Church of England Newspaper (February 1958)
In the fourth of his interesting series of articles on Science and Christian Culture (Church of England Newspaper, December 20, 1957), Mr John Wren-Lewis paid me the high compliment of taking as his topic my recent book, Saving the Appearances.
The title of his article was “Can Religion Reach Out of Its World of Myth?” and he answered this question at the outset by suggesting, in harmony (I understand) with Bultmann, that, in order to do so, we must first learn to “appreciate what religion is really like”; and further that such an appreciation requires a more sympathetic understanding of the pre-scientific, or “mythological” world-view which is usually lacking today. This, he said, involves “the achievement of a new degree of historical imagination going beyond anything that most of our historians have yet essayed”.
Now I endeavoured to point out, in Saving the Appearances, that this mythological world-view was not an elaborate invention of human fancy, but had for untold ages, prior to the Scientific Revolution, been man’s actual way, and his only possible way, of experiencing the world of nature and the world of spirit.
I suggested that it arose from the fact of his “participating” in his environment (“original participation”) and I traced the way in which this participation was gradually eliminated by the historical influence of two separate processes, first the cultivation (by the Greeks, to start with) of logical and analytical thinking — a process which culminated in the Scientific Revolution — and, secondly, by the Jewish religion, with its determination to extirpate, as idolatry, all instinctual or sub-conscious workings of the numinous.
Towards the end of the book I suggested that, now that “participation” has been virtually eliminated, it lies in the nature and destiny of man to recover it and to experience it after a new fashion (“final participation”); that is, without losing the full personal existence in freedom, which only the elimination of the compulsively numinous could have brought about.
It is here that Mr Wren-Lewis parts company with me. I should be sorry in any event to lose such a generous companion and I am all the sorrier when I find that the reasons he gives for his departure suggest that even in the earlier part of the journey he was not quite as close to me as he supposed.
For let us look at his own account of the mythological world-outlook. He starts from the finding of psycho-analysis that
paranoia — the feeling that the world of experience is only a veil for hidden forces — is a disease, arising through the “projection” into the general environment of fantasies derived from personal relationships.
This, he gently admonishes me, is not a mere theory but “an empirical observation about how certain people refuse to face up to the full impact of personal relationships with other persons”, and it begs no philosophical questions about what the general environment is really like.
Well and good; but he continues (rather amazingly, in my view and, incidentally, in my italics): “And it would seem to follow from this that the virtual ‘universality’ of ‘mythological’ or ‘participatory’ consciousness means that the whole human race is to some degree given over to a neurotic attempt to escape from full personal life —.” And when he says “is”, it is clear (because that is his whole case) that he means “and always was”.
Now I do not want to throw non-sequiturs about, and I am sure Mr Wren-Lewis does not claim (though I fear a hasty or incautious reader might be left with the impression that he does) that this second proposition is also clinically established, or that it is anything more than a theory, or that it begs no philosophical or historical questions. The point is, that it is the theory which he in fact accepts.
In other words he assumes that the mythological world-outlook was based on self-deception. His view is, thus, not very far removed from the ordinary theory of ‘animism’, though, it is true he locates the self-deception at a deeper and more sub-conscious level. Like Max Müller and Herbert Spencer, Mr Wren-Lewis regards mythology as a “disease”; the only difference is, that for them it was a disease of language, while for him it was a disease of the psyche.
Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas; and this is where I am obliged, much against my inclination, to bite the hand that has fed me such acceptable praises. For the plain fact is, that the whole argument of Saving the Appearances is directed against precisely this view. Looking back now at the summary which Mr Wren-Lewis gave of that argument, I think I see where the misunderstanding began. He says that I describe pre-scientific man as “feeling that he participated in the natural order…”
But what I in fact described was pre-scientific man actually participating in the natural order; indeed, I thought I had made the distinction rather emphatically, as for instance on page 97 of Saving the Appearances, where I wrote:
We can either conclude that this persistent assumption [i.e. of participation] was a piece of elaborate self-deception, which just happened to last, not only from Aristotle but from the beginnings of human thought down to the 15th or 16th century A.D., or we can assume that there really was participation.
And I added that I found the second hypothesis the less fantastic of the two.
Mr Wren-Lewis clearly does not. He exhorts us to approach the mythological world-outlook with “a new degree of historical imagination” in order to appreciate what religion is really like — and our reward for doing so is to be told, what we have been so often told before, sometimes by theologians and sometimes by scientists, that practically everything human beings have ever thought about what mattered most to them — The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Homer’s Odyssey, the Oresteia, the Divine Comedy, for instance — was a phantasmagoria of self-deception, a tissue of neurotic fantasies.
I wonder if I cannot lure Mr Wren-Lewis back into going my way, after all? He said this new degree of historical imagination of his was “one of the most important tasks of our time!” Sure he must mean something more than that!
