The Rev. Gerald Slusser, Ph.D.
It has been widely realized that we now live in a secular culture, i.e., one in which religion is not the dominant force as it was in the nineteenth century. Europe witnessed the emptying of the churches in the early 20th century and even in the U.S. there has been a slow drift away from religious institutions for a couple of generations now. What has brought about this radical shift? Is there something underlying general cultural values and practices which has changed? Indeed there is; our worldview has undergone a radical shift over the past century and a half.
A worldview is the equivalent of a metaphysic, or is one’s functioning metaphysic even though one may never have heard, or used that term. Furthermore, one’s worldview is always held by faith, the faith which lies at the core of one’s life, the faith which Paul Tillich termed "ultimate concern". This faith lies at the heart of our existence and determines how we live. A worldview is the set of assumptions which one has about life and reality, and, deriving from that, about what is important and unimportant, about values, ethics and mores. The worldview held most widely in our contemporary culture is essentially scientistic and materialistic. We look to science for our answers about virtually every question and expect that the answers will come, and our questions are almost entirely about our material welfare. And if we ask science about values, there are not and cannot be any answers, as we shall see. This contrasts radically with the situation at the turn of the nineteenth century and earlier when, by and large, these answers came from religion and were about ultimate destiny. I have termed our culture scientistic rather than scientific to indicate a significant difference. There is not and cannot be a scientific culture, except for what we mean when we speak of that ethos which permeates a given scientific field such as chemistry or physics. The word culture in that usage has a very restricted sense, meaning the paradigms and parameters which characterize that field of science. What creates a scientistic culture is not so much science and its findings as it is the assumptions of the worldview which has spawned our modern culture and the attitudes and practices which accompany it. The scientistic worldview almost literally turned the previous primordial, traditional worldview on its head as Marx said he did with Hegel. It did so by assuming and then dogmatizing the idea that the most real thing we know is the material, and further, that all else arises, develops from the material. Thus the idea of evolution from a material beginning, as with Darwin’s thought, slowly, but surely permeated the culture and displaced the idea of God as the source of the universe, especially the human race. A second idea which accompanied evolution was the unverifiable notion of progress, a progress virtually guaranteed by science and technology, but also the belief that humans were getting better and better, outgrowing their "childhood" and able to manage the world without divine guidance. All this upward thrust was believed to be natural and aided by human action, not the providence of God.
A scientistic culture is radically secular; it has no space for the sacred. For such a culture the "world", the cosmos, has become emptied of any presence; it is merely empty space and objects, bits of matter, in that space. Matter has no "intent" and no purpose, no subjectivity, no feeling, no experience. Although, loosely speaking, Bacon, Newton and company were the founders of the scientific enterprise, they did not live in it. Their notion of deity, however, was a God who was outside of the universe, imposing on it from its origin the laws by which it must function. Their work, their ideas, laid the foundations on which the fully secular worldview arose. Newton assumed he was exploring God’s world, albeit a God apart from the world, not involved in it, but it was not long before a French philosopher would proclaim that he had no need for that hypothesis. When the ancients looked at the stars they saw God’s handiwork and "sensed" God’s presence within the whole. When a modern looks at the stars what is seen is perhaps spectacular, even wondrous and awesome, but, for the most part, there is "no need for the hypothesis" about God’s handiwork and no sense of presence, since scientism has eliminated that necessity. (God seems to have been replaced by the "Big Bang".) Of course for the ancient, it was not a hypothesis, but something known intuitively, a veritable experience. What we have lost is this intuitive knowing, a vision that comes from the eye of the heart, not from reasoning.
What happened that the sacred dimension vanished? Newton thought he was "thinking God’s thoughts after Him" and certainly believed that "God in the beginning formed the world". For him, God explained the rationality of the world, but a fully mechanical world. Descartes, marveling at the wonder of human consciousness, human knowing, said cogito ergo sum. I am conscious therefore I know that I am. But tragically for modern thought, he went on to decide that he discerned "thinking substance" on the one hand and "extended substance" on the other. Extended substance could be directly perceived, measured, weighed, known intersubjectively. It was thus extended substance which was to become the focus of scientific study and extended substance had no experience, no intent; it was Newton’s mechanism in essence.
