The Way to Meaning

There is no talking our way out of the meaning crisis.

What is the meaning crisis? There are dozens of answers. Personally, if I’m speaking with someone who already shares a good deal of my world view, I might point to the rise of nominalism as an alternative and, in the present day, a complete replacement to the traditional philosophy of the West seen most clearly in Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, and the Christian Fathers and theologians influenced by them. Specifically, the damage done to philosophy and science, and eventually to everyone’s everyday patterns of thought, by the abandonment of the two most morally significant of Aristotle’s Four Causes: the Formal and Final causes. Other people might point, not to these old philosophical concerns, but to their consequences: widespread mental illness and moral confusion. But none of that is what I’m writing about right now.

I once saw a comment on a relatively obscure corner of the internet (the Substack blog “Letters from Fiddler’s Greene”) which I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. The commenter bemoaned the constant insistence by religious thinkers on the right wing that a key element of winning the culture war for the right wing will be a widespread return to religiosity. The problem with religion and the reason this person remained an atheist was that it seemed to them that whatever kind of belief they and modern people in general are capable of, is not the same as the quality of belief possessed by our ancestors. Not a difference in intensity, but a difference in nature. An absence of some quality which made belief true and not merely a mental exercise.

I think this is the true meaning crisis. There is something wrong with, in fact there is something missing from, whatever people are doing when they “believe.” Even I, and you, must struggle with this to some degree, because we are all partly products of our time and place.

What’s the solution to the crisis of meaning? What is missing from our belief, what are we not seeing when we try to find meaning?

The answer is the Tao. But that is also not what I’m writing about. The idea of a Tao, Logos, “the Way” and so on is probably already familiar to most of us who have read C.S. Lewis or people influenced by him. I’m not trying to persuade you that he’s right. So I’ll deal with this part very clearly: what’s missing is an understanding that first of all, there is a Tao or Logos, and secondly, that true belief in it (in Him, but we’ll get to that) means participating in it. To believe in the Logos, you participate in the Logos. This is hardly an original observation, I think you’d probably be told exactly the same thing, in a more compelling way, by any of the so called Four Horsemen of Meaning: Bishop Robert Barron, iconographer Jonathan Pageau, and the psychologist/philosophers Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke.

Here’s what I’m writing about. What does participating in the Logos mean? Whether the person I was talking about it above knows it or not, this is what was holding them back from embracing Christianity. What does it mean to be a Christian? Does it mean to intellectually assent to certain beliefs? Does it mean to obey certain rules? Does it mean to undergo certain rituals? Is doing any of these things actually the same as belief? How can I be sure that my interior experience of having a belief actually reflects reality?

Each of the Four Horsemen would give a different answer, and I would probably prefer the answer given by Bishop Barron or Jordan Peterson. But that doesn’t really matter. Because for a person looking into the idea of belief from outside, like the person we’re talking about, the answer is going to involve a lot of talking about thinking and patterns of thought and how we understand things. The words attention and knowledge will probably be thrown around a lot. And a person will generally be left with the impression that participating in the Logos basically means having a certain way of thinking that corresponds to the truths of the Logos. Participation, they might conclude, is something in the mind, a place where I direct my attention, a certain way of thinking.

And this is entirely unhelpful. If this is true, the Logos is just an idea. Maybe it’s a universal and objectively true idea. Maybe it’s so transcendent that it in some ways reminds us of divinity. This this idea is God, or maybe rather, when people talk about God, they actually mean this universal idea that we must participate in. Well, now we have Gnosticism, or at least some kind of esotericism. And a person who believes and practices this could outwardly appear to practice a religion and believe in it, but internally, this way of thinking is entirely incompatible with the dogmas of any theistic religion. We have not solved the problem of how to believe in the same way our ancestors, unburdened by this “idea” and these “ways of thinking,” believed in Christianity.

And we’ve made a bigger problem. We’ve accepted a world view where good and evil exist in some sense, but we’ve made them more remote and unreachable than ever. And idea is just an idea. We can hold it in our minds. It can influence how we behave. But nothing can change its own nature, so neither can we. Either this idea is an impersonal force with no agency, which we must hope will by circumstance happen to change and improve us, or whatever agency it has is, as the esotericists and occultists would have it, something that we individually or collectively create, in which case it has no more power to change us than we have. This idea, then, is useless. Either it can’t help us, or worse, it contains evil itself within it, and there is nothing that needs to be helped. Worrying about the meaning crisis is pointless: whatever problems it causes us, the Logos as an idea can’t help us escape them.

I do think that Bishop Barron, and probably Jonathan Pageau, and maybe in some way Dr. Peterson, understand this. Vervaeke is something more like an occultist and probably represents the most deliberately pernicious influence among the four. But for the other three, their preoccupation with what and how people should think and what thinking and attention and so on actually mean, is a distraction that gets in the way of explaining that the Logos is not merely an idea but a person.

Understand the Logos as a person, we have now understand not just an idea, but a proper God. The God of classical theism and the theistic religions. Of course, I’m a Christian, and I don’t think the other theistic religions completely solve the problem either. A personal but fundamentally inhuman God is still remote and distant. How can we participate in something that is alien to us? Even if we could somehow, it would be nothing more than an act of destruction in which the human parts of ourselves would have to be overridden and replaced by this foreign divinity. This is what makes Christianity unique and uniquely compelling. God became a man.

This Godman explains everything. He is the bridge that makes it possible for us to participate in the Logos and by doing so saves us from the crisis of meaning and the consequences it had for us. A man can be imitated, followed, obeyed. A lot more could be said about how this specifically works in Christianity, a subject of some debate. But what I want to focus on is what this generally translates into: this is not a pattern of thought, this is a behavior, what tradition calls a virtue. Virtue is the missing quality of belief, the thing that made the beliefs of our ancestors more than just intellectual assent to some idea. Virtue is eminently human: the root of the word (vir) even means man. This Godman embodies virtue. And this is one of the ways we participate in the Logos: by being virtuous. This is the reason Christianity originally referred to itself as The Way, an expression which could be translated as Tao or Logos.

The absence of virtue, too often lost in these conversations about patterns of thought and complex philosophical concepts, is the cause of the meaning crisis. The simple evidence of this is that it is easier to evangelize someone who is already trying to be virtuous than someone who is not. From Plato to Confucius, ancient philosophers of virtue often made remarks in which they seemed to anticipate the need for a Godman who is the Logos and in whom the Logos is embodied. When people want to know how to make life meaningful, or what political solutions the right wing has to offer, or why a person should abandon atheism, the answer ought to be virtue. This is not a complete answer, of course, but it points people in the right direction much more concretely than discussions about patterns of thought and directions of attention.

Simple common people understand instinctively that virtues and vices influence our patterns of thought more than the other way around. We should all aspire to place this sort of common sense above intellectual aspirations. We should all remember that there is no talking our way out of the meaning crisis.

“Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done…an attempt at complete virtue must be made.” C.S Lewis, Surprised by Joy.