Who are the Archons in the Bible that control earth from the sky ?

Today the term “archon” is often associated with various 1st centuty sects loosely referred to as “Gnostics.”

Many Gnostic doctrines taught that the world was created and ruled by a lesser divinity, the demiurge, and that Christ was an emissary of the remote supreme divine being, esoteric knowledge (gnosis) of whom enabled the redemption of the human spirit.

Of course the “gnostics” and Christians did share a number of beliefs living in the same cultural milieu, and Paul was especially engrossed in the Enochian worldview.

For large sects of Judaism every nation was under the influence of an evil “god”.

Read the early Fathers, they give a picture of the Cosmos as utterly demon-haunted, in need of constant blessing and redemption, and even throughout the Middle Ages the Church was thought to buffer one against ever present evil spirits.

We are at war, all of creation groans in enslavement.

The term simply means first in rank, a ruler, and appears in Greek texts 650 BC.

The first time it’s used to designate *angelic beings in text occurs in the OT LXX Dan 10:13, vaguely around 150 BC….which also contains the first references to the conception of angelic beings who are the Patrons of specific nations on earth.

David Bently Hart says HERE :

“For Paul, the cosmos has been enslaved to death, both by our sin and by the malign governance of those ‘angelic’ or ‘daemonian’ agencies who reign over the earth from the heavens, and who hold spirits in thrall below the earth. These angelic beings, these Archons, whom Paul calls Thrones and Powers and Dominations and Spiritual Forces of Evil in the High Places, are the gods of the nations….Whether fallen, or mutinous, or merely incompetent, these beings stand intractably between us and God. But Christ has conquered them all.”

In Paul the world is said to be ruled by mysterious “powers” or “authorities.” The words used to denote these beings differ from passage to passage. They can be “principalities” (archai), “dominions” or “authorities” (exousiai), “powers” (dynameis), or “lordships” (kyriotetes). Most of these passages specify that these powers are evil, the enemies of Christ and Christians.

In some cases, these passages could simply refer to human political authorities. But in other passages, this is clearly not the case. Ephesians (3:10 and 6:12), for example, specifies that they dwell in the sky. And Colossians (2:8 and 2:20) refers to them as “elemental spirits of the universe.”

It’s extraordinary, but Paul’s letters seem to just take it for granted that the world is ruled by evil spiritual powers of some sort.

The Gospel of Matthew (4:8), the Gospel of Luke (4:6), the Gospel of John (12:31, 14:30, and 16:11) and 1 John (5:19) all say that Satan or a similar being (whom the Gnostics equated with the demiurge, the chief of the archons) is in control of the world. The Gospel of John even specifically calls this being “the archon of this world.”

Specific examples :

In 1 Cor 2:8 the Greek is τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου, (ton archonton tou aionos toutou) “the archons/rulers of this age”.

A few verses earlier, 2:6, he says that his proclaimed gospel message is a wisdom “not of this present age nor of the archons of this present transitory age”: οὐ τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου, (ou tou aionos toutou) οὐδὲ τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου τῶν καταργουμένων (oude ton archonton tou aionos toutou ton katargoumenon).

In 2 Cor 4:4 Paul refers to Satan or some similar being as being ὁ θεὸς τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου (ho theos tou aionos toutou), “the god of this age”, blinding the eyes of unbelievers from understanding the gospel message Paul preaches.

In Galatians 1:3, Paul starts off his letter by speaking of Christ sacrificing himself to save us ἐκ τοῦ αἰῶνος τοῦ ἐνεστῶτος πονηροῦ: “out of the age of this present evil” or “this present age of evil”.

In Ephesians 2:2 we have the author speaking of the time when the Ephesians were living κατὰ τὸν αἰῶνα τοῦ κόσμου τούτου, “according to the age of this world” or “according to this age and world” and κατὰ τὸν ἄρχοντα (archonta) τῆς ἐξουσίας (exousias) τοῦ ἀέρος, “according to the archon of the power of the air” τοῦ πνεύματος (pneumatos) τοῦ νῦν ἐνεργοῦντος ἐν τοῖς υἱοῖς τῆς ἀπειθείας, “the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience”.

Add to that the list of “powers” listed in Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers (ἀρχάς, archas), against the authorities (ἐξουσίας, exousias), against the cosmic powers of the this present darkness (τοὺς κοσμοκράτορας τοῦ σκότους τούτου, tous kosmokratoras tou skotous toutou), against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (τὰ πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις, ta pneumatika tes ponerias en tois epouraniois). (NRSV)

These are the fallen “angels” — gods, Elohim. As a result of their rebellion, God portioned the land and turned over those portions to the control of supernatural members of his council (Deut. 32:8–9), 70 nations just as Christ sends out 70 apostles to reclaim them, originally leaving Israel for himself as a remaining plot of holy land to be inhabited by the descendants of Abraham, whom he called for that purpose. But the supernatural guardians of those portions turned, one by one, to evil, causing God to judge and curse them, as recorded in Psalm 82. 

These are the disobedient sons of god in the DIVINE COUNCIL Yahweh put in charge of the nations after the Tower of Babel, the Pagan pantheons of gods, who became corrupt after receiving the praise of men.

The word angel means “messenger.” It’s really a job description, according to Michael Heiser, author of the book Angels. Angels deliver messages to people from God and sometimes deliver other things, like dinner (1 Kings 19:5) or death (Isaiah 37:36 for instance).

There are other heavenly creatures such as seraphim and cherubim who have different jobs — throne guardians or heavenly choirs, or the “elohim,” the members of God’s divine council. Jeremiah speaks of standing before “the council of the Lord” (23:18).

So not all angels are heavenly beings. The English word “angel” comes from the Greek angelos. Both angelos and its Hebrew equivalent (mal’āk) refer to messengers, whether they be angelic or human.

The Angelic Hierarchy from St Dionysius the Areopagite’s On the Celestial Hierarchy HERE is as follows :

First Order

1. Seraphim — Fire, “Those who burn” — light and life

2. Cherubim — Fullness of knowledge or wisdom

3. Thrones — Seat of Exaltation

Second Order

4. Dominions — Justice

5. Virtues — Courage, Virility

6. Powers — Order, Harmony

Third Order

7. Principalities — Authority

8. Archangels — Unity

9. Angels — Revelation, messengers

In 1613 Sebastien Michaelis wrote a book, Admirable History, which included a classification of demons as it was told to him by the demon Berith when he was exorcising a nun, according to the author. This classification is based on the Pseudo-Dionysian hierarchies, according to the sins the devil tempts one to commit, and includes the demons’ adversaries (who suffered that temptation without falling).

St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist are the two St. Johns to whom Michaelis refers. 

First hierarchy

The first hierarchy includes angels that were Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

• Beelzebub was a prince of the Seraphim, just below Lucifer. Beelzebub, along with Lucifer and Leviathan, were the first three angels to fall. He tempts men with pride and is opposed by St. Francis of Assisi.
• Leviathan was also a prince of the Seraphim who tempts people to give into heresy, and is opposed by St. Peter.
• Asmodeus was also a prince of the Seraphim, burning with desire to tempt men into wantonness. He is opposed by St. John the Baptist.
• Berith was a prince of the Cherubim. He tempts men to commit homicide, and to be quarrelsome, contentious, and blasphemous. He is opposed by St. Barnabas.
• Astaroth was a prince of Thrones, who tempts men to be lazy and is opposed by St. Bartholomew.
• Verrine was also a prince of Thrones, just below Astaroth. He tempts men with impatience and is opposed by St. Dominic.
• Gressil was the third prince of Thrones, who tempts men with impurity and is opposed by St. Bernard.
• Soneillon was the fourth prince of Thrones, who tempts men to hate and is opposed by St. Stephen.

Second hierarchy

The second hierarchy includes Powers, Dominions, and Virtues.

• Carreau was a prince of Powers. He tempts men with hardness of heart and is opposed by St. Vincent and Vincent Ferrer.
• Carnivale was also a prince of Powers. He tempts men to obscenity and shamelessness, and is opposed by John the Evangelist.
• Oeillet was a prince of Dominions. He tempts men to break the vow of poverty and is opposed by St. Martin.
• Rosier was the second in the order of Dominions. He tempts men against sexual purity and is opposed by St. Basil.
• Belias was the prince of Virtues. He tempts men with arrogance and women to be vain, raise wanton children, and gossip during mass. He is opposed by St. Francis de Paul.

Third hierarchy

The third hierarchy Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.

• Verrier was the prince of Principalities. He tempts men against the vow of obedience and is opposed by St. Bernard.
• Olivier was the prince of the Archangels. He tempts men with cruelty and mercilessness toward the poor and is opposed by St. Lawrence.
• Luvart was the prince of Angels. At the time of Michaelis’s writing, Luvart was believed to be in the body of a Sister Madeleine.

Many of the names and ranks of these demons appear in the Sabbath litanies of witches, according to Jules Garinet’s Histoire de la magie en France, and Collin De Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal.

The Biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson has this to say HERE:

“More cosmically he envisages “powers and principalities” which, though conquered by the death and exaltation of Christ, remain capable of opposing believers, who must continue to do battle “against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12). 

Similarly, Peter pictures the Devil as a ravening beast out to destroy unwary believers, and counsels them to “be sober and watch, because your adversary the Devil goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour” (1 Pet 5:8).

Luke envisages Satan as the arrogant ruler of a kingdom counter to God’s own, capable of granting great power to those willing to worship him, and commanding a vast army of demonic spirits. John declares that “the whole world lies under the power of the evil one.” 

Finally, the Book of Revelation imagines the world caught in a cosmic battle between Christ and Satan, the great beast waging ceaseless war against the saints in unholy alliance with the corrupt power of an empire that buys and sells human lives and brands them with its mark.”

