After the Future

Return of the Repressed

In "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I", I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans continue to associate the Democratic Party with what is for them the unrelatable ethos of the secular, cultural Left, i.e., the ethos of top 15-20% of educated, economic elite Americans who live in urban areas and university towns throughout the country.

Main Street's discomfort with Dems is not primarily about whiteness and racism, it's about Dems having a mindset that Main Street finds strange because it's not what it grew up with. And for that reason, Main Streeters ally with racists and white nationalists. While most on Main Street might sincerely reject any kind of overt racism, they still feel more comfortable with the traditionalist ethos of the GOP-- even if it shelters racists--than with the secularist Liberal ethos that Democrats have become identified with. On the votes of these decent, but conventionally conservative, denizens of Main Street does the future of American democracy depend. [See Note 1]

So the Democrats, if they are to save democracy, [still] have the extraordinarily difficult challenge of maintaining their secular progressive base while winning enough Main Streeters to overcome all the structural advantages the Republicans are now exploiting. The Democrats have programs that will benefit most Main Streeters, but Main Street still doesn't like the Dems and their programs because they "feel" socialist and un-American.

The Republicans' job is so much easier. They're like Lee defending Richmond. Their task is simply to stoke the flames of anxiety and resentment in Main Streeters about Liberals seeking to destroy everything they hold sacred. And once elected, Republicans feel no need govern competently, no need to even try to solve urgent problems. Just obstruct, obstruct, obstruct to defend the interests of the 1%, which is really all they truly care about.

The problem for us now is that if Republicans aren't defeated decisively and soon, we will remain impotent and paralyzed as a society to deal with the real threat that comes from Technocapitalism. It's become clear to me that the Republican elite have come to assume that democracy is no longer viable, and so they are jockeying for their place in the autocracy to come. They don't care about where Technocapitalism is taking us or what happens to the rest of us so long as they're in control and the 1% remain unmolested. The one-party rule that dominated in the South for most of its history provides the blueprint they want to nationalize. 

In Part II, I go more metahistorical, more big picture. I try to explain why I believe that this is more than a temporary political crisis, but a civilizational one, a crisis of the spirit. The country is reeling from what I call ontological dizziness. This dizziness is symptomatic of the kind of society that the disruptive, quasi-nihilistic, materialist ontology that consumer, Technocapitalist society has created. In doing so it has crowded out the originary mythos that grounded Western societies since at least the mid-first millennium BCE until the mid-19th century. This originary mythos fused Greek transcendental philosophy with Jewish revelation, and while the Logos/Mythos polar tension in this fusion has always been fraught, those leaning more toward the Logos pole still embraced its transcendental Mythopoetic foundations. That ended in the mid-19th century, and if one hadn't realized it already, Nietzsche spelled it out for him. 

I argue that while faith is still a possibility for individuals and small groups whose ontology still draws on the great originary mythos, it is completely at odds with the materialist, Positivist ontology that has become hegemonic in defining the contemporary American imaginary. There are some people of faith, like me, who can live with that and adapt, but I also understand why people of faith who don't have the time to think things through feel that things are profoundly out of joint. Because when they try to hold two opposing ontologies together--the spiritual onotology assumed by their faith and the materialist ontology that shapes almost every aspect of the world they live in--they're just not compatible. To use a fancy word like 'ontology' does not mean that the feeling of out-of-jointness isn't experienced by ordinary Americans as deeply disorienting. 

They believe that the materialist ontology is wrong, and I agree with them. And when people tell them that they are free to believe whatever they want to believe, it doesn't change the fact that whatever they believe as individuals or small communities is contradicted and dwarfed by the mammoth materialist energies of Technocapitalism; a vulgar, materialist, violence-celebrating entertainment media; and a snarky Liberal elite who see them as antediluvian morons. They have come to feel that they are strangers in their own land.

Ok--so maybe we could sort all that out in time, but there is no time. I'm arguing that this usurping materialist ontology has come to shape the presuppositions of the cosmopolitan Left and its institutions in such a way that it has enervated Liberal resistance to the greatest proximal threat humanity faces, which is posed by Technocapitalism.  

The real villain here is not the radical Right, but Technocapitalism and its materialist ontology, and the way it is impoverishing what it means to be human. Liberals have got to come to terms with how they've bought into it and how their continued acquiescence is a large part of why we're in such trouble. 

And so here we are in a society riven by a culture war in which both sides need what's best in the other--Logos from one, and Mythos from the other--but cancel one another out as techno-capitalism continues to drag us all toward disaster. What is best in each is buried under what is worst, so it's easy to understand why each side sees the other at its worst--that's mostly how they present themselves to one another.

But the curious thing is the way each is in its own way lives in a delusional bubble. The cultural right lives divorced from the reality as it is in fact shaped by the rationalist-materialist social imaginary that dominates in North Atlantic societies. That is the dominant, collectively experienced reality that all of us experience regardless of our personal beliefs. And so the dizziness that people who also have spiritual beliefs experience in such a world is understandable, and so too is their groping for and grasping onto all kinds of bizarre ideas that give them the illusion of stability or the hope of a return to it. 

On the other hand, educated Cultural Left elites are living in their own bubble. They are quite comfortable within the hegemonic rationalistic-materialistic imaginary that the cultural right finds so disorienting. And so those on the Cultural Left feel their imaginary is grounded in reality in a way that the Right does not. Their private ontology aligns with the public one. But it's not grounded in reality, either--or more precisely it's repressing the most important part of reality. It's all Logos and no Mythos. But it has no sense of what's missing, and it's precisely because the Logos-dominant worldview of the Cultural Left is so hegemonic, that those in it are blinded concerning how ontologically ungrounded and unbalanced their world is. They take for granted that it is the only "legitimate" possibility. It's not, but they feel no need for any other. At least the people on the Cultural Right know there's problem, even if their proposed solutions are horrifying. 

Techno-capitalism has created a society in which most Liberals feel mostly comfortable--it's a social construct that flows from their basic rationalist-materialist ontological presuppositions. But from my pov, this Liberal, Technocapitalist society is now or soon will be in a predicament rather like that of Wile E Coyote: Bamboozled by the trickster Roadrunner, it has run off a cliff, and there, hovering in midair for a few moments, it runs in place until gravity does its thing.

Well, Technocapitalism is the trickster spirit, and the radical Right is the law of gravity. The Right is basically saying that if you want to take society off the cliff, you're forcing us to do our thing--it's the law. We'll crash it. Since Liberals believe that laws are just stuff we make up, they have no capacity to comprehend what's happening. In their minds they should be able to go wherever they want and fulfill every desire unless a Democratic congress passes a law against it. Reality doesn't work that way. Sooner or later it pushes back. 

So I argue in Part II that if we're not off the cliff yet, we're on our way. And if we're not off yet, maybe there's a chance we can change course, or even if we're already off it, maybe--maybe--it's not too late to turn back to get a handhold on some root or branch that's extending out to us. 

If what I'm saying here is that the radical right is unwittingly performing meta-historical Hegelian negation is too far-fetched or too much of a stretch for the secular Liberal imagination to take seriously, let me suggest another analogy that comes from Freud: We're seeing a collective return of the repressed. [See Note 2] What's been repressed is the spiritually transforming vitality of the originary mythos, and as with all powerful repressed energies, the more persistent and rigid the resistance to them, the more violent and crude their return.

19th Century capitalism and its vulgar materialistic/positivistic ontological imaginary crudely replaced what at its best was profound and sublime manifestation of the Living Real that had its last cultural efflorescence during the Romantic period. So now, for lack of any vital presence of the profound and sublime in our collective life, it makes sense that something even cruder must come to displace what is already so crude. The religious-cultural Right represents the return of repressed Mythos, but in its crudest and most delusional form. If there is a more robust explanation for the emergence Donald Trump and his embrace by the Religious Right in this country, I've not heard it.

And it's not over because the hegemonic Cultural Left still hasn't learned the lesson. Nevertheless, I believe the restoration of a transcendental Mythos dimension that has broad cultural legitimacy and which restores access to the profound and sublime is still a possibility for us. The future of the human depends on it because the machines don't do profound and sublime, not at least in the way I understand what both those words mean. 

For any society to truly thrive, it must provide a trellis on which its citizens might grow to realize their best human possibilities. That trellis comprises both vertical and horizontal dimensions, i.e. both Mythos and Logos, and both must be maintained from generation to generation. In the mid-19th century the neglect with which the vertical dimension had been treated by previous generations led to its collapse. And so souls born into such a society with the collapsed vertical only know the horizontal, and they sprawl aimlessly along the ground.

In such a collapsed, flattened society, there is nothing readily available for those who would climb upward, and the whole society suffers from the deprivation of something deeply vital and inspiring. It loses the capacity to be vitalized or inspired by the ancestors who had climbed upward because what they have to report from that higher altitude no longer makes any sense.  

Nevertheless, for any healthy society to thrive, there must be both a Logos and Mythos dimension, and a constant, vigilant effort in the cultural sphere to integrate Mythos with Logos, and Logos with Mythos as knowledge on both dimensions expands. A society that has one without the other might survive for a while, but the people in it suffer, and sooner or later the repressed polarity will return guns ablazin'. And when it gets to that point, there's little chance of reconciliation.

I fear that is where we are--at a point beyond reconciliation. But maybe not. Maybe it's not too late to avert disaster. I remain hopeful, but not optimistic. 

P.S. In 2010, I wrote a long piece on the TV Series Lost a few weeks before its finale. I used it to riff about its allusions to Dante and to what a postmodern imagination--i.e., a post secular, post-Positivist imaginary--that integrates Mythos and Logos might look like. Near the end I say:

Whatever we think we know at this moment is both true and untrue. We have experiences which are true, but so what? Our interpretation of what they mean is mostly guesswork and belief. There are dimensions upon dimensions of facts, and modern rationalism has validated access only to one dimension, the northern hemisphere dimension [maya], so to say, and its superficiality and materialism is profoundly impoverishing to the imagination and to the life of the soul. Jack's story is the story for the culture as a whole. He's the modern, northern hemisphere rationalist, who has been gradually converted to become a southern hemisphere [awakened] kind of guy. He is the archetype of modern consciousness converted to the postmodern [post-secular] consciousness, and I think the smart money is on his being chosen as Jacob's replacement. If the angelic world is going to hand off responsibility for the future of the earth to someone, he has to be both a man of science and a man of faith.

What does it mean to have postmodern [post-secular] consciousness? We are in a state of mind as fallen beings, especially as fallen moderns, where we are having experiences but almost always missing their meanings, because we haven't the imaginative frame or habits of mind to recognize [what's significant in] them. Whatever we think we understand is engulfed by an infinite sea of all that we don't--and so it always was and will always be. Modern rationalists are the only fools who ever thought otherwise. That's why the sacred texts and great works of art are more true than science. They point us to dimensions of the real that transcend our current impoverished, commonplace understanding of it. Postmodern [post-secular] consciousness creates the possibility of being open to a broader spectrum of the real again. That openness is the transformation we see in Jack. 

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Note 1: This essay originally appeared on November 22, 2021, under the the title, "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part III". I then feared that Dems would do worse than they actually did in the midterms earlier this month. It's pretty clear that enough Independents on Main St. were discerning enough not to do what history would incline them to do, which is vote against a sitting president with low approval ratings in the midterm after his taking the White House. But the country is still split, Trump has announced his candidacy and is still the dominant force in the GOP, and Kevin McCarthy, or someone Trumpier, is likely to be the new Speaker of the House. So everything I wrote then still stands. We're still very much not out of the woods. 

Note 2: I'm appropriating the phrase 'return of the repressed' in a way that Freud would not approve, but Jung probably would. He was trained in Freud's very rationalist-materialist horizontal milieu that set very strict taboos regarding the validity of experiences in the mythos dimension. And yet despite his resistance, repressed mythos found a way to break through in Jung. It produced his mythos-oriented depth psychology, which forced his break with Freud, and it produced the mythic symbology of The Red Book, which was derived from his experience of recurrent hypnagogic states. For someone to dismiss those experiences as psychotic is simply to betray the prejudices of someone who operates constrained within a rationalist-materialist ontology.

I should point out that Jungian mythos is set in what I would describe as a more shamanic, i.e., pre-Axial, neighborhood within the Mythos dimension than the post-Axial, transcendental neighborhood to which most of my essays point. Nevertheless, knowledge that derives from experiences in both neighborhoods (and others) are valid and need to be legitimated in the post-secular future that restores the Wisdom/Mythos dimension. The problem for us now is that we don't have a sapiential community to help individuals who have experiences like these to interpret them in such a way that they understand their significance and can learn from them in fruitful ways. To what degree Jung--and other guys like Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade--had the spiritual maturity and wisdom to interpret such experiences correctly is open to debate, to say the least. But at least they took such experiences on the vertical axis seriously. 

See also "A Geneaology of Our Current Insanity, Part 1".

Liberalism + Whatever

There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful societies and would-be society builders is liberalism-plus: liberalism plus nationalism (as in 19th-century Europe or Ukraine today), liberalism plus intense ethnic homogeneity (the Scandinavian model, now showing signs of strain), liberalism plus mainline Protestantism (the old American tradition), liberalism plus therapeutic spirituality (the mode of American culture since the 1970s), liberalism plus social justice progressivism (the mode of today’s cultural left), etc., etc. Something must be added, some ghost needs to inhabit the machine, or else society begins to resemble the portraits painted by liberalism’s enemies — a realm of atomized, unhappy consumers, creatures of self-interest whose time horizons for those interests are always a month rather than a decade, Lockean individuals moving in a miserable herd.

--Ross Douthat

There are many Liberalisms from the hard, classic Libertarianism of the Koch Brothers and the Cato Institute to the soft Liberal Niceness of bleeding-heart Dems, but Liberalism, whether left- or right-leaning, is the basic cultural operating system that runs American society, and as such it is essentially the ideological justification for the material conditions that Capitalism has created. And whatever the material benefits produced by Capitalism, this ideology in turn justifies its sociopathies in all its iterations from Industrial Capitalism to Consumer Capitalism to what I've been calling Technocapitalism, the thing that is warping our minds and flattening our souls as our humanity becomes more deeply disembodied and simulacral.

So it's not surprising that Liberalism is under attack from both the Left and the Right, but mostly from the Right--whether it's the Claremonsters like Michael Anton and John Eastman, the Federalists like John Daniel Davidson, or the Integralists like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule, all of whom in their different ways are proposing illiberalism as an antidote. The post-structuralist, Identitarian cultural Left is not against Liberalism so much as it's become its reductio ad absurdum. Is there any possibility for a healthy Progressivism in a post-liberal world? I think so. More on that below. 

So both Republicans and Democrats are Liberals, and both parties assume its Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, no matter what the individual religious or spiritual beliefs of its members. Michael Novak's theo/neocon nonsense notwithstanding, the phrase Christian Capitalism is an oxymoron. American Democrats' biggest blind spot is its assumption that Capitalist political economies are the best and really the only healthy possibility. At the same time, neither party denies that Capitalist political economies are in their essence sharklike--predatory, impersonal, cruel, vicious, untameable. The difference between them lies in that the Democrats think the shark is tameable and the Republicans don't.

So Republicans have accommodated themselves to its fundamental cruelty. They justify a politics of cruelty by asserting that it's the natural order, and it's better to be predators than prey--and if you're prey, it's your own damn fault. Pack a gun, grab what you can, and defend what's yours once you get it. The cowboy patriarch John Dutton is exemplary in this respect. And so is someone like Trump, although he and his family resemble more the Roy family in Succession. [See Note 1] They are all barbarian warlords who understand how the "real" world works, and that the law and religion are for slaves and prey, not for the master predators they fancy themselves. 

Republicans, the "Conservative" Liberals, are probably right that they're in this sense more realistic than Democrats about how capitalism and the society it has created really works. They see Liberal Democrats as feckless in their thinking that Capitalism has a benign face, and just plain silly insofar as Dems try to be Bruce, the fish-friendly shark in Finding Nemo. You know, "Fish are friends, not food." Cute idea, but unless someone like St. Francis is his trainer, a ridiculous one. The problem with this kind of "liberal" Liberal is that they are too comfortable with Capitalism and too complacent about its fundamental nihilism and so too easily find ways to to live with it because for the most part they benefit from its predations.

So implied in the Douthat epigraph above is that that Liberalism is a cultural operating system that anybody who feels the emptiness of its nihilism finds ways to hyphenate it with what he calls "liberalism plus"--Liberalism plus nationalism, Liberalism plus mainline Protestantism, etc. The "plus" is what gives Liberalism the meaning that it can't supply on its own. But in the end all these "pluses" are simply remoras clinging to the shark's underbelly. And whatever, for instance, might have been a genuine spiritual energy in mainstream Protestantism for a while had at best a constraining effect on the monster, but Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist forms, was always in an uneasy tension with the beast its theology cleared the way for. Eventually the monster ate its maker, and now the shark roams free. We call the shark's unconstrained freedom since the Reagan era Neoliberalism.

Democrats feel guilty about how they benefit from Capitalism in a way the Republicans do not, and Republicans, as a way to deal with their own repressed guilt, project their contempt for Democrats as weakness, gutlessness, or a fundamental lack of manliness. They are thought of by Red America as overly educated hollow men like Jamie Dutton. And as for the underclass, life is hard, they assert, and we do the weak no good to make it easier for them. Better to brand them like a cow or make them shovel out the stables, then see if they have what it takes to become a real man. And so we get these absurd, cringey manliness performances from people who have no center, empty suits  like Don Jr., Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio. And yet they are embraced by Red America despite the utter inauthenticity of their schtick. They're phonies, but they're our phonies, declares Red America.

But Liberal elites on the cultural Left, rather than to find relief from their guilt by focussing their energies by working to remedy the class and wealth disparities from which they derive their privilege, find relief in a performative priggishness. Is there real compassion and thirst for Justice that motivates those in the woke social justice warrior project on the Secular Left? For some, of course, yes, and I don't question their sincerity. But the ethos that frames this project is more the heir of Foucault and Deleuze than Gandhi and King. Does this cultural Left mindset allow for the possibility of Justice as a transcendental ideal? Clearly not. Whether these folks have read Foucault and Deleuze or not, the mental framework that shapes the SJW project derives from a postmodern commitment to historicism that makes any talk of transcendentals incomprehensible.

So my criticism of the post-Marxist Left, i.e., the Left that has given up on class war for culture war, is that its identitarian politics leads to a form of groundless metaphysical lostness that gives meaning and purpose to its warriors only so long as one is engaged in the liberating project to abolish taboos. But once you run out of taboos, then what? This project is only good at saying No but has nothing inspiring to which it can say Yes. 

Justice as transcendental ideal also often requires saying No to custom and taboo, but the Socratic project [See Note 2] required a saying No to clear the way for something deeper and richer to emerge to which one could say Yes. Cultural Left elites today are heirs of the Sophists, not Socrates. The distinction was significant then, and it is now. There are a lot of young idealists on the Cultural Left who sincerely believe they are warriors for Justice, but in fact, they are warriors for Nothing, i.e., warriors in the service of a negative project that clears a space for nothing except appetite.

Is there an alternative? Yes, the one pointed to by Socrates--and all the prophets and philosophers of the Axial Turn. I argue in a preliminary way in my genealogy series for the restoration of a transcendental dimension to the broader cultural imaginary. While the illiberal traditionalists horrify me, I understand where they're coming from. I think their diagnosis of the fundamental emptiness or flatness of Liberalism is mostly correct. Nevertheless, while After the Future's project has been to accept parts of the conservative critique of Liberalism, it seeks a solution that aligns with a Left politics, i.e., a progressive solution that embraces ontonormativity as a foundational experience/concept. [See Note 3]

The project on the illiberal, reactionary Right derives from an assertion of ontonormativity divorced from an intuition of it as participating in the Living Real. They focus on the empty form, not the life that gave the form its shape. And so without the life, the empty form too often becomes filled by dark, chthonic impulses that serve ends that are quite the opposite of what ontonormativity would inspire. They justify the illiberalism of their project because they believe American society needs an intervention, and that because they know better, they must rescue society from its nihilism and restore Justice and Cosmic Order to a society that has lost any sense of either. But, in fact, they don't know any better.

And yet they persuade themselves that if people don't understand it now, they'll nevertheless benefit from their tough-love intervention. Eventually those who resist will come to appreciate the benefits of having been "educated" by the new regime. So they use this appropriation of transcendental idealism to justify their illiberalism, and are either ignorant of or don't care that in the past similar justifications have legitimated the most horrifying violence. It derives its energies not from the Living Real, but from an old, anal, control-freaky impulse that leads to the auto da fe and pogrom. 

I agree that the only real solution to the nihilistic crisis that is at the heart of contemporary Liberalism is a religious one, but I have argued here for years that that the fundamental choice that lies before us as a society is not between religion and secularism but between good religion and bad. Politics as religion is always bad religion because politics--and economic striving, as well--when they become the primary source of meaning in people's lives, become parodies of religion, and as such a form of idolatry. One's participation in politics and the economy should be shaped by one's religious commitments, but they should never be substitutes for them. 

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I do not consider myself a Liberal, but I do think of myself as a Progressive in the late-19th-, early-20th-Century sense, more with the Social Gospel/W. J. Bryan strain than with the Deweyan/statist, managerial liberal strain. I'm a communitarian/subsidiarist who nevertheless recognizes that the technocratic state is a necessity. I have no desire to destroy it but see the task as to vigilantly hold it accountable and to use its power as a tool to solve problems only it is capable to solve in the service of a democratically determined common good. Without a broadly shared cultural commitment to an inspiring ideal of the common good, no productive, healthy Progressive Left project can get traction. Material interests alone cannot provide a sufficient basis for a vigorous Progressivism that might actually enact Justice.

As suggested above, I reject as a dead end the poststructuralist historicism that plays such a large role in shaping the post-Marxist politics of the contemporary Left. An effective Left politics must derive inspiration from transcendentals like Justice, Truth, Goodness, Beauty that are the source of all ontonormativity. These are not intellectual abstractions but energizing sources of felt meaning. A truly vigorous Left politics becomes a possibility only when the broader culture becomes capable of imagining a possible future in which these provide a solidarity-creating energy for its accomplishment. And I'd argue that a true Left solidarity cannot come into being so long as Rationalist Materialism provides the dominant metaphysical imaginary for American society. 

So those on the secular Left who talk about the need for solidarity are quite right--nothing changes without it. But that kind of healthy, constructive, Left solidarity is playing no significant role on the American political landscape right now. We got a whiff of it in Bernie's campaigns, but the last time we really saw it was in the Civil Rights movement before the assassination of King. King, for all his flaws, was someone through whom Justice as a transcendental ideal shone. All Americans of good will felt it, were moved by it, and changed by it. But King was killed and reaction set in, and not long after with the ascension of Reagan, Neoliberalism and its inherent nihilism becomes the elite consensus for both the Republican and Democrat establishments. 

So after Reagan, a "Liberalism" that dominates both GOP and Dem elites becomes too entrenched an ideology to have any truck with Justice and a solidarity movement to instantiate it. Let the Invisible Hand do its thing. Goodbye labor unions, good by multi-racial solidarity, goodbye any hope on the Left for real Justice, goodbye any sense that there's such a thing as 'society', much less a common good. The hardcore Neoliberals consolidate their gains as the isolating, enervating, anti-common good, individualistic world they always wanted becomes realized by the proliferation of its solipsizing Technocapitalist produce. The Left retreats to fight cultural issues in despair of fighting structural power and economic issues. Nothing pleases Neoliberal elites more--their opponents are divided in their squabbling over abortion and guns, and thus easily subdued. 

The historicist Secular Left has no robust answer for this because it has no real way of standing outside of it. If we've learned nothing else in the last few decades, some things other than material interests are important for the creation of solidarity. The Right has an easier job of creating it because its goals are served by drawing upon the primitive resentments and fears that have always been the primary animator of the mob. The mob is a form of counterfeit solidarity, and the best on the Left know that riding the tiger produces nothing good. Some other energies must be drawn upon to create a sense of solidarity, but they're not readily available except in small groups here and there. 

So how is my critique of Liberalism different from the one illiberalism makes? I do not think that Liberalism has created a world that is worthy of our hatred. It has, though, created a world that is inadequate for true human flourishing. It is incomplete, not evil. For all its talk of freedom, Liberalism and its rationalist materialist imaginary imposes constraints on the spirit and closes off more possibilities than it opens up. The cure is not to destroy Liberalism but rather to subordinate what's good in it to something else more deeply humanizing. Science and critical thinking, pluralism and free speech, freedom of religion, democracy, and a conception of fundamental natural rights are good gifts Liberalism bequeaths to us. They must be retained and defended while realizing that they must inevitably be subsumed into a higher cultural synthesis in which the Wisdom dimension is restored. 

All I am asking of any Liberal reading this is to suspend disbelief, to treat what I'm saying as a thought experiment. I am asking you to try to step back from the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary that shapes all our ways of thinking whether we have religious commitments or not. We can surely say about Liberalism that it worked for a while, that it gave us a spectacular means to create material bounty. But it exacted significant costs, and we are no longer in a position to pay them. The cost was a loss of wisdom in our public life and of our capacity even to care that we lost it.

Insofar as people care about wisdom in their private life, it has at best indirect public impacts. But the fact is that wisdom never has a seat at the table in our political economy. Utility and expediency are the only criteria, and both are useless in solving the deeper problem, which is one of metaphysical imagination. The cost therefore is not just that we lack wisdom in planning for the future, but that without it we are we are spinning meaninglessly at a time when we need our wits about us and firm ground upon which to plant our feet if we are to face what's coming without being washed away.

The inadequacy of Liberalism is apparent to everyone but the 20% or so of educated elites who have benefited most from it and who are the primary constituency that the Democratic Party now serves. They cannot understand how the regime that has benefited them so much could be hated so intensely by those whom Sam Francis called years ago Middle American Radicals, the Jacksonians the GOP recruited during the Reagan era but mostly neglected until the Tea Party and Trump. The gifts of Liberalism are not valued by the Middle American Radicals or the Integralists and others on the Right because they see Liberalism as the shark that has chewed up their world and everything they hold sacred. They're not wrong. And elite Liberals do not endear themselves to these folks when they tell them to get over it and move on. 

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So if you've stuck with me this far, I'm likely to lose you in what follows. I have no expectation that what I'm trying to do here would be well received either by those who are deeply captured by a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary or by one that is rigidly dogmatic or fundamentalistic in his religious beliefs. I speak to those who care about the human prospect and share with me the sense of urgency about what is happening to us as a civilization. And I speak to those who are open to think through things in a way that doesn't fit neatly into any established categories, but nevertheless sees their thinking as part of a long tradition that dates back to the Axial revolution. There's lots of 'new' thinking out there about our collective life together, but the only thinking that I can take seriously has to be grounded in some understanding of the transcendent. Transcendence should not be surrendered to the Right. 

I'm arguing for something that is, to say the least, not obvious--especially to people who lean Left, who are my primary audience. I see myself as a dog that's barking up a tree. I smell something up there and I think I know what it is, but it's hidden among the branches and leaves, so I'm not sure quite what it looks like. But there's something there, and we need to see it and understand it better.

I am among those who believe that any new political project lies downstream from the emergence of a new cultural project. This new cultural project requires bringing what's up in that tree to ground. What that means for us going forward is outlined in the first five or six parts of my Geneaology Series, and if what I'm writing here makes any sense to you, I encourage you to at least read Part 1 and Part 2.

Here's an excerpt from Part 2 "Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West" to suggest what I'm barking about--

A metaphysical imaginary can be judged as effective to the degree that it works in providing a meaning framework for a society on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Let's call the horizontal dimension Logos and the vertical dimension Mythos. Mythos operates on the dimension of depth, with the deep meaning of things; Logos works on the horizontal dimension, on the everyday surfaces of things. Science and what might be described as everyday common sense operate on the Logos axis. Religion, poetry, music, and other art forms work on the vertical axis, and if they play a vital cultural role, they connect a society to the Living Real. Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation.  

In Part 1, I talked about how we are facing the imminent death or disappearance of culture. By that I meant that it's what inevitably happens to any society that has lost the vertical dimension that connects it to the Living Real. No Living Real, no culture. What we have now within the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is not "culture" as it has been experienced by humanity throughout most of its history, but a simulacra of culture, a virtual culture, a parody of culture. 

A full, effective metaphysical imaginary integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos. Our contemporary civilizational crisis lies in that Mythos no longer plays a vital cultural role. There are still artists and deeply spiritual people, but they do not play a vital role in shaping the culture's metaphysical imaginary. They are subsumed into the materialist commodifying ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism. [Art and Religion become optional, a matter of preference, a consumer choice, entertainments. Neither offers robust counterbalance to the pervasive Rationalist Materialism.]

...

There is real knowledge found on both horizontal and vertical dimensions that derives from real experiences, but the criteria for the legitimacy of knowledge on either dimension is very different. The criteria for knowledge on the horizontal dimension is empirical, objective factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. Factuality is relatively easy to establish, but wisdom is rare, and some people have more of it than others. It needs to be sustained by a tradition. Because it's unverifiable except to those who have some measure of wisdom, its legitimacy became questionable to all those who had only a little measure of it. And so inevitably it led to the current crisis we are undergoing that is directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension playing a role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West. This is a crisis that has been a long time coming, most acutely since the middle of the 19th Century. But we're living now with the consequences. We have become a society that lacks any capacity for making judgments that are wise. We make decisions only on the basis of expediency and utility, i.e., by criteria that exist only on the horizontal or Logos dimension.

...

Mythos, if understood as operating on the vertical dimension, is compatible with science, which operates on the horizontal. Science gets out over its skis when it tries to be Mythos. Religion gets out over its when it tries to be Logos. Nevertheless, a robust future metaphysical imaginary must find a way to satisfactorily integrate the knowledge that comes from both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, but in such a way that the legitimacy of the knowledge gained on either dimension is respected by the other on its own terms. A healthy, integrated human being as well as a healthy, integrated society "knows" in both ways. Fideism and Scientism must be rejected as equally inadequate in their respective reductionisms. [See Note 4 for criteria to evaluate effectiveness of a society's metaphysical imaginary.]

So why is it no longer possible for us to sustain a culture-wide metaphysical imaginary that integrates both Logos and Mythos? In Part 1, I argued that because we are acculturated into a Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, it is extraordinarily difficult even for genuinely religious people, people whose individual lives have a vital vertical dimension, to feel that the mythos that grounds their spiritual beliefs has anything to do with the everyday world in which they live. 

