A response.

Matthew

5 days ago (Medium.com)

This article is a response to a certain fellow writer who wished me to “show that God is love”, an idea he evidently had some distain for. It got pretty long, but that is perhaps somewhat unavoidable given the scale of the subject, and it became less of a response and more of a plea to deconstruct many of the impediments to observing basic human intuitions as we find them, drawing together ideas I have written about elsewhere. I hope you find it worthwhile. You might want a cup of tea.

I — The Mind & Knowledge — How Do We Know?

There is an interesting evolutionary theory that suggests that rationality developed as a way to win arguments within a group as a kind of verbal tussle that creates orders of dominance without physically fighting. Like many such evolutionary ideas this is difficult to evidence and so inevitably speculative, but either way the idea that argument is often pretty useless as a tool for epistemology is evident almost everywhere in our society today, be it on Twitter, on comment threads, on TV debate panels: argument is everywhere and it isn’t helping us.

Indeed the idea that we have evolved a broad scale epistemological mind full of tools for knowing “truth” seems inherently unlikely unless such epistemology has a demonstrable evolutionary function, and as you can see with the way arguments often work, or the way for example the “culture wars” clearly manifest as attachment and identification with an in-group, our quest for knowledge is easily swerved off target if it benefits us in some other way.

However, “knowing” things in some form, even if only in a heuristic sense, is deeply important, and the mind seems to have evolved to generate knowledge through two avenues: tools and myths.

This knowledge is deeply related to the curious emergence of consciousness. Animals have many deep kinds of knowing, swallows know how to migrate from the lakes and rivers near where I live in the South of England to winter breeding grounds in sub saharan Africa, sea turtles make transoceanic migrations using the magnetic field of the earth. Yet we describe this not as “knowledge” but as “behaviour”, because without conscious self-representation, without the questions “how?” or “why?”, this is a knowledge as seamless as the flowing of a river or the flowering of a prairie.

But somewhere between this seamless biology and our present minds is a jump in evolution into what scholars describe as “behavioural modernity”, the emergence of particular tool use, music, dance, self-representation, abstract thought and language, everything upon which self-consciousness rests.

The emergence of consciousness then is the emergence of a mind that in some sense seeks to “know” as much as it knows it does not. A part of the mind separates out. Suddenly a human being finds themselves “thrown” in Heidegger’s terminology, (perhaps “flung” is better), into a reality in which the knower seems to emerge dewy eyed and blinking into reality, asking “how?” and “why?”.

Naturally, this stupefies us. Our current scientific conceptions of reality are not remotely close to understanding how this thing we call consciousness is drawn like groundwater from the bore-hole of evolution, nor even how to describe what it is. But the abstraction of consciousness aside our inner world of knowing and the way we share that with one another is defined primarily by representation, particularly by language. Our communal, collective epistemology is defined by our communal representation. In order to know we must say or show, to ourselves and to others, and that knowledge is then held in a collective storehouse and passed on in a para-genetic form of ideas that evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins would come to coin as “memes”.

Tools and myths then are aspects of language. Tool use correlates with a descriptive language use, one that relies little on object permanence or abstract thought, but relates to a functional intuition and problem solving. However along with this every human society that has ever existed up until the historically unique modern West has held this in tension with abstract metaphorical, mythic “knowledge”, a world of stories and beliefs, gods and spirits. “How?” and “why?” then are answered with different kinds of language, the literal and the metaphorical.

It may seem that this division has a relation to the bifurcation of our hemispheric brains. This is not a new evolutionary development, every creature that has a brain shows some form of bifurcation, and it may relate to a need for simultaneous forms of attention, the particular and the broad, the object of immediate grasping and the world around we must remain simultaneously vigilant too. However why exactly this division is so deep rooted we still do not fully understand.

While every part of the brain is to some degree involved in everything, it is becoming increasingly clear differentiation between the hemispheres is deeply important. While the left hemisphere has long been known as strongly involved with language, it seems the right deals with metaphor (I, II, III), and the emotional elements of music (IV, V), while the left interprets the structure of sound and is responsible for many of the motor skills involved in playing an instrument (VI). The right hemisphere then deals with broad, emotional, metaphorical perspective, the left with analytical structural thinking and particular motor action. In the terms of Psychiatrist Dr Iain McGilChrist the right hemisphere “presences” the world, the left “re-presences” the world, the left is the map, the right the territory (VII).

