After the Future

My What Big Teeth You Have

This post was written in March 2006:

Con artists understand that most people operate in a symbolically patterned world, and that reality, whatever is really there, is hidden behind the symbols. We tend to accept the world as it appears at face value. We can't live without a certain minimum level of trust that things are in fact as they appear. Con artists know that because people are uncritically inclined to accept that the symbol represents truthfully what lies behind it that they can use the symbol as a kind of disguise. A sheep symbolizes passive docility; the wolf cunning and rapacious greed. The wolf knows that if he appears as its symbolic self, no one will trust him, so he hides his real nature and presents himself symbolically as a sheep. His effectiveness in the con depends on his effectiveness in appearing non-threatening and innocuous, someone who raises no alarms in those upon whom he seeks to prey.

The con artist knows that people don't see what's there; they see what they are habitually disposed to see. Did you ever wonder as a kid how Little Red Riding Hood could ever have mistaken the wolf for her grandmother? I think the story speaks to this kind of patterned perception. We are inclined to see (or hear) what we have been habitually conditioned see, what we are comfortable seeing. When running into someone on the street have you ever heard a "Good" to a "How are you?" that you didn't ask?  The person wasn't listening to the actual verbal content or your greeting. He was simply enacting a symbolic or formal ritual where the content doesn't matter.

Con artists understand how to blend themselves into the patterns and symbolic rituals of our everyday life--one might be a wolf, but so long as he is tucked in bed like grandma and is wearing her nightgown and little night cap with the red ribbon, chances are that's all Little Red Riding Hood will notice. She sees big teeth but is not alarmed about them because she has been lulled into a mood of trust by the larger pattern of familiarity. In such a state of mind she minimizes the importance of what doesn't fit into the familiar pattern. She trusts that her world on that fateful day is the same as the world as it was the day before and the day before that. Big teeth, long snout? Minor aberrations. It's a story about how we are all more inclined to believe the symbolic version of reality rather than any evidence to the contrary.

Leonardo DiCaprio shows how it works in his role as Frank Abagnale in "Catch Me if You Can." He wasn't a wolf really; there was something rather innocent about his conning--he just wanted to be more than he was. But the key to his success was his uncanny ability to embody symbolic roles--airline pilot, lawyer, etc.--to become a symbol without having any of the substance to which the symbol points. Con artists play on that trust, and they have a talent for insinuating themselves into our symbolic landscape to appear the way we expect them to appear, to be what we want them to be. We tend to disregard whatever evidence doesn't fit into the familiar pattern.

It might be worth considering in a post at another time to what degree we live in a literal vs. a symbolic world. That's a big question, and there is no simple answer for it. My answer would pick up from what I was developing in the earlier post in which I talk about the hypertrophied eye and how it has led us to limit our consideration of what is real only to what we can see. For any of us who are religiously or spiritually inclined, what is real is not what we see. Rather the ground that provides the supporting matrix for what we see is far more real, even if it is something that enters our field of awareness mostly in subtle ways.

In a fallen world, except for the rare epiphany, because we are cut off from what is most real, we most intensely experience the husks of things--and symbols are the husks. And so what appears in our experience is real to the degree that is saturated with the living reality that grounds it and which gave it its shape, and it is unreal and dead to the degree that is has lost its connection to it.

Some symbols in our cultural life live (paternal/maternal love is one that comes to mind) and some are dead but live with a kind of zombie life.  Especially during a decadent or transititonal cultural era like the one we're suffering through now, we live in a cultural world of dead or undead symbols.  A con man can very easily inhabit a dead symbol because we don't really have that strong a sense of what the real thing is--we've forgotten or never known it.  As a result, we're easily confused and easily fooled. It happens to the best of us.

The transcendent reality behind the appearances in a symbol that truly lives is unfathomably deep and multidimensional, and anybody who has had a glimpse knows the real from the false. And so if we as human beings are grounded only in what we see, if we believe only in what is given to us on the surface, then we can be easily manipulated by anyone who has the ability to appear as something other than what he is. The devil is quite capable of quoting scripture to persuade us that his perverse purposes are legitimate. It happens all the time.

Our practical day-to-day life requires that we learn to navigate effectively in a world of appearances and dead symbols, but the more important meta-task is to discern what lies behind them and to re-connect with what is true and life-giving and to reject what is false and undead. And very often what is acclaimed by the official reality as true is false and what is denounced as false is true. Our only protection is to develop a nose for what is rotting inside the whited sepulcher on the one hand, and on the other a nose that knows the sweet fragrance of that which lives. This is a cognitive skill best developed by the thinking heart.

Some years ago, when I was reading to my son before bed, we were working through a fantasy series based on Welsh myths. The stories had an interesting recurring feature in which an evil spirit was able to disguise itself as something beautiful--a bird, person, flower--and it was so beautiful that the unwary would be irresistibly drawn to it, and when the victim would get close enough, the evil spirit would appear in its true ugly form and bite its victim and cause him to become deathly ill. But as beautiful as the shapeshifter was in its disguise, it always had a minor flaw that distinguished it from the real thing--it had an extra toe or finger, the wrong colored eyes, a leaf pattern that wasn't quite right. If one was alert and discerning, he could recognize the con for what it was.

