Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 20: Death of the Universe
While the previous lecture explained the theological shifts that severed the connection between faith and reason, this episode explores the scientific and sociological changes that purged the material world of the narrative vitality it once possessed.
Aquinas’s revised conception of the natural and the supernatural influenced Meister Eckhart and William of Occam. Eckhart (and the Rhineland Mystics which he exemplified) shifted our understanding of spirituality as less about ascent upwards (i.e. self-transcendence), but God’s descent downwards. Rather than what moves the will, love is the result of the will negating itself and making space for God (agape). In this world, inner conflict is valorized because it is seen as the self overcoming obstacles to alignment with the divine.
Nominalism is the idea that we create/impose patterns in the world by speaking about them, and that such order is predicated on language. Occam contends that God essentially asserted the world through speaking His will (rather than via love or reason). As God’s will is not bound by reason, reason can no longer serve as a stairway to the divine. Rather, reality is just a chaotic backdrop against which a battle of wills is occurring.
These philosophical developments occurred alongside a rising tide of commercialism and self-determination. Increasingly, people saw opportunities to change their material status through effort and intelligently managing risk (through banks, corporations, insurance). All these endeavors relied purely on personal ingenuity and a secular source of power, and the state adapted to protect these interests.
New psychotechnologies of numeracy and symbolic math were developed to address the increasing precision demanded by commerce and celestial navigation. Along the way, we discovered that the night sky, once idealized as an orderly realm of heavenly objects, is more like a giant billiard table governed by impersonal math and physical laws.
The Copernican revolution was predicated on the notion that math should be the ultimate arbiter of reality, and that our senses were actually a deceptive veil. The centrality of math was further championed by Galileo, who among other things developed a theory of inertia, effectively “killing” the universe, as it meant that matter no longer had any will of its own; rather, it only resisted motion (i.e. resists our will, to show how we’re deceiving ourselves).
Thus the objective world became synonymous with things that were measurable, while everything else was relegated to the subjective domain of the mind. The result is a rather bleak universe in which the external world is composed entirely of inert, purposeless, and undifferentiated matter, while the internal world consists purely of an unbounded battle of wills vainly clinging its feeble raft of meaning.