Pageau has said in one talk that the ascension is clearly symbolic and that he wouldn’t think that if someone had a camera back then, they would have caught him on film. However, he said it is symbolic of something that happened, albeit not seen by the human eye.
Another thing is where heaven is. I am reminded of the quote from W.B. Yeats: “There is another world, but it is in this one.” I think that Pageau would say that it didn’t take any time at all. However, I’m not Pageau of course, and I have appreciated much of what he’s said but not everything. He gave me a different perspective on the OT.
Having said that, I think the view taken in the story is a materialist one. I also think that we’re missing something that is essential to our existence, and it is connected to how we see our role in the world. I have been reading Charles Eisenstein who has taken a very interesting stance on how to change the world in his book “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible” (which is very cheap on Kindle) in which he asks why we fail to believe that by loving people around us, caring for the old and sickly, helping in various ways, we might be inadvertently solving the larger issues we are facing.
Yes well according to the perennial philosophy there is a hidden world behind the world of appearance. So in the story of Christ’s Ascension he disappears into a cloud as he rises. And that is the case that he is present to the believer he is nevertheless invisible.
So let me attempt to read the story symbolically.
Now the heavens are the source of spiritual truths and powers. Each planet represents a concentric sphere of Truth and power. Christ rises above them all to the place of preeminent power at the right hand of God. Thus he is said to have conquered the principalities and Powers. His way of life and his mode of being–the way of love and sacrifice–are thus symbolically shown to be the highest possible pattern of human life.
Right. According to the perennial philosophy there is a hidden world behind the world of appearance. So in the story of Christ’s Ascension he disappears into a cloud as he rises. And that is the case that he is present to the believer he is nevertheless invisible.
So let me attempt to read the story symbolically.
Now the heavens are the source of spiritual truths and powers. Each planet represents a concentric sphere of archetypal truth and power. The resurrected Christ rises above them all to the place of preeminent power at the right hand of God. Thus he is said to have conquered the principalities and powers and therefore encompasses them. His way of life and his mode of being–the way of love and sacrifice–are thus symbolically shown to be the highest possible pattern of human life.
Sounds good. I can see that I’m not familiar enough with the symbolism of the NT, but I could imagine that you are right in that description. I tend to see the description of Jesus as the “first fruit”, the first of many resurrected. The Christ seems to be more than that, being the firstborn at the beginning of creation, the formgiver, the King of Kings etc. Perhaps that is misguided.
The symbolism of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus as the Christ, can be read as an endorsement of Jesus as the Pattern of patterns for human life. Baptism was understood to be ritual initiation into the Pattern. Then people were expected to live out the pattern everyday. Those who faithfully follow the Pattern are considered saints. Saint Paul said, “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me” and that he “died” to himself daily. The resurrection and the ascension have symbolic meaning for the present and eschatological future. Symbols are the doors connecting the phenomenal world with the spiritual one.
Do you think that the early Christians thought of it this way? I have often asked myself whether a story had been concocted or whether there was symbolism in it. It wouldn’t have been fitting for people proclaiming the truth to lie about the whereabouts of Jesus. If heaven and earth are seen as coming together in the man Jesus of Nazareth, he became Jesus the Christ at what moment? At birth or at his baptism?
The Nag Hammadi scriptures suggest there was enormous variability in the thinking of early Christians. But I think the writers of the canonical gospels saw no conflict between the literal and the symbolic.
There’s no mention of a divine birth in the epistles of Paul or in the Gospel of Mark which is usually considered to be the earliest of the four. The gospels of Matthew and Luke which have miraculous birth stories probably came later. The Gospel of John which identifies Jesus with the logos through which the world was created was probably written last of the four. So what we seem to see is progressively higher christologies over time.
Which raises questions about how to read the story symbolically. Traditional methods that I’m familiar with have tried to harmonize the Gospels and Paul’s epistles without complete success. I haven’t seen Pageau address the issue. What’s significance do conflicting views of the story have for a symbolic reading? One can speculate historically about how the differences arose. But the historic record is incomplete. To me it is one more finger pointing to our ignorance about Ultimate Reality.
I was really taken aback when, 20 years ago, I heard Pierre Grimes say that Mark was a typical Greek tragedy (I think it is still online). He proved it as well as far as I am concerned. The Gospels of Luke and Matthew obviously couldn’t let that stand and so they added to the story and developed a Christology that was very close to the stories of other mythical figures. John was the one who brought the cosmic Christ, i.e. the Logos, into a Gospel. I have heard people say that John is probably closer to Paul than anyone.
I can’t remember where I read a talk about miracles. It could have been on Pageau’s site, but what interested me was the way in which CS Lewis was quoted pointing out that we have our own perspective on our planet, somewhat like fishes in an aquarium. If something happened outside of the aquarium, but affected the content of the aquarium, it could be seen as a miracle. He says that reality is a question of perspective, which is quite right. Everything is a miracle until it is explained. If there are things that we can’t explain, but affect us, isn’t that something that could be seen as a miracle? Conscious life on earth is a miracle, let alone the incarnation.
