After the Future

Here We Are

Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it is no longer by any means clear who is leading whom. So they have persuaded themselves that there is no other option but to support a Trump-led Republican Party, even one that is lawless and depraved, because the Democratic Party is, for them, an unthinkable alternative. The result is that they have been sucked, cognitively and psychologically, into their own alternative reality, a psychedelic collage made up of what Kellyanne Conway, a former counselor to Mr. Trump, famously called “alternative facts.”

Peter Wehner

Wehner's essay references Allan Bloom's 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, at the time a critique of the postmodern Left's epistemic nihilism. Wehner's point here is that what Bloom complained about then is now a far more significant problem for the Right than for the Left, at least insofar as it threatens the stability of the political and social order.

I agree, but it's not that the Cultural Left has moved on from epistemic nihilism. Nihilism is the most influential shaper of our public metaphysical imaginary, no matter what one's personal beliefs might be, no matter whether one leans to the cultural and political Right or Left.

While most decent people don't think of themselves as nihilists, nihilism is so much in the air they breathe that they are unaware of how it influences their thinking and behavior. So the next thing you know a perfectly decent evangelical Christian finds himself voting for an uber-libertine in Donald Trump, believing his lies, and storming the Capitol to save his presidency. And perfectly decent, morally earnest college students find themselves marching to justify Hamas's butchery in southern Israel. It's the most morally earnest, whether they're aware of it or not, who are the most impassioned agents of a nihilism they would insist they don't believe in. 

***

The world is run by the ambitious, not the wise. I understand that. And the ambitious have no need of wisdom or knowledge except that which serves their ambitions. And yet humans don't want to live in chaos to which the unchecked ambitions of the ambitious lead us. So in a world where transcendent values have no public legitimacy we are given two basic choices: (1) either the Hobbesian state of nature in which a violent anarchy reigns, and where life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', or (2) the Hobbesian Leviathan that produces a 'brave new world' of  frightened, flat-souled Last Men, distracted by bread and circuses--a lot like the world satirized in WALL-E. On the globals scale, Neoliberalism is producing the worst of both. 

Is there no alternative. I, of course, think there is, but we are reluctant to choose it for complicated reasons. It comes down to this: 

Every society needs forms and norms, but the healthiest society has norms that are aligned with Reality, that is, with the way things are, not with the way we wish them to be. And yet because there is a transcendental dimension to Reality, it must be a part of what a healthy society seeks to be in alignment with. (See diagram below.) Because this affirmation of a transcendent dimension is so difficult for us to enshrine in any vital way in our public discourse today, we cannot affirm it except as individuals. But as individuals we are divided and conquered. 

A broadly accepted sense of Justice as metaphysical balance is essential for a vital sense of social order. Even Machiavelli would agree with that. (See Note 1) Without a center pole to organize and orient our navigation of the world, we spin purposelessly and allow those with the coarsest ambitions to drag us where they may. That's why the idea of justice embraced by the intersectional Left is so useless for us today. It's a symptom of what ails us rather than any kind of cure for it. Whatever its good intentions, it has very little to do with Reality--either in terms of the way the world works or in its relationship to Justice as an inspiring transcendental. It's metaphysical foundations are nihilistic, and its program drags us toward chaos. 

***

I make the case for this in the informal series I've been writing on and off called A Geneaology of Our Current Insanity. The basic argument I make largely relies on the structure diagramed below. Every civilization needs a vertical pole as part of its metaphysical imaginary. But the intellectual elite in North Atlantic societies for complicated historical-cultural reasons beginning in the 14th century amputated what had been its vertical pole since the mid first millennium BCE. It remained as a  phantom limb so long as religious faith--in a fideistic form that rejected Greek metaphysics--remained robust. But it was just a question of time before the loss of this limb would be broadly felt in practical ways, and that time came in the mid-19th century.

After Darwin, any idea of transcendent dimension interpenetrating with the immanent was fairly quickly supplanted--in about 50-60 years--by a wholly horizontal, i.e., wholly immanent, cosmology. Henceforth the imaginary that dominated elite discourse essentially framed the human project as metaphysically meaningless, as an utterly random production of an impersonal, cruel, and purposeless universe that eventually ends with a whimper in heat death. To believe anything else was either naive or medieval. 

Now most Americans--at least 85%--believe that there is some kind of God or transcendent dimension or order despite what the scientific narrative tells them about the origin and history of the cosmos. The 15% who don't largely comprises overclass elites. Many of these Americans among the 85% might not go to church, but they don't believe the narrative of meaninglessness, even if they don't have a better narrative to replace it. Some, of course, on the religious Right completely reject this narrative and  the science that promotes such meaninglessness. But while those on the non-atheistic Left embrace science, they are capable of only weakly affirming some vague understanding about there possibly being a transcendent dimension, but who really knows? And certainly those crazy religious people can't be right.

So among the non-religiously fanatical, vagueness reigns, and vagueness always loses when it comes up against fanaticism on one side and scientistic dogma on the other. So, if you have to choose, it seems more respectable to lean toward scientistically based meaninglessness. It's as conventional an attitude on the cosmopolitan Left as believing in climate change. No one will challenge you at a cocktail party in New York or Seattle if you favorably quote Sagan, Hawking, or Dennett in making your point. However, describing yourself as a Neoplatonist and quoting Plotinus or Meister Eckhart at such a gathering would come across as bizarre, to say the least. 

So it's easier, especially for young people, to embrace the meaninglessness. Some read Ayn Rand or come up with some other pop-Nietzschean ideas about making their own meaning in a meaningless world or whatever. But the naiveté of such adaptations should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two minutes. And besides, there was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum. Ayn Rand is no Nietzsche. 

Along these lines, I had a conversation recently with a physics major who told me she cannot believe in free will, but chooses to live 'as if' she has it. That exemplifies the kind of cleverness that typifies the postmodern way of coping with its nihilism. We play all kinds of tricks on ourselves so that we may eat our cake and have it to. Cleverness in this sense is a poor substitute for intellectual honesty, but it passes in a world where nihilism is our public metaphysics. So, you know, whatever. Who am I to judge what lies you tell yourself? Whatever gets you through the night, right? 

So lying to oneself is not just something people on the Right do. Many on Left do it too, but with a sophistication that avoids criticism because it's attuned to the postmodern nihilistic aesthetic. If you challenge them by saying it makes no sense, they reply "Of course it makes no sense. Nothing does. Why should I care about making sense?"

