Don Cupitt interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 16th February 2009

0:09:07 Born in Oldham, Lancashire, in 1934; paternal grandfather was a plumber, maternal, a butcher; father was an energetic man who later ran a metalwork factory in London; during the War he made fuselages for war planes, and landing ships; mother worked for Singer sewing machines; she married at eighteen and I was born when she was twenty; they died in the 1990's; after the War my father was earning a good income and decided that their four children should have  private educations; my brother became a chemical engineer and my two sisters both became doctors; the boys went to Charterhouse and the girls to Cheltenham Ladies College; my parents believed they had done the best for us and that, I believe, was the main work of their lives; they were a bit unhappy in old age partly because our education distanced us from them culturally and physically

2:57:09 They moved around the country during the War; my father was very busy as a sheet metal engineer, establishing factories in various places; in the early years of the War we were living near Birmingham, and later were living in west London at the time of the V1s and V2s, so I saw a bit of the War from a civilian viewpoint while growing up; I remember hearing the first V2 landing in Chiswick near where we lived; there I went to a prep school in Gunnersbury;  I remember the English teacher; he gave me a book called Dodd's Beauties of Shakespeare which I still have; also remember the mathematics master, Mr Blake; he lived in Earls Court in great poverty, an old man who had returned to teaching because of poverty and the War; he lived in a house with only gas lighting; otherwise there was nobody of note whereas at Charterhouse there was a very high class staff with some notable figures

5:33:23 Mother was quiet, very dedicated to her children; she had only a few friends and in later years we tried to get her interested in the world, but outside her family life she had few interests; she had not had enough education whereas my father had night school and work; neither had any interest in religion so I had no religious upbringing from them; the only religious influence was from my grandmother, Emma Cupitt; she had got a scholarship as a girl to go to medical school from a poor family in Nottingham; the family would not allow her to go as she was the eldest of twelve children; she had to stay at home and help her mother to raise them; all her life she was under-educated and frustrated; she took up palmistry, reading tea leaves, divination from dreams, theosophy - all sorts of occult kinds of knowledge; remember being taken by her to a spiritualist meeting; perhaps my rather critical interest in religion owes something to her for whom religion provided a sort of knowledge for people who had not had the opportunity to encounter real knowledge; I never attended a séance but do remember at spiritualist meetings, a medium would get up and claim to be hearing voices from the other side; for me at the age of ten or so it was obvious that this was a bit of a con where everybody was complicit, including the medium; so my religious scepticism owes something to that early influence

8:33:24 All my life I have had a succession of fads and crazes and have picked up a lot of my general education simply by being very keen on something for a short period; an early interest was butterflies, which I collected, and I am still a member of Butterfly Conservation to this day; it was one of the means by which I got into natural history and birds; I also became very keen on Italian opera and assembled a large collection of gramophone records, and by that way learned something about music and at Charterhouse got a master to teach me Italian; my interest in opera started at about twelve; before I was thirteen I had read all of Dickens and was a voracious reader from an early age; I used to haunt second-hand book shops and certainly had nearly all of Everyman's Library as a small boy; until I was thirty I probably read a novel a day in addition to academic reading; it is the best way to learn language and writing; we were lucky in that way as it was a better education than the modern child's equivalent which is having a thorough knowledge of cinema; I have only got interested in cinema late in life; in my generation television hadn't yet arrived and it was the novel through which you basically learned about the world; I had no particular encouragement from my parents to read; I would not describe any of my siblings as intellectuals but they have had good careers; I was rather exceptional in being rather reflective and having a huge appetite for language, and having fads and crazes; I remember another, architecture, which really started at school when my housemaster took me church crawling; I have always been a Pevsnerite and always had the latest volumes; I have taken a pride in being able to read a city historically; only very much more recently have I learned to read landscape in the same way

11:48:02 I won a foundation scholarship to Charterhouse and was a boarder; I remember the names of some other scholars including Geoffrey Lloyd and Richard Swinburne; I started reading general subjects and did eight O levels, and then switched to science at A level; there were some excellent masters who did influence me but I did become aware of religion and religious thought at school; of the masters - Oleg Polunin, an eminent field botanist who wrote most of the standard books about the Himalayan flora, Wilfred Noyce, the poet and mountaineer, taught me Italian, Percy Chapman taught me zoology, Bob Arrowsmith was my housemaster, and very good on architecture - but there were many interesting and talented characters; I was taught English by W. C. Sellar, the author of '1066 and all that', and I remember the way he talked about Browning to this day; the upper middle-class world of school was strange to me at first but I took to it culturally, even though many of the boys came from class-conscious well-to-do Surrey families that would have not normally been my first choice of company; I was not bullied, always physically large and able to hold my own, not particularly combative, and never had a problem with the relics of a north country accent; I was only a moderate games' player and only captained the school at chess; coming up to take my scholarship exam in June 1947 I strayed out on the cricket pitch and saw P.B.H. May make 180-odd runs against Eton; that was the most physically beautiful display of sport I have ever seen; he subsequently captained England; of course, the school in those days did have high class professionals, for example, the cricket professional was an England spin bowler called George Geary from the 1930's; I was no good at cricket but quite liked football; oddly enough I never had a decent musical education though I picked up a little on my own; music has never been a major thing in my life, I am predominantly a verbal person, an articulator; a few years ago it seemed that my sight was deteriorating very badly and I would have to listen to music more, but just recently surgery has improved my eyesight so I expect I shall stick to the word from now on; the last music craze I had was for modern music, Stravinsky and after, including a lot of modern minimalism

