The Battered Caravanserai

Or / And - On Liberty - Rebel X - Overture - The Complementarity of Doubt and Belief

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Or / And

In The Double Refuge I explore the relationship between doubt and belief. I argue that one can help in understanding the other, and also that one can be a refuge for the other. As Omar Khayyam said 900 years ago, the world’s a rough and dizzying place, a “batter'd Caravanserai / Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day.” To live in this world, it helps to be flexible, one moment measuring it like an astronomer, and the next rotating with it, like a dervish among the spinning stars.

Like Khayyam, we’re sometimes mathematicians and sometimes poets. Sometimes we doubt and sometimes we believe. More recently, Søren Kierkegaard writes in Either / Or (1843) that we can live EITHER an aesthetic life OR a moral life. In The Double Refuge I argue that we can live with doubt OR we can live with belief, AND we can live with both. Rather than an eternal dichotomy and a desperate leap from one to the next, I suggest a balance (as in Montaigne), or a pivot (as in Zhuangzi), or negative capability (as in Keats), or any other concept that allows us to pass freely to and from the realms of doubt and belief. I doubt God is worried about the exact percentage on either side, or about the exact way we define one or the other. I suspect that the only two things He really cares about are love and truth.

In The Double Refuge I argue that there's nothing wrong with doubt. Even in terms of religion I think doubt is both inevitable and beneficial. How else could a popular contemporary Christian like Peter Enns write a book called The Sin of Certainty? While I go a great deal further into doubt than Enns does, we both assume that the only God worth worshipping is benevolent and reasonable. Such a God isn’t likely to punish us for exercising rationale thought, or for wanting things to be experienced before we believe them. Nor would He want to strike from our records the lessons of history, science, human geography, and philology. Instead, I imagine, He would want us to question all the definitions which limit Him (She or It) in this or that way.

Perhaps God would even take an interest in the seeker who looks for a Universal Meaning yet can’t quite find It, yet is still willing to consider that God has hidden It well. Conversely, God is unlikely to punish a believing person who questions his faith, and who struggles with things like evolution or comparative religion.

This is where The Double Refuge comes in: it focuses on the close relationship between those who doubt, yet are open to belief — open agnostics — and those who believe, yet are open to doubt — critically-minded theists. 

Reflective people understand that we can be fooled, and that we can fool ourselves. All around us in 2025 we see people believing things that just aren't true. Russians are the victims of NATO. Ukraine started the war. Vaccines are the real threat. Global warming’s a hoax. The Democrats stole the election in 2019. Sellers, not buyers, pay tariffs. Etc. And on the global stage we see religious groups slandering and hating each other, even though they all insist they’re acting in the name of God. A televangelist milks another congregant, a Russian priest blesses another bomb, a jihadi slaughters dancers in a desert, a group of brahmins attacks a village of Untouchables, a Jewish settler takes another plot of land. In such a world, it’s natural to keep an open mind, to doubt openly, and to be skeptical about religious conviction.

Although it may surprise a truthful doubter to find belief, and although it may disconcert a truthful believer to find doubt, the adjective here — truthful — can overpower the nouns doubter and believer. Who will blame seekers for pledging allegiance to truth, no matter what that truth is? For such people, a deeper understanding of open agnosticism may be helpful, since it explores how we can allow ourselves to find It, and also how we can thrive even when we don’t.

I should note that hard agnosticism is less helpful than open agnosticism in this regard. Hard agnostics insist that we can never know whether or not spiritual Truth exists, whereas open agnostics doubt the finality of doubt. Open agnostics think, Who knows? Some day we may know. (I compare open and hard agnosticism in A Middle Position, Rivers of Change, Huxley’s Definition, and The Unconvinced.)

It’s important to remember that open agnostics don’t want theists to stop believing. Quite the opposite. Who doesn’t want to find a complete and total Meaning? Who doesn’t want to believe that the universe is controlled by benevolence, and that we have an eternal soul? Agnostics just haven't come to this conclusion. Perhaps they will some day, or perhaps they never will.

My point is that it doesn't matter. God is patient. There is always time in an essentialist or spiritual universe to find a Greater Truth There is all the time in the world, and beyond. If there is an afterlife and a spiritual world, and if God is the benevolent Guardian of the universe, then there will be time to embrace a solid, unchangeable belief. From the third century of Origen to the present day of Father Richard Rohr, theologians of Grace have argued that God simply isn’t in the business of damnation — let alone eternal damnation.

In the struggle toward love and truth, no one needs to be left behind. In the meantime, the doubter who leans towards belief, and the believer who entertains doubt, can find a resting place in the double refuge.