Religious people respond in four basic ways to this split between what their religion tells them is true and the reality of their everyday world:

1. They separate their lives into public and private spheres. In private life they go to church and practice their religion with friends and family, but in public their lives are ruled by the law of the shark, and they, too, become sharks if they have any ambition.
2. There are, of course, lots of religious or spiritual people who live decent lives in this public sphere, but because they are not driven by ambition, they only rarely rise to leadership positions. They choose careers as artisans or in service professions. But even so, unless they own their own businesses, they must work in organizations--schools, hospitals, government bureaucracies--whose ethos is shaped by rationalist-materialist assumptions and that are often run by ambitious sharks. 
3. They retreat into quietism--monasticism, Anabaptist separatism, Dreher's Benedict Option, off-the-grid cults, etc.  It's possible to live an integrated life in such bubble worlds, but living in them requires the abdication of responsibility for what happens in the rest of the world.
4. They seek power in the political sphere to order the society into a theocracy in which they will no longer feel alienated even if almost everyone else will. This was Calvin's project in Geneva, and is now the Catholic Integralist and Evangelical Dominionist project. It leads to illiberalism and oppression. 

This is pretty much reality in North Atlantic societies as most people experience it, and few are really, truly happily thriving in it. The restoration of the vertical axis to the metaphysical imaginary cannot be forced in the way the fourth group wants. As soon as it's forced, it loses any claims to wisdom or spiritual authority. Nevertheless, the restoration of a wisdom dimension is desirable, and it's more likely to happen if people are prepared for it, look for it, hope for it--and live it in their own lives as best they are able. My Genealogy Series is an attempt to trace how the wisdom dimension functioned in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West until it didn't, and to make the case for its retrieval in a way that makes sense in a globally pluralistic world.

I do not see "wisdom" as being as exclusively derived from any one religious or philosophical tradition. I see religious and philosophical traditions deriving their legitimacy by their effectiveness in providing the broader culture access to the Living Real. No religious or philosophical tradition is doing that for North Atlantic societies in this moment, and, I'm arguing, the lack of such a sapiential tradition with broad cultural legitimacy is at the heart of the crisis we are living through. A lot depends on whether we will be able to find a healthy way to resolve this crisis. 

The task as I see it is not to force anything on anybody but rather to ring an alarm that we are in a profound meaning crisis, and that we need to find some level of consensus on the vertical dimension. Any solution to this problem must be bottom-up rather than top-down. No sane person wants some Mandarin class to arise to impose its "knowing better" on everyone else. Or another way of saying this is that we should expect no solutions from our current Mandarins in the universities, media and other cultural institutions, including the church's managerial class. If something 'real' arises, they will, after some initial resistance, adapt. 

How might this happen? I really don't know the specifics but suspect it will emerge in a way that is both continuous with Liberalism and discontinuous with it. How did Buddhism happen? How did Taoism happen? How did Christianity happen? How did is Islam happen? The energies of the  Living Real have a way of breaking through from time to time in a way that is recognized by the broader culture, and it does it in a way that is both continuous and discontinuous. Christianity, for instance, is both continuous with and discontinuous with Judaism. I have every expectation that something like these historical breakthroughs will happen again. How and when I have no idea, but we should hope for it, expect it.

If it happens it won't be about believing a new doctrine so much as it will be about restoring a felt connection to the Living Real. No felt connection, no breakthrough. And when such a breakthrough occurs, it's something that wise Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, other religionists, and all people of good will will recognize as cognate with their own wisdom traditions. Doctrine--right teaching--follows from the experience of connection.

The Living Real is accessible by all. Those of us who are Christians have an account regarding how such access became possible, but accepting that account is no prerequisite for access to it. What matters is that one hears the song and is inspired to sing it. It doesn't matter what language you sing it in if we all are hearing the same melody, the melody of Justice. Hearing this melody is the prerequisite for the solidarity that is necessary for any real progress.

So this is not an intellectual enterprise. It's not something you can think yourself to--and it's certainly not something a minority can force on a majority in the political sphere. It's about hearing the song. Lots of people hear it even now, but maybe only faintly because of all the noise that drowns it out, and because so few others who do hear it are singing it with confidence and gusto.

***

Question: But what to do if we don't hear it, or until we hear it?

Answer: The best we can. We respond to what's given to us and do what's called for. We work for Justice as best we can know and feel it. And sometimes that means just resisting as best we can the siren songs that lure us and our fellow citizens toward shipwreck.

In the short run, perhaps all many of us can do is say, No, that's not the song. I don't know what it is, but that's not it. That's the Socratic daemon working in us. Better to wait and trust that something true and new will break through. So while the temptation is for many compelling, the worst thing anyone can do is surrender to the siren song for want of anything better.

We are in that respect like Odysseus on the trackless sea or the ancient Israelites wandering in the wilderness. We must keep moving even if we don't know when we'll eventually arrive. And that means we must resist Circe's enchantment or the longing to return to the fleshpots of Egypt. These are mythopoetic archetypes that speak to us in this moment. I realize that this might sound like a rationale for complacency, but it isn't. It requires fortitude and hope beyond hope. It is not just about waiting passively because there will come a moment when we must act decisively, but there has to be a chance for success, even if a small one. Wisdom is knowing when the chance is presented. Only a fool expects his roses to bloom in January, but we must be alert, vigilant, and prepared for the first signs of Spring.

In a post last month I wrote that I was looking for an entertainment alternative to the nihilism that passes for prestige TV,  I read for the first time Tolkien's Silmarillion, re-read the LOTR trilogy, and re-watched the Jackson films. I was surprised by how they engaged and moved me. And I've been wondering since why it works in a way differently from something like Game of Thrones, which after a while I found unwatchable. I think the key is that for all GOT's fantastical elements, there is no Mythos or vertical dimension in it. There's not a whiff of transcendence in it. It's just the modern secular world transposed into one where dragons and zombies and magic are real, but where true goodness and true wisdom are not. It's Succession in medieval garb. Some find such entertainments interesting and enjoyable. Some find Tarantino's films entertaining for the same reason. I find them suffocating.

In Tolkien's legendarium, the whole point is to imagine a world where the vertical Mythos or Wisdom dimension is integrated with the Logos dimension. It's an adventure fantasy and an entertainment on one level, but it strives and largely succeeds to create a metaphysical imaginary with a Mythos dimension that provides an analogue or metaphor for what we all long for but can't bring ourselves to believe in because of our Rationalist-Materialist cultural programming. 

So let me finish this long piece on a Tolkienian note. A few paragraphs above I referenced the mythopoesis of Homer and Exodus as a source of needed wisdom in this moment. Let me now reference Tolkien and his central character, Aragorn. "Not all those who wander are lost", he says. He knows this from his experience wandering anonymously throughout all Middle Earth for decades until finally his decisive moment arrives.

He goes by many names, but his real name, the name his mother and wife called him by, was Estel, which means hope beyond hope. Tolkien's entire legendarium is a meditation on fate and freedom, patience and fortitude, and of the centrality of hope when there seems to be no "Logos" for it. What is it in us that makes us capable of such a thing? Our capacity for living on the vertical, or mythos dimension, the dimension of depth and wisdom.

So to sum up, Liberalism Plus, i.e., the various Whatevers subordinated to "Liberalism" that Douthat talks about, can no longer work, but going forward the gifts of Liberalism must to be retained in a way that is subordinated to a living, developing, dynamic Wisdom Tradition. We don't have that now, but until we do, the bad guys and their seductive song of destruction must be resisted lest they steer us all to shipwreck . 

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Note 1: Some of the references in this essay assume you have some familiarity with  Yellowstone, the most popular (and important?) TV show in America right now  but more in Red than in Blue America. (11/10/22: See "How Taylor Sheridan Created America's Most Popular TV Show" in The Atlantic.) I think every Liberal in Blue America should watch it to better understand a moral world that is largely incomprehensible unless you know people in Red America. I don't know that it qualifies as 'prestige' TV (too many contrived plot-driven implausibilities), but it's got some good lines here and there and some compelling characters. For instance Angela Blue Thunder, a ruthless warrior princess with a fancy law degree, tells Chairman Rainwater in the Season 3 finale--

“They make their rules to be broken. The United States has broken every rule it has ever made. From its first treaty with France to every treaty with us, to their last treaty with Iran. They only hold others to their rules. They make war when they want, where they want, they take what they want, and then they make rules to keep you from taking it back. They make rules for the slave and they make rules for the masters.”

Not the kind of sentiment you expect to hear expressed streaming on Peacock. But that's how the Duttons run their ranch and it's how the U.S.--whether the Blues or Reds are in office--runs the world. And it belies the Liberal fetishization of 'rule of law', and it's why so much piety about rule of law from Liberals sounds so empty these days in Red America. What does it have to do with the way the world really works? It's just a tool that the powerful use to their own advantage to sustain their hold on power and to punish their enemies. It's used to keep the lower orders in line, but rarely if ever against elites in the power structure.

Are they wrong? Yes and no. The rule of law has always been at best aspirational in most of U.S. history. And at best it's been like a fragile truce competing parties agree to abide by until it's no longer in their interests to do so. And it's a truce that the MAGA world no longer feels works in its interests. So for them it's all-out war now.

In a society with a living sapiential tradition, the "law" would be grounded in what I've been calling ontonormative justice, as for instance the Tao or the Torah is understood to be grounded in the law of heaven. We don't have a sapiential tradition, so Law is whatever we make up as we go along, and when it goes against people's sense of what's "right", it's disregarded as illegitimate. This sense of what's right largely derives from custom and acculturation, but in a healthy society custom and tradition would in turn be grounded in a vital, evolving connection to the Living Real. We're not a healthy society, and so appeals to Tao/natural law don't make much sense now, but that needn't always be the case.

In the meanwhile the distance between what people feel is right based on custom and what is enacted law results in a contempt for the law and the kind of vigilantism that is rampant in Yellowstone or that we saw on J6. The law when it's just just based on one faction's opinion is substanceless and evanescent for opposing factions, a temporary inconvenience that can and will be reversed when they take power. Because we live in a society that has no sapiential tradition, the rule of law has no deeply felt legitimacy because no one sees the lawmakers as people worthy of respect--with a few exceptions, they are just careerist hacks with no claim even to even a minimum of rudimentary wisdom. 

Succession and Yellowstone are very similar in their being about two "mob bosses" and their families, but despite their similarities the Succession world is profoundly repugnant to those in the Yellowstone world. What's different about these two worlds is more significant than what's similar, and to understand why is to understand a lot about the clash between Red and Blue America. It's really about the clash between Jacksonians and Hamiltonians. The show doesn't justify all the violence; it just accepts it as reality, and if violence is just the way it is, who would you rather win--the Duttons or the Roys?

The difference lies in that none of the principal characters as written in Succession has a soul and so redemption isn't a possibility any of them. Winning is the best it gets for anybody, so it's the only thing that matters. But you don't care who wins, or at least I don't. Goodness doesn't exist, so there is no possibility for a good choice--there are only the clever, ruthless, winning choices—or stupid, cringey, losing choices.

The principal characters in Yellowstone are really bad people, but goodness is a possibility in the Yellowstone world in a way it's not in the Succession world. The souls in Yellowstone are on the road to damnation and loathsome when you first meet them--particularly John, Beth, Rip, and Jamie. But at least they have souls, and you find yourself, despite the horrible things they've done, hoping for their redemption.  

Most people who live in Blue America are not typified by the people who inhabit Succession, but that's how Red America thinks about Blue elites. They can't trust them because they don't believe in anything except a project to justify moral license and appetite. People in Red America act in egregiously licentious, appetitive ways, but they know it's wrong. And yes, our leaders in Red America might be ruthlessly violent, but they justify it in the service of preserving something sacred that they believe in. What does Blue America believe that goes beyond some callow, meritocratic, careerist idea of upward mobility? That's why Jamie Dutton is such a pariah in the Yellowstone world. He'd be a perfect fit in the Roy family. He's a careerist who only cares about what's good for him. And Blue America asks, "What's wrong with that?" 

Red America knows the difference between good and evil, and the protagonists in Yellowstone believe they are in a continuous struggle against evil and its agents, but in order to prevail against evil, they must be meaner than evil. They also know the difference between having a soul and not having one, and Red Americans see the ethos of Blue America as so soulless that those who live in it have become incapable of making such distinctions.

They are wrong to think so. I live in Blue America and almost everyone I know has a decency and lives by a deeply felt, if little understood, moral code. But Blue Americans--especially the most powerful, affluent, and educated among them--should perhaps think a little about what's valid in Red America's perception of it. What do Blue elites really believe in? When push comes to shove, are their deepest commitments really all that different from the commitments of the Roy family?

I doubt that the Yellowstone writer Taylor Sheridan is going to go there, but it's not impossible in in a sequel show called 2043 that Tate --the child of both White America and Native America and heir to the Yellowstone Ranch--returns the land to the Tribe and succeeds Rainwater (or whoever) as chief/chairman. Unlikely, but not inconceivable in the more complex moral world Yellowstone explores. Justice is a possibility in that world even if it rarely shines in it.

Note 2: In Genealogy Part 3 "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" I write--

Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is. 

A wise teacher must first discover for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts. 

Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.

See also Geneaolgy Part 8 "Plato--Habitus as Heuristic"

Note 3: "Ontonormativity" is a word I first came across in John Vervaeke's YouTube series entitled Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I like his description of it as how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities. Such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it. 

I spend a lot of time talking about Vervaeke in Parts 4A,4B, 5, and 6 of my Genealogy Series. In Part 6 I make the case why I find Vervaeke's insistence on understanding ontonormativity within a naturalistic framework inadequate. So I am appropriating the term in way that is congenial to my Transcendentalism that is different from Vevaeke's use of the term. My idea of ontonormativity bears some relationship to the Eastern idea of the Tao or the Western idea of Natural Law, but not in a way that is primarily intellectualized or systematized. By that I mean that the ontonormative is discerned by the supple or wise heart. It's grounded in a kind of inspired or awakened experience that breaks through our acculturation from a transcendent source. 

Note 4: In Genealogy Part 5--scroll down to the second half of the essay--I lay out and develop in a preliminary way four criteria--coherency, scope, richness, and adaptability--for evaluating the effectiveness of a society's metaphysical imaginary:

(1) how coherent its integration of its knowledge on both vertical and horizontal  dimensions,

(2) how broad the scope of its knowledge on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions,

(3) how both the scope and coherence of its knowledge adds a spiritual and emotional richness, meaning, and purpose to human experience, and

(4) how adaptable the imaginary is to changes in human experience of reality [and growth of knowledge] on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions.

...A rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary has broad horizontal scope, coherence, and adaptability, but lacks vertical scope and richness. Religious subcultures like the Amish or Hasids have coherent, vertically rich metaphysical imaginaries that lack horizontal scope. What a vital, healthy civilization needs is a metaphysical imaginary that has both vertical and horizontal scope, coherence that integrates knowledge on both dimensions, and richness that comes from a sense of meaning and purpose that derives from our expanding on both dimensions, and the ability to adapt as that expansion produces knowledge not yet recognized.

Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability

Because the politics of inevitability assures you that whatever the good things are, they’re being brought about automatically by some invisible hand, right? The market is like Mom. You know, it’s going to take care of you with that invisible hand. And you don’t have to think about what the values might be, what you actually desire. You lose the habit, right? You never perform the mental gymnastics of stretching to figure out what a better world might actually be because you think you’re on track to that better world no matter what happens.

So it’s not just that you don’t recognize that somebody else’s values are different from your own. You’ve forgotten completely that there is such a thing as values, that they might be plural, they might be different, they might be contested. And so you find yourself, as you say, in this kind of binary where I’m rational and the other guy’s irrational.        

But actually, your notion of rationality is completely meaningless. It’s just means-ends rationality. But you can’t even really define what the ends are, your own ends. And you’ve lost the habit of asking what another end might be like.

...

And once we realize that there’s a plurality of values and we actually stretch ourselves again to see that, then we can track backward from that and start to ask about means-end rationality. But when we forget all about ends, which is what the politics of inevitability has done to our brains for the last 30 years, then we can’t actually talk about rationality. You can’t talk about means-end rationality if you don’t know how to talk about ends anymore.

Timothy Snyder on Ezra Klein's show

The context for these comments is Putin's rationale for invading Ukraine, but it touches upon the larger argument I'm making in my Genealogy series about metaphysical imaginaries: In our public intellectual life, we have come to assume that the rationalist-materialist imaginary is the only one that has legitimacy, and so any possible future must follow from its presuppositions. The imaginary and its deity, the Invisible Hand, work together to promote a sense of complacency or resignation that the global economy is going to do what it's going to do; technology is going to do what it's going to do--and it's all for the best, so no need for us to do anything except go with the flow.  And even if we wanted to do something, it's pointless; it's out of our hands. That passes for rational thinking, but it isn't. It's just an an act of abdicating our collective agency, which we justify by the tenets of a bad religion. [See Note 1]

Bad religion is any metaphysical imaginary and its practices that close down possibilities for human flourishing; good religion is a metaphysical imaginary and its practices that open them up. American mainstream political thinking is under the sway of a religion called Neoliberalism. As with any religion, it has its extremists (Republicans) and its moderates (Democrats), but the basic tenets for this religion are its utilitarian ethic, its profession of toleration, and its celebration of individual autonomy and self determination.

"So what's wrong with that?," you might ask. It's certainly better than some form of religious or ideological fanaticism. Yes, it is. But as with most problematic ideologies or values systems, It's not about what they affirm but about what they leave out. Certainly a healthy society must embrace pluralism, but that should not mean an embrace of chaos and randomness. Has it become impossible for us to imagine a non-nihilistic meaning structure that embraces pluralism and difference? Only if we believe in the inevitability of our own current presuppositions. 

The idea here of having a coherent, non-nihilistic meaning structure is not easy to convey in the context of a society that on the face of it seems so irretrievably committed to its current imaginary. But as I argue in Part 1 of the Genealogy series, there is an underlying coherency, even if it is nihilistic, in our contemporary rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary that promotes, if not guarantees, our experience of fragmentation, alienation, and isolation. How so? It might be helpful to contrast our contemporary imaginary with the premodern imaginary given to us in the Great Chain of Being.

The Great Chain of Being provided a coherent meaning structure for late ancient and medieval Western societies until it broke down after Galileo and the barrage of new knowledge that obsoletized its static structure. But, as I argue in Part 11, that doesn't mean its fundamental intuitions were wrong. It wasn't just a pure fiction that had no basis in reality; it worked effectively on several different levels--until it didn't. The test of any imaginary is the degree to which it works to effectively convey a coherent picture of reality. It should never be confused with reality, which mostly lies filtered beyond any capacity we have to cognize it directly. A healthy metaphysical imaginary adapts and evolves as knowledge on both the vertical and horizontal dimensions expands. As I argue in the Genealogy series, after the breakdown of the Great Chain of Being, the vertical dimension gradually disappeared. That's what's missing now, and that's the root cause of our collective ontological dizziness. 

The best metaphysical imaginary is the one that integrates the broadest scope of knowledge most coherently and in a way that has rich emotional and spiritual depth. The Great Chain of Being did that. It worked because it provided a model of reality that integrated a picture of the cosmos, with a picture of good social/political order, with a rich picture of spiritual/moral aspiration. That's what any effective metaphysical imaginary should do.

Our contemporary rationalist-materialist imaginary performs these functions, too, but It provides a sense of intellectual coherency only if you accept its nihilistic presuppositions. Most people accept these presuppositions without really thinking about it and about how they conflict with other things they believe that are important values for them. So, why do I insist that these presuppositions are nihilistic?  Like the Great Chain of Being our rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary integrates the cosmic, the social/political, and the moral but does so within a cosmology that accepts that the universe is shaped by Darwinism and other cosmological materialistic assumptions that creation itself was a random event, that the history of the universe since the Big Bang has been random, impersonal, meaningless, and dispassionately cruel. And that fits with a Darwinian social  organization that embraces the randomness of markets and the inevitability of technological development. There's no meaning in any of it except that that's the way things are, and we do what we can to have a more or less pleasant life within its constraints.

And this fits with a Libertarian/utilitarian or socio-biological moral imaginary that makes no moral judgments about anything except to insure the randomness of each individual making his or her own random choices to determine for himself what is in his best interest within the minimum constraints of the social contract to not harm others. There is no robust sense of the common good, or else it is defined as the sum of each individual pursuing his own interests. This makes dealing with threats like climate change and income inequality almost impossible because it requires individuals to surrender their short-term interests for a common or social good that has no imagined, inspiring content. The idea of freedom has no real moral content; it's just the negation of restraint, and unrestrained you are free to do as you please whether it's to run a porn site or join Doctors without Borders. The second can have no more moral value than the first within a rationalist-materialist frame.   

So on the cosmic level, randomness is all; entropic heat death is our telos. On the moral spiritual level, there is no concept of moral development or of there being a transcendent Good. On the social/political level Justice is something that we make up as we go along, a function of prudential contracts we make with one another to prevent the war of all against all, the greed and power of one against the greed and power of the other, which would otherwise be our natural condition in a random, impersonal, cruel cosmos. 

If you think I'm exaggerating about the fundamental spiritual vacuity of the the rationalist-materialist imaginary, it's probably because you don't think of yourself as a nihilist even though you accept the its basic presuppositions as outlined above. You think of yourself as a good person who has a moral code. You see yourself as being more moral than lots of people who justify their violence and cruelty by appeal to the scriptures or other religious sources.

But what's your argument from within a strict Libertarian frame to justify your thinking of yourself as a good person? Being good within a rationalist materialist frame simply means being conventional, following the rules, rules that have no ontological foundation except a Hobbesian agreement that we cease to pillage and rape and to lord it over one another. [See Note 2]

But it's important to understand that there is nothing deeply moral about the Hobbesian social contract. It is simply a truce, a way to stop the underlying savagery for a while. It's just a survival strategy that we pay for by alienating ourselves from our inner predator, our inner Genghis Kahn, our need to dominate, to be glorified, to be be in control. The Hobbesian Liberal is not a moral hero, but a scared rabbit hiding behind the police powers of the state and the so-called rule of law and its bureaucracies. Scared rabbits have no morality; they have only shame to frighten other scared rabbits into conformity. There is nothing inspiringly moral in a fear-based conformity. Liberal societies are created by scared rabbits who foreswear their inner predator and use the state to suppress any predator who breaks the rules. It's a system that has utility, but no real moral significance. 

My point has been that while you may think of yourself as a good person, what basis have you to argue that you are no more than a scared rabbit? I believe that you are more, or are potentially more, but that you have to awaken and grow something within you that supplants the predator/prey dynamic that is our natural condition. In order to do that, you must draw on some understanding about what it means to be human that does not fit within a Hobbesian utilitarian ethos, which is the only social organization that makes sense within a rationalist-materialist metaphysics. We all deep down know we are more than that. A true morality, as contrasted with a moralism that parodies it, is all about realizing that deep-down we are more than talking animals, that we are capable of transcending and transforming that aspect of ourselves. 

The Great Chain of Being models that human potentiality in a way that our current rationalist-materialist imaginary does not and cannot. The Great Chain had a place for Chaos--at the very bottom. But it also had a place for human moral transformation, for human divinization, which is what we are to become if we follow the growth pattern that is in our spiritual DNA. There is a dynamic, growth aspect in this model insofar as a being can ascend or descend. A thing was judged better or worse depending on its place on the chain, either closer to the top--good because more constituted by Mind, or the bottom--bad because more constituted by chaos and less by Mind. In the rationalist-materialist imaginary, a human being can only be predator or prey. 

A being descends as it physically or morally disintegrates, i.e., loses its form. It ascends as it grows into a fuller, denser, intenser possibility of its innate potencies, as a seed become a mature plant. What defined something as good was the degree to which it realized the fullness of its form as imagined in the mind of God. So something participates in the Good to the degree that is healthily growing toward the full realization of its mature form. Something is bad to the degree that it lacks participation in the Good becomes a perversion or parody of what it was meant to be, and so  regresses, moves away from the the path toward the full realization of its form.  

Now there's another aspect regarding the rationalist-materialist presuppositions that undergird the Liberal Order, which is that like the Great Chain of Being had its day, so now has the Liberal Order reaching the end of its day. We live in dread of its collapse because our only imagined alternative is a regression into illiberalism--and clearly that's a possibility if we don't think of something better. But we now have an opportunity to think of something better, and we should be very much involved in that. Snyder points to that in the excerpt above.

What's missing in the rationalist/materialist/Libertarian/utilitarian imaginary that currently dominates our collective imagination is a positive imagination of future possibility. We have no imagined future that inspires us to work for it or fight for it. That's what enervates us and so inclines us to a politics of inevitability.  We think we have values, but our values only incline us to say No to things that are repressive or restrictive of individual freedom.

We are energized only in the service of a No. We have nothing positive that inspires us to transcend our constraints. And isn't that what real freedom is all about?--to transcend our individual and collective constraints? And the only way that's truly, deeply possible for us as a society is if for the best of us its an imagined possibility, which requires a metaphysical imaginary that embraces the possibility of moral transcendence.That's really not a part of our moral landscape as Americans for complicated reasons I'm exploring in the Genealogy series. 

***

I think that what inspires us about the Ukrainian resistance is the way we see an entire society coming together in such a way that so many people experience themselves  as transcending their individual constraints and petty self interests. These Ukrainians are not scared rabbits, and we're inspired to learn that people who are not that different from us are still capable of such courageous, spirited behavior. Each person who commits himself to the resistance is putting his or her personal self interest aside in order to contribute to something that transcends those interests. While surely these resisters hope for practical outcomes, these are not people who are applying a utilitarian calculus to motivate their actions.

No one sane puts his or her life on the line for an abstraction; they do it because they are inspired by something that calls them to be something more. The essence of being a truly alive human being is to be in a continuous process of self-transcendence. Sometimes circumstances force us out of our slumber; sometimes awakening to the more we have it in us to be is something we must find within ourselves to achieve alone or with others. When we actually see others awakened in this way, we cannot help but be inspired by it. 

I want to argue for a metaphysical imaginary that asserts that some things are more worthy of our desires and aspirations than others, that to assert this is not incompatible with living in Liberal social democracy, and that it is not sufficient for a healthy society to just say No to tyrants. It must say Yes to a Good, and that while this Good is something mediated by cultural constructions, it transcends cultural constructions, and that the measure of our lives both individually and collectively is determined by our proximity to that Good. The Great Chain of Being did that for the premodern West; it broke down not because it was wrong on a vertical moral/spiritual axis, but because it no longer worked on the horizontal historical axis. 

And the important thing to understand about the juncture between the American Right and Left right now is that the people who were storming the capitol on 1/6 saw themselves as resisting tyranny in a similar way to how the Ukrainians see themselves doing it. It's not the same, of course. And this goes to my point about good and bad religion. Those who stormed the capitol were inspired by bad religion because there was no good religion available to them. Without it they feel a desperate, ballast-less anomie that comes from living within the spiritual vacuity of a soulless, rationalist-materialist imaginary they associate for good reason with Liberalism because of its antipathy to the values of American customary culture.

The stormers want to feel inspired by something, anything. And if bad, delusional religion gives them that feeling, they are going to embrace it. The only real solution in the long run is not to tell them that they are ignorant and delusional, but to offer them something better, to inspire them with something that is truly Good. Customary culture can no longer provide that sense of the Good to ordinary Americans. It has to be found in something else. It has to be found in an imagined hoped-for future. 

One of the more interesting ideas that Snyder discusses was in his answer to Klein's question about how Ukrainians see their historical story as defining them. Snyder says: 

...what’s interesting about the Ukrainians is that they seem to be moving more towards the argument that the nation is not about a clear story of the past. It’s more about action directed towards the future.

And I say this because both in the case of the Russian invasion in 2014 and in this much more stressful period now, when I talk to Ukrainians anyway, I don’t find them talking much about the Second World War, about ancient hatreds with Russia, or about some long narrative which has to be clear in some way. I find them more focused on what they’re doing.

...

Like a French historian said that a nation is a daily plebiscite. It’s not about having the past all in order. It’s not about having all of your blue books on a shelf, all of your red books on a different shelf. It’s about what you do every day, you know, as a collectivity which exists, as a collectivity because it’s directed towards some kind of a future.

That's all I'm saying. That if we're to break out of our spiritual/ideological gridlock here in the U.S., we can learn from the Ukrainians in quite a few ways, but perhaps the most important is their refusal to be constrained by the past grievances and instead to focus on imagining a best possible Ukrainian future. There is for us no positive political future for Americans if, unlike the Ukrainians, we continue to surrender our agency to an idea of historical inevitability. And we will continue to feel impotent unless we undertake the 'mental gymnastics' Snyder talks about that requires that we scrutinize what our deepest values truly are and in awakening to them to discover flowing from theman inspiring vision of a future--a telos--that's worth fighting for. 

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Note 1: I feel a need to stress from time to time that I am not against technology or innovation. The question is not whether either is good or bad but rather what or whose interests do they serve. The system is set up in such a way that technology and innovation are driven by the desire of innovators to make a lot of money. This is a truism that plays a central role in the politics of inevitability. It is assumed that there could be no other motive and no other ends besides financial gain that would be adequate to motivate innovation. So long as we inhabit a metaphysical imaginary that is dominated by rationalist-materialist presuppositions, this will remain the case. Change the imaginary, you change the motivations--and almost certainly change the nature and quality of what is innovated. 

Note 2: And so the irony here is that so many religious people are pre-Hobbesian. Their desire to burn people at the stake is better explained by a primitive alignment with the impersonal, Darwinian cosmic nihilism outlined above. Those on the American religious Right experience themselves as prey being crushed and mangled in the Liberal maw, so they embrace a new identity as predators and justify it as doing God's will. They are correct that their customary culture and its norms and values are being destroyed, but Liberals are not to blame; consumer capitalism and mass media are the real culprits. Like so many other things, human identity has become a consumer choice, and it's understandable why people who derive their sense of identity from traditions find this bewildering and wrong. The Liberals that they despise are simply those who have adapted to this brave new world and have prospered in it. It's in this sense that Colbert's mot that 'reality has a liberal bias is true'. The mainstream cultural OS is Liberal in its rationalist materialist presuppositions, and so only programs compatible with rationalist materialism run smoothly on it. Customary culture most emphatically does not run well on it, and so seems divorced from reality. 

Genealogy Part 11: The Christian Synthesis

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

--"Jerusalem" by William Blake

I want to bring into focus certain key themes that emerge in the early common era that became central for shaping the Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary of Latin Christendom. I want to focus, first, on how Christian Neoplatonism came to provide the metaphysical imaginary throughout the Mediterranean world, and then to focus particularly on developments in the European West until the late medieval period. And then we'll look at how retrieval of its essential elements lost after that point might provide a matrix for a postmodern/postsecular metaphysical imaginary. 

Christianity started as a Jewish sect among several other Jewish sects, but the cosmopolitan pluralism that we discussed in Part 9 created a cultural infrastructure for its rapid spread. So while its historical roots were deeply embedded in Judaism, it quickly become a universalist religion, riding on the back, so to say, of Hellenistic cosmopoltanism and Roman roads. The New Testament was written in Greek; new Christians read the Septuagint, the Hebrew scriptures that were written in Greek.

So while the Greek influence is strong, there is obviously a lot going on in nascent Christianity that has little or nothing to do with Neoplatonism. And when push comes to shove, I'm not interested in tracing the systematic thinking of Christian intellectual elites that owes so much to Greek thought as I want to deepen understanding how these early Christians' experience of the Living Real was shaped by their imagination of it. To do so requires understanding the Greek influence as playing an almost equal role with Jewish influence.

