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In the fifth episode of Secular Christ, Philosophy and Theology professor, Sean J McGrath continues his seeking for Christ in the Secular Age. His starting point this time is the work of the American Franciscan priest and writer Richard Rohr, who through his many books and public lectures has led to a rediscovery of the cosmic christ and contemplative Christianity.
Canadian Philosophy and Theology professor and former Catholic Monk Dr. Sean J. McGrath examines how to practice contemplative Christianity in the secular age.
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(0:01) Jakob Lusensky: When looking for the secular Christ, where do we start looking?
(0:06) Sean McGrath: I think the place to start looking is in the popular culture and the popular media—social media, YouTube—and we look for figures who are speaking of Christ or invoking Christian symbolism in that media. And there I think there are three figures in particular who stand out: Jordan Peterson, Slavoj Žižek, and Richard Rohr.
So Richard Rohr, he’s in fact been on the scene for quite a long time. He’s been at this for a while. He was a big hit in the seventies with something called the New Jerusalem Community, which was a charismatic revival of Roman Catholicism. He’s a Franciscan priest and a baby boomer. So he sort of sparked a return to Jesus, or he was part of the return to Jesus thing that happened in the seventies—with, you remember, maybe, Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, and all that. The hippies discovered Christ, and Rohr sort of led them, not only back to Christ but back to Catholicism in a certain way. And that was, I think, Rohr’s first big moment in the limelight.
Rohr’s other big moment was as an interpreter of the Enneagram, the personality test. And he did a lot of work in that regard and he still works in that vein. And so he traveled around giving the Enneagram test to people, that many people find more compelling than Jung’s perhaps more familiar Myers-Briggs test. But more recently Rohr has emerged as a spokesperson for contemplative Christianity. And it’s in this regard that I want to speak about him. So, he founded a center for contemplative Christianity in the southwest of the United States. He’s become very popular with his podcasts and his writings on contemplative Christianity; many people are following him. He counts Oprah Winfrey as one of his friends. I know Bono sends him texts. He’s been featured in a major article in The New Yorker.
The first point I’d like to make is that he’s not the first, obviously. I think prior to Rohr, there were other figures who have somewhat been forgotten, chief among them Thomas Merton, the Cistercian monk we spoke of earlier. But contemplative Christianity never really goes away. It’s always been, sort of—it’s always been there. But it recedes from the limelight, and then somebody like Rohr comes along and brings it back into the light and—power to him, because for me, it is the absolutely—it’s absolutely the key to secular Christianity. The recovery of the contemplative dimension of Christianity is crucial to recognizing that Christ is not the enemy of the secular, but he is, in fact, the way towards a religious experience of the secular—at least for those who are the heirs of Christendom.
So how does this work? Well, Rohr has done a great deal of writing and preaching and podcasting on the theme of the cosmic Christ. That is, the that Christ is not identical to Jesus of Nazareth. But Christ is a cosmic being, the principle of the universe, the principle through whom all things are made, who pervades everything. He’s not far from us, in another world, but he is the innermost essence of everything. He is the logos. And through the logos, through the Christ, all things are made. Rohr takes this directly out of Paul—particularly the letter to the Ephesians and the letter to the Colossians—the image of the invisible God through whom all things are made, who is incarnated in Jesus. And Rohr’s credentials on this are impeccable.
He doesn’t distort this one bit, but he presents it in such a way that it sounds like news. And this is a bit unfortunate. It sounds as though Rohr has coined the term Cosmic Christ. And this is absolutely nonsense. The term Cosmic Christ is as old as the term the Trinity. There are treatises on the cosmic Christ that were written in Byzantium fifteen hundred years ago, as Rohr would be the first to acknowledge. That the theory of the cosmic Christ is the oldest gospel. When Paul traveled Asia Minor planting churches and preaching a gospel, he was not telling stories about Jesus and his healings and his teachings; the gospels were written later. He had one story to tell, and it was the story of the cosmic Christ, now revealed in the incarnated, crucified, and resurrected Messiah. That was—that was all he had to offer, and it was inflammatory, and it galvanized communities and led to the birth of Christendom.
So, the point is the cosmic Christ is an old theory, not a new theory, and it should not be put into some kind of opposition with the Roman cross. We should not forget the Roman cross. And when I speak of the Roman cross, I mean the historical Jesus, the man who died on the cross and was declared resurrected: that very specific site. We’ve said that this is a paradox, that we have, on the one hand, the universality of the Christ. You know, the Christ, the cosmic Christ, is to the world very much what the Tao is to world in Taoism, or what Buddha nature is to the world in Buddhism. He is the immanent divine principle. There is nowhere where we cannot find him. He is eternal. He is the light of all people before Jesus and after Jesus. So there’s that universal element. But then there is this singularity of incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection in the person of Jesus, and we must not tear those two apart.
