The Full Creation

Peter Leithart has written extensively on Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and the medieval quadriga (see the end of this post for further reading). My goal in this post is to restate much of what he has said, with the hope that some new associations will emerge.  The north-south axis is associated with space, the east-west with time. Further, we can say space has two extremes, inside and outside, and that the (masculine) north is associated with the outside, the (feminine) south with the inside, while the (masculine) east is associated with the past, and the (feminine) west with the future. If this is so, we can see that the Historical sense of the text maps onto the east, the Tropological to the south, the Allegorical to the north and the Anagogical to the west. A brief definition of each of these terms is in order. The Historical is concerned with what is, what actually happened: the literal and historical meanings of the text. The Tropological is associated with what we are to do: t...

Icon of the Last Judgement by Fr. Luke Dingman Most of the time, we do not think using 'scientific', 'empirical' or 'rational' modes of thought: we do not think axiomatically or with pure logic. The reason is that such modes of approaching reality are extremely expensive: they require a lot of time, thought, rigor, training etc and most people do not have the leisure to learn to think in such ways. Instead, we mostly interact with reality in non-rational ways (not irrational): we attribute and assume cause and effect without 'scientific/empirical evidence'. That is to say, we use the language of story, symbol and imagination to approach reality most of the time. More than that, we make many decisions without fully thinking them through, that is, we make them according to habit or ritual or intuition. The reason, again, is that to think things through completely and in a fully rational way takes time, often more than a lifetime, because reality is comp...

This post draws heavily, and in some cases directly, from the work of James Jordan, Peter Leithart and Michael Bull, as well as Matthieu and Jonathan Pageau. I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Jacob Russell, Bradley Heißmann and Eugene Schreder: their conversation provided some of the content, as well as crystallise my thinking. In the Bible and in ancient cosmology, the cherubim are high-ranking angels. In the bible, they are described as having four heads. Moving from the top clockwise and ending at 9 o’clock, these are man, bull/ox, eagle and lion (although see below for how the faces move). As humans, we have six sides (think of a coffin), but four that relate to movement through space, since we cannot fly. This is part of the reason we have four points of the compass (the other reason is, of course, the passage of the sun and moon, which creates a line from east to west across the sky). Thus, the number four and the square is associated with defined space....

The problem we face today (and the problem that nearly all my reading, thinking and writing is centred on) is how to be the Church in the face of modernism. This was a really important book for me and I hope this essay goes some way to explaining why. I will say at the outset that I am simplifying here: pre-modern conceptions of the universe have persisted in the West, but nevertheless, the general trend has been towards abandoning such perspectives, and I am concerned with the overall downward trend, not exceptions. The general problem can be called scientism, that is, that matter is all there is, and thus the scientific method defines all there is to know. This is our basic outlook, and it manifests itself in many different ways, from ideologies as a concept, to consumerism and popular culture. In this way, all metaphysics, religion, spirituality and morality are seen as not based in material reality, and therefore not real, but rather imagined: they are social constructs, complet...