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?”

Platonic Vitalism against Darwinian Evolution

                  

First, one may ask if science can even study life which is, after all, a mysterious immaterial force, Micheal Henry, for one, says NO, as I’ve written HERE.

Nor is he alone, as the Nobel-prize winning Biologist Frangois Jacob observed that “Biologists no longer study life,” because “there is no metaphysical entity behind that word, ‘life.’

Indeed, for most modern people, nothingness is at the center of being, as irrational as that may be.

Well, strip the cosmos of its lived phenomena of life, then use this method to study life, and one will find only death.

So, what is the vitalist or platonic case ? Simply that a notion of life as primary, and something like platonic forms to instantiate species, is necessary to explain evolution.


This criticism of the neo-Darwinian premise of random change should be familiar: one finds the objection featured prominently, for example, in the arguments of the 1966 Wistar participants….Functional complexity and randomness stand fundamentally at odds with each other.


Probabilistically favored paths, he argues, must exist through sequence and function space, to enable evolutionary processes to move from one novel island to another within the time available — and those paths must have been built into the universe from the start. As Wagner writes at the conclusion of his 2014 book,

The Arrival of the Fittest, “life’s creativity draws from a source that is older than life, and perhaps older than time.”

As a superstar genius in evolutionary biology, Andreas Wagner HERE proposes something like “Platonic Form libraries” to account for the statistically impossible innovations in evolution :

“The number of potential proteins is not merely astronomical, it is hyperastronomical, much greater than the number of hydrogen atoms in the universe...

Referring to random change, recited like a mantra since Darwin’s time, as a source of all innovation is about as helpful as Anaximander’s argument that humans originated inside fish. It sweeps our ignorance under the rug by giving it a different name.

But given the staggering odds, selection is not enough. We need a principle that accelerates innovation...

Let me put this point as strongly as I can.

Without these pathways of synonymous texts, these sets of genes that express precisely the same function in ever-shifting sequences of letters, it would not be possible to keep finding new innovations via random mutation. Evolution would not work.

So nature’s libraries and their sprawling networks go a long way towards explaining life’s capacity to evolve. But where do they come from?

You cannot see them in the glass lizard or its anatomy. They are nowhere near life’s visible surface, nor are they underneath this surface, in the structure of its tissues and cells.

They are not even in the submicroscopic structure of its DNA.

They exist in a world of concepts, the kind of abstract concepts that mathematicians explore.”







John Milbank, in his second Stanton lecture, notes that when Darwin proposed his theory, “while absolute space and time and the force of gravity represent the direct divine presence, this is still manifest in a totally regular fashion expressible by comprehensible laws. There appeared to be no biological equivalent to this regular divine governance.”

He mentions there were attempts “interested in compensating for this lack in terms of discovering more regular immanent processes at work in features exhibiting apparent organic design.

This included processes leading to the constant creation of new species…that break with the Aristotelian focus upon fixity of species and the search for explanation of variation within species only, in favour of the attempt to account genetically for the variation of species itself…[a] design that ultimately explains the mutual adaptation of species and environment, while in the case of The Origin of Species the immanent law of one-way selective adaptation of species to environment becomes a sufficient explanans unto itself.

It only unambiguously does so if, as with Richard Dawkins, one seeks to show natural selection at work fundamentally on the genetic level. Yet it is in fact far more likely that natural selection works at every level – genotypic, phenotypic, species- wide…

For genetic theory, by positing the idea of an anarchic drift of mutation suggests, first of all, that the glissando of continuous variation is essentially vital rather than mechanically physical. Secondly it suggests that this can result in genetic mutations that are not expressed at the phenotypic level and are therefore never subject to the tests of natural selection, while further on down the generational line they will of themselves issue in phenotypic alterations. …

Milbank asks,

“what makes this individual biological in nature? The answer must have to do both with the inner inertial drive to organic self-development, and the drive to reproduce within certain regular parameters.

Yet in that case, if one is to evade the most nakedly teleological construal of the biological individual (granting it a kind of ‘quasi-intention’), then an entire gene population and sequence, or else an entire population group or sequence becomes the more likely subject of the evolutionary plot. But if the group assumes priority in this way, then resemblance between individuals reverts from accident to essence, and biological existence must still be construed in metaphysically realist terms.

And the possibility of extending a realism of ‘universal’ forms from the species to a cross-species level exists in terms of the disputed phenomenon of independent lines of development converging towards isomorphic ends, as with the structure of the eye. If biologists like Simon Conway- Morris are right to claim the reality of such processes, then this suggests that nature is ‘attracted’ by certain forms in an irreducible manner.

