NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’

Don Cupitt

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/20

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1672/20

Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews

Interviewee’s surname: Cupitt Title: Mr

Interviewee’s Don Sex: Male forename:

Occupation: Philosopher Date and place of birth: 22nd May 1934, Oldham, Lancashire , UK Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: engineer and manager Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 21/5/16 (track 1-2), 07/06/2016 (track 3), 23/06/2016 (track 4-5)

Location of interview: Interviewees' rooms in Emmanuel College

Name of interviewer: Paul Merchant

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661on compact flash

Recording format : audio file 12 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel

Total no. of tracks 5 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 7 hrs. 59 min. 05 sec.

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: OPEN

Interviewer’s comments:

Don Cupitt Page 1 C1672/20 Track 1

[Track 1]

Could you start by telling me when and where you were born?

I was born at Oldham in Lancashire, on May the 22nd 1934, my parents being Robert and Nora Cupitt. The place of birth was a maternity home. I think in those days women went into such a place. It was a substitute for the old practice of confinement. But the belief was that, childbirth was a period when you needed very special protection and seclusion.

And can you tell me about the life of your father, in as much detail as you can?

Yes. My father’s family came from Nottinghamshire. I remember Bertram Cupitt, my grandfather, who was a plumber, fought in the Royal Engineers during World War I. But I remember him, his eighty years as a good, solid Victorian craftsman, with a very firm identity. My grandmother was Emma Hester Wayman[ph]. A quite different character. A frustrated intellectual. She had been longing to be a doctor, and she got a place at Nottingham University Medical School to read medicine, but her family wouldn’t let her take it up, she had to stay at home and look after the children. So all her life she was in search of a knowledge that had been forbidden her, and therefore keen on every sort of spiritualism, theosophy, divination of every kind, and the wisdom of the East. My father grew up very secular, but with perhaps a questioning, doubting side to him that came from his mother, and came out more strongly in me. My father was only five foot eight in height. I am six foot four. He was stocky and short, good-looking, black-haired. From early on he was obviously a leader and organiser. He started as a gas engineer; at the time when I was born he was putting in the gas mains around Oldham. And later he became a heating and ventilating engineer, who put in hot air ducting systems to heat factories. And it was that that really counted when the war came along, because it was seen that he would be useful organising the mass-production of war materials, in particular aircraft bodies. So my father was above all an engineer, a heating and ventilating engineer, or a sheet metal fabricator. Very active, very hard-working, but successful during the war. He established factories, trained the workforce and so on. I’ll tell one story about the war years. My father worked with a firm called Fletcher Brothers on the west side of Don Cupitt Page 2 C1672/20 Track 1

Birmingham. They fabricated the bodies of fighter aircraft. In 1940 it was a matter of producing these things as fast as could possibly be done, as the Germans were shooting them down every day. Harry Fletcher went over to having a triple workforce, each shift worked eight hours a day. Fletcher himself for weeks never left his desk. Meals were brought to him at his desk, and he slept a few hours here and there, basically falling forward on his desk. So he worked straight round the clock through much of 1940, with the factory working three times its normal rate. My father helped to set up that system. All sorts of things were done. Training often women workers to produce war materials under extreme pressure, because of course, as everybody knows, we had gone into World War II with not nearly enough stocks of weapons.

[04:09] Thank you. What do you remember of time spent with the paternal grandparents? You say you remember your grandfather for example.

Yes. I think I was well under ten when they both died in their sixties. Bertram Cupitt, the plumber, I remember watching him work in the old-fashioned way, with a blowlamp and solder and a cloth, making a joint in lead pipes. Very old-fashioned plumbing. The other grandfather was a butcher, I also remember, faintly, but he had two marriages, and I’m not quite sure which marriage I’m descended from. He was John Gregson senior. And, one of his sons was also called John Gregson, a man much admired in the family. He looked much like me. He became a geography teacher. When the war came along he went in the Navy and became a Met officer, and ended rather senior in the Navy. So he made it comfortably into the middle class as it were. Though most of my family were traditional northern industrial, and, very simple in background.

[05:22] Can you tell me now then about the life of your mother?

My mother went to school, learnt to write in rather schoolgirly hand, left at fourteen. Worked for Singer sewing machine, Singer sewing machines, and, married my father when she was nineteen. I remember fifty-nine and a half years later how utterly bereft Don Cupitt Page 3 C1672/20 Track 1 she was, because she had never been an adult on her own. She had always been married to an organising, driving, energetic man, who did everything for her. And we found in his car his last Valentine to her, already purchased, and it had to be decided whether we should give it to her. And we found that she didn’t know how to fill a car with petrol. My father had always seen that she had got into the car and it was full of petrol. She was desperately under-educated. She was devoted to her children, and a great make-doer-and-mender, naturally, with her background in dressmaking and so on, very good at that kind of thing. She kept an immaculate home. But all the children went off to boarding schools and then to universities, and then fled the nest. So she grew gradually lonelier and more depressed as she got old, and had no cultural resources to fall back on. I do remember once talking her into spending a few days Pevser-ing in Suffolk. We got a copy of Pevsner. I said, ‘Let’s go and see some beautiful buildings, stay at pubs and just drive round Suffolk, and see the famous churches and so on.’ But I’m afraid she got terribly bored after a day or two; she didn’t know what she was looking at when she looked at a building. She couldn’t read the history of a building off looking at the building. She hadn’t got the education that, all Cupitts know you must get, you must know these things, you must strive for education, all of it you can get. She hadn’t got that, and so she was unhappy. And we were sorry when she also got something that she passed on to me, macular degeneration. She couldn’t see either. So, she had little else but the radio to comfort her in her last years, and was, yes, a bit unhappy. Proud in a way that they had educated their children by sending them to public school, but this of course had itself brought cultural distance between the children and the parents, as everybody who is the first in their family to go to university will know. But, at the end of the war my father had become quite senior, and was earning a good income, because of his very energetic work producing munitions. So he decided that all the children would be sent to public schools, the boys to Charterhouse, and the girls to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. So we were all educated to go into a higher social class than we had been born into. But that was the way it went. Both the girls became doctors. I also went towards biology, thinking of becoming a doctor at first, but then started to move a good deal of course.

[08:53] What did your parents say about their own childhoods? Don Cupitt Page 4 C1672/20 Track 1

All I remember is that my father was a good runner. He was a good enough golfer to enter the national amateur championship. I remember caddying for him. So he was good at sport. And he had a lot of birds, and that may have been a factor in getting me interested in natural history. Of my mother’s childhood, I know only that she loved her brother, John Gregson, and had his photograph by her when she died. He had gone of lung cancer, through cigarette smoking, in his late sixties. But she loved him. And we called our own eldest son John Robert Gregson, by way of mixing my father’s name with my mother’s brother’s name.

What do you remember of time spent with your father, as a child? I gather he was busy, and…

He was very hard-working, but, he sometimes took me with him on expeditions of various kinds. I remember going by train to Newcastle and staying in a station, in there, and finding myself eating pigeon, which was presumably the same sort of pigeon that was flying about in the station. [laughs] To a child, this was slightly alarming. I remember sitting on his shoulders at Grimsby watching the herring fleet when I was only about three or four. I’ve just got memories of being taken by him to this place and that. [pause] He was very conscientious about delivering us to school and to university I remember; at the beginning and end of each term he would do the long drive. He loved to have a good car. In his most prosperous years had a Bentley, and it was immaculately looked after. In his later years he declined in fortune, and, oddly enough, although he was a very good metal basher, he didn’t like money, and never knew how to invest it. So although he was given a lump sum in compensation when he finally lost his last job, he just put it in a building society and they lived off the interest, and it wasn’t enough, they were a bit poor towards the end of their lives. I never spent very much time close to my father. I suppose the cultural difference was a factor, I, I’m not sure. But he was a, very much an old-fashioned patriarch I supose in his way.

Do you remember anything of the sort of thing as a younger child that you would talk with him about? I realise it’s a bit of a, a long shot.

Don Cupitt Page 5 C1672/20 Track 1

No. No, I don’t. No. He would occasionally reminisce about friends and tell stories. But he was not a, he would not confide, no, he was not that kind of man. Too self- contained, yes. No. You have to remember, he was a son of a man who fought in the Second World – in the First World War, and the men of the First World War were notoriously silent afterwards about what they had been through. A whole generation of men were silent after the First World War, for a long time to come. My father was influenced by that I think. We were never a demonstrative family. He had no religious beliefs, nor did my mother. But I do remember, at the end of his life he worried about whether he would be remembered. He didn’t believe in life after death, but he did want to be remembered, and he bought a few pieces of very good furniture, I think with the idea that they would be passed on to us children, and we’d keep them and they’d be kind of heirlooms that would come down to us, and help keep his memory alive. Because of that, after he died I instituted a custom by which the four children would meet once a year for dinner somewhere in England, in memory of our parents, which we still do. We’ve done it for the last twenty years or so I suppose, at different parts of the country, an occasion, and we’d drink the health of our, in memoriam, of our parents.

[13:26] Thank you. And then, time spent with your mother as a child.

I’ll tell a story about how resourceful she was. How she saved the life of my two-and- a-half-year-old brother. She was cooking marmalade in the kitchen at a house at Bramhall in Cheshire. There were wasps crowding round. In those days there were abundant flying insects, creatures of whom one doesn’t see much today, but in those days, there were fly papers hung in kitchens and so on. And if you cooked marmalade, the air was full of wasps. And she batted at them and so on. I remember her saying, ‘I suppose there must be some point in wasps.’ She believed that God had created everything to have a kind of function in his creation, and there was therefore supposed to be some good purpose that the existence of wasps served. But it didn’t work out in this occasion, because my little brother put his finger into some spilt marmalade on the table and stuck it in his mouth, but there was a wasp attached. It stuck him on the end, stung him on the tongue. And he sent out the most immediate howl. My mother knew instantly that his life was in danger, and I saw she knew what Don Cupitt Page 6 C1672/20 Track 1 to do. She pulled out a spoon from a drawer and held it bowl facing downwards on top of his tongue to keep his airways open. She grabbed the child, struggling and screaming as he was, held down his tongue like that, and by that means kept him breathing for a about an hour and a half until the swelling began to go down. And he would live. But otherwise, the violent swelling of the tongue would have closed off his breathing, and he’d have died. Now I don’t think many mothers nowadays would know immediately exactly what you must do if your little one gets stung by a wasp on the tongue, but she did.

How did she know, do you think?

She was of a generation of women who inherited large amounts of traditional law and wisdom from their mums really, and lived like that. She didn’t have much education, but she knew some practical things like that, and… She was very good at practical things like dressmaking and mending clothes, and, looking after children’s ailments. Mm. Anyway, I remember being impressed by that resourcefulness, and, similar things happened when, when we had accidents and went flying off our trikes and crashed or something. She was good at patching up children.

What do you remember doing with her, other than [inaud]?

I just mentioned an occasion when we tried to have a holiday with her away from home in Suffolk to cheer her up. No, I don’t remember otherwise any lengthy or close discussions or confidences. The family was curiously cool. We kissed each other, not very often. It was a kind of, Lancashire Protestant, emotional control, which is, seems strange nowadays but it was the custom then. It was not a very emotional family, and not much given to confidences. I don’t know that I can say more than that.

[16:54] That’s OK. Do you remember, though, doing things with her, going places with her as a child, or helping her with, with this or that?

Don Cupitt Page 7 C1672/20 Track 1

No. It’s a long time ago, the memories aren’t there. We moved house so often. I remember once counting up that we had lived in twenty houses in my first twenty years, mainly because of this wartime thing of moving at least every six months. And in some occasions, I remember, my mother hadn’t fully unpacked before we moved on again, from house to house, in the Midlands, in the north, or in the London suburbs. [pause] She used to say that the only way the two of them had got together a little capital was by buying houses, doing them up, and selling them at a modest profit. Perhaps she did that kind of thing, painting, improving houses a little bit. And they got a little money together. But my father was paying for four children to go through top public schools out of income. Today the costs of doing that would be about £120,000 a year, or £140,000 a year perhaps. After tax. In those days my father’s income was probably about two and a half thousand. [laughs] And, so, he ran up a massive overdraft, and I think my parents were concerned to make enough money to pay off the educational overdraft, and that’s why they worked so hard doing up houses and moving on.

[18:36] Thanks. Can you say more about her religious belief?

In her later years she turned a little towards religion in the way that people do. But, she didn’t inherit any particular religious beliefs. As I’ve said, my grandmother Cupitt’s addiction to the wisdom of the East and to divination was the nearest thing to religion in our family. We were never taken to church by the parents, or, nor any carol services or anything like that. My mother didn’t talk about such things, but, she went to church a little in her last years, once or twice, out of curiosity. When my name began to be publicly known they were quite impressed, but of course they wouldn’t read books like mine, or, or be able to talk to me about my ideas. [pause] I don’t remember any occasion on which she expressed she expressed religious questioning or anxiety on her own part. She was content if she had enough friends, enough to occupy herself, to get by. I think, perhaps they came from a very Catherine Cookson sort of North Country world. She thought of getting by, without having any deeper religious questioning or curiosity there.

Don Cupitt Page 8 C1672/20 Track 1

So we shouldn’t read, in that case, too much into her view of the wasp as having a purpose, because, it wasn’t…

[laughs] Just a popular belief of the time I think that was still held. Yes. [laughs] Yes, the answer is, yes, must be some purpose to a wasp. She had a lot of North Country sayings. I remember her saying, for example, ‘What are you doing standing around like one of Lipton’s?’ That’s a saying from the years of the General Strike and Depression and unemployment and so on. And the shop assistants in the big grocer’s shop, Lipton’s, had nothing to do, they were just standing around, because nobody had any money to go in and buy groceries. So standing around like one of Lipton’s was something you accused a lazy child of. She had lots of comical sayings like that, and, they amused us. But, she had the woman’s version of the same emotional restraint that was common amongst men of that place and class. Mm.

[21:23] What did you play with indoors? We’ll get to outdoor play as well.

[laughs]

But sort of, indoor play.

Mainly reading. I, I became a voracious reader from an early age. We were living in London at the time of the V-1s and V-2s, through the, well, 1943, ’43 I should think, ’44, to the end of the Forties. I went out to Charing Cross Road, in those days a great place for second-hand bookshops, and children roamed freely all over London. And with my pocket money I bought sixpenny copies of Victorian novels, and that kind of thing. And then I started trying to buy the whole of Everyman’s Library, and, and the Victorian poets and so on, all sorts of things. I read everything I could. Quite early on the read I most enjoyed, after Brontës, was Dickens, and I do remember that I did read the whole of Dickens’ collected works by the time I was thirteen. So reading was one thing. Another was natural history. I began to collect butterflies, and again in the Charing Cross Road there was the celebrated shop Watkins & Doncaster, a naturalist shop which sold you butterfly nets, setting boards, cleaning fluid, jars, pill boxes and so on, for the insect collector, Victorian collector. And I had a little filing Don Cupitt Page 9 C1672/20 Track 1 cabinet thing with my butterflies in it that I had collected. You wouldn’t do that nowadays, but in those days you still killed things. [pause] Other interior occupations, I don’t remember. The butterfly… Oh, railways, another craze was collecting locomotive numbers. Those were the days of Ian Allan’s little books, which listed all the locomotives and their types for the four great railway lines. And, one used to go to places like Hanger Lane in London where the main line from Paddington went down, across to Bristol, and watch the trains go by from there, and write down their numbers. Or you could go into the railway engine sheds that were scattered about London, and copy, tick off the numbers in your book as you went from loco to loco. Just recently I recaptured that by going to the National Railway Museum at York, and it reminded me of my boyhood, being chased round engine sheds by railwaymen. There used to be gatherings of small boys at the end of the platform, in major stations, and one went especially to places like Crewe or Clapham Junction, these were the busiest stations through which most trains went. And ticking off the numbers. I was caught then, at that time, by the beauty of Victorian engineering, and the glamour of it, by the great figures like Bazalgette and Brunel, and so on, and the attractiveness of railway, steam engines. I suppose a steam engine is a very easy thing to understand. Nowadays all of us wear on our wrists a bit of quartz technology that we couldn’t explain, but, in those days Victorian technology was legible as it were, you looked at it and you could see how it worked. That was very satisfying. And, the things they made struck me as very beautiful. I always hated Victorian art, liked Victorian engineering. Mm.

[25:18] Were there significant outdoor places? I realise you moved, you moved around throughout your childhood, but…

Yes.

In the various places that you lived, significant sort of outdoor landscapes, localities, that sort of thing?

At the age of about, eight, in 1942, I was sent for a few weeks to stay at a farm in Oxenhope in South Pennines, not very far from the Brontë country. That planted in Don Cupitt Page 10 C1672/20 Track 1 me a love of the northern hills and of the sheep farming landscape, which I’ve kept ever since. Until recently with arthritis disabling me, but until recently we used to go up several times a year for three or four days walking anywhere from the Peak District to the Yorkshire Dales, or the North York Moors National Park. I used to love walking in those landscapes. Otherwise, I took advantage of what was available, but, I was at boarding school a lot of course, at prep school in Chiswick, and then at boarding school in Surrey, where there was some opportunity to look at particular landscapes, in the region of Hindhead, the Devil’s Punch Bowl, that sort of Surrey hills landscape, which has some quite good natural history there. I remember one of the masters at school taking me on a scientific project with nesting boxes for birds, counting the number of young they were raising, checking their nests and so on. Mm.

Where did you collect the butterflies that you…?

As I had opportunity, on summer holidays and so on. It was only occasionally that we happened to go to a good place. Somewhere like Dorset where there’s a very wide range of species of butterflies. Obviously in the middle of London, or a city, you only see a small number of garden species. The scarcer ones, it was a matter of luck where we had the odd holidays. But the books began to have distribution maps from about 1947. I think E B Ford’s book Butterflies, 1947, in the Collins New Naturalist series, was one of the first to have a distribution map, and I could look at that you see and, from where we were going then, I knew what to look for. Mm. I don’t think, it was never much as a collection, I’m glad to say. I wouldn’t dream of killing a butterfly now, and haven’t done so since I was a little boy. But, but the love of… I’m still a member of Butterfly Conservation, even now, and still occasionally go to the few places near Cambridge where you can see exciting things. Mm.

[28:17] What was the nature and extent of your religious faith or religious interest as a child, curiosity?

It started at the age of fifteen when I was confirmed. My housemaster at school prepared me for Confirmation. In those days the great Anglican public schools assumed daily chapel. But the school had two Anglican chaplains, there was daily Don Cupitt Page 11 C1672/20 Track 1

Anglican worship, and the housemasters were presumed to be able to prepare their own boys for Confirmation. And that’s what I had. As a result of that, I did discover I was unusually religious, and even at the age of fifteen would communicate at least twice a week, and would occasionally go to late services in the old school chapel as well as in the famous modern War Memorial Chapel. So I was very devout at fifteen. Then, my studies of zoology began to secularise my thinking, and a tension grew up in my mind between Plato, whom I had also learnt at school, and Darwin, metaphysics and British empiricism and natural science. So my initial impulse to religious thought was trying to find some synthesis of the speculative and religious elements of my own thinking with the, the bottom-up Darwinian evolutionary ways of thinking I was also learning. At seventeen I was going to chapel much less, I remember, and not I think going much to parish church when I was at home for the holidays. But then I was converted back at Cambridge at eighteen, and I’ve remained strongly religious since. Mm.

How did you get from having parents with no strong interest in religions at all, not having an interest yourself, being confirmed age fifteen? What happened between…

Everybody was. It was just a matter of custom. But, oddly enough, even that, which included a, a short retreat and confirmation by the Bishop of Guildford and so on, that included a short retreat at Farnham. Even that was enough to show me that I just liked religion, and religious subjectivity. Not that I had specifically religious experiences, but at least I was inclined to a particular kind of religious experience, which I would rather call a mysticism of the sense of sight. I have always tended to have a very strong idea for natural beauty, in the manner of, say, the paintings of van Gogh: seeing things super real, vivid, glowing, kind of, with a kind of religious glory investing the whole scene. The sort of thing that van Gogh can give to a bowl of sunflowers, or a chair, or just a café scene. I’ve always tended to see the world in that way. This is an extrovertive rather than an introvertive mysticism. It’s seeing the world as having the divine glory scattered over it. And that’s the only element of belief in God that remains to me now, oddly enough. A visual mysticism, that owes a little to Wordsworth, a little to Traherne and Vaughan. It’s in the tradition of English poetry. It’s in Gerard Manley Hopkins. [pause] I still sometimes have the feeling of an epiphany in front of a particular painting, or series of paintings. I remember Don Cupitt Page 12 C1672/20 Track 1 several occasions. It struck me with for example Bridget Riley. Surprisingly. Many people don’t see her works as extremely beautiful, but I have done so. And I have a, a visual epiphany just seeing, glancing at one of her paintings. Funny. Her late paintings. [pause] So, that sort of visual religious experience I’ve always had strongly. I’m a highly visual person. I had much better than average sight when young, and was lucky to have at my school a brilliant art teacher who taught me how to look at paintings, and see immediately who they were by, whether they were good. [laughs] I can immediately go into a modern art gallery and glance round and see what the good ones were. They stand out, and hit me, very strongly. I’ve always had a lot of art books, and a large visual memory. So for me, religion is tried up strongly with a sense of sight. Curious.

[33:55] Do you remember things that you looked at in childhood in that way? So perhaps, pre-Confirmation experience of looking.

I, I’m trying to think what I remember. I suppose butterflies would be a very striking example. I’ve always had a love of insects. Their furious love of life and clinging to life, their sheer energy, their, busyness. [laughs] And I still look at insects with great admiration. In the early spring, in the house, you still sometimes see green lacewing on the wall, and look at it, its tiny brilliant copper eyes, its sheer beauty. And I’m very moved, just by the sight of an insect like that. [pause] Not only insects, but, to some extent birds and small mammals, when they’re available. But much of my life’s been urban, and nowadays, I no longer see the things I still found as a child. As a child I loved to find slow worms and glow worms, and cockchafers, and stag beetles, hawkmoth caterpillars, hummingbird, hawkmoths feeding. I love the sort of creatures you can find in a pond. So my, my visual delight in the world was also a love of busy small creatures and their… I used to be able to find these things; nowadays I don’t often see them. But children look out for small things. A child cannot appreciate architecture, has no idea of sculpture, doesn’t think much of landscape, but a child does notice small things [laughs], insects and so on. I remember taking a boat-load of kids out on Windermere, and trying to tell them about the huge and mighty forms that Wordsworth describes around Windermere. Totally unimpressed, and, they’re just too busy, feuding with each other and arguing and, absorbed in their own childish Don Cupitt Page 13 C1672/20 Track 1 preoccupations. The Lake District didn’t strike them as even remotely interesting. [laughs]

[36:25] We’re going to come to your first school in a minute, but just before that, can you tell me how you were like or different from your siblings in that sort of early childhood period?

[pause] My brother was one and a half years younger than me, then two or three years to the next sister, and then seven, eight or nine years the next. There were quite big age gaps with the girls. That I had very strong intellectual preoccupations that were just unusual, I only began to realise gradually. They used to say that at school I was either top of the class or bottom. I was rather bipolar. That’s probably true. When I was on top of my form, they used, teachers at school used to say that I was the most gifted child they had ever seen. But when I was doing badly, I was hopeless, paralytically bad. So I went up and down very oddly. And myself, I wasn’t very clear about the difference between myself and other people early on. No, it only came gradually over the years. I was a slow developer. I didn’t publish my first book till I was thirty-six. If I had been a novelist it would have been ten years or more earlier than that. But, with my sort of preoccupations in philosophy, ethics and religion, it can easily take till you’re in your forties before you have any idea what you yourself think, or that for you, just thinking and self-questioning is actually the most interesting and important thing in life. I now say, part of my project was to try to make the philosophy of life into a respectable subject, because it never has been. But I only began to think in those sort of terms in middle age. When a child… No, oddly enough, I surprisingly seldom asked about the rationale of my religious beliefs for a long time, didn’t ask very clearly. So, sorry, I was a slow developer. I can’t say clearly how far I was conscious of being odd and different at an early age, except that I was psychologically very bipolar, very up and down. Mm.

So that you could do, you could be doing very well or very badly, within the same subject?

Don Cupitt Page 14 C1672/20 Track 1

[hesitates] Yes, or, from year to year, yes. Yes. [pause] I didn’t know which of my ideas were interesting and which were any good. Curious. Yes, I remember at theological college in my early twenties, twenty-three, that sort of age, twenty-four, having acute religious doubts, but just soldiering on despite them. And not formulating them clearly intellectually in the way I would now. So it would be hard for me to say what there were doubts about. [laughs] So, my thinking only gradually got a little clearer over many many years.

[40:06] Thank you. Could you tell me, then, first, on schools, about your first schools, or, or school if there was just one?

I remember my first school was a primary school in Southport, Lancashire. I remember my mother taking me to school, it was a church school. I remember wooden panelling and a kind of dado on the wall. Pitch pine furniture. Rather gloomy atmosphere. I remember my mother waving goodbye and going, and I felt very gloomy and lost. Age four that was. After that a scattering of primary schools. At the age of eleven I won a scholarship to Ealing College, a well-known grammar school. Didn’t take it up, because my father was going, by then decided to go to Charterhouse. But, I had started in London at Gunnersbury Preparatory School, a little prep school of rather dubious merit, near, in Gunnersbury, close to Acton Town tube station. And that was the most important of my early schools. From there I did get a good scholarship to Charterhouse.

Do you remember anything of teaching and learning at that age?

Nothing of school books, no. Only the English master at my prep school, Hugo de Chanchif[?], giving me a copy of Dodd’s Beauties of Shakespeare, and telling me that it was by the only English clergyman ever to be hanged. It’s a book published in the late 1770s or so, when rather bowdlerised selections of Shakespeare were safe to give to children. People used to think Shakespeare was rather rude, or something. But he was out of fashion. The influence of popular Protestant Christianity was beginning to make people rather suspicious of the element of bawdy in Shakespeare. Dodd was the anthology. But, Dodd was also a fraudster, and he had been hanged, so, I tell this Don Cupitt Page 15 C1672/20 Track 1 story as a kind of warning of my own future really, that, as the story indicates, that was the kind of company I might end up in. The headmaster was inclined to sexually abuse the children. But in those days we took it for granted. The modern shock horror about the sexual abuse of children seems a bit strange to children of my generation, because we tended to think that all old men were dirty old men, and men were old after about thirty-five or forty; if a man was much older than your own father, he was an old man. So the fact that the headmaster abused some boys, including some of my own friends, didn’t strike us as very surprising, and we never thought of telling our parents about it. It’s a curiously different world from today. I think you will remember that a case of child abuse is mentioned, that is a cause of, laughter really, in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, at the beginning. Somebody looks up from a newspaper saying ‘Oh, another naughty Scout master.’ [pause] Curious. Anyway, we were not shocked by such things. Perhaps they didn’t do us very much harm. I don’t know.

What would you say to each other about it at the time? You, you wouldn’t think of telling parents about it, but what…

No we didn’t. No. We were not particularly shocked, and I don’t think the boy in question was particularly traumatised actually. Surprisingly. It might have been worse for a girl, I don’t know. Perhaps, she would have a deeper sense of wrongness. I don’t know. [pause] There was a similar scandal at Charterhouse in later years. And again, it tended to make the boys laugh. So perhaps boys do laugh these things off a bit more. But at the moment it’s the cause of enormous preoccupation in Britain, and newspapers and so on, and is seen as a very difficult problem. But, in a different cultural setting it was not seen that way. I think what happened was that in about 1980 one or two really bad cases of child sexual abuse came to light, and they changed public attitudes immediately. For example, a paediatrician relative told me of an appalling case of the sexual abuse of a baby that had come his way, and the case was so shocking that at first I couldn’t believe it, but he showed it was true. He assured me. And he had notified the police that this case had come to him, and they must do what they thought appropriate about it, and he would give medical evidence. [pause] But, when it turned out that sexual abuse of children could be that bad, then perhaps public attitudes changed dramatically. And that’s what happened. Before Don Cupitt Page 16 C1672/20 Track 1 then, when I began to look back historically, I thought, what about antiquity, what about ancient Greece and Rome? Such things were known about, and did happen then. Freud of course knew all about it. So there’s a literary history that can be studied. There was always a tendency to blame the child, which Freud himself to some extent shared, rather shockingly. [pause] So that’s a curious history. Just an episode from my own childhood at that particular preparatory school. [pause] It came back to me when the whole subject became much more salient in the 1980s. Mm.

[46:27] And it was one boy, or more than, more than one?

More than one I think, yes. Yes. But, one case that just happened. Mm. [pause] Makes you wonder how numerous cases actually there are. Now the police are talking of hundreds of thousands of cases coming their way. More than they should ever hope to investigate. But I have found that there are cases where, amongst, for example, certain people in Canada, aboriginal peoples of Canada, when a population become rather demoralised and the men a bit disoriented, child abuse can be rife in a whole population. There are several cases known. [pause] Perhaps in our own time there’s been a good deal of change in morality since the invention of effective contraception and so on, and, we are suffering a certain amount of sexual confusion and disorientation which has had a bad effect on men. Perhaps it’s to do with feminism too, leaving men a bit uncertain of who they are and how to behave. Mm.

And, just finally on this. How, I suppose a question a listener might ask, is, how, how could it happen? You know, in what kind of, in what kind of spaces could it happen? Because you would…

In the headmaster’s study. Yes. Yes. [pause] Yah. [pause] Perhaps people tend to gravitate towards occupations that may give them opportunity to pursue some kind of sexual minority interest. Yes. [pause] Our thinking about these things is in transition, and I’m pretty unsure. I have just occasionally been very shocked by particular cases that are really bad. In other cases I think perhaps we get too worked Don Cupitt Page 17 C1672/20 Track 1 up and too indignant, and we’d do better to give people the strength and the self- confidence to get over minor incidents, and not let them become traumatic. Mm.

Would the, would what happened at the prep school have been mild, or, or…?

Fairly mild, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, it wasn’t much more than pulling a boy’s trousers down and feeling. And such things were very common. I don’t think I found it traumatic at the time anyway. There was a case at a school… I’ve always known of a minority of such cases on the fringe of awareness and so on. But, as I say, it was the discovery of really serious psychologically crazy abuse of children in later times. I think that kind of thing would have been concealed completely earlier; its very rare. An historic example. What about Kierkegaard and his discovery of his father’s secret, a secret they shared? It strikes me on the evidence of the surviving manuscript left by Kierkegaard himself that his father had probably sexually abused him I’ve suggested this in print. Nobody has taken it up. But it might have happened, and it might have been something that was thought so bad that it was repressed and completely forgotten about and became a kind of hidden trauma, but it left Kierkegaard with the feeling that he was unfit for marriage, and he never did marry. He felt he had been damaged. There are a number of historical cases of that kind. I think Virginia Woolf was one, wasn’t she. Yes. Mm.

[51:00] Thank you. Can you take us, then, now to Charterhouse?

Yes. I got the sixth foundation scholarship of my year, 1947. The fees at Charterhouse were £264. Today they’re about £35,000. That means that, the value of a pound has fallen to much less than 100th now of what it was then. We still cling to the old denominations, and we still have copper coins. Remember how in the Bible a day labourer got a penny a day. You still have pennies in your pocket, but, they won’t buy anything. I don’t know why we make the coin, when a cup of coffee costs two or three pounds, and a newspaper, a couple of pounds. Yes. Anyway, my grandmother took me down, I remember, to Charterhouse for the exam, and the school seemed very big and very glamorous, on a Surrey hilltop. It had moved there from London, from the London Charterhouse, as part of the general Victorian exodus to the countryside, Don Cupitt Page 18 C1672/20 Track 1 which was supposed to be pure and healthy and good for boys’ morals. And, the school played soccer, because the ground was stony, and it was too rough for safe rugger. So it was the, one of the best known of the football schools. Whether I still spoke with some North County vowels at that time, I don’t know, but at any rate, I was suddenly introduced into an upper middle class world, very different from the one I had been in as a child. Mm. The school staff included many excellent people. They are remembered in a memoir by the novelist Simon Raven called Shadows on the Grass. That’s about the beaks I knew, included about twenty people whose names and personalities I still remember well, people who taught me. So, I liked the culture of the school, even if the tribalism of the stockbroker upper middle class was not my world at all.

[53:31] Yes, how did you, on arrival as it were, how did you see yourself as, in relation to the other pupils?

Just fitted in. I had got a tuck box, like everybody else, with my name painted on it. I wore the same uniform and looked like everybody else. And, rather, I settled in rather happily, made friends. On the whole, I was happy and it went well. [pause] Because I was tall, adequate at games, reasonably bright, at least on my day, I could get by. I was able to accept a certain amount of upward mobility socially, I could cope with. I became a school monitor, head of my house, and so on. Rather as a little later, as a national serviceman, I not merely got a commission, but was the best cadet of my year, and got a special book as a gift, best cadet. [laughs] So, I liked that kind of environment apparently, and was seen as a future leader, at that age. [laughs] I wouldn’t be now, but, then I was.

[54:51] What was your route from joining Charterhouse to coming to the point of choosing A Levels and choosing to read science?

Yes. Yes.