17:03:09 Between the ages of eight and eleven I had a craze for railway engines; I joined those small boys who knew their way through holes in the fence into every engine shed in London; remember their names to this day, where you would go with Ian Allan's guides and tick off every engine when you had seen it; this craze then got me interested in Victorian engineering, a love of bridges and Brunel; I was not a performer as a boy, was probably too shy; I was eventually head of my house and a school monitor, and was seen when young as a potential leader; later, as a national serviceman I was best cadet of my year despite being not at all military; I did have the air of a leader when young and was no doubt expected to be a church leader at one time; that is perhaps where my talent was thought to lie which was possibly why I was easily assimilated into a higher class than I had been born into; when I first became a practising Christian after my confirmation, I saw myself as a liberal Anglican Tory, in the Harold Macmillan or Rab Butler style; I only became aware of being more socialist in my twenties; when young, I was attracted to readers and writers like Britten, Eliot and C.S. Lewis, those after World War II who still hoped it might be possible to reconstruct Christian Europe; I was only a Tory in the sense that people in Europe were Christian Democrats; we looked at Fascism and Communism and didn't want either of those; in the fifties, many in the West thought it ought to be possible to rebuild a Christian society in England; I was fifteen when I was confirmed, after which I became a weekly communicant and sometimes went once during the week as well in the old chapel at Charterhouse; I was pretty devout around the ages of fifteen or sixteen, then when I did a lot of Darwin and zoology I drifted away from it, then returned to religion very sharply at eighteen at Cambridge; much of my time at school I was very interested in religion and in religious thought; the two great influences were Plato and Darwin; I met Plato's 'Republic' by reading it aloud with the headmaster in his study with the other school monitors, it was our induction into being leaders, and I met Darwin through doing zoology; Plato's top-down vision of the universe and Darwin's British empiricist, bottom-up vision of the universe, were in conflict in my mind from the age of sixteen-seventeen onwards; I knew that I was very religious by the time I was fifteen-sixteen and also knew that religious thought was going to trouble me within a year or two; did not go to religious camps until I got to Cambridge; I wasn't touched by evangelical, twice-born Christianity, until Cambridge; all my life I have been liable to religious experiences I think caused by a kind of overspill of joy, often associated with the sense of sight and sunshine; when I was first converted I remember what I took then to be an experience of God with a feeling of almost continuous warmth, a curious sensation which mystics often report; they link it with actual dilation of the capillaries; if you are a Tibetan lama one of your practical exams consisted of drying out a damp sheet with your skin because you can meditate to the point that your capillaries dilate just keeping warm; I knew what it was like feeling a sense of religious exaltation that made one physically warm; the earliest religious experiences I have actually put in my books were ones that I had as an undergraduate; they were usually extravertive and visual in the sense that they were outside myself and seen as something like a brilliant painting of Vincent van Gogh, a sort of super-vivid sense of colour and of the brilliance of the world; in some recent books I call that ‘brightness’, the fact that our visual experience is more conscious than our other sensations; when visual experience is most highly conscious and the world takes on a kind of glory; a lot of English poets describe it, it is experiences like that which have been my most common; I still have that, experiences something like Protestant joy when the feeling of God's grace boils over in my soul, a feeling of an extraordinary sense of exaltation; it is often associated with Methodist hymns; I think it an extinct kind of religious experience now, but I knew it when I was young

25:13:30 At A level did botany, zoology and organic chemistry; the school recommended me to try Trinity Hall, Cambridge, I got an Exhibition there and came up in 1952; the Exhibition was in those days £100, so a significant chunk of the fees which probably helped my parents, and they were very pleased; in those days Cambridge was simpler and less congested and I do remember that every term my father delivered me by car to the porters' lodge, unloaded my suitcase and drove out again; that was the old modern Cambridge where buses went down Trinity Street, rather than the post-modern, present Cambridge, which is as the film industry would like to see it; in those days the buildings were sooty and you could drive and cycle anywhere; felt intellectual exhilaration, of course, and great freedom after school; for someone like me from a modest background it was exciting, visually because of the beauty of the buildings but, above all, intellectually; there was a huge range of interesting people; I used to say that Cambridge was the best youth club in the world, now I say that in many ways it is the best place for the elderly as I am a life fellow of my college; somehow the colleges manage to be both a superb youth club and day-centres for the elderly; it is an environment that I have enjoyed so much that I really wanted to stay; the Master of Trinity Hall was Professor Dean, Professor of Pathology, one of the last professors to be appointed before the retiring age came in, and he was already in his eighties; the best known of the fellows was Owen Chadwick, the Dean of the College, and he was my supervisor when I changed to theology; as a supervisor he was quiet, conscientious, a good teacher, very hard-working and serious-minded; amongst undergraduates it was believed that he had had a riotous past when he had been a considerable rugby player, but when I came up he was already in his mid-thirties and sobering down; thought he was going to be at least Archbishop of Canterbury and probably much more important than that; amongst the fellows, Louis Clarke of the Fitzwilliam Museum; also Ronald Fisher, the celebrated biologist, who produced a methematical Theory of Natural Selection', in a book that saved Darwinism at a time when its intellectual prestige was rather low because no answer had been found to the question of how mutations which are recessive could ever spread through a whole population; Fisher did the mathematics of natural selection and then people following in his footsteps could demonstrate it by looking at big seabird populations; of the other fellows, I remember Tony Chaplin, and my director of studies, George Kenner, a scientist; Kenner had a big influence on me as in my second year he suggested I should do the history and philosophy of science which had just then begun as a Cambridge subject; I did so and it had a big influence on me as it turned me to philosophy; the lecturer in the history of science was Rupert Hall who lectured on both the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; the philosophy of science was Russ Hanson who looked like the young Orson Welles; he was a young American who had listened to Wittgenstein and was rather a distinguished young philosopher of science, who, unhappily, died prematurely and tragically in a plane accident in America; I learned a lot from him because he introduced me to Wittgenstein's ideas, and to the way I would eventually come to think in philosophy, in 1953 when I was still barely twenty; I went to supervisions in King's with Donald Parry; my botany supervisor was John Scott, but I also met Max Walters and Anna Bidder; in organic chemistry, a chap called Saunders at Magdalene; I well remember going to supervisions with Hanson, which were very exciting; he lived in a bed-sitter in Parson's Court or somewhere; in those days Cambridge was short of accommodation; underneath his bed was a large wooden box, and one day he pulled it out and it was full of brass scientific instruments; this was the beginnings of the Whipple Museum for the History of Science; he was a delightful man and the one book he did publish was 'Patterns of Discovery'; one of the things he picked up from Wittgenstein was that seeing is already interpreting; that was leading away from pure empiricism, the eye doesn't just photograph the world, it interprets it; through him I got interested in language and interpretation, and the post-empiricist line of philosophy; I also learned that science is a cultural activity and it has a history; a lot of scientists seem to think that it exists in a platonic world of its own; scientific ideas reflect the society that produces them and they have a certain life-span and are superseded by other ideas; reading history and philosophy of science was a useful transition subject when I turned to theology