In any case, it seems that we must still think of the living individual as in some sense instantiating a formal essence. A question of the mystery of the source of ordering, if not of designed order (since no order at all may be unimaginable) still remains, especially once it is realised that the operation of ‘natural selection’ is, as once more Conor Cunningham points out, a contingent, ‘emergent’ process that has itself evolved.

And how are we to explain why this contingently-arising ‘drive to survival’ -- which sounds just as anthropomorphic as the drive to appear or to appear as beautiful – is then sustained into the future? One might say, that, of course, nothing is seeking to survive, it is just that certain random mutations turn out, within given equally accidental conditions, to be able to persist.

But this still leaves begging the question of the ontological character of the living unit, because the totality of such conditions is itself, as Bergson pointed out, the subject of change, and therefore one cannot appeal to ‘conditions’ as though these belonged generically to a kind of universally-given ‘conditioning factor’ and were not themselves totally subject to endless variation in seemingly contingent relationship to everything else.

And why does a ‘single’ gene or pool of genes remain single such as to ‘underlie’ (‘substantively’) a process of mutation? Still more, why do genes and animals self- replicate over time and for-a-time in an organic way that produces constantly new individual instances of a recognisably ‘same’ species?

These questions mean that one cannot stop asking exactly what it is that in some sense seeks to survive and to increase, or simply to sustain an inertia beneath variety? Why are there any consistent living things at all?

For if variation were more absolute, if no continuities in growth and reproduction were readily discernible, then there would be no reason whatsoever to speak of ‘life’ in any sense whatsoever.

This consideration suggests that a ‘vitalist’ view (for want of a better word) of the evolutionary process makes more sense than does the Darwinian one. For it appears that life is not exhaustively subject to mechanical or to even merely physical and chemical laws, but is instead a kind of self-organising force or habit grounded in nothing before itself.

Life endlessly engenders life and does not as life die – for if death cannot generate life, then the priority of life over death renders it immortal; there is no life without resurrection, as Russian philosophy has often argued. Nor is it born, as Michel Henry today points out, since it is not caused.

life is not built-up from the pre-living; instead, if we free ourselves of the anthropomorphic delusion that physical reality from the outset ‘obeys laws’, then we shall see that it is more likely that something like a ‘living’ impulse, a totally unpredictable auto-creative force underlies all of physical nature, with a rising hierarchy of complexity and capacity for self-casuation.

This force is, of course, what Henri Bergson once famously named the élan vitale."

...

Really, all these developments in systems biology are simply reinstating artistyitles formal and final case which the methods of science had left out. David Hart HERE put it :

“I suppose, would be the inability of certain contemporary champions of “naturalism” to grasp that the question of existence is qualitatively infinitely distinct from the question of how one physical reality arises from another (for, inasmuch as physics can explore only the physical, and the physical by definition already exists, then existence as such is always “metaphysical,” or even “hyperphysical”—which is to say, “supernatural.”)

it would be worse than naïve to imagine that the sciences have thereby proved the nonexistence of final and formal causes. In fact, by bracketing such causes out of consideration, scientific method also rendered itself incapable of pronouncing upon any reality such causes might or might not explain....

The notion that there is evolutionary convergence in certain details of physical development across species divisions—the shape of a wing, the mechanism of a cameral eye—makes good sense to him, but the independent full development of close morphological analogues like the timber wolf and the thylacine seems to strain his credulity.

If evolution is a sort of “algorithmic” process of chance mutations, incredibly numerous and rare and unpredictable, selected by adventitious environmental conditions, and is a process moreover whose course is cumulative but not accumulative—progressive but not directed—then it is certainly surprising that genetic variation over millions of years under varying conditions in different regions could actually produce such similar results in such complex organic structures.

It simply strikes me as pleasing to imagine supplementing (or even underpinning) the genetic and the convergent explanations with the Platonic or Aristotelian suggestion that, perhaps, there is such a thing as the form of the wolf or the form of the cat—lupinity or felinity as suchthat impresses itself upon the somewhat intractable material substrate according to the prevailing conditions in a given time or place.

Then the existence of both a placental mammalian wolf and a marsupial wolf, born at the end of evolutionary genealogies separated by oceans for millions of years, seems hardly surprising at all.

