Transcendence and Transformation

An Interview with Charles Stang

Charles Stang is the Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) and Professor of Early Christian Thought at Harvard Divinity School. Wayfare Editor Zachary Davis sat down with Charles to discuss his life as a scholar of religion and learn more about his research initiative, Transcendence and Transformation.

How did you begin to study religion the way that you do? What was it that pulled you into this path? 

As an adolescent, I became gripped by certain kinds of existential questions that I first hoped would be addressed by my church community. I was raised in the United Church of Christ in suburban Minneapolis, and I found my upbringing in the church pretty wanting. I wasn't so much repelled as I was just bored.  I don't remember listening to a single sermon. 

So when these existential questions began to arise in me – What are we humans? What are we doing here? Are we meant to be in relationship to the divine? Are we ourselves divine? – I turned to Christianity, but I didn't find that the church community I was a part of was particularly interested in fielding those questions. 

College was a real turning point for me because although I had what I would now label as religious or spiritual questions, I first turned to literature and philosophy to get traction on them. The study of literature repelled me immediately. I thought I would love it, and I found out that whatever went under the banner of literary criticism in the university bore little relationship to the questions I wanted addressed. But I did find that place in philosophy, especially at the margins of academic philosophy,  in ancient Greek philosophy and in modern continental philosophy. The main current of philosophy in this country is what's called  “analytic” philosophy, and that tradition seemed to have little interest in the sorts of questions I was interested in.

When it came time to leave college and think about what might come next, two things happened. First, I think I got tired of my late adolescent atheism, which was a sort of brief phase in my life. I was honestly a kind of half-hearted atheist even then. And I sort of gave up on that—I just stopped pretending that I was an atheist. And I thought, I can be a theist without being Christian. 

When I returned to religion, it was first and foremost by believing in God, or maybe it's better to say the sacred; I wasn't sure that the divine that was pulling me was a person, God the Father, God the Son, or even God the Spirit.  But I decided that I had unfairly shed my Christian identity and thought that I needed not just to study Christianity but to step back into it and inhabit it.

And at the same time, I realized philosophy was not a place I could ask and answer the kinds of questions I was interested in. The study of religion was actually much more capacious. It included a lot of philosophers that academic philosophy had largely discarded. At one point certain philosophers who in many ways were hostile to religion became for me incredibly powerful sources of religiosity. Ironically, Nietzsche in particular was a huge catalyst for my return to religion, to Christianity. I think in some ways his book The Anti-Christ, which he wrote late in life, catalyzed my own interest in learning about early  Christianity. 

What was it about Nietzsche's writing? Was it the seriousness with which he took these questions? 

Yes, nobody takes questions as seriously as Nietzsche - but also with a fantastic sense of humor! But what really gripped me with Nietzsche was this idea that we can become so much more than we are. That was like a siren call that just went straight into the center of me, and I think it was what I was always hoping Christianity would be about.

And in some way, of course, Christianity is about that. But the version of Christianity I encountered in a suburban Midwestern upper-middle-class white church seemed not at all to foreground that project of self-transformation and self-transcendence. I heard it in Nietzsche and I fell hard for him, and that question has been an absolute mainstay of my adult life, personal and professional, academic and existential. What is the human? What can we become in relationship to what we're calling the divine? And I spent a large portion of my adult life trying to explore that within the bounds of the church, and have stepped out of the bounds of the church more recently, both personally and professionally.

Why did you feel you needed to step away from your Christian community?

I've been in the Episcopal Church for about twenty years. My frustration with contemporary Christians, at least of the flavor I encountered, is that I don't think they really believe in God.

I don't think they believe in the transcendent, the transformative. I think contemporary Christianity  is overwhelmingly about do-gooding with a kind of biblical veneer or mandate. And I think the call to do good, the radical call to love your enemy that Jesus demands, is a hugely transcendent and transformative call, but I don't really see that radical call foregrounded.

I see my experience with Christianity as a lot of people who sort of roll their eyes at the explicitly religious, who are there largely to instill morality in their children and to feel a kind of call to do good in the world. And I don't know that we need Christianity or any other religion to do good in the world. Quite apart from that, I needed something else from religion than that. 

Many Latter-day Saints are leaving their own congregations today—perhaps for similar reasons, that they perceive their spiritual lives to have stagnated and for one reason or another aren’t finding nourishment in an institutional setting. But I fear a lot of the people leaving don't really have a serious plan for continued spiritual growth, and I fear that the alternative to “stale” American middle-class Christianity is stale, middle-class secular nothingness. Same spiritual stagnation, just more lonely. How are you trying to awaken from a spiritual slumber and shake yourself into a different trajectory, and is the path that you have been on something that any seeker could pursue?