That's the thinking part, but in such encounters the heart also knows better, whether or not the head notices the extra toe. The heart has to be strong if it's not to be overwhelmed by unworthy desire which is also very strong in all of us and always will be. Unworthy desire or impulse cannot be extinguished; it can only be refused, and it's easier to refuse if another choice is presented as an alternative. The stronger our hearts, the clearer the alternative. So the task is on the one hand to be vigilant and alert, but on the other to develop a solar powered heart whose impulses are stronger than the instincts from below that otherwise drive our actions.

We are all of us wandering in a world of shapeshifters, a world where the shapes may or may not point to something true that lies behind them. Luckily, not all of what surrounds us intends us harm. And along these lines the official reality, as I spoke about it yesterday, is often innocuous enough. But there are times when the official reality is hiding horrors which, like Little Red Riding Hood, we are simply not conditioned to see because it doesn't fit into our pattern of expectations. Fear makes us stupid, but so does wide-eyed trust.

I've been thinking about Wisdom a lot in the past year. I've written about how I like John Vervaeke's definition of wisdom as the ability to overcome foolishness, if by foolishness we mean the innate human predisposition toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. Such wisdom starts in Socratic aporia--i.e., assuming that what we know is probably wrong and should be replaced by something better, and that even that is probably wrong and needs to be replaced, and then replaced again and again. That doesn't mean we are simply overcoming one set of delusions by replacing it with a new set, but that with each replacement we are getting a better grip on reality.

The key word here is 'better', because our grip on reality is always relative, never absolute. We never know anything for sure, and that's good because it makes life more interesting because there's always a new, as-yet unconsidered possibility. But better really is better. Better means less deluded than before. And the test of it is that you get better at making judgments that turn out right, right enough to act on with minimal fear of being deluded, but always open to the possibility that you are missing something. That's what keeps you on your toes and helps you to notice when something looks right but smells wrong.

We are told in the gospels to be shrewd as serpents and guileless as doves. The key is to be both. To be both Martha and Mary, both Little Red Riding Hood and the woodsman. To be one without the other is to be foolish, and each of us in our own way has to grow out of his or her foolishness. The serpent without the dove is a fool who trusts nobody, assumes you're lying, demands proof you're not, and even with it demands payment in advance; the dove without the serpent is a fool because he assumes he is comfortable in his delusions, assumes the best and so lacks vigilance, and is easily conned. The dove-dominant person with an integrated serpent lives with a openness to Life and change and growth, but has developed a nose for what doesn't smell right. The serpent dominant person with an integrated dove is down-to-earth and good humored but while inclined to believe that there is nothing new under the sun, is open enough to be surprised and inspired when something deeply real breaks through. 

 

The Coming Politics of AI

How exactly the parties would align—pro-AI or anti-AI or somewhere in between—is unclear. The possibilities are downright kaleidoscopic. Democrats, traditionally more concerned about long-term threats such as climate change and pandemics, might oppose AI development on the grounds of existential risk. Republicans, traditionally more concerned about the preservation of existing social structures and mores, might oppose it as a potentially destabilizing force. Or maybe they’d support it, given their distaste for government regulation. Then again, they might oppose it on the basis of their science-skepticism, whereas Democrats might support it because they’re “following the science.” Maybe both parties will oppose regulation for fear of ceding AI dominance to China.

The Democrats will eventually take a position. The Republicans will mindlessly oppose it. Gridlock will ensue. The machines will win. So it goes in a society that has no vertical axis and no idea about what it means to be human anymore.

Genealogy Part 12B: Propositional Tyranny in the West

The following post is a mainly a background piece to provide context for the first conversation between the Greek Orthodox Bishop Maximus and the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke.

This is also a contribution to my ongoing Genealogoy Series which has two primary objectives. First, to establish that the metaphysical imaginary that developed in the West in the last seven hundred years, for all its benefits, is reductive and unbalanced. Secondly, to make the case how Neoplatonism provides a template for the restoration of the vertical axis as depicted in the diagram below, i.e., to restore in the West (and elsewhere) a metaphysical framework that comprises both "Sophia", understood as self-transcendence, and "Phronesis", understood as the methodologies that enable us to get a deeper grip on the reality of the World. Such a framework, I want to argue, would restore a philosophical imaginary that Christians, Jews, Muslims shared until the Reformation. And it provides the infrastructure for an East-West dialogue that isn't possible between Eastern religions and forms of Christianity that have rejected their Neoplatonic heritage.

Why should this matter? Because there is no pushing back against where technocapitalism is dragging us unless there is global consensus derived from a shared imagination of the human future. (See Note 1) Neoplantonism, I am arguing, is latent in the West and Middle East, and is essential for establishing in thought and practice an antidote to the rationalist materialist imaginary that while still hegemonic for us is faltering. The collapse of the vertical axis was unique in the West and maybe necessary (for a time) to allow for certain critical developments on the horizontal axis, but it's now time to restore the vertical. 