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On Liberty

While much of what I write about in The Double Refuge is on the philosophical and poetic side, I also emphasize the role of politics. In particular, I argue that freedom of thought — which includes the freedom to follow any version of belief, doubt, or disbelief — is most fully exercised in liberal environments. While versions of agnosticism can be found from the Mesopotamians to the Persians, Greeks, and Romantics, agnosticism gets its name from Thomas Huxley, who lived in mid-19th century England. Huxley defines agnosticism amid the fusion of scientific disciplines in the middle of the 19th century. This was also a time of great political change, with various reform laws moving England slowly toward a full and functioning democracy. Huxley’s version of agnosticism runs parallel to the type of open, critically-minded society envisioned by John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty was published the same year as Darwin’s On the Origins of Species (1859). The evolution of science, and the science of evolution, evolved in step with liberal democracy. 

Not only does agnosticism arise in this liberal context; this liberal context is key to the free operation of thought and belief. We aren’t free to think and explore the variety of thoughts that characterize agnosticism if we’re censored from reading and writing, or if we’re forbidden to express ourselves, assemble freely, or decide our communal future. Likewise, theism and atheism require free and tolerant environments, as well as the political will to maintain those environments.

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Rebel X

As regards Christianity, we often see its mystical infrastructure and its doctrinal superstructure, but we often overlook the political structure which allows a church to exist in this batter’d caravanserai, this stark world of division and violence. Gilding the altars and polishing the gargoyles, we hear the sound of tanks rumbling down the street. F.R. Scott gets at this danger in his poem from 1945:

We can understand the historical novelty, and the deep human need, for Forgiveness and Grace. We welcome these with an open heart (especially when we’re on the receiving end…). We also understand the need for confession and service to others. These are two far more difficult things that we need in order to become compassionate human beings. And we welcome these with earnest hearts (and conditions, always conditions…).

We can understand Grace and Service easily, just as we can easily see Jesus as an exemplar of how we need to care for others, forgive those who wrong us, minister to the suffering, etc. But one thing that we tend to overlook, or downplay, is the political context. We construct convenient hierarchies, institutionalized churches, and conservative doctrines, but we often overlook that Jesus challenged spiritual hierarchy, institutionalized religion, and conservative doctrine.  

One might even say that Jesus was a nonviolent revolutionary. Rebel X. Certainly he stood up to the Jewish and Roman elite, and certainly he refused to kowtow or equivocate. If the emperor had no clothes, he would shout out loud in the crowd, even while the guards, on the nod from the moneyed elite, moved in to drag him away.

The systems that we set up tend to repeat themselves. As hard as we struggle toward liberty, equality, and fraternity, the old influences of power, money, and exclusivity rise up from the deep to nip at our flippers. So we end up with political and economic systems that favour the wealthy, and religious systems that favour doctrine and compliance. All of these systems ignore those on the periphery, in their shanty towns of random poles and tarps, or lost in the crowd. If Jesus were around, and he saw the gilded offices, the crowded food banks, and the modern day emperors with their imaginary perfections of dress and design, he’d shout at the top of his lungs.

Many churches are well-known for their charity and service to the poor and downtrodden. For the millions who found refuge from poverty or old age in the care of the charitable orders, we remain eternally thankful. So I don’t mean to make any moral charge against churches in general. But now many secular institutions are funded and staffed to do the same. Morality isn’t the unique domain of religion. The spirit of helping others, of getting outside your own frame of mind so that you can hear and see what lies beyond you, is a universal human ability. It’s what drives us to connect with the world around us in a positive way, using compassion and critical thinking together so that we can feel and understand what others feel. Shakespeare’s Lear perhaps says it best when, banished from his own wealth and privilege, alone on the storm-wracked heath, he finally empathizes with the plight of the poor:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp.
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

What Lear says of the heavens, I would say of atheism, doubt, and belief: none of them can be divorced from politics, economics, and basic human decency; all of them show themselves more just, more worth respecting when they go beyond self-interest. When they are open, liberal, charitable, and loving.

By political I don’t just mean universal suffrage and rights, which are of course crucial. I also mean the recognition of others, the understanding of things that we find strange or uncomfortable, and the willingness to share with strangers not only power and wealth, but also the pursuit of meaning and truth.

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The Complementarity of Doubt and Belief

Most of the time life flows and we flow with it. We find meaning in the things we do, the people we love, and the things we hold dear. Yet sometimes we can’t find intrinsic value in our world. We admit to ourselves that we don’t see a way through. We’re a tiny spark in a fiery universe of ten trillion suns. We don’t know 🔺 if the universe is tightly controlled by a greater Plan, 🔺 if the Plan allows free rein for Chaos, or 🔺 if Chaos is the dominant Force. Our world becomes a bewildering puzzle of ifs, our blue and open skies blanketed by cloud or shrouded by night.