34:30:02 At the end of my first term I became an evangelical and was caught up with them for about a year, then I drifted away and went first rather liberal, then rather Anglo-Catholic; why I was converted, I don't know; in retrospect I suppose that in my first few weeks in Cambridge I was lonely and a bit vulnerable and was taken to the usual evangelical sermon on Sunday evenings in Holy Trinity church and was converted on the spot, and joined CICCU; I began to feel they were too narrow almost immediately and by the end of my first year I had broken away from them and had begun theological reading on my own; by the end of my second year I knew that I wanted to be ordained and was reading rather widely in theology and drifting away from science; it was rather surprising that the evangelicals should have been the means of reviving my concern for religion, but it is often said that British theologians are evangelicals trying to work their way out of it; it has been a bit of a blight on Cambridge and, to some extent, Oxford as well, in that this has been such a prominent feature of the undergraduate religious scene for over a hundred years; Moody and Sankey conducted an evangelical mission to Cambridge in late nineteenth century, from that the Intercollegiate Christian Union grew; in my undergraduate days much of the University was very religious; the leader and guru of CICCU was Basil Atkinson, an under-Librarian of the University Library, and he was the organiser; he was rather like a Victorian Calvinist; it was a rather grim, puritanical, kind of religion but worst of all it was totally anti-rational and still is to this day; I quickly found myself rather horrified and could not make sense of the language you were required to use; there was a version of evangelicalism in Cambridge in the early nineteenth-century deriving out of the evangelical revival of the Wesleyans in the eighteenth-century, and the equivalent of continental Pietism with an emphasis on personal experience and holiness in your personal life; in London, the Clapham Sect evangelicals, of whom Wilberforce was a member, were very influential in doing good works; you could not call them irrational as they had a big influence on ethics in the nineteenth century; Charles Simeon was Vicar of Holy Trinity and established the  tradition of Cambridge evangelicalism but it got the rather oppressive quality from the Americans with the strong emphasis on conversion; having become converted you became an instant expert on everything as you now had the true godly point of view on all matters; missionary societies also had an influence; remember that Charterhouse had a school mission to the East End which was almost a class mission, with boys of the privileged classes taking kids from the slums to camps; Cambridge had one too; as an undergraduate I remember going on one hop-picking mission to Kent, where undergraduates lived alongside hop-pickers in the fields and supposedly talked to them about religion; I came eventually to see that as really inspired by class and feeling rather absurd, not something I really wanted to be involved in; it had a sort of respectable intellectual origin in the 1740's; when early British empiricism, especially in the sciences, was at its height there was a desire to show that religious belief could similarly be verified in personal experience; that influenced the evangelical tradition in theology; it was claimed that you could have personal experiences that in detail verified your approximately Calvinist religious belief; this is now obviously not true; by the 1960s people began to publish books saying that your religious beliefs shape the kind of experiences you have, therefore of course your religious experiences verify your religious belief, just as, if somebody has a vision of the Virgin Mary it is pretty certain that the somebody is an adolescent Catholic girl and not a Muslim; if you ask the young girl how she knew it was the Virgin Mary she would say the vision was like the statue in church - Belief shapes experience; I had come to see that myself by the 50s and was not persuaded by the argument, but that was why such rationale as evangelicalism came from that origin; of course, today's evangelicalism as promoted by Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, isn't even that rational, though very popular still

