My own conviction is that life was not ‘created’ — I have always taken the view of Bergson and [G.B.] Shaw, that life was, so to speak, already there, but not in our universe of matter. It has spent fifteen billion years or so somehow ‘inserting’ itself into matter. Shaw expressed it by saying that the universe that began as a ‘whirlpool of pure force’ aims at becoming a ‘whirlpool of pure intelligence’.
--Colin Wilson in "The Future of Mankind"
Gombrich writes that ‘the true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent .’
I have used the language of transparency and translucency--of ‘seeing through’--repeatedly: because as Gombrich says of the work of art, as Jean Paul says of metaphor, as Kerényi says of myth, and as Merleau-Ponty says of the body, our vision must not stop there at the bounds of the ‘thing’--but neither must it be replaced by something else. It is the function of such translucent, or semi-transparent, beings to remain transparent rather than draw attention to themselves, because in doing so they achieve their goal.
. . .
Body and soul, metaphor and sense, myth and reality, the work of art and its meaning – in fact the whole phenomenological world, is just what it is and no more, not one thing hiding another; and yet the hard thing is the seemingly easy business, just ‘seeing what it is’. The reality is not behind the work of art: to believe so would be, as Goethe put it in an image I referred to earlier, like children going round the back of the mirror. We see it in – through – the mirror. Similarly, he says, we experience the universal in, or through, the particular, the timeless in, or through, the temporal.
--Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 11812ff)
In the Christian mythos, of course, uncreated life is God, whose spirit in Genesis is described as hovering over the Deep, the chaos God created out of nothing. In the Christian mythos, the Johannine Logos, the supreme Divine Intelligence, incarnated in a world ruled by the Law of Force, whose stand-in at the time was the Roman Empire, whose more local stand-in was Herod. Salvation history, as I think about it, is the gradual interpenetrating of the Deep--the created non-Divine--by the Spirit of God--the uncreated Divine--and the eventual supplanting of the Rule of Force by the Rule of Divine Intelligence. By intelligence I mean 'mind', and by mind I means something more akin to the German 'geist', which has a more dynamic, creative, active meaning than the English 'intelligence' which suggests what's measured by IQ. Not what I mean here.
The incarnation of the Logos was akin to the planting of a seed in the earth, which if cultivated grows within it and subverts the cruel, random, whirlwind of brute force that cosmological and Darwinian science accurately presents as the material world and its energies. It effects this subversion and transformation by gradually penetrating matter, for which the Incarnation of the Logos is the paradigm. Humans are the tip of the spear in this evolutionary project. They are the infusion point of Divine Life into the whirlpool of pure force. Humans are the means by which, if it is to happen, force becomes transformed into Divine Intelligence.
What might this project look like if successfully completed. It's imaged for us in Isaiah 11, the first reading of the second Sunday of Advent:
“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
7 The cow and the bear shall graze;
Their young ones shall lie down together;
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8 The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole,
And the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den.
9 They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea.
Humans play their role in this salvific project to the degree that their minds are shaped by Divine Intelligence, which is not to be confused with the kind of intelligence that computer science mimics. CS's machine learning project is mainly driven by the un-subverted whirlpool of pure force that is "evolution without grace". Divine intelligence is that to which Socrates, Plato, and all the Axial philosophers and prophets point--a transcendent, light-filled dimension of Being in which the immanent world derives its life, i.e., to the degree that it truly lives.
Computer Science mimics an attenuated, left-brained human intelligence incapable of responding to mystery or the numinous, but intelligence in the Christian Neoplatonic sense means to participate in the mind of God. We are at a critical moment in human history when it's not clear whether the human mind will align itself with the law of force that governs evolution without grace or with the Divine Intelligence that seeks to transform evolution by gradually interpenetrating it with grace.
The Renaissance Neoplatonists, particularly the Florentine artists influenced by Ficino, came to understand that the mind of God was not something that you ascend to by escaping from matter, but rather something that you find embedded in the heart of matter. There is a shift at this time in the imagination of the the task for both philosophy and art. The goal was no longer to ascend up the Great Chain of Being to a realm of pure intelligence outside time and space, but rather to uncover the presence of the Divine Intelligence incarnated but lying undisclosed, i.e., unseen, in the created world.
The artist's gift is to render what he saw in its unfiltered translucency visible to us, if we have the eyes to see it. The goal is to see what's there, but what is there is far more than what we are usually aware of in ordinary states of awareness. The artist assumed at this time the status of more than a craftsman but of a creative, visionary genius because in inspired states of mind he saw what others mostly did not, and through his craft was able to render a likeness through which--if it works and we are in our right mind--we can see what he saw.
The quality of genius in great art was measured by its inspired disclosive power, which was to reveal the inner life of a thing in its translucency, i.e., the goodness and beauty that lies hidden or at best filtered out in the world around us. In other words great art discloses the immanence of the Divine Mind in creation, but this isn't possible unless the artist's mind is somehow suffused with the creative energies that flow from a visionary encounter with that Mind. The greatness of all great art is commensurate with its disclosive power and its ability to help us who encounter it to see or recognize something that before was not visible to us or at best seen as through a fuzzy lens. Originality was primarily about revealing the 'origin' of the subject in the Divine Mind.
We don't believe in the presence of the Divine Mind suffusing all creation anymore, but that doesn't mean it still isn't there waiting for us to discover it as our ancestors did.
That these objects were often beautiful is a secondary effect of the felt truth that they disclosed. Later second-rate artists would make paintings, sculptures, music, and literature that reversed engineered, so to say, the work of great visionary artists, and these may be more or less interesting, but lack originality in this deep sense. They had the form without the originary energy and so were not translucent because there was no light in it to shine through it. But the deeper creativity to which I point here is both a discovery of what's there coupled with an active intensity of attention or concentration that brings into the field of awareness what was not in it before.