If nothing else, this notion is not much more incredible than the idea that there is, say, a sort of cat-shaped niche out there in certain ecosystems that environmental forces will inevitably cause to be filled…”

Much of this relies on our conception of nature of course, Himmelfarb in Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, writes:

“The theory of natural selection, it is said, could only have originated in England, because only laissez-faire England provided the atomistic, egotistic mentality necessary to its conception. Only there could Darwin have blandly assumed that the basic unit was the individual, the basic instinct self-interest, and the basic activity struggle. Spengler, describing the Origin as ‘the application of economics to biology,’ said that it reeked of the atmosphere of the English factory … natural selection arose … in England because it was a perfect expression of Victorian ‘greed-philosophy,’ of the capitalist ethic and Manchester economics.” -

The Cosmos Ensouled ? A World Full of gods

                                                       

Is the cosmos ensouled ?

Well, the idea has a long pedigree, we’ll briefly look at some of its most capable defenders here, the Cambridge Platonist’s, Fechner, Campenella, and James, all mentioned by David Bentley Hart who sums up the position well in Roland in the Moonlight in an illuminating conversations he had with his dog :

“‘Is it a kind of panpsychism you’re proposing?’ I asked.

He sniffed loudly and emitted a small growl.

‘Not a term I care for,’ he said after a moment. ‘’Not that it’s wrong. It’s misleading, however, now that there’s this crop of philosophers around who think they can be both panpsychists and physicalists, which is sheer folly. They think of consciousness as a physical property that, in sufficiently complex composite structures, achieves reflective awareness and intentionality. You know - Gale Strawson, Guilio Tononi, Philip Goff.

But that’s nonsense, of course, since consciousness isn’t a property, properly speaking, and certainly not one that can be measured in an aggregated volume, and it doesn’t exist in discrete packets that can be added up into cumulatively more conscious totalities. It’s not a *property* at all, in fact, but an act, and therefore exists only within a noetic agency, and always already involved intention and autoaffection and so forth . . .

So anyway, I am suggesting a type of pansychism, if one must call it that, but most definitely not a physicalist version of the idea, which is just sheer gibberish - a vacuous panchreston of a theory at best. But that’s not very exotic to me, is it? I mean, you’ve written on the metaphysics of classical theism, haven’t you? Well, if you believe in God in that elevated and transcendent sense, then you’re already a panpsychist of some kind.’

When, once again, he failed to explain his meaning, I asked, ‘How do you reckon?’

He sighed, obviously vexed by the sluggish pace of my wits. ‘If you believe that everything arises from an infinite act of mind - the rock over there no less than the intelligence in you - then you believe there’s a presence of a... of an infinite knowing logos within the discrete logos that constitutes each thing as what it is. There’s a depth - even a personal depth, so to speak - in everything, an inner awareness that knows each reality from inside ... or from deeper than inside - an act of knowing it’s *interior intimo suo*. There is *one* who knows what it’s like to be a rock.

And wouldn’t that infinite personal depth have to express itself, almost of necessity, in a finite and personal interiority of sorts? Surely the knowledge of what it is to be a rock is already the spirit of the rock *as* a rock - the rock knowing itself. So isn’t that very knowledge of ‘what it’s like’ already the reality of a finite modality of personal knowledge, a kind of discrete spiritual self? A personal, reflective dimension as the necessarily contracted mode in which the uncontracted infinite act of mind is exemplified in that thing?

And why shouldn’t we call that dimension or mode by its classical names - dryads, hamadryads, naiads, nereids ... kami and tama ... yaksas and yaksinīs and gandharvas and apsaras ... nymphs and fairies and elves and longaevi of every kind? Especially when they’re pretty and graceful and scantily clad?

‘I see. I don’t . . .’

‘It’s really just as Thales said so long ago: all things are full of gods. Or as Heracleitos said: there’s logos in everything. All the ancients, really, with few exceptions. Plotinus, for instance: life and soul in all things, he says. And the Renaissance Platonists. The living world is an incalculably populous pantheon. And God - the infinite vanishing point, the comprehensive simplicity of Being as infinite spirit - is full of gods. And so are you ... if you throw that window open. Which I think you know full well, in that essentially Shinto soul of yours. Or esoteric Buddhist soul, perhaps - if one can call what has no svabhāva a soul. It was the great Shingon priest Yukai himself, after all - the fiery scourge of Tachikawa-ryu, as you’ll recall - who said that mind pervades all things: the grasses, flora of every sort, trees, the earth underfoot . . . That’s good cittamātra orthodoxy, I imagine ... with a specifically Japanese inflection.’”