An enfolded material transcendence : baptizing Deleuze

          

Nietzsche famously critiqued Christianity for its Platonic notion of some imaginary heaven where values or transcendental forms existed. It devalues the material world he said. Well, regardless of the historical falsity of his narrative, it is a large aspect of modern Christianity. We hear in Orthodox Christianity that this “two story universe” is a result of Protestant secularism - read HERE 

Nevertheless, it is a looming problem. To solve it, many theologians are turning to…. Deleuze !

Basically, this amounts to an “enfolded transcendence”

Transcendence, not as another intelligible world or immaterial substance that inheres in matter, but rather a *structure* of creation that points to a Creator.

So that meaning is the being of all that has been created.

As Deleuze says, “We are dealing with two cities, a celestial Jerusalem and an earthly one, but with the rooftops and foundations of a same city, and the two floors of a same house.”

The two levels of body and soul are distinguished but inseparable, related by a fold: “The great equation, the world thus has two levels, two moments, or two halves, one by which it is enveloped or folded in the monads, and the other, set or creased in matter.

No power above and beyond nature, rather what is already there enfolded at the root, here is the zone of immanence where transcendence plays itself out, unfolding itself in a way that is staged by the Creator.

Hence the entire cosmos is liturgical, all of creation as a plane that is ordered to praise.

For the whole story, what follows is complex, but here you go....

First, from James KA Smith :

“What we find in Leibniz and Deleuze are the resources for countering a Platonic and modern disenchantment of the world via the reenchantment of nature, emphasizing the creational character of reality by an affirmation of the integrity of immanence. The integrity of creation is seen as a third way between autonomy and occasionalism.”

“The common ground of these two projects is their rejection of a Platonic dualism or “scale of being” that devalues the being of materiality in the name of intelligibility or seeks to escape this “plane of immanence” to ascend to an unencumbered transcendence.”

“What Deleuze sees Leibniz doing is overturning Platonism—while at the same time rejecting nominalism—by means of subverting dualism ”

“For Deleuze, this subversion of Platonic dualism is seen in the persistent motif of folding in Leibniz’s corpus. Rather than a break or a line of separation, the fold (le pli) indicates a duality without disjunction, a difference within a unitary structure.Thus, Deleuze likens Leibniz’s philosophy to a Baroque architecture—particularly a Baroque chapel—“where a crushing light comes from openings invisible to their very inhabitants.”

What characterizes the Baroque building is a distinction of two floors that are nevertheless inseparable and, to a degree, indistinguishable. “For Leibniz, the two floors are and will remain inseparable; they are really distinct and yet inseparable by dint of a presence of the upper in the lower. The upper floor is folded over the lower floor” in the way that the Baroque chapel separates the upper sacristy from the common areas only by the draping folds of a canvas.

Keeping in mind the ontological stakes in this metaphor, Deleuze asks in conclusion, “Is it not in this zone, in this depth or this material fabric between two levels, that the upper is folded over the lower, such that we can no longer tell where one ends and the“and the other begins, or where the sensible ends and the intelligible begins?”

Ok. I know that is….pretty abstract, you can see some diagrams of this HERE with the following commentary :

                        

Baroque House • • • • Clearly the two levels are connected (this being why continuity rises up into the soul). There are souls down below, sensitive, animal; and there even exists a lower level in the souls. The pleats of matter surround and envelop them. When we learn that souls cannot be furnished with windows opening onto the outside, we must first, at the very least, include souls upstairs, reasonable ones, who have ascended to the other level ('elevation'). It is the upper floor that has no windows.

It is a dark room or chamber decorated only with a stretched canvas 'diversified by folds, ' as if it were a living dermis. Placed on the opaque canvas, these folds, cords, or springs represent an innate form of knowledge, but when solicited by matter they move into action. Matter triggers 'vibrations or oscillations' at the lower extremity of the cords, through the intermediary of 'some little openings' that exist on the lower level. Leibniz constructs a great Baroque montage that moves between the lower floor, pierced with windows, and the upper floor, blind and closed, but on the other hand resonating as if it were a musical salon translating the visible movements below into sounds above. (The Fold)

Indogenous vs. exogenous • The lower level or floor is thus also composed of organic matter. An organism is defined by endogenous folds, while inorganic matter has exogenous folds that are always determined from without or by the surrounding environment. Thus, in the case of living beings, an inner • formative fold is transformed through evolution, with the organism's development. Whence the necessity of a preformation.

Deleuze uses Leibniz’s theory on the Baroque (the folded subject) to help explain the position of the individual: the subject is perspectival, it is its point of view and represents a particular moment. Deleuze explains how the Baroque differentiates two forms of folding: material and soul that exist on the two levels of Baroque architecture - matter on the lower, and soul on the upper - where each floor is labyrinthine, extending to infinity.

However, these two floors are connected, and Deleuze suggests this connection is formed by another fold , thus there exists a means of communication. On the surface of a fold there is the means whereby a point can develop producing a singularity (when discussing Leibniz, Deleuze uses ‘singularity’ to describe the perception of movement). This is a point of inflection (the place on the curve where the tangent crosses it), what Deleuze describes as an “elastic point”.

