Orthodox Worldview

We don’t describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe
(Rene Descartes)

Symbolic Grammar

To navigate the world of infinite potential one has to zero-in on what is relevant. But the contexts of life tend to not stay the same for too long. As circumstances of life change, so does what is relevant. Therefore, the category of what is relevant can only be accounted in terms that are flexible and more or less mysterious. It can only be accounted by the language that is humble enough to leave a space in its center for the ultimately inconceivable and unapproachable.

To orient ourselves in the world we need to understand religious language, a symbolic reference map that renders otherwise irrelevant information — because there is too much of it— relevant. Essentially, the task of every worldview is to sacralize certain aspects of reality by analogizing them with the divine reality. When we recognize certain finite things around us to be divine, we effectively say that this particular thing is an expression of the absolute.

Expressed as forms in space and patterns in time, anthropomorphised in archetypes in space and narratives in time, these are the symbols that meaningfully connect human consciousness with its material environment (they symbolise something, and symbol means to connect). When we participate in a symbol we instantiate and identify with what it symbolises. In a very meaningful sense, when we partake in a kiss with somebody we embody and become love, because a kiss is a symbol of love. Put simply, religious language affords participative symbols that install meaning to our lives.

There is no alternative to having an interpretive schema when it comes to living in the actual world, acting and deciding. The word decide stems from Latin word to cut, which means preferring some things to other things, and in order to do so a certain value hierarchy is inevitable —an interpretive schema that judges on account of a set of axioms. Human beings, independently of their desires, automatically sacralize certain segments of reality in order to be able to make decisions in the world; the only question is whether this sacralizing is made consciously or unconsciously — either we are aware about how we name our God, or we are put at the mercy of subconscious drives (gods) and goals of others — this is how idolatry plays itself out. The only alternative to religious language is idolatry.

If we are serious about rendering love as a fundamental source of life, it has to be discerned amidst flesh around us and placed at the heart of our moral grammar, of our map of meaning. This is what “meeting Christ” means — an act of faith in a person who gave nothing but love but was crucified precisely for it. Using a somewhat eccentric analogy, it can be said that just as agents of Eros need an identified embodied object to actualize their drive (instead of leaving sexual drive rudimentary and impotent), so the agents of Agape need an incarnated reference point (Logos) to actualize their logoï. If grace is defined as “a transformation through which we see ourselves as desired, significant, wanted”, then in both cases we are cut from it, mistaking ourselves for its real source — others. In the case of erotic love, its self-encapsulation is grotesquely symbolised by masturbation — an act of satisfying an ecstatic drive by one’s own means, as if saying “I am my own source of pleasure. I do not need the other to bring me pleasure and the other does not need me to bring pleasure to him or her”. Rowan Williams puts it this way: ““Solitary sexual activity may release tension, but it’s not about this business of being perceived and transformed. So not much about grace. So in the case of agapic love, its self-encapsulation — self-love or Greek philautia — is considered to be “the root of all sin” by the Church Fathers. Not much about grace.

Our aim here is to demonstrate how orthodox symbolic grammar is not just aligned with the fundamental constants of phenomenological experience, but serves as a framework for their permanent rescusciation and subversion, simultaneously. Christian metaphysics does not just coordinate one’s being in the world, but radically transforms one’s understanding of it in the first place. As David Bentley Hart has put it, at the core of Christianity lays “a certainty that history has been invaded by God in Christ in such a way that nothing can stay as it was, and that all terms of human community and conduct have been altered at the deepest of levels”. Christianity’s initial impulse has emanated from two traditions — Platonic bent of Hellenistic philosophy and prophetic wing of Judaeic religion, thus joining holistic-hierarchical vision with emancipatory enslavement by the Absolute. This joining of Greek strive for discerning constants of reality with Judaeic ascetic allegiance to the Good empowers creative tension of an unprecedented kind. For the purposes of sustaining this set of claims, following reflections will concentrate on how Christian symbolic landscape accounts for the constants of phenomenological experience delineated earlier. The three prime attributes of the Christian Worldview are:

1. Holistic Set of Phenomenological Archetypes That Correspond to the Constants of Transformative Experience;
2. Incarnate Logos as Microcosm and Mediator in Historical Presence;
3. Axis of Self-Sacrificial Praxis for the Sake of Love and Truth Discerned in Other, Demonstrated in the Impossible-to-take-one-step-further Narrative of Christ (sinlessness-betrayal-torture-crucifixion-atonement), and Recovered as Imperative for Emulation in the Metamodern Condition.

