My (current) map of reality

This is a highly condensed version of how my map of reality developed; much is left out, and clarity is sacrificed for a packed sentence. My journey began in a tradition that has a deep respect for scripture, especially interpreted 'materialistically' or 'literally'. While there's problems with this, it has the strength of honouring the word of God: I was never persuaded by liberalism, which thinks it knows better than the Bible. My thought has always been that if God has spoken to us through Scripture, perhaps he knows what it means and we don't always, and to hold something in contempt is to place yourself in a position where you cannot understand it.

But before I get in really deep, I should explain the basic problem I had, which was essentially a feeling of cognitive dissonance with my experience of the world, knowledge of history, literature, art and science etc, and what the mainline reformed-evangelical protestant church (I will use the word 'protestant' below to refer to this tradition) told me reality was. They didn't fit well with each other, to the point where they sometimes felt like they occupied different planets. This post marks the point at which I feel the tension between Christianity as I know it and reality as I know it has largely been resolved.

I had been exposed to Douglas Wilson, Peter Leithart and associates, as well as the classical education, and the most significant thing for me (of relevance here) was their attention to literary structures and patterns of the Biblical text, and in tying it to everyday or basic human experience. This helped to give some coherence to the Bible: my tradition's emphasis on materialistic interpretation had fragmented the text and removed much meaning. Michael Ward's book "Planet Narnia" was also helpful here, because it pointed out structures in the Narnia books, and related them to medieval associations with the planets. Together with David Chilton's commentary on Revelation and a smattering from "Through New Eyes" by James Jordan, these books led me to develop the basic intuition, not fully articulated in words, that literature echos basic structures of reality, or rather the converse: that reality has basic structures we try to express in literature. As a side note, I read this book called "The Forgotten Heavens" which basically illustrated Biblical cosmology (heaven, hades, hell, earth) and pointed out there's a bunch of really weird stuff in the bible, which was, without fail, ignored by most Protestants I interacted with (which was a problem to me, because they were showing they thought knew better than the Bible what was important and what wasn't). C.S. Lewis's "The Discarded Image" formed a kind of parallel here, fleshing out something of the ancient cosmology, filling the world with a hierarchy of being. 

Somewhat after this (I think), I subscribed to First Things, which introduced me to the breadth of thought from Catholic, Orthodox and Protestants, as well as Jews. The benefits of this are too numerous to name in full, but two are relevant here: the way the saints spoken of as alive (the expositions of Mary as the Church were especially helpful, because it helped me see how something can be identified with something else, yet remain distinct), and could be communicated with was a new thought, and the often brilliant cultural analysis was very helpful in helping shape how I interpreted what was happening around me (Alexi Sargant had this piece pointing out the replacement of the saints with Marvel superheroes in the contemporary imagination, illustrating the inevitability of having a horde of gods or saints in the human consciousness). As a sort-of throwaway, there is a line from Shakespeare "Oh for a Muse of fire" which is request for the Holy Spirit to fill the artist; Tim Powers uses something similar in a fictional story about how vampires, as spiritual beings, acted as muses to various poets, giving them great gifts (but at a great cost). John C Wright, in a Doxacon Prime talk, raised the point that all artists know that inspiration comes from outside them, but materialists attribute it to the subconscious, while Christians/ancient cosmologists attribute it to angels or other spiritual beings. About this time, I also subscribed to The New Atlantis and Mars Hill Audio, which together with First Things, had a very keen awareness of the effects of modernity, and technology (Alan Jacobs and Michael Hanby were invaluable here) on us as humans (the basic point being that technology alters how we perceive reality, even though we think it doesn't), and especially how Christians and the Church should respond. Ken Myers, of Mars Hill Audio, remains the best commentator of how Christianity should answer the whole person (that is what culture is for): we gain knowledge of the human from the Greeks, so to speak, but we can only be completed in Christ, and his interviews spanned essentially every aspect of humanity, including music, philosophy, virtue, literature, technology, science, law, gender, history, freedom, poetry, myth and the list goes on. As another aside, Ken Myers had thing where he talked about having a heart attack, but by the time people knew and prayed for him, the danger was already past. However, his response was to this was that prayer 'works' regardless of chronology: future prayer can 'affect' past events, which was an odd thought at the time, but one that made a kind of weird sense. He also interviewed someone about reading the dead saints as spiritual mentors, which hinted at the idea that the dead aren't dead, something not really present with any force or immediacy in the Protestant consciousness. 

