Finding the Ancient Way: Part Four

For the previous article in this series – Finding the Ancient Way: Part Three

Here powers failed my high imagination:
But by now my desire and will were turned,
Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,
By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Paradiso – Canto XXXIII ~ Dante Alighieri

There is a seeming contradiction at the heart of Human nature. We are at once drawn by the wonder of the mysterious and also driven by the desire to know and understand. Mystery is alluring. It calls out to us and excites us. Yet that very allure drives us to want to comprehend.

Once known and comprehended, however, the mystery is dispelled. It is like the excitement of a long expected party followed by the let down once the event is over. Who among us cannot recall the wondrous world of our childhood imagination and the hidden disappointment of growing up to find that the world, once explained, is really rather dull after all.

It is interesting in itself that we do hide this disappointment, even from ourselves. It seems to be, for many of us at any rate, something of which we are ashamed. This may be in part because the modern world teaches us to view such things as foolish and childish. Yet I think the real reason is that it is a deep affair of the heart.

We are like a lover who hoped to marry someone far above our station and having been disappointed, are ashamed that we ever dared to really hope. If it had been just a day dream or an idle fancy it would not have mattered.

The very fact that we really did desire, that we really and truly hoped, is what must be hidden. We hide it from others because we cannot bear to subject that sacred part of ourselves to scorn. We hide it from ourselves because we cannot bear the pain of lost hope. We find the absence of hope comfortably numb and prefer it to the bitter agony of hope disappointed.

Are we then doomed to a repeating cycle of disappointment? Constantly pursuing the next mystery only to find it isn’t really what we wanted, until there are no mysteries left? Is human nature a contradiction that destines us to be forever let down? This is precisely what modernity would have us believe.

Bertrand Russell had at least the virtue of honesty when he described the modern cosmological view. Everything that human beings love, indeed everything human at all is “…destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins”

His famous quote ends with this line. “…only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

This cosmological view is considered by many to be scientific. I would suggest, however, that it is not. Imagining the solar system as a vast death is not scientific, nor is the idea of a universe in ruins. These are, in fact, mythological ideas that have been attached to scientific facts. There is no need to dispute the facts in order to reject this mythological view.

Is there then a vision of the universe that can explain the riddle of human nature and give us hope for something other than “the vast death of the solar system” and “a universe in ruins”?

The Ancient and Medieval world shared a beautiful view of the universe. We are generally taught to think that this view perished because it was unscientific. I would suggest that it is more accurate to say that it simply went out of style. It is less that an unscientific view was replaced with a scientific one and more that one mythology replaced another.

I do not here use the term mythology to mean ‘false’ or ‘made up’ but rather an over-arching narrative that offers and explanation of reality.

I do not mean to suggest that the ancient-medieval cosmology was scientifically correct. It was factually incorrect in many details, though less so than most people would think. Much of our modern portrayal of the ancient and especially the medieval world is grossly inaccurate.

The point, however, is that we do not need to embrace their scientific inaccuracies in order to embrace their broader view of reality. Nor do their incorrect scientific facts, most of which were born not of defective thinking but of the inability to make precise observations, invalidate their understanding of the nature of the Cosmos.

They thought of the universe as filled with light as an ocean is full of water, we think it is endless darkness. They thought the universe was full of life, though not organic life, where we think it is a sea of death upon which we float in a forlorn lifeboat.

Most importantly they believed that the universe was full of music and that there was a Center around which everything revolved in a Cosmic Dance. This idea of the dance, profound in its order and elegance, formed their basic conception of reality.

The fundamental nature of reality is a play, a sometimes solemn but always joyful dance in which each thing has a place and in which all things pursue the Center.

They believed that the Music of the Spheres filled the entire universe. To us it sounds like silence just as water, to a fish, must seem like air. For we have never been without it. Like air, we do not notice when it is there, we would only notice if it were absent.

The image of the Dance is like a solar system in which the planets revolve around the sun. They are endlessly falling towards the sun, thus their motion is towards the center. It is this desire for the Center that creates the Dance.

The idea of the Center is a good illustration of how the scientific facts do not detract from the cosmological view. The ancients and medievals believed incorrectly, due to the capability of their observations at the time, that the Earth was the physical center of the universe. They did not, however, believe that the Earth was the Center of the Cosmic Dance.

They believed that all the motion of the Dance, indeed all motion in the universe, was caused by something that was outside of, and above, the physical universe. The Transcendent Reality that stands above the physical universe, that encloses it, and that fills every part of it, in a word, God.

The Center of the dance was not a physical place and the visible universe was only an image of it. The fact that there are more than seven planets, that they revolve around the sun instead of the earth, and that our sun is one among billions changes very little for the grand vision of the Dance.

Here then is the solution to the riddle of human nature. In the Cosmic Dance we find a Mystery that is always new. As the planets fall forever towards the sun and never reach it, we can know forever and never exhaust the mystery.

All things are forever moved by their desire for the transcendent. This is why Aristotle called God the Unmoved Mover. He is the unmoving center, infinite, present everywhere, and containing all things. Around him the Dance revolves as all things seek the center.

This also explains the teleology or purpose of all things. The Dance is the purpose of all things and each thing finds it telos, its perfected identity in the Center. It is in the Dance that we find out who we really are. It is here that we know as we are known. When we press in towards the Center we find the world is always more than we imagined and the mystery greater than we ever knew.

‘I have come home at last! This is my real country!
I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life,
though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!’

~ C.S. Lewis