Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 50 — Tillich and Barfield (Summary & Notes)

“The no-thingness of God takes into itself the nothingness of meaninglessness, and it overcomes it… You come to experience no-thingness as the inexhaustible creation of meaning.”

(In case you missed it: Summary & Notes for Ep. 49: https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-49-5577775df252)

Ep. 50— Awakening from the Meaning Crisis — Tillich and Barfield [1:02:58] https://youtu.be/iu9fa4TkWE0?feature=shared

• Paul Tillich is not just theorizing, he is trying to give us guidance on how to live. When he speaks of courage (e.g. in his book The Courage To Be) he is speaking of “an existential courage that ultimately allows us to confront and overcome meaninglessness in its depth… This process of en-couragement.” He’s not talking about bravery in the face of danger, or fortitude (the ability to endure)
• For Tillich, courage is a virtue. There is something of wisdom in courage. “The courageous person sees through the illusion and the distortion of fear or distress to what is truly good, and acts accordingly.”
• This notion of seeing through — “seeing to the depths” — comes up a lot in Tillich. This is related to Tillich’s notion of faith. He thinks of it not the assertion of propositions to be believed, but rather as ultimate concern.
• Concern is deeply perspectival and participatory. When you’re concerned about something you care about it, and you’re also coping with it. You’re committed to it, involved in it. It encompasses you even though you are being involved in and through it.
• Concern is also aspirational and open-ended. “It points to the inexhaustibleness of the ground of being.”
• Tillich understands “God” as an icon as opposed to an idol. An imaginal symbol for the ground of being, and therefore God is no kind of being. There is “no-thingness” to God, in Tillich’s view. To see God as a kind of thing is a form of idolatry.
• God is the simultaneous grounding of meaning-making, reality, and the relationship between them.