Now there are still some Rationalist Materialists, you know the kind who 'believe' in science. They want to insist that their commitment to 'reason' and 'objectivity' absolves them of any accusations of nihilism. They just "follow the science". How can that be nihilistic? They believe in objective Truth. But here's where the postmodern thinkers do us a service. They have taken the presuppositions of Rationalist Materialism and pushed them to their logical, i.e., nihilistic, conclusions. There's no such thing as knowable objective truth, they correctly insist--there are only interpretations. 

But are some interpretations better than others? No--if there are no criteria by which you can judge better and worse. But yes, if there is some scale that measures deeper and truer, and more superficial and less adequately true. The point is that none of our propositions are absolutely true, because absolute truth is unknowable, but that doesn't mean that we can't move toward a deeper appropriation of the truth and talk about it in ways that make sense.  

As illustrated in the diagram below, if there is no vertical dimension to orient our thinking on the horizontal dimension, then there can be no way to evaluate better and worse, truer and falser. Maybe on a purely utilitarian level, but not in any way that truly matters for the way we live meaningful lives.

If there are no depths and heights, there are only surfaces, and if there are only surfaces, there are only shifting habitual patterns of perception that are 'truthy', but never really true in any profound sense. This was Hume's insight three hundred years ago, and postmodern thinkers are simply putting a point on it. What we think is truth, they more or less say, is whatever we all agree it is, and what's fashionably truthy one moment isn't in another. And so here we are. What is fashionable on the Left is rejected by the Right, and vice versa. And truth becomes whatever whoever has the power to force it on those who disagree.

So here we are. This is really what the culture wars are all about. 

***

But truth as fashion is not the only possibility. In my Genealogy Series I attempt to make the case for human reason having to operate on both horizontal and vertical dimension as illustrated below. The vertical dimension is what makes meaning in a deeply satisfying way a possibility. 

Now let me say that while accepting this imaginary is not the same thing as having religious faith, it is not incompatible religious faith. Indeed it diagrams the Christian metaphysical imaginary bequeathed by the early Church Fathers and accepted in both the East and West until the Reformation. I would also argue that it maps what Taoism, Vendantic Hinduism, the esoteric branches of Islam and Judaism affirm. But I'm more interested in retrieving an imaginary that does not require faith or confessional commitments.

In other words, in a pluralistic, globalizing society, I believe it's possible to develop a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary with a vertical or transcendental dimension. It will be accepted to the degree that all people of good will would find it reasonable and desirable because restorative of cultural vitality and as a robust alternative to the meaninglessness and nihilism that is currently hegemonic in our public discourse.

I believe the embrace of such an imaginary is inevitable at some point in the future, but not in my lifetime. But until that happens, the nihilism of Rationalist Materialism that currently shapes our collective metaphysical imaginary rules by default. Our social and political disorder are its symptoms. I suspect we must (continue to?) go through a collective dark night of the spirit that strips away all our delusions to clear the way for the emergence of something new. In the meanwhile we sow seeds in the hope they may germinate in the future when the time is right.  

In the long run, the only real cure is to re-member the amputated vertical limb. Until then we all spin in ontological dizziness in a world without a center. BTW, I envision such a re-membering as a cultural project, not a political one. It cannot be forced. If we shift to a social imaginary that has regained its center, it will happen in much the same way that we shifted from a geocentric idea of the cosmos to the post-Copernican one--it will just make sense to anyone who thinks about it, and in time will become common sense. As our ideas change, our work in the world changes. And as our work in the world changes our ideas change, and the next thing you know, as our ancestors became no longer medievals but moderns, so will we become no longer moderns, but whatever comes next. 

Yes, even after such a transition, the world will continue to be run by the ambitious, not the wise. But the ambitious won't be allowed to run amok as they do now. There will be resources within the culture that will allow sane people of good will to push back. The problem for us now is that most people of good will have no deeply held convictions, and to the degree that they do, they are fragmented, divided and conquered in so many ways. And so with no common ground on which people of good will can set their feet to push back, an impassioned bad will takes the field unopposed. And I'm not as worried about how that bad will manifests in MAGA as I am as in how it manifests in the C-suites of the financial and techno-capitalist overclass. 

Note on this diagram. I have no expectations that this is more confusing than helpful for most people who look at it unless they are already familiar with the presuppositions that undergird it. But I'd like to emphasize that I don't see this diagram as describing a static situation. The movement from ignorance to knowledge is dynamic, experiential, and developmental. As is the movement toward self transcendence. Wisdom as Phronesis and Sophia is a function of the experience of a movement away from ignorance on the horizontal dimension, and delusional, self destructive thinking and behavior on the vertical dimension.

Both axes describe growth upward toward becoming a more densely, i.e., a more fully realized or formed  or individuated Self, which in turn leads to the development of capabilities to see and understand the depths of things on the horizontal dimension, the world around us. So I mean for this diagram to suggest that a human life well lived requires the integration of the vertical with the horizontal in whatever measure that is possible for each of us within the limits of our particular existential situations. That growth toward integration changes the way we experience and imagine Reality. Its fruits are apparent in the generally good judgments we make as we grow in wisdom in both dimensions. As one becomes wiser, he or she makes better judgments both in practical matters as well as in matters of cognizing truth in art, religion, and philosophy. Nobody knows everything, but some people get it right more than they get it wrong, and there's a reason for that. 

In previous posts I talk about four criteria that define what a healthy society's metaphysical imaginary should comprise: Here's a summary: 

Scope: The best metaphysical imaginary has the broadest scope on both the horizontal and vertical axes. Premodern societies have more scope on the vertical axis and less scope on the horizontal, but it could be argued that premoderns had a better grip on reality than moderns because they were not as profoundly alienated from the world as moderns are. We moderns know more "about" the world, but we are at the same time more disconnected from its vitality, and in that sense have less of a grip on it.  A remedy for us now is to restore the individual's ability to get a better grip on reality, or in Neoplatonic terms, to participate more deeply in it. This requires self-transformation in both a psychological-therapeutic sense and in a spiritual sense. We need to expand our scope on both the horizontal and the vertical, but it's more important now that we expand on the vertical because we desperately need more wisdom to deal with the crises looming on the horizontal as it expands especially in the domain of information technologies--AI and VR. 

