Nature, Grace, and History

1.

The secular naturalist consensus of the 20th-century mainstream —in the present century there is no consensus about anything, and no mainstream— found it easy to look back with condescension on our great-great-great-grandparents’ belief in the immortality of the soul. Until the recent past, they supposed, people were foolish enough to imagine that some will-o’-the-wisp of the former person survives the corruption of their body. But now, the naturalists congratulated themselves, we have come to understand, correctly and irreversibly, that the soul is only an illusion sustained by the organization and activity of the body itself, its gemmules, its aperiodic crystals, its protein helices, and so cannot fail to corrupt along with it.

Whether or not this is good metaphysics, it is definitely not good history. For in fact the period of the human past that conceived the fate of the human individual in this way —as having a beginning but not an end, and as having an initial short chapter with a body followed by an infinitely long second one without one, or with a body of a very different kind—, was extremely brief. In order for this period to begin, several conditions had first to fall into place. For one thing, human beings had to start thinking of themselves as individuals, and thus as the sort of entities that might persist beyond death, anchored in one and the same individual identity, for all time. And in order for this condition to emerge, significant new cultural practices, not least writing and other elaborate technologies of record-keeping, had to come along to do the work of anchoring, in baptismal scrolls and comparable registers, the persons we could now imagine ourselves to be.

Detail from John Sloan, Movie, 5 Cents (1907)

The 20th century thought it was setting things uniquely right, finally waking up after a continuous and undifferentiated prehistory of superstition. Some resistance to the consensus of the “serious” people continued, of course, and it came not just from those still attached to their superstitions, but from those who were unserious in other ways. Thus Woody Allen reflected in 1993: “I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” (So far, he’s still getting his wish.)

The sempiternal duration for which Woody yearns here is in fact not so different from the historically unusual representation of the fate of the soul in the era immediately preceding his, and ours, the era of our great-great-great-grandparents. To live on in heaven, that is, as yourself, forever, is much more like living on in your apartment than it is like most other conceptions of the fate of the person after death. To live on in the hearts of your countrymen, in turn, to achieve this-worldly honors and acclaim, is not so much, as Woody is imagining it, a consolation the 20th century came up with to compensate for the loss of immortality, as it is rather a return to a representation of human destiny that had immediately preceded the discovery, or invention (same difference), of individual immortality.

Indeed the one representation seems to constitute a sort of transitional phase on the way to the other: the hearts of our countrymen were, in religion-historical terms, the temporary lodging we received before moving into our own permanent apartments. And before either of these representations had its moment, for the vastly greater part of human history the default representation of our prospects after death was one that emphasized neither achievement of glory nor infinite duration of the individual, but reabsorption of the person into nature, or into some limited subcycle of nature.

But let us dwell a moment longer on the transitional representation, on “glory”, “acclaim”, “living on in the hearts of our countrymen”. In his classic La Mort chez les peuples altaïques (1963), Jean-Paul Roux compellingly argues that, before the arrival of the universal religions in Inner Asia —especially Islam—, the Turkic Tengrists knew how to pray only for longevity and earthly glory. After their Islamization, they learned to pray for the soul’s post-mortem elevation to eternal paradise as well.

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There is an enormous corpus of pre-Islamic Turkic inscriptions beseeching Tengri —God, that is, or the Sky— to provide blessings. But these blessings are always conceptualized as, so to speak, “non-transferable”: the ruling presumption was that you can’t take it with you, but you may as well turn to Tengri anyway, at least if you are a sufficiently important person, for some help in augmenting your earthly greatness. I am reminded of a late-20th-century slogan I recall seeing on t-shirts and bumperstickers, a source of low snickers among golfers and recreational boaters: “The one who dies with the most toys wins”. This time around our paganism comes with a heavy dose of infantilism, but trade out “toys” for “arms”, “cattle”, “slaves”, and we find, again, that this late-modern compensation for the loss of immortality is in fact a return to what had been the highest aspiration just before immortality’s discovery.

