I became convinced some thirty years previously that the warnings of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had to be taken seriously: that the death of God, which he announced in the late nineteenth century, threatened to undermine everything of value in the civilization of the West. Nietzsche believed that Man would have to become God, in a sense, as a consequence of the collapse of Christian belief: would have to forge his own values and thereby find his place in a cosmos now devoid of divine transcendent purpose.
But, concurrently, I read the psychoanalysts, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and the great biological psychologists of the late 20th century, and came to know in a terrifying manner that we were not masters in our own houses, and could not, in consequence, consciously conjure forth the spirit needed to replace what we had lost with the degeneration of institutional Christianity. We have a nature—an ethical nature. Everyone experiences their own proof of that, in the ability to escape from the sting of their conscience when they do what they should not, or fail to do what they should. And I became convinced, for those and other reasons, that the world of human experience has a moral structure that cannot be evaded; a moral structure that is in fact our home. And this was not because I became convinced of the existence of the Good, but because reading history, psychologically—and reading it as a perpetrator and not a victim or, even more unlikely, a hero— had convinced me that Evil was real, and that it dwelt in the heart.
And as I studied as deeply as I could manage, I found that the wisdom of the Biblical stories, for example, appeared truly bottomless. No matter how much time I spent assessing or analyzing the stunningly brief accounts in Genesis I always learned more—and more, and more—without any indication that I had come close to the bottom. This came—and still comes—as a tremendous surprise to me. It was not in the least what I expected and, although I have spend three decades trying to explain and understand it, I believe that I am still far from an acceptable understanding. It’s partly because the Biblical stories are all connected to one another, so that the Bible is, in some sense, the world’s first hyperlinked (and thoroughly hyperlinked) text. It’s partly because those foundational stories are woven into the great art and literature that has emerged since the dawn of the Christian era, as well as into the morality that structures the manner in which we perceive and respond to the world. And I began to see that the stories that have grounded our culture had to be revitalized and their meanings made conscious, or we would literally lose our minds, in the same way that people deprived of their equally mysterious private dreams inevitably lose theirs.
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