relies on mysticism (a direct relationship with the divine). As stated within this sub-tab, ‘We hesitate to truly define the divine; it is felt. Striving to feel that Inner Light is what our worship is about’. The whole explanation of liberal Quakerism is beautifully written and makes clear what liberal Quakerism offers each of us that perhaps is difficult to find elsewhere”.
I absolutely love the comment to this post by Don Badgley. He speaks my experience with the divine.
Truly, Jesus was a mystic just as Rufus Jones and so many others down to our time. There are so many words recorded as coming from Jesus in the five gospels (“Thomas” included) that demonstrate he believed what he experienced with the divine is also fully available to everyone. Two of my favorite sayings of his:
“I am he who exists from the Undivided. I was given some of the things of my Father. Therefore I say, if one is undivided, he will be filled with light, but if he is divided, he will be filled with darkness.”
“I am praying that they may all be One – just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they too may be in us.”
If Quakerism is indeed an experiential faith, it is no wonder that so many Friends have a natural consequence of experiencing a mystical relationship with the divine. That same experience is available to all. Our challenge is in removing the impediments to that experience – both within ourselves and the culture at our meetings. I see this as the great driving force within the “liberal” Quaker movement, since its beginning in the mid-1800’s. However, surely this effort can be embraced by all
denominations. The first step is recognizing that the spirituality of Jesus is fully available to us all.
It seems to this Friend that a good place to begin might be to stop labeling this Friend as Liberal and that Friend as Orthodox. Perhaps these are a convenient identifiers but it they diminish the persons of each group by a subjective separation. At the moment we Experience the Divine Source, G-d, these worldly categories are rendered meaningless. In that moment we are changed. In that moment we “see” and even religion itself becomes meaningless.
In that moment we perceive the entirety of creation as having the Divine within it, outside of the physical universe, eternal, infinite and both knowable and unknowable in the same moment. Ego-theism? The moment it becomes an “ism” it arises in ego. That includes QuakerISM in all its forms. Nonetheless, this is a human way of expressing the inexpressible. Every religion is that as well and yet, they all fail in the moment of communion.
Recognizing “that of God within”, the “Inner Light” in everyone is only a danger when it excludes or just ignores the Inward Light that opens us to the Divine. The phrase “made in His image” is an ultimate example of human ego and quite understandable in its time and context. It is also just silly.
There is a yellow garden spider creating miraculous architecture on my deck. She is spectacular and also has “that of God” within her. Perhaps my awareness of that Presence in her is a manifestation of the Divine Source; even as it informs my relationship with the eternal and unchangeable One.
I’m not happy with the label “liberal Quakerism” either, though I’m a lot more happy with labels in general than may Friends. Talking about actual communities of faith and their differences gets really convoluted without them. The Quaker mutation that gave rise to the liberal Quaker movement has a fairly easily discernible origin and a distinctive historical character. It has the value of being in use a long time in a fairly consistent way. “Liberal”‘s connotation of freedom makes it descriptive of the liberal Quaker movement, too, though its political connotations don’t.
The standard alternative of “unprogrammed” doesn’t work for me because I don’t like definitions by negation and because you end up going off into an involved historical distraction to explain “programmed” vs “unprogrammed” to those who are not already in the know. “FGC-affiliated” avoids all these problems, but it isn’t really descriptive and that affiliation isn’t really definitive.
So I keep using “liberal”.
As for your yellow garden spider: When Friends in Unity with Nature started talking about that of God in all creation, it seemed like a natural step to me. It’s easy to move from the idea of a divine spark in humans to full-on panentheism, the belief that God is in everything. And the logos theology of the prologue to the gospel of John backs it up. If the Christ as the Word created everything and sustains it, then there is that of God in all creation. Matthew Fox wrote a whole book about this.
But I’m interested in the experience of the Logos, the Word, that of God in everything. Don, you talk about your “awareness of that Presence in her [the spider] [as] a manifestation of the Divine Source. I would like to hear more about that experience.
Steve,
The words we use are so freighted with worldly meaning that they may unintentionally mislead us. I understand that you are using “Liberal” in a 19th Century Quaker context but it is impossible to process the word without a conscious and subconscious overlay of other common meanings. Liberal equals license. Liberal as in not conservative. Liberal as in undisciplined, and so on.
The word/label Pantheism does not seem to fit my Experience of the Eternal Unchangeable because it assumes a “being deity” that I do not experience; “a doctrine that equates God with the forces and laws of the universe.” And, the label “God” has become nearly useless for my purposes because I cannot dislodge it from common meanings. “God” as defined by the world is a rather disappointing being in that even in its broadest definition – is too small for me to worship.
You ask about my Experience and I am left with the inadequacy of words to convey that which can only be perceived in glimpses and that is known in wordlessness. I am left with metaphor and an attempt to simply point in the direction of the Light.
We are physical beings, made of the stuff of stars, forged in the infinite cauldron of the physical universe, and we are Aware. That awareness is a miracle in itself, and connects us to our/its Source by its very existence. That does not translate as ego-theism for me so I coin a phrase that may fit better, Uni-theism. There are moments in which the entirety of the physical universe, (the 400 billion galaxies each an average of 100,000 light years across, each containing billions of stars) is felt and known as merely physical. It is perceived a physical manifestation that is present within a far greater Truth and Oneness; a reality that is uncreated and outside of the space-time continuum and that can hold the totality of the physical as I hold a flower petal in my hand.
Our physical existence is a brief and fleeting sparkle within infinity but, in that instant of awareness, we are given a view of …………that which can only be sought, perceived and experienced beyond the reach of our words. Because I know this, because I have experienced this, I can find it in the orb of the garden spider, in her being and in all I encounter. And finally, all that remains is Love.
Your description of Uni-theism speaks to my condition. Thank you Don. I find it very helpful to attempt to answer these questions. I find words clumsy when describing such things. But it allows us to grow in our capacity to hear each other and to savour what each Friend offers.