Important blog post about renewing the meaning of the cosmos.
The West has been ruined by one enormous non-sequitur.
For millennia, our ancestors built a meaningful understanding of the cosmos that reached its apex in the Divine Comedy of Dante. All being was ordered by the love that moves the spheres of being.
However, when Copernicus and Galileo showed us that the shape of the cosmos was different than we imagined, we made a huge, willful mistake.
We had understood the geocentric model to be meaningful. When we moved to a heliocentric model, we lost a sense of the meaning of the world.
But in truth, the world didn't lose meaning; things mean things. It can't be otherwise. Meaning is inevitable. So by default, we gave the cosmos a negative meaning. We transformed it from heavens that declare the glory of God into space that declares the vast emptiness of life.
It is time to renew the meaning of the cosmos; to become poet-scientists again. To meditate on the heavens and hear what glories the have to tell us. To pick up the pieces of The Discarded Image—still phenomenologically as true as ever—and develop a coherent model of the cosmos again.
Just because the model changed structure does not entail that it lost meaning.
Today is a good day to begin. The total eclipse reminds us that the world is indeed wonderfully ordered. The perfect fit between Sun and Moon has deep meaning for us to ponder.
Excellent response to the complaint by a critic that this would be "going backward."
"First, as to putting the clock back. Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that whole idea of clocks.
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be.
And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.
If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
We have all seen this when doing arithmetic. When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being pig headed and refusing to admit a mistake.
And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on."
Lewis, C. S.. Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics) (pp. 28-29). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