I am unsure how to understand the Gospel miracles, as I have already said. Whether they are symbolic (which they are as well) or whether they happened, is still something that isn’t clear to me. I prefer to explain them in a symbolic way, but I may be missing something.
The “aquarium” or “fish tank” analogy is included in this quote from Lewis’s book, “Miracles” on the Symbolic World blog, :
Jonathan Pageau and J.P. Marceau take up C.S. Lewis’s argument on this video: youtu.be/Su_ggDVzKLw
Marceau says that Lewis was set against the naturalism of his time which was a relatively simplistic kind of materialism where nature is one big interlocked mechanical system. Lewis’ strategy to introduce miracles in that worldview was to take something closer to us, our rationality, and show that it is not something that can be fit in that interlocking system. If all that is real ultimately is the mechanical level then this will make our rationality unreal. Our intellectual concepts will have to be reduced to something mechanical. But, this would make our theories themselves unreal. Only the mechanical level would be real. This would mean that the materialist theory is not rational. So we don’t have to believe it. The argument is self defeating.
Pageau calls it a blind spot. Materialists take for granted the invisible part of their world. They take for granted their own consciousness which the materialist theories don’t explain. Pageau tries to tell them “Look up. You have patterns that you use to interpret reality. You can’t pretend as if those patterns are physical because they’re not. You also can’t pretend that the patterns don’t exist because your using them to interpret reality.
Marceau goes on to say that what is much more traditional is a non-reductive kind of physicalism. He introduces a series of examples that become more and more complex and make their way up progressively to miracles.
If you look at the lowest level of physics, physicists will say that fundamental fields of probability at the bottom of physics you can see that particles just appear there. If you leave it there, its a very poor explanation of what is going on. It’s super strange. Things don’t just pop out of fields of potential. That’s a strange thing to say. But, the reason why we accept this strange emergence is because we also know the top down pattern that informs the potential. We know certain laws of physics that tell us that the probability that certain particles will manifest themselves out of potential there. We know the potential at the bottom layer of physics and the emanation of the laws on the potential explains to us why the particle appears and because we have this pattern to explain the emergence we’re OK with it.
You already have two layers of reality there. And it just keeps getting more and more complex as you go up the different layers of reality. To explain the emergence of something you always need to know the top down pattern that that informs it.
One layer that is useful is the one that happens in our brains. If you look at what happens in our brains as we’re saying words, you would see billions and billions of neurons which coordinate in perfect ways so that the right signals are sent to your muscles and your lungs and your mouth so that you say the words you intend. And this kind of coordination is so complex that the possibility of error is so high that it is amazing that we are able to say what we intend. But, once you know the top-down pattern, which is the fairly simple desire to say these words then the whole coherence makes sense. You can explain the bottom-up emergence by simultaneous knowing the top-down emanation.of your thoughts. You have two layers of reality there.
The way that non-reductive physicalists explain it is that you cannot reduce the brain as a whole to its individual constituents. If you try to do that you get the problem of all these possibilities that don’t cohere. We need to explain that there are constraints that come from my brain as a whole.
Modern cognitive sciences also includes the environment. It’s not just your brain in your body, it’s also your environment, and who knows how far this goes. It’s this old structure, this pattern, this abstract spirit so to speak, that informs, that shapes the potential that is emerging from your neurons. This is going from the cellular level to the level of mind of an individual person.
So, when you look at something from the bottom up without understanding the pattern that informs it, you can’t make sense of it. The sense actually comes from the manner in which the bottom level joins together and connects with the top-down pattern.
So if you look at a painting, all the individual specks of paint on the painting, it’s just a jumbled specks of paint until you understand it’s the painting of an apple. When you know it’s the painting of an apple, then all of a sudden all those specks of paint make sense. They find a reason to be there.
If we keep going higher we get closer and closer to miracles. The sort of top-down causality that ultimately Lewis was getting at. The way that can have causal influences on your neurons for instance the way that rationality can smoothly intermesh with the brain is the same kind of smooth interaction that God who is behind emergence altogether can have on creation. But it’s useful to go through a few layers to get that this is so.
One example is the placebo effect. You need the narrative frame to have a sense of what is going on. The top-down causality of the placebo makes sense of the emergent chemical reactions which cures the illness.
Lewis gives a useful criterion to think about what a miracle is and how to think about them. At the level of God and miracles, once we know that a certain event was a real miracle, should make all of reality more intelligible. When we talk about emergent phenomena the question is, what are they emerging for?
Pageau says inevitably they’re emerging towards different levels of unity. A multiplicity jumps into a one, and then ones at that level jump into a higher one, and so forth. They’re emerging towards an identity. They’re emerging towards name. They’re emerging towards pattern. They can also be emerging toward a narrative.
Now I know where I have read that. I think that this argument is right for reasons that Lewis wouldn’t have know in his day, but which are becoming evident. There is the thought that much of what is experienced when watching the solar system is being likened to brain activity. The electromagnetic forces are present in a much larger dimension than in the brain, but they are there.
