Modern Christianity generally comes in two flavors: textual and individual. Textual Christianity sees the Bible as the source of the Christian faith, and that reading/believing the text and doing it is the job of the Christian. There are two problems with this. The first is that being a Christian was originally like joining a family (the biblical canon was not settled for at least two centuries); you become family by doing family and gradually understanding the values, inside jokes, and contributing yourself. The second problem is that textual Christian assumption that the Bible is easy to interpret is empirically incorrect: since the Reformation there are now tens of thousands of denominations, many of which differ on substantial pieces of theology. Were the Bible easy to interpret, this we would not see differences of opinion on so many major areas. The individual approach tries to solve this by focusing on the individual, but if the goal is to act with our own sense of goodness—generally informed by the culture around us instead of by the Bible—it is not clear how this is Christianity.

The modern view of what a religion is has also diverged from its original meaning: originally religion described the nature of reality. Now while we see pagans as worshipping many gods, all religions had the understanding that being came from somewhere, which the Greeks called the arché, but was called Tīan (Heaven) by the Chinese, Brahman by the Hindus, the Absolute by modern philosophers, etc. Zeus was not the arché: he was born of Chronos and Gaia, and like the other gods, Zeus was in the universe and bound by it. The arché, by contrast, is being itself. Greek philosophy considered the arché to be unknowable; one of Christianity’s contributions is the claim that the arché is personal (as opposed to an impersonal force), and so we can relate to the arché. Furthermore, Christianity claimed that the arché became human, died, and since the arché is life itself, resurrected. Not only that, but through Jesus, we can be united with the arché.

What does it mean to say that the arché is personal? What does it mean that being is personal? The ancient world had two answers to what it means to be a person. The first is “the worldview of the One”: individuals are like drops of water, and the arché is the pool of water. However, when water droplets merge back into the pool, their individuality disappears. The second is “the worldview of the Many”: the arché is like a rock and individuals are chips off of it. However, it is not possible for rocks to reattach. So in the one case we essentially cease to exist as a person if we unite with the arché, while in the second case we retain our individuality but uniting with the arché is essentially impossible. Christianity claims that God—the arché—is both One and Many at the same time: One essence and three Persons. (This is kind of like a family: genetically and culturally one, but unique individuals.) The arché, then, is fundamentally relational, fundamentally interdependent. So the original Christian view of “love” is not a feeling, but the state of being both one and many at the same time. (Of course, maintaining oneness requires many of the actions we associate with love, and frequently produces the feelings we associate with love.) So when John says “God is love”, he does not mean that God is the perfect example of love (although that is true), but he is making a statement about being: being is love; love and being are in some sense the same thing.

Religion also needs to answer why the world is the way it is, for instance, why is there evil and suffering. Ancient cultures tended to answer these questions in the form of stories—myths. Modern people assume that the scientific explanation of how the world works is true and that myths are false, but in reality they are talking about different things and are not at all incompatible. Myths are a cultural way of bringing meaning, of answering why. The Christian (and Jewish) answer to why there is evil and suffering is the Fall. The story is frequently seen as God giving a harsh punishment for a small disobedience, but that is to misunderstand it. The first humans were created “like God”, so capable of relational love, which means we must have free will, for love is only love if freely given. But as creations, humans are dependent on the arché for their continued existence, because only the arché has being. The serpent told Eve that if she ate the fruit she would be like God; the sin was to try to become being itself, like God. This is like an electrical outlet unplugging itself from the wall. The natural result is death, although not immediately, since, like a battery or a cut flower, we still have some amount of residual life left over in us. We, being plugged into Adam and Eve (in a future-now sense), became unplugged, too. And since humanity was placed over Creation, the rest of Creation is slowly dying, too, since it was plugged into us, and we unplugged ourselves from life. Furthermore, a cut flower cannot rejoin itself, and our plug has even become rusty and misshapen, so we cannot be rejoined to the arché. However, when the arché became man, we can plug into him.

