What perspective brings together such an eclectic mix of writers as T. S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien and Aleksandr Dugin? What ontology can find justification in the different perspectives of Plato and Heidegger? At this time of year it is a perspective that we can and do encounter. It is a recognition of the mystical encounter we often find at Christmas time. The Virgin kneeling before the manger with the ox and ass nearby is a unity of the gritty realism of a hard birth without domestic shelter and the presence of the Divine Logos. A thousand magical stars shoot from this one event forever relived in our various customs and traditions. In our celebration of Christmas we rediscover the encounter with myth and meaning.
So writers as disparate as Tolkien and Chesterton on the one hand and Berdyaev and Dugin on the other recognise the truth of myth in contrast to the flattening out of the world that is the modern project - the Enlightenment deception.
As Orthodox icon carver, essayist and youtuber Jonathan Pageau has often explained - myth is where truth is to be found. It is how we apply our attention to understand the meaning of seemingly random and material existence. Not all truths are at the same level he argues, rather the higher level is at the level of myth.
There is another important aspect to the meaning of myth. It is about participation in Truth. Yes there is a flat and material meaning that can be found in the world of science, mechanical cause and effect and reduction to basic material explanations. This though is how an alternative in Heidegger, the great anti-Platonist, and Plato himself can be found.
As Heidegger taught, meaning is found in the realm of encounter, rather than the alienated and dry picking apart of things by empirical science. On the other hand Plato always points to material reality having a correspondence to the metaphysical Idea, in the realm of Being - where Truth is whole and not partial as in the world of becoming, always in a state of flux. These very different perspectives can be united in the sense that our encounters can be mystical if we free ourselves from the Enlightenment paradigm.
Of course all our most important encounters and the stories by which we understand the world are far removed from the reduction to parts of empirical science. The souls and personalities of our loved ones are at a higher level of reality and meaning, than reducing a human being to a talking ape determined by the mechanical laws of cause and effect. And so while the Platonist attributes the reality we experience through personal encounter as revealing the higher meaning of the Forms, Heidegger might define this as the authentic encounter of beings prior to any abstract scientific theory. The unity of the perspectives is a rejection of a reductive and abstracted approach as found in the Cartesian move towards subjects dissecting an objective and neutral reality.
Of course Heidegger and Plato have seemingly irreconcilable ontologies. This is where Christmas provides the unity and the answer. For Christmas is when the Word becomes flesh, when that outside the realm of beings enters our world of becoming. By the miracle of Christmas, through a virgin birth, the universal and the particular, the immortal and the mortal, the world of becoming and the world of Being are joined and reconciled.
This also reveals further that as Saint Basil put it we like Moses have licence to plunder the Egyptians. We can indeed take from and Christianise the pagan ideas and beliefs. Paganism as a religion participated in a lower level of reality, worshipping angels and demons, rather than the Living God.
Every level of meaning and belief participates to an extent in the Truth, insofar as it does it is good. If it is taken as the complete Truth it becomes idolatry. Everything is made new by the Incarnation. pagan deities become the characters of fairy tale, the Wild Hunt of Woden is turned into the chivalric hunt of the Christian knight and the slaying of the dragon by Saint George. All reality is transfigured by the Incarnation at Christmas and its fulfilment on Easter Day. Death itself is revealed as an absence consequent upon the Fall.
And so, we look for completion not in a political, technological or economic progress to worldly utopia - for that will always lead to reductive ugliness, but instead we look to be transfigured by the Divine. From Cromwell to Marx, the attempts to create heaven on earth have cut us off from Goodness, Truth and Beauty.
The whole Enlightenment project, with roots in the Reformation and earlier the nominalism of the Ockhamites, has alienated us and disenchanted the world. Instead of finding in the beautiful a link to the Transcendent we have come to regard it with cynicism - the famous hermeneutics of suspicion, which kill our souls. And it is these hermeneutics of suspicion that are the reason the powerful who dictate our narratives have taught us to abandon our myths, our stories and instead seek for utopia through political progress.
While the Church has always understood the myths and customs of the world are imperfect and tarnished by sin, that is not the same as hiding an evil reality. This though is the premise of the Enlightenment and has its roots in a Protestant rejection of Church ritual. This pathological cynicism is the justification for Western progressivism that turns against its own myths that help us to access the mystical truth and instead forges a Faustian and Promethean world of hubristic ugliness. It is also the reason why Christmas is so important in terms of re-enchanting the world and rediscovering the myths that help us to understand the deeper and higher realities of being human in a Fallen world that was created fundamentally as Good.
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