Transfigurating Archetypes

Symbolic landscape: in red is Chaos, in blue is Order, in green is the Self, in bold are the Christian figures that join and epitomize positive traits of the three

If the reality around us fits to the archetypes, then it seems interesting and worthy of care. The problem is that the archetypes can be seriously tilted and damaged — in case of individuals and groups of people. For example, take a guy who had a terrible experience with the opposite sex — have been rejected, denied, excluded and humiliated. His image of a woman would often tilt toward something egregiously negative. When archetypes are tilted in this or any other way, those who hold them begin effectively living in a deformed world, where they are going to assign certain values and characteristics to the objects and agents that do not “deserve” it. They would extrapolate their inner deformation on the environment, which will gradually ensure that their account of the world is radically out of sync with reality. To stay intact with reality on its own terms, the archetypes have to be configured properly. But is there a “proper” configuration? It depends on what our aims are. If we aim at a person to live a fulfilled and life of actualised potential and at the communities to have a stable collective interactions — then yes, there is such a configuration and we might call it “balanced”. In it, all archetypes are taken into account and ascribed with proper significance. As James Surwillo has argued, Christian metaphysics “wins the culture war because it had naturally formulated archetypes that were most true in story form. Whether the historical nature is factually accurate makes no difference as long as the rational aligns with the spiritual in narrative, myth, and symbology”. Christianity offers an incarnation of a complete set of archetypes with positive valence:

Hence, “Nature” is good and represented as a pure Virgin Mother who, while staying pure, gives birth to the savior. She joins “the birth-giving womb” trait of Nature with “accepting forgiveness”, au contraire its negative side where “the tomb of death” joins “frozen and vengeful fixation”. “Culture” is presented as a loving and meritocratic Father, who rewards good acts and has no sympathy for the evildoers. He joins “earthly wisdom” with unconditional parental love, au contraire the tyrannical tendency of culture to control and the tendency of the powerful to see power as an aim in itself. And the “Self” is represented as a Son, whose love is unlimited, truth is unbridled, and riotous agency in the world reaches extremes of human condition — he was a sinless compassionate lamb who took all sins of the world upon himself and sacrificied his life to redeem them. For it he was betrayed, tortured, and crucified, but even on the cross he preserved his unbounded love for his Father and his tormentors. This story cannot be taken one bit further, this is the limit of what a human being can aspire to. With this story God provided us not with any philosophy or ideological set of laws, but with a mission to live human life in love, by imitating God’s actions, by partaking in God’s action as symbolised in the symbol of Christ.

So Christianity does not just offer a holistic set of phenomenological invariances. It might be argued, that in Christianity we have a rather subversive way of dealing with the archetypal reality — more transfigurative than balancing and sustaining. Instead of harmonizing Yin-Yang way of Taoism, Buddhist detachment, complete surrender of Islam or an inclusive relativism of Hinduism, Christianty affirms self-sacrificial engagement with reality around us in the service of God. Constants of orthodox symbolic grammar are set in such a way that archetypal transfiguration.

Orthodox Cosmology

In the scientific worldview, Earth elliptically cycles around Sun, while from the perspective of human consciousness, sun appears to rise in the morning and set in the evening. Moreover, it is around this “appearance” that the whole structure of our time and concepts like day and night are constructed, and the fact that is “works” makes all the difference — we cannot help that the phenomenology of our lives is dependent on ‘first-hand’ experience of a human being — that is the nature of reality that is ever going to be important and significant. We do not live in the scientific world, we can occasionally look at the world from this perspective, but we cannot live in the world according to this perspective. We cannot help the facts that sun rises in the morning and falls in the evening — and it just happens so that we configure our timeframe according to these facts. We cannot help the fact that, as argued by J. Pageau, most of the time the earth is flat.

