Soil & Soul: The Womanhood of God: By Alistair McIntosh In coming to know the cultural ground on which we dig, a key observation is that the Western mindset comprises of two interwoven strands. It is essential to understand these if we are to know ourselves. One is the Hellenic strand, represented by the Greek philosophers and the Greek influence on the New Testament. The other is the Hebraic strand, coming from the biblical tradition of the Old Testament. (Of course, to our Jewish friends there is nothing ‘old’ about it; but allow me to go on, speaking from a Christian cultural context). The Hellenic way of looking at reality, in the footsteps of Plato and Aristotle is, is broadly rational and empirical. It works by logic and leads to the refinement of scientific truth and explicit order. It sees objective principals, such as atomic theory, as the bedrock of reality, and it understands time as marching on in a linear progression. The Hebraic way, by contrast and as a generalization, is mythic and poetic. It works by elaborating story and parable, to portray poetic truth, implicit order. It accepts mystery or ‘unknowing’ as the bedrock of reality, and it understands time as dreamlike and cyclical. This does not make the Hebraic ‘irrational’ but it could be said to be ‘arational’ –something other than rational alone. The difference between the two might be demonstrated like this. Consider the question: ‘What is love?’ Go to the academy and ask a modern representative of Hellenic thought-Richard Dawkins at Oxford university, say-and you might get a response like: ‘Love is the biologically evolved neurochemical stimulus by which the selfish gene mediates its own replication.’ Now this would be a response from the logos-the principal of reason, the principal of strict causality that gives order to the universe. On the other hand ask of a Hebraic sage, and you might be told: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy!’ It’s like when Moses asked God who he was, and God relied, (with block capital letters in most translations): ‘I AM THAT I AM.’ That’s mythos. Pure poetry, acasual and non-linear to the point of self referential circulatory.Very Zen. And some thinkers would say that there is a third way of knowing that is poorly developed in either the Hellenic or Hebraic mainstream. This is the way of Eros. The eros reply to the question might be: ‘Love, and you will know.’ It’s all in the experience. As such, it falls out with the range of either discourse or narrative. The issue is not that any of these mindsets is necessarily wrong and another invariably right. The point to remember is that each represents a different facet in the totality of knowing. The Hellenic is more inclined towards the exteriority of reality as approached through reductionist analysis using the head. And the Hebraic inclines towards the interiority of things as perceived by the heart. Untimely, however, such logos and mythos polarities are a false dichotomy.They ought not be split apart. It is as if mythos is the landscape on a dark night, knowable only in dreams and visions; and logos is a penetrating torchlight by which the traveller might illuminate the next few steps but not the totality of the journey. Their separation according to Raimon Panikkar, is at the root of many of our troubles today. In defending the place of myth in a world of reason, he says: A myth is something we believe in because we take it for granted. . . . [It] makes the understanding understandable, the reason reasonable. . . . A myth defies a further foundation. It is beyond any possible definition, because the myth is the horizon that makes the definition possible. The mythos cannot be separated from the logos. . . . [Such is] the irreducibility of Reality to an intellectual principal. . . . [This] is the explanation why to impose our concept of peace does not bring Peace [because] is nature of peace is grace. It is a gift. The rational mind if bereft of the soul’s touchstone of beauty that poetry offers, may come to know the world with great precision, but at the cost of fragmentation. The butterfly of mythos is crushed by the holding. It will not tolerate the disrespect of too much prodding and dissection. By contrast, however, if the poetic mind is stripped of logos, it will lose its coordinates, it will lose its sense of proportion, ratio, of order-and so readily fall prey to fanaticism, demagoguery, neurotic nostalgia and chaos. That is why we need both mythos and logos together. Indeed we need the driving passion of eros too. It is what gives us the motivation to get things done. In total then, holistic human involvement in life requires the heart, head and hand. Set out like this it seems pretty obvious.So why is it, then, we do not see more of a self evidentially good thing in the world around us? The answer, I think, rests substantially with Plato and the philosophical hero about whom he wrote, Socrates. Socrates seemingly lived in an era when the balance between logos and mythos was swung in the other direction, and eros was considered suspect. He saw rhetorical skill being abused by politicians and lawyers (his hated Sophists), and believed that reasoned argument was the path to justice. However, Plato was living two-and-half millennia ago. He was living in a military city state based on aristocracy, patriarchy and slavery. His idea of what justice meant was very different from ours.To him it meant a regimented ‘right ordering’ of society whereby everybody kept their place in a militarized feudal system. The problems that he identified and his solutions are therefore not necessarily fitting to our era. They have, however, left a considerable legacy. They have been engaged by Renaissance thinkers onwards to legitimize Europe’s ruling robber-barons, the monarchies, with neo-classical formulations of learning, honour and glory.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Jul 2013 00:46:54 +0000