“‘It makes sense, if you think about it, that this infinite consciousness, refracted into finite instances and modes and self-reflective awareness and thought, might engender ... well, a kind of limitless modal regress. Consciousness might inhere in all sorts of natural totalities, but also in totalities within other conscious totalities, with a corresponding subjectivity appropriate to each - parts as wholes, wholes as parts of other wholes.

Campanella, of course, treated this with rare brilliance. So did Gustavo Fechner. And James, and Royce, and Pierce, needless to say. And this like a physicalist panpsychism, in which every totality is subsumed into whatever is most integrated within it, like modular brains. Rather, it would be as if every level within every composite were just as conscious in its own way as every other: particles, simple objects, composed from those particles, complex structures, organisms, natural systems, the *anima mundi* ...

All part of an endlessly complex, infinitely divisible hierarchy of conscious perspectives, containing and contained, reflecting and inflecting in one another. And the subjectivity of persons, too, like me - and I suppose you too, in a manner of speaking - would be one mind of modal contraction within the total hierarchy of modes of mind, an ever more particular and ever more comprehensive subjectivity and autoaffection and intentionality.

It’s a lovely and stirring idea, at least: all of nature as a system of living coinherences, an endlessly multifarious mirror of the boundless potency contained in the infinite actuality and simplicity of the eternal ‘I Am’ - all of nature as an incalculably variously faceted prism of the infinite light of the divine Spirit? Don’t you agree?’”


                                  

The scholar Lee Irwin summarizes this theory in various philosophers thought the ages HERE.

Below are summations I’ve pulled:

"Tommaso Campanella (d. 1639) represents a late example of a Renaissance theory of panpsychism. He identifies three primaries: power, wisdom, and love as inherent to all things. Power or perhaps better, energy, is his first principle—the power to be, to maintain being, to sustain existence. Wisdom derives from sensation, perceptions of being, and as all things are and perceive, they “know” both themselves and other beings. The primary elements of the world are such knowing beings, with varying degrees of perception and power, and through combination “the heavens are sentient and the earth and animals as well.”

Further, the world and its multitude of beings reflect the image of God and are related to one another through (divine) love. This primary quality of love is fundamental to the joy, power, and awareness of existence; self-knowledge and more inclusively, knowledge of others, results in “change in the sentient body” through a sharing of perceptions, in both sympathy and antipathy.

The medium of this sharing and communication is soul, individual and universal, “infused by God” (infusa a Deo). This identity of being and knowing creates a panpsychism that is also pantheistic, the world ensouled, the constituative elements and all complex beings ensouled, but all imaging divinity and divine presence.

Knowledge in this context is a reflective process by which the higher intellect (intellectus mentalis) is assimilated into that which it contemplates, such that “the world becomes a conscious image of God with all its parts endowed with sense perception.”

Thus Campanella emphasizes perception over traditional knowledge and the “testimony” of direct witness over distant authority or mere opinion. The human being is thus a microcosm (or epilogo), a witness who can reflect on the macrocosm as a living soul, a “perfect animal with its own body, spirit, and soul.”
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The Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More (d. 1687) and Ralph Cudsworth (d. 1688), both dedicated Protestants, defended a view of nature and matter as a “vital, formative (plastic) ground” of Spirit. Cudsworth wrote, “we constantly oppose the generation of souls . . . out of dead and senseless matter and assert all souls to be substantial as matter itself.”

Thus the “spirit of nature” was a divine power pervading the physical world and sowing “spermatical or vital” seeds, thus giving rise to all natural forms. These “seminal forms” (like Stoic logoi spermatikoi) pervade all of “plastic nature” and act from within to shape matter into variable forms—beings, plants, animals, humans—as a “whole corporeal universe . . . together in one harmony.”

According to Henry More, the vital conjunction of spirit with matter (or soul with body) was through a shared “vital congruity” that blurred their differences and made each receptive to the other. Soul pervades the entire universe, within all matter, and working through the plastic vitality of nature, shapes each thing according to the “predispositions and occasions of [its] parts.”

This soul (or spirit of nature) was the “vicarious power of God” as a shaping power inherent to matter-nature, a power that permeated the entire body of each and every created being.

This immanent “spirit of nature” could not be accounted for by mechanical explanations or measureable and observable effects; rather, it reflected a purposeful, spiritual universe “above fortuitous mechanisms.”
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In Gustav Fechner’s (d. 1887) famous book, Nanna: On the Soul Life of Plants (1848), he wrote about his “day light view” of the world as nature utterly alive and conscious, matter outwardly and spirit inwardly. Spirit and soul were inseparable from matter and nature; for Fechner, souls were inherent to every aspect of nature, with simpler souls below humans and more complex above humans in the planet, the sun, the solar system, and the cosmos overall.