So what was your sort of intellectual journey through the school? Don Cupitt Page 19 C1672/20 Track 1

In… I think, I took eight O Levels and, they include five distinctions and three credits. And they tilted me towards the sciences. Although as earlier on, I had done Latin, I had gone a year of Greek, French of course, and… I don’t remember all the subjects in detail. But it looked as if the sciences was mine, and, if it was not the mathematical end, not physics, but biology. So, particularly biological sciences I was moving towards by the time I left school. [pause] The best masters in terms of their personal influence were probably Bob Arrowsmith, Ian Fleming-Williams, Oleg Polunin, Wilfred Noyce. Polunin was a very distinguished field botanist, and a nice man. I think his father had been a member of Diaghilev’s troupe, they were Russians. Wilfred Noyce was one of the Charterhouse mountaineers, like Mallory and Irvine, who had died on Everest in the 1920s. Wilfred Noyce too was a, a Himalayan mountaineer, and he taught me Italian, because I was keen on opera at that time. And he was a poet. There were a number of excellent and very gifted teachers. All I can say is that, mainly for botany and zoology I got an exhibition to Trinity Hall in my last, beginning of my last year, and knew that I would be coming up to Cambridge. But I, I did on the whole enjoy the time at Charterhouse. Though I have unhappy memories of some bullying, not of me personally but of bullying which, I failed to do something to stop it. I knew damn well it was wrong, and I didn’t. Small children can be horribly cruel to each other, and adults should be firmer about it. I remember, later, reading in Bertrand Russell that the one line from the Bible that he admired was one he had been taught, from the Book of Proverbs: ‘Though shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.’ Good line. Mm.

What did the bullying involve?

Oh, just flicking towels, and surrounding and taunting some boy who was perceived as, as a weakling, or, something. But, bullying is mysterious to me anyway. Why on earth do people do it? It’s horrific. But… It happens with girls too, they too can be savagely cruel. But I witnessed incidents. In retrospect I know damn well I should have intervened to stop it, and I might have been able to do so, if I had been fierce enough about it. So, I was, I just hate the memory. Yes.

Don Cupitt Page 20 C1672/20 Track 1

When you think of that memory though, can you identify why you didn’t intervene, as many people don’t?

No, I don’t know. I simply hadn’t developed strong enough ethical convictions at that age. I suspect, you tend to go along with the others. Kids do, they follow fashion, they’re always aware of fashion. Nowadays I’m totally unaware of fashion. I don’t know whether trousers are long or short or whatever. I know nothing about fashion and I’m glad of it. But in those days, you went with the mob. And it could lead to bullying. Yah.

[58:55] Can you tell me some more about the way science was taught, including the use of outside spaces to do science as well?

Yes. I’m trying to remember what sort of philosophy of science was taught. I remember being taught to rule a line down the middle of the page, write observations on the left-hand column and influences on the right-hand column. I don’t think they taught any very sophisticated account of scientific method. I only began to pick that up when I was being taught philosophy of science at Cambridge. At school, I think the teaching of science was rather naïve, but it did introduce me to Darwin, and I did actually get a copy of The Origin of Species. Percy Chapman was the zoology master, Polunin the botanist. Excellent men, both of them. But schools still held to the old Victorian idea of the unity of all knowledge under Christian Platonism, and until very recently a former pupil of mine was head of Charterhouse, a clergyman. A clergyman headmaster, in Christian civilisation, held all the subjects taught in the school in a sort of intellectual unity, and the Victorians still believed that that was possible. I think nowadays we would see severe intellectual tensions, differences of method, moral disagreements and so on, all over that syllabus. But in those days, you were supposed to believe that everything fitted together. And, science, we learnt a bit of the history of science. For example, Harvey on the circulation of the blood; Lavoisier, Priestley and so on on the discovery of oxygen. So we learnt something of how the great advances in scientific knowledge had taken place. But really, the rigorous use of critical thinking to question all your beliefs, and to keep your own system of knowledge in good repair, by constantly criticising and refining it, no, I don’t think Don Cupitt Page 21 C1672/20 Track 1 the education reached that level. People try to do it now. I think at a similar school today, there’d be an attempt to teach more rigorous intellectual methods, to prepare people for university.

Do you remember how evolutionary biology and Darwin was taught by…?

Yes. Percy Chapman.

Mm.

Not in detail, no. No. As, as is the case, once you understand Darwin, you know he’s right. Even if there are bits that he could be couldn’t account for, and couldn’t explain very well, in the theory, as he himself put it. Broadly speaking, if Darwinism is clearly presented, you can’t help but know that the relationships between animal species and so on all look like a kind of family tree. So that, the evolution in the sense of humankind from ape-like ancestors over the last five or ten million years came to me pretty easily. At the time when I was doing it, the great discoveries of the Leakeys were only just beginning, of course, and Darwin himself had only known two or three proto-humans, Neanderthal man and so on, who the Victorians already knew about. But the very detailed, increasingly detailed account of the gradual emergence of homo sapiens that we now give, was all in the future. Nevertheless, Julian Huxley’s revised and updated version of Darwinism was taught as orthodoxy at school, and was obviously right.

[1:02:58] Do you remember at school in any sort of space or lesson of any kind, discussion of relations between science and religion?

I don’t think so. One of the chaplains, Henry Bettenson, was an excellent patristic scholar, some of whose translations of the Fathers are still in print. I remember a little bit of his teaching. But he didn’t get much involved in significant religious controversy. The first fifteen years after the war was a time of neo-orthodoxy. Everybody wanted to rebuild Christian culture. Everyone hoped it would be possible for Christian democratic parties on the Continent to recover something of Europe Don Cupitt Page 22 C1672/20 Track 1 before it had been driven mad by nationalism and militarism. People wanted to rebuild Christian Europe. So, on the whole, people are surprisingly conformist. You have to remember that when I was at Cambridge in the early Fifties, half the undergraduates claimed to practise religion. Today that would seem amazing. The same was true of school, it was just assumed that people of your sort were Anglicans. [laughs] As in Jane Austen, everybody is an Anglican. There was no mention of dissent anywhere in Jane Austen’s novels. Well, public school was rather like that, in being a purely Anglican world in which the general coherence of culture and of religion and science was just assumed. God was, God’s creation was nomothetic, that’s to say, God had made the world, by, perhaps by setting up the initial situation, and letting the laws of nature work themselves out, and evolution run the way it had done. If we thought in those terms, we felt we should see how chance mutations might figure within a providential scheme, you see. It’s the elements of random in a scientific world which are, are not very reconcilable with theism, but, because God of course is almighty, and determines everything in strictly orthodox theism. But, at school in those days, an element of random, we accepted. God took the long view [laughs] as it were. Mm. [pause] No, I wasn’t aware of religion and science being particularly an issue; that was to come later. Mm. I obviously did not take biblical stories about creation literally, but we didn’t. Liberal Anglicans assumed a large element of myth in the Old Testament and that kind of thing, of course. I was never very keen on supernatural beliefs anyway. I’ve never believed in miracles, even at my most orthodox period, even in the early Fifties, I’d never believed in miracles. So I’ve been inclined to treat stories about supernatural causes of events and so on as mythical or allegorical. Mm.

[1:06:21] What do you remember of any science fieldwork, you know, beyond the school, in the school grounds, that sort of thing?

What I most remember was being taken by Percy Chapman for a fortnight to Skibbereen, County Cork. There, Louis Renouf, the professor of zoology at TCD, had established a little field study centre in a sea lough called Lough Hyne. There I saw, for the one time in my life, the full splendour of the life of the British shores as it had been before the invention of the seaside. It was extraordinarily beautiful. The Don Cupitt Page 23 C1672/20 Track 1 range of species of big sea molluscs that I saw, I’ve never seen since and no doubt nobody will see them. Not just things like the Emperor fan worms, the size of large pencils with a fan of delicate claws that look like a peacock’s eye feathers, but the sea hare, the sea lemon, those wonderful, highly coloured, large molluscs. The sea hare swam, a big plum-coloured slug with rippling waves running down its body of slender tissue. Yes. No, the beauty of the seashore life was greater, as great as a coral reef. But in England they’d strip that stuff away and shovel sand out to create seaside resorts. As Jane Austen described in her unfinished novel Sanditon, which is a satire on the invention of seaside resorts. But the English wreck the shoreline of their own country. But the beauty of that has remained with me ever since, of the, the greatest experience of the beauty of nature I’ve ever had, to see what there was before human beings came along and wrecked it. As it is, something over half of nature has already gone, both inland and on sea, by, by fishing, by tampering with shorelines, by pollution, and so on. And by over-hunting, over-grazing, desertification and so on. We’ve more than half ruined our environment already, and will no doubt finish off the rest in the next thirty or forty years. But I have seen it as it was, I have seen paradise.

[1:09:07] Can you say more, then, about the content of your religious faith from the age fifteen onwards?

Yes. It gradually faded; the visual mysticism I kept, visual, delight in visual beauty, both of nature and of art, I kept very strongly indeed. Rather than, actually, music, but I did, I was lucky in having a sense of sight that was educated. But, my religious belief I think faded in my late teens, until I came back to it at Cambridge. So, it gradually evaporated from me at school.

Why did it?

I don’t, I don’t know. Maybe I was absorbed with how rapidly I was changing, and absorbing new ideas and new material. And, religion somehow was less salient. There was not much religious enthusiasm at school, but there were a lot of very memorable events and occasions. Give an example. One well-known old member of the school was Ralph Vaughan Williams. He composed a new anthem for the school Don Cupitt Page 24 C1672/20 Track 1 at the headmaster’s request, and I remember seeing him come to attend the first performance. But he was old and mountainous and stone deaf. He was helped laboriously to a place next to the drums in the school orchestra, so that he could hear something, just. And, it was a touching sight to see this rather gifted man in the ruin of old age. So, vivid events like that have stayed in my memory. But my enthusiasm for school was a bit diminished by the War Memorial Chapel, and this tendency to encourage a blending of the military with Christianity, military values with Christian ones. There was a kind of, horizontal coffin-shaped, large objects suspended above the altar in school. You could read it as a repeat of the altar, or as a soldier’s coffin. And a huge cross. And you got the impression that the soldier who died in battle for England had somehow repeated and participated in the redeeming death of Christ. That began to offend me bitterly at school, and may have been one of the things that put me off. They had not been sufficiently careful in the War Memorial Chapel to avoid a kind of sanctified militarism. Mm.

[1:12:09] Thank you. Did you pray at this age, at the time of being confirmed for example?

I did then, yes, but I think I must have gradually given it up, but I don’t remember. I returned to rather intense prayer, and indeed to mysticism, at the age of twenty, at Cambridge. Mm.

But at this age, what did prayer entail, and what did you feel? People say that different things happen when they pray, including nothing. But what happened when…

Prayer was simply expressing a wish; I would not do anyway. I was never keen on intercessory prayer. I thought it was silly to believe in such things. You have to remember, my religion, even at my most devout was always a rather kind of Christian Platonism, and I took the world order for granted, and thought it was wrong to have one’s prayers dominated by eudaemonism. That’s to say, the belief that the universe revolves around me, and wants to give me special favours. That’s a, I always disliked that kind of thing. I had met it and rejected it as a small boy; my grandmother had prompted me there. So, I did not pray in the sense of asking for things. Even at an Don Cupitt Page 25 C1672/20 Track 1 early age I would have seen prayer as a way of expressing solidarity with someone, a kind of ritual quality, rather than any kind of causal efficacy. I wouldn’t have thought of prayer as being causally efficacious. There’s a very long history of England of attempts to test scientifically the efficacy of prayer. I’m sure you know about it. One very simple one is simply to calculate how many prayers are offered daily in the Church of England for the health of the sovereign, under The Book of Common Prayer. Why is it that sovereigns have a rather lower than usual life expectancy, when they’re prayed for in 15,000 parish churches, morning, at Matins and Evensong, daily? [laughs] But, but there have been famous attempts to test the efficacy of prayer, empirically, and they’re clearly silly. Mm. So prayer in the sense of meditation was more my line, or adoration in the sense of clearing one’s mind of everything else, let it be as empty as possible, but simply looking up, for example, into a blue sky, looking at the world. I did that. [pause] Prayer as a kind of expression of love for life and for the world. I use expressions like love of life and world love. And of course nowadays I quote Tolstoy. Life is God, a sentence which occurs in War and Peace.

[1:15:25] What do you remember of Richard Swinburne, who was also here?

Yes. I remember him as a small boy, small, dark. I would gossip with him. As I remember… I just think I remember the names of the other scholars. I think I was sixth and he was seventh. [laughs] I don’t remember any, I didn’t… He was in a different house, and I was never a close friend, but we would just talk occasionally. And, knowing that the other was also a scholar. Not more than that. Of course in his religious thought he eventually became quite different from me, and I’ve heard that he eventually became Green Orthodox, he became so conservative in his views, and he felt he had to join a basically fossil form of religion. I always took the view that fossil religion was not for me, that the liberal Anglicanism was the least intellectually oppressive and backward of the main forms of ecclesiastical Christianity, apart from liberal Anglicanism. The other sort of religion I approved of was the Society of Friends. But I would never have thought that it was a good thing to be a Roman Catholic or a, Eastern orthodox, because those kinds of religion had died intellectually centuries ago, as they themselves say. The councils of the Church, the developers of Don Cupitt Page 26 C1672/20 Track 1 doctrine, stopped in the year 787, and nothing that’s happened since can make any difference at all to your thinking. I don’t take that view.

[1:17:13] What were you doing at this age at this school when you weren’t working?

[pause] Cycling and exploring I quite often did within bounds. I suppose I always enjoyed touring. I do remember cycling, for example, to Compton, to see the famous G F Watts Museum there. Cycling towards Guildford. But within bounds. Cycling; just wandering on my own; perhaps butterfly chasing. I wonder if I was still doing any of that, I don’t remember. [pause] The school kept one pretty busy. We listened to the radio a little. There were no newspapers. To an extraordinary extent we lived without the media in those days, still. Nowadays, a child could hardly imagine growing up without the media. Television hadn’t been invented – hadn’t come back yet. We listened a little to the radio, but even then it was mainly sporting commentaries. Outside events in the outer world, the only two I particularly remember hearing comment on while I was at school were the assassination of Ghandi and the battle between Archbishop Makarios, the Cypriot ethnarch, and the British over the question of the enosis of Cyprus with Greece. There was much indignation about Makarios as a Christian prelate, so fiercely opposing the British of course. [pause] So outside events and the media reached me a little. Mostly I was absorbed in school life, and remember things like, Shakespeare productions for example, music at school, the school museum, with a taxidermist, there was even a school taxidermist in those days. A school library. The cultural resources of the school were not negligible. I now think that the old English culture was not that good, but it did exit, there was something there, and the school introduced you to it. No, I take a more pan- European or even global view of culture nowadays; I’m not all that impressed by traditional English culture. It’s patchy in quality.

[1:20:15] And, finally on Charterhouse, what do you remember of the teaching of philosophy and theology here?

Don Cupitt Page 27 C1672/20 Track 1

All I remember was the headmaster sessions, reading aloud Plato’s Republic, and discussing it, in a class with the dozen or so school monitors. I think the head usually took the, Socrates, and the various people with whom Socrates was in dialogue. But that made a big impression on me, because the Republic is a great work of systematic philosophy that everybody should read. It was the beginning of an introduction to philosophy. But, notice a change here, that whereas, when Ernest Rhys established Everyman’s Library in about 1904 or something, he did include the major works of Western philosophy in the library; today that would not be done. Philosophy no longer counts as part of literature. It’s not read. So that many people who edit and write for the literary pages of journals have never in fact read the greatest Western books. Intellectually, the best books since antiquity written in the West is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. But we don’t reckon it’s something an ordinary person should even try to read, or want to understand. And I think that’s one of the reasons why our culture’s not as good as it should be. Philosophy has disappeared from the syllabus. The English no longer read even Berkeley and Hume, and Locke. And, John Stuart Mill survives, some of his essays are still read. But on the whole, we tend to cut the serious books out of the English faculty’s purview. They’re not there. Which is a shame, to limit literature to fiction and drama and poetry, and cut out the heavy stuff. A mistake. Because many philosophers are also great writers. A partial exception to what I was saying is that Penguin Books have had considerable success in popularising Nietzsche, and, the Penguin Classics do include a few works of Descartes and Plato.

[End of Track 1] Don Cupitt Page 28 C1672/20 Track 2

[Track 2]

Could you tell the story, then, of the move from school to university? We don’t know, as listeners, whether you apply for all sorts of places, what you were thinking about doing, how you came to the decision to do what you ended up doing.

Yes. During my last years at school I was thinking of being a doctor, and worked for six weeks at Amersham General Hospital in a variety of jobs, having told the hospital, could they give me temporary employment in various departments, so I’d get some idea what life in the world of medicine was like. I did have a year – a week, a week in a general operating theatre, and saw a number of major operations, which was very interesting. So I had thoughts of being a doctor; thoughts of reading biology. Otherwise, it was the school that recommended Trinity Hall, and, I went up and I got an exhibition. A disappointing result, but good enough. Again, it earned what was in those days a fair percentage of the fees, which was easier for my parents to cope with. So I arrived in October ’52, to read Natural Sciences Part I at Trinity Hall. I remember it was just about the time of the Coronation, on television; I saw the famous broadcast that inaugurated the television age. My room in Trinity Hall was an interesting one. It was on the ground floor to the left of the main entrance, and out of the window, which jutted forward a bit, it was a bay, I could see King’s College Chapel to the right, just past the Old Schools. So it was very central Cambridge. I was in there for three years, sharing a room with McNeill Alexander, the celebrated zoologist, as an undergraduate. He was a good friend to have. A Northern Irishman. Liberal-minded, and, good scholar. Good chap. Still alive I think.

[02:10] What do you remember of the content of Part I, or, or at least the first year of it?

Yes. I remember something of the teachers. In zoology the professor was called Gray[ph]. But we had also Hugh B Cott, who wrote the big book on animal coloration. And I think Wigglesworth. Had he arrived then? The man who first really found out how insects fly. Anyway, there were good zoologists, and, I enjoyed the lectures and practicals. Even though, very quickly I was getting passionately interested in religion again too. I liked the breadth of the atmosphere at Cambridge. Don Cupitt Page 29 C1672/20 Track 2

Of course it was many times larger than public school, with interesting people in all directions, and it was easy to meet people and wander in very varied circles. So, it was a thrilling, culturally thrilling place to come and be a student. And I liked it. I was preoccupied with the rate at which I was changing, and my own developing thinking, and just growing up. I had managed to defer military service in order to get my degree first.

[03:28] Could you tell me about aspects of the, the practical science teaching that was so striking then as to be memorable now, if there are?

In the botany department, and, a bit, I remember Max Walters. You had to put in a little time helping at the Botanic Garden, as Darwin had done back in the early 1830s or when he was there. [pause] Yes, there were practicals. Scientists work harder than arts people, they’re more serious-minded. But I didn’t mind that. And, at the end of my second year I got a rotten result, no doubt because I was so absorbed in religion and other things, but I got a 2:2. And, George Kenner, my director of studies, suggested I might like to study the history and philosophy of science, then available as a half subject with organic chemistry. So I took it, and, was greatly influenced by it, because I learnt from it that scientific ideas are human products, they’re cultural, they have a history. They reflect the period when they produced; they have a limited life. You learn all sorts of things about science when you embed it historically. That was then just beginning, in those years in Cambridge. In the philosophy of science I had Russell Hanson, a young American, a former pupil of Wittgenstein. He familiarised us with some of Wittgenstein’s ideas within a couple of years or so of the great man’s death. So that was, that was exciting, I did read that. Then it began to turn me away from science towards wanting to study philosophy and, or theology. [05:26] In religion, what had happened was that, very early after my arrival in Cambridge I got somehow inveigled into going along to an evangelical Sunday evening sermon, and was converted to evangelical Christianity for a while. Almost immediately I began to reject its ways of speaking and its beliefs as being far more realistic than I could see was justified. People claimed something like personal acquaintance with Christ. That sort of stuff. And, this struck me as nonsense and a dishonest way of Don Cupitt Page 30 C1672/20 Track 2 talking. So I began to start to fight my way out of evangelicalism as soon as I went into it. But in a sense, every Christian intellectual for 150 years now has been trying to fight their way out of the old realistic dogmatism and find a different formulation acceptable both to themselves and to the Church. You could say that, amongst bishops and archbishops, they wouldn’t be where they are unless they were smart enough to know the score. They do know it. They keep a bit of a distinction between what they personally believe privately and the belief system which they don’t contravene in their public utterances. Rowan is an extreme example of that, so was the last Pope, Benedict. They know that the old natural theology, the old proofs of God, of the soul and its immortality, and of the last Judgement, and that the old belief in the authority of scripture, had been destroyed by Christian thinking. Nevertheless they continue to believe the faith of the Church. In their defence, I now say that Christianity anyway never, was never intellectually very strong. If you read works of apologetics produced between year 100 and the year 1800, they strike you as terrible today. Even the best, even a book like Augustine’s City of God, or a book like, John of Damascus’s De Fide Orthodoxa. These books by modern intellectual standards are terrible. And even Aquinas is full of, though he has bits of good philosophy, is full of observing coherences between his profound agnosticism about God and his profound confidence in the Church’s right to inflict the death penalty on heretics. So, oddly enough, the historic Christian faith was never as coherent as it pretended to be. In that respect Nietzsche makes one of his few bad mistakes. He says that Catholic Christianity is a coherent system of thought. I say, it isn’t and it never was. Intellectually it was surprisingly bad. It was only when critical thinking came along that people quickly began to realise what a lot of stuff had just never really noticed. For example, the standard doctrine of the divinity of Christ is based almost entirely on the Jesus of St John’s Gospel. But no, virtually no theologian between Clement of Alexandria and Schleiermacher in about the seventeenth century has ever noticed that the language and the thought of the Jesus of St John’s Gospel are totally different from the language of the thoughts of Jesus’s in Matthew, Mark and Luke. John’s Gospel cannot represent history, or the views of the historical Jesus. It’s a kind of, mystical composition of utterances of the originally exalted divine Christ, but it’s not the historical Jesus. So, once critical thinking starts going, it all falls apart. But, in a sense, we’ve all faced that problem now. We’re in the situation where, we’re completing the changeover from a religion-based civilisation to a science-based Don Cupitt Page 31 C1672/20 Track 2 civilisation. That’s nearly complete. But the old religion was never as good as it thought it was, and never as enduring as it thought it would be. So, I want to try to encourage people to say, it’s worth trying to find your way, fight your way out of dogmatic belief, and naïve certainties. Those certainties were never actually very certain. It wasn’t as good as you thought it was. So often in people’s minds there’s an idea that faith was more or less untroubled until the eighteenth century or some time. It wasn’t. It was not like that at all.

[10:29] When you say, when critical thinking came along, what are the timings of that?

Descartes. That is the first modern critical thinking. He’s fairly quickly followed by the heart-searchings of Pascal. But then, by the beginnings of deism, the first deist writing, Lord Herbert of Cherbury and so on, go back as far as Descartes’s own lifetime, a flood of deist writings, mainly from English gentlemen, appears around 1696 to 1730, Toland to Tindal, and those deist books raise many of the right questions. And of course, the British start to become generally pretty sceptical, educated ones, from about the time of Swift onwards. Swift is aware of it coming. He mentioned the fact several times. A simple example I give to quote people is that at the beginning of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, where Mr Rushmore [Rushworth] entertains a party of young people from Mansfield Park at his own house, Sotherton Court. And he explained to them why the house’s chapel is no longer in use for daily prayers, why in this modern age daily prayers have to be given up and can’t be maintained. It’s clear that Jane Austen, despite her evangelical sympathies, and her on the whole orthodox Christianity, is well aware that the time of religion is well under way, and there’s a very interesting discussion of it. Though, it’s still not made very clear as to why it is that Edmund and Fanny Price are so sure that religion continues to be a serious and important matter even after it’s been rejected by most people. That’s part of the puzzle of the book really, to work out what faith consists in for those who are still Anglicans, as Jane Austen’s characters are, in a scientific age. Well after Newton. Remember, Newton’s picture of a mechanistic universe isn’t really compatible with belief in a moral providence. Newton himself knew that his own thinking would bring about the death of God. Hence his silent face. Do you remember Wordsworth? Wordsworth, coming down Castle Hill into Cambridge, and Don Cupitt Page 32 C1672/20 Track 2 into St John’s College, moved into his room there, looks across, and sees Trinity College Chapel, and Newton with his prism and silent face, the sculpture of Newton in Trinity College Chapel. I think Wordsworth is there alluding to what a troubled soul Newton was. Like every other don at Oxford and Cambridge, he was in orders, but he must have known that his own thinking was going to mean the death of God. That’s a long time ago.

[13:39] Could you tell the story in detail of the sermon in your first year that resulted in this conversion? I mean what did it involve?

The preacher was the notorious Archbishop of Sydney, a terrible stronghold of the most extreme bowsers[?] in Australia. Terrible people. [laughs] But, it was just a conservative evangelical sermon. The story of this at Cambridge is that, back in the 1890s when undergraduates, and even dons, were increasingly rapidly losing religious belief, Moody and Sankey, the two celebrated American evangelists, came and preached a mission in Cambridge and made a lot of converts. That established a tradition by which around five per cent of Cambridge undergraduates, and perhaps the same at Oxford, perhaps the same at other universities too, are evangelicals to this day. They’re often called fundamentalists, after the title of a series of American tracts called the fundamentals. Tracts that define the red lines, the points of doctrine that evangelicals would not give up. One of them was the special creation of man. Another was the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Another… And the empty tomb And another was the infallibility of scripture as the Word of God. And so on. So this very conservative Protestant version of Christianity became established as a minority group amongst Cambridge undergraduates, and has now been for over 100 years. On the whole, it means you are not quite up to the place. Evangelicals are people who know they’re not quite good enough to be at Cambridge, and, the evangelical faith gives them a certainty that in really important matters they are right and the rest of us will burn. That cheers them up. It’s a compensatory form of religious belief. You hold that the infidels are going to suffer, your faith tells you that. Anyway, I was caught, I don’t know, I may have been for a bit a bit lonely or something, having just arrived at Cambridge and struggling to make sense of a very complicated new social world, I don’t know. It was very soon after my arrival. But I, this continued going to Don Cupitt Page 33 C1672/20 Track 2 evangelical events after a very few months, I was fighting my way out, first towards the Anglo-Catholicism of the clergy in my own college chapel, and secondly to my, to mysticism and my own version of liberalism. So, as an undergraduate, as well as doing my official subject, the Natural Sciences Tripos Part I, the history of philosophy of science, I was also already reading a lot of theology, and a lot of the popular religious writers of that period. And so I, I was growing and changing very rapidly, beginning what’s become a kind of lifelong quest to think myself through to a religious and philosophical outlook with which I could feel satisfied and be content. I now think one never quite comes to rest actually, there isn’t a destination. But there is a need for constant change. At least I’ve had the, the joy of having new ideas, and moving into unchartered territory. That has been very exciting. And of course encountering some of the great writers, like Eckhart in the West and Dōgen in the East, who, who have cheered me up. [17:41] During my undergraduate years I got to know the mystics, in those days through the influence of Evelyn Underhill and other people, and there was a good deal of interest in Christian mysticism, and, editions were printed, new editions, of many of the best- known writers. The Cloud of Unknowing, Pearl, Ruysbroeck, Eckhart, Walter Hilton. Yes. Good stuff, worth reading. Especially St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Spain. So I learnt something from them, and from the liberals that I could get hold of. So it was a time of very rapid reading, and socialising, and, living at the very high pace one does as an undergraduate at Cambridge. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[18:46] What do you remember of the relations between the chaplains and this, I think it was called the CICCU isn’t it, the…

Yes.

How did they view each other, or how did you get to understand how each of them viewed each other, and what they said?

[laughs] They tended to keep separate in my college. And I remember at Trinity College, when Billy Graham came and preached a mission in Cambridge, out of Don Cupitt Page 34 C1672/20 Track 2 courtesy he was invited to preach in Trinity College Chapel, and I remember hearing the people telling of the pained groans from elderly eccentric clergymen such as F A Simpson in the congregation [laughs], during Billy Graham’s sermon. It obviously caused acute pain to some of the older dons. We occasionally had undergraduates of, we had evangelical preachers. I remember in later years myself as Dean of the college inviting the leader of the Inter-Collegiate Christian Union to interrupt me during a sermon, and I’d call him down, and we’d hold the rest of the sermon as a debate between the two of us. I’d challenge him to do it. Of course nobody present had ever seen a sermon interrupted before, just as nobody had ever heard the banns forbidden before at a wedding. So that everybody in the chapel nearly had a heart attack. But it went very well as a sermon, there were big crowds, and… [laughs] So, we tried sometimes to get a dialogue going. But, the evangelicals taught a kind of popular revivalist version of Calvinism, strongly influenced by the Americans, rather different from the distinguished evangelicalism of the early nineteenth century of people like Wilberforce and Clerkson, which Jane Austen had so admired. Do you remember? In Mansfield Park, Fanny is inclined towards abolitionism, where it’s well known that Sir Thomas Bertram clearly makes his money out of slaves. And Fanny very courageously dares to use the word abolition at the dinner table, and there’s a dreadful silence, which is so bad that it’s reported in the novel only in retrospect. Well that early nineteenth century version of evangelicalism was morally progressive, and very courageous. But, this modern version of evangelicalism is repressive and anti-intellectual, rather horrid really, and it does harm. I think people should, if possible, be rescued from it, but it’s not easy to rescue them of course. Anyway, I tried to get out of it very quickly. And that made me begin my lifelong search for a satisfactory philosophical and religious outlook. [22:01] What I did know was, I wanted to be ordained of course. So after Natural Sciences Part I, in my third year, I switched to Theology.

In the short period that you were with the CICCU, what kinds of things did you not do because of that faith, what kinds of things did you not think or say, and that sort of thing? So how was your behaviour affected for that period by following that?

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Yes. An obvious one was that I carried no insurance and didn’t lock things up. I held a realistic belief in God, and held that if I was a believer, I should trust in God’s protection. So I was rather proud of having no possessions, and, and no concern for property, and no insurance, I felt you shouldn’t. Nowadays, even evangelicals I believe carry insurance, but, on their own premises, you shouldn’t. You remember, the whole insurance industry is post-Christian. It develops, it starts with the development of the maths of probability in the seventeenth century, which made possible the compilation of actuarial tables, and therefore life insurance. So it’s only with the decline of religion that insurance takes over as a substitute for God. Insurance covers you when God doesn’t cover you in the old way any more. So, I was so strongly a realistic theist that I really did take that view. My rooms were not locked. I wouldn’t lock a bike either. I just left the bike unlocked, and if it got stolen, I bought another one. But I, I would not show mistrust to my fellow human being. [laughs] So, otherwise, well of course I, I wouldn’t, I would not swear and that kind of thing; I would have followed convention, or what passed for conventional Christian morality, and prayed and read the Bible and so on. But I was also importing my own critical anti-supernaturalism, and anti-eudaemonism. By the way, eudaemonism means the belief that some kind of guardian angel watches over you and protects you from evil, and that the whole supernatural world is arranged in a kind of great theatre above your head looking down at you, watching your behaviour, watching over you with great interest, whatever you do. Well, I’ve never thought that anyway. So I didn’t believe in miracles. I don’t really believe, never did believe, in intercessory prayer. But I did follow the conventions of evangelical religious belief, and, I suppose all my life have stuck to conventional Christian sexual morality oddly enough [pause] Half of me still has roots to the old pre-Sixties world. I suppose the great changeover in religious belief, the death of the old Christian Britain, happened in the early Sixties. I take the view of modern church historians on that. A bit of me still does belong to that old world. Most of me has changed over to the new.

[25:28] What was the role of leaders in that brief conversion? I mean do you remember anything about the appearance, sound, character of this person who gave the first sermon that was affecting you, and perhaps other…?

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Yes. Oh, Archbishop Gough. No, I don’t, I don’t remember I’m afraid. The chap who was best known was John Stott, vicar of All Souls, Langham Place, just by the entrance to the BBC Broadcasting House. The other great London church is that of the, Brompton, you know, Holy Trinity Brompton. The Alpha course and things like that. So when John Stott finally retired, Holy Trinity Brompton took over as the main centre of London conservative evangelicalism. In more recent years I did once go down to our Cambridge evangelical bookshop toward the station, purchased half a dozen works of their literature, with a view to writing something about it. I tried to read it, but it was so bewilderingly bad, I couldn’t bear to read it, and, didn’t think it worth writing about it. It was astonishingly poor. And no knowledge at all of modern critical thinking, and of modern philosophy. So I now think that kind of religion we should just disregard I’m afraid, and take no, pay it no more attention than we would to any other American cult.

[27:06] What do you remember, at any stage, in any place, of discussion of relations between science and religion at Cambridge? This could be, lecturers mentioning things, it could be undergraduates talking among themselves.

Yes. Yes. [pause] I don’t think it was a very intensely disputed thing at that time. I’m just trying to remember. Richard Braithwaite delivered a celebrated lecture in Cambridge called ‘An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief’, 1955, and I remember going to a meeting in Trinity Hall at which he spoke, presented his views. [pause] I don’t remember a great deal of very animated controversy actually. [pause] I’m trying to, I’m trying to recall incidents. I always took the view that, any argument of that kind, you could take it that the scientists are probably right, as they had been in the most famous case, that of Galileo. At the time of Galileo, the leadership in cosmology passed definitively from the Church to the scientific community. The people who mattered in Europe knew at the time that Galileo was right, certainly right and quite obviously right. The same is true of Darwin of course, quietly. Somebody like Nietzsche would meet Darwin as a schoolboy and admit straight away, Darwin’s right, those ideas are dangerous. Marx held the same view. Nietzsche and Marx in their different ways both thought, worried about what use politicians might make of this theory, but they knew it was obviously right. So in general, in science and Don Cupitt Page 37 C1672/20 Track 2 religion debates, I went along with the scientists and always have done. Though I have known one or two fundamentalist geologists who teach only descriptive geology and don’t accept the theories about the age of the Earth. It’s astonishing, but, a friend of mine who lived down our road in Cambridge held a lectureship in geology at Reading University, at which he continued to teach a sort of fundamentalist version of geology. Purely descriptive; the layers of rock were there all right, God must have made them that way. But he denied the geologists’ picture of the history of the Earth. He thought, in the biblical manner, that the universe had been constructed as a theatre for human life, and the universe had been constructed in such a way the Bible would be a good guide to the architecture of that theatre with everything happening within it. But, respectable academic scientists in those days didn’t trouble themselves to refute such views. [pause] So I don’t remember science and religion being a very intense subject of debate. In later years there were people like Ian Barbour and Arthur Peacocke who laboured over this topic. I think, most of us assumed that the main alternatives were either, evangelical Christianity was obviously wrong; liberal Christianity, which was trying to find a happy medium, or something; and established natural science, which was clearly right. But, I always thought, even at eighteen or twenty, that scientific method was obviously, quite obviously, by far the most powerful method of arriving at truth that human beings have ever had, ever devised, and you should on the whole go along with scientific theories. Even in my rather sceptical theory of knowledge, scientific theory gives you a picture to be going on with at present, for now, and it gives the best such picture. It’s all we’ve got. So, for me, science versus religion was never a very lively issue. I took it for granted that, sacraments and other such rituals were not causally efficacious. They were not feats of religious wizardry of some kind. The ministry of healing to the sick, for example, was not a supplement to orthodox medicine. They were simply an expression of love and care. So I suppose I was inclined to an expressivist view of religious action, even in my twenties. Looking back, that’s what I now suspect. If you visit the sick, or pray over them and so on, you’re expressing love and care; you don’t suppose you’re assisting the doctors, or that what you are doing produces measurable clinical results, benefits. Mm.