Coherence: The best metaphysical imaginary therefore integrates in a coherent way what it knows on both the vertical and the horizontal. This is the task of philosophy. As we learn more on the horizontal, we need to integrate it on the vertical. As more people take seriously the importance of growing in wisdom, i.e., as a new participatory epistemology and ontology becomes increasingly legitimated, humans will find ways to understand and interpret what we know as knowledge expands on the horizontal in ways that help us to get a healthier grip on the world. We need science, but we need its findings now more than ever to be wisely interpreted in such a way that it serves the deepest human needs, not the needs of shareholders. 

Adaptability: The best metaphysical imaginary is in a continuous process of expanding and deepening our grip on reality. Coherence requires the development of the ability to adapt what is known on the horizontal to what has broad consensus on a restored vertical, and vice versa. As new knowledge becomes legitimated on either axis, it is likely to challenge existing imaginal models on either the vertical or horizontal, and so the Wise celebrate as progress (rather than resist as disruption) the need to revise the imagined models because our doing so effects the expansion and deepening of our grip on reality. Self-transcendence on the Vertical axis means that our model of reality is continuously developing as we become wiser, and analogously our expansion of knowledge on the horizontal requires a continuous adaptability in our thinking and knowing on both horizontal and vertical axes. The best metaphysical imaginary is a dynamic, evolving system. But such evolution is healthy only so long as it retains a creative tension between the horizontal and the vertical.

Richness:  The best metaphysical imaginary enriches, complexifies, and deepens our experience of the mystery of Being--or what I call the Living Real. When a society loses touch with the Living Real, it sickens and it must find a remedy. It should be obvious to anyone--even those who are best adapted to living in a late-modern milieu, i.e., educated, affluent cosmopolitans, that late Modernity has produced a sick, spiritually impoverished society for most people who are living in it. The problem of spiritual poverty cannot be addressed from within Liberalism because Liberalism has created the problem, but neither can it be addressed by the Religious Conservatives because while they want to restore the vertical axis, their solutions are incoherent and maladapted to the reality on the horizontal axis. An important task for 'richness' is to develop some consensus about what a rich, deeply human life comprises. Right now, as a matter of cultural consensus, we haven't a clue. 

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Note 1: As Charles Taylor points out in his A Secular Age:

Even Machiavelli still has an understanding of this kind when it comes to Republican forms. There is a certain equilibrium-in-tension which needs to be maintained between the “grandi” and the people, if these forms are to survive. In healthy polities, this equilibrium is maintained by the play or rivalry and mutual surveillance between the orders. But there are certain developments which threaten this, such as an excessive interest on the part of citizens in their private wealth and property. This constitutes “corruzione”, and unless dealt with in time, and severely, will bring about the end of republican liberty. There is a causal attribution here: wealth undermines liberty; but the term used, with its strong normative resonances, shows that the understanding of society is being organized around a concept of normal form. (p. 182). 

Idols and Icons

Idolatry consists in immobilizing oneself before an idol because one sees it as opaque, because one is incapable of discerning in it the hidden invitation that it offers to go beyond it. Hence, the opposite of idolatry would not consist in breaking idols, in practicing a fierce iconoclasm aimed against every inner or external Image; it would rather consist in rendering the idol transparent to the light invested in it. In short, it means transmuting the idol into an icon.

Henry Corbin, “Theophanies and Mirrors: Idols or Icons?” trans. Jane Pratt and A. K. Donohue, Spring 1983:2.

A dogma--like the trinity; an image--like the cross, a text--like the Bible; a ritual--like the mass--can be either and idol or an icon. If the former it is a prison for the soul; if the latter, it is a doorway into a bigger, richer world. 

Self-Transcendence, Constraints, and Social Order

Every society needs moral norms and behavioral codes. Without them we would all be in Hobbes's state of nature. The culture war that is tearing the country apart right now is about who gets to define what those codes are. The main combatants are the Left and Right wings of our Calvinist heritage--the priggish Neo Victorians on the Right and the equally priggish Neo Abolitionist Identitarianss on the Left. The Right is wrong because the old social order was unjust in its repressiveness of women and minorities; the Left is wrong because its basis for abolition is not 'justice' but 'desire'. The cultural Left seeks to abolish taboos that impede desire understood in a postmodern Freudian sense, and they find a way to do it that is insufferably moralistic. 

The intellectual vanguard on the cultural Left, at least for now, does not believe in transcendentals. For them Truth and Justice are just stuff we make up for the sake of convenience to navigate in a world that at root makes no sense. Justice is just a name for whatever is the cause of the day, which is usually what is trending in elite academic circles. For this faction on the Left, the idea that Justice is a transcendental ideal that calls a society to become its best possibility is an impossibility.  But without justice as a grounding principle, it must find something else, and it draws on forms of postmodern Freudian theory like that of Lacan, Zizek, Deleuze, and Guattari to find it--and all they's got is 'desire', which in the American context is conflated with the 'pursuit of happiness' and the freedom to determine for oneself what that happiness might be. Any attempt to argue that some desires are better than others and some may be destructively narcissistic is rejected except when it involves violence. 

So to boil the postmodern Freudian doctrine down to essentials, humans are all victims of the Oedipus complex, which is the cultural download we each receive when we are weaned and learn that we are not the center of the universe and must learn to play our role in society. These roles are cultural constructs and are  by definition repressive and as such the greatest impediment to our pursuit of happiness, and so they must be deconstructed and abolished when they are obstacles to any individual's pursuit of happiness however that might be construed. 

These roles are social constructs and as such are in flux over time, but they trace back to our premodern cultural heritage, so, for instance, the vast majority of children who are born biologically male and female must learn to play the roles of men and women, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, etc.  Daddy insists on it, and so does Mommy, perhaps even more vehemently. Those roles for men and women are different in different societies, but one gets assigned a role and one must fit into it whether one likes it or not, and mostly we humans don't like it.

I accept that humans are born polymorphously perverse, and that as a result no matter what the gender or sexual role assigned to us, it's a constraint.  And so the Oedipal desire to kill the Father is not personal; it's about the child's resentment at being constrained when she or he loses the Mother as his or her exclusive object of desire. The people who fail to make the Oedipal transition become primal narcissists--people like the fictional King Lear or the all too real Donald Trump--people whose driving force is to become once again the center of the universe as they were in the pre-Oedipal state where their wish was their desire. So what is this desire about except to restore our polymorphous perversity, which means a longing to return to a state of primal narcissism?