42:23:24 Despite doing natural science and Darwin being a hero, my interest in religion was stronger; I shared my room as an undergraduate for three years with Neil Alexander who became a celebrated professor of zoology at Leeds; I knew Jonathan Miller well, who became a doctor and then a comedian, and I knew Francis Darwin, so I had a lot of friends in the sciences; why did I go towards ordination? - I suppose my religion was so strong in those days that ordination was what I wanted to do, I wanted to study theology; I had got interested a bit in Anglo-Catholic writing, a bit in Dean Inge and liberal platonic Protestant writing, and quite a lot in the mystics; this I did while still trying to do science in which I got a 2:2, terrible, but by that time I wanted to do theology; I remember Jonathan Miller well, young and red-haired, gawky and looking a bit like me; although it was the great time of Footlights in Cambridge I knew none of those people at all as they operated in the English Faculty which wasn't our concern; Cambridge was intensely sociable in those days and I do remember that in my second year I knew every other undergraduate in the College; I knew Jonathan Miller because he had been at the same school as my room-mate; after Part 1 I changed to theology and Owen Chadwick became my supervisor and taught me nineteenth century church history; George Woods taught me the philosophy of religion, he was Dean at Downing and a moderate in the tradition of William Paley and Bishop Butler; he said he was ‘a Cambridge Latitudinarian’; the Part 1A syllabus was very demanding, and I probably worked too hard but enjoyed doing it; I attended King's most weekdays at 5.30 for evensong; my room was on the corner and I could see and hear the Chapel from there; I was very absorbed in religion; I was not ready for women although some chaps were good at making friends with them; one friend had many girlfriends from Girton and you went to his rooms to meet them; a few I have remained in touch with; George Woods once told me not to keep so busy that I never got round to getting married as he regretted doing; being ordained and becoming a Cambridge don and a lecturer, with very heavy pastoral responsibilities in the College, meant you worked seven days a week and thus no time to marry; I took his warning seriously and married at twenty-nine

48:57:08 I did very badly in the Part1A theology and got a 2:1 and not a first, but Owen Chadwick encouraged me and thought I might have a future in theology; I got a place at Westcott House to train for the ministry but before that I had to do my military service; I was twenty-one and had just graduated with what the Army saw as a science degree so within days I had to present myself at Catterick Camp and join the Royal Signals; having been at boarding school the hardship of the army wasn't all that strange; my school had had no central heating and you washed in cold water in the depth of winter, also you had to keep the window open at night and I remember frost on blankets in the morning; curiously, public school boys like me found basic training in the army less harsh and alarming than ordinary kids from northern cities who had never been away from home before; the depressing thing was losing two years of one's life when there was so much else to do; the whole culture was much more militarized than today; you grew up with war memorials, in institutions which had seen whole generations sacrificed to war and believing that it was a good thing to die for your country; now we live in a civilian culture and the old military values mean nothing; I hated military service but was able to profit a little from it; I did believe that the Second World War had been a just cause though the First World War was a catastrophe that should never have happened; the gradual running down of the British Empire that followed was a pretty untidy business; I got sent out to Cyprus but I was able to take a lot of philosophy books with me which I read; I passed out of officer training as top cadet and even won in heavyweight boxing; demobbed in 1957 so we were one of the last generations to do national service; have talked to Bruce Kent who did it a couple of years later about the winding down of empire; I coincided with the Suez invasion; my Signal troop was attached to a gunner regiment which was sent to Cyprus to relieve Commandoes who went to Suez; what a waste of time that was; remember fearing nuclear war for a few days; it was a catastrophic mistake, and a disaster for the Conservative party and its values

55:44:14 Back in Cambridge I was sent back to Trinity Hall to do Part III in the philosophy of religion; it was a post-graduate qualification then and for that I returned to George Woods; I worked very hard and got a decent first at last; people then suggested that I would be pressed to take up an academic career but the Principal of Westcott House, Kenneth Carey, also asked me to be vice-Principal there when called upon; he later became Bishop of Edinburgh; the vice-Principal then was John Habgood who became Archbishop of York, and previous to him was Robert Runcie who became Archbishop of Canterbury; in those days it was a strong liberal Anglican college with a high class student intake; it had been a bit left-wing in the 1930s when Joseph Needham went every Sunday morning from Westcott House by coach to Thaxted where the celebrated Communist Conrad Noel was the Vicar - a great English stronghold of Communist English Catholicism, and a lot of Westcott House people were keen on that; these were people who could still see in communism a little bit of the Kingdom of God on earth and they wanted to change English society; thinking of William Morris, there were connections between Victorian medievalism and socialism; nowadays there is indignation that Cambridge chaps could have got mixed up in such things but it didn't seem like that at the time; Victorian social concern morphed over the generations into sympathy with far left ideas about rebuilding society; I was turned in a socialist direction a bit while at Westcott House; we believed in the welfare state and things like that; living through the Attlee government after the War I noticed the hatred of the conservative press for it, but also the stupendous achievement of people like Aneurin Bevan, who in six months in the teeth of opposition, managed to get the National Health Service established, and within two or three years we saw a spectacular improvement in public health; this made one believe that social reform really could transform society; it is hard to remember now, but you can't make a film about the Second World War using the same uniforms because people are a size bigger than they were then; we really believed that Christian ethics could build a better society; another example of this was my friend Ralph Lapwood, a Fellow of Emmanuel, who was with Chairman Mao on the Long March and was also an English free churchman and a good mathematician; he reminded one of the ease with which a person of that period could combine communism with Christianity; we took them both seriously as projects for making a better world; the profound disillusionment with communism and Maoism that occurred during the sixties has blurred our recollection of the earlier period when it really could be seen as a project for realizing the Christian gospel on earth