It is not that an actual afterlife, involving indefinite temporal duration of the individual, is entirely absent from the transitional phase in which earthly glory is valued above all. But when it is acknowledged, it is usually an ambiguous, spectral, or shadowy condition, and hardly a future state to be desired. In a 1905 autobiography, for example, the Apache leader Gerónimo writes of his own beliefs prior to becoming a Christian:

As to the future state, the teachings of our tribe were not specific, that is, we had no definite idea of our relations and surroundings in after life... We held that the discharge of one’s duty would make his future life more pleasant, but whether that future life was worse than this life or better, we did not know, and no one was able to tell us.

It took, for Gerónimo, full conversion in order to be able to claim proper knowledge of his own soul’s ultimate destiny. Naturally, like many converts (including me), the Apache chief remained ambivalent for the remainder of his life, and continued (again like me), to practice many of his earlier pagan ways — but he did so, now, with a sharper sense of what was at stake.

What interests me, anyhow, is not to figure out why our most recent ancestors were foolish enough to imagine that the soul goes on living after the body has been corrupted, but why, at a certain point in history, well after the introduction of the technologies that anchored personal identity over time, the greatest aspiration, for the greatest possible human life, was elevated from an aspiration to longevity and glory, to a hope for eternal salvation.

2.

It is of course only a caricature to represent this eternal state, as I have been doing up until now, as sempiternal duration. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens, as David Byrne sang, not because one sits around forever with nothing to do, but because there simply is no time for anything to happen in. An eternal blessed state is not a never-ending victory tour capping off a life well-lived.

But for our purposes the popular caricature works just as well as the loftiest abstractions of, say, St. Augustine. We can’t blame the common people for not being philosophers, and when we find them representing life after death as pleasurable infinite duration, rather than as a blessed state outside of time altogether, we should no more dismiss their representation than we would dismiss, as students of human diversity, Inuit representations of onomastic reincarnation, where a grandmother is reborn in her granddaughter simply in virtue of the fact that they share the same name. It is a historical fact that Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan sought earthly glory, imagining that this was more or less as good as it gets, while a medieval Christian peasant or Muslim tradesman, though far less “worthy” than these two men —so far from worthy in fact that the Tengrists never would have had the idea that it was worth praying for them at all—, were able to anticipate a fate infinitely greater for themselves than the fate of the greatest pagan conqueror. And it is this shift in expectations that we are trying to understand, whether in its most sophisticated or in its most caricatural variation.

We are confronted, believers or not, I mean, with a hard historical fact: that a new kind of hope came into the world at a certain moment, a hope that had not been there before. For believers, one way of accounting for the appearance of this new hope is to say that it was a revelation.

For skeptics, there are alternatives. Belief in the immortality of the soul, as I’ve said, emerges almost automatically, though with some delay, from the discovery of the individual self as a salient locus of identity. And this, again, seems to occur in parallel with new practices of record-keeping through literacy, which takes the lives of the ancestors and turns them into a series of successive points, thereby straightening the experience of life out from a cycle or circle —wherein we long enjoyed full participation in the cyclicity of nature itself—, and into a line. Gradually these new practices turned the focus of human societies away from the ancestors and towards the destinies of individuals. And in this way the line became a ray, beginning with each of us as individuals and extending sempiternally into the future.

What for the believer is revelation, then, is for the skeptic the after-echo of new information technologies and their downstream epistemic consequences. There is at least some possibility however of breaking out of this tired antinomy, by insisting that anyhow revelations are history-bound things, and no one ever claimed otherwise: they make their way out into the world through history.

You might by now have started to make out what I really want to discuss today. Revolutions in the history of information technology have tended to carry revelations along with them. But we are currently in the midst of a massive revolution in the history of information technology. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect, there is simply no way our old representations of the self and of its fate after death —and by “old” I mean here not only those of the Tengrist warlords, or of the medieval Christian peasants, but also of the cocksure 20th-century secular naturalists who thought they’d settled matters once and for all— are going to survive intact.

What then is going to come next? What can we already, now, begin to discern on the horizon?

3.

If you are a Protestant, you might notice that even our last information revolution, the one we associate with the name of Gutenberg, delivered some new theological truths of its own. But I believe it is already clear that our current information revolution is much more significant for world history than the one that preceded it. There is much more distance between the AI-driven internet and the printing press than there is between the printing press and the very earliest scratchings on oracle bones.