These inflections are potentially innumerable and become available perspectival positions. This folding, created by inflection, creates an “envelope of inherence” and Deleuze explains that this inclusiveness simultaneously creates the fold at the moment the fold forms this inherence .


                 

Thus, we have the process of aggregation in the folding: the folding creating the force of inclusion, but at the same time this incorporation is forming a fold around that which has been gathered up. Deleuze explains what this means for the soul described by Leibniz (what occurs on the upper floor): this windowless floor, covered with drapery, is inclusive to the point where the process of enveloping is so encompassing that a soul is formed . This is not a place, exactly, nor entirely a point of view, but “what occupies point of view, …a soul, a subject”. In this process of inclusion, which concurrently forms the fold, it becomes apparent how an inside can be formed from an outside: the windowless floor, defining the soul for Leibniz, creates an intact subject, a soul attached to a body (matter).


We can now begin to see how our sense of self-hood, which appears to be inside us, actually comes from the outside and is formed in a little pocket we conveniently call our ‘self’. The normally polarised inside and outside become connected in the model of the fold, therefore contradictory terms become reconcilable: truth/lie, us/them, and so on. The outside, therefore, is found on the inside, the other is in myself, and the answer to the unthinkable paradox of what truth is, is in thought itself.

The fold, whilst forming an envelope which situates the subject at that point of view, in its act of folding over also enables that subject to see itself. The subject can be self-reflective (and reflexive), can see its place in the world and has agency in terms of moving their perspective (by simply moving along the fold).


Allright, James KA Smith continues:

“As suggested above, the test case for any such ontology is the microcosm of the human person. Deleuze contends that in Leibniz there is a communication between “the pleats of matter and the folds in the soul.”

The two levels of body and soul are distinguished but inseparable, related by a fold: “The great equation, the world thus has two levels, two moments, or two halves, one by which it is enveloped or folded in the monads, and the other, set or creased in matter.”

In this sense, the early modern question of the union of body and soul is approached by Leibniz in terms that are decidedly un-Cartesian and hence un-Platonic: “There exists only one and the same world, conveyed on the one hand by the souls that actualize it and, on the other, by the bodies that realize it; this world does not itself exist outside of its expressants.

"We are dealing with two cities, a celestial Jerusalem and an earthly one, but with the rooftops and foundations of a same city, and the two floors of a same house.”

“But for Leibniz, this appurtenance is characteristic not only of the human person but of matter in general, both organic and inorganic. “The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold.”

“He argues that there is (and must be) an active, creative force inherent in things. Thus, what distinguishes his theory from Boyle’s is that, for Boyle, the “divine law” that governs nature is external to nature rather than inherent to the structures of nature ”

“In fact, for Leibniz, the immaterial aspect of the monad is identified with force, and this force “is itself an inherent law imprinted by divine decree” on materiality. In this sense, what is compressed or folded into the monad is simply order that inheres in matter. The temporal structure of materiality permits the unfolding of this original order folded into the organism.

As Deleuze comments, “The first fly contains the seeds of all flies to come, each being called in its turn to unfold its own parts at the right time.”

This is because the ordering command is compressed or folded into materiality from the beginning, granting a certain independence and integrity. Thus again, undoing Platonism, Leibniz concludes that “souls never leave behind their whole body” (Nature and Grace);”

“there are also no souls which are completely detached from matter, and no spirits without bodies. Only God is completely removed from matter” (Monadology,.”

“Leibniz’s affirmation of materiality in his ontology stems from early reflections on the incarnation, so there is a sense in which the creation is a collection of hypostatic unions.

Therefore, not only is the plane of immanence imprinted with a divine order from the beginning, but it is only in this materiality that the original fold of the command can be unfolded; matter, or the body, is the theater of unfolding ad infinitum.”

“Leibniz constantly emphasizes the reflective or expressive activity of the universe in general and the (rational) monad in particular. A monad “is representative in its nature,” and it is “the body by means of which the universe is represented in the soul” (Monadology).

Each individual is a “living mirror” of the universe, which as a whole is a mirror of the Creator. Therefore, the key to understanding Leibniz’s theory of expression or reflection—a key that Deleuze misses—is the notion of the imago Dei, transferred now to the universe as a whole.”

“The multiplication of beings, then, is a multiplication of mirrors, which, “in turn, multiplies the reflections of the Creator. ”

“the affirmation of immanence as the integrity of creation. In this way, transcendence is affirmed in immanence, or what we might describe as “enfolded transcendence” as a creational given.In other words, this ontology emphasizes the referential structure of creational immanence—that “meaning is the being of all that has been created”.

The question of transcendence, then, is not a matter of an immaterial “substance” inhering in matter but rather a structure of “referring and expressing” that points to an origin. The only way in which this can avoid becoming a Platonic, or even an iconic, dualism is if we understand “meaning” in a phenomenological sense of intention that is not substantial.”

“ Thus, the zone of immanence is invested with transcendence, not as a kind of container for an ethereal substance but rather as a structure of phenomenological reference to an origin that is not itself subject to temporal conditions (or even “being”).

