Diabolical Science

This blog has been about 30 years coming.It was inspired by reading Frances Yates work in the late 1980s and I saw something important about what i consider to be  a mistake in Western Cultural thought or perception, the beginnings of Modernity. The Renaissance was a cultural flowering and this feels like the cutting of that flower which still has significant consequences for the present time.

The art and archetecture of the Renaissance is both aesthetically pleasing and has a strong mythic force, a sense of unstrained mystery. I wasn't aware that their was theoretical work that reflected that. Yates showed that there were such writings which had been eclipsed in the minds of subsequent generations.This rich tradition that has been variously termed: Platonic Theology,  Christian Kabbalah and The Magical Hermetic tradition, exemplified in the writers like: Ramon Llull, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Cornelius Aggrippa, Giordano Bruno, John Dee and Robert Fludd. Recently I have got around to read some of these writers to get a taste of their vision.

In my previous video I spoke of the evolution of consciousness and i will use quotes from Rudolf Steiner's the Riddles of Philosophy to give a basic outline of the story leading up to these writers. 

In the Centuries prior to the advent of Christ we see the emergence of Greek thought where intellectual forms replace an earlier picture based consciousness. Yet the way they experienced thought was very different to our experience.

Steiner writes:

(For) the Greek thinker, thought came as a perception...thought had the immediate power of conviction...For the Greeks, it was a question of being able to garner thoughts from the world. They were then themselves the witnesses of their truth.

Then moving into the early Christian Centuries we see spirituality reflected in the intellectual life in the work of Plotinus, Dionysius Areopigite and the Corpus Hermetica

Steiner:

After the exhaustion of Greek thought life, an age begins in the spiritual life of mankind in which the religious impulses become the driving forces of the intellectual world conceptions as well. For Plotinus, his own mystical experience was the source of inspiration of his ideas.

Steiner posits that moving into the middle Ages the vividness in the way thought was experienced was diminished by the emergence of the ego into consciousness:

The thinker of antiquity had the feeling that thought was given to him; the thinker of the later time had the impression that he was producing thought.

Frances Yates drew my attention to Marsilio Ficino who brought back to prominence Plato Plotinus, Dionysius Areopogite and the Hermetic Tradition all of which he either interpreted or translated in latin. Through Pico della Mirandola the Jewish Kaballah takes Christian form. Being aware of these writers makes me think they must have provided the the kind of atmosphere that contemporary viewers of Shakespeare's Tempest would have sensed in Prospero.

These writers presented a very unified sensibility, melding divine creation, geometry, myth, mind spirit the four elements the great macorcosm and the microcosm of man. John Dee's Hieroglyphic Monad starts off:

It is by the straight line and the circle that the first and most simple example and representation of all things may be demonstrated, whether such things be either  non-existent or merely hidden under Nature's veils.

Robert Fludd loved illustrations. This one maps the macrocosm from God represented by his divine name, through the three heavens of angels, the fixed stars the seven planets the globe of the earth, presided over by nature, the soul of the world with her head in the lower heaven of angels, her right hand bound to god, one foot on the dry land the other in the sea. The earth has the three realms: animal, vegetable and mineral. The ape of nature is art with its four spheres and many correspondences. What is fascinating about this picture is that it is a map of the great macrocosm it accepts a harmony between man god and nature and not only is it a system of knowledge, it is also aesthetically pleasing. It represents a unified consciousness, so at odds with our disparate disciplines of knowledge of the current time.

To give a taste of Fludd's writing I will quote from the beginning of The History of the Macrocosm:

Infinite nature, which is boundless Spirit, unutterable, not intelligible, outside of all imagination, beyond all essence, unnameable, known only to the heart, most wise, most merciful, FATHER, WORD, HOLY SPIRIT, the highest and only good, incomprehensible in height, the unity of all creatures, which is stronger than all power, greater than all distinction, more worthy than all praise, indivisible TRINITY, most splendid and indescribable light, in short, the divine mind, free and separate from mortal matter, glory of all, necessity, extremity and renewal: Here, I say, GOD, the highest and greatest of all, whose name was made blessed in eternity, skilfully formed the admirable machine of the entire Macrocosm, and beautifully adorned his structure Even all the Philosophers, both ancient and more recent,...-- the most ancient; Plato the innate source of the universe; others the infinite cause, both outside all things and yet in all things and everywhere; others - the Being of Beings, the Prime Cause insofar as other causes are derived from it, the maker and originator of all, and according to Plato, the repository of understanding... Next, Plato and Mercurius Trismegistus call him father, in so far as he is the originator of all fecundity and the begetter of all things; finally, the greater chorus of the Philosophers (among whom are named Democritus and Orpheus) concludes that GOD contains every name, since all is in him and he himself is in everything, not unlike the manner in which all straight lines drawn from the centre to the circumference are said to be in the centre: or just as Number is said to exist in unity, which is the common measure, source and origin of all numbers, and contains every number, joined to itself in a unique way. Wherefore, the Pythagoreans, and the most learned in science of numbers, likened the Monad or Unity to God the Maker, because he was, alone and by himself, before all, and also because he was the first mover and only activator that existed to complete the huge structure of the creation; moreover, they attributed the Dyad or Duality to his matter, or subject that he worked on, because it was the second constituent upon which the Maker worked to complete the world; and finally they assigned the Triad to that spiritual power, or fiery, shining essence of his, by which the said matter or substrate of the world was brought from the potential state to the actual...