Understanding the interrelationship between reality and our imagination of it is critical for the larger argument that I'm trying to make about the evolution and malleability of our metaphysical imaginaries. We tend to think that we live in reality, and of course we do, but our experience of it is filtered by our imagination of it, and that imagination of it is provisional, to say the least. What is real and what we experience of it are not the same thing. Some people are more deeply open to and aware of aspects of the real than others are, and one of the premises of the argument I've been making so far is that the ancient philosophical schools developed spiritual praxes that opened up transcendent dimensions of reality to their experience, and these experiences were foundational for their thought. If you don't understand the nature of the experience, you can't understand what they were thinking. 

We no longer find it possible to take these experiences of transcendent reality seriously because, even though people often still have these experiences (qq.v, James, Varieties of Religious Experience; Taylor, Waking from Sleep), our metaphysical imaginary has changed in the last five hundred years in ways that have delegitimated them. They are reduced to subjective psychological/aesthetic experiences rather than thought of as disclosive of the Real. So underlying my argument is the assumption that this inability to take an ontology that comprises a spiritual or transcendent dimension is a mistake, and that this mistake has profound consequences of which we are mostly oblivious. 

This experience of transcendence is central to the Axial Revolution and its assertion of ontonormativity, our sense that the immanent world isn't but ought to be ruled by the law of a higher order. Humans have become aware of this higher law through the intuitions, visionary experiences, and revelations of philosophers and prophets in different civilizations--whether the Law given to Moses, the Tao by Lao Tse, or the transcendental realm of the One, the Good, and the Beautiful as in Socrates and Platonism. There are two basic responses to this revelation--either (1) give up on the sin-dominated, delusion-saturated, immanent world and find a way to get out of it and into the transcendent world, or (2) Reform/transform the immanent world so that it aligns with the transcendent world--'thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven'. 

The Theocracy of ancient Israel set itself apart from the pre-Axial societies that surrounded it, and in doing so exemplified the second; the Greek philosophical schools exemplified the first. [See Note 1] In the age of empire after Alexander and then Rome, Aristotelian or Stoic republican virtue was still exercised by the few elites who were in politics--e.g., Cato, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca--but this was not an option open to most attracted to philosophy, who instead undertook more apolitical philosophical pursuits.

Virtue as practiced in the more prominent Greek schools became mostly about theoria--the purification and alignment of one's individual mind with the transcendent One through ascetical spiritual and contemplative practice. There's not much room for political engagement when the whole goal is to get out of the body and up into the transcendent world where the One is to be contemplated. So the idea of an eschatological-historical political fulfillment is more Jewish than Greek, and it becomes symbolized in Christian imagination as the New Jerusalem, which is to be the fulfillment of history when the Law of Heaven and the Law on Earth become one as pictured in the Book of Revelations.

Now whether the mythopoeisis of the New Jerusalem means that history gradually evolves toward toward it or whether it's a dramatic intervention to come crashing down from the heavens at the end of time has been much debated. If you lean in the hopeful, progressive direction, you believe that humans are co-responsible with the Divine for making the New Jerusalem a reality in history.  If you lean in the more pessimistic direction, you believe in the marrow of your  bones that humans can do nothing to change history. History is a jail from which humans must be liberated either in the Buddhistic sense of being released from the chain of incarnations, or in the Christian sense of returning home after death from exile in a fallen world. The New Jerusalem is not something we co-create with the Divine, but something that the Divine gives the just, risen from the dead, in the eschaton.

Most secular people operate oblivious of how their imaginations are shaped by theological presuppositions, but these are two archetypes regarding the telos of history have a profound influence in organizing our political and metaphysical imaginaries, whether we are religious or not. And I think it's fair to say that if you incline to the first interpretation, your politics tends to be hopeful, progressive, and reform-oriented, and if the latter, oriented toward conservative stability and good order.

The first is more flexible and desirous of change, the second more rigid and resistant to change--except maybe to change things back to the way they were before things get out of joint. I'm with Blake, and like him I see this as a local project; it starts small here and there, in England or in America; in South Africa or in India. What is universalist in such a project is discovered only in the depths of particularity. 

This conservative idea of political change shaped the medieval order. That order derived from an integration of Jewish monarchical theocracy with Greek metaphysics. The politcal-social realm on earth receives its form as it reflects the cosmic metaphysical hierarchy in the Great Chain of Being, which, of course, derives from Neoplatonism. As above, so below. As the transcendent world is changeless and eternal, so should the immanent world be stable and ordered. Revolution does not mean the creation of something new, but rather a "turning back" to the way things were before they became deformed by the lawlessness of tyrants or political elites whose debauched lives went against the natural cosmic order, as in Macbeth. [See Note 2] 

I am conscious how removed these themes are from our ordinary experience of the world we live in today. And I feel compelled whenever I can to try to show their relevance. These ideas were not abstract two thousand years ago but in fact organized the imaginaries of the societies in which they arose--and deep down, even if only latently, they continue to organize our contemporary imaginaries. In the premodern West, the social imaginary and the cosmic imaginary were interdependent, and both were shaped by the Christian Neoplatonic synthesis. When the cosmic imaginary started to break down after Galileo, so did the stability of the hierarchical social imaginary, and with it the moral imaginary that was deeply linked to it. 

One of the essential flaws that fragilized both the premodern cosmic and social imaginaries was their commitment to an order understood as a static hierarchy. The investment in such an order made it rather resistant to adapting to the torrent of new information and social change that flooded Western Europe in the post Renaissance/Reformation period. That the premodern hierarchical imaginary was not flexible enough to adapt does not mean that the fundamental intuitions that supported it were wrong, but that the custodians of the old hierarchical order lacked the imagination and flexibility of spirit to adapt. They were too invested in the superstructure rather than trusting in the Living Real that had given it its shape. The Erasmian spirit loses to the reactionary spirit in the Church, and science goes one way and faith the other. This was a tragedy, but perhaps one that could not have been avoided. 

One interesting consequence was that a secular version of slumbering Jewish eschatological orientation toward the future gradually awakened and oriented those leaning toward a progressive understanding of history to see in science the method for achieving the New Jerusalem. In other words, Greek rationality coopts Jewish eschatology in the hopes of creating a reason-based utopian future that has nothing to do with God, who, if he exists at all, is a remote, uncaring clockmaker God who set up a cosmic machine for humans to reverse engineer, if they have the wit to do it. Progress comes to equate only with material progress, not spiritual or moral progress. And so here we are. 

In the premodern imaginary, the only kind of progress that mattered was spiritual and moral. I'm interested in thinking through to a way of reconnecting the moral imaginary with the cosmic imaginary in a postmodern, Christian-Neoplatonic key. But in order to do so, the static hierarchical imaginary has to give way to an imaginary that is dynamic and historical. And so obviously, when I use the word "cosmic" I don't mean by it only the visible world, but a multi-dimensional cosmos where these various dimensions impinge on one another.

We're at a point where ancient religious ideas are converging with developments in computer science and modern physics--at least in its "weird science" precincts. It suffuses our imagination in science fiction from The Matrix, Lost, The Anomaly, The City and the City, Upload to just name a few that are top of mind. We don't take these works of fiction literally, but they work as metaphors for something that we deep down sense to be true: that the world given to us by the senses is not the only world that there is, maybe not even the most important one.

If we are intelligent enough to create virtual worlds, it becomes easier to imagine that other intelligences likely created our world. Once you've allowed yourself to make the shift regarding "other dimensions" from 'probably not' to 'probably so', then you move to the next step, which is to ask what can we know about these other dimensions that has any real plausibility? How do we know about them?  Who can we trust among those who profess to have answers for these questions? What criteria are there to evaluate the validity of this 'knowledge'? As the asking of these questions acquires increasing legitimacy in intellectual circles, we move more deeply into a post-secular age. 

So this is my way of segueing to how Christian thinking about what the deepest human aspirations should be about, which couldn't be clearer or more plainly stated in the Christian scriptures and in the thinking of the most important early Church Fathers--to become transformed by Divine Love. The point cannot be more emphatically asserted: Nothing is more important for the human project than to be transformed by Love. History, however imagined, is first a moral project--not a moralistic one. And so therefore, knowledge--the only knowledge that really counts--correlates with spiritual transformation, and the primary agent in this transformation is Divine Love. That was true then, and it's true now.

And so the only people you can trust about what they have to say about 'other dimensions' are people who have been in some degree transformed by Love. Are there "other dimensions" that have nothing to do with Love. Undoubtedly. Does this tell us something about the nature of evil and delusion? Probably so. And so for that reason, the only way you can be sure about anything is the degree that you feel the power of Love in it. And so therefore it follows that you cannot truly know anything really worth knowing if you are not Good, and you are Good to the degree that you have been transformed by Love. All other moral prescriptions, rules, imperatives, practices are subordinate to that one. If they are not in some essential sense enacted in the service of Love, they are at best useless and probably harmful. 

So the cognitive/epistemological project on the vertical axis is linked to the moral/spiritual project. The reason that Western developed societies are reeling in ontological dizziness currently is because they gave up on this moral spiritual project because it was difficult, and because there were more easily obtained benefits by pursuing a cognitive/epistemological project that operated solely on the horizontal material Logos axis. There is currently no cognitive/epistemological project on the vertical Mythos axis that has broad cultural acceptance. The big question is how to remedy this. I am not claiming that to do so solves all our problems, but it at least provides a framework for a solution that is currently unavailable to us. 

Christians inherited the idea of the dynamic, central animating power of Love from both the Greeks and the Jews, integrated it, and popularized it, that is, made it more broadly available. It saw itself as the bringer of good news regarding this subversively deep truth to the whole world. Not just for a particular people--the Jews--and not just for Greek philosophical elites, but to all people of good will. And many people of good will were already receptive to it because it fit with what they already suspected was true. That Christians often let this mission become coopted by other agendas that are utterly alien to it, and often in spectacular fashion, is not at issue. I want to focus on where it has succeeded, not in where it has failed. What matters is what was most deeply true in this new cultural movement. 

No religious tradition can sustain itself if there is no experiential underground water table, so to say, that from time to time erupts into the above-ground world in springs that renew life in the waking world. This underground stream is the spiritual dimension that sustains any living culture by virtue of its connection to the Living Real. And a culture is healthy to the degree and to the extent that its people are refreshed by it. Now this idea of interior depths in the soul, which we'll see developed in Augustine, contrasts with the earlier imagination of mysticism which owes more to the Greeks, which emphasizes something in the heights, as something that one has to leave the body to encounter. This is true in Plotinian mysticism [See Note 3], and we see it even in Philo, for whom ecstasy is central to his experience of encounter with the Divine--

...but escape also from your own self and stand outside from yourself, like persons possessed and corybants seized by Bacchic frenzy and carried away by some form of prophetic inspiration. For it is the mind that is filled with the Deity and no longer in itself, but is agitated and maddened by a heavenly passion drawn by the truly Existent and attracted upward to it.

I have no doubt that this was a real experience, and as I laid out in Part 10, the aspiration to have such ecstatic experiences of transcendence comes from the Axial Revolution's focus on a transcendent dimension that is more real than reality as we experience it in the immanent, sublunar, embodied world.  And so it makes sense that a longing to leave this world to experience that other world would be a focus of spiritual practice.

But this is a rare experience. According to his biographer, even a mystical prodigy like Plotinus had such an experience only four times, and with varying degrees of intensity and duration. And in reading about the sages who oriented their whole lives toward such experiences, you might wonder whether this is any way to live. Isn't this too world-denying, too negating of the body? Too individualistic? An example, perhaps, of what David Brooks calls the higher selfishness? It can be, although apparently it was not true of Plotinus. [See Note 3] But this tendency to see the body and its impurities as the chief impediment to the highest faculty of the mind--nous--attaining to the enjoyment of the contemplation of the One is very Greek. The Jewish m.o., even when influenced by the Greeks, is more down to earth. And so in Christianity there is this metaxic, creative tension between Greek otherworldliness and Jewish earthiness. Problems ensue when the tension snaps, or when one crowds out the other. 

And so in the period of post-Axial development in the early centuries of the the common era, the dominant element in this tension is Greek--the orientation of spiritual practice is on a vertical axis, with the primary focus on what is above--with the individual spiritual aspirant reaching out from below to that which is above. As we'll see there is an ecclesiology that shapes Christian thinking that counterbalances spiritual elitism, but still the goal is the transformation of what is below by the power of that which is above. And spiritual fulfillment is something imagined as having begun below but only completed above after death. The idea of eschatological historical fulfillment recedes into latency.  

Nevertheless, the Jewish idea of a God who cares, who initiates a reaching out from above to us humans below, valorizes a dynamic of descent not seen with the Greeks. We see it, though, in Philo and in the Song of Songs the One God reaching out in Love downward toward his people Israel, as the bridegroom to his bride.

And so it is by this logic of outreaching Divine Love that Christianity sees itself as an extension of Judaism. This Divine reaching out from above to humans below attains a fulfillment in the incarnation of the One God in a human being. That this was perceived as blasphemy by many Jews is understandable, and that it is implausible for most people now who inhabit a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary goes without saying. I am not here to persuade the skeptical, but instead to show how powerful this idea was, and why it was so broadly accepted within the Hellenic/Roman world--and beyond.

I've used the following Iain McGilchrist quote before, but I think it warrants re-reading from time to time because it distills what is central to the Christian mythos and why it was so compelling then and why it still is for so many now:

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.(The Master and the Emissary, Kindle Locations 11566)

This points to why this new religion was so appealing when people first encountered it. It was compatible with foundational ideas already in the Hellenistic imaginary, and yet there was a central distinguishing idea here that derived from Judaism that refutes Greek ideas about the impersonal indifference of the godhead and asserts instead that the One God cares because he is Love, that he suffers compassionately with us, that our choices and our actions matter, particularly as we choose to love or refuse to. How astonishing this idea is, and that, especially for us now who have become incapable of astonishment, it sounds too good to be true is also understandable. But there are an awful lot of very smart, deeply wise people who hearkened to this good news, and this Genealogy series seeks to better understand why it was so compellingly believable for them. 

And so going forward I want to organize our consideration of the thinkers and developments within Christian Neoplatonism around several key themes:

Imago Dei/Divinization: What is our deepest identity and destiny as human beings, and how do we find our way to its fullest realization?  What practices promote the development of our deepest human identity as created in the image and likeness of God? 

Visio Dei/Apophaticism: To what degree is God knowable or unknowable? To what degree is his presence in our lives cognizable? Where is such a presence visible?

Agapic and Erotic (understood correctly) Love: What is the real thing? What is its counterfeit? How can we tell the difference? How do we become transformed by it and so more capable of communion with other people, with the natural world, with the spiritual world.

Wisdom/Knowledge: What does it mean to truly know? How do we deepen our knowing? How do we distinguish truth from illusion? What is the role of tradition, exegesis, hermeneutic theory? How does a Neoplatonic metaphysics support a participatory epistemology? 

Cosmic/Moral/Social Imaginaries: How is our moral development linked to our ideas about the Cosmos? Does our cosmic/moral imaginary play a role in shaping our political/social imaginary? What does that say about our current political and social imaginary? Is it possible within the framework of knowledge provided by science to frame a different cosmic imaginary that, so to say, could be extrapolated from our moral imaginary? 

The Meaning of History: Is the goal to escape history or to transform it? Is this even a legitimate topic? 

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Note 1: Nobody with any sense can take seriously Plato's political thought experiment in The Republic as a blueprint for politics in the real world. It's clear that civic virtue was critical for Aristotle, but that had more to do with the idea that human flourishing required political engagement without there being any idea about what the ideal polis ought to look like. Aristotelian republican virtue as an ideal recedes during the late Roman Empire and early medieval period and emerges again in the Italian city states in the late middle ages. 

Note 2: I think that this goes a long way to explain the power of the archetype that energizes Qanon. People attracted to Qanon are not wrong to sense that the world is disordered, and so it's understandable that an atavistic sense of medieval order and disorder would incline them to blame corrupt elites and to believe that their elimination would restore cosmic and social order. But is it so atavistic? Does this not explain the disorder and the remedy for it as we all imagine it in Putin's corrupt, kleptocratic Russia? How ironic then, that Qanon is inclined to side with Putin. It can only make sense if you are committed to the idea that Western media is part of the whole corrupt Western elite system, so it must be wrong about Putin. And therefore Putin must be right no matter how overwhelming the evidence to the contrary. 

Note 3: I'll probably have more to say about Plotinus in the context of the the cosmology developed by Dionysos the Areopagite. I want to go to Augustine first. He was influenced by Plotinus, and I will discuss Plotinus in passing as an influence on Augustine, but the most interesting thing about Plotinus from a history-of-ideas perspective and for the story I'm telling was his integration of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers, and then how in turn Plotinus's thought was Christianized. He would probably be a far more important figure in Western thought in his own stead if he had not been absorbed into what became Christian Neoplatonism after Augustine and Dionysos. 

++++++++++

Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series. Regarding future installments in this series, they will come when I get to it, which depends on how much time and energy I have for it. The goal going forward will be to understand the historical development, i.e., the historical-cultural impact of Christian Neoplatonism on North Atlantic and Mediterranean societies through to the Renaissance, how it went underground after the Reformation, and how it worked as an underground, inspiring force in the arts and philosophy through the modern period. (3/30/22)]

Genealogy Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation

I wanted to stress in Parts 8 and 9 of this series that philosophy for the ancients, and theology for the early Christians, while it was an exercise in theoria, which in Greek means nous-awakened contemplative seeing, it was not 'theoretical' in our modern sense. It was first a praxis whose objectives were to transform the soul. Or to use a word that has pejorative connotations for most moderns, it was a mystical exercise. But I would like to clarify that there are two broad categories of mysticism that often co-existed in post-Axial societies that must be distinguished from one another: the Mysticism of the Heath, which is the continuation of pre-Axial Revolution religious practices, and the Mysticism of Transcendence, which is post-Axial.

The Mysticisms of the Heath were mostly concerned with managing a spiritual economy of malign and benign local gods and spiritual forces to prevent and mitigate misfortunes and to promote ordinary human flourishing--long life, bounteous crops, healthy children, victory over one's enemies, etc. This is the world of shamans, sorcery, and ritual sacrifice. The Mysticism of Transcendence is what we've been talking about regarding the praxis and theoria of the Greek schools whose primary objectives were to ascend to a union with the One and to know the Good, to do it, and gradually to become it.

This pre-Axial/post-Axial distinction is important to keep in mind. Most people who don't know much about religion tend to lump the two together. Nevertheless, the popular practice of many Christians, Jews, Buddhists is often more pre-Axial than post-Axial, at least insofar as it is transactional: "Lord, if I win this battle, I will build a cathedral to honor your Holy Mother." Or in a more contemporary idiom,"If I get this promotion or win this game, I won't miss church on Sundays anymore." Central here is the quid pro quo. If there's no payoff, what's the point of religion? If God isn't going to help me get what I want, then who needs him? This is pre-Axial religious thinking. [See Note 1]

The post-Axial Mysticism of Transcendence is about redefining true human flourishing. In part it's about rising above mundane concerns of the Mysticism of the Heath, but also to be a presence in the world that seeks to undermine or subvert the regime of local gods. Christians pray "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven", and it's so familiar to us that we rarely think about its implications. It defines an aspiration that is at the heart of the Axial revolution--the idea that the local cultural operating system can be subordinated to another OS that operates above and outside it, and which can break into and reconfigure local, sublunary systems. This introduces the idea that things don't have to be the way they are now because that's the way they've always been. Things can change for the better. Progress--a dream of better future--becomes a possibility. This possibility is implicit in Greek thinking [See Note 2], but it is a more dynamic element in Jewish eschatological thinking and imagination. 

This idea of progress has come to mean different things to different people, and it has often led people into delusional, destructive political projects. But that doesn't mean that all such attempts to 'immanentize the eschaton' are misguided. As I said in a post last week, a reactionary politics is rooted in a reactionary religion; a progressive politics must be rooted in an eschatological mythos. That it is even possible to think about a possible positive future is largely a product of Jewish thinking in the later Second Temple period about which I write below. But the important caveat here is that politics flows from culture. The transformation has to happen first in the broader culture so that the culture moves toward a true progressive politics without it being forced on it. The worst thing that ever happened to Christianity was its having become the official religion of the Roman Empire after Constantine. 

So in societies in which post-Axial religions took root, they lived side by side with pre-Axial customary practices. This was true in the Hellenic-Roman world; it was true in medieval Christianity, and it was true in Buddhist societies, and others. And so in such societies, an interesting split develops between a small spiritual elite that aspires to spiritual transformation--and everybody else. These elites see spiritual transformation as a possibility for themselves and their brothers and sisters who are likewise engaged in the spiritual practices of the Mysticism of Transcendence--usually in monasteries. Those outside the monasteries, generally speaking, have no such spiritual aspirations; they expect that their lives will follow the pattern established by their ancestors, and in the West their religious practice owes more to Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean Mysticisms of the Heath than to the Mysticisms of Transcendence.

I think it was St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) who said that few will be saved and most will be monks. But this problem of elitism is a tension in Christianity from the beginning, and it motivates a reform movement in the late medieval period whose objective was to export the Mysticism of Transcendence from the monasteries into the world. This is a story we'll tell in more detail in future posts, but these reform movements culminate in the the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers'--particularly the Calvinists'--objective was to exterminate any vestiges of the Mysticism of the Heath as they persisted in Catholic practice. And they also rejected institutions committed to the Mysticism of Transcendence, at least as it was pursued in the monasteries. The Reformers saw monasticism as promoting a spiritual elitism they thought to be un-Christian. In doing so, they proscribed the pursuit of an itinerary of spiritual transformation that was central to Greek, Jewish, and Christian practice that has been the focus in recent posts in this series--and posts to come.

So a more nuanced discussion of these developments lies ahead of us, but for how I can say that it is obvious to me that they threw out the baby out with the bath water, and their doing so led to unintended consequences that contribute significantly to the crisis of meaning through which we are suffering now. Nevertheless, after the Reformation the hope for progress still ran deep, but it was imagined instead primarily in terms that were cognate with the concerns of the Mysticism of the Heath. In other words, progress after the Reformation  was framed as a means to secure ordinary human flourishing--long life, bounteous crops, healthy children, victory over one's enemies, etc.--but now without the mysticism or any aspirations to divinization.

Or so I'll argue in future posts in this series. But I want to remind the reader from time to time why it's interesting and important to understand where these ideas originate, why they were significant at the time, how they evolved and were adapted to different historical circumstances, and why they still remain consequential for us today. 

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Back to the ancient Mediterranean world:

One of the most important characteristics of the Western Mysticism of Transcendence is the role of Love--both for the Greeks and for the Jews, and later for the Christians. The main texts here are Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium, which lay out an eros-driven itinerary that leads the soul upward toward union with the transcendent One--the source of all Goodness, Beauty, Wisdom. For Christians this love of the One is central, but also comes to emphasize a love of the neighbor--even of the enemy--in a way that is not found in the Greek tradition. Indeed the eschaton referenced above is imagined as the communion of saints at a banquet in the New Jerusalem to which all are invited but only those transformed by Love will be admitted. 

The point is that the goal for both Greeks, Jews, and Christians in this early post-Axial era is an interior moral transformation that is effected by this transcendent force whose main characteristic is Love. This love, as we'll see, has both an erotic and an agapic dimension to it. I will let scholars argue about the precise meanings of these terms, but for our purposes Eros is about deeply felt connection and communion with everything--nature, other people, beings in the spiritual world. Agape is about overflowing compassion. Both are first and foremost divine activities, but they become possible for humans by virtue of their communion with the Divine. 

So, again, post-Axial philosophy and theology were first grounded in experience; they were not an abstract exercise. The quality of one's thinking was directly related to the quality and depth of one's experience. Wisdom is about the integration of experience and one's reflection about its significance, but in the light of the inherited wisdom of the ancestors. The sacred texts--both from the pagan philosophers, the Bible, and the early Fathers are part of an ongoing reflection, and our reading of them has value primarily as they afford occasions for inspired exegesis.

So reading the text is not an intellectual exercise, at least 'intellectual' in the sense that moderns mean it. It was a spiritual exercise, a way of becoming transformed by one's encounter with the text. This was true for both the pagan philosophers who read Plato and Aristotle as it was for the learned Jews who read the Torah, the Prophets, or the Wisdom literature. From early on Jewish exegetes encountered the Bible not just as history and law, but as having deeper mystical meanings that were not available to the superficial or uninspired reader. This kind of reading was adopted later by Christian exegetes who saw at least three levels of Biblical interpretation--Literal/historical, Allegorical, and the more deeply mystical/Anagogic. 

In Part 9, I talked a little about Gnosticism as arising out of Jewish interactions with Greek thought and practice, but I wanted to say a bit more about what was happening in Judaism in the later Second Temple period, which ended with the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. 

McGinn spends most of his Chapter 1 "The Jewish Matrix" in Foundations (See Note 2) focusing on the two primary forms of literature that came out of Jewish culture at this time--the aforementioned Apocalypses and Wisdom literature. The second of these we know most familiarly as the Psalms and the Song of Songs, both of which would be central to Christian mystical thinking and practice:

"If the purest of wisdom had ancient roots in Israel, it is nonetheless true that it became an ever-growing force in Jewish intellectual life during the years of the direct contact with Hellenism," James Kugel reminds us. The Wisdom of Ben Sira (or Ecclesiasticus, composed early in the second century BCE) the Psalms of Solomon (first century BCE), and especially the Wisdom of Solomon, dated as early as the second century BCE by some more likely written ca. 40 CE, are primary examples of this tendency which has close ties with the philosophical tradition in Hellenistic Judaism evident in such figures as Aristobulus and especially Philo. . . . If the concern for cosmic secrets in the otherworldly apocalypses brings them close to the ambit of the developing cosmic piety of Hellenistic tradition, this proximity of interest is heightened in the wisdom literature, where, as in Greek cosmic piety, the experience of God reaches the believer through meditation of the order of the universe. Elements of a more personal relationships to God, or at least to a divine power, are also discovered here. (Foundations, p. 19)

The Song of Songs isn't mentioned in this paragraph because it's not clear when it was written, but best guess is in the early 100s CE--so very late. 

The Apocalypses are significant for two main reasons. They articulate a shift in the understanding of history, and, second, they articulate an aspiration to see God face to face, as in the famous passage from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. This was a vision afforded to certain important Jewish figures--Abraham, Jacob, and Moses. But it became something available to the writers of Apocalypses in a visionary experience where they ascended into the heavens where they had this encounter. These texts became a key resource in their adapting Greek theoria, the contemplation of the One, to Jewish thinking and practice. Jews aspired to an encounter that was more personal, i.e., face to face--not as a merging of one's identity into the Infinite Divine. Judaism is a personalistic monotheism in a way that Greek transcendental philosophy is not. The Greek schools were closer to Buddhism in this respect. 

This personalism is abundantly evident in the overtly erotic language of the Song of Songs, which in an interesting way reverses the dynamic of ascent that we see in Plato's Phaedrus and Diotima's discourse in The Symposium. The Lover is not the human who ascends, but God who descends, who reaches out to his beloved. The initiative lies with God who seeks to bring us to him. In the Greek imagination, the One is just up there doing his thing without much interest in human beings. If humans are motivated to go and pay him a visit, that's fine, but their doing so is of no concern to him. 

McGinn:

Building on the work of Gershom Scholem and Saul Lieberman, Joseph Dan argues that the rabbinic evidence suggests that [Rabbi] Akiva [who flourished in early 100s CE], the great hero of early Merkavah mysticism, was also the source for a new understanding of the Song of Songs based on three elements: (1) that the book was given to Israel on Mount Sinai; (2) that it is the holiest of all the biblical books; and (3) that its author was not Solomon but "the King who owns peace," that is, God himself. In other words, the book is a divine self-description, the kind that seems expanded upon in the unusual Merkavah text known as the Shi'ur Qomah. In Dan's words, "A new concept and meaning of the Song of Songs emerged in rabbinic academies and transformed esoteric homiletics [e.g., midrasnhic speculation on Ezekiel 1] into mystical activity.

...The early rabbinic commentaries on the Song make it quite clear that the Bride is to be identified with the people of Israel. This corporate and historical allegorical reading of the Song of Songs was influential on Origen, the first surviving Christian mystical commentator on the book, who knew the that the rabbis placed it among the four esoteric texts reserved for advanced students. (Foundations, p. 21)

We'll get to Origen in a future post, but first we need to spend some time with the great Jewish thinker, Philo of Alexandria, whom McGinn describes as the

"first figure in western history to wed the Greek contemplative ideal to the monotheistic faith of the Bible, a union since applauded by many but condemned by others, both Jews and Christians, as a form of miscegenation." (Foundations, p. 35)  

Lest there be any question, I am not in the anti-miscegenation camp.

Philo was an older contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, born around 20 BCE and died 50 CE. McGinn says that "Although his most avid readers were Christians insofar as he foreshadowed an exegetical method for joining biblical revelation and Greek philosophy in the service of a mystical Ideal. . . .His goal was to show that Judaism was the true religion and to draw out the inner meaning of the biblical narratives and ritual practices that formed the heart of Judaism" (Foundations, p. 36)

Let me start with this long excerpt from McGinn Chapter 3, "The Greek Contemplative Ideal" where he discusses Philo, and then we'll unpack it:

If the story of the Fall signifies the disordered soul which has forgotten its true nature as image of the Logos, the hidden message of the other books of the Pentateuch, especially the histories of the patriarchs and the story of Moses, presents a typology of those souls who have regained their true nature by following the path to mystic conemplation. Like Plato, Philo holds that ultimate bliss resides in the vision of God, or "knowledge of him who truly is. ...For the beginning and end of happiness is to be able to see God". 

Thus Moses,"entering into the dark cloud, the invisible region, abides there while being initiated into the most holy mysteries." He becomes, however, not only an initiate, but also a hierophant and instructor of divine rites, which he will impart to those clean of ear.

The power that motivates the contemplative life leading to the vision of God is a divine eros, but Philo makes it clear that this love is not a native gift of the soul but is rather an inspiration by which God calls us upward to himself. Philo gives greater emphasis than Plato to the role of ecstasy "standing outside" [the self] in the upward path:

...escape also from your own self and stand outside from yourself, like persons possessed and corybants seized by Bacchic frenzy and carried away by some form of prophetic inspiration. For it is the mind that is filled with the Deity and no longer in itself, but is agitated and maddened by a heavenly passion drawn by the truly Existent and attracted upward to it. (Her. 70)

....the Jewish thinker holds that the soul is only a created image of the Logos, not a part of the Logos itself, to come to know one's inner self on the journey up to the Existent is to gain an awareness of the "absolute nothingness of created being". "And the man who has despaired of himself is beginning to know him that is." Divinization for Philo thus implies a self-naughting absent in much pagan mystical tradition, though we shall see an analogue in Plotinus. 