So all of us at that early age and continuing through life resent the constraints that were forced on us with our acculturation, some more than others depending on the configuration of the tribal codes and the roles they assign. But the resentment is always there, and so if we have not learned to own and manage these resentments, they lie festering in the soul. And when someone completely unrepressed and infantile like Donald Trump comes along, he gives permission to many for all that unmanaged, festering resentment to express itself in deeply destructive ways. And so here we are wallowing in a culture of narcissists, the Left not being much better than the Right in that regard. 

So the resentment is a problem for the powerless post-Oedipal child, and he must repress it and seek the Father's approva--or else. There's a fundamental slavishness to it as the child becomes rather like a dog seeking the approval of his master, and spirited human beings rebel in adolescence in different ways. But its why, especially in more straitlaced, repressive societies, the repressed admire the rebels among us insofar as they seek to break the taboos and assert their individuality over against the regime imposed by the symbolic Father. We all go through this in adolescence, but it's a phase for most of us that we pass through if we become successful adults. Adults understand that there are positive and negative constraints. Negative constraints keep us trapped insofar as they remain unconscious and unexamined; positive constraints become a path to liberation if chosen and worked with.

So, for instance, It's one thing to have a parent who forces his child to play a sport or a musical instrument so he can live through his child vicariously; it's another if the parent imbues a love of the sport or music in his child that inspires him to want to be the best he can be. To become the best you can be requires discipline and constraint. To give your life a shape, you have to constrain desires that if indulged would lead to shapelessness. To become an adult means to have chosen to give a shape to one's life. A man-child is either trapped by his fear of displeasing the Father or trapped in a resentful need to rebel against him. The Right tends toward the first kind of childishness; the Left toward the second. 

The adult has become of aware of his resentments and desires, has learned to own and manage them and to integrate them into a bigger, richer, shapelier possibility for becoming a full human being. So you can look at constraints as a problem or you can come to understand them as what gives a good life its shape in a life-long process of auto-poiesis and self-transcendence. In Neoplatonism, the more form a being has, the more densely real it is. So in Neoplatonic terms, true freedom is exercised in a continuous, dynamic trading in one set of constraints for another in an ongoing auto-poetic process of becoming more densely, humanly real. Another word for this intensity of form is 'virtue', and at the end of the process is what Aristotle called eudaemonia, which is the only happiness that is worthy of our desire. This sense of the word 'virtue' must be retrieved. In a society in which Calvinistic moralism is so dominant, we hear the word only in the sense of what Big Daddy wants. 

We must have constraints, but we must develop some wisdom about which constraints are healthful and which are not; we are children to the extent that we live passively with the constraints that were imposed on us children. We become adults to the degree that we come to understand those constraints and find ways to transcend them by adopting other constraints that are auto-poetic. This was the Nietzschean project, but as I'll argue below, it was in a deeper way the Socratic project. I respect those among our cultural elites who see Nietzsche as a model of self-transcendence in this mature sense. The argument that I've been making here over the years is that we have to move beyond Nietzsche to retrieve Socrates understood in the right way. 

***

Every society has constraints, aka taboos, and every society always will, and the culture war in this country right how is about who gets to define what those taboos are for our children. But the deeper, really important question is how do you decide which constraints are healthy and which are not? And the answer depends on how you define what it means to live a full human life, and about that we clearly have no consensus. And so, as suggested above, an important part of living a full human life is to develop the capacity to transcend the constraints of our acculturation, but not in a way that is completely shapeless.

My critique of the the Cultural Left is that while it's right about transcending oppressive cultural constraints, it's wrong insofar as it leads to social shapelessness and forms of narcissisim. We humans both need constraints and we need to transcend them, but transcendence for the sake of transcendence, the Nietzschean option, is not a foundation on which you can build a healthy society. The Socratic option is to transcend one's cultural constraints but in such a way that one comes into a deeper relationship and alignmnet with Reality. This is not a possibility on the Cultural Left because it cannot believe that there is any such thing as Reality in the Platonic-realist sense of the word.

So instead the Cultural Left, insofar as it is in thrall to the postmodern Freudians, is obsessed with sexual desire. But do we really believe sex and sex drives are what most deeply defines us? Don't we all deep down recognize that the cult of Sex Positivity takes something that's partially true and pushes it into something that's unbalanced and distorting and fundamentally empty? 

So, from my pov, the moral program proposed on the Left, insofar as it makes an idol of Desire in the post-Freudian sense, is reductive and as such offers no genuinely 'desirable' alternative to the program of the Right. And quite possibly the Left is endorsing a program that is harmful for people in the throes of ontological dizziness insofar as it endorses metaphysical meaninglessness and shapelessness at a time when we need to feel that there's something firm underfoot upon which we can take a stand.  

Using 'desire' as a criterion for defining the 'good life' is not the problem; defining what is most deeply worthy of our desire is. Desire, like the intentionality of consciousness, is always 'about' something. The most important question we need to ask ourselves is what is our desire about? In other words, what is worthy of or deepest aspirations? What kind of society might there be that would help people to shape their lives inspired by such aspirations? To make it so much about sex is shooting too low at best, and at worst promoting a narcissistically regressive infantilizaton.  

But if sex is not the main thing, what ought to be the object of our desire--on what ends, individually and as a society, should we focus our attention and energies as worthy of our deepest aspirations? Is it possible that we could come to some consensus about that? I genuinly believe that we can because in the final analysis Socrates was correct--what we all desire is the Good, and if we knew it, we would choose it. (See Note 1) I believe this deep desire for the Good is innate in all human beings, even the worst of us. We just live in a society that has no memory anymore about what that Good is as something to guide our collective cultural aspirations. 

But the taboos can only be transcended in a healthy way if there's agreement that such transcendence is in the service of the Good. If there is no mutually shared idea of the Good as a transcendental aspiration, then all you've got is desire, and one man's desire to grab a woman in the genitals because he wants to and can is equal to another's to give up her life to save someone else's. To argue otherwise is implicitly to acknowledge that there's a hierarchy, i.e., some desires are higher and more worthy than others, and that only makes sense if there is some transcendental standard that defines what is more or less worthy, more or less truthful, more or less Good, more or less Just. We all deep down recognize this. None of us are moral relativists. We just don't know how to talk anymore about what it means to be truly a moral agent, which involves the capacity for self-correction and self-transcendence. We perform instead what we think others expect of us as moral behavior--whatever the Daddies and Mommies of the Left or Right demand--rather than to be inspired by what is truly, deeply transformatively Good. 