The question of how we plug into Jesus is answered differently by sacramental and non-sacramental Christianity, so we will look at sacramental Christianity first. Before we can do that, however, we need to understand the sacramental worldview. Modern people see the world as the visible physical, material world and, for some, there is an invisible spiritual world; the important thing about modern thinking is that these worlds are separate. The ancients did not consider them separate, which means that material things have intrinsic meaning, and they can have spiritual effects. This is why vampires are physically harmed by the cross: since the vampire receives its power from the devil, it is physically harmed by the weapon by which Christ overcame the devil. Similarly, in Greek thought, a fire is not just a chemical reaction; lighting a fire is wielding the power of the gods (which Prometheus brought down at the cost of, essentially, his life). Sometimes this is called an enchanted worldview, and the modern separated view a disenchanted worldview. Moderns distinguish between objective truth (what we can visibly verify in the material truth, which is independent of us) and subjective truth (like your pizza preferences, or the taste of garlic). Dividing it this way produces a crisis of meaning, because the things that make life meaningful cannot be proven. However, we can look at the dichotomy differently, through a participatory view. Some things must be experienced to be known, like the taste of garlic, but the fact that people come to very similar conclusions about what garlic tastes like demonstrates that this is not just some subjectively defined taste. On a deeper level, a family must be experienced to the be understood, which can be done through adoption, or even over time as a family friend. Knowing the arché is a similar relational, participatory knowing. However, just as relating to others is limited if we, for example, get angry at any slight—our anger may cause us to distance ourself, or the other person to distance themself—so our ability to relationally experience the arché is limited to the extent of our virtues. Vices like arrogance and anger, for instance, will limit our experience of the arché, and since the arché is truth, being, and love, our knowledge of those things is limited by our vices. Or, put another way, the ability of a mirror to experience light is limited by how clean it is.

Part of how we plug into Jesus is through the sacraments. Since the physical and spiritual are integrated, we interact with the spiritual through practices involving material components; such actions are often called rituals. In Baptism, the priest asks Holy Spirit to sanctify the water, which cleanses our sins and gives a renewed body (which fixes the problem of our inherited, rusted, misshapen plug that cannot be re-plugged in, and essentially re-plugs us back in). The Eucharist is analogous to the electricity; unmediated, electricity is dangerous, but through the bread and the wine Jesus gives us his body to consume. The sacrament of Marriage is not two people forming an alliance (secular) or even a unbreakable covenant (evangelical), but two people becoming one; it is the One-Many synthesis lived out. The sacrament of Ordination gives a person spiritual authority, kind of like a license gives the electrician the authority to handle the dangerous electricity (presumably Ordination is conferred on someone who has also received the requisite education and training on how to handle it safely). Sacramental objects are this which have some of this spiritual electricity. Just like electricity is everywhere in nature, and can be attached to objects via static electricity, so spiritual energy can be concentrated in objects, like the bread and wine, holy water, relics of the saints, etc.

The purpose of the church service differs between sacramental and non-sacramental worldviews. In the non-sacramental worldview, the goal of the church service is a combination of social club (music, coffee-hour social time) and political party (lectures, agreement with set of beliefs). The sacramental goal is to participate in the worship of God in heaven. Moses gives a picture of this, in that the tabernacle built on was instructions on the nature of the heavenly worship and how to participate in it. The saints also talk about a liturgy being performed in heaven (Porcu speculates that perhaps the motions of the stars is part of this somehow). In a similar fashion to how someone putting on a mask or a superhero costume borrows some of the energy of that character and becomes them, our imitation of the heavenly worship is also participating in it. Furthermore, because we are participating in the same heavenly reality, all participants of the liturgy, past, present, and future, are in some sense participating in it at the same time—in liturgical time, which is outside normal time. (This is the same reason why we say “Christ is born” on Christmas and “Christ is risen” on Easter, instead of “was born”, “rose”.) So we go to church to participate in the family activity, just like you do not go to the gym n times a year and now you’re healthy, but rather being healthy is participating in health, of which going to the gym is a key part.

