This is a wonderful article with insights well stated, especially the validation of parts of postmodern thought. But the article, along with many others of the same content, eclipses the one Inkling, namely Barfield, who was really the leading figure when it came to themes of participatory knowledge and the "rediscovery of meaning." While his fiction never put him on the same standing as Lewis and Tolkien, it does seem like Barfield deserves wider attention for his groundbreaking ideas in his philosophical works. At least one reason for this redressment is to acknowledge the ways in which Barfield both directly and indirectly fed the imaginations and intellects of Lewis and Tolkien.
Beautiful explained. Majority of Christians in the West are materialists. Since I’ve started to unpick my materialistic world view and begun to return to an ancient mindset, I feel so much more connected to God, the Bible and Creation.
We are all a product of our time. It is hard to put the "materialist cat back into the metaphysical bag" so to speak but we are all doing out best. Lewis and Tolkien certainly are wonderful guides on that journey. I honestly can't blame many atheists, the only versions of Christianity they've been exposed to are flat, gnostic, and disenchanted.
Oh man was this a delight to read. It sums up so much of what I have been pondering in the last year particularly but also for the last 20+ years since my first encounters with Tolkien and Lewis.
I wrote a related essay on my own page a while back about the modern Protestant church in America (my inherited tradition) and how an unwitting adoption of materialism (as you’ve laid out so beautifully here) and of market capitalism (the commodification of stories as you’ve put it) has led to this shallow and hollow simulacrum of what the Church is meant to be. I would love to hear more about how you connect the desacralization of the Christian faith with the Enlightenment and the rise of everything as commodity capitalism in the West. To me this is one of the biggest untold stories of our time, especially given how absolutely dominant the fundamentalist Christian + free market capitalist marriage on the American right has been over the last 50-75 years. I sense that there is a growing awakening in some online spaces like this or with Peterson and Pageau and others, but it is still an underground movement to a large degree.
There is a lot to be said about the desacralization of Western Christianity that won't fit in a comment box but in a few words I would say there is a bit of a mutual reinforcement that goes along with hyper-individualistic Enlightenment rationalism and historically that eventually turns into a version of Christianity that defines belief as simply affirming propositions rather than an embodied communal liturgical life. Some may think I'm being hyperbolic when I use the word gnosticism to describe this but I mean it fairly literally. Ultimately I do think this is related to the rise of liberalism in the West which I think Fr. Seraphim Rose does a great job explaining in his book Nihilism.
I appreciate how you shed light on the use of words like 'emergence' as a facade to explain the unexplained, which is essentially a form of 'magic' that often goes unacknowledged. As someone who used to identify as a 'rationalist' searching for the missing piece of the universal puzzle, I can personally attest to the accuracy of your observations.
Your post takes into account the philosophy of two great men and I would like to add a third; Jung. I think his work could tie a lot of this up neatly, and it kept coming to my mind as I read. In his book 'The Undiscovered Self', he says "“The danger that a mythology understood too literally, and as taught by the Church, will suddenly be repudiated lock, stock and barrel is today greater than ever. Is it not time that the Christian mythology, instead of being wiped out, was understood symbolically for once?”. (I also believe this passage ignited Jordan Peterson's early work on Christian symbology)
You mention quantum physics in your post, "the world becomes narrative again", this resonates with Jung's collaboration with Pauli, the father of quantum physics. Their convergence in understanding quantum physics and mysticism led to the development of Jung's concept of synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle, which adds another fascinating layer to the intersection of symbology, science and narrative.
Your post has sparked intriguing connections and insights, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it!
Thanks for the kind words and your comments on Jung's thought! I am not nearly as familiar with Jung's work as I am with Tolkien and Lewis so I appreciate the supplement.
I never thought my love for Tolkien and my study of Jung would ever intersect. Your post has given me a lot to think about. It's intriguing how both of these great men and their works are deeply influenced by Christianity, and their wisdom remains relevant in today's world.
Cameron, my last comment on this post of yours will play off this statement, which is mostly a quote of Tolkien:
"The world is made by Logos — by meaning and purpose.
'We have come from God' (continued Tolkien), 'and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.'"
The Myth Model vastly expands the nature and scope of the power of a 'sub-creator' into the God-delegated power of secondary creation given to all self things. So Tolkien's writing a profound literary myth is an grand instance of this delegation of the power of secondary creation exercised by a human self thing, and all those who read JRRT sub-create a vast relationship among themselves and the author to which God gives Being by a primarily act of creation.
