David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart is an intellectual Christian and so, to many in our secular culture, must seem like a mythical beast. Western culture has its roots in Christianity and through reading Hart I have become more aware of these roots. It is like being able to see a new richness in what was already there. I grew up learning almost nothing of Christianity from school, family or friends and that’s the norm now. The irony is that secularity grew out of Christian culture, it is a further development of Protestant reform. So much of contemporary Christianity presents itself or is presented to us as a caricature,  in beliefs of fundamentalism and predestined eternal torment etc. Atheists are overjoyed that these Christians meet their expectations and can be written off so glibly.

The catalyst for this blog was watching a symposium on youtube organised by Hart entitled Mind Soul World: Consciousness in Nature. 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLajs77Y9ipluZ2zlrC4Ru9LGfEWcPrGm-

Watching this gave me the weird feeling that youtube is actually a good thing and I could spend my time watching material that expands my interests. The entire symposium is well worth watching, but I admit that a number of the papers were entirely beyond me, particularly the lectures on "Intentionality and the Transcendent Ends of Consciousness". One of the reasons I write this blog is to clarify my own thinking, but also I think endevours like this help diseminate ideas and hopefully help them to enter into broader social discourse. 

I recommend watch this symposium as i am unlikely to do it justice, what I will say is just a little on the ideas that it has reinforced for me, I am not claiming this is any sort of accurate summary of the materials. Secularity assumes that the onus is on the Theistic to prove the existence of God, however  Theism has the upper hand in being able to account for the primary experience we have of mind/intentionality/rationality. Whereas the secular gravitates to the materialist which sees an outer nature in many ways dead, certainly in terms of meaning, that is, it is seen as essentially mindless, random and meaningless, so where our own rationality intentions and goals come from is at least problematic and the most logically cogent approaches tend towards arguments that eplain consciousness away as some kind of illusion. An approach that isn't generally satisfying for common joe and jane, and may be one of the reasons why there aren't large numbers of militant atheists. Christians however who say in the beginning was the Logos (Word/Rationality) have the advantage of being able to place our rationality and intentionality easily within this divine framework. 

Also obvious from watching this symposium is the wealth and depth of intellectual tradition that these speakers were familiar with and large intellectual landscapes that play little part in popular culture. Canonical authors Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Gegory of Nyssa, Thomas Aquinas, Berkely, Descarte, Kant, Goethe are familiar territory for these intellectuals and should be a key element in our education. Across the talks a criticism of modernity emerged,a sense of something having gone wrong with our philosophy/metaphysics at the start of modernity 15/16th C.  John Milbank even suggested that perhaps there is an alternative supressed occult hermetic tradition that we would be better connecting to, represented in thinkers like Robert Fludd. He didn't mention any other names but this caused me some excitement as I had been quite inspired by Franes Yates books on the Hermetic tradition which to me also suggested another road not taken where the external world maintained its sense of holiness. Instead science diverged from alchemy/occult theory, driven perhaps more from a desire to avoid heresy than sustained rational argument and possibly through a failure of Christian metaphysics at the time. Milbank has elsewhere argued that secularity rather than being a neutral space is infact a metaphysical invention. 

That the world presents itself to intelligably to us increasingly strikes me as a wonder.

I'm riding my own hobby horse here and I'm not giving a good idea of what Hart so here so to right the balance I'll quote the opening paragraph from Hart's introductory essay:

The occasion of this colloquium is a book project on the nature of consciousness and the metaphysics of the soul; ... as one of many subventions for research on “the place of mind within nature.” As far as that designation goes, however, one of my aims is to invert its terms and argue that the mystery of consciousness is better approached by an inquiry into the place of nature within mind. The conclusion toward which I am working is, quite frankly, one of “theistic idealism” (using that phrase in as generously compendious a way as possible). My overarching argument is that consistently physicalist emergentist accounts of the origins of consciousness invariably fail; that scrupulous reflection on the nature of consciousness yields a picture to which certain classical understandings of the soul (Western and Eastern) are far better suited than is any kind of materialist reductionism; that these understandings of the soul inevitably entail a concept of the soul as having its ground and end in infinite divine mind, and as indeed being essentially an instance of restricted participation in the unrestricted consciousness of God; that the irreducibly transcendental orientation of intentional consciousness becomes intelligible only when seen in light of this transcendent reality; and that ultimately, perhaps, it is necessary to conclude that consciousness and being are inseparable, because in God they perfectly coincide. That, at least, is the grand design; but the discrete steps by which it will unfold will be fairly modest to begin with, and I hope sufficiently rigorous throughout. 

