The Greek tradition had been one of tolerance of others’ beliefs, an inclusive attitude to the gods, and one could see Constantine’s Edict as lying in that tradition. But by the end of the fourth century, such tolerance was a thing of the past as the dispute between Symmachus and Ambrose over the Altar of Victory demonstrates. For the Greeks spirituality and rationality, muthos (mythos) and logos, could coexist without conflict. That muthoi could be ‘frozen in written form and interpreted to make statements of “truth” (logoi)’ was alien to the Greeks.
But, as Freeman [in The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason] admits, there was resistance to such formulations in early Christianity, as well, and Christians as much as pagans suffered under Theodosius’ decree. What Freeman takes to be the contrast between Greek and Christian thought might better be seen, according to some scholars, as the contrast between, on the one hand, the flexibility of a way of thinking which can be found in the rich tradition of the early Christian fathers as well as in the paganism with which it co-existed (where the hemispheres, too, co-operated), and, on the other, a culture marked by a concern with legalistic abstractions, with ‘correctness’, and the dogmatic certainties of the left hemisphere, whether Greek or Christian, which inexorably replaced them. Thus Mary Beard writes in a review: ‘The real problem is in Freeman’s stark opposition between the classical and Christian worlds.’ . . .
The striking thing about Greek intellectual life had been the tolerance of opposition: independence of mind, in this sense, began with the Greeks. But it also declined with them, and eventually with the Romans after them, so that Christianity, which is in one sense the most powerful mythos in advocacy of the incarnate world, and of the value of the individual, that the world has ever known, also ended up a force for conformity, abstraction, and the suppression of independent thought.
--McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7951-7980).
The point here, with which I concur, is that Christianity loses its potential to enrich and vitalize culture to the degree that it becomes hamstrung in dogma and fundamentalism. Basic Christian beliefs can be asserted or celebrated--the Incarnation, the death and resurrection, even the Immaculate Conception, so long as there is an mythopoetic openness to interpretation. Mythos is true in a different way from how most of us tend to think of truth as being fact or evidence based.
Mythos is potentially disclosive of unseen depths. If we develop a mindset that is open to it, those depths disclose "data" that then becomes something that left brain thinking can integrate with 'facts' ascertained in the ordinary way. The left brain is at its best when it is less obsessed with being certain and more nimble and adaptive to a broader range of possibilities. As McGilchrist points out in the excerpt above, the early Church fathers had that in a way that got lost later when Christian authorities became obsessed with certainty and social order.
If Christians had real faith, they would just trust that the experiences, revelations, intuitions, of the ancestors invite us to a deeper understanding of our own experiences, revelations, and intuitions. Dogmatism, fundamentalism, and moralistic priggishness instead strangle the life out of those revelations and attenuate their possibilities for enriching our lives. And the reason they do, according to McGilchrist, is because of the tendency humans have to straitjacket the world of experience that the right cerebral hemisphere gives and to live instead in the overly controlled environment given by the left hemisphere.
I've been familiar with McGilchrist's book for years now, and thought its basic thesis interesting, but it's only been in the last few months that I've taken the time to read through it carefully. It maps so closely to what I've been writing here that it's kind of eerie. It's essentially a book that grounds in neuroscience my development of the Metaxis theme in the light of the gospel admonition to 'be guileless as doves and shrewd as serpents'.
My metaphorical dove is the experience in consciousness that the right hemisphere gives us--empathy, felt meaning, concreteness, synthesis and connection, gestalts, metaphor, a profound sense of connection to the life world, and openness to and curiosity about the unknown. It's what is spirited in the human being. The serpent is the experience the left brain hemisphere gives us, which is highly focused, analytical, abstract, calculative, organization-and-system-building, and desperately needy for certainty, neatness, perfection, and control--and prone to violence to achieve or maintain its hegemonic control. It prefers to deal with truths removed from their life context, to study the butterfly dead and dissected rather than alive in its habitat.