Sartre’s nausea — where he sees a black chestnut root beside him as an alien presence — lies in the pit of our stomach. Unable to change ourselves, we reach out to some greater Power, whether we call it Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, or just plain God:

The clouds part, the night breaks into dawn, and we see things differently. It’s not some psychotic break from one to the next, but rather a natural movement from dark to light, from doubting about everything to believing in everything. The flip-side of a=the same coin. It’s the movement towards intrinsic Meaning, even Universal Meaning, even though our rational minds remind us that we’re only a small part of the universe and that we shouldn’t be making conclusions at all.

This dawning isn’t a rational thing. It isn’t born from the Renaissance of Greek thought or from the rational triumph of the Enlightenment. Rather, it’s born from the Romantic sense that we live in a world of facts, yet we feel in a world of poetry. One might call it a special type of poetical reason, where we think and feel simultaneously, as in T.S. Eliot’s unified sensibility. This reason subsumes and transcends the glorified rationality of the Enlightenment of the 18th century. It imbibes reason and moves forward with it to a more deeply emotional centre, even as the sciences come together to offer a more convincing vision of material evolution.

We see this fusion of thought and emotion in the poetic visions of Shelley, Keats, and Camus. Shelley writes in “Mont Blanc” that “The everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind.” Keats writes in “Ode to a Nightingale” that “the dull brain perplexes and retards,” and that “here there is no light, / Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown / Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.”

In “Noces à Tipasa” A hundred years later, Camus employs this Romantic mode, flowing from the existential to the essential. Camus moves from things as they exist in their scientific neutrality — with their electrons swirling and the wind blowing them randomly here and there — to things as they are in their poetic intensity, fine as the finest senses, like the essence of absinthe fermenting in the sun:

Au bout de quelques pas, les absinthes nous prennent à la gorge. Leur laine grise couvre les ruines à perte de vue. Leur essence fermente sous la chaleur, et de la terre au soleil monte sur toute l'étendue du monde un alcool généreux qui fait vaciller le ciel. Nous marchons à la rencontre de l'amour et du désir. Nous ne cherchons pas de leçons, ni l'amère philosophie qu'on demande à la grandeur. Hors du soleil, des baisers et des parfums sauvages, tout nous paraît futile. Pour moi, je ne cherche pas à y être seul. J’y suis souvent allé avec ceux que j’aimais et je lisais sur leurs traits le clair sourire qu’y prenait le visage de l’amour.

After several steps the absinthe takes us by the throat. Its grey wool covers the ruins from view. Its essence ferments under the heat, and from the earth to the sun, and into the whole stretch of the world, rises a generous alcohol that makes the sky wobble. We walk toward an encounter with love and desire. We don’t look for lessons, nor for the bitter philosophy that we ask of greatness. Apart from the sun, kisses, and wild perfumes, everything seems meaningless. As for me, I don’t look to be alone here. I’ve often come with those I love, reading in their looks the bright smile that is the face of love.

Elsewhere, Camus writes in-depth about meaning and suicide; in Noces à Tipasa he allows existence to slide into essence. He soaks himself in the sunlight, in the warm breeze, and in the smell of absinthe, which is itself soaked and fermented in the sun. He reasons that it’s a good thing to set aside the rationality of the philosophers, and he reverses Sartre’s dictum that existence (and existentialism) comes before essence (or essentialism).

This type of reason can take us beyond conventional reason into a world of beauty and meaningful order, one that we hope for but can’t prove to our rational minds. Its frame may be bound by electronic and magnetic forces, by genetics and evolution, yet its body is hope transmuted into belief — in a Force beyond all material forces; in a God or Being, transcendent or immanent, unifying everything and full of otherworldly Grace. We might call this Force the Good, God, the Mother, Allah, Vishnu, or Dao. Yet whatever we call It — He, She, or It — we imagine It as Something greater than we can imagine. 