In this relatively short section we see theat the starting point is always God, but also how geometry and number are integrated with theology and philosophy. To me this is also why Renaissance art is so good, it balances divine and human, it is beautiful, glorious, mythical and sanctified. 

The renaissance is something of a turning point between the middle ages and modernity. In Shakespeare we get renaissance colour but we also have the emergence of the modern sense of the individual. Then there is the birth of modern science.

Yates' in the Rosicrucian Enlightenment shines a light on the emergence of science through the establishment of the Royal Society.  I think the standard line of atheists is that scientific thinking shook off out dated magical and theological thinking through it's high minded rejection of superstition, but Yates paints a rather different picture, where thinkers like Fludd and Dee were esteemed and something happened that stripped away the magic. She writes of the birth of the Royal Society:

...in the year 1648, for this was the year in which the meetings at Oxford began which are stated by Thomas Sprat in his official history of the Royal Society to have been the origin of the Royal Society... These Oxford meetings were held in Wilkins's rooms at Wadham College and they ran from about 1648 to about 1659, when the group moved to London and formed the nucleus of the Royal Society, founded in 1660. 

Yates adds some colour to the setting:

Describing `rarities' that he had seen in Wilkins's rooms at Wadham in 1654, Evelyn says that Wilkins had contrived a hollow statue which uttered words by a long, concealed pipe, and that he possessed many other 'artificial, mathematical, and magical curiosities'

Interesting to hear of magical curiosities at the birth of science and while this was happening the Rosicrucian Manifestoes were being published in English translation. which starts with this wonderful declaration of the perfection of the arts and society thus:

SEEING the only wise and merciful God in these latter days hath poured out so richly his mercy and goodness to mankind, whereby we do attain more and more to the perfect knowledge of his son Jesus Christ and nature, that justly we may boast of the happy time wherein there is not only discovered unto us the half part of the world, which was heretofore unknown and hidden, but he hath also made manifest unto us many wonderful and never heretofore seen works and creatures of nature, and moreover hath raised men indued with great wisdom, which might partly renew and reduce all arts (in this our age spotted and imperfect) to perfection; so that finally man might thereby understand his own nobleness and worth, and why he is called microcosmus, and how far his knowledge extendeth in nature.

In 1652 Thomas Vaughan published an English translation of the Fama and the Confessio, under the pseudonym of 'Eugenius Philalethes' 

Thomas Vaughan's patron is said to have been Sir Robert Moray, afterwards very influential in the formation of the Royal Society. The, as it were, public acknowledgement of the Fama and the Confessio may have encouraged John Webster, a Puritan divine, to come out with a remarkable work in which he urges that 'the philosophy of Hermes revived by the Paracelsian school' should be taught in the universities. 

Webster includes mathematics, particularly as recommended by John Dee in his Preface to Euclid from which Webster quotes at length, with ecstatic encomiums of Dee. He also profoundly reveres that `profoundly learned man Dr Fludd', and he is under the impression that if authors like these - and his book is an amalgam of Paracelsist, Agrippan and similar Renaissance magico-scientific type of thinking, with Dee and Fludd as his favourites -were taught in the universities

The teaching of this magico-scientific philosophy presents a rather different picture than how science actually developed although it is worth remembering that Newton himself pursued alchemical studies. John Dees reputation turned for the worse after his death, he had previously been well regarded, as  astrologer to Queen Elizabeth he had even chosen her Coronation day, and she was his patron although not a bountious one. He had been consulted by the royal navy to help with development of weaponry to help them defeat the Spanish, designed some of the first stage machinery for the theatre, introduced Euclid with an at the time famous Preface and had one of the largest library in Elizabethan England. But in an act of malice his magical diaries were published after his death and his reputation was tarnished as a practitioner of forbidden magic although for Dee himself he regarded the magical work he was doing was with angels, although his scrier Edward Kelley was a rather unsavoury character who had had his ears cut off for theft. So Dees reputation turned from that of a fairly central and influential and accomplished figure to that of a dark and forbidding bogyman to eventually a misguided and foolish purveyor of magical tricks. But Yates says:

Religious passions were still high, and a dreaded witch-scare might start at any moment to stop their efforts. So they drop Dee, and make their Baconianism as innocuous as possible. One wonders what they did with the references to the R.C. Brothers, their invisibility and their college, in the New Atlantis. 

Yates goes on:

There were many subjects which had to be avoided : utopian schemes for reform belonged to the revolutionary past which it was now better to forget. The Society had many enemies in its earlier years; its religious position seemed unclear; witch-scares were not altogether a thing of the past. The rule that religious matters were not to be discussed at the meetings, only scientific problems, must have seemed a wise precaution and, in the earlier years, the Baconian insistence on experiment, and on the collecting and testing of scientific data, guided the Society's efforts. A permanent Society for the advancement of natural science had arrived, a real and visible, not an imaginary and invisible, institution, but it was very restricted in its aims compared with earlier movements. It did not envisage the advancement of science within a reformed society, within a universal reformation of the whole world. The Fellows of the Royal Society were not concerned with healing the sick, and that gratis, nor with schemes for the reform of education. These men could have had no idea of what lay before the movement they were encouraging. To them its weakness would be more apparent than its strength, the dangers of extinction which still beset it. They had arrived ; they had made an Invisible College visible and real, and in order to preserve its delicate existence great caution was required. It all seemed, and was, very sensible. And although Baconian experiment was not in itself the infallible high road to scientific advance, yet the Royal Scociety, so respectable, so well organized, was a statement clear to all that science had arrived. Nothing could stop it now. 