It does not matter if video-game designers did not aim at explicit recreating of an ancient cosmology, the crucial thing is that they did it anyway, whether because market economy of the video-game industry selected for what was truly interesting to the audience, or because there is actually no other way to provide a meaningful engagement save for narrating a story of hierarchical ascension. In the video games, the Earth is flat and the World is a square map, where players look for guidance and navigation. “Despite the pervasive nature of modern science… universal cosmology is still there, lingering so close to us that it has found itself trapped between our actual human experience and our scientific theories about the world”, yet “the Sun… still rises in the East and the Earth does not move unless there is an earthquake, and the sky is still lit up there stretched like a dome over our heads.” Notwithstanding, we are still being told that this phenomenological experience is but an illusion — and it is hard to imagine how conflicted and disharmonized one’s frame of reference ought to be to maintain that the only and most crucial reality we are ever going to actually experience in our lives is a mere delusional semblance. J. Pageau takes discussion to a completely otherwordly dimension by declaring a war contra the Copernican revolution — “there is a growing image on the recent horizon of human experience, it is an image of a family or a group of friends all next to each other at a table or in some other intimate setting, yet all interacting with tablets, ipods and smartphones as if the people around them didn’t exist. I would like to propose that this image, this reality is the final result of Galileo’s cosmological model”. By its nature, the disjunctive and reductive “scientific method… is a revolt against qualitative evaluation, it is an attack upon any teleology in phenomena, any meaning in things or how they change”. In other words, scientific method, being a necessary part of a whole process of Logos, on its own accord becomes a rudimentary and partial destructive mechanism, bereft of any praxeological meaning (see Hume’s distinction between “is” and “ought”). It’s deficiency trudges from it’s complementary nature. There are two basic modes of thinking: poetic conjunction (where one sees two otherwise contradictory things to be somehow composing a whole which is bigger than the sum of its parts) and reductive disjunction (when we explain gestalt phenomena as being a mere grouping of separate facts that can be studied in and of themselves thus explaining the higher phenomena and reducing it to be a sum of its parts). Only when these two modes (gravity and entropy) are working together, the life (which is born out of tension) becomes possible. In the real life this tension was only addressed and transcended in Christianity, whose central figure Christ is a microcosm and mediator which builds a bridge between these two worlds, by embodying judgement and love simultaneously, marrying Truth and Love in a certain style of behavior which is fully synchronised with the Divine process of Logos through which the world is created. If science ultimately separates Heaven from Earth, theory from practice, and humanity from meaning, Christ ultimately joins the two and mends every fragmentation by being the One in whom everything comes together (in striking contrast to the Devil in whom everything fragments by dint of lies, deceit, and hate (Greek word Devil means “to through apart” and “accuse”)).

In 1922, fr. P. Florensky wrote an article in his “Imaginary Value in Geometry” in which he used general theory of relativity to show that considering the relativity of motion, one could develop a perfectly coherent mathematical model in which the Earth is the reference of motion. This model would in fact correspond to Ptolemy’s cosmological descriptions. This article was one of the reasons the Communist State gave for his trial and execution, a dark irony considering the usual “violent religion” vs. “enlightening science” rhetoric we are tought in primary school regarding Galileo’s censorship. What is interesting about Florensky’s article is his reason for writing it. He said that although Copernican model is fine, “Ptolemy’s system, however, has priority due to the compliance with common sense and loyalty to phenomenological, credible experience, compliance with philosophical reason and finally, compliance with the rules of geometry” [Florensky 1922]. Our aim here is not to show that heliocentric vision is wrong (it is not), our aim is to prove that the language we use to inform our life decisions ought to be commensurate with how consciousness experiences reality, and not with how technology and machines experience it (say, telescopes and microscopes). Our aim is to posit the worldview in which an obvious thing is taken into accout — the only vessel of human engagement in the world is our embodied consciousness. Our aim is to ingrain the antroposcene with the priority it deserves.

