After the Future

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.  

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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.

Genealogy Part 12A: Vervaeke's Neoplatonic Wisdom Project

I'm going to break up Part 12 into several components based on the conversations between Bishop Maximus and John Vervaeke that I have linked to here. In addition to watching these conversations between these two, I have watched the second half (25 lectures) of Vervaeke's Awakening to the Meaning Crisis, which has enabled me to better understand and appreciate what he's up to. (See Note 1.)

In any event, it took my watching his conversations with Bishop Maximus to get me see that Vervaeke is far more open to traditional religious thinking when he sees that it works, and clearly it's working for someone like Bishop Maximus. It has been one of my presuppositions that renaissance--if it's to come in the future--must come from a retrieval in a postmodern key of something understood by our premodern ancestors but forgotten by us, and that it must be integrated with science's practical approach to living in the world given to us by our rationality, i.e., our ability to figure things out and to understand them as they are and not as we wish them to be. I am committed to rationality, not to materialism. This is Vervaeke's project, too, or so it seems to me. 

Vervaeke's cognitive science compliments the neuro-scientific work of Iain McGilchrist about whom I've written extensively. Both thinkers are deeply philosophically literate, and they both use philosophy as a tool to integrate knowledge in other domains--cognitive science, neuroscience, computer science, biology--and the arts. And both use philosophy in what I illustrate in the diagram below to be the integration of Phronesis with Sophia. The goal for both is to point the way to the reestablish a Wisdom Tradition in the West--and elsewhere, but particularly the West. Wisdom is essential for any religion that might be described as 'good religion'--and I'd argue for any society that we can call a good society.  (See Note 2)

That, too, is my central concern, and I see my task here as to function mostly as an intermediary to make the work of these and others working on these issues available to an audience that might otherwise find such a project inaccessible because they haven't the philosophical background to understand the significance of what they are doing.  So that's the task for me with Vervaeke and McGilchrist going forward. Both are staking out a middle ground that integrates Sophia and Phronesis within 'Religio,' i.e., the experiential grounding of the human in the Living Real.

(See Note 3 below for explanation of this diagram. This is my way of conceptualizing what is needed using some of Vervaeke's language. I have no idea whether he would agree with it.)

I add content to this diagram in the Genealogy Series where I first introduce the critique of the contemporary metphysical imaginary as bereft of the vertical dimension depicted here, and about how the future of the human project requires its restoration in some way. I see both Vervaeke and McGilchrist as key contributors to this restorative task. Their work obviously depends on the work of many others, but what makes both so interesting to me is their ability to integrate and synthesize a broad range of work in ways that are so relevant to the meaning crisis for which late-modern Liberal thought has no remedy. 

The first twenty-five of Vervaeke's lectures are designed to establish the historical developments that led to the meaning crisis we are currently undergoing, and the second 25 lectures are designed to show how Third Generation Cognitive Science is mapping some possible solutions. He says that all healthy societies have highly functioning Nomological, Normative, and Narrative Orders. All three of these have broken down in contemporary North Atlantic societies, and their breakdown needs to be addressed because we, unlike other societies that have preceded us in the West, have no broadly recognized 'psychotechnologies' to help people to deal with what he calls the "perennial problems"--the various human tendencies toward self-deception and self-destructive behaviors--otherwise known as foolishness.

'Nomological Breakdown' is the prevailing sense that the cosmos is random, cruel, impersonal, and purposeless. Humans did not think this was true two hundred years ago. But developments in science coupled with the culturally disruptive effects of industrialization have destroyed any collective sense that we live in a cosmos that is undergirded by a benevolent order. We see this reflected in prestige cultural work from Game of Thrones to The Sopranos and Succession. I think that one of the reasons that Everything Everywhere All at Once won so many Oscars this year is because it wants to depict the random, meaningless, cruel cosmos that for us has become "normative" while asserting the possibility for deep, human personal meaning achieved through persistent, agapic love. The fundamental intuition is correct, but deeply inadequate. It's a start, though. And there are other signs of a shift toward affirming meaning among our culture's elites who are becoming bored with all the cruelty and meaninglessness. 

'Normative breakdown' is our experience of a social order that has come to emphasize the autonomous individual to such an extent that any idea of the common good has become impossible to ground politics, social norms/ethics, or any sense of living in a shared society. I've been arguing for years that this is leading us to disaster because of the way we are all divided and conquered in such a way as to be impotent to confront and push back against where techno-capitalism is dragging us.  