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Note 1. What Socrates means to "know the Good" is another question. We mostly have opinions about what the right thing to do is that derive from our programming by to prevailing cultural conventions, which is quite different from 'knowing' the good. According to Plato/Socrates, it's possible to have right opinion, i.e., when your opinion about what is good happens to correspond with what the Good is, but that is different from knowing the Good. Knowing the Good comes from a deeper kind of disclosure that transcends convention. And because such disclosures are a possibility, convention is always vulnerable to challenge. In the Neoplatonic tradition, there are degrees of knowledge--from inklings to satori-like theophanies. But inklings are where most of us start. 

A healthy society has norms that derive from right opinion about the Good. It passes onto its children habits and attitudes that will make it easier for them aspire to the Good and to be open to its disclosures--in other words easier for them to become free adults. The segregated societies in the South clearly did not have norms that were aligned with the Good, and most people of good will recognized that. Clearly, there are other things about southern society and its customary culture that are aligned with the Good, but if it were a healthy society, it would have recognized that slavery and segregation was just wrong, and not looked for all manner of sophistical arguments to justify it.

It's in this sense that southern society has trapped too many of its citizens in such a way as to make it harder for them to become free adults. They are trapped by their resentments and find themselves incapable of transcending them. This, as suggested above, is why they have embraced an infantile nihilist like Trump. He has legitimized their resentments of the Liberal Big Daddy that shames any behaviors that are not P.C or woke, and encourages their acting these resentments out. Before Trump those resentments festered. He blew the lid off whatever contained them, and bizarre, delusional, clownishly ineptly childish events like J6 were the result. 

But societies that have mostly right opinion about the Good are not good enough unless they encourage its children to become free adults. In Calvinist societies we think of Virtue as a cage. If we lived in a Neoplatonic society, we would think of it as a trellis. That used to be the goal of a liberal education. All spirited human beings want to overcome illusion and ignorance; they want to develop a deeper and richer relatiohship with Reality. They are not satisfied to live in a shadow realm but want to live in a world where the deep Real lives and shines. And the project for Socrates was to play the role of midwife for his interlocutors, that his he sought to bring their innate capacity for recognizing the living, shining Good into awareness.  

Socrates agreed with the Sophists that most people's thinking was shaped by social conventions, and insofar as they were, they were living in a world of shadows. He disagreed with the Sophists that shadow thinking was the the only kind possible.The postmodern Freudians, like the Sophists, would argue that there are only the conventions, and our freedom--if we have any freedom at all--lies primarily in transgressing conventional constraints, i.e., saying No to Big Daddy. Is there really any more to it than that, and  is there anything truly morally serious about that for anyone older than 17? 

The naivete, if not the absurdity, of the postmodern Freudians, I hope, is apparent to most readers. It's sophisticated nonsense. Their position leads to regression toward Hobbes's state of nature which forces the social contract that creates the Leviathan--which is for Hobbesians, most of our cultural elite, a closed system in which transcendence is an impossibility. To this extent Freud was correct in Civilization and Its Discontents. Being in society creates constraints, and those constraints are the source of our resentment and violence and discontent and we long to break out. 

None of us want to live in a closed, repressive system. But we can't live in one that is completely without constraints. We want to live in a system where self-transcendence and auto-poeisis is a real possibility, but transcendence toward what? Making our Selves into what? Anything we want? But is anything we want the Good? I don't think so, and neither can anybody who thinks about it for a minute. We all deep down know there is a "Good". Why are we so afraid to acknowledge it and build a society around a collective aspiration toward it? 

A Simulacral Age

The past decade has been defined by how life, the real thing, so often resembles fiction — the first Black president succeeded by a reality TV star and serial conjurer of failed businesses, the pandemic, the astounding and scary new artificial intelligence marvels monthly. “You can’t make it up,” people say. But for those of us who turn to humor to help process the nonstop parade of weirdness, a new cultural trope was addictive: imagining that it is, indeed, all made up, that any improbable piece of news is a plot twist in a TV series or movie or digital simulation.

The writers’ room ran out of ideas (Donald Trump choppering from his Covid hospitalization back to the White House for a Mussolini balcony moment). This new show is so meta (the Ukrainian comedian who played an Everyman who became president and actually became president) and so implausible (who stopped a superpower tyrant’s blitzkrieg). That season finale really jumped the shark (Jan. 6). And then last year’s hearings of the Jan. 6 committee — astonishingly effective because a former ABC News president shrewdly produced them, unlike any before, as a 10-episode multimedia TV series.

In America at large, however, the blurring of reality and fantasy isn’t merely fascinating. Americans’ knack and weakness for these mixtures amount to a founding national predisposition — what made America the global center of show business, from P.T. Barnum to Hollywood to televangelism to reality TV. Our wise forebears also built walls between important reality over here and entertainment and make-believe over there and installed useful establishment gatekeepers to decide what belonged where.

During the past half-century, those barriers crumbled gradually, then suddenly. America’s iffy grip on reality turned from a chronic condition to acute and pathological, metastasizing beyond entertainment and spreading throughout the real world, most disastrously into our information and political systems, a phenomenon for which no single individual and enterprise has been more responsible than the real-life inspirations for Logan Roy and ATN. Early this season, Logan told his children, “I love you, but you are not serious people.” He could have been talking to America, where people now feel entitled to their own facts as well as their own opinions.

Kurt Andersen

We can take a splinter of truth and with it build a huge edifice of illusion. We can do it alone, but we prefer to do it with others because of the way others seem to give the illusion a solidity and stability that it otherwise lacks. Can we snap out of it? Yes, but if only if we're motivated--or inspired--to do so. Why would you be motivated? Because you are deeply interested--inpired--to get a deeper grip on reality. How do you get a deeper grip on reality? You must emulate Socrates.

It was not that Socrates knew more in some quantitative way but that he knew better in a qualitative way. The Socratic challenge is not to know more with certainty but to know more wisely, if by wisdom we mean a way of being in the world that has a deeper, richer cognitive, i.e., more deeply engaged, relationship with the Living Real.

Socrates was the wisest man in Athens because in a remarkably precocious way he had such a deep grip on reality, a grip that would not have been possible had he not understood first that he knew nothing. That's  another way of saying that what we all take for knowledge isn't really knowledge--it's just a map or a simulacra of the real. Is it possible to know more deeply what's behind the map? I think it is, but that's a different topic than I want to get into here. The task is not to have some experience of Abosolute Being, but rather to progressively come into deeper contact and relationship with its presence in the world around us. The first step in coming into deeper contact with reality is to realize all the ways our lives are structured to estrange us from it. 