To make the second argument for restoration requires making the first argument in a way that is compelling enough that people understand both how we got here and why where we have got to is no longer tenable. Western theology made a turn in the 14th Century, as Maximus and Vervaeke discuss, that had ambiguous unintended consequences in shaping the metaphysical imaginary in the West. Eastern Orthodox Christian thinkers debated the same issues, but rejected making this turn and in doing so were able to preserve the vertical axis in a way the West proved unable to do.  

I say the turn in the West was ambiguous because on the one hand it allowed for a new emphasis on human freedom and the dignity of the autonomous individual, it opened up a political vision for self-determination through republican and later democratic polities, and it created the conditions for the emergence of science and technological development in ways that have materially benefitted humanity enormously. This has been a source of the West's sense of its exceptionalist self-understanding--and for good reason. 

But on the other hand, this turn has led to the amputation of the vertical axis, and we have paid a price for that, a price whose cost many have understood all along, but which was ignored because of all the material benefits that we accrued without it.

It's arguable that these positive developments may not have been possible if the vertical axis had not been amputated, but it's important to understand that the vertical still was felt as a phantom limb until the middle of the 19th Century. The radical turn to materialism at that point has led us into our current predicament. This materialism is no longer tenable, and neither is a pietistic call to faith a solution.

Societies cannot produce or impose faith in the people who populate them, but they can provide a trellis, a framework that recognizes the central importance of wisdom, has ways of identifying those who have some measure of it, and ways of teaching it to those who would aspire to it. We have none of that anymore. Whatever solution we develop to restore the vertical axis, it will perform for us in ways that Neoplatonism performed throughout the West and Middle East for centuries, so why not start by trying to understand what Neoplatonism is and taking seriously the possibility that it might be helpful in helping us to find a way forward? 

(Note: This diagram is explained in Note 2 at the end of Genealogy Part 12A.)

So in our current situation the challenge, in theory, is how you reintroduce the vertical in a way that avoids such a restoration that will, if the Religious Right gets its way, turn the country into a Christian version of Iran. This would be a disaster. The kind of restoration I hope for can only happen in a bottom-up way, rather as Christianity became hegemonic in the Roman Empire. Christianity, as Bishop Maximus points out, took Neoplatonism and transfigured it into something that was compatible with Christian soteriology in such a way as to make it broadly available. It was broadly accepted because it made sense to elites and had practices that engaged both elites and non-elites. A healthy society needs the engagement of both, and so now something similar is called for--something that would make sense in a pluralistic society with a latent infrastructure that is open the transcultural insights that shaped the Axial Revolution. 

So it was interesting to me when, after not thinking much about this Genealogy project for over a year, I came across this YouTube of Vervaeke conversing with Bishop Maximus which addresses these issues in ways that surprised me for reasons that I describe here. The following is a commentary on this conversation in a way that I hope will be helpful both in furtherance of the Genealogy project but also to make available what might seem to many fine points of metaphysics whose relevance it might be hard to comprehend.  

***

As the post's title suggests, I think the crux of this conversation is to point to a turn in the West that led to what Vervaeke has been calling "propositional tyranny". This turn set the stage for secularization and a kind of rationalism that was not at first incompatible with religion but gradually became so. People nowadays say all the time that religion makes no sense to them, and I say of course it doesn't because it can't to the degree they are captured by the conventional imaginary that dominates in North Atlantic societies. This imaginary is shaped by Rationalist Materialist presuppositions that are incompatible with the kinds of presuppositions that are required for a religious worldview. (See Note 2)

There was a time when being an atheist was transgressive, but now in the marketplace of ideas it's a consumer choice that is as conventionally acceptable as preferring football to baseball. To be an atheist for many (most?) does not require that you think or that you reject prevailing conventions, but only that you go with the flow if you travel in certain cosmopolitan cultural circles. If you are captured within the Rationalist Materialist frame, you are likely convinced that atheism is the only thing that makes sense, but it's just not. You are simply acculturated to believe that it is, and that acculturation began as a "mistake" among theologians in the 14th century. 

I have long been persuaded by the arguments made by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, by Brad Gregory in Unintended Reformation, and the arguments made by John Milbank and the other figures in Radical Orthodoxy that Western theology who make this argument. They trace how this turn had enormously impactful unintended consequences for reshaping the metaphysical imaginary in the West that led to its secularization in a way that was unimaginable in other societies. This argument is about how the Univocity of Being, Nominalism, and Voluntarism in the theologies of Scotus and Ockham crowded out the participatory ontology and epistemology that was hegemonic before them.

But, you might ask, "Who cares? That was then and this is now, How is an argument among medieval monks remotely relevant to our situation in late modernity?" Well, because ideas matter. They shape how we think about the world which in turns shapes how we work in the world, which in turn shapes how we think about the world--and the next thing we know we've worked and thought our way into a nihilistic dystopia. Ideas that we have come to accept as normal have justified the liberation of greed and will to power, and we just accept it as normal. This is insane. Humans have always been driven by greed and will to power; what is unique about our late modern civilization is that we celebrate these vices rather than seek to constrain them. And sane people have no flag to rally around to push back against such insanity.