'Narrative Breakdown' is our experience of living in a society that derives no sense of meaning or purpose from an overarching Mythos derived from what I've been calling a metaphysical imaginary. The best we can do, as in Everything Everywhere All at Once--itself a paradigm of narrative breakdown--is affirm the possibility of meaning through love. Otherwise narrative meaning--true mythopoeisis rooted in Religio--is impossible in a society where Rationalist Materialism dominates our metaphysical imaginary. We are still skeptical of embracing grand narratives. So we are ruled by default by narrative habits we can't shake, in the American case by Calvinist individualism and its Horatio Alger bootstraps narrative that justifies Neoliberal meritocracy. This is a narrative that makes no sense in a world that is quickly evolving into one where the machines will be doing most of the work, and where humans will have to obtain their sense of identity, dignity, and purpose, i.e., their sense of life's meaning, from something other than their activities in the economic sphere. 

When I talk about the breakdown of the Liberal Order, this is basically what I mean--that Liberalism hasn't the resources within itself to solve the problems that Liberalism has created. That doesn't mean that Liberalism is or was wrong--it was enormously valuable and important for the human project--but Liberalism from the beginning has been structured in a tradeoff relationship between Phronesis and Sophia in which the former has crowded out the latter. Now it's time to reestablish a metaxis--a creative, balanced tension--between Phronesis and Sophia. More and more people are recognizing that this is necessary, but nobody knows how to do it. I certainly don't know how to do it, but I trust in the human project, and I believe that we can find a way to rebalance things one way or another.  

So the new restoration that is called for is what Vervaeke calls 'Religio', which is what I've been calling the Living Real. For him and for me this requires getting a deeper grip on reality, and to do this requires a participative ontology and epistemology that Neoplatonism theorizes, (with a little help from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and 3rd Generation Cog Sci)--or so I want to argue.

Vervaeke uses this word 'transjective' (See Note 4) to describe our relationship to the world around us as alternative to the way our imaginary is still so profoundly influenced by Cartesian subject/object relationship. He references Martin Buber's talking about the same thing in his I-Thou relationships. This requires an ontology that is essentially different from the one we inherited from the Enlightenment, one that rejects the Cartesian I-It, and embraces a kind of intersubjectivity if we understand by that a deep, immersive interconnectedness that is in a very real sense a function of anagogic (self-transcending), expansive Love.

This is the deep truth at the heart of the cosmos, but it's a truth we have become oblivious of because of the breakdown of the three orders referenced above. And so the task is to "wake up" to it, not in some sentimental, superficial sense, but in a way that is profoundly restorative for true human flourishing. So this is not just an intellectual project, but it has an essential intellectual component. We must find a way as a society to get a grip on the world and our experience in it that our current Rationalistic-Materialistic imaginary makes extraordinarily difficult. 

For Vervaeke, (and for me, and for Bishop Maximus) such a project is agapic and anagogic, by which he means driven by an understanding of the human being as self-transcending by virtue of his developing a deeper grip on reality that is empowered by a transcendent benevolence--if we can find a way as a culture  to value this truth again. Obviously individuals "self-transcend" all the time, but it's not valued by the broader society in the way it needs to be. And I think that it goes to the restoration of Nomological, Normative, and Narrative Orders in ways that make sense, i.e., that are well adapted to the world that is emerging where machines will be playing an unprecedented role in shaping the world we all live in.

This is not a world that the Cultural Right has any real grasp on. They feel the disruption and the ontological dizziness it causes, but they have no creative solutions. Its project is if anything profoundly maladaptive because it refuses to deal with the world as it is and as it is changing. They want simply, to use the Bill Buckley phrase, to 'stand athwart history yelling stop', but that is no response adequate to the enormity of what's happening. As a result its best solution is to restore a nostalgic imaginary Normative order by top-down fiat. Such a Normative Order is necessary in any healthy society--they are right in that--but it must emerge bottom-up out of the 'self-organizing' energies of the Living Real. 

So this being my first stab at trying to write about what Vervaeke is doing is tentative because I'm not sure I understand it fully yet, but I think it's important to have this background to understand why he's so interested to have these conversations with Bishop Maximus. About which I'll have more to say in the near future. 

You might also want to watch this lecture Vervaeke gave in December that is his attempt to explain why Neoplatonism and Cognitive Science are doing the same thing. 