We have naturally come to see analytic or objective knowledge as the highest point of an epistemological staircase we can climb, a belief evidenced by the abundance of success science has had in flooding our world with technology. Be it healthcare, atomic weapons, aeroplanes, computers: science works. Our society depends upon it. Yet we have also come to see the knowledge spheres of tool and myth as deeply in competition. Science subordinates all knowledge beneath it, and believing myth has become inconceivable to us. There are stories that might have a quality as parables, metaphors that might have some vague serviceability, but metaphors and myths are always preceded by the word “just”. We live in a profoundly literalised world. The question then is whether this epistemological judo move that has largely occurred since the enlightenment (as I have written elsewhere, for reasons of historical contingency occuring on largely religious fault lines rather than the emergence of the light of “reason”, a myth of the enlightenment 1,2,3,4), in which our deepest forms of knowing are subordinated and rejected, is actually the best way of knowing what is true, or whether an imbalance has come to blind our world.

We can begin by looking not just at the literal/metaphorical distinction but looking at the importance of the distinction in language itself between vowels and consonants. Ancient sacred texts in languages such as Hebrew or Arabic both originally wrote using only consonants, and it wasn’t until later that scribes added the pointing system of vowels. Trying this with English shows how removing vowels takes away the emotional and temporal character of text, although little of the meaning. If you remove the vowels from a sentence you can reasonably easily make out its meaning, if you remove the consonants you get nothing. Try this sentence for a start:

Tr ths sntnc fr strt. — y i eae o a a.

Yet if you do the same thing with speech the opposite occurs in terms of feeling. You can read a sentence with vowels and you get the shape and feel of it like a kind of baby talk, or someone talking with their mouth taped, but the consonants can’t actually be read, you need vowels for them to have any articulate quality.

Consonants therefore bring semantic borders into the ambient, endless feeling of the vowel. This may well have something closely in common with how we discern objects in the world around us, for it is the actual borders that seem to give objects their significance. A game such as pictionary makes sense for this reason, and I can draw a circle with a stalk and an outline of a leaf, or a fluffy cloud with stick legs and you can guess I am drawing an apple or a sheep with very little actual information, like words without vowels.

Words though do not just evolve with an arbitrary denotative meaning like pure symbols, their significance is also as sounds. Their selection has a sonic as well as denotative relationship to how we use them. It is likely many words we use carry some sonic sense through their evolution however aspectual or vestigial they may be, and something of their feel likely has or had an unconsciously felt connection to their referent.

How we actually discern what objects are, and how our brains break down reality into what we perceive is still largely beyond our understanding. What exactly makes a chair a chair and how a brain draws objects “out” of reality is deeply mysterious. Yet it clearly relates in some way to this division of language, again mirrored by the bifurcated brain: there is the seamless, flowing, atemporal reality and there is the overlay of necessary divisions we make in order to create our world of objects. We can glimpse this distinction through the brain in patients who have injury or illness in a particular hemisphere, for example neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor who suffered a stroke in her left hemisphere and remained cogent enough to later describe the experience:

“Light burned my brain like wildfire and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expensive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Harmonic. I remember thinking there’s no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body. But I realised “But I’m still alive! I’m still alive and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I’m still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana.” I picture a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realised what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover.” (VIII)

Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. Before we get to where on earth “beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people” comes from, first we might ask how “knowledge” crosses between these kinds of perception. Clearly objective and analytic language, the modes of science and to some degree philosophy, deal with the consonants of reality, hence a worldview extracted from science is one of reductionism that flounders at the shores of the “hard problem” of consciousness. This kind of language cannot “cross back” to a non-objective reality, not only this but it can go as far as denying it even exists. Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, for example, dismisses the idea of the hard problem of consciousness as renewed vitalism and calls consciousness “the minds user illusion”. (As McGilchrist has pointed out from various studies of patients with damage to the right hemisphere, this odd, insistent denial seems to be particularly characteristic of the isolated left hemisphere. (IX)) Philosophy is analytic and rational and although it does move away from the literal, framing ideas or concepts in sequence, it still falters at more comprehensive kinds of knowing, and seems to fall somewhere between the more denotative logic-language of science and mathematics, and the language of argument previously discussed. Can language go any further beyond itself?