Second Part

0:09:07 Of the Oxford group including Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, I met the latter two or three times; didn't greatly like their views as I began to study theology as it occurred to me that they hadn't really assimilated the philosophies I liked, nor biblical criticism; their Christianity was of a rather neo-orthodox kind which didn't attract me; in philosophy at this time I was coming to be deeply influenced by Kant and Kierkegaard, and Hume because he was the set topic for the Part III; I had been very keen on mysticism, I knew the negative way by giving up the images, and tended to see critical thinking in religion as a matter of refining, purifying, emptying out, giving up, inadequate and merely human images; my religion was getting rather austere and abstract at that stage; I liked a very high orthodox theism; I did not like any religious wish-fulfilment or anthropomorphism, and I greatly admired the painting of people like Mark Rothko, Jews who similarly were religious minimalists; I reached my very radical views in religion by pushing high orthodoxy even higher to the point where God became an abstract ideal rather than a person; in that I was very different from C.S. Lewis and his generation with their literary and aesthetic attitude to religion, they liked what Lewis called thick religion, with as much blood, mythology and symbolism as possible, like Geoffrey Hill who thinks that there can't be any true religion without lots of blood; I liked thin religion, I suppose because I was already disgusted by the amount of irrationality and wish-fulfilment that there is in religion; I remember my grandmother saying to me after the 1947 Harrow train crash that she had been thinking of catching that train but God had warned her not to; I thought, “What about the people who were on the train” - that kind of naive belief that the universe revolves around you and wants to secure your well-being and so on, I always hated; some people used to accuse me of being almost Islamic in my liking of a very abstract notion of God being a cosmic law-giver rather than as personal providence; I always liked the Second Isaiah who emphasised that God was beyond language; as I liked the negative way in mysticism that meant I wanted a critical thinking, to see religious thought as a kind of journey into darkness and unknowing, and I still do; religion is about learning to be at ease with the void and with death, learning to accept the emptiness and mystery that surrounds our life and not being completely terrified and out of your mind by it; all my life I have seen people who find it very difficult to bear the end of life after death; I have always wanted to overcome that and by being as dry and austere as possible to look the truth of the human situation full in the face and accept it; I didn't want a religion of fear, of wish-fulfilment, I simply wanted to look the truth in the face and survive; I moved towards a view of God as a very exalted spiritual ideal of perfection; I had not quite reached this stage at Westcott where I would still have called myself sympathetic to Anglo-Catholicism and to Aquinas, but Kant and Kierkegaard were becoming the main influence; they still were in the 1960s when I didn't respond very warmly to John Robinson 'Honest to God'; I knew him quite well, but thought the 1960s radicals too keen to humanize God; at that time I was still very high orthodox; it is often hard to reconstruct one's own thinking in retrospect; when I read one of my old books again I am surprised how much of my later thinking is already in it, on the other hand, at that time I wouldn't have read them in that way and wouldn't have seen it; as the years pass, some things become more salient in your thinking and some less, as the arrangement of thoughts in your head changes; although it seems to me that my thinking has changed radically all my life, often quite recent thoughts are already to be seen in my early stuff; the whole notion of what our mental development is and how it takes place is rather mysterious to me; I have called my writing a 'projet fleuve' and you are meant to understand the whole thing as a kind of personal story because I don't believe that any human being will ever again be able to suppose that he has caught the whole of reality in a single system of thought; once you introduce a time dimension, once you think of everything as relative, transient, flowing, a 'projet fleuve' is all you can do, and this is how it has seemed to me over the period from the 1960s to now when I have been writing; my books are the only autobiography I can produce; I don't really know why I have travelled this way; I don't believe in metaphysics any more but I do believe in writing as an attempt to describe one's own journey; I have sometimes said, “Would anybody like to take up my project and continue from me as I lose the ability to continue with it?”; one or two people might want to try to do that; so instead of writing traditional, systematic, philosophy or theology, I have done a sort of confessional engagement with my own times - a kind of spiritual autobiography which has documented how someone like me has changed over these generations; I am also aware that it is one of the most violent periods of change in the whole of human history; we have grown up in all sorts of ways; the film 'Hue and Cry' (Ealing Studios, c1949) portrays a gang of boys in west London, a ruined city; when I saw that film not long ago I realized that it was my own childhood; the extent to which the world has changed since the 1940s when I was a boy in west London, is amazing