Gradually over the next few centuries, the rules of scientific procedure were elaborated and refined, but it was not long until science "forgot" about "thinking substance" perhaps mainly due to the spectacular success it had with material substance. It is important to note here that most psychology, insofar as it claims to be a science, accepts the reductionistic principle that causes are to be found in the material foundations, objectively observable factors.
Humans were dazzled and enchanted with the power which scientific knowledge and its applications put into their hands. But for science the world itself was not enchanted, nor any longer was science even "thinking God’s thoughts", simply discovering the rules of the machine, a machine which had no purpose. And, tragically, within the scientific view, along with the presence of God, beauty departed from nature. All qualities such as the beauty of the rose, the radiance of the sun, or the nightingale’s song, were deemed to be qualities that are purely offspring of the mind, belonging to ourselves, not nature. Nature in itself is meaningless, purposeless, colorless. Soul, or anything approximating it, has been erased from the worldview of scientism. Commenting on this tragedy, Alfred North Whitehead, the noted philosopher, wrote that, according to this view: "The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly." But he further added, despite the genius and power of this point of view and despite its reign in our universities and scientific studies "it is quite unbelievable".
One more note must be made about this scientistic worldview and that is the utter pessimism which results from it. For there is no space within scientific findings for hope, purpose or meaning. "Hence, no role exists in the universe for purposes values, ideals, possibilities, and qualities, and there is no freedom, creativity, temporality, or divinity. There are no norms, not even truth, and everything is ultimately meaningless." This outcome is well summed up by another philosopher, Bertrand Russell. From his A Free Man’s Worship:
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms;. . .that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system. . .—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. . . . .
Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of change, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.
One can scarcely read those words without feeling depressed. Yet it is that profound meaningless skepticism which is at the heart of the scientistic worldview. And, as Whitehead noted seven decades ago, scientism reigns without a rival. Well, without a rival that is a serious and immediate threat to the dominance of scientism. But there is a rival, gaining power day by day in this late twentieth century when the limits of scientific knowledge are more and more being recognized and even science itself is undergoing developments pointing in another direction than pure mechanism, however these latter are beyond the scope of this paper. Another view is entering our thought by way of increasing concern for spirituality. That worldview is what Huston Smith termed "Forgotten Truth, The Primordial Tradition" and it is to it that I now turn.
The Primordial Tradition is also called the "philosophia perennis"; according to Aldous Huxley this is: "the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial in the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being…" Further, argued Huxley, this philosophy is immemorial and universal. "Rudiments of it may be found in the traditional lore of primitive people in every region of the world and in its fully developed form it has a place in every one of the higher religions." Smith also noted that he could not imagine a better brief summation of the perennial philosophy than Huxley’s, and, since I agree, I will use it here and largely follow Smith’s discussion: there are three points: 1) The metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; 2) the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with divine Reality, and 3) the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of Being.
A key feature of the metaphysic is its understanding of the nature of the matrix that produced, that indeed underlies and permeates this universe. According to the perennial philosophy, that nature is hierarchical in character. Arthur Koestler in presenting his own scheme of the universe termed this nature a "holarchy", i.e., a hierarchy of holons. A "holon" is a self-maintaining entity which is part of larger wholes. Hierarchy, Koestler admits, is a word loaded with unfavorable connotations, such as a royalty, or privileged classes having preference over others whether in general society, or the military. But the fact is that all complex structures and processes display hierarchic organization including inanimate systems, living organisms, social organizations and even patterns of behavior. This hierarchical view extending from the lowliest existent up to the ens perfectissimum, said Koestler, "has in one form or another been the dominant official philosophy of the larger part of civilized mankind through most of its history". The point is that all Reality is hierarchical, everything that exists fits into one or another hierarchy and most important, being increases as the levels ascend. For example, a stone has less being than a single cell in an ant; the ant has less being than a mouse; the mouse has less being than a dolphin and the dolphin less than a human.
Now what does it mean to say that one thing has less being than another? First off, it means that the higher has more reality. We are so accustomed to thinking-believing, in our social construction of reality, that the material is the real, that we cannot conceive (or at least rarely do) that another level more real than this three dimensional time-space continuum could exist. At the same time, we are strongly affected by and even confess the transcendent importance of things which are not material such as love, anger, fear, confidence etc. Or again, compare our three-dimensional bodily self which exists in the material continuum with our personality, our inner, spiritual self. Which is the more real? Which is the more important? The reductionism of secularity, our typical cultural pattern, or worldview, is seriously inadequate to deal with these higher levels of reality. More yet, there are things that exceed us, exceed our personality, exceed our love, our highest personal reality.