I think in this we can start to recognise the rise of modern science, but it is interesting how the impetus of the move away from magic and Platonic Theology was not due to a standoffish scientific skepticism towards such things, but because of a the threat of persecution, their mathematics was stripped of it's magic to save themselves from the imputation of the diabolical, when to begin with at least their hearts and minds were aflame with magic and divine love.

Now this I think had very serious consequences, suddenly the theological and the experimental were split from one another and the collection of data came only from this fallen world. Truth took on a small t and the greater internal origin of Truth in God was entirely left out, even if it was still in the early practitioners consciousness

Hopefully what I have said so far gives some colour to the era and the transformations going on, now I'll end by giving a summary of three main turning points.

1. Renaissance thinking was Theistic in nature, God, the good the true and the beautiful was at the centre. In Fludd we can see a unified picture of reality from the divine through the angelic, the human and it's various arts down into the animal; vegetable and mineral. In reading Fludd or Ficino we can enjoy a sense of unified consciousness of both aesthetic and philosophical harmony.

2. Science was born in the Royal Society by people with deeply religious sensibility who compromised their ideas of religious and social reform through a fear of persecution. Their ideas were stripped down into an enquiry of the external world. Subsequent generations took this stripped down enquiry as the basis for Science and it came to be their exclusive method for discovery of truth. This was a fundamental error and is philosophically naive. Truth is always  something found through thinking, through contemplation it is found within, the bowing down to an idol of an external truth found exclusively through the senses, does not make sense and following this path leads to the death of meaning. This is one of the main cultural afflictions of the current time.

3. In a Magical paradigm our experiments are seen as either divine or diabolical, good or evil, of God or the Devil but to avoid persecution  a myth of Science was created as an impartial and amoral realm of disinterested enquiry neither good nor evil but purely for the advancement of a knowledge discreet from and independent of Divine knowledge. This amoral framework is false, none of our actions are outside  good and evil and this has allowed many diabolical scientific developments to take place under the guise of amorality that were immoral.







References

Frances Yates - The Rosicrucian Enlightenment

https://www.bookdepository.com/Rosicrucian-Enlightenment-Frances-Yates/9780415267694?ref=grid-view&qid=1561320602486&sr=1-1

Robert Fludd - Essential Readings Selected and Edited by William Huffman

https://www.bookdepository.com/Robert-Fludd-William-H-Huffman/9781556433733?ref=grid-view&qid=1561320711290&sr=1-2

Rudolf Steiner - Riddles of Philosophy

https://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA018/English/AP1973/GA018_index.html

A Confession of Faith

I thought it would be a good thing to make a confession of faith, so anyone reading this will know what the label on my bottle is, so they will know if my wine is something they would wish to drink.

I was raised in a secular family, all my siblings are atheists, my parents were both born in Christian families but as adults they were not Christians, we lived distant  to my grand parents who we almost never saw and we never attended church nor were we baptised. Although in my case, I was named by a friend of my father’s who shared a love of opera singers with him, an Irish Roman Catholic Priest, but I have no recollection of him. We did have cousins who were Christians, who we saw very occasionally and I once attended midnight mass with them, but all I experienced was being very tired from staying up so late. I encountered no Christians who inspired me, the occasional Jehovah’s Witnesses did come to our door but they did not call to my soul. 

I wasn’t much of a reader, the only novels I read were for school but I did like Asterix & Tintin books.

Listening to the music of Yes "Close to the Edge" at age 11, did inspire me, I remember lying on the floor following the lyrics 'a seasoned witch to call you from the depths of your disgrace", there was a magic there. At 14 I read the Hobbit followed immediately after by the Lord of the Rings, I had never had an experience like that before, it opened something up inside me, I may love those books now more than I did then. They were a revelation, I didn't know Tolkien was a Christian, I did not think much about him, I do remember looking at a picture of him sitting under a tree and feeling an intense love for the man. Looking back I'd say reading those books was a taste of religion, a discovery of a region of the soul.

In my 20s I read quite a lot, books both good and bad: Dostoievsky, Kafka, Vonnegut, A E van vogt, Philip k Dick. I read some Kerouac who professed an interest in Buddhism and I started to read some spiritual literature: Buddhist texts, Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads I didn't entirely ignore Christianity as i read the Gospel of St John, I even quite liked it, these texts did feel like works from another age I found them fascinating but there was an alienation between my mind and the mind they represented, I did not think I knew God or experienced divine love.

Colin Wilson’s work did play an important part for me, here was an author who was still alive, with a modern sensibility who was willing to explore byways of experience, ghosts, phantoms, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition etc and I read Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom which while I don't know I understood I started to get the sense of the primacy of consciousness over matter.  At some point in my alienation I felt depression and confusion and felt compelled to pray with a passion. I think God answered that prayer, I was brought to God in the depths of my disgrace and it makes me admire atheists, or at least wonder at them. How can they go through life without love of God? How do they manage with no source for meaning? At about age 30 I read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, this book had a conscious spiritual impact on me, here was someone who was familiar with God, who made me realise God could be close and present. I started to walk inside a spiritual tradition, and a few years some years back I was initiated into Kriya Yoga (in the lineage of Yogananada).

