The Metaphysics of Faith

Part 7, The Ontological Bifurcation of Modernity

Having described some of the consequences associated with the loss of a Neoplatonic, participatory metaphysics, I want to say some things about how this loss transpired.

To some, this might seem to be an irrelevant history lesson. But recounting this story is important for both diagnostic and prescriptive purposes. As I’ve described, we tend not to notice the implicit metaphysics of modernity. It’s simply the air we breath. So if we can describe exactly what the Neoplatonic, participatory metaphysics of the Christian tradition was replaced with we’d be in a better position to both notice our metaphysical assumptions, making the implicit explicit, and be more surgical in pushing back upon the default assumptions that create such inhospitable soil for the flourishing of the Christian faith.

So, let’s tell a bit of this story. How did we come to lose the participatory metaphysics in which Biblical faith grew and thrived?

In this post, we’ll focus upon the impact of René Descartes and what has been called “Cartesian Dualism.”

Recall, according to the participatory metaphysics of the Christian tradition, existence was participation in Being. This participation implied a metaphysical link between creature and Creator. To be sure, as I’ve pointed out, in order to preserve the analogia entis this link can only be understood analogically, but there existed an ongoing and vital connection between God and the world. This meant that the spiritual and the material realm were bound together in a whole. Since all being was connected to and flowed forth from God, there existed a unity of being.

Descartes severed this connection by positing an ontological bifurcation. Specifically, he asserted that there were two distinct substances in the cosmos, what he called res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended substance). In separating these dual substances, Descartes made a distinction between the mental and the physical, which would go on to sever the connection between the material and the spiritual. This bifurcation would create a host of downstream problems, the most famous being what is called “the mind/body problem.” How does the mind, as an immaterial and spiritual substance, interact with the physical brain? Descartes’ failed answer to that question is now pejoratively called “the ghost in the machine.” Having cut off the mental from the physical, Descartes couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Importantly for our story, material existence lost contact with spiritual existence. Instead of ontological participation, an ongoing metaphysical connection with spiritual reality, we had two separate substances that couldn’t be fit together. And we still don’t know how link the mental and the physical. There are, in fact, very good arguments (called “the hard problem of consciousness”) that the connection can never be resolved. If so, it seems reasonable to assume that Cartesian Dualism is deeply wrong about the nature of reality and has led the modern world down a metaphysical cul-de-sac.

Crucially, Cartesian Dualism severed our ontological connection with God. The effect of this severing is the disenchantment of the material world. I share some of this story in The Shape of Joy. Metaphysically speaking, we live in our heads, as an isolated subjective consciousness, surrounded by inert material objects. Our interior world is the domain of meaning and values, and the exterior world is the domain of facts. More, as modernity has progressed the interior world of meaning and value has come to be viewed as illusory and fictional. The invisible mental stuff described by Descartes, in being invisible, isn’t real. To say that something is “only in your mind” means that it doesn’t really exist. The only thing that is real is the exterior world of facts. And because of this, science has increasingly became the sole arbiter of truth.

Relatedly, upon the separation of the material world from mind, the cosmos came to be understood to function like a machine. Creation had been viewed as a theophany, as an ongoing act of divine communication. God’s Mind spoke to our minds, Logos to logos. Now the world is viewed as silent and mute. Prior to modernity, our relation to God was constant and ongoing. God was present. Today we view God as absent and interventionist, a Deistic “tinkerer” with the cosmos.

This description of mine has been told before. This story is not new. But as I mentioned above, it’s important to understand how we lost a participatory metaphysics and what it was replaced with. Most modern people assume Cartesian Dualism, that there two kinds of things in the world, minds and objects, and that these things are ontologically separate. Further, they assume that if anything in the mind can’t be verified by science then what is in the mind is imaginary and fictitious. Only objects are real. Only facts are true. The world is inert and is devoid of mind, best viewed as a large machine that runs independently of any sustaining or guiding intelligence. Existence is taken for granted and is no longer viewed a gift. Theophany has been replaced with an existential void.