It’s very tempting to tear it apart, because it’s in the tension between the two that the revelation of Christianity occurs. If we tear Jesus out of the equation, we’re left really with just a kind of principle that allows for a religious universalism as a religious syncretism, and maybe it’s less offensive to our New Age sensibilities about post-Christian attitudes, but it’s not the gospel, and I’m not suggesting for a moment that Rohr would tear the two apart. But I sometimes wonder if among his many enthusiastic listeners—among the Oprah Winfrey set and the post-Christian set—whether this is properly understood, or whether in his movement to popularize Christianity by retrieving contemplative Christianity, by retrieving and emphasizing the doctrine of the cosmic Christ, he is indulging in a certain way in a kind of watering down of the gospel to make it more palatable to our contemporary appetites and inclinations. I want the whole Christ. So it’s the cosmic Christ, crucified and resurrected. That’s the gospel. And that’s what launched all the revolutions. And that, for me, that is going to be the solution to our perverse form of secular life, which has sort of usurped the legacy of Christendom and the construction or the advent of a new form of secularism. That said, I think contemplative Christianity is the way. And so I want to align myself very much with Rohr on this.
Sometimes it sounds as though contemporary Christianity is sort of a, you know, a spin-off or a marginal interpretation, that Christianity is really dogmatic, rule-based, legalistic, moralistic, bound up with propositions and theories, and that the contemplative is sort of the outsider. And certainly that might be true from a sociological perspective, because contemplative life tends to be marginalized, not only by mainstream Christian churches but by society generally. By the contemplative we sometimes mean—well, what do we mean?—by the contemplative we’re speaking about the mystical experience of Christianity, Christianity as a doctrine of immediacy, as a way of life, as something that is not primarily bound up with events the past, but which is happening now—the evidence for which is manifest in personal practice. So, contemplative Christianity is the answer, I think, to the movement to the East, and this is what Rohr recognized. All of these hippies went east because they couldn’t find in Western religions a truth that was experiential. They wanted an experience of divinity. They didn’t want a theory about divinity or a propositional religion. And they certainly didn’t want a legalistic religion of rules and moral codes. They wanted to—they wanted to enlightenment. And what Rohr has done is drawn these pilgrims back to the West to say, the enlightenment you seek is in the gospel. In fact, it’s the heart of the gospel.
(9:59) This is so plain to see when you begin to read the text without certain kinds of prejudices. You see that what Paul and the others, and John in particular, the Gospel of John, are talking about is knowledge, illumination. Christ is the light of the world. What does he bring? He brings power. But it’s a curious kind of power. It’s not a power that makes you better than others. It’s a power that allows you to lay your life down for others, to invert, you could say, the natural egoism of the self and the natural logic of the world, to turn it upside down. And in that self-surrender, one doesn’t suffer a kind of self-punishment, but rather experiences a liberation from the kind of confinement that we habitually suffer from in our ego-driven lives. So it’s a kind of Christian moksha, if you like, to use the Hindu word, or a satori, a liberation from the egoic, and it’s central to Christianity.
Another way to talk about contemplative Christianity’s with regard to the binary of the sacred and the profane. We said that this is the perennial religious thesis, you could say. You know, human religion is bound up with this distinction between the sacred and the profane, that some times, some spaces, are sacred and closer to divinity, and other times and other spaces are further away. And we use rituals to connect the profane to the sacred. Well, Christianity abolishes this distinction, in many ways, when God becomes identified incarnate in an ordinary human being. Everything becomes sacred, which is another way of saying nothing is profane. That is the secularizing gesture. And notice that it can be interpreted the other way around. In other words, one could say, with this doctrine of incarnation, nothing is sacred. And I think that this is the Antichrist, you could say. This is the perverse doctrine of secularization, which we really need to overcome. But the overcoming of the desacralization of the world, or the disenchantment of the world unleashed by Christendom—the overcoming of it will not be through a return to the older system, the reinstallation of the sacred and the profane or the re-enchantment of the world, but a recovery of this contemplative Christian experience—experience, not a doctrine—that everything is sacred.
And maybe we could speak briefly about what this means. I think contemplative Christianity is experiential rather than dogmatic. It’s other-centered rather than self-centered, so it’s a doctrine of redeemed poverty rather than a doctrine of human potentiality. Or, if you like, it’s a doctrine of divine potentiality in the human, the human now gifted with divine power, but through another, through the agency of Christ or through grace. And thirdly, I think it is communal. It’s communal, but not in such a way as to undermine the absolute necessity of solitude and prayer. And if you want, an individuation that can only come through an interior path that is really yours alone. And that most of our social interactions are kind of designed to free us from this work of being alone. Somebody said that all the problems of the world can be traced back to the fact that people can’t spend an hour alone. And I think this is right at the heart of the contemplative Christian tradition, contemplative Christianity, Christianity generally—is a history of solitudes contemplatives, prayerful men and women, who through an experience of interior transformation have been able to go out into the world and have an extraordinary effect on their community.
