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Jacob Harrison has written an excellent essay on the intersection of psychedelics and Christianity, clarifying the important issues involved. https://cryptochamomile.substack.com/p/jesus-is-not-a-mushroom

What do people mean when they talk about having experienced “ego death” on a psychedelic trip? Given widespread assumptions about what it is to be alive or to be dead, it would seem paradoxical for someone to claim to have literally died while on a trip. “And yet here you are,” one might reply. But if someone claims to have experienced ego death rather than simply death, the paradox is resolved by assuming that the ego is something that can die while the person yet lives, all the better for having got rid of that troublesome baggage, the ego. One other way of resolving it would be to assume that, even though the person dies body and soul when the ego dies, he or she can be instantly reborn, or at least quickly enough that no one notices the gap. But then, given the intimate connection, on this supposition, between the life of the ego and the life of the person himself or herself, it seems most likely that the ego would be reborn also. I suppose it could be changed by the experience, though.

In this effort to understand such talk more clearly, it might be worthwhile to invoke a dictionary definition. In Greek and Latin, ego is just the word for “I”. The New Oxford American Dictionary, which I consulted online, distinguishes three senses of “ego” in English:

a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance: a boost to my ego

Psychoanalysis the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity. Compare with id and superego.

Philosophy [in metaphysics] a conscious thinking subject

As experienced from the standpoint of someone who is alive, someone else’s death appears to be the death of his or her ego in all three senses. The conscious thinking subject is gone. There is no more mediation between the conscious and the unconscious, or between the superego and the id. There is just unconsciousness, and the superego and the id are just as absent as the ego. Completely absent also is any manifestation in the dead body of a sense of self-esteem or self-importance.

But what will your own death be like as experienced from your own standpoint? Will it be that you simply won’t have any standpoint? That you will go out of existence? For my own part, I cannot imagine going out of existence, at least not without returning to it. I can imagine my own nonexistence only by taking up what I would have thought of as someone else’s viewpoint, but then it becomes my viewpoint and so I must exist after all.

In the case of a person who is tripping and reports, either during or after the trip, having undergone ego death, it won’t be so clear to an observer whether the person who makes this claim has suffered the death of the ego in all three meanings of the word. There probably won’t be any clear evidence that the person ceased to exist as a conscious, thinking subject during the trip—certainly not in the clear way evidenced by a corpse. On the other hand, it could easily appear that, while peaking, the person’s ego in the psychoanalytic sense has given up the ghost and is no longer busily trying to compromise between the conflicting demands of the superego and the id, and this is what could be meant by the death of the ego when there is still a living, breathing person before us. In such a case, the tripping person might appear to be either a crazy person or a saint or one alternating between those extremes. In some cases, an observer might notice a lack of self-esteem in someone during or after a big psychedelic trip, in others, a lack of self-importance. Either lack could be described as the result of “ego death”, although that language might seem a bit overblown. In the case of lack of self-esteem, this would be an unfortunate result; in the case of lack of self-importance, perhaps a desirable one. Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, and that another commandment that is like it is to love your neighbor as yourself. If you lack self-esteem and don’t love yourself, then loving your neighbor as yourself will mean not loving your neighbor, and it is unlikely that that is what Jesus had in mind. But if you are self-important, you will find it difficult not to love yourself more than you love your neighbor, and it is unlikely you will love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength. Hence, we feel that it is better to have some self-esteem but to be wary of having too much of a sense of self-importance.

But we don’t have to limit our investigation to what can be observed of the behavior of a tripping person by someone else. We can take a trip ourselves and find out what it is like from the inside. This of course won’t be scientific, in the sense of the statistical generalization of a series of quantitative measurements. And what I have said already, about whether we can observe something that would count as ego death in the behavior or lack of it in dead people or in people who are tripping, isn’t scientific either, but rather more like natural history. But science is not the only way of learning.

Reflecting on memories of the experience of peaking, I think Christian terminology is more accurate than the secular terminology of “ego death”. A trip can be terrifying, in which case one is confronting sin, death, and the Devil. It can also be liberating and joyful, when one realizes that the Holy Spirit has conquered sin, death, and the Devil, come what may. Then it isn’t just “the ego” who dies (only to be reborn to tell about it), it is oneself, body and soul, who dies and is reborn, body and soul. That all happened many years ago, and back then I wouldn’t have used Christian terminology to describe it, but I do now. You can’t change what has already happened, but neither can you stop changing your conception of it in the light of ongoing experience. There is no past that exists separately from the present.