In his landmark work The Poem, poet Don Paterson suggests that part of what poetry itself can do is enable us to relate to the form of our consciousness that emerges in early childhood, before language. As language develops the world is necessarily broken down into pieces, the differentiations that begin with self and other that allow us to represent, and so something of reality is lost from our grasp. Poetry allows us for a moment to take language to its very limits, find momentary glimpses of higher unity, of the universe as it is. Paterson, drawing on the word of Chilean psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco, describes this “atemporal and infinite connection” as something that still exists, “like an operating system upon which the more recently acquired software of perceptual category and language sits.”

Of course poetry itself is an organised form of a much deeper kind of language, the language of myth, song, and narrative that has always constituted the storehouse of cultural and religious understandings and orientation points all civilisations have held. And poetry, like religion, depends on a concept of “revelation”.

In his seminal essay A Defence of Poetry, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley contrasts “those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination”. He says that “Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.”

How is he able to say this? Shelley observes that something about imagination, or poetry in his broader sense, has a simultaneous relationship between our receptivity and the revelation of reality:

Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre…

…Every man in the infancy of art observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest delight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. (X)

Two centuries later, modernist poet T.S. Eliot would come to make a similar observation about the relation of poetry to “the nobler purposes of human intercourse”, its role in society, and the consequences of its decline:

If, finally, I am right in believing that poetry has a ‘social function’ for the whole of the people the poet’s language, whether they are aware of his existence or not, it follows that it matters to each people of Europe that the others should continue to have poetry. I cannot read Norwegian poetry, but if I were told that no more poetry was being written in the Norwegian language I should feel an alarm which would be much more than generous sympathy. I should regard it as a spot of malady which was likely to spread over the whole Continent; the beginning of a decline that people everywhere would cease to be able to express, and consequently to feel, the emotions of civilised beings. This of course might happen. Much has been said everywhere about the decline of religious belief; not so much about the decline of religious sensibility. The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can still understand; but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it become meaningless. (XI)

Here we are then. In a matter of decades, the words in which men have struggled to express it have become meaningless. The assumption that religion is a kind of pre-science, a primitive attempt at quasi-reason, that the dawning light of the enlightenment has broken over the horizon and liberated us, is simply a myth. A myth in the most modern sense of the word, just a myth, something that isn’t really true. The mind does not just apprehend reality through analytical chains of reason or the cold objective process of science. Even science itself shows this. Properly speaking, it seems much of what is worth knowing is to the “right” of this kind of knowledge. Intuition, imagination, experience, metaphor, poetry, myth, religion, are diving boards of epistemology. More is required, the kind of knowledge not subordinated to the will:

What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship — what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave — and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will… (X)

II —The Landscape of Experience and the Dividing of the Mind

I am aware I have said an awful lot without getting to God or Love. I hope if you have got this far it is clear that my view is that our way of apprehending the world in the dominant form in our time is skewed, and because of this we are obscuring basic realisations about the quality of reality itself. So with this in mind, let us turn to the landscape of experience.

Writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley, after experimenting with psychedelics, first mescaline and later LSD, wrote in a letter: “…what came through the open door was the realisation of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.”

Psychedelics and the range of experience they elicit are utterly mystifying. Studies of the brain on psilocybin aren’t exactly enlightening, it seems something occurs to the brain’s attention function, producing significant effects in a part of the brain known as the claustrum (XII), which regulates between kinds of attention, and in the words of one study “suggest(s) decreased activity and connectivity in the brain’s connector hubs, permitting an unconstrained style of cognition” (XIII).

Perhaps what the effects of a drug such as psilocybin provide is a thumping hit of Don Paterson’s previously mentioned “atemporal and infinite connection” as something that still exists, “like an operating system upon which the more recently acquired software of perceptual category and language sits.” This software seems to be lifted away for a moment, leaving something wide open underneath. One description of a psilocybin trip I found particularly moving is recounted from a Reddit philosophy user who was suicidal before a trip which saved him:

As we approached the skies began to darken and an enormous, I mean enormous, rain storm blew in. I felt the sting of the tiny drops and the weight of the heavy drops as the world around me exploded into technicolor ecstasy in spite of the darkening skies. I was inside of the moment. The moment that monks, and new age officianados chase after for years by way of meditation hoping to grasp a shadow of what I was now completely immersed within. I was swimming inside life for the first time in what felt like my entire existence.