St Maximus the Confessor — central figure of the early Orthodox thought — developed a very complex and beautiful cosmological doctrine, where the world and life are created by God as a gift of excessive love. This process of creation is called Logos through wich everything was created — thus in every detail of the fractal world can be discerned a strive for the three transcendental limits: beauty, goodness and truth. When something is full of life, then three of these transcendentals ought to be discovered there in some guise. The process of Logos is a certain style in which these three transcendentals are aligned and we as humans are lucky to have Logos embodied in flesh and acted out human life (Jesus), so that we can align ourselves with it by copying its actions, thus becoming like God (process of this syncing is called theōsis). In us we have a seed of divine image, since we too were created by Logos, these central seeds of our nature are called logoï, that inherit the image of Logos. By setting our eyes straight on Logos getting rid of all the shkurki of sin in the process of metanoïa to only leave place for our logos (purity of heart-love and purity of mind-truth) we are able to participate in this process of Logos, enter into a communion with God. This abstract language of metanoïa, theōsis, logoï and Logos is a map that helps people navigate moral and intellectual landscapes they inevitable find themselves in as they live their lives. It is important to understand the consequences of this view of cosmos, where human being is not a random instance of the mutations of matter, but rather a conscious agent whose actions may determine the direction where the life will be tilted — whether it will be Hell or Paradise. This cosmology describes how the whole history of the cosmos, its beginning and end, its ontological constitution and teleology, has its center in Christ, the Logos of God, Who shows to creation’s multifarious logoi the proper way of conversion along the ‘radius’ of the Logos towards it’s centre. It is this re-discovered radius of life in sanctity, life that brings the ultimate actualization and happiness, where metamodernism strives to place all of us (for to have a truly happy life, one has to sacrifice it for the highest possible aim — that of love. This is why they say that one never owns something unless he gave it away as a gift). The consequence of this cosmology is that it puts human consciousness in the centre, not in the sense of it having a ultimate value in comparison to other things of the universe, but in the sense of recognizing that as human beings we have to take ultimate responsibility for our actions, which implies actually living in the world where our actions have ultimate meaning and significance, world whose constituent elements are categories of human perception — narrated acts that have meaning.

M. Heidegger reclaims ontological significance of Earth arguing that “what this word (Earth) means here is far removed from the idea of a mass of matter and from the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that in which the arising of everything that arises is brought back — as, indeed, the very thing that it is — and sheltered. In the things that arise the earth presences as the protecting one.” In this deeply Orthodox perspective, Earth is understood as Practice and Heaven is understood as Theory. It is when a certain segment of matter (Earth) is clean enough (see immaculate conception of Mary), then the grace of Heaven (Holy Spirit) incarnates in it the Word (Jesus) which is totally synchronised (by its acts and thoughts) with the eternal Truth (Heavenly Father). If not for this centre of creation (Logos), material reality (practice) could not be joined with the eternal reality (theory), thus incapacitating consciousness, since it is in it’s very nature to discern and render things that are Caesar’s to Caesar (material possessions (matter) and ephemeral power), and things that are God’s to God (moral acts (what matters) and eternal truth). Fr. Andrew Louth gives a concise description of the process of syncing dichotomies (process of Logos), showing how “by ‘a way of life proper and fitting to the Saints’, the human person unites paradise and the oikoumenê to make one earth. Then, by imitating by virtue the life of the angels, the human person unites heaven and earth. Then, by being able to perceive the logoi of the created order, the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible falls away. And finally, by uniting created nature with uncreated nature though love, the coinherence or interpenetration of God and the creation becomes apparent” [Louth 2013, p. 4]. Christ merges the atemporal constants of experience (Heaven) and human flesh as it acts in matter and temporality (Earth) thus being the microcosm and mediator at once.

Crucifixion

Various thinkers have different perspectives on the significance of the central Christian event, that of Crucifixion. Jung mostly connected what happens on the Cross with his process of symbol formation, which is the resolution of the horizontal tension of opposites of good and evil by the descent of consciousness into the realm of unconscious and emergence out of that a greater symbol of wholeness. This is exactly what transcendence is — where two opposites are held in creative tension not by outright overcoming, but by a metamodern confessing of truth of the both of them, an oscillation between the two in faith that what will emerge out of it will transcend what was before and that this miraculous incarnative resurrection is the very process that sustains and, in a way, creates the new life of the Universe — over and over again. It was Les Oglesby, who fascinatingly reconciled this horizontal reading with the more orthodox, vertical reading of Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Balthasar’s conception is theological (which is what we need for the task at hand) — for him in Crucifixion and descensus the highest Divine Love is connected to the lowest Hell of human existence and held in a tension of similarity of greater dissimilarities. For Balthasar, this miraculous bridging of the gap between Creator and creation is the ultimate meaning of the Cross (and of any particular human life — it is impossible to take this radius of narratological meaning one step further).