Gutenberg’s revolution, perhaps more evidently if you’re not a Protestant, also brought on a few centuries of dominance for the naturalist consensus I have already evoked. To show, as Isaac Newton did in 1687, that there are “mathematical principles of natural philosophy”, is to show, or can be taken as showing, that what we thought was the study of a nature as real as we are is in the end the study of abstractions, to wit, the abstractions of mathematics. This is the conceptual revolution that left us with what was supposed to be the “common-sense” notion of bare extension or of intrinsically inert matter kept in motion by external impacts. But what was thought to be common-sense ended up sending us down very strange pathways indeed, yielding up, in particular, the queer idea of the natural world as what Erwin Schrödinger called a “play before empty benches” — an idea that practically no one in the history of humanity had even considered prior to the 17th century. It just seemed too implausible. Any honest reasoner will concede that it seems no less implausible now.

This was likewise the conceptual revolution that restyled the cosmos —a term whose original meaning is something like “orderly whole”— into “space”, a term that turns almost the entirety of the physical universe into something, again, very much like an abstraction. And here we arrive at one of the primary points of the present essay: when secular naturalists look back haughtily at earlier representations of the world around us as “naive” or “superstitious”, they generally do so in total ignorance of the utter inadequacy of their preferred updates. The universe is in fact something closer to a cosmos than it is to “space”. It is not a “container” into which physical stuff may either be poured or not, but rather, in light of what we still dare to call the “cosmological principle”, is a uniform and isotropic tissue (so to speak) of filaments and other smaller structures.

As with any successful conceptual revolution, we were for some centuries unable to see the audacity of the claims the Newtonian revolution made, precisely because it was so successful as to make its claims appear self-evident. But there were latent tensions in this program from the beginning. Science was supposed to deliver to us the final definitive account of the world as a great swarm of physical things, with a very small subclass of these things that managed, through the intricacy of their organization, to attend the “theater of things” as its spectators. But it was the same tools of abstract mathematical analysis of the things in this theater that, from the beginning, as I’ve suggested, threatened to “abstract them away”. And indeed a few centuries further on, with this abstract analysis now significantly enhanced by machine modeling, a current of thought has come along, styling itself “simulationism”, that seeks to replace physics altogether as the foundational science of reality, and to install “informatics” upon the vacated throne.

Regular readers will by now be familiar with my principal criticism of simulationism: that it is yet another instance of the Anglo-philistine habit of spinning out what are purported to be novel accounts of how the world works, in total ignorance of the historical precedents for what one is saying — believing, in sum, that one is speaking and reasoning when one is in fact channeling familiar leitmotifs that come down to us unawares from the ancestors. I have pointed out in particular that in virtually every age, learnèd people have been so impressed with their own state-of-the-art technologies as to come to believe that these technologies are not just impressive artifices, but models, epitomes, microcosms of the world itself. In the 17th century, as we all know, the universe became, for a while, a clockwork; in the late 20th century, it became a computer. For our more distant ancestors, it was many things besides — a chariot, a wheel, a horse. All of this is what the French anthropologist Daniel de Coppet called the “sociocosmic” dimension of human life — the projection out into the cosmos as a whole of the defining features, whether machines or domesticated animals, of social life in any given phase of its historical development.

And yet… To the extent that I am myself a history-bound thinker, as I’ve already begun to articulate earlier in this essay, it of course behooves me to remain sensitive to the way visions of reality are articulated within the available vocabulary of a given era, even —and this is I admit the hardest case for me— when it is my own era we are discussing. Considerations of this sort have been particularly pressing for me since I have begun, over the past few years, to understand myself, more precisely, as a history-bound Christian thinker, and thus as someone who is, disarmingly to some, prepared to lend quite a bit of credence to claims initially articulated in the aim of being understood and affirmed by Bronze Age pastoralists. Is the Lord really my “shepherd”? That’s obviously not the best way to account for the relationship, if the people you hope to convert are hunter-gatherers with no idea of domestic livestock, or, in the other direction, if the ones you are hoping to keep in the “flock” are post-industrial city-dwellers. But we make do with the teachings we have, in the idiom of their initial expression, while also finding ways to update them, in paratext and commentary.

