The Bishop Fish and the Spaghetti Monster

 On the cusp of the modern age, in the twilight of the Medieval era, a figure seeming to have emerged from the margin of a manuscript was caught by fishermen and presented to the King of Poland - a fish that seemed to wear something like the vestments of a bishop.  This novelty was a great delight to the King, but when his bishops met the fish it indicated its desire to be freed.  The episcopate prevailed upon their monarch who reluctantly released the fish.  On its return to the sea it turned back and made a sign of the cross over those who released it.

This strange folk tale is clearly about a liminal figure, with the characteristics of absurdity and the monstrous one might expect to emerge from the sea.  And yet does it reveal the arbitrariness of the late Medieval Catholic faith?  Is not the bishop fish something like the arbitrary caricature of a deity reminiscent of the new atheists’ spaghetti monster, which was created to indicate the arbitrary absurdity of a world governed by a divine Logos rather than chaos.

The spaghetti monster is propaganda for the case that religious faith is arbitrary and a random belief.  In one sense the Bishop Fish is both absurd and arbitrary.  He emerges just as the world of Medieval symbolism is breaking down and nominalism is about to gain a hold over the European mind.  Nominalism being that theological perspective that asserted God as free and therefore arbitrary.  America is about to be discovered and the world proved to be round.

We can better understand this seemingly arbitrary figure through the work of the Pageau brothers, who make the case for the meaning and coherence of Medieval and Ancient symbolism.  The marginal figure is indeed absurd because he represents the edge of and the limit of order.  Jonathan Pageau has pointed to the gargoyles on the edge and outskirts of the church building, otherwise designed to follow a very exact and non-arbitrary hierarchical order, from the chancel to the nave.  It is on the edge that symbolism breaks down.  The monsters are found on the edge of the world.

From a traditional religious standpoint a character as arbitrary as the spaghetti monster would only be found in the liminal space - the edge of the world, the ocean.  It points to the new atheist misunderstanding of religious faith in that traditional religion is an assertion of the order and structure of reality and the claim that reality is not arbitrary.  Indeedin our postmodern times,  the materialist’s world quickly breaks down into flux, with nothing transcendent to hold its structure together.

But the Bishop Fish is not simply liminal.  He has the authority to give a blessing.  In this sense he is more like the strange Orthodox icons of Saint Christopher depicted with a dog’s head (a favourite figure of Jonathan Pageau).

Surely what we see in the figure of the Bishop Fish is the order of the Logos through the Church giving meaning and structure even to the chaotic realm of the sea - formless and churning.  One is reminded of the beginning of Genesis - And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

The Logos speaks order and form into the dark void of the deep.  And a bishop who is also a fish might just symbolise the domain of the Logos over the watery chaos.  And the Logos operates upon the world through His Apostolic Church.  A bishop is an authority of the Church, a fish is a strange and monstrous creature, living under water, without legs or arms, existing in a dark and uninhabitable place.  The combination has meaning, it is not arbitrary.

Is this just a story to illustrate the invisible God’s authority over the void?  Perhaps, on the cusp of modernity, there is even more to this strange figure.  And here one risks inviting the ridicule of the New Atheist.  It is about perception.  In the late Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Century we are at the final waning of the Medieval mind that was able to perceive differently, perhaps perceive more holistically than our nominalist and empirical senses of modernity.

The Medieval man, much like the ancient and classical man existed in a more full world, symbolic and rich with meaning.  Everything pointed to God, as we find in the work of the last great Medieval voice as modernity corroded all around him - Dante Alighieri and his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy.  Nothing was random or arbitrary; nothing represented the meaningless and random combination of the Spaghetti Monster’s characteristics.  

In this symbolic world there was a heightened perception of reality and that which is not palpable.  The highest faculty was the mind or the nous - itself invisible and intangible.  The ultimate aspiration was the heavenly realm.  At the same time the immaterial soul was entirely embodied in physical Creation that was good and, though fallen, pointed to God.  There was nothing at all arbitrary about the ancient or Medieval worlds.  And we still hold onto much of that immaterial realm, bar the transcendental principle of God upon which these aspects depend - logic, morality, that the cosmos is governed by consistent principles (the Christian idea at the root of science, because empiricism would be meaningless unless rules discovered held and did not change the next day).

Everything in the cosmos pointed to the glory of its immaterial and spiritual Creator.  The chasm between Creator and creature was bridged by the Incarnation of the Godhead in the physical reality of Jesus Christ in First-Century Palestine.

It was therefore possible to perceive the world and the particular creatures making it up more holistically and see their spiritual meaning.  In that sense it is entirely credible that a strange and exotic deep sea creature might point very clearly to the glory of God.  We now would not be capable of perceiving this, existing in a materialist paradigm.  The fish is described as looking as though it wore bishop’s vestments, not actually wearing vestments.  And in this almost-modern world those who reference this folk tale express some scepticism.  Nonetheless, when creatures point to their and our Creator they will do so in the realm of mystery.  It will be subtle and only perceived by the spiritually-attuned.

This bizarre story, in which the fluid realm of the unknown, the liminal, the monstrous and the chaotic is shown to have in some sense ecclesiastical orders is an affirmation of order and structure even in the deep.  It is an affirmation of the universal governance of God through His Logos.

In that sense this strange Bishop Fish is not an assertion of the bizarre, freakish, and laughably superstitious.  No it is an affirmation of the ordering principle of the Logos and the preeminence of the Church as Christ’s body on earth.  In that sense it is the very opposite of not only the Spaghetti Monster, but our world of flux, chaos and nihilism - the world of Jackson Pollock and Tracey Emin.  A world with no boundaries and no meaning.  And yet we moderns and post-moderns have the temerity and lack of self awareness to mock the Bishop Fish.  Indeed it seems that the Spaghetti Monster is a far more fitting deity for our post-modern world than it would ever have been for Christendom.

The Person or the Individual - conservatism versus liberalism

 The great contradiction within Western conservatism is its focus on individualism.  True and unadulterated conservatism is a collectivist philosophy, not an individualist philosophy.  It is differentiated from Leftist collectivism not through individualism but first in having multiple layers of relational identity rather than reducing identity to one level, such as class or race and secondly in the voluntary element of the collectivist identities, which are based on love, not upon compulsion.

The overlap between classical liberalism and conservatism is not ideological, but pragmatic.  It is best represented by Dr. Jordan Peterson in popular culture, but goes back as far as Edmund Burke the Whiggish father of British conservatism and was politically most effectively implemented by President Reagan and Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher.

Individualism became the shibboleth of conservatism during the Post-war period, under the influence of Friedrich Hayek, a liberal political philosopher, who clearly spelt out his rejection of conservatism in his magnum opus, the Constitution of Liberty, in which he identified himself as a Whig and not a Tory.

At root conservatives and liberals have a different anthropology.  For liberals the human being is an atomistic individual motivated by self interest, for the conservative the human being is a person, defined by his relationships with other people, with traditions and identity.

This fundamentally different starting point explains some of the confusion in the position of the highly popular and influential Dr. Jordan Peterson.  In Thatcherite wording he talks of individual responsibility as being the cornerstone of civilisation.  This fails to grasp that to be in relationships one must be more than a self -interested individual as per Adam Smith or Herbert Spencer.

In misidentifying conservatism Peterson then misidentifies the Left, regarding the modern woke movement as a sort of cultural Marxism, rooted in collectivist identity.  He does not understand that breaking all familial, cultural and historical ties to assert one’s identity is the supremely individualist move.  Yes there are superficial groupings in the world of intersectionality. But these have no collectivist depth and are so superficial as to be a mere coming together of deeply atomised people alienated from all the collective identities they have inherited.