What does that require? An attitude of humility and an openness to be corrected. Humility requires that we acknowledge that whatever we know is dwarfed by what we don't, and it's ok. Because then our life becomes much more interesting as we come to understand it as continuous process that progresses qualitatively--not quantitatively--toward greater levels of wisdom.

Qualitatively in the sense of the way our relationships are qualitative. The goal is not to know more, but to develop a better, deeper, richer relationship with the Living Real, i.e., to use a Vervaeke phrase, to fall in love with reality, which is what happens when you develop such a relationship. And so as we grow in wisdom we grow in love because the one cannot exist without the other.

The wise are not people who know more but who know better because they have this kind of deepening relationship with the Living Real. That was the Socratic project--to get his interlocutors to undestand first that what they thought they knew was mostly wrong not in some propositional way but in this qualitative way because their relationship to the Living Real was obstructed or blocked but needn't be.  

Last Sunday, Christians around the world celebrated the feast of Pentecost. It is the celebration of the presence and movement of the Living Real in our lives. As Bishop Maximus says in the conversation with John Vervaeke that I commented on here, Christianity took what the great pre-Christian sages and saints knew, and made it more broadly available.There was still the life of the monk within the Christian tradition who sought this encounter with the Absolute, but there was made available to everyone after Pentecost a grace that enables us to find the presence of the Absolute everywhere, and that inspires us--or should--to look and pay attention more carefully so that we may find it wherever it would disclose itself to us. And our attending and responding over time is the way we humans come to renew the face of the earth. 

Christians believe that the Holy Spirit is the spirit of Truth, that it works in us and inspires us to overcome our tendency to self-deception and self-destructive behaviors. It is that which inspires us to move into a deeper relationship with Reality, which is the only solution to the alienation that is the source of our delusional thinking. It is that which illumines our minds with insight which is the experience of deepening that relationship. It's what gives us hope that we might live in a Real world rather than in a simulacral one. It's a grace and power that is working there whether we're Christians or or not. It's just there, it's available to all people of good will who have a supple enough heart to acknowledge its presence and to hearken to it.

The problem is that to many who sense the presence of the Living Real don't know how to hearken to it. The problem with too many people who think of themselves as spiritually motivated is that they have neither Socrates' humility nor his openness to be corrected. They think they know when really they do not; they think they are right because if God is with them, how can they be wrong? But God cannot be with them if he is the cause for their fear, hatred, and desire for violence and retribution. This is where Socrates becomes an essential resource. We need his humility; we need his openness to be proved wrong, we need his hunger to come into deeper contact with the Living Real. 

Pentecost is an invitation to enter into a deeper relationship with the Living Real, and as in all relationships that are worthy of the name, so does our relationship with the Living Real grow and develop and become richer. If that's not true for you in the relationships you have with the people in your life, how can you expect it be true for your relationship with reality? And so we must all ask ourselves whether the people in our lives are an occasion for our overcoming our inclination to live in a simulacra, or are they there to reinforce it? 

See also "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" and "Habitus as Heuristic".

What Is After the Future About?

Note: Every once in a while I revise my About statement at the top of the left column on this site. I thought I'd post my most recent revision here today:

After the Future is a public diary that I've been writing for over twenty years. It's what I'd be writing anyway if there were no such thing as a blog. I have no imagined ideal audience. Friends, family, and a few former students know of my work here, and so of course I have them in mind as I write. But mostly I write about what I find to be compelling for whatever reason. It's where I go to think things out. 

So if what I write here has any value, I trust it will be found by those who might value it. I have no ambition for it to be more than that. If there is anything unusual in what I write, it lies in my particular sensibility or perspective, which I'd describe as that of a Postmodern Christian Neoplatonist. (See Note 1) Such a framework, while it certainly does not at this moment resonate with the zeitgeist, I suspect will emerge with broader cultural legitimacy in the future. Either it or something like it. Why?  Because it must. What we have now in hegemonic Rationalist Materialism is aberrational, and it cannot be sustained. 

I say something like a Postmodern form of Christian Neoplatonism must emerge, but, of course, it might not. But if it doesn't, that will be because the machines will have won. As Willigis Jager writes, "The men and women of the future, to paraphrase a line by Karl Rahner, will be mystics, or they won't be at all." Most of us are mystics now without thinking of ourselves as such. (See Note 2) We don't because we have the experience but miss the meaning. We haven't a metaphysical imaginary to help us identify and interpret the mystical experiences both subtle and intense that most of us have. So like seeds strewn on barren ground these experiences cannot germinate, and if they do, they have no trellis upon which to grow. 

I see Rahner's prediction about humans 'not being at all' in the future as the inevitable outcome if technocapitalism remains unchecked, and it will remain unchecked unless some consensus develops around a metaphysical imaginary that is robust enough to resist where technocapitalism is dragging us. Many (most?) decent, thoughtful people are horrified by the kind of world technocapitalism is creating, but they feel powerless to do anything about it. How can they if they have no understanding about what a human being is and so have no imagination of a positive human future to fight for? Unless that changes, the machines will win by default. I'm no Luddite. I'm not against technological advancement. I'm against unchecked technocapitalism that serves no needs except its own, certainly not the needs of ordinary human beings. 

I say something like Christian Neoplatonism because while that is my standpoint, I see the Neoplatonist part of it as the foundation for a prisca theologia that is cognate with the mystical theologies of Judaism, Islam, and the post-Axial spiritual and philosophical traditions of Asia. As suggested above, by 'mystical' I mean spiritually experiential in some degree, and entry-level experience in this sense is an intuition of the transcendent Good and Justice as an ontonormative ideal. By ontonormative I mean something that transcends our social constructions and which operates in the souls of the most alert humans as a force to subvert social constructions when they fail to live up to what transcendental Justice demands. If there is to be any sustained, robust resistance to technocapitalism, it has to be global in its scale. And so it must have a shared core imagination of what a human being is, and that imagination must comprise a spiritual dimension that draws from post-Axial commonalities and structural similarities rather than from differences in practice and distinctions in thought.

The Secular Age is over. The choice is no longer between secularism and religion, but between good religion and bad. The cult of the Invisible Hand is bad religion, very bad religion. Protestant fideism is not enough to build a new civilizational ethos upon, and in its Calvinist forms has been too complicit with the emergence of technocapitalism and a wisdomless Puritanical priggery on both the left and right that creates more problems than it solves. Therefore, we need to retrieve something like Christian Neoplatonism precisely because it restores the amputated vertical axis illustrated in the diagram below. 