Therefore, the affirmation of the integrity of creation (or the goodness of materiality) contains within itself an affirmation of transcendence, not as another intelligible world (hence, we agree with Deleuze’s critique of Platonism) but rather as that which inheres in the structure of creation insofar as it points to a Creator. In this way, Deleuze’s and Leibniz’s emphasis on “expression” in the plane of immanence is a fruitful point of contact for conceptualizing the referential structure of creation without canceling the affirmation of immanence.”

Diemer reminds us that it is precisely this conception of an original enfolding that guards the integrity of creation: “The appearance of something new is not the result of a power above and beyond nature bringing into it what was not there before. Rather, what is already there is disclosed through the subjective activity of individual creatures within created constant structures.”

The enfolding is an original enclosing that grants a relative autonomy to the created order that now unfolds itself, disclosing the folds in the “root.”

The affirmation of the integrity of materiality entails a rich account, in both Leibniz and Deleuze, of the “interlacements” within the zone of immanence that occasion the unfolding of that which was enfolded at the origin”

“There is no pristine, immediate access behind the scenes; rather, the invisible is seen in the visible, such that seeing the visible is to see more than the visible. This zone of immanence is where transcendence plays itself out, unfolding itself in a way that is staged by the Creator.”

                  

David Bentley Hart, in “The Beauty of the Infinite” attempts to tie in Deleuze’s idea with St Gregory of Nyssa :

“All creation declares God's glory, and so should be understood not simply according to a logic of substances, but first as a free and flowing succession of semeia, within which "substances" are constituted as the relative stability of the "notes" or "moments" that the whole discourse (the Logos) calls forth; being, as a kind of cogent rhetoric, is the aesthetic surface of shared implications and complications whose very needless excess expresses the nature of divine love. Rather than a strong distinction between sign and substance, then, one should perhaps speak of "substantial signs" or of "semeiotic substances." Perhaps one can read Gregory in something like (and against) the way Deleuze reads Leibniz.

In Deleuze's The Fold, the monadology of Leibniz is transformed into a "nomadology": the accord of every series in a preestablished harmony is recast as the divergence of every series into (in a phrase borrowed from Pierre Boulez) a "polyphony of polyphonies"; and the implication of all things in the monad's unique perspective becomes the folding and unfolding continuity in disjunction of surfaces, and the truth (or truths) of infinitely many perspectives. 

Deleuze, being a thinker of what he calls the "neo-Baroque" - the atonal, the sublime“the atonal, the sublime - has really no use for Leibniz's ontological “harmonics"; but for Christian thought the infinite and form can and must be thought together, not in the interest of some banal cosmic optimism, but because the measure of difference is primordially peace, a music whose periods, intervals, refrains, and variants can together (even when incorporating dissonances) hymn God's glory. 

Embracing neither the austere moral calculus of Leibniz's determinism nor certainly Deleuze's adolescent fascination with sheer divergence and aleatory digression, one can yet conceive of an infinite, "ontological" music that eminently contains all transitions and intervals together, in which any series may digress without ever passing beyond reconciliation, beyond the reach of musical mediations that might restore it to the measures of that original peace that allows it to move at all (this is, of course, to speak eschatologically).”

“ Here again one must invoke the ontological difference, and with it the difference between the infinite music of the Trinity and the finite harmonies and discords of our fallen song. A "baroque" Gregory, so to speak, is one whose understanding of the divine image as perfected only in ceaseless motion completes an understanding of creation as a continuous unfolding (akolouthia, to use Gregory's word) of a marvelous "fabric" expressive of God's transcendent abundance. In the case of Gregory, for whom the soul (somewhat like Leibniz's monad) can in a sense mirror the whole of being's display, it becomes possible to see the image not as simply the naked eidetic correspondence of eikon and archetype, but as dynamic correspondence by way of likeness and difference, or likeness as difference.

Here one has dispensed with any concept of a malign ontological interval between eikon and simulacrum, as the mystery of the image is not simply its inner approximation to an invariable anonymous essence, but its "superficial" arrangement of the signs it comprehends.

The soul is an image of God in its traversal of all the semeia of being, within an infinite that always bestows itself in concrete instances of beauty, kabod, and so is an image by "reflecting" the whole infinite series in itself: inflecting the infinite and being inflected by it and all its interdependent positionings, by being always in motion, impelled by love, finding its proximity to God only in the endless music of this deferral.

This is the soul's steadfastness in the good, “changelessly beautiful amid change, drinking in an inexhaustible beauty.

Only in Christ, of course, has this ordering of the finite toward the infinite perfectly occurred; only here is the true image of God and the true form of the creature entirely given; but the Holy Spirit is able always to bring all natures into conformity with that love, to reconcile them to the infinite according to the salvation Christ has wrought, and to fashion in them anew the beauty for which they were created.”

Why Stories? Because the Cosmos is more poem than proposition

My new essay is published over at the Symbolic World, please share generously:


God speaks in stories because our Cosmos is constituted by stories. Indeed, the categories we think in are not primarily constituted by space, time, number, or causality but by the living full-bloodied categories of tradition, experience, and language.

