The Long Orphic Shadow

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Michael Horton’s new book Shaman and Sage: The Roots of “Spiritual But Not Religious” in Antiquity, is really two studies in one. The first is historical: as book one of a planned three-volume project, Shaman and Sage is a massive, deeply researched intellectual exploration of the Western esoteric tradition, from its origins in Egyptian and Indo-European mysticism all the way up into the early Middle Ages. The second, however, is even more interesting. Horton’s volume—as its subtitle might imply—is as much a theological intervention as a historical one, seeking to confront the deep roots of a seemingly contemporary theological problem. Why do so many people think they don’t need “organized religion” to seek God—or the “divine”? 

Where Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World was journalistic and observational, Horton’s approach is genealogical. And that genealogy leads him to an interesting place: for Horton, the modern shift to an individuated, anti-institutional spirituality is not a historical novelty, but merely the latest outbreak of a long-gestating intellectual phenomenon. The provocative thesis at the heart of Horton’s study is that the Western tradition—and ipso facto the Christian tradition—has, since basically its origins, incubated “Orphism,” a theological-philosophical tradition that, in Horton’s telling, is fundamentally opposed to orthodox Christian thought. And it is this latent Orphism that underpins what today’s millennials mean when they call themselves “spiritual but not religious.”

It is impossible to do full justice, in any review such as this, to the depth of Horton’s historical research and interpretations of primary texts. Comprehensive treatments of individual claims—for instance, Horton’s interestingly against-the-grain reading of Pseudo-Dionysius—must await responses from the specialists whose work Horton engages. In what follows, my goal is simply to provide some overarching observations about the book’s argument as a whole—and, perhaps, a critique of where its logic ultimately leads.

* * *

Sharply drawn dichotomies are a defining feature of Horton’s intellectual project. In that spirit, the volume opens with a distinction that sets the trajectory of the rest of the book, a distinction between “locative” and “utopian” world-pictures, or macrocosmic understandings of the shape of reality. In Horton’s telling, early human societies favored locative models, in which “the individual feels embedded in an ordered cosmos with boundaries that must not be crossed. One belongs to a family that belongs to a clan that belongs to a city, which is the earthly copy of the archetypal society of the gods above.” We have here something very like the “three-tier” world-picture of ancient thought.

But the locative cosmos harbored its trickster. In Horton’s account, the cultic figure of the shaman—who invokes supernatural forces in order to transgress the boundaries of the ordered cosmos—presaged the emergence and consolidation of utopian outlooks, and the dawn of many of the world’s richest religious traditions, in what is commonly described as the “Axial Age.”

Horton rejects the common characterization of the Axial Age as a philosophical transition from polytheism to monotheism. As Horton reads this period, the shift is “definitely not a trend from polytheism toward monotheism, as frequently suggested, but rather toward monism, which I use in the modern philosophical sense.” In particular, at the heart of the new utopian outlook is “the idea of the emanation of everything that is real from a single and absolute source, spreading like fireworks into a dazzling appearance of diversity and returning to its real being as a simple unity[.]” 

For Horton, a metaphysics of emanation is wholly opposed in principle to the Jewish-Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which bursts the boundaries of any ostensibly “perennial” philosophical system. “Not in the myths of the nations but in the covenant history of Yahweh with his chosen people, revealed authoritatively in Scripture, is the truth to be found.” Jewish-Christian monotheism, for Horton, must be philosophically grounded in something altogether other than this utopian outlook.

The religious-philosophical system that follows from an emanationist cosmology, Horton contends, can be termed “Orphism,” after the legendary Orpheus said to be its founder. Orphism, as Horton renders it, is “a catchall label for what ancients themselves understood as teachings concerning the soul’s immortality, its fall into a bodily prison, and its reincarnation in various bodies ‘to pay the penalty’ with the hope of escaping the wheel of rebirth to reunite with the One and All.” The distinguishing features of Orphism, however, are not merely soteriological, but broadly metaphysical: elsewhere, Horton emphasizes that Orphism “is wholly vertical in its lower to higher orientation: the particulars of historical time to the eternity of universal ideas, corporeal to incorporeal, visible to invisible, division to unity.”