Nietzsche and Heidegger blame the metaphysical tradition that began with Socrates for this trend toward nihilism. I'd argue the opposite--that the nihilism about which they complained ensued from a misreading of Socrates and Plato in the late medieval period. This is what Maximus and Vervaeke are talking about in this video. I see the problem not as originating with Socrates and Plato, but in a creeping Averoism that led Western thinkers to misread them in a way that overemphasized their use of logic and abstract rationality. That's there in them, but it's not what makes them important. But it's what these 14th Century philosophers took from them while leaving out what they thought was mumbo jumbo. Logic and propositional truth have their place, but the hypertrophied role they played in Western philosophy going forward from that moment displaced participative knowing, and in doing so created the conditions for the meaning crisis through which we are now suffering.

After the Renaissance, a Neoplatonic participatory ontology and epistemology played little role in philosophy and mainstream Reformed theology in the West, but remained vital in the visual arts and literature. It popped up now and then in Anglo philosophy in figures like Ralph Cudworth and Henry More in the 1600s, and Thomas Taylor in the late 1700s who deeply influenced figures like Blake, Coleridge, Shelly, Wordsworth, and Emerson. Poets "got it" in a way that Western philosophers and theologians, with a few exceptions, became incapable of. I think this is important to keep in mind when listening to the Maximus/Vervaeke conversation, which is essentially about how this participative ontology and epistemology was preserved in the East, and how it provides some clues about how it might be bolstered, if not restored, in the West.

I want to emphasize that Neoplatonism is always there in a state of dormancy in the cultural memory of the West, and it can at some point be 'remembered', especially when, as now, there is such a need for it. English Romanticism and American Transcendentalism were deeply Neoplatonic in their roots, but neither was powerful enough to push back against the enormous materialist energies released by the Industrial Revolution, by its celebration of greed and will to power, and by its justification by a crudely materialist Social Darwinist ideology. Any recovery of a Wisdom tradition in the West will start with poets and mystics (See Note 3), or with philosophers who have the souls of artists and mystics, but it must spread to mainstream philosophy and science, and cognitive scientists like Vervaeke are among those beating such a path. Hence his openness to Bishop Maximus's demonstrating to him that Christian Neoplatonism is still alive and well in Eastern Christian traditions in ways it's not in the West. (See Note 4) 

And so it follows if the imaginary could shift from a richly deep participatory ontology to one that is flat and non-participative, it can switch back again--but in a postmodern key. Indeed this is the project of figures like Heidegger and thinkers influenced by him such as Paul Tillich, Henry Corbin, and Martin Buber--and other interesting figures like Owen Barfield who was influenced by Coleridge. (I was recently surprised to see that Vervaeke gives these figures a tip of the hat in the closing lectures of his Awakening series.) So in what follows, I want briefly to lay out some background to put into context Maximus's comments about shifts in Western theological thinking in the 14th century that led to what he and Vervaeke call the "tyranny of the proposition". Maximus talks about how the same issues were debated contemporaneously in the East and were resolved in ways that preserved the participative ontology that was lost in the West. This, it could be argued, is a more consequential reason for schism between the Eastern and Western Churches than the Filioque debate that led to the earlier schism In the 11th century. (See Note 5)

This turn in the West away from a participatory ontology leads to two arguments made most prominently by Duns Scotus in reaction to Aquinas's analogy of Being--the univocity of Being and Voluntarism--which in turn cleared the way for Nominalism--lurking in the background since the 1100s--and the literalism associated with it to take the field pushing participatory knowing to the fringes. (See Note 6)

So if the reader will indulge me, I want to lay out how consequential was the shift toward the "univocity of being" argued for by Duns Scotus. This is really the background for what Maximus is arguing for as the fundamental flaw in post-Thomistic scholasticism. Hopefully what I write here will be more clarifying than mystifying.

The problem for the early Church Fathers was to preserve a way of affirming that God was both transcendent and immanent without falling into a form of pantheism. This problem is at the heart of what Maximus is trying to explain to Vervaeke. Plotinian Neoplatonic emanationism, without the idea of creation ex nihilo, lends itself to pantheism because if all creation is an emanation of the One, all creation must be the same substance with the one. (See Note 7) In pantheism, individual beings arise from and melt back into the One. To think that any individual being has existence that is in any way separate from or different from the One is delusional. Christian theism, on the other hand, is personalistic; it wants to preserve a concept of persons as having irreducible, individual identities--what Maximus calls hypostases--that at the same time are deeply connected to a personal God, to other people, and to the Being of the world.  

So the challenge in Christian thought is to preserve a sense of God as 'personal' and intimately engaged with his creation while at the same time utterly, unspeakably transcendent and incomprehensible. This is emphasized in the apophaticism of Dionysius the Areopagite, which asserts that God is beyond being and so beyond comprehension. He wants to insure that God both functioned as the deep infrastructure of creation while still 'existing' outside of creation. If pantheism overemphasizes immanence in a way that merges creation with its transcendent source, Scotus's univocity of being (for reasons explained below) understands transcendence in a way that emphasizes the separateness of God from his creation and from God's playing an immanent role in creation upon whom, in the Neoplatonic ontology, it is utterly dependent for its existence and for its flourishing. As the grape depends on the vine for its nurture toward ripeness, so does creation and the individual soul depend on God. 