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Note 1: Vervaeke's use of the term "naturalist imperative" is still not particularly clear to me, but it is not fatal from my pov because I'm willing for now to live with his understanding of 'self-transcendence' without insisting on extrapolating from it the metaphysical implications. But I'm still not crazy about his ideas about "Religion that is not Religion", because I think is impossible. The issue, as I see it, is not to give up on religion but to make distinctions between good religion and bad religion, and then to find ways of protect good religion from the forces--particularly the forms of idolatry that are associated with propositional tyranny--that persistently work to degrade it. What he's doing in 'Religion that isn't Religion', imo, is his trying to establish what's involved in good religion, and he's doing it in a way with which I am completely sympathetic. Good religion has vulnerabilities that often incline it to become a parody of good religion, to be sure. But even a 'Religion that is not Religion' must have its cult, code, and creed--or it just becomes another individualistic lifestyle choice, like choosing to undergo psychoanalysis. There is clearly a therapeutic dimension to what Vervaeke is doing, but his ambition is to find a remedy for a culture-wide meaning crisis, and so his proposals have broader aspirations than simply to be just another individualistic therapeutic technique. In article about him he's quoted:

How do we get from these disparate groups developing these new wisdom practices to an actual culture shift? Vervaeke’s answer surprised me. “I call it stealing the culture. What I mean is something analogous to what Christianity did in the ancient world where it stole the culture from the pagan worldview. There was no political revolution and no one was proposing how to reorganize the state. Instead, there were a bunch of communities of practice and transformation that rehomed people, teaching them through agape that they could be persons whereas the existing worldview said that they were not persons. The communities started networking together.”

I've thought for a while now that something like this is probably what's going to happen. As Christianity grew out of Hellenized Judaism, so will a restored vertical axis develop from within already existing post-axial religious traditions. In other words it will grow out of those traditions that have the infrastructure that predispose it to embrace self-transcendence. Vervaeke's conversations with Bishop Maximus demonstrate how this might happen. Eventually--not any time soon--a fusion metpahysical imaginary that integrates what's most valuable in all the great post-Axial traditions in concert with developments in Cognitive Science and philosophy will emerge that works best along the lines diagramed in the figure above. This needn't replace the great traditions, but it will provide a common framework that will allow for consensus to develop about what's important for the human future. I don't know that this will happen, but I hope it will. 

Any religion becomes a parody of itself when the cult, creed, and code become ends in themselves rather than a means 'affording' self-transcending transformation--what Vervaeke calls anagoge. Because such 'means' have value only insofar as they "work", then when they stop working for whatever reason, the 'wise' have to be adaptive enough to find out what does work. Vervaeke looks around him and he sees religions mostly not working in that they don't produce self-transcending, wise human beings, but too often rather the opposite--self-deceptive, self-destructive fools.

So religion as it is broadly practiced understandably seems for him to be more a part of the problem than offering any real solutions. But on the other hand, he certainly doesn't want to see himself as trying to promote a new religion, so it makes sense that he should come up with a way of talking about 'Religion that is not Religion' as a non-inflated way of describing what he's trying to do. But in the final analysis, his 'Rellgion that is not Rellgion' has a cult, code, and creed, and clearly, whatever he calls it, he hopes it will be culturally ascendant. 

Note 2. Lest there be any ambiguity, I support the secular state, and I believe that the restoration of a Sapiential Tradition is cultural project, not a political one, that can thrive in an open, democratic society. But as a cultural project, a sapiential tradition should have broad cultural legitimacy in the same way that Rationalist Materialism has legitimacy today. In my view there was no greater damage done to Christianity and its subversive call to self-transcendence than when Constantine made it the official religion of the Roman Empire. 

Note 3. The diagram seeks to conceptualize what a healthy metaphysical imaginary comprises. Such an imaginary recognizes knowledge and truth on both the horizontal and vertical axes, and I'd argue prioritizes the Vertical in the sense that McGilchrist prioritizes the Master over the Emissary. Both are needed, and both keep the other honest, but wisdom is more important because more foundational, and wisdom is precisely what our current Rationalist-Materialist imaginary has no place for. Late modern societies are in turmoil because they have no vertical axis and so spin aimlessnessly with no center to stabilize them. They continue to expand on the horizontal axis but have only the most superficial utilitarian criteria to interpret what they learn. I think this is changing and it must change. Vervaeke's work is very encouraging to me for this reason insofar as he's seeking to restore a place for Wisdom within the framework of cognitive science. The science part of that is horizontal, but the 'congitive' part of it is very open to ideas about self-transcendence on the vertical. 