Each soul contributed to the complexity and diversity of the whole of nature that formed a perfect unity, an ensouled cosmos. He contrasted this view to the “night view” of materialism in which humans were a product of blind forces in a universe of utter darkness.

Arguing by analogy, Fechner believed that where there was life, as in human beings, there was also soul. Human consciousness only contributed to the existing consciousness of every plant and animal to create a collective earth consciousness, or earth-soul, that in turn contributed to the living consciousness of the conjoined planets, sun, and moons.

Between earth and sun a special relationship existed through an exchange of light-energy that connected all organic beings in a unitary consciousness. In this “intercourse of light” (Lichtwerkehrn), each organic being contributed its unique quality of awareness to the whole.

In turn, this created an “earth system” superior to humanity that maintains the harmony and balance of nature. Fechner calls the earth consciousness a “guardian angel” who watches over all inhabitants in communion with the sun, moon, and other planets and to which human beings may pray.

Even at the level of plants, the water lily could enjoy the warmth of water and the invigoration of sunlight. Every being had a soul capacity for aesthetic response and “words for us were like fragrances for them.”

Thus all organic beings have a degree of inwardness, distinct by species, location, and habitat. God is the unifying matrix of this shared awareness; soul development is a guiding influence in an increasing scale of complexity for each aspect of nature (a cell, a plant, an animal) in “a state of becoming that gives direction to the entire process.”
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The great American psychologist William James…articulated a view he entitled “pluralistic panpsychism” in which all things maintain an independent psychic perspective, down to the atoms, while also forming a unitary field of shared perceptions in living beings.

Under the term “polyzoism” James expressed the view that every cell of the brain has its own unique consciousness, but through interaction, cells contribute to a unitary field (including the subconscious) or “arch-cell” reflecting brain activity as a whole.

He writes, “the self- compounding of mind in its smaller and more accessible portions seems a certain fact.” This compounding aspect does not stop with the human mind but continues into superconscious unities; through mystical experience, the individual may participate in these higher unities.

Thus James agrees with Fechner that an earth-soul consciousness is “a formidable probability” and that higher degrees of ensoulment, in a living cosmos, may well lead to a formative God compounded out of the collectivity of all conscious entities.

James further argued for a synthesis of experience and reason in which a pluralistic universe could be comprehended in a rational manner that valued the empiricism of mystical perception as contributing to our understanding of a panpsychic “continuum of cosmic consciousness.”

Irwin’s essay goes into a several others as well, check it out HERE

Paul's celestial vision of Cosmic reversal over the Powers

                                

Superb scholarship paper by David Burnett on Paul's celestial vision, I've removed the biblical references and Greek to improve readability, read the entire thing HERE :

“For Paul, these dispossessed “sons of Adam” were enslaved to both the celestial gods/angels and to death being destined to perish.

Both these enemies are in need of defeat to secure the redemption of the “sons of Adam.” 

In the apocalyptic event of “the resurrection” a great cosmic eschatological reversal is to take place: the holy ones will no longer be enslaved to the celestial “rulers” and “principalities,” for they will have been destroyed by the Messiah. ..

The once imperishable celestial bodies “will die like human beings”

Then the human beings in Christ will receive from God “pneumatic” bodies, which are “celestial” constituted of “glory” , becoming as the stars , imperishable, never again subject to death , no longer “fleshly” like “mere human beings,” for “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” .

The last enemy to be defeated is death, when the Corinthians will be given heavenly bodies, raised in celestial glory and bearing the “image” of the “one from heaven,” fit to judge and rule where flesh and blood cannot dwell .

For Paul, his holy ones will be made like the celestial bodies, having bodies like them, fit to inherit their habitat, and to take their rightful place as true heirs with Christ, usurping the old powers and being raised in celestial power and glory as heirs of the cosmos.”

Angels, Antiangels, and the celestial Hierarchy

                                                          

Alan of Lille on the Celestial Hierarchy: the attributes of the different choirs of angels, their roles in the spiritual paths and correlatives in the human order, as well as the attributes and roles of the fallen Antiangels in causing disorder for humanity.

The higher ranks of angels absorb light by adoring God, and thus pass on the light to the lower ranks of angels who do the same, but if an angel turns away from God, he no longer absorbs light, and no longer passes light on, but becomes a source of darkness for the lower ranks.

This is from the Paulist Press volume on 'Angelic Spirituality'. There were a few switches that happened From Dionysius through Gregory the Great to Bonaventure, etc.