Well I'm looking forward to the book and I hope that it is aimed sufficiently at a popular audience for me to be able to appreciate it. I have read 3 Bentley Hart books in the last few years, one of which was an introductory History of the Church which I appreciated, but the other two had a greater impact upon me. I'll give a very pithy account of them. They were:

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies

The main title of this book is actually the publishers and it takes a shot at and hopes to draw on the popularity of Richard Dawkins book "the God Delusion". But while the book takes a few introductory shots against the New Atheists: Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett & Christopher Hitchens who all take a stridently antagonistic approach to Christianity, instead it is more a historical essay that is better expressed by the sub title which was the author's original title. The historical essay really seeks to show us that the all too common claims made against Christianity of having a violent past and suppressing Reason, Science and Progress, by giving the examples of the Crusades, the Inquisition the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the trial of Galileo. Hart gives a nuanced look at history and while seeing plenty to be appalled by, yet shows that the picture is over simplified to the point of being deceptive. It is well worth a read, I will say that the reader new to Hart is likely to be struck by his invective, for instance this on Sam Harris' book "The End of Faith":"‘little more than a concatenation of shrill, petulant assertions, a few of which are true, but none of which betrays any great degree of philosophical or historical sophistication’"

The other book of Hart's I have read is called

"The Experience of God: Being Consciousness Bliss"

This book Hart describes as simply an effort to define the term God "in obedience to the classical definitions of the divine found in the theological and philosophical schools of most of the major religious traditions". Hart is undertaking this because in contemporary debates "the contending parties are not even talking about the same thing." He goes onto to define how the concept of God is not another thing amongst things but the basis of being, not the caricatured Zeus like figure amongst the clouds. It is a good sized book and I will not do it justice but I do recommend it.

Hart is a figure who I would love to see regarded as one of the premier cultural critics but who instead is unfortunately rather marginal. He is highly intelligent, culturally rich and deeply Christian thinker and writer. I am not sure that he is a great innovator but he is I think an astute commentator on modernity and well worth exploring.

World Views and Meaning in a Civil Society

This is a post I intended for the George MacDonald Facebook page, I thought maybe it would be better hosted here.

George MacDonald lived at one of the turning points in our culture. Victorian England was still ostensibly a Christian culture, you can see in his novels that church attendance was the norm but he also documents how this was increasingly a social show and he often depicts sincere atheists in a better light than insincere Christians. 

By the time of the Inklings (A literary discussion group comprising CS Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield, et al), they were exceptions by being Christian intellectuals in a largely secular culture, particularly in the intellectual culture. Lewis wrote a very good book “The Discarded Image” which dealt with the way throughout the middle ages Christian philosophers, scientists and poets viewed their conception of the ptolemaic world view. Lewis didn’t see this world view as fundamentally Christian but it was used in a Christian context. In this view there was a participation with the world the world macrocosm was reflected in the microcosm of man. Within this view we have the Christian idea that in the beginning was the Word, so we have meaning at the centre of existence.

We now live in a secular society where the ruling paradigm is  materialism that looks for truth with a microscope or telescope “out there” in the world and I don’t see that much difference to the fundamentalist Christians who see the truth as “out there” in a book. MacDonald had a very strong imaginative sense of participation with God, where Truth is seen and experienced as fundamental.

The US election has just passed and one of the things that really strikes me about it, is how much cynicism there is about our societies basic building blocks. There is a sense that our politicians are bought and corrupt, no one is trustworthy, other building blocks like the nuclear family are both far less robust than they had been and generally not even considered as important. There are plenty of people who think 911 was an inside job, that global warming is liberal hoax, that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays and that jesus Christ did not exist. It is now pretty mainstream to think Western culture in all it’s varieties including Government and Business is simply an oppressive patriarchy. CS Lewis spoke about how this inclination to see through everything means that you end up seeing nothing. All of these impulses are deconstructing, I don’t think we’ll find a beautiful world if all we do is take things apart. When rationality that starts off with the presupposition of meaning ends with the conclusion that all meaning is subjective, then it should be no surprise that our discourse becomes increasingly frivolous. Instead of arguing the nature of meaning and the world, university students seem more concerned with where they sit on an entirely fluid gender spectrum.

Are we going to be able to build a new intellectual spiritual paradigm to replace that ‘discarded image”? Personally I think Owen Barfield may represent a possible direction.  I don’t think religion is simply a matter of individual salvation, it is used as a basic building block for civil society. Sorry if these are rather gloomy reflections.