And the activity of "lesser" self things—those which are on a par with electrons—weave a vast schema of relationships to which God also gives Being. This vast complex relationship in Being is the object studied by science as nature. Clearly the complex relationship which is humanity and the complex of relationships which is nature cannot be separated, but they can be distinguished in many ways, although all relationships are subsumed in the unity of Being. The understanding of Being in the Myth Model context leads in two major and seemingly divergent directions. One of these directions is the role of neurophysiology in human experience, and the other is the role of Christ's kenosis in creation. Regarded as questions, to both of these directions the Myth Model offers speculative solutions:
Neurophysiology serves the function of keeping up with the godly self things who sub create the core of the essential somas of organisms. The nature and quality of this function is subject to Natural Selection (Darwin's caps).
Christ's kenosis bears the burden—in a single self thing—of the non-being in the Being of the one universal relationship of all self things. It reveals the vulnerability of God as his greatest attribute, exceeding that of any creature.
Thanks for the use of your space. It has helped me think out the Myth Model more discursively, rather than only in thought verse which lights up single facets of the thing. JBSP
Cameron, I like your statement, "Reality unveils itself to us as 'myth-woven'", especially when I give 'myth-woven' the spin which I'm seeking to communicate through my Spiritual Thing Substack. My spin begins with the speculative distinction between primary and secondary creation and develops it into the Myth Model.
The Myth Model expands the framework for Myth back to the beginning, through the delegation of modes of secondary creative power by God to spiritual creatures, whom I name 'gods' in my thought verse. A different mode of secondary creative power is delegated to material creatures.
One of the Myth Model's ontological assumptions, which gives it great simplicity, is that invisible and visible creatures have the same form, identified as that of self things. The self thing form consist of the unity of aware agency and essential soma. Both gods and organisms can be resolved into these two aspects. The aware agency of all self things is a primary creation of the Triune God, and the essential soma of all gods is, in the beginning, also a primary creation.
And, God bestows the primary creation of Being on the relationships of self things. Relationships are secondary creations of self things, so Myth Model Being is a hybrid of secondary and primary creation.
And, material self things are hybrids of the secondary creation of their essential somas by other self things and the primary creation of their aware agency by God. The activity of self things, from which their Being evolves reflects the development of the intention of each self thing's aware agency.
To each self thing the mode of primary creation in their lives is simultaneous with the activity of their aware agency, and to all self things the activity of other self things is concurrent to some degree, however remote, because of God's simultaneous presence to all in the primary creation of their aware agency and Being.
The primary creation of Being involves a judgment of God on what is good and true in relationships, and a rejection of what is not fitting to God's original creative intention. But, what is not fit remains as Myth Model non-being sustained (both passively and actively) by the power of secondary creation distributed among all self things.
Thus, the Myth Model necessarily carries the iniquity of evil into the myth-weaving of Being, which is the evolving content of the dark drama within the true narrative of all creation.
Cameron, this comment is on your text, "For many, what can be seen under a microscope or through a telescope is somehow more real than what is seen with the naked eye."
Given that this is a rhetorical flourish, since most people do not use microscopes or telescopes, I take it to mean that most people see what is real as that which (they believe) science has certified to be real. Didn’t Walker Percy play on this theme?
But there's a more interesting twist for me which I've mulled over for many decades: Science has achieved a vast instrumental extension of our natural senses, our 'naked eyes', and this instrumental extension of our senses necessitates the development of ideas which allow us to recognize how nature presents itself to us in this new way. The challenge for us is to resolve Christ's presentation of himself and science-seen nature into one image seen in parallax, like the separation of one's own two eyes works to naturally see depth. To obtain this depth of spiritual view is not easy, and, really, it has not been accomplished, but I think that we should be inspired by the first of John Henry Newman's Oxford University Sermons, preached in 1826: “…we cannot imagine that God would promulgate, by His inspired servants, doctrines which contradict previous truths which he has written on the face of nature.” How can we read the book of nature concurrently with the book of Revelation?
This comment is on your line, "Of course, for modern people, this phenomenological way of viewing the world can be a bit nebulous and it is often discarded for a more disenchanted utilitarian understanding." Hopefully, my comments reflect close enough the context in which you've written. My context, as I've said, is what I call the Myth Model of creation.
Given my understanding of the 'phenomenological way' to be the study of how an object presents itself, there is an analogy between Christian faith and the structure of phenomenology: To construct an honest phenomenological analysis, one must believe that the object (virtual or real) exists as the kind of thing that presents itself in different ways. Because of this analogy, almost all persons who incline toward materialism will naturally shy away from phenomenology. Materialism in its many forms (of which 'utilitarian understanding' is one) goes hand in glove with the subjective perspective favored by modernity. The subjective perspective is easy to see if you you consider, "It works for me, therefore it is true." And, "It works for us scientists, therefore it may be true." These two approaches are fellow travelers and can grade into each other, because both are ways of not committing to the authentic existence of that which works or that which is studied. True enchantment flows only from the firm belief that the other—even regarded only as that which I use or that which I investigate scientifically—enjoys its existence from God. The Myth Model provides (I think) a schema for understanding more certainly how other, more humble creatures, which we take for granted, are enchanted.
Cameron, I've read your essay "Christianity as the Master Narrative: Tolkien, Lewis, and the Phenomenology of History." If you don’t mind, I'd like to make a series of comments on it concerning about a dozen points you've mentioned. In my comment on your "Santa Claus" essay, I said that I had not developed a discursive presentation of my Myth Model concept, which I nevertheless thought you might find interesting, even in the "thought verse" form in which, facet by facet, I'm trying to present it. However, I think that commenting on your present essay might help me throw my concept into a more discursive form, because phenomenologically your essay and my Myth Model are two ways in which the same Object presents itself.
So, here, I remark briefly about my notion of phenomenology, based principally on my reading, over the last five years, of several works of Fr. Robert Sokolowski. I've also obtained some understanding of phenomenology from my earlier reading of Edith Stein.
Phenomenology boils down to how some real object presents itself to someone's or some cultural's point of view in the terms of that point of view, "bracketing" other terms for the exposition. The aim of Christian phenomenology is to clarify how the object presents itself to the mind and senses to those to whom that point of view is natural. Two things are essential here, the reality of the object in the mystery of its existing and the implied humility of the one bracketing. And a third factor in Christian phenomenology is that the essence of the object can be communicated to honest phenomenological practitioners. One can see this in Edith Stein's reading of St. Theresa of Avila's autobiography in one night. By dawn, her phenomenology and she herself had become Christian, in one stroke of grace perfecting nature. So, in its structure, phenomenology implies the master narrative about which you have written well.
This is a wonderful article with insights well stated, especially the validation of parts of postmodern thought. But the article, along with many others of the same content, eclipses the one Inkling, namely Barfield, who was really the leading figure when it came to themes of participatory knowledge and the "rediscovery of meaning." While his fiction never put him on the same standing as Lewis and Tolkien, it does seem like Barfield deserves wider attention for his groundbreaking ideas in his philosophical works. At least one reason for this redressment is to acknowledge the ways in which Barfield both directly and indirectly fed the imaginations and intellects of Lewis and Tolkien.
I quite agree Barfield is an important figure. I will actually be referencing his notion of "Chronological Snobbery" in an upcoming post.
Beautiful explained. Majority of Christians in the West are materialists. Since I’ve started to unpick my materialistic world view and begun to return to an ancient mindset, I feel so much more connected to God, the Bible and Creation.
We are all a product of our time. It is hard to put the "materialist cat back into the metaphysical bag" so to speak but we are all doing out best. Lewis and Tolkien certainly are wonderful guides on that journey. I honestly can't blame many atheists, the only versions of Christianity they've been exposed to are flat, gnostic, and disenchanted.
Oh man was this a delight to read. It sums up so much of what I have been pondering in the last year particularly but also for the last 20+ years since my first encounters with Tolkien and Lewis.
I wrote a related essay on my own page a while back about the modern Protestant church in America (my inherited tradition) and how an unwitting adoption of materialism (as you’ve laid out so beautifully here) and of market capitalism (the commodification of stories as you’ve put it) has led to this shallow and hollow simulacrum of what the Church is meant to be. I would love to hear more about how you connect the desacralization of the Christian faith with the Enlightenment and the rise of everything as commodity capitalism in the West. To me this is one of the biggest untold stories of our time, especially given how absolutely dominant the fundamentalist Christian + free market capitalist marriage on the American right has been over the last 50-75 years. I sense that there is a growing awakening in some online spaces like this or with Peterson and Pageau and others, but it is still an underground movement to a large degree.
Thanks for the kind words!
There is a lot to be said about the desacralization of Western Christianity that won't fit in a comment box but in a few words I would say there is a bit of a mutual reinforcement that goes along with hyper-individualistic Enlightenment rationalism and historically that eventually turns into a version of Christianity that defines belief as simply affirming propositions rather than an embodied communal liturgical life. Some may think I'm being hyperbolic when I use the word gnosticism to describe this but I mean it fairly literally. Ultimately I do think this is related to the rise of liberalism in the West which I think Fr. Seraphim Rose does a great job explaining in his book Nihilism.