William James attempted to give the higher realities due credit as he wrote: "…religion says that the best things are the more eternal things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word". Thus James touches on three qualities having to do with the degree of reality:
Each of these terms is the name of a continuum from little or none to absolute. At the high end they constitute the attributes of God, e.g., omnipotence, eternality, omnipresence, all-inclusiveness, absolute importance, absolute worth, and Total Consciousness, awareness of everything in being. Ranging between the lowest and highest realms of reality are all the various levels of being. In the perennial tradition these are often divided into four levels of existence, according to their respective degrees of being.
It may be asked at this point, if these "higher levels" are more real, why do they not appear scientifically, or perceptually? In short, how is it that we don’t seem to experience them? The answer, oversimplified, is this: science doesn’t "see" or "allow them to be seen" because by the ground rules of science, its fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality, these higher realms of being do not exist, at least for scientific purposes; they are excluded from the scientific world. Any data which might relate to them is considered either as error, noise (static in the experimental apparatus) or anomaly.
The infant comes into the world with little ability to "see" the world, everything is for the infant, in Wm. James words "a blooming, buzzing confusion". The child, through feedback from those around her learns to "make" (social construction) the world in the same shape as do the others; "reality" is thus a somewhat "made-up" construction. Those who claim to have some experience of a higher realm, who are seeing things differently than convention, are often advised to see their psychiatrist, or if they claim to have encountered "spirits" or "demons" are regarded as superstitious, or worse. Politeness usually allows for religious experience to be excepted from such pejorative treatment, but it still is excluded from scientific data. The four levels of traditional metaphysics are:
Now, to reiterate, the first plane noted above, the terrestrial, has the least reality, not the most, as we have come to believe from our scientistic worldview. In fact, the primordial insight is that each of the lower levels gets its reality from the fourth plane, the highest. Frithjof Schuon puts the insight into a nutshell:
"Spirit is substance, matter is accident: that is to say that matter is but a contingent and transitory modality of the radiation of the Spirit which projects the worlds and the cycles while remaining transcendent and immutable. This radiation produces the polarization into subject and object: matter is the final point of the descent of the objective pole, sensorial consciousness being the corresponding subjective phenomenon. For the senses, the object is matter. . .for the [intuitive] Intellect, objective reality is the Spirit in all its forms. It is by it that we exist, and that we know; were it not immanent in physical substances, these could not exist for one instant. And in this Spirit, precisely, the subject-object opposition is resolved, it is resolved in Unity which is at once exclusive and inclusive, transcendent and immanent. The alpha as well as the omega, while transcending us infinitely, reside in the depths of our heart.
Schuon, who is arguably the greatest metaphysicist and scholar of Comparative Religion of modern times, terms the modern scientistic worldview a "luciferian veil" which clouds both our minds and our hearts. If we are to have a serious spirituality, it is necessary to free our minds, our very souls, from this "luciferian veil" and develop our intuitive intellect, the eye of the heart. More yet, it is the practice of spiritual discipline which in itself can free us. Then we can come to know our true and central identity which is our innate oneness with Unity itself. "To believe in God is to become again what we are; to become it to the very extent that we believe and that believing becomes being"
Spiritual practice, whether it be formal or informal, self-conscious or not, involves three aspects of life, or has three bases: the love of, the worship of and communion with God, whether private or public, whether in the form of meditation or prayer, or simply in appreciating beauty wherever it is found; the second base is the love and service of others than ourselves, including the non-human world, this is the realm of ethics; the third is the metaphysical, the search for God in wisdom. Thus the human contains and reflects the three aspects of Divinity, viz. Knowledge, Love and Power. Everyone needs a bit of each, but each of us tends to find our way more in one aspect than in another. Examples abound of saints who were great in one or another of these areas while seemingly neglecting the others, and only God can guide us to our destiny in the choice of where our energies shall go. But without a significant amount of each, there will be some lack, or distortion in one’s spiritual life. It is with spiritual practice that we can again believe in God and become again what we are, realizing our innate oneness with Unity itself.