10:32:02 After Westcott House I was ordained and went back to Salford, Lancashire, as an assistant curate; the old Anglican system was that you could only be ordained if a church guaranteed to pay you for your curacy; when a bishop ordained somebody that person became part of the bishop's ‘familia’, and the bishop was responsible for his upkeep as the Medieval church didn't want the scandal of wandering clerics; to avoid this the incumbent of a parish guaranteed  to pay him; my title was as Curate at St Stephen's, Salford, whose Rector was Gwilym Morgan, and that made it possible for the Bishop to ordain me; nowadays that has rather fallen apart because the Bishops, I think rather unjustly, ordained hundreds of women without title, many of whom have never got stipendiary jobs; I was there for two years and then the offers from Cambridge started to come in; I came down to look at Trinity Hall and Corpus, but I had promised already that I would go back to Westcott House if called upon as vice-Principal, and I ended up by going there in the Summer of 1962; I was ordained Deacon fifty years ago this year in June 1959 age twenty-five, was in Salford from then until 1962, and then I moved into Westcott House in the late Summer and began to write my lectures for the Autumn term; while at Westcott House I taught in effect the whole syllabus of theology; the Principal didn't do much lecturing but concentrated on administration; I enjoyed teaching because teaching undergraduates requires one to clarify one's own ideas; we worked far too hard in retrospect; the Westcott House day started at 7.00am with meditation, then there was matins, then the Eucharist, then breakfast with youngsters talking animatedly throughout, four hours teaching until lunch, prayers just before lunch, then there were activities in the afternoon and evening, then evensong, meditation and dinner, so the day ended at 10.00pm; this was seven days a week; I got used to being a workaholic; after a year I began to feel very lonely in the vacations and married; Susan Day, whose brother had been a friend of mine during national service, lived near us in Buckinghamshire where my parents were then living; Susan was a modern linguist and was secretary to the foreign editor of 'The Times'; after we had dinner one evening it was obvious that we should marry; she was startlingly beautiful then, and remained so for thirty years; I was just lucky that she said yes; we had three children, a boy and two girls, and all doing fine; we were twenty-nine and twenty-six when we married, and we had children straight away; we married without money really; I started in Salford on £400 a year, and at Westcott House on £800; in 1965 Emmanuel offered me a fellowship which I accepted; I started there on £1750 a year; we had no capital, no house, and lived in a house provided by Westcott; curiously, one did seem to survive in those days in what now seems to be a state of great insecurity; I would be aghast if my own children were as hard-up as I was when young

17:53:14 Dennis Nineham, the Regius Professor of Divinity and Fellow of Emmanuel College, was also Chairman of the Council of Westcott House; when the Deanship of Emmanuel became vacant Dennis thought I was the right person to be offered it, together with a college lectureship in theology and a directorship of studies, where later philosophy was added to theology; this just gave us enough to live on and even to start a mortgage; when we had been at Emmanuel for just one year a lectureship came up in the faculty and I was lucky enough to get an assistant lectureship in the University; by that time I was thirty-four but Cambridge teaching jobs are much sought after, luckily I was just offered jobs and did not have to produce a CV as one would do now; in those days you did not have to sell yourself but patrons found you, a relic of the old patronage system of England; as well as getting an assistant lectureship Dennis saw that I got the Stanton Lectureship in the same year; a year before the College had nominated me to be a University Proctor, so at the end of the 1960s in a single year I had nine stipendiary jobs in Cambridge; it seems crazy, but the stipends were not large, for instance, as Director of Studies I got about £30 a year; I remember when I was Senior Proctor, the stipend for the Vice-Chancellor, Eric Ashby, was £400 plus a concrete block for his bicycle in the Old Schools with the University arms painted on it; Cambridge rather assumed that you had private means at that time; Emmanuel has shot up in standing during my time; when I arrived there it had rather a low standing and a high proportion of the undergraduates left with ordinary degrees rather than honours degrees; some of the dons dated from the old pre-critical era and still saw the University passing on a fixed body of knowledge, mainly the classics of Greek and Latin literature; then a series of reforming Masters, backed by efficient Bursars, began to raise the standards - renewing buildings, appointing better and more fellows, and taking pains to get really good applications; nowadays the College is reckoned one of the top two or three almost every year; we have had a line of particularly good Senior Tutors who have raised the status of the College; one of my consolations has been to have really good students to teach, a comfort if your views mean you don't do very well at Cambridge

23:19:11 My first books appeared in about 1970 - the Stanton Lectures; in 1973 I had a period of high mental excitement when I discovered I could do speculative thought, and knew that for the rest of my life I would do creative writing, creative religious thought, having new ideas; 'The Leap of Reason' is now dated and I haven't read it for many years, but it was in writing that book that I discovered that I could psych myself up to such a state of mental arousal that thinking was just like rolling out a carpet and watching the pattern come into view; the sense of exultation and power was so great everything became clear; the book eventually appeared in 1976; at the same time I joined a group that produced a book called 'The Myth of God Incarnate' which caused a bit of a scandal; this was the first book by church men and women theologians which argued that we should recognise the mythological character of the idea of incarnation; in 1979-80 I published 'Taking Leave of God' and that did shut down my career, and finished me as far as academy and church were concerned; before it came out I knew that I would get into trouble, but I also thought that it was sufficiently new and striking that I couldn't not publish it; it sold 3000 very fast in the first year; I did not ask anyone else to read it before publication, but John Bowden, the managing editor of SCM Press said it might cause trouble, that it was a renewal of the radical theology of the 1960s coming back, but I wasn't particularly warned; it was really an ultra-Kantian book; in Kant's philosophy, God survives only as an ideal of reason, traditional metaphysical belief comes to an end, and it becomes possible to see God as an object like a pearl of great price in the parables of Jesus, a symbol of the goal of spiritual life, but God can't be thought of as any kind of causal explanation for the existence of the world; I would have said at the time that I can keep the religious value of ‘God’ but am giving up the metaphysics because that has been taken over by science; we don't really need that end of the idea of God but do still need the spiritual goal end; for me God is still omega if I can't say that he is both alpha and omega; of course, the Church was outraged and wouldn't buy this at all; I was defended by the then Master of Emmanuel, Derek Brewer; Bob Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, was asked about my being prosecuted for heresy at the Church courts; he employed various people to draft replies, but his official line was that academics must be free to explore new lines of thought; the implication was that if a parish priest had similar ideas he might be in dire trouble; I was defended too by the then Bishop of Ely; I found it a considerable psychological setback, but I was befriended by John Robinson himself who was then Dean of Trinity; he was thrilled that somebody had come along who was a step further on than he had been; we had a couple of public debates and I preached twice for him; interestingly, although John always claimed himself to be still a realist about God, he never said that I was wrong; for him God was either only a personification of Love, or he could be read, in a Martin Buber sense, as saying that God was an unknown, infinite person who called upon us to see everything in a personal way; some existentialist theologies of encounter in that period took that line and part of John Robinson was saying that; I didn't say that but was saying we had to give up the idea of God as a really existent super-being; it doesn't make sense, it never did; I could just have defended my view on the ground that it was always Christian orthodoxy that all theological statements are analogical or symbolic, no theological statement is literally true; the mystics had always said that, even the second Isaiah said it; at a pinch, in the Church courts, if I had been in robust health and able to defend myself, I might just have been able to defend my position as being dogmatic symbolism; I suspect that some such view is actually held by a high proportion of theologians but I had been more explicit; perhaps my sin was that I had come out too much into the open