So why is 'univocity a problem'? It was born of a rejection of Aquinas's analogy of being in such way that it sundered the grape from the vine. In thought, at least. But as I said above, ideas have consequences. So first, let us clarify what the analogy of being accomplished:

It's often been pointed out that Aquinas was more influenced by the Neoplatonism of Dionsysius the Areopagite than by Aristotle, and that his project was not so much to Aristoteleianize theology as to integrate Aristotle within the existing Christian Neoplatonic, i.e., Dionysian metaphysical frame. Aquinas might use Aristotelian language, but he uses it in the service of a Neoplatonic participative knowing.

Good Dionysian that he was, he stressed the absolute "otherness" and apophatic (unspeakable) nature of God that asserts that nothing that we say about God can be true, at least in any propositional sense. We can say things, though, that are true by analogy or metaphor. We can know something of the Goodness of God because we have some sense of the goodness of creation, and so we can infer indirectly that its source must be good. That we can say that the uncreated God is good can only be inferred by analogy from our knowledge of creatures. And the same is true of the being of creatures and whatever might be true of the Being of God. There is nothing we can say in a propositional sense about the Being of God that is true. To think otherwise leads to idolatry and propositional tyranny. That's the challenge for Aquinas--to find a way that talks about the intimate relation of God with his creation while avoiding pantheism on the one hand, while, on the other, preserving a way of talking about God that is not reductive and idolatrous. As we'll see, Scotus's univocity of being leads to the latter. 

So for Aquinas, while this goodness or existence of creatures is sourced in God, it isn't God. It is, however, good or it exists in a way that points to God as its source. So to say that God is Good or that he 'Exists' is to affirm something in this analogous way. We know of our existence and have a taste of Goodness in our lives as creatures, and in that sense we have some taste of God, but the Goodness and Existence of God is so beyond human understanding that to say that God is good or that he exists is to say something that is true-ish, but not true in any way that we can with confidence assert that we comprehend.

Now I don't want to go down any rabbit holes regarding to what degree Scotus embraced a pure univocity of being, and so what I'm describing here is more about a current of thought that shows itself in him with more nuance than those who later go through the door he opens. But here's what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says about Scotus and univocity:

Scotus has a number of arguments for univocal predication and against the doctrine of analogy (Ordinatio 1, d. 3, pars 1, q. 1–2, nn. 26–55). One of the most compelling uses Aquinas’s own view against him. Aquinas had said that all our concepts come from creatures. Scotus says, very well, where will that analogous concept come from? It can’t come from anywhere. If all our concepts come from creatures (and Scotus doesn’t deny this), then the concepts we apply to God will also come from creatures. They won’t just be like the concepts that come from creatures, as in analogous predication; they will have to be the very same concepts that come from creatures, as in univocal predication. Those are the only concepts we can have—the only concepts we can possibly get. So if we can’t use the concepts we get from creatures, we can’t use any concepts at all, and so we can’t talk about God—which is false.

So it's important to understand what's going on here. He's essentially dismissing the apophaticism of the Neoplatonic tradition as illogical, and in doing so, whether or not he goes through it, he opens the door to idolatry. To refuse any logical assertions about God was the whole point of Aquinas's use of analogy--to protect a way of understanding how humans can be intimately related to a being about whom they could say nothing that had propositional truth value. Our knowledge of God is fundamentally experiential-participatory, and about that no propositions can be asserted with univocal clarity. Poetry works precisely because of its multivalence. Poetry, and any kind of religious language, can't be taken "literally", not because it's untrue, but because literalism is reductive of the infinitely deep meaning of Being and as such idolatrous. Scotus was not interested in poetic language; he was interested in logic. Aquinas was trying to use langauage as clearly as possible to make the point that language can never clearly and univocally assert anything about God. 

Scotus had no problem with Aquinas's assertion of the utter transcendence and infinity of God, but he took exception to the idea that the existence of creatures was definitionally different than the existence of God. Either a being is or it isn't. Sure, God is an infinite being and humans are only finite beings, but both "exist", and to say that God is not 'a being' or that he doesn't 'exist' is makes no sense. Clearly creation 'is' and God 'is'  So yes God exists, and yes, he transcends everything that we can know and comprehend, but the being of God as existing is logically the same as the being of creatures as existing. To claim anything else is to abuse our use of language, right? It's just logical, no?

Why is this a problem? What are the stakes in this kind of assertion? The older Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary insisted that whatever God may be is not 'univocal' with the word 'being' or 'existing'. Aquinas's analogy avoids this univocity in preserving both God's beyondness of any concept of being that we might have while at the same time showing how it's possible for a kind of knowing about him in a way that resists a propositional reductiveness and the literalness that comes with that.

The problem lies in that this assertion of univocity of being, along with voluntarism and nominalism, is part of a three-legged stool that supplants the older tradition of participatory knowing. Aquinas, in the Dionsysian tradition, strove to find a way to preserve God's immanence and transcendence. Univocity of Being/Voluntarism/Nominalism destroys the immanence part of this balance. With this new three-legged stool, God's absolute transcendence is affirmed, but so is his absolute freedom, which requires that the world not depend on him because that would constrain his freedom.