[32:48] Don Cupitt Page 38 C1672/20 Track 2

Was it during your time at Cambridge that you went on the, is it a sort of mission, to a hop field?

Yes. Yes.

Could you tell me a detailed story of that? You just mentioned it I think.

I do remember actually, yes. And amazingly, Owen Chadwick came with us, I remember him. We went to the hop fields in Kent, near Goudhurst, a little party of Cambridge undergraduates. In those days there was a Cambridge University house in the East End of London, and many Cambridge people had links with it, and there was a sort of class mission of the upper middle classes to the working class slum-dwellers. Curious class mission. And there was the Charterhouse in Southwark. [laughs] So there was Cambridge House too. And, missions were organised to live and work amongst the hop pickers and talk with them. So we slept in the kind of stables on piles of hay, and ate very simple, communal meals, picked hops and talked with the East Enders all day. Funny that we did that, but there, we did, there it was. There is a bit of an element of class condescension in it now, I’m not sure that I approve of that kind of thing. I think we lack a bit, a decent understanding of what to do about class in modern Britain, a decent theoretical understanding of it, and of what should be done about it. The Labour Party notoriously is in difficulties over this, because there are battles between people who can claim working-class credentials and people who are obviously very middle class for control of the Labour Party. But yes, I did go. And quite enjoyed it. In retrospect I wonder what we were trying to achieve. Maybe it was a feeling of a kind of fellowship and a shared vocabulary between social classes, such as you could get in wartime, but in peace time the classes tend to live in quite separate social worlds and don’t understand each other’s ways of thinking at all. So I’m not quite sure how we were supposed to convert anybody, or that we ever did. [laughs]

What was the aim, to…?

Well that’s just what I wonder. Yes. Yes.

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But it had, it was a religious mission, like…?

Oh yes, oh yes it was meant to be a religious mission. Yes. Yes.

And therefore, what did you talk to them about, do you remember, while…?

Their lives really, yes. Yes, their lies. Trying to understand their angle on the world, I suppose. It’s a long time ago, and I don’t remember it very well. And things have changed since then. As I say, it strikes me in retrospect as rather comical. And even the great Owen Chadwick, a considerable celebrity in his day, went along with us. Yes. [laughs] Mm.

[35:52] Why did you stop doing science?

I wanted to be ordained. For that I had to do theology. [pause] For a person who asks questions of my kind, there’s always a problem, what you do for a living. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, if you were intellectual and you wanted to think and write, or you were a poet, you looked to become a librarian, or a tutor in a great household. This was, you needed the patronage of the aristocracy. But during the nineteenth century, creative artists and thinkers looked for alternative ways of making a career just as writers were able to make a living by writing. For a person like me, who was very strongly Christian at that time, communicated seven days a week, normally, went to Evensong five or six days a week, for a person like me, ordination, and, being a Christian priest, seemed the obvious ways of going forward. And I thought the Church of England was a sufficiently broad church for somebody of my liberal views to be content within it. [pause] So, I can only say, I believed in a kind of, very liberal, broad church latitudinarian Anglicanism that left persons like me with considerable room for personal development and growth. So I rather liked the idea of being a priest, and, went to the selection conference and passed and was admitted, and so on. And I began to read Theology at Trinity Hall where Owen Chadwick was Dean. He was my director of studies. He taught me nineteenth-century church history. For Old Testament I went to Schofield I think, a lecturer of that period; for the New Testament to Tony Pearce[ph], a very distinguished chaplain of Magdalene Don Cupitt Page 40 C1672/20 Track 2

College; and for philosophy of religion, to George Woods, Downing College Dean. At that time, in the 1950s, the classic pattern in Cambridge was that you could be both a theologian and an active priest in the Church of England, so that the common pattern was that you could be a college dean running the college chapel and a lecturer in theology. You could hold both posts. Nobody holds both posts today. Today… At that time, most of the posts were occupied by that kind of person, a liberal Anglican theologian, who was both a functioning priest and an academic intellectual. You had to be both. It was thought to be a rather good thing. But as I say, it’s difficult now.

[38:51] Did you over these three years at university do things that weren’t sort of academic work or private sort of reading? In other words, did you have the kind of hobbies and crazes that you talk about having in your childhood?

I always had a rush of different interests, yes, and, just read very widely. I was… Yes, I’ve often said that, I read about a novel a day and had many thousands of books until quite recently, when I’ve started to try to give away all those hundreds of feet of shelving of old Penguin books and second-hand books and so on. I’ve been giving away a lot. But I did read a lot, and I spent time with a lot of friends. It was an age of easy friendships. In my second year at Trinity Hall I knew everybody in the college to talk to. So, you had wide friendships and met a lot of people. [pause] I, I… I enjoyed life rather intensely at that period. Though I had no single strong friendship with a woman; I wasn’t yet ready for marriage. George Woods, my philosophy of religion tutor, took me aside once and said, ‘Don’t let them keep you so busy that you never get round to marrying.’ I wish I had done so. And I left it too late. So I did eventually marry but not till twenty-nine. Until then I was in such a rush, and preoccupied with my own rapid change in growing knowledge and so on. Mm.

[40:42] Any political activity or interest at Cambridge?

Yes. I called myself a sort of T S Eliot Conservative, a rather Christian democrat type of Conservative, in the early Fifties. But by the end of the Sixties I was getting Don Cupitt Page 41 C1672/20 Track 2 around to being a welfare state and then a Harold Wilson Labour type of voter. You remember, at the time, the Labour administration that came in after the war was utterly detested and hated by the right-wing press. In retrospect it’s absolutely marvellous they were able to achieve so much in a country that was bankrupt, apparently without any money. They managed to nationalise the railways and the mines and so on. And Aneurin Bevan gave the best of his health and strength to getting the National Health Service going, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the hospitals and from the medical profession and from the Tory press. So, I came gradually more and more to admire what the Labour Party had achieved in England, and by the beginning of the Sixties was calling myself a Christian socialist. I had moved away from my rather neoconservative position of the earlier Fifties. I was simply moving with the times then I think. Once the NHS had become established, within two or three years the improvement in working-class health, particularly the health of women, was extraordinary, was wonderful. That persuaded me that ethical action, collective action in this world, can significantly better the human condition. The human condition is not more or less the same from the fall of man till the return of Christ; on the contrary, it can be bettered a bit by human beings. Not all that much maybe but you can… But, human historical action in this world can achieve good things. Not only negatively, as in battling against fascism, but also positively. The idea that your station in life was given to you by God and you are stuck with it, was obviously wrong. So we were all changing. By the Sixties we were already, already ready to leave the old culture behind, and try to create a new outlook. And you could say that desire for a renewal of culture was best expressed by the wonderful music of the Beatles at their peak. That lovely freshness and charm that they had. Mm.

[43:47] What, then, happens after your degree?

I had to go in the Army. I got my degree in, roughly June the 10th or something, 1955, and within a couple of weeks was told I must report to Catterick camp in North Yorkshire, just beyond Richmond, there to receive basic training as a member of the Royal Signals Regiment. So, full of trepidation I went up there, by train, with a suitcase full of stuff. And we did army basic training. But as I’ve often reported, having lived in fairly Spartan and disciplinary conditions at an English public school, Don Cupitt Page 42 C1672/20 Track 2

I didn’t find the discipline of the Army particularly difficult. I did meet there a friend called Roger Day, a person, superficially at least, like myself. He was bolder than I was. He brought up an Austin 7, and parked it just by the side of the road, half a mile from Catterick camp. Whenever we got a few hours’ leave and could sneak out together, we got out to his wagon and had ourselves a little bit of freedom, which we spent in, wandering around the ruin Cistercian abbeys of Yorkshire. Fountains, places like that, was good enough. But, the first weeks of basic training were pretty grim when I was sort of waking up in the mornings and shaving in cold water, and thinking, now I’ve got to waste my time for two years. And that was pretty hard. But we were selected for officer cadet training, and, Roger and I were sent down to Aldershot, to Mons officer cadet training school, where you were for a few months an officer in training, yes. And, again, I quite enjoyed it. But, I’m not really at all military, and, and I was rather critical of military values. It was a pity that young people in the mid-Fifties were still being pulled up for compulsory military service, covering the period of decolonisation when Britain was gradually withdrawing from all sorts of places, and trying to fight a few sort of anti-colonial and similar wars, in Kenya, in Malaya, in Cyprus, and in other places. I was, found myself marginally on the edge of the Suez adventure, in 1956. [46:54] Anyway, I was commissioned, posted back to Edinburgh. Had a first health problem there I remember, glandular fever or something, he was sick for a little while, had been in hospital. But anyway, we served a few months in Edinburgh, and then were posted out to Cyprus, and it was Suez. Mm. [pause] The Army was, tolerable, I put up with it. I was bored and fretful. I so much enjoyed the intellectual excitement of Cambridge, but in the Army of course, you are not paid to think, as the sergeant- majors would say. You’re not paid to think. You are only paid to obey. [pause] But, I remember sailing alongside HMS… sailing on HMS Ark Royal, a huge old-fashioned aircraft carrier, with 2,000 soldiers aboard, sailing hard for Cyprus, to back up the Suez adventure, where we relieved 3 Commando who went into Suez. [pause] A small thing on the way. A silly soldier fell off the side of the Ark Royal, and an officer saw him go. And reported it immediately to the captain. We were officially on active service. The captain had been given a deadline to get that aircraft carrier, that aircraft carrier into the harbour in Cyprus by a certain deadline. The question was, should he let that floating sailor go, and just steam on, or should he swing round Don Cupitt Page 43 C1672/20 Track 2 and rescue the young lad? And the captain took an instant decision to do the latter. He saved the life. But to do it of course, the great ship, steaming at full speed, had to do about a six- or seven-mile circle, a huge circle, because of the long lead time, and it had to be steered very accurately so it came past just the right place where the sailor, the soldier, was floating in the sea, swimming and calling for help. Within a few hours the captain had successful accomplished manoeuvre, recued the soldier, who was promptly put in irons as he thoroughly deserved. [laughs] That was rather touching. There’s a touch of humanism in the British Army. The captain took a risk and was vindicated. A life was saved. And, I was persuaded, which I thought for long afterwards, that the British Army was reasonably humane as an institution. And, there is a touch, a tradition of humanitarianism in English culture, which is its best feature, the best thing we’ve got. So, that also led, of course, that when a great enterprise is afoot and all your resources are committed to one direction, the lead time for any deflection off course is considerable; it takes a long time to change course or to recap or whatever. And that returned to me in connection with thinking about climate change, and just how many decades it’ll take to change the direction of our present culture, so we really do give up fossil fuel, and about half our present way of life. Of course we are perhaps rather unlikely to be able to do it. Anyway, I, I like that memory in a way, and that, the system, being merciful enough to rescue that chap, when it would have been entirely within the captain’s rights to have sailed straight on, and left him to drown.

[50:52] To what extent was there opportunity for religious worship in these, during these two years, or if not thought, religious…?

Well there was always a, there was always a military chaplain, and I used to help out, and a few people used to come to church as it were in the, in the Army. So there was always a church tent, and somebody would play a harmonium and so we’d sing hymns and so on. [laughs] A bit of religion. And I was observant, yes. I do remember in basic training, I had to decide whether I prayed before getting into bed in the barracks, and I did it, so I was pretty, very keen at that age. And, a roomful of young lads shushed each other [laughs] while I was on my knees. And, I mean in retrospect I’m struck by my own determination to witness and the strength of my own Don Cupitt Page 44 C1672/20 Track 2 belief at that time. [pause] So I, I was still, I still held a modified, realistic faith in God and prayer, and the importance of the self’s relation to God, and the need to witness to it. I still have in ’55/6, yes.

No other trainees also praying?

No. No.

The fact that they shushed suggests almost a kind of…

Respect. Yes. Yes. I was seen as a leader when young. I was very energetic, very tall, and able to move reasonably well between different social classes. So I suppose I was seen as a leader. I hadn’t yet become a villain, I was a rising person until I was thirty-five or something, thirty-three, thirty… Yes. Up to thirty-three I was going places. [laughs] Yes. [pause] Yes, it’s true, I think amongst ordinary working people, a certain superstitious awe of religion and church buildings and so on still persisted. I remember in Salford, when I was a young curate in the early Sixties, meeting humble working-class folk who were frightened to enter a church, because they saw it as a place where there were spirits. But the middle class was very strange. They were frightened of the graveyard too, and, making us wonder whether it was a good idea that the dead are so conspicuous in Christian places of worship. You go through a graveyard full of dead people to enter a church. And when you get into the church, there’s all sorts of reminders of the dead in the monuments all the way round the walls. It’s totally different from Muslim worship, which is entirely concerned with the living. So why is so much emphasis laid on the dead, and why does it give rise to a certain fear of church buildings amongst the common people? I don’t see a satisfactory answer to that. Except that in England the parish churches have always tended to be seen as mausoleums which the gentry use as their own family chapels as it were [laughs], monuments to themselves in the parish church. [laughs] [54:36] So some residual religious belief still existed amongst ordinary people in the Fifties, but now I think it’s gone. Yes. Even, maybe early Sixties, yes. I think it’s gone now. Our whole culture has been rather de-traditionalised and secularised, rather quickly and rather severely. It’s a long time now since I heard about fear of ghosts. I don’t Don Cupitt Page 45 C1672/20 Track 2 know anybody. I’ve often during my life sat through the night in haunted rooms to try to reassure people who are frightened of ghosts and so on. I’ve said, ‘Well if you are so terrified, I’ll sit through the night in the room and read a book.’ I’ve done that more than once. By people who are in danger of being unable to live in their own houses because of their conviction they were haunted. But now I hear much less of that. I don’t think… Fear of the spirits of the dead is easy to find in today’s Britain.

When was, can you remember the first of those occasions, when you sat in someone’s room to reassure them?

One was my own mother, late in life became convinced that the room she was in was haunted, that the house was haunted, the particular house we had. I said, ‘We’ll sit through the night.’ And I did. Another occasion was when I was a curate aged about twenty-seven, in Salford. There was an old lady who was in danger of being taken off to a mental hospital because of her complaints to the doctor of the knocking noises that she heard in her bedroom wall late at night. She said she was desperate and the family were desperate. Was she crazy, what was going on? So I and a friend sat through the night in her bedroom while she slept the night. I got a Scout master, the parish Scout master, to join me. We sat through the night. Then only a day or two later the police arrested the chap who was living the other side of her bedroom wall, it was a council house, who had been receiving crates of whisky and stacking them against the wall, during the night. He was a receiver of stolen goods. Just stacking boxes. And that was the sinister knocking she heard that had terrified her through the night. [laughs] So, so there’s no ghosts in my story, but the poor old thing didn’t get carted off to the loony bin [laughs] for having gone mad. She perfectly sanely heard weird knocking noises. [pause] No, I think supernatural belief has stopped, and I rather presume now that belief in life after death has virtually stopped in England too. It was very strong once. I was shocked when people first said to me that they were frightened to enter our church. But, you wouldn’t hear that now. [pause] To give an example of how much things have changed from not very long ago at Emmanuel College. At a wedding reception. There was a big party in the cloisters, outside the chapel. People were drinking champagne and smoking cigarettes. And I noticed they had taken their champagne and cigarettes into the chapel itself. And I was aghast that even the middle classes are so secularised they could smoke and booze in a church, in Don Cupitt Page 46 C1672/20 Track 2 full use, that they themselves have used only an hour before. Evidently people had quite lost the old sense of the holy. It’s gone. Now I, I find it hard to persuade other chaps of my own age that this has happened, but I think a lot of the presuppositions of traditional religious belief, that everybody deep down has a sense of the holy, have a sense of the supernatural, basically a sense of God, that’s gone. Now, rather a major event. And the Church hates to confront it, but it’s happened. I think. Mm.

[59:12] Did you… This will be the last question today. Did you, having moved over to studying theology and then going on to National Service, and then, the next stage, the next time will be you being ordained and… Did you throughout that period in any way keep up with the study of science through, for example, popular science writing, magazines, that sort of thing?

Yes. I’ve always read journals like New Scientist, Scientific American, and a few scientific books, and, I still belong to Butterfly Conservation. I still visit bird reserves. Only a week or so was at the great bird reserves along the Norfolk coast. So, all my life I have enjoyed and been interested in science and the scientific world picture. But remember, I don’t take it as literally or dogmatically as most scientists do. It’s all part of our human construction, my language, of the world about us. You will remember that in Genesis Chapter 1, God, confronted by chaos, uses language to draw great lines across the chaos, and carve it up into the human world. I take that as a parable of what we are to do, and what all of us have actually done. When we came into the world as babies we saw only a confusing buzz of noisy sense experience. Very gradually over tens of hundreds of thousands of years we have evolved a language in which we talk to each other, and carve up the chaos that we are presented with into a world. The only truth we can claim for our world picture is that it’s, it’s pragmatic. It works, it’ll do for now. It helps us to find our way around, but it’s only human. So I am, as I call it, an anthropomonist. [laughs] I introduced that word in the early, in the mid-Eighties. Anthromomonism. But, I still take it that science gives us by far the richest and most powerful picture of the world than we have ever developed, and one should be loyal to it. And I still keep in touch with science, even today, and there’s a lot of scientific friends of course in the college. I do remember, for example, in the Seventies being instructed by a young physics fellow in the Don Cupitt Page 47 C1672/20 Track 2 science of global warming, and reminded that although the nineteenth century didn’t know how to insulate a steam engine, or a house, the nineteenth century did discover that gases, many gases, are extraordinarily good insulators from heat. So that the scientific basis of global warming, the greenhouse effect, was known to the Victorians. They had got the knowledge already. Putting it together, and realising, that it really is the case that the whole globe is gradually heating up as a result of our activities, that began to be realised quite soon after the war, the late Sixties; it was explained to me in the Seventies. Well that’s the kind of thing I’ve always wanted to keep up with and to know about. So, I, I like natural science. But because it changes so rapidly, and scientific theories are human constructs, I don’t take such a dogmatic view of natural science as many scientists do. I think the best scientists are people like Feynman, people like that, of great mental agility, and lightness. Feynman, the way Feynman wrote about physics strikes me as being about right.

[end of session]

[End of Track 2] Don Cupitt Page 48 C1672/20 Track 3

[Track 3]

Can I ask some questions on last time? Or, picking up on things that you said last time. And then we’ll continue from where we got to chronologically.

OK.

Which was about where you go to Westcott House, that’s about when, that’s about where we got to.

Yes

But last time you mentioned that you worked in the Botanical Garden with Max Walters, during your…

I can’t say that.

Ah.

Only that I attended his lectures.

Ah.

People reading botany were required or encouraged to put in an afternoon each week doing some sort of general work in the Botanic Garden. And I suppose if you had an aptitude for natural history or something, as Darwin had, you might get to know the professor of botany as Darwin did. But I wasn’t at that time quite so enthusiastic for science as I had been, because I was already turning towards religion and to philosophy.

So, because I was, I was wondering whether his Christianity was something that was known and talked about among the students reading science then.

Don Cupitt Page 49 C1672/20 Track 3

No, I don’t think so. No. No. One or two biologists were Quakers I remember. But that’s, that’s all I do remember. But then, Cambridge of that time still had a certain amount of Anglicanism in it. The college chapels were pretty full. I remember a poll finding that more than fifty per cent of all undergraduates practised religion, or claimed to do so. And that’s far higher than it would be today. Today, the number of people at the Sunday early morning service, undergraduate members of the college, might be only half a dozen, but in those days it was sixty. So, the very rapid decline of Christianity since the Second World War could be very well illustrated from studying the service registers of the Cambridge colleges

[02:05] Thank you. And why did you describe yourself as fighting your way out of evangelicalism? In what ways was it not straightforward to leave, if you like?

Religious doctrine is impressed upon one’s mind with great violence, and is very difficult to give up without a breakdown. There are several famous historical arguments – examples, of thinkers who could only break with orthodox Christianity by having a breakdown. It is very hard indeed, fighting your way out of religion, and the person with doubts with a capital D is a stock character in the Victorian age. And it’s still a problem to change one’s most basic beliefs. That’s why, in my opinion, although most theologians today are sceptical about the existence of any supernatural world, they don’t come out. It’s too painful to do so. So you get a kind of agnostic theology, or as it has been called, a flight into history. You report what Christianity was in the past, and you bracket out the question of whether it can be made to mean anything effective today. So, I was, on one hand I wanted to fight my way through the problems, and arrive at a satisfactory philosophy of life. Wittgenstein says somewhere that many of the great philosophical systems are attempts to find a religious vision of the human condition with which one can be satisfied. And, Spinoza is an excellent example of a philosophy of that kind. Perhaps I too was all along in quest of a satisfactory and fully honest philosophy of life. In the end I ended up thinking that somebody like Samuel Beckett was a kind of person of superlative ability and honesty, whom I would want to satisfy, and who I perhaps was myself.

[04:24] Don Cupitt Page 50 C1672/20 Track 3

So does that imply that when you were working your way out of that evangelicalism, that there were real feelings of sort of anxiety and angst?

Yes. Yes, and one punishes oneself. I can thinking of several examples, including my own, where a theologian becoming more sceptical loses his voice. Freud says somewhere that the fracture ward in a hospital is full of people who are punishing themselves for something. And, there’s an element of that in dysphonia, or loss of voice, on the part of theologians. I believe the distinguished Jesuit Carl Rahner, the best Roman Catholic theologian of his generation, suffered from loss of voice in his last years, and ceased to speak in public. So it’s very tough being what they call a radial theologian, and the press thinks you’re merely hunting publicity. On the contrary, you are fighting a hard battle against yourself. There are many examples of martyred heretics welcoming the flames, as, was it Cranmer, was reputed to have put his hand into the fire first, because that had signed some document that he now repented.

Did you experience loss of voice at this time, at Cambridge, coming out or are you talking-

No. Loss of voice, not till Michaelmas Term 1990. No. No, this early on, I was working my way from evangelical Christianity of 1952 to the liberal Anglican Platonism closer to the thought of Dean Inge of a couple of years later. And then perhaps a rather T S Eliot or W H Auden kind of position later. Eliot and Auden passed for orthodox, and if you look up the references to God and metaphysics in the Four Quartets, or if you look closely at Auden, you will see that their views are much closer to my own views a generation later. They were non-realists about God. And, T S Eliot I think nowhere espouses the orthodox doctrine of God, and, Auden loved Christian liturgy and the aesthetics of Christianity and the ethics, but was actually agnostic about supernatural doctrine. That’s the sort of way one goes. I notice too that the present Pope, a very able and distinguished Pope, Francis, pointedly and carefully refrained from endorsing a realist interpretation of supernatural doctrine. And he gets away with it, the funny thing is. And people love his ethical gestures. But they don’t notice what a lot he’s putting on the backburner. He’s quietly shelving. Doctrines like the doctrines of Purgatory, and the Treasury of Merit and so Don Cupitt Page 51 C1672/20 Track 3 on, were never formally renounced by the Church, but the Roman Church is clever at putting on the back burner, quietly taking out of use, doctrines that are no longer intellectually defensible. I don’t think you would get the present Pope showing any enthusiasm for Marian doctrine, which of course did become wildly excessive towards the end.

[08:17] Thank you. And the last question on last time. Can you explain how these two things go together? You say several times that science is obviously right in various ways, but also that it’s in a way merely sort of historical and human created and, and that sort of thing, just one particular way of representing the world. So how do those two things fit together, its superiority and its kind of ordinariness if you like?

Yes. The crucial thing about science is that it has by far the best worked out intellectual method of any system of knowledge, and it is continuously capable of self-correction. Whereas, in religious doctrine the tendency has always been to say that the whole lot, the whole system, is immutable. You cannot criticise it piece by piece. It resists criticism. You are supposed to swallow it whole. And, to that I have recently implied that even in the Middle Ages and for the first, 1500 years, Christianity never had anything like a decent rational apologetic. It grew in a rather loose-knit way as a cultural tradition, with a few good bits of philosophy and a collection of texts. But there’s no good quality Christian apologetics until they start producing them in response to the work of Descartes and Galileo. Can theology compete in the new world of the natural sciences? The answer was, it can’t actually. [laughs] Because, it’s impossible to be as consistently critical, self-critical in religion, as you always are in science. Interestingly, Nietzsche says Christian ethics destroyed Christian doctrine. That’s to say, Christian ethics requires stringent self-examination, and when it’s applied to one’s ow beliefs, then that becomes thoroughgoing critical thinking. Which of course undermines orthodox doctrine very quickly indeed. We look, for example, at the gospels and the New Testament generally, and ask whether it actually endorses the orthodox doctrine of the divinity of Christ. And the answer is, it doesn’t. And Newton and Locke were among the first notable English teachers who noticed that, they were aware of it. And similarly, because the New Testament doesn’t really endorse the dogma of the Trinity, that too has never really caught on for Don Cupitt Page 52 C1672/20 Track 3 ordinary believers, with the notion of the distinct personality of the Holy Spirit. Well, the third person of God in the Trinity has never quite caught on with believers. So, on the one hand the church clings to orthodox doctrine, it simply can’t be changed, it’s taken to be immutable, and on the other hand, in an age of critical thinking we are used to the idea of not adopting a belief or a practice until you’ve thoroughly scrutinised it and tested it out. A rigorous scientific testing of religious belief produces a pretty negative result, of course. An amusing example of that is this, that, some idiot once noticed that the most prayed-for person in England is the reigning monarch, for whom prayers were proscribed morning and evening in the Book of Common Prayer, and those services every benefice clergyman must read in his church. Well, given that the monarchy is prayed for so much, you might expect a proportionately greater later life of monarchs. Every day the parson says in the parish church, ‘Grant him in health and strength, long to live,’ and so on. Is this prayer answered? And the answer is that in fact English monarchs have a rather lower than average expectation of life. [laughs] So there have been rather idiotic attempts like that at experimental tests of religious belief, and, of course, they’re really a bit of a joke.

[12:56] And, at this time when you are moving from evangelical Christianity to something else, did you ever consider that atheism was an option in your case?

Not quite straight atheism. But I did notice that there is a symbolic death of God in the Roman Catholic year on Holy Saturday, when the lights are put out in church and the images are all veiled, and at the end of the famous service of Tenebrae there is complete darkness. Another thing I’ve emphasised in more recent writing is that, the Bible teaches a religious philosophy of history, religion passes through a series of stages or dispensations: Paradise, the Patriarchs, the Law, the Gospel, the Kingdom of God, the sealing of Heaven and Hell, and the end of the world. In that history, Christian doctrine, or the doctrine currently taught, is relative to the dispensation that you are actually living in. For example, in the age of the Patriarchs, you can be polygamous, and anybody can sacrifice, Abraham can set up an altar and sacrifice himself. He doesn’t have to wait for a Levite priest to come along. So religion by later standards is quite unorthodox. And indeed, in Eden the very first of the biblical Don Cupitt Page 53 C1672/20 Track 3 epochs, there was no religion at all, because God is present on Earth all the time, and therefore no religion to communicate with him is needed. Now the religion of the Church, once they believe that Jesus was exalted o Heaven, became a two worlds religion, and the job of religion is to communicate between the heavenly world up above and the earthly world down below, and to pray for the return of Christ and reunion of the two worlds. But when the two worlds are reunited, God is ubiquitously present on this Earth, and religion is no longer needed. So, provided you keep the idea that the Church will eventually give way to the Kingdom of God, you can understand the notion that the supernatural world is only required in religious thought during a period of waking, marching through the wilderness, towards the Promised Land. When you get to your destination, religion and supernaturalism are no longer needed. So in my last attempt to reinterpret the doctrine the doctrine of God, I said, when the two worlds get reunited, God is dispersed over all the worlds as light. There’s no temple in the City of God in the Book of Revelation. No temple. No religious system. But there is a ubiquitous presence of divine light. And in my own experience and thinking, a kind of scattered glory of God is ubiquitous in the natural world. I have always felt a sense of sight is religious. For me it is a very close link between theism and theory, a word which means seeing. Light is understanding. [16:23] So, I can see this view is dispersal of God happening in somebody like Gerard Manley Hopkins. ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flare out, shining like shook foil.’ That implies that visual glory scattered through the world, associated perhaps especially with the sun, sunlight, and also with the words like contemplation. That’s what’s left of God today. The old, intensely focused God, who is like an immensely hot fire, and a blinding light, is not seen in the Bible directly after the Books of Moses; he doesn’t appear in the New Testament in that form at all. And, there was always a bit of a contradiction, because on the one hand we are told that our destiny is ultimately to see God; on the other hand, the Bible always teaches that no man can see God and live. So there’s plain contradiction there, which I will resolve by saying, we moderns have lost the old God above, but there is a, kind of dispersed religious experience in nature and in art, for most of us linked to a sense of sight, but for the musically gifted, with a sense of hearing. Notice that of all the arts, today perhaps music is the closest to religion even now. So I link God with phany. You know phany? Epiphany, theophany. And there’s phany there. And, any words like Don Cupitt Page 54 C1672/20 Track 3 epiphany or phenomenon, is an appearing, a beautiful glittering appearance. Theophany: an appearance of God. [18:32] So, for me, I’ve always had strong visual religious experiences, still do, but I don’t have a metaphysics of God, and I call my point of view objectively a-theist. I don’t believe, and don’t have to believe, in an objective God. I do believe that even the transient world of sense experience, of which we are part, and with which we pass away, even in that, some experience of a kind of dispersed glory is still possible. That’s what’s left of traditional religion. [pause] I think in our country, we associate it especially with our very changeable weather, [laughs] we associate it especially with the Sun. Yes. [laughs] But, both God and the Buddha were traditionally symbolised by the solar disc. There’s a little British Museum image of the Buddha, simply as the solar disc, sitting on a chair, attended by disciples. I rather like that, the traditional link between light, illumination of the mind, reason as the candle of the Lord, and, light, physical light, and glory. It’s in that sort of region that you can have what I call an ultra-light religion and world view for the future.

[20:19] Thank you. Could you now, then, take us on through your life story and tell us about your training at Westcott House in the late 1950s.

Yes. I returned from the Army, went up to Westcott House in 1957. I had taken with me in the Army a lot of philosophy books, and had read them carefully in spare time, while we were stationed in Cyprus. On coming back to Trinity Hall, to Westcott House to start training, I spent the first year affiliated back through my old college to the university, and doing a Part III postgraduate one-year course in the Philosophy of Religion. My director of studies at Trinity Hall was Bob Runcie, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, and a friend. I worked hard at that, and despite being feverish and unwell on the day of the examination, at last got a good First, after mediocre Tripos results so far, I at last got a good First, and pretty soon was told that an academic career was mine if I wanted it. After that, I returned more soberly to doing the ordinary ordination examinations, and finding a parish in the north of England, trying to return to my roots culturally and in terms of family. Going back to industrial Lancashire. But I enjoyed Westcott House. Rather old-fashioned, a bit Don Cupitt Page 55 C1672/20 Track 3 paternalistic, but, a bit all-male in those days still, as everywhere was. But it was a friendly college, and many of the friends I made there I still have.

[22:31] Was there any interest in your science and history of science background at Westcott House among the other…?

No, I don’t think so. No. We were thinking mainly in terms of philosophy. [pause] No. I think in religion in those days, we talked about the mission to the industrial areas of the working class. Those were the days when we looked at the worker-priest experiment in France, and we had a thing called the Sheffield Industrial Mission in the north of England, and a lot of keen young ordinands were hoping to connect the attempt to revive traditional Christianity with a mission to working-class areas, and, a kind of family-oriented approach to religion. The Family Communion Service became the main service on the Sunday morning, instead of the traditional Choral Matins with sermon. So that was the main concern at the time anyway. And we still believed, right up to the early Sixties, that England could be reconverted, but in fact the Sixties turned out quite differently. And I had completed my time in the parish, and returned to Westcott House as a teacher before John Robinson’s book appeared, and the radical theology debates of the Sixties began.

What experience did you have of those missions in Sheffield? Could you tell any… If you weren’t…

No. I didn’t go on them, not myself, no. Ted Wickham was a well-known character who had chiefly run the Sheffield Industrial Mission with a few assistants. They had factory chaplaincies, chaplaincies to factories. By the way, there are several things of that kind still exist. For example, it’s now recognised that being a policeman is a very high stress job and can be absolutely crippling, when you are dealing with very ugly or sad cases. And a lot of police forces now do have a chaplain, I know people who are chaplains to the police, and they tend to give supported counselling to policemen who are having a bad time. Well, so, Ted Wickham pioneered that kind of thing in factories. Whereas the Catholic worker-priests had simply become ordinary industrial workers and trade unionists, the Sheffield people remained chaplains, and didn’t Don Cupitt Page 56 C1672/20 Track 3 normally enter employment in the industry they administered. But they did act as a kind of welfare officer counsellor, independent adviser, rather as they did in the armed forces, with some success, in World War I. One or two chaplains had made a major national name for themselves as forces chaplains during the pressures of war. [25:43] I think, and we can believe, that industrial chaplains could connect with the working class and their concerns by doing something similar in peacetime. I simply went to a very old-established industrial area, the oldest part of Salford, for my parish-ey. We relied really on a family approach, church schools, and Sunday schools, all the traditional organisations, and, a lot of visiting, a lot of showing interest and trying to help people.