This is my favourite pages, please post more
That's great to hear! Thanks for reading. I am working on posting more in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned.
What an excellent post.
I appreciate how you shed light on the use of words like 'emergence' as a facade to explain the unexplained, which is essentially a form of 'magic' that often goes unacknowledged. As someone who used to identify as a 'rationalist' searching for the missing piece of the universal puzzle, I can personally attest to the accuracy of your observations.
Your post takes into account the philosophy of two great men and I would like to add a third; Jung. I think his work could tie a lot of this up neatly, and it kept coming to my mind as I read. In his book 'The Undiscovered Self', he says "“The danger that a mythology understood too literally, and as taught by the Church, will suddenly be repudiated lock, stock and barrel is today greater than ever. Is it not time that the Christian mythology, instead of being wiped out, was understood symbolically for once?”. (I also believe this passage ignited Jordan Peterson's early work on Christian symbology)
You mention quantum physics in your post, "the world becomes narrative again", this resonates with Jung's collaboration with Pauli, the father of quantum physics. Their convergence in understanding quantum physics and mysticism led to the development of Jung's concept of synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle, which adds another fascinating layer to the intersection of symbology, science and narrative.
Your post has sparked intriguing connections and insights, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it!
Thanks for the kind words and your comments on Jung's thought! I am not nearly as familiar with Jung's work as I am with Tolkien and Lewis so I appreciate the supplement.
I never thought my love for Tolkien and my study of Jung would ever intersect. Your post has given me a lot to think about. It's intriguing how both of these great men and their works are deeply influenced by Christianity, and their wisdom remains relevant in today's world.
Cameron, my last comment on this post of yours will play off this statement, which is mostly a quote of Tolkien:
"The world is made by Logos — by meaning and purpose.
'We have come from God' (continued Tolkien), 'and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.'"
The Myth Model vastly expands the nature and scope of the power of a 'sub-creator' into the God-delegated power of secondary creation given to all self things. So Tolkien's writing a profound literary myth is an grand instance of this delegation of the power of secondary creation exercised by a human self thing, and all those who read JRRT sub-create a vast relationship among themselves and the author to which God gives Being by a primarily act of creation.
And the activity of "lesser" self things—those which are on a par with electrons—weave a vast schema of relationships to which God also gives Being. This vast complex relationship in Being is the object studied by science as nature. Clearly the complex relationship which is humanity and the complex of relationships which is nature cannot be separated, but they can be distinguished in many ways, although all relationships are subsumed in the unity of Being. The understanding of Being in the Myth Model context leads in two major and seemingly divergent directions. One of these directions is the role of neurophysiology in human experience, and the other is the role of Christ's kenosis in creation. Regarded as questions, to both of these directions the Myth Model offers speculative solutions:
Neurophysiology serves the function of keeping up with the godly self things who sub create the core of the essential somas of organisms. The nature and quality of this function is subject to Natural Selection (Darwin's caps).
Christ's kenosis bears the burden—in a single self thing—of the non-being in the Being of the one universal relationship of all self things. It reveals the vulnerability of God as his greatest attribute, exceeding that of any creature.
Thanks for the use of your space. It has helped me think out the Myth Model more discursively, rather than only in thought verse which lights up single facets of the thing. JBSP
Cameron, I like your statement, "Reality unveils itself to us as 'myth-woven'", especially when I give 'myth-woven' the spin which I'm seeking to communicate through my Spiritual Thing Substack. My spin begins with the speculative distinction between primary and secondary creation and develops it into the Myth Model.
The Myth Model expands the framework for Myth back to the beginning, through the delegation of modes of secondary creative power by God to spiritual creatures, whom I name 'gods' in my thought verse. A different mode of secondary creative power is delegated to material creatures.
One of the Myth Model's ontological assumptions, which gives it great simplicity, is that invisible and visible creatures have the same form, identified as that of self things. The self thing form consist of the unity of aware agency and essential soma. Both gods and organisms can be resolved into these two aspects. The aware agency of all self things is a primary creation of the Triune God, and the essential soma of all gods is, in the beginning, also a primary creation.
And, God bestows the primary creation of Being on the relationships of self things. Relationships are secondary creations of self things, so Myth Model Being is a hybrid of secondary and primary creation.
And, material self things are hybrids of the secondary creation of their essential somas by other self things and the primary creation of their aware agency by God. The activity of self things, from which their Being evolves reflects the development of the intention of each self thing's aware agency.
