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In my circles on twitter, the Mystical Christianity conversation is cropping up again. It tends to come around every few months, at least for the past year I've been on the site.
Tyler Alterman writes a long post on it that is mostly summed up here:
Now to broaden this outside of just Christianity, I'm curious what the Motte thinks of symbolism as a whole? I will admit my own path back to religion came via a symbolic pathway, although I believe it goes far deeper than this.
That being said, from my short time here it seems like most of the Christians on this site aren't that into symbolism, and tend to be more "rationalist" and materialist in their worldview. Again, might have a mistaken impression.
I know this is a rationalist offshoot forum so not sure I expect a ton of mystical/symbolic discussion, but I'm kind of surprised by how little there is given how many professed religious folks there are here. And I do think from a Culture War angle, that materialism is definitely losing steam (especially amongst the right) as we see more and more cracks form in the edifice of Expert Scientific Opinion(tm).
On a deeper note, the symbolic worldview is all about seeing the world through the language of God (or meaning if you prefer), in a way that helps people bind together and understand events in the same way. Right now we are in "darkness" symbolically because, well, nobody can interpret events the same way! I personally think a return to the symbolic is inevitable given how confused everything is at the moment, although the transition may not be smooth or easy.
Here's what I keep bumping into with lines of thought like this.
Like many others, I did the angry atheist thing. But I was never really able to get past the wisdom present in Christ saying "By their fruits shall ye know them" - and indeed, one of the things I appreciated about abandoning the conservative, constricting faith of my youth on exactly those lines is that I could read, say, stuff from zen Buddhist thinkers and appreciate them morally on a deep level without having to decide whether they were really devil worshippers or not, for example, as my home tradition would have insisted. But, speaking of fruits, over time I think I became really discouraged by the behaviors, habits, and world views of many people who were most vociferously anti-theist, whether that was through New Atheism, or whether (and worse) it was from various cultural strands through university influence that were all downstream from the biggest anti-theism of them all, French enlightenment philosophy from the last 250 years. Meanwhile, many, many people will look at, say, Mormons they know, or the Amish, and they're say, "They believe a lot of silly things, and they sometimes seem quite naive about the broader world, and yet at the level of behavior, they can be the nicest, most selfless, most family and community oriented people I know."
I appreciate the project of trying to reconcile science (but less so "reason") with the great world religious traditions that have shaped the bones of different civilizations. I think as a practical matter, fundamentalism's insistence on loudly proclaiming anti-hard science positions has often been deeply counterproductive. And yet it seems to me that much of the strange power of real, historical religious traditions often has something deeply to do with their shared status as being beyond reason and evidence, and the shared authority that comes from that, and especially the common knowledge that comes from that shared authority.
And the shared authority aspect is really key. Speaking entirely from a secular game designer perspective here (because that's where my brain mostly lives), the game theory of Mormonism, say, working makes total sense to me. You believe that God exists, is all knowing, is all powerful, and is all good. And you know that God specifically commands you not to lie. And because God is all knowing and all good, this means there is no way of weasle-ing or lawyering your way out of this. You might as well try to lie your way out of obeying the law of gravity. And just like knowing that gravity exists, you believe, deep in your bones, that you've been freed by this knowledge - that there was a deep, powerful, important rule about the universe that hurt you for not knowing it, and you've been liberated by knowing it now. People who believe in Foucault might see this story as a panopticon, meant to police and and imprison you, but to believe this tradition, really, is to believe that you started out in the prison of your own self-destructive moral error (no different than not understanding gravity or the empirical germ theory of disease), and this knowledge (through faith) frees you from that prison. But then something much more complicated happens once you're in a shared community that also overwhelmingly believes these things - because (and this is where game theory and my game designer sense kicks in) you also have the common knowledge that everyone around you also has been liberated in exactly this way, and you know that they know that God knows, with perfect knowledge and perfectly benevolent judgement, exactly what they're doing too, and they can't weasel their way out of it either, no matter how much money or worldly power or social status they have either. And to the extent that this belief is truly pervasive, and the authority of this belief is respected, people truly do become different, and something real comes into a being - a community, or a world view, a way of being, that actually didn't exist before, but does exist now. A kind of high trust society comes into being because of that shared common knowledge about everyone else's metaphysical beliefs.
I guess this is something like a William James-ian pragmatism at play, because I feel like the word "truth" is tugged in different directions here. What does it mean if a myth isn't materially true, but believing it nevertheless brings into being something true and real and good - and meanwhile, this insistence on the assumption of materiality itself as the final arbiter is also possibly unjustified - based on an untruth, if you will, and its own faith commitments that precede it?
So, finally, returning to the initial discussion... The thing that I wonder about a lot is the impact of this move to make Christianity, say, "make sense", or any of these traditions. Based on what I just said about, it's not clear to me that the shared, common knowledge authority of these traditions, and the game theory results of that, really survive when authority is shifted over to "reason", to "making sense". Because the reality of this turn towards the insistence on myths surviving reason and making sense is that most of the game theory I just discussed seems to dissipate immediately - if I know that I am hopelessly biased and self-dealing, and I know that you are hopelessly biased and self-dealing too, once we both turn to our own personal reason as the final arbiter of these traditions, we might all reasonably expect that each of us is going to lawyer the beliefs until their authority is threadbare, and what they compel of us will be minimal. And that sounds appealing for me, in my selfishness, but it doesn't sound so good to me for the rest of you, who have all sorts of selfish designs for me. And eventually the whole thing collapses. One might very well arguing that this exact process has been exactly what hollowed out mainline Protestantism.
I'll be honest, though - I really do feel muddled here. Because the response that "doesn't it matter if these traditions really are materially true, though" certainly feels compelling, too, and I can't actually set that aside. I can say all of the above, and honestly believe it in broad strokes, I think, about how these various systems likely work socially. I can absolutely find the actual human results of some other, theoretically more sophisticated, more cynical belief systems pretty corrosive and sometimes disastrous, and wonder what that actually does mean about their truth content. But at the end of the day, it's very hard to actually pull myself out of a strictly material belief system, too, I guess.
Phenomenology makes more sense to me than materialism. It was the phenomenological lens of Jordan Peterson that first spoke to me from a Christian perspective. I was already a Buddhist and I was used to navigating existence from a standpoint of phenomenological empiricism.
As a phenomenological empiricist, I could say that states of consciousness matter, and things that I do could predictably alter my consciousness. I could try different kinds of meditation or take a face-melting dose of mushrooms and reliably change my experience of existence.
The alternative to phenomenology is some kind of materialism. But materialism usually leads to some kind of nihilism. If matter is more real than consciousness, then the things that intuitively matter to humans are really meaningless. Love is just chemicals, beauty is just electric signals in your brain. It is the worldview of Neil DeGrasse Tysonism, and I don't find it particularly appealing.
Ultimately I decided on faith to not be a nihilist. I decided that love matters, beauty matters, and the people I love matter. I decided it was good to act in the world to bring about more good. And it seemed to me that phenomenology was an intellectually rigorous philosophical framework to act from, since consciousness is prior to any physical model of the world.
From there, Christianity was not so far away.
This is built on a spiritualistic premise that the only things with meaning are the ones without any grounding in the material.
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Great write up overall. In terms of the last bit, definitely agree about pulling away from a strictly material belief system. It’s something you need a community for, and it does exist but can be hard to find.
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