Yogananada had a love of Christ and it seems to me I too would never had loved Christ but for the awakening through Hindu tradition. The Christian tradition now has a life for me.

I am culturally Western and so learning to know and love the Western Christian tradition was important, culture should live and there is no culture without spirituality. I have attended the local nearly empty churches a few times in recent years and maybe I’ll attend more often. I like the experience of love of God in fellowship.

Christianity seems to be in retreat in the West, there needs to be some sort of religious spiritual rebirth, for the good of our culture, for the good of us all, I can't see what that would be, it would be interesting to imagine different possibilities.

My first experience of Tolkien and Lewis

I grew up in an artistic secular household, my father followed his Maori root and became an artist in the Maori renaissance of the 1960s & 70s, he also left home when I was 9, but he had liked the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and had read the Hobbit to my older brother as I read it to my nephews later. Aged 10 or 11 the Hobbit was read to my class by my form teacher and I enjoyed it, but it wasn't a revelatory experience. I read a couple of novels required of me for school, I was not much of a reader although I did read Asterix, Tin Tin and Lucky Luke comics for pleasure. But I think everyone in my family, I being the youngest had read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and for some reason, I think there may have been some expectation of novel reading in my English class, that might have sparked it, I had a sense that I should read these even if the notion of reading a novel was a foreign notion to me.

But reading the Hobbit something new happened to me, I became absorbed in it, reading this was a revelation, I wanted to keep reading and not go to sleep, I just wanted to read this book it was suddenly the most important thing to me. Gandalf, Bilbo, Dwarves, Trolls, Goblins, Gollum, Wolves, Beorn, a dragon and a treasure. I lived in this imaginary world with an inner intensity previously not experienced, something opened up in my that all these decades later I am still exploring and discovering.

I immediately followed this by reading the Lord of the Rings and this world I had found I discovered to be deeper broader and more profound. I felt I was discovering my own inner life although many others had read this before, it felt very personal to me and I felt connected to it, I was stealthy and small like a Hobbit, I was at home in the Shire, I loved and experienced the wonder of the Elves.

Reading Tolkien made me realise there was a joy in books and I started reading a variety of books. It wouldn't have been until I entered my 20s that I read any C S Lewis around this time I read a number of classic English Children's stories: The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Also Sylvie and Bruno), Winnie the Pooh & the Narnia Books, I also read some science fiction including Lewis Space Trilogy although I think I only read the first two books. I enjoyed Lewis' books they had a certain visionary quality of imagination that appealed to me, but they also had a lot of didactic Christian teaching that did not, I being somewhat antithetical to Christianity at the time.

I also discovered Lewis "master" George MacDonald around this time and his fantasy book "Lilith" struck me as simply great as it still does, this had the elements of Lewis' visionary imagination in their pure form, I also read the Curdie books but strangely yet I didn't explore MacDonald's works more fully at that time.

Appreciation goes through cycles and I am now at a time when I appreciate Tolkien, Lewis, MacDonald (and Owen Barfield and Charles Williams) even more and that has come about rather paradoxically through an awakening of Religion and Spirituality largely through the Hindu tradition. And I now see these writers as "Christian Romantics" an important part of and development of Western Christian culture and their wider corpus needs to be experienced.

The Lord of the Rings movies were created here in New Zealand and were released in the final years of my Father's life, it was great to talk to him about them, we both enjoyed them and had some reservations, but it was great to be reminded that we both loved the Lord of the Rings.

I will always be grateful for Tolkien opening that door into a larger world and I wonder how many people he has done that for.

A basic outline of the evolution of consciousness in the historic period

I have been reading Owen Barfield, Rudolf Steiner and Bruce Chlaton's writings about them and I thought it would help me picture their ideas by putting down in as simple an outline as I could the basic narrative of the evolution of consciousness that is in their work. For those reading this it won't serve as an alternative to reading their works but is meant to show the basic shape of their ideas in a potted form.

Literary tradition provides us with a record of recent changes in human consciousness and in this time period we can see changes. By looking at the way words and meaning develop we can see certain patterns. The word "pneuma" that once had a single meaning which held within it the separate meanings we now have of breath, wind & spirit, represents the way our current inner (spirit) and outer (breath, wind) meanings were previously unified. This represented a kind of consciousness where matter and spirit were also unified. Likewise,the reason that ancient man expressed himself in myth was not because he liked to tell fanciful stories but because that is how he experienced the world, Mythic consciousness where spiritual and physical had not yet separated was what Owen Barfield termed original participation, I remember taking a course on the Australian Aborigines, who from an external perspective with modern eyes would seem to live a life of material deprivation but instead their landscapes were rich with stories and meaning embedded in them and the world's origin was not a theory but an experience they entered into. It was however a tribal life rather than individual life. An interesting snapshot into an earlier time before they crashed into the modern world view.

From the time of the rise of Greek thought about 5 centuries before Christ till about the 15th century, we see the rise of intellectual life but still with a sense of participation. Subsequent to that the sense of individuality develops and original participation dies. Alienation emerges, in Shakespeare for instance we witness characters with individual inner life. Colin Wilson notes that the emergence of the novel marks an opening of our inner private life.

R J Reilly's book Romantic Religion has a chapter on Owen Barfield which gives an excellent overview of his works, he writes on the emerging self and the awareness of historicism:

"The seventeenth century first gives us words that indicate this perspective: progressive, antiquated, century, decade, epoch, out-of-date, primeval. Also, as an aftermath of the Reformation, we begin to find words hyphenated with self appearing in the language: self-conceit, self-confidence, self-contempt, self-pity—the centre of gravity has shifted from phenomena to self.”

We often think of thinking just in terms of what Barfield calls alpha thinking which is thinking about things, but just as important is what Barfield terms figuration. which is joining our sense information or percepts with concepts to make the things of the world, Steiner goes into detail regarding this process in his book "Philosophy of Freedom", the chair we see only exists when we have combined the concept "chair" with the percepts we experience. In thinking our world is created, interior is anterior. 

Another key historical marking point is the Galileo affair, his theory of the heliocentric solar system which is so often given as an example of the suppression of science by faith, yet I think this a facile interpretation, as the Pope was not objecting to Galileo presenting his theory but rather his insistence that it was TRUE. Barfield uses the phrase 'saving the appearances" to describe how up to this time theories regarding the workings of the material world were regarded. They were seen as systems for best describing our experiences, TRUTH was considered the nature of God and the human intellect could strive for it but not contain it. So Galilieo could be seen to be making an idol of thought and this kind of idol is now prevalent in our modern thinking. We have a lot of these eternal laws of the universe that are both scientific orthodoxy and part of modern consciousness and this is so for both religious or secular people, to go beyond these "Truths" is to the orthodox "unthinkable". 

So we have slowly built up in our minds thoughts that we worship as realities, true they have reshaped the external world with automobiles, computers, satellites, cell phones, high rise buildings etc. It's a moot point whether we would have created these things using theories rather than idols. But our ancestors would have thought these creations  magical/diabolic and I think we would be wrong to scoff at them for this interpretation. But this thinking creates from thinking a world with no inside, where the thinking that built it has been banished. Leaving a world without meaning which is not a good place. Although Steiner states that this stage is necessary for the development of the individual and an intentional act of imagination will move humanity to a new synthesis that Barfield calls Final Participation if we so choose to take that step.

Along with these dead idols of thought another striking modern obsession is looking for the smallest basic building block to find the fundamental basis of a world pictured as mechanical. Animals are killed and dissected to see what they are composed of but instead they decompose. Plants are put in blenders and the goo is examined to give an explanation for their life, form and beauty. In contrast to this, Goethe had the sense that plant and animal would yield up their nature to him through sufficient contemplation, that our senses, aided by our thoughts and are good tools for discovery. Truth is all around us, it is within us. Consciousness is the inside of creation. Steiner’s book Occult Science an Outline is an attempt to look back into the past from the inside, the opposite of H G Well's time traveller who took modern materialist thought back into the past to refashion a dead world. 

Our challenge now is to reforge the world in ourselves with abundant life and beauty, through imaginative and spiritual effort.

Response to Steiner Studies video on Owen Barfield Saving the Appearances

I have been invited by the Steiner studies channel to do a response video to his video on Owen Barfield’s book “Saving the Appearances” and it’s relationship to Steiner’s thought. I have previously done one video on Barfield which was cut off due to environmental noise, I intended to do a follow up, but I am thinking that it would be good to do a number of videos. Originally I had thought I would need to get a full understanding of Barfield’s work, but I think instead I’ll treat it as a work in progress, where the act of making the video is the means by which I grapple with his thought..

So lets start Steiner Studies rolling the original video, I’ll put a link to the original video in the description:

I have been thinking about Owen Barfield and his book “Saving the appearances” Barfield is a very interesting writer thinker and one of the great interpreters of Rudolf Steiner’s work. And his book saving the appearances is his seminal philosophical work. Originally he intended it to be a book to make the case for Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy and spiritual science, but the book became it’s own thing it became self contained.

  

Now I haven’t done any videos on Rudolf Steiner and he is certainly a hard person to explain, I am not an expert of Steiner and I think it is very difficult thing to be. I also think he is a very difficult thinker to grapple with for quite a few reasons. 

So a few words about Steiner. he was born in Austria in 1861 and lived till 1925. He was a gifted student and his first major claim to fame was editing Goethe’s scientific papers, this lead to his first book “A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception” which was followed by his original work “The Philosophy of Freedom”   which Steiner continued to think of throughout his life as his seminal work. I feel a sense of jeopardy in trying to characterise this book, I’d say it was a theory that posited that  in true thinking we could both grapple with reality and find individual Freedom. 

Neither of these books made much of a splash at the time and I feel few have really tried to grapple with them and their influence may be yet to come. However Steiner has been an influential figure,  here in New Zealand for instance,  half way around the world from where Steiner was born we have Waldorf kindergartens and schools based on Steiner’s education theories. Biodynamic farming also came about by farmers seeking advice from Steiner. Such influences have not endeared him to the academic Intelligencia. 