Why now should one seek to hold on at all to the truths conveyed in revelations that have lost, or seem to have lost, their salience in the wake of new technological and conceptual revolutions? The recent naturalist consensus suspected those who expressed any desire at all to hold onto older, dustier truths, of incoherence at best, and willful benightedness at worst. The most epistemically charitable of the 20th century’s naturalists generally sought nothing more solid than an agree-to-disagree détente, a demarcation of the respective domains, as the kindly Stephen Jay Gould put it, of the two non-overlapping magisteria. If you are a Leibnizian, as I am, Gould’s formula, however well-intentioned, is just about as wrong-headed as can be. What we in fact have are two perfectly overlapping magisteria, nature and grace, which Leibniz also describes as a “kingdom within a kingdom” (it’s nature that’s contained by grace, and not the other way around).

The naturalists tended to see those who held onto antiquated truths —such as the truths revealed in the Gospels— as sharing in the same spirit of wishy-washy “subjectivism” that likewise characterized the New Age alternatives on offer in the era: as if the believers still lurking around in our day and age were demanding only that they be permitted to have “their truths” alongside whatever truths we learn in high-school biology, or more or less acquiesce in accepting when they come down to us from our scientific institutions.

And yet, ironically, it may be that the preservers of antiquated truths, articulated in forgotten idioms, represent the single best hope for a robust realism, accommodating several registers of revelation —including the past few centuries of scientific revelation, also known as discovery— from several different epochs at once.

I myself believe many different things. I believe human beings are born with original sin, and that they can be redeemed from sin by their own free choice. I believe this option was added to the menu, by revelation, only a few millennia ago, and that it is therefore one that human beings did not have for 99% or so of their existence. I believe a major impact event caused the moon to break off from the earth 4.5 billion years ago, and around the same time, perhaps relatedly, simple organic compounds began to form into living beings. I believe, as I have said, that the structure of the physical universe, at a sufficiently zoomed out level, is isotropic and homogeneous.

Far from believing these things “in different ways”, with “different hats on”, I see the role of the Christian philosopher as one of trying to figure out how these seemingly disparate and superficially incompatible truths in fact mirror the same truth of one and the same world.

4.

What I’m feeling my way towards in the present essay is a historicized redux of the image of the world as a world of nature and grace, a world of perfectly overlapping magisteria. This effort leads me to what I realize are some rather unconventional views, from the point of view of standard Christian dogma. For one thing, I find myself concerned to place the human experience within the longue-durée perspective of “deep history”, which inevitably leads me to a conception of creation, sin, and the possibility of redemption that significantly decenters the human as the main protagonist of the greatest story ever told.

I am not the only person to attempt such a move. Anne Conway explicitly argued, in her unconventional but not completely unprecedented Quaker philosophy, that even a horse has the potential to achieve the perfection of Christ. I would agree with her, but would also insist on including, within the fold or the flock, however many octillion cyanobacteria are currently floating around out there as well. Just as the story of redemption in the New Testament was articulated in terms comprehensible to a pastoralist, so too was the story of the Fall articulated in the Hebrew Bible in terms amenable to a society captivated by a newfound discovery of some of the remarkable particularities of the human species that seemed to set it apart from nature. Later revelations, notably those in the broad sense of “revelation” that includes natural science, have in turn narrowed that rift once again, and brought us back into community with all the horses and bacteria and viruses with which we are co-constituted (though perhaps it’s the viruses that are the “yelling monsters” of which Milton wrote, outside of any hope for redemption, “hourly conceived / And hourly born, with sorrow infinite”).

Detail from John Sloan, Movie, 5 Cents (1907), depicting a scene from Thomas Edison’s The Kiss, (1896)

In this light, while there are many plausible candidates for the deep-historical event that might be nominated as the true Fall, I am attracted to the idea that it was the Cambrian explosion of 540 million years ago. For some billions of years before that, life on Earth was more or less a peaceable kingdom — feeding was a matter of almost imperceptible absorption of nutrients from passive microbial mats. But then some low animal, perhaps serpentine in form, introduced a new idea into the world — that a creature can get a more efficient dose of energy by eating other creatures similar to it in kind. New forms proliferated, a literal arms race ensued, with predators and prey constantly seeking to outdo one another by new weaponry and stratagems — spikes, shells, camouflage, venom, bioluminescent dummy appendages, and on and on.

