St. Stephen and Philosophy

Probably the most compelling aspect of the Stephen
experience is the warmth of his personality, his consistently
loving attitude and the gentle humor that pervades what
he says. Autobiographically, Stephen was important in helping
me overcome what philosophers call the scientific worldview,
accepting the reality of an afterlife, and interpreting Christianity
in a way that I found congenial. Philosophically I found his
teachings very impressive, combining as it does some of my
most cherished ideas about life. In what follows I try to place
Stephen in the context of Western thought.

To begin with the pre-Socratics, Stephen is similar to Heraclitus
with his emphasis on growth, movement, and change. On the other
hand, Stephen has Parmenidean aspects in his attitude that all is
one. If nothing is separate then movement may indeed be an
illusion, as Parmenides' famous follower Zeno argued.

More specifically, Stephen's account of reincarnation and
knowledge as memory is Platonic in nature. In Book X of Plato's
Republic is the Myth of Ur in which a man of that name, being placed
on the funeral pyre is found to be alive. He gives an account of the
afterlife in which the dead are judged and are offered the opportunity
to become incarnate once again. But before they do so, they must be
immersed in the River of Lethe. Lethe means forgetfulness and
aletheia is its opposite, to remember. Interestingly, it also means
truth and reality which follows the Platonic doctrine that to know the
truth, what is real, is to remember. Stephen's teachings concur with
this and suggest that what we need to remember will be revealed
to us. "Feel within, RECALL the knowledge which you have."

So, what are we remembering? What is this truth that we can
rediscover? In the end perhaps, it is the holist's intuition that all
is one. That separateness is an illusion. An illusion that is necessary
perhaps for the possibility of experience, but one that can be
dangerous if we forget that it is an illusion and act as though
we are separate from other people and from nature. If all is one,
how can competition be based on reality? How can there be not
enough? And how can any part of God's creation be rejected?
To reject one part is to reject all.

Corollaries to Stephen's teachings can also be found among
the Stoics. Epictetus in particular suggests that events themselves
are neutral. It is only our judgment of those events that leads us to
consider them positively or negatively. In this case, no experience
comes with a judgment already stamped upon it. So, consistent
with the Christian dictum to judge not, Epictetus suggests that at the
beginning of our education we still blame others for 'bad' things that
happen to us. It represents progress if instead we blame ourselves
for negative experiences and the end of our education is when we
blame no one. Stephen also thinks that no one has to view any
experience as bad and argues that Jesus' response to crucifixion
was continued love and continued acceptance. He rejected nothing,
neither the events, nor those whom we would call his persecutors,
nor God, nor his destiny.

Stephen's notion of experience also has close similarities to the
philosophy of John Dewey, a twentieth century holistic philosopher
who Sidney Hook called the American Buddha. Dewey views
experience as an interaction between the 'organism' and the
'environment.' Experience represents a contribution from both.
What this means for a Stoic is that control of the 'organism' is
in principle sufficient to keep experience from becoming 'suffering,'
or 'undesirable.' We cannot control external events, such as
disease, death, poverty, or false accusations, however we can,
in principle, choose our attitude to these events. For Stephen,
if we refuse to deviate from a loving attitude, from acceptance
(non-rejection), thus from reality, if in fact all is one, then no
experience can be 'bad.'

This however, does not mean that Stephen is a quietist. He says:

"The starving masses do starve because we in the West
choose to let them starve. In that sense the sin of not recognizing
their at-oneness with ourselves, as a product of the human mind,
does cause or allow their suffering. It is not God as love that is
responsible for their suffering. If they continue to love God, being
able to bear the pain, they surely contribute in a striking manner
to experience of God's love. God does not NEED this suffering -
his love would be manifest anyway.

"It seems plausible to say that that which we may need may not
be what our physical selves may want. That we may cry out that
we are no longer loved when we in fact are."

Stephen's notion that the only sin is stagnation is also consistent
with Dewey. Stephen says "Sin consists of attempts at "stagnation,"
or non-growth along the path set each one of us individually and
corporately "by the Father"." Dewey also rejects stagnation
in the following passages.

"In . . .The Dawn of Conscience James Henry Breasted refers
to Haeckel as saying that the question he would most wish to have
answered is this: Is the universe friendly to man? The question is an
ambiguous one. Friendly to man in what respect? With respect to
ease and comfort, to material success, to egoistic ambitions? . . .
Mr. Breasted's answer . . . is that nature has been friendly to the
emergence and development of conscience and character. Those
who will have all or nothing cannot be satisfied with this answer.
Emergence and growth are not enough for them. They want something
more than growth accompanied by toil and pain. They want final
achievement [but] . . . morally speaking, growth is a higher value
and ideal than is sheer attainment (55 - 56)."