Then there is Anthroposophy which Steiner foundered, this came about by being asked to give a talk to the Theosophical Society and from this he started to acquire a genuine following, he became the leader of the Austian/German branch of the Theosophical society. Many people have assumed from this that Steiner’s thought has its genesis in Helena Blavatsky’s work. Steiner has always denied this saying he always spoke from his own spiritual sight and Steiner parted from the Theosophical society to found the Anthroposophical society. He wrote a good number of books on Anthroposophy and delivered a huge number of lecture series that were recorded and have been issued in book form.  This large body of Anthroposophical work has effected the way people look at Steiner for the intensely spiritually inclined it has been a source of attraction but for many Atheists and Christians it has served as an easy excuse to ignore him. Owen Barfield certainly did not do so.

However there is a very close relationship between Saving the Appearances and Steiner’s philosophy and I wanted to talk about that relationship a little bit because there does seem to be an apparent tension between Saving the Appearances and Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom or Steiner’s Epistomology  and I want to go into that tension a little bit because I think that tension reveals something about both Barfield and Steiner. 

Now Barfield was a member of the writers circle known as the Inkling, he was a friend of CS Lewis and Tolkien. He was an influence upon Lewis becoming a Theist, but he did not have the religious upbringing that Lewis had. Barfield’s early books the fairytale The Silver Trumpet was the first mythic publication i think by an Inkling. Further his two books a history in English Words and poetic Diction were quite influential on Tolkien’s thinking on language and the nature of mind. I am pretty sure these were developed prior to his discovery of Steiner, so Barfield’s discovery of Steiner was one of convergence rather than conversion. There is never a sense that Barfield is being constrained by Steiner’s thought but that of joyful sharing. But as Steiner’s early books were pretty much ignored so  Barfield also has been on the outside of intellectual fashion and there has been little engagement with his work. Even his good friend Lewis on becoming a Christian refused to continue their intellectual fight.

First of all where is the tension coming from? Barfield goes to great lengths in the first part of his book. to demonstrate and prove that the world of appearances and everything around us that we touch smell see hear feel is just a system of collective representation. That is to say a system of mental representation. Representation within our mind that just happens to have a mind happens to have the same collective representation. 

My feeling on this is that there is always a caveat with Barfield and what he is doing here is leading us from what is the common currently accepted world view. The subtitle to Saving the Appearances is “A study in Idolatry” what he is trying to show us is that there is an idolatry in this modern world view that is shared by almost everyone. 

Now you might say this sounds an awful lot like someone like Kant or Schopenhauer would say. That is that the world is a mental representation so Barfield sounds like he is on the side of the Kantians. Who both of these thinkers Steiner goes at great length to argue against.So why is Barfield in the side of the idea that the world is a mental representation.

I just want to say a little about Steiner and Kant that comes from Steiner’s Autobiography which I   think is one of his key works. As a young man Steiner was compelled to get and understand Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Steiner says “In my boyish way I was striving to understand what human reason might be able to achieve towards real insight into the being of things” And Steiner tells of the intensity of his reading of Kant, he writes  “Many a page I read more than 20 times in succession. I wanted to reach a decision as to the relation sustained by human thought to the creative work of nature.” Steiner goes on to say “It seemed to me that thinking could be developed to a faculty  which would actually lay hold upon the things and events of the world. A “stuff which remains outside of the thinking which we can merely “think towards” seemed to me to be an unendurable conception.” Steiner then makes a remark that is key to his work as a whole and where he diverges from Kant “ Whatever is in things, this must also be inside of human thought.”

My favourite contemporary Christian thinker is David Bentley Hart and i want to quote him to show that these concerns aren’t unique to Barfield and Steiner. I have stressed that “thinking” for Steiner and Barfield is an incredibly important process, in my previous Barfield video I talked about the different kinds of thinking that Barfield delineated. Hart has spoken a lot about Modernity, the last 400 years, and the rise of science and the predominance of a certain kind of thought, which Barfield designates as alpha thinking. Hart writes:

SHOULD SCIENCE THINK?

The question is not quite as facetious as it might sound; it is really rather metaphysical; and it is a question that will ever more inevitably pose itself the more the sciences find themselves constrained rather than liberated by the mechanistic paradigm to which they have been committed for four centuries now. I should note, however, that it is also a question that makes sense only if one is using the word “think” with the perversely distinctive connotation given it by Martin Heidegger when he advanced the somewhat Orphic claim that “”science does not think.” For there is, he insisted, an enormous and inviolable distinction to be drawn between the calculative and quantitative concerns of the scientist on the one hand and, on the other, the properly philosophical or contemplative act of reflection that is the exclusive province of the genuine thinker.

I’ll link to the entire article in the description. 

This is not a negative value judgement on the intelligence of scientists, but a comment on the nature of their thinking, and they share suppositions that are now common to the general population that developed in modernity and which are unquestionably accepted but which is not common to human thinking throughout history. Barfield sees an Idolatry in these unquestioned suppositions.

And yet at the same time Barfield is trying to express and justify Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy. In the course of the book and towards the end of the book Barfield writes an interesting passage he says we cannot save souls unless we first save the appearances and of course hence the title of the book so this is an important passage in the book. He says we cannot save souls unless we first save the appearances. I think it’s in this sentence where Barfield and Steiner meet and where the tension is resolved. But what does this mean Saving Souls?