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As far as I know, there isn’t a philosophy that champions a free and easy flow between doubt and belief. So I refer to this way of thinking and feeling as the double refuge. By this term I mean both doubt and belief, and I mean the easy manner in which we might go from one to the other. Seeing both as the same safe harbour, 🔺 we don’t need to worry that we’re slipping into a strict dogma when we believe, and 🔺 we don’t need to worry that we’re slipping into a grim positivism when we doubt. This allows us to go either way, at any time, in the manner of Keats negative capability, which he defines as “the ability to be in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Behind this double refuge principle lies two other principles. First, there is no such thing as rational religious certainty. In the realms of theology, we can only aspire to belief, not to knowledge in the rational sense. Second, we can only define God as the ultimate Mystery. Those who define God narrowly and dare to speak for Him only demonstrate their limitations, often bound by their particular history, geography, culture, and frame of mind. Yet we can experience the mysteries of our human existence and we can experience the Mystery of divine communion, whatever form or shape that takes. Neither is exclusive. Together, they allow us a double freedom. Either / And.

In The Double Refuge I argue that 🔺 doubt allows us freedom or refuge from dogma and exclusivity, and that 🔺 belief allows us relief or refuge from endless exploration and from the darker corners of doubt. In this scheme of things, belief is the second refuge, when the endless exploration of agnosticism is either too tiring or too vexing. It’s what we look for when “Nous ne cherchons pas de leçons, ni l'amère philosophie,” when “We don’t look for lessons, nor for the bitter philosophy.”

This second refuge isn’t a place we need to believe in or live in all the time. We’re creatures of the moment and in some moments we doubt. But it’s a place we can live in all the time if we want to, because agnosticism doesn’t care if you remain in doubt or if you embrace the Mystery of a spiritual dimension. The only thing is that if you decide to commit yourself irrevocably to belief, and leave aside doubt altogether, you’re no longer an agnostic, and you no longer avail yourself of the first refuge. Perhaps you don’t need it any more, or perhaps you’ll come back to it later. It’s always there. There’s no pressure either way. But as long as you doubt, you can go back and forth freely, and needn’t worry about any permanent stance or definition.

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Key to this double refuge is the philosophy of agnosticism, which lies between belief and disbelief. It’s an attitude toward life that doesn’t shy away from doubt. Agnostics accept their doubts, which makes it easy for them to be skeptical, yet they also doubt their doubts, which opens a path to belief.

For agnostics, doubt isn’t a form of inviolable truth. It’s more a method, in parallel with the scientific method or an open-minded mysticism. It’s less a way of life than a way of going with life’s flow, less an explanation and more an exploration of what’s true.

The 12th century Persian poet Omar Khayyam approaches the skeptical side of agnosticism when he writes, “I will divorce reason and religion, / And take to wife the daughter of the vine.” Like Khayyam, the agnostic distances himself from being married to any one idea or system, whether in the realm of religion or reason. The agnostic prefers to drink the wine of life to the dregs and to be intoxicated by the world that lies before us. He doesn’t want to be slowed down or stifled by conventions, by pre-determined ideas, or by fixed categories of thinking or belief. If he were trapped in a metaphoric marriage to religion and reason, the agnostic would opt for a momentary separation rather than a divorce. A suspension rather than a rupture. And instead of marrying the daughter of the vine, he’d spend some time with her, get drunk with her friends, and ask if Sister Moon was free Friday night.

While Khayyam distances himself from the doctrines of religion and reason, he gets ever-closer to what I think of as their essence: exploration, curiosity, wonder, and connection. He rejects the grand cosmic scheme of religion, yet he articulates cosmic harmony in a mystical way: instead of explaining how the diurnal cycle is divided in parts, he writes of “this battered Caravanserai / Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day.” He says that we are “the puppets and the firmament is the puppet-master,” and he soberly notes that “For a time we acted on this stage,” and then “one by one” we went back “into the box of oblivion.” And while he professes to reject reason, in real life he was an expert in cubic geometry and solar calculation. Even in his poetry he has the realistic mind of the naturalist, who looks at the world and doesn’t superimpose on it some other world: “This reason which seeks the way of bliss / Says again and again to you, / ‘Seize this moment which is yours: You are not that herb which is cut down only to flourish anew.’”

Khayyam’s point isn’t that ideas and systems are dangerous in themselves; as scientist and poet he took full advantage of both. His point is that we shouldn’t be captive to fixed systems and categories of thinking. We shouldn’t be captive to the nice distinction, at least not while life is all around us to be lived:

When Khayyam says he’ll divorce religion and reason he’s making a poetic point about living for the moment, entering the current of life rather than losing ourselves in the arid fixities of dogma. Likewise, when agnostics take religion and reason to task, they don’t aim to dispense with either. They aim to shake them up, to re-configure them, and to question their separation. More than anything, they aim to reconnect with experience and with a sense of freedom and wonder, which can get lost if we stick too doggedly to a single conclusion about the meaning of life.

It’s this free and open attiutude which makes it possible for agnostics 🔺 to doubt as much as they want yet also 🔺 to believe as much as they want.

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