Such an experience is unforgettable. It wasn’t at all like the loosening and falling away into unconsciousness that I recall from being anaesthetized for surgery. Or rather it was like it in only one way: I was unmistakably not in control. I was being bombarded with a rain of miraculous events, a flood of light and sound and feeling and thoughts (but no time to stop and say what they were), which was absolutely overpowering. There was nothing to do but to accept it. It came in a series of discrete steps, from one upper limit of beauty and truth to another one even higher and deeper, the new upper limit, to another, until the whole thing came to a stop. And then started up again, only now just slightly less, a little softer, and I felt a little less overwhelmed and that must have been the moment–although I didn’t yet realize it–that I first began to come down. “But how was that anything like death?” you may well ask. It was when the whole thing stopped momentarily. At that moment I didn’t think or experience anything. All the power was suddenly turned down and off, and there was no time. It wasn’t until time started back up again, accompanied by a whooshing sound as of machinery powering back up, that it seemed as though no time had passed, and I had the thought that I had just died and been reborn.

On another trip, equally unforgettable, in what I hoped was the coming down phase, I was lying in bed in the dark with my eyes closed, wishing for peace from ugly thoughts and images. I was seeing garish, cartoon-like visions of demons and ugly, evil, frightening things: bloody knives and fangs, vomit, shit, pus, corpses, evil acts of cruelty, the Devil himself; and I thought, “It’s a good thing that I don’t believe in Satan, because if I did, I might think that he was here, ordering me about and preparing to take me to Hell.” But that thought didn’t help much, because the next thing that happened was that my heart started beating very rapidly and I was afraid I was going to die at any minute. I got out of bed and starting pacing around, trying everything I could think of to calm myself. There was no breakthrough, only endurance, with the same awful feeling of being in a state of panic coming back a wave at a time over the following days and weeks, with gradually increasing time between the waves and gradually decreasing intensity. On that trip, I didn’t think I had died and been reborn. Rather I had survived an ordeal. At the time, it didn’t seem that any good came of it that was worth the price. In retrospect it cured me of a certain false confidence.

I’m sharing these memories and reflections in order to suggest that it might be better to confess that a psychedelic trip can be a confrontation with God and with sin, death, and the Devil rather than to use the terminology of “ego death”, which sounds more secular, psychological, milder and less scary.

But if the Holy Spirit has conquered sin, death, and the Devil, why do we have to keep bothering about them? They are conquered in the end, which is what one knows deep down while peaking, and the conviction remains, but may weaken over time, and life, even though it is new life, goes on, and in this life we are all sinners, we all die, and through these means, the Devil is always desperately trying to undermine our confidence–and his dread–that he is inevitably defeated and we are reborn into new life. God is that being than which none greater can be conceived. Think of everything you love, everything desirable, everything admirable and noble, everything you could possibly want there to be at the bottom of all things and imagine there is a being who embodies all those things, is the spirit of all those things, causes all those things. Sin is forgetting that this is what God is and consequently failing to love Him with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength and failing to love your neighbor as yourself.

We don’t need to be God for everything to be fundamentally all right. We just need to be in the right relationship to God. More than anything else, psychedelic experience has convinced me that it is possible to achieve that. But I am a sinner. I don’t stay in the right relationship to God and taking more trips eventually doesn’t help any more. That is where going to church and reading and studying the Bible with others comes in. This is where Jesus comes in. Or at least that is where they eventually came in for me. It is also possible, I am aware, to be a practicing Christian during the period of first experiencing psychedelics and for the whole time that they still work. And it may be possible that taking trips never stops working or that it starts working again. That is fine too. I’m not trying to dictate to anybody, just sharing my thoughts.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-psychedelic-christian-podcast/id1579583551?i=1000556603289

I enjoyed my conversation with Clint Kyles of The Psychedelic Christian Podcast. I think he is doing great work with his series of interviews of psychedelic Christians! Click on the link to hear it.

God waits for us. We want to believe that our God is everywhere and everywhen present, and that there is no knowledge or power that He lacks, as assurance that He is the one true God; because if there is some knowledge or power that our God lacks, there might be some other god who has the knowledge and power that our God has but who also has the knowledge and power that our God lacks; and then that other god would be the one true God.

We also believe we have control over some things and no control over other things. 