When the two work together in a balanced way, the right hemisphere delivers richly textured experience, and the left hemisphere makes the attempt to understand it, to reflect on it. So our sense of Self is more associated with this kind of work that the Left brain does in relationship to the givenness of the world disclosed to us through the right brain. But the title of the book is based on a story told by Nietzsche about which I wrote in this post back in 2012. Basically it's about how the Emissary (my Serpent), which should be the servant of the Master (my Dove), develops instead a contempt for the Master, and decides to rule on its own authority. Tyranny ensues. The Serpent Party locks up those in the Dove Party who live more anarchically Or the Serpent Party, whose experience of he world is circumscribed by calculation, abstraction, and the need fore certainty, simply dismisses those in the Dove Party as Fools who attest to things that nobody can prove.
McG is at pains to distinguish what he has to say about the two hemispheres from notions that were popularized in the 80s, and it's easy, before reading the book, to think that this is just another kind of silly attempt to simplify what is far more complex. But when I first encountered the book, I thought that establishment neuroscience would be unsympathetic to his thesis. Apparently, so did McG. So I was surprised when I read in his recently published preface to the updated edition ten years after publication --
When after twenty years of research I arrived at the point of publication of this book, I believed I would face a hostile establishment. With a few exceptions, that has not been the case, and, thankfully, some of the best-known names in neuroscience are on record as engaging seriously with the book’s thesis. I also expected, of course, the usual faction of self-appointed ‘myth debunkers’, who would feel comfortably one-up on the gullible masses by professing that there was ‘nothing in it’ without the bore of acquainting themselves with the evidence before pronouncing. I imagine there have been plenty of those, but that is neither here nor there. . . .
Ten years on, I have been genuinely astonished by the completely unforeseen extent to which this book has been taken up by people in every discipline, and from every walk of life. It has already sold over 100,000 copies, and has readers all over the world. I think the reason for this must be that the structural and functional differences between the brain hemispheres which I describe have, as indeed they must, their correlates in the mind; and that we are intuitively aware of these structural and functional differences within our consciousness – but only, it seems, once they are pointed out.
--McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 156-169)
Indeed they do, but this intuitive awareness assumes in the reader a certain openness to the world that the right hemisphere would give him if he's open to it. This book is not pop psychology or philosophy. It's an important, ambitious, intellectual synthesis. It is, in fact, prodigiously exemplary of left and right hemisphere cooperation. It is for that reason unlikely to persuade those who are already captured by the tyranny of reductive left hemisphere biases
The first part of his book is essentially a marvelous synthesis of the findings of neuroscience with phenomenological philosophy, drawing particularly on Husserl, Scheler and Heidegger. The second part is to look at the history of ideas and culture in the light of the synthesis established in Part 1.
He focuses primarily on the great moments of hemispheric balance in western cultural history were Golden Age Greece, Augustan Rome, the Renaissance, and the Romantic period. These are periods of expansion, soulfulness, wide-ranging creativity in the arts. But they don't last, and usually there's a period of constriction and ridgidification that follows, and we've been in such a post-Romantic constriction at least since the second half of 19th Century. We are at a moment of the apotheosis of Left Hemisphere tyranny now in the West both in its high culture and popular culture. And the question is when, if ever, the balance will be redressed.
In the meantime contemporary high art is with some exceptions lifeless, abstract, ironic, conceptual and popular culture in film and TV is irredeemably vulgar, either in its Hallmark Channel sentimentality on the one hand, or in its Game of Thrones or Westworld celebration of the violent, the pornographic, the greedy, the powermad and the paranoid on the other. And in the midst of this utterly soul-shriveling disconnection from the life and wisdom of a world given to us by the right hemisphere, we have Game of Thrones/Westworld mentality shaping the future of what it means to be human in the image of psychopaths running high-tech companies and authoritarian governments whether here or in China.