And some hundreds of millions of years later, the hominids were still at it; their spiky appendages had transformed into clubs and knives and guns. According to the great classicist and comparative-religionist Walter Burkert, hominid cognition itself may have emerged together with a dawning awareness that this is all a rather nasty business, and that we’re going to have to come up with some rituals to expiate our transgressions even as we continue to participate in them. Culture, on his view, therefore emerges largely as a mechanism for collective processing of the objectively horrifying precondition of the continuation of our lives, that it requires the constant usurpation of the lives of other beings.

For most of human history this heavy fact was processed through sacrifice, of animals, but also, often, of plants and other offerings. Later it was processed through one big sacrifice, of God made man, and through the subsequent expression of thankfulness, in saying grace, for the food, including the animal flesh, one was about to receive. Today animals are killed by the billions, and rendered into commodities, for which no thankfulness at all is expected, but only an exchange of a small amount of money. So to the question, “Is it a sin to eat meat?” The only plausible answer is: “Well, it depends.” The way it is generally eaten today? Yes, absolutely, this is a grave sin. It was always at least a transgression, but a necessary one, and one that traditional cultures knew how to process and to balance out.

This is just one example of a much broader point I am trying to make: that what counts as sin can and does change from one historical era to another. There simply can be no blanket prohibition on certain acts —as Anglo-philistines in the utilitarian tradition, and as Protestant deontologists of a Kantian leaning, would like to have— that would not first have to be subjected to a “thick description“ to determine what is really going on. And as with sin, so with redemption, and so with the fate of the soul, to return to our point of departure: nature and grace overlap perfectly, but there can be no stable transhistorical articulation of what the “principles” of these are, even if Leibniz was able to give us a compelling account of the principles of nature and grace such as it made sense to characterize them at the moment he was writing.

5.

Life and consciousness may well be accounted for in terms of the autocatalysis of cellular automata. Our belief in the individual existence of stable entities known as “persons” may well be an artifact of certain technological and administrative practices. And yet the promise of the eternal salvation of whatever it is that we are on the ultimate reckoning — that is real. What this eternal salvation involves, and how we account for it, is bound to change from one era to another, and the faithful must be prepared not just to weather that change, but to embrace it and even to aspire to be among the first accurately to characterize it.

In spite of my stated intention for this essay, I really am not yet able to discern much of what new revelations our new information revolution might bring with it. I have a strong suspicion that the shift, mentioned already here and articulated in several previous essays, from physics to informatics as Prima Scientia, will bring with it significant consequences for our shared cultural understanding of reality, and of the individual self, and so also, inevitably, of what it would mean for an individual self to be able to hope for eternal salvation.

This is not a concession, on my part, to simulationism — not exactly. I continue to see this doctrine’s primary exponents as classic Anglo-philistines of the very worst kind. In particular, I cannot help but notice that they are, malgré eux, echoing some fairly familiar and avoidable heresies. I’ll be the first to admit that the technical arguments of Nick Bostrom et al. are quite beyond me — I guess I’m too dumb 😂. But I gather at least that they arrive at a vision of the world as constituted by complicated hierarchies of conscious beings, pulling the strings and sealing the fates of those further down the Scala rerum from them. Other traditions have arrived at similar cosmic visions; in many of these, it is nearly certain that naturally occurring psychedelic compounds played a key role. The Gnostics in particular were keen on presenting our world as rather different than it appears, as a lower rung of reality with sundry Archons above it, “playing” it so to speak like a video game. In this respect, you might say, the simulationists are a sect of Christian heretics without even knowing it — they take themselves to be descended only from our most recent ancestors in the era of secular modernity. But this is in line with a much more general feature of the world that produced both Bostrom and me. I, too, thought I was growing up under the reign of secular modernity. Looking back, now, I understand with painful clarity that I was raised as a barefoot pagan — from the tribe of what Paul Beatty called the blond aborigines of California.

Much as every era will come up with its new unnecessary complications of the cosmic order —multiplying these entities beyond necessity, and beyond decency, now in terms of demiurgic emanation, now in terms of virtual-reality technology—, so will every era find new ways to articulate the enduring and simple truth of the harmony of nature and grace. A historicist-realist Christian philosopher, of the sort I have set myself up as being for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, will seek to remain attuned to the way these articulations transform across the ages, always giving rise to new appearances, but only ever appearances, of incommensurability.

—JSR