What do I mean by this? The retrieval of something like Christian Neoplatonism will require the restoration of the the Wisdom Axis. Wisdom, as it has been understood in every civilization except in the secular West and its imitators, has become excluded as playing any role in shaping contemporary public discourse. Wisdom, if it is to play a role in shaping a moral consensus within any society, must be grounded in a metaphysical imaginary that has a transcendent foundation. The metaphyiscial imaginary of the West had such foundation, but it was amputated after the Reformation. It retained a cultural presence in the West as a kind of phantom limb until the mid 19th Century, but since then, i.e., for the last 150+ years, we have been living out the consequences of its loss, and with each passing decade we spin with increasing speed in unsustainable ontological dizziness. 

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

We are going through momentous events in this historical moment, and while we may be having the experiences and missing their meanings, is there any doubt that we are experiencing something unprecedented in its significance? What happens in this century will be a huge civilizational axial moment, a turning point for humanity, for better or worse. What that means remains to be seen, but something big is afoot. Everybody feels it. The world is crackling with it. It's different from other historical moments if for no other reason than the ways in which machine learning and developments in biotechnology are seeking to redefine what it means to be human. Some radical discontinuity lies not too far ahead in the human future. Our anticipation of its inevitability is the deep source of our collective anxiety and our insane politics. 

I have no illusions that what I have to say is original. I traffic mostly in the originality of others whose insights and scholarship are far more profound and interesting than anything I am capable. If I contribute anything it might be in the ways I make connections. If I have a talent, it is more synthetic than analytic. I think also I have a good nose for the Living Real and with it a reliable ability to sniff out b.s. when it presents itself as something more.

So what is After the Future about? It's simply one person's attempt to read the signs of the times and to interpret them from the perspective of Christian Neoplatonist. For the moment that's rather an eccentric perspective. But then again maybe I'm onto something. 

 

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Note 1: Christian Neoplatonism shaped the metaphysical imaginary of the West from the early Church fathers from the gnostic elements in St. Paul through Origen, Clement of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, St. Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, through John Eriguena, the Cathedral schools, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas. With the theological assertion of nominalism and voluntarism in the 14th Century, Neoplatonism lost its hegemony. This occured, ironically, almost simultaneously with Christian Neoplatonism's artistic apogee in Dante's Divine Comedy. It's spirit, if not it's theology, was carried on, however, through Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, and the Rhineland Mystics, and after Luther, German pietism, which was the source of German Romanticism in the 1700s. 

The main characteristic of Neoplatonism in any of its forms is its participative ontology and epistemology and its openness to the working of transcendent energies (agapic love) to effect the human transformation the Church fathers called theosis. Once that participative imagination of the human relationship with the world was gone, once the Reformation rejected theosis, the way was paved for educated elites to reject the world as shot through with the divine, and to see it instead as just stuff that could be molded by the human will. Hence Calvin's Geneva, hence the Jacobins' Paris, hence capitalism's remaking the world in its materialist-consumerist image. This worked for a while, but it is clearly no longer sustainable. 

Neoplatonism provided an imaginary for the educated to live compatibly with the animism that lingered from Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean paganism. That was all gradually pushed to the side after the 14th Century in a way unique in the West, and the world became Hamlet's disenchanted, sterile promontory.  But it's not the world that is sterile, but our ability to relate to the deep Living Real that suffuses it. It is we who are sterile, and that sterility must be overcome if humans are to 'exist at all' in the future. Is it possible for us as a society to become once again spiritually fertile?

I think it is possible. There have been Neoplatonic moments of spiritual fertility from time to time since the 1300s: Florentine Neoplatonism in the late 1400s, the Cambridge Platonists in the 1600s, the influence of Thomas Taylor's translations of Plato on the English Romantics in the late 1700s are the most prominent. But none of these could compete with the seductive materialistic power of the burgeoning science and the capitalist system it abetted. So my point is that Neoplatonism has always been there under the surface--is there now--waiting to re-emerge. I guess I'm arguing that it must emerge again in the near future but this time stick. For if it doesn't, it's hard to see how there can be any kind of human future that I would define as human. Am I optimistic? No. Am I hopeful? Always. 

Note 2: Studies/polling have establish that at least 40% of people have had spiritual experiences that they would call as such. My guess is that there are many more who have had spiritual experiences but they think of them as aesthetic rather than spiritual. Many people think of themselves as agnostics, but few--5-6%--are atheists, if by atheism we mean a hard rejection of any kind of spiritual reality. To be an agnostic ususally means that one does not accept the confessional assertions of organized religion, but does not preclude an openness to religious/spiritual ideas that makes sense. My hope is that in coming decades the kind Neoplatonism about which I'm talking will make sense. In order to do that it needs to provide a compelling, plausible narrative that integrates experience of the world with a recognition of interior capacity for self-transcendence. That's what the diagram above seeks to illustrate in a rudimentary way. 

Genealogy Part 12B: Propositional Tyranny in the West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 are at the very least dabbling in illiberalism as an antidote. The post-structuralist, Identitarian cultural Left is not against Liberalism so much as it's become its reductio ad absurdum and in doing so has given Progressives a bad name. 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 their 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. 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 and in this sense they are 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 mainstream Protestantism might have had a genuine spiritual energy for a while that imposed some constraints 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 mainstream Protestantism leaving only its most fanatical forms behind, and now the shark roams free gobbling up the customs and traditions of the heartland. 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. Blue America is thought of by Red America as overly populated by 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, and 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 focussing their energies by working to remedy the class and wealth disparities from which they derive their privilege, find relief from their guilt 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 1] 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 2]

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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Note 1: 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 2: "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. It's not derived from logic but from the cognitive capabilities of a supple heart. 

 

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, and 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. My goal in this post is  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. 

Many moderns found it possible to take these experiences of self-transcendence 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 such experience. 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 order 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 "real" world imagined outside of time and space 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 in the sense of self-rule 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 it 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. 

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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. 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. 

***

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.

++++++++++

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 Note 2) 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 kairotic 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 Note 2) 

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. (See Note 3)

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. 

Note 2: One of the analogies Socrates uses in his conversation with Theaetetus is to liken the memory function of the mind to a ball of wax on which impressions derived from the senses are made and thus retained in memory. And so we know something to be true from our empirical experience through the senses--for instance my recognizing a person I know approaching in the distance because the gestalt of the person correlates with the memory impression on my mind-wax.