 I thought this was going to end in a question for people to discuss, maybe the question is what do people think of the idea that a world view that sees meaning as fundamental (as religious views generally do) is necessary for healthy functioning society? Is their such a world view and how does it get taken up by society at large?

Owen Barfield - Saving the Appearances

The Inklings were a small group of Oxford writers and friends who would meet weekly to read aloud and discuss their works in progress. The two most famous members were JRR Tolkien who wrote the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings (these were the first novels I read with pleasure) and C S Lewis who wrote the Narnia books and was influential with his books of Christian apologetics. Tolkien and Lewis' output extend beyond the popular works in very interesting ways.  But there were also two other significant Inklings, Charles Williams who wrote fascinating contemporary novels where the spiritual world would break through into this world and strange books of theology. Lastly there was Owen Barfield.

Barfield isn't as well known as Tolkien and Lewis and this is partly because he can be hard to read, but he influenced them both. He is hard to read largely because his ideas are contrary to so much modern thought and assumptions. Barfield engaged with Lewis in what they termed the Great war. This was a dialogue between them that would lead to Lewis moving from Atheism to Theism and  curing him of his "chronological snobbery", more on that later. Barfield's early fairytale the Silver Trumpet was a success in Tolkien's house and his writing on Language in A History of English Words and Poetic Diction were influential, within the Inklings. Amongst the Inklings he is probably the most significant thinker.

I did find "Saving the Appearances" difficult and I can't describe it as Barfield would, but this could be a very significant book. It is a major reassessment of the way we see ourselves and history, it questions the very nature of the way modern people think. We are used to thinking of the evolution of the external world but we are not used to thinking of the evolution of consciousness, this is an oversight that could have profound repercussions. History is generally written with a contemporary mind or consciousness reinterpreting the past through our sensibility, but if we read works from an earlier time period and we allow ourselves to listen for the meanings and impressions of that time we then start to see a different world view to our own. We see that the issues and significance of ideas and events were different and they had different suppositions.  If we turn from literature and it's relatively small time scales to the sciences that talk confidently about millions of years of geological time, then the possibility of a disconnect and re-interpretation from modern consciousness becomes massive. Barfield makes the observation that when Scientists talk about the distant past, they are inferring how it would appear to a contemporary human being had they been there. But obviously, no contemporary human consciousness was there.

Barfield posits three types of thought. Figuration, Alpha and Beta thinking. The external world only makes sense to us through our original figuration, figuration as I think is mostly our language and underlying thought forms. The basic blocks of our thinking that we participate in when we experience the world. Alpha and beta thinking is abstract thinking not different in kind but in subject. Alpha thinking is thinking about the contents of figuration.  Alpha thinking is about concepts relating to the external world, scientific concepts like gravity, laws of motion are all alpha thinking.  Beta thinking is thinking about thinking i.e. philosophy.

We sort of know that all inquiry begins with consciousness, but then we forget this as we analyse our world, we abstract ourselves and our consciousness from our thoughts of the world. If we look back at the middle ages and before, we see thinking where the nature of the macrocosm cycles through the microcosm. It seems that this abstraction came about not through logical exposition but through the successes of alpha thinking in shaping our world and as the books title says "saving the appearances" that is having concepts that can accommodate that which we see e.g. theories of motion, gravity etc.

That in short are the bare bones of this book, but Barfield thinks about thinking with an intensity that is startling, maybe you won't agree with where he goes with this, but I think he is well worth engaging with.

Reflections upon reading CS Lewis' Allegory of Love

I first came to Lewis through reading his Narnia novels, not in my childhood but in my twenties. While I enjoyed these books I wasn't that excited by them. I was very aware that he was a Christian apologist which at that time I did not regard as a point in his favour. But I have slowly come to see that Lewis has a sensibility well worth exploring and I have also come to appreciate the Christian cultural/spiritual tradition.

Lewis has a number of different facets to his work. The Mythic/Fantasy Imaginative works, Christian Apoligetics, Philosophy/Theology, Social Commentator and Literary Criticism and analysis. This last category of his writing I think is often overlooked now, partly because of the fame of his Narnia books and the rise in appreciation in the US particularly of his overtly Christian writing.

In recent times I have read two works of his literary analysis by CS Lewis "The Discarded Image" which explores the cosmological conception of the Middle Ages and how it appears in literature. And Now the "Allegory of Love" which is an exploration of Allegorical tradition of Courtly Love. Both books are impressive works of scholarship but also very engaging reads.

