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, completely arbitrary as far as obligation is concerned (as Kant put it, you cannot derive an ought from an is, a premise that traditional religion denies). This has resulted in, for instance, ridiculous approaches to art. Freudian, Darwinian and Marxist theories on art all have this in common: that the artist in not acting out of their intention to communicate a truth, but rather suppressed sexual desires, or advertise their sexual fitness, or driven by economic laws, as Marilyn Robinson argues in her book "Absence of Mind". In other words, all our pretty speeches about what art is are pure delusion: there is no meaning, only mindless deterministic processes at work. Meaning is an opiate, a delusion we need to keep on going, something the film 'Hail Cesar' touches on.
Under such stultifying and machine-minded 'thinking', people may be driven mad, as in the case of Communism and Naziism, or else their spiritual insights are suppressed. This is what Nietzsche was so famous for describing, and Freud and Jung discovered: when traditional religion is abandoned because people can no longer believe in the supernatural, those feelings do not disappear. Rather, they are forgotten and descend into what Jung called the "subconscious". The effect of this is to reduce meaning to materialistic things, which is seen in consumerism, and ultimately, by seeing that such things as art have power over human beings, to regard art cynically as a means of control, as post-modernism. The derision and yet ubiquity of 'self-help' therapy is related: it is despised because it is seen as people deluding themselves to overcome difficulty because they aren't strong enough to determine the course of their lives, and widely used because people really aren't made to 'do it alone.' The problem with modern psychological methods is that they flatten the psychological and the spiritual into one thing, as CS Lewis points out in Mere Christianity. Ultimately, material things and explanations are seen as inadequate and deprive people of meaning in their lives, resulting in what some call the meaning crisis. Jordan Peterson and Bret Weinstein are popular today because they focus on where meaning comes from, and draw it directly from ancient mythological narrative. They have gained traction because they support their assertions with evolutionary biology: they link Jungian mythological analysis directly to biological hard-wiring to explain why people should behave in ways that generally match common sense and traditional morality.
The materialistic mindset has unfortunately born fruit in the Church. Two main outcomes are 1) literalism and 2) liberalism, both of which largely deny traditional spiritual meanings of the text, due to the sweeping abandonment of traditional modes of religious expression in the years since the Enlightenment. Traditional modes presuppose a metaphysical approach to reality, one that sees the spiritual penetrating the material in every aspect of reality as we encounter it. This basic premise was swept away for one reason: CS Lewis points out that magic and science were in competition in the early modern period (contrary to popular belief, witch trials were not in their heyday in the medieval period, but later, when the scientific method was being developed), but science won because it generated spectacular results. Traditional religion was then regarded as being in the same basket as magic, a lot of mumbo jumbo that appeared not to match up with how reality seemed to work, and it could not match the dazzling output of science. In response, Christianity bifurcated into intellectualism (e.g. Calvinism) and emotionalism (such as the religious revivals of the 1800s). The former corresponds to the high regard for reason (the term has degenerated into 'intelligence' today) at the time, the latter to emotive experience, which can be felt and is therefore hard to deny.
Literalism limits itself to the literal, historical and metaphorical meaning of the text. This is why conspiracy theories and strange ideas of spirits emerge, especially in Baptist and Pentecostal/charismatic churches: they can see the Bible talks about spirituality, but have a culturally limited vocabulary, restricted to the materialistic. Sundered from the traditional spiritual language of the Church, they have to invent their own, and tend to see spirits more as ghosts rather than ontological beings, whose bodies are can be made up of nations, images and cities. Jonathan Pageau points out that this is the method of conspiracy theory: using materialistic language to try to express spiritual reality, which fails. The latter problem, liberalism, generally ignores or regards as irrelevant literal and historical meaning, in addition to the traditional spiritual interpretations of the Church. Because they rely on historical-critical methods of textual interpretation, they treat the Scriptures with contempt. They do not have a way for the supernatural to interact with people, so they discard what does not fit their preconceived conceptions of morality. Instead, they perceive the scriptures as an imperfect expression of ultimate moral principles, with perhaps the exception of the gospels.
This raises the biggest unresolved problem for materialists, and that is morality. Materialists have successfully eliminated the spiritual from the modern consciousness. They have not managed to achieve the same with morality, mainly for pragmatic reasons: although there is no empirically backed theory for morality, it is a fact that moral behaviour is necessary for society to function as we know it, although it creates the problem of how to decide what moral system to accept. Now, this is an odd way to look at the world, because morality has traditionally been seen to arise from two things 1) who human beings are and by implication, their ultimate goal and 2) the nature of reality in general (riffing on Aristotle by way of Alasdair MacIntyre's book 'After Virtue'). If you answer these two questions, the desirable pattern of behaviour tends to arise naturally. Thus, to ask the question of what moral system to accept is odd, because you are actually asking what the nature of reality is. After all, you don't want to go against human nature or reality, because that ultimately won't get you very far.
