"As Above, So Below" review

Intro
So, "As Above, So Below" got panned pretty hard: 38% on Metacritic and only 26% on Rotten Tomatoes (39% audience review). This post is my attempt to defend the movie and call the critics a bunch of lame sophisticati ... my own coined term comparing "sophisticated" critics and commentators to the mysterious, legendary, and evil Illuminati ... although, if Tolkien were alive and did agree with me, he might have classed them with "the monsters and the critics" (his essay that, according to some heavy scholars in that field, single-handedly saved Beowulf from the obscurity of being considered an incoherent hodge-podge of a plethora of disparate sources by demonstrating an amazing literary unity of theme and execution) ... but I'm not sure he would have been much of a horror fan, although I can think of a way that "found footage" could fit with his general outlook on theater as Aristotelean katharsis.

Anyway, The movie is in the "found footage" sub-genre of the "horror" genre. But, as with just about everything that I write here, I am going to toss the whole "genre" thing out the window as, at best, very confused, and more likely a complete load of bunk. It's not totally that, but I do think people rely on it as a crutch for seeing themselves as erudite ... knowing what is in what genre, what elements works in a specific genre are "supposed" to have, etc. And, to be honest, people talking about the genre of "adult high fantasy" in particular makes it a little difficult to keep my lunch down. From what I have read of Tolkien's thinking, he would be a bit bewildered by what passes popular muster in the genre of which he was supposedly one of the founding fathers. But, I do like some things that get put in or arise in that genre, and he did have an idea of faerie stories as a distinct class of narratives, so I will leave that all behind and get on with the real task at hand.

The movie is horror, and maybe I'm a wimp, but it did satisfy me as that because I did have to check my underwear for skidmarks a few time.

But what holds it together for me is a couple sources and themes of which I think your average "educated" critics are not too aware. The two sources of which I speak are alchemical thought and Dante, which it mixes. The themes are self-revelation and confronting interior things that one has relegated to the realm of "horrors within," buried in the subconscious to come out only in nightmares, or in this case, the bone-laden catacombs under Paris.

I'm going to leave it up to the reader to watch the film on their own, rather than giving a synopsis outside of what naturally occurs in discussing those elements.

Alchemy
So, they are going down into the catacombs beneath Paris in search of the tomb of Nicholas Flamel. If you have read Harry Potter, you know that he is supposed to have been an active alchemist in the 14th and 15th centuries. The record on this is spotty. Wikipedia authors say that nobody has found any evidence that he actually practiced. I suspect there may be a confusion. I need to dig my John Granger books out (TIME referred to him once as the "dean of Harry Potter studies"; you can go to his site at www.hogwartsprofessor.com ... I have gotten together with him a couple times, the first in Vegas in 2006 at the Lumos conference and the other seeing him speak in the Samsung lecture area at the Columbus Circle shops in NYC while I was in grad school, and we ate in wholefoods afterwards on the lower level ... really good guy, and I'm not just saying that because he credited me in his book on ring composition in Harry Potter; he's a genuinely good man and a great human being).

Granger has done a lot of work on "literary alchemy," which is not the same as trying to actually make gold from lead or even practicing any form of physical magic. It is taking the symbolic principles of the "method" described for the alchemical processes and applying them to literature. He even claims that the Globe theater was designed on literary alchemical principles. I'm not knowledgable enough in the area of Shakespeare and the Globe to know if he is right. But my main point in bringing it all up here is that it is possible that Nicholas Flamel did do literary criticism, or maybe even writing himself, along the lines of the principles of literary alchemy.

To give an example of what literary alchemy is, the alchemical crucible has four elements surrounding it: White on top for pure spirit, black on the bottom for pure matter, red sulfur on the left, and quicksilver on the right. In the middle of the crucible is produced the gold. In literary alchemy, the four represent character traits and in the middle is the golden soul, produced in the fire of trials and tribulations. In Harry Potter, Albus (Latin "white") Dumbledore is on top, Voldy, as a materialist who thinks material death is the worst thing, is black on the bottom, redhaired Ron with his volatile nature is sulfur on the left, and cool-reasoned Hermione is quicksilver on the right (another name for quicksilver is mercury, who is the Roman god modeled on the Greek god Hermes, and that sounds like? ... there you go, now you got it) . I have theories about that whole thing, but this is not the time or place. The point is that you see what literary alchemy looks like.

One way or another, this movie associates Flamel with alchemy and Scarlette and her cohort are going down there to find his bones, or hopefully an empty tomb that proves he made the philosopher's stone and is still alive somewhere on the elixir of life made from the stone. And what they really hope is to find the/a stone itself down there.

 Now, here is the thing about literary alchemy, basically what I just said, it's about finding the golden soul, which is the transformed soul. Many people think of alchemy as only the forerunner of chemistry, but I think really, at least on this level of literary alchemy, it's the forerunner of pscyhology, which is about the healing of the soul. Carl Jung even has a whole book called Alchemy and Psychology (which I have but have been too lazy and distracted to read yet). I think this movie works on the healing level.

I think some who have interpreted the movie have gotten it wrong, and maybe even that the film-makers might have been sloppy in one passage, allowing the misinterpretation. Those interpreters take the face in the golden mirror and the "as above, so below" to mean that "I am the key ... as I think it, so it will be," as in magic powers. The stone is the person who realizes this, and they get magical powers from realizing it. I don't think this is it, especially with the other elements I will describe. I think the film is appealing to personalist, and even spiritualist alchemy. I don't think "spirituality" as such is their point, but it is one aspect of the concept of "person." But while I don't think it is meant to be a fully "spiritual" film, I do think that the title, "as above, so below," is seen better as an allusion to heaven and earth, especially after what I will describe from Dante, rather than the magical power thing of "as I think it, so it will be."

I think Scarlette seeing her face in the golden mirror is not that she is the stone, but that she is the golden soul, the healed soul, the goal of personalist alchemy. People taking the magical powers line point to the fact that after she sees this she is able to pass over the blood channel and bash back the stone wall zombies and then heal her friend. BUT, I think that what they fail to notice is what intervenes. I think they see surviving the encounter with her dead father's corpse as an effect of having those powers, when really it is a cause.

After she is healed, she knows what she has to do to survive ... she has to confront the "horror within" - her doubts and feelings of guilt over her father's suicide (remember, that phone ringing was the first of the odd things from their life above ground encountered by the group in the catacombs). That was the point in the movie when I realized what was going on fully with the alchemy aspect as the core of the film (I picked up on some Dante aspects earlier but was waiