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"
“The Word of God [the Logos] became a human so that you may learn from a human how a human may become God.”--
Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus, 1.8.4.7-9
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 Judeo-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 what Shaw calls the whirlpool of pure force, whose stand-in at the time was Herod and the Roman Empire. Earth evolution, 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 whirlpool of pure force by the whirlpool of pure intelligence, i.e., the gradual divinization of the non-divine.
Whatever Shaw means by it, by intelligence I mean 'mind', and by mind I mean 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. I like Shaw's whirlpool metaphor because it suggests that intelligence--the Logos--is a dynamic, supra-rational, energetic thing rather than static in the way the Platonic world of ideas is usually conceptualized. Logos as creative energy comes closer to the biblical idea of this Greek word.
The incarnation of the Logos, the birth of the divine in the human, meant that the divine was infused into humanity in a way that was unprecedented until then. We Christians, of course, believe that we were created as divine beings because we were created in the image and likeness of God, i.e., we always were in some sense divine. But the story of the Fall is the story of identity loss, that is, of our having lost or forgotten any sense of ourselves as truly divine and of our looking for all kinds of counterfeit ways to restore it through egoism and will to power. And the story of redemption is of our having been given the possibility of finding or remembering our true identity--our true divinity--again. Christians like me believe that something happened on Good Friday, which was the restoration of something that had been lost by way of an infusion or transfusion of divine blood, so to say, into the earth and by extension into the human, which is the same thing. And by its salubrious effects the possibility of restoring the divine in the immanent world becomes a possibility inside/out. The kingdom of justice is born within, we are told, and so then is the restoration of Justice in the world effected, inside out. It cannot be imposed outside-in by force.
I think it's quite intelligible in light of Shaw's idea in the epigraph. The Incarnation if understood as the infusion of the divine into the whirlpool of pure force initiates at least the possibility by which the whirlpool of pure force can be transformed into the whirlpool of pure intelligence. This infusion of the divine into the earth/human is like a seed which if cultivated by humans grows within their own hearts and as it does, humans become agents through which the earth awakens to its own deepest potentialities. The cruel, random, whirlwind of brute force that cosmological and Darwinian science accurately presents as the material world and its energies becomes subverted.
All we have is metaphors, and another for the divine blood shed on Good Friday is seed that fertilizes an otherwise sterile world egg. And as the fertilized egg gestates and develops, it subverts the kingdom ruled by the law of evolution without grace. This deeper evolutionary process is what I call the Living Real, and as it operates in the depths of the earth, so does it operate in the depths of the human soul. As it grows in one, it grows in the other, and gradually a fallen world--a world that knows not Justice becomes transformed, restored, and the face of the earth renewed.
Humans can therefore, if they choose, become agents in this evolutionary project. No longer exclusively acted upon, humans can become active co-creators in the project to transform the whirlpool of pure force into the whirlpool of pure intelligence, i.e., to subvert evolution without grace by being infusion points through which Divine Intelligence awakens and transforms it. This is an impossible idea within the dominant late-modern metaphysical imaginary, but it would not be if we find a way to restore the vertical dimension to the Rationalist Materialist imaginary that thinks it can get along without it.
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.
That's the Christian mythos as I understand it. Fanciful nonsense? Only if the idea of the whirlpool of pure intelligence gradually taming the whirlpool of pure force remains an imaginative impossibility for us. This, of course, is an impossibility, for those whose imaginations are completely circumscribed by the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary.
Humans play their role in this project to the degree that their minds become right or just, that they are restored in the image and likeness of the Divine Intelligence in which they were created. The goal for humans is to get into their right minds, which clearly most are mostly out of. This intelligence, of course, 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 by which the immanent world derives its life, i.e., to the degree that it truly lives, it participates in it.
Computer Science seeks to mimic 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 in this inside-out transformative process.