Is God here at this very moment? Yes. Is God causing me to think these very thoughts? No, or at least not necessarily. He has given me the freedom to think my own thoughts and make my own decisions about certain things that He has given me the power to do or not to do. Now let’s suppose that He knows what I’m going to do long before I do it or even think about it. After all, He is not only here at this moment. He is at every place at this moment, and at every place at every moment and knows everything about everything—past, present, and future. Could He share with me His knowledge about what I shall do in the future if He wanted to? Yes. He can do anything that is logically possible. If He did, would I still be free to do or not to do what He has told me I shall do? A Yes answer to that question implies one or the other of two equally unacceptable alternatives, supposing that I now choose not to do what God has told me I shall do: either 1) I make it so that God was either lying or mistaken, or 2) my choice now, not to do what He told me I would do, retroactively changes what He told me. If I choose now not to do it, then He told me back then that I wouldn’t do it. That is, if I had the power to do anything other than what God has told me I would do, then either I would have the power to reverse time and change what God has said, or I would have the power to show that there is something that God doesn’t know or else that He doesn’t always tell the truth. Since neither of those consequences is acceptable, it follows that I don’t have the power to do anything other than what God has told me I shall do.

But what if God doesn’t tell me? If we suppose that God knows what everyone is going to do long before any of us has decided to do it or even thought about it, then even when He doesn’t tell us, the consequences would be only slightly different and just as unacceptable. If God knows what I am going to do before I do it and before I’ve decided to do it, but doesn’t tell me, and I then fail to do it, I won’t consequently make it to be that He is a liar, because He hasn’t told me; but I will make it to be that He was wrong and so didn’t really know after all. Or, we could say that I make it to be that time is reversed, the past is changed, and what He knew then was that I would fail to do the thing that we were formerly supposing He knew I was going to do.

Something must give way. Either we are wrong in thinking that anything is ever really up to us, or we are wrong in thinking that God knows in advance what we shall decide about something that is up to us. I think it is more likely that we were wrong to think that the true God has infallible knowledge in every detail about what has yet to happen than that we were wrong to think that we have choices about some things and are responsible for those choices. I don’t think it takes away anything from the glory of God to suppose that, although He could know in advance and in every detail what will happen in the future, He has chosen to leave some things up to us, so that He waits to find out what we shall do about those things. It is more glorious to be able to choose whether to exercise a power than to have no choice in the matter. That He has freely chosen to give us a limited version of His own unlimited power doesn’t turn us into rival gods or imply that there is any god greater than Him. He could take back complete control whenever He wants to.

Objection: God is outside of time and He would have to be in time in order to wait for anything. Knowing what someone will do and causing him or her to do it are two different things. God timelessly knows that one freely chooses to do what one freely chooses to do.

Reply: The spatially metaphorical view of all of time from outside of time boils down to conceiving of the future as if it were already past. This is what seemingly justifies the claim that God, or anyone for that matter, could infallibly know what someone will do without causing him or her to do it. One can know without a doubt that in the past someone else made a certain decision without having caused him or her to do it. But one could know infallibly (we are not talking about a reasonable prediction that turns out to be true) that someone else will “choose” a certain course of action in the future only by knowing infallibly that one will have sufficient control over that future situation such that, when the time comes, one will be able to cause the other person to “choose” that course of action by preventing any alternative. Furthermore, to rule out the vagaries of one’s own free choices, one will need to know infallibly that one will have no choice but to control the other person’s behavior in this way.

Finally, there are no decisions to be made in the present that will affect the future if everything just happens timelessly, because there would be no present moment in relation to which anything would be past or future.

The only important sense in which God is represented in Scripture as having foreknowledge is that He makes promises and knows not only that he intends to keep them but also that He will keep them. This is the sense in which the prophets tell us what will happen. It is a philosophical/theological question whether we should also believe that God knows, in advance and in every detail, what is going to happen. If we think of God as the being than which (whom) none greater can be conceived, we can ask whether it is greater to have such foreknowledge or greater not to have it. Is it greater not to be able to be surprised by anything that happens, or greater to be able to be surprised?

It is hard to answer this question even as applied to merely human wisdom. It is plausible to say that someone who has become wise through long experience is less apt to be surprised than someone with less experience. And yet experience also shows that those who are less likely to become wise through experience are precisely those who are adept at ignoring things that do not fit their preconceptions. And this makes it plausible that the wiser person is the one who is more likely to welcome surprises and hence to be surprised.