Yes, could you tell in detail of your experiences as assistant curate, including those that you refer to in the Sea of Faith programmes where you’ve talked, for example, about the hospital visits and that sort of thing.

Yes.

But, any detailed stories of your experiences as an assistant curate. I think it was 1959 to ’62 was it?

Yes, that’s right, yes. Yes. One visionary experience. I do remember at the bus stop just outside the Roman Catholic cathedral in Salford being suddenly smitten with a violent religious experience of grace. Funny, but I did. I, I remember several things that I did enjoy. In the hospital I met the problem of evil. Women who had had a child that had some small deformity thought that God was punishing them for some sins. And I had to try to explain that you shouldn’t see it like that; it’s just a biological accident. The process by which we reproduce ourselves can make lots of little mistakes. If we didn’t there wouldn’t be any evolution; we wouldn’t be here. Life has to be contingent, there have to be some accidents, and some bits of bad luck, for life to work at all. You can’t expect life to be so well-run and organised that it’s never defiled and never challenging. So I tried to argue people out of the belief that they had committed a sin against the Holy Ghost or something. [28:00] Don Cupitt Page 57 C1672/20 Track 3

Another thing I remember that struck me as interesting at the time, I found that a lot of the humbler folk in the parish were frightened to enter the parish church. They still had a surprisingly strong sense of the holy, and they found holy places, graveyards and churches, intimidating, threatening. I wasn’t sure how to overcome that. I think that deeply ingrained cultural feeling for the sacred has gone now, people have lost it completely, but in those days it did still exist, it was quite a surprise to me to discover it. [pause] Yes, perhaps in those days too people still believed in things like ghosts, whereas they don’t today. From that period of my life I remember on two or three occasions sitting up all night in a haunted room to reassure somebody who was terrified by their own house, believing it be haunted. I did that in the parish, with a sober sensible young bloke who was a Scout master, so that I wouldn’t be on my own, in the bedroom of an old lady who was in danger of being sent off to the mental hospital because she was repeatedly complaining to her doctor about things going bump in the night. She heard strange bumping noises. So we sat up all night one night, and, dozed in the armchairs in her bedroom, listening for the bumping noises. We drew a blank. And we said, we could find nothing, we don’t think there’s anything there. We couldn’t say more to her. But two days later, I found that, she lived in a terrace house, and the man who lived in the house next door had been receiving contraband boxes of liquor during the night and stashing them against the wall just behind the head of her bed. [laughs] And so she was, that was the noise that she had been hearing. So that at least did save her from being sent off to the mental hospital. But, supernatural belief was not quite extinct in those days, and people were often frightened, they had fears of the dark and so on. It’s gone now I think. At least I’ve, I’ve heard nothing of ghosts and read nothing in the papers about ghosts. And I’ve heard nothing in the papers about the healings at Lourdes for many years. The pilgrimages to Lourdes and other Catholic shrines still go on, but who believes in that kind of thing any more? Very few people apparently. They’re no longer making the newspapers, but they were when I was young. Every year you were highly aware when the pilgrimage to Lourdes was taking place. And the newspapers had correspondents there reporting on miracles. Not now.

[31:11] In what other ways did you interact with the people of the parish?

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Differently with different people. [pause] Well, one interacted as best one could on whatever level was possible. There were still old-fashioned intellectual, working- class intellectuals, amongst the petitioners, well just a few. The younger people in church were people on the way out of the district. The Church tended to act as an instrument of embourgeoisement. The kids who were going to grammar school would first have sung in the church choir; they were on their way out of the parish. The ordinary folk in the parish who were having a hard time, getting knifed or beaten up or something, as one was I remember, it was difficult to talk to closely, except to try to find ways they could find the courage to understand and manage their own lives a bit better. [pause] Hm. [pause] We were very conscious of Anglican-Catholic rivalry, having a Roman Catholic cathedral in the parish. We went on Whit walks, which were a major occasion for the Protestant members of the parish, and there still survives a photograph of me in full clerical rig walking in one of these religious processions. But Catholics also had their Whit walks, but the Catholic priests were still bound by the old law that they couldn’t wear their cassocks in public, so they walked in morning dress, to show that they were priests. But there was a good deal of rivalry between the two communities, so a little bit of Northern Ireland did wash over into Lancashire, Catholic-Protestant rivalry and tension. Mostly friendly. But I never got to know any Catholic priests while I was in Salford. Mm. Enjoyed it. In some respects I was fascinated by working-class life, because it’s so intense and emotional, and close-up. But being rather middle-class intellectual I found it very tiring, and on my days off walked down to one of the Manchester stations and got a train out towards the Pennines, to say with an old uncle in a farmhouse out there, and have a day away from the overheated, crowded excitement of a, a downtown district of Salford. It was, it was exhausting. I liked it. I could have become addicted to it. But it was also too tiring. Education had taken me away from that world. Mm.

[34:17] The few intellectuals among the parish that you mention, what were they, what did they tend to be interested in talking about?

I noticed on their bookshelves works by people like Ruskin. That’s to say, they were leftover Victorians. Remember we’re talking about the year 1960 or so. These chaps had obviously been born in the reign of Queen Victoria. So they, they had late Don Cupitt Page 59 C1672/20 Track 3

Victorian texts probably, yes. They would know about Coppet and Cobden, and Gladstone and so on. I do remember Ruskin’s works being still read by men like that, which, you wouldn’t get anything quite like that today. No. But, it was a fascinating world anyway. And the church managed to pull about, 120 people to the main Sunday morning Eucharist, in a parish of about, four or five thousand I suppose. It was a, a significant presence in the community. In the 1920s and Thirties it was a famous slum parish, and the parson had been a man named Canon Peter Green, a great character. He was able to function as a Victorian. On Fridays at about 5.30 p.m. he put on formal dress and got a stick, and went round the parish, driving the men out of the pubs so that their wives got their pay packets before they’d spent it on drink. And it was accepted that he did this. [laughs] When he came along, people drank up hastily and left. But that degree of authoritarianism and tyranny was thought amusing and greatly respected, and admired, in its day. Because it was perfectly true that a working man on a Friday with a pay packet, if he was the dominant partner in the marriage, would have a couple of drinks for himself out of it first before he got home. Whereas a man with a dominant wife would hand her his pay packet and she would give him back his spends. [laughs] Most of the parish thought that was the way it should be. But I, I was amused that they still rather liked Peter Green’s rather authoritarian style. They respected it. But it was of a previous generation. I went to see Peter Green, age ninety, in a retirement home in Farnham, Surrey, but he was demented. It was rather tragic, to see somebody who had been a great man and much respected, and the author of a whole shelf of books, just a demented wreck in extreme old age.

[37:20] Did you experience any expression of kind of, anti-religion among the, among members of the parish?

There were some, yes, occasionally. When visiting the sick and dying in hospital, I do remember attempting to say the Prayer of Commendation over somebody who was dying, an elderly woman. The man who was there, who was the woman’s son, and he protested and demanded that I leave. And so I just, did so obviously. You would occasionally meet people who were strongly anti-religious, but mostly the old C of E was still respected in those days. How much you might be able to get away with now, Don Cupitt Page 60 C1672/20 Track 3

I don’t know. I’m just thinking that, one of the great ordeals of the year was carol singing in the hospital. We all formed up in procession with the choir behind a processional cross and so on. We formed up in procession at the parish church, and then went next door into Salford Royal Hospital, and sang carols in all the wards. We also sang carols climbing upstairs in procession in the hospital, which was four storeys high. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to sing carols in choir as you are climbing stairs, but it’s killing. [laughs] I don’t know how we did it, but we had to, that was part of the drill. Nobody objected. It just happened. [38:58] I do remember it being objected to in Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge by a fierce intellectual female, namely Queenie Leavis, wife of the great literary critic. She fiercely denounced the practice of holding services in the open ward that we still kept up. [pause] But in ’59 to ’62 I don’t remember that kind of opposition. And remember, on some occasions, as in the Army there can be a kind of church parade which everybody’s assumed to accept to this day.

When was the occasion when Queenie Leavis objected to…?

This was when it was at Westcott House. At Westcott House we used to conduct worship in an old people’s home in Chesterton. And, I think some… No, wait a minute. I’m mistaken. Delete that. When I was at Westcott House we occasionally conducted worship and a service in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, and on one occasion Queenie Leavis was there in a bed, and she objected strongly. She didn’t want to have any part in Christian worship, because she didn’t believe any of it. And so on. But only a number of people would come out in such open opposition to religion. Remember, we live in the first generation in which the majority of the English people now say they have no religion. In those days, the number of people who are not even nominal Anglicans was tiny. It was well under ten per cent certainly. So that, going openly post-religious or anti-religious as a mass phenomenon has only arrived with the new millennium. Mm.

[41:11] And can you say something about what effect you think that attending to people in hospital had? In the Sea of Faith programmes you reflect, you reflect on this a little Don Cupitt Page 61 C1672/20 Track 3 bit. And, I was trying to sort of imagine you going to the hospital and then coming away and thinking about the experiences.

Yes. Yes, well, going to visit people, taking them chocolates or flowers or grapes, praying for them, even taking them the Reserved Sacrament, these were symbolic gestures of support, but I never supposed that they could have been scientifically tested in the same way that a new drug or therapy is tested. So, I took an expressivist and rather Wittgensteinian view at that age. I never supposed that intercessory prayer was causally effective, of course it isn’t, obviously. [pause] I think, I think that’s unavoidable. I do remember that I organised, with the theologian Geoffrey Lampe, an open letter, asking the Church of England authorities not to revive the practice of exorcism. At that time, in the early Seventies, there were demands for every diocese to have somebody licensed to perform exorcism. But it struck me that this attempt to return to a world in which people believe in evil spirits was a disaster. The Church was going horribly downmarket, and should not do so. So we organised an open letter, and sixty-five theologians signed it, asking the authorities, and pointing out that the Reformation largely ended belief in evil spirits, and stopped exorcism. The Roman Catholic Church continued to exorcise babies before baptism until the 1960s, but in the Church of England there were no rights of exorcism, and one canon said, you are not to do it without a bishop’s approval. And bishops never did approve. So that for centuries after the Reformation the belief in evil spirits was kept out of the C of E. [pause] So, a certain rationalism, and attempts to adopt a more modern world view, was part of Anglicanism from the Queen Elizabeth Settlement onwards, and it was obviously part of eighteenth century Anglicanism, in Jane Austen and so on. You can’t imagine people in Jane Austen holding supernatural beliefs really. No. Even though it is a completely Anglican world.

[44:22] Could you, then, tell us about the next period of your life, when you returned to Westcott house I think as Vice-Principal, is that right?

Yes. Yes.

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And so if you could tell us about the period, say, 1962 to 1965 when you become a Fellow here?

Yes. Yes. Yes, I began receiving invitations to return to Cambridge while I was in Salford. I did visit Corpus, who offered me the deanship there. I turned down Trinity Hall, my own old college, without visiting it as I remember. But eventually Westcott House asked me to return as Vice-Principal, and I did in the late summer of 1962. On arrival I found I had to teach pretty well the whole of the ordination examination syllabus. I had to lecture, give a standard course of lectures, on everything from the philosophy of religion, to the Thirty-Nine Articles, to mediaeval church history, to the Old Testament, and so on. I was, I was doing everything, teaching all hours. And it’s hard to imagine how hard we used to work in those days. At Salford, the day started at 6.45 a.m. with early Eucharist, and ended at 10.30 p.m. with walking round the chapel. So it was double the modern working day, and it was six days a week. Yes. And, not only was the day, working day, in the parish about double an ordinary working man’s week; at Westcott House it was even more demanding, because you were expected to have meals with the members, who all wanted to talk animatedly about their own current worries and concerns and so on. Again, we started at seven in the morning, Matins, Eucharist, meditation. But then you had breakfast, intense chatter, then you had four hours of teaching, then you had intercessions, and then you had lunch, and then you had some afternoon activity, and regular teaching, four till six, and then Evensong and meditation, and dinner, and then evening meeting of the whole house. So that, you were on the go from seven a.m. to about ten, 10.3 p.m., on a normal day. It was very very tiring indeed, during the term. [47:06] I do remember at that time my philosophy teacher, George Woods, had taken me aside and said, ‘Don’t let them keep you so busy that you never get round to getting married.’ That happened to me, and I’ve much regretted it. So I said, ‘Yes George.’ [laughs] But at Westcott House, there was a sharp contrast between an enormously busy working week during full term, and being completely on one’s own during the vacations when there as nobody around, and rather lonely. So after I had been there a year, I did think myself of George Woods, and, thought of marrying. And, thought particularly of the sister of a friend with whom I had done National Service. I had met her a couple of times and we had looked appraisingly at each other. [laughs] I Don Cupitt Page 63 C1672/20 Track 3 asked her out to dinner one night and proposed on the spot, to her astonishment. But fortunately she accepted me. And Westcott House gave us a little Victorian terrace house about half a mile from the college to live in. So I was able to start a family immediately. I was twenty-nine, Susan was twenty-six. She was astonishingly good- looking, and people looked at me sceptically. Perhaps she likes horses, they said very unkindly. And, I do remember in Westcott House publicly thanking the Principal for being the only one of my friends to express the hope that this would make me more human. I was very intense and serous-minded and industrious in those days. But, I began married life, and, still worked very hard indeed at Westcott House, for three years, and my first son was born while I was there. I well remember that. I sat up with Susan. And I noted that whereas in 1960, in the parish, every woman who had just given birth to her child attended the Churching of Women immediately afterwards, an old Anglican service, the purification of women after childbirth. So, the idea that childbirth created a condition of ritual impurity lasted until the Sixties in England. And now, only two or three years later, I was attending the birth of my own son, who was born just after midnight on March the 31st. He was born on April the 1st. And, I went home after that, very tired, and rang my parents. And, they answered the phone extremely sleepily, being both… I said, ‘You’re grandparents. A boy’s just been born.’ ‘Oh,’ they said, and put the phone down. And I fell asleep. And then the same day they were knocking on the door. And, shortly afterwards the ambulance arrived with mother and baby. And I remember my mother, and her excitement at this great event in the family. So that’s the happiest memory of that particular period. [50:47] But then, in 1963, just before marrying, there was the question of Honest to God. I was leading a party of Westcott House students in the parish of Harpenden, and I remember on Sunday morning going to the newsagent and buying a newspaper, the Observer, and seeing the famous headline, ‘Our Image of God Must Go’, by John Robinson. And then, for the next six weeks the whole nation was talking about Honest to God. And, I was not that impressed. I bought the book and read it. It didn’t strike me as being particularly new, and it didn’t say anything that I didn’t know already. But it did have an enormous impact on the nation, and particularly on all the people in the new, you might say para-clerical, helping professions, the social workers, the teachers, the probation officers, the psychiatric social workers and so on, Don Cupitt Page 64 C1672/20 Track 3 a whole lot of people in the helping professions. This offered a kind of Christian humanism they could believe in. [pause] There was some possibility, through John Robinson, who was deeply Anglican in temper, some possibility of the Church of England reviving if it welcomed these new ideas. But in fact the evangelicals of course attacked John Robinson, threatened a court case, and Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop, censured, publicly censured John Robinson, thus terminating his career in the Church, and ending the Church of England’s hopes of a post-war revival. So it was all rather catastrophic. But, a huge interest aroused by this book came to nothing. A generation of people had gone to work in south London, in the diocese of Woolwich where John Robinson was suffragan bishop, a lot of people had moved into south London parishes there, and were working very hard to try to make something like a Robinsonian and Westcott House model of Christian humanism work. But that effort only lasted a few years, and eventually it, it died out for lack of momentum and success, lack of any official encouragement. And the radical theology of the next five years attracted interest among students at the time, but it didn’t leave very much in the way of a permanent legacy, so it came to nothing, which was a big disappointment. The equivalent thing in the Roman Catholic Church of course was the holding of the Vatican Council, and the very distinguished Pope John XXIII, who was a widely liked and popular figure. Unfortunately he didn’t live very long, and under his successor, Paul VI, the Roman Catholic Church reverted rather to its old ways. It lost courage to believe it could modernise.

[54:14] Was it here, was it during this period at Westcott House, that you mention, either to me last time or in the Alan Macfarlane interview, you experience very acute doubts about your…?

I’ve always had fits of acute doubt. I remember one at Westcott House, I nearly gave up. But then I went on. [pause] And realised that perhaps for people like me, oscillation between faith and doubt is a fairly normal condition. John Betjeman at the end of his life used to quote his own line that God was man in Palestine and lives today in bread and wine. He used to say that he believed all that for about half an hour every six months; the rest of the time he was sceptical and sure of annihilation in death. So I think a lot of theologians, a lot of people, combined adherence to outward Don Cupitt Page 65 C1672/20 Track 3 forms with a sort of growing scepticism, a rather normal condition for people to be in, in my generation. I suspect that the majority of theologians were privately near sceptic, including all the best known. Mm. [pause] So we were losing, very traumatic, we were just hoping that the cultural climate would change perhaps, that ideas would come along that would help. If we were doubtful about Bultmann and Tillich and Robinson’s attempt to convey their ideas, perhaps other new movements might make things a bit easier. But, philosophical criticism of metaphysics, and biblical criticism, had undermined the old coherence of Anglican doctrine, ever since about 1850. George Eliot knew that this had happened of course. She was the most important intellectually of the early Victorian English sceptics. Because George Eliot had actually read the great Germans, which was rare in England at that time, but she read them, and she understood. [pause] So, yes, in my generation, people were hanging on and hoping for better times, after the Sixties. [pause] I didn’t come out in a big way until the end of the Seventies.

[57:08] And how was Honest to God discussed at Westcott House by…?

There was enthusiasm by some people, yes. They saw Christianity, as I to some extent I always see it myself, as self-secularising. The movement in Christian thought is from God to man, the image that it comes from the next world to this world, the sacred comes down from the world above and disperses itself through the world of experience. So that Christianity came to evolve towards humanism. The dominant impulse in Christian thought, in the first millennium, was towards the contemplation of God the Father by the monk in his cell, the Benedictine monk. The second millennium became increasingly Christ-centred. And we used to say back in the 1960s, the third millennium will increasingly be spirit-entered, it’ll be Pentecostal, religion will become very diverse, imminent, Quakerish, this worldly. So that, whereas early Christianity was very strong on ideas of metaphysics, Platonism, an exalted mystical doctrine of God, and the priority of the contemplative life, in the second millennium, Christianity had gradually evolved towards humanism and democracy. Now today, as we sit here in the third millennium, 2016, Christianity is culturally almost forgotten completely, and very very unpopular. And Christian ethics survives under the label ‘humanitarian considerations’. The word humanitarian is Don Cupitt Page 66 C1672/20 Track 3 used now where the word Christian might have used in earlier times. So there has been a certain anonymous triumph of Christian ethics in the modern period. We have a strong consciousness now, but our civilisation may crash before long and come to an end, through catastrophic climate change and other things like that. What will survive, we hope, will be the best bits of Christian ethics, and a little bit of Christian aesthetics, the feeling for life that there is in Christianity. [pause] But, the main movement of Christianity we already saw back in the Sixties is towards humanism, and I think the pop singers and Beatles and so on who knew the similarity between their flower power age love and Christianity’s Pentecostal dreams, they saw the same point. Yah. [pause] Religion has wholly returned into this life, in the Beatles and the best of the pop music, pop festival world of the Sixties.

[1:00:27] What experience did you have of that world of the Sixties?

If you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there. [laughs] That’s the old joke. No I didn’t. I was conservative still myself. Only gradually did I take up these ideas and begin to work them through in my own thinking. At the time I was still conservative, right through the Sixties, really, and did not write much for the Sixties periodicals, now I think of it. [pause] No, I never in print endorsed Sixties ideas about religion, never. I only turned radical from the mid-Seventies onwards. Mm.

[1:01:18] To what extent did you talk to your wife about your, well both your work but also your private thoughts about religion?

Yes. I wouldn’t burden her with it, she’s temperamentally not that kind of person. She’s a potter, a studio potter, she likes art and craft, rather than speculative thought. So, we’re temperamentally different. Although we are an extremely close match in many ways, and have been married now for well over, way over fifty years, on the whole we tend to keep out of each other’s lives, and, I will turn up and help her with things from time to time, and she will turn up to support me as it were, but, we tend to let each other have our own way of thinking and own life. Though in religion, her views, though not systematically worked out, are not very different from mine. But Don Cupitt Page 67 C1672/20 Track 3 back in the Sixties when our children were being born we did still baptise them. And we still occasionally took them to church, until we were warned off our parish church because the children were noisy. But we, we did, I do remember that we did take them. So, we tried for a bit to make the old system still work, so far as we could.

Did being a, did becoming a father imply any changes to your sort of working routine and sort of professional way of life?

I don’t think so, no. We had a very happy domestic life in the sense, years when one’s raising young children are the happiest years of life. So I, I always enjoyed that domesticity, even if during full-time I was out a great deal. As I got through my thirties I would dine out less and less. A good college man in the old Cambridge parlance dined with the fellowship virtually every night and left his wife and children alone. I could never have done that, obviously. I would shoot off home for a couple of hours after lunch, to break a long day, or something of that kind. Or I would not go, stay in for dinner, but come home at seven, at seven o’clock. At the college when I had moved across to Emmanuel, the first service of the day was, eight o’clock, 7.30 or eight, actually, yes. And the last, 6.30. Six o’clock, six o’clock, yes. There was morning and evening prayer, Communion every day and so on, in the college, and we had a college chaplain. So it was still a fairly long day. But I took more time out to be with my family, and, much enjoyed raising children. Yes. I remember noticing that my son was sceptical like myself. I remember when he went to school, having just reached the age of five, he was instructed about Pentecost, the day of Pentecost, and he came home very puzzled. He said, ‘If they had had flames coming out of their heads, wouldn’t their hair have got burnt?’ And I said, ‘My dear, they’ll never make you a bishop if you ask that sort of question.’ [laughs]

[1:05:28] Do you remember… What stands out in your memory of time spent with them when they were young? There was first, there was, your first child was a son, and then, others?

Yes. Yes. We did the usual outings and family holidays. My, Susan is a good linguist, so she loves travelling to the Continent. So we would rent a cottage in Don Cupitt Page 68 C1672/20 Track 3

France or Germany or something, but we always enjoy family holidays. And occasionally ventured further afield. I remember taking the whole family to Hong Kong where I had a short-term lectureship, and, we enjoyed the exoticism of a major oriental city, where people live double lives, with a day job and a night job in the night market. Yes, the frenzied excitement and complex life of a, of an Asian city was very exciting for us all. We, we travelled. From ’74 we began to have a family car. Before that I had not had a car. My religion had made me rather want to live loose. I had no insurance and relied only on providence, until we had a car, and then came separate taxation of husband and wife, and you began to have to have money of your own. I remember after we married neither of us had any private money, and both of us had unfettered access to all the joint accounts. There were only joint accounts. So as we originally set everything up, it was meant to be very, post- capitalist as it were [laughs], the way we lived. But once you’ve got a car, somebody has to own it, and somebody has to insure it, and so on and so forth. So you get gradually trapped by a bourgeois way of life. But that’s, unavoidable. The law developed in that direction, you had separate taxation of husband and wife came in then in that period, in the Seventies I think. Mm. [pause] The youngest daughter inherited from me a passion for animals, particularly, she had a large collection of animals. Mostly creepy-crawlies. I remember she had giant hissing cockroaches, and they fell sick, and we found a vet who specialised in exotic pets in Cambridge and we took these giant hissing cockroaches along, and they had mites. And the poor old vet had to explain that the only way to treat mites was with insecticide, but you can’t treat a giant hissing cockroach with insecticide. [laughs] And Sally had to think about this, how painful and difficult a fact it was that nothing could be done for her giant hissing cockroaches. But she had a variety of animals. And one year when we went on holiday a fellow of the college kindly undertook to look after them all in his rooms in college, and while he was looking after them, one night a snake escaped, and managed to work its way downwards, and appeared in the room of one of the two or three best-known English poets, who was at that time a Fellow of the college, a man of extremely sensitive nerves. And there was the most appalling row, when a snake walked into this chap’s room, and it was Sally’s snake. Fortunately, the snake was recovered and returned to Sally. But, English poetry nearly suffered very severe damage as a result of that. And we didn’t try to have the animals moved into college after that. Too risky. [pause] I do remember sitting up with Sally one evening, one Don Cupitt Page 69 C1672/20 Track 3 of her hamsters escaped. There were always a lot of hamsters in the house. And, it had gone into the fire bricks behind a disused fireplace in the corner of a little Victorian room downstairs. The only way to catch it was to lay a, get a potato, chop it up into small pieces, and put them in a line, leading away from the hearth, out towards the centre of the room, so that the animal would be persuaded to come out and collect these bits of, bits of potato, and come back for more. And gradually venture further and further away from its refuge. And we managed between us to sit deathly still for two hours waiting for this wretched hamster to emerge, and successfully caught it, and it was taken off, back upstairs, with great rejoicings. So anyway, being then young and energetic and so on, I greatly enjoyed family life.

[1:10:51] And at Westcott House in this pre-1965 period, did you have colleagues who you were able to privately talk to about the complexities of your religious belief and thought?

Yes.

You’ve mentioned last time that you were aware of other people who separate out their sort of, public statements from their private questioning. So, who could you talk to about this sort of thing?

My colleague as Chaplain at Westcott House, I was Vice-Principal at Westcott House, my colleague as Chaplain was Raymond Hockley, a composer and musician, had at one time been a Quaker. A thoughtful, interesting man. He was the sort of person one could chat to. [pause] But mostly, I was slowly assimilating and working out my philosophical position myself. The special subject in philosophy at Part III level in the year ’59 to ’60 was David Hume. I had also acquired a reasonable knowledge of Kant. And then, after that became very keen indeed on Kierkegaard, whom I read intensively for some years. As an undergraduate too I had been introduced to the ideas of Wittgenstein. So those were the thinkers who meant the most to me. And, a good academic expositor like Norman Kemp Smith, a Scottish philosopher, was my principal companion. His books about humankind and so on were quite excellent. And, oh, I had to try to assimilate the end of metaphysics and what came after it for myself as best I could. [pause] At the same time, my dissatisfaction with over, Don Cupitt Page 70 C1672/20 Track 3 naively literal supernatural language meant that I got involved in the critique of religious language, what kind of meaning can it have? Is it descriptive, can it be understood realistically, describing states of affairs, or has it some other function? Gradually, in my first books, those worries about the meaning of religious language, how and whether it’s possible to say anything about God, those, those worries and doubts bothered me a lot during the Sixties and the Seventies, and eventually led to my radical theology. My doctrine of God became more and more Islamic, I was pushing God up into abstractness, ideality, and that eventually happened with Taking Leave of God. I could only hold onto the idea of God if I got rid of all the naïve anthropomorphism. An obvious difficulty was this, that the believer wants to think of God as some kind of a person. [laughs] And God’s also supposed to be eternal. How can there be an eternal person, who does not change one iota? How can you recognise a person as a person if he or she cannot change, doesn’t change and cannot change, in any respect at all? Kierkegaard himself in a discourse on the unchangeableness of God talks about a traveller on a long journey who comes across, who comes up against, a smooth, vertical, shiny, black wall, which he cannot get round and cannot pass. That’s the unchangeableness of God. An absolute barrier to thought. And, it was illustrations like that from Kierkegaard that eventually tilted me towards realism – non-realism, and I gather that nowadays on the leading edge of Kierkegaard scholarship, quite a few people are beginning to interpret Kierkegaard as a non-realist in my sort of way. [1:15:15] God is just an imaginary focus of religious aspiration. God is the standpoint of eternity, from which we are judged absolutely. God is an unthinkable source of law and absolute authority in the Islamic version. At any rate, people thought that my idea of God was becoming Islamic. I would say it was becoming ultra-Kantian actually, a non-realist idea of God. God is beyond all symbolism. I used to love a Buddhist story, which relates how in the afterlife the monks are all arranged in a vast debating chamber, and they get up in turn to address the gathering. One stands and says, ‘It is beyond thought and beyond language. It is eternal and blissful and beyond our imagination.’ And the next one who got up and said, ‘Did that chap say anything?’ [laughs] And that’s the puzzle that ends the thing. Once you’ve ended all the superlatives, you’ve realised that they’ve forced you into a non-realist view of God. If God’s beyond human thought and language, then, God does not strictly exist. Don Cupitt Page 71 C1672/20 Track 3

[laughs] Yah. And that involves also a more radical thing. Are we always and only ever within our own humanity, in our use of language, so that the very attempts to know the world absolutely is a mistake? We can only ever know a world that has been constructed by our own thinking. That line of thought also began to bother me pretty early on, and is occasionally mentioned. In its strictest form I call it anthropomonism. In effect, there is nothing beyond ourselves and our language, and the pictures that we project upon the void, the objective world around us, has the same sort of reality as the constellations that we project upon the night sky. It can’t be more than that. Because we are always inside our own faculties, our own senses. We are inside a cave which is within us, and there’s nothing the other side of the flux of experience which our own thinking shapes into a world. That movement on, from the non-realistic doctrine of God towards a form of philosophical nihilism, was always troubling me from the Seventies onwards. But, curiously, although I think, from book to book, I’m struggling to move, advance, step by step, when I read back later I can see that the things that worried me at the beginning were the same as the things that worry me now, I’m still stuck in the same things. That, we can never transcend ourselves while still being ourselves. An attempt at self-transcendence was implied by all previous philosophical religious thought before Nietzsche. When, with Nietzsche we begin to see it’s impossible to transcend yourself and yet still be yourself. Kant was right. Nietzsche’s ultra-Kantian position turns out to be correct, and… One possibility is that, we see that we’re now in a world in which the best we can do is art. We can refine, refine the pictures we project upon the flux. Mm. [pause] Sometimes I put the point like this. In the Bible, Adam and Eve come into existence as already made, fully-formed, rational, talking beings. But of course historically it wasn’t like that. We all started off as babies. And nobody else ever got into our heads to correct our thinking. Even as babies, the first thing we knew was a blooming, buzzing confusion of sense experience, rather like what I see if I screw up my eyes, just a teeming, burgeoning confusion. I have somehow got to carve that up into a world. The creation story, by telling us of God carving it up into a world, emerging from unconsciousness, becoming conscious, sorting out his world, drawing great lines across the cosmos, that’s a model for us. God’s creation of the world is a role model for us to follow. We’ve got to build our own world. We did. Through thousands of years of conversation, we managed gradually to develop and refine a shared language in which we could gradually evolve a shared world picture. But Don Cupitt Page 72 C1672/20 Track 3 nobody from outside the human realm ever stepped in to help us along, or to correct us, or give us a bit of advice. We were always only inside the human world, as we tried to decide what’s out there. And scientists get cross as hell when I use this kind of argument. But I always reply that when you experimentally test the scientific hypothesis, you test it back against the view of the world that’s taken for granted in everyday life. Scientific experimentation is not absolute. You cannot eliminate the ordinary language world view from your scientific experiment, and, that’s always presupposed] anyway, it’s always there. [1:21:50] So, my attempt is to produce a radically post-metaphysical, post-religious, post- objective vision for a future kind of human being. I think we can only evolve in that, in that direction gradually. I’ve called it anthropomonism, but that really means only, we shouldn’t idly suppose we can escape from or transcend our own humanity. Our world view is limited. Just as a bee’s world view is a bee’s world view, and a sheep’s world view is a sheep’s world view, so ours is a human world view and we’re stuck within in. [laughs] There’s some endorsement of this in modern physics. The universe is expanding so fast that the bit of it that can be reached by travelling at the speed of light is getting less and less. The universe is thinning out. Eventually all we’ll be able to know is a rather small area around ourselves because we’ve expanded so vastly. So, already large chunks of the universe are moving beyond any possibility of our ever travelling there or knowing anything about them. So the more we know, the less there is. The world strangely shrinks as our knowledge and sophistication expand. It’s curious that physics has a sort of parallel to my own worries about the limitations of human language and human knowledge. Mm.

[1:23:33] When you say that scientists get very annoyed when you talk in that way, what do you have in mind when you say that, which particular…?

Scientists are inclined to take a dogmatic view of their own notion of truth, particularly people like Atkins and Dawkins at Oxford. I don’t disagree with them in the least on the matter of science; the scientific method is far the best method for creating truth that we ever had. And, I’m imbued with modern biology, and have had many, many distinguished biologist friends. But, science is constantly subject of self- Don Cupitt Page 73 C1672/20 Track 3 correction. Scientific theories appear to have a limited life and then appraised by other theories. Science needs a sense of relativity and corrigibility to be science. Science must not fall into a kind of religious dogmatism about itself. That’s all I’m saying. But, in the philosophy of science, people who take a leftist point of view, like me, are often very unpopular with the mainstream scientists. They, to my mind they’re more dogmatic than they should be. [pause] Mm.

Have you had conversations with those people, with people like Atkins?

