A friend of mine who is desperately seeking the truth about God and Christianity asked me to read a collection of essays by Aldous Huxley called Huxley and God: Essays. He wants to know what I think of Huxley’s writings from a Christian perspective.
I haven’t gotten very far… my new kitty, Kali, is distracting me!
If you know anything about Huxley, you know that he wasn’t a Christian.
“Officially an agnostic,” Aldous Huxley was to declare in 1926, “but [he demurred] when in propitious emotional circumstances with certain landscapes, works of art,…certain people, I know ‘God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world.’ “
His early philosophy was more hedonistic, but in later years he was dubbed a mystic. He came to believe that “truth is universal, that God is One.”
So, needless to say, there’s a lot of stuff that he believed and wrote that I disagree with. But here’s something I read today that I thought was spot on:
At the other end of the scale are the Catholics, the Jews, the Moslems, all with historical, 100 percent revealed religions. These people have their working hypotheses about nonsensuous reality; which means that they have a motive for doing something about it. But because their working hypotheses are too elaborately dogmatic, most of them discover only what they were initially taught to believe. But what they believe is a hotch-potch of good, less good and even bad. Records of the infallible intuitions of great saints into the highest spiritual reality are mixed up with records of the less reliable and infinitely less valuable intuitions of psychics into the lower levels of nonsensuous reality; and to these are added mere fancies, discursive reasonings and sentimentalisms, projected into a kind of secondary objectivity and worshipped as divine facts. But at all times and in spite of these handicaps a persistent few have continued to research to the point where at last they find themselves looking through their dogmas, out into the Clear Light of the Void beyond.
I disagree with some of his terminology, but his point is a good one. Dogma gets in the way. Especially when it’s man-made dogma.
My comment is that imperfect human beings are never going to have all the answers, and so it is illogical to expect that any human system of belief (dogma, if you will) is ever going to be either complete or coherent.
This Christian is OK with that situation, but many are not. Fundamentalists, in particular, attempt to placate themselves by asserting that what they do have, if not complete, at least is without error. The result for many is that they end up placing their faith not so much in God, but in their own limited understanding and experience.
From that point of view, it’s my guess that Huxley is impressed (if not persuaded) by those believers who have gotten past that stumbling block, and engage the world as it is…!
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I’ve read more of Huxley’s writings, and I gotta say… I’m impressed by his grasp of what it really means to worship God.
He may never have come to the belief that Jesus is God and his Savior, which is sad, but we should all take a page from him in the way he looks at religion and God. I’ll be writing another post on it later today (hopefully).
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I have a Huxley book on my shelf waiting to be read. I can’t wait to hear more about him and your thoughts on his!
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I loooove Aldous Huxley. I know, I know … I’ll burn in hell for it. Ha! Ha! Ha! I’ve been to hell and back and survived.
I’ve read a couple of your later notes.
Don’t let the dogma get ya down, OK. It sucks, for sure. And I’m a baby Catholic saying this to you!! If it doesn’t fit for you anymore, then find what does fit your heart, spirit and soul.
It’s OK. I’m supporting you in your own journey, albeit through a message on your blog and through words.
God and this universe love you just the way you are … period.
Grace and peace,
Joe
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