Lewis has said that when reading every second book should be an old one and one of the reasons for that is that by reading old books we discover a sensibility different from our own. If we could read books from the future they would serve the same purpose, unfortunately we haven't figured out how to do so. Sci Fi is possibly an imaginative attempt to satisfy that desire. Old books can let us see our own time with other eyes.

Lewis dedicated this book to fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield and a central strand of thought that he may have picked up from Barfield is that through literature we can explore the way consciousness develops. "Allegory of Love" explores literature from the Middle Ages and some things that we may regard as fundamental had not emerged, for instance the romantic love story that leads to marriage which now seems such a cliche. In Courtly love adultery was the norm and it is interesting to see the way a new mode of love hammers itself out in the imaginations of the poets. Whether they were leading or following the social trend I don't know, but in those works we can see the transformation.

Another interesting development that Lewis seems to be tracing is that of the expression of the inner life through literature, which first found expression in Allegory and Lewis focus primarily on the Romance of the Rose for this, where the different parts of the personality are depicted as separate personifications. Later he claims that it was possible to do the same thing more realistically. The Romance of the Rose Lewis claims is the most consistent and structural Allegory, the later works he explores use Allegory only in part, mixed with other modes of expression.

I'm not going to give a survey of the whole book which is rich in ideas, and I admit I was not able to digest it all,  partly because I didn't have sufficient familiarity of the texts he discusses. But even so I was captivated by Lewis easy engagement with these works from the Middle Ages leading up to Spenser's Fairy Queen. That engagement drew me with him through all 450 pages. This book could well serve to generate enthusiasm to read these early texts.

It was also interesting how Lewis' familiarity with the Middle Ages is reflected in his Narnia books. The odd mix of mythologies, images, ideas lumped together that makes the Narnia books is stylistically typical of works from the Middle Ages.

Hopefully this will spur me to read Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida and the entire Fairy Queen other books discussed. It would be great to return to this book again when I am more familiar with the imaginative country it explores.

The Works of George MacDonald: A long journey to the beginning

Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of The Rings were the first novels I read with pleasure (aged 14) and they made an immediate and lasting impact upon me. It was very different with George MacDonald, although it must be about 30 years since I read the first book by him, which would have been either Lilith or Princess and the Goblins, I'm not sure which. I certainly thought Lilith was very good but it didn't lead to further reading. I think WH Auden and CS Lewis both gave me the impression that MacDonald's realistic Victorian novels were not very good and not worth reading, so I had the impression that MacDonald effectively had a small oeuvre.

Lilith I re read every so often, each time I read it it took me on a journey and amazed me, but the events of the book were not imprinted on my mind, I had certain lasting impressions, the ancestral house, the Library, Mr Raven, the movement between this world and another, the room of the dead. But it was such a unique book that takes you on an inner journey and you come out of it as you come out of a dream. I am starting to read this again this time taking extensive notes and it would be good to write a blog on this book alone.

The Princess and the Goblin's I enjoyed but probably didn't give it sufficient credit due to it being a children's book. I re-read it to my daughter and very much enjoyed it, Princess Irene's grandmother struck me as something of a prototype for the Lady Galadriel. Having recently read GK Chesterton's comments on the book, I realise I have taken this wonderful book too much for granted:

But in a certain rather special sense I for one can really testify to a book that has made a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start; a vision of things which even so real a revolution as a change of religious allegiance has substantially only crowned and confirmed. Of all the stories I ever read ... it remains the most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life. It is called The Princess and the Goblin, and is by George MacDonald....

I read Phantastes and the Golden Key and also enjoyed them very well, but I think because I read his visionary fantasies I had a mistaken impression of him as a rather vague romantic whom I could enjoy but shouldn't contemplate too deeply. However slowly I came to realise that I had lived with MacDonald's work for a long time and their influence although subtle was lasting, there is a sense of the numinous, a slaking of a thirst of the soul, that finally pushed me out of my sleepiness and I realised that I wanted to know more about George MacDonald. I joined the George MacDonald Society Facebook group, which I found a source for a lot of good information and stirred my enthusiasm. It was through this group that I came upon an article called "George MacDonald: Merging Myth and Method" by Robert Trexler, which you can find here:

http://www.george-macdonald.com/assets/downloads/gmarticle.pdf

Trexter in his opening remarks made the following statement:

"But if the revival of interest in MacDonald can be partly credited to Lewis, so also can some of the misconceptions about MacDonald, especially as regards MacDonald the novelist."

Trexter goes on to argue that MacDonald's realistic Victorian novels have been significantly undervalued by Lewis and are worth serious attention, he focuses on one of the Wingfold novels "There and Back" and marks mythic motifs within the novel.

