Chapter Nine Christianity and the Desecration of the Cosmos “For every thing that lives is Holy” In the opening chapter of this book I said that unless we reverse the premises of the type of thought and action productive of our present techno-scientific inferno, we will not escape the disaster towards which it is ineluctably propelling us; and in this chapter I ‘want to bring into focus the nature of the main premise that has to be reversed, and to put it in the context of a drama which is not to do simply with a phase of our local European history, but is arche- typal in the sense that it is intimately bound up with the whole ambiguity of human existence and the whole dilemma of human destiny as envisaged in the Christian tradition. It is a drama, that is to say, which has to do with both our fall and our resurrection; for the reversing of the premises of the type of thought lying be- hind our present plight entails no less than the reversing of a process of ignorance, through which the distortion of our capacity to per- ceive the reality of things leads to our enslavement to an illusory world entirely of our own invention; and the reversing of that pro- cess is simultaneously the prelude to our regeneration, and such regeneration is simultaneously a return to a state of being and con sciousness which can only be described as paradisal. I referred just now to the distortion of our capacity to perceive things truly. What do I mean by this? The answer to that question + Last line from William Blake's “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” op.cit., p.193.DESECRATION OF THE COSMOS, 201 pitches us into the center of the arena, because it leads us directly to defining this most pernicious of the premises we are called upon to reverse. For behind this distortion lies our virtually unquestioned acceptance of the belief that as we see things so they are, or that the way in which we perceive things with our ordinary conscious ness corresponds to the reality of these things — a belief which we encapsulate in the phrase, “seeing is believing”. And behind this lies in its turn something more sinister. Behind it lies a particular mental outlook, an outlook implicit in such statements as that made by Hamlet, that “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”, or as the Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” — statements which, as Shakespeare was well aware but as Descartes appears not to have been, subsume the distortion about which I am talk- ing. For what is asserted in them is not simply the notion that human thought is the determining factor of all things, including our own existence; but also that this thought is capable of provid- ing us with a valid type of knowledge. And itis, finally, behind this notion that there is or can be a valid type of purely human knowl- edge that lies the premise to which I have been referring. I will be more explicit. There are two factors that we have to grasp if we are to escape from the process of ignorance in which we are entrapped. The first is that how we perceive things depends crucially upon the state of our consciousness, and that the state of our consciousness depends upon the state of our being. This does not mean that the reality of the things themselves varies according to the consciousness which perceives them, and still less that their existence is dependent upon their being perceived. It simply means that how they appear to us, the kind of reality we attribute to them, and whether we see them as they are or, as it were, through a dis- torting lens, have very little to do with the things themselves and very much to do with the quality of our own being, the purity of our soul and the level of our intelligence. And this in its turn means that the way in which we see things may not correspond in the least to the reality of the things themselves. If our consciousness is dominated by a host of illusory ideas, then how we perceive things will be correspondingly illusory. And the fact that the great major-202 CHRISTIANITY ity of mankind at a particular period may perceive things in a cer- tain way does not in the least alter this: the mass of mankind may simply be enslaved to a particular set of delusions, and its percep- tion will be conditioned accordingly. In other words, what we perceive by means of the senses, and how we perceive it, as well as the manner in which we investigate it, are always conditioned to conform to the hidden systems of action and reaction, belief and thought, which at any particular time happen to dominate our consciousness. It is the prevailing conceptual paradigm of our consciousness, and the reality we at- tribute to it, that determine what we think is real and what we think is unreal. It is this paradigm, in which we believe often with- out being aware that we believe in it, that constitutes for us the ultimate reference point or touchstone according to which we dis- tinguish between what we regard as true and as not true, relevant or irrelevant, in the data on which we base our theories and ac- tions, and that gives them the meaning they have for us. Even what we call a “fact”, far from being self-evident, depends entirely upon a consensus of opinion among those of us who call it a fact, and this consensus depends entirely upon our common subscrip- tion to the ideas, beliefs, and values built into such a paradigm. And the particular paradigm to which we subscribe will in its turn depend upon the state of our inner being and hence of our con- sciousness. This is why the appeal to what is called empirical evidence the evidence of the sense-data — is so delusory; for it assumes that cour senses can perceive things in a kind of objective manner that is quite independent of our prior subscription to such a conceptual paradigm. Far from this being the case, what we think constitutes empirical evidence, let alone the way in which our senses read it, is already determined for us by our prior commitment to the presup- positions built into the paradigm to which, whether we are aware of it or not, we give our adherence. Hence not only how our senses perceive things, but also what we regard as valid empirical evi- dence, are entirely dependent upon the state of our inner being and our consciousness. That is why Herakleitos can say that the