Peterson’s understanding is mostly concerned with the process of Logos — engagement, subordinated to the principles of Truth and Love. When one participates in the process of Logos (namely, when one follows the way of Christ), when one never lies, only tells the truth and acts solely for the sake of love — she is willing to let die all of the things which are incommensurate with the modality of Christ, even if it includes sacrificing herself (this is what called Imitation of Christ in the catholic spiritual tradition). This process draws on the biblical understanding of Jesus as Divine Fire, near which not only redemption is close, but also the hell of judgement. It is the most sweet to be near one’s Ideal, but also the most painful since we always fall short of it. So for Peterson, this process of suffering on the Cross, when is undertaken willingly on behalf of the crucified, is the only way of engaging with the world which brings redemption and alleviates suffering — and he means it technically. Suffering is the only ultimate reality you cannot pretend doesn’t exist — when you suffer it is just you and your suffering — you can’t pretend your way out of it. No wonder the central figure of our tradition is a person who suffers on the cross. This symbol of Crucifixion thus is the ultimate locus of meaningfulness of human existence, an archetypal narrative that cannot be taken one bit further. So, making it short, Peterson speaks about the Process of Logos (sacrificing oneself willingly for the sake of Truth and Love), whose story of Incarnation within human history is unsurpassable in terms of archetypal significance (it is the story where human condition is taken to its limit — sinless loving human is betrayed, tortured, crucified… and yet victorious — a slain lamb on the Throne — the ultimate inversion of natural order, subversion of every hierarchy, for the sake of one ultimate hierarchy of Divine Love). The problem with Peterson, however, is that he would often confuse categories of Father as protective culture and Father who is in Heaven. It may be speculated that his oftentimes unchecked conservatism stems from this confused language. Evidently, Son does not play the script written by Father as Culture, Son plays along a very different tune, composed by One who utilised Word as an instrument of creation in the first place, and it could not be Culture, since by definition Culture is something which is a product of the outside agencies. Christian notion of God the Father obviously has consequences for how we deal with Culture, as it is understood as somehow analogous to God the Father as worthy of respect and loyalty; but there appears a big distinction when notions like praise and worship come along. In no way any particular static Culture deserves unchecked worship — one of pragmatic reasons for the idea of God is that it transfers the locus of the sacredness from any embodiment of the corruptible worldly power to the God above – it is exactly what prohibiting idolatry means.

Postscript: How Does Christ Save People?