Well only in the period when I was actually doing philosophy of science, I took some interest in it. And occasionally I talked with individuals, including some of the members of this college. Yes. They vary. Some scientists take my view, of course, particularly the splendid Feynman, who is well-remembered in America, Richard Feynman, took my point of view. And so did the philosopher of science, the well- known Californian whose name’s gone right out of head for a moment. [pause] Hm. I’ll have to forget, cut that one out. But… Yes. [pause] No, I, I usually say of scientific truth that we can say of it that it is good enough to be going on with for now. That’s the great formula. It’s true, in science means we can go on with it for now. It’s, we can make practical use of it. It makes sense to see the world in this way, for the moment. But theory may change. Science grows and changes rapidly. Consider how much the universe has grown in size since my lifetime. When I was young there was only one galaxy, the Milky Way. Today there are one hundred billion galaxies, each containing several hundred billion suns. So the universe has increased in size by a factor of about ten to twenty-five or something during my own lifetime. The change is enormous. Think of the change in knowledge of the solar system that’s happened. Really astonishing. And, knowledge of extra stars with planets going round them, I think there are now 1,000 outside. So that, the rate of scientific advance is extraordinary. [pause] Wittgenstein says somewhere that men will never travel to the Moon. [laughs] Even he. But, they’ve done it. [pause] But no, I’m a great admirer of science, and, never wish to take part in the debates about Richard Dawkins’s book, because I think he’s substantially right. He’s a good commentator on Darwinism, who tries to bring out how big the implications for the culture of Darwin’s ideas are. That’s all. He’s not himself a creative scientist, but a Don Cupitt Page 74 C1672/20 Track 3 very good interpreter of Darwin. And I have noticed that in my own lifetime, as the star of Freud has set, so that of Darwin continues to rise.

[1:28:10] Can you take us on, then, through the period 1965 to 1970. So, tell us about sort of, moving to the college, change in your life there, and also, if it’s through this period, in the late Sixties, that you begin to think about writing books, because you start to publish books in the early Seventies, can you give a sense of why, why you think you began to think about writing then?

Yes. Yes. I was appointed to the college in ’65. Only a year later the Master asked me to be a Proctor. The college nominated me, and in the year ’67/68 I was elected Senior Proctor for the whole university, a major university official. In that year, or, I think it was the year following, I had nine stipendiary offices at once. At university level I had the offices of Proctor, University Assistant Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion, Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion. At the college level I had Dean, Director of Studies in Philosophy, and in Theology, College Lecturer in Theology. And then in three other colleges I also had Director of Studies in Theology. So I had nine stipendiary jobs. Mind you, many of them were not worth very much. A director of studies was paid about £60 a year. So they were… But they did add up to enough to live on. Through the offices of Dennis Nineham, the Regis Professor of Divinity who died a few days ago, I got a university teaching post, and a Stanton Lectureship, and my first books was written, the Stanton Lectures, the first two years’ courses of lectures were published under the title Christ and the Hiddenness of God, which was an attempt to relate the human image of Jesus to the increasingly abstract, beyond language, idea of God that I was moving to. And I noticed the curious lack of any constructive new teaching about God in Jesus, he’s a, even then I began to wonder if he isn’t in fact a somewhat secular figure. Because, Jesus’s teachings, at least the bit of it that’s made most impression on humankind, is not about the relation of human beings to God, but about the relation of human beings to each other. Overwhelmingly. Overwhelmingly, Jesus criticises existing human relationships, the ill-feeling, envy, resentment, injustice that often characterises them. He wants to see a new order of human relations, he wants to see us capable of making the painful, difficult, first move in the ethics of love and reconciliation. Don Cupitt Page 75 C1672/20 Track 3

[1:31:13] So those ideas were going through my head as I wrote the Stanton Lectures, and they were published in my first book in 1970. The third year of Stanton Lectures was ethical, and about the objections to Christian ethics that were being voiced since the Sixties. But I only began to turn to the idea of having a definite project in ’73, I think it was ’73, might have been ’74, ’73, when I had a period of intense intellectual excitement, out of which I wrote an essay called ‘The Leap of Reason’. I discovered that by working up my state of mental arousal, until I had psyched myself up into a kind of mental turbulence, I went to sleep thinking about a particular question. It would drum in my head all night, and I’d begin to see lines of thought and sentences running in all directions, and after a while a pattern unrolling. I have compared it with rolling out a carpet, you have the whole cylinder of carpet just in front of you, and you push it. It rolls away, and you see the pattern unfolding before your eyes. In that way, I discovered that I could do pure speculative thought in a few weeks in the Sixties, and in about five weeks wrote a philosophy of consciousness, a small philosophy of consciousness in which there had been some examples in the nineteenth century, but this was a new one of my own, perhaps partly stimulated by Kant and Kierkegaard. The book that appeared eventually was called The Leap of Reason, and I’ve not reread it recently, but it gave me the idea that, the joys and excitements of speculative thought are so great, so overwhelming, that this is what I’d have to do. And, the whole idea of my work being a kind of projet fleuve, a flowing project in which I’d try to work out my own religious position of the particular time, and move on a bit from where I was last year, the whole idea of a continuously moving system of thought was becoming entrenched in my thinking at that time. In the past, creative thinkers mostly produced one system of thought in their lifetime, only one, and stuck with that. Even Schopenhauer still stuck with that. He produced one system, and then stopped. I’ve got an alternative view, of a continuously moving project which crystallises itself out into a somewhat different system every year or two. [pause] In a book called Life Lines I even went further still, and produced a kind of metro map, like the London Underground map, showing the various stations and possibilities in philosophy and religious thought as a kind of track on which you move. And the idea of the book called Life Lines was that in that book you would be able to find your own journey somewhere. Once you have read my account of what’s happening in various stations and how they develop into each other and so on, the idea was, you read the Don Cupitt Page 76 C1672/20 Track 3 book and find yourself in it somewhere on that map. That book was written with the idea that it might become a computer-readable book, you would read it with a computer, but, I never became computer literate enough to do that. But, during the Seventies I was crystallising my characteristic ideas of a continuously moving, evolving system of thought, endless, but without any conclusion, no fixed conclusion, it just moves on indefinitely. That I still stick with. Although Creative Faith of 2015 was my last really good book, it’s not really my final system at all. I don’t think there is a final truth. There is no day of judgement. There is no cosmic finality when all the goodness and all the badness will be sorted out for each other and we will know all the truth and so on. Once you give up the idea of a metaphysical finalisation of reality, then you have to try out some such projet fleuve, as I invented. I think I was perhaps the first person to do it. Kierkegaard had three stations in his picture of religious life and so on, aesthetic, ethical, Religiousness B and Religiousness A. So, it’s three or four positions in Kierkegaard’s scheme of thought, but I have many more than that. I just see life as inevitably, not a pilgrimage towards a predetermined goal, but a quest. Mm. And in that case, for me, there’s not really a difference between speculative thought and creative art, they’re more or less the same thing really, you’re trying to make a truth that you can live with and live by, and that satisfies you, but it’ll only satisfy you for a year or so, and you’ll want to find a new thing. So I have occasionally in the last five years said to people, I wonder whether one day somebody might be willing to take up my project when I’ve dropped it and carry on with it, somebody who’s sympathetic to my general approach. And one or two people have said they’d like to be able to do that if they could, but that, I don’t know that anybody will. The one person who, in the world who knew my stuff really well, better than I know it, died only six months ago, before me unfortunately.

Who was that?

Nigel Leaves, of Australia. He did a PhD on me, which is the standard book. But, but he, he died, but he might have been… He was, he had been commissioned to write another book about me, but, unfortunately he had a heart attack in his fifties, which took him away from us too early.

[1:38:15] Don Cupitt Page 77 C1672/20 Track 3

And who else have you thought might?

I, don’t, I don’t know. No, that would be vanity. One of these… Because I now begin to doubt whether human beings even have a future at all. I’ve had to give up the idea that there may, some time in the future, begin to be a lot of people who actually like my books. Most people hate what I do. But, unfortunately, the Western tradition might be coming to an end. I mean it certainly looks as if the bunch of environmental and climate change issues are so big and so great that we’re not going to do enough in time to avert disaster. I suspect already we’re on the slippery slope. And the countries like Australia are already beginning to experience catastrophic climate change. But the Western, the world economy, the modern world economy, is a huge tanker. The lead time for it to change its course in any very big way is very long. We’ve hardly begun to discuss yet giving up aircraft. Nobody’s… People talk about more runways and more flights. So it looks as if we’ll do far too little, far too late, to avert disaster. In which case, there is no long-term future for our tradition, and I have to say that my own efforts in religious thought and philosophy have been attempts to say, well we can be happy, though transient. And though the whole set-up within which we live is transient, and perhaps in a few hundred years’ time there’ll be nobody left to remember any of us, even so, one can be happy today, on my view, one can be happy about transience. We’ve got to, because there’s nothing else. So we have to reconcile ourselves to what is, in the present moment. The Buddhists I think already say this, at least the ones I most admire. Mm.

[1:40:39] Can you say more about the moment when you discovered this way of, of thinking and writing? I think you said it was, at some point in the early Seventies, the, this ability to sort of, energise yourself and work yourself up to…

Yes.

Where were you when it, you know, when it happened, what was it like, how did it proceed in the…?

Don Cupitt Page 78 C1672/20 Track 3

I learnt from Freud and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard about the sleep work, that the brain is active when you go to sleep. So I used the night time, intensive thinking during the night, to do this kind of thinking, somewhat to my wife’s irritation, and she’d complain that I was thrashing about and so on. Very recently. And of course, for Freud we do, or, the mind does work better during sleep than during wake. There’s also the Freudian and Jungian doctrine that a nervous breakdown is a period of accelerated rapid intellectual development. We often have breakdowns at key points in our own intellectual development, they help us through a transition. So, I think, I think I knew early on that it was a dangerous method, and I rather turn against it now, to heighten subjectivity, to intensify a kind of existential angst in order to think more clearly and seriously about the human condition and have new ideas. The method I was using is taught by some philosophers, but it’s dangerous. And now I use it more cautiously. I’m old, I can’t have long to live, I hope, but, at my age, it’s pretty well impossible. I’ve had to stop writing, because the stressing-up needed to have good new thoughts of any interest is too much for me now.

[1:42:47] How did you achieve the stressing-up?

Just by intensively trying to concentrate on the subject and the main, the main conflicts within it. [pause] I remember that, one of the more recent years I have done it by reflecting on ordinary language. At one time I was trying to find out what ordinary people’s philosophy, built into ordinary language, is. So I started writing down religiously and philosophically interesting phrases from ordinary language. And, after writing a page or two, noticed that the most commonly used word was life. And, after a while I noticed that life was used where the word God had been used before. Nietzsche, D H Lawrence, Leavis, and some other writers, talk of faith in life, trust in life, the lessons of life, what life teaches us, loving life, and so on, the way life teaches us, what life throws at us. And, I began to realise that for the last 150 years we’ve increasingly begun to talk about life as we used to talk about God. So I wrote a little book, The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech, and I said there that one of the results of the return of religion into this life is that the word God has become secularised into the word life. I found 150 idioms. But in the second book called Life, in the mid… oh no, about, as late as 2004, in Life, Life, I found about 300 life Don Cupitt Page 79 C1672/20 Track 3 idioms. I did another book on The Meaning of It All, and the word ‘it’ in ordinary speech, and especially the phrase ‘it all’ is another expression for God. So I began to reflect on ordinary language. When I was thinking about the word ‘being’ and trying to have interesting philosophical ideas about the nature of existence and what it is to be, I used idioms from ordinary language, and I simply thought about phrases like ‘it came to pass’, ‘it befell upon a day’, and ‘be’ hyphen ‘ing’, ‘be-ing’, as an activity or process. So thinking about words, thinking about words in ordinary language, what they imply, these were often my starting points. I would listen to the language generator in my head, churning out phrases, and trying to follow the ones that were interesting, as I worked in the dark. And the bit in your head that does language seems to churn away all night long, phrases running out of it and running away. And that’s what’s called thinking. Yes. While trying to follow the interesting bits.

So in terms of night time activity, it involves this intense kind of thinking in the evening and then going to sleep, or staying awake in that…?

I did stay awake a lot, but, in general I tried to write early the next morning, get to my desk. I’d even go so far as not to read the newspaper before I hit my desk and got down a few hundred words. I, I tried the experiment of having a notebook by my bed, and jotting down good ideas when I had them. Never made a success of that at all. Because ideas that seemed to be very good in the middle of the night, had gone dead flat by the time I looked at them again after breakfast. So I didn’t use a notebook. I’d rather use this peculiar method that I had worked out myself. Much of it evolved just listening to the way language runs spontaneously in our own head, listening to stock phrases in ordinary language, and asking what they imply; asking what ordinary people think about belief and life and death. Mm.

Why this focus on ordinary people and ordinary…?

I suppose I got that from Wittgenstein, that in philosophically sceptical and troubled times the thing we’re most at home in and can best be sure about is the world of ordinary everyday life, ordinary language and ordinary life. [pause] Wittgenstein somewhere compares language to a city. Ordinary language, he compares with the tangled, narrow little streets at the very centre of the old city, near the southern tip of Don Cupitt Page 80 C1672/20 Track 3

Manhattan, or in the old city of London. But around there, there gradually evolved broader thoroughfares, longer, straighter streets, bigger, more modern buildings. These are supplements to ordinary language, built by special branches of knowledge and sciences and the like. But all communication between the suburbs has to be routed through the centre. Because ordinary language is always there in the middle, everything’s mediated through it. So if you study ordinary language you can get in touch with everything else; that’s Wittgenstein’s idea.

[1:49:09] And, in terms of sort of, collecting the material, did you make attempts to, read certain things, or go to certain places in order to access ordinary language if you see what I mean?

[laughs] That reminds me of Angus Wilson, the novelist, sitting in a bus behind a couple of old ladies gossiping, with a notebook and a pencil, jotting down phrases in order to make his novels authentic. That’s what he did, he took a notebook with him out in public. I didn’t do that. And I never did conventional research. I tried to get it all out of my own head. I relied on having a pretty good memory. I remember thinking about who had used the word ‘life’ in a way that would cause the way we used to use the word ‘God’. [pause] I failed in the original Life book to mention Tolstoy. Near the end of War and Peace Pierre says, he’s thinking about what he’s learnt from the experience of war, the Napoleonic Wars. Life is God, and to love life is to love God. Everything moves and shifts together, and that movement is God. And that’s Tolstoy, one of the very first chaps to see that religion has become completely secularised in modern culture. And that ordinary everyday life is now all there is. This was the glorious achievement of the Paris School painters of the 1870s and ‘80s, particularly Claude Monet, and a few others. Even Renoir too, yes. Ordinary life has become innocent. In the whole Christian period the city of man was the great way, and it was ugly, it was always an image of Hell. But, with the arrival of modern sanitation and better prosperity, better wages, ordinary city life becomes innocent in the late Seventies in French painting. I love Pissarro’s pictures of traffic and so on in Paris, for example. That innocence of ordinariness is I think a big advance on earlier things. But it suggests that we should no longer see religion in terms of a very sharp binary opposition between a good world and a bad world, the Don Cupitt Page 81 C1672/20 Track 3 city of man and the city of God and so on, but start with understanding transience and reconciling ourselves to it, and be content with it. Mm. And, I take it that this, actually rather radical ethics of transient, transience and of love, was already part of the teaching of Jesus, and shows up in such sayings as, take no thought for the morrow. [pause] A lot of ordinary people will say nowadays, that after the age of seventy or so, it’s enough to live in the moment, live for the day, have a short future horizon. Live now.

[1:53:01] Which sorts of people are not ordinary?

[pause] I use ordinary in a positive sense. Ordinary language, oddly enough, tends to make the ordinary seem rather dull and uninteresting, and there has to be something that’s special to attract attention, a feast or a fast or something as opposed to a ferial day. [pause] I just mean the everyday, the quotidian, but not in any sense of disparagement; rather, being content with it and accepting it. And, being generous. Some novelists and some painters are noted for the way they have a rather generous attitude to large casts of diverse characters. It’s a curious feature of Iris Murdoch’s novels, in spite of her Platonism; she’s at her best when she’s got a large field of characters, and she’s very kind to them all. And it’s a great strength of Shakespeare, and of Dickens. It’s one of the strengths of the English in art; we like a rather richly populated world. And, it takes all sorts to make a world. [pause] By the way, many people haven’t noticed, the word world literally means the age of a man, weorold, from Saxon, i.e., it's the social, cultural world within which a person lives. Mm. That’s my anthropomonism: the world is always a human world, a human life world. Mm. [pause] [1:54:55] So, these ideas which I seem to be putting forward, ultra-radical Christian ideas, were actually implicit in Christianity from the first, as a good deal and there’s a good deal of them already in the Hebrew prophets and in Jesus. It took Christianity a very long diversion to get where it is today. But the movement back to this world starts with Protestantism and the higher valuation of marriage and family life that comes with Protestantism, and then the Catholic Counter-Reformation too. But then goes on to people finding value just in ordinary city life, just in ordinariness. [pause] People Don Cupitt Page 82 C1672/20 Track 3 talk about after, whether they’re come through some people of disaster or illness, I need to rebuild my life. We have to create a human life for ourselves to live. Which we all do. And, after trouble we want to get back to it, or remake it, or build it. We use various phrases. That’s the new subject matter for religion and ethics as I see it, in such time as the human race has left of it; I don’t know how much there may be.

[1:56:26] Could you tell me about decisions made in terms of publishers and agents, as you move into this period of writing?

Yes. I always intended to write for people who are fairly hard up: clergy, people, and, teachers and people like that. So I always published with an ordinary low-cost paperback publisher. I’m afraid I never had an agent. I’ve on the whole had rather poor sales. So although I’ve published over fifty books, virtually all of them were published at a loss for me. The college used to, the main cost for me was the excellent typist who banged them all out on a word processor, and gave me a first draft of my own text to correct, and then did it again. [pause] But, I published, the first two books went to the Lutterworth Press and appeared in hardback, then I went to the SPCK didn't I? I finally settled with the SCM Press at the end of the Sixties, and stayed with them, but from time to time got kicked out by the SCM Press because their sales were no longer good enough. And I moved over to Polebridge in America. And, the last two books, one of which has only just appeared, came from Polebridge. So, I was twice sacked by the SCM [laughs], but then got back again. So, I’ve had a rather mixed publishing history. And some modest success in China, twenty books were translated into China by a professor of philosophy with a strong interest in religion, who loved my anti-realism. And he with the aid of a student of his have issued about nineteen volumes in Chinese, some of them with his own philosophical commentaries. In China, the universities don’t have theology faculties, but the philosophy faculty is allowed to talk about religion, because religion and philosophy never became so separate from each other in Asia as they did in Europe. But I, I ‘ve no idea, although I have visited China to lecture, because of the language barrier, I’ve no idea what I look like in China or what they say about me. I’m told there’s a certain amount of publication there, but what it amounts to, I don’t know, nor what the sales have been. Probably not very good. I suspect my ideas are a little bit too intensely Don Cupitt Page 83 C1672/20 Track 3 philosophical for the average person in England. It’s very noticeable that nobody will consider a philosopher to put on the paper notes, paper bank notes in England; it has to be people like Jane Austen and Darwin, or, people now under consideration. But, philosophers, like Locke and Mill, wo were actually great exponents of British values, and therefore you think might be popular, but nobody reads philosophers in Britain. Philosophy is not popular as a subject. So my books are not popular. People who care a lot about religion usually don’t like philosophy. So, only a few of my contemporaries have liked my books, and they are mostly people who were my former pupils. I’ve had the best pupils, but many of them have reacted sharply against me. [laughs] Yes. [pause] So, making any headway with my ideas has not been easy, but, I don’t mind about that anyway. It may or may not, my stuff may or may not be thought of interest in the future. I just don’t know. And I mustn’t care. Since I shall never know what may happen to my stuff, it doesn’t matter, I mustn’t let it matter to me.

[2:01:14] Who did you have…

In a sense… I’ll just say…

Yes.

Because there is no truth out there, we make everything, then, my own thoughts are only a possible sort of arch projection of a possible faith, a way of life, that we could live by, and I do live by myself. But I can’t claim more than that for it anyway. [pause] So, I don’t take the view magna est veritas et praevalebit, great is truth and it will prevail. Nothing [inaud] either that there is such a thing as ‘the truth’ out there, or that it will win. I dropped both ideas. [pause] Here’s a curious point. When Ernest Rhys established Everyman’s Library in about 1904 or so he planned a library of all the most important books, including some from right outside the Western tradition, some Asian ones as well. In the philosophy of theology section of the library he did reprint most of the major classics of Western philosophy, including, for example, a good bit of Plato, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and a scattering of the main philosophers through from Descartes to Nietzsche. But it was assumed then that an Don Cupitt Page 84 C1672/20 Track 3 educated bookish person ought to know a bit of philosophy, but today that’s no longer true. Pelican have managed to make a success out of publishing good translations of Plato and Nietzsche. Just one or two others but not many. That’s about it. So, philosophy is not very popular, but I love it, and I suppose I, I write it because I love it, and in the hope of doing it in a sufficiently pop, Nietzschean sort of way, to find a few readers, but you won’t get more I don’t think in Britain. [pause] Interestingly, Iris Murdoch much liked some of my stuff, for a while, but even she, hugely popular as a novelist during her own lifetime, when she published philosophy, had tiny sales, nobody wanted it. And to this day it’s true, that a biography of Wittgenstein will easily outsell any of his own writings, which people don’t want to read. Even though he is very important and very easy to read. To me he’s very clear. But people don’t like philosophy, it’s funny, but they don’t.

How did you know that about Iris Murdoch’s view of your work?

She mentions me in various places, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and so on. We, we did meet once and talk. I noticed in 1980 that my Taking Leave of God had appeared at the same time as her Nuns and Soldiers, and there was a marked similarity between the religious thought of the two books. On the basis of that I wrote to her. She had in fact read my book, and her comments on her copy of my Taking Leave of God are preserved at Kingston University, in the Iris Murdoch Archive. [pause] And, there’s a scattering of mentions of my ideas. Anyway, that, my noticing that led me to write to her. She rang up. Eventually we met, and Dennis Nineham, and Ruth gave us lunch, and we had some conversations and passed messages. But by that time she was already very sadly beginning to slip towards dementia, and I was slipping towards breakdown myself. So we didn’t have all that much talk. And then in my later thinking she, I became more anti-Platonist, more post-Platonist, where she became more dogmatically Platonist in her last books. So we grew apart. So, it was, we were like two ships that for a time crossed each other’s paths, but then they diverged again. It was just a moment when we thought the same. Mm. But, it’s mentioned, this is mentioned, and I published an article about Murdoch in a recent anthology, about her, and in her own letters that have just appeared. Mm. [pause] She still attracts a little interest as a philosopher, but, I suppose it’s by her novels that her reputation will, either stand or fall. She asked me whether I tried writing novels, Don Cupitt Page 85 C1672/20 Track 3 and I said, ‘No, I haven’t got the time for anything like it, whereas you have, but I haven’t.’

What did you think of her novels?

Like most other people, I liked the early ones, and I compared them with Ingmar Bergman’s films. They were something like Shakespearean moral comedies of ideas and so on. She thought of them as, in some ways, like Victorian novels. I’m not sure whether that’s the best parallel. But, yes, her best early stuff is entertaining and good. They get a big dull as time goes by. She thought her best ones were her later ones, but other people tend to see her in decline as the… They get too wordy, and begin to slip into Alzheimer’s as she loses control of the plots in her writing.

[2:07:45] Could you tell me about relations with people at SCM Press, regarding the publication of particular books. So, the extent to which you were edited or guided in certain directions, or conversations about sales, or titling, that sort of thing.

Yes. After the symposium, The Myth of God Incarnate in 1977, John Bowden, the theologian, cleric, who was the, running the SCM Press, did publish some follow-up material, liked my stuff, got me to write a little book about the whole controversy, he became my publisher. He acted as commissioning editor. He liked my early books. When in 1980 I sent him a book called The Autonomy of Religion, he liked it, he wanted to make something of it. He suggested that it be retitled Taking Leave of God, echoing a famous line from Meister Eckhart. And the book appeared with the title that he had given it. He was enthusiastic because he saw this as a revival of the radical theology of the Sixties, twenty years on in a somewhat different climate. [pause] So, John Bowden was my main contact. He didn’t normally ask you to change the content of a book. He might talk a bit about marketing or title. He was good at writing blurbs, but I got into the habit of writing a bit, a draft blurb to help make things easier for him. Taking Leave of God, he did succeed in making a big success of, but of course it was pretty drastic for me. But, it did, it did well. Very unusually, it was reviewed twice in the Times, it attracted so much interest It sold about 3,000-odd its first year, which was good for such a difficult book. And, I stayed Don Cupitt Page 86 C1672/20 Track 3 with John all the way through until, there was a book called Reforming Christianity, of about, the year 2000, 1998 or 9, I’m not sure, have to look it up, which he rejected, and I took it to Polebridge Press, because I had already begun my connection with the Jesus Seminar people in California. [2:10:35] But John Bowden was the main contact at the SCM Press, especially during the Eighties. And other than he, the other person was Peter Armstrong, the television producer, who made the films, the big, three big documentary projects with me: a little series called Open to Question; a two-hour documentary called Who Was Jesus?; and then the six-programme series the Sea of Faith, in the early Eighties. But Peter’s skill in making such a success of the Sea of Faith obviously helped my reputation a lot at a time when I was in much trouble with colleagues, and knew that I would never get any preferment or any promotion academically at all. [pause] So those were my two chief impresarios, the commissioning editor of SCM Press with John Bowden managing it and stuff, and Peter Armstrong, the television producer, who was in his seventies, head of religious broadcasting for BBC TV.

How did you come to meet Peter Armstrong?

He contacted me. I can’t remember. I don’t… I’m not sure. He must have heard some bit of interview I had given and thought perhaps I could do some programmes for him. I don’t remember details though. I might look in the archives, see if there’s anything, there’s a hint of it there. But that was the first thing we did together, was a series of just four little programmes with a studio audience, where I started with a ten-minute piece putting forward a thesis, and then we had a discussion. Peter liked those, then got the idea, wanted to make some big documentaries. [pause] Who Was Jesus? did reasonably well in the mid-Seventies. But the major excitement was over the Sea of Faith in the mid-Eighties, filmed 82 to 84. That came out with a large book which is still in print.

[2:13;08] When you first were meeting with Peter Armstrong, however that came about, what did you, what can you say about his motivations or his interests or his reasons for doing what he was doing? Don Cupitt Page 87 C1672/20 Track 3

He was a journalist, a TV producer, looking for ideas, out of which he could make programmes. And, and a television programme he envisaged in many ways as a kind of cinema project. It’s moving pictures, things like that, which was hard for me to learn, but an interesting skill to study. But he was looking for dramatically culturally interesting material to make religious programmes out of, first of all. He was a very hard-working, talented chap, and I’m still working with him now. Because there’s currently some talk of reviving the Sea of Faith. The documentary series of six one- hour documentaries had such, such effect that it led to the foundation of a Sea of Faith movement, a national network of groups in this country and another one in Australia and a third in New Zealand, plus a scattering of people elsewhere. Unfortunately in America the evangelicals stopped it being broadcast, they were able to prevent it. Roughly, they could organise a boycott of the products of any firm that dared to endorse the Sea of Faith and finance its publication by both transmission by PBS America or whatever network would put it out. So the evangelical censorship was pretty strong, and the whole series never got shown in America. This has had a bad result. As a result, my ideas have never been well understood in America, and I’ve never had much in the way of sales, even though nearly all my books have had at least a few copies distributed in America, sometimes quite a lot. I just never caught on. Nobody has a clue what I’m talking about. [laughs] I suppose, America is more conservative religiously, and it’s more preachy and inspirational, their whole idiom is rather different. Whereas I’m a, a nasty sceptical European, they wanted to be uplifting and edifying, you know, and, you have to… Rather like, rather like eighteenth-century Britain, there has to be a happy ending, everything will be all right. You want to dish out reassurance. When a book about me appeared in America, they wanted a picture of me to put at the front of it, and they said, ‘Nothing too recent. Send us pictures of yourself at various stages.’ The picture they eventually chose was one from 1963. That would be, apparently, the latest age at which I was still presentable enough to be acceptable to America. [laughs] 1963. Mm. So in America you have to be young and glossy and reassuring, and have big hair, and, and so on. There are people who privately think much like I do but they’re willing to package their writing in the local way, whereas I can’t do that unfortunately.

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Are there people that you are thinking of that do that, who think along similar lines but sell it better in America?

The best example is Stephen Batchelor, the Buddhist. He is a very interesting character, but, his ideas about reinterpreting and reforming Buddhism for today are very similar to mine. We always feel we’ve got a strong affinity when we meet and we talk, when we read each other’s stuff. And his books I’m not sell well in America. Probably well enough for him to make a living. Why it is that he is successful there and I ‘m not, I don’t know. But I think I’m probably a very bad commercial writer. I can’t write for a market. I don’t seem to please the public on a big scale, in the way that my friend Robert Macfarlane does. Macfarlane is a Fellow of this college, but he is an irresistible writer, so enjoyable and easy to read, that his books sell in tens of thousands. I’m just not commercial in that way unfortunately. I haven’t found the secret of being really popular. [laughs] I don’t… I don’t know why that is.

[2:18:27] Did you get any sense of Peter Armstrong’s own religious belief and thinking?

I didn’t. He would normally be fairly restrained about that, well still is. He’s married to an Indian woman, his second marriage, now. But, what his present views are, I don’t ask him, and he doesn’t volunteer. He’s mainly interested in his own film output. He makes film, and he likes that. [pause] When we were making the Sea of Faith, somehow everything came together. I attempt to draft the script, but Peter’s ideas are how to give it pictures that would really work. He got an excellent composer, location researcher, sound recordist, a very good cinematographer. Everybody was good, and they all came up, all the films came out really quite surprisingly well. It was one of the last old-fashioned, heavyweight BBC documentary series. When we travelled there was a crew of ten. [laughs] And, to a surprising degree people got out the best stuff, the real thing. When we went to Copenhagen, they got out the box of Kierkegaard’s papers for me to look at, you know, and, when we filmed the Galileo, the museum of the history of science in Florence, brought out real papers from Galileo. We indeed actually thought the documentary series was so well backed visually that we should have had footnotes or some TV equivalent for it. Because people were not aware that I was holding real Don Cupitt Page 89 C1672/20 Track 3 relics as it were, was in the real places, the real bloke concerned [laughs], real handwriting and so on. So, other countries were very helpful for the making of a fairly grand, heavyweight documentary film series. And Peter’s film talents made sure it came out well. As for my performance, he knew immediately when I got it right, and he knew when to say, ‘That’s it, I’ll use that.’ So, I, I enjoyed the project from the point of view of learning a little bit about how narrative film is made. It’s a difficult art, not one that I could claim to understand and practise myself at all. Mm.

[2:21:11] Who decided on the, the individuals to focus on in each of the episodes, which usually focused on two or three?

Yes. I did that. Peter wanted a systematic statement of my general position in philosophy of theology. But I, I said, I don’t think I can do that, I’m not anywhere near my final position yet. I’m not sure enough of my own ideas. And I knew already from undergraduate teaching that you can only communicate ideas to others when you have completely mastered them yourself. So I said, we’ll have to show something of how the modern intellectual situation of religion has arisen since the end of the Middle Ages and the rise of critical thinking and science. So, in each programme perhaps we can have one major thinker who sets the agenda, states the problem, and then some other religious thinker struggling with it in his own life and thinking. The first one was the mechanical universe, about the mechanisation of the heavens by the astronomy of the century after Galileo and Descartes, and the reaction to it, Pascal. So Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, gave the syllabus for the first programme. Then the others follow the same kind of pattern. That way, I persuade the people that, although all over England there were people having doubts and questions about religious belief, they didn’t know there had been such a long history of major thinkers before them, and hence the popularity of the series, that people discovered that their own doubts and anxieties were not completely new, but had been out there being discussed for centuries. That on the whole the great thinkers of Europe had never given up their ancestral religion easily or readily; on the contrary, there have been great battles all the way through with it. [pause] And the story is barely over yet. Anyway, we started with Galileo, Descartes; ended with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, because, at that time Nietzsche had become thoroughly acceptable, was quite well Don Cupitt Page 90 C1672/20 Track 3 known in England once again after a long period of eclipse. We didn’t, as we had made it originally, go on to more modern people, like perhaps Foucault, Derrida and Rorty, whom we might have chosen. No.

Why not?

I think at that time I only felt, I felt that the fully modern situation had been reached with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein to show one way of working it out, the fully modern position of philosophy. But, I myself had not fully absorbed French postmodernism yet. Perhaps it’s just as well I didn’t, because of course both Foucault and Derrida have gone into eclipse, rather surpassingly, after their death. The French themselves seem to have forgotten too. France has been in such a gloomy mood about its own decline over the last thirty, forty years. What looked at the time a very good and lively philosophical movement, centred in Paris, has rather evaporated. Although words like deconstruct are now part of the language, they’re not used very accurately, and, Derrida’s ideas about language are not understood very well. [pause] [2:25:03] When more recently we’ve been thinking of adding one or two more modern programmes to the series, I have thought of the possibility of looking at one or two striking modern women who have been exemplars of a kind of post-Christian sainthood. Simone Weil, Edith Cavell, Etty Hillesum, I’d like to do a programme, if I had the strength, I probably haven’t now, I’d like to do a programme about them one day. These are the saints of modernity. Yes.

Can you go into this a bit more, for the, for the listener who won’t be familiar with any of those?