Someone might object that using the word “surprise” is likely to give us a bias in favor of thinking it is better to be able to be surprised than not, because the word has positive connotations, as when out of the blue something happens to inject a feeling of joy that we didn’t expect. Let’s ask, then, whether it is greater to be able to be disappointed or greater to be unable ever to be disappointed. Surely no one likes to be disappointed. But what could make it so that one would be unable ever to be disappointed? One way would be simply not to have any expectations in the first place. For us humans, with our limited knowledge and reliance on expectations shaped by desires and experience, this is difficult or perhaps impossible. But supposing that God has infallible foreknowledge, it would be not only easy but inevitable. He would never be disappointed because He would always already know what was going to happen. For the same reason, He would never be pleasantly surprised by anything that happens. But since pleasant surprises in our lives add joy, can we believe that the being than which none greater can be conceived never has joy in that way? Would it be greater not to have infallible foreknowledge so that one could have pleasant surprises? A first thought was that the lack of infallible foreknowledge is also what makes one subject to disappointments, and that a being who is not subject to disappointment is greater than one who is. Can we conceive of the being than whom none is greater as lacking infallible foreknowledge in such a way as to make the joy of pleasant surprises possible without also making the pain of disappointment possible? Maybe the greatest being conceivable doesn’t know in advance and in every detail what is going to happen, but does know that at any time He can make happen whatever He wants to happen. It is plausible that this would take the sting out of possible disappointments while still allowing Him the joy of pleasant surprises. And while we humans aren’t relieved of the sting of disappointment by having the power ourselves to make happen whatever we want to happen, still our disappointments can be mollified by considering that the greatest conceivable being does have that power and exercises it, so that we can be sure that despite our disappointments everything comes out all right. And nothing stands in the way of our having the joy of pleasant surprises.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-psychedelic-christian-podcast/id1579583551

I wrote somewhere that we psychedelic Christians may be rare birds, but we exist! Here is more proof. Clint Kyles has created the Psychedelic Christian Podcast. Click on the link to listen to the entertaining and instructive interviews he has conducted with other psychedelic Christians.

Several months ago, Philip Smith, a friend of mine, told me that he understood my belief in psychedelics and in Christianity, but that he didn’t understand what I thought was the connection between the two. This is a fair question. In the present-day flurry of publicity about renewed interest in psychedelics, one reads much in the way of scientific and therapeutic interpretations of the value of psychedelics but not much about religious interpretations. In contrast, during the period when psychedelics first burst upon the scene, there was a lot of interest in the religious aspect of psychedelic experience, but usually expressed in the terminology of East Asian religions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism (but not Confucianism). Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner adapted the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a psychedelic manual for guiding a psychedelic trip. Leary also wrote Psychedelic Prayers, a psychedelic interpretation of the Tao Te Ching. For a while, Leary declared that he was a Hindu. Alan Watts, a former Anglican priest, echoed Aldous Huxley’s endorsement of the Perennial Philosophy, explaining in vivid prose his understanding of the Supreme Identity of Atman and Brahman, the riddles of Zen Buddhism, the ideal of wu-wei, or non-action, and the usefulness of emptiness in the Tao Te Ching. In The Joyous Cosmology he went on to describe his psychedelic experiences as consistent with his previous writings. The poet, Gary Snyder, memorialized as the fictional Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, studied Zen Buddhism in Japan, although Kerouac himself maintained his Roman Catholic faith along with his interest in Buddhism. Allen Ginsberg evinced interest in both Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism. Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary’s mothering support figure at Millbrook, travelled to India, found a guru, and became Ram Dass. Also at Millbrook, Bill Haines adopted a Hindu framework, took a lot of LSD, and bullied into Enlightenment his devotees whom he had saved from addiction to bad drugs. And Art Kleps explained that members of his Neo-American Church considered LSD and other psychedelics to be sacraments because they lead to Enlightenment, which he defined as the realization that life is a dream and the externality of relations, an illusion. But he also stated an official equivalence between LSD and the Holy Ghost. So, yes, there were a few hints of a Christian understanding of psychedelic experience, but they were few and far between compared to the number of interpretations in terms of East Asian religious traditions. One notable instance of the consumption of psychedelics in a Christian setting was Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment, the “Miracle of Marsh Chapel.” It was a double-blind study in which Christian divinity students received either a placebo or a dose of psilocybin in a basement room while the sounds of the Good Friday service in Marsh Chapel upstairs were being piped in. Both immediately afterwards and decades later as confirmed by a follow-up study, the subjects who had received the psilocybin reported it as a life-changing experience for the better. However, Leary, who was Pahnke’s academic advisor for the experiment, reported in High Priest that he was disturbed by the Christian proselytizing that the experiment inspired in one of the participants, and it was clearly not a direction that he wished to pursue, nor one that caught on very much among the legions of psychedelic trippers of the era, with the exception of the enthusiasts of the evangelical Jesus Movement, who disavowed psychedelics when they turned to Jesus.