Secularists draw their morality primarily from one principle: that of the universal dignity of the individual. They do this for two reasons 1) because man is the only measure of things available to them, apart from material reality from which they have been unable to derive moral principles, and 2) they have successfully removed the traditional context of family, tribe, nation or tradition from our conception of ourselves. The second they have achieved through such work as that of Rousseau and Locke, introducing the idea of social contract and human rights, which extract the individual from every social bond, obligation and responsibility. Thus, they do not think of 'the human' but of 'the individual', and regard the wishes of the individual as supreme, so long as other individuals are not affected.
Biblical literalists do not draw their morality from this principle, because they do not accept man as the highest authority, but God. However, they approach the Bible 'scientifically' to derive morals; where principles are not stated explicitly, they line up proof texts that empirically suggest a principle. This leaves them in a strange spot when faced with commands, such as wearing head coverings. Either they must approach it legalistically (God said it, so we gotta do it, though we don't know why) or extract the underlying principle (wives are showing deference to husbands). Liberals, of course, because they regard the historical-critical method as a greater authority than God, reject the command as an antiquated cultural practice. Their interpretations are not driven by the text, but by a previously accepted moral framework that discards anything that doesn't fit.
I will elaborate a little more on literalism, since it pervades much popular interpretation of the Bible, and when it is dominant, causes much exegetical grief. This is not to say that there is no literal meaning (there is), or that it is unimportant (it isn't). Literal interpretation, when done correctly, has the positive effect of keeping us grounded in reality.
But when literalism ignores or treats with suspicion other meanings of the text, it becomes an incoherent and fragmented method of interpretation. However, it is more often coupled with a Platonic approach to church doctrine - that is, there is an unchanging and immaterial system of theology existing in a spiritual dimension only remotely accessible to us, that can and should be logically extracted from the Bible. Pursued in isolation, however, this is not a particularly Christian approach, and stands in opposition to most of Christian tradition. It is rather the direct product of a scientific approach to reality.
Science ignores the qualities of things, and only asks what principles govern the behaviour of matter. It ignores the question of what something means, riding roughshod over the 'raw material' of nature. When Scripture is treated only as raw material from which we extract the principles of doctrine, which must then reconfigured to fit our lives (or 'applied' as is often said), we are doing something that 1) dishonours the form of the Bible and 2) ultimately induces a Picassoesque contortion of the human frame.
Finally, materialism places the emphasis on content, not form, because it is looking down at matter and asks only how things work, not what they mean or refer up to or express. Metaphysics (when it is not gnostic) relies heavily on material form, the arrangement and medium the content is placed in. This is because metaphysics refers to invisible things, so to express them one must make use of material in a way that speaks to the unseen. When the unseen aspects of reality are denied, all forms are seen as arbitrary dressing. Thus, the Christian message is reduced to content, in particular, a legal statement that 1) all people are sinners and have violated God’s law, much which is seen as arbitrary, as it does not reflect reality as moderns see it and 2) Christ fixes the problem legally. This is all a bit impersonal, and functions at the ‘intellectual’ level. To fix that, the ‘relationship with God’ aspect is added as an emotional support. This cleans the Christian message of nearly all metaphysical language: ontological relationships are completely excised. Thus, this altering of the Christian message, which happened gradually following the Protestant Reformation, is not a response to the ‘traditions of men’ supposedly introduced by the Catholic Church, as is commonly supposed. It is rather a response to a paradigmatic shift in how the West perceived reality. It was making the gospel message ‘relevant‘ to a people who no longer understood the world metaphysically or symbolically. This is unfortunate, because a materialistic world with the legal+relationship gospel message is decidedly not the working cosmological model of the Scriptures.
To summarise: the effect of modernism on the Church's liturgy and interpretation of Scripture is to 1) split the expression of the liturgy into emotional or intellectual, or some combination of these, and 2) regard the Scriptures primarily as raw material, from which a lens of legality, morality and self-help may be derived with which to interact with a materialist world. At this point, things have reached a pretty pass. It creates all sorts of problems. For instance, because moderns have abandoned metaphysics altogether, it is very difficult for them to understand the logic of the Old Testament law, to draw much meaning from historical narrative, genealogies, descriptions of buildings etc, or to see how such things as the story of creation lays out the structure of reality. Even treating the Bible as a work of literature, which would save much of the traditional view, is abandoned in favour of systematic theology.
This is where this book comes in. Pageau points out that the Scriptures rely on a pre-modern conception of reality, one that relies on metaphysics, not materialism. Only if one recognises this do the Scriptures begin to make complete sense. The Bible is a story dense with symbolic meaning. It is deeply embedded in the material world, which it does not treat as inferior to some Platonic form of doctrine, but rather essential to our humanity. It assumes a reality penetrated on every level with spiritual reality.
I will outline a few of the basic symbolic structures in the book. The most immediate and obvious order of the universe we encounter, and one we need no science to grasp, is that heaven is up and earth is down. This perception is basic and central to all ancient (and modern) metaphysics. It is basic because it is scaled to the human, unlike scientific models.