***
Incarnation is mostly about a descent that makes possible an ascent, how the latter is impossible without the former. But I want to digress for a few moments to discuss The Renaissance Neoplatonists, particularly the Florentine artists influenced by Ficino. Ficino's Christian Neoplatonism transposes the Platonic Ideas from outside of space time into space time. He and the artists influenced by him came to understand that their task was to raise up creation by descending into it to discover there the mind of God embedded in it. The goal for them was to reimagine ascent as descent. The task 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., hidden, in the created world.
This shift invites a new consideration of the significance of the Incarnation. The descent of the divine into all creation made possible the lifting up of all creation, not just a means to escape from it. There is a shift at this time in the imagination of the the tasks for both philosophy and art--and, of course, for a nascent science. Science becomes a possibility now in a way it wasn't before this shift. In order to awaken to the hidden mysteries in the earth, first must the hidden potentialities of the human mind be awakened. The unawakened Mind embedded in creation is correlative, an image of, so to say, the unawakened Mind embedded in the individual human. But science loses its way insofar as it becomes subordinated to the will to power and the desire for material prosperity. I'm not saying that material prosperity is a bad thing it itself, but it is when it becomes an end in itself. It becomes evil when it is the only important thing sought for rather than a byproduct of a different kind of pursuit, which is the pursuit of wisdom, a pursuit which seeks the awakening to the Divine Mind both within ourselves and the earth.
It's interesting to me that a central theme of the Christian mythos is that the most significant things originate in the least significant places. Why should there not be an analogy along the lines of as a barn in Bethlehem is to the violence of the Roman Empire, so is the earth to the cosmic whirlpool of force? Is it possible then to at least imagine the plausibility that the divinizaton of the cosmos, i.e.,the evolutionary process Shaw imagines by which the cosmos as whirlpool of force becomes interpenetrated by pure intelligence could therefore begin in a cosmic backwater like the earth? It's at least an interesting premise for an Amazon sci-fi series.
My point here is that the event we celebrate every Christmas needs to be understood within this cosmic context. It was the first step in the enactment of this project--the incarnation of the Divine Mind into the whirlpool of pure force that culminated in a surrender of the former to the latter on Golgotha. Pure Cosmic Love crucified in that event paradoxically created the conditions that made possible the ultimate subversion of the whirlpool of pure cosmic force--or so Christians like me believe.
And so Christians like me believe that those who claim to be Christians fail as Christians to the degree that they embrace the rule of violence and force--whether in crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, or the violent overthrow of governments. These are agents of the whirlpool of force, not agents of divine intelligence. They are Christians to the degree that they work in whatever way they can as agents of divine intelligence to subvert cruelty, violence, and force in all the ways it continues its rule in the immanent world. Yes, there is no peace without justice, but neither justice nor peace is served by the aggressive use of violence. The rule of pure force cannot be overcome by pure force. Something else is called for, and if we're Christians we should believe that 'something' became available to all humans after the Incarnation of the Divine in the human on that silent night that we celebrate on Christmas.
After that first Christmas something new became a possibility for humans, the possibility for them to restore within themselves the Divine Mind in whose image and likeness they were created. The divine descending into the human created the conditions that made possible the human ascending to the divine. The early church fathers called this 'theosis'.
What are the implications? There are many, but one of them is cognitive, which is what the McGilchrist excerpt points to. He talks about how the artist's gift is to render what he sees in its unfiltered translucency visible to the rest of 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, unawakened states of consciousness. The Renaissance 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 we who encounter in what he made, if we are in our right mind, and can see what he saw. We become capable of seeing the world in Merleau-Ponty's phrase "according to" the work of art. I'm arguing that that "right mind" became a possibility for us because of the Incarnation.
At the time of the Renaissance, 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 mostly 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 the awakening of a latent inner capacity. This awakened 'talent' enables him to see what was before undisclosed. The latency of the divine mind within awakens to the latency of the Divine Mind embedded in the created world. 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.