This is a fascinating quote from Barfield and very important and I agree that it is in harmony with Steiner, I’ll quote the full paragraph shortly but I’d say that the tension is not so much between Barfield and Steiner’s thought as between Steiner’s thought and  our common cultural inheritance which Barfield is addressing. The resolution between Steiner and Barfield is in thinking, which Barfield spends so much time examining, breaking it down into figuration, alpha and beta thinking. The nature of language it’s origins and development. In humanities earlier state of Participation and our coming state of final participation. All this strikes me as a reformation of ideas  essential to Steiner’s thought.

To repeat Steiner’s statement earlier:

“ Whatever is in things, this must also be inside of human thought.”

Now I’ll read the paragraph from Barfield on Saving Souls and saving the appearances:

it may be objected that all this talk of the relation of man to the phenomenal world is cold stuff having little or nothing to do with religion, whose field is the soul and its salvation, But this “watertight” attitude is itself a product of idolatry. What the psalmist wrote of the old idols is true of the twentieth century. “They that make them are like unto them” The soul is in a manner all things, and the idols we create are built into the souls of our children; who learn more and more to think of themselves as objects among objects; who grow hollower and hollower. In the long run we shall not be able to save souls without saving the appearances, and it is an error fraught with the most terrible consequences to think that  we shall. 

Woe, this gets at the heart of the issue for me. Our modern thinking and perception has problems in it that effect both the secular and the religious. I have felt for a long time that the fundamentalist that see authority “out there” in the good book, are not that far from the scientist who seeks the answers “out there” in matter. Meaning and participation are not found there. Barfield is saying this is the reason that religion and culture is in crisis in the west.

Another way we could express saving the Appearances would be to say if we believe   that the world is a mere representation within our subjective mind then if we can demonstrate that the world of appearance has an actual life in it and has its own reality then simultaneously we can see that within our own minds there is something real and living so by coming to a new relationship towards the appearances we are simultaneously able to elevate our own conception of our own minds from the mere projection of the unrepresented particles into something living and real and I’d imagine that this is where Barfield’s Saving the Appearances comes into harmony with Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom.

I think you’ve touched on the heart of it here when you say “within our own minds there is something real and living” which is another way of expressing Steiner’s statement

“Whatever is in things, this must also be inside of human thought.”

When two people look at the same chair their perceptions are different in and of themselves, but the perceptions in and of themselves never make up the chair, the chair exists when those perceptions are integrated into the conception of the chair and strangely it is that conception that is shared between the two people and it is in this shared conception that they experience the same chair.

So thanks again Steiner Studies for inviting a response. I think there is plenty more scope for further exploration.

Original Steiner Studies Video:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zkv2PUW2gWU

Should Science Think? David Bentley Hart:

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/12/should-science-think

My previous Owen Barfield video:

https://youtu.be/sCSqKGTowZs

C S Lewis

I first came to Lewis in the 1980s through his Narnia books and Space Trilogy, at that time I liked a lot of his images, his mythic imagination but thought Lewis did way too much Christian preaching and that his Christian beliefs did not fit seamlessly into his stories but jutted out making them unshapely. By comparison I thought George MacDonald's book Lilith was a thoroughly marvellous work where imagination and Christian teaching worked together seamlessly. But I also held an antipathy toward Christianity then which I no longer hold.

I read my daughter the Narnia stories while she was growing up, she liked them and read some of them on her own and we watched the 3 Disney Narnia movies that came out and unlike many others, we liked them all.

But it is only in the last decade that my appreciation of Lewis has grown and that i have read more widely of his works.

Lewis was the central figure in the Inklings, all the key Inklings were primarily friends with Lewis and secondarily with one another,  the Inklings' original meetings were held in Lewis' rooms at Oxford. My appreciation of Lewis has grown, I appreciate him as a person and a writer although he is not my favourite or I think the greatest Inkling. Lewis' work may have the broadest scope combined with a pretty popular reach, his polemics probably lack the intensity that the other three Inklings (Tolkien, Charles Williams & Owen Barfield) have in spades. They are perhaps the closest thing we have to a modern circle of Prophets and Lewis was the everyman, being the most sensible and prosaic particularly in his popular book of Christian apologetics "Mere Christianity". While his Narnia books while the four main children feel very ordinary the books are filled with a certain outlandishness of imagination mixing Father Christmas, fawns, talking animals a witch and a Lion who serves as the Jesus of Narnia.

Owen Barfield writes of Lewis "C S Lewis was for me, first and foremost, the absolutely unforgettable friend, the friend with whom I was in close touch for over forty years, the friend who might be regarded hardly as another human being , but almost as a part of the furniture of my existence..."

But Barfield also writes about Lewis' influence on him as a thinker "I told him (Lewis) that ... it was he that taught me to think at all" and that he was impressed that Lewis refused to take philosophy as a merely academic exercise.

Lewis was a good Christian, he got Owen Barfield to act as his personal lawyer to administer the  significant funds Lewis earned from publishing and funnel it into charitable activity. Lewis was certainly not materialistic in the sense of wanting to acquire significant possessions and material wealth. I don't know if Lewis wrote about divine poverty, I don't think I have read anything.