Edith Cavell is remembered because, obviously in Belgium, she treated allied prisoners and so on as a nurse during the First World War. She was shot by the Germans. But some of her sayings, like ‘patriotism is not enough’, and, some of her sayings are well remembered. She was an early example of a kind of saintly humanitarian. [pause] Etty Hillesum was a grown-up version of Anne Frank, a Dutch Jewess of twenty-nine who died in Auschwitz. She was a product partly of her Jewish background, but also with an interest in Christianity and in analytical psychology. Don Cupitt Page 91 C1672/20 Track 3

And, she pursued sanctity in a most remarkable way, even as her death in the concentration camps was closing in on her, and she went voluntarily with her parents to dine with them, because she wouldn’t want them to go alone. So she didn’t seek to escape, even though she could easily have done so. But she’s a very interesting example of a modern secular saint. And, the third one I mentioned was… Huh! Who? [pause] Oh Simone Weil, also a Jewish woman, who wrote interesting books about her struggles with religion during the Second World War, and trying to share the suffering of people in Europe, and who perhaps died of starvation as a result. But, was for a time in the Sixties and Seventies a very popular, widely read writer. These are examples of women emerging from the traditional, rather hidden away status of women, to become notable religious figures in their own right, and pursuers of a new kind of sanctity, and I’d have liked to have done a programme about them. Because there was no notable woman in the series, apart from Annie Besant. Mm.

Is this one way in which you’ve been discussing a possible update of the programmes…

Yes.

…by adding on, by adding new episodes?

Yes. At the moment all that’s in discussion is that Peter Armstrong’s had a conversation with me rather like this one, and is thinking of turning my ideas into an extra programme, in his suggestion. If, if the BBC were interested in financing a bit more, I’d try to look at those three women perhaps, but I don’t know. It’s not, nothing’s definite yet. [pause] What was interesting was that the programme, the original series, has lasted so long, been remembered so long, which doesn’t usually happen with television programmes that I think people of goodwill in general have realised that Christianity is in extremely rapid decline, and although the largest and most important and influential of all the world’s religions, is suffering very severe rapid eclipse, and disastrous. And we need some kind of rescue exercise to save something from it. Yes. [pause] Perhaps that’s, that’s what Etty and Edith Cavell were doing. Etty herself says, historically a woman’s job has been to complete man. She’s existed for his sake. She doesn’t know what she is in her own right. She has Don Cupitt Page 92 C1672/20 Track 3 never had a chance to find out. And in a sense, Etty’s eccentric pursuit of a kind of sanctity was also her pursuit of trying to discover what it is to be a woman apart from your role in completing man, and giving him posterity and society, help and comfort and so on. So that the emergence of woman as a major religious subject in her own right is a very interesting new thing in the twentieth century that I would have liked to have done. I hope somebody else will try to do it.

[2:30:34] What do you recall of the immediate response to the broadcasting of the programmes? In other words, how it was written up, but also, what people said to you about it, you know, who knew you?

It was apparently widely read, and was much discussed. I got about eighty or ninety letters a day while it was going out. I kept all the letters. And then about, eighteen months after the book, first broadcast of the programmes, four clergymen from Leicestershire came to see me to say they had been meeting and discussing the issues raised by the programmes; they were thinking of calling a national conference. So I said, ‘I’m not really a religious leader. I can’t… I don’t think you could look to me to lead a movement, or anything of that kind, because I’m not sufficiently political in the right way. But I’m happy to be, to serve you in any way I can, for example to talk, if you hold a national conference I’d speak, or, help in any way I can. But what I will suggest is, that I’ll go through the letters I’ve received and send you some names and addresses of people you might invite to the conference.’ So I went through the letters, wrote down the names and addresses of about 200 people who had written particularly interesting letters. They were mailed, and the first conference was held at Loughborough in 1987 or so, in conditions of such secrecy that the names of the clergymen were not put in print at all [laughs], who had attended, in case they got in trouble. Anthony Freeman had already been getting into trouble, been expelled from his job and so on, by his bishop, for holding views like mine. [laughs] So, anyway, the first conference was held, and I think this year’s will be the thirtieth. Mm.

[2:32:53] Could you give us a sense of the range of responses that you got in those letters that were sent to you, eighty or ninety a day? Don Cupitt Page 93 C1672/20 Track 3

Yes. Well as it’s turned out, the letters were mostly from interested people who had got their own religious doubts and worries, mostly of a traditional, pretty obvious, kind. But, the Sea of Faith has turned out to do a job as a field dressing station where people can come and belong for three or four years while in personal transition, rethinking their own philosophy of life there: how are they going to get through? One of the classes of people we get is older people who are living through a very long modern retirement. It often happens nowadays that a bishop or a doctor or a lawyer whose profession has given them an ethic to live by and has propped them up, when they retire, suddenly find their engagement book is empty, nobody wants to hear from them, as they’re no longer interesting. Now they’ve got a twenty-year-old – twenty- year long, perhaps, descent into the grave. What are they going to do with all this time? And how are they going to find out what they really think? This is the sort of person who has religious crisis in old age, and it’s a new kind of person, very common now. The older books on the sociology of religion simply show people getting more and sure about God and life after death after the age of sixty-five up to the age of ninety. Rates of belief rise steadily. The situation today is different. Today, people start having serious doubts on retirement, perhaps particularly the clergy. Do I still want to go to church now I no longer have to? We had bishops coming to the first conferences with those sort of worries. What do I really believe? I’ve been propped up by the profession, professional ethic, for a long time. But where am I going now? What do I make of death? What do I make of this long period of coasting gently downhill? And I may say that I myself have been retired twenty years this year. Twenty years so far of furious activity and writing. But, one’s later years can become years of rather intense activity, actually, they are, common. Mm. Almost everywhere you go, talking, or at conferences, there’s quite a high proportion of older people; they have the time and the money, but they’ve also got the curiosity and the anxiety about what they themselves really think about death for example. Mm.

[2:36:00] So if letters from people who have religious doubts of their own is one category of the sort of letters that you get, are there other sorts of letter that you were getting then?

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I’d get a few simply denouncing me for raising unnecessary doubts. One even from a fairly close relative. She said, ‘Why aren’t you content with simple faith?’ [laughs] And, I didn’t know what to reply to that. But there are people who think that way. Darwin himself says that at some dinner he was seated opposite a member of the aristocracy, an earl, who said to him, ‘Mr Darwin, why don’t you give up all that kind of biology stuff, and turn to something really interesting, like table-turning or spiritualist mediumship?’ [laughs] He couldn’t understand why for some people an intellectual life is intensely exciting and, all that you want to do. It had no sense at all. So there were the simple faithers. And some people wrote to me saying things like, ‘The Deanery Synod of, so-and-so, has met recently and decided to censure your views, and write to tell you so, that we strongly disagree with them, disapprove of everything you say.’ And I’d write back politely thanking them for their views. [laughs] So, you get varied responses. But, I think nowadays, the BBC television, and Horizon and so on, have done enough simple popularisation of science and so on for them to realise that Ascension Day is a little bit puzzling. He ascended into Heaven, where he is received into a cloud, and now he’s seated at the right hand of God, and so on. That cosmology is no longer ours, and yet the Church never thinks of modifying the Feast the Ascension. Why does the Church go on celebrating the Feast of the Ascension when it all depends on such a bizarre and totally obsolete cosmology? It’s a puzzle. But a lot of lay people are worried about that kind of thing. But notoriously in church, nobody ever asks you what you think. You are invited to sit quietly and listen to the sermon, but you are not asked what you yourself think. So the Sea of Faith aimed to be an organisation in which people could let down their hair in a big way, and try to find out what their real doubts are, and what their real thoughts are. And it’s a sort of, therapeutic environment. And, thousands of people have passed through it over the years. And perhaps it’s helped them to decide which way they’re going. For a few people it brought them back into religion, not, it wasn’t a dressing station on the way out of religion, as they went further back from the front line. No. For a few people, a non-realist, a purely symbolic and ethical interpretation of faith gave them a way of continuing to function. [pause] How those people have stood up to it in the long term, I don’t know. I don’t know. I myself, in the early Eighties, combined non-realism and a rather expressivist idea of faith with pretty conservative practice. The services in the chapel here went on just the same as before. I got big audiences while I was preaching and so on. But, the practice continued Don Cupitt Page 95 C1672/20 Track 3 fairly conservative. But… Of course today, I no longer find that satisfactory. I think, religion must give up all thoughts of life after death and another world, a supernatural world above. It must become totally secular. Broadly, an ethical supernaturalism must replace the old metaphysical supernaturalism. Ethical supernaturalism means being much more generous than a lot of the do-as-you-would-be-done-by kind of morality expects. But we’re used to this. Strangely enough, modern people are capable of supernatural generosity, as for example when they give blood. Organ donation is a good example of a kind of generosity which in the Middle Ages they wouldn’t have understood at all. It does happen. Yes. [pause] I was impressed a while ago when the Germans took in nearly a million refugees from Syria. Of course, Germany’s under-populated, it has a declining population. The probability is, those refugees are going to do Germany a pile of good. But it did require initially real moral imagination on the part of Angela Merkel to be so generous. And she’d got to persuade people and live down the short-term unpopularity. As I’m sure there’s no doubt that immigration, mixing cultures, bringing in, transfused with fresh blood, is very good indeed for a country, and I’m sure it will be for Germany. But the imagination to be really generous to people a long way off, or perhaps, even to people who are your enemies, is a hard thing to learn, but modern people do it. So, modern people may be capable of an ethical everyday life version of Christianity which in its own way is just as good as the old religion was, if not better.

[2:42:25] Presumably, in making those television programmes you had no sense that they would lead to something called the Sea of Faith Network.

No. No.

What did you and Peter think, or hope, might be the result of making the programmes?

I don’t think we even thought about it at the time. Two years of very hard work indeed finally led to the broadcast of the programmes, and they’ve been favourably reviewed. We were highly relieved. I wasn’t even prepared to think about doing more for the moment. I wanted to get on with writing. Making the programmes Don Cupitt Page 96 C1672/20 Track 3 proved intellectually stimulating to me, so, it did help give me the horsepower to write more books afterwards. I gained impetus. [pause] But I had also, of course, to reconcile myself to a lot of hostility, both from the academy and from the Church, of course. That you just have accept as normal, that’s how the game is. I think, today, in academic theology, somebody who holds the sort of views I held in, thirty years ago, for forty years ago, wouldn’t have difficulty. Often it’s the first person who attracts all the odium, but then, somehow his ideas become normalised, and become part of the syllabus, or one of the possibilities. And people accept that.

Did negative reaction from colleagues in theology and from the Church come following the book Taking Leave of God, or, or from the programme or…?

Both I think, yes. But… Yes. [pause] I… This did rather pray on my mind, and may have been a factor in my eventually having a breakdown. But I’m unsure. I think we’ve said already that, one punishes oneself in these matters, for thinking new thoughts, for betraying one’s own deepest, most, deeply ingrained beliefs. And it’s, it’s very hard to be seriously self-questioning. So I don’t know whether my troubles after the Sea of Faith particularly were endogenous or exogenous [laughs], whether I was punishing myself, or whether people were punishing me for being so energetic and doing so much at such a speed, and, people not liking me, potential disturbers to the syllabus on conservative subjects, when somebody has new ideas. [laughs] A university is seen by society and by the Government as a kind of factory that produces employees for industries. Universities don’t want ideas, they don’t want any intellectual excitement. They want an efficient routine at low cost, so you can get a degree and earn your money. The idea that universities are actually concerned with things of the mind and new ideas may crop up is horrifying in the real world. [laughs] Yes. Because it disturbs the syllabus, and… Yes. [laughs] I should have been more good-humoured about it, or, good-humoured about it all, but there it was. I’ve always been intensely a religious person. I had a passion of, both for Cambridge and for the Church of England. So, my troubles were psychologically difficult for me. Whereas I think, John Robinson never had particularly psychological problems after Honest to God. He took all the fretting and the stress, he rather enjoyed the publicity. [coughing] I don’t think there was ever a period when he had simply to withdraw every cover. I don’t think there was. But there was with me anyway. And I just Don Cupitt Page 97 C1672/20 Track 3 bashed on as best I could with the books. I still have some new ideas. Like, what is a story, for example. There’s a book that’s been translated a bit, and, had some influence, outside theology altogether. I remember at the time when I wrote that I was working virtually every day of the year and getting down a few words, even on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, I was so workaholic. [pause] But as, as Nietzsche says, having new thoughts is extraordinarily exciting mentally, when you get a good new idea, and see its possibilities. But I tended to waste my chances. I had good new ideas too fast, and few of my books were properly researched or written out at the length they should have been, to make the most of the ideas I was having. And I don’t know what to make of that, but, or what people may or may not say in the future about it. But I tended to publish first drafts and rather hasty sketches where I could perhaps have taken several years and made something big out of a book. I did too much in too much of a rush and paid the price, that may be the truth. I’m unsure. Mm.

[end of session]

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[Track 4]

Could you start today by telling me about the group that you joined that produced a book finally, The Myth of God Incarnate, but it was a, I gather a grouping of people who were holding discussions to start with. We talked about your book last time, and about the Sea of Faith, and not about this group, The Myth of God Incarnate.

Yes. The Myth of God Incarnate, 1977, was a symposium of essays by liberal theologians, who all agreed that the notion of Jesus as an incarnation of God, rather as incarnations of God in Hinduism, was mythological. This caused great scandal. But it’s part of the changeover from dogmatic to critical thinking I think. When it comes to critical thinking, you regard all ideas as human products. You don’t just accept them dogmatically without thinking, but you see them as human historical products, they arose in a certain context, they do a certain job in a certain kind of society and so on. That book was edited by John Hick, the liberal Presbyterian philosopher of religion, but it did include a number of Anglicans, and at a fairly late stage in their discussions they asked me to join them. That was about ’75, ’76 or so. Because I was just producing Who was Jesus?, television documentary, and beginning to move in a more radical direction myself. So I joined them. And, I suppose I was already suggesting then that, whereas the teachings of the historical Jesus, his moral teaching, have returned in modern times, especially since the mid-nineteenth century, the old picture of Jesus as cosmocrator, world ruler sitting on a rainbow, ruling the universe, very out of date now, in a sense the historical Jesus is alive still, but the divine Christ is dead, he belongs to a past age. The book was wildly unpopular. People were very grumpy. I think amongst the religious and amongst church people the older dogmatic ways of thinking are still strong, but there it is. So, there was a very agitated press conference when the book was released. It sold quite, quite well. And we produced a reply to it, and there were various books written by conservatives. So it was a, a foretaste of my later struggles. One or two other members of the group had difficulties with their own universities. I think there’s a feeling that theology as a subject survives only if the churches are willing to support students to study it. If theology becomes systematically heretical, strays too far from church teaching, the churches will no longer support the subject, and it’ll slowly die. That was the fear, after The Myth of God Incarnate. I suppose that’s still a problem, but in spite of it Don Cupitt Page 99 C1672/20 Track 4 there has been a gradual drift over from faculties of Christian theology to departments of religion, or religious studies, in most universities.

[03:45] Thank you. And do you remember anything of the discussion of science by this group at all?

I don’t think there was discussion of science, no. No. I do remember from that period, and earlier, discussion about whether the Big Bang was the same event as the creation of the world by God. The Papacy even rather endorsed that view. But people at the liberal end of Christian theology were mainly interested in demythologising the received dogmatic theology to make it easier for people to rethink it all. We were not primarily concerned about science, I think. Although, science was beginning to alter ideas about the relations between men and women, about heredity, and sexuality. For example, when science discovered that men and women make an exactly equal contribution to the genetic make-up of the offspring, that was a step forward in establishing the equality of the sexes. Before then, it had been thought that the man contributes the baby’s form, and the woman only its matter. There was a link between the words mater and matter, materia, curiously. So, woman was thought of as inferior or subordinate so long as people were in the grip of a false Aristotelean biology. The establishment of the equality of the sexes, and the function of the sexual difference in making evolution possible, obviously made a big difference to the churches in time, and is still making one. That’s an example of the sort of issue that does make a big difference. I suppose too, the general recognition of our past history and our descent from animals, and kinship with them, also helped to switch religion towards this world, and towards a higher valuation of the emotions. I rather think that in classical Christianity, Plato and Aristotle give the idea that what makes us human is our reason, but once our descent from animals and our close affinity with them had been established, you are bound to take a higher view of the drive to life, aggression, sex and so on, you were bound to see human beings as constituted as bundles of emotional drives, and not just as rational, immortal souls trapped in flesh. So, science did gradually, particularly in my early years, was gradually changing religious thought. But we didn’t particularly debate individual issues yet, not very much. I’m trying to think of good science and religion books from the religious point Don Cupitt Page 100 C1672/20 Track 4 of view. All I remember is E L Mascall, Arthur Peacocke, Ian Barbour, those are the writers whom we read in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies. There were not very many. And the standard of books wasn’t all that high. Perhaps most people accepted the broad compromise: science deals with the world of fact, and religion with the world of value. Now these were distinct worlds. That way you could defer, or shelve, put on one shelf, set aside, conflict and, serious clashing. Mm.

[07:44] Yes, is that your, are you able to say more about your response to reading those sorts of books, those few books that were…

Yes. I don’t think they made all that much difference at the time. They didn’t really tackle the problem, set in modern culture, especially since the work of Kant and Hegel. The very idea of a supernatural world, populated by invisible spirits and the souls of the dead, and by God, and the angels and saints, that idea of a supernatural world behind this world, which has influence over events in this world, that idea is dead, very, very dead, has been since the early nineteenth century really. Some sort of naturalism, some sort of purely this worldly orientation, was becoming unavoidable, which meant there had to be a rather radical revision of Christian doctrine, more radical than most people could yet envisage. I’m trying to think of the first influential Christian atheists. They were fairly early. R B Braithwaite, 1955, and Paul van Buren, I should think about ’67 or so. Those two books, in Braithwaite’s case only a lecture, tried to imagine a purely empiricist reading of Christianity as the following of an ethical path as taught by Jesus and illustrated in the stories told by him and about him. That sort of minimal account of Christianity had been foreseen by Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century. So a very radical theology had been envisaged by a few people quite a long way back. But obviously for theologians like me who were trying to practise the faith who were ordained and so on, that was as yet rather risky and rather far ahead of where we could go.

[10:02] Did you at any point read the books written by and influenced by someone called Donald Mackay, which tended to make that complementarian argument of the relationship between science and religion? Don Cupitt Page 101 C1672/20 Track 4

Yes. Yes, I remember, his works on determinism and freedom. I remember, was it the essay Freedom of Action in a Mechanistic Universe, raising an issue that had been around as long as Newton. If Newton’s laws on motion are correct, and Newton has correctly described things, all events in the material world, how can there be such a thing as freedom of action? What account are we to give of a relation between mind and body and so on? Yes, those science and religion questions have been around since Newton. Yes. And they’ve never been answered very well. I think as modern quantum physics came to be better understood, people began to be less worried about determinism. And the laws of science today are more, regarded more as statistical rather than strictly mechanistic. So I would say, Mackay was concerned with rather traditional science and religion issues, but people are beginning to move away from those, and I’ve never myself felt much troubled by the determinism issue. [pause] I do accept that our life is considerably circumscribed, and our own psychological life is considerably determined by factors outside our control. We are to some extent the creatures of our time and our make-up, our genes and so on. Our freedom is limited. Yes, I, I accept that. But, I don’t think I need the absolute metaphysical freedom that Kant tried to envisage and to keep in his system. So perhaps a whole issue there has been continuously changing since World War II. World War II, at the end of World War II few people in Britain yet understood the new physics, it was still taking shape. But as it came to be better understood with every roaring development, the physicists became the popular philosophers and sages of the age. As philosophy declined in public esteem, physics rose. And the physicists aren’t worried by, let us say, determinism, threatening their own scientific enquiries for example that they themselves had determined. So it’s not such a bothersome issue as it was. Mm.

[13:12] Thank you. What do you remember of the television programme that followed the Sea of Faith programmes, which was a discussion featuring yourself and A J Ayer and Hugh Montefiore?

I do remember it. I remember that I was horribly nervous. I don’t know why, but I was very stressed out by the severity of the hostility I was getting from the academy and from the Church. So I was too nervous to acquit myself well. [pause] I should Don Cupitt Page 102 C1672/20 Track 4 have been more combative. I remember regretting that I hadn’t done a good job, but there it was. That’s all I remember of it really.

Do you have any memory of what the others were, what Hugh Montefiore was saying and what A J Ayer was saying?

I suppose… Yes. Ayer was struggling towards realism, British empiricist philosophy of religion. It’s always inclined to move towards phenomenalism, the idea that there’s nothing but the endless stream of sense experience passing before our eyes, impinging upon our senses. We can’t know what’s on the far side of that, we can’t get out it of our own heads to see what may be on the far side of the veil of sense. There is only the veil of sense and the patterns we project upon it. Now British empiricism was always inclined to go that way, and so was I. But Ayer was nevertheless searching for a kind of realism about the external world. All his life he tried to, he felt that realism was what you had to go for. So, I was always drifting in the direction of a kind of idealism, and Ayer didn’t want to go that way. So, I do remember him, during the course of a discussion, picking up a glass and saying, ‘This is a glass isn't it?' or something. That’s the Dr Johnson defence of realism, you kick some stone or something and say, that’s a physical object. But I was surprised that Ayer, who was quite a clever man, should have produced such a naïve argument [laughs], for naïve realism, which is obviously wrong. [pause] In reply to people like Montefiore, I think I want to say, why does the Church still celebrate compulsorily a whole lot of feasts which are highly mythological and of which we can make no sense? For example, why do we celebrate Ascension Day? Historically, it doesn’t exist really. And it embeds us in a completely pre-scientific view of the world, which imagines that Heaven is no higher above the Earth than the clouds. Jesus goes up like a rocket and disappears into a cloud, and he’s in Heaven. I mean, this is a purely mythological view of the world, a time when people had nothing but religion for which to describe the science of things on high, meteorology. So what they call the science of things on high, mingled the weather, astronomy and theology all in a single continuum, and only a couple of miles above the Earth. It’s amazing that the Church expects the priests to celebrate the Feast of the Ascension and kind of explain it, year after year, still, even now. And there’s more like that. And, I must admit, I don’t think Hugh had a good answer. [pause] I remember first feeling this absurdity when, in Don Cupitt Page 103 C1672/20 Track 4

Christmas, about 1959 was it, when the Roman – when the Russians put up Sputnik 1, and it was going round the Earth making pinging noises, as we were singing carols in the parish church at my home about angels bending near the Earth to touch their harps of gold. And the account of the sky in the morning paper and in the hymn book were so far apart from each other, I thought it was crazy. Why am I in church, why am I ordained, when the world of religion is so preposterously at variance with the world we actually inhabit? Again, for some reason you can’t say that to bishops because, you don’t become a bishop unless you are a kind of stuffed shirt who refuses to openly discuss such questions [laughs], who uses a sort of method of silent crushing, simply to repress any serious discussion of the subject. But anyway, I, I felt at the time of Sputnik 1 the absurdity of the fact that the modern Christmas carol service had only begun after Einstein’s theory of relativity. Why was the Church going backwards historically, at a time when modern science was roaring ahead with extraordinary success? So the, the increasing anti-intellectualism of the churches has distressed and bothered me all my life, and it’s only with a handful of people like the present Pope that I see somebody clever enough to try to do something about it.

[19:04] From the point where you stopped reading science and reading the history of science, in what ways have you kept up with developments in science, what, where have you tended to go to for your science?

Colleagues in the college. There’s a, there is an astronomer in the college, a chap whose speciality is the life history of stars. And so colleagues in the college. Journals like Scientific American and New Scientist. You can learn a bit about what’s going on. And I’ve had a few lifelong friends who are good scientists as well. So I’ve kept in touch. I’ve always had an interest in the philosophy of science which I had done as an undergraduate. So I follow the work of those people, while it was important. Though nowadays nobody takes very much notice of the philosophy of science. I was interested in Popper and Feyerabend, and the radicals, twenty, thirty years ago, but their successors are not around today. It may be that scientists have won the argument, and the philosophy of science doesn’t matter very much; if you’re a sophisticated scientist you can admit that present scientific theory is only provisional, and will be replaced with better theory in due time. What science gives us is ways of Don Cupitt Page 104 C1672/20 Track 4 thinking about the world that are good enough to be going on with for now. We shouldn’t claim more than that, and that’s enough. That’s the view I now take, that, both our ordinary construction of the world, in ordinary language, and the more sophisticated picture of the world given by our science, are human cultural creations, which we can make use of, while they work. When they begin to be obstructive, we should discard them. But of course, everybody’s used nowadays to a curious situation that we can operate with seven different theories of the world in ordinary language. We still talk about sunrise and sunset, even though we’ve thought for many many centuries that the Sun is the centre of the universe and it’s the Earth that tilts, not the Sun, as it were. And we still use Newtonian physics to make a lot of everyday calculations, as well as our sophisticated modern physics. So it looks as if everybody now understands the relativity of theories. I’d like the same thing to be done in religion, of course. And people less dogmatic about their religious ideas, more inclined to take them as ways of thinking that are useful for the present. And I think we’re all getting a little bit multi-faith in religion too. I’ve always admitted that a large part of me is Buddhist, as well as most of me being Christian. And my closest single ally today is in fact a Buddhist, a close friend with whom I happen to be dining tomorrow night. He comes to Britain once a year, we have a meal. So, I like the religious ideas of some other traditions besides Christianity. I think that’s how we are nowadays. Within the churches there are lots of people who like yoga, or like meditation, and they borrow these things from the East. Why not? [pause] So I’m hoping, as society gets more cultural and multicultural, the churches will become less dogmatically prescriptive. That’ll be a gain.

[23:12] Could you, could you talk, as far as you would like to, about the effect of Taking Leave of God and the Sea of Faith on your career? You have a website that says that these things shut down your career.

Yes.

You’ve alluded to a period of having to retreat and recover, but apart from that, we’re, the listener is not sure precisely what happened to you…

Don Cupitt Page 105 C1672/20 Track 4

[laughs] Yes.

…following those things.

Yes.

So, in terms of the Church, and in terms of the academy, you know.

Yes. I prefer not to comment on this much in public. Because my later solar ethics, and my idea of living without any sentiment, suggested that I shouldn’t ever get involved in complaint of any kind, or being defensive, or, fighting back against my critics. It would be better simply to affirm one’s life and do one’s own thing, and disregard the hostile criticism. So I haven’t wanted to sound embittered. People sometimes claim, reviewers have claimed, they detect a note of bitterness in my books. If so, I’m sorry, I should find ways of keeping it out. Because I wanted to be purely affirmative as possible, and not to retaliate. The effect of these two books on me. Taking Leave of God caused an immediate row. There was a review in the Times and also a little story, and a week or two later another review. Bob Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, criticised it in a sermon at Cambridge, but then wrote me a private note apologising for having criticised me. [laughs] That I’ve never said before, but now he’s dead and perhaps I can say it. But he did send a private note, saying he wouldn’t really have wished to criticise me. Some other senior figures, like the Bishop of Ely, Peter Walker, defended me fiercely against critics. So I, I didn’t lack defenders. Dennis Nineham and Iris Murdoch at Oxford thought the book Taking Leave of God might be historically important, and discussed a symposium of essays about it, and the book did have a lot of influence on students, and it still sells, it’s still read. At the same time there was also a lot of fierce criticism. My colleagues in the faculty, if they reviewed the book, would try to kill it by describing it as popular, which is quite difficult, but that’s a standard academic way of killing an idea. [laughs] There was a lot of resentment of the publicity I was getting. People who, my colleagues, didn’t like to be constantly asked about me and so on. So, there was a good deal of friction, and this did have a rather bad effect. I could have no promotion, I got slightly demoted actually. I achieved a lectureship with tenure in 1972, and after that… 1976, sorry, 1976 I finally got tenure till the retiring age. It was after that that Don Cupitt Page 106 C1672/20 Track 4

I could safely come out without finding I would not hold a job; I got a university letter saying, ‘You are reappointed to the retiring age.’ So I couldn’t actually be forced into unemployment. But, people who wanted to come to Cambridge and study my ideas with me were turned away, by my faculty. And it was that sort of thing that obviously did hurt. I got no more research students, not allowed them, because my ideas were arousing so much interest. And there was similar resentment over Sea of Faith, because, it had some popular success and the book sold rather well. So I was given a difficult time, and, I have never held a benefice in the Church. The highest rank I ever achieved in the Church was Assistant Curate. So I never even became a vicar. And haven’t had any income of any kind from the Church since 1964. [pause] I’ve just not held church posts. [28:22] So, my career was over. The leading journals declined to review my books. So although there are a lot of them, they’re the most widely read books on theology of that period, they were not reviewed in the leading journals, in order to keep down sales, and even today you may well find that at Heffers in Cambridge, none of my books is in [on] sale. There’ll be thirty in print but none on sale. So… So there was some reluctance to sell and review my stuff. And I was aware that my ideas were unpopular, and I was being squeezed out. John Robinson had had somewhat similar treatment. He never got a job in the Church again. But Dennis Nineham managed to persuade Trinity College to appoint him Dean, and in this college post he could bat out time till his retirement. I rather had to stay, but, the whole thing was beginning to get on my mental health, because, I had hoped that I was doing a constructive and useful job for Christianity, and should not be seen simply as a kind of external enemy. But there it is. The better you do by your own lights, the more antagonism you arouse, and of course there are many examples of theologians, like the Catholic modernists for example, who were driven out, and in some cases driven to their deaths, early deaths, by the Church. That’s been the position of the liberal or radical theologian since about the time of D F Strauss. In retrospect, now, I, I really do not want to feel any bitterness or regret, partly because the long-term value of my own work is still in doubt anyway, I’m sure. And partly because I’ve had great consolations. I was very fortunate to be a Fellow of a collage which I love. I was very fortunate in my private life, in my marriage and family. So I had, I had a haven, and I had a very secure income; if I lay fairly low I could get by. And defiantly carry Don Cupitt Page 107 C1672/20 Track 4 on writing books, and building up a body of work that must eventually be looked at carefully by somebody, even if it was a short run and didn’t do well. But it was not easy. My sales began to fall, off and I was eventually fired by SCM Press, went across to America and began to publish there. Came back to England and tried again with SCM Press, and then got fired by them again. Because my sales were barely enough to justify publication you see, so it was difficult. So although today I probably have over thirty books in print, the total sales are still small. [laughs] And my annual income from all my writings is barely the same as the fee for writing a Guardian column in the daily paper, one column. So it’s, it’s a hard battle anyway, being a revisionist theologian. The conservative forces in the churches are very strong, and they’re determined to hold on. [32:18] Let me give you another example, that of Judaism. It’s still the case to this day that there have been lots of revisionist forms of Judaism, including some which take my view of God. There’s polydoxy, there’s reconstructionism, Mordecai Kaplan. There are all sorts of people like me. But still to this day, almost two-thirds to three-quarters of all Jews remain Orthodox, of the ultra-conservative kind, who really believe in a God who thinks in Hebrew, and have the whole Torah in his mind from all eternity, and cause angels to be taken to Moses and so on: i.e., the whole pre-scientific, very naïve, realist dogmatic belief system is still dominant, and I imagine that to this day most people could give a better account of the Genesis 2 creation narrative than they could of the Big Bang. To this day. So religious ideas, even when they’re badly wrong and a bit of a menace, are extraordinarily tenacious, and I’ve just got to accept that in these matters, things move slowly.

[33:37] What might you have wanted to do if there hadn’t been this reaction to those books and to that film? So, you say that you’ve, the highest position you achieved in the Church was Assistant Curate. Does that mean that you would have, if not for these things happening, attempted to do other things in the Church, or to do other things academically?

I think, I always wanted, once I had started, to have the freedom to develop my own thinking, the way it was going. So, eventually I avoided any attempt to found a new Don Cupitt Page 108 C1672/20 Track 4 denomination, or go into a straight political leadership struggle in which what I said would be representing the views of a large body of followers. I felt I probably had to do a rather individual, personal, journey in my books, and get my own thinking straightened out as far as I could. So I had given up an active leadership role, by the end of the Sixties I had given up such ideas. I think I was originally scheduled to be a church leader, and I directly succeeded two Archbishops of Canterbury in my jobs at Westcott House and so on. Two Archbishops in my post at Westcott House. And it looked as if I had been picked out for leadership. I was once offered a post one short of a diocesan bishop, but declined it, because I realised that I wouldn’t be happy in a leadership role. I really wanted the freedom to do my own thinking. So that’s what I ended up doing. And I, I had to take the view that whether the world liked my ideas or not, I should try to work something out that might be satisfactory as religion for a fully modern person, one could live and die with it. But that turned out to be a long job, and I had years of rotten mental health, especially through the period around 1989 to 1995, about that period. Yes, I took early retirement, and have got gradually happier and stabler ever since. So I’m not now seriously threatened. I don’t make waves in the way I used to, but I have managed to get the books out anyway. And, I’m reasonably content. But I haven’t come up with a new creed for the Church. It’s more of a personal journey. Demythologising the old religion has led me towards a philosophy of ordinary human life, and what I call solar ethics. It’s led me to a kind of liberal left Quaker version of Christianity that I have worked out for myself. A few other people I know think and live along similar lines, but we’re not a major religious movement yet, nor likely to be perhaps. I don’t even know whether there needs to be, needs to be anything like organised religion in the future. It may be better if the Christian ethical tradition, nowadays called humanitarian, because the word Christian is so embarrassing, that will continue anyway. [pause] And the memory of the Christian tradition will be there for historians. But I think churches are now in headlong decline, and it’s suddenly started spreading in the US too, rather surprisingly. Amongst Americans, in the youngest adult age group, people are getting to be almost as secular as Europeans. So, yes, I, like other people, undertake the personal pilgrimage, a bit like the existentialists, through which I’ve tried to make the philosophy of life a serious subject, and tried to find a vision of the human condition and an ethic with which I can be satisfied, and with which I can die content. Now I’m in my eighties have perhaps only a very few years left, but I’m content enough, I’m Don Cupitt Page 109 C1672/20 Track 4 not complaining at all. And, so far as one can learn to live generously and without any hostile feeling in one’s heart towards anybody, so far as one can say yes to life to the end, that’s as near to eternal happiness as a modern person can get. So I’ve done about as well in my long-term research as I could hope for, and I’m left not complaining now. It’s all I can say really. Mm.

[39:14] Are you able to say anything more about that period, you may not want to, but about that period, 1989 to ’95? You mentioned last time that you had lost your voice at one point.

Yes.

But, the trouble is that, if you say your mental health was poor in that period, it leaves, it leaves it open to the listener to imagine what that means.

I see, yes.

Can you give us any sense of what it meant in your case?

Yes. In the Michaelmas Term 1989 I just couldn’t go on, I couldn’t speak in public I’ve met this with theologians before. It often happens, that a organist can no longer move his fingers, he can’t play the instrument, that a pianist may get the same thing, a violinist. But in the case of theologians and preachers, it’s losing your voice. There was one previous fellow of Emmanuel who had had to give up the ministry when he lost his voice. It’s, to my mind, a symptom of the anguish caused by the loss of traditional faith. It’s happened to one or two, to contemporary theologians, notably I think the great German Jesuit Karl Rahner, who was perhaps the most eminent Catholic theologian of his generation, in his last years he fell silent. Other people read his stuff aloud. And, reviewers and commentators wonder whether he was still a Catholic at all. But he didn’t speak in public. I was in that position in ’89, I could not carry on, and I got sick leave, and was granted by the university a period to recover enough to be able to carry on. I took two terms off, and resumed for the Easter Term of ’90, but limped along, managed to give some lectures, but found it very difficult. Don Cupitt Page 110 C1672/20 Track 4

Occasionally got students to help. By various devices I managed to keep my teaching going, until about ’95, ’96, when the writings of that period are very faulty, and I should perhaps have done less than I did. A difficulty was, I wouldn’t feel able to retire until I had got enough pension income to retire on without being excessively hard up. I needed to earn a living. I got severe anxiety and depression. [pause] I felt that I would recover if I could retire, first from the post of Dean of the college but keeping my fellowship; secondly from my university lectureship. I completed retirement in 1996 at the age of sixty-two. By paying additional voluntary contributions and this and that I made sure I’d have enough pension to survive upon. So that was all right. But those years were very difficult, and they had a bad effect on my sales. Though I, the stuff I did for America were fairly good at that period; the stuff I was doing in England was terrible. If you go out of our own immediate context you can function a bit happier. Something Freud noticed. I think Freud noticed that people are often neurotic in their native language, their mother tongue, but fluent and sane and perfectly OK in another language. Yeah, perhaps I was in that position. At any rate, the first American books were not too bad, in the Nineties. But After God, 1996, was a disappointment, I regret having published it.

Why?

It’s no good. There are a few good ideas in it, but it was written too fast under pressure for money. It was translated into various languages, a few people liked it. But it’s a bad book. Often I’m not sure which of my books are bad. [pause] Sometimes, the books with the most new ideas in are bad because they’re difficult to read, but they do have new ideas struggling to get out Whereas the most fluent books have least new ideas where I’ve fully assimilated everything. And of course both Freud and Jung held that a period of mental breakdown is also a period of very rapid growth. So I, I was growing, a kind of second edition of my ideas were forming in my head through these very difficult years. But the books which I was trying to write were no good because I hadn’t got it all interwoven and smooth, smooth running, yet. [pause] In a sense, I did have, even then, my own method of becoming systematic. Over the years I had delivered ten or a dozen different courses of lectures on various topics, so I had well over 100 handouts in my big stock of handouts for lectures.. Each August and early September I’d go through these, and look and see what kind of Don Cupitt Page 111 C1672/20 Track 4 stuff I was teaching, and whether it was all up to date and consistent, some bits with others. So I revised the ones that needed revising each year. And by this means was able to develop my thinking systematically, simply because I was teaching such a wide range of topics. That was a help. So in the later Nineties I was getting going again. There’s a book called The Last Philosophy of ’96 or so which shows me coming out of the worst time with somewhat improvement to my general philosophy. Perhaps reaching something fairly close to final form. [45:53] It’s interesting, because, I looked to see what dates other people had their bad years, years of breakdown. With Hume, Derrida, Foucault, I think all had their breakdown period very early in life, student years, twenty, twenty-five, that sort of period. I had mine in my fifties or early sixties. Very late. Perhaps I was just a very late developer. Kierkegaard had one in his mid- to late-thirties. Nietzsche had a catastrophic one in his early forties. Anyway, everybody above I admired, who cracked up at some time or other, the sole exception being Kant, who was always hideously sane, but then got Alzheimer’s in his last years and hated it. But, other people who, who had been full- time thinkers, have had similar problems. That cheered me up, and I thought, well in time I will come through this, but it’s not easy, very difficult. I don’t know how far it was a matter of external pressures on me, and how far it was autogenic, it was a matter of me punishing myself for tearing up the foundations of my own thinking and selfhood. There is an element of self-punishment in these problems I’m afraid, there just is, as I now think. So I’m less inclined to blame other people, I want to forget all that, and simply say, yes to life, while I have life, and, enjoy, enjoy life as best I can. You can keep this up, though, damaged. All my life I’ve achieved, I’ve found most happiness through the sense of sight. I’m a, I have a very strong feeling for art in particular, but also for natural beauty. So I’ve always found the world of phenomena glorious. The very word phenomena comes from phaino, to shine. It’s linked with the idea of having radiance or glory in the natural world. And I’ve always felt that very strongly, and it’s always been a matter of religious comfort for me. I still feel it now, even though my sight deteriorated rather badly with macular degeneration. One eye is more or less non-functional. But I still feel it now. So even if one’s a bit in decline and a bit damaged, one can still say yes to life, and, and that I feel able to do. The love of life, and the sense of the beauty of the world of sense experience, can go on increasing right up to death, and that’s a considerable comfort. Mm. Don Cupitt Page 112 C1672/20 Track 4

[49:14] And finally on that period. How did your, how did your sort of typical day differ from the sort of sense of a typical day that we’ve had before? You described when you were at Westcott House, the sort of pattern of the day. You’ve mentioned periods of writing late at night. You mentioned writing on Christmas Day once and that sort of thing. But I wonder, during this period, if we could see you, what would we see you doing over those years?

’90 to ’96 were my last years of work. I was still seeing students about ten hours a week, lecturing about four hours a week. In the vacations, writing every morning. I’d think about the previous day’s ideas, and where I was wanting the argument to be going. Overnight I’d be thinking about that. And I’d hit my desk and scribble each morning until about noon, and then begin to look over what I’ve done and correct it. So I was still doing a bit of writing most days in free times, simply to keep a book going. I remember reading recently that in the great American biopic of Abraham Lincoln the actor, who I think was Fiennes was doing it, stayed in character throughout the whole period that the film was being made, i.e. his make-up, his hairstyle and dress, and everything. And he was Lincoln all the time. I wrote that way, in the sense I tried to keep the ideas of the book before me all the time during the period in which I was writing. So I generally wrote fairly intensely with quite a lot of concentration on the ideas and argument of each book. I’ve still not reread a lot of the stuff I’ve written, but of the ones I have reread, about half strike me as quite good, and about half I could have done without. But then I suspect, maybe my own judgement about what of my own stuff is any good is unreliable.

Nevertheless, what do you pick out as your best?

Oh, I don’t know. Possibly the Solar Ethics of 1996. Possibly Creative Faith of 2015. Other people might say the BBC Sea of Faith book of 1984, which is not so original, it’s more a commercial product, written for a market. One of the few books that I’ve written that have been commercial. Mm. I’m unsure. Taking Leave of God, I’ve not reread carefully for many many years, but it is still read. A few copies are sold. Unfortunately the one person in the world who knew me better than I know Don Cupitt Page 113 C1672/20 Track 4 myself was Nigel Leaves, who did write a couple of books about me, and he had a commission to write a third, coming up to date, but he died a few months ago, to my great sorrow, and will now not write, but, he understood my stuff exceptionally well, and might have been the best person to say what he thinks may be of lasting interest. I don’t know. [53:04] I don’t even know that we have much future, because I’m so concerned that we’re not going to do anything like enough to stop catastrophic global warming. We’ll be far too slow, we’ll do too little too late. This may mean that our whole cultural tradition is coming to an end in the next couple of generations or so. I think we may know it’s coming to an end within twenty years, when big cities start to go under water, big coastal cities. When I’ve thought that, I’ve thought, well, we have to live without very large-scale, long-term certainties. If you can be solar in the present moment, and reasonably care free, and live generously, that may be all you can hope for. And, the whole idea of being vindicated in some long-term future has to be given up. I don’t believe in any sort of last judgement. And I don’t believe also in the idea that history, or some sort of substitute for God like that, will in the long run prove me right or wrong. I don’t… I don’t think our cultural tradition, our religious tradition, is now vigorous and strong enough. I think we’re in decline. Science and technology still go on, but in philosophy, after Nietzsche and Heidegger perhaps, we don’t look like going much further at the moment. There was a brief flood of excitement in France in the Seventies and Eighties, half a dozen notable thinkers, but they’ve gone into eclipse rather quickly, and we now don’t hear much of them. I got very excited by the new French philosophers at one time, but they’ve, they’ve slipped away. So perhaps the European tradition came to an end in the two world wars, and, we may not be able to do much to revive it. It looks as if the churches will not be revived, but, the core ideas of the ethics of Jesus will live on anyway, even if his name is forgotten, his ideas will live on under such phrases as ‘humanitarian ethics’. So I’m pleased about that at least. So I haven’t got a big enough picture of where we are and where we’re going, to be able to picture any sort of long-term developments. No.

[56:21] Could you tell me about the experience of supervising PhD students, including, I think Sarah Coakley was one of yours? Don Cupitt Page 114 C1672/20 Track 4

She was a pupil at one time, but, I… But I don’t remember her well at all as a student. Except of course that she was so good-looking that everybody said, ‘What’s the name of that girl?’ So, she was the best-known member of faculty simply because everybody in the faculty asked for her name when they saw her. [pause] I didn’t have any PhD students after I became notorious. I think I remember one who was a very unstable, unreliable person, who was given to me only as a punishment. [laughs] But, no, I just didn’t get… I did supervision of undergraduates, and in the undergraduate field I did teach the best people of that generation. I still got the best students, and that was a comfort. I had some very good people. And I was able to do a little to promote the careers of a few people by writing in support of their applications for jobs and so on. So I was able to do a little along that line, but… I didn’t have research students. I occasionally got sent a copy of a PhD or a, a dissertation or something, about my work. And some of that is in the archive now at Hawarden. So there was some student interest in other universities. But that’s all I can say. I think it may be that the move over to a rather culturalist understanding of Christianity has occurred. That’s to say, amongst many of the younger generation of theology students, people don’t think that Christianity is dogmatically just true. They think of it rather as a complex, evolved cultural tradition of great interest and complexity within which all sorts of moves are made and so on, but it’s not got the kind of philosophical anchorage in reality that used to be supposed in the days of neotermism[?] and such like philosophies. Indeed I’m surprised with many solid young theologians to find they’re studying Christianity rather as if it were Classics. It’s interesting, there’s a lot of talented people, a lot of ideas are put back and forth, but, you don’t think of the thing as a whole as being true. [inaud] I made that point in a recent book by saying, before the Enlightenment asked Christianity to justify its own affirmations, what kind of apologetics could Christianity produce? And the answer was, there was very very little apologetics before the late seventeenth century. Almost the best example one can give is a book like Oregen’s Contra Celsum, written in about 270 to ’80 or so, where Origen, the theologian, tries to defend Christianity against the hostile remarks of a pagan writer named Celsus. The apologists earlier on, there are a people of some modest ability. But it’s all extremely crude by modern standards. The apologetic arguments for thinking that Christianity might actually be really true, produced in the first 1500 years of a faith, were pathetically inadequate by Don Cupitt Page 115 C1672/20 Track 4 modern standards. They’re astonishingly weak. It was only after books like Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious and Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation, he’s challenging sceptical books of around 1700 with the Enlightenment spirit of radical criticism being directed against Christian beliefs. Only then did people begin to wonder whether Christian doctrine could stand up to the sort of tests of truth that scientific affirmations were expected to pass. Of course the answer was no, of course not. [laughs] Even today I think people often don’t realise that, that, the apologetic arguments and the standard of reading of these gospels and so on shown in the classic theologians of the first 1600 years is very very low. There were a few Christian philosophers who have produced a few good bits of philosophy, but they didn’t read the gospels closely. They never really read the New Testament to see what support it gives to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation and so on. So it’s surprising in retrospect how loose-textured and weak intellectually Christianity was, until it was severely challenged by the Enlightenment, and it’s never been satisfactorily defended since, oddly enough. [1:02:19] John Hick, in a book called, something like Christianity at the Centre, his best little apologetics book, attempted a popular defence of Christianity from a modern philosophical point of view. That’s about the best that can be done; it’s very weak. It’s about as good as can be done today, but it’s not good enough. So it’s curious in retrospect. Then of course the same might be said of Hinduism too, it’s a, it’s a collection of traditional stories that have meant a lot to people and shaped their view of the world and so on. But they were very never convincingly argued for. [pause] Yes, another example I sometimes give is this. Christian apologists from the late third century onwards frequently produce an argument for the truth of Christianity from the successful and rapid spread of Christianity around the pagan world, and from the preparation for the gospel in Greek philosophy and the general culture of ancient paganism. These are very feeble arguments. And in terms of rapid spread, rapid conquest of large parts of the Mediterranean world by - if that’s your criterion on truth, then Islam spread far more rapidly and far more convincingly than Christianity. For example, the glorious building called the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem was begun, was built less than a lifetime after the death of the Prophet, it was by about 690 or something our dating, it was built. Whereas, a Christian building of the same standard didn’t appear for about 500 years, at Ravenna. So, Islam’s civilising Don Cupitt Page 116 C1672/20 Track 4 influence and its rapid spread was far superior to Christianity’s, which shows the feebleness of the best-known of all apologetic arguments. Again, another apologetic argument was, you can be sure the Resurrection is true, because your local bishop has got the message from his predecessor in the line of bishops that goes right back to the Apostles, who saw the risen Lord. That’s why people say the faith is apostolic, because the successors of the Apostles, who are the bishops, certified the truth of the faith to you. But if you ask your local bishop to explain to you what the Resurrection of Christ is and how it happened and what his reasons are for thinking its true, I doubt he could produce anything really [laughs] I mean as an argument for something's truth it's absurd. It takes one a long time to realise this. Wittgenstein did say, he was astonished by how weak the evidences of religion are. [pause] We expect them to be much stronger than they are, but, when we look at them closely we see how curiously, very weak they are. Mm.

[1:05:47] Could you tell me about the influence on you and your work of developments in science, science of the brain, developments in science and philosophy about where consciousness is, the contributions that science has made to changing ideas of what the self is.

Yes.

The influence of that on your work. I ask in part because I think there’s a link between your thinking and your interest in computers and information systems that might be related to the career of your son. I don’t know.

[laughs] Yes.

So, so if you could, yes, if you could cover that.

Yes. Perhaps the strongest influence has been the development of Big Bang theory. Remember, when I was young the steady-state cosmology was still being propounded by Hoyle, Gold and Bondi, Fred Hoyle having been a member of my college. But gradually we got used to the idea of Big Bang. And in my own later work, a version Don Cupitt Page 117 C1672/20 Track 4 of it appears in my philosophy as ‘the fountain’. The fountain is my way, my term for referring to the way everything is a kind of outpouring stream of rushing pure contingency, that all the time pours out and passes away. On the largest scale, this is the picture of the Big Bang and the expanding universe, like a huge fountain circling out and spreading. On a smaller scale, it’s also the human self, as an up rush of libidal energy rushing out into expression. So a human being is like a fountain of signs, a fount of communication. We long to come out, to get ourselves out into expression, to make our contribution to the human conversation that goes on all the time, and that creates the world. So the image of a fountain replaced the old metaphysics of substance in my thinking. I gave up thinking of the self as a substance and as immortal in the early Eighties, and from the Nineties onwards thought of the self as a kind of outpouring stream that turns into signs and becomes communication, through our self-expression. This expressivist idea of the self then influenced also my ethics, and said our deepest desire is to come out into expression. We come up till we pass away. So through these ideas I was able gradually to find ways of religiously affirming pure transience. Instead of looking for eternity, I found eternal happiness and comfort in a picture of the universe like the fountain. From close-up, the fountain is nothing but rushing contingency. But when you look at it from a long way away, it’s a symbol of healing, of contemplation, of repose. Fountains are put where several crossroads meet in gardens, especially in remembrance gardens where the dead lie. Fountains are associated with eternity, with peace, contemplation, and rest, reconciliation. So, my vision of everything as utterly transient became gradually reconciled with my one attempt to see, find a religious consolation in the contemplation of life. Life itself, then, I began to see under the image of the fountain, and this became a replacement for the old Plato and Aristotle kind of metaphysical substance on which I had been brought up. [1:09:48] So far as the brain is concerned, and consciousness, my main theme on that has been to link consciousness with our use of language to bend back and talk about itself. Self-consciousness is a turning back of language of a kind that we get in humour, and I think the cleverest remarks about consciousness and self-consciousness are made my Nietzsche. Nietzsche says, we need to be able to make a distinction between what other people say and what they really mean or think but never say to us. We need a sort of appearance-reality distinction in order to understand other people. So, we Don Cupitt Page 118 C1672/20 Track 4 impute consciousness to them by way of saying that the real selfhood of a person is a bit different from his self-presentation. Hence the concept of pretending, feigning and deceiving. A lot of words in ethics are related to this contrast, of which you get a bit in the Bible and a bit in the ancient Greek philosophers, and interestingly, the most influential book on the young child’s formation of the idea of the human mind is a book about how children develop the idea of pretending. A contrast between what a person really means to do and what she lets on to you, as it were. In St Paul this appears as the contrast between the inner man and the outer man, and in the Book of Samuel, in the Old Testament, it’s a contrast between outward appearance and the heart. So in different languages the same point is made. So I tend to link consciousness with a certain level of linguistic sophistication. And I notice, by the way, a point made by Lacan, but also by Freud. Yes. That the unconscious is linguistic. It thinks in jokes, puns, humour. The unconscious mind - its symbolism and so on - implies language is there already. That language creates consciousness. I was thinking of Freud on the dream work and so on, and the very influential reading of Freud’s book on the interpretation of dreams, when I was young. It persuaded me that our consciousness is linked with a running of language in our heads, and our noticing of puns and allusions and hints and other lines we can’t follow up and other lines we don’t want to follow up. So in my later books, when I’m thinking about, thinking at night, lying in bed and brooding over whatever ideas currently obsess me, I’m listening to a running of language in my head, and, well… So I don’t think of consciousness as a pure self-presence to itself of a thinking spirit, that Cartesian and older notion; I take rather a modern view, that consciousness is a special effect of the movement of language. Mm. Notice that when I use a word to fix something you experience, like the word ‘orange’, I immediately introduce an allusion to other occasions, to a fruit that’s called orange, to the colour of the robin’s breast, to the colour of the fox, the colour of the marigold, the colour of the orange tip butterfly and so on. I start thinking of other things that are orange. That’s to say, when I start to fix the world in language, I’m putting general terms onto things which suggest other occasions and set the thought running in different directions. It’s that way in which the use of language sets the mind in motion, sets little trains of thought running in different directions. [1:14:25] Don Cupitt Page 119 C1672/20 Track 4

So, I’ve always wanted to give a predominantly linguistic account of consciousness, which means that I can’t really understand how one could think, possibly think of a computer as ever answering back, and being thought of as a person. Because the computer doesn’t have that sort of multi-level, multi-directional, divergent kind of thinking. Computers are linear, not divergent in their thinking. [pause] Yes, I say, [laughs] yes, it’s often said that men are convergent, they think in a straight line as it were, concentrating on a single point, whereas women are divergent because they have to do so much multitasking. So women are always thinking about five or six things at once. Well, computers are convergent, whereas I have sometimes said in my later books, I think I’m turning into a woman, meaning that I’m becoming highly conscious of the multiple divergent character of thinking. So although I’m super- rational, I’m no sort of calculating machine. I’m more like a female. [laughs] I am, I’m thinking about several different things at once.

[1:16:01] Is that view of the difference in male and female thinking something that you think has any sort of reality, you know, is something…?

Oh it’s just a traditional cultural joke, isn’t it, really. No more than that. Except that men have to train each other, be trained, for the hunt. For tens of thousands of years men did the hunting for flesh, and women did the gathering of nuts and fruits and roots, for food. Well, women gather stuff that’s in place, it’s very diverse, it’s all over the place, but they don’t have to be so highly trained to hunt food down and catch it, in collaboration with others. So, when men do a war dance or a hunting dance before they off on the hunt, the idea is to get these minds fixed on the image of the animal they’ve got to catch, together, in collaboration. So male thinking needs to be very focused, and disciplined, whereas women’s thinking doesn’t. Not in the same way. Women have just got to remember other things like, where the children are, and what they’re up to, and so on. Mm. [pause] I was just thinking too of a, of the same contrast of a friend who was Master of this college saying woman is postmodern man. He was in a sententious mood but I suppose he had the same sort of [inaud] in mind. [laughs] Mm.

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And can you tell me about your, your relations, such as they are, with computers? Because during your career, computers came in as something that not only might be in an office, but might be at home. And I wondered to what extent computers entered your life over the period.

Only very slowly. I’m not a techie. I’m not machine-minded. I’m not the sort of person who would himself buy the latest gadgets. My son spontaneously turned out to love computers, and we bought him the old BBC computer all those years ago, and, I remember him working with Peter Armstrong on the Domesday Project, which was a kind of schools project, for producing a modern Domesday Book in the form of huge computer disks with information about various topics all over Britain, a kind of catalogue of the country, on two or three big disks, that you could analyse and even ask questions, on this huge index. But he taught himself computer languages and became eventually a very accomplished and versatile computer programmer. So naturally he has attempted to educate me and give me gadgets, and make sure I learn how to operate them and so on. But I’m still not very computer literate. I’m interested in a metaphor, because there’s been such a strong tendency to want to think of the brain as a computer. Whereas I’ve tended to take a more arts and more literary view of the brain. I’m closer to, say, David Lodge, the novelist, whose thinking is in some ways a bit like mine. And he has a book called Thinks, one of his eight novels, about the nature of thought, and he’s a clever bloke. That’s more how I think.

[1:19:55] And to what extent have you studied, or followed rather, developments in the kinds of science that, you know, put electrodes into brains, and match up events with sort of stimulus, that sort of…?

Yes.

I ask that because, there’s a section in your book, The Worlds of…

Oh, it’s a terrible book. All those years ago. Yes, primitive and horrible. Yes.

The Worlds of Science and Religion. Don Cupitt Page 121 C1672/20 Track 4

Yes.

OK, well I’ll ask you about the book in a moment.

Oh, yes.

That includes a section, there’s a chapter on objective knowledge, and you’re talking about mind and brain, and you, at one point there’s a, there’s an image of someone experiencing something, having the electrodes put on the brain with some sort of read-out, but they can see the, their brain while they’re having the experience through a kind of prism.

It was a kind of, joke story to create a puzzle that you might look at, your own brain being operated on. Yes. It was a kind of, joke parable, to show the absurdity of science trying to find memories as if they were physical objects in people’s brains that could be looked at. Surely it’s not like that. And to picture the brain as if it was a kind of person inside you head that makes decisions and does things and so on, or the brain as a kind of filing system, or even a shelf of videos containing your memories. Those metaphors are crudely mistaken, to my mind. It’s the whole person who talks and thinks. It’s that whole outpouring stream, coming out into expression, finding the right symbolism for expressing yourself. That’s where we should locate consciousness, intelligence and so on. So I’m not very happy with the kind of neuroscience that attempts a precise psycho-physical parallelism, matching each of our mental capacities to some sort of physical region or structure in the brain. I don’t think that’s very useful. It’s rather like picture theory of meaning in the early Russell and Wittgenstein. Trying to find out how a factual sentence has meaning, Russell and Wittgenstein explored to the limit the theory that the meaning of, the sentence is a kind of logical picture of a state of affairs. But what about negative facts and conditional facts, and the famous non-existent elephant in the room? No, these, these lines of argument get you nowhere, they’re a muddle. [pause] No, no I, I simply stick to reiterating, thinking is a matter of the motion of language, I still, I stick to that idea. I don’t think we’ll find consciousness by looking closely enough at the physical structure, or the motions taking place within the chemistry of our brains. Don Cupitt Page 122 C1672/20 Track 4

[1:23:21] And where, again, would you have kept yourself up-to-date with what was going on in these sciences? You know, how would you have known about these attempts in neuroscience? Was it, is it the same sources that you mentioned, Scientific American and New Scientist?

Yes. If you… One advantage of the college system is that you do have friends you can talk with about these things, and we’ve always, I always used to gossip with scientific friends about what they were doing, have arguments. And raise my questions about realism and anti-realism with scientists dealing with these things. I remember my pleasure in discovering once that the realism/non-realism issue in theology is very closely paralleled in economics because debates about the nature of money, and whether it’s real or not, the gold standard and value and that sort of thing are surprisingly similar to God and mammon, have rather similar logical status. They’re real only in so far as people believe in, they work as currencies in which people can sort of swap obligations. [laughs] Mm. Yes, I… Yes, I understand that this interview is for, well, a particular interest in the science and religion issues. That’s not usually been very bothersome to me I don’t think. Though I have met some and talked with some very aggressive, very secular scientists, like the excellent Peter Atkins at Oxford, who’s very combative and difficult and prickly. Well, I’m usually taken by that sort of bloke. I always want to ask him about how he himself views his own selfhood and his own life, and how he views his own decline in his seventies and eighties as he gets old and comes to the end. But I’ve noticed that some scientists are very tough-minded about themselves, and, and are not made religious by the proximity of death. I don’t know. But I, I have sometimes tried to talk with those sort of folk, to find out whether there are any areas in which they’re open to the possibility of religious thought as being helpful. Perhaps the most tough guys would not admit to any need for religious thought at all. [outside noises] Mm.

[1:26:18] In what circumstances did you meet and talk with Peter Atkins?

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Oh, once or twice at the Hay philosophy festival. At the Hay Festival there’s a philosophy wing called HowTheLightGetsIn, put on by the Institute of Art and Ideas in London. Hilary Lawson, who’s the leading figure there. Atkins lectured there several years, so did I. So bump into him there. Mm. I also remember lecturing for him at Oxford once. I remember his room in Queen’s College I think. And reading one of his books, in which he set out a scientific world view very clearly. But I, I’m quite sympathetic to such prickly blokes. Because it’s the case that in our culture, even yet, scientists have difficulty getting what they say taken sufficiently seriously. Even yet, the arts people always claim to be superior. I know this from my son’s years at the National Gallery, where he as a scientist would invent with his computer new technologies for the study of paintings, and the arts people would simply swipe them, take over the results, and without giving the scientists any credit, pronounce on the stuff from their point of view. And, and John used to tell me that one time he and the other scientists at the National Gallery would pretend to put on North Country accents and pretend to be provincial mere scientists, compared with these rather poncey and precious London art historians. [laughs] Mm. [pause] Yes. John invented the technology for recovering the under-drawing, underneath a Master painting, but also an effaced inscription of a stone, off a rock or a stone. He can use a variation of his own scanning technique to recover an inscription that used to be upon a worn-away, effaced piece of rock, where the original tapping in of the inscription with a chisel had slightly altered the orientation of the atom some way down, and the reflectivity of crystal surfaces, minute ones, some way down into the stone. So even after the inscription was entirely effaced, with a clever enough program and several scans from different points of view you can recover a lost inscription, and it will come up. And John could produce a lost inscription, which was correct in a language he didn’t himself know. [laughs] Real fun. So it was a kind of magic that he had done this, but, he had done it. And archaeologists have been able to look again at a whole lot of stuff that’s been dug up in the past and recovered text off it. Mm. So, I’m, I’m broadly speaking favourable to science, and obviously impressed by its fabulous achievements, in, after two or three hundred years of today’s rapid sort of development. Mm.

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You’ve talked about your son’s career. What about your daughter, or daughters’ careers?

Caroline, the older daughter, in many respects like me, she became a professional psychologist, a clinical psychologist, and as such she achieved consultant rank by about the age of thirty-one or two. So she was always thought to be something of a star. And today is still head of psychological services for a hospital trust in south London. At the same time she had also got very interested in Tibetan Buddhism, and is also a fully professed Tibetan Buddhist, active in the Oxford group and in a group she and her partner have themselves started in south London. So, yes, she and her partner have perhaps, continued and are developing the Buddhist side of my thinking, which finds some analogy between the Buddhist notion of the self and modern psychology. And there are quite a few psychologists who do incorporate some ideas from Buddhism into their own practice. Of course, mindfulness and the kind of relaxation therapy, as a form of psychotherapy, is very common nowadays, even on the Health Service. [pause] So, of the three children, Caroline may be the one who stayed closest to my ways of thinking, but in a Buddhist rather than Christian context. And she’s not particularly keen on theory, but she is more interested in new ways of finding out and treating the problems which she actually gets. She’s interested in, for example, applying standard cognitive behaviour therapy even to psychosis. Nowadays she herself treats psychotic patients who seem to have the craziest delusions, and finds ways of talking through the delusions and gradually working a way out of them. Historically we’ve always supposed that you can only use the talking cure, psychoanalysis and things like that, with neurosis, and psychosis is of a different order of severity, and handed over to the psychiatrists. But Caroline is breaking down that distinction nowadays. And she’s starting something that, I think the next book she edits will be on that. Mm. So, it’s, yes, surprising. I hear sometimes what her favourite patients are talking about. And they make Oliver Sacks, [laughs] seem very small beer. The weirdest psychotics, she can apparently understand and help. Mm.

And, the other daughter?

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The littlest one, the youngest one, sort of baby of the family, went to do philosophy at Leeds, but ended up then also in psychology, and then also social administration at Nuffield in Oxford. Caroline was at Oxford too. And she became a charity evaluator, whom you call in, if your charity is getting a bit old and not very productive any more, she will study your objects that you were originally founded to, to achieve, pursue, and, retrain your workers and generally liven up your charity and make it more effective. Sally is very energetic, very good value, very good at her trade apparently. But has moved away from London and now lives in a big family house down on the south coast, where you can buy a mansion for the sake of half a house in central London, for the price of half a house in central London. And her, because her daughters are getting up towards secondary school age, she can give them each a bedroom, and more space, and, probably better schooling, by moving of London, and that’s what they’ve done. But for the moment she stays with charity evaluation, and may perhaps go freelance in that area, in the voluntary sector anyway. She’s done a little writing, but, is less academic than the others. She’s not done learned writing.

[1:35:28] Thank you. Did you read The God Delusion when it came out?

No, I’m afraid not. No. Because it’s not philosophical. I suppose, Dawkins had in mind Freud’s description of belief in God as not just an illusion but a delusion. A piece of harmful, erroneous kind of thinking. No, I didn’t, because, I didn’t particularly disagree with Dawkins, and I didn’t want to get involved in fighting that particular battle. He was really taking on the evangelicals. But that for me is now so far behind, I’m not really very interested in tackling their beliefs. Whereas I suppose in Dawkins’ case, their continuing hostility to Darwin, and their attempt to prevent a study of evolutionary biology in state schools in America annoys him. I think that’s quite right, quite understandable, that biologists feel rather aggrieved about the way they’ve been treated by Christians, and still are. So I, I’m in general sympathetic to what he’s trying to do, but I didn’t feel particularly involved in the controversy, which was slightly different from the main line of the way my own thinking was going. Again, I suppose I didn’t want to be a particularly high profile public controversialist, because that’s not the kind of thinking I do. My stuff is rather private, and I had to wrestle with it in isolation, on my own. And so, I’m afraid I didn’t get involved. I Don Cupitt Page 126 C1672/20 Track 4 gather it sold a million copies one way and another, and, made him rich. Mm. Well, good for him. [laughs]

And what about the work of the other, New Atheists as they’ve been called by the media?

Again, I felt some sympathy, because, as you see in the case of Islam and in matters like female genital mutilation, a lot of religious tradition is very harmful. [pause] And, the view that our traditional organised religions do more harm than good and we need to leave them behind, I can well understand. I read the Sam Harris book, and agreed with it really. I think the churches have become a bit of a menace. They need reformation drastically. And the homophobia in the churches is ridiculous, when such a high proportion of the clergy have always been male and gays. [pause] I suppose that since the end of the Middle Ages European culture has been developing extremely fast, new ways of thinking, and I’m interested in that, and where it’s taking us. I don’t particularly want to defend or attack the historical orthodoxy, which to my mind is no longer deserving of serious consideration frankly. [pause] I did read and review some of Dawkins’ earlier books, and liked them. He’s a good populariser of Darwin’s ideas. Think of Stephen Jay Gould and other people like that, a number of writers over the last 100 years, have made their living simply by showing what a hugely powerful and interesting theory Darwinism is, can be applied to an astonishing range of phenomena, and is always very illuminating. [pause] Even yet we haven’t come to the end of the use to be made of Darwin’s ideas. It just goes on and on. [laughs] [pause] But I, curiously, I’ve never met Dawkins. No. Don’t know him.

[1:40:11] And have you followed any work in evolutionary biology since those books that you were reviewing, and I should imagine it was The Selfish Gene and some, and some following work in…

Yes. Climbing Mount Improbable.

Yes. Yes.

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Yes. Yes.

But work in epigenetics and, and convergence, and the kind of new, new evolutionary biology, is that something you also follow in the say that you have followed other sciences through New Scientist and Scientific American?

Yes. No, I haven’t supposed there’s going to be any way back to the old metaphysical and teleological ways of thinking about nature. I suppose I am still an orthodox Newtonian mechanist in the sense that I think in naturalistic terms about the natural world, and I don’t really see any imminent purposiveness driving it. We use the word orthogenesis for evolution apparently in a straight line. But I think nowadays it’s beginning to be understood why that sort of thing happens. For example, why in some climatic conditions it pays an animal to be big, so that over the millennia a creature steadily increases in size, from being a little dog to being a great big horse. Orthogenesis. Those things can be understood without reviving any idea of teleology, imminent purposiveness or goal seeking. I think I remain orthodox mechanist really there. Wanting to avoid any talk of purposes. Mm.