That these works of art 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 their work lacked this quality of translucency because there was no light in them to shine through them. They were merely algorithmic. 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 awareness 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. Regardless of what intellectual difficulties there might be in grasping what I'm trying to articulate here, it used to be possible for people to take what I'm describing seriously. There used to be a shared sense of the truth of it, even if there was no way to explain it that was completely satisfactory. That there is no longer a shared sense of the truth of it is at the heart of what ails us.
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, it is a judgment on our inadequacy, and as such 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. Rather first there must be a 'disclosure' in the encounter with the art object, then comes some feeble, inadequate attempt to articulate what was experienced. The articulation is never equal to the experience. At best it simply points to it, and tries to understand the world "according to" it.
My reason for digressing here about the great Renaissance artists is to provide a model for something that is possible for us all. The Renaissance artists, like the great saints, were prodigies, but they image for us in their work a kind of work that is possible for each of us in more modest ways. For like them, when we awake to ourselves, we awake to the world. We don't believe in the presence of the Divine Mind suffusing all creation anymore, but that doesn't mean it isn't there waiting for us to discover it. The chances of your making such a discovery are increased significantly if you are predisposed to believe it's there to be found.
For the best of the Renaissance artists, ascent to the divine is effected by a descent into the material world to discover the incarnate divine hidden everywhere in it. 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 an evolutionary process of the awakening of Divine Intelligence in both the soul of the world and the individual souls of us humans. And that we humans, in whatever small way, play a central role in the advancement of this project, and that we therefore have a responsibility in whatever way is there for us to be agents of its disclosure, particularly its Goodness. We need to see the Good; we need to be the Good for others to see. 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--its truth, its goodness, its beauty--and its fundamental justice.
Part 2
The 2,000-year old Western tradition, that of Christianity, provides, whether one believes in it or not, an exceptionally rich mythos – a term I use in its technical sense, making no judgment here of its truth or otherwise – for understanding the world and our relationship with it. It conceives a divine Other that is not indifferent or alien – like James Joyce’s God, refined out of existence and ‘paring his fingernails’ – but on the contrary engaged, vulnerable because of that engagement, and like the right hemisphere rather than the left, not resentful (as the Old Testament Yahweh often seemed) about the Faustian fallings away of its creation, but suffering alongside it. At the centre of this mythos are the images of incarnation, the coming together of matter and spirit, and of resurrection, the redemption of that relationship, as well as of a God that submits to suffer for that process. But any mythos that allows us to approach a spiritual Other, and gives us something other than material values to live by, is more valuable than one that dismisses the possibility of its existence.
--Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 11566)
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 of Nazareth (which, of course, I do), just contemplate the idea of Uncreated Life and its Divine Intelligence working through human beings to penetrate the whirlwind of force in order to redeem it. It's a big idea--I know. Big ideas make us uncomfortable these days. But it grows on you if you give it a chance. 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 insights, intuitions, visions that come by way of the dove--then some attempt to use our intelligence to understand its significance and to create cultural forms that embody or make available or enact that understanding.
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 a place of exile in a vale of tears from which we must be rescued. It emphasizes that God didn't choose to redeem us from outside of history; rather, he effects his redemption by entering into it and working within it through human beings. We humans have always had the choice either to go with the flow of evolution without grace--the whirlwind of pure force--or to resist it, and in doing so to become co-redeemers of the earth as agents of the whirlpool of divine intelligence. 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 something like 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 awaken in us.
"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 created in the image and likeness of the divine, that is with minds that participate in the Divine Mind, which is achieved, in part, by its awakening to its presence embedded 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 on it grows.
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 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 singing 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 the whirlpool of 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 violence whisperers, people who have the ability to calm the violence in our own hearts and then eventually the violence 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.
[Versions of this post originally appeared around Christmas 2019 and 2020. I've revised it a little for clarity and added some content as it will be helpful in my attempt to develop "The Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" theme I'll be posting about in coming weeks.]