I am very thankful for this article as it changed my thinking and led me to read the Wingfold books: Thomas Wingfold Curate; There and Back and Paul Faber, Surgeon. I realised that I had only touched upon the riches that MacDonald's work had to offer. I like novels that contain ideas and deal with the interior life of their subjects and these novels did that in a unique way. They had likeable and varied characters, the main themes seemed to be a slow unfolding of faith which is depicted in a very real and sincere manner. The books are also many layered, with mythic and visionary elements that come from Polwarth's writings and his brother's manuscript although are not limited to these. MacDonald concentrates on personal transformations and the inner journeys we make to become better people and our movement towards the divine. He does this with gentleness and seriousness unparalleled by any author.

So almost 30 years after first reading MacDonald's work I have come to see that he has created a great body of work and I am at the start of a voyage of discovery, sailing into the east. I feel as though I have a lot to get from MacDonald, through his realistic Victorian novels, his sermons and criticism and the fantasy novels that I already know, but not well enough. I have come to the beginning.

Christianity: an appreciation from the outside

I grew up in a society that was already largely post-Christian. I don't recall my friends going to Church and I certainly didn't. I do remember having a pastor come to talk to us in standard 2 or 3 (aged 8-9). Increasingly the public discourse around Christianity has become vitriolic, giving the impression that the Christian religion is regressive and intolerant and responsible for slaughter. This blog is not going to be a defence organist these allegations, although I don't think they are fair and I would highly recommend David Bentley Hart's "Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and it's Fashionable Enemies" to answer those issues. I intend to write instead an appreciation of the Christian religion, at a later stage I would also like to do a blog that considers what religion is.

Over the years i have come across many Christian thinkers and artists and I have come to realise that Christianity is central to Western culture, I think we should celebrate our culture and steep ourselves in it and having an open attitude to Christianity is an essential part of that.

JRR Tolkien was the first author that I really read with joy and a sense of compulsion, his mythology which forms the fabric of his work is intrinsic to his Christian faith. CS Lewis' Narnia books had a wonderful sense of invention, Lewis wears his Christianity much more overtly than Tolkien.

Both of these writers owe a significant debt to the Scottish writer George MacDonald who wrote wonderful fantasies for both adults and children that speak directly to the heart in a way that no modern writer I am aware of can. Lilith, Phantastes and the Golden Key are gorgeous examples of the fantasy genre still unrivalled.  MacDonald also wrote much Victorian fiction which though very popular in his own time is now not so highly regarded, I think largely due to his central themes of faith that critics are now allergic to.

Lewis Tolkien and MacDonald are significant modern writers to me whose Christianity provides a rich imaginative backdrop to their works. The large sensibility of G K Chesterton unfortunately has no modern correspondence although it has a mirror within the Vedantic tradition with the works of Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo, writers like Chesterton that are also overlooked by contemporary critics.

I have recently started reading George MacDonald's Victorian novels and was interested in the way he depicted the Christian faith of the time. He painted a faith that was extensively practiced but mostly by habit and his central characters seek to find a faith that was the living water of Christ's teachings. That we now have a society where secular materialism is our orthodoxy is hardly surprising. The modern rise of fundamentalism and literal readings of the Bible play into the hands of the critics of Christianity. Insisting upon the earth being 6000 years old and focussing on old harsh dogmas, like the sin of homosexuality give the faith a facade of superstition. I can't see these trends as the living waters of Christ's legacy of compassion, they also have little to do with the work of the great theologians.

Looking further back than MacDonald we have amazing artistic achievements from Christian artists, William Blake's startling mix of visual poetic and prophetic vision still sears the mind's eye. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Handel's Messiah, Bach's work almost entirely fits within the Christian context, Dante's works of sublimity cannot be separated from the Christian faith. The cultural impact of people like Saint Francis, Martin Luther, Jacob Boehme, John Bunyan and John Milton to name a few is enormous. Trying to understand them without their Christian context is impossible.

Today amazing feats of engineering and massive public resources are invested in building roadways and their impressive over passes. In the Middle Ages they put that kind of effort and resources into building Cathedrals, filled with artwork telling the story of Christ, with incredible acoustics so that divine music celebrating Christ could be sung, Stained glass windows where the light would shine through Christ. Incredible arches, beautiful proportions all designed to raise our minds to the divine, they are still there to be marvelled at. I find these much more impressive than motorways.

Early Christian writers like Saint Augustine, Origen, Geoffrey of Nyassa drew out of the teachings of Christ rich theological traditions. We lack even the awareness of what it is that we are missing.