I should also mention that Albert Hofmann, the discover of LSD, reported that he saw right away  the religious or spiritual significance of the LSD experience, which he connected with visionary experiences he had had as a child. But he seems to have conceptualized this religious significance in terms of a sort of nature mysticism, and not in Christian terms. There is also a shamanic tradition of the use of psychedelic plants, which sometimes, as in the Native American Church, incorporate Christian elements but more often adhere to a non-Christian tradition. So, one might think that there is something inherent in psychedelic experience that causes a tendency for people to reject Christianity in favor of East Asian or tribal religion, or nature mysticism; or, in accepting Christianity, to reject psychedelics. 

In response, I would first point out that an interest in Asian religious traditions, as a fashionable new source of spiritual inspiration for Western seekers who thought they knew Christianity all too well, preceded the widescale use of psychedelics. Alan Watts can serve as a star example of someone who was already preaching the virtues of Asian religions before he tried psychedelics and then interpreted the experience in those same terms he was already using. So, for some, it may have been a case of people expressing what they believe they have learned from psychedelic experience in the terms they use to talk about whatever they are accustomed to thinking of as the most important and profound aspects of life. For others, it may have been a case of following the leaders. This would explain why so many psychedelic enthusiasts nowadays talk in terms of neuroscience and medical and psychological therapies instead of Zen koans. In other words, I think the association of psychedelics with East Asian religious traditions, nature mysticism, or shamanism, in the minds of people of my generation, including me, was an effect of intellectual fashion. That doesn’t mean it was insincere or shallow, but just that there is no reason to take it as the final word on psychedelics and religion.

I call myself a psychedelic Christian not because I understood my peak psychedelic experiences in Christian terms when I had them, but because I have since come to believe that the historical fact that I was young at a time when psychedelics were all the rage is on the same footing as the fact that I happened to be born into a Christian family living in a culture molded by Christianity; that is, that both these facts are instances of God’s grace. Memories of my peak mescaline and LSD experiences help me to understand what Jesus says about the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, in the Gospels, and to understand what the Apostle Paul says about God making foolish the wisdom of the world. To explain my thinking on the subject, I list here some facts which I notice and some articles of faith connected with them:

Facts

Some things that I care about the most are not under my control, nor under the control of any other individual human being or group of human beings.

One of those things is the fact that out of all the people who have ever lived, are now living, or will ever live, I am exactly one of them, and I know which one. And I believe this is true for each person who ever lives, from his or her own first-person perspective.

I don’t understand how such a personal fact can be caused by, or arise out of, an impersonal, uncaring universe.

It makes sense that God could be the reason for this personal fact, since God is a person and perhaps doesn’t want to be the only person. I don’t know how God does it, but at least I can see why God would do it. 

God could also be the one who is in control of all those other things, usually lumped together under the heading “nature”, that are undeniably not under my control or under the control of any other people, individually or collectively. Something or somebody is in control, or else things would be more unpredictable than they are, and I have already said why I think it is a “somebody” and not a “something”.

Articles of faith

Everything is fundamentally all right.

If death were permanent unconsciousness, something would be fundamentally wrong.

Death is not permanent unconsciousness.

If death were survival as a disembodied spirit, something would be fundamentally wrong.

Death is not survival as a disembodied spirit. I have always had a body and always will.

If death meant that I would no longer have a first-person perspective, something would be fundamentally wrong.

Death does not mean that I will no longer have a first-person perspective.

If I neither loved nor were loved, something would be fundamentally wrong.

I love and am loved.

If free will were an illusion, so that nothing was really up to me, or if only trivial things were up to me, then something would be fundamentally wrong.

But the most important thing, which is accepting the gift of everlasting life, is up to me.

The faith that everything is fundamentally all right is confirmed both by peak psychedelic experience and by what Jesus says and does. I can see no reason to believe in the possibility of becoming permanently unconscious. It looks like a real possibility from the outside, but not from the inside, and consciousness is the inside. Neither experience nor a priori reasoning can produce a rational belief in it. But fear makes it appear real. So, it doesn’t follow that I don’t need Jesus to tell and show me I have life everlasting. Without him, with only psychedelic experience and reasoning to support my faith, I would be less sure. Personal experience and pure philosophy are necessary but not sufficient, for me anyway. Like the father in Mark 9:24 who cried out, “I believe; help my unbelief!”, I waver, and reading the Bible and going to church helps me, in a way that continuing to take psychedelic trips didn’t. But when LSD worked, it worked; and at that time, I would read the Bible only to try to interpret it in terms suggested to me by my reading of Alan Watts, and I didn’t even consider going to church, as I thought it was controlling, judgmental, uncool, and anti-psychedelic. It took a long time of tripping, and then studying and teaching philosophy and world religions, before reading the Bible, praying, and going to church worked again; but now they do,* and that is why I call myself a psychedelic Christian.