Great question. I do recognize myself as a seeker. I'm proud to be a seeker. One thing that has kept me in Christianity has been recognizing that whatever frustrations I may have with the contemporary church, this is a tradition with amazing resources, sages to be studied and followed, and so I have tried to find my sages and follow them, and you don't really need that many sages in your life. You just need a handful. Some of mine are Christians and some aren't. So one thing for the disaffected is to go back to your tradition and look for the sources of living water—they're always there. And that may be within the LDS tradition itself, or it may be part of the longer Christian arc from which the LDS church emerges. 

A second lineage I love and attach myself to is the New England Transcendentalists. An initiative that we're following here at the Center for the Study of World Religions is called Transcendence and Transformation, and is quite obviously an attempt to connect ourselves to that ancestry. I think about those disaffected Christians (and Emerson was certainly a disaffected Christian) and what they did. He found sages within and outside the Christian Church, and he activated what he called a new animism.

And I find that category very suggestive and appealing. Emerson tried to activate a relationship to the world in which we humans are not the sole agents of consciousness walking in an inert landscape, but in fact, we are crowded with other persons, nonhuman persons, and that this world is alive, vibrantly so, with consciousness. And he found that belief reflected in some of the sources that he and others were excavating from the “Western tradition.” And I think he found it in this landscape, and I've worked really hard to step into this landscape and let it introduce itself quite literally and speak. And as I've learned to listen, I have met all kinds of non-human persons out and around these parts. 

I’m a great admirer of St. Francis of Assisi, who expressed deep love for the natural world. He wrote a hymn called Canticle of the Creatures where he addressed even celestial bodies in familiar terms, thanking God for Brother Sun and Sister Moon. This way of seeing ourselves in concert and communion with the created world is both a radically new way of living in the world and also the most ancient. How has your own experience in the world changed as you've tried to pay attention to the more-than-human world?

I’ll answer with a story. About six years ago we got a dog named Xena, with remarkable powers of communication and perception. I can't tell you how uncanny it is, what she knows about us. She's a vizsla, and vizslas, especially when they're young, need to be off leash outside every day. And so my wife and I, sometimes together, sometimes apart, were outside with our dog every day in the woods through all seasons. And that was a bit of a baptism into the animate world.

This practice of regularly immersing myself in nature was more transformative than I expected. And then, I started reading in what's sometimes called neo-animism. These are folks who are trying to revive the category, which was a term of derision largely for indigenous traditions around the world in the late nineteenth century.

In anthropology, animist traditions were framed as sort of primitive forms of religion. And on this view, the evolution of religion tended towards monotheism of course, Christian monotheism being the perfection of that evolutionary scheme. But this reading in the literature of neo-animism has given me new vocabulary that is also feeding into my practice, and my practice is enriching the reading.

I also began to get into the very vibrant world of the anthropology of the Amazon. Eduardo Kohn's book How Forests Think was my gateway drug into that world that continues to bend my mind.

And you mentioned St. Francis, who I regard as a bit of a lone voice. There are few prominent Christian animists in the tradition, which is unfortunate. But I've also derived great benefit from going back to the world I know better, which is the ancient Mediterranean world, and looking at other kinds of polytheistic, animist worldviews, and trying to inhabit those as well.

If someone's thinking, OK, I'm bored with my current church and I want to grow spiritually, but I also know that I'm really shaped and transformed in communities of mutual love and commitment. How do you approach that recognition of the social dimension of spiritual life? 

It's a fantastic question, and I think it's one that haunts the seeker of spirituality. I take inspiration from what I'll call communities of discernment or fellowships of spirituality that have stepped out of the ready-made community of church, but recognize that they need to form other fellowships, other communities. I think the Transcendentalists recognized this. They weren't just a collection of individuals, they were a deeply entangled community of thinkers and practitioners. 

Traditional Christianity will scorn seeker spirituality for being individualistic. The terms change, but the basic charge is the same: cafeteria spirituality, just picking and choosing what you do and don’t like. I think that's unfair; it's a caricature. It's speaking some truth, but the fact is a lot of traditional Christianity, at least modern American Protestant Christianity, is also individualized cafeteria spirituality.

I would advise people to not be afraid to be a “selfish” seeker, and to search out other seekers and form cells of spiritual community. I think there is good reason to think a cellular model is what we need, one that has the agility necessary to meet contemporary spiritual longings.

You’ve led an initiative called Transformation and Transcendence. What are the major currents that you and your researchers have been examining, and what are you personally most energized about? 

Well, it was an initiative in some way meant as a provocation. I feel like the study of religion, not unlike contemporary Christianity, has lost sight of a certain North Star, which I could just call the sacred. It doesn't really believe in the sacred. It doesn't seek to encounter the sacred. It doesn't seek to transcend or transform. I sound hopelessly out of fashion. I feel as if the study of religion has tried to fit in with the humanities by becoming a kind of secular enterprise of critique.