Philo was the first to introduce into mystical literature the famous oxymoron of "sober intoxication" to describe  the way in which the mind is taken out of itself in the upward way. "It longs for the intelligible, and on beholding in that realm beauties beyond measure the patterns and originals of the sensible things in the world below it is possessed by a sober intoxication . . . (Foundations, p. 39)

Philo makes no reference to the Song of Songs (probably because it wasn't written yet), and so his idea of union with God follows more the Greek pattern of ascent, but an ascent that foreshadows the Song of Songs insofar as it is in response to a Love that reaches out to the human soul from above. Like Plato, Philo holds that ultimate bliss resides in the vision of God, or "knowledge of him who truly is. ...For the beginning and end of happiness is to be able to see God" as Moses did: 

Making Moses the ideal mystic, the divinized man, marks an important moment in the history of mystical traditions, for both Jews and Christians, if only because it links the generalized and often abstract subjective apophaticism [See Note 4] of the Hellenic tradition with the personal life story that could, at least in part, be imitated--the account in Exodus of how Moses ascended to meet God in the cloud and darkness that hung upon Sinai. (Foundations, p. 38)

Philo's importance rests on the merger he effected between this form of Greek contemplative piety, with its growing emphasis on the transcendence of the divine First principle, and his Jewish faith grounded in the Bible and in the practices and laws of his people. This reconciliation was achieved not only by seeking a deeper and more universal meaning in the scriptures, but also by transforming Platonic contemplation into a more personalistic mode. (Foundations, p. 36) (See Note 3)

So Philo approaches Greek philosophy from within the Wisdom tradition in Judaism that was already heavily influenced by Hellenism. But his most interesting contribution for the purposes of this Genealogy series was his placing Plato's transcendental Ideas, not in some vague transcendental dimension, but in the Mind of God. This is a critical move that will profoundly influence Christian Neoplatonism: 

Philo's Logos doctrine has deep roots in Hellenistic Judaism's speculation about the figure of Sophia, or Wisdom, as well as in certain aspects of Middle Platonism, especially in the gradually emerging intradeical interpretation of Plato's world of Ideas (i.e., the teaching that the Ideas are to be found in the mind of God). Aristotle's criticism of Plato's theory of Ideas had shown how difficult it was to maintain a separate realm of Ideas as in some sense a cause of the world. One solution first explicitly found in Philo but almost certainly something he inherited from previous Middle Platonists, was to move the Ideas into God, to identify them with the Divine Mind that causes the universe. (Foundations, p. 37)

But again there is a personalist character here that for instance is not found later in Plotinus, whose concept of the Ideas is as impersonal principles in the first emanation from the One. The Logos for Philo is conceived not as an abstract principle, but as son of God and the face of God:

The existence of the inconceivable God can be known through analogy because he reveals himself in two ways, first, through the intelligible Universe, or elder son, that is his Logos, and second, and derivatively through the sensible universe as through a younger son. . . .The Logos is "the Idea of Ideas, the first begotten son of he Father, a "second god."

To his chief messenger and most venerable Logos, the Father who engendered the universe has granted the singular gift, to stand between and separate the creature from the Creator..."And I stood between the Lord and You" (Deut. 5.5 ) neither unbegotten as God, nor begotten as you, but midway between the two extremes, serving as a pledge for both.

...he [the Logos] is a "vivid and living hypostatization of an essential aspect of deity, the face of God turned toward creation," as David Winston puts it. As the manifestation of the hidden God, the Logos reveals the two essential aspects of God's relation to the world, the creative power and the ruling or conserving power. (Foundations, p. 37-38)

I don't suppose it's so obvious that it needn't be pointed out that there is a proto-trinitarian theme introduced here, one that is further developed in Kabbalism--the Ein Soph in its three aspects Keter, Chokhma, and Binah. This Genealogy series is not the place to get into this, but maybe some time in the future it would be interesting to become more deeply immersed in understanding the continuous cross-fertilization through the centuries between Christian and Jewish mysticism. I don't know a lot about it, but I do know enough to understand how rich a vein this would be to mine. And in a very significant way, at least in terms of speculative theology/philosophy, this cross-fertilization starts with Philo. 

McGinn goes on:

The Logos is also central in the soul's return to God, both primordially and consequently. "For just as God is the Pattern of the Image [i.e., the Logos], which was just named Shadow, so does the Image become the pattern of others, as Moses makes clear at the beginning of the Law Code by saying, "And God made man after the iImage of God" (Gen 1:27); thus the Image had been modeled after God, but man after the Image . . ." (Legum allegoriae 3.96) (Foundations, p. 38)

This idea of humans being created in the image and likeness of God is articulated here in a way that will be central for defining the Christian spiritual itinerary. The human being in his fallen state knows not who he is until he rediscovers his deepest identity as created in the Image of God. This is key to both Jewish and Christian ideas about divinization.

But it's also key to what will become a Christian Neoplatonic participatory epistemology:

The Logos is immanent in all things but in a special way in the human mind. The presence of the Logos within the soul, that is, within the higher dimension of nous (Philo followed Plato in adhering to a tripartite understanding of the soul)...makes possible both knowledge of the existence of God and the return of the soul to God from its present fallen state. (Foundations, p. 38)

The world is intelligible because the underlying structure of the macrocosmos is the Logos, which also deeply structures the human Mind as microcosmos. Like knows like, but as the deep structure of the macrocosmos is mostly hidden from human awareness, so are the deep, inner capacities of the human mind hidden. To know the first requires the awakening of the latter, i.e. the awakening of the dormant 'nous'. [See Note 5] So I want to stress from the get go here that while there is a tendency to think of Platonism and Neoplatonism as having a rather static epistemology,  that is, imo, a rather vulgar understanding of them. There is an inherent capacity within this transcendental framework for a continuously evolving process of learning and deepening of one's knowledge: as the mind wakes to its own unfathomable depths, so does it wake to the unfathomable depths of the cosmos. Depth calls unto depth. 

But I think it is also critical to understand that the capacity for true participatory knowledge is a function of one's moral development and, as we'll see, of one's capacity for Love. The spiritual itinerary is not just to learn magical formulae and acquire cognitive superpowers, but to become the Self one was created to be. This is a moral project. The capacity for growth in real knowledge is a function of real moral development, if by moral development we mean becoming gradually transformed into the image in whose likeness we were created. The wisdom that follows from that is the only really important cognitive power that humans should care about. Whatever the range of one's cognition, one still needs wisdom to interpret and understand correctly what one cognizes. 

So far, we've spent time with the two main streams that constituted the Western Axial Revolution. We turn in future posts to understand how these streams were adapted to and developed in light of the Christian revelation. I think it should be clear that I have no sympathy with efforts to try to isolate a pure Christianity from Greek or Jewish elements. I applaud miscegenation. Christianity at its best is small 'c' catholic. It must embrace the whole world with confidence in its capacity to find what is Good where there is truly good, and not be so fussy about its provenance as providing some criteria about what is truly Christian and what is not. This is not syncretism if it is done with arms spread wide in a broad, empathic, erotic embrace. 

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Note 1: I'm not saying that all intercessionary prayer is wrong. A subject like this needs more nuanced discussion than I can give it here: clearly it is not wrong to pray for the deliverance from suffering for others or ourselves. Clearly Jesus made a point of delivering many from their suffering. But I would just say that Jesus's miracles were more than just his random administering supernatural medicine to the ailing, but rather infusions of liberating life that were proleptic of a life in which all will share in the coming kingdom, which was already taking root in the hearts of those who encountered and recognized him. The intecessionary prayer that is more deeply appropriate for us in almost all situations, then, is not something like "Cure my cancer," but "Thy kingdom come."

Note 2: Plato's Republic is an exercise in utopian thinking, even if it depicts a regime  in which none of us would ever want to live. 

Note 3: All the excerpts that follow are from Bernard McGinn, The Foundation of Mysticism: Origins to the the Fifth Century, 1991, Crossroad/Herder & Herder. I indicate locations in the text with the abbreviated (Foundations, p. xx.) I don't always include in the excerpt McGinn's references to primary sources. You can get the book and check those on your own.

Note 4: I don't want to get into the weeds about apophaticism now because we'll get into that in the future. But it's a key theme that creates a paradoxical tension between the idea of a theistic personal God who cares about humans and a God that is beyond all understanding. 

Note 5: This is a theme I've talked quite a lot about, and is reflected in the quote from Max Scheler I posted the other day. It's also a theme that I relate to John Vervaeke's work as I discuss it in Parts 4A and 4B. Whether Scheler was aware of its similarity to Neoplatonic thinking I don't know.

Go to Part 11.

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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 December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

 

Genealogy Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism

The Greek tradition had been one of tolerance of others’ beliefs, an inclusive attitude to the gods, and one could see Constantine’s Edict as lying in that tradition. But by the end of the fourth century, such tolerance was a thing of the past, as the dispute between Symmachus and Ambrose over the Altar of Victory demonstrates. For the Greeks spirituality and rationality, muthos (mythos) and logos, could coexist without conflict. That muthoi could be ‘frozen in written form and interpreted to make statements of “truth” (logoi)’ was alien to the Greeks. But, as Freeman admits, there was resistance to such formulations in early Christianity, as well, and Christians as much as pagans suffered under Theodosius’ decree. What Freeman takes to be the contrast between Greek and Christian thought might better be seen, according to some scholars, as the contrast between, on the one hand, the flexibility of a way of thinking which can be found in the rich tradition of the early Christian fathers as well as in the paganism with which it co-existed (where the hemispheres, too, co-operated), and, on the other, a culture marked by a concern with legalistic abstractions, with ‘correctness’, and the dogmatic certainties of the left hemisphere, whether Greek or Christian, which inexorably replaced them.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7951-7962). 

To better understand the context in which Christian Neoplatonism arose, you need to have a feel for how crazy was the proliferation of all kinds of religions and mystery cults during the 650 years between Alexander and Constantine within the Greek and Roman world. That's more or less a stretch of time from where we are now in the 2000s back to the mid 1300s. A lot can happen during that amount of time, and a lot did. But the big story was the exportation of Greek civilization to the East and South, and the importation of Egyptian, Persian, and Indian mythologies, philosophies, and religions to the West.

Right dab in the middle of that stretch is when Christianity arose, and I would argue that the practice and thinking of the wisest Christian fathers was the product of their sifting and integrating what was most fruitful and healthful from all that cross fertilization from so many Axial sources. More recent attempts, mostly by Protestant scholars, to sift out from all that what was genuinely Christian from what was imported from paganism (that's biblical--good; that's pagan--bad) has always struck me as fussily narrow. Other attempts to portray the free-wheeling Gnostic heretical sects as the underdog fighting against the Orthodox "man" also miss the point.  

What's particularly interesting about what became the Catholic or Apostolic tradition was the way it sifted through all that, kept what was helpful, and tossed what wasn't. Sure the Catholic Church in later times, with its inquisitions and indexes, is viewed for good reason through contemporary eyes as being overly rigid about correct doctrine. But the Church in the first three centuries was more truly catholic in its openness to anything that enriched their experience and understanding of their new faith. It's a fascinating, fertile moment in the development of Western civilization, and it needs to be understood better than it is. 

To be a philosopher in the ancient world meant not primarily to be someone involved in some theoretical enterprise, but rather to adopt a way of life, a habitus, that involved disciplines designed to transform one's soul. It's interesting from a history-of-ideas perspective to know what was taught in the various schools, but more important is to understand the way of life to which one committed when joining a school. Some of these schools became models for monastic life for Christians later. There were numerous Greek Schools that spun off from Socratism--Cynicism, Stoicism, Cyrenaic Hedonism, Megaran Monism, and later Pyrrhonistic Skepticism,  Epicureanism, Stoicism, eclectic Middle Platonism, and then Neopythagoreanism.  All this went through its own sifting process culminating in Plotinian Neoplatonism in the mid 200s CE, which integrated Plato, Aristotle, and Neopythagoreanism. It was in the 200s CE that the Christian integrative project was taken to a new level in the remarkable figures, Clement and Origen. 

Middle Platonism (90 BCE-mid 200s CE) influenced the Jewish Alexandrine thinker Philo (d. 50 CE) and  provided a matrix for the proliferation of Jewish Gnostic sects throughout the Roman Empire. Throw into the mix the Manichaeans, Orphics, Mithraists, and dozens of smaller mystery religions and cults. It was a crazy hodgepodge of utter wackiness mixed in with sober, morally serious thinkers like Cicero, Plutarch, Cato the Younger, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and others. But as now 'anything goes', so then 'anything went'--so long as you weren't seen as politically subversive. 

Of these the most significant influences on Christian thinking and practice were Gnosticism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism. Gnosticism, because of its Jewish provenance had a significant impact on early Christianity, most notably in Paul's epistles, the Gospel of John, and the Gospel of Thomas. The last isn't canonical, but there's little in it that I can see that makes it heretically Gnostic. 

Ah, that word "heretic". Let's take a moment to clarify the meaning of this radioactive word:

We tend to think of all the controversies surrounding who's a heretic or not through the lens of modern pluralistic tolerance for difference. We celebrate the heretic as the free thinker, the one who marches to the beat of a different drummer, the creative crazy whom stuffy conventional thinkers fail to understand. It's important to understand that as with any cross-section of humanity, there always have been and will be anal Christians, but the really soul-crushing rigidity in the Church and its obsession with suppressing heretics didn't set in until after Constantine when the Roman Empire became the official sponsor of the Christian Church. The Christians' counter-cultural identity dissolves as the Church now becomes part of the establishment. More and more serious Christians leave society for wilderness monastic communities.   

Fundamentalism and rigid Dogmatism are for Christianity--or for any religion--a disease that infects those who don't know better, and too often the people who rise into positions of power are among the diseased, or they just don't care one way or another about 'truth'--they only care about maintaining the social order and the prerogatives that they enjoy at the top of it. The Renaissance popes come to mind, as do figures like the defrocked Cardinal McCarrick or Jim and Tammy Bakker, just to name a few of the most egregious in recent memory. This kind of self-serving corruption is endemic in any human organization, religious or secular.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy is only rarely suspended in the life of human communities. That this is true should not prejudice us against the truly wise and inspired thinkers who were the real singers in this dynamic historically evolving opera. Too much attention is paid to the house managers, the lawyers, and the accountants, the people who have a role to play in keeping the house lights on. But too often they think they are more important than the singers. People come to be inspired by the music, not to be told moralistic platitudes or to check the books or hear learned disquisitions on Canon Law. My goal in this Genealogy series is to celebrate the singers. 

But it's important to distinguish the compulsion for order and conformity from the need to discern what's better and worse. It's important to understand that many of the early inspired singers saw in "pagan" Greek philosophy and other spiritual movements a song with which they could harmonize. They saw in them a parallel revelation and ways of thinking and ways of life that they could learn from and adapt to their own belief and praxis. They were right to do so. And it's important to understand that as much as these early Christians took from pagan thought, they sifted through it to adapt what fit and to reject what didn't in the light of what they found transformative and liberating in the Christian song. (See an outline of these criteria below.) And it's important to at least entertain the possibility that maybe they were mostly right--and when they were wrong it was an honest, correctable mistake.

I don't know whether later in this series I'm going to get into a more detailed examination of Gnosticism--there are many Gnosticisms--but I will say for now that there are two principal things that made parts of Gnosticism incompatible with the great Christian tradition that took shape in these centuries. First, its rejection of the body and the inherent goodness of creation; second, its obsession with knowing magical formulae as essential for salvation. To see the body and the material world as evil or at least as limitations to be transcended flows from Platonism, and this matter/spirit dualism was problematic for early Christian thinkers who wanted to adapt Plato and Neoplatonism to enrich Christian experience. But the whole point of Gnosticism was to escape Prison Earth, which is ruled by a Cruel demonic overlord that some Gnostics identified with, Yaweh, the God of the Jews. This is one of the ancient sources for anti-Semitism--the idea that the Jews don't worship the true God, but a Gnostic demon. Can we all agree that such an idea is worthy to be tossed out as 'heretical'? 

This more pernicious aspect of Gnosticism is somewhat reflected in the Gospel of John, which has a tendency to blame the Jews for everything. But while I can recognize why John's Gospel might be difficult for Jews to read, it does not cross the line into Gnostic 'heresy'. So when you read "the Jews" in John's Gospel, you need to understand it as a reference to a religious power establishment that worked hand in hand with the Romans to kill the best and wisest man in Jerusalem. Plato blamed democracy for killing the best and wisest man in Athens. You can understand why either might have an axe to grind with their respective poltical-cultural establishments. What was historically contingent for these writers cannot be extrapolated into some general principle, as alas, too many have done with evil effect. 

The Gnostics in the ancient world were known for their arrogance, their insistence that they knew better because they had the secret knowledge and formulas essential for salvation. A good example that illustrates how this persists even today appeared in the news last week. Some reactionary Catholics have their shorts all in a knot because a priest in Arizona when baptizing people throughout his career said "We baptize you..." instead of the prescribed "I baptize you...." If you accept the premise that the incorrect use of one word is consequential, then all kinds of chaos follows, which the article details. To obsess about exact wording like this is a characteristic of Gnosticism. It should be pointed out that most of the people in this priest's parish don't see this as a big deal and see their priest, now retired, as a beloved, warm, menschy guy. 

But there were (and are) all kinds of Gnosticisms, and while some of it is contrary to the originary genius of Christianity, much of it was and is consonant with it. Again we see this in John, Paul, and Thomas. Those centuries before Constantine were an important time for wise Christian thinkers to sift out what was harmful or nonsense from what was fruitful. And so before talking about what the most important of these early Christian thinkers contributed to the development of Christian Neoplatonism, I want to lay out what I see as key criteria that the early fathers used  to guide them in their sifting project. I am excerpting what follows from my summary of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age which covers the key criteria or what he calls "axes of significance":

Taylor argues that during the Patristic period, Christian thinkers wanted to use Greek ideas to help them to articulate their understanding of the significance of the Christian revelation. There were elements in Greek thinking, particularly from Aristotle, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism that were helpful, and there were other elements that were distortive. Much of the arguing during this period focused on how much one gains or gives up in using Greek ideas to establish a Christian ontology and moral order. Taylor argues that the struggle was argued out on six axes of significance where Christian ideas using the Greek philosophical framework made significant alterations that were to have a significant shaping effect on the imaginaries of medieval Christendom:

1. The significance of the body. While Greek spirit/body dualism persisted in some Christian thought, the more significant dualism for Christians was the one articulated by Augustine's "two loves" (love of self vs. love of God), based on the Jewish dualism of the heart of stone versus the heart of flesh. It is not the body that presents a problem qua body. The problem rather is to determine what is worthy of our love, or to put it another way, what is worthy of our 'ultimate concern' and what obstructs or distracts us from loving that which is truly worthy. That is a function of the predisposition of the heart. The life in the body is validated for Christians by its havng been hallowed by the Incarnation and the resurrection. The body has been redeemed in a way impossible to embrace within the pure Greek scheme. The goal is not to escape from the body but to transform it, to sanctify it. 

2. The significance of history. The Incarnation gives history and the events that happen in it a significance not found in Greek thought. In addition, the Greek idea of eternity--the beginninglessness and endlessness of time--is replaced by the Jewish/Christian idea of creation and the idea of history's eschatological culmination at the end of time. History has a plot: it is  a story of falling away and return. For Christians the turning point in the plot is the Incarnation, and the end point is the eschatological gathering of all time together in the communion of the saints. The lives of the saints are the lives that depict the story of return--of alienation and reconciliation. The Prodigal Son is the archetype.

3. The significance of the individual person. Individuation was not particularly important for Greek thought. But for Christians the significance of history enhances the importance of the individual whose eternal destiny is worked out in time. This sense of the individual is not important in the Plotinian Neoplatonist ontology, for instance, for which the goal is rather Eastern in the sense of the individual overcoming the illusion of individuation and melting back into the cosmic pleroma. And while for Aristotle the physical body was important, the individual had particularity only insofar as it is secured by matter. No body, no individuation. The eternal desinty of the individuated immortal soul is a Christian preoccupation. There's a lot of murkiness about the status of the individual in Aristotle's post-death existence, but the ultimate destiny of the human person is to be bodily transformed as Christ's body was transformed in the resurrection. Individuation and the Body are linked in this very important sense. 

4. The significance of contingency. Stoic fatalism and Plotinian necessity requires that things are exactly as they should be because they could not be any other way because God could not have created any other world. The human task for classical Stoics and Neoplatonists is simply amor fati. The idea of changing anything for the better or that there there could be such a thing as human progress is futile and delusional. This idea is challenged by Christian ideas of freedom and grace--although Plotinian necessity is still echoed in Augustine's and later Calvin's bizarrely un-Christian doctrine of double predestination. The more authentically Christian position is that there is no total plan, God created a more interesting universe than that. Here's Taylor view: 

...the Christian eschaton is made up of paths, of stories. And these are shaped by contingencies. That the stories end well is sometimes seen as their having been rigorously scripted from the beginning. This is often what people call Providence, following the Stoics. God plans sins, so that he can script in some mercy. 

But a rather different model is suggested by the Bible. God's Providence is his ability to respond to whatever the universe and human agency throw up. God is like a skilled tennis player, who can always return the serve. We can see this mode, for instance, in the famous phrase of the Preface of [the] Easter Vigil:"O felix culpa" (happy fault), applied to Adam's sin; happy because it brought such a response from God to redeem it. . . .

[The Good Samaritan story] takes us beyond any established relation into the domain of accident or contingency: my neighbour is someone I come across, bleeding in the road. It was sheer accident that I came along at just that time; but this accident can be the occasion for rebuilding a skein of human relations animated by agape. The Samaritan's action is part of God's response to the skewed serve the robbers have lobbed into history. (SA p. 275)

5. The significance of the emotions. Life in the body is good, and it is humanity's eternal destiny to be embodied, so the challenge is not to suppress the emotions, but to transform them. Emotion and desire are affirmed, and Stoic apatheia is rejected. The idea of a compassionate, suffering God was an impossible idea for Greek thought, and a stumbling block for anyone whose thought was deeply embedded in the Greek imaginary. And unlike Buddhism, desire qua desire is not the problem so much as on what the human heart focuses its desire and its longing, on what it loves--see number 1 above. 

6. The significance of God as ‘person’ capable of ‘communion’. The Cappadocian formulation of the Trinity is of three persons in communion. God’s intervention in history, and in particular the Incarnation, was intended to transform us through making us partakers of the communion which God already lives, and so that we become what we were created to be, fully individuated persons in the image and likeness of Him who created us. It was, in this sense, an intervention meant to make possible our “deification” (theosis). Salvation is thwarted to the extent that we treat God as an impersonal being or as merely the creator of an impersonal order to which we have to adjust. Salvation is only effected by our being in communion with God through the community of humans in communion with one another.

This understanding of communion as the telos of history is the central idea, the hermeneutic key, without which it is impossible to understand the animating spirit of the Christian revelation. If you want basic criteria to judge whether someone who claims to be Christian is truly animated by the spirit of the gospels, you can do so by evaluating to what degree he wants to include rather than exclude, to embrace rather than shun, to give the benefit of the doubt rather than to judge, to forgive rather than condemn, to converse with the enemy rather than to attack him, to obsess about rules rather than the quality of relationship. Yes, Christians are admonished to be wise as serpents and guileless as doves. This is a warning to be not foolish or naive, but while the dove and the serpent need to be talking to one another, the dove sets the agenda. Too much church history, especially the kind that has been motivated by concerns about institutional preservation, alas, has come from the serpent setting the agenda, and for this reason its spectacular failures and its loss of spiritual authority in the broader culture. 

These six themes will be central to the story I want to tell regarding the rise and fall of Christian Neoplatonism in the West, and also as to whether something like it is possible to provide a mythos dimension in a post-secular society.

But another theme central to the Neoplatonic tradition that I want explore in this series is its participatory epistemology. The important thing that Western civilization had through its Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary were assumptions that allowed for a knowledge born of wonder and of a need to deepen one's understanding of the world as an act of love. This idea of knowledge as eros was central to the pagan Neoplatonists and to the Christians who learned from them while inspired by the agapic ideals of the gospels.

We'll talk about how this way of knowing was lost during the late-medieval period and how its loss laid the groundwork for the rupture between science and religion in the modern period. I see that rupture as one that can be healed, and must be healed eventually if a metaphysical imaginary that includes a wisdom or vertical dimension is to be restored some time in the future.  

If an epistemology that is based on participatory knowledge becomes the new norm in philosophy and cognitive science, as I think it will, it changes the game. Heidegger and Scheler got the ball rolling, Buber and Merleau-Ponty were important figures in the last century that should have been paid more attention to than all the stuff that came out the squabble between Structuralists and Post-Structuralists. Owen Barfield is also important here in a way that is too much overlooked. We see more recently Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke picking up the baton, relating these thinkers to neuroscience and cognitive science in ways that are pregnant with possibilities for some future integration of Logos and Mythos. 

That's where I eventually want to wind up in this series, and we'll see if I have the energy and perseverance to get there. Even so, it might take a while.

Go to Part 10.

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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 December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

Genealogy Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic

Whether the goal was to convert, to console, to cure, or to exhort the audience, the point was always and above all not to communicate to them some ready-made knowledge but to form them. In other words, the goal was to learn a type of know-how; to develop a habitus, or new capacity to judge and to criticize; and to transform--that is, to change people's way of living and of seeing the world. If, then  we remember that philosophy's assertions are intended not to communicate knowledge but to form and to train, it will come as no surprise if we find aporiai in Plato, Aristotle, or Plotinus in which thought seems to be enclosed--points at which there are reformulations, repetitions, and apparent incoherences. 

Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?  p. 274.

To lay the foundation for what I want to say about Christian Neoplatonism, we have to spend some time understanding what Plato was about. This includes correcting some rather entrenched misunderstandings about Plato as a rationalist obsessed with dessicated abstractions. This is the picture we get of him in the McGilchrist's Chapter 8: "The Ancient World" where he says talking about Plato and his impact--

The reliance on reason downgrades not just the testimony of the senses, but all our implicit knowledge. This was the grounds of Nietzsche’s view that Socrates, far from being the hero of our culture, was its first degenerate, because Socrates had lost the ability of the nobles to trust intuition: ‘Honest men, he wrote, ‘do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion.’‘What must first be proved is worth little,’ Nietzsche continues in The Twilight of the Idols : 'one chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive.'

...

In this later Greek world, truth becomes something proved by argument. The importance of another, ultimately more powerful, revealer of truth, metaphor, is forgotten; and metaphor, in another clever inversion, comes even to be a lie, though perhaps a pretty one. So the statements of truth contained in myth become discounted as ‘fictions’, that is to say untruths or lies – since, to the left hemisphere, metaphor is no more than this.

The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7731-52).

?!What Plato or Socrates is he talking about? Certainly not one that I'm acquainted with. Certainly not the Socrates of The Symposium or Phaedrus. The dialogues are teeming with metaphors, analogies, parables. I think McGilchrist is relying too much on Nietzsche's agenda-laden perspective and extrapolating in an unbalanced way from some unfortunate passages in The Republic, which are what they are. But Plato's political ruminations need to be understood in the context of what all his dialogs were--imaginative thought experiments, not doctrine. 

Rationality was important for Plato, but he was not first and foremost a rationalist;  he was rather a mystic and contemplative visionary. This side of Plato I think has been an embarrassment to most modern readers, and they either dismiss that aspect of his philosophizing as wink-wink-ironic or as his just using conventional phraseology of his time, the way atheists will say today, 'Oh my god', or that was a desperate 'Hail Mary' move. 

Both Hadot and McGinn correct this error, and McGinn points out that even if Plato were not a mystic or visionary, everybody in his time and in the centuries following thought he was. And the whole goal of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy in the schools that they founded was theoreia, a contemplative vision of the Divine One. The meaning of theoreia is very different from our 'theoretic' or theoretical', which suggests abstract thinking. There is nothing abstract about the contemplative vision of the One, which was for the visionary an overwhelming, ineffable, ecstatic experience of the Really Real, and to try to understand ancient philosophy without that experience as foundational to its project is to deeply misunderstand it.

So the metaphysical speculations of the ancients were provisional attempts to articulate or make some sense about what the nature of the Real is in the light of such experiences. But isn't this true of all philosophers who are worth paying attention to? They have a foundational intuition, and their philosophy is their attempt to extrapolate from it. The quality of their philosophy depends on the quality and richness of their intuitions. You cannot understand any "original" philosopher unless you can grasp his or her foundational intuitions, which may or may not be foregrounded in his discursive explication of them. 

It's with this in mind that we must understand Plato's so-called doctrine of the Ideas: He's trying to give an account concerning how the world that we experience with the senses relates to this other transcendent realm that was disclosed to him in awakened visionary experience. There is no doctrine here--just metaphors, analogies, myths to make some attempt to give an account of his experience. Experience, not abstraction is the foundation here. I'm not going to belabor the argument. If you need more evidence read McGinn (Chapter 2, "The Greek Contemplative Ideal") and Hadot (chapters in Part 2: "Philosophy as a Way of Life").

A similar misunderstanding relates to the idea of the 'Intellect' in the Greek transcendental philosophy. It's not about intelligence in the IQ sense or about being an intellectual in the modern sense. It's about Nous (See Note 1), the the divine part of the human soul, which is a dormant faculty that when awakened is capable of contemplating the divine and divine things like the transcendentals. Nous is the divine faculty that inheres in the human mind that must be activated or "remembered" in order to be capable of cognizing the divine. (See Comment 1) This is a different idea than the biblical assertion that humans are created in the image and likeness of God, but it's kissing cousins with it, and it will play a role in Patristic thinking about divinization or 'theosis'.

I want to spend some time here developing what I began in Part 3 about the Socratic elenchus. Hadot argues that Plato's dialogues were simply provisional training exercises, models for the kind of thing that students undertook in his Academy. The idea was to use dialectic discourse to see if thinking in this format could "birth" an insight. Tibetan Buddhist monks use dialectic for the same "training" purposes. The exercise often ended in aporia, without any conclusion, i.e., without any insight having been birthed.Theaetetus provides a good example. The goal is an attempt on Socrates' part to think out loud mostly with his young interlocutor Theaetetus, a budding math prodigy, to see if together they can come to some understanding about what 'knowledge' truly is.

The foil here is Protagoras's doctrine that 'man is the measure of all things', which in the context of this dialog is interpreted to mean that every human being determines for himself what is true or not true, what is knowledge or opinion. Clearly for Socrates that's not satisfactory. This is one of my favorite dialogues for the way it depicts Socrates' charming garrulity--his menschy warmth, his wit, his sincere desire to understand and to help others to fully realize what lies sleeping within them--and his ability to admit when a question cannot be answered. That's how this dialog ends up:

SOCRATES And are you still in labour and travail, my dear friend, or have you brought all that you have to say about knowledge to the birth?

THEAETETUS: I am sure, Socrates, that you have elicited from me a good deal more than ever was in me.