*I’m not saying that Christianity is true because it works, but that it works because it is true.

Listen to the great Christoph Bull in a jazzy mood that sounds psychedelic and Christian to me:

Ron Huggins, a Doctor of Theology who lives in Wisdom, Montana, wrote me the following on Facebook: “I’d be very much interested in hearing you more on what you mean by the Holy Spirit coming ‘through psychedelic experience.’ . . . .

He continued, “The language of the Holy Spirit ‘coming through’ psychedelic experience is not one I would probably use. I would feel comfortable to say that the Holy Spirit can use psychedelics to bring people to God, but then I would say that the Spirit can use pretty much anything to do that, good or bad. For me that would certainly be true, but by a very indirect route. They demolished my world view and sent me off in the direction of Eastern mysticism from which point, I think, the ‘My sheep hear my voice’ factor kicked in and caused me to ultimately need to turn my back on that and surrender to the exclusive claims of Jesus. However for many psychedelics led to Eastern mysticism and a life-long antagonism not toward the figure of Jesus per se, whom they always say they affirm, but toward his own account of himself as given in the New Testament. In other words, Jesus the avatar, or the Jesus who was the I AM in the same sense that we all are, or Jesus the advanced being.

But never the Jesus who said of himself and himself alone ‘I am the way, the truth and the life, No man comes to the Father but by me.’ I suspect that that may be the more common result of getting to spirituality via psychedelics. Anyhow, what’s your view on all this?”

I answered, “I think Jesus has sent the Holy Spirit, just as he said he would, and he is here right now, but I become distracted by worldly concerns so that I don’t pay attention to him. Recalling what my experiences under the influence of mescaline and LSD were like reminds me that I have known without a doubt that there is a Reality that encompasses and overwhelms worldly concerns. The Advocate is more powerful than the Accuser. I would not have used these terms back then, but I do now, and I believe they are more accurate than what I would have said then about what was happening then and is happening now, in a less intense but more sustainably joyful way.

“I also look forward with hope to the restoration of all things.”

The fictionalized version of me I called “Jim Chase” in “One Day in 1969” spends some time during his big LSD trip mulling over the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God which was formulated by Saint Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century. What follows are some further thoughts on Anselm’s line of reasoning.

When Anselm writes about a being than which none greater can be conceived, he uses a common-sense distinction between existing only in the mind and existing in reality. I think we clearly understand this distinction when we understand claims like “Unicorns don’t really exist,” “There is no Santa Claus,” “A centaur is a mythical creature with the lower body of a horse and the upper body of a man,” etc. He makes the claim that existing in reality is greater than existing only in the mind. What does this mean, and is it true? For one thing, something that exists in reality also exists in the mind whenever we consider it, so that its existence is more extensive than that of something that exists only in the mind. But I think we can go further than that. It is not only more extensive; it is also more effective, more powerful, more demanding of our attention. Consider the difference, for example, between, on the one hand, imagining that you are in a field that contains an angry bull some ten yards away who is staring at you, snorting, with head lowered, pawing at the ground with one forefoot, and, on the other hand, really being in such a situation. I think this is the kind of distinction Anselm has in mind when he contrasts existing only in the mind or imagination and existing in reality also and says that the latter is greater. It isn’t a matter, necessarily, of which we would prefer. I know I would rather be imagining a possible encounter with an angry bull than to be really confronting such a situation. But I think I can see what Anselm means when he claims that existing in reality is greater than existing only in the mind. We care more about something that exists in reality than we do about something whose existence is imaginary.

Anselm asks us to contemplate the concept of a being than which none greater can be conceived. And now I think that, given the context of Anselm’s argument, the concept of “greater than” takes on a connotation of what is laudatory, as well as impactful. I take it that such a being would have every positive, desirable, satisfying quality that I can think of, to a greater degree than any other being, as long as none of those qualities exclude each other. And this is an advantage that the Ontological Argument has over the other classical arguments for the existence of God. A being than which none greater can be conceived would have all the qualities that God should have. In contrast, the Cosmological Argument just gets us a First Cause, which could be impersonal and not necessarily benevolent; the Teleological Argument purports to show there is a Designer with a Purpose, who presumably would be personal but, again, not necessarily benevolent. So, since a person is greater than a thing, and a benevolent person is greater than an indifferent or malevolent one, a being than which none greater can be conceived is personal and benevolent to the greatest degree possible.