32:29:19 In 1976 I had got tenure with a university lectureship, I was on the professional plateau and couldn't quite be thrown out; happily the Bishop of Ely, the Master of Emmanuel and the Archbishop of Canterbury were all friends and supported me in response to indignant letters calling for a trial; I could survive, but on the other hand I was tarnished; the most you could hope for was that with time the heat would simmer down, but John Robinson never recovered from 'Honest to God', he never got another job except as Dean of Trinity and that was a respectable niche where he could bat out time; 'Honest to God' gave a whole generation of young people the possibility of become Christians again; it was a great work of Anglican theology by a chap who was as Anglican as you can get; Michael Ramsey's refusal to back him and his kowtowing to evangelicals by condemning it meant that the radical position in the Church of England was really finished; in the long run the evangelicals took over after 1963, they are now the majority in the Church of England, and there is no future for people like me; I began to realize that in 1980; the church authorities would always side with the evangelicals because they were afraid that if it came to a major trial in the church courts the evangelicals would win as they were more orthodox in terms of literal adherence to the founding documents of the Church of England; this meant the kind of critical thinking I believe in is in the long run incompatible with membership of the church because it can never accept critical thinking; the Western church will have to go the same way as the Russian church in the end, and hopes of reform and renewal for the Episcopal churches of the West have had it; the whole idea that any community has a hot line to truth is out of date now; that is why I have now, very reluctantly and sadly just recently discontinued communion; it was very painful and I hated it, after sixty years, but I felt I had to do so; John Robinson, to some extent, tried to work his way back into respectability, but I won't do that; I think it is time to admit that once you move over to a critical view of scripture and Christianity you can no longer belong to one of the traditional scriptural religions which have a fixed framework of thought; in my most recent theology I align myself a bit more with people like the Quakers and say I am a post-ecclesiastical sort of Christian; I greatly love Christian culture, ethics and spirituality, I admire Jesus for his extraordinary ethical radicalism, and I would like to imagine a new secular future for Christianity, but I don't think we can any longer hope to maintain the continuity of the Church, the apostolic succession, the tradition of truth within a community

38:36:21 'The Sea of Faith' was my third television series and came out in 1984; Peter Armstrong, the producer, suggested trying to do a systematic theology, but I thought I was not ready for that; what we eventually did was a series of six television documentaries which are historical studies of major challenges to religious belief since Galileo; when it came out it was accompanied by a large book and also a number of articles in 'The Listener'; it did quite well and attracted a fair bit of interest, and was my single most successful book; limited though the medium is, I don't regret having done a bit of television; the evangelicals managed to stop it being broadcast at all in the USA, but it was shown in Australia and New Zealand and gave rise to Sea of Faith networks there as well as here; these are groups of people scattered round the country, radical Christians, some clergy, some lay, some still within the church, some outside; people try to discuss their own religious future and what they believe

40:48:07 On the Dawkins' controversy, as far as the biology is concerned he is obviously right; he is right to object to the irrationality of the evangelicals and the threats that they present to scientific education and medical research; the controversy itself is Victorian, and since philosophy now has moved into entirely different regions it does not interest me greatly; unlike Dawkins I think religion continues to be interesting after you have given up belief in any supernatural world; remember that from the time of Galileo and Descartes onwards, modern science was based on leaving out all ideas of purpose and meaning being built into the external world; the idea that events in the world happen in accordance with the will of a personal providence that is directing us all towards a moral goal is obsolete anyway; once the universe had become mechanised in the seventeenth-century the death of God was inevitable; Darwinism only repeated the same point