SOCRATES And does not my art show that you have brought forth wind, and that the offspring of your brain are not worth bringing up?

THEAETETUS: Very true.

SOCRATES But if, Theaetetus, you should ever conceive afresh, you will be all the better for the present investigation, and if not, you will be soberer and humbler and gentler to other men, and will be too modest to fancy that you know what you do not know. These are the limits of my art; I can no further go, nor do I know aught of the things which great and famous men know or have known in this or former ages. (Jowett translation)

Socrates earlier describes himself as a midwife to bring out of or to birth in his interlocutors something that is latent in their minds or souls. In this dialogue the exercise failed, insofar as he and Theaetetus were unable to develop a satisfactory explanation for what knowledge is. Socrates has spent most of the dialog excluding all the things that people, Theaetetus and others, wrongly think knowledge is, but after all that, they cannot develop any satisfactory idea about what it is. But the exercise was not in vain, because the beginning of wisdom is to know what you don't know.

But that doesn't close off the possibility of future insight--the possibility of "conceiving afresh" in the future. There is a timing or kairos dimension to birthing in this sense. One can prepare for it, but it cannot be forced. It comes as a kind of gift. It is in this sense that habitus becomes heuristic. A constellation of practices--habitus--structure a salience landscape that is open to, indeed aspires to, transcend its constraints.

The heuristic aspect lies in the hunch that self-transcendence is a possibility. So one becomes a philosopher as a way of life is to adopt a habitus that engages practices as a heuristic exercise on a hunch that such self-transcendence is a possibility for oneself. Philosophy is not primarily rational exercise. It uses rationality to subvert rationality. One trusts in the efficacy of the practices because of the testimony of those living and dead who have proved their effectiveness. But that doesn't mean that these practices will be effective in any particular case. But because they often fail does not prove them invalid.

One of the consequences of inhabiting such a habitus is that you come to see the world around you as a provisional mental construct--what I've been calling an imaginary. An imaginary organizes our experience of the world in more or less adequate ways, but its adequacy is measured by its approximation to ontonormative truth--truths glimpsed in states of higher consciousness. This points to the insight Plato's Allegory of the Cave would have the reader understand--the world construct we live in is, relatively speaking, an illusion, at least in comparison to how we might understand it if we had minds whose 'divine' potential was fully realized. In the meanwhile, aporia is the beginning of wisdom. Aporia is a heuristic that opens up the possibility for true knowledge.

A similar arrival at aporia is the result at the end of Meno in which the question is whether virtue is teachable. At first glance, most of us would think it possible if one finds a person of true virtue from whom one could learn, but Socrates is interested here in the particular virtue or wisdom of statesmen like Pericles and Themistocles. Neither stinted in his children's education, and yet this education did not produce men of notable statesmen-like virtue. So it seems surprisingly evident that virtue is not teachable. But even more surprising is Socrates' saying that these prodigies of statesmen-like virtue were effective because they had right opinion, which means that they had no knowledge, and so no real clue why their judgments proved so consistently reliable. They made good judgments, but could not give an account of how they came to them, and so they were incapable of teaching others how to develop this particular capacity for statesmen-like virtue--

SOCRATES But if not by knowledge, the only alternative which remains is that statesmen must have guided states by right opinion, which is in politics what divination is in religion; for diviners and also prophets say many things truly, but they know not what they say.

MENEXENUS: So I believe.

SOCRATES And may we not, Meno, truly call those men "divine" who, having no understanding, yet succeed in many a grand deed and word?

MENEXENUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES Then we shall also be right in calling divine those whom we were just now speaking of as diviners and prophets, including the whole tribe of poets. Yes, and statesmen above all may be said to be divine and illumined, being inspired and possessed of God, in which condition they say many grand things, not knowing what they say.

MENEXENUS: Yes.

...

SOCRATES Then, Meno, the conclusion is that virtue comes to the virtuous by the gift of God. But we shall never know the certain truth until, before asking how virtue is given, we enquire into the actual nature of virtue. 

A few things interest me about this passage. First, that, as in Theaetetus, while there is no adequate insight birthed with regard to the question under discussion, that does not mean that this is the end of it. The question needs further thought, and perhaps before understanding whether virtue is teachable, one needs to understand what virtue itself is.

Second, clearly the Socrates depicted here near the end of his life is no enemy of poets, diviners, and prophets. To dismiss this as Socrates' being ironic is silly. Socrates often describes himself as being inspired by some god or muse, and I take him at his word. Nevertheless, this is not knowledge because individual human human agency has nothing to do with it--they are simply channeling the gods.

And third, following on this, his idea here of 'divine' strikes me as Homeric in its pre-Axiality. It's the kind of thing Dreyfus and Kelly are pointing to in All Things Shining, which is that the gods shine through certain people who are otherwise rather ordinary. It is not they as humans who have achieved any level of virtue by their own agency, but it is rather that they are virtuous because they are favored by the gods. Nothing is changed or transformed in them as a result of their being channels. There's no transformative self-transcendence involved.

The Socratic project--and the Axial project in general--is not about being a passive puppet of the gods, but about becoming an an autonomous, free, active moral agent, a fully realized Self who becomes such by the awakening/birthing/remembering of latent capacities of mind or soul. The goal is not just to do good, but to become formed by the Good. One adopts a habitus of virtue as a heuristic path of self-transformation. To act virtuously does not mean you are virtuous--the habitus is not virtue. It's a praxis that makes becoming truly formed by virtue more likely. 

Dreyfus and Kelly in their book want to retrieve this pre-Axial sense of the "moods" of Being as a strategy to deal with the contemporary meaning crisis. As with John Vervaeke, I admire them for taking this on and the risks that are attendant to their reputations in the way they go about it, but I am not satisfied with what they are doing, and neither do I think would be Socrates for reasons explained in the preceding paragraph. And because neither purely naturalistic explanations (Vervaeke) or pre-Axial/Heideggerian (Dreyfus & Kelly) explanations are fully adequate or satisfying, even though both are definitely important parts of a bigger picture.

Now my point here is simply to elaborate on what Hadot points out in the epigraph: in the case of Theaetetus or Meno, the goal was for Socrates to "not to communicate to them some ready-made knowledge but to form them". The task, in other words, for Socrates was to assist them with his midwife's art to become self-transformative by their awakening of an innate capacity to cognize transcendental truth, which from other dialogs we know to be the only real knowledge. Socrates' purpose in his conversation with them was to see if he could help "birth" in them their own realization about what real knowledge and virtue are. If successful they experience an awakening in some small degree of their Nous, and in doing so move toward becoming more authentically, deeply who they are, i.e., more conformed to the divine, not just channels for it. (Again, see Comment 1) 

In both cases there were no births, but that doesn't mean that such a birth for either would not be possible in the future. Or maybe one or the other of them will wake up in the middle of the night with an insight or the kind of birth that Socrates is looking for. The point of using logic, with all due respect to Nietzsche, is not to deduce one's way to the truth, but to show the limits of logic, so as to open up a less constrained salience landscape that allows for a new insight--or perhaps even a visionary experience--to emerge. 

That's the point Hadot is making in the epigraph. The task isn't to argue about who's right or wrong about this theory or that, but to have a transformative experience in a disclosure of some kind that breaks into our ordinary, day-to-day consciousness from outside of it. The experience is what it is, and the evidence that lots of people have these experiences is well established. The only controversy is how to interpret them, and that depends on your metaphysical frame. The task for me in this Genealogy series is to make the case that the Christian Neoplatonic tradition has an interpretation that provides robust interpretations of experience if we accept the criteria laid out in previous posts--scope, coherence, richness, and adaptability. 

So there are certain practices--the use of Logos in dialectic is one of them and contemplation (theoreia) is another--that prepare the way insofar as they organize one's thinking and attention so that, first, one knows what he does not know (the use of dialectic), and second, that one does know when he has birthed genuine insight--in contemplation or in other contexts of awareness or attention. I like Vervaeke's explanation of 'insight' as the flash that occurs when we transcend the constraints of our current salience landscape. He talks about it as a 'transjective' process, and at some point I'll come back to explore that. 

The use of 'Logos' is a horizontal practice that prepares for insights on the vertical dimension, but is used also to test their validity and to make sense of the world in the light of them. And in a broader sense Logos is exercised by the sapiential community that has a role in determining whether an individual's insight on the vertical dimension is valid or delusional and how it ought to be interpreted in a way that is most fruitful for the individual as well as for the broader community.

Fruitfulness is measured by the way insights increase the scope, coherence, and richness of one's personal imaginary, but also in many cases to support, enrich, or expand the broader cultural imaginary. In other words, certain tried-and-true traditional practices--habitus--work heuristically to frame individual and community aspirations  so that they lead to insights that enrich, support, and expand the tradition. All this depends on these practices actually working to connect the individual and his community to the Living Real. Once they stop performing this connective function for whatever reason, a society starts to reel in ontological dizziness. 

If I were not so prolix, I would stop here, but I wanted to say a word about Plato's dialogue Parmenides. When I first read it, I thought the second half was a spoof. It was rather like Colbert's mocking Sarah Palin or Kevin McCarthy for their abuse of language or stretching it beyond its usefulness. The conversation between Parmenides and Aristotles in the second half is an exercise in what Vervaeke calls combinatorial explosiveness in which the mind is either chased off or bludgeoned into submission by a superfluity of logic.

My first take was that Plato wrote this as a refutation of the monism propounded by a pompous Parmenides and his condescending student Zeno by allowing the man to condemn himself with his own bloviation, by the stupefying absurdity of his taking logic where it cannot go. This is a dialog that ends not in aporia but in dogma. And it is hard to believe that anyone is transformed by it unless being bruised and bloodied is what you mean by being transformed. If this is the use of logic or dialectic to which Nietzsche and McGilchrist are pointing, I couldn't agree more. But it should be pointed out that Socrates is not participating at all in this dialectical exercise. It has nothing to do with him. The young nineteen-year-old Socrates, if anything, is dubious about the monistic 'doctrine' of Parmenides and Zeno. 

But I don't know if it's so easy to dismiss Parmenides. Socrates says in Theaetetus referencing this meeting with Parmenides--

that I have a kind of reverence; not so much for Melissus and the others, who say that "All is one and at rest," as for the great leader himself, Parmenides, venerable and awful, as in Homeric language he may be called;--him I should be ashamed to approach in a spirit unworthy of him. I met him when he was an old man, and I was a mere youth, and he appeared to me to have a glorious depth of mind. And I am afraid that we may not understand his words, and may be still further from understanding his meaning;

And it's interesting to me that Ficino thought this dialog was profound. So I remain open to there being something in it I cannot yet grasp, and in future might yet be birthed in me. But I suspect that the real import of the dialog will be best understood in a broader discussion of apophaticism, which will be an important focus in future posts. 

Go to Part 9.

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Note 1: That McGilchrist misreads Plato, does not take away from the importance of his broader argument. He makes distinction between 'Reason' and 'Rationality' that is helpful in understanding the distinction between Nous and Logos.The distinction is rather like the one in German between Vernunft and Verstand:

Reality was not, as Goethe and the Romantics came to see, the fixed and unchanging state of affairs that the left hemisphere assumes. ‘The phenomenon must never be thought of as finished or complete’, Goethe wrote, ‘but rather as evolving, growing, and in many ways as something yet to be determined.’ Interestingly, in the light of the last chapter, he noted that ‘ Vernunft [reason] is concerned with what is becoming, Verstand [rationality] with what has already become … [Reason] rejoices in whatever evolves; [rationality] wants to hold everything still, so that it can utilise it’. That we take part in a changing world, and that the world evokes faculties, dimensions, and characteristics in us, just as we bring aspects of the world into existence, is perhaps the most profound perception of Romanticism. This was not an idea or theory, but, for the Romantics, an incarnate reality. One can see it in the paintings and feel it in the poetry of the period. It is related to the sense of depth which is everywhere conveyed in its art.

McGilchrist,  The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 9563-9569)

Reason/Nous/Vernunft operates on the vertical; Rationality/Logos/Verstand operates on the horizontal. The first is more the domain of the right hemisphere, the second the domain of the left. I hope I've made the case that McGilchrist ought to have understood that Socrates/Plato's use of dialectic was part of an unfinished, evolving quest of the mind for greater understanding in the sense that Goethe means 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 December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

 

 

Genealogy Part 7: The Bigger Picture

[For Nietzsche t]he Overman or post-human animal is he who freed himself from those forms of sham religion known as Nature, Reason, Man and Morality. Only this audacious animal can peer into the abyss of the Real and find in the death of God the birth of a new species of humanity. As with Christian faith, the only place to begin is with a confession that our hands are steeped in the blood of divinity. Man, too, must be dismantled, in so far as he is modeled on the unity and infinity of the godhead. He is defined so completely by his dependence on his Creator that the two must fall together. There can be no obsequies for the Almighty without a funeral ceremony for humanity as well. The death of God must herald the death of Man, in the sense of the craven, guilt-ridden, dependent creature who bears that name at present. What will replace him is the Overman. Yet in his sovereignty over Nature and lordly self dependence, the Overman has more than a smack of divinity about him, which means, ironically, that God is not dead after all. What will replace him continues to be an image of him.

That the death of God involves the death of Man, along with the birth of a new form of humanity, is orthodox Christian doctrine, a fact of which Nietzsche seems not to have been aware. The Incarnation is the place where both God and Man undergo a kind of kenosis or self-humbling, symbolized by the self-dispossession of Christ. Only through this tragic self-emptying can a new humanity hope to emerge. In its solidarity with the outcast and afflicted, the crucifixion is a critique of all hubristic humanism. Only through a confession of loss and failure can the very meaning of power be transfigured in the miracle of resurrection. The death of God is the life of the iconoclast Jesus, who shatters the idolatrous view of Yahweh as irascible despot and shows him up instead as vulnerable flesh and blood.   --Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

It's clear to me, anyway, that our life here on earth has a purpose, and that the future of the earth is central to that purpose. And yet it's clear that for most Christians this history, or any sense of humans being part of an evolving historical drama, has little to do with their understanding of who they are, where they came from, and where they are going. I think there is a mythopoetic narrative possibility here that awaits its moment to emerge into a legitimate space that has not yet been prepared for it. We live now in a time when all grand narratives are suspect, but that will not always be true. It's just a sign of the temporarily "decadent" stage through which we must pass in our time. We are at a historically low slack tide now, and soon enough we will be dealing with the flood tide and its aftermath.

In the meanwhile, the default Christian mythopoesis about history seems to depend strongly on the "exile" model--history is jail time: we do our time on the earth following the rules as best we can so that we can get out of jail on good behavior and go to our heavenly home in the spiritual pleroma. This model, in my opinion, is more Buddhist or Hindu than Christian. In such a model the earth is a prison to be escaped. I think of the earth rather as our ailing, semi-comatose mother whom humans must find a way to nurse back to health.

And so the exile model also enervates rather than energizes progressive political action by focusing on goals to be realized in eternity rather than in history. The Enlightenment idea of historical progress has likewise suffered enervation. Like all grand narratives, its assumptions have been debunked by postmodern deconstructive skepticism. And so the secular Left, because of its now postmodern assumptions, has no plausible narrative of human progress that it can embrace unironically, and so has become feckless in the face of threats from a more robust, grounded, regressive Right.

At its energetic best the postmodern secular Left musters something like Occupy Wall Street, but because of its anarchic, foundation-less ethos, it has no ground to stand upon and so to sustain itself. The Enlightenment model, including its Marxist offshoots, was always flawed because too dependent on a flattened understanding of the human being and its aspirations, and it is hard for me to see any plausible sustainable resistance to the Right that is not grounded in an imagination of human possibility that is deeper and richer than the flattened, postmodern model of the human to which the secular Left largely subscribes. 

But because the Enlightenment narrative for human progress has failed does not mean that another narrative of human progress cannot be framed. And I would argue that once there is a broader willingness to recognize that Christian ontological foundations can legitimately provide a framework for its development, Christian thinkers and activists can play a pivotal role in shaping such a future narrative. That foundation is already there; it always was. The Enlightenment narrative grew from a reductive misappropriation of it. We are clearly not at a point where the broader culture and its public intellectuals are willing to recognize that fact, but it's interesting to me that a Marxist like Eagleton seems to be working his way toward it, and that is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. Maybe, maybe not. Eagleton, at least, understands the terms of the problem.

***

Owen Barfield in his book Saving the Appearances provides a mythopoetic way to think about the Christian meaning of history that I, at least, find compelling. For me it's a heuristic device, a provisional way to organize and hold random things I believe together with an openness to a better way presenting itself. Barfield understood the problem of modern cultural decline in much the same way Nietzsche did, but he frames it as a necessary, if risk-fraught, middle phase in the unfolding of a larger historical drama. This drama extends back in the evolution of human consciousness to what he calls Original Participation and forward to Final Participation, i.e., from the metaphorical Garden of the beginning times to the metaphorical New Jerusalem of the far-distant end times, from the participation mystique of totemic and animistic peoples, to the communion of saints envisioned in Revelations.

These ideas are similar to Teilhard de Chardin's evolutionary mythopoesis regarding the movement of history from the Alpha to Omega, from creation of the cosmos to the true telos of history at which point all things converge in Christ. Both Barfield and Teilhard take evolution seriously, but in a way that hearkens back more to Hegel than to Darwin. (See Note 1) The mechanics of Darwinian biological evolution are mostly accepted but subsumed into a larger movement that is geist-driven, i.e., spirit or mind driven--or, as I would put it, grounded in an understanding of how the world is dynamically grounded in the Logos, what I have been calling in other posts the Living Real. 

Like Nietzsche, Barfield agrees that the modern era has been a time in which the last vestiges of transcendent meaning as a 'given' in the world have disappeared—transcendent meaning is no longer something a truly modern consciousness experiences as coming from out there. Moderns experience meaning partly from acculturation, but while that provides the scaffolding, the most intense experiences of meaning are subjective and constituted from within. But with this enhancement of subjectivity comes social fragmentation, anomie, fecklessness, enervation--and with it the progressive undermining of the cultural scaffolding that has brought us to this postmodern moment. So the solution must be to awaken capacities in the human soul and the soul of the earth (which are the same thing) in order that meaning in the world be reconstituted. The movement toward Final Participation is a movement toward an intersubjective communion: the alienation of the subject-object rift is repaired, all beings become Thous. The lion lies down with the lamb, and swords are refashioned into plowshares.

For Nietzsche this reconstituting project assumes a world without grace and without the possibility of communion--it is radically individualist. If there is any meaning to be created, it derives from the ontologically groundless uebermensch and his surrender to the will to power. For Barfield's postmodern Christian, the reconstituting project derives from an ontological grounding in the Logos that dwells in the depths of the human soul and the soul of the world. For Barfield it is possible, indeed essential, that meaning be constituted by a different kind of ‘overcoming’ man, not Nietzsche's uebermensch, but rather the Logos awakener, the man or woman in whom the shattered or broken image of the Logos in whose likeness they were created can itself be reconstituted: awakened, healed or reintegrated into a joyful communion with the cosmos.

Whether currently believable or not by most non-believers, this narrative opens up human possibilities rather than closes them off, and it provides a frame that helps to shape a humanity-enhancing political agenda. The bigger problem as I see it is that most Christians don't believe it either because they are still locked in the Exile model. If Christians don't live it, or something like it, they offer no real alternative to the prevailing narratives of the secular Left or the inflamed Right. 

If for the postmodern Christian, meaning is fundamentally subjective, that does not mean it is arbitrary or ungrounded. It just means that the grounding is intrinsic, and lies within the supple, grace-inspired, Logos-grounded human heart rather than in the cultural nomos. We are still in a fraught intermediary stage insofar as we still feel compelled to privilege objective truth as real truth, which we still see in the vestiges of in positivistic science. But the understanding of truth as subjective to which Kierkegaard pointed, and then later Nietzsche, directs us to an understanding the rest of us have to catch up to. For both the postmodern Christian and Nietzsche, truth is not static and timeless; it's creative, dynamic, and evolving, but if for Nietzsche truth is basically stuff the "post-human animal" makes up as he goes along, for the postmodern Christian it is deeply grounded in a creative, evolving understanding of the Logos's awakening in history. It is, therefore, about discovering depths and potentialities in the Logos-grounded human being heretofore unrealized. For Christians the image of those potential capacities fully realized is the risen Christ. 

***

An epochal shift occurred on the first Easter that has not yet been fully accomplished. The nature of this shift didn’t manifest itself broadly in the West until the time of the Renaissance and the dawn of the Modern period when individual inwardness and the autonomy of the thinking self became more broadly experienced by humans for many reasons, not the least of which was the broadening of literacy after Gutenberg. Modernity has been very much the Age of the Eye; whatever we're moving into now will involve a different McLuhanite ratio of the senses, and with it a corresponding shift in consciousness that is even now underway. 

The ancient Israelites were the "Chosen" people because they were "given" the Law on Mt. Sinai. If at first the law was given extrinsically on slabs of stone, the Law has worked to soften the heart to be vulnerable enough to receive an awakening of the Law, i.e., the Kingdom of God, i.e., the rule of Justice, that Christians believe became a new possibility for humans through his birth, death, and resurrection. This new Law is like an infusion of blood in the sick soul of the earth and of the humans who live on it, and is the salubrious power by which the law of tooth and talon becomes subverted by the law of Justice and Peace.  

Since those events, that Law has been gradually awakening in the depths of human souls of many who recognize it intrinsically or intuitively, whether or not they are Christians or even believers of any kind. It's just there as an ontological fact. The only question is whether humans will hearken to it and align their lives with it. To the degree that they do, they become "justified". What's important is, first, the intuition of Justice as an inspiring trasncendental that calls us to live at a higher level, i.e., to live by a law that subverts the "natural" inclination to live in accordance with the will to power, greed, and joyless pleasure.

The Logos sings the secret song that the entire cosmos sings; we hear it and hearken to it with the grace-inspired heart--the conscience--and the more developed the conscience the more clearly heard the song. The condition of being fallen is the condition of not being able to hear the song.

The great saints sing this song and dance spontaneously to its rhythm. But all humans of good will, believers or unbelievers, hear it to some degree whether they recognize its source or not. Christians are those who identify it as the Logos and who believe that the human capacity to hear this song at all depended on the events we celebrate during Holy Week. It is therefore something that is extra-subjective, in the sense that it is the song of the Cosmos, but our way to it is by first awakening to its sounding within. And as it sounds in one heart it has the power to awaken its sound in the hearts of others, and eventually it will be a song heard and sung everywhere and developed everywhere. That's my image of Final participation, the Omega point, and of how we are to find our way to it.

For Barfield these changes  in human consciousness during the modern period have not been spiritually regressive despite the secularism and materialism that have accompanied them. He recognizes that for the educated urban dweller in the West, religious language and ritual have lost almost all of their sacred power as something given to us from a meaning world out there in culture. But that does not mean that what comes to us as given from the tradition is therefore untrue or unbelievable as atheists insist. Does that mean, then, that rituals like the Catholic mass because they confer no external meaning should be cast off as meaningless? No, because the mass is the celebration of the central event on which all history pivots, and as such the moment when the song of the cosmos dies into human subjectivity, so that it might rise again in our human singing of it and in doing so awaken one another and eventually our semi-comatose mother, the earth. The mass is that song, and to participate in it is to sing it whether we experience the full significance of its meaning or not.

***

And right now the Christian imagination of the future is not very robust because it is still hamstrung by its premodern self-understanding. The exile model--the heaven as final destination model--still plays too powerful a role in the Christian imagination of history. The idea that the goal and purpose of human existence is to get off the planet and into some spiritual pleroma can no longer be embraced; too much is at stake, and it makes too easy a blindness to our responsibility for future generations who will live on the earth. 

There is indeed a spiritual pleroma, and it is the source of all life and all goodness, but our job is not to get off the planet and into it, but to be the awakening point in whom the unheard song is heard and sung. We humans are the infusion points through which the Logos lives into our death, enlivens our souls, and thus enables us to renew the face of the earth.

This is a big, big task, and we are only at the beginning of our understanding how to do it, because we are only at the beginning of understanding how radically things have changed in the last five hundred years. We are only beginning to fathom the massive, unprecedented responsibility that human beings have now assumed for the future of the earth.

I believe this this cultural moment that conservatives call "decadence" is a necessary moment in our collective spiritual evolution. It is not a story of decline but rather simply a story of transition from the old to something new. It is analogous to the ancient Israelites' wandering in the wilderness, or perhaps better to think of it as a cultural dark night of the soul, a collective Good Friday moment through which we must pass in order for a cultural resurrection, a renaissance, to occur. In the Darkness we must maintain hope; we must keep putting one foot in front of the other, we must trust that if we stay alert and vigilant we will be able to tell the difference between the song that calls us forward or calls us to disaster.

We are in a transitional experience, but the outcome is never certain because the outcome depends on our fallible choices. We have the choice either to fall back into Egypt or move forward into Canaan. Nazism was Germany's hearkening to a neo-pagan song, a song that awakens a nostalgia for totemic embeddedness. That tendency is an ever-present temptation for all "decadent" western societies. Nostalgia is the siren song to which the Right hearkens, and we should never underestimate its power to enchant and to draw us toward shipwreck.

Over the years I've written extensively about my fears that the attitudes that lie behind the political popularity of movement conservatism are rooted in this nostalgia for lost embeddedness and with it the lost sense of the sacred. It was a terrible loss, and it is cruel to adopt an attitude of contempt toward those who feel the loss most acutely. But you don't win these people over politically by debunking their beliefs, but rather by offering them something better. And the Left in this country is not offering anything that satisfies the ontological craving that those on the Right feel.

If the cultural Left believes it has adopted a more grown-up understanding of how things are in its refusal to believe in spaghetti monsters or however they callowly reject a deeply complex and interesting religious tradition, they will soon discover that they will be overwhelmed by religious forces that are not so complex and interesting. Going forward, the argument will not be between the forces of irreligion and religion but between good religion and bad religion. Good religion hears the song of the Logos, bad religion the enchanting, demagogic songs of the anti-Christ.

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Note 1: "'Hegel', remarks Jurgen Habermas, 'completed the philosophical appropriation of the Judeo-Christian tradition as much as was possible under the conditions of metaphysical thinking.' Transcendence is now, so to speak more horizontal than vertical--more a question of history which is perpetually in excess of itself, en route to some future pleroma or state of fulfillment, than of a God who lies in the silent spaces beyond his own universe." (Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, pp. 46-47)

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Ed. Note 1: This is a repost of a pre-Trump essay written in 2016 at a time when even most Republicans saw Trump as a vulgar, self-absorbed buffoon not to be taken seriously. It is entitled "Death & Resurrection of the Human: The Rising of the Logos's World Constituting Song". I post it as part of this Genealogy series especially for those who have not been reading here over the years to provide some context. And I post it because I think it goes to the heart of the larger argument I'm trying to make, which is that we need to develop a postmodern mythopoesis, i.e., a pole in a reconstituted metaphysical imaginary that plausibly provides a vertical dimension. Such a mythopoesis cannot just be fabricated out of whole cloth as if it were some science-fiction fantasy or a work of purely intellectual construction. It has to be grounded in a tradition of revelation sustained by individuals from generation to generation who are awake to the significance of that revelation. And it must work plausibly to provide a robust, fruitful interpretation of people's experience of the Living Real, which is more common than is generally acknowledged (See Taylor or James.)

I see what I'm doing as small 'c' catholic in the spirit of Pico della Mirandolla. I am writing from a Christian perspective because that's where my roots lie and because I believe its disclosures, but I do not see it as incompatible with others who do it from a Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim perspective--or the cognitive-science approach exemplified in John Vervaeke's work. We all have things to learn from one another. There will always be differences, and they are to be celebrated, but we also need to acknowledge where we are all talking about the same thing but from different angles of approach.

My interest is to retrieve and celebrate what is vital from the western wing of the Axial Revolution. I look forward to learning from those who are doing it from other traditions--and from cognitive science, which is heir to the Western wing of the Axial Revolution, as Vervaeke is quite aware. I just think the scope of what can be relevantly retrieved and developed from Western axiality is broader than he does. 

Ed. Note 2: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

Go to Part 8.

 

Genealogy Part 6: Vervaeke's "Awakening" Series v. My "Genealogy" Series

Plato lived at a time when the inner crisis of the traditional Greek polis and the religion intimately bound up with it had become evident, and there seems to be no reason to deny that this had a profound effect on his decision to abandon the public arena to cultivate the wisdom necessary to build a more just human society. The reform of the polis meant the reform not only of its citizens, but of its religion as well. If society is out of joint, it can only be because humanity's whole attitude toward the universe and its divine source was in need of repair. Plato's philosophy is powered by an unremitting desire for reform: personal, political, and religious.

Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 1991, p.  25

If you've  been reading my "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" series, you are aware that I just learned of Vervaeke's "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" series of YouTube video lectures. If you are intererested in what I am doing, you will be interested in what he's doing. We are barking up the same tree. But I thought I'd take a few minutes to explain that while much, if not most, of what I'm arguing is consonant with Vervaeke, there are a few critical places where we disagree. At the time I wrote Parts 4A and 4B in this series, I had only watched up to his Lecture 10, which I found very helpful in making my argument for the restoration of a metaphysical imaginary that had restored a vertical or transcendent wisdom dimension. I have to-date completed watching his lectures up to 24 on Hegel. 

It's clear that Vervaeke wants to restore a wisdom dimension to our way of knowing as much as I do, but he's mainly interested in establishing its legitimacy from a cognitive-science point of view. I think that his main concerns are to establish a broadened therapeutic model that establishes scientifically legitimized psycho-technologies that help people overcome their individual meaning crises. I am more interested in the broader social-political dimension of the meaning crisis and how that might be resolved in a way that enjoys broad consensus. I know--good luck with that. Nevertheless, however unrealistic such a project might seem at this moment, things do change in unexpected ways. So I do not see this as an idle exercise, but rather, if nothing else, as something that might be of use for my grandchildren. 

Vervaeke recognizes that these psycho-technologies are not new, and he's at pains to show how they were understood and used in the great Post-Axial religious traditions. His first 24 lectures tell the story of Post-Axial cognitive development by spending a little time with Buddhism, but mostly by tracing out historical developments in the Western religious or "awakened" thinking from Socrates, through the Gnostics, Neoplatonists, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and on to the Romantics and Hegel. Considering its ambitious scope, I think he provides a very solid survey in a very concise format. I have a quibble here and there, but nothing serious. I think more positively about Romanticism than he does, for instance. 

We differ in a more significant way in that I have a broader concern, and a more ambitious argument to make, which is reflected in the epigraph. The Socratic/Platonic project was to reform the religion or metaphysical imaginary of early Hellenism. Their project initiated the Western wing of the Axial Revolution. The crisis in early 5th/4th century Athens is very different from the crisis that we face, but I don't think the solution is all that different, which is a recovery of the vertical or transcendent dimension that first broadly emerged in the mid-first millennium BCE. The loss of this dimension is what we now think of as the death of God. I think of this loss as temporary and aberrant. I believe it can be found again, but in a way adapted to a post-Positivist, global cultural milieu. 