I thought that he would take the analogy further by arguing that before birth the mind/wax received impressions of the transcendental forms, and that this gives us the innate cognitive capacity to grasp real knowledge, especially as the phenomena experienced in this world participate in transcendentals like truth, beauty, justice, et al. This would be consistent with his ideas about knowledge as anamnesis that he explores elsewhere.

But he does not go there. I think this is explained by what Hadot says in the epigraph. The task is not for Socrates to inform Theaetetus that he has a Nous, a divine part of his mind that is in a state of slumber, but to see if he can awaken it.

The impressions made on the mind-wax from our empirical experience are acquired in a different way from the impressions made on Nous, and so function in a less reliable way. But Nous impressions don't function at all until they are awakened, and that's the whole point of Platonic praxis in the Academy, according to Hadot.

And while it might seem that this kind of a priori-ism bears some relationship to Kant, it really doesn't because of the need to awaken the a priori categories. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but Kant's precluding any kind of thinking that embraces metaphysical speculation would exclude the kind of a priorism that Plato's anamnesis points to.

I don't want to get into the weeds on this, but I think it points to where Vervaeke and I diverge. Vervaeke describes himself as a Kantian who is interested in providing a naturalistic account for the awakening phenomenon, and I have no doubt that he and those he collaborates with can develop such an account, but in the end the question will be whether it can account for anomalies that transcend the Kantian a priori programming, so to say.

To analogize from The Matrix, the Kantian a prioris are like the way all the people and agents within the Matrix are programmed. That program defines the limits of what's possible within the Matrix no matter how much flex there is in the system for people to develop their capabilities. I think--I'm not sure--that Vervaeke is trying to understand the mechanics of cognitive development within the Matrix, i.e., within naturalistic constraints.

But to do so doesn't account for minds that operate outside the constraints of the Matrix.Well, Vervaeke would say that's ridiculous, that there is no outside the Matrix to account for, but isn't that really the big question? Who's to say? Even le Tellier's anti-relgious thought experiment in "The Anomaly" presupposes a mind outside the simulation that designed it.

And what gives Neo his superpower is that he is able to enter from outside the Matrix and to operate within it in a way not constrained by its code--i.e., the aprioris that determine the limits of everybody, including the agents, who operate within the Matrix. This is what enables him to defeat Agent Smith and the other agents who are still constrained by their code, even though their a prioris give them abilities the humans they police don't have.

Now of course I know that this is fiction, but it is a metaphor for what the Axial Revolution says about the nature of reality: There is the world down here, it runs according to certain rules explained by science, but there is a higher set of rules that Nous knows, and the whole point of human existence is to align one's life with those rules. And people like Teilhard and Barfield argue that the long-term evolutionary task is for humans to become agents through which the higher rules come gradually to supplant the lower ones. (Obviously the case for the evolution of consciousness needs to be made; it can't just be asserted, but that's for the future.) This idea of the evolution of consciousness superseding biological evolution is the basic heuristic that shapes the mythos dimension I'm arguing for in this series. I can't, of course, prove it, but I do think I can make a case for its plausibility using my scope, coherence, richness criteria.

And so from a Christian point of view, if Jesus of Nazareth is who Christians says he is, then it is at least conceivable that he could come from outside the world limited by naturalistic constraints and not be constrained by them. If people constrained within a naturalistic frame say that's impossible, well yeah, it is, if you choose to think within the constraints of a naturalistic frame. All I'm saying is why should we be constrained by naturalism? That's just a belief system like any other, and if people want to live in that kind of imaginary, that's fine. But I prefer to live in an bigger, more richrly imagined world than is possible within those constraints.

In the long run, the model that gets accepted will be judged plausible not only by criteria that are acceptable within the constraints of natural science, but by its power to create a mythos that works most robustly to improve the chances of the kind of self-transcendence that Vervaeke is so interested in explaining. Mythos has to take into account what natural science 'knows', but it needn't live scupulously within its limits. I'm not saying that you can just make stuff up, but I am saying is that the limits are "limits" that can themselves be transcended.

I will at some point come back around to epistemological issues that make more sense than appealing to a ball of wax, but there's something to start with there. McGilChrist's M&HE and Dreyfus and Taylor's Retrieving Realism' will be my primary provocations, which I think can be integrated with Vervaeke's cognitive science within the context of the kind of the Christian Neoplatonic imaginary I am arguing for. But first the genealogy.

Note 3: 4/24/23--In the last week I've been listening to Princeton's Michael Segrue's Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues in the Great Courses series available for free if you have an Audible subscription. His Lecture 11 is on Parmenides, and I was surprised that he too thinks that the second half of this dialogue is parody of the over-the-top use of logic to point out the absurdity and fundamental incoherence of Eleatic monism. It's similar in this sense to Euthydemus. Most of Segrue's lecture, though, is about how Parmenides, in talking to the 19-year-old Socrates, points out legitimate flaws in Socrates' theries about the Ideas.

I think that this reinforces my contention that the theory of the Ideas was never meant to be doctrine but rather an attempt to develop a plausible epistemology and ontology that provides an imaginal or mythopoetic framework to support the really important thing, which is his moral project of self-transcendence. This project is most explicitly articulated  in "The Allegory of the Cave" in The Republic, "Diotima's Discourse" in The Symposium, and the third speech on love in Phaedrus. I've found Segrue's lectures interesting, but they make no reference to Hadot and his intepretations seem to be developed more out of the Kantian and Analytic traditions. For that reason, Segrue seems to give too much importance to Socrates's use of logic as a tool to discover truth. I contend that the elenchus is primarily a tool to demonstrate the limits of logic, i.e., to deliver aporia.  Logic and definitions do not give you the truth--only experience does. Aporia clears the space for awakening to or remembering the truth. 

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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.

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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 even now  only just begun. 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 supra-subjective, in the sense that it is the song of the Cosmos, but intra-subjective because of the way we all can participate in it if we open ourselves to it and hearken to it. 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/Eastern Orthodox 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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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. And it's for this reason that much of what I write is about the restoration of Christian Neoplatonism, which is metaphysically cognate with other such post-Axial traditions. We all have things to learn from one another. There will always be differences, but we also need to acknowledge that we all have a stake in the future of humanity that rationalist materialism and its mechanomorphic imagination of the human being does not. 

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. 

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 shamanic relgious traditions but more importantly 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), 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, and I am not against rationality, except in its reductively materialist forms. And I am 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.