I think that if there is anything that I contribute on this blog since its inception in 2003 that you will be hard pressed to find elsewhere is the attempt to look at the world through a mythopoetic lens that seeks a to be 'hemispherically balanced'. Whether I do this well or poorly is not for me to judge, but I do it because I trust my fundamental intuitions, and because it seems to me that it's called for.
Christianity for dogmatic, fundamentalistic, and moralistic Christians is all logoi and no muthoi, all left hemisphere and very little of the right. The main reason I remain a Catholic is that no matter what left-brained nonsense comes out of Rome (although with Francis we have a reprieve from nonsense) or lifeless, priggish moralism comes out of so many pulpits, or continued stream of revelations of corrupt chanceries, there is a richly textured experience for an awakened right hemisphere in its liturgies, sacred music, and emphasis on contemplation and the life of prayer. I am lucky in my local parish because all those things, including good homiletics, are there in a very palpable way. Catholicism survives despite itself because of the space it preserves, no matter how misunderstood, for that which is given to human experience from the depths.
Faith is something that must be understood mythopoetically. It comes to us from the right hemisphere, and becomes a parody of itself when it loses its felt sense of being grounded in that experience. Faith will always be nonsense to a left-hemispheric critique if there is no grounding of it in the right. The mantra for me is fides quaerens intellectum, which means 'faith seeking understanding'. Fides is the experiential foundation in the right unpacked and made sense of by intellectum, the left.
So faith is not the credulous assertion of unbelievable propositions, but a way of experiencing and understanding the world in the light of a heart awakened to a dimension of reality that has always been central to authentic Christian experience. To live in a faith community in the best sense of the phrase is to live in a community shaped by the intuitions and revelations of the ancestors, which are there to awaken in us the same intuitions and revelations. When they stop doing that the community dies or becomes a zombie version of itself. The awakening is the experience of faith as 'gift' that is so often spoken about and so little understood by those who have not experienced it. If there is no such awakening, no matter how groggy one remains after it, there is nothing for the left hemisphere to understand, and Christianity becomes a parody of itself dominated by left-hemispheric tyrants.
Dostoyevski depicts such a parody in Ivan's Grand Inquisitor parable. It describes the efforts of a left-hemispheric tyrant to keep the "faithful" in a state of sleep because they are easier to control when slumbering. When Christ appears on the scene to wake them up, the Grand Inquisitor must kill him. Wakefulness and liberation are too messy, too hard to control, too inimical to social order. In The Brother's Karamazov, Ivan's is a life tortured by a dominant left-hemispheric experience of the world, while Alyosha has a more balanced experience of it. He may be somewhat naive at the outset, but he's grounded and has more inner resources to work with and is capable of developing or maturing in a way that his brothers are not. He is as intelligent as Ivan, but his intelligence is a serpent in service to his dove.
Anxiety, substance abuse, clinical depression, insane, cult-like partisan politics shapes the soul of the West in this moment, and nobody with any credibility has a remedy. It all comes from living in a social imaginary in which left-hemisphere values have hypertrophied in such a way that they strangle or crowd out the possibility of a deeply felt connection to truth, to real meaning and real life.
Politics has no answer. In fact, no sane politics is a possibility until some sanity be restored to the broader culture. The churches may at some point present a possible solution, but for now they have lost their moral authority and can be of no use in the near future in addressing the broader cultural crisis.
But something has got to shift, and I believe that the shift will come bottom-up rather than top-down. Life is stirring in the seeds and roots and the question is when this Winter will end and a new Spring commence. There are lots of individuals who feel this, but the problem now is that they have no robust cultural legitimacy in a utilitarian, expediency-oriented, soul-crushing, left-hemisphere-dominated world. I trust, though, that somehow they will eventually find one another and find a way to articulate a sane imagination of a flourishing human future that is just not available to us at this moment.
There are signs of Spring, though--and this book by McG is one of them. While I'm not as active on this blog as I have been in its earlier years, I do intend for it to be a place to point to those signs and interpret them as honestly as I can.