Voluntarism asserts that God created a world but did so in a way that would not impinge on his freedom, which it would do if it depended on him as participation requires. Language in nominalism hypertrophies truth as logically correct propositional assertions and loses its ontologically disclosive character in metaphor and analogy. Words just become arbitrary signifiers, and their relationship to the deep 'truth' of the world becomes significantly weakened. With these developments begin the disenchantment of the West. The world thus disconnected from God just becomes profane stuff, material to be exploited, clay to be molded by the human will to meet human needs. In the beginning, the shaping was constrained by some residual sense of the old divine immanence, but in time the shaping became whatever the market demanded. Anybody who disagreed was considered a flake or a mystic, which are synonyms for within this new mindset. 

And although not logically required by the disconnection of the human being from the mystery of being effected by these developments, it was only a matter of time before the personal God of revelation became the impersonal god of the Deists, a remote deus otiosus that had no interest in his creation or intervening in it in an way, and with whom no personal relationship was possible. The Christian idea of incarnation became unnecessary and then unbelievable. Sure, plenty of educated people remained Christians, and many of them retained a personal sense of relationship with the God of Christianity, but unless there was some powerful experience that supported that sense of relationship, Christianity became more of a moralistic system that morphed easily into Unitarianism or ethical humanism. And besides, religious belief was a private affair and should have no influence in the public square. 

And so the consequence for Western civilization was the loss of the vertical axis in the diagram above. People might have their personal relationship with God, but that had nothing to do with vertical axes or wisdom or self-transcendence or the idea of theosis that Maximus and Vervaeke are talking about. The world became flat, and the only legitimate discourse concerned knowledge on the horizontal. But I'm arguing that the vertical axis is the civilizational trellis on which the healthy vine grows, and while the vine is always there, it sprawls and grows wildly in a society in which there is no sapiential tradition, i.e., no trellis to give its growth shape. The society suffers because it produces no truly great, wise souls, and so expediency and utility are all. (See Note 8)

With the loss of Aquinas's analogy, came the loss of the ability to resist the temptation that our propositions about God come to represent truths about God, which they can never be. Better to say nothing at all. For similar reasons the Jews prohibited speaking the name of YHWH and making images of him. The danger is idolatry, and language can become idolatrous, and in fact that's exactly what happened in Western thought--and culture. So while propositions such as 'God is Good'  or 'God exists' seem piously unobjectionable to those of us who live in a world where language has become idolized, we have become insensible to the problem such statements are indicative of, which is the degree to which they really say nothing unless you participate in the truth to which they point, and if you participate in the truth of it, it would be risible to make such a statement.

The result of taking such statements seriously at this time leads to our living in a world where language, like the grape from the vine, has become sundered from its source, and the Neoplatonic project about which I write is largely about restoring language to its connection with reality. This sundering starts in the late medieval period, and nominalism is what it becomes, and we are all nominalists now. It's ironic that univocal propositions like 'God is good' could lead to nihilism, but this is the argument, and I agree with it. The implications need to be explicated more than there's room to do here, but this is what Vervaeke and Maximus are talking about when they talk about procedural and participative knowing and demonstrative reference. 

As we'll see in coming posts, literalness is the problem because of the way that it leads to idolatry, to the illusion that our propositions about God are anything more than 'demonstrative reference' to a Thou. Our language about God has no positive content; it can only say,  "Harden not your hearts. Pay attention. Respond." When you start claiming that your statements about God are anything more than that, you start demanding that people believe in certain propositions, and if they don't--then to the stake with them! Dogmatism and Literalism are a perennial temptation for religious thinking, but with the crowding out of the participative ontology and epistemology of Neoplatonism by univocity and Nominalism in the West, there was no longer a vigorous way to defend against it. And you see how too much of Chrisitianity has become, on the one hand, a soul-dead alienation factory and, on the other, an incubator for fanaticism. 

This is why ideas matter. The problem is not whether someone disagrees or agrees with a given proposition about God or anything else. The problem is that propositional tyranny became a thing in the first place and was legitimated by a kind of reductive thinking that made logic and propositional truth "super-salient" during the modern period. This came to distort our experience of reality in such a way that by the early 1600s we have Descartes sitting in his study wondering if there's a world outside of his head. This is unthinkable in a world shaped by a participative experience of reality, an experience that was--and is-- theorized by Neoplatonism in a way many are just coming once again to appreciate. The rubber hits the road in philosophy not in some abstract sense, but in the way that it helps us to participate in reality and to get a grip on it.

I was going to say something about Scotus's Voluntarism, but I'll save that for another time. This is enough for now. The main point of this post was to provide some background for what Bishop Maximus is trying to lay out regarding how Eastern Christianity in retaining its Neoplatonic framework was able to resist the West's drift toward Rationalist Materialism. Next time more about how this metaphysical imaginary provides a framework for the recovery of a participatory ontology and epistemology, which is at the heart of Vervaeke's Cog-Sci project, his commitment to the 'naturalistic imperative' notwithstanding. I'll have more to say about these conversations next week or whenever I have the time. 