It goes to what I wrote in Part 1: Lots of people have beliefs and experiences that occur on the vertical dimension of human experience, but those experiences are out of joint with the Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary that dominates in techno-capitalist/Neoliberal societies. And so that forces them to live in meaning bubbles that have little or nothing to do with the public world in which they live day-to-day. We think we live in a pluralistic society, but we really don't. Rationalist Materialism is not on an equal footing with other possibilities; it dominates all of our thinking when it comes to decisions that we make in the economic and political spheres--and plays an outsized role in shaping thinking and imagination in the cultural sphere as well. This is despite the fact that 95% of people are open to the possibility that there is a spiritual dimension, and 30-40% of people have had what Vervaeke calls awakening experiences, i.e., temporary experiences of spiritual provenance.

Vervaeke and I would probably both agree that most of those people who have had such experiences go back to sleep again and go on with their lives as if they never happened. The hypnotic, soporific power of Rationalist Materialism and its shadow spawn, techno-capitalism (See Note 1 below), is so, so powerful. Only a few find the resources within the culture to interpret and develop those experiences in a fruitful way. Religiions used to do that kind of work, and still do here and there. But Vervaeke's solution is to establish scientifically legitimated psycho-technologies that when they become broadly available will help individuals to transcend their individual crises of meaning. I'm all for it, and more power to him. We disagree in that I think that the broader culture needs a richer, broader way of interpreting these experiences. In other words, we need mythos. 

Vervaeke makes it clear that while he recognizes the significance of the Axial Revolution, he doesn’t think that its use of mythos is retrievable because it is not plausible for us as late moderns after the death of God, and he seems to think that cognitive science can do the job that mythos once did. Maybe he's right, but I'm dubious. I understand why he thinks this--it's hard to imagine anything else within a metaphysical imaginary dominated by Rationalist Materialism. I'm trying to imagine a way out of those constraints--or at least how transcending the constraints of Rationalist Materialism and its positivist biases might be possible. If individuals can do it in a fruitful way, groups can, and if groups can, then so can the larger society. This has happened historically before, and it can happen again. Whether it will or not, I don't know, but I think that if Vervaeke and his colleagues in cognitive science are successful in their project, it prepares the way for the success of what I'm arguing for. 

Vervaeke probably wouldn't agree because he seems to be in the religion-without-religion camp, which, imo, is unsustainable even if it were desirable. Religionless religion = contentless wisdom. He argues that the content given in awakening experiences isn't relevant. In one of his lectures he says that some people have experiences of higher consciousness after which they say, “I know now that there is a God,” and others say, “I am sure now that no God exists.” So he seems to think that the content of one cancels out the content of the other in a way that makes both unreliable testimony and as such not legitimate knowledge. And besides, knowledge isn't the point. Overcoming the constraints is. 

I understand that some people find the religionless option attractive insofar as it insures against a rigidifying dogmatism, but there are other ways of dealing with that problem without giving up the idea that right understanding of the content given in these experiences is possible and preferable because of the way it can enrich culture. And it fails to address what I feel is the really important problem going forward, which is that a consensus needs to be developed that has enough potency to resist where Rationalist Materialism is dragging us. 

For Vervaeke, fruitfulness is achieved by the individual overcoming or transcending psychological constraints at one level by rising to a higher level of cognition, and I recognize the importance and legitimacy of that. Parts 4A and 4B explore its importance. But surely there can also be a legitimacy that comes from traditions that integrate the broad range of insights of those who have had a broad range of experiences of “higher consciousness”.

There are already sapiential traditions that have the legitimacy of thousands of years of testing truth claims derived from a wide variety of awakening experiences. Sapiential traditions have ways to discern the legitimacy or delusional character of the experience, to take the content that people report regarding their experiences seriously on their own terms, and then to reflect how they might be integrated into a larger, broader understanding so that these experiences might be interpreted in the most fruitful way that expand knowledge on the vertical dimension. This is real knowledge with real content.  

So to take his example about contradictory testimony about the existence of God above: the Dark Night of the Spirit is something recognized in Christian mysticism that in no way contradicts other experiences people have of the radiance of God’s agapic love. In fact the experience of darkness or absence is an indicator of a more advanced state of spiritual development. The two experiences are not contradictory, but different aspects within a bigger picture. The experience of absence is just as much content as the experience of presence. Each is powerful and important, but the interpretation is more important. And if you have the first experience outside the context of a broad, well-established sapiential tradition, you would probably be persuaded that there is no God. The sapiential tradition provides the bigger picture, a picture that hardly anybody is familiar with anymore, apparently not even Vervaeke who has made a sincere effort to educate himself about post-Axial spiritual traditions.

So from my pov, he is doing good work, but it needs to be supplemented. And that's really the goal of where I'll be going in the development of my Genealogy series. When I first started it in December, my goal was to make the case for Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary in a postmodern key, and that's still where I want to go. The five parts that I've written so far were attempts to clear the ground, so to say, to do what I can to make such a project at least minimally plausible for the skeptical but open reader. My plan is to show how powerful the Christian Neoplatonic synthesis was for 1500 years, why it broke down, and why and how I think it could be restored--not in a spirit of nostalgia but in a spirit adapted to a postmodern/post-positivist milieu.

I recognize people like John Millbank and the others in the Radical Orthodoxy 'movement' as allies in this project, but my goal is to write in a way that is more accessible for the non-specialist. I don't see what I'm doing as original, but I think I have a good nose for what's 'originary', i.e., what is connected to the Living Real, which is the origin of anything worth paying attention to. So I see my task as to curate and synthesize the originary work of others, hopefully in a way that is interesting and helpful for those who take the time to read through these long and admittedly first-drafty essays. This is a blog after all, not a book. It's a record of my learning and thinking about what its implications are. Maybe someday it will turn into a book, but I have no particular ambition to write one. 

The second part--why it broke down--is already laid out in a summary I made of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, which can be found here, but in order to do justice to the first part--the power and depth of the Christian Neoplatonic synthesis--I think it's necessary for me to go deeper and into more detail. And my primary resource for doing this is Bernard McGinn's remarkably, rich and clear exposition of the entire tradition of Western mysticism in his "Presence of God" series. I'll also be drawing on Pierre Hadot from time to time, who was a source for McGinn and Vervaeke. McGinn is currently a retired University of Chicago scholar who published the first volume in this series in 1991 and the most recent in 2021, so it spans thirty years (so far?). For the purposes of this "Genealogy", I will focus primarily on Vol 1, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the 5th Century and Volume 4, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany.

I'm reading in both now at the same time. The first is important for establishing how the Christian revelation and Greek contemplative 'theoria' was developed in the "schools" founded by Plato, Aristotle, and others over six hundred years that culminates in the Plotinian synthesis, how Jews and Christians interacted with this tradition in such a way that culminated in Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysos. Volume 4 is important for the way Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysos were 'modernized', so to say, after Albertus Magnus moved from Paris to Cologne in the mid-1200s to lay the foundations for modern science on the one hand, and on the other, the spiritual tradition we now call the Rhineland mystics. The great figures in this northern European Christian Neoplatonic tradition include Albert's student Aquinas, and their younger contemporary Meister Eckhart, Eckhart's disciples Suso and Tauler, then Nicholas of Cusa, and later Jacob Boehme. (Is it oxymoronic to be a Lutheran Neoplatonist? A question for later consideration.)

I've been arguing for a while that the southern wing of Christian Neoplatonism that flowered in Ficino's Florentine Platonic Academy is the key to understand the criteria by which great art should be evaluated from the Renaissance through Romanticism--esp., Keats, Shelly, Wordsworth, Coleridge and beyond. But the other little understood Christian Neoplatonic stream tracks through the Rhineland toward German Idealism. If German Idealism is incomprehensible without the Rhineland mystics, neither are they comprehensible without understanding the proto-Christian Neoplatonism that developed starting with figures like Clement of Alexandria and Origin.

And none of any of this would be comprehensible if there were not an experiential, "awakened" dimension that was the foundation for all their thinking. This is a sapiential tradition that had vitality until the middle of the 19th Century when it hit a wall after Hegel. (Is Wm James an exception? We'll look into that.) The question now is whether Vervaeke is right that there's no recovery of the knowledge, qua mythos, that lies on the other side of that wall. I think that it is recoverable, and that this great tradition can be renewed--not just for people at the fringe, but in a way that inspires a broader cultural renaissance. I continue to promote the possibility of renaissance not just because I believe it's possible but because I believe the alternative is so very, very dark. 

So the plan, for now at least, is to do what I can to understand that tradition better for myself and to do what I can to make it interesting and plausible for readers here who might also be interested to understand it better. The installments over the next weeks  (and months) will explore the Axial impact of Socrates and Plato, the schools that developed from them. For reasons explained above, I'm more interested in this 'tradition' not for its various thought systems but for its development of life-transformative psycho-technologies, to use Vervaeke's term, that afforded experiences of transcendence that grounded their thought systems, which were left-brain-hemisphere attempts to understand the world in the light of their experiences on the vertical dimension. And then the task is to understand how awakened Christian thinkers appropriated these technologies and transformed them. 

Go to Part 7,

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Note 1: I just want to clarify that I am not a Luddite, I am not against markets; I am not against innovation. I am, however, against the tail wagging the dog when the tail is Neoliberal technocapitalism and the dog is the broader society. The tail wags the dog when the dog has no ground upon which to set its feet to resist, and so cannot say No to developments in technocapitalism that are in techno-capitalism's interests but not the interests of the larger society or of humanity in general. 

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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 December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

Genealogy Part 4B: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries

At some point I might go back and organize this series into something easier to follow, but in the meanwhile it's simply a raw reflection of my thinking through things as I go. The problem/question that I'm working on is why, if most people believe in or are open to an ontology that has a spiritual dimension, are we living in a culture where a materialist imaginary dominates in the most important areas that shape our collective priorities. I'm also interested to think about whether it's possible for a society to develop an imaginary that operates at a higher moral or wisdom level. What I say below does not depend on your having watched this lecture by John Vervaeke, but it will help. I recommend that you start around the 17-minute mark. Or you can read this first and go back and watch the video. 

Vervaeke is presenting a model for understanding what consciousness does, which is that it provides a way to focus our attention in such a way that it filters out the vast amount of possible information that there is out in the world and in our memories so that we might focus on what is relevant or salient. What defines relevance? Well that depends on your 'salience landscape'. He references Piaget's ideas about child development to illustrate how constraints within one's salience landscape are overcome when one has insights.

In the five-candies example, he points out that most four-year-olds when given the choice between two rows of five candies in which the second row is arranged with more space between the candies, invariably choose the second row because it looks like more. Why? Because it takes up more space. Space, says Vervaeke, is "super salient" for the four-year-old, and super salience is usually a sign that you're stuck or blocked by unconscious patterns that organize what is salient for you. Normal cognitive development is all about the way you transcend those unconscious patterns by having insights. An older kid will understand--will have an insight--that space isn't relevant, that the only thing that matters is the number of candies. What's in the world does not change, but your ability to see the world with greater clarity and depth does. 

So the point that Piaget and Vervaeke are making is that the way we see the world is not shaped by what's there but by the constraints in our salience landscape. Cognitive development for all of us, children or adults, is determined by overcoming the constraints of our salience landscapes at different points in our life. The problem lies not in our being blind to evidence but with the unconscious psychological systems or structures that organize what is 'salient' or relevant.

This goes a long way in explaining what has been described as the epistemic bubbles that shape our polarized politics. Kellyanne Conway was mocked for talking about 'alternative facts', but she would have avoided the mockery if she said instead that there are alternative salience landscapes, or alternative interpretive frames, which is what I think she really meant. Liberals also would do well to understand better how their own salience landscapes shape what facts are relevant, and which are not. 

Our salience landscapes shape the interpretive frame that shapes for us what's meaningful. If we lived in a society that had a vertical dimension, we would understand that the path of wisdom is a life-long process of self-transcendence, i.e, of a continuous transformation of our salience landscapes. There are an awful lot of people, and many of them are our leaders in media, business, and politics, who haven't advanced much further than to see the world from within a typical middle-schooler's salience landscape. Middle School is when we all learn to be Social Darwinists. 

In theory, there is no limit to the kind of transcending that is possible. The wisest among us are those who have progressed furthest in transcending their constraints--this is what it means to be truly free--but there are limits to what's possible for any individual that are set by the collective metaphysical imaginary into which a person is acculturated. You can't get too far ahead of the pack, or you're completely in your own world, which is insanity. We all need to keep a foot in the social imaginary of our contemporaries. 

Hopefully those who are more advanced in their self-transcending are beating a path to make it easier for the rest of us to follow. And when enough people follow, a tradition develops, and after a while that tradition, if it remains vital, affords to the broader society an alternative salience landscape that more and more people will find attractive because of the self-transcending benefits it affords, and things can reach a tipping point where the entire society flips its salience landscape so that it is more in touch with the Living Real. This happened in the Axial Age and some would argue during the Upper Paleolithic. But it also explains how imaginaries evolve, including, for instance, how intellectuals, even many of those in the French nobility, became "Republicans" in the 18th Century. For them it was a combination of seeing that the current ancien regime wasn't working and that a compelling republican alternative was being presented by the philosophes.

Because these constraints that structure our salience landscapes are culturally conditioned, they shape a consensus reality in very provisional ways. They feel more real than they are. Premodern societies had constraints that are very different from the constraints of modern societies, and so what is relevant or salient for premoderns is very different from what is for moderns. The point is that we see things that our ancestors did not see because what we see as salient from within a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary is very different from what is salient for people from within, really, any premodern metaphysical imaginary, whether in the West or anywhere else.

The challenge for us is to be open to the possibility that they saw things that we do not. I am not saying that we have to re-inhabit a premodern imaginary, but that we must retrieve in a postmodern key what was lost, which is the vertical or wisdom dimension. Wisdom was salient for our ancestors in a way it just is not for us, and so the question is whether we are capable of developing a new salience landscape where wisdom can be restored as salient not just for a few individuals here and there, but for the society as a whole. That is the formula for 'renaissance' or rebirth--a recovery or remembering of something vital that has been lost or forgotten. 

All of us are working within constraints, and to think that we know T.H.E. truth is always delusional, but some are wiser than others because their cognitive development has helped them see through certain common systematic or structural constraints that come with their acculturation. To use Vervaeke's language, they have learned how to realize when they are bullshitting themselves.

We can never live without constraints because we need the necessary filters that consciousness provides to prevent our being overwhelmed by too much reality. But some filters (or salience landscapes) are more aligned with what is really there, and the goal is to be continuously trading up, so to say, i.e., to trade in one set of constraints for another that helps you to see more deeply what is really there, to get into, to use Vervaeke's phrase, "deep contact with the guts of the world". This was Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's project, and it's the project of Iain McGilchrist. And as I argue here, it was the project of the great Renaissance artists influenced by Ficino's Christian Neoplatonism. 

If you watch Vervaeke's earlier lectures you will see that Socrates is a hero for him for pretty much the same reasons he's one for me. In Part 3, I talk at length about how Socrates was a master of cognitive development in Vervaeke's sense. The beginning of wisdom is to know that you don't know, and Socrates' project was to confront his interlocutors with the fact that they were bullshitting themselves. It's all about seeing the limits of conventional wisdom, but it goes deeper.

Socrates understood that the people with whom he was conversing were living within a constrained salience landscape that came with their acculturation. For us those constraints are also shaped by experiences growing up, including trauma, but mostly from what you learn about and submit to in progressive stages about how the dreary "real world" works within the constraints of a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary. And the same was true in Socrates day, even if the constraints were structured differently. Whether then or now, our experience is shaped by our acculturation starting with the Oedipus Complex when we learn what our role is in society and to follow its codes.

This is Stage 1 in Kohlberg's moral development scheme,and his successive stages illustrate how what might be described as 'moral' saliency landscapes progress from pre-Conventional, to Conventional, and, for some people, to post-Conventional stages. [**See note at end of this post where I expand on this.] Schiller and Kierkegaard talk about similar shifts in saliency landscapes. The point in all of these is to move beyond or to transcend conventional constraints, and to find something that in contrast was 'really real'. This isn't a justification for antinomianism, but for discovering a deeper "law", a deeper understanding about how reality actually works. And it isn't just an intellectual exercise, but one that, if successful, enriches and deepens your experience of the world.

As an aside here, a problem that I have with a lot of New Age spirituality is that it's all about developing human potential that doesn't really care that much about moral development so much as it cares about cognitive development. Or it's what David Brooks calls the "higher selfishness" that is typified by Gwyneth Paltrow's new-agey lifestyle brand "Goop". There is no real wisdom without moral development, no matter how much other aspects of human potentiality might be expanded or developed. I don't think Vervaeke, qua cognitive scientist, falls into this trap. I don't agree with him about everything, but I respect his moral seriousness and sincerity. Moral seriousness is not a problem for any of the great civilizational post-Axial religions, and that's why the recovery of the depth dimension must start with them and what they have to say about self-transcendence.

My own contribution to this, for what's worth, is from a Christian Neoplatonic perspective, but I have the deepest reverence for the other great traditions from which I will always have much to learn. I will argue in a future post that the Christian Neoplatonic tradition does not reject Gnosticism, but takes what's best from it and the other ancient mystery religions, and integrates them in a synthesis that has the highest level of coherency, scope, and richness. The renewed interest in Gnosticism after Nag Hammadi, while it might undermine a certain kind of wisdomless, conventional, law-and-order Christianity, does not undermine its deepest mission found in the the canonical New Testament, particularly in Paul and John, which is to provide a model for self-transcendence grounded in a moral ontology.] 

Socrates' elenchus, I argue in Part 3, was a tool to awaken his interlocutors to the constraints of the their salience landscape so as to open them up to the possibility of experiencing what's really there at a deeper, richer level of perception and understanding. Its relevance for us today lies in that while the elenchus could be used effectively to disabuse materialists of their constraints, the same is true for religious people. The problem with Christians or Buddhists or Muslims--or any religious group--is the way that their beliefs rigidify to become part of a system of constraints that need to be transcended if they are to truly understand the deeper truths to which their doctrines point.

We are all fools--whether religious or irreligious--if we think that we are not operating under constraints in our current salience landscapes. And all of us--whether religious or irreligious--are all captured by the constraints of a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary, which creates a baseline salience landscape from which we all need to be liberated. It has a tether on all of us. The problem lies in that too many people are too comfortable and too well-adapted to it, and too many of them are making decisions that shape our life together, and not for the better. 

But in the same way that we all need salience landscapes, all religions need doctrines. The idea of doctrine-less religion or religion without religion is silly. It is embraced mostly by people who have strong religious instincts but who are either trying to shake the rigid religious formation in which they were brought up or because they associate these doctrines with the rigid, doctrinaire people whom they understandably find deeply unattractive.

But doctrines should not be thought of as unbelievable things that we believe anyway because we fearfully think that's what is expected of us--that's Kohlberg Stage 1. We should think of them rather as invitations for contemplation. We should feel challenged by them. We need to take them seriously because people wiser than we have taken them seriously for thousands of years. They are truths that call us into a deeper relationship with them, and if we approach them in the right way, they will deepen and broaden us, i.e., increase our level of wisdom as they transform our salience landscapes.

A living tradition is one in which the insights of one generation are passed to the next, not as propositional assertions of truth, but in the vitality of the lives lived in that tradition that are exemplary of its wisdom and moral fruitfulness. One is inspired by their lives, and so one wants to follow on the path of wisdom and moral fruitfulness they trod before us. So we approach any doctrine in a spirit of learned ignorance. We must assume that we have no idea what the doctrine signifies, and that rational analysis of the doctrine is by itself an approach that is unlikely to lead to a deeper understanding of it. But if we are even half alive, we feel that there is something calling to us in it, and we hearken to it. We cognize the truth, and then we use our rational faculties to integrate that truth with what we already know or in some cases to revise what we already know, because the "insight" delivers us from the limitations of the salience landscape that made the knowing at this higher level so difficult. 

So I've been arguing that because the salience landscape in which most people today are acculturated is so profoundly shaped by Rationalist Materialist assumptions, it is extraordinarily difficult to take spiritual or awakening experiences seriously or to interpret them in a way that might actually be life-transforming in a positive way. People will continue to have these experiences, but the question is whether they are having them in such a way that the ontonormativity that challenges them to align their own lives on a higher salience landscape can have a similarly transformative effect in our broader cultural life.

I suspect a broader cultural shift will happen when a critical mass of people who have these experiences--the 30-40%--coalesce around a coherent interpretation of their experience that creates the conditions that make a next step possible. In other words, a new collective salience landscape emerges within a certain group within the culture, and then this group has a ripple effect throughout the culture, and perhaps even reaches a tipping point where its salience landscape becomes normative for the whole culture. If such a thing is to happen, its appeal will lie in that it is continuous with what we have come to understand about reality through science, but reframes scientific factuality not with "alternative facts" but with a compelling alternative salience landscape that meets the criteria for coherence, scope, richness, and adaptability in a way that nothing available to us now in our collective life does. 

We'll see. 

Go to Part 5

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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.

**How I think of Kohlberg's Six Stages

Pre-conventional: Kierkegaard's Aesthetic

1. Follow the Rules for fear of Punishment. Example: Teacher's pet in elementary school who tattles on those breaking the rules. Rules are arbitrary and have no legitimacy except as how those with power define a regime of rewards and punishments. Example of arrested Level 1 development: the slave in any master-slave relationship. I follow the rules not because they are in any way true or right but because the Master demands it.  

2. What can I get away with? I'll do what's expected of me to avoid punishment, but will do what I want if I'm clever enough to get away with it. Since the rules have no legitimacy outside of an arbitrary rewards and punishments regime, there is nothing wrong with doing what you want so long as you can avoid punishment.  Example: healthy testing of boundaries typical in middle school necessary for developing sense of autonomy.  Example of arrested Level 2 development: Donald Trump. Rules are for other people. I make my own, and I don't care who gets hurt.

Conventional: Kierkegaard's Ethical

3. Rules matter because they define what is  "right", but personal loyalties matter more. I'll break the rules if it benefits those I love even if it means I'll get in trouble if caught. Example: It's wrong to lie, but I'll tell a lie to protect a friend who will get in trouble. Extreme example: The mother with a sick child who will break every protocol--steal, scream, maim, or stomp over anyone who gets in the way of her mission--to make sure her sick child gets the best care in a hospital. 

4. Personal relationships matter, but the common good matters more. You can't just break the rules with impunity because it benefits your family and friends. Example: Socrates submits to his execution despite being offered escape by rich friends. He rejects escape because he does not want to undermine the rule of law in Athens, even though he has been unjustly condemned by Athenian law. His personal well being and the pain of his loss for his friends is not as important as the larger common good. 

Post-Conventional: Kierkegaard's Religious

5. Some rules are just wrong, and I have to do whatever I can including breaking them at the risk of my own well being and the well being of my family to reform them. Example: Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi.

6. The rules might be right 99% of the time, but some circumstances require that I break them and suffer the consequences. K's teleological suspension of the ethical. Example: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor executed for his involvement in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler. Murder is wrong, but in this instance the rule must be suspended for the greater good. 

How one's moral thinking and actions develop from one stage to the next depends on a lot of factors, including challenges posed in particular existential situations. Not everybody is confronted with the choice whether to get involved in a plot to assassinate a genocidal madman. But that's the point. The rules at one level don't determine thinking or behavior in situations where they don't apply, and the morally mature person understands the difference.

And it's usually a personal crisis of some sort that forces a choice that will move someone from one level to the next. Socrates is not the moral inferior of Bonhoeffer; it's just that the choices that they were confronted with were different and so required a different order of thinking. And it could be argued that Socrates was condemned for the same reason that MLK was shot and Bonhoeffer hung because each in their different way was perceived as destabilizing the existing social order. So really Socrates' moral mission was enacted on Level 5/6, even if his choice to submit to his execution was made on Level 4. 

I should also point out that most of our public moral thinking in politics and business operates on the level of utility, which never goes beyond Levels 1 and 2. The highest level of moral development that you'll see dramatized on TV is Level 3, which is that family and friend loyalty trumps everything else. But most of our popular culture in TV and films operates only on Levels 1 and 2 where Level 2 people think of themselves as uebermenschen and everyone else as Last Men.

I'm sure that's how Trump thinks of himself, as a superman who lives in a realm beyond good and evil because the norms that define good and evil are b.s and have no foundation in the Good, which he has no sense of. He, and other masters of the universe like him in the political and business spheres, confuse the Pre-Conventional with the Post-Conventional, which is what Nietzsche really means in his talk about beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche was a Post-Conventional thinker who has been appropriated by people to justify their Pre-Conventional behavior. And most of the rest of us can't tell the difference because we have no vertical dimension--no wisdom--which provides criteria with which to evaluate their thinking and behavior. 

Genealogy Part 4A: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries

I had been struggling about how to present what I want to say about Western Axiality in a way that might make some sense when I came across this lecture series by the Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke entitled "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis". (His Lecture 10, which is relevant for Posts 4A and 4B in this series, can be found here.) Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of him or his work, but he's clearly barking up the same tree that I am. His approach is from a different angle than the one I'm taking, but he provides some critical pieces from cognitive science that I see as supporting the argument I am trying to make.  

Vervaeke is more interested in the experiential, cognitive aspects that I've been calling 'knowing on the vertical dimension'--or 'Wisdom'. I'm more interested in the Mythos aspect, which is more about how the cultural matrix shapes/programs/configures individual experience. Mythos provides the meaning framework that makes experiences on the vertical interpretable. I'm arguing that our "meaning crisis" derives from our culture no longer having a broadly accepted mythos. I'm not sure Vervaeke would agree that our lack of 'mythos' is the cause of our crisis because he wants to develop an interpretive frame that is more cognitive-science based, with emphasis on the science. And he might not agree, but I think that what he means by a 'salience landscape' can be borrowed and repurposed to help me establish what I mean by a 'metaphysical imaginary'. Regardless, there's plenty of overlap there, and I'll get into that in "Part 4B". 

I'm assuming that anybody who reads this blog knows what I'm talking about regarding 'wisdom.' Vervaeke is spelling it out in a cognitive-science idiom that might make it more acceptable for people who are allergic to religious language. But clearly for the kind of metaphysical imaginary I think we need to restore in the future, its legitimacy would require that most people have some level of experiential wisdom by Vervaeke's definition--or at least respect for people who do have it. 

Referencing Steve Taylor's Awakening from Sleep,  Vervaeke says that research studies have found that 30-40% of people claim to have had "wisdom" or "awakening" experiences of some kind. This doesn't surprise me. Just read Wm. James's The Varieties of Religious Experience to get some sense of how common such experiences are. In the U.S. today under 10% of people are atheists or agnostics, which means, whether or not they are churchgoers, the vast majority of Americans--perhaps  90%+--are open to an ontology that includes a spiritual dimension, however "spiritual" might be thought of or imagined.

The problem/question for me is why such a large percentage of the population hasn't a stronger and more positive impact in shaping the metaphysical imaginary but instead allows a materialist imaginary to be the default. As I argue in Part 1, while there are benefits to pluralism, hyperpluralism in this area of "knowledge" has the effect of dividing and conquering any opposition to the materialist imaginary. And, as suggested above, and I argue in Part 3, hyperpluralism is largely an effect of there being no cultural trellis, no Mythos, to provide an interpretive frame for people to make sense of the experiences they have.

Ten people might have similar awakening experiences, but there might be ten different interpretive frames used to make sense of them, and so each cancels the other out in terms of establishing broader legitimacy. And more importantly, experiences don't self-interpret--everything depends on the kind of interpretive frame that the individual brings to his awakening experience, and some interpretations lead to positive and others to very negative, if not insane, results. Context is critical. 

So the insanity does not originate with the experience itself, but with the insanity of interpretation given it. There's the awakening experience, but the wisdom only comes when it gets interpreted correctly, and correct interpretation comes from a wisdom tradition renewed in each generation by people who have had awakening experiences and developed them in a sane, morally fruitful way. Moral fruitfulness is the ultimate test of the interpretive frame for any kind of awakening experience. Right now, there's no such sane tradition, except on the fringes of our social life. And so while I believe 30-40% of people have had such awakening experiences, I wonder how many have interpreted them in sane, morally fruitful ways. 

And so there's no broadly agreed upon criteria to sort out what's sane or insane, real or delusional, profound or superficial. If a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary with a vertical dimension ever emerges in the future, it will have to draw on the work of people like Vervaeke and his colleagues who are trying to develop a social science model to do this kind of sorting. More power to them, but I fear that the ethos of 'cognitive science' is still 'constrained' by the positivist taint imbued by the dominant Rationalist Materialist imaginary. That's fine, because I think that ultimately, whether Vervaeke wants to go there or not, there is an implied metaphysics that needs to be extrapolated from the experiences he is trying to understand. Ultimately, I believe a "right understanding" consensus will emerge, even if it's premature or unscientific to extrapolate a metaphysics from those experiences at this point.

In the meanwhile, I realize that when I represent myself as a Christian Neoplatonist, it makes no sense to almost everyone I know, including other Christians. Whatever floats your boat, they most probably would think, because they have no idea what I mean by it. And yet I'd argue that Christian Neoplatonism was the metaphysical imaginary for Western Civilization for over a thousand years because it provided what Vervaeke calls a coherent "salience landscape", i.e., a coherent, meaningful world picture in which certain things came into focus for our ancestors that no longer come into focus for us. Because they no longer come into focus for us, does not mean they are not there.

And so for centuries, right up to the Reformation, this imaginary worked for many of the culture's most intelligent and creative people, i.e., those who were knowledgeable on the vertical or wisdom dimension. Most educated people today know more on the horizontal dimension than St. Augustine did. That does not mean they are wiser than he. Whatever the scope of his personal genius, he had an interpretive frame provided by Christian revelation and Neoplatonism to work with that gave his thinking and his spirit scope to grow. We don't have that scope now, and we need something like it that works in a plausible way in a postmodern, post-secular key. I would argue that one of the principal reasons we have so few great souls who play a larger role in shaping our contemporary social imaginary is because they have no trellis on which to grow and expand. 

So when I talk about Neoplatonism, I am talking about an ontology that assumes that we are living in a world that we mostly don't understand because we don't really see or experience what is really real. And while the goal is to gradually improve our experience and grasp of what is really real, it is extremely difficult to do it in a society whose metaphysical imaginary lacks a vertical dimension. Having a vertical dimension is not unique to Christian Neoplatonism. Other post-Axial religions and philosophies make similar assertions and prescribe similar cures. But Christian Neoplatonism is my tradition, and it contributes to our understanding about what it means to be human in ways that other traditions do not, and so it deserves to be correctly understood by more people than do.