42:47:21 I think Westerners since the Romantic Movement have got fairly used to the idea that there can be a religious experience, for example of the sublime in nature, that is not theistic; we have known about Buddhism for a long time; a number of Western philosophers like Spinoza are clearly religious in the sense that they are seeking to place the individual in the world, to help the individual find a religiously satisfying vision of life, without anything like orthodox belief in God; it doesn't seem to me that the relation to God is part of the definition of religion, rather I want to know what a human being is, what I am, how my life fits into the general stream of life; I want some understanding of my place in the scheme of things - what I can know, what I can hope for, what kind of happiness a human being can enjoy, or whether human life is hopelessly tragic and unable to cope with the thought of death; how do we respond to a sort of vision of the world that emerged after World War II in the thought of people like Beckett, Sartre, and so on, which all my life has been part of the mental landscape? I want the possibility of a spirituality but without the old metaphysics, and this feeling goes back at least as far as Pascal; you notice in Pascal two things are happening, one is that the external world can no longer be viewed as a world controlled by a benign divine providence, and secondly, we have to start from ourselves; the reconstruction of modern knowledge after the Enlightenment is entirely from the point of view of the human being who looks at the world around him without dependence on divine revelation; the modern situation is anthropocentric and we have to find God within ourselves; that changeover from the vision of a world ruled over by divine law to a vision of the world that comes out of the human heart, the shift you see in Blake and Wordsworth, and which is foreshadowed in Jesus himself; he also is breaking with the idea of an external law ruling human life and instead talks about a new way of living from the heart in which human relationships are put first; I still see Jesus as a sort of pioneer of modernity; he successfully radicalized the message of the prophets who had themselves said that at the end of time the law would be written on the heart and God would put his spirit within us; some kind of internalization of religion within the human being was already looked forward to in the Old Testament and taken forward in the New Testament; in my view, religion needs to become much more anthropocentric, much more a matter of the individual’s imagination and attempt to project meaning into life; I now talk about ‘the religion of ordinary life’ and point out the extent to which in the last half century idioms about life have taken over in our language the place formerly taken by idioms about God; this starts in a very big way in D.H. Lawrence and F.R. Leavis, but can be found in earlier writers; people talk about a life as if it were God, they talk about faith in life, loving life, being committed to life, learning the lessons of life, and so on; I think that now in our rather post-religious epoch people see the stream of life itself as taking the place of God; it is in life that we live, move and have our being; the lines "life is God”, and to “love life is to love God” appears in 'War and Peace'; ‘everything moves and changes together and that movement is God’; Hegel calls it geist; interesting that odd pioneers in the Romantic Movement are beginning to change over to a new kind of theology which is completely secular, immanent and human, and that is what I have been groping after in the last ten years; it has a Christian origin but is a kind of fulfilled Christianity and is post-ecclesiastical, no longer preparing for another world above, rather it is teaching us to live life to the full here below; I nowadays urge people to be nihilists, to give up all ideas of a supernatural world, God, and life after death, and look for the possibility of a fully religious existence and love of life here and now

50:14:19 There is a resonance in China and Japan; I was much influenced by Dogen and some other Japanese writers; in 1945-7 there was in Denmark a group of poets and theologians who wanted to articulate a new religion of life on the basis of Kierkegaard; they saw Western existentialism as culminating in a purely religious affirmation of this life and a kind of aestheticizing of life; you can see this beginning to appear in art in French Impressionism, a visual joy in the transient world; all the things that Plato put lowest in value - shadows, water, trees, plants - are suddenly looked at with intense love because they are transient; look at a paintings by Roger van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck where the saints and angels are perfect, ideal, symmetrical faces, and are stone dead, but look at the patron at the bottom of the painting who is old and worn, and much more interesting; I don't want timeless, sexless, celestial love, I'd sooner have human love; I want an intense religious affirmation just of this life and just of transience; that is why recently I've even gone so far as to outrage John Hick by denying the problem of evil, I want to say yes to metaphysical evil; the film 'Wings of Desire' is about a man who is offered the choice of being an angel or a human being, and he chooses the latter as he would rather have human love plus death than be immortal but sexless; I want to make religion totally this-worldly and irreversibly so; I also want to say that we are lucky to live in our own epoch, the first age in all of human history where ordinary people of the poorest class can have a full-length life, reasonable health and education, justice, peace and prosperity, and access to culture; no society before has achieved as much, it can be done, so there is no reason why this life shouldn't be made a lot better; to the Americans I say I don't want you evangelicalism, I would rather have European social democracy and welfare state; the churches' provision of almshouses and prayers for the sick was on a pathetically small scale and completely inadequate compared with what we can now do; I want people now to see that modern civil society is a lot more Christian than the churches, not least in its attitude to women and gays; this is the theme of a recent book; I want to make people aware that the decline of ecclesiastical Christianity is not the decline of religion altogether, we have gained more than we have lost; the decline of religion is already far advanced in Jane Austen's 'Mansfield Park'; she was well aware that the replacement of the old Anglican landowners had already begun; I no longer want to struggle for favour with the Church, but rather to persuade people that religion is not over and it is possible to find a way of saying yes to life which includes accepting its transience without complaint

56:45:22 I have wanted to democratize both philosophy and theology; historically, philosophy was an elite subject but today with mass higher education we are actually teaching philosophy to a mass audience, far bigger than the great figures of the past would ever have imagined; theology in the past was written for church leaders and it was an ideology of ecclesiastical power; I have tried instead to base my religious language on ordinary language; I wrote a book called 'The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech' in which I listed the most important new idioms about life which have come in since World War II, and plotted those idioms against the traditional doctrine of God to show to what extent we have transferred the religious focus from God to ordinary life; the obvious way is in which the funeral service in modern England is nearly always the closure of a life and not about another life after death; in philosophy I have tried to say that we can be content with the world view that is the product of our ordinary, everyday conversation with each other; in ordinary language we have come to use the word perception to mean interpretation, when we talk about the difference between one person's perception of an issue and another's, perception means interpretation; it is not only the philosophers who are no longer the blank-slate empiricists they used to be, ordinary people have got the message too; I have rather specialized in my recent books in putting into bold type little phrases taken from ordinary language that make quite sophisticated philosophical points; I claim that my current philosophy and religion of life is in fact what is already emerging in ordinary language; I say to the reader that I am not trying to foist my ideas on you, but am trying to show you what already shows up in your own language; in that way I am trying to make philosophy and theology more democratic subjects which will be accessible to ordinary people