Looking at the work of Nicholas Hagger
Looking back over his prolific career, which includes more than sixty books, Nicholas Hagger, the octogenarian English philosopher-poet and cultural historian, sees a vital thread running through all his prose works: bringing his philosophy of Universalism to birth and ‘parenting it towards adulthood.’
Challenging modern philosophy, physicalism, and the secular, Universalism restates the unity of the universe and informs the panoply of Hagger’s literary, mystical, religious, philosophical, historical, cultural, and geopolitical writings, establishing him as a trailblazer in the ‘new metaphysics.’
In a nutshell, Universalism is a philosophy and worldview of the fundamental unity of the universe and humankind. It is a movement to reconfigure all academic disciplines as interconnected wholes and establish a democratic world state.
Broadly, I see it as underwritten by existential or ontological mysticism, the discoveries of quantum science, which challenge consensus reality, and the disclosures of depth psychology regarding the nature of consciousness and the human psyche.
Hagger has seen the Light as the common essence of all religions and presented many mystics’ illuminations. He has charted the history of the rise and fall of civilizations, reconciled divisions within world culture, and proposed a world state with limited supranational power to abolish war and bring in a Golden Age of peace and prosperity.
He has set out a new approach to literature and identified its fundamental theme as a quest for the One — an infinite Reality perceived as Light — alternating with condemnation of social follies and vices.
Two monumental companion volumes conveying that epochal thread linking his works have been published.
They are The Essentials of Universalism: A philosophy of the unity of the universe and humankind, of interconnected disciplines and a world state (Liberalis Books, October 2024) and A Baroque Vision: 100 verse selections from 50 volumes (Liberalis Books, September 2024), which provides a perspective on the genesis of Universalism.
It’s more than thirty years since Hagger called for a metaphysical revolution to embrace all disciplines in the world’s universities and in the arts. This was at the time of the publication of The Fire and the Stones, which presented his theory of world history and religion, and Selected Poems: A Metaphysical’s Way of Fire, in 1991.
He was aware of a ‘movement of metaphysical renewal’ in various disciplines and the arts. It began in the 1980s after 300 years of humanism, skepticism, and materialism dominated the perception of all academic subjects, including history and poetry.
Significantly, this movement, then ‘just surfacing to public attention’, took its lead from Albert Einstein and Carl Jung, in philosophy from Alfred North Whitehead, and in poetry from W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot.
An existential metaphysics
Indeed, history and poetry were two vital areas that made existential metaphysics possible, in which historical humankind could see and know the crucial principle of fire behind the universe, the metaphysical fire holding all disciplines in place.
Despite the prevailing secularisation of our times, there were signs that the Truth was being revealed more widely, that the esoteric was becoming exoteric, and that, with evidence from New Age conferences, the Fire ‘was burning in the consciousness of ordinary people’.
The next stage would be a movement to ‘re-mysticise’ Christendom and other religions in the widening of metaphysical consciousness, and it seemed that our time would see a metaphysical revolution, or restoration, which the world badly needed.
Hagger arrived at Universalism first through his early mystic life when, in his mid-20s, he became a professor of English literature at three universities in Tokyo. Surrounded by images of the Buddha’s enlightenment, and taken to meditate in Zen temples, he found himself on a ‘Mystic Way’.
This began with an awakening followed by a ‘centre-shift’ from the social, rational ego to a deeper part of himself, ‘the soul which is in contact with the enduring spirit’.
All aspects of Hagger’s thinking and vast range are covered in The Essentials of Universalism which, at 800 pages, is a remarkable anthology, the 75 excerpts from 25 works chosen by the author himself for their importance in his life’s work and how they show how his many innovatory ideas are connected.
Since the book was completed, Hagger has published The Algorithm of Creation (2023), a profound statement of a ‘Theory of Everything’ and further developing his Universalism. (You can read my review here).
Hagger says that Universalism furthers existentialism in that, rather than involving an abstract idea of a purely rational philosopher, it involves ‘opening to the Light in illumination and experiencing the One behind and within all natural phenomena — in an intuitional, concrete, existential mystical experience’.
He states: ‘Universalism existentialises the rational approach to metaphysics and offers a regularly attainable invisible Reality in place of the fleetingly glimpsed and unattainable epiphanies and apparently unsolvable problems that destroyed the Romantics and the Modernists.’
A universal energy
Universalism differs from Idealism, Hagger points out, in that whereas Idealism sees matter as composed of Idea, mind, consciousness or spirit, Universalism focuses on the Fire or Light as a universal energy which gives rise to both consciousness and matter: ‘Insofar as this mystic and metaphysical Reality of the Fire or Light is the spirit or consciousness it has given rise to, then it is closely linked to metaphysical Idealism, as is much Eastern mystical thinking.’
Consciousness, under Universalism, is regarded as being non-materialistic in relation to the brain, and not dependent on the brain as physicalists contend.
The background to A Baroque Vision is that, between 1979 and 1982, Hagger wrote three letters to the eminent literary critic Christopher Ricks about his (Hagger’s) poetic identity, and Ricks agreed with his final view that his verse blends the Romantic and Classical traditions within the Baroque tradition.
According to Hagger, the Baroque style, which can be found in all European countries, combines the spiritual and the sensual and features movement, transformation, the ‘Mystic Way’, the mysterious Light, the transcending of death, the divine soul, and Heaven. In his Preface, Hagger clearly shows that his Baroque vision was behind and grew into his Universalism.
A Baroque Vision presents an edifying selection of work—drawn from 50 volumes of Hagger’s poems, verse plays, and masques—that shows his Baroque roots and how he has been inspired by the metaphysical poets John Milton, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Hagger has 2,500 poems, two poetic epics, and five verse plays to his name.
Nicholas Hagger, man of letters, has lectured at universities in Iraq, Libya and Japan. His substantial literary output also includes two travelogues and 1,425 short stories. His archive of papers and manuscripts is held as a Special Collection in the Albert Sloman Library at the University of Essex.
In 2016 he was awarded the Gusi Peace Prize for Literature, and in 2019 the BRICS silver medal for ‘Vision for Future’. He has studied Islamic and Oriental philosophy, and led a group of Universalist philosophers.
I have a number of articles at Medium about Nicholas Hagger. See my list, ‘The Unitive Vision’.