To each self thing the mode of primary creation in their lives is simultaneous with the activity of their aware agency, and to all self things the activity of other self things is concurrent to some degree, however remote, because of God's simultaneous presence to all in the primary creation of their aware agency and Being.
The primary creation of Being involves a judgment of God on what is good and true in relationships, and a rejection of what is not fitting to God's original creative intention. But, what is not fit remains as Myth Model non-being sustained (both passively and actively) by the power of secondary creation distributed among all self things.
Thus, the Myth Model necessarily carries the iniquity of evil into the myth-weaving of Being, which is the evolving content of the dark drama within the true narrative of all creation.
Cameron, this comment is on your text, "For many, what can be seen under a microscope or through a telescope is somehow more real than what is seen with the naked eye."
Given that this is a rhetorical flourish, since most people do not use microscopes or telescopes, I take it to mean that most people see what is real as that which (they believe) science has certified to be real. Didn’t Walker Percy play on this theme?
But there's a more interesting twist for me which I've mulled over for many decades: Science has achieved a vast instrumental extension of our natural senses, our 'naked eyes', and this instrumental extension of our senses necessitates the development of ideas which allow us to recognize how nature presents itself to us in this new way. The challenge for us is to resolve Christ's presentation of himself and science-seen nature into one image seen in parallax, like the separation of one's own two eyes works to naturally see depth. To obtain this depth of spiritual view is not easy, and, really, it has not been accomplished, but I think that we should be inspired by the first of John Henry Newman's Oxford University Sermons, preached in 1826: “…we cannot imagine that God would promulgate, by His inspired servants, doctrines which contradict previous truths which he has written on the face of nature.” How can we read the book of nature concurrently with the book of Revelation?
Cameron,
This comment is on your line, "Of course, for modern people, this phenomenological way of viewing the world can be a bit nebulous and it is often discarded for a more disenchanted utilitarian understanding." Hopefully, my comments reflect close enough the context in which you've written. My context, as I've said, is what I call the Myth Model of creation.
Given my understanding of the 'phenomenological way' to be the study of how an object presents itself, there is an analogy between Christian faith and the structure of phenomenology: To construct an honest phenomenological analysis, one must believe that the object (virtual or real) exists as the kind of thing that presents itself in different ways. Because of this analogy, almost all persons who incline toward materialism will naturally shy away from phenomenology. Materialism in its many forms (of which 'utilitarian understanding' is one) goes hand in glove with the subjective perspective favored by modernity. The subjective perspective is easy to see if you you consider, "It works for me, therefore it is true." And, "It works for us scientists, therefore it may be true." These two approaches are fellow travelers and can grade into each other, because both are ways of not committing to the authentic existence of that which works or that which is studied. True enchantment flows only from the firm belief that the other—even regarded only as that which I use or that which I investigate scientifically—enjoys its existence from God. The Myth Model provides (I think) a schema for understanding more certainly how other, more humble creatures, which we take for granted, are enchanted.
That was educational, informative and encouraged deeper thought. Thank you.
Cameron, I've read your essay "Christianity as the Master Narrative: Tolkien, Lewis, and the Phenomenology of History." If you don’t mind, I'd like to make a series of comments on it concerning about a dozen points you've mentioned. In my comment on your "Santa Claus" essay, I said that I had not developed a discursive presentation of my Myth Model concept, which I nevertheless thought you might find interesting, even in the "thought verse" form in which, facet by facet, I'm trying to present it. However, I think that commenting on your present essay might help me throw my concept into a more discursive form, because phenomenologically your essay and my Myth Model are two ways in which the same Object presents itself.
So, here, I remark briefly about my notion of phenomenology, based principally on my reading, over the last five years, of several works of Fr. Robert Sokolowski. I've also obtained some understanding of phenomenology from my earlier reading of Edith Stein.
Phenomenology boils down to how some real object presents itself to someone's or some cultural's point of view in the terms of that point of view, "bracketing" other terms for the exposition. The aim of Christian phenomenology is to clarify how the object presents itself to the mind and senses to those to whom that point of view is natural. Two things are essential here, the reality of the object in the mystery of its existing and the implied humility of the one bracketing. And a third factor in Christian phenomenology is that the essence of the object can be communicated to honest phenomenological practitioners. One can see this in Edith Stein's reading of St. Theresa of Avila's autobiography in one night. By dawn, her phenomenology and she herself had become Christian, in one stroke of grace perfecting nature. So, in its structure, phenomenology implies the master narrative about which you have written well.