We got to our seats on the mezzanine and the show was cranking. Ocelot, now one of my favorite jams, was blasting through the torrential downpour with Phishs’ always unmatched light work causing the entire scene to undulate in this orgasm of existence where the universe just took notice of itself because it had no choice. I danced sincerely for the first time in my life. I outstretched my arms to the skies as the universe poured down upon my body and in that instant(those instants, I suppose) I became so incredibly self aware and also so incredibly devoid of ego. Matter, sound, light, all energy, everything became the same thing expressing itself in its own unique way. I was the 13.7 billion year old cosmos. Everybody was. We were alive. We were together. In this chilly tempest dancing to express our love for self, our love for each other, and it was the most earth shattering concept that ever dared to enter my mind. I was crying tears of joy. (XIV)

Yet from an evolutionary perspective the existence of such states of the mind seems inexplicable. Why on earth do our brains contain this capacity for such experience? What is going on here? Sam Harris, atheist and philosopher took psilocybin mushrooms later in life having experimented with them when he was younger, and he also described this mystification with why the contents of experience seem adjacent to such expansiveness:

“the fact that there are landscapes of mind this vast lurking on the other side of a mushroom is simply preposterous. I mean how could that make any sense? The scale of the thing is all wrong. It violates every intuition you have about what it is to have a mind and a body in a world. It’s as though we’ve lived in a universe where if you just reached into your right pocket with your left hand, rather than pull out your wallet you’d pull out the Andromeda galaxy. So the experience is altogether too much, it’s like a reductio ad absurdum of one’s desire for experience itself. It’s as though the cosmos were saying “oh it’s experience you want, you want to see and feel and think? Ok how’s this”. And then what follows is a vision so blinding in it’s beauty and intensity that it shatters your mind. It just unmakes you. Again I have to admit the poverty of words here. We have a word for love, for instance, but what’s the word for all the love you can possibly feel, and all the love you recognise you have failed to feel at every moment in your life up until this moment. What do we call the experience of having that ocean of feeling invade you, and fill every empty space in your mind? There really are no words to describe this experience.” (XV)

Basing assumptions about the universe on the unique experience of drug induced psychedelic trips is naturally not completely justified. However it is important here to draw some implications. Firstly that peak experience we define as immensely transformatively meaningful is highly moral in character, deeply related to an apparent underlying feature of the apparatus of our brain and its receptivity to reality, and somehow simultaneously beyond the categories of language to grasp.

Psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths led some of the first significant research into the benefits of a psilocybin trip, describing that volunteers experienced “a sense of unity, a feeling that all people and things are connected, accompanied by a sense of sacredness… love, joy, and a deeply felt sense of encountering ultimate reality. These experiences are felt to be more real and more true than everyday waking consciousness.” He also described these effects as “biologically normal”, not a bug in the brain but an inherent aspect, raising the question “why are we wired to have these salient, felt to be sacred experience encountering ultimate reality of the interconnectedness of all people and all things, experiences that arguably provide the basis for our moral and ethical codes, common to all the world’s religions”. (XVI)

Of course in the modern world the desire for such an all-at-once hit of experience is framed in an individualistic, therapeutic context and seems to constitute a kind of overcompensating desire for a rebalancing. Psychedelics may turn out to have some therapeutic benefit, even if said context seems to diminish their meaning, but they are not themselves the answer to the question which they raise. Why are we wired to have these experiences?

This is of course not limited to psychedelic trips. Jill Bolte Taylor’s description of the right hemisphere glimpsing “a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people” reflects a similar experience, and we can also find this within our most ordinary self-observation. The contemporary practice of “mindfulness”, derived loosely from introspective traditions involves the act of directing attention to the quality of experience, of inner witness as an inherent good, as atheist Sam Harris again put it in a discussion on spirituality for non-believers:

…merely witnessing experience, the fact that consciousness itself has an intrinsic quality of well-being, that that which is aware of sadness isn’t truly sad and that which is aware of joy is the same thing as that which is aware of sadness and so you can keep falling back into that position of merely witnessing and that can become very very expansive and that can become a context of a kind of self transcending love and happiness. (XVII)

Likewise, philosopher Thomas Nagel has observed in an essay on death that something about experience itself contains an inherent good: “There are elements which, if added to one’s experience, make life better; there are other elements which if added to one’s experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. … The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its consequences.” (XVIII)

These are observations about human experience rather than about the universe itself, but it is a trend of modern epistemology to assume that all experience is arbitrary until it can be reduced to an objective set of propositions. But as I hope I have attempted to show, this is problematic at best.