At one point he did, it is true, suggest that he meant much more. For, in half a sentence, he tentatively equated this universal neurosis with the Fall. If we are justified in inferring from this that the true meaning of the neurosis theory is, simply that all human thought and experience, for as far back as we can fruitfully imagine, has been infected with and distorted by the results of human sin, then indeed I heartily agree with him and I should only take leave to questions whether he had made a wise choice of terminology.
If on the other hand (and after reading his article three or four times I find the implication difficult to avoid) the neurosis theory involves the judgment that all mythological and religious handling and indeed the cultural life of humanity generally — apart from Jewish history — was without positive value or significance, then I suggest that this is just the predicament from which historical imagination is fitted to save us.
What, after all, do we mean by historical imagination — which is perhaps the new scientific method, the science of tomorrow; and which may well draw nourishment from an enlightened psychology? We must at least mean the capacity to experience a bit of human history from its own point of view as well as from our own. Because he lacked it wholly, Gibbon could write the history of the Roman Empire leaving out Christianity. He was not a historian, he was an 18th century philosophe compiling a chronicle.
These sweeping and eclectic value-judgments are its very antithesis. Historical imagination, when it comes, will, in my view, enable us to see the whole of human history as the process of man’s fall and redemption, and will assuredly prevent us from writing off nine-tenths of it as irrelevant.
It will prevent us from projecting our own particular psychological predicament back on to the past — it will, in fact, prevent us from projecting “projection” back on to the past — no less effectively than it will prevent us from projecting back the cosy rationalism of the Enlightenment. It will certainly prevent us from supposing that human beings were already “attempting to escape” from a full personal life before they could possibly have become “persons” in our sense of the word at all.
It will, I believe, enable us to hold the vast and tragically opposed forces of human history in tension within ourselves instead of sitting too early or too easily in judgment on them. It will, for instance, enable us to concur up to the hilt with Mr Wren-Lewis, as I do, when he emphasises the primary significance, in human experience, of active relationship to other persons, and says that the Jews of old knew this quite clearly already (he might have added active relationship to God, since we owe to the Jews the whole concept of a “covenant relation between man and God).
But we shall also realise that it was precisely because it was given to the Jews to “know” this for the first time in the midst of a world that was ignorant of it, that it is now a “primary datum” of human experience, and that we are now able, if we will, to achieve the full personal lives of which he speaks and truly to meet other persons in love. We shall accept as necessary the rejection by the Jews of the instinctual, the compulsively numinous in religion, but we shall not therefore reject as mere trash and error all this, which had been the paramount experience of the human race for aeons and aeons before.
For we shall recall that, besides the fully conscious “covenant” relation to God and our fellow men (which may grow into a relation of freedom and of love), there is the subconscious relation which comes of His activity in our whole being, physical as well as mental, as our Creator and the Creator of the world around us; and it was rather this relation of which the heathen were aware.
Like Michelangelo at work on the Sistine Chapel, we shall revere the majesty of the Prophets, but we shall not forget the elemental strength of the Sibyls opposite them.
Surely, even on the neurosis theory, there is something to be said for this point of view. I thought it was almost a first principle of psycho-analysis to encourage, not the suppression of the patient’s fantasies and, too, too powerful impulses, but rather to raise them into the light of full self-consciousness, and reveal to him how to control them from the Ego and hold them in tension as the materia prima of a full, rich, warm, generous personality.
If it is an historical fact that Christianity came as the crown of the Jewish dispensation, it is equally a fact that it entered history at the Alexandrian moment where Hellenism with its mythological and “participating” content, and Judaism, with its rejection of participation, were beginning to flow together, and the New Testament is stamped indelibly with that confluence. I believe we are on the threshold of an age in which the two streams will fulfil this promise by mingling in a new and closer intimacy.
William Blake went so far as to say that no man could be a Christian who was not also an artist, that is, a man of imagination. My gratitude to Rudolf Steiner (about whom I have aroused some controversy in these columns) is due mainly to the fact that, besides, immeasurably deepening my understanding of the organic unity of Christianity with the Jewish dispensation, he has proved to me that truly Christ-ened man inherits the whole of history as his portion. Christianity, as it has developed since the Scientific Revolution, has become a religion without a cosmology.
Mr Wren-Lewis, if I understand him rightly, and perhaps also Bultman, values it precisely for that reason. I think they are mistaken. I think that a religion without a cosmology must die, and I believe that Steiner has given us back the Christian cosmology in a form suited to the understanding of “post-scientific” man.
Lastly, historical imagination will enable us to understand the Scientific Revolution itself in its true significance. Mr Wren-Lewis suggests that I want to “go back on it”. This is incorrect. He quotes my use of the word “idolatry” in that connection, but not my very careful definition of it; and he does not mention that almost the last words in the book are Felix eidolon! This is not a complaint; he obviously could not quote the whole book. But in actual fact I believe the true significance of the Scientific Revolution to lie in the fact that it has indeed made possible for man, and for the first time, a full personal life in the deepest and most Christian sense. But that is the paradoxical sense, in which we can only become fully personal, by becoming full impersonal, by “participating” selflessly alike in our fellow men and in the true being of the world around us.