Do we want to appreciate our own culture? Surely some awareness of our cultural past would be valuable? A willingness to share those things that moved our ancestors with a great sense of awe and beauty, if we want to commune with them then we need get over this rude sense of distaste that we now have for the Christian religion.

Strangely our modern technological society grew within a Christian framework, was fostered by Christian Universities by Christian scientists. It is odd that we have come to believe the Christian religion was antithetical to scientific investigation.

Rupert Sheldrake (to paraphrase) said that he came to Christianity because he no longer believed in materialism and that Christianity was the spiritual tradition that fitted with his cultural background. Sheldrake has done a number of scientific experiments that have been repeatable which show materialism to be highly improbable. Pretty much the same can be said of CS Lewis his memoir "Surprised by Joy" shows the slow process by which he came to Theism, little is devoted to how he came to Christianity, but again it best fitted him and the joy of sharing a tradition with others could not really be had by him from the Hindu, Buddhist or Islamic faiths.

David Bentley Hart wrote a very good book "The Experience of God: Being Consciousness Bliss" which showed how the fundamental concept of God in Christianity, Islam and Hinduism is the same. The advantages that religions give is that on a most fundamental level these Theistic faiths allows that meaning, love and connectedness are fundamental qualities of the world. It also for me makes more sense that this relative world could spring into existence from the absolute reality of God, whereas a relative world popping into existence from nothing just makes no sense.

This is an external view of Christianity as i don't practice it, I practice Kriya Yoga which is a Vedantic or Hindu tradition, a lot of the advantages that Lewis found I don't. There are sufficient sincere practitioners of Kriya Yoga to have sense of shared observance. Having a living Master is a a huge boon, also the Churches where I am are no longer thriving and I can't with a clear conscience advocate the uniqueness of Christ which seems to be such a focus, I can accept his divinity.

Fundamentalists may have done more harm to Christianity than Atheists although it seems to me that the public debate only focuses on these two extremes rather than on the more sophisticated practitioners of Christianity.

An appreciation of Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson’s work as a whole has had a significant influence upon me.

By happy accident I first came to Wilson’s work via his first book the Outsider.  I suspect a friend recommended it to me. Not long before the world of literature had opened up to me with a great sense of excitement. Wilson’s book surveyed an interesting cross section of writers and he wrote with a sense of urgency and engagement. This book was warmly received upon it’s initial publication and shot Wilson to literary Superstardom for a short period, By the time his second book appeared “Religion and the Rebel” a critical reversal had taken place and from this time on he was critical unfashionable. But wilson did not fade away instead he became a literary workhorse producing an astonishing number of books on a variety of subjects but all with a pretty consistent world view.

The Outsider looks at the development of the Outsider figure in literature, a figure that is marginal to the general thrust of humanity, lurking in the margins, feeling a sense of independence and alienation and regarding themself as self invented.

A lot of the literature at the time Wilson wrote the Outsider was pretty pessimistic and Wilson dwelt on the rather romantic artist who had high hopes and expectations which the drab mundaneness of life would crush. The beautiful vision at night is followed by the dull reality of the despairing morning after.  Such modern misanthropists as Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. All paint the absurd stupidity of human existence.

But Wilson was an optimist and instead of trusting the despairing morning after he trusted those moments where our spirit is lifted and we seem to see more, a birds eye view. From an information point of view we would trust a theory that is supported by greater information so likewise he trusts more those moments when we see more.

An artist like Herman Hesse whom Wilson played a part in introducing to the English public and William Blake both have a strong sense of vision and please Wilson more.

The Outsider was a good start to his career. It showed Wilson as a synthesiser of ideas, he read voluminously and he found the world of ideas his natural place of play. I haven’t read all of his books and don’t intend to but I am going to cover some books I consider important. I am uninterested however on his writings on crime and sexual deviance which may be of interest to others.

I should also mention that wilson was right from the start happy to declare himself a genius, some critics have made fun of this and while personally I don’t think he is, I  do think he is  probably less egotistical than many with ostensibly humbler views of their own talents, he was approachable and open and his views are generally pretty broad.

Significantly later than The Outsider Wilson wrote a best seller called “the Occult” it may have sealed his doom amongst the literary progressives. It was a considerable boost to his professional livelihood and also a significant development of his thought. I suspect it may have had a significant cultural impact, I certainly hope so.

With the Occult Wilson fearlessly sailed the seas of jeopardy. He happily, calmly, level heatedly surveyed ideas that were beyond the pale of polite academic discourse: ghosts, telepathy, magic, poltergeists, possession, telekensesis and fairies. For those who read the book though he showed that these subjects could be worthy of our interest and could say something about human capability. This was also a large book and the size reflects the scale of the reading that Wilson drew on. 

With this book the reader who is carried by Wilson’s arguments comes away with a sense of the scope of the human mind or spirit that is usually only barely tapped, he gives a sense of spiritual growth through personal effort as though at this time in our culture human Beings have the opportunity to enter into evolution consciously.

What this book did for me was to give a wide survey of "the paranormal" and shows how it is in fact much more common and "normal" than we have been led to believe but also show how optimistic heightened states of awareness that every healthy person experiences can lead to much greater things. Wilson’s book Beyond the Occult is a very worthy sequel.

The Craft of the Novel

What I found interesting about this book is Wilson’s perspective on what he thought the creation of the novel did. He argues that the invention of the novel freed humanity from a lot of the Dullness of Human life, Wilson credits Samuel Richardson with his novel Pamela as the inventor of the Novel and he writes:

From the perspective of the twentieth century, we can see that even Richardson’s greatest admirers failed to grasp the extra-ordinary nature of his achievement. Dr Johnson had the warmest regard for Richardson, but if anyone had told him the retired printer was one of the greatest innovators in literary history, he would have dismissed it with one of his bear-like growls. (‘Your feeling does you more credit than your intelligence, sir.’) Today, we can see that what made Richardson so remarkable was not that he enlarged our knowledge of human nature-—he didn’t—but that he freed the human imagination.

I think part of why I find this so interesting is the idea that human consciousness changes over time, the works of Homer and  Virgil do not have the individual interiority of Richardson’s novel. Although personally I think Shakespeare is the beginning of this sense of individual interiority, Harold Bloom writes about this in his book Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human.

The other reason that this book had such a big effect on me is that he gave this amazing introduction to a very neglected novelist John Cowper Powys which led me on to reading Powys’ monumental works and i still think wilson’s summary is one of the best appreciations of Powys’ over looked novel a Glastonbury Romance:

Powys is a mystic, and the first thing to note about the book is that it appeared when he was sixty. This kind of vision could not have been achieved by a young man; the young tend to be trapped in immediacy. In the course of his six decades, much of which had been spent lecturing in America, Powys had developed an increasing sense of the oneness of man and nature. He would not have been in the least surprised by the discovery made by the experimenter Cleve Backster that plants can apparently read our minds; in Powys, trees, grass, even rocks, possess their own strange, dim consciousness. Human beings alone are cut off from this universal consciousness by their narrow, intense perceptions, although Powys prophesies that this will cease to be so, that there will soon be a ‘catastrophic change in human psychology itself’ which will cause certain human beings to experience a sense of oneness with the ‘subhuman organisms in nature’. Powys fills his enormous canvas——the book is nearly twelve hundred pages long——with an almost Shakespearian panorama of humanity. But no matter how absorbed we become in these human beings, we remain aware of the vast, overarching nature above them.

It is sometime since I have read Wilson’s Craft of the Novel and I am sure there is much more that others could find in it.

So far all the books I have mentioned have been non fiction or critical works even though they sit outside the usual framework of literary criticism. But Wilson has also written a large number of Novels it is mainly his science fiction or Lovecraftian inspired works that i want to talk about, but all his novels have something of value in them. They are all novels of ideas and Wilson is able to dramatise ideas in a really engaging way.

The Novels I mean are the SpiderWorld tetralogy, The Mind parasite , The Philosopher’s Stone and The Space Vampires. All of these novels have an amazing sense of people being challenged to rise to new heights drawing upon powers that are latent in all of us and moving towards a better world where we can access this rich inner world. The spider world novels also have a great outward invention and take place in a richly imagined environment.

That’s all I am going to say about them, but Wilson does manage to show that he thinks a good novel should be filled with optimism and expand the reader’s horizons and sense of possibility and that the the life of the mind is rewarding and challenging. I thoroughly enjoyed reading these works and have read most of them multiple times.

From Atlantis to the Sphinx

Wilson was writing this book as Graham Hancock was writing his important book Fingerprints of the Gods which Wilson book, drew upon he saw a draft i think prior to publication, the two became friends they are both iconoclasts. the idea central to these books is that there is a whole chapter of human civilisation that isn’t in our history books. There was a high human and globel culture that existed over 12,000 years ago. The Egyptian and Mayan cultures were child civilisations of the older one, this is the idea we know of Plato’s story of lost Atlantis. This civilisation was wiped out by a global cataclysmic along with a large number of species.