Sacramental Christianity is not focused on studying the Bible, but the Bible does play an very important role. However it views the Bible differently than most Protestant denominations, which—especially fundamentalists—treat the Bible as a collection of facts. (A fact being something objectively verifiable, different from truth.) In this they do not differ much from the modern view of history, which is almost solely concerned about ascertaining facts, “what really happened”. In contrast, the ancients were concerned with what the events meant, so moving facts around to make the meaning clear was standard practice, and is responsible for many of the contradictions in the gospels. The early Christians identified three interpretations of a passage: the literal meaning, the moral meaning, and the typological meaning. The literal meaning we are familiar with; in David and Goliath, the literal meaning is the description of a historical event. The moral meaning is lessons we can draw from the text, in this case, one moral meaning is that we need to have faith that God will bring victory when we are outmatched. The typological meaning is more like an archetypal reading prefiguring Christ. So David is a type of Christ, and Goliath is the type of the devil, or of death, thus David and Goliath is a typological prefiguring of Christ conquering death. (This is not modern allegory; David is not a ficticious stand-in for Christ, but rather David and Christ do the same sort of thing.) There are a lot of possible interpretations of a passage, so we need to acquire the mind of the Church. This is not agreement with doctrine, but more like the intuitive feel of craftsman or the athlete. Or to continue the family metaphor, it is like joining a family and acquiring the family’s perspective on life, of knowing how they would think, feel, and act in a certain situation. This is acquired not just through intellectual study, but by participating in the family.

Any worldview needs to explain why there is not only great beauty in the world, but also wickedness and ugliness, typically called “the problem of evil”. Now, to say something is evil is to make a claim that it is merely something that I intensely dislike, but it violates a higher moral law, independent of us. This requires some sort of universal lawgiver, which is the arché. So the existence of evil actually argues for the existence of God, not against. But where does it come from? The Christian answer is that love requires freedom (forced love is not love), and some may use their freedom to do unloving things. So evil comes from us. However, generally people are not looking for an intellectual answer but rather an emotional answer to why a loving God permits evil. The response of “it is part of God’s plan” is a terrible answer, since it makes God responsible for evil. Saying “God will make this into good, and we need to endure” is better, but, among other problems, it tends towards passivity. The early Christian answer was not “endure suffering”, but “transcend suffering”. A young child cannot handle hunger or tiredness well and melts down, while adults feel the same things but are not undone by them. Jesus was betrayed, unjustly tortured, and killed, and not only was he not undone by this, but he even said “Father, forgive them”. In fact, even death did not undo Jesus—he came back to life. A long succession of saints has demonstrated that we, too, can attain this maturity because we are connected to the arché. (For instance, St. Lawrence was not undone by the pain of being strapped to a red-hot gridiron; after a while he said “turn me over, I’m done on this side”.) One response to this is consider this beautiful; another considers transcending evil to be ridiculous. In the latter case, then you have to say that there is no meaning in the world, but if the world were truly meaningless, you would have no way of ascertaining it. Jesus demonstrates another thing: rather than fighting evil the obvious way by, say, fighting the devil in single combat, by passively accepting the evil and being victorious, he demonstrated that evil has no power. It is a corruption of good: violence is a corruption of physical force, which is good in the case of cutting vegetables or pounding a nail; rape is corruption of sex. Defeating evil does not require greater force, rather good conquers evil, and Jesus is leading us into the overthrowing of evil.

Christ reconnected us to the arché, yet everything is not fine. This is because we have freewill, and we developed a resistance to being plugged in, otherwise known as sin, by developing vices (anger, jealousy, lust, laziness, etc.), much of which is trained in us by the culture and families we grew up in. We need to reject acting in all the ways that fall short, which is called repentance. For all the talk of “reaching our full potential”, we rarely act towards it, because our full potential is always acting perfectly—for instance, always being able to say the right thing in the moment, and never being overcome with anger, fear, anxiety, depression, additions, etc. You might even say “I’m not myself today” because you can recognize that you are very tired or frustrated and that this is preventing you from acting how you want. This repentance is not just a one-time thing and then we get out of hell, which typically only changes some things. Rather, this is an ongoing process and lifestyle. One part of this is regular Confession. This is not the priest forgiving your sin, but rather the priest witnessing to you that your sin is, in fact, forgiven, and also giving a spiritual training regimen for overcoming this weakness. Another part of this is the saints, who have fully overcome all their sins and are with Jesus. Their example and writings help us, and there are even many accounts of saints appearing to someone to help them. Since our sins and vices interfere with us seeing God, the arché, which is being itself, the more we become free of these, the more we experience being, and the more we actually become real. The saints always perceive God, and thus are fully real.

We can see two worldview revolutions in history, in the transitions between the three major historical periods. The first was the transition from Ancient to Medieval civilization, or the transition from the pagan to the Christian worldview. Paganism was essentially that there are various deities that must be placated with sacrifices. We have already examined the Christian worldview. Most of the pagans believed in the arché but did not think we could interact with it. When Christianity said that the arché was personal and had become a person (not just taking the appearance of one, like Zeus on his many dalliances), this was revolutionary. Not only could we relate to the arché, but if the arché had become human, then that radically changed the value of people. Pagans thought it was better to be male than female, and better to be free than a slave, for obvious reasons. Paul’s declaration that in Christ there is no male/female, slave/free, Jew/Gentile was completely unheard of in the ancient world.

There were three major features of the new Christian civilization. The first feature is “Christianity operated like a family”. To be sure, there were conflicts, but generally the bishops got together and hashed out a resolution. Even after the East/West Schism, everyone thought Christianity was the foundation of society. The second feature is that the church and government could not be separated. Rulers were responsible for not only for the material affairs of their subjects, but to some extent their spiritual health as well, so there needed to be symphony with the Church, where both government and Church had input in governance (hence the Byzantine two-headed eagle). The Church called authorities to moral account, but the emperor could call Church councils and the bishops were subject to the law that the ruler enforced. The third feature is conformance to Christian values was driving cultural progress. “In pagan Rome, for example, slaves had no legal status at all, deadly blood sports were a common form of mass entertainment, and the punishments handed out to criminals would be considered cruel and unusual by modern standards.” (107) Unwanted babies, frequently girls, were callously abandoned on trash heaps. As the Christian worldview became adopted, the practice of abandoning babies quickly stopped, and while slavery was not ended, slaves became actual persons and had some legal rights. There was also rapid technological advance, partly because if the arché created the world then it was clearly rational and understandable (unlike the chaotic world that the pagans understood it to be), and partly because labor was more expensive than when slaves had no rights. The advances in the Renaissance were done on the foundation laid by Christendom.

The second historical worldview revolution was the Protestant Revolution, which began the transition from Medieval to Modern. This is often portrayed as fixing the corrupt Church, that is not correct. Actually, the Roman Catholic Church had been reforming itself for centuries (unfortunately not always for the better), and the Reformation did not merely reform, but fundamentally altered what Christianity was. There are three major consequences. The first consequence was that, since Luther held all the Church councils to be invalid, that everything was up for debate. To vacate a 1500 years of family culture and thought is essentially to create a new family; Protestants are functionally a different religion than what came before. The second consequence was that since the Tradition of liturgy, councils, etc. was invalidated, the Bible had to do all of the work that they previously had done. Not only was this an unprecedented perspective on the Bible, but it also changed Christianity from a relationship with the man Jesus to a relationship of a book. You do not get relationship from a book, you get knowledge, and since every theological possibility was up for debate now, getting knowledge from the Bible to know which of these is correct became very important. People did not agree on what the Bible said, and the family splintered into thousands of branches. The third consequence was that Christian stopped being the foundation of society. Increasingly wealthy rulers found being held morally accountable to be troublesome, and you cannot be accountable to a religion that is not yours, so the branches of the Churches ended up being nationalized (Henry VIII and the Church of England being the most flagrant example). This changed Europe from a common worldview to becoming balkanized nation-states and also resulted in the State, not Christianity, having the ultimate power, resulting in religious intolerance. As a result, in the United States, there was no state religion, and in the French Republic there was no religion at all. Society became secular.

“Secular” has many meanings, but in this context it is that government and society should function without any religious beliefs. From the historical context of the religious wars in Europe this idea makes sense, but the problem is that neutrality is illusory. For one thing, if religion should have no influence in society, then it must not be important; this is not neutral. However, religion deals with the nature of reality, and you cannot have no answer to that question; you must have a worldview of some sort. If you exclude religion, all that you get is a materialist (only physical matter exists, there is no spiritual component) religion. Since morality by its nature requires something above us defining morality, a materialist worldview implies that power is the only force in the world, as indeed Communists and Post-Moderns have asserted. The use of power by amoral states in the twentieth century resulted in more deaths than any other century by at least an order of magnitude.

A secular, materialist worldview makes a sacramental view very difficult. If spiritual and material are separated (and especially if there is no spiritual component at all), then it makes no sense that the water of Baptism and the bread and wine of Communion have significance, nor can we participate in a cosmic liturgy by imitating it. “The idea that we can’t see God because we aren’t yet fully real also doesn’t fit into secularism, as there can’t be any higher reality if the physical world is the only reality (or the only one that matters). If objective knowledge is the only valid kind of knowledge, then moral growth is irrelevant to intellectual growth, and the idea that truth is a Person is simply nonsensical.” (122) Even those in a sacramental tradition are not immune to the cultural worldview, the water in which we swim, and that culture is incompatible with a sacramental worldview.

There are five ways that we can become sacramental again. The first is that we have to internalize that the physical and the spiritual are integrated, which is something that every modern resists. Heaven is not “up there”, a miracle is not a temporary cessation of reality; all of matter has spiritual content, but we cannot see it because we are not fully real. The second is to adopt the perspective that we are works in progress. There are three stages: belief, action, habit. You do not become healthy because you bought a gym membership, but through a habit of using the gym. Likewise you do not become real by praying a prayer and escaping hell, but by the habit of shedding sin and vice and moving towards reality. Third, accept that you have to learn from the church. You cannot just decide you disagree with a council or the tradition; you do not become more real that way. Fourth, the Church must become central to your life, otherwise it is just a hobby. Set up a prayer corner in your house so you can participate in prayer and liturgy every day. Fifth, do not let worldly concerns, especially political concerns, become the main thing. Remember, we are trying to move towards reality, not the world’s idea of morality.

Heaven is not a place of idle rest and pleasure (which is a rather infantile idea), nor is it just singing in God’s Presence. These are the opposite of the gospel. Rather, heaven is more like an age, as the Nicene Creed says, “... the age to come”. It is not the end, but the beginning where we start partnering with God in the Creation he had in mind. It is a journey to becoming one with the arché, which is best described as joy. The arché is where all the things you love comes from. The Church is not trying to restrict our pleasure, but is training us not to settle for those worldly pleasure but to seek their source. The kingdom is here now, but it is also not here yet; right now we are in a transition period, where both coexist. Certain the kingdom is not a place of idleness. People come alive when they build, create, learn, and push themselves; the coming age will be one where our vices do not hinder that, and other people are consistently helpful. Whatever it is like, it will certainly be dynamic, joyful, and real.

Journey to Reality was recommended to me as what the author has to teach about the sacramental worldview before he can teach what he wants to teach. It gives the sacramental worldview in large brush-strokes, highlights how it differs from the secular and modern Christian worldviews, and gives some historical background on how this situation came about. It is also a good summary of eastern Patristic Christian philosophical understanding of sin and the Fall. Having been exposed to much of this already, nothing in the book was surprising, but it is packaged nicely and is very readable.

The idea of the arché was new to me, though, and I found that helpful. Knowing that most ancient cultures had some concept of the arché gives some context for the appeal of Christianity philosophically, as well as giving more perspective on what John is talking about when he said the the logos (roughly equivalent to the arché by this time) became flesh and dwelt among us. More importantly, though, God as being, reality, love rather than a being greater than the universe, is helpful in perceiving God’s transcendent Otherness from us. Obviously a being that creates the universe is rather Other, but if God is being itself, that is an incomprehensible Otherness. This changes oneness with God, or St. Athanasius’ “God became man that man might become divine” from something sort of like marriage, including the awkward sexual metaphor, to oneness with God being something awe-full. What could it possibly mean to be united with being, with life, with love?! Marriage as a metaphor for that would seem to be like a child’s drawing compared to Thomas Cole’s paintings. However, just as the attraction of romance is the otherness of the other gender, like myself but mysterious, I think the more we see God’s transcendent Otherness, the more the strength of our desire to be united with the mysterious, incomprehensible Other who, nonetheless, I am like.

If God is being, it also makes sense of Maximus the Confessor talking about us moving toward being or non-being, which I completely misunderstand as a something quasi-Buddhist when I read it. Instead Maximus is saying that as we sin we move towards non-being because we are moving away from God, who is being. In that sense, sin is sort of uncreating oneself. This changes sin from disobeying traditional rules to something that is deeply meaningful (negatively so).

Despite the fact the Porcu has a Ph.D. and several other degrees, and is clearly knowledgeable in the main content, there were some surprisingly glaring problems in other areas. I am not well-versed in early US history, but I think the assumption that the US was founded with as a purely secular state is incorrect. I believe that the assumption was that society would be Christian—John Adams said that the Constitution was unsuitable for any but a “moral and religious people”, but there would be no state religion enforcing which version of Christianity. It is the modern interpretation which interprets separation of Church and State to mean a State religion of secular materialism. Similarly, the situation of Henry VIII and the Church of England is more complicated than Henry wanting a divorce, not getting it, so setting up his own archbishop who would give it to him. At that time the Pope actually ruled over physical land, so allegiance to the Pope was also allegiance to another king. A more glaring error is that, yes Christians absolutely founded the first universities (although I believe Islamic Caliphate also had centers of learning), but the etymology of “university” is not uni (one) + (di) versity! It comes directly from medieval Latin, universitas. These types of errors appear to be simply repeating pop history without doing any research into the situation. This does not strike me as the kind of error an academic makes, even in books aimed at a popular audience, and it hurts his credibility in my eyes. While I find the book useful, I wonder if anything in the core material is also poorly understood. Some of the statements seem too black and white, even for a book aimed at a popular audience. The author appears to be fairly young from his picture on the back, and I know from personal experience that nuance is not a strength of young male intellectuals. Still, if you claim a Ph.D., I expect something more thorough.

Porcu’s summary also highlights the eastern Patristic influences on C.S. Lewis. I am unsure where he got them from, maybe it was simply from George MacDonald, since although he studied medieval literature, I believe, and of course had thoroughly read the classics (in Greek), I did not think that much eastern Patristic thought remained in the West, due to the language barrier. At any rate, The Great Divorce illustrates our lack of reality when the grass pierces the protagonist’s foot, because he was not real enough to bend the grass. I must have read that a very long time ago, since I have no review of it (at time of writing), but I never really understood that part. The Last Battle‘s “farther up and farther in!” is a pithy summary of the Porcu’s last chapter, too. In fact, while Porcu says that the saints are fully real because they always perceive God, I think Lewis is more correct, in that we will always farther up and farther in, and will always be becoming more real (albeit probably somewhat asymptotically).

This is a helpful introduction to the sacramental view, and I hope it enables me to read deeper on the topic. If you have limited experience with eastern Patristic thought, this book is a good introduction to their philosophical depth. Anyone who finds American Protestant ideas somewhat unconvincing, and C.S. Lewis refreshing (if somewhat mysterious) is likely to find this to open up a wealth of rich avenues of rich Christian thought to explore and integrate. I think any American Christian will find this book helpful in some area.