There are a lot of interesting questions about the various qualities that would be possessed by a being than which none greater can be conceived. For example, is it greater to be sexual rather than asexual? And if so, is it greater to be male or female, or somehow both? If we conclude, as Anselm does, that God is the being than which none greater can be conceived, we might wonder whether it be greater to have the supreme perfection of sensory qualities or to have no sensory qualities at all. Does God smell better than anyone or anything else? Is God delicious? Is God more beautiful than any woman, more handsome than any man? Is God sexier than anybody else? Is it greater to have a body or not to have a body? Personally, I side more with William Blake than with Hume or with Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian ascetics on this. It is no more anthropomorphizing to conceive of God with human bodily characteristics in a superior form than it is to conceive of him as having human mental faculties in a superior form. Maybe it is that God can be human in the fullest sense whenever he or she wants to be, and when that happens, he or she is just as fully divine as ever.

The overriding question is whether this is all just a game of imagining or whether it is something serious, consequential, and real. Anselm’s argument, I think, cries out for an interpretation according to which if it is not something serious, consequential, and real; then we are not, after all, thinking about a being than which none greater can be conceived. Or else, we are saying that there is nothing greater than being frivolous.

It often occurs to people, when they first encounter Anselm’s argument, that he is simply defining God as existing and then deducing from that definition that he exists. “You can’t define something into existence,” they say. As I understand it, this is the purport of Kant’s objection in saying that existence is not a predicate. Now, it is true that it won’t do to define a unicorn, say, as “an animal that looks like a horse, has a single horn growing out of its forehead, and exists,” and then say that you have proved that unicorns exist. However, it is fine to define a unicorn as “a mythical beast that looks like a horse except that it has a single horn growing out of its forehead.” Why is this definition acceptable while the first one isn’t? Because unicorns exist only as the product of human imagination. They don’t exist independently of being imagined. Our definition of a term depends on our knowledge of the meaning of the term. One piece of that knowledge is whether the term refers to something that exists in reality or instead in the imagination only. A third possibility is that of being an entity that is theorized to exist, with a certain degree of probability. Because this matters to us, the definition of “unicorn” should include the information that it is mythical. Likewise, our conception of a horse includes the information that horses really exist and are not merely imaginary or theoretical. It doesn’t follow that the definition of “horse” should explicitly include that information, for we assume that unless a definition specifies that an entity is mythical, or theoretical, then it is not. But we didn’t learn from the definition that there are horses. We believe horses exist because we have seen them. If we hadn’t seen them, we might still believe they exist because people we believe to be honest and knowledgeable tell us so. We believe unicorns are mythical, not because we have canvassed the universe and found none of them grazing the plains or hiding in a dark forest, but because we have learned from our teachers that unicorns fall under the category of mythical beast.

Anselm reasons that the concept of a being than which none is greater is the concept of a being that exists in reality, and not in the imagination only, on the grounds that a being which exists in reality is greater than one that exists only in the imagination. I find the grounds persuasive, just as I would understand and be persuaded by the argument that horses are greater than unicorns because there really are horses, while unicorns are mythical. I would be construing “greater than” as “more important, more engaging, more worth caring about.” But is this, in effect, defining something into existence? In the case of horses versus unicorns, it isn’t objectionable for the definitions to include, implicitly in the case of “horse,” explicitly in the case of “unicorn,” the information as to whether such beings actually exist. However, this isn’t a matter of deriving the real existence or lack of it, from the definition. The definitions must match what we already know about horses and unicorns. Then and only then should we deduce anything from the definitions. But what about the concept of a being than which none greater can be conceived? Do we know that such a being exists in reality, as a horse exists, rather than existing only in the imagination, as a unicorn exists? Are we defining it into existence when we reason that in order to be such that none greater can be conceived, it must exist in this way; or are we finding out something about it which we should be careful to include, or at least not to contradict or exclude when we try to formulate a definition of it? Something potentially confusing about the issue is that the term “a being than which none greater can be conceived” sounds as much or more like an attempt at a definition of a term, of “God,” for example, than a term to be defined. Considering it as a term to be defined, we might come up with something like this: “an entity which Anselm argues must exist in reality and not in the mind only, on the grounds that existing in reality is greater than existing only in the mind.” Anselm himself, or anyone else who is persuaded by the argument, could change the wording to “an entity which I argue must exist in reality and not in the mind only, on the grounds that existing in reality is greater than existing only in the mind.” If this qualifying clause “which Anselm argues,” or “which I argue,” is left out, so that it would read “an entity which must exist in reality and not in the mind only, since existing in reality is greater than existing only in the mind,” then it would be a question begging fallacy to argue that the existence of such an entity follows from the definition. But with the qualifying clause, the definition leaves us free to be persuaded or not by the argument, so that if we are persuaded by the argument, we aren’t guilty of making an illegitimate attempt to define such a being into existence.