Logos without mythos is itself the great myth of modernity. In reality, truth always has a local dialect, a history, a place, and even a face….the secular fact itself is an imaginative construct...

Read the rest HERE

Informative vs Transformative knowledge : the Gutenberg Galaxy Brain

       

God must be sung to be known.

Once, reading was communal, Christians listened to Gospel reading almost as part of an aesthetic experience, one which attuned the listener into a specific way of being, liturgically shaping disciples into a certain type of people.

After the printing press, Christians began to read silently, inside their head, and began to conceive of knowledge as affirming propositional beliefs to a closed off inner self.

There are things that only certain types of people can know.

This was the change from transformative knowledge (being formed into a certain way of being by liturgical attunement) vs informative knowledge.

For example, the content of a song may have lyrics about going to sleep, but if the form is musically rock & role and not a lullaby, you will not sleep. Likewise if the content of a Church service is about Jesus, but in the form of a rock concert, you will be “formed” into a way of being consonant with rock & role.

In Eastern Orthodox Christianity there is certainly an oral communal doxological epistemology.

Christian Roy HERE uses the insights of Marshall McLuhan to note that the protestants hitched their fortune to dialectic over rhetoric and grammar and the spatial gutenburg galaxy of visual print perception that favors individual rational interpretations of the Bible, as opposed to oral, audio communal doxological epistemology through time :


“I don’t think concepts have any relevance in religion,” Marshell McLuhan wrote.


“Analogy is not a concept. It is resonance. It is inclusive. It is the cognitive process itself. That is the analogy of the Divine Logos.”


His son Eric McLuhan :


To a Catholic, faith is not simply an act of the mind, that is a matter of ideology or thought (concepts) or belief or trust, though it is usually mistaken for these things.


Faith is a mode of perception, a sense like sight or hearing or touch and as real and actual as these, but a spiritual rather than a bodily sense."


(The Protestants, he found in his research, had decided to regard faith in terms of ideas and concepts. Their decision meant that they had, in terms of the trivium, hitched their fortunes to dialectic, and abandoned the old alliance of rhetoric and grammar to which the Church still resolutely adhered.)

Elsewhere Roy put it this way :

"Literacy becomes a substitute for common sense, the "communis sensus" of analogically resonant audile-tactile experience acquired through whole-body practice rather than bookish rote or purely mental ratiocination, with manufactured spectacular emotionalism thrown into the mix to add some punch to mass mobilization over homogenized spaces when required for sectarian, administrative, military and/or industrial purposes."

John Vervaeke also speaks of this HERE :


"So Christianity splits between an Eastern Orthodox and what’s going to be called a Catholic version of Christianity. This of course weakens Christianity. It also has an impact on it: by separating itself from the East, Christianity loses some of the connection that leads to Christianity in the West, [in] Western Europe. Christianity loses some of its deeper connections to that Neoplatonic mystical theology.”

That starts to have an impact! The West starts to become less and less Platonic and more and more Aristotelian. Now as always, this starts what a change in Psycho-Technology.

What’s happening is there’s a shift in reading - how people read! And it’s after the schism. (*Krantz, Corbin, Chatham*)

So before that, and this is something I can speak to from first person, before that reading is done, largely aloud; people read aloud! They read the Bible, for example, because that’s mostly the only thing that can be read! And some of the church fathers, people like Augustine for example, they read aloud. Reading is often done communally.

First of all, you’re embedded in a cultural context, you’re embedded in a sapiential community. You read aloud, and more than you read aloud, you’re reciting….

But when somebody is singing a song, singing a poem - and most songs are poems if you think about it - it is appealing to you! Not just propositionally - it's not just that kind of knowing; its not just try-ing to create beliefs in you! First of all, by reciting the poem, you… and trying to communicate it to others, you have to bring in all your know-how of communication, being able to share with other people.

You have to… all your ways of paying attention [are] much more embodied. There's a Perspectival stuff: What does it feel like? What is it like to be here, in this space, in this context with these people uttering these words? And with that, it has the potential to be Participatory because people are like, “these are poems that have changed [me]!”. [They] have made a difference to their identity. They know these poems, not the way you know the words on the back of your cereal box, they know these poems because of the way in which they have been changed by them; their very sense of identity has been altered by [them].

See, so when people were reading then, they're reading the Bible, they're reciting it. They're reciting it communally. They're also doing something [else] - and I do this practice now and other people do - It's called Lectio Divina as the book “Sacred Reading” is shown on screen). It's a way of reading a text in which you are not speaking]…

The point is not to have the propositions and to speak. It is to let the text, as much as possible, speak to you! It is to engage with the text in a meditative, mindful fashion, opening yourself up to the possibility of it transforming you. It is much more like going to listen to a piece of music and having prepared yourself, prepared [your] receptivity to have a profound aesthetic experience. It's analogous to that.

You're reading and you're reciting in such a way that you're trying to open yourself up to this text speaking to you. People that are religious will often talk about this as if God is present in the text and speaking to them through the text.