Barfield obviously loved Lewis as a friend and admired him as both a writer and a human being, it is very easy for us to do the same.

There is a key story in Lewis life regarding World War I, he made a promise with one of his fellow soldiers Paddy Moore that if either one of them failed to survive the War they would look after the Parent of the other, Paddy Moore did not survive so Lewis ended up living with and in a sense looking after Mrs Moore, now anyone that has read Lewis biography will experience a certain amount of pain about this as Mrs Moore seems to have been a selfish and domineering person who not only impacted Lewis but also his older brother Warnie, I don't know if people connect Warnie's drinking with Mrs Moore but it certainly doesn't seem to be a stretch. I came across a comment recently about Warnie raising the issue of Mrs Moore and being bluntly cut off and that it was not a subject that could be discussed. Was this a feature of Lewis, he did a similar thing to Barfield in cutting off their great War discussion, that Barfield was able to continue somewhat and find resolution by writing about it after Lewis death. But in the case of Mrs Moore it has often been framed that Lewis had to do what he did because of his promise, but I don't think so Lewis chose to interpret his promise in a certain way, if someone takes responsibility for their parents all they need to do is make sure they are financially sound and to visit them regularly, living with them is surely not required. If Lewis thought he was being a good influence on her I can see no evidence of that and allowing her free reign with her petty tyrannies was surely not doing any good for her character and was certainly causing his brother very real suffering.

Lewis' work is multifaceted he did Christian apologetics, imaginative allegory, science fantasy, children's fantasy, adult myth, literary criticism and autobiography as well as a extensive letter writer not just to his friends family and peers but also to numerous fans that wrote to him

I will end with a number of selections from his works that have particularly stood out for me:

On Re Reading:

In literature the characteristics of the 'consumer' of bad art are even easier to define. He (or she) may want her weekly ration of fiction very badly indeed, may be miserable if denied it. But he never re-reads. There is no clearer distinction between the literary and the unliterary. It is infallible. The literary man re-reads, other men simply read. A novel once read is to them like yesterdays newspaper. One may have some hopes of a man who has never read the Odyssey, or Malory, or Boswell, or Pickwick: but none (as regards literature) of the man who tells you he has read them, and thinks that settles the matter. It is as if a man said he had once washed, or once slept, or once kissed his wife, or once gone for a walk. Whether the bad poetry is re-read or not (it gravitates suspiciously towards the spare bedroom) I do not know. But the very fact that we do not know is significant. It does not creep into the conversation of those who buy it. One never finds two of its lovers capping quotations and settling down to a good evening's talk about their favourite. So with the bad picture. The purchaser says, no doubt sincerely, that he finds it lovely, sweet, beautiful, charming or (more probably,) 'nice. But he hangs it where it cannot be seen and never looks at it again. 

On why we should read old books:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. ALL contempo-rary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook - even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united - united with each other and against earlier and later ages - by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask; "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt (note: this was written in 1943) or between Mr H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us .in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them. 

On The Scottish writer George MacDonald whom Lewis called his master, and in his autobiography he said he baptised his imagination:

Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not consciously made by individuals at all But every now and then there occurs in the modern world a genius — a Kafka or a Novalis — who can make such a story Mac-Donald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know But I do not know how to classify such genius To call it literary genius seems unsatisfactory since it can co-exist with great inferiority in the art of words—nay, since its connection with words at all turns out to be merely external and, in a sense, accidental Nor can it be fitted into any of the other arts It begins to look as if there were an art, or a gift, which criticism has largely ignored It may even be one of the greatest arts, for it produces works which give us (at the first meeting) as much delight and (on prolonged acquaintance) as much wisdom and strength as the works of the greatest poets It is in some ways more akin to music than to poetry or at least to most poetry It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and 'possessed joys not promised to our birth It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions...

Definition of Myth from "An experiment in Criticism", this book should be read by anyone that has studied literature, it serves as something of an antidote to the possession by fashionable literary theories and an encouragement to surrender oneself to great pieces of literature and be receptive towards them

The pleasure of myth depends hardly at all on such usual narrative attractions as suspense or surprise. Even at a first hearing it is felt to be inevitable. And the first hearing is chiefly valuable in introducing us to a permanent object of contemplation—more like a thing than a narration—which works upon us by its peculiar flavour or quality, rather as a smell or a chord does. Sometimes, even from the first, there is hardly any narrative element. The idea that the gods, and all good men, live under the shadow of Ragnarok is hardly a story. The Hesperides, with their apple-tree and dragon, are already a potent myth, without bringing in Heraldes to steal the apples... The experience is not only grave but awe-inspiring. We feel it to be numinous. It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us. The recurrent efforts of the mind to grasp—we mean, chiefly, to conceptualise—this something, are seen in the persistent tendency of humanity to provide myths with allegorical explanations. And after all allegories have been tried, the myth itself continues to feel more important than they. I am describing and not accounting for myths...

And lastly an except from "Out of the Silent Planet", the first book of Lewis Space Trilogy, the books in this trilogy are quite odd mixing quite a bit of didactic dialogue but Lewis also has these richly imaginative depictions and here I love how he recasts our experience of space:

But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him.. He had read of 'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name `Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes—and here, with how many more, No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory—the

'happy climes that ly 

Where day never shuts his eye 

Up in the broad fields of the sky: 

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.