Genuine visionary art always has something of the numinous or the sacred about it. That's what the translucency discloses, an inner dimension of light that radiates out of it. It is in this sense disclosive of dimensions of the mystery of Living Real that are not available to us in everyday consciousness. The power of great art comes from the energy that is released by its participation in its origins in the Divine Mind.
There are many objects that present themselves as art, but they are great art to the degree that they have this disclosive power. If we encounter great art but are not moved by it, that is an indicator that there are dormant parts of our own minds that have yet to awaken. Contemporary, late-modern, consumer culture values in its educated elite a cleverness and celebration of irony that is inimical to this awakening. They need to find what Ricoeur call 'second naïveté.' It's not something you get from critical analysis. First the disclosure, then some feeble, inadequate attempt to articulate what was experienced.
For the best of these Renaissance artists, ascent to the divine is effected by a descent into matter to discover the incarnate divine hidden everywhere in creation. This is the paradigmatic way in which the world ruled by force is transformed into a world ruled by the Divine Intelligence. Our participating in the project does not require that we be great visionary artists, but rather that we take seriously the idea that the world is in a process of being suffused by the Divine Intelligence, that we play a role in the advancement of this project, and that we therefore have a responsibility, in whatever modest way there for us, to be agents of its disclosure, particularly its Goodness. In doing so we participate in the great evolutionary project, which is to transform the whirlpool of pure force, of violence and cruelty, of meaninglessness and absurdity, into pure intelligence, something more deeply penetrated by the Logos--its truth, its goodness, and its beauty.
***
With these ideas in mind, try to understand the power of the Christian mythos of Incarnation. Whether or not you can accept the idea that the cosmic Logos literally incarnated in Jesus Christ (which, of course, I do), just contemplate the idea of Uncreated Life and its Divine Intelligence penetrating the whirlwind of force in order to redeem it. Try to put aside your late-modern, jaundiced view of everything, and instead entertain the idea with 'second naïveté'. This requires something childlike in us, the willingness to be perceived by the sophisticated as foolish--for the child in us shall lead us. Jesus said that we should be guileless as doves and shrewd as serpents, but second naïveté requires that the serpent enter into the service of the dove. First the experience--the dove--then some attempt to use our intelligence to understand its significance.
The Christian idea of incarnation, when taken seriously, awakens in us an awareness of the centrality of earth existence, that what happens on earth matters, that it is not some delusional prison from which we must be liberated, or an exile in a vale of tears from which we must be rescued. It suggests that God didn't choose to redeem us from outside history; rather, he effects his redemption by entering into it and working within it through human beings. They have a choice either to go with the flow of evolution without grace, which appears to be leading us to some post-human dystopia, or to become co-redeemers of the earth. Humans become the latter insofar as they restore within themselves the image and likeness of the Divine Mind. The Divine became human so that the human might become divine--here on earth, in space and time, not in some other world or dimension.
So much in our late modern conception of what it means to be human refuses to countenance this possibility, and yet our survival as humans requires that we retrieve it. The threat is very real that otherwise the machines will push us aside, or we will ourselves become machines, who operate with an intelligence that has nothing divine about it and that becomes closed off from the dimension of depth where the Divine Mind seeks to disclose itself.
"All creation groans for the revelation of the sons of God," according to St. Paul in Romans 8. That is, it awaits humans who have awakened within themselves the Logos, the kingdom within, and with this awakening the gradual restoration of their identities as image and likeness of the divine, that is with minds that participate in the Divine Mind, which is achieved by discovering its presence in the created world. To the degree that the Logos awakens in us, we become the sons and daughters of God.
This is not achieved overnight. There's a reason the gospels use seed metaphors for the birth of the kingdom within, and yet as it grows, we begin to see and think more clearly as our propensity for delusion and bad judgment gradually subsides. Our feelings of alienation and estrangement subside, our love of the earth and the people in it grows (if not the capacity to suffer foolishness).
I believe that this seed has incarnated and germinated in the hearts of all kinds of people, and being a Christian is not a requirement. Understanding is secondary; more important is to hear or hearken to follows from a kind of hearing or hearkening to a song that since the Incarnation suffuses creation. It helps to have a little music theory (or teaching), but more important is hearing the music and playing it, no matter the level of proficiency.
As the sons and daughters of God awaken, they hear this music, this song, which is the voice of conscience, the daemon, the muse, whispering in its still small voice. Even if in the midst of the roar of chaos and violence, it can be heard and hearkened to. This is not easy to do at this critical juncture in human history. This is a project that is continuously threatened by the forces of chaos and violence whose noise currently all but drowns out our ability to hear it.
But if we hear and hearken to it, this song will come gradually to still the violence and chaos that otherwise dominates in our hearts, and we in turn become chaos whisperers, people who have the ability to calm the violent hearts of Isaiah's cobras, bears, lions, and wolves. Wasn't this the gift of St. Francis, to subdue the tooth-and-talon violence of biological evolution to the peace and harmony of the divine intelligence that ruled so prodigiously in his soul?
In this way we become co-creators of the New Jerusalem, an image of earth existence where violence and chaos have been subdued by the rule of Divine Intelligence and its justice, when the earth shall be full of Isaiah's knowledge of the Lord. This is an evolutionary project. It is accomplished gradually, heart by heart, generation by generation, each finding its own part of the song to sing. Each of us as individuals has some part in this chorus, some part to sing, no matter how seemingly insignificant. All that matters is that we harden not our hearts, that we hear and hearken, and do what is called for.
[This post originally appeared on December 12, 2019]