I think it will lose if it competes on that field. I think the study of religion needs to understand that there is something unique in this enterprise and that people are drawn to it because they sense that we humans are more than the humanities are telling us that we are. So it was a provocation that tried to give shape to that impulse around these two poles of transcendence and transformation. We've had reading groups on the divine feminine, on plant consciousness, on Henry Corbin, who is a twentieth-century philosopher of religion and scholar of Islam, who I think holds great treasures for the study of religion and for philosophy and spirituality more generally.

We've also had speaker series exploring psychedelics and the future of religion (which is an ambivalent scene for me). There's a lot of noise, and I've been working hard to try to find the signal amidst the noise in the contemporary conversation around psychedelics and religion.

I’m particularly fascinated by your explorations of plant consciousness. What about that conversation is generative for you?

Recent work in the humanities in the social sciences has generated new interest in the age-old question of the relationship between matter and spirit and its relevance for the environmental crisis we now face.

"Vibrant materialists," such as the political theorist Jane Bennet, have asked us to revise our view of matter as an inert object we manipulate and invite us to think instead of the vibrancy of nonhuman and allegedly inanimate things, that is, their agency and creativity.

This promises to cultivate a different ecological sensibility and different sorts of political interventions in the environmental crisis. Some environmentalists have revived interests in spirits. Actually, interest in spirits has never died down, but scholars are taking  it seriously again.

And they're taking these phenomena seriously if not literally as occasions to widen our notion of agency. Perhaps humans are just one expression of a more widely distributed agency, an agency spread across the full spectrum of this alleged antinomy between matter and spirit.

The decentering of the human is sometimes called the nonhuman turn or the more-than-human turn. Could it be that by shifting our focus away from the human, to the more-than-human, we actually summon an ecological imagination that better safeguards humans, precisely by displacing them from the center of all our inquiry?

One person I’ve learned a great deal from is Robin Wall Kimmerer. She is trained as a scientist and wrote an influential book on moss, but is also an Indigenous practitioner and has tried to bring those two worlds together in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. She says that science is an incredibly sophisticated language of objects. That is to say, it presumes a subject/object dichotomy and treats its objects of inquiry as just that, objects. And therefore, that applies a certain lens to the material world.

What you will find in the work of scientists like Robin Wall Kimmerer, Monica Gagliano, and Suzanne Simard is a questioning of that very frame and lens. And that's at the heart of neo-animist ontologies and epistemologies as well. That is to say, a suspicion that what we are dealing with here is not humans encountering a world of inert objects or even other living beings that maybe have some remarkable capacities, but that these plants, animals, and maybe even those things we label inanimate are persons, subjects like us, and yet importantly different.

And that changes the nature of the inquiry, it changes the nature of the experiments that are afforded, and it changes the nature of the results. So I'll just say that things like objectivity and iterability become very complicated if what you're dealing with is something that is interacting with you as a person.

I think what's really exciting is that research is pressing on these really fundamental questions about what ways of knowing science can claim, and what is revealed and concealed by those ways of knowing.

In a recent essay called “The Dream of the Sphere,” you called for a post critical study of religion. What was your goal with this essay?

The title of that piece is a reference or an allusion to a late nineteenth-century novel called Flatland. It's a world of two-dimensional beings in which one square has a dream of a sphere and tries to tell all the other squares what a three-dimensional object might be and how it might interact with their two-dimensional world. And it's a great shock to the two-dimensional world.

The square is persecuted and eventually put in prison, and all talk of spheres is outlawed. So I use that as a provocative analogy to where we find ourselves in the humanities today. I feel like the humanities is living in a bit of a flatland, and I believe in more than two dimensions, many more. 

What we're calling the sacred exists in dimensions beyond the two. Once we acknowledge that, we can begin to think critically about how the sacred interacts with the dimensions we are accustomed to perceiving. And our perception can be expanded as well, but the sacred will always exceed the capacities of our even expanded perception.

The Flatland essay was an attempt to surface traditions and practices that recognize this and work with this many-dimensioned reality. And the fact is, what we'll just call the modern Western secular flatland is convinced that we know what is real, and that conviction is a huge exception in the history of humanity, and in fact, it's the exception in the global present.

We are actually a tiny minority suffering from this view that we are convinced is the truth, and we scorn and ridicule anyone else around the globe who has a different ontology and a different epistemology, and we look down on traditions from the past that have different ontologies and different epistemologies without recognizing that we are just this very thin crust on the human enterprise.

I don't think this thin crust is serving us particularly well. I think this view is deeply tied to the predicament, spiritual and environmental, political, and psychological, that we find ourselves in. So, here at the Center for the Study of World Religions, we're at the periphery of the university quite literally trying to use this fulcrum to bend the conversation towards transcendence and transformation, to help others recognize, encounter, and experience the sacred. 

Charles Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.

Art by Alonsa Guevara.