Cosmogenesis

Matthew Fox, in one of his not-so-heretical moments, notes in Coming of the Cosmic Christ that

When a civilisation is without cosmology it is not only cosmically violent, but cosmically lonely and depressed. Is it possible that the real cause of the drug, alcohol and entertainment addictions haunting our society is not so much the "drug lords" of other societies but the cosmic loneliness haunting our own? Perhaps alcohol is a liquid cosmology and drugs are a fast-fix cosmology for people lacking a true one.'

He spends the rest of the book (indeed, the rest of his ouvre) constructing a rather newagey and silly cosmology for his disciples to inhabit. But he makes a good and valid point. Western Culture (in all the places where that culture has moved - even eastern places) tends to rob traditional cultures of their world: not just their products or political structures, but their languages, their religions, their cultures, their traditions and their family ties. Eventually they are "free". But free how? Free to be like the rest of us, individuals divorced of both a culture and a plug-in to that culture that would otherwise define us. But still we have a plug, if you will, in search of a socket in which to plug it. We seek to "jack in".

Working as I do with addicts in recovery, and having spent a good part of my 30s looking through the thick lens at the bottom of a cocktail, I begin to see the sense in Fox's idea (although not in his suggested cure). I only disagree slightly: we are robbed of traditional cosmology but we are not without a cosmology.

Read on...

Looking at a culture that has removed signposts of morality, traditional religion and family, Fox suggests we embrace that culture and give up looking for the "lost paradise" of our pre-modern sensibilities. Rather, we should move with joy through the next stage of our cultural/theological evolution and rewrite, change or just toss out the parts that no longer fit. Modernity offers us very odd sciences: we should take them and toss out the parts of religion that don't fit. Sociology offers us new understandings of sexuality and relationships: we should take them and toss out the parts of religion that don't fit. Psychology offers us new understandings of mysticism and the human person: we should take them and toss out the parts of our religion that don't fit.

There's a pattern here.


Fox's book was published in 1988 (there were others as well, both before and after, in the same vein) while he was still a Roman Catholic priest. For his heresies he was silenced by the Vatican. He was then welcomed with open arms into ECUSA, where his "rave masses" caused such an embarrassment to the Bishop of California that said bishop rethought his policies on welcoming Roman clergy. But, silenced or not, Fox's ideas about tossing out the parts that don't fit have held on. And the result has been that even the "traditional cosmology" of the a-traditional west has been lost.

I joined a good many others sitting in sundry locations participating in meaningless wooji-wooji - either social or "spiritual" and either with or without intoxication - seeking a world view that would hold me. The problem was two-fold: (a) The manufactured world view could not hold me because I was making it up: one can not bootstrap oneself into a brave new world. (b) I was rejecting the only world view that was true - created for me and all men by the Source of Creation, Himself: without that ground of Truth any world I created was doomed to collapse.

Dr Frankenfurter, in the Rocky Horror Picture Show offers a toss-off line at the end of one of his songs:

But maybe the rain isn't really to blame.
So I'll remove the cause...
(impish laughter)
But not the symptoms

The line is curious because the Hero and Heroine of the movie, Brad and Janet, have been stopped by a flat tyre in the rain outside of Frankenfurter's Castle. The rain isn't the problem: the flat is. They arrived at the door asking for a phone. So the song ends up meaning "I'm going to occupy your time until the rain stops, but when the rain stops, you'll still have a flat tyre and I'll be long gone." (Which, for those who have not seen the movie, is exactly what happens.)

I'm taking this curious turn into pop culture of the 70s and 80s because it is exactly what we do: removing the cause but not the symptoms. We offer a dozen (hundreds, thousands) of things to occupy one's time, but when the game is over, one's tyre is still flat. One is still without a spiritual home.

In conversations about work, one notes how part of the modern solution for addiction (or depression or hyperactivity or bad karma or any thing else) is medication. We use pills to adjust the addict's mental state. Rather than curing the depression or addiction or, better yet, giving the patient the ability to work around and through the depression and addiction, we medicate them. We take the money out of the pocket of the illegal drug dealer and give it to the legal drug dealers. In other words, rather than help the addict (or depressed person, or hyperactive person) live into God's Cosmology for His Sons and Daughters, we offer just to make them comfortable in our modern world-without-cosmology.

The only thing missing is the impish laughter - but I bet, if you listen carefully, you can hear it... all the way to the bank.

In his landmark work, Being As Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, John Zizioulas notes that in the Church "[t]o be and to be in relation becomes identical... A human being left to himself cannot be a true person." The etymology of "Community" is "Middle English communite, citizenry, from Old French, from Latin commnits, fellowship, from commnis, common." The etymology of "idiot" is "Middle English, ignorant person, from Old French idiote, from Latin idita, from Greek idits, private person, layman, from idios, own, private."

A human being left to himself is an idiot.

Our culture has begged us and schooled us to define life from a first-person vantage point. That's not a "Cosmology" - a "world view". Rather that's a "me view" an "Egology" if you'll pardon the word-smithing. When one's egology disrupts the egologies of others, one medicates to be brought into line. Here we see the lie: there is a cosmology to which we are to adhere, or rather not violate. We may freely pick any thing we wish or seek - provided it comes off the offered menu. Even in our egologies, we are forced into a cosmology: one that shapes us and forms us into something other than the Icons of God that we are born to be. Rather it leaves us idiots.

JimN, having found the answer to the Cosmology problem, offers us this patristic logia:

But men, having turned from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which God had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion. For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption to nonexistence again. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore, when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good.
St. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation

The right answer to addiction (of any kind) and to the other cosmological issues for which we simply medicate is not to change the symptoms. Addiction (ie prolonged use) to SRIs or other psychoactive medication (Prozac, Zoloft, St John's Wort) is just as bad as addiction to THC or PCP. Rather the right answer is to turn that internal mechanism, now misfiring, onto the correct addiction: the contemplation of God.

To hijack a line from Timothy Leery, we are invited to "Turn on. Tune In. Drop out." We are invited to take our cosmology from the Cosmogenitor and ignore the rest of the offerings going on around us.