About this time, I was listening to The Andrew Klavan Show, and his interpretations of movies was often quite insightful (his conversion story, The Great Good Thing, illustrates the difficulty of conversion for modern people); he helped me see how culturally-inflected archetypal patterns are present in movies, and thus why they resonate (or not) with the audience. I also read "The Unseen Realm" and listened to the Naked Bible podcast both by Michael Heiser, which cemented everything "The Forgotten Heavens" said, and fleshed out the supernatural cosmology of the Bible. Around this time, I listened to "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman which is perhaps the most brilliant portrayal I have read of how the gods work in our society today.

Instrumental in all this is that I occasionally attended a traditional liturgical (but somewhat woke) Lutheran church, where they played Bach (attending a conservative Anglo-Catholic service fixed the problems here, and is the only thing that has exorcised the spirit of bitterness towards the Protestantism I grew up with). This helped me see that actions, our bodies, our minds and our spirits are all united; my experience with mainline Protestantism was that it deliberately splits the human being up, forcing you to leave your body (or brain, or emotion, or intellect, or morals etc, depending on the denomination) at the door: the secular world was in a completely different orbit to the 'spiritual' orbit, and they only occasionally intersected. James KA Smith was essential here, pointing out that we are liturgical creatures, shaped by habit far more than individualist modernism cares to admit.

Somewhat after this, I was introduced to Jordan Peterson and listened to many of his talks. The upshot was that he decisively destroyed the last vestiges of the materialistic worldview (best articulated by those Philistines, the New Atheists) I had hanging about, although I cannot claim to removed it entirely - you cannot escape modernism entirely - and nuked postmodernism: we lived in a world drenched with meaning, but we can often take courses of action that degrade meaning. In addition, he helped reinforce the liturgy point, pointing out in an organised way, with reference to actually reality (instead of assuming that morals are arbitrary things God invented and arbitrarily requires, which is the unspoken assumption of much mainline Protestantism) that there are basic patterns of behaviour in everyday life that lead to greater meaning and goodness (even if it costs you). Finally, his use of Jung was exceptional, showing how all stories echo archetypal patterns and articulate valuable information about our humanity, and what choices we should make. Pointing out that the line that reads "Behold, sin crouches at the door" is actually suggesting that Cain opened the door to let himself be possessed by a sexually aroused cat, I think, gets the point across about how visceral the Bible stories really are (when they aren't neutered by people who think they know better than God). However, Peterson didn't seem to have any ultimate reasons for why reality was this way: he seemed to stop short of affirming that there was a source beyond the universe.

Then we come to Jonathan Pageau. I had previously listened to part of his talk about space and time, and was like, nope, nope, nope, I can't do this. But then I listened to his Halloween one, then his Santa Claus one (the rest is history), and everything mentioned above started to fall into place. I had been introduced to fractals as a major structure of reality by Nassim Taleb, Yoram Hazony and Michael Bull, and the contrast between by order and chaos by Niall Ferguson's "The Square and the Tower" and Jordan Peterson, so I had many concepts ready to hand, but no overarching life world to arrange them. I finally could organise how to think of spiritual beings, how they act in the world (without coming out with wacky charismatic ideas), a hierarchy of being, the concept of the centre-fringe-edge as the basic structure of the human, the family, state and nation. So, putting all this together: I now have some metaphysical shelves on which to plonk things. There is more to this story than the above, but that's best left for now. Thank-you to all the people who helped me do it - I couldn't have done it otherwise.