But one objection to the valuing of the human desire for unity and intrinsic connection, or for an ethical ontology based around consciousness and selfhood, is that we are a spec of reality, and what is out there is vast and indifferent, as the physicist Lawrence Krauss put it:

“We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a one percent bit of pollution in a universe…we are completely irrelevant. Why such a universe in which we are so irrelevant would be made for us is beyond me.” (XIX)

The problems here are many. Relevance is, obviously, relative. And since as far as we know we are the only conscious creatures in the entire observable universe, and since we look out at its stars and nebulae coming to us down the light-years and respond with awe and curiosity at its beauty, it is no less fanciful to say that we are the universe being aware of itself, and thus could not be less significant.

Either way, insignificance is an interpretation. We are left with two choices. The first is to assume everything outside of our own reality cannot be described using anything other than facts that entirely resist value judgements, which is the ground of the scientific method as we know it, and what makes it so powerful as a tool. Science attempts to exclude value judgements and be as objective as conceivably possible, an approach which labours to lift it from dogma but one that naturally produces a highly aspectual kind of truth. Krauss’ statement is therefore ironically unscientific, the product of stretching the scientific approach into a worldview and forcing it to make value judgements it is not equipped to make. If indifference is framed in the approach then indifference is what you will get, it takes monumental arrogance to claim you have discovered it.

One could also observe that this approach seems akin to studying music without ever listening to it lest its beauty or subjective quality influence your understanding of its structure. As a heuristic approach this might be fine. Yet doing this solely would inevitably cause you to see music as something entirely different than what it is, something coldly structural and lifeless. A second approach, taking the music metaphor, is to recognise that beauty and harmony as they are met subjectively are as important to its reality as its structure, and objective separation does not give us a more true world but a less true one.

After all science, as objective as it has become, rests on a religious framework. It depends on the assumption that the universe is ordered, law-given, harmonious and intelligible — qualities that can not explain themselves any more than I can bite my own teeth.

These divisions between spheres of reality have significant consequences in society today. Our avenues of truth have become increasingly siloed in such a way that apparently simple concepts seem to divide us. What is a woman? Your choice is between insistent literalism: only a corollary of sex and nothing else, or else a literalised metaphor: if I feel like a woman on the inside or I like feminine things, I am a woman. These two sides seem to fight it out across social media on a daily basis, in arguments that look oddly similar to Dawkins vs Creationist debates about a literalist view of Genesis that Origen described 1700 years ago as “ignorant” (XX).

Yet many of our contemporary debates rest on strangely muddled Christian foundations. The entire of the ideology of gender muddles together a strange rejection of Christian categories with a quasi-appropriation of its moral ideas. Believing people have some particular value because they are marginalised or oppressed, and the emergence of competitive victimhood as a way of apparently re-ordering society is a limb pulled from Christian morality. Yanked from its foundations, recycled into a literalist world that denies the metaphysics in favour of an oddly incongruent individualism that is drifting towards transhumanism, these ideas circle back on themselves, and the constantly evolving morality of progressivism seems to mirror Caligula putting his laws so high up no one could read them and then enforcing them nonetheless. They are chaotic, self-contradictory and unmoored from any questions of why we believe them.

III — Morality and Metaphysics

This takes us to an important issue of our time. We cannot exist without moral beliefs, morality is our way of being, corporately and individually, but in order for us to not descend into relativism we have to accept that moral claims are metaphysical claims. To believe some person in a war torn part of the world is inherently valuable and possessing of rights is not different from believing a piece of land is holy, it is a belief, and one that for the most part in the West we actually believe.