So, experiential, other-centered, and communal. Let me say just a brief word about each of these. When we say that Christianity or contemplative Christianity is experiential, we mean to say that it has to do with our daily lives. The dogmas of the church—let’s say, incarnation, resurrection, Trinity become—through contemplative practice, through the practice of meditation, the practice of prayer—they become symbols that mediate personal experience now, not just symbols of something holy transcendent, of the God who is the creator of heaven and earth and who is incomprehensibly beyond us, but also symbols of that which is most concretely immanent, which is most—which is closest to us. So we experience, now, the doctrine of the logos as a doctrine concerning daily life. Our experience of the earth, of our senses, of our bodies, of the animals and plants around us, as an experience of Christ, the logos. The experience of others as an experience of the Christ, and the experience of our self as an experience of the Christ. There is nowhere we’ll go where we will not encounter the light and power of the logos. This is the experience of the self as a site of redeemed poverty. So we still have that crucifixion moment you like. There is still that crushing encounter with our moral impotence, but now it is accompanied—it’s not just accompanied, but it’s made possible—by the light of grace, flooding our lives from the cross. We see ourselves as poor only because we are now granted all the richness of Christ—this is one of Paul’s phrases—we are given everything. And the person who has been given everything not only becomes a wealthy person, but they become one who knows that prior to this gift, they were poor. Our poverty is illuminated by the gift of grace.
And secondly, contemplative Christianity is other-centered, and by that I mean we never for a moment—or the contemplative Christian does not for a moment—confuse this experience of giftedness with the awakening and actualization of their own human potentiality. They do not discover in this a doctrine of an enlarged self. This is not, this is not self-actualization. For, at least for the Christian, the transformation comes from without. Paul uses this phrase, “in Christ” 164 times in his letters. We are to love each other in Christ. We are to greet each other in Christ. We are to lay down our lives in Christ. We are to enjoy knowledge and power in Christ. It is always through the Christ, and never without him, that the enlargement, that the enrichment, that the illumination of self and life occurs. So this is the doctrine of grace: that which I could not do for myself has been done for me. And with this, Christ becomes now concrete, personal, a power of self-transcendence, a power of knowledge and love.
(18:13) If this language has become too familiar for us because we’ve heard it too many times, one can look east and find, particularly in the tradition of Shin Buddhism, an extraordinary, analogy to this. In the Shin tradition, they call it Nam[u] Butsu, the other power, the idea being that the Zen practitioner could become self-deceived that the path towards illumination lies in his or her own power, that it’s a matter of practice, that it’s a matter of sitting straight. It’s a matter of undergoing long periods of meditation and training. And it’s all up to you, so to speak. And the problem there, of course, is that the enlightenment—this is Pali canon of Buddhism—enlightenment is not a work of the ego. It is a work of undoing the ego. And so, in the Shin tradition, they speak of the other power, Amita Buddha, and one develops a practice of relying on the other power of Amita, Buddha, calling upon him. Namu [Amita] Butsu is the prayer that the Shin Buddhist will utter, calling on Amida Buddha to save. All the light and power and love and of the Dharma is through the Amita Buddha, not through the ego. So, it’s an analogy. I think formally speaking—more or less identical, formally speaking—to what we’re talking about as the experience of grace.
And thirdly, it’s communal. So out of this solitude, the solitary transformation, one could say, one finds everyone. One finds the church, now understood as the body of Christ. Not the building down the road where I was baptized, but the body of Christ. Christ is still incarnating himself in the body of the world: in the plants, the animals, the trees, and other people in the community. These are the members of his body. The people I know. The ones I don’t know, the suffering ones, the downtrodden, the casualties of our techno-barbaric civilization. They’re all members of the Christ, of the body of Christ. They are the church and with the contemplative experience of transformation, one finds oneself extraordinarily capable of loving the other.
We spoke about how loving everyone is not a human ability. And that’s exactly right. It’s the divine ability. It’s agape. And this is what this is, what is given to us in the Christ experience: the capacity to love the world. We find, for example, that our burdens are taken from us by others, burdens that we couldn’t carry ourselves, and amazingly we now have the power to carry the burdens of others. Things that could not be—that power, the power to lift the burden of life from the other, something that would be crushing to another person becomes light for us. We become capable of service.
So I take these three to be these three moments, you could say, of contemplative Christian realization. The experience of self as a site of redeemed poverty, and the experience of Grace, the other power, and the experience of the body of Christ in my community, human and non-human. I take this to be the contemplative experience of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The Father is that principle of self. And the Son is the principle of otherness. And the Spirit is the principle of the community. We probably have to go into some Systematic Theology to unpack that, but I think we’re on fairly solid terrain here. That the Trinity in contemplative Christian experience is no longer a speculative theory about God that might or might not be true. It is now a personal experience of myself, of the immanent God, the God who is acting in my life and of my community. And out of this experience, the Christian ought to be able to do extraordinary things. And I think we see that in history, in the history of the church and in the history of the world. Wherever we see love conquering over hate, wherever we see the logic of the world inverted and self-assertion giving way to self-donation. Wherever we see charity, we are seeing this. We are seeing the victory of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, once again.