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Note 1: Whatever may have been the benefits of the marriage of market capitalism with science to produce the unprecedented technological developments of the last two hundred years, the chickens are coming home to roost, and with the advent of AI-machine learning, developments in biotechnology, and the continued improvement in Virtual Reality, we are confronted with a transhumanism or a post humanism that is fundamentally in conflict to an understanding of human nature and human ends that has shaped all the great post-Axial civilizations for the last 2500 years. I am appalled that there is so little resistance to what might very well become the end of the human project unless there is a concerted global effort to push back.

Note 2: Those who have been gifted with faith must live in a metaphysical imaginary that is incompatible with the nomological order that shapes the modern conventional worldview, and so religious people can make no arguments that make sense in the mainstream societies in which a conventional Rationalist-Materialist frame is hegemonic. They can only point to all the ways that it's failing. If you don't see there's a problem, then you're not looking for an answer, and so what I write here probably seems a little nutty. Nevertheless, my imagined audience is not primarily religious people, but open-minded people who get that there's a problem and are receptive to solutions that embrace a non-materialistic metaphysics. 

Note 3: Catholic and high church Anglican thought and practice in some quarters remains an exception to this generalization. I'm very sympathetic to Millbank's, Pickstock's, and Jean-Luc Marion's theology, and I think that Pope Francis is a breath of fresh air. But the most public facing and impactful aspects of Catholicism in the U.S. are reactionary and more obstructive to what I'm talking about than receptive to it. The conservative Catholics on the  U.S. Supreme Court and Integralists like Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule, and kids like Nate Hochman have a greater voice in defining the American Catholic intellectual ethos than the proponents of Radical Orthodoxy. Hopefully that will change at some point. 

Note 4: By "mystics" I don't mean anything particularly woo-woo, but rather the common experience--at least 40% of the population--of 'illuminating' experiences or experiences of heightened cognition or what can only be described as "spiritual". This is something available to everyone, not just elites. But elites are essential for providing an interpretive frame to help people understand the significance of these experiences and how to cultivate them in such a way that they lead to wisdom and a deeper grip on reality.

The problem that I have witnessed over and over again is that too many people who have these experiences either (1) suppress them as weird and frightening, (2) have them interpreted in primitive, distorting ways by religious cults, or (3) reduce them to aesthetic experiences that are caused by brain chemistry. It's not on the level of experience but on the level of interpretation that the restoration of the vertical Wisdom axis is most needed. I would go on to argue that poetry and the arts have suffered precisely because poets and artists have illuminating experiences but not the cultural framework to represent them in genuinely fruitful ways. 

Note 5: More consequential because causing a more fundamental rupture between the metaphysical imaginaries of the West and East. I've made several attempts to wrap my head around the Filioque debate, and it boils down to a problem, which from my point of view, seems to be exemplary of both sides falling into theology's tendency toward propositional tyranny, that is, of trying to make distinctions by the use of language and logic that is beyond the scope of our capacity to do so. It's astonishing to me that such a debate could be the cause of schism. So the idea that Eastern Orthodoxy is in some way immune to propositional tyranny in a way the West is not is at the very least questionable. But that's not a debate I want to get in here. The question of the univocity of Being, which did take hold in the West in a way it did not in the East, is very consequential--as is the related shift to Nominalism and Voluntarism.

Note 6: I'm not prepared to argue it here, but until someone convinces me otherwise, it's hard to argue that  Catholic theology retained Aquinas's participative epistemology. If so, scholasticism strangled the life out of it. Certainly scholasticism's epistemology was only latently participative, especially in its Counter-Reformation dogmatic forms that were so propositionally rigid. This kind of propositional tyranny was defended in the name of clarity, an obsession that defined the mood of the modern age, and reduced language to a form of idolatry. The 19th Century assertion of papal infallibility does not arise from an ethos that drew from a rich experience derived from a participative epistemology.

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying here, but Catholic Scholasticism seems on the whole to have suffered deeply from propositional tyranny because it was captured by an imaginary that privileged a reductive rationality in this sense. Aquinas's participative ontology/epistemology was there dormantly, and was not brought out again until thinkers like Gilson and Maritain made efforts to restore our memory of it. As mentioned in a previous post, more important for what I'm talking about is Nouvelle Theologie's retrieval of the Patristic Neoplatonism. Whatever is participative in Catholicism was preserved in its sacraments, liturgical practices, Marian devotions and veneration of the saints, its sacred music traditions, its monastic communities, and in its varied local festivals and customs. That's not nothing, but to the degree that they preserved a participatory vitality, it did so despite the rigid dogmatism of its theology and moralistic legalisms, not because of it.

Note 7: The problem with pantheism is the difficulty within it to establish a moral imperative. If everything is God, then there is no evil and there can be no better or worse, no wisdom or foolishness. There is no moral telos, and so no reason for virtue within a such a metaphysical imaginary. The good and the evil alike melt back into pleromatic Being. (I know some pantheists would object to this characterization, but that's a debate for another time and place.) Creation ex nihilo, on the other hand, requires first of all the creation of The Nothing. If everything is God before creation, where does The Nothing come from? I'm drawn to the Cabbalistic mythopoetic notion of the tsimtsum, which asserts that the infinite Godhead, in order to create the universe, had first to create a void--a Not-God--within himself.

