The scientific revolution forced thinkers to re-evaluate the nature of the cosmos. While medieval thinkers had described the heavens with metaphors drawn from anthropomorphic life, by the 16th century they were increasingly tending to describe the heavens with metaphors drawn from the machine. The Protestant reformation, followed by the Enlightenment, further contributed to this general state of affairs which some thinkers have described with the phraseology of ‘disenchantment.’
These were some of the themes I explored earlier this Spring in a paper I presented for a conference at the
University of York. Titled, 'The Holy Spirit and the Animated Cosmos',
my paper suggested that the pathway to recovering an animated view of the cosmos in general and our world in particular is not to go back to pre-scientific modalities, but to understand the imminence of the Holy Spirit in our world through the lens of Hebrew temple theology.
I recently updated my paper to answer certain objections that friends have posed, though I will continue to benefit from any further feedback people may have to offer. The paper can be downloaded at the following link:
1 comment:
Robin,
I have been thinking and writing privately about this for years since ready Margaret Barker on Temple Theology and seeing it as an enchanted way of seeing compared with the medieval and modern worldviews (or models as Lewis would have put it).
Lewis cautions that the medieval model is not better than the modern, but that each is exactly a model and we should not forget that. The modern model, according to Lewis, has largely forgotten that it is a model and not the real thing. We think we have a lot less silly way of seeing the world and we look down our noses at the older ways of seeing because ours is, we think, a lot less anthropomorphic view. But, he points out (in the Discarded Image) which is more anthropomorphic, to say that the planets move because of a "kindly enclining" or because they read in a statute concerning the law of gravity and obeyed the law out of some sense of duty? Most of the time when we try to remove the myth we just substitute another myth in its place.
But this idea of recapturing a sense of wonder by looking back to Temple Theology is very attractive. I also like the work of John Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy group who look at the origins of early modernism.
Sincerely,
Ryan
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