Yet we must also hold this in tension with the fact that we don’t know if we do believe it. Author of popular book Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari said that “human rights are just like heaven and like God, it’s just a fictional story that we have invented and spread around. It may be a very nice story, it may be a very attractive story, but it’s just a story. It’s not a reality. It’s not a biological reality. Just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, homosapiens have no rights also, take a human, cut him open, look inside, you find the blood and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys but you don’t find any rights.” (XXI)

You also don’t find consciousness. This quote might be read as a blunt description of what we call the “hard problem” of consciousness, and such an approach, I hope it is clear by now, represents the entire problem of the real “fiction” we have told ourselves: the idea that an objective epistemology can function as a total way of knowing, as a worldview.

Moral claims then are clearly metaphysical claims. While Herodotus might have observed that custom is king, our customs relate to how we see the world, and one of the characteristics of a moral worldview, especially in the West, however individualistic or multicultural we become, is the belief that certain moral truths are universal. You can’t attend a protest about injustice, violence or war crimes somewhere in the world, then come home to the belief that the idea on which such protestation is based is “just a fictional story that we have invented”. We believe our moral claims really are true, yet divorced from metaphysics they leave us with a deeply incongruous world.

So what if the world was the other way around? If you ask the question of whether you can maintain Christian morality we still hang on to deeply if you don’t really believe Christianity is true, in a strange way you are asking the wrong question. We already accept it as true, we have just fostered a mind that has unmoored truth from stories, traditions and metaphysical claims under the inane belief that what is really true is what you find when you break something down until, unsurprisingly, you don’t find very much. We still hear the music, but all we allow ourselves to believe in is the silent and soundless notation.

What Yuval Noah Harari is describing are “tropes” as much as they are stories: symbols, metaphors and metonymies that we used to orient our world. These parts of our world are ever-present and intuitive. If someone you love gives you a gift, for example, you don’t take it apart and analyze its molecular structure and conclude that it is nothing. But nor would you say that the meaning of a gift is an arbitrary story we make up and put about, thus making it kind of nothing apart from that we pretend it is something. The meaning is there, the stories we tell reveal our world because we cannot exist without them, we are them. They have a causal reality, they have a conscious reality. They may be mystifyingly emergent, but they are as real as electricity.

One could suggest then that our minds receive reality as much as they create it. We tend to think of the brain as a kind of light bulb that “emits” consciousness, rather than “permitting” or even “receiving”, a theory that posits a bottom up materialism that is to say the least, unproven, to say more, a category error. What we separate out as “consciousness”, if not fundamentally separate, reflects that reality is qualitative as much as it is quantitative, and that our reception of it may be subjective, but this does not make it arbitrary. Beauty or goodness then would not be stories we make up, but aspects of reality we encounter, meaning would be another.

Of course, one of the most important stories we tell ourselves, or have told ourselves, is about our very existence, about why there is anything, why it is beautiful or good, vast or terrifying. Here we are at last: ὁ Θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν. God is love.

At some point, disappointing as it may be, this essay will end at a diving board. If my points so far have any validity then there is a shore beyond which reasoning can only point, and the conclusion is subjective in the most meaningful sense of the word. But that said, reason and objectivity must be signposts of truth, dismissing them only takes us to the liberal handed, quasi-reasoning and fundamentalist gullibility many people are afraid of when they think of the clichés of religion. It still matters, and we can go as far as we can.

Love is not the only epithet used for God in the Christian bible, nor does love as we often use it quite encompass the scale in which the love of God is illustrated in the bible or the history of theology and art. Love translates several words that are used in the bible, most notably the Hebrew Ḥeseḏ, and the Greek agapé, each carrying an aspect of elements we use the extremely flexible and clearly sentimentalised word for in modern English. Indeed, most visions of the presence of God in the bible strike not sentimental love but terror, in Isaiah 6 when the prophet has a vision of the throne room of God in which angels circle singing “Holy, Holy, Holy”, he falls on his face and responds “Woe is me! For I am lost!”. In the New Testament book of Revelation upon seeing the risen Jesus, John falls on his face “as though dead”. The shepherds who see angels above their flocks in Luke 2 are “terrified”, and the response of the angels not to be afraid reflects the commonest command given in the bible: “do not fear”. God’s love is then is not a sentimental platitude, but inconceivably awe striking, holy.

God’s moral nature is also one that grants us freedom and responsibility. A strange and paradoxical relationship is upheld in theology that is oddly upheld in our modern balancing of subjective reality and physicalism, a balance between sovereignty and the responsibility that comes with free choice. The early chapters of Genesis seem to equate the emergence of consciousness with “the knowledge of good and evil”, a merism that reflects not just dualism but a plunging into a moral world of self-awareness and freedom. Like our own instinctive morality today still clearly reflects, a moral standard of love is simultaneously a judge against those who violate it.

Of course the impediment of our own violation of this command to rule over sin seems oddly inevitable. Jill Bolte Taylor’s glimpse of a right hemisphere of “beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people” is an obvious admittance of the fact that while we would all like the world to look like this, we more often do not find it does. In fact, it is rare that we do. The history of Christianity itself is a history of men appropriating and then egregiously violating their own commandments, and this history of hypocrisy understandably stands against many people’s belief in the real thing.

But this dim reflection of judgement upon Christianity itself carries in it part of what Christianity proposes. In the New Testament the Stoic concept of conscience is mirrored in the image of God that we bear, a sense that we carry within us both a self and a reflection of the standard against which and by which we are able to know ourselves. Perhaps one might argue that this is what language-defiant experiences of “sacredness… love, joy, and a deeply felt sense of encountering ultimate reality”(XVI), or that previously mentioned young man’s experience of “love for self, our love for each other…the most earth shattering concept that ever dared to enter my mind” are a reflection of. Such a reality is part of us, as well as being a standard we are held to. We bear the image we also violate.

The proposition of Christianity is that the fragments of the experience we encounter, and the moral intuitions we possess as well as their contradictions in the world, their mixing with suffering and struggle that characterise much of human reality, are brought together by a second kind of revelation, the revelation of the bible and most of all, universally, in the person of Jesus, around which all of these fragments resolve into integration.

Besides the world of inner, subjective experience, the New Testament makes clear that while the Kingdom of God begins in the inner place, it looks like something on the outside. While certain moral ideas are absorbed from various ideas circulating in the Roman world, nothing prepares for Jesus radical command to love even your enemies, nor the cross societal imperative of the apostolic mission to love with the self-sacrificing love of Jesus.

Writer and reluctant atheist Douglas Murray said in a discussion with the theologian N.T. Wright about the role of Christianity in a world of disbelief, that while he had deep criticisms of much the church in its present state, as well as a reluctance to believe certain things, he had been profoundly emotionally struck by member of a black church who had offered forgiveness to a young white supremacist who had walked into a service and shot several in the church as they worshipped. He was at the time doing speaking events with Cornel West, a Christian socialist who Murray disagrees with on almost everything, but Murray described being deeply moved by West referring to the white shooter as his “brother” (XXII).

In Matthew 11 when Jesus is asked by John the Baptist from prison if he is indeed “the one who is to come” and Jesus replied: “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.” Jesus teaches that these signs are the outward manifestation of a Kingdom that comes not in power but in humility and charity, and in Jesus claim that it is he himself that will judge the world on their treatment of “the least of these”.

Glimpses of harmony, higher unity, beauty and goodness may indeed fire us to seek inner experience. But the message of the New Testament is that this harmony emerges in the world as ordinary love for one another, love as you have been loved.

And so it is that the failures and hypocrocies of Christian history are mixed with the quiet and constant working out of this belief. So many of the intrinsic values we take for granted in Western society, be it concern for the marginalised, the emergent concepts of human rights or conceptions of healthcare emerging from Christian efforts in the fourth century, as Albert Jonsen, University of Washington historian of medicine describes while early medical history begun with the Greeks and the Romans who might care for slaves as a resource only:

“the second great sweep of medical history begins at the end of the fourth century, with the founding of the first Christian hospital at Caesarea in Cappadocia, and concludes at the end of the fourteenth century, with medicine well ensconced in the universities and in the public life of the emerging nations of Europe…“During these centuries the Christian faith . . . permeated all aspects of life in the West. The very conception of medicine, as well as its practice, was deeply touched by the doctrine and discipline of the Church. This theological and ecclesiastical influence manifestly shaped the ethics of medicine, but it even indirectly affected its science since, as its missionaries evangelized the peoples of Western and Northern Europe, the Church found itself in a constant battle against the use of magic and superstition in the work of healing. It championed rational medicine, along with prayer, to counter superstition.” (XXIII)