Without the void, then everything would be God, and so the making of the void within the godhead creates the possibility of there being 'Not-God', i.e., the Nothing out of which the universes is created. This void in Genesis is imaged as the "Deep", the chaotic nothingness as yet unmixed with the form-investing energies of the the creative Godhead. This idea maps well to a Jewish/Christian transfiguration of Neoplatonism insofar as provides an imagination of a moral cosmos that stretches between chaos and the void of nonexistence at one extreme and the density of form and existence at the other extreme.

The human moral project begins somewhere between these two extremities, and human freedom lies in whether it will choose to ascend toward greater levels of density of Being, i.e., to become more real analogously as God is real, or to descend toward dissolution and chaos and in doing so to become less real.  As Maximus says, Humans become by grace what God is by nature. We don't become God, but we "can" become divinized. To become divinized requires, therefore, not that we become some plaster saint, but rather that we become more deeply, densely human, i.e., "mensch-y". And this process of gradually becoming more real in this sense is not only self-transformative, but transformative of the world. This process is what Vervaeke is trying to articulate when he talks about his "virtual engine". (See his lecture on Aristotle.)

And so for Christians the Pauline idea of incarnation as kenosis comes to make a kind of profound sense because it suggests that the redemption of the world--not just humans, but all creation--required that the godhead, which from the beginning contained creation as the emptiness that is not-God--entered into that emptiness in an unprecedented way. His energies brought creation into being and sustained it from the beginning--but radiating from outside it into it, but the Incarnation suggests that a new kind of relationship between the Godhead and creation was initiated. No longer was the relationship outside-in, from the periphery toward the center, but now inside-out from the deep center.

When Nietzsche declared that God is dead, he was talking about a phenomenon that was broadly experienced in the late 19th century, but he misinterpreted its significance. God had not died; he had just changed his address. This had been true since Pentecost, but the social imaginary hadn't adjusted. Modern science has forced us to ditch the hierarchical imaginary, but that doesn't mean that Neoplatonism is incompatible with science. God, I would argue is no longer to be sought as a presence outside the void shining down and into it as the old Plotinian/Dionysian hierarchical imaginary mapped it, but now need to seek him at the center of it radiating up and out.

Any postmodern Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary, I would argue, needs to start with this relocation of the origin of emanationary "energies" of the One from the periphery or creation to the center, and I would suggest that requires a re-imagination of what had been conceived as an itinerary of Ascent up the chain of Being to now an itinerary of Descent into the guts of the world, to use a Vervaeke phrase I like. The goal is not to get out of the immanent world into a transcendent, timeless, eternal world at the top of the chain of Being, but to discover the possibilities for transcendence within and at the heart of chaotic immanence and so to be the agents for its transformation. 

Maximus was correct when he said that the Eastern Fathers transfigured Neoplatonism in a way that enriched it and popularized it in the light of the Christian revelation. I'm arguing that Neoplatonism needs further transfiguration in the light of how this inside-out imagination of the post-Incarnation world makes salient the idea of descent into the guts of the world, and that such an idea of Neoplatonic descent will expand and make more meaningful what scientists understand as their task. 

I have no doubt that there is a dimension outside of time and space, and that there are people who have experienced it, but, since the Incarnation and Pentecost, that's not our concern and not the kind of experience that we should seek. The task for us is transcendence within immanence. That, at least, is how I have come to think about it. If the human task is to get a deeper grip on reality, that requires plumbing the depths of the human soul, which correlates with plumbing the depths of the world. We Christians celebrate this week the events that made this human descent not just a possibility, but a moral imperative that frames the human project going forward. I see this as very compatible with what Vervaeke is talking about. I also see such a framing as imperative for framing the human project in way that offers a robust alternative to where techno-capitalism is dragging us. 

Note 8: I do not think having such a vertical axis is incompatible with democracy and an open society. People should be free to believe whatever they want and should never be forced into anything by the state. People cannot be coerced into being good, they must be inspired to become good. Democracy is a political regime that provides the space for people to choose to be as good or bad as they choose to be so long as they don't infringe on the rights of others. The really important question is what kind of society would inpire most people to freely choose to be as good and wise as they can be. Secular Liberalism with its Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary fails in almost every respect except to protect individual rights and freedoms. 

Nevertheless, I think it's wrong to assume that democracy must necessarily have a leveling or least-common-denominator effect, where the the crude and the vulgar have equal footing with the the sublime and holy. Right now that is true, but it need not be. A healthy society with a healthy sapiential tradition would inspire most people of good will toward self-transcendence and wisdom. That most don't is not because they aren't capable of it but because no public figures model it, and it has little legitimacy as a real possibility. How that might be remedied is perhaps the most important question facing us in the next few decades as developments in technology threaten to shape by default what the human project will become if there is not a robust constituency of the Wise to resist it.  

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Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in early December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.