After arguing for its roots in Persian, Vedic, Egyptian, and other sources, Horton traces the Orphic world-picture through the mystical initiation rites at Eleusis, through the formulation of Orphic principles as philosophical dogmas (the process by which the eponymous “shaman” becomes the “sage” of Western antiquity), and through the subsequent debates over the reception of these axioms. From there, much of the book becomes a theologically inflected history of the Platonic philosophical tradition writ large, running through Plato himself, Plotinus, Origen, Porphyry, Proclus, and Iamblichus, among others.

The “climax” of the volume is a fascinating juxtaposition of two thinkers, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and John Scotus Eriugena—both of whom understood themselves as Christians, but who, in Horton’s reading, represent very different engagements with the “Orphic” inheritance carried forward from classical civilization. As Horton has it, “Pseudo-Dionysius . . . represents a creative transposition of Neoplatonic themes to distinctive Christian doctrines” (good), while Eriugena “articulated a medieval philosophical religion” (bad). Pseudo-Dionysius fundamentally revises Orphic Neoplatonism; Eriugena succumbs to it.

What’s wrong with “philosophical religion”? Well, as Horton has it,

philosophical religion assumes that historical religions, including their scriptures, do not themselves present the truth until they are interpreted allegorically to say in many cases the opposite of their obvious sense. In its simple creed, Christianity is as particular as Judaism or any other religion. It has its own narrative (mythos), rites, and way of life, all bound to the body and history. Yet when interpreted philosophically, it is the consummate religion: the ultimate myth underlying the same universal doctrines affirmed by reason (i.e., Orphic presuppositions).

Put another way, Horton is concerned to critique a method of theological inquiry in which “Christianity” is treated as merely a localized and inculturated instance of a general monistic philosophical system—not a tradition that meaningfully norms that system. For proponents of this “philosophical religion,” where particular bits of Christian doctrine—such as the resurrection of the body—seem incompatible with the broader emanationist schema, with that schema’s characteristic emphasis on immateriality and intellectual ascent, then the doctrine must be disregarded or allegorized away into nothingness. So too, the Incarnation of Christ becomes—at best—an elevated instance of a general metaphysical “type” (that is, how God relates to all finite realities), rather than as a world-transforming event.

Something like this, for Horton, is the perennial temptation of theological metaphysics, over which the specter of Orpheus hovers; by contrast, Christianity ought not be “philosophized” into being something other than itself. “A feature of ‘axiality’ across cultures, we have seen, is the transposition of ritual-founding myths into philosophical ideas. Yet Israel stands out as a glaring exception.” What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, indeed.

* * *

Horton is clearly correct that all mainstream Christian theological claims cannot be uncritically assimilated to the metaphysical paradigms of late antiquity. To take the most obvious case, an unreconstructed Neoplatonism logically implies, in Arian fashion, the subordination of the Son to the Father. And it seems to me that Horton is also on firm ground in critiquing Eriugena’s impulse to subordinate “God” and “creatures” to a homogenizing category of “Nature,” or Meister Eckhart’s willingness to dissolve the substance of the Triune Persons in an effort to reach some simple unity of the Godhead beyond Trinity. In the business of doing theology, there is always an enduring risk that, consciously or unconsciously, alien philosophical concepts may be impermissibly setting the norms for Christian thought.

But equally true, I think, is Johannes Zachhuber’s observation that, at the dawn of what Christians now call “orthodoxy,” it was indisputably the case that “Christian authors could not avoid embedding their doctrinal confessions about the Trinity and of the Person of Jesus Christ into a terminological and conceptual system whose validity did not directly depend on the acceptance of these doctrines[.]” The Fathers of the Church, that is, worked within the philosophical milieu of their day. And when one comes to biblical texts like Acts 17:28 (“In him we live and move and have our being”) or Colossians 3:11 (“Christ is all, and is in all”), it’s hard to miss the Hellenic philosophical resonances.

What was, for Christians, the appeal of broadly “Platonic” philosophical systems? Countless books have been written on this point, but it must be stressed that this inheritance provides a robust philosophical model for conceptualizing (among other attributes) the infinity, aseity, necessity, immutability, immateriality—and, crucially, universality—of the Creator. The God of Sinai is not the deity of a particular clan or city, but the one tree into which the Gentiles are now grafted. A theological emphasis on transcendence and unity is not something alien to Christian thought; it is a crucial constituent of the Christian tradition from the very earliest days. Surely, any Christian theological metaphysics must account for this in a compelling way.

In my view, Horton’s efforts to disentangle Christian claims from the broadly Platonic philosophical tradition ultimately invite more theological problems than they solve. Grant, for the sake of the following argument, that I am wrong and Horton is right—that "[i]n terms of their most central doctrines, Orphism and Christianity are wholly antithetical,” and that a sharp opposition exists between “locative (Orthodox) religion” and “utopian (spiritual-Platonic) faith[.]” One thereby declines to affirm that the Christian God is related to creation as its ontological source and ground (at least in the sense entailed by an exitus/reditus cosmology). 

As I see it, one then has two alternative options for conceptualizing the God-world relation: (1) God falls “within” the horizon of a larger, essentially locative reality; or (2) God is radically transcendent, such that our categories of “reality” do not apply to Him in the same way, though He is in fact the cause of created things. Neither of these seems particularly theologically palatable.

The first horn of the dilemma renders God essentially finite and logically contingent, thereby compromising both His infinity and aseity. As David Bentley Hart explains, “[i]f creation were somehow something simply ‘outside of’ or ‘other than’ God, like one object outside another, then logically one would have to say that there is something more than—something in addition to—God, [who] would be a kind of thing . . . a being embraced within what wider abstract category is capacious enough to contain both him and his creatures under its canopy[.]” To be sure, there have been Christian thinkers who have grasped the nettle and alleged that God is a contingent being—Richard Swinburne comes to mind—but this is far from the historic Christian position. And I do not think it is Horton’s own view.

Consider now the other horn of the dilemma—what we might call a “radical transcendence” approach, which prioritizes the apophatic. As Herbert McCabe summarizes this view, “the Lord we worship is not a god but the unknown reason why there is anything instead of nothing.” I suspect, at bottom, Horton is committed to something like this view: in distinguishing Pseudo-Dionysius from Eriugena, Horton calls attention to the thinkers’ supposedly “incommensurable accounts of the metaphysical basis for analogy,” arguing that “[t]here is an unbridgeable gulf between saying, on the one hand, that we know God’s attributes insofar as ‘like produces like’ and causes are in the effects and, on the other, insofar as the creation proclaims the invisible attributes of its creator.” The former is bad, Orphic; the latter is orthodox. 

But there’s a problem here. Horton seems to be insisting here that in order to maintain the God-creature distinction, there be no real ontological continuity or resemblance between terms as predicated of created realities and terms as predicated of God. This is an account of theological analogy that collapses, ultimately, into equivocity. Once theological predication becomes equivocal, what does it then mean to say that God saves us from sin? Or that God is love? We don’t really know. The specter of twentieth-century mainline Protestant thought, with its deracinated and “demythologized” theologies, begins to emerge—a paradoxical result indeed.