1. Humility that is not false. Let’s say that something unexpected happens — a glitch in a system. Memory won’t help — you have to figure it out as it unfolds by paying close attention to what happens here and now. By disidentifying with what you already know you shake off the false layers of information that mess with your ability to perceive reality as it really is. How do you accept any irregularity? You have to agree with it willfully, otherwise you’ll be disenfranchised from reality — will fall pray to the illusion that your mind is so willing to construct for you. The faster you yield to what you know — the better. Jonathan Pageau says that in Christianity “the expression of the absolute is equal to the absolute itself”. This relation between God the Father and God the Son makes world exist, makes it real instead of illusory by interpenetrating earth with heaven and heaven with earth. This relation is enough to account for the existence of the world we live in. However, this relation is not enough to account for God, because there is also God the Holy Spirit. Therefore, God always escapes our ability to render it fully meaningful, while at the same time talk about God renders the world we live in meaningful.
2. Spirituality. It may be useful to think about the Holy Spirit in terms of spirituality. If God the Father and God the Son coordinate human mediation between heaven and earth, Holy Spirit may be seen as something that directly inspires human beings with the essence of Godly relations. Holy Spirit affords inspiration, which affords living a life in the spirit of God. In this sense, spirituality is an exercise in bringing the spirit of finesse to living a human life as a mediation between infinite and finite. Spirituality directly offers us a respiratory metaphor to account for the existential finesse by liking it to a gracious exchange between inhale and exhale.
3. Metaphysical coordinates. Christianity provides the fullest metaphysical coordinates to orient one’s existence. We don’t describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe (Rene Descartes). Mandala — when the spirit is not directed upwards, towards haeven, but is rather self-centred and thus lost on a path that forms a maze. Protects from disoriented drifting — when you slowly begin to act on desires without conscious decisions.
4. I think there is a power in Christianity that comes precisely from the réalisation that in a very meaningful sense the eternal Christ (spiritual essence of personhood) is not placed higher than a concrete historical person Jesus from Nazareth. That temporal body of Jesus is not less important than the timeless figure of Jesus. Or, as Jonathan Pageau has put it, “the expression of the infinite is not less important that infinite itself. It is what makes this world real, ascertain that it is not a mere illusion”. It is in this equivocation that a Christian convergence of heaven and earth happens when the material creature is put on par with divine and ethereal principalities. In this way, no particle of creation is left irrelevant or is to be left uninhabited. The task of a Christian is to bring this convergence to every aspect of reality — to partake in the agapic dissipation of God’s love into the whole of creation — to inhabit the uninhabited, to spiritualise.
5. Of course this dialogue between conscious and unconscious is the primary juxtaposition of any complex spiritual system, Taoism has it at its root and Islam has it on its side, if I may say so. The understanding that life is best lived in harmony and through “golden means” is apparent to any wisdom tradition. But the essence of theological strive is to find correct or at least right words to express the true embodiment of this harmonious interaction between heaven and earth, culture and nature. Of course, for Christians, the ideal way of this interaction is modeled by Christ who lives in a very peculiar way that is said to redeem the whole of creation in the eyes of the Creator. What it means is that the way of harmony becomes accounted for in the form of human life narrative — the only form we are adapted to make sense of and emulate. How else might have the loving God helped us without diminishing our freedom if not by this unimposing example? The only way to cultivate love in another person is to love her unconditionally, and the only way to cultivate love in the community is to live out unconditioned love in your life — that is, to actually sacrifice the whole of yourself for the sake of the other. It is only through this sacrifice that the true love and communion are born.
6. On the necessity of God. We cannot get away with just depositing the primacy of the concrete others around us, although we cannot do without this acknowledgement. The reason we need to speak and relate to God is that we don’t occupy the same space with Him, we don’t fight with him for territory, He is not another ego greedy to control and satisfaction. In sharing this ground of relatedness to God with other people we create a community with a centre that allows for unconditioned forgiveness and sincere repentance — because people in it do not compete for recognition, but merely réalisé their deep relatedness to the infinite and unconditioned source of any action in the first place. This shared interdependence is what grounds and sustains the community around the principles and forms of love that does not want anything in returns, that is, refuses to recognize the games of live as a zero sum games where someone else’s failure necessarily means you’re being better off. And from this initial recognition stems the chance at giving rise to and participating in the non-zero-sum games — relations where my wellbeing requires your wellbeing and vice versa.
7. Other as Metaphor. In Jungian dream interpretation when we dream of other persons, it usually represents a part of ourselves that wants to come to light, a certain quality in us that has something to say. At the same time, the dreams about other people, especially ones we are close with in outer life, sometimes really just illuminate certain aspects of our relations with those persons or reveal something about those persons themselves. In other words, other persons in our unconscious realm are just other people and also metaphors for something within us simultaneously. Other people cannot help but serve as metaphors of what we haven’t yet integrated. Other people are the means of transformation in the sense that they are the only ones who can exemplify for us something we don’t yet have or don’t yet are.
8. Hell. Honestly, I think that the best artistic rendering of hell was accomplished in the “Stranger Things” TV series. They depicted an other-worldly realm called “Upside-Down” as a not very faraway place. Actually, it is just right here around us, people are in it, begging for help, but we don’t see them — we refuse to realize and sympathize with their suffering. I think this depiction is theologically accurate, because it emphasizes the mundane nature of people’s everyday hellscapes. It is not a place with which you threaten those whom you don’t like, but a very real place where real people around you are suffering — right now. This place is here and sometimes we are all here — in this state of Hell.