It is generally believed that the journey toward the universal requires walking a wide path. In the natural sciences, a single result that appears to prove a theory could well be an anomaly. Tests have to be repeated, new experiments devised.
Only when a theory is verified repeatedly does it begin to take the shape of knowledge. Similarly, in psychology, larger sample sizes mean more trustworthy results. The more people in an experiment, the more you can minimize individual eccentricities and glimpse general principles.
But philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard understood that some of the deepest insights don’t arise from large sample sizes and generalized tests. Rather, they surface from a deep penetration of the singular. By courageously digging as deep as possible into his own subjectivity, Kierkegaard wrote in a way that revealed something about the nature of human existence. He wasn’t unique in this approach, but his work significantly impacted how many twentieth-century philosophers approached the biggest questions.
This way of entry into knowledge marks the work of psychoanalysis. For instance, Sigmund Freud left us with only five significant case studies, which are still referenced to this day. For people such as Kierkegaard and Freud, we must take the narrow path of the singular if we want to approach the promised land of knowledge.
In this theological memoir, Barry Taylor has given us a beautiful example of this journey along the narrow path. He shares fragments of his life that are deeply personal, yet reach into the dark recesses of what it means to be.
The words metaphysics and spirituality have become trite terms today. Bookstores use them as categories to house insipid collections of new-age nonsense. These books call their inane ideas ancient wisdom and wrap basic personality tests in religious language or offer self-help through the power of positive thinking.
The words have become so distorted that one must be careful when using them. But they are important words, and they are appropriate to use in describing this work. Metaphysics can be provisionally understood as referring to questions regarding the status of what is not reducible to the field of the physical, while spirituality describes how one tarries with and makes room for this dimension. Traditionally, these questions have been the staple of theology, but we see this dimension also playing out in other fields. In biology, we have the antagonism at the heart of evolution. In mathematics, we have the uncertainty principle. In physics, we have the quantum world. In psychoanalysis, we have the unconscious. These are all descriptions of something that is in the world, but not of it.
This book is a work that is truly spiritual in the most earthed and authentic way. Taylor has given us a profane book on the spiritual, a non-superstitious work that touches on metaphysical questions. In doing so, he avoids the beasts of scientism and superstition, the two demonic dangers philosopher Paul Tillich told us authentic theology defends against. While one flattens out the world with a hammer, the other splits it in two with a sword.
Taylor doesn’t write with a hammer or a sword. Instead, he writes in the tradition of someone like Simone Weil, helping us discern what we might call the holy dimension of reality. Not holy in the sense of something outside the world, but rather the wholly, as in a wholly other dimension within our world. One that does not commit us to belief in angels, demons, or gods any more than our confidence in the scientific method commits us to a crude materialism. Taylor is a profane priest who offers us a depth of understanding that goes beyond the tired distinctions between theist and atheist, sacred and secular.
It helps that this profane priest combines two things that rarely meet: an academically trained writer and someone who throws his arms around life. If this were only a memoir, it would be a fascinating read. And if it were a standard theological text, it would be deeply insightful. But the way the two become one within these pages makes it utterly compelling.
This is one of those rare books that has the power to offer the reader intellectual riches, while also leaving them with something that might make their own tarrying with the negative slightly less difficult. Indeed, it might even make it fun.