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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.
Typical American Protestantism is shallow and unsatisfying. It's a religion for low-openness people that like following rules and reciting answers to equations that have already been solved. Understandably, that doesn't appeal to people with a high appetite for novelty.
Buddhism has filled the gap for a lot of Americans who seek a spiritual experience with a little more hands-on ambition. It also meshes well with materialists who have a hard time assenting to metaphysical beliefs (including techies like Tyler). Don't get me wrong, Buddhism has plenty of metaphysical claims, it's just not too bothered if you don't believe them. You can still pursue various useful and/or entertaining states of consciousness without assenting to its metaphysical underpinnings.
There is a resurgence of interest in Christianity nowadays as it is the underpinning of our civilizational worldview, and this has apparently caught up with Tyler. So his answer to this dilemma is to propose a Christianity that is more like Buddhism. He calls it "Mystical Christianity", but the proposal imports the mystical side wholesale from Buddhism. It downgrades the truth claims of Christianity into a useful allegory or symbolic system. This is roughly the path that Jordan Peterson has tread, bearing some fruit.
What it ignores is that Christianity has an existing, living, vibrant branch of mystical practice of its own - the path of theosis, direct experience of God. This is maintained in the apostolic churches which have kept a practice of monasticism. Historical mystics are among the most fervently believing people in the literal truths of its doctrines. It's through this lineage that I surprised and embarrassed myself by becoming a Christian again after 18 years of absence.
I count Tyler as a friend, though it's been some years since we've spoken. I see him, along with people like Jordan Bates, as kind-hearted heathens who are drawn to the warmth at the periphery of the Christian faith through their good instincts. As a techie myself, I also had a lot of resistance to becoming a Christian. I arrived at a materialist worldview after a traumatic Protestant childhood. That materialism had been loosened by my own experimentation with Buddhism and Psychedelics. By the time I approached Christianity, I privileged a phenomenological worldview over raw materialism. Put simply, to have a model of the physical system of the world, you must first perceive the model. Consciousness is more real than particles.
My first encounter with real Mystical Christianity was through Sophrony Sakharov's short book "His Life is Mine", given to me by an Orthodox monk during a visit to a beautiful monastery in a desert valley in New Mexico. Sophrony is a modern saint who died in the 1990s and was recently canonized. He taught a practice whose apogee is witnessing the Uncreated Light, the energies of God himself. As a youth in Russia, he toyed with Buddhism, and that anecdote softened my little heathen heart towards him. I loved the way he wrote about Christianity as a quest for a foundation of being, with a God whose name is "I AM". It sounded so much more grand, creative, and fertile than the repressive moralistic Protestantism of my youth. In his writing, he is in the mystical tradition of such saints as Ephrem the Syrian, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, and Gregory Palamas.
At any level of analysis, there is fruit in Christianity. The moral world we inhabit is Christian, it is from Christianity that secular society gets its notion of Good and Evil. So analyzing the stories and patterns of it is useful, even as allegory.
But there is perhaps something deeper if we listen to those who pursued God with all their being and claim to have found him. As a popularizer of Christian thought, Jonathan Pageau offers a counterpoint to Jordan Peterson. His Symbolic World podcast uses the patterns of meaning found in Christianity to explain the world, but he does it from a position of faith informed by the mystical Christian tradition. In particular, I know he is a fan of St. Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373) and his "Hymns on Paradise" as well as the works of Maximus the Confessor. Symbolic thinking is fundamental to the method of these saints without discounting the truth of doctrine. Maximus sees in man a microcosm of the universe, and in the universe a macrocosm of man.
IMO Pageau's project is more flexible and more creative than Peterson's, despite the fact that it is more traditional (or perhaps, because of it). Ephrem's works have inspired people for 1600 years, and I don't believe Peterson's will last that long.
My suggestion for people like Tyler who are interested in mystical Christianity is to go meet some monks. If you've given thousands of hours to listening and practicing Buddhism, then perhaps try a few hundred encountering the Christian version. Give the tradition a little respect. Read a book or two, spend a weekend at a monastery, buy a prayer rope and try the Jesus prayer.
I would love to see a subculture of tech kids pivot from Jhana-maxxing to pursuing the Uncreated Light. Perhaps Silicon Valley ambition can create a bumper-crop of saints.
I'm new to the Orthodoxy stuff (there are at least three of us on here???), so forgive me if I misunderstand, but isn't what you're saying true because the entire idea of "symbolic" was very different for the ancient Hebrews that wrote, redacted, and passed down Scripture and built the Church. Different than our contemporary understanding I mean. The notion of symbolic over and against literal is a very anachronistic way of reading the symbols that are being described and referenced in Scripture and the writings of the saints and church fathers. Similar to the false dichotomy of spiritual vs physical.
Dichotomizing like that gives too much away to the scientific materialist viewpoint which insists that there is the real (its domain) and then there is the other stuff, which is at best entertaining literature and poetry, and at worst woo woo and delusion.
As Orthodox Christians, we see that our entire world is aflame with the Divine Energies. We pray to the God who is "everywhere present, filling all things." We recognize that creation is just one great Burning Bush.
As such, moments of profound symbolic importance are, to us, moments where the physical is fulfilled in the spiritual, where the goodness of this world is, for a bit, perfectly aligned with the Good of the world to come, a point in physical and psychic space where Heaven touches earth.
That would be awesome. Something to pray for!
Me, you, @Gaashk, @ortherox (sp?) and I think @TheDag (?) are Orthodox. Probably more if I had to guess.
Is this true? I've heard over and over that the allegorical/symbolic reading of the Scriptures is something the Church Fathers did. We even have the words allegorical and symbolic in many Orthodox chants. Perhaps symbolic over and against literal I agree with - the literal and the symbolic were seen as one. Symbol literally means "where heaven and earth meet."
And hey I'm working on converting the techies on twitter. Come help out!!
There's the Five (some say Four) Senses of Scripture, and passages can be debated as "meant literally or to be interpreted symbolically?" but there are limits.
You can probably get away with "Jonah was not literally in the belly of a fish" but no dice on "Jesus was not literally born of a virgin".
I agree with that, though I'd argue Jonah was definitely in the belly of a fish.
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Yes, this is exactly what I was getting at. Symbol as a unity between heaven and earth, a point in which the physical and the spiritual are reconciled. A completely different notion compared to when people say "just a symbol" in our modern parlance.
This probably didn't come across clearly in my ramblings of last night -- apologies, we have a newborn and a toddler at home so sleep is in short supply.
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