The primary associations with heaven are meaning and order and authority (often personified as the gods), while the earth is thought of as substance and matter and power. Heaven is seen primarily in terms of form and ontology: that the things of earth are expressions of beings or forms in heaven. This structure is repeated in our bodies: ideas are in our head, which has authority over the body, but little power, while our body has great power and very little in the way of ideas. It is the same in a nation, with a ruler with authority and a population with power. It is the same in a tree: roots support the trunk, while the leaves give food to the roots. This pattern repeats all over creation and it rarely goes the other way.
We ascribe order to the heavens because the sun, moon, planets and stars order the seasons, day and year in our perceptions. To make this point more clearly, let us consider a film, aimed at a general audience, which wishes to show the movement of the seasons. Scientifically, the way to do that would be show the earth's axial tilt and its passage around the sun. What director would do that? None, and if they did, few people would intuitively get that symbolism. It is not basic to our humanity to think of the earth going around the sun as the reason for the seasons and never will be. What is basic is the face of the sky, so you could show snow for winter, rain for spring, sun for summer etc and everybody would understand that seasons are being referred to.
We ascribe substance and power to the earth because plants grow out of the earth in response to the passage of the heavenly bodies. All organisms take their sustenance and substance from the earth. They (appear to) take their spirit from the air, which is why the spirit is associated with air and the wind. The earth and the things it produces do not often have highly concentrated meaning associated with them. They need work. Metals must be mined, smelted, purified, hammered, shaped, fitted together, polished etc to assume a meaning. A lump of stone has little meaning associated with it, but can assume a great deal more meaning if it is carved into a particular shape. Earth is down, and earth gives substance.
These relationships are not normally laid out in analytical form, but rather imagistically. Heaven was a circle or dome, the earth a square, since the former is associated with the general and complete, the latter with the particular and defined. The ancients did not think of heaven as sky. They knew that the beings inhabiting heaven were different in nature to us, being more like thought: they were not literalists, thinking of the gods as a CGI superhero. Space is perceived as a pillar or vertical axis, while time is a circle or wheel. The archetypal forms of space are the tree and mountain. Thus, space is associated with hierarchy and order, with the top being closer to heaven and thus more crystallised meaning, while the bottom is less defined. Time is associated with the snake, in particular, the snake eating its tail or ouroboros, because time is an ever-renewing cycle.
Finally, the most important aspect of Biblical cosmology is that of the symbolic. Heaven (head) is up and earth (body) is down, but there must be something to mediate between them. This thing that mediates is what is called a symbol. That is, it is the expression of a heavenly principle in an earthly substance. On the scale of the cosmos, that is man, whose ultimate role is to mediate between heaven and earth, to symbolise. On the scale of the individual, that is the heart. The proper integration of the body and mind, which is expressed as the action of the heart, is that of order taking form to produce an outcome, to put things very clinically. Death is the result of sundering heavenly order from earthly substance, which is part of why the fall caused death, because it broke our relationship with God. Man thus functions as the spatial axis between heaven and earth, and the fall broke this mediatory or priestly axis, which was restored in Christ. When we fell, the wheel of time, which is associated with life, was unhitched from the spatial axis and became destructive, resulting in death.
An important point here is that this is all about perceptions. Scientific understandings are always added on to this basic frame. They are always post-hoc. They always require expensive brain-power and education to effectively understand. They are never immediately intuitive to our understanding of the world. So, we still think like pre-moderns *but we think we don’t*. A great mistake of the modern age is that we think science finally lets us identify ‘facts’, unlike all previous modes of knowledge. This is a mistake, because other modes of knowledge also generate ‘facts’. When you adopt a metaphysical framework, science is not about pure fact, but about a perception built around or packaged along with a particular fact. This is because no scientific advance is possible without extremely precise instruments. These instruments represent a technological extension of ourselves: they extend the eye into the heavens with the telescope, the ear into the subsonic with the microphone, the tongue and gut with food chemistry and so on, using instruments that let our senses operate at scales they do not normally occupy (refer to the article “Most of the Time the Earth is Flat” by Jonathan Pageau for more on this). When looked at this way, the fact that we can see the sky above as representing heaven is not a problem. It is the default human scale of perceiving reality. We can extend our perception through the use of instruments, to see galaxies. Thus, the problem with the scientific perspective is not that it asserts that the earth is a sphere flying around the sun. It is that this idea is proposed to the exclusion of all others. Because it abandons ontological thinking, which allows us to see technology to become an extension of our beings, it creates the illusion that science is neutral, when in fact it only amplifies the range of our senses.
Much more could be said. I have not touched on the more interesting aspects of the books, but stuck to the reason why the book is necessary, and what is basic to human perspectives of reality. I do think that the greatest challenge to humanity today is to overcome the anti-human perspective of modernism, and more particularly, to remove its influence from the Church. I think part of the way forward is to apply symbolic interpretations to scientific information, because the knowledge gained by such a method is valid, but not incorporated into a metaphysical framework of meaning. Perhaps more important is the role of the Church in helping explain how our lives are structured symbolically, a good example of which is James KA Smith’s superb exposition of a trip to the shopping mall as cathedral liturgy.
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