• Tillich’s method of correlation is how Tillich approaches theology: that there is always a polar tension — a tonos — between existential questioning (questing) and revelation (how the depths of reality reveal themselves). There is an ongoing, resonant, mutual fitting between them. (Note how similar this is to anagoge)
• Tillich talks about the depth of reason. He’s describing the recursive machinery of aspirational rationality. He says we have an ek-static relationship where we’re standing beyond ourselves. (this is where “ecstasy” comes from)
• In the psyche, Tillich describes the depths of reason are experienced as ek-statis i.e. self-transcendence, and the depths of reality as miracle and mystery. In more Heideggerian terms, we can think of miracle as that aspect of being that is the shining and mystery as the withdrawal. The method of correlation is the anagoge between them.
• In Tillich’s view, symbols are not made by us. They are self-organizing, and they grow out of the unconscious within us and the unconscious without us. He says fundamentalism and literalism (e.g. in the case of Christian symbols) are an inappropriate way of holding onto them and keeping them alive. This echoes Jonathan Pageau when he says that Christianity in the meaning crisis are going through a profound death and rebirth of its symbolic structure.
• Tillich says symbols have a surplus of meaning, they have a more-ness to them.
• How is all of this realized by you? In the relationship between the existential self and the essential self. Notice that this is the relationship of the current self in existence to the sacred second self. This relationship is aspirational. Tillich keeps saying that the essential self is ahead of the existential self— not causally but normally. “Tempting” the existential self to a better way of being.
• In the Protestant era, Tillich said meaninglessness was experienced as guilt. But now, in our current period, we are experiencing meaninglessness within ourselves as despair. He says this is being represented by the existentialist. (He was writing in the 50s/60s when existentialism was more prevalent). This line from Stoicism to Protestantism to Existentialism ultimately points to Tillich’s notion of faith. Idolotry is so pernicious for Tillich because the no-thingness of God is central to this idea of faith. “The no-thingness of God takes into itself the nothingness of meaninglessness, and it overcomes it… You come to experience it as the inexhaustible creation of meaning.” (Keiji Nishitani thinks the same thing can be found within Buddhism.)
• “There is a fecundity at the level of fundamental framing and the way it’s coupled to being that it cannot be drained dry by despair. When we stop trying to push away the nothingness, but have instead an imaginal relationship to it and move through it with the nothingness of God, then we overcome meaninglessness.”
• Nietzsche got close to this: “If you stare long enough into the abyss it begins to stare back into you.” But it can be said that Nietzsche didn’t stare long enough. This is Nishitani’s critique of Nietzsche and nihilism.
• There’s a term by Gregory of Nyssa from the Eastern Orthodox, Neo-Platonic tradition that you also see in John Scotus Eriugena: epek-tasis. It’s the notion that you’re not trying to rest in God — God is not ultimately “had,” even in resting in him. Instead, it’s an infinite self-transcendence in the infinity of God. There is no resting, there is only the constant disclosure of the inexhaustibleness of the ground of being.
• Tillich explicitly and repeatedly argues that the symbol joins together and grounds the subjective and the objective. He says Nietzsche even uses this in his “will to power,” where he’s trying to find something that bridges between the subjective (will) and the objective (power).
• This points to one of the ways Tillich is different from Jung. Tillich always puts participation into creative tension (tonos) with participation in being. He sees this overcome in what he calls a theonomous (“God-governed”, where “God” here means the ground of being, the ongoing epek-tasis of the inexhaustible, etc.)
• The connection to gnosticism and the transgression of theism is explicit in Tillich. He calls this response to the meaning crisis “the God beyond the God of theism.” This is the non-theism of Tillich. Anatheism. It’s the rejection of the presuppositions that are shared by both theism and atheism. Some of these presuppositions are: 1. God is the supreme being, (the theist answers ‘yes’ to this and the atheist answers ‘no.’), 2. God is accessed primarily or solely through belief, 3. Theology and anti-theology do not require transformative anagoge, 4. Sacredness is personal or impersonal
• Vervaeke’s main criticism of Tillich is that while in one way he is more practical than Heidegger, giving us guidance on how to live and cultivate courage and faith, he does not offer practices of transformation. Jung, on the other hand, created a practice for enacting and cultivating the imaginal. A practice of active imagination.
• This notion of deep symbolic participation that is translated into practices goes to the heart of Owen Barfield’s work. He’s one of “The Inklings,” and ongoing discussion and fellowship that also included Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams as the core four.
• Barfield was influenced by gnosticism but also by Rudolf Steiner, who Barfield interprets as a modern gnostic. He’s also influenced by neo-Platonism through Coleridge. Also other early Romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel. One thing these early Romantics emphasized was the in-finity (“non-finiteness”) of reality. The lack of being bound or fully frameable (as opposed to just being uncountable.) “The inexhaustible moreness.” The idea is that this inexhaustible moreness is that which continually draws us and affords us into self-transcendence. Schlegel referred to it as “the finite longing for the infinite.”
• This eduction (“drawing out,” which is where our word education comes from) discloses or reveals the sacredness. “We experience and participate this in creativity,” i.e. the flow state. Poesis, which we translate as poetry, is how we experience this. “Ek-statis in creativity.” This is a transformative experience. “A felt change in consciousness.” The self after is both continuous and discontinuous from the self before.
• The Greeks had the word pneuma-spiritus. Pneuma, which could mean “wind,” and spiritus which is “spirit” — the self-moving aspects of the psyche. We think of this concept mostly as just spirit, but Barfield sees this inherent etymological division, capturing both the objective world of the wind and the subjective world of what’s going on in the psyche. Barfield says they inter-penetrate and inter-afford each other. Using the word in this way is a form of participation for Barfield, before the Cartesian disjunction later split the meanings. (Vervaeke argues that what Barfield is pointing out that these people had a more transjective, anagogic resonance with reality.)
• Vervaeke isn’t so sure about Barfield’s evolutionary hypothesis i.e. that Cartesian division, and has pointed out that we still have words in our language with double meanings. e.g. when we say “attack” we can mean physical destruction or critical argumentation. Or when we say “see” we can mean visual experience or understand, and “understand” etymologically also means “to stand under” but can also mean co conceptual understanding. There are many examples like this that can get very complex.
• Lakoff & Johnson claim that this is not an evolutionary thing pointing ti ancient ways of being conscious. Rather, this is something pervasive in our cognition and our culture now, and it points to psychological development within individuals. We start with a sensory-motor definition of words and later pull them up a layer of abstraction to use them more metaphorically as we grow.
• Vervaeke & Kennedy argue that the psychological development is actually deeper than is being represented by Lakoff & Johnson, and that their model is too simplistic. There should be a top-down aspect to this psychological development as well, not just a bottom-up. And that these two things — the concrete sensory and the intellectual — meet together in the imaginal. (e.g. to say “I see what you’re saying” is an imaginal use of the word “see”) The intellectual form that these sensory-motor words (e.g. see, grasp, get…) converge upon is also being expressed and developed through different imaginal renderings that connect back to the sensory-motor.

