Vale Don Cupitt
By Greg Spearritt
Don Cupitt came into my life in a life-changing way in 1987, courtesy of our esteemed Aunty.
I’d heard some snippets of an interview where he discussed ideas from his book, The Long Legged Fly. I was a liberal Christian struggling to find a coherent worldview. Cupitt’s thoughts intrigued me.
Soon after that I was attending a local parish retreat leading up to Easter and was suddenly, divinely, inspired to walk out to the phone box on the footpath (remember them?) and ring Brisbane’s Church Stores (remember them?) to order a copy of Fly.
I devoured the book while on a subsequent private, semi-silent retreat with a few friends. It was exciting stuff, in spite of the fact that I understood very little of it at any depth. Thus, however, began an engagement with Cupitt’s thinking that led me out of my liberal Christian bind and into a joyful, radical agnosticism (that I unhesitatingly now describe as atheism). It was with great relief that I came to assign my realist ‘God’ to the scrapheap of irrationality and personal irrelevance.
As a friend has described Cupitt’s take on God, religion and language: “Bleeding obvious – but only after he’d so neatly exposed it.” Language was the elephant in the room, invisible to most of us, but with its enormous footprints all over what we took to be reality.
Don Cupitt was a gracious and generous man in my direct personal experience, as well as in his writing. I met Don and his (equally gracious, generous) wife Susan on several occasions, and with my partner was kindly invited to afternoon tea at their house when we visited Cambridge. He and Susan visited Australia a number of times, at personal expense, for Don to deliver talks, many of them at events organised by our newly-formed Sea of Faith in Australia Network.
Don’s writing was uncompromising, to the detriment of his career in the Church of England. His intellectual honesty appeared to be too much for the established Churchmen of his time. It’s no coincidence that he came to their notice in no small way with his contribution to the collection of essays titled The Myth of God Incarnate. His 1982 book Taking Leave of God, naturally, did little to endear him to the powers that be, even though it actually left ample room for continued Christian faith and practice.
In research I completed in 1995 on British and American pluralist theologians I found Don to be one of just a handful of these thinkers to engage honestly with, and be genuinely influenced by, Buddhist thinking. He recognised its otherness and came to see himself, to some degree, as a Christian Buddhist.
One idea that attracted Don to Buddhism was the notion of impermanence. He memorably used the image of a fountain which from a distance appears solid and permanent, but on closer inspection is in constant motion, constituted by millions of drops coming into being and passing away. As he, himself, has now done.
It’s an interesting juxtaposition, the passing of Don Cupitt just a few days before the inauguration of Donald Trump: intelligence, scholarship, integrity and decency on the one hand, wilful ignorance, corruption and vulgarity on the other. It was never going to be good time to lose Don, but in his spirit I believe we have a fight on our hands. We must remain, intelligently, uncompromising and honest.
I am immensely grateful for Don Cupitt having been with us, adrift as we all are on this “glittering, heaving sea of meanings”, and for his wonderful ability to shine a light to help us make our own way in it.
Disclaimer: views represented in SOFiA blog posts are entirely the view of the respective authors and in no way represent an official SOFiA position. They are intended to stimulate thought, rather than present a final word on any topic.
Greg, thank you, I find much of your article inspiring and very worthy of its subject.
You mention that the Cupitts visited us each year at their own expense. Perhaps Don’s interest in our Australian group came about after your visit to him. Despite attending conferences where he spoke and reading some of his books I have never felt close to him, but your article brings him closer.
There is a point which I have made previously but it seems I should mention it again now. There is another form of communication apart from language and it is via the arts. Beethoven and Rembrandt still speak to us, but not with words. Cupitt frequently mentioned the importance of the visual arts but I do not remember him pointing this out.
Don was talking about language ‘sensu lato’ – the movement from sign to sign, all of which is humanly-created and of which it’s impossible to move outside. (He expressed it much more elegantly than this!) It therefore incorporates all of the arts.
Life is an interpretive experience interpreted by ever life form moment by moment. Making meaning within the constraints of its existence.
Don did good! 🙂
No candle can burn forever
RIP