Vervaeke constantly refers to the “weirdness” of nature, in which so much is going on, not least in the ways that human beings connect with the world. He says that he doesn’t need a God for many “normal” wonders, and he wouldn’t call them miracles. I think that people just aren’t able to handle the fact that this could be all to do with God’s interaction with the world.
I think that the materialists themselves just shut down the argument when they are confronted with the simplicity of their argument. They are dedicated to explaining everything away and ignore that which they cannot. I have met people who have said that the one argument for God they entertain is the sheer complexity of existence. The fact that we are continually discovering things that are possible, which were just imagination a short time ago, is enough to ask oneself, how much more is possible in ways we can’t even imagine? What if these things were witnessed two thousand years ago?
The miracle of the human body never ceases to amaze me because it isn’t just buttons to push, it is biochemistry combined with electric signals that help us think and do things. There are panic reactions where the mind is bypassed, our faces react faster to things than our minds do. I still think that the top-down emanation is just one aspect and difficult to classify. Where do the archetypes come from? How much of it is my contribution to anything?
I think we completely forget that our environment is as much a part of us as we are a part of it. The interaction is multi-layered and doesn’t always involve our cognition. If you switch off the cognitive aspect, many things go on working (I experienced this about thirty years ago and “woke up” after I had showered, dressed, had my breakfast with my wife, drove my car to work and taken over the shift).
That is a very good point, but one where Vervaeke asks, “Was that a miracle?” When is something a miracle and not just a wonder of existence?
I found this helpful, because we have to know what words we are using and how they differ from those used at the time of Jesus:
I see this as ‘of a family’ with fine tuning arguments which even physicists, many of them at least, feel drawn to. Life being the most complex things we’ve noticed yet. I mean the universe could have been something the equivalent of one giant lump of protons. Or scattered neutrinos almost never even coming near each other. (I am not making a case for those scenarios in specific, just that coming from nothing it would seem like the amount of universes that could support or encourage complexity would be vastly outnumbered by ones that were monolithic and simple, even static.
I rejected supernaturalism a long time ago. The discussion opened me up to take a fresh look at CS Lewis a writer I enjoyed years ago, but had pretty much dismissed. Non-reductive naturalism appears to be the middle way. People live as if non-reductive naturalism was the truth without thinking about it most of the time whether they admit it or not philosophically. At any rate we don’t have to go far to see evidence of a meaning crisis. Who among us couldn’t use an injection of higher level meaning in our lives?
“Materialists” of the sort being discussed here don’t really exist… It’s a common error of the “faithful” to presume people must have some sort of “commitment” to their metaphysics.
I can’t think of a single person who would identify as a materialist, that wouldn’t instantly and without hesitation abandon that position if given reason to.
It’s just that “there is stuff we don’t understand and can’t explain” is not a very good reason to start filling in the blanks with fiction about the supernatural… at least not where we believe that fiction to be true.
Yet it seems that can be tempting… This is how gods are born after all… to explaining events our ancestors couldn’t understand.
Following in that proud tradition I suppose the new gods can be the god of dark matter and dark energy, the god of quantum physics, the god of abiogenesis and the god of cosmological constants…
There are quite a few possible positions under discussion here. There are at least two overarching cosmologies, the modern scientific one, and the traditional symbolic one. There are at least two kinds of materialism or physicalism, reductive naturalism and non-reductive naturalism.
The symbolic world can be looked at at least from psychological or metaphysical perspectives. Theologically orthodoxy and neoplatonism and mysticism, Eastern and Western are at least in the historical contextual background. And we have the ideas of emanation from above and emergence from below.
Then there are different ways of looking at these alternatives including faith, agnosticism, skepticism and atheism and the variants thereof. I haven’t seen anybody dogmatically holding to one or the other positions at this point in the discussion.
Personally I don’t see faith as an all-or-nothing proposition for anybody. Depth psychology shows that we are more than our consciously held philosophical positions on things.
“One of Putnam’s favorite examples is that, depending on our interests, we can correctly and usefully describe a chair in the alternative languages of carpentry, furniture design, geometry, or etiquette. each of these descriptions is useful in its own way, without being reducible to any of the others. there is no a fundamental theory of what being a chair is, so to speak. and this is valid with regard to a vast amount of entities (possibly all of them, with the exception of the entities of microphysics), since they can be described in different ways not just because of conceptual relativity, but also because things have different properties that belong to different ontological regions, to use husserl’s term.”
Mario de Caro Università Roma Tre and Tufts university
Many cognitively non-equivalent and mutually irreducible conceptual schemes must be used to take account of the different levels of reality. The use of symbolic language in the traditions is one way of dealing with this and can only be understood within that concept. As soon as one interprets symbolic language with scientific concepts, it doesn’t make sense.
I think the inclusion of moral features, free will, normativity, consciousness, and intentional properties in a worldview is important enough not to exclude them. Just because science has difficulty in categorising them doesn’t mean they’re not important. Therefore the use of symbols, analogy, allegory, metaphors, and fable is warranted.
