I finally finished this book! Somewhat slow going just because it’s written rather densely and dryly, and tends to say the same thing multiple times from different viewpoints. And Watts will do things like casually quoting Angelus Silesius, and then I have to go look up who that was, and I fall into rabbit holes of various kinds.
The book is interesting mostly historically, as a moment in Watts’s thoughts that he eventually grew past, or perhaps psychologically as a snapshot of a particular place in the continuum from something like Christianity to something like Zen. It was written in 1949 (woot!) and the edition that I have has a Preface to the Second Edition, which he wrote in 1972. That later preface doesn’t come right out and say that all the Catholic mumbo-jumbo in the book should be ignored, but…
The main proposition that I see Watts as putting forward in the 1949 text, what the “Supreme Identity” represents, is simply that you and I and all finite beings are just the Infinite playing and having fun.
But since he’s still an Anglican (or something) priest as he’s writing this, he has to tie it to all sorts of Christian and Catholic dogma and theology and symbology and so on, and also say absolutist stuff like how a particular fun thing that the Infinite does (manifesting as finite beings and then having them realize what’s really going on) is the most important, or even the main or only, thing that it does, since he wants to claim that the Resurrection story is a metaphor or projection of this, and obviously that’s the most important thing there is if you’re a Christian.
(We could have a whole tangent here about how the Anglican Church considers itself to be Catholic, whereas the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t consider the Anglican Church to be Catholic, and how it’s therefore not entirely clear what Watts means when he refers to “the Church” or even “Catholic dogma”, especially since he is maybe an Episcopal priest which is “in the Anglican communion”, but really it doesn’t matter to the overall impact.)
He has some fun (albeit expressed in very erudite and scholarly terms) with the cycle from a baby to whom all is unthinkingly one, to a person who feels separate from the Infinite, to perhaps eventually conscious (if inexpressible) realization of the Supreme Identity. He draws circles for this, but it’s not entirely clear to me how we get back to baby again; I don’t think he says, and it’s not a personal reincarnation event because he doesn’t think that’s a thing, and doesn’t think that real Buddhism for instance does either. He draws parallels between that cycle and various things in Catholic (Christian? Anglican? Who knows!) dogma and mythology, having to do with the structure of the Church calendar, the First Adam (Adam) and the Second Adam (Yeshua), and how the Father and Son are one but also not one, and so on in somewhat clever and diverting ways.
He does venture out into symbological pareidolia a bit, as in writing of the “Church year” that the “long period of Sundays following Pentecost is without any organized character and it is possible that this formlessness of half of the year has some connection with the fact that the religious point of view must be unconscious of the dark or hidden incarnation of the Son in Adam.” Or, y’know, it’s just summer and not much is going on. :)
I was conscious throughout of the tension between the more or less cool and sensible stuff that he ultimately wants to say, and the uncool and silly Church stuff that he wants to reference and praise or at least not insult at the same time. His main move here is to say that the real stuff about the Infinite can’t be expressed directly in words or in terms of the finite, and that religion by its nature is all about words and the finite, so the best that the Church can do is introduce symbols, and talk about various “projections” of the Infinite into the finite as though they were the important thing.
Which seems to me to be a rather weak excuse, really. If Watts can spend a whole book talking about the Supreme Identity, what is it that stops “religion” from doing the same thing? If Watts can say that the important thing about the Resurrection is that it symbolizes in finite terms an important inchoate fact about the Infinite, rather than whether or not it actually happened historically, why can’t “the Church” say the same thing? Why, in particular, does the Church tend to like burn people at the stake who say the wrong thing about this mere finite projection?
The whole question of sin, judgment, and eternal punishment, and therefore of the necessity of salvation and so on, and for instance the jealousy and wrathfulness of the Church’s God, poses a very hard question for Watts here, one which he almost entirely ignores. If all finite beings are just the Infinite having fun, then what role is there for “sin” and “judgment”, “jealousy” and “wrath”, and yipes “eternal torment”? “Salvation” in the sense of a Buddhist “realization” isn’t necessary at all; it’s just a thing that you can do if you feel like it and are willing to do the work or are lucky enough to have the bottom fall out of your water bucket. This all seems to me un-Catholic in the extreme.
Aside from rather lengthy treatments of how prior theologians addressed it, and the problems with their approaches, Watts treats of this whole thing really just once, in less than a page; “judgment” doesn’t even appear in the (rather good!) index. And this is notable because he addresses pretty much everything else two or three or a dozen times, perhaps on the theory that since it’s inexpressible directly, expressing it indirectly multiple times might help. Or just on the theory that the theologians that he’s trying to reach like reading lots of scholarly-sounding words.
But back to judgment and so on. Essentially the only thing that Watts says about it in the book is that “sin” is when a finite being does things that work against the realization of the Supreme Identity, and that someone who dies without having gotten to realization “is in a special sense ‘judged’ eternally” (shame-quotes in the original). Their not getting to realization is just fine from the viewpoint of the Infinite, since it was the Infinite that did it, but it is also “eternal” in that everything is eternal from the viewpoint of the Infinite (sub specie aeternitatis). So the “eternal torment” of the sinner is pretty much exactly the same as the “eternal torment” of anyone who stubs their toe, since both exist timelessly within the Infinite, and both are just fine and cool as far as the Infinite is concerned, since the Infinite is the one what done it.
“The only eternal view of such ‘damned’ lives is one which knows them as integral threads in a fabric where light and dark are harmonized in perfect beauty.”
Which, yeah, harkens for me back to the idea of a non-judgmental God, but really leaves out pretty much everything about jealousy and wrath and actual eternal torment, and how Salvation means that Jesus suffered so you don’t have to. If the Dark Night of the Soul of an unrepentant sinner (i.e. one who never comes to Realization) is an eternal state of suffering because it exists timelessly within the Infinite, then in exactly the same way so is the Dark Night of the Soul of a sinner who eventually finds God and is redeemed (i.e. realizes his Supreme Identity with the Infinite). And the idea that the repentant and unrepentant sinner suffer eternal torment in exactly the same sense is, again, about as un-Catholic as you can get, no?
So my theory is that Watts realized this eventually, and decided that “Christian dogma” may not actually be “without the slightest alteration, … a perfect analogy of realization” after all, and that he’d be better off not tied to the Church and all its obsession with judgment and salvation and like that, and from that we get the later and less contorted-feeling works.
There’s a bunch of other stuff in this book, including some interesting analyses of the Thomist approach to the problem of evil (and why it’s not really compatible with the Supreme Identity), some rather early and overly-simple and overly-broad statements about Japanese and Chinese and generally “Oriental” philosophy and religion which he would also grow beyond in later years, how people who achieve realization behave at personal and social levels, what “achieve realization” might actually mean, and so on.
I don’t think I’d recommend this book to anyone not interested in Watts himself and how his thought developed, and it’s certainly not a good introduction to his work in general: one should read later books for that. But I enjoyed reading it (now that I’ve finally finished it!) and it did inspire a certain amount of thought. So that was good!
ceoln 
Hm?