[End of Track 4]

[Track 5]

Could I ask you for your memories of the reasons for writing The Worlds of Science and Religion, and that might include…

I was asked to. I was asked to write it by…

1976.

Yes. I was sked to write it by Jean Holm, who I think is probably named in the book as the general editor of the series. It’s a series of little books on religious studies intended for schools. I don’t see Jean Holm. Ah yes, I’ve found Jean Holm here. Yes. They were intended for last year of, in the sixth form or the first year at university, just to get young people talking about things. But it’s so long ago and I don’t think I’ve read the book in all these years. My stuff only became critical in, perhaps Taking Leave of God and The Leap of Reason, but then, in Taking Leave of God, Christ and the Hiddenness of God, Taking Lave of God. By the end of the Seventies I was beginning to start my own distinctive project, whereas that was a commissioned book, written for particular editors. There was a second one called The Nature of Man following from it. Yes. In Cambridge, I had been instrumental with others in setting up a little science and religion paper in the Tripos Part I first year. There were four topics in this paper, classical physics and Christian thought, Darwinian biology, the anthropologists on religion, and the [inaud] psychologists. These four topics, Freud and Jung that last one. So we taught four little topic areas in the science and religion debate. Gave a, between us gave a short course of lectures on each of them, and had a paper on it at the end of the first year, to get people into theology by broadening their thinking out a bit first, before they became intensely concentrated on the study of the New Testament or something. And we did that for, for some years. Arthur Peacocke worked with me on that, and John Bowker. I did the, yes, yes, I did two of the four topics I think. It was quite a useful topic, and nowadays there is some science and religion taught in the faculty. There’s the Starbridge Lecturer on the subject. Mm.

So this, you developed this course while you were at Westcott House?

No. At Emmanuel, in my…

Oh, OK.

We were trying to update the Tripos, introduce some religious studies topics within it. There was a course called Introduction to Modern Theology, which was rather close to the topics eventually discussed in the Sea of Faith films. And there was a science and religion paper. About eight papers altogether in this first year course; students had to do five or, whatever. Quite a good course to start people off on theology by thinking how the subject had once been almost as wide as culture itself. The sciences have differentiated themselves out of a larger culture that used to be dominated by religion. Mm.

[04:00] And could you tell me something of the, of the beliefs and outlook of those two people who you worked on this course with? You’ve mentioned Arthur Peacocke and John Bowker. So Arthur Peacocke first.

Yes. He was Dean of Clare College. He had been a biochemist himself. He took orders. And he wrote a big book called Christian Theology and Natural Science. His son became a well-known Oxford philosopher. [pause] Yes, I knew him quite well, but, he died a good while ago, he died rather early. Mm. John Bowker still lives in Cambridge, but he’s rather old now. But he moved towards comparative religion, got a chair in Lancaster, moved up there. But then because of his wife’s ill health they retired, both of them retired back to Cambridge, and still live in South Cambridge. John had originally started as an Old Testament person, then he learnt Arabic and did a bit of Islam. He got interested a bit in science and religion, comparative religion. Those sort of religious studies topics, it was on the strength of that he went to Lancaster, but then he retired early in order to look after his wife. So, neither of them became very well-known in English theology, though they were both respected figures. And John has remained active and still writes for popular religious studies books to this day. He’s in his eighties now. Mm.

Did you get to know Arthur Peacocke’s view of your Sea of Faith programme for example, or your more controversial books?

No. No, I don’t remember that, anything about that. No. We were simply, we were friends, and sympathetic to each other’s ideas. [pause] I suppose, I was gradually giving up the idea of chopping bits off the creed, to chop it down to size, to make something modern and believable out of it. I was thinking of a more radical recast of the whole way we think about religion. Whereas, Arthur Peacocke, like the well-known later Polkinghorne, who is also still alive, was a scientist who, well liked a good deal of the traditional Christian doctrine of creation, because it had pictured the whole of the cosmos as being intelligible in a single mind. So that the Christian doctrine of creation implied the rationality and comprehensibility of the natural world, and its systematic unity. So actually there is something slightly theistic about science all along, always has been. Because natural science presumes a coherence of the unity and the rationality of nature as a whole. Mm. And God’s knowledge of the world is a kind of matrix within which the scientist functions. The scientist thinks God’s thoughts after him, as they said in the seventeenth century. The difference being that whereas God makes the world real by just thinking it, a scientist arrives at his copy or representation in the world by trying to think God’s thoughts by trying to trace the divine order in creation. Mm. It implies a realistic account of science I suppose, and of God and of creation. Arthur worked within that paradigm. I was trying to get right out of it. Mm.

[08:37] Their, roughly speaking, their position on the question of scientific explanations of the world and religious ones would be close to the bit in the beginning of the book where you talk about the conversation of your two children, and the younger daughter said, ‘God made us,’ and the older brother says, ‘It’s nice to think so, but actually, it was evolution.’ And you said that that you said to them, ‘Well I think you’re both right.’ That would be the, the sort of position I think that Polkinghorne and Peacocke are taking in seeing…

Yes, that’s right. That’s right, yes.

…evolution being the means that God chose.

Yes. It shows that at the time when I wrote this book in the Seventies I was still a fairly standard, liberal Anglican. Yes.

Except that you go on to say that that’s an unsatisfactory, shallow answer.

Yes. Yes, yes. Yes. Yes. [pause] Yes. [laughs] Mm.

[09:42] Now, could you take us, it’s quite a long, this question has got quite a long reach, but, we’ve discussed the books that made you sort of well-known, but I wonder whether you could give me a review of your, of the development of your thinking over that very long period, from, say, the late Eighties to the present. But there are some very good reviews of your work, and there’s a website. So, we don’t want to, I suppose, reproduce anything that already exists in the public sphere, but could you just map out for, I suppose, the listener who might want to engage with all of your books, the sort of significant twists and turns in your thinking, or the key developments in your thinking, including the significant points where you have engaged with, say, a new philosopher, or a period where you’ve particularly read… I know you’ve mentioned the period where you were particularly reading the French philosophers. So, what was the effect of that on your writing at that stage?

Yes.

So, I know you’ve, at least in two books, attempted a kind of, a cube map of your, of your thing, but could you now orally sort of give us a sort of overview of the key twists in terms of your thinking from late Eighties to the last book, 2015.

Yes. Yes. It’s not easy to do simply.

No.

There’s always been an experimental character to my writing. I’ve got a new fad, a new interest, and have pursued it in a few books, to see what I can make of it. Roughly, but only very roughly, late Eighties, catching up with French postmodernism, writing my own postmodern quartet, which includes Life Lines, The New Christian Ethics, What is a Story?, books like that, Creation Out of Nothing. From ’90 onwards, there’s an interest in Heidegger, the religion of being, The Revelation of Being. I was caught briefly by the religious thought of the last stage of Heidegger’s career. It is possible that The Revelation of Being is one of my best books, but I didn’t stick with that. I knew that I was not

understanding Heidegger very well. [pause] There was a period of interest in ordinary language, which led to three or four little books, that led me back to Wittgenstein. The ordinary language books started at a time when I wanted to return into ordinariness in religious and philosophical thinking. I started looking at phrases in ordinary language to find out what ordinary people’s world view is, and what they think about religion, how it’s changing. So I invented the study of new idioms coming into ordinary language as a way of studying the movement of the zeitgeist, the way religious thought is changing. In the first of those books, The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech, I tried to prove that we now use the word ‘life’ in the same sort of way as we used to use the word ‘God’. A second book in that series was called The Meaning of It All in Everyday Speech, and I showed how various totalising words such as ‘it all’ also carry something about religious thought. And Kingdom Come In Everyday Speech was about eschatology, and Heaven and Hell, and how we now use that sort of language. [13:36] That led me in the Nineties towards a growing interest in democratising both philosophy and religious thought. In the past, expertise in high philosophy and in high theology was for tiny elites only. Many of the great works of the Middle Ages existed in a single copy. You had to trek down to Paris on foot to borrow the book and read it, and then return it. Somebody like Thomas Aquinas probably only had direct access to about ten or twenty books. The manuscript copy of some of the great works of the Middle Ages were so few, and, you had to travel such a long way to find them. The mass production of books, like the mass production of recorded music, made a huge difference to the whole subject. So we needed a more democratic philosophy of theology for a democratic age, when the masses are getting higher education, and ordinary people are studying philosophy and wanting to understand it. So, I went back towards ordinariness, and ordinary life, and the later Wittgenstein’s ideas, to try to find a new way of doing philosophy and theology. There were still some more lines of thought to be pursued, and it’s gone up, right up to the present day. I have shifted towards Jesus and his parables, when I joined the Jesus Seminar and began to understand what a secular thinker Jesus is and to pursue that thought further, and to see him, not as the obedient Son of God who restores the patriarchal order, but rather as the rebellious Son of God, a kind of Lucifer, who is punished for his sin, but nevertheless survives and lives, punished though he was. So that, the thing of Jesus haunts many of the later books. And also the idea of a shift from being to goodness. Traditionally we’ve done first metaphysics and then ethics. We first asked, what there is, what is supremely real; then we’ve asked how we should live,

and what we should value. I changed that round and said that, we might understand religious thought today better if we started with ethics and only did ontology after ethics. That’s to say, we sketch out the kind of world there ought to be, and ask how we might live in order to attain it. In that case, we can talk about creative faith, 2015, that was my last really original book, and talking about religion as a way of world making, in which I really model religion for the future on the work of people like Martin Luther King, who quite openly describes what kind of world he thinks there ought to be. He rejects the present world as unsatisfactory. He then asks what kind of world there ought to be, and then, various people ask him, what can we do now to bring about that world? Indeed, Lyndon B Johnson himself, one of the greatest modern American presidents, actually called in King and some of his associates into the Oval Office and said, ‘What laws do you want us to pass? Tell me and I’ll see if I can do it.’ And he did. And considerable advances were made in the field of civil rights as a result. So, my religious thought has gone on being exploratory and experimental. I’ve tried various lines, looking for a satisfactory form that religion might take in the future. I’ve tended towards these ideas of a radical democratisation. I’m rather against the idea of an organised religious body governed by religious professionals, towards a more lay conception of religion, as a common struggle, to imagine and to bring into being a better world. So, that’s now, in my eighties and long past the age at which I can actually teach anyone else about these ideas, I find I’m still learning and still developing in my own retirement. I doubt if I have the strength to write another good book. But I’m still thinking, strangely.

[18:55] What are you currently thinking about then that might become another book?

There’s the aesthetics one, about beauty, and the ethical line of thought. I’m back to Plato’s old absolute, beauty, truth, goodness, being, and juggling those. And, trying to think of a way in which philosophy can be made interesting to ordinary people in the future. One of the things I found as a philosopher of religion. But when I attempt to demythologise popular dogmatic religion into philosophy, people say, well that’s great, but what you are producing is more obscure than the older stuff you’re trying to explain. Because of course, philosophy has dropped out of the syllabus for ordinary people in this country, nobody reads it. So I need to find some way of making philosophy popularly intelligible, and interesting. [pause] Yes, perhaps it might be a philosophy of life book, which talks about beauty and goodness, and consolation. And about personal and social ethics. I think, in politics and social ethics,

I’m still just a standard Western liberal. Don’t want to change very much on that. But I want to introduce the notion of a, a supernatural generosity of living, living without any ressentiment, without any hostile feelings towards anybody, living generously. And, a living that’s consoled by natural beauty. There’s a curious thing you know. I’ve, in late life, got to like the novels of Thomas Hardy rather belatedly. Hardy’s own scepticism and pessimism about the human scene is consoled by his strong feeling for landscape and natural beauty. So that when really dreadful things happen in his novels, he follows by cheering you up with a paragraph about natural beauty. [laughs] You feel a bit better. Funny I should think the same as Hardy on that. But, art helps to make life bearable. [pause] And, the particular kind of living from the heart that I call solar living, living by coming out and accepting transience and your own transience. Those ideas still spin around in my head. Then, I might, they might lead to a bit more, but, I rather think nobody would buy anything I wrote now; I’m too old. I’ve reached the age when you tend to get left off the address lists, because people think you’re so old you must be dead by now, and, you’re not told the things that are happening. And so I don’t think, I don’t think I could write anything now that would sell well.

[22:37] What sort of things are you thinking of that you’re not being invited to?

Funerals and memorial services. I’m often not told my friends have died. Yes. I’ve noticed that happen two or three times recently. But, I’ve been rather isolated and not going on the conference circuit and things like that much, so I’ve perhaps dropped out too much. I could even have got a bit out of date. I’m just reading a book by a Canadian who was a bit of a protégé once; I think he’s ahead of me now. I’m slightly aghast reading a new book, that perhaps I’ve got a bit behind. I’m no longer at the leading edge. I thought I was, and I wasn’t looking what other people were doing. But this chap is perhaps ahead of me. Mm.

Who is he?

The name is Galston, David Galston. Canadian. Living and publishing in Oregon, in the US, at the moment, I think. Mm. [pause] So, that’s been roughly the journey. I don’t claim it’s been anything like a linear journey. It’s more a matter of a lifelong process of exploration and questioning. [pause] It’s not tidy. It’s not an orderly pilgrimage towards a pre- established destination. It’s rather a matter of an artistic quest, to try to find an outlook that

will satisfy me in a rapidly changing world. But it may be that other people, if they ever look at my stuff as a whole, will perceive a unity in it all that I don’t perceive. Because I’m no expert on myself, indeed it’s part of the consequence of my general mind in philosophy, and I have no particular insight into my own stuff. I have periods when I think it’s quite good, and other periods when I think it’s very bad. I don’t know.

[25:16] And over those years when you were not writing, or teaching, what might you have been doing, what, what were you doing in times when you felt that you were sort of at leisure, or, having a break, or doing something other than work?

I… Oh, well that means, do you mean before the 1970s, going back to the Sixties and the Fifties?

No no. Over this period that we’ve been talking about today, from the Eighties to the present.

Oh, that period, mostly working hard on the next book. The average was well over one book a year, one and a half books a year. I’ve done, I think, since, since ’96 I’ve done thirty books I think. Yes, that period, precisely, yes. [laughs] It’s a lot. I’ve done things, a little bit of travel, a little bit of going to California to meet the Jesus Seminar people. A little bit of visiting the Sea of Faith Networks in Australia and New Zealand, and talking with friends there. Keeping the Sea of Faith Network going, or, trying to contribute a little bit towards it, has been one of those activities. Helping my children get established a bit, so far as we could, with the inevitable things of house purchase in London. We were fortunate that they were all able to go on beyond first degree at university, and get educated to a level that was right for them. And before the huge increase in fees came in, which now makes life so very difficult indeed for young people. They need a huge amount of capital to get them through higher education and marriage and buying a house and starting a family. So your years between the ages of twenty or thirty are heavily weighed down by money problems. And that’s a great mistake. [pause] Now, I’m trying to slow up, give myself leisure, sleep more, contemplate more, think more. I might write a little. I do a little bit in the way of interviews and so on, like these, this thing now. I shall be going to the Sea of Faith conference in a couple of weeks from now, and talking to old friends there. So there’s, there’s something on most days, nearly every day.

The question was inspired by seeing a cover of a book about you, which had you apparently hiking and standing in a sort of upland area looking over a valley. So, it made me want to ask about sort of, hobbies and pastimes and what…

Yes. I used greatly to enjoy landscape. We used to walk particularly over the north of England, the Yorkshire Dales, the Lakes, and the North York Moors, and the Peak District, those northern places based on the Pennines. Used to love walking, so it’s a bit of a sadness to me that, arthritis has meant I’m rather immobile nowadays, it’s a bit of a struggle to get around. But, we do a little, a little bit of that sort of travel, mainly to outlying parts of the UK. I was only a week ago in Mid Wales, which I love very much. So we do a, we do a little bit of travel. And Pevsnering, that’s to say, I always have copies of the whole of the Pevsner volumes, and like to work through and see at least the main buildings, all over the country. I like architecture, and I like being able to read landscape and buildings historically. It’s a thing we’ve learnt to do in the last thirty years, through the work of a few pioneers. So I enjoy that. And we have grandchildren, and they come and stay a lot, and, dash about. They include some very talented children. Fortunately the brains of the family go up in each generation. And the best of the grandchildren are much smarter than I am. [laughs]

[30:08] Can I ask about two organisations that might have taken an interest in you or you in them. The Templeton Foundation, have you had any relations?

Never had any relation with it. It’s never come across me, and I’ve never bumped into it. I simply hear about the prizes being awarded for contribution to religious thought or whatever. I think John Hick won it once didn’t he? Polkinghorne won it once? Yes. So I’ve heard of it, but I, it’s never, I’ve never interacted with it in any way. I don’t know who the people involved are. No.

And, more locally, the Faraday Institute at St Edmund’s College in Cambridge.

No, I don’t know them. What are they?

They are, I think they are a Templeton, I know they are, a Templeton-funded science-religion sort of, set-up within one of the colleges, St Edmund’s College.

Ah yes.

Denis Alexander was the Director of it.

Oh yes.

And now it’s, I think Bob White, who is a geophysicist.

Yes. I don’t know them, no.

[31:20] Thank you. And can you talk about the decision, made relatively recently, around the time that you were giving the interview to Alan Macfarlane, the decision to stop actual religious practice.

Yes. Yes. [pause] I was saying there that I probably would have to break with the Church, because, it’s not going to change, and I do think its kind of religion is now badly out of date. The Church is ideologically… [pause] [outside noises] Yes, I gave up practising Christianity by giving up my weekly Communion about, eight or ten years ago. And I announced it in advance, that I was going to do this on a certain date. Really to make a point, seriously, I think the Church does need reform and renewal, and that the mediated kind of religion in which truth is mediated by authoritative sort of, gateways, priests, sacraments, creed and scripture and ritual, the whole apparatus of the Church, mediates forgiveness and grace from God to man, and leads us up towards salvation. But this kind of mediated religion, in which the organised religious institution is very strong and powerful, went with a hierarchical vision of the universe which pictured the Earth and heavenly world as having become separated, and some sort of means of getting back and forth between the two worlds needs to be established. And we need something to tell us how things are in the heavenly world, and how one can be more where we can please the beings up there and get their help and support, and, get ourselves right with them and so on. Well that whole world view I say is now obsolete. It began to become obsolete at the end of the Middle Ages, but in

Protestantism it was kept going for another few centuries, in a moderated form. But a few people from the start wanted to go as far as the radical reformers and the Quakers, and go on to the Kingdom of God, the next stage in Christianity’s traditional history in itself, when mediated religion comes to an end, and instead, the heavenly and earthly worlds are seen as conjoined, there’s only a single world, here on Earth, and in the Kingdom of God there is no temple, says, the Book of Revelation, i.e., there is no organised religious mediation. Everybody finds his own path for himself, everyone finds his own way to religious experience, religious inspiration and comfort. [34:50] So, I began to feel the Church was irreformable, actually, that it would chug on, gradually fossilising, until eventually the Church of England in a generation or two more will be as conservative as the Eastern Orthodox churches, i.e. completely immovable, and it won’t be able to do anything. And, for a person like me, such a church is no longer of interest. I mean essentially, a pilgrim is constantly on the move. I don’t, I really don’t like having things fixed in my world; I’m used now to constant shift and change. I like transience; I’m not nostalgic for fixed points of absolutes and metaphysical certainties and so on. In fact I moved so far in my basic assumptions for ecclesiastical Christianity that I felt I had to leave it in order to make my point. [pause] And of course, in the Kingdom world, as with the Quakers, there are no differences of hierarchy, of rank, no sacraments, and no, no mediation. You can be a Quaker humanist or a Quaker, unbelievable, a Quaker of some other religion. Because, Quakerism is a quest for an immediate kind of religion that everybody finds through his own head. Mm. I’ve called this kingdom theology for a long time, but a lot of people don’t find the thing easy to understand, because the Roman Catholic Church in particular has forgotten the Kingdom, and assumed that ecclesiastical religion will go on forever to the end of time. So it teaches the immutability of dogma, and, and there continues to be hierarchy, clergy, popes, priests and popes, even in Heaven. Heaven is the Church triumphant. Whereas in my view, the Church itself is transient. It comes to an end; there comes a stage at which we should leave it behind and move on to the next thing. But the Roman Catholic church in particular forgot all about the Kingdom, it forgot that the pontifex, the bridge- builder, the papal type figure, is only needed so long as we see the two worlds as being apart. When we’ve amalgamated the two again, and we believe in a single world, then we no longer need a bridge between two worlds So, virtually redundant.

[37:47]

Could you remind the listener where he or she would need to look for this sort of foretelling of the collapsing of the, of the two worlds into the sort of Kingdom?

Yes. In one of the later books, I remember, I copied out all the passages from the Old Testament about that day, at the end of time, when the last age begins. The idea of it goes back into Persian religion and the origins of Zoroastrianism, the idea of a, the world history is a battle between good and evil, until one day there’s a last battle, as a result of which a last age of peace and happiness on Earth with no more wars, no more conflict, no more eating of flesh, no more predation happens. So the idea of a kind of return of Eden at the end of time is about two and half thousand years old, or a bit older. It was already quite strong in the world in which Jesus came. Indeed, Jesus announced its revival, and was arguably teaching that it comes when we step into it, when we decide for it. Indeed, the rabbis themselves taught that if Israel observed the whole Law for one day, the Kingdom of God would come. [pause] The later teaching of the prophets was that Israel was disobedient, would not obey the Law in full. God promised one day there would come an age when the old religion of an external law, binding us from without, would be replaced by a religion written on the heart in which our own feelings would spontaneously be good and innocent. And, the new internalised religion of the heart is what Jesus promises. I call it emotivism. Our religious experience and our moral beliefs are simply expressions of our feelings, because the expression of feeling is the most important thing in the world, it’s what there is, it what makes everything Hm. I’ve always found these ideas hard to convey, they’re very strong in the Bible, but they’re curiously forgotten, after a couple of hundred years during which the Church has simply been battening down the hatches, trying to ensure its own survival. The old arc of salvation keeps getting patched up in the hope that it’ll sail on a little bit longer, but I think the time has come to leave it. So, sadly, after fifty-five years or whatever it was, I stopped going to Communion about eight or ten years ago. Mm.

[41:00] How did you announce the leaving?

It’s in Above Us Only Sky, I think towards the end of the book I say, on the day this book is published I shall leave the communion of the Church. I’ve retained my orders, so I am still technically ‘the reverend’, if you wish to use that term. I’ve kept my orders, because nearly all my friends are Anglican clerics like myself, or a high proportion of my friends, and I want

to keep in touch with them. So I still buy Crockfords to get all their addresses. I know hundreds of them. So I’m still in orders, I’m still a clergyman in good standing, because oddly enough, in the Anglican canon law, you are a priest in good standing if you’re a fellow of an Oxford or Cambridge college, and you don’t need to say the services every day if you’re engaged in the study of divinity full time. So I can just about qualify as a respectable Anglican cleric, even though I’ve given up the mediated religion of the Church, which gives me authoritative information about the supernatural world. Unfortunately I don’t think there is such a world, so I think, everything we need to construct a religious life and a moral life ourselves is already available to everyone, it’s right there for all to see. There’s nothing hidden, religion is easy; we know damn well what we can think and how we should live, it’s just that we don’t, but we can start, we can try. [pause] True religion is to love life and to love your fellow human being. True religion is to be without hatred in your heart towards anyone. True religion is not to be worried about metaphysical evil, the traditional time, chance and death, the traditional threats to life that have frightened people in the past. If one can say yes to transience, and accept life’s uncertainty and brevity and so on, then you are halfway there. So I say that, my kingdom religion, the crucial thing is to face up to and solve the problem of, not physical evil, suffering, or moral evil, sin, but metaphysical evil, temporality, contingency, finitude. [pause] So we need a simple philosophy of the affirmation of life, and a philosophy that brings together life and love, and belief, always linked in English and German, Leben, Liebe, life, love, belief. Belief, lief. Mm. [pause] So, I was, I was sorry to leave the Church, and probably that had a bad effect on my sales too, because most people can’t contemplate the end of Church, but, the church has been so preoccupied with itself for so long. I think the Victorian age was already postmodern, it was attempting a kind of revival of the Church after the death of the Church. But Victorian religiosity was very often rather churchy and mediocre in quality. So we ned to forget that.

[45:00] The Jesus Seminars, could you tell me about your experience of them and perhaps of America more widely, through attending…?

Bob Funk, who founded the Westar Institute, was an American theologian, a rather literary- minded New Testament critic. He had a little money, but he got fed up with academic theology, and he founded the Westar Institute and a small organisation for promoting religious literacy he called it, in a lay world. And he set it up originally in Santa Rosa, an

industrial town, a bit north of San Francisco. It’s, more recently it’s moved to Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, further north. Bob asked me out there because he had read one or two my books and liked them, and realised I was very close to him in thought. So, he invited me to lecture at the Jesus Seminar, and he said, ‘This is your first visit, we’ll pay all the fares both ways, for everything.’ So we went out and we liked it. The Jesus Seminar had already done its main work, and was on a second phase. The early effort was an attempt to discover the teaching of Jesus. They, Bob and his friends, went through the whole of the sources for the sayings of Jesus, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and also John and Thomas, and other sayings about Jesus preserved elsewhere, in the News Testament and in Jewish tradition. He got together 1330 units of tradition and the Jesus Seminar set up, study them and vote on them all one by one. They assumed they’d define their own criteria of historicity. And, going through all this material, there were about fifty or eighty fellows at each meeting, and a few hundred members of the public who would come along to listen in on discussions and occasionally intervene. And over a ten-year period they published a whole shelf of books, and their own version of the New Testament with sayings of Jesus printed in various colours and so on. So it was all quite an influential attempt to make collective and public and completely open a quest for the original message of the historical Jesus. So that was quite helpful to me, I quite enjoyed listening to it, and, taking a small part in it. And for two or three years we would go along to it. [48:00] Then it began to get a bit expensive, and there were a lot of other things also that we were wanting to attend to in Australia and New Zealand. And as I was getting older, my wife and I both found the very long flights, and aircraft, a strain on the physique, because I’m too large for ordinary seats anyway. And the economy class aircraft seat is impossible after a time. At the end we were travelling through airlines, business class, the cheapest business class, with temazepams to knock us out for the dozen hours or so, the best part of the flight. So that travel was, was quite useful and helpful. And it did teach me a lot of things about Jesus. First, there’s a very strong criticism in Jesus teaching of ressentiment, meanness of spirit, the ill-feeling we feel when other people are a bit more fortunate than we think they should be, the meanness of spirit of the elder brother who hates his younger brother getting pampered, or the labourers in the vineyard who hate to see the latecomers getting paid as much as the chaps who work the whole day through. There’s a Jesus attack on meanness of spirit. His insistence, is said, on a kind of supernatural generosity of spirit, which is more than just love for the neighbour, it’s love for your enemy. And his insistence that this must come first, it

must come from you spontaneously, from your own heart. And the criterion of good and evil is not your adherence to external laws, but the spirit of your own feelings by which you live. So it’s what comes out of you, not what goes into you, that makes your acts right or wrong. The more I read that, I began to see it fitted in well with the lines of philosophy that were already developing. So the picture of the fountain began to bring together for me both my ideas in metaphysics about modern physics and so on, and the teaching of Jesus. So I can see the possibility of a kind of kingdom Christianity based on the historical Jesus that some earlier people have looked for, like Albert Schweitzer and so on, but had given up as perhaps impossible. [pause] Yes, I, I liked the Jesus Seminar, but it’s quite expensive, because when you went there, you had to pay not only return fares to the other side of the USA, but also, your own hotel costs while you were there, plus your own conference costs. So the whole thing was very expensive, and, it began to be difficult to afford. And I, as my own health was declining in these last ten years, I began to be less able to do that kind of thing. I haven’t quite got the mobility any more. Still, I enjoyed it while I was able to go to it anyway.

[51:26] Did your wife come with you and attend?

At first. At first she did, yes. Yes, she had been driving and that kind of thing, yes. But then she rather, obviously, had got her own life to live, and was less keen to come along, after a few years.

Yes. So she actually attended the seminars and listened and contributed?

Yes, or she went off and did things on her own, yes, she looked up friends and whatever. She did travel with me a bit. And, she enjoyed coming with me on two occasions to Australia and New Zealand, three occasions maybe. But these things are fairly expensive. And, of course, since 1999, or whatever it is, 2000 I think, the stock market has not risen at all, it’s gone down, so it’s been very difficult to find any way of saving that makes much money in the last ten or fifteen years. So I’m not as well off now as I thought, as I originally thought I would be by this time. When I was saving to be able to afford to retire, it was easy to save money, little bits of legacies came along and so on. And I soon found enough to live on and I thought we were quite comfortable. But, in the last ten or fifteen years things, conditions have been more difficult. And it’s now difficult for everyone to save for a decent, comfortable

retirement. So we don’t travel as much or spend as much as we did. We’ve rather concentrated on seeing our children housed.

[53:10] And finally, could you describe the archive that you’ve recently established?

Yes.

By describe I mean, give a sense of what sort of material is there, what sort of material you didn’t put there. You know, what… So, how you sort of decided what should go.

I never kept everything. I suppose, it would have been too bulky. The archive does contain a copy of everything I’ve written, and of all the translations, and of all the essays in symposia, as well as the single-author books, and much or most of the journalism, the contributions to the Sea of Faith magazine, and recordings of radio and television programmes. So there’s quite a lot of varied stuff. And some personal material, photographs and so on. But when I came to look for letters, I discovered how very little had survived. Unfortunately, the only early letter, the only relic of any kind from the first ten years of my life was a letter that fell in the hands of evangelicals who made sure I never got it [laughs], and destroyed it. A relative who was evangelical. And, very few letters or personal memorabilia have survived. But, I was able to put a few little bits in anyway, some photographs, my ordinary Cambridge University diaries, which have got the phone numbers of all my friends in the back too in there. So it takes about, one wall of a medium size room. It’s not all that big. I did add a few hundred of the books that have most influenced me, and where I made some sort of marginal notes or something. And a few of the documents of the period when I was mentally ill, I put those in as well, just out of honesty. I’ve always taken the view that you shouldn’t hide anything, and the efforts of people like Jung’s family to keep stuff confidential and inhibit scholars from seeing everything were completely wrong. One should be honest and open.

[55:55] What’s the nature of those documents on the period when you were mentally ill, or what…?

That was the stuff of 1989 to ’95, the period when I was particularly vulnerable. I went through a very bad period. I made various jottings on bits of paper, trying to understand what was happening to me. And all the medical appointments I was having, and, what people were telling me. It’s only a few pages, a few little bits. I’ve not even checked to see how much of that stuff’s got through the cataloguing and into the archive. It is all catalogued now I think, and I’m told it’s online, but, I’ve not been to look at it myself, because that’s not my concern anyway [laughs], any more, I don’t need to bother about it. Because I’m not my whole self; I'm only what self i am today. You know. Mm.

What were the medical appointments, were they, that are included in those documents, what kind of medical appointments?

Well, I did talk to one or two psychologists and doctors. There were various people I was seeing, trying to find out what the hell was wrong with me. When I couldn’t speak, I went down to see if I’d got a throat cancer. I had an examination in London. And, it was even recommended for an operation at one stage, and spent a couple of nights in the specialist hospital down in London for, that dealt with things like throat cancer. So I do remember vaguely things of that kind. A lot of it I don’t even remember now, it’s thirty-odd years ago. And I’ve been through lots of other things since. I’ve always been accident-prone, and I’ve always had a lot of bangs. I think I may have said earlier on in these conversations that I used to, I was notorious for having an accident and breaking a bone each October after a new book was published, and I was punishing myself for my own ideas. Mm. So, yes, I did put in a bit of evidence about my troubles anyway, simply out of truthfulness really. One should not conceal these things. And most people who attempt the kind of thinking I’ve attempted have found it has, it imposes a good deal of psychological stress upon one, it does. The extreme example being Nietzsche, whose sufferings were quite extraordinary. But Wittgenstein was pretty crazy too. Mm.

[58:41] There’s also a website, a sort of Don Cupitt official website. Do you, are you able to say who, who created it or who helped you in establishing it?

I got someone I knew who was a, a web master, a web designer, to do it for me. I think I was becoming aware ten or fifteen years ago that the Internet was becoming more and more

influential. More and more students, instead of looking in a library catalogue, google first to find out about any subject. So I ought to have some kind of Internet presence. So, I started my own website, and asked this chap to design it for me. And, it didn’t really include more than a brief note about non-realism, and, a list of my books, contributions in symposia, books about me, and a little bit about the websites on the Sea of Faith and so on. That’s all. But since then, quite a number of other things get added on. Other people put up most of the Sea of Faith television series on YouTube, and, even Who Was Jesus? has gone up on YouTube I think, half of it anyway, recently, because I’ve seen it there. And a variety of other interviews and lectures have popped up here and there. This is in the hope jut of advertising my books. Similarly, the publishers have put about nine or ten of my best things on Kindle, though I gather Kindle is now in decline, rather surprisingly. And Amazon usually make, will sell copies of my books quite cheaply, because people are interested in collecting them. I also put on the website that I was willing to give away books free to anyone who wants them. It was simply an attempt to spread my ideas. I had never had an agent, and never bothered much about that, hoping as the decades went by I would gradually increase readership, and, eventually do as well as John Hick. I never did anything like as well as John Hick, of course. The best of his books sold in hundreds of thousands. Mine never sold more than, ten, more often just one or two, thousand, over several years. [pause] So, I’ve never sold well, but, I’ve just about kept going anyway. [laughs] Mm.

[End of Track 5]

[End of Interview]