Now, to be sure, Horton occasionally suggests some sort of fruitful rapprochement between the Platonic philosophical current—one could call it “Orphic,” though for Horton this characterization is implicitly pejorative—and Christian thought. He grants that “Augustine’s mature thought reflects a form of chastened, self-critical Christian Platonism that established the creative tension in medieval theology,” and acknowledges that “there are some metaphysical and cosmological doctrines that cannot be accommodated while others, though shared with pagan philosophy, are required by exegetical deduction.” This is quite true—but it is an observation that fits uneasily with the very sharp distinctions between “Christianity” and “Orphism” that his project is concerned to establish.

Erich Przywara charts what strikes me as a more defensible philosophical course, one that does not attempt to split off Christian thought from “Orphism,” as if the whole business of metaphysical theology was the problem, but rather to correct Western philosophy’s metaphysical errors in the deepest sense. In Przywara’s account, a properly Christian view of theological analogy represents “the decisive mean, set over against both theopanism (an absolute devolutio from above) and pantheism (an absolute evolutio from below)[.]” Christian thought certainly cannot acosmically collapse the God-creature interval (Horton’s principal concern), nor aggregate finite realities into a monstrous totality; and yet all finite existents are always immediately dependent upon the God who calls them out of nonbeing in every moment (creatio continua). Przywara’s proposal seems meritorious to me; is he to be counted among the impermissibly “Orphic” because his analogia entis is articulated within a broadly Platonic framework?

Now, the foregoing discussion—though important—has been rather technical. What of Horton’s overarching thesis—that modernity, at its heart, is basically Orphic? Did our metaphysical tradition necessarily make us “spiritual but not religious”?

In venturing a potential answer to this question, I turn to a perhaps unusual source: Shahab Ahmed’s recent work on the internal constitution of Islam. In What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic, Ahmed sets out to explain how a large swathe of historical Muslim society could conceive of practices like wine-drinking—typically considered off-limits to Muslims—in distinctively Islamic terms. On its face, this seems like the same sort of “transvaluation of values” that Horton identifies as characteristically Orphic.

Ahmed doesn’t make this move. In offering an answer to the “problem of wine-drinking,” Ahmed argues for conceptualizing Islam as such as a hermeneutic engagement with the “Pre-Text,” “Text” and “Con-Text” of Revelation to Muhammad. By “Pre-Text,” Ahmed refers to immediate existential encounter with Allah, the originating source of Qur’anic revelation; by “Text” Ahmed means the Qur’an; by “Con-Text” Ahmed means the corpus of Islamic tradition as it has developed over time. The diversity of Islamic practice correlates with which “pole” is emphasized: Muslims who drink wine understand themselves as engaging with the “Pre-Text” of Revelation (conceiving of wine as one of Allah’s good gifts) over and beyond the specific proscriptions of the “Text” of the Qur’an.

The genius of Ahmed’s analysis is that it is generalizable beyond the Islamic context; it is an articulation of the basic structure of spirituality within a religious tradition that affirms both a universal God and a particular revelation or set of institutions and practices. To posit a “revelation” is to posit a Revealer. And to the extent that a given tradition affirms that this Revealer is apprehensible within the terms of reason (cf. Romans 1:20) there will always be those who seek a more direct encounter with that Revealer. To put it in Horton’s terms: there will always be those who claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” because the internal structure of Christian thought invites such a response.

Martin Luther, of course, was famously skeptical of such efforts. But within bounds, this tension seems to have periodically engendered fruitful internal critique within the Christian tradition: consider Søren Kierkegaard’s critique, in the name of God, of the ossified theological culture of his day. And yet, as Horton rightly grasps, this element also opens the door to the cafeteria-style spirituality of modernity. That is a bitter pill to swallow.

Horton has written a book that I hope is widely read and vigorously debated. The questions it poses are critical questions for all who take theology seriously—going not simply to the form of Christian doctrine, but its underlying substance.  But I am unconvinced that it is our “ways of conceiving reality that [are] more mystical, speculative, abstract, and transcendent” that are modernity’s chief problem. For my money, that’s where wonder begins. And a Christian tradition without it would probably be an impoverished thing.