Like most serious Christians, I see Christianity as being first and foremost about moral development, but what distinguishes me from most Christians is that I care about the ontological and epistemological framework in which true moral development needs to be understood. Such a frame is not absolutely necessary, but it provides the aforementioned trellis, which is helpful for healthy, expansive growth. I think there would be more people with a profounder degree of moral development and the 'wisdom' that comes with that if there was such a trellis. When I look around, I don't see a lot of wisdom and depth to help people with their moral development. I see mostly moralistic platitudes and pop-psychological nonsense because the only trellises broadly available are moralistic and pop-psychological. 

Each vine finds its own way on the trellis, but it helps if there is some consensus about the trellis's basic structure and orientation. All I'm saying is that we have something to learn about that from the tradition of Christian Neoplatonism adapted for the kind of post-secular society we will inevitably become. The question concerning the human future, assuming there will be one, is not whether humans will be religious but whether their religion will be crazy or sane. And its sanity will be largely determined by whether it works with an ontology and epistemology that helps to map a way for people to more deeply participate in the Living Real. There is a lot of religion embraced by an awful lot of people right now that is insane precisely because its reality map is so deeply alienated from the Living Real. 

So while the story is more complex, and I hope to get into details about them at some point, one aspect of understanding what happened after the Reformation was that the 60-70%--I'm assuming there's a consistency here from generation to generation in Stephen Taylor's and Wm James's findings--who did not have such "awakening" experiences, and in the 18th and 19th centuries asserted that their un-awakened perception of reality was more accurate than those who wanted to take seriously what their awakening experiences seemed to imply. The combined impact of the industrial revolution and the new understanding of the human being post-Darwin allowed them to assert an alternative imaginary without a vertical dimension that supplanted the older one. This majority--whether secular or religious--became more interested in knowledge that produced material results rather than produced wisdom. Faith, rather than being understood as a cognitive faculty that when developed leads to wisdom, became instead believing in stuff that no longer made sense within an imaginary that had lost its vertical dimension. Religious fundamentalism and rigid dogmatism are "faith" for people who don't know better. 

Increasingly during the Modern period, while people continued to have awakening experiences, they were artists and mystics, and as such curiosities, rather than sources of legitimate knowledge and insight, at least insofar as they shaped public life in the "real" world of science, politics, and economics. And so by the mid-19th century, the vertical dimension became less accessible even for artists. The avant-garde, as a weak echo of what was more robust in Romanticism, was interested in saying No to what it perceived as bourgeois or reactionary, but it became progressively less capable of mediating the Living Real, at least in a way that broke through to the broader culture.

I don't want to oversimplify. Clearly some great art was produced until around the time of WWI, but after that, art became, mostly, something else--either entertainments whose quality was measured by their cleverness or novelty, or, more seriously, works of despair that expressed the artist's alienation from the Living Real. Waiting for the Living Real, i.e, for disclosures from the vertical dimension, became Becket's Waiting for Godot or Munch's Scream. This kind of art was sincere and important in reflecting to the broader society what had become of it in a world dominated by the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. Such art is truthful because it reflects the reality of what has happened to us. But because it happened does not mean it's the final chapter in the story. And I, for one, am ready to move on. I don't have any patience for what has become a conventional nihilism. It's no longer telling us anything important.

Now Vervaeke is not interested in belief systems, but he is interested in "ontonormativity". Ontonormativity is explained in the lecture 10 linked to above, and I will let him speak for himself, but he points to what I've been writing about here, which is how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities, and such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it.

I would say, for instance, that Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is ontonormative in its inspiration, but was also way ahead of the capacity of most people at that time (and now) to be changed by it. Some, of course, were changed by it. Was it naively idealistic, or does it set a standard by which we judge ourselves as failing to live up to our best selves as Americans? I would designate Lincoln and MLK as prophets of American ontonormativity. Were they naive idealists? They are rare figures in our public life, but we revere them because they point to a truth about our better possibilities as Americans that derives from their wisdom on the vertical dimension that is cognate with the wisdom of the Declaration. 

So Vervaeke takes on the question regarding how it is possible that people have experiences that seem more real than reality, how they come to experience the world as not measuring up to its deeper possibilities. He says that this is at the heart of the Axial Revolution, and while I've been arguing that after the death of God we have lost any vital sense of Axiality as a culture-shaping power, it's recovery is as important for us now--i.e., for the social transformation that we need now--as it was for the civilizations and societies that were first transformed by it 2500 years ago. I have no idea how this will happen, but such transformations do happen. 

So before continuing with what I want to say, please watch the Vervaeke lecture, and take notes about some of the technical terms he uses to explain how cognitive frames get transformed. I hope to write later this week "Part 4B", which will try to further unpack what he's saying in the light of the ongoing argument I'm trying to make here about the restoring a balanced metaphysical imaginary. 

Vervaeke's lecture is the tenth in a series that extends to over forty. It's as far as I've come, so I don't know yet where's he's going, but there's nothing he's said so far that I haven't found to be aligned with and supporting what I'm arguing, and in many ways expanding and enriching it. The crux of what I want to talk about comes in the second half of this lecture, so you can fast forward to that to see why. If you want, start around the 17 minute mark--and then go back to the beginning or to the preceding lectures to see how he got there.

Go to 4B.

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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.

Genealogy Part 3: Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus

Rather than proceed in some linear fashion with the genealogy of the title, I want to explore first the claim made in Part 2 concerning the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical--or Mythos--dimension. Without first having established that, I think it's very difficult to understand why the originary Mythos of the West--Christian Neoplatonism--worked for so long, why it eventually failed, and how something like it might be recovered. It's not Christian Neoplatonism as it functioned then that I'm concerned about so much as finding something like it that can function for us now in the way we need it. The goal here in Part 3 is to try to begin to understand what kind of work it did and why that's important. In future posts I'll attempt a more sustained attempt to understand why later it failed. The answer, btw, is not because science disproved it. But before getting to that, some thoughts about our current predicament and why such questions matter. Why should one care about things like the vertical dimension of a metaphysical imaginary, anyway?

My concern is not with individual religious belief. Individuals can believe whatever they want, but I do think that a society to flourish, it must have a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary that integrates a central vertical axis, or Mythos, that works in tension with the horizontal axis, or Logos. I make that case in Part 2.  Most contemporary Christians, especially if they are Protestants, don't think of their faith as a 'mythos' that fuses two post-axial traditions: Greek speculative transcendental philosophy and prophetic Judaism. It just isn't that Greek/Jewish synthesis anymore in any way that matters for contemporary Christian practice or understanding.

Most Christians believe what they believe without it having to make sense in terms that the broader culture recognizes as legitimate. They may have found a personal vertical dimension, but it has little or nothing to do with the way the broader society operates, and so at the heart of their experience of the world is a fundamental incoherency, that in extreme cases results in Ontological Dizziness, aka, the absurd. As I argued in Part 2, one common strategy to avoid Ontological Dizziness is to compartmentalize: Religion is about my private, spiritual life; work and career are about my public, material life. The two have little to do with one another, and for most the former has no impact on the latter. As Eagleton remarks in Culture and the Death of God, "...it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is time to give it up." The children of the compartmentalized usually don't compartmentalize. Most just get absorbed into the great rationalist materialist metaphysical void, or they join a religious cult. 

But for the first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era these two traditions lived together in what was often in somewhat simplistic terms rendered as a marriage between Athens and Jerusalem as metonyms for reason and faith. This might be understood as Athens/Reason = the horizontal, and Jerusalem/Faith = the vertical, but that would be wrong because it fails to recognize the central role that Axial verticality played in Greek philosophy, at least as it came to us from Plato and Aristotle. 

Of course the persistence of pre-Axial Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean paganism continued to play a significant role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West, especially in shaping its local customary cultures. But the idea of the marriage of Athens and Jerusalem was more right than it's wrong in describing the post-Axial dimension of the Western metaphysical imaginary. The philosophical/theological framework for it was Christian Neoplatonism. It worked for those first 1500 years, with its last robust articulation in Florentine Neoplatonism in the late 1400s, and after that continued to be influential in the arts, if not in philosophy, science, or even the theology of the Reformers. [See Note 1)

So the 19th Century after the fading of Romanticism becomes increasingly individualistic and materialistic, both undermining whatever relevance religion--or the vertical dimension however understood--had played in the social sphere. After Nietzsche, it becomes harder for anybody to think on the vertical dimension--at least publicly. Whatever trust there was in the testimony of people who attested to knowledge on the vertical dimension eroded with each passing generation after the mid-19th Century. Because with each generation those attestations were becoming increasingly incompatible with a materialist metaphysical imaginary whose hegemony among educated elites was becoming increasingly dominant after Darwin, the Industrial Revolution, and the intoxicating success of new technologies and discoveries in science.

What changes is not the validity and power of traditional vertical knowledge, but rather the incapacity of the growing numbers of the educated to understand it--or really, to even care about it. During this time there were plenty of religious charlatans and cranks of the televangelist or theosophical ilk, but there were also Christians and other religious figures who were still taken seriously as public intellectuals, even as late as the the decades immediately after WWII. Reinhold Niebuhr, William Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Ivan Illich come to mind. But by the 80s they were no longer taken seriously--or maybe more accurately, there was no new generation that arose to carry on where they left off. Desmond Tutu is the last of that kind of religious public intellectual, but most people born after 1980 were probably wondering what the fuss was about when he was eulogized after his death last week. He was a mensch--a great, wise spirit. 

That kind of public figure no longer exists, and one has to wonder why. I'd argue that we experienced a shift in the country after the failure of the sixties to rebalance things. The shift was symbolized by the country's choosing Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in 1980. Whatever Carter's limitations as a politician, he was a morally serious person in a way his successor was not. I'll argue this in a future post, but I think the country's choosing Reagan and the way he was lionized on Main Street America marked the beginning of what I believe was an irreversible shift into a simulacral culture and in doing so left behind any possibility that American society might be led by relatively sane grownups.

Since Reagan, the country has progressively slipped into greater and more intense alienation from reality. I'm not saying Reagan is the cause, but he symbolizes it, just as Trump is not the cause of our current collective insanity, but the symbol of it. It has become increasingly difficult for people to hear or see the truth; it's become much easier to live in a world where you can customize it to meet your preferences. This is particularly acute on the cultural Right where since Reagan it looks for shallow performance artists to lead them by playing to their fantasies. Reagan, a remarkably talented political performance artist, was at least recognizably "normal" in a way that Trump is not, the difference between them is the measure of how deeply the Red zones of this country has descended into ontological dizziness.

So, while the crisis became particularly acute after the 80s, it has been a long time coming--for around a thousand years. But in its current acute stage, it traces back to the mid-19th century when the truth claims of the old Mythos started to seem for many dubious or, even worse, irrelevant. Life on the horizontal was where it was at for mid- and late-20th-century Americans on the make, and considerations concerning the vertical could be postponed to end-of-life anxieties about what comes next. The young have no time for that, or at best they give a tip of the hat on Sundays to such concerns.

Life otherwise for any red-blooded American was to be lived on the horizontal.That's where all the energy and action was. Religion was for most primarily a transactional technology that was supposed to enhance one's flourishing on the horizontal. If I mind my Ps and Qs, I will prosper. That kind of horizontal religiosity simply cannot withstand any kind of stress test. The sense of the vertical in that kind of thinking about God was already very weak, and so no need to depend on him when one has the use of his wits and the strength of his will to succeed.

That is the Protestant work ethic. It derives from the Calvinist vertical mythos, but it was something that found it could live very well without the vertical. Conservatives praise middle-class values, but there is no need for a God to practice them because there is no presence of the vertical in them. Prosperity and success are its primary motivators. Christianity ceases to be itself to the degree that it loses its ability to mediate the Living Real. If Christianity only does its work on the horizontal, it becomes Christianity in name only. It's a pseudo-Christianity that functions in the same way that Catholicism functioned for the IRA in Ireland or Orthodoxy for the Christians Serbs in the Balkans. It easily slips into becoming a tribal cult. 

But increasingly for the larger post-WWII population, the horizontal became the only thing that mattered--that's where a full life was to be found and lived. The vertical was only for people who hated life, who hated sex and pleasure and life's bounty. A kind of superficial, pop-Nietzcheanism emerges for the sophisticated to justify and celebrate the hedonism that the post-WWII consumer society not only made available, but demanded of citizens in fulflilment of their patriotic duty. As people become increasingly absorbed in their pleasures and their stuff, they become increasingly incapable of responding or hearkening to the vertical. New Age spirituality emerges to provide a religiosity designed for consumer capitalist society, where one can dabble and indulge one's egoism for a lifetime and think oneself profound.

So the dimension of depth became increasingly irrelevant with each passing generation from the mid-19th Century to the present day. And so starting in the late-19th Century, the most important thinkers understood the significance of the loss of depth and its consequences in diminishing the human. They started scrambling to find an alternative for what had been the vertical dimension heretofore occupied by the God of Jewish revelation. For Nietzsche it was the Dionysian, for Heidegger it was the unfathomable depths Being, for Sartre it was this idea of the human as having a godlike, boundless freedom.

All in their different ways generated God replacement after his death some time in the middle of the 19th Century, and the plausibility or legitimacy of these new gods was measured by the degree to which they solved the problem of modern alienation. They were in their different ways trying to find a way back to a connection to the vertical--however that might be conceptualized. For people who were attracted to these thinkers, the last place they'd look for a cure for what was ailing them was the Churches, which, in their view, were alienation factories. And to a large extent, they were not wrong. Kierkegaard certainly thought so of the church in 19th Century Copenhagen. His experience was not exceptional then or now. The churches in their obsession to make sure that Christianity is correctly understood and practiced too often have made Christianity into something that is misunderstood and wrongly practiced. 

The one thing that united all existentialists, following Nietzsche, was the rejection of Greek transcendental "essentialism", for which they blamed Socrates'--through whom, for Nietzsche, emerged the beginning of Western decadence. Socrates' overly rational dialectic and Plato's notions of an otherworldly world of ideas or essences were where all our problems started. Nietzsche and those who followed him were in effect rejecting the entire post-Axial project and its assertion of a transcendent, vertical dimension that impinged on and sustained an immanent world. That rejection became axiomatic afterwards. It's something that is hardly ever challenged these days if you want to be an intellectual in good standing.

But if solving the alienation problem was the primary concern, Nietzsche's real villains should have been Democritus and Protagoras, not Socrates and Plato. It's astonishing to me that Socrates of all people should be considered a "decadent", and the only reason I can think of is that the intellectual avant-garde after Nietzsche became so captured by a form of rationalist materialism by the late 19th Century that they became incapable of responding to Plato's Mythos. It would be like admitting you really like watching It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas. Intellectuals in good standing don't take such sentimental rubbish seriously. But really what they're saying is that they've become incapable of responding to truth that comes in the form of parables. They've lost the imagination for it, the vertical capacity for it. 

The Socratic/Platonic program was adamantly opposed to the tendencies in Greek thought that Democritus, the proto-scientist, and Protagoras, the Sophist, represented, which was truth on the horizontal without reference to the dimension of depth. The vertical dimension in Plato is essential to his post-Axial project--for him it is all about being connected to the Living Real, but late-modern educated elites captured by a rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary must reject the vertical in Plato as nonsense.The Greek proto-scientists--Thales, Anaxagoras, Democritus, et al--are the only Greeks that matter for contemporary Rationalist Materialists. Of course the Sophists matter for demagogues, propagandists, and advertisers. 

Now it's pretty obvious to me that Socrates and probably Plato were mystics. I hesitate to use the word, because of its connotations of flakiness or associations with the New Age within contemporary discourse. But all I mean by it is  experience on the vertical dimension. People have such experiences all the time that they used to recognize as experiences of the transcendent dimension breaking into ordinary consciousness in subtle or dramatic ways. The current fashion is to call them "aesthetic" rather than mystical experiences because that is more compatible with the hegemonic Rationalist Materialist imaginary.

But when Socrates talks about Justice, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as transcendentals, he is not talking about abstract concepts, but about an encounter with the sacred. They are transcendentals because they, operating on the vertical dimension, intersect with the everyday horizontal experience. There is something about them through which the divine shines. They are numinous, and they inspire. If you have ever been deeply moved when learning of or witnessing a particularly inspiring manifestation of these transcendentals, you've had a mystical experience, an experience that comes from the vertical dimension. There are all kinds of mystical experiences, but the experience of the transcendental archetypes listed above is entry level for most people.

So such experiences are common enough, but less so in a culture that has become increasingly simulacral. And obviously there are different ways of understanding or interpreting their provenance. The Heideggerians, Dreyfus and Kelly, try to make the case for a retrieval of a pre-Axial sense of the sacred in their All Things Shining, and I am sympathetic to what they are trying to do, but they bend over backwards to avoid any reference to the vertical in the post-Axial sense I'm trying to articulate here. [See Note 2]

But the point I want to make here is that the experience of the divine or the sacred is something that is rather common. The interpretation of their meaning or significance is where it gets tricky, and this is where a wisdom tradition becomes critical, because while clearly some experiences might 'feel' sacred, many are not. They are delusional. If they are genuine, they are disclosive at varying levels of depth of the Living Real, while others are just counterfeit. I think that many, if not most, of the people storming the Capitol last year sincerely experienced it as a participation in a sacred event. Clearly it was not.

How do we tell the difference? Well, assuming we have good moral instincts and a modicum of intellectual honesty, we can all find out for ourselves by trial and error. But while you can teach yourself the violin, your chances of becoming a good violinist are significantly increased if you have a teacher or a tradition as a resource that makes learning more efficient. It helps to have someone in your life who "knows", who can say to the student, "No, that's not it. Try again." The aspiring violinist is more likely to make progress if there is a trellis on which his development as a violinist can climb and a "gardener" who checks things from time to time to prune what otherwise drains vitality. The same is true in moral development or In the life of the spirit in general. To have such a teacher/gardener can save time, and it might even save your soul. 

Our situation now as late moderns after the collapse of the vertical is that there are no longer any teachers--at least any that are public facing. No more Desmond Tutus. None that break through all the noise, anyway. That along with the destruction/disappearance of customary culture means that there is no cultural trellis to climb. We're all on our own. And mostly we're not doing very well. If we're lucky we find someone along the way who is a little farther along in his or her learning how to navigate on the vertical, but even so, this has no significant impact on our larger cultural, political, and economic life. It just keeps doing its rationalist-materialist thing, and dragging us all along with it whether we want to go or not. 

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We can learn from Socrates how to teach ourselves and one another. There have been--and still are--extraordinary people like Socrates who were/are able to find their own way. And we need to learn from them as best we can. Such people search out those who have some wisdom and learn what they can from them, but when push comes to shove, they find their own way insofar as they have activated an interior moral compass that guides them. For Socrates his teacher was his daemon, and I suspect it's the same for many people today, whether they think of their inner teacher as a daemon or not. For Socrates his daemon had an apophatic or negative influence. It was an inner voice that warned him when he was going off path, when he was being seduced. His daemon only said No, it had nothing to say about how to proceed positively. Socrates had to find within himself a positive way forward, and he had to choose it. (Apparently in the early-'30s Heidegger had no such daemon. Similarly self-proclaimed Christians like Josh Hawley haven't one either.)

Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is. 

A wise teacher must first discover for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts. 

Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.

Logic is used not to reveal what's true, but what cannot be true. As Socrates' daemon doesn't tell him what to do, it tells him only that that's not it--don't go there. That's what all good teachers should do. Wisdom on the vertical dimension comes from learning, first, what to say No to, and then, second, saying Yes to what emerges or discloses itself when a space is cleared for it. This is why the beginning of wisdom is to know what you don't know. The biggest problem that we have in truly knowing is that we think we already know when we just don't. This is the problem for people who are attracted to theocracy. They lack humility; they think they know better, and they just don't  And the biggest problem for people who live captured within a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is that they think their knowledge on the horizontal is the only  knowledge that's truly worthing knowing, and that's why they lack wisdom. 

If you don't have this disclosive experience, and you only just believe what others tell you what the truth is, you remain in a state of alienation from the Living Real. At best, believing in the testimony of others who have vertical knowledge predisposes you to obtain such knowledge for yourself. You're unlikely to do the preparatory work if you don't believe there's anything that will emerge once you've cleared a space for it. But if you knock, the door will be opened; if you ask in good faith, you will be answered. But you have to develop the vertical capacity to hear the answer. A 'mystic' is someone who simply has developed some measure of vertical capacity, some level of discernment made possible by the acquisition of some degree of wisdom. That vertical capacity was something one encountered in prominent public figures quite frequently before forty years ago. It's very, very rare to encounter it anywhere these days.  

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Back to the Christian Mythos: The originators of the Christian Neoplatonic mythos, the early Church Fathers, were mystics in this sense--their greatness lies in their capacity to have cleared a space for something divinely originary to fill it. Among the earliest of them were those who fled into the emptiness of the Egyptian desert where they could create for themselves more easily an interior emptiness, that aporia, that was the precondition for their encounter with the divine. The quality of their theology depended on this vertical capacity to have been emptied so as to be open to be filled in this sense.

The greatest of them were inspired and illumined by their experience of the Christian revelation, and they used Greek philosophy to make sense of their experience of the world in the light of it. The trick was to stay grounded in the vertical experience and to make philosophy, or Logos, work to serve its explication on the horizontal. Trouble sets in when philosophy/Logos is used by people detached from the vertical. That's when the Emissary usurps the Master. The task is to hold the two--Logos and Mythos, the horizontal and vertical together, but the vertical is more important because its what grounds or roots you in the Living Real. I think the early Church Fathers did it in a way that is very difficult for us to understand now, but not impossible. I'll try to make their project more relatable in posts in the future. 

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Note 1: One of the most concise and accessible renderings of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem is provided in the still very readable Irrational Man by William Barrett. (See Chapter 4 "Hebraism and Hellenism".) Barrett understands Continental existentialism as the heir of the Hebrew part of this marriage, and scientific rationalism as heir to the Greek part. Yes and no. He's wrong about the Hellenic insofar as he sees the Greek contribution as significant only on the rationalist, horizontal dimension. The verticality of Greek philosophy was essential for the role in played in the Christian Mythos in its premodern form.

But he's right insofar as he sees the Hebraic as the down-to-earth, gritty, menschy, experiential dimension of faith, a faith that cares about the depth dimension regarding moral issues, if not so much about metaphysical ones. The fathers of existentialism are, after all, the Danish, Tertullianesque, anti-Hegelian gadfly Soren Kierkegaard and the Russian irrationalist Fyodor Dostoyevski. Both were deeply Christian in their commitments. But then again they still lived in societies before the disappearance of the vertical pole, aka, the death of God.

For these existentialists, the attitude was to hell with metaphysics and its systems, of the whole futile effort to make sense of things that are beyond our capacity to make sense of them. The only thing that matters is one's moral commitments. Yes, every individual human being's life is a drama that needs to be lived in this particularist, existentialist sense, but existentialism in its radical individualism gives up on the societal (civilizational?) sphere leaving it to go its merry way, and that's the sphere that is in crisis right now because the deep meaning axis in our lives has become so privatized in this existentialist sense. Both Kierkegaard and Dostoyevski could assume the vertical dimension, i.e., a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary as a backdrop for their thinking in a way that we no longer can. 

Note 2: Even in their description of the most intensely vertical, i.e., mystical, of the gospels, that of St. John, Dreyfus and Kelly reduce Christianity to a "mood" of agape. They see no reason to explain what the origin of this mood is, or whether it has more validity than any other mood or whim. It's just part of a smorgasbord of moods that you can choose from those that call to you on a menu on which all choices are equal. I think their book also makes it clear, if unintentionally, why Heidegger was seduced by the "mood" of early Nazism, and why without a transcendental or vertical dimension to ground our ideas of the Good, there's no real reason to say he was wrong. They try to, but fail, imo. Heidegger is an important, corrective thinker who must be taken seriously, but he is an incomplete, and to say the least, flawed one. The same is true for Dreyfus and Kelly--important and incomplete.

Ed. Note For more on the importance of Greek transcendentalism, see also "Part 8: Plato: Habitus as Heuristic".

Go to Part 4A.

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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.

Genealogy Part 2: Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West

Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness?  I think not.  For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of science locates its highest values not in mystic symbol or ritual or epic tales of faraway lands and times, but in a mode of consciousness, why should we hesitate to call this a myth?  The myth has, after all, been identified as a universal phenomenon of human society, a constitutive factor so critical in importance that it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond....

What is essential here is the contention that objective consciousness is emphatically not some manner of definitive, transcultural development whose cogency derives from the fact that it is uniquely in touch with the truth.  Rather, like a mythology, it is an arbitrary construct in which a given society in a given historical situation has invested its sense of meaningfulness and value.  And so like any mythology, it can be gotten round and called into question by cultural movements which find meaning and value elsewhere.

Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture (1969), p. 214

What Roszak calls myth, I call a metaphysical imaginary. I use the word 'mythos' in a way similar to the way Roszak uses 'myth', but I do not think it's possible to have a materialist or rationalist 'mythos', because a mythos works on the dimension of spiritual depth. Roszak points out that rationalist materialists think they know the truth as opposed to those who believe in myths, but that they, too, live circumscribed within myth. Point taken, but I still prefer to make a distinction between myth and metaphysical imaginary.

A metaphysical imaginary can be judged as effective to the degree that it works in providing a meaning framework for a society on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Let's call the horizontal dimension Logos and the vertical dimension Mythos. Mythos operates on the dimension of depth, with the deep meaning of things; Logos works on the horizontal dimension, on the everyday surfaces of things. Science and what might be described as everyday common sense operate on the Logos axis. Religion, poetry, music, and other art forms work on the vertical axis, and if they play a vital cultural role, they connect a society to the Living Real. Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation.  

In Part 1, I talked about how we are facing the imminent death or disappearance of culture. By that I meant that it's what inevitably happens to any society that has lost the vertical dimension that connects it to the Living Real. No Living Real, no culture. What we have now within the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is not "culture" as it has been experienced by humanity throughout most of its history, but a simulacra of culture, a virtual culture, a parody of culture. 

A full, effective metaphysical imaginary integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos. Our contemporary civilizational crisis lies in that Mythos no longer plays a vital cultural role. There are still artists and deeply spiritual people, but they do not play a vital role in shaping the culture's metaphysical imaginary. They are subsumed into the materialist commodifying ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism. Art and Religion become optional, a matter of preference, a consumer choice, entertainments. Neither offers robust counterbalance to the pervasive Rationalist Materialism.

Religion and poetry have become consumer choices, like buying a new car. They serve our needs or they don't, and mostly they don't because religion and poetry fail to be relevant to the way the larger society actually operates. People don't feel a need for either because the larger society feels no need for either. Being irreligious has become as conventional as being a sports fan. Is this the problem of religion, or is it the problem of the society that has made religion so irrelevant? Well the answer depends on whether you think there is a problem with a society whose cultural forms no longer connect the people in it to the Living Real. Lots of people (most?) are like Cypher in The Matrix--they would prefer to live in a virtual reality, a Metaverse, which is both the pinnacle and the reductio ad absurdum of the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. 

There is real knowledge found on both horizontal and vertical dimensions that derives from real experiences, but the criteria for the legitimacy of knowledge on either dimension is very different. The criteria for knowledge on the horizontal dimension is empirical, objective factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. Factuality is relatively easy to establish, but wisdom is rare, and some people have more of it than others. It needs to be sustained by a tradition. Because it's unverifiable except to those who have some measure of wisdom, its legitimacy became questionable to all those who had only a little measure of it. And so inevitably it led to the current crisis we are undergoing that is directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension playing a role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West. This is a crisis that has been a long time coming, most acutely since the middle of the 19th Century. But we're living now with the consequences. We have become a society that lacks any capacity for making judgments that are wise. We make decisions only on the basis of expediency and utility, i.e., by criteria that exist only on the horizontal or Logos dimension.

Roszak says that myth is so critical for the operation of a society that "it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond". Well, in my terms, he's talking about a metaphysical imaginary, and in our case it's a metaphysical imaginary that's missing one of its two dimensions. This creates incoherence despite even if until recently it provided the appearance of it. Our current crisis of incoherence lies not in that we lack a metaphysical imaginary, but in that the one we have lacks a vertical dimension, the having of which provides what Roszak calls the "mythological bond" that holds things together. Rationalist materialism fails to provide that bond, even if it is our dominant metaphysical imaginary. That's why it feels like the world is falling apart. 

This loss of Mythos, the vertical dimension, in Western societies is also known as the death of God. It spawned a backlash that was simmering for a while, but it flared into public awareness in the U.S. at the time of the Scopes trial. Since then, American evangelical Christianity, which had been the custodian of the American version of the Western mythos, became more rigidly fundamentalistic and increasingly hostile to knowledge on the horizontal dimension. But its growing fundamentalism also made its already rather weak hold on the vertical dimension even weaker. We're in a situation now where neither rationalist materialism nor American Christianity provides American society with any vitality on the dimension of depth. We are a society that completely lacks wisdom in the conduct of its affairs. Expediency is all. 

Roszak is saying that Rationalist Materialism is a myth and doesn't realize it, but I'm saying that Rationalist Materialism has come to so dominate our metaphysical imaginary that we operate no longer with a Mythos or vertical pole around which to spin, and so we spin erratically and meaninglessly. Without the vertical pole to orient activity on the horizontal, we reel in ontological dizziness. Because neither a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary and its religious fundamentalist antithesis has a vertical dimension, neither can be called Mythos. The civilizational crisis we face today, I'm arguing, is the direct consequence of a society whose metaphysical imaginary has lost its vertical dimension. This loss of Mythos has produced a society that lacks wisdom because it lacks broadly accepted cultural forms that connect it to the Living Real. 

A functional metaphysical imaginary 'works' on both the horizontal and vertical. It integrates facts and wisdom. It fails to the degree that one or the other fails to balance the other. The difference between premoderns and moderns is that premoderns privileged the vertical; moderns the horizontal. Most premodern metaphysical imaginaries worked because the vertical and the horizontal reinforced one another. In other words, the everyday world of experience made sense in the context of its mythos. Modern societies have evolved in a way where its everyday experience became increasingly divorced from what had been its vertical dimension until eventually the vertical became irrelevant for the way in which people conducted their everyday lives.

A metaphysical imaginary should not be judged as inadequate by what it affirms but by what it leaves out. And so for that reason I would say that the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary fails us, not because of what it knows on the horizontal, but because of what it leaves out the dimension of depth and its wisdom. But any religious system that seeks to play a vital role in a society fails if it rejects knowledge on the horizontal. Fundamentalism fails twice over because it rejects knowledge on both the vertical and the horizontal--it lacks factuality and wisdom. Biblicism is a reductive metaphysical imaginary that provides no real knowledge on either the horizontal or vertical dimensions. Fideism, which for some people has a genuine spiritual depth, rejects knowledge whether derived vertically or horizontally. Biblicism and Fideism cannot work on a social or civilizational level because both in their different ways reject real knowledge on the horizontal dimension.