In misdiagnosing the problem, liberal individualists such as Peterson also misdiagnose the solution - it is not more individualism, but a reassertion of all the collective and traditional ties that bind human beings together.  Such ties are the Church, the family, national and ethnic identity, one’s local community, be it town or village.  These are collective identities, although they do not compel via bureaucracy like a Marxist system.

Marx is held up as the arch collectivist and yet much of his philosophy was devoted to the destruction of collective ties as false consciousness leaving only class identity - which would be overcome when everyone would live as liberal individuals in the communist utopia after the temporary collectivism of Socialism.

A conservative solution is not to reduce us to individuals, but to re-establish the hierarchy of the ties that bind.  Individualism emphasises the revolutionary, the atypical, the innovative, but also alienation and selfishness.  Individualism is a threat to conservatism.

If we turn to Greek philosopher theologian Yannaras we can understand that the human being is more than an atomised individual - individual from the Latin for indivisible, essentially a unit - and is rather a person, from the Greek prosopon, which is again related to hypostasis (from the theology of the Greek Fathers).  Just as the Trinity is relational so we in its image are relational and the word prosopon brings with it an emphasis on looking towards others.

Thus who we are is defined by a complex network of identities, not a reduction to an atomised individual.  The individual is the person abstracted from the organic and spiritual reality of life and this concept led to such contractual and reductive understandings of politics such as the social contract following an imagined state of nature and the emphasis on a progress that moves away from that which roots that ground us.

This deep contradiction, which is not a synthesis, can be found in the policies of the Conservative Government of the 1980s, which undertook radical economic reforms that atomised people and alienated them from communities built around the imperfect world of the industrial economy.  The Conservative Government was in part fighting the revolutionary Marxist movement that was controlling the working class through the trade union movement, but used the weapon of liberalism not conservatism to fight that war.  

Margaret Thatcher herself famously said that there is no such thing as society.  In a seeming paradox she went on to contradict herself by caveating that there did exist the social fact of the family, which surely transcends the atomised individual and is the foundation of a cohesive society.  Nonetheless her neoliberal economic policies turned Britain into a country not of communities, but of individuals seeking wealth and material advancement.  This was then to be further progressed by the Blairite Labour Governments that undertook a radical policy of social liberalism thereby further alienating and atomising us, to be taken to the furthest extreme with same-sex marriage under Cameron’s Conservatives - in which marriage became not a social good but a contract of disconnected individuals manifesting their non-communal and non-familial emotions and desires.  Marriage as the complementarity of the genders for social cohesion and the procreation of children was redefined.

The intellectual surrender of conservatism to liberalism, so that the modern Conservative Party is a classical liberal party today has meant the dismantling of British society.  The Left has continued to push not for collectivism, but rather a consumer social society to match consumer economics.  Through a Leftist philosophy of self realisation and autonomy people have alienated themselves from a collective identity seen as oppressive in favour of autonomy and irregular and ad hoc identities.  Such a social trend and such reductive cultural values cannot be resisted by classical liberalism, which has a very weak idea of society.  Now even gender is a consumer choice.

What needs to happen instead is a smashing of the idol of free market economics as an end in itself and the replacement of an anthropology of individualism with a Christian idea of the person - relational, communal and not defined by autonomy but by his traditional society.  In this we should look more to the Church Fathers than the reductive thinkers of liberalism from Locke to Mill.  

What differentiates conservative collectivism from Leftist collectivism is the emphasis on love rather than statist compulsion.  We love our families, we love our countries, we love our God.  This is not a system either of bureaucratic or commercial corporate compulsions. Individuals bereft of collective identities other than the State will find themselves compelled by State and Multinational Employer in a way that the person of enriched and traditional identities cannot be.  

We need a rich understanding of the human being and human culture, not a deracinated and reductive ontology of random and autonomous individuals for whom the demands of relationships and hierarchies are seen as a compromise of identity, whereas they are of course the very framework of our identities - they make us human.