In Geneaology Part 5 I introduce the criteria listed in the lower left of the chart above in an a preliminary attempt to evaluate what from my pov the health of any society's metaphysical imaginary requires. The argument to support such criteria is laid out in the development of the various parts of the series, but the crux of it is that any healthy society must have a metaphysical imaginary that comprises both a vertical and horizontal dimension as depicted in the diagram. The vertical and the horizontal map different domains of knowledge and have their own criteria of legitimacy, but they must remain in metaxic, creative tension, what Vervaeke calls an opponent or trade-off relationship. They both constrain and enable one another to produce deeper levels of knowledge and wisdom. Because knowledge on the horizontal and vertical proceed in a way that is interactive--we, i.e., our cognitive capabilities, are transformed/expanded as our knowledge of the world is transformed/expanded. When that interaction breaks down, when one or the other operates without being in a dynamic interrelationship with the other, as is our current condition, the whole system becomes impoverished and dysfunctional.

The criteria that define this metaxic relationship are as follows: 

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 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 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. 

Note 4: 'Transjective' is his term to identify the relationship between subjects and objects. There is no subject-object relationship; there are only transjective relationships. I'm not crazy about the term. I think maybe 'interjective' would work better in the sense that in the word understanding the prefix 'under' is etymologically closer in meaning to 'inter'. This emphasizes a way of experiencing the process of "understanding' as involving a cognitive subject standing between or in the midst of two poles of of knowledge and integrating them in the way that metaphor and analogy integrate two different things to produce insight. 

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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.

For "Genealogy Part 12 B: Propositional Tyranny in the West", go here.

Genealogy Update

Several factors have stalled my continuing my Genealogy of Our Current Insanity project, but it's something I've always planned to return to. I've mentioned the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke in several of the earlier posts here, and I just came across this video in which he interviews the Greek Orthodox Bishop Maximus. This starts out slow, but I hope you'll stick with it. It's an excellent articulation of themes I'm grappling with in my larger project of retrieving Christian Neoplatonism in a Postmodern key. This conversation is important for the way it demonstrates the relevancy of the practice and thought of the early Christian Fathers is relevant for trends in cognitive science and Philosophy of Mind. 

I'm at the end of the quarter in a course I'm teaching right now so don't have time to comment, but I hope to do so when my plate is clear. But a couple of quick things: There is a certain amount of theological distinction making in this conversation that seems to emphasize why the West went wrong, and I largely agree. I wouldn't say that Eastern Orthodoxy has "unique" resources, but I do believe that it has resources that enrich and enhance the Western Tradition, and indeed this was recognized in Catholic scholarly circles in the Nouvelle Theologie in the early 20th Century. Its focus was to retrieve the Greek Patristic patrimony that Bishop Maximus draws upon in this conversation. I am not interested in East vs. West polemics, but rather to retrieve what's best in a rich and diverse tradition that comprises both East and West. 

I blame western Nominalism and Voluntarism for what became in the West the "propositional tyranny" discussed in this video. These trends in Western thought gradually closed off a more participatory way of thinking that was the dominant "Realist" mode in the West until the 1300s. Nominalism and Voluntarism provided the theological framework that was adopted by most of the Reformers, and that in turn provided the framework for western capitalism and its technological advancement. But at what price?  This is all laid out in my summary of Taylor's A Secular Age. so I'm not going to rehearse all that now. But why those ideas took hold in the West and not the East is something I'd like to explore some time. I suspect there was a time bomb in St. Augustine that didn't detonate until the late medieval period. But I'm not ready yet to make that argument.

Bishop Maximus is quite right when he says that so much of that Eastern patristic tradition was unavailable in the West because so few in the West knew Greek and so little of it was translated into Latin--and wouldn't be until centuries later. So any discussion of the Christian Neoplaontic tradition in the West usually starts with Augustine, and goes through Pseudo-Dionysos, John Eriugena, the Cathedral Schools, and then culminating in the great Thomistic synthesis. My original plan was to follow that track emphasizing what is, if not unique, at least more emphasized in the West. But I have always thought that it's important to bring the Greek fathers into the story, and I haven't been clear about how to do that without overburdening the reader's patience.

The Genealogy Series is not meant to be a scholarly project but rather the far less ambitious telling of a story that talks about the trajectory of the post-Axial Revolution in the West to the present day in the hope of our understanding better what resources are available for us in shaping a more richly human future. Such a future is in jeopardy as it becomes increasingly clear that Liberal Order and its hegemonic rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary hasn't the resources to deal with the crises and challenges that humanity faces in the next hundred years.

The idea that Christian Neoplatonism might provide such resources might seem far-fetched to almost everyone, but that's why I think watching this conversation is important. Clearly a guy like John Vervaeke sees its relevance. That's why I found this conversation so interesting. It boils things down to essentials in a way that I think any interested, reasonably well educated person might understand. But it still needs some unpacking. 

After writing what's above I learned that there are subsequent conversations. Here's Part 2 that just went up about two weeks ago:

Part 3

Part 4 added 3/13/23: