The Language of Creation | Book Review

A Summary of The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis

Matthieu Pageau’s The Language of Creation challenges the assumption that we understand the world better than our ancestors. We simply see it differently. And perhaps we may see less than our ancestors did.

Pageau unearths a more ancient way of seeing the world. It’s a worldview in which everything is imbued with meaning. In other words, it’s a symbolic worldview. All of Creation can be seen as iconography, as a sign, or collection of signs, pointing us to a Creator. Everything means something. Eating and drinking, sleeping and waking, building and breeding, daytime and night, summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat all mean something. God still speaks through it all just as He always has.

The fundamental difference between modern and ancient cosmologies hinges on meaning. Materialism only really accommodates matter and energy. The ancient Biblical cosmology consists of the two opposing poles of meaning and matter. Every event is grounded in both material reality and spiritual significance. In other words, it’s factual as well as meaningful. Here we find immaterial meaning expressed through the material world. Meaning informs. Matter expresses. Spiritual reality informs bodily reality with meaning and purpose. Matter expresses the spirit by making it visible and tangible.

Heavenly Intentions and Earthly Expressions

The Biblical cosmology unites heavenly ideals with their earthly manifestations. Pageau explains that terms like light and darkness had nothing to do with photons. Instead, these described specific aspects of the process of knowledge. Material reality was seen as obscure or “dark” while heavenly principles provided illumination or “light.” When the two components come together they explicitly reveal some unifying truth.¹ This process of engendering knowledge is described as the heavens (light) and the earth (darkness) coming together. The earth is not just some warehouse full of matter. It’s a mysterious “darkness” informed by the “light” of a higher identity.

Just as the heavens cover the earth and the earth supports the heavens; meaning covers matter and matter supports meaning. This is the structure underlying the Biblical cosmology. Wisdom is the cosmic seed of the universe, a concentrated point of light containing the entire spectrum of the universe in the form of pure information. Understanding is analogous to the earth’s soil. It expands and expresses the seed into something recognizable to us. As Pageau explains, “understanding is the power that supports a principle with specific facts, and wisdom is the principle that covers these facts with a spiritual identity.”² Knowledge is the result of this interaction.

This fundamental interaction between wisdom and understanding can be seen in the construction of a house. Wisdom is the idea of the house. It can be thought of as the plan for the house. It’s abstract like the blueprint. Understanding is necessary for implementing the abstract plan. Understanding is the process that puts the plan into action. The spiritual principle of the house is lowered into concrete reality while the physical materials are raised into a coherent structure. The former is wisdom the latter is understanding in the Biblical sense. At an even more basic level we have the principle of a hammer. Knowledge means grabbing hold of and using that hammer. Knowing a hammer in this sense results in us nailing, and ultimately knowing and experiencing the house.

Humanity as a Microcosm of the Cosmos

Man’s existence is central to this process of knowledge. Man is the union of heaven and earth through body and spirit. Formed from the dust of the earth and the breath of heaven, man is made in God’s image. He is both embodied soul and animated body. He joins matter with meaning literally and figuratively. He brings heaven down and at the same time raises matter up. This is what distinguishes him from all other creatures.

Man’s role is to mediate between heaven and earth. The head speaks to the mysteries of the flesh. The body expresses and supports the head through the actions of the arms and legs.³

Man informs matter with meaning and expresses meaning through matter. He has authority over creation [naming and eating] and transmits meaning [hosting and feeding]. His first job is naming the animals.⁴ In doing this he brings heaven down by assigning spiritual identities. No other creature is capable of uniting spiritual principles with corporeal facts through language. Later we find Abraham hosting and feeding angels.⁵ These messengers of God exchange information for food, seed for flesh. A promise descends; offspring ascends.

Just as there’s this polarity between heaven and earth in the cosmos, man and woman are the two opposing poles of humanity. When the two human forms are in unity they also reproduce an image of themselves. Man sows his seed in the woman and woman bears and then sustains the child with milk. The seed bestows meaning to the matter borne by the woman.⁶ Man and woman hold complimentary positions, both wholly necessary to complete the unity. They are opposite sides to a coin.

Society Patterned After Humanity

Society follows a similar pattern. The family and the church are composed of a head (leader) and a body (members). The head provides meaning and purpose. The body provides power and support.

Society is a series of embedded re-presentations progressing from the particular to the universal. We see man as the mediator between heaven and earth, between society and its social classes, between a community and its members, and between the head and the body. At each level we find a common identity. Each is a microcosm of heaven and earth.

Heavenly breath communicates the abstract identity to the body through discourse. There is communication connecting the head and body. Information is transmitted between them.

Lowering Authority & Raising Power

Anointing & Tithing

The relationship between authority and power maps to this idea of lowering breath and raising dust. Anointing and tithing are examples of this from the Bible. Anointing transmits authority from above. Tithing transmits power from below. Today, we use different language for this. We appoint people to be the head of a government or an organization. And we support them through taxes or donations. We don’t often think of taxes as part of a heavenly transaction, but that is the underlying pattern.

Ordering the Individual & Society

By creating and enforcing laws we are arranging visible facts of society to embody the invisible spirit of God.⁷ There should be agreement between the spiritual and corporeal realities. God lowers his identity through meaning and language. This invisible breath is met from below by a body that physically expresses its meaning. God provides the spiritual identity and people provide the physical expression. The identity descends from heaven and the expression arises from the earth.

Receiving God’s commandment is like when Adam names the animals. He gives them an identity. To name something is to manifest its meaning and value. We’re acknowledging its place and purpose within the cosmos. Labeling sharpens our ability to think about a concept. When we encounter something we don’t have a name for that can be frightening. Once we name the thing it becomes familiar and much less scary. We can contend with it. And we can express the thing to others.

Obedience to God’s law is an expression of spiritual identity. Obedience isn’t just a means for maintaining social order. Deeds are an expression of our spoken identity. The great ‘I Am’ is what He is. He shall be on earth what He is in heaven. Again, think of the principle of the seed. The mighty oak is contained within the acorn. And when planted in the earth it becomes what it already is simply by following the laws laid out for it.

Transmitting a specific identity through naming is not the same as giving seed to a wife though. In doing that man transmits his full identity, his male half, to be reproduced within the female half. He dwells in her. His presence is inseparably intertwined within his child. This is like God’s presence in the universe itself, and His symbolic presence in the temple.

The Language of the Alter

Temples and houses of worship are meant to embody the invisible “breath” in the same way a written language does. Materials are arranged in such a way to communicate God’s plans from above. The temple and the priests exist to materialize meaning and to mediate the transformation of matter into meaning. On the alter flesh was consumed and offered up to heaven. It’s a form of cosmic taxation. The tent was there to materialize the breath of the heaven. It hosted spiritual principles and transmitted meaningful information. None of it is frivolous.

Today we speak a different language from that of our ancestors. We look at religious traditions containing highly compressed truth and they just seem backward to our scientific understanding of the world. We recognize the objects and the materials, but we’ve lost the higher set of rules, the arcane language of the temple, that allow us to decipher their meaning.

Unless one is familiar with the arcane language of the temple it makes no sense why the curtains are blue and contain fifty loops, or why the opposing clasps are golden.⁸ This is like instructing someone writing the word ‘BLUE’ to make three vertical marks, four horizontal marks, and two loops open to the left and one long sweeping loop open at the top. One must already have great familiarity with the English alphabet and its higher rules of vocabulary to infer the concept of blue from this. If the marks of a written language are placed haphazardly the expression is at best meaningless, or worse it might communicate an entirely different meaning. It hosts another “spirit” altogether. Without some agreed upon meaning things become incomprehensible. Things revert back to the primitive state of knowledge where there is no established connection between fact and meaning.

Stabilizing Space & Transforming Time

A key distinction within the ancient cosmology involves the concepts of space and time. Technical descriptions explaining space and time in terms of gravitational fields and quantum physics are not helpful here. These technical explanations are similar to the mechanics of how a word is written. They say nothing about what the word means. Likewise, quantum mechanics does not help us understand the spiritual significance of space and time.

Ancient cosmology understood time and space not in a technical sense, but rather as competing dominions. The dominion of “time” represented a more primitive stage of creation in which everything exists in a fluid state. Things churn haphazardly. The dominion of “space” is an artificially constructed or “formed” stage of creation that stabilizes reality by giving it structure. Both states occur in nature the way a substance appears in either solid and liquid states depending on the specific conditions.

Space is heavily ordered. It’s reasoned and purposeful. The concept of space implies consistency and is ultimately productive. Space at its essence is defined by outward (earthly) facts that perfectly express an inward (heavenly) meaning. It’s the quality of things that are straight and true.

Time is more of an enigma. Time annuls itself, “destroying what it has built and freeing what it has bound,” according to Pageau. “The pattern of time expresses itself like a circular argument: summer derives from spring, which derives from winter, which derives from fall, which derives from summer?” It’s somewhat of an absurdity since it expresses self-contradiction and ultimately produces nothing.

This space/time distinction is central to understanding the ancient cosmology. The domain of space favors consistency and stability over completeness. The circular domain of time favors completeness over the consistency. Time is more integrative whereas space is more exacting. God is the creator of both time and space. Both are true aspects of reality.

The two domains interact with one another. The transforming forces of time act on the stabilizing forces of space. Picture a small piece of land surrounded by churning sea around its periphery. There is a constant ebb and flow, wetting and drying, as the chaotic waves of time run up the the beach before being pushed back by the land. This constant battle for manifestation by space and time represents a fundamental duality. This is universally self-evident across virtually every ancient culture. Space is typically represented as a tree-like structure, whereas time is often a wheel.⁹

Space and time manifest across different scales. The space domain can be represented by a house anchored on a firm foundation. The time domain is more like a wheel spinning on some hidden axis. The two models seem incompatible. But it’s largely a matter of perspective. After all, my house does indeed appear firmly anchored in terra firma. But if I zoom out it is in fact fixed to a spinning blue marble rounding the sun. This results in expressions of time in which night and day, summer and winter, time and change all pass over the house.

Naturally, tensions exist between space and time. This can be thought of as a battle between consistency and completeness. The Bible frequently uses the terms ‘righteousness’ and ‘perfection.’ Righteousness indicates integrity, often at the expense of completeness. Perfection relates to completeness with a manageable loss of integrity.¹⁰ “Grace” is what results when there is an equilibrium between consistency and completeness according to Pageau. Grace represents a perfect balance between space and time. Without grace the world would destroy itself. Too much extreme rigor and the world would be destroyed by judgment. Leniency that is too extreme results in the flooding of everything. These two destructive elements are represented symbolically as fire and water. Destruction by fire or flood are the two basic ways things tend to go awry. This space/time distinction is the key to understanding all sorts of other phenomena.

Losing the Land

There is always the danger of losing the land to the deluge of time. The dominion of space is clearly ordered. There’s an obvious connection between objects and their spiritual meaning. The universe has purpose and meaning. But in the dominion of time the spiritual connection is lost in the chaos. The spiritual principles no longer provide answers to the mysteries of corporeal reality. And the facts no longer support the theory. This is what’s called “losing the land” in the Biblical cosmology. It’s characterized by exile and wandering in foreign lands.

At the human scale the symptoms associated with “losing the land” include committing impulsive and regrettable acts, losing the support of one’s family and friends, losing your source of income, becoming homeless. Alcoholism and addiction are vehicles that take a person down this well beaten path, but certainly not the only things.

Losing the land can happen at a societal level. In fact, “losing the land” might describe what is happening to society today. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined the term ‘liquid modernity’ to describe modern life characterized by relentless disposability where “change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty… with no ‘final state’ in sight and none desired.”¹¹ Life is no longer about ‘being,’ but rather forever compulsively and obsessively ‘becoming.’

I describe the predicament elsewhere on this site in an exploration of the current moral and spiritual crisis:

There are no longer any self-evident truths and no fixed points. It’s just an ever flowing, ever changing amalgam governed by sentiment. We may attempt to remain anchored but we’re out of place just by staying put. Nothing around us stands still. Relationships, identities, and economies are all in constant flux. Families, communities, companies, and jobs drift away. This creates an overwhelming sense of uncertainty. We must always be on the alert, ready to jump to the next opportunity. We’re finished if we fail to constantly reinvent ourselves. Those who are most free to move end up on top; a world ruled by shiftless bums who lack a stable personality core with strong preferences for the transient over the durable and the ephemeral over permanence.

It now seems that secular materialism, a cornerstone of modern Western society, is flooding the land, disintegrating the culture, and driving us into exile. People are uprooted. We become migrants wandering from one economic opportunity to the next. Moving for greater opportunity is not new as Chris Arnade points out. “People have long moved for jobs. This has been done before — the dust bowl, the northern migration of African Americans. Yet those were a reaction to failure, not a sign of success.”¹² Exile was once a substitute for capital punishment, a fate almost as bad as death. But now many of us live in a state of self-imposed exile .

Stumbling Blocks & Corner Stones

The space/time duality manifests itself through foundation stones and stumbling blocks. Within the Biblical cosmology we find these concepts. The foundation stone is the principle that “builds the house” in keeping with the analogy of a home. The foundation stone successfully integrates matter into space. But the stumbling block is the principle that “floods the house” by disintegrating the space. It comes out of nowhere to bring down the edifice. It’s the piece of knowledge that doesn’t fit.

Pageau gives the example of phlogiston. Phlogiston was an element believed to be contained in all combustible materials and given off during combustion. The idea made sense in the context of the visible phenomenon, but a closer look revealed that the theory simply wasn’t supported. Phlogiston had to be rejected in order to move forward toward a truer understanding.

The stumbling block is subversive. It floods the space with uncertainty. It topples theory, but is also cause for renewal and can ultimately lead to a truer understanding. Thus, in the Biblical cosmology temporal changes were seen as the result of inconsistencies arising from a failure to integrate alien facts.

Every journey involves stumbling blocks and stepping stones. It’s obvious to anyone that a straight line is the most direct path. The crooked path is wasteful. Just as stepping stones can straighten our path, obstacles like stumbling blocks enforce a tortuous path. The crooked path may be necessary, but it is not the perfect expression of reason. The crooked path is not the opposite of the straight path though. It contains components of both rationality and irrationality. The crooked path expresses both the positive principle of efficiency and also the negative principle of waste. The cyclical is the true opposite of straight. Along the straight path every part of the journey is reasonable and every step is progress towards the destination. The crooked path contains both waste and productive work. But a completely cyclical trajectory circles the destination and ends up where it started. It’s all wasted in the context of a destination.

Blessings & Curses

Blessings and curses follow naturally from the alignment or misalignment of meaning and matter. The blessings we receive lead to productivity and surplus, safeguarding against the changes of time. But the curse interferes with the joining of meaning and matter. It renders work futile. It leads to sickness at the human scale and the squandering of resources at a societal level.

Obedience to the law allows us to partake in the blessings of work and rest. As we observe the law we find ourselves in familiar space. When we violate God’s law, including the laws of nature, we decouple our efforts from our higher identity. Our work is for the benefit of someone, or something, else. If we turn from the law we find ourselves wandering in exile. Our bodies and souls need rest. But we can only rest in a safe and familiar space. And it takes work to preserve such a space. Work is what maintains the alignment of matter and meaning.

There is no rest when misalignment occurs because dry land no longer supports us. The space becomes flooded. We are tossed and turned by the oscillations of time, swung from one painful extreme to another like a pendulum. We become subject to cyclical time which destroys, but can ultimately renew and restore the familiar space by cleansing it.

Formation & Transformation

The misalignment of meaning and matter brings about destructive change. Pageau explains that there is a difference between ancient and modern concepts of change. We generally consider change as any type of modification. But in ancient cosmologies there is a distinction between formation and transformation.

Transformation describes the process of change that occurs when inconsistencies arise from the failure to integrate alien facts. Transformation doesn’t only mean changing one thing into something else. It’s about changing whatever it is into its opposite. Time essentially inverts or negates everything. Since this inversion is iterated again and again, time is seen as cyclical. As these inversions happen a negative quality gets negated. This double negative is a source of resurrection and renewal.¹³

Formation was seen as the polar opposite of transformation. Formation was the result of an identity integrating matter and producing more of itself and less of the other. This is seen in the growth of a tree. The tree begins with a singular identity in the seed. It expands into a coherent structure. This is not really the ancient idea of change at all. Change creates less of itself. It is negation. Formation is a positive process more like growth or development. It culminates in fruit, which is a consistent expression of the first principle of the seed. It does not contradict itself.

This formation-transformation distinction is important in understanding the ancient idea of purity. Remaining pure simply implied remaining oneself. This is done by only integrating elements that supported one’s identity. Impurity resulted from incorporating elements that remained foreign to the communal identity. This could only result in less of oneself and more of something else. This is not growth, but rather transformation or change in the ancient sense. Purity was associated with stability in the domain of space. Impurity succumbs to the influences of change under the domain of time.

At the human scale, change, or more precisely transformation, was associated with disease. The heavenly identity gradually looses its authority over the body. This is a fairly accurate description of how cancer works. Rogue mutations start to take over the body. It’s been said that if we live long enough, we will all eventually succumb to cancer. This is the transforming power of time at work in us.

Purity laws are meant to counteract the breakdown of identity. Transgressing these laws unleashes transformations that flood the land and condemn us to exile. Exile isn’t some arbitrary punishment meted out by God. It’s what logically follows when we transgress the laws of space in favor of the laws of time. Things naturally revert back to a more primitive and chaotic state of nature. It’s a natural consequence similar to when one sticks a finger in a flame and gets burned.¹⁴

In the Biblical cosmology creation is a process of formation or refinement. It’s the opposite of mixing which is simply a dilution. Instead, it involves separating out something specific from the more general. God creates by dividing, e.g. the earth from the heavens, the sea from the land, the night from the day, woman from man.¹⁵ Distinctions are important. The erasure of all such distinctions annihilates its object as a living force. This is the negation associated with time and change (transformation). It’s symbolized by the snake eating its own tail. This is the devouring power of “time.” Transgressing these boundaries returns us to a state of ambiguity and confusion. This is the danger when we blur identities. And this is why Mosaic Law forbids various forms of hybridization.

These principles still apply today. The destructive flood is a real and recurring event. When we fail to uphold truth society looses its shape. Things begin to disintegrate. We’re watching this play out in real time. When there is no core value structure that people agree on there are no longer any self-evident truths. Without self-evident truths there is no hope for consensus. Without consensus, we only achieve resolution through power. Consider that, as Auron MacIntyre points out, we now live in a society that cannot even agree on what a woman is. The question is whether things will ultimately succumb to fire or flood.

Balancing the Tension through Work & Rest

Work and Rest are ways to balance the tension between space and time. Work is the construction of ‘space’ by refining (purification) and arranging (ordering) matter. Work involves expressing a plan (heaven) in material reality (earth). It means taking raw matter (flooded land) and refining it into familiar space (dry land).

Rest, or idleness, allows the gradual return of wild elements. Entropy sets in and things gradually revert back to the wild. Fluidity and instability return like when the sump pump goes out and the foundation quickly becomes submerged. The land goes back into its slumber.

There needs to be a blending of work and rest. The process of refining matter always creates byproducts. These unusable left-overs or remainders can pollute the space. Alternatively, they can be incorporated as ornamentation. We work and produce but there is always some remainder. That remainder is expressed on the Sabbath or through Carnival or the Jubilee.

The ultimate purpose of the Sabbath is to make peace between the artificial forces of stability (space) and the natural forces of transformation (time). This peace accord between ‘space’ and ‘time’ seals the the floodwaters out and turns any and all remainders into ornamentation to prevent reason from forcefully attempting to integrate things that are pointless and absurd.¹⁶ This creates a higher order space, or meta-space as Pageau calls it, where the creator is hosted within creation itself.

Festivals serve as ornamentation. Festivals tend to mark the end of productive work. When the work is done it’s time for merrymaking with all sorts of pointless song and dance. Tools accompany work while musical instruments and sporting equipment accompany rest and recreation.

Entertainment fits into the cyclical inversions of time. When you think about it, acting and cinema are founded on lies and deceit. Music is a seemingly pointless distraction that causes the universe to turn and dance. Games of chance are irrational.

Pageau says that Sabbaths and Jubilees are a type of inoculation. They provide a small safe dose of rest that produces resilience to the powers of change in order to avoid the catastrophic flood that ultimately results in exile and death. Distraction, rest, and recreation are part of the renewal.

At the communal level, the Sabbath, along with ornamentation more generally, are expressed as kindness to the remainders of society. That means charity to the poor, homeless, and stranger. The aim is not necessarily to assimilate or eradicate poverty and homelessness, but to recognize the humanity of those who are at the margins.¹⁷ Charity simply acknowledges the poor as poor and the stranger as strange.

Sleeping & Waking

We find the pattern of work and rest everywhere. Resting produces a natural but transitory reality. Working produces a more enduring but artificial reality. Pageau sees parallels with this in industry and agriculture, in cooking and baking,¹⁸ and through spinning and weaving.¹⁹ These patterns are part of the tug-of-war between ‘space’ and ‘time.’

Work and rest is ingrained in the daily pattern of artificially dressing and naturally falling asleep. When awake, the conscious gives meaning and direction to the body. At night the identity looses control of the body while it lies unconscious. Consciousness looses its external referent and turns on itself like the snake eating its own tail. It finds itself wandering in a self-contained self-referential dream world. In a way, this is an internal form of exile. But there’s an aspect of refreshment and renewal as well. As Pageau puts it, “the conscious identity is plunged into the darkness of the flesh to be renewed.”

The internal exile of sleep follows the cosmic pattern of exile. There is a temporary loss of agreement between meaning and matter. There is a loss of authority by the mind and a loss of power by the body. This is similar to losing the authority of heaven and the support of the earth. In the morning the process is reversed. The conscious identity regains authority and resurrects the power of the body.

Clothing & Nakedness

The pattern continues through dressing and undressing. Clothing is meant to cover nakedness and to express the intentions of the head. This is most apparent with a uniform. The uniform reveals a person’s identity. This is particularly important for anyone who is appointed to a particular role. The stewardess, judge, police officer, soldier, priest, or king is identifiable by their clothes. “It’s like the label on the side of a box,” says Pageau.

A disguise works the same way but in reverse. It’s intended to conceal one’s identity. A disguise is the outfit of a spy or a turncoat. Deception, distraction, or recreation is its purpose. For example, people wear masks during many of the sanctioned inversions of time like Halloween or Carnival so they may indulge in decadence without the social repercussions.

On the other hand, nakedness represents a return to a state of nature. There is an innocence in small children unaware of their own nakedness. But soon they discover their nakedness and they spend the rest of their lives self-consciously covering themselves to hide their most delicate parts. Alone in our shame, we are the only creature that wraps themselves in vestments.

Dressing is an effort to restore a degree of decorum. Clothes are worn for “dignity or decency or decoration” even when they aren’t needed for warmth said Chesterton.²⁰ Dressing is the strict imposition of meaning on matter. Ornamentation is a major aspect of clothing. It takes the remainder and dresses up the body. Adam is fallen so he dresses the body, he builds walls around the city, he imposes laws on society. These are artificial means for addressing the consequences of sin. They create artificial barriers to stave off the floodwaters of time. He understands that sinful things must either be artificially set right or recycled through death. Nakedness, along with dancing, disease, and death, is a manifestation of the idea of cyclical time.

Arts & Trades

Just like clothing, ancient arts and crafts were not purely utilitarian. Nor were they solely art for the sake of art. They were expressions of higher spiritual truths. This appreciation allowed them to build magnificent structures like the great medieval cathedrals while our more technologically advanced society is known for cubicles and abstract art.

Writing is another form of art that was needed once the spiritual mediation with heaven was lost. Writing was needed to preserve wisdom in fixed form. Laws had to be written to protect the integrity of society from dissolution and cyclical change.

Failing to Mediate Properly

Work and nakedness are both closely connected with the Fall. The Biblical cosmology is full of enigmas. But it doesn’t leave us in the lurch regarding the purpose of humanity. Man’s purpose is to mediate between heaven and earth. This involves knowing God as the perfect answer to the riddle of life and death. Or as the Westminster Catechism puts it, “To know God and enjoy Him forever.” Virtually every story in the Bible involves transmuting the evil of cyclical change into a higher good that better hosts the Creator of all things.

The Garden of Eden represented that perfect balance between consistency and completeness. This walled garden embodied a balance between the cyclical currents of time and the rigid structure of space. Here natural change and artificial stability were in equilibrium. Things were in harmony.

Adam isn’t only the mediator between heaven and earth. He is the mediator between his own mind and body. There are these concentric worlds of the individual, family, community, and the cosmos. Each is a microcosm of the next. All are interrelated. And the greatest truths are those that hold across every level. Even Adam’s two hands may be seen as miniature versions of space and time. The dominant hand, generally the right hand, correctly expresses the intentions of the mind while the expressions of the other hand only vaguely agrees. Our ability to coordinate heavenly intentions and earthly expressions derives from our ability to coordinate our own mind and body. The Fall upset all this. There was a loss of spiritual mediation with heaven. There was a loss of agreement between meaning and matter. The effects ripple through the individual, society, and the cosmos. We find ourselves alone in our shame in a world that is diseased.

The Fall left man no longer in communion with God, but only with himself. It’s an image of the world loved for itself, an image of life understood as an end itself. Man loved the world, but as an end rather than as transparently indicative of God. Man is left shamefully naked from his failure to cover the flesh with meaning and purpose from above. This nakedness exposes inconsistencies that lead to disintegration.

Man’s original sin wasn’t just that he disobeyed God, but that he ceased to be hungry for God alone. He failed to support God’s heavenly breath (intention) which resulted in him failing to properly integrate earth’s matter (eating unsuitable fruit). When we fail to support this hierarchy the Fall is inevitable.

Sin is anything that goes against the will of God. It’s a failure to mediate properly. It’s the incorrect union of heaven and earth. It’s the failure to fulfill the purpose its creator intended. It’s missing the mark. This involves incorrectly supporting the spirit with facts and incorrectly informing matter with meaning. It’s ultimately the failure to raise matter and to lower meaning.²¹

The consequences of sin follow naturally. Sinning means losing the guidance and authority of heaven as well as the power and support of the earth. The integrity of space and time becomes broken. The delicate balance is upset. The land becomes flooded, forcing us into exile and confused longing. At the individual level this means going against one’s own convictions. At the community level it’s going against proper authorities.

Unification, Procreation, & Recreation

Human sexuality embodies the entire cosmology. Male and female can be seen as microcosms of heaven and earth. They also represent the duality of space and time. Woman is the source of matter (food) and man is the source of meaning (seed). The masculine identity was associated with forming and constructing. The feminine represented transformation and renewal. It was Adam who imposed reason and language onto material reality. The Garden of Eden connected falling and renewal to the woman even before the Fall ever occurred. She came from Adam while he slumbered. Sleep, as we know, is the cyclical process of falling followed by renewal.

Sexual intercourse, not surprisingly, is a microcosm of the interaction between cosmic ‘space’ and ‘time.’ Pageau explains that the virgin female represents untamed nature ruled by cyclical tides and seasons. The fertile woman experiences periodic bleeding which represents renewal that comes by the periodic flooding of ‘space’ by ‘time.’ Only the male can halt this process by artificially ‘fixing’ the womb, turning it from a recurring cycle into a productive space and making it an expression of his seed.

John Eldredge describes this mythic encounter between man and maiden. He notes how the beauty of woman arouses man’s strength. Man offers it to her. She invites him into her. It’s an act of courage, vulnerability, and selflessness on both their parts. The man must rise to the occasion or else nothing happens. His strength must swell before he can enter her. And the woman must open herself in an act of stunning vulnerability. She embraces him. She draws him in. She envelops him. He must move. He spills himself in her, for her. He is spent when it is over. But what a sweet death it is. It’s a life giving dance.²²

Sexuality involves the two poles of re-production and re-creation. One brings power and authority and produces a family. The other is a source of recreation with the potential for renewal and resurrection. It’s a powerful thing. Sex can literally give us a new identity as mother or father. This is potentially ruinous for all involved when it’s approached too casually.

Sex is ultimately a unifying act. An individual is biologically complete in every way but one. Reproduction requires a complementary partner. It’s this unity of man and woman that achieves fullness and fruit. There is no such thing as casual sex. No divorce decree or annulment can ever undo the carnal knowledge of another. We carry that residue with us into every future relationship.

Unification, procreation, and recreation exist in this single act. Sex re-produces and it re-creates. And so these earthly processes unite two people. The earthly processes support the heavenly ideals of fullness and solidarity. This is why casual sex, non-complementary mixing, and gender dysphoria assault ancient sensibilities. The Church thinks much more highly of human sexuality than the secular culture does. And that is why she walls it off within a permanent, exclusive, and complimentary covenant called marriage. She rejects the idea of treating others as some biological amusement. This cannot simply be dismissed as prudish or bigoted. Prudishness or bigotry might exist. No one denies that. But these Biblical principles are rooted in something much deeper and far truer.

The Scientific Worldview is Incomplete

Of course, Christians believe that God creates each person. But they don’t deny that each person is the product of a sperm and an ovum. They know that God’s act of creation doesn’t rival the natural process of conception. Instead, creation is understood as the entire event of nature and existence.²³ The question of existence is not rooted in history. Rather, it concerns the very possibility of history. Neither classic Newtonian physics nor quantum theory can explain the existence of the other or itself. These abstract theories simply don’t fit within their own scientific models of the universe.

The materialistic worldview is incomplete. It takes the lawfulness of the universe for granted. It views the natural world as entirely self-standing. This excludes higher ideals like meaning, and purpose.

An unquestioning faith in science leaves us blind to spiritual realities. Science is inherently a spiritual endeavor. We enter into the unknown trying to make sense of it, to give it a name and thus transmute it into something familiar. Science is exploration. Exploring caves, diving the ocean depths, probing the vastness of space are all explainable in spiritual terms, not by science.

The scientific worldview is compatible with the Biblical worldview. The two are not mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact, the ancient symbolic worldview integrates science and material reality completely. All scientific understanding starts with confusion and vague intuition. Understanding is refined through experimentation. There’s an oscillation between established knowledge and new discoveries which make the previously held model look outmoded. For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity made Newtonian physics seem embarrassingly crude. Science expands rational space by solving mysteries of physical reality. This cuts through the cloud of confusion only to have new riddles arise that the current models cannot explain. The dark waters of confusion return.

The Shadowlands Point to Something Higher

Pageau wants us to understand that, “God is the principle of time and space, straight and crooked, familiar and foreign, rational and irrational, revealed and hidden, true and false, good and bad.” Art, medicine, engineering, scientific discovery, and exploration are all spiritual endeavors. And so are cooking, cleaning, restoring, repairing. Farmers and first responders are both life givers.

Pageau shows us that the Biblical cosmology describes the shape of the world. Scripture describes how the world actually is. It tells us that the world is not just one big petri dish. Instead its a story, a song, a dance.

Everything exists in God. Things exist because God sees them. We see them because they exist.

What we call reality is in a sense a land of shadows. We perceive just a faction of what is actually there. And we don’t fully understand what we do see.

The things we see are shadows of an ideal as if seen through a veil. As Chesterton noted, “a shadow is a shape; a thing that reproduces shape but not texture.”²⁴ And so there must be a higher reality that encompasses it all. And good and evil both point us there. “A certain degree of ‘lower evil’ may be transmuted into a ‘higher good’ for the knowledge of God” according to Pageau. That is precisely what happened through the Fall. It all culminated with the crucifixion. God took the worst that humanity had to offer and turned it into the greatest event in human history.

There’s a perception that science debunked these ancient stories. Humanity was once prone to naively accept the transcendent but our eyes are now opened as we peer into the microscope and see meaningless matter governed by mindless causality. There’s no going back. We can never unsee it. And we’re so struck by it that we fail to notice that our plight perfectly matches the narrative of the Fall. We tasted fruit from the tree of knowledge. Now we see everything explained in terms of mechanical causality and we find ourselves separated from God.

You cannot sever heaven from earth and expect earth to remain intact. But that is what we’ve attempted. The reverberations of this cut across every level of being. It leaves men neutered and women barren. It results in diseased bodies and widespread psychosis. Broken people, broken families, broken communities, broken societies, a broken world. We are without a doubt witnesses to the Fall.

_{Photo credit: “Rosetta Stone detail” by quinet is marked with CC BY 2.0.}