I think they are correct about this, it isn’t academically mainstream but more evidence is coming to support it. What Wilson’s book does more than Hancock’s, although it is actually one of Hancock’s interests, is to ask “What difference does it make if human cultural history is much longer?” his answer is that we can see a broader view of humanity, that culture isn’t just a linear projection but can include falls and set backs, things we once knew we may not know now there can be other and quite legitimate ways of seeing the world.  

Wilson writes:

 if we are talking about a different knowledge system, a system that is as valid as our own and yet unthinkably different in approach, then it could be of unimaginable importance. The kind of knowledge possessed by modern man is essentially fragmented. If some future visitors from outer space landed on earth, and found vast empty cities full of libraries and museums and planetariums, they would conclude that men of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries must have been intellectual giants. But as their scholars studied our encyclopaedias of science and philosophy and technology and every other conceivable subject, they would quickly recognise that no single mind could even begin to grasp what it was all about. We have no essential knowledge system - no way of seeing the universe as a whole and making sense of it.

once again Wilson has written a very enjoyable book, I think Hancock should be given the nod as the ground breaker, but wilson was there with him and offered a different and complimentary view.

Alien Dawn

I did feel some trepidation approaching this book, i thought wow has Wilson dived into the full kookiness of UFOs? But I was interested to see what he did with it. Wilson doesn’t investigate cases, what he does is asks a good friend who owns a bookstore that specialised in UFO books to load him up with good ones and he reads voluminously and synthesises what he reads.

Now for the most part what we have have is witnessed phenomena that can’t be reproduced in a laboratory, so we can’t do experiments about it as you can with telepathy for instances. There has been some analysis of physical effects but for the most part it is witnessed phenomena and so we need to evaluate the credibility of the witness, the number of witnesses the consistency of experience described and try to make some provisional observations.

Wilson Aligns himself more with Jacguee Valee and Carl Jung interpretation he thinks yes there is validity in these experiences.

Generally we tend to think of UFO phenomena as modern but Valee sees it as a continuation of a lot of phenomena that was regarded as fairie. And when we think of Fairie we tend to think of cute little things with wings but fairie phenomena was actually serious , interaction with Fairiecould have very serious experiences of time disjunctions, a short time with fairies and you find upon your return hundred’s of years have passed and everyone you knew is dead. Modern UFO phenomena the time disjunctions don’t appear as great & possibly it is due to an evolution in the phenomena.

Wilson is exploring UFOs from the standpoint that Consciousness is central. This follows the modern idea the the world looks more like a giant thought than a giant machine. We accept as reality what is actually only a small portion that our senses and limited consciousness allow us. The UFO phenomena is something from outside of that everyday limited reality that intersects with it and shows us a glimpse of a different vista.  People may see this as ‘merely’ psychological but instead it is an acceptance that our consciousness is not somehow distinct and separate from reality.

In the chapter Alien powers Wilson writes:

For ten years or so after Arnold’s sighting in 1947, the main question was whether flying saucers came from our solar system or another galaxy. By the 1960s it was clear that this was the wrong question, and that the entities behind the UFO phenomenon did not appear to share our limitations in space and time. Vallee pointed out that they seem to behave like creatures out of folklore, Keel that the phenomena resemble those investigated by the Society for Psychical Research in the nineteenth century. Abductions and crop circles did nothing to clarify the issue, except to make us aware that we seemed to be dealing with beings whose powers were far greater than our own. Their ability to manipulate human beings, to take over our lives, control our minds and monitor our thoughts, seemed designed to make it clear that our notion that we are the most intelligent life form on Earth needs some serious revision. 

Yet the work of Robert Monroe makes it clear that we are seeing only part of the picture. If his experiences are to be taken seriously, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we view ourselves. If we truly understood ourselves, we might have far less reason for feeling inferior to these beings. Monroe’s ability to leave his  body strikes us as literally superhuman. The same is true of David Morehouse’s powers of remote viewing. Yet it seems that Morehouse is only one of a team who can all do it

Dreaming to Some Purpose

This book is a very candid overview of his life and work. It can be useful as a guide to which of his works will interest you. This book is a great testament to Wilson’s tenacity. Frustratingly I also discovered that there is an unpublished novel, Metamorphosis of a Vampire which i’d love to read.

I am aware that such a pithy summary of Wilson’s work will never give a proper impression of his work especially when he confronts so many controversial subjects, there is no substitute for actually reading him.

So once again thank you Mr Wilson your work has made a difference to me and I think there is much from your work that could still benefit humanity as a whole.

There are other worthy Wilson books you can read , these are the one’s that stand out for me.