Yet in spite of its role in shaping our societies, Jesus message was not a political one. When Jesus was asked if we should pay taxes he asked whose image was on the coin, when they replied that it was Caesar he said “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”. This statement, the undercurrent of which nonetheless leads Jesus to the cross, reflects a far deeper dynamic to the teaching of Jesus message. Perhaps it is political in that it offers to overturn the very dynamics of worldly power by proclaiming a radical concern for the lesser and an equality that dismisses temporal authority. Yet Jesus death represents these dynamics not as a game of social welfare but a bursting through of a moral reality itself through transformed individuals. While Christianity has been entangled with the empires of the world, attempts to politicise the moral dynamics of Christianity in forms such as Marxism without any of the myths or beliefs are blood soaked and disastrous. Jesus overturning of power commands a transformation of the inward self that makes itself known as a radical compassion for the lesser, an aligning of the will with the love of God.

In the culmination of Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I have a dream speech’, he recites words “I have a dream that Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain, And the glory of the Lord will be revealed”.

These words rarely make popular quotations from this immensely powerful and history-altering speech, yet at the time they would have rung with familiar meaning to anyone in the Western world listening. They come from the old testament book of Isaiah, in a prophetic passage widely taken by Christians to foresee the coming of Jesus, and are preceded by the words that open Mark’s gospel with the introduction of John the Baptist: A voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God”.

King, a preacher and deeply learned theologian, understood this as representing poetically the great message of the Old Testament prophets, that the redemption of the world looks like the equality civil rights is demanding, that the low are lifted up and the high are brought down. The song of Hannah in the book of Samuel says “The Lord makes poor and rich; He humbles, He also exalts. He raises the poor from the dust, He lifts the needy from the garbage heap”.

History to this day is still shaped by the quiet outworking of this Kingdom proclaimed by the person of Jesus. We recall its echos instinctively across culture wars and global outcries at values that come from we know not where. This intuition is found in our very minds, in the depths of moral experience we are capable of feeling, both in mind shattering immensity and in quiet and simple reflection. Love is not a platitude, it is the grounding of who we are. Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth century anchoress writing during the backdrop of the brutal hundred years war, the peasants revolt and the destruction of the black death, wrote:

Our faith comes from the natural love of our soul and from the bright light of reason and from the steadfast perception of God which we have when we are first made…the sensory being is grounded in nature, in mercy and grace, and this ground enables us to recieve gifts which lead us to eternal life…God is nearer to us than our own soul. (LT55–56)

Julian, the first woman recorded writing in the English language (that we know for certain is a woman), wrote that she received a series of visions aged thirty when she was near to death. Later she wrote these “showings” in a short text and a longer texts in which she considers more deeply the meanings. Throughout the visions of God’s love she wrestles with and asks questions of sin and of the contradictions of justice and love, returning to the vision of the compassion of God that will, as she comes back to, “make all manner of things well”.

She concludes the purpose of her visions: “Do you want to know what your Lord meant? Know well that love was what he meant. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you? For love…this is how I was taught that our Lord’s meaning is love.” (LT86), she also says: “I saw that for us he is everything that we find good and comforting. He is our clothing, wrapping us for love, embracing and enclosing us for tender love, so that he can never leave us, being himself everything that is good for us, as I understand it.” (LT- 5)

Here we are then, a diving board. Considering Christianity in the modern world is a reflection of how personal such things are, and we all have our own obstacles to overcome, not the least the embarrassment and discredit of those calling themselves Christians and acting otherwise. But history has been no different. When Julian was writing those words a lengthy war was being fought across Europe by knights and kings who also called themselves Christians, as piously as anyone today. But so too has the outworking of Jesus message gone on, and it permeates more of what we value than we are often willing to observe. Perhaps it is fitting I end this lengthy essay with a bible text. Reasoning will take us no further, as Thomas Aquinas said when towards the end of his life he ceased his writing, and being implored to continue he said: “All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me”.

So, from Isaiah 55:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
You will go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands.
Instead of the thornbush will grow the juniper,
and instead of briers the myrtle will grow.
This will be for the Lord’s renown,
for an everlasting sign,
that will endure forever.”

If you’ve got this far, thanks for reading.

Written by Matthew

Let’s meet the mountains and see what they heard. https://thisisleisfullofnoises.substack.com/