"The live being recurrently loses and reestablishes equilibrium
with its surroundings. The moment of passage from disturbance
into harmony is that of intensest life (Art as Experience, 17).

Instead of signifying being shut up within one's own private feelings
and sensations, [experience] signifies active and alert commerce
with the world; at its height, it signifies complete interpenetration of
self and the world of objects and events. Instead of signifying surrender
to caprice and disorder, it affords our sole demonstration of a stability
that is not stagnation but is rhythmic and developing (Art as Experience, 19)."

Stephen also stresses the importance of feeling. ""If you FEEL,
it is much better, than being able to hold with the physical mind. For
as some insight comes in, other insight may begin to escape you."
Dewey's philosophy gives enormous importance to feelings and
rescues them from the dustbin of subjectivity to which the scientific
revolution had relegated them.

For Dewey, emotions are not to be thought of as discrete states of
mind with a "cognitive content." Instead, the idea is that a coherent
experience involves a selection and arrangement of qualities of the
world in an interactive stance. Emotions play a role in this selection
and arrangement. The qualities selected and arranged are real,
existential qualities of the world. For this reason, emotions reveal real
aspects of the world that would otherwise not be noticed. For instance,
if one is "in love," in a strong occurrent sense, one notices all the charms
of one's loved one. The loved one's charming and lovable characteristics
are noticed and selected. When one falls out of love, the same person's
displeasing qualities may be noticed for the first time. Both emotions,
love, and hatred due to betrayal, open up different contexts in which
the person is revealed. The noticed qualities are never perceived as
discrete and separate items, (although one might choose to consider
them reflectively like that), but as features of people within a
contextualized point of view.

Combining Dewey and Stephen one might say, as you feel so will
you see. If you can feel love, then one will perceive God as manifest.
A feeling reveals the world in a certain way. By feeling, one will
perceive the loving interconnectedness of things, rather than merely
accepting this as an intellectual doctrine. According to Stephen,
we will then perceive truly.

But for me at least, perhaps the most attractive philosophical idea
that is represented in Stephen's teachings is something akin to
Hegel's notion of God, what Hegel called the absolute spirit.
Hegel puts forward the idea that human experience is part of God
coming to know his own nature. Experience is only possible if there
is something doing the experiencing and something experienced.
This requires the illusion of dualism. God therefore has to make
nominal distinctions within himself. Of course, all of creation is still
God and still within God. The purpose of creation, for Stephen, is to
make God's love manifest and in fact is the result of a kind over-flowing
of love. Physical reality is not some ghastly mistake, as the Gnostics
believed. It is part of God experiencing himself. Our lives therefore
have a larger all-encompassing purpose and that is as God's sense
organs. Every experience we have contributes to God's ever-expanding
awareness and experience of his own nature. Hegel believed God's
ultimate nature is freedom and saw human history as a progressive
realization of ever greater degrees of freedom, from primitive
communal societies which were free but unconscious of their freedom,
to slavery, feudalism, and so on. I suspect that Hegel may be right
about God's nature as freedom, although I'm not so sure about his
views of human history. I also suspect that the views that God is freedom,
God is love, and God is life, are all the same thing. What this really means
I am still attempting to discover. With regard to Stephen, he thinks that
human experience contributes in this Hegelian fashion and also that
we are intended to experience everything. What this ultimately means
is that an enlightened life continues to have pain as well as pleasure,
wild unfounded recriminations as well as gentle appreciation lovingly
expressed. One who is saved does not cease to be involved in turmoil.
All that might change is one's attitude to these events. We can learn from
trying circumstances. We learn what we currently think are our limits and
hence where we still need to grow. Where we find ourselves judging
people or events negatively, we are made aware of potential new avenues
of growth. Christ's attitude to his own crucifixion being a wonderful
example. If one imagines that trying circumstances cease after one
is saved and one loves God with all one's heart, soul, mind and strength,
just look what happened to God's most beloved son. Still less can we
expect prosperity, ease, and material comfort. But we can expect to
love our lives more regardless of circumstance.

I have found Stephen's teachings to be philosophically profound.
My consistent attitude has been that this cannot be a hoax, in the
same way that Shakespeare's plays are not a hoax, Machado's
poetry is not a hoax, and Einstein's theorems are not a hoax. If Tom
Ashman is a fake medium, the teachings expressed are fake in the
same way Plato's philosophy is fake, Bach's St Matthew Passion is
a fake and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain is a fake, i.e., not
at all. Of all the things expressed in Stephen's teachings, as I said at
the beginning, the consistently loving attitude he expresses in his replies
to questions is the most convincing and inspiring of all his lessons.