This is how people were reading. It’s a form of reading that is ontologically remedial; it's designed to heal you transform you. It's designed to trigger, activate and educate your procedural, Perspectival and Participatory knowing, not just give you propositions. It's about helping you, in your reading, [to] remember the Being mode and not just Have beliefs and propositions.

And what that really means is a shift to giving exclusive priority to definitions….

So people now start to read silently to themselves and what they're trying [to do], what they give priority to, is coherence within a language rather than transformation within themselves in the world.

So what matters is how the various symbols - and I don't mean that in a spiritual sense - the various propositional terms and logical connectives fit together coherently. So, a new model for thought emerges. See the old model was “thought is a conforming to the world”, and then we get this articulated and developed and expanded into this whole process of Gnosis and Anagoge and self-transformation, that model of knowing that's also a way of Being, that's also a way of Becoming.

That's being taken away and it's being replaced by a different model. Thought, knowing, is to have coherent propositional language. Thinking is to have a coherent set of propositions in your head. So Kranz talks about, “we shift from the extensive self, the self that is trans-projectively connected to the world, that understands itself in terms of its conformity to the world, to an intensive self”.

This is a self that's inside my head. It's inside my beliefs. My ‘self’ is primarily the way I talk to myself by affirming my beliefs through propositional language. So people start to think that the primary way in which we know things is to get as much coherence within our inner language, than instead of conformity in our outer existential modes.

Now, why would people make this shift? People make this shift because the world is starting to open up again. People are starting to get interested in Knowing the world scientifically. We're getting it… And it's gonna… it's just slowly beginning here! But we're going to get the move towards the value of having cl[ear] - and by the way, I believe in this value! I'm a scientist, right?! - the value of logically coherent, well organised propositional theories. The power of this is being discovered. So when I can read in this other way, I can empower my argumentative skills tremendously.

What I'm losing is I'm losing reading as a psycho-technology of psycho-spiritual, existential transformation. Reading is now becoming the consumption of propositions and their structuring in logical coherency.”

Religion - a modern invention

What is called "religion" today was non-existent for people in the ancient and medieval worlds. There was ritual.

Modern Abstractions like "religion" hide ancient realities.

It was in the 16th and 17th century that the concept of "religion" as we know it was invented as a reified, abstract, monolithic, uniform, timeless, and universal "thing" that is found across time, cultures, and languages.

Holy texts such as the Bible or the Quran never identified people by their private transcendental/supernatural beliefs.

As this article HERE says, Ethan Shagan in his book The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment says :

"..the biggest transformation in the history of religion in the West was not the rise of unbelief but the transformation of belief itself...

As Brent Nongbri has put it:

"Because of the pervasive use of the word religion in the cultures of the modern western world (the “we” here) we already intuitively know what religion is before we even try to define it: religion is anything sufficiently resembling modern Protestant Christianity…Most of the debates about whether or not this “ism” (Confucianism, Marxism, etc…) is really a religion boils down to the question of whether or not they are sufficiently similar to modern Protestant Christianity."

In fact in an absolutely fascinating subset of chapter two of his book entitled “The Invention of Religion Outside the West,” Cavanaugh over and over again points out that in notebooks and autobiographies of early missionaries in the modern period, there is constant amazement at indigenous peoples that they “had no religion.”[vii] This as a claim was not equivalent to saying they were “godless,” or “heathen,” as one might expect. Instead it was a very genuine observation that they had no compartmentalization of culture whose pieces of which could be referred more or less one-to-one with what was becoming the modern picture of Protestant “religion.” It thus became confusing for the missionaries, with their own notion of what “religion” was, to understand exactly what a “conversion” for these people would look like. Thus, though this is a simplistic summary, pieces of indigenous cultures were arbitrarily broken out of and abstracted from the wholes which they previously were integrated with, to discern these peoples “religion.”

Cavanaugh cites the study of Derek Peterso regarding the Gikuyu people of Kenya: "Religion was supposed to be an otherworldly belief system, a contract agreed upon by God and believer. This disembodied, propositional definition of religion was the template that allowed European intellectuals to make sense of the ideas of colonized subjects. By reducing difference to sameness, by disembodying subject's ideas and practices, comparative religion functioned as a strategy of intellectual control." Or one more example, fun fact: There was no religion named “Hinduism,” until 1829. There were of course Hindus for much, much longer. Yet “Hindu” was a Persian term, used traditionally to refer to those on the far side of the Sindhu river. Writes Cavanaugh:

"The invention of Hinduism as a religion allowed for the differentiation of Hinduism from politics, economics, and other aspects of social life, and it also allowed for the distinction of Hinduism from other religions such as Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism. Such differentiation was not simply an improvement on the former system of classification, however, as if new terms suddenly allowed Indians to see what they had been missing before. To the contrary the use of the term religion has produced confusion and misdescription of the phenomenon of Indian life. As Timothy Fitzgerald points out, the separation of religion from society in India is misleading in a context in which caste hierarchy, exchange of goods, ritual, and political power are densely intertwined.

Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities by Carlin A. Barton is a superb book.

Other good books on the emergence of the concept “religion” are:

Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept

‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment

The Territories of Science and Religion.

Barton writes :

"When we make the claim that there is “no religion” as we know it in the cultures we are describing, we can hear readers objecting: But that culture has gods and temples, holy days and priestly rules, so how can we say they have “no religion”? The point is not, as Nongbri emphasizes, that there weren’t practices with respect to “gods” (of whatever sort), but that these practices were not divided off into separate spheres from eating, sleeping, defecating, having sexual intercourse, making revolts and wars, cursing, blessing, exalting, degrading, judging, punishing, buying, selling, raiding and revolting, building bridges, collecting rents and taxes. 

We are not arguing that “religion” pervaded everything in those cultures or that people in those times and climes were uniquely “religious,” but that, as Nongbri makes clear, “[A]ncient people simply did not carve up the world in that way.”...It is in the disembedding of human activities from the particular contexts and aggregations found in many societies into one concept and named entity or even institution that we find the genealogy of the modem western notion of “religion.” 

Just as people had intercourse of more or less the same varieties as today (if the pictorial evidence from antiquity can be relied on) and made babies (or not) but did not organize these practices and experiences into a category of “sexuality,” so too people sacralized and desacralized/desecrated, feared and revered and loved, made bonds and oaths, performed rituals, and told stories about gods and people without organizing these experiences and practices into a separate realm. 

“Imagining no religion” does not mean that we imagine that people did not make gods or build temples, praise and pray and sacrifice, that they did not ask metaphysical questions or try to understand the world in which they lived, conceive of invisible beings (gods, spirits, demons, ghosts), organize forms of worship and festival, invent cosmologies and mythologies, support beliefs, defend morals and ideals, or imagine other worlds.” (4); the modern construct of religion is pretty much based on Christianity (7-8); “In the academic field of religious studies, the claim that religion is a modern invention is not really news” (8); “Nongbri has observed that despite decades of problematization of the notion of “religion,” “[I]t is still common to see even scholars using the word ‘religion’ as if it were a universal concept native to all human cultures. In ... the study of the ancient Mediterranean world, every year sees a small library’s worth of books produced on such things as ‘ancient Greek religion.” 

Indeed, the number of scholars who begin their books on “Roman Religion” by asserting that they know that the term doesn’t fit Roman culture, but they will continue using it anyway “for convenience” is remarkable. Nongbri goes on to suggest that the reason for such self-contradiction is the lack of a coherent narrative of the development of the concept of religion, a lack that his book proposes to fill. Fitzgerald forthrightly argues that, “[R]eligion cannot reasonably be taken to be a valid analytical category since it does not pick out any distinctive cultural aspect of human life,” as opposed, for instance, to ritual that does but that also crosses boundaries between that which we habitually call “religion” in our culture and that which we habitually call the “secular.” 

Peter Leithart sums up HERE the excellent book by acclaimed historian Peter Harrison sThe Territories of Science and Religion,

Once of the primary changes Harrison examines is from internal to external. Prior to the seventeenth century, both “religio” and “scientia” were virtues, not courses of study or institutional structures. According to Harrison, “for Aquinas religion (religio) is a virtue - not, incidentally, one of the preeminent theological virtues, but nonetheless an important moral virtue related to justice. He explains that in its primary sense religio refers to interior acts of devotion and prayer, and that this interior dimension is more important than any outward expressions of this virtue. Aquinas acknowledges that a range of outward behaviors are associated with religio - vows, tithes, offerings, and so on—but he regards these as secondary”.

Scientia was also a virtue or habit, but an intellectual one. In Harrison's summary, Thomas linked “science with the derivation of truths from those first principles, and wisdom with the grasp of the highest causes, including the first cause, God. To make progress in science, then, was not to add to a body of systematic knowledge about the world, but was to become more adept at drawing ‘scientific’ conclusions from general premises.

‘Science’ thus understood was a mental habit that was gradually acquired through the rehearsal of logical demonstrations. In Thomas’s words: ‘science can increase in itself by addition; thus when anyone learns several conclusions of geometry, the same specific habit of science increases in that man'”. On these premises, its’ all but nonsensical to claim that there is, or isn't, war between science and religion. Scientia and religio aren’t the sort of things between which there can be war.

Harrison discerns that a seemingly innocuous grammatical change signalled tectonic shifts. Calvin wrote of “Christian religion,” religio Christiana. English translators added a definite article that was not in the original Latin. According to Harrison, “the expression ‘the true religion’ places the primary focus on the beliefs themselves, and religion thus becomes primarily an existing thing in the world, rather than an interior disposition” as it was for Aquinas. During the seventeenth century, the definite article became much more common, with the unintended result of making “explicit belief and creedal knowledge” the content of religion .

If religion is a set of beliefs, then it can also be plural. And “true religion” no longer means genuine piety or devotion, but is the answer to the question “which religion corresponds to the facts?”