I can imagine someone objecting that it isn’t always true that something that exists in reality is greater, more impactful, more important, more valuable than something that exists only in the imagination. A copy of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, which exists in reality and in which one can read of the exploits of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and his squire Sancho Panza, is not greater than the fictional characters Don Quixote and Sancho Panza themselves, who exist only in the imaginations of Cervantes and his readers. But in endorsing Anselm’s line of reasoning, I am not committed to the claim that you can pick anything you like that exists in reality and compare it with anything you like that exists only in the imagination, and you will find that the thing that exists in reality is greater than the thing that exists only in the imagination. The claim to which I am committed is that, for anything that exists only in the imagination, if there were a thing exactly like it except that it also exists in reality, the one that also exists in reality would be greater than the one that exists only in the imagination. So, I’m not saying that a copy of a book, because it really exists as a physical object, is necessarily greater than a fictional character whose fictional adventures are described in that book. But a copy of a book that exists in reality is greater than a copy of a book that exists in the imagination only. And I would say that a man who exists in reality and not in the imagination only—any man who really exists whether or not he resembles Don Quixote and whether or not he is capable of appreciating the literary worth of the fictional character of Don Quixote—is greater than Don Quixote.

A more fruitful objection than the one that says that existence is not a predicate is to argue that Anselm’s argument is too strong, in that it allows us to prove the existence in reality of the imaginary ideal version of any object or person we wish. For example, one could reason as follows: I can conceive of an island than which none greater can be conceived. And since it is greater to exist in reality than in the mind only, a greatest possible island exists in reality. In place of “island” one could put “house” or “wife” or “husband” or “pet” or anything else. The objection is fruitful because it invites the following response:

But the argument is not too strong. I admit and celebrate the supposedly disastrous consequence. An island than which none greater can be conceived must be an island that exists in reality and not just in the imagination. If it exists only in the imagination, it is not really an island at all. And the same goes for a house than which none greater can be conceived, and a wife, a husband, or anything else. So, there is an island than which none greater can be conceived? Yes, as long as there any islands at all. I don’t claim objective knowledge as to which one it is (or which ones they are, for I suppose there could be a tie), and I will admit that any two people who care enough about islands could have a great debate about it. Personally, I suspect that it is Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of southern California, and that the house than which none greater can be conceived is the one I live in, and that the wife than whom none greater can be conceived is named Mary Jo Call, and that there is a tie for the son than whom none greater can be conceived. The principle of the thing is objective, but the application of it is subjective. A claim about what can be conceived turns out to be a confession, after all, about what the person making the claim is able to conceive. And in order for something to qualify as one than which none greater can be conceived, not only must it exist in reality, but it must also be one with which the person making the claim is personally acquainted. The objection that the argument is too strong points to practical, aesthetic, and ethical implications of Anselm’s seemingly purely abstract reasoning about the real existence of a being than which none greater can be conceived. It doesn’t just lie there, as an empty abstract concept would. Just as in the more particular cases of the island, the house, the wife, etc., the ones than which none greater can be conceived are ones with which one is personally acquainted; so too, a being than which, of all beings, none greater can be conceived is one which falls within the realm of one’s own experiences of concrete instances. I know of no better literary expression of such experiences than some of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/poems-and-prose-penguin-classics_gerard-manley-hopkins/309199/?resultid=5b952e1d-94c7-4758-8a11-2ae41562138a#edition=3804489&idiq=1223549 

For example:

Hurrahing in Harvest

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise

            Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour

            Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up heart, eyes,

            Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;

            And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a

Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder

            Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—

These things, these things were here and but the beholder

            Wanting; which two when they once meet,

The heart rears wings bold and bolder

            And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

As for the practical and ethical implications, I think the parables of Jesus about what the kingdom of heaven is like and his answer to the question, “What is the greatest commandment?” are the clearest expressions of what to do and why, given a conviction that a being than which none greater can be conceived falls under the category of concrete instances with which or with whom one is personally acquainted. For example:

Matthew 13: 45-46

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”

Matthew 22:36-40

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”