Mythos, if understood as operating on the vertical dimension, is compatible with science, which operates on the horizontal. Science gets out over its skis when it tries to be Mythos. Religion gets out over its when it tries to be Logos. Nevertheless, a robust future metaphysical imaginary must find a way to satisfactorily integrate the knowledge that comes from both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, but in such a way that the legitimacy of the knowledge gained on either dimension is respected by the other on its own terms. A healthy, integrated human being as well as a healthy, integrated society "knows" in both ways. Fideism and Scientism must be rejected as equally inadequate in their respective reductionisms. 

So why is it no longer possible for us to sustain a culture-wide metaphysical imaginary that integrates both Logos and Mythos? In Part 1, I argued that because we are acculturated into a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary, it is extraordinarily difficult even for genuinely religious people, people whose lives have a vital vertical dimension, to feel that the mythos that grounds their religious beliefs has anything to do with the everyday world in which they live. More often than not, those religious concerns become directed toward a supernatural world that has little relationship with the immanent, sublunar everyday, common-sense world of their daily experience.

Their mythos must necessarily alienate them from life in a world that is dominated by a Rationalist Materialist imaginary. Rather than for them to think of their lives as entwined with the destiny of the earth, they see the earth as a place of exile or as illusion from which they must be freed by getting off-planet and into the supernatural dimension, which is their true home.

This leads to a quietism that leaves the earth open to be dominated by the sociopaths. A quietist mythos that assumes that the earth is dominated by evil, delusional, and depraved human beings has robust explanatory power--isn't this an apt description of the world we live in? But it also functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. But better that kind of otherworldly, quietistic fideism, like that, for instance, practiced by the Amish, than the kind of militant fundamentalism that seeks holy war to impose a wisdomless theocracy on the rest of us. That would simply replace a wisdomless liberal horizontality with a wisdomless illiberal one. Theocrats on the American cultural right crave to live in a "godly" society, but what they really crave is a society that has recovered its vertical dimension. 

We all crave it, whether we recognize it or not, because we all crave the Living Real, whether we recognize it or not. As I said above, a felt connection to the Living Real is the only cure for alienation, and there is no society in the history of the world that is experiencing alienation with greater intensity than American society. American society craves a restoration of Mythos to balance out a suffocating, alienating, overweening horizontality. Lots of people live in communities that attempt to live lives aligned on the vertical dimension, but as I argued in Part I, it is hard for such communities to flourish. They are running a cultural program on a cultural OS that has become incompatible with it. I believe that eventually, if we are to find health again, we must find a way for the entire society to restore the dimension of depth while respecting the freedom of every individual to find his or her way on it.

I realize that such an idea is an affront to the postmodern, cosmopolitan ethos in which most the culture's elite swim, but I think that most also recognize that something's got to give. I also realize that I have to make a more compelling case than I've done so far that at the root of our crisis is this loss of the vertical. See Part 3 for that. People have lived so long without it that they have no sense of its loss. It's just disappeared without a trace, and so we assume it never existed. The ancestors who report their connection with the Living Real, we think, were delusional; they didn't have science to set them straight.  

In a future posts, I will make the case that there is a Living Real, and that we live in a society that has lost any sense of its importance. But even without having made that case yet, I think anybody who is half awake realizes that we cannot continue on the course we're on. Something radically different is called for. At the root of our civilizational crisis is a crisis of meaning, and meaning comes from the vertical dimension. 

Part 2B: Random Reflections on This Theme

On Christmas, I posted "A Reflection on the Incarnation" in which I laid out in rough outline a way of synthesizing the vertical with the horizontal. The challenge is to recover the Mythos that roots Western civilization within the context of what evolutionary science and modern cosmology tell us about reality on the horizontal dimension. I think that the core mythos of Western civilization can be accurately described as Christian Neoplatonism, which is an integration of two post-Axial traditions--Greek transcendental speculative philosophy and Jewish revelation. Of course, I recognize how implausible what I wrote there sounds both to Christians of a certain stripe and to secularists of another. But my goal is not to persuade people I am right that the Christian Neoplatonic mythos is the only one that's possible for the West--or the world. I do, however, insist that something like it is called for. My goal is not to argue so much as it is to evoke, as a memory of something long forgotten. 

And in any event, I suspect that Christianity is its best version of itself when it is countercultural rather than providing a civilization's central mythos. In all likelihood, at least in the next hundred or so years, I think that something other than the Christian mythos will play the primary role if we find a way to restore the vertical pole to our collective metaphysical imaginary. But in its main outlines such a mythos should be compatible with the Christian mythos as well as with the mythoi of the other great post-Axial religions. All I'm saying is that the broader society needs an alternative to the Rationalist Materialist cultural OS if they are to run effectively, i.e., run in a way that provides a way for the broader society to reconnect to the Living Real. 

I think there needs to be room for the vertical knowledge that comes from pre-axial 'shamanic' religions, as well. This was the case in medieval Christendom and in Buddhist societies, where a system of hierarchical complementarity allowed for a whole range of religious practices within one social system. The goal in restoring  the vertical dimension would be to embrace a religious integrated pluralism. I'll explore what this means in a future post, but the way I think about it now is that a future Mythos has its own vertical and horizontal dimensions--a transcendent, theistic vertical, and an immanent, polytheistic horizontal.

As suggested in Part 1, something like a metaxis that defines a centering Perennial Philosophy as the colorless light in tension with many colors refracted in particular traditions, local variations, orders, and sects is probably what is called for. Again, this is for a later post, but I"m not talking about Bellah's "civil religion". There's not enough of the vertical in that, but there must be a civil dimension to whatever mythos we come to embrace.

My goal in writing these essays is to bark up a tree that needs to be barked up. For those of us who live in societies shaped by the Christian mythos, it's important to understand why that Mythos "worked" for so long and then why it didn't. To do so requires that we think very differently than we think now, that we entertain the plausibility of a metaphysical imaginary that is not dominated by Rationalist Materialism.

All I see myself doing, is barking out loud to draw attention in whatever modest way to something that's missing but not gone--it's up there in that tree. We need to bring it to ground one way or another. And the best way I know how to do that is to talk about what I see hiding among the leaves and branches when I look up into them. Perhaps others will see more clearly something quite different than what I see. And clearly, bringing it to ground is a task for the future. We're not ready for it yet. The important thing is that people start looking, and then that they find some way to bring it back into our collective lives. I make no pretension to know anything more than to say that there's something up in that tree, and that we need to coax it out of hiding. 

In the posts to come in this 'genealogy" series, I want to bark a little more. I want to spend some time to understand how the originary mythos of the West collapsed, what the implications of that collapse were, and then how to imagine a robust Mythos for the future. We're at a juncture now where we've lost any sense that the vertical matters--that wisdom matters--that spiritual concerns should play any role in shaping life in our collective public life. They are not even relevant in defining our collective moral commitments. We've bent over backwards to find ways of affirming moral goods that have no reference to a transcendental foundation, to the Good. We find utilitarianism, social contract theory, abstract deontological rules or some bizarre form of sociobiology as preferable alternatives to ground our moral thinking. These are all moral programs that might work compatibly on the rationalist materialist cultural OS, but that doesn't mean they are adequate or come even close to what is called for to meet our civilizational crisis. They confuse a practical expediency for wisdom. 

As I said above, people who actually take the great post-Axial metaphysical imaginary of the West seriously still exist, but they have no influence. What they have to say does not scan in the broader culture. It's a tradition that isn't even taught anymore (mostly) as part of an educated person's understanding of what it means to be educated. At best, matters of the spirit are concerns that might be allowed for people to muse about in private, but mostly they are entertainments to be indulged by children and adults who have nothing more interesting to do with their leisure. Reading Plato has the same status as reading a Michael Crichton novel, but more boring. But I think that nothing is more important than for those who will be most influential in shaping future civilization to recover that great tradition. [See Note 2]

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So I'm arguing that the deep roots of our crisis are causally linked to the failure of our current metaphysical imaginary. That being said, who among us with any cultural legitimacy thinks metaphysically anymore? The intellectual class just blithely accepts that Rationalist Materialism is the only game in town. There are the religious people and then there are people who accept science. Sometimes there are people who have a foot in both worlds, but even if religious people accept science, the metaphysical imaginary in which they live is dominated by Rationalist Materialist assumptions.

How that jibes with their religious beliefs is not something most people fret about--at least until recently. But whether they fret or not, they have been living in a disjointed world where one set of assumptions is at odds with the other. Most compartmentalize: this is my private life where I read the Bible or Cabbala; that is my public life where I enact ruthless tactics to enrich my company's shareholders. It is never good to compartmentalize, even if doing so was a strategy that provided some temporary social stability. That stability is gone, and so therefore is the utility of compartmentalizing. 

I argued in Part 1 that it was possible for American society to maintain some level of stability so long as the customary culture that shaped the lives of most people in Main Street America still had some vitality. The persistence of customary culture until last mid-century provided the social ballast that insured a level of stability that just isn't there anymore. American customary culture used to provide a grounding, humanizing character for exurban America, but it has lost its vitality. It has become a simulacral.

Norman Rockwell's depiction of that customary world in the mid 20th century was the earliest sign that it was already achieving museum status rather than doing anything vital. This loss of WASP, exurban customary culture is coupled with the loss of the customary cultures of the ethnic minorities in the urban areas--Irish, Italian, Jews, Germans, and other European traditions that carried the Western originary mythos and its customs with them from the old country. With the destruction of all those customary cultures has died whatever vestiges of vitality were left of the Western originary mythos in American society. 

There is still some customary vitality in Black and Hispanic communities, and I'm sure there are other communities I'm unaware of where some customary vitality persists, but the pressures to erode what's left of them are terrific. Many people still go through the motions in communities where the originary mythos has lost its vitality. But it doesn't work, and it can't be passed to the next generation. But without even the zombie forms of customary culture, people are now being thrust into ontological dizziness in a way that is unprecedented.

These are the people who are attracted to Trump or to cargo cults like Qanon who show up in the hundreds at Dealey Plaza. It gives them an unhealthy parody of community because the healthy real thing is no longer available. Better such collective fantasies than oxycontin or meth, but these are simple folk dealing with the loss of a cultural heritage that is making them crazy, and as such they are vulnerable to be seduced by anything that promises a cure or even just a temporary respite.

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As I argued in Part I, the Western originary mythos came to English North America in a deeply attenuated form with Calvinism, which means that its metaphysics were univocal/nominalist and voluntarist. If you're unfamiliar with these terms, i'll explain them in a future post, but the upshot is this: Ideas have consequences, and by the time Europeans, especially the English, came to America, they carried with them a metaphysical imaginary that profoundly alienated them from the Living Real. And it was for this reason that the native Americans who encountered them thought they were crazy. And as Benjamin Franklin observed (see epigraph for Part 1), the English who lived among the Native Americans never wanted to go back to live among their own people. Why choose to live in a cold, soul-shriveling social world if you could live in a rich, warm, deeply symbolic one. 

So before the reader rolls his eyes dismissing me as a naive Rousseauan who celebrates the noble savage, let me assert quite adamantly that, yes, Rousseau was mostly right in some very important respects. I would just frame the noble savage issue differently. It wasn't that there was anything special about native American culture that was not true of most premodern, pre-literate customary societies. Such societies lived close to nature and felt deep communal bonds that are essential for the flourishing of any human life. And they had a richly deep metaphysical imaginary that provided a symbolic world that reinforced their experience of the world as deeply participative with it. They had societies with a mythos axis and so had societies in which wisdom played an essential role in shaping their societies, a wisdom that most of the white settlers had no capacity to recognize. 

What was really different and weird was what elite European society had become by the 1600s, which was one deeply alienated from the Living Real, and so the European metaphysical imaginary came to reflect that profound alienation. Descartes was the miners' canary. With him we get the first strong indicator that the European educated elite had become so alienated from the Living Real that they could actually conduct a thought experiment that started with the assumption that no extra-mental Real even existed.

A century later, Rousseau looked at the people he hung out with, especially in the courtier class, and it was clear to him that these people were just strange, because so deeply estranged. There's got to be a better way to live, he thought, and so it's not surprising that he embraced the idea of the nobility of a people who were as different from the French courtier class as could be imagined. They had a dignity and a wisdom that was simply unavailable to Rousseau's elite contemporaries.  And in fact, as Franklin pointed out, so many of the English who emigrated to America found in their encounter with the Native Americans something that proved Rousseau correct.

But we all know the story that follows. The other more deeply alienated English who stayed proudly English in their deep alienation from the Living Real, responded to their encounter with Native Americans by essentially wiping them out by force of arms. An aboriginal, richly human, symbolic society is destroyed by a deeply alienated, anti-symbolic society, and we Americans have inherited the winners' violence and their deep alienation from the Living Real. We've had two hundred and fifty years to become even more alienated from it. And we wonder why everybody around us now is losing their minds. 

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And so the question follows: If our deepest problem lies in that we live within a metaphysical imaginary that is profoundly spiritually impoverishing, how do we find our way to a remedy? Well, it's a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. Does our metaphysical imaginary shape our experience, or does our experience shape our metaphysical imaginary? I'd argue that experience is primary and then our thinking about the implications of our experience follow from it. But it's reverberative, to use a McGilchrist term. A society reaches a tipping point where the one reinforces the other for better or worse. I'll come back to McGilchrist in a future post to explore how this might work in a positive way, but in the meanwhile, an examination of a society's underlying metaphysical imaginary is a strong indicator of the relative sanity or insanity of the social world in which its people live. We are insane now largely because our metaphysical imaginary is so deeply alienating, and our insanity is reinforced by our metaphysical imaginary precisely because it lacks a vertical dimension. 

And so, any reader of this blog should not be surprised to learn that I think that the secular materialism/positivism defines the contemporary metaphysical imaginary of the global north and pretty much everywhere capitalism defines a society's central priorities. My critique here owes more to Baudrillard's ideas about disappearance, symbolic exchange, commodification, and seduction than to Marx. Marx assumed that humans would stay relatively rational in thinking about their political interests, and it's there where's he's been proved most wrong. He had important things to say about alienation, but he had no idea how bad it was going to get. 

What we have is too insane for a Marxist critique. Because Marxism suffers from the same problem that the capitalist materialism does--no vertical dimension--it provides no cure for ontological dizziness. That's why Soviet Society failed and why now Capitalist democracy is failing. Both in their ontological vertigo are ripe to be exploited by someone like Putin over there and Trump over here. These demagogues present themselves as figures who are selling sanity and metaphysical realignment with the vertical dimension when in fact they are promoting a counterfeit of them. They represent a reversion to oligarchical warlordism in a postmodern, hi-tech key.

Even if they have a really bad solution, they, at least, understand the problem. Not Trump of course: he's a big, dumb, dark channel for an egregore whose energy someone like Bannon and the Claremonsters, who do understand it, seek to exploit. But unless the "good guys" come up with a better solution to our collective loss of verticality, then there's a very good chance the dark, violent forces Bannon seeks to exploit will win. He understands the hunger for the vertical dimension can be exploited with a snake-oil version of it. Secular Liberals correctly see the snake oil, but then incorrectly conclude that anything that comes from the vertical dimension must be snake oil. 

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And so then the next question is this: what happened in Europe that set it apart from every other society that existed in the world around five hundred years ago? The causes are complex, of course, but chief among them is Gutenberg's printing press and the Reformation. Both together magnified what had been an incipient trend among some of Europe's elite toward alienation and disenchantment, and while I have laid out a summary for what I believe is the most coherent explanation for what comes next in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age here, in posts to come, I want to emphasize key parts of Taylor's story and add a layer of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and the Emissary to provide the thousand-year genealogy of our current insanity. Both these books are essential reading for anybody whose hair is on fire as mine is and who wants a deeper understanding about what we're truly dealing with and how we might find a way forward.

Go to Part 3.

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Note 1: My use of Logos here as knowledge on the horizontal axis carries a different meaning from what I understand as the Johannine Logos, which is foundational for intelligibility on the horizontal axis, but also the intelligibility of revelations that disclose themselves from the depths of of the Living Real on the vertical axis. The Johannine Logos is in my Christian epistemology foundational for both Logos and Mythos. 

Note 2: After writing Part I, I learned about David Brooks's interviewing Leon Kass on Ezra Klein's podcast. I see Kass as struggling with the same issues I am, and while I'm uncomfortable with any thinking that originates from within the University of Chicago's Straussian milieu, Kass is an interesting, morally serious man, and I intend to read his Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus (Yale University Press, 2021). I am interested to learn whether he is barking up the same tree as I am. 

At first glance, it would appear that he is. In the podcast he says that there are three things a 'nation' needs to flourish, (1) a story of origins, (2) a covenant/law, or broadly accepted moral ethos, and (3) a tabernacle, a cult that defines a nation's highest spiritual aspirations. Ok--he's talking mythos here, restoring the vertical dimension--and I'm listening with interest to learn where he's going to take this, and then he blows it by saying American society had such a mythos until the sixties. There's no bigger turn off for me than to blame our current turmoil on the sixties.

The sixties were a failed attempt to correct the deeper problem. Read Roszak. The Making of a Counterculture is still very, very relevant and remarkably prescient. That the counterculture failed then has more to do with the power of technocapitalism to absorb and coopt almost every vital attempt to subvert it. There was no mention in the conversation between Brooks and Kass about how technocapitalism might be playing a role in our current crisis. This is a blatant refusal or blindness that affects so many American Conservatives. It renders whatever of value they have to share, if not irrelevant, at least as something incapable of influencing the broader cultural ethos. Nevertheless, I'll read Kass's book in the hope that his arguments will be more nuanced, but I fear it won't get past much of what's acceptable at the American Enterprise Institute where Kass is a fellow.

But even so, there might be common ground here. I'm just not sure that Exodus provides the originary mythos that is going to do the job for us now, even if it was the mythos of the Puritans who came to New England. If you read Part I, you know what I think about Calvinism. The Canaan they founded was no land of milk and honey I'd ever want to live in. But the basic problem with the Puritans was that while indeed they had a vital mythos, it was too colorless and too deeply implicated with the emergence of capitalism and its materialist metaphysical imaginary. I'll argue this assertion in a future post, but the point to make here is that you can't solve a problem from within the frame of the metaphysical imaginary whose contradictions are the cause of the problem.

We are living in a time where the problem needs desperately to be resolved, and the Calvinist mythos does not have the resources to do it. And yet Exodus could work as a contemporary mythical lens if we understand it not as our having arrived in Canaan as those first Puritans believed they did, but as our still wandering in the wilderness. It's precisely the the obsoletized metaphysical imaginary of the Calvinists that we must leave behind as we wander in the wilderness for a few generations during which we unlearn its soul-crushing habits of mind. But to what land of milk and honey are we headed? Again, considerations for a future post. 

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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.

Reflections on the Incarnation

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.]

On Reading Simone Weil's 'Gravity and Grace'

I've avoided reading Weil's essays until recently because I was put off by what appeared to be her body hatred, her need to be pure, her angelism. But now that I've read her, I have to say I am strangely moved. There's something there to be grappled with, and I feel in her a kindred spirit with whom I would love to have conversed and to have befriended. Our becoming friends, though, could happen only after we spent some time arguing. 

Where is the line that separates a pure-hearted commitment to truth and goodness from a fanaticism for perfection? Not sure I know for myself, and I don't think Weil found it either. But I think that the striving for moral perfection is basically un-Christian because it leads to a tight-assed rejection of the messiness of being human. Our ultimate destiny is to be perfect as God is perfect (emphasis on the 'as'), but this isn't something we accomplish by exertion of will. The testimony of the great saints is clear about that; it's something that happens to us if we're open to it, if we choose to respond and work with the grace afforded to us. Perfection is something to be achieved in time, but not primarily by the will. There is a willfulness and body-hating angelism in the young Weil that I believe had she lived would have been tempered, but it's something that has to be called out.

Our perfecting, or theosis, plays out in different ways for different people, but mostly it's not about trying to be a perfect human being but about doing what's there for us to do, which is to accept the burden and yoke of discipleship more in the spirit of St. Therese's "little way". It's the small, everyday things that build habits of perception and will that prepare us to do the big things if we are called upon to do them. But the little things are enough if that's what's given you. Most of us haven't achieved the level of humility that would permit us to go big and not to be damaged by it. 

But if Weil's angelism led to something that I think was unbalanced, that doesn't mean that so much of what she perceived and understood was wrong. And in reading Weil, I find something I haven’t encountered a long time, and it’s this feel for transcendence in a late modern key, and this way of talking about what it’s like for humans to touch it.

There is in her this sense of its subtlety and beauty, its gentleness and serenity. It is that feeling I get from time to time when in the presence of true beauty. I think that it’s what medieval Christians experienced in the cult of the virgin, but it’s something found in all the great spiritual traditions, this sense of mercy, of grace, of whatever is the opposite of force. Weil gets that and talks about it beautifully.

For instance, this sensibility is at the heart of her insight about the difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic. Weil is not a fan of the latter because she associates with it, I think rightly, a kind of force that had no patience for the gentle, simple beauty of the Romanesque.The Romanesque balanced masculine and feminine; it gave us chivalry and the Grail stories, Hildegard of Bingen, and the cult of the Virgin. The  Gothic that gave us those astonishing cathedrals and the control-obsessed, centralizing Church militant. 

I remember when I made my first trip to Europe thinking that the Gothic cathedrals were impressive, but the Romanesque chapels were purer, simpler. There is grandeur in the Gothic, but better is that sense of gentle beauty before which one feels not compelled but invited. The Gothic cathedral has more in common with the assertiveness of the modern skyscraper, the Romanesque chapel with the roadside shrine in an arbor. The mood for the latter is not awe so much as it is of being moved to tears. Weil understands this difference. The latter is more deeply Christian. 

Weil was respected and read by a certain kind of mid-century Christian intellectual because she was such a prodigy, but I think mostly she was not understood. Did Gustave Thibon, who wrote the Introduction to Gravity and Grace understand her? I think mostly not. But he encountered in her something that he respected, a sincerity of spirit that was rare. So give him credit for that. (Perhaps I’m too hard on him, but I found his writing style in his introduction to Gravity and Grace jarringly out of tune with the spirit of the essays he introduces.) And amazingly her essays are still in print, which means there’s still enough of an audience that, like me, is intrigued by her and even now seeks to understand what she was pointing to.

***

But now I want to argue with the Weil who wrote “Human Personality”. At first I was struck by its Buddhistic tenor. I have no objections to Buddhism--I see it as pointing to parts of the human project that Westerners need to understand much better than they do. We have much to learn from Buddhists. But Christians emphasize the individual and the incarnate in a way that is mostly not found in Buddhism and that emphasis is, imo, misunderstood by Buddhists probably because it's misunderstood by most Christians, among them Weil. I suspect that her main exposure to Christian personalism was in its cruder or more childish forms, and in reaction to them goes too far in the other direction. We see this in an anecdote told about her by Thibon when he saw her for the last time:

As I parted from her I said jokingly, in an attempt to hide my feelings: “Goodbye until we meet again in this world or the next.” She suddenly became serious and replied, “In the next there will be no meeting again.’ She meant that the limits which form our ‘empirical self’ will be done away with in the unity of eternal life.  (Gravity and Grace, p. xii)

Of course, this is Thibon’s interpretation of a memory, so who knows how accurate it is, but it's not contradicted by what she writes in "Human Personality". There is something about the thinking of mid-century spiritual intellectuals—we see it in T.S. Eliot, as well—that is more interested in eternity than in temporality, as if we can know something about eternity and that it can be spoken about in some credible way. I resist this fascination with the “eternal” because it opposes my commitment to the idea that what matters most is what happens in time.

And I resist the idea of the “impersonal” because the whole point of Christian spiritual practice is to become more deeply a person, i.e., one's Self, i.e, the Self created in the image and likeness of God, and that this is accomplished when this Self, which starts as a seed, grows to eventually supplant/transform the Darwinian Self, and this "supplanting/transforming" can only happen for us humans on earth over time. The Darwinian Self is the natural human being concerned with biological flourishing--spread your seed, dominate your enemies, seek glory in your achievements. In other words, get your inner Genghis Kahn (or Donald Trump or Tiger Woods or etc.) on if you have the will and wit to do it--or if you don't, bow the knee and get behind and draft on those who do. 

And I resist the idea that we shall not meet our deceased loved ones in the future as un-Christian because for Christianity the goal is communion. And communion, as opposed to Buddhistic merging into the pleromatic Unity requires a plurality of persons, that is, of realized Deep Selves. This plurality of Deep Selves is what Christians call the communion of saints. So it seemed to me this comment by Thibon suggested that Weil was more of a Buddhist than a Christian, at least in this respect.

Or at least this was my first impression upon reading this essay. But it became clear that she’s talking about something that resonates deeply with my own understanding of the relationship of transcendence to the temporal.

If I had a conversation with her, I might make the argument that the idea of eternity is a meaningless abstraction invented by philosophers as a placeholder for something they didn't really understand.  "Eternity" pointed to a dimension of reality they knew was important, something radically different and in some ways nobler and more deeply, densely real than what most people take for the real world. If time = change, change = growth/decay, so the opposite of temporal is the opposite of growth/decay, which is eternity. "Eternity" became a  way to name what was incorruptible, and the essence of incorruptibility was God. So I understand that, but I'd still argue that we have no way of knowing for sure whether God is an eternal being or a temporal one, or that he himself is not co-evolving with his creation. 

That being said, it’s certainly possible that there’s a dimension of God that exists beyond Time, but, even so, that is no concern of ours. What makes a theistic conception of God interesting for humans is the fact of his relationship to us in time, and clearly that means he exists in time. All attempts by thinkers to emphasize the eternity, infinity, the power, freedom, and the absolute transcendence of God might in some way be pointing to the truth about him, but it’s not relevant to our experience of him. If you profess to be Christian, the temporal aspect of God is knowable, and we are invited to form a relationship with this God in time through his revelation in Jesus of Nazareth.

Ideas about his existence beyond time are purely abstract speculation, and, imo, create more problems than they solve. Better not to speak of it. This is the emphasis of the apophatic tradition in Christianity, to recognize that anything we say or think about God is wrong, and so best not say or think it. I think that there is common ground here with Buddhist non-theism, which derives from an honesty that one can only speak about what one knows.

So instead of the word ‘eternity’, I prefer the word ‘transcendence’. Transcendence points to a dimension of being that stands outside of what I think of evolution without grace, but that doesn’t mean it’s outside of time. It just exists in another dimension, a temporal dimension, that interpenetrates with the world we experience on earth. In other words, there's a temporality--and evolution--at a higher level that seeks to become intertwined with and transformative of the lower temporality of biological evolution.

So when Weil talks about there being nothing sacred in the human personality, and that the sacred in the human is only what is impersonal, it sounds at first that she is rejecting the idea of human individuality, and that the goal is to give up our individuality and to merge into a higher unity. Maybe this is what she thought. I’m not sure. But there is common ground here with what I’ve been thinking about regarding the Deep Self and Communion.

I think we want to affirm the same thing. What she calls the impersonal eternal is the same as what I call the Antrhopos archetype, aka, the Christ within about which St. Paul is so articulate. The Christ/Anthropos archetype is universal--it's something potentially cognizable by every human being whether they are Christians or not, and it exists in a transcendent dimension, i.e., a dimension that is nobler and more densely real, as all archetypes do. But Christians like me believe that the possibility of the Christ Self supplanting/transforming the Darwinian Self became a possibility for everyone only after the events in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago.

Our theosis, our divinization, becomes a possibility only after the Divine became human. Only after the Divine has lived into human death, did it become possible for the human to die into Divine life. Only after the Old Adam was redemptively transformed in the resurrected New Adam was it possible for the rest of to become who we were created to be. The interior, i.e., inside-out, realization of the New Adam became a possibility for all humans in a way that it was not pre-Pentecost.

So what I'm calling the Christ/Anthropos archetype is what St. Paul points to when he says not I but Christ in me--not the Darwinian Self, the Old Adam, but the Anthropos, the Christ Self, the New Adam. Wouldn’t Weil be receptive to the idea that this "Christ in me" is what she calls the impersonal, but which is in fact a deeper personal, a deeper form of individuality and uniqueness?

The Christ in me is not Christ himself--he has his own embodied individuality--but his image and likeness--the Anthropos archetype--is individualizable in my ‘person’. And the point of Christ's incarnation and resurrection was precisely to restore his shattered image and likeness*, qua the archetypal human in the human being. He did this so that this archetype might in its full development make us individually substantive enough to enter into communion with God face to face. Face to face is emphatically not Weil''s idea of “the empirical self being eradicated in the unity of eternal life”.

That's why Christians emphasize the resurrection of the body--the Anthropos archetype has no body; it must be individualized in bodies. The archetype is like a seed strewn into the souls of all humans but for reasons that are lost to human memory, the human soul-soil in the Old Adam became infertile to its growth. This infertility is what Christians like me point to as original sin. And so Christians like me believe that the possibility for the restoration in the Old Adam of the soul-soil's fertility became possible through the deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. In his resurrection, he was the first human being in whom the Anthropos archetype became fully realized and so now its realization becomes a possibility for the rest of us.

So for each of us to realize the Christ archetype does not mean we become Jesus bots, but rather the fully actualized individuals we were created to be who are destined for communion. The banquet parables in the Gospels and the circle dances and wedding parties at the end of Shakespearean comedies are proleptic images for this longed for telos. And while these are simply images about something that is otherwise unimaginable for us, especially given the poverty of our late-modern, buffered imaginations, they give us every reason to hope that we will be in communion with, among others, those whom we came to know and love, and to think this not possible is downright un-Christian. 

Nevertheless, Weil is right to point out that whatever part of us that touches eternity or that is moved by transcendence has little to do with our everyday personality shaped by the anxieties of our day-to-day getting along in the world, which I assume is what she means by the "empirical self". And I agree with her that our preoccupation with the aggrandizement of our personalities, our constant seeking to flourish in terms defined by the Darwinian Self (her empirical self?), is more of an impediment to the part of us that is capable of being moved by transcendence.

I see her as someone obsessed with trying to extirpate her empirical/Darwinian Self as it operated in her. We see something similar in Gandhi's autobiography. The idea is that you have to kill the empirical self (Darwinian Self) to liberate the Deep Self. And it would appear that she does not think of the Deep Self as a truly individuated being but rather as just a part of the soul that seeks to merge with eternity. I suspect we’re talking about the same thing. I just think her impersonalist way of articulating it is deficient from a Christian point of view.

I would agree with Weil that the more focused we are on being affirmed in our Darwinian Selves, the less sensitive we become to hear the music, which is the movement of grace in our lives. For this reason, our lives in the collectivity, especially one so dominated by consumer capitalism, make it more difficult to be touched by transcendence and to hear its music. And I agree that it is in solitude, away from the crowd, that we are more likely to be so touched. But isn’t this need to separate from the collectivity a way of affirming the importance of our individuality? And does it preclude the idea of our having individual Deep Selves brought into fuller realization by a lifetime of openness and response to grace?

So I may or not be right about this, but I think if I were to have a conversation with Weil, I could convince her that what she and I are talking about is pretty much the same thing.

*See "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

See also "Quote of the Day: Simone Weil" and "On Simone Weil"