• Vervaeke argued that we can link that to Michael Anderson’s notion of the “massive redeployment hypothesis,” and that this symbolic, imaginal use is this process of re-exaptation. e.g. “You can invoke balance to talk about justice represented by the imaginal (symbolic) statue of Lady Justice as a way of using — re-exapting — the physical balance machinery and using that machinery to give a structural-functional organization to this hard-to-articulate, ineffable sense of justice.” It’s an enacted metaphor, and enacted symbol. “This is poesis in its deepest sense.”
• This also helps explain the translucency of the symbol, why we can both see it and see through it. e.g. we can look at it as physical balance but also see through it into justice. It also explains our temptation to literalism and idology. (i.e. where we can forget justice and focus just on balance. We lose the iconic seeing-through and only look at the concrete.)
• Then there’s the division — the meaning crisis. And Barfield is very explicit about the meaning crisis. Two worlds mythology, inner and outer being separated, subjective vs. objective, etc… Barfield says we need to move to final participation as a response to the meaning crisis. This is “a recovery of participation integrated within the gains of the rational sciences.” Part of what that means, and what he emphasizes, is the recovery of the perspectival and the participatory.
• Vervaeke agrees and thinks this is deeply right, but is critical of Barfield in that this also means a science of meaning cultivation. “How does that participatory and perspectival fit into our scientific processes?… Both sides have to be involved in this marriage or it will fail.” This is what he has tried to do with relevance realization theory and putting it into discourse with spirituality, symbolism, sacredness, and these great prophets of the meaning crisis.
• Barfield is very indebted to Coleridge and Schlegel, which is not always acknowledged by his followers. You can’t just import Barfield into classical theism, since this alone won’t bring about final participation (and isn’t fair to Barfield’s ideas). Di Fuccia points out that this is what makes Barfield different to Heidegger: Heidegger took from Eckhart this notion of “letting be” — Gelassenheit — which is really a complete passivity, which is a very Lutheran idea. But Heidegger forgets the other very important important term in Eckhart: Durchbruch — “break through.” Breaking the inappropriate frame and moving through and making the new frame. This is something Barfield picks up on in his notion of creativity as participatory, and his idea of poesis is synergistic.
• “What have I tried to show you? That the vocabulary, the grammar, and the framework of relevance realization, and how it can be developed to talk about spirituality and sacredness, can be put into deep dialogue with Heidegger, Corbin, Jung, Tillich, and Barfield, that also afford deep, critical, creative dialogue between them and afford a potential synoptic integration. All of this is what I’ve meant by, and what I mean by, awakening from the meaning crisis.”

List of Books in the Video:

• Paul Tillich — The Courage To Be
• John P. Dourley — The Psyche as Sacrament
• John P. Dourley — Paul Tillich, Carl Jung, and the Recovery of Religion
• John P. Dourley — A Strategy for a Loss of Faith
• Paul Tillich — Morality and Beyond
• Keiji Nishitani — Religion and Nothingness
• Richard Kearney — Anatheism: Returning to God after God
• Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski — The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings
• Michael Vincent Di Fuccia — Owen Barfield: Philosophy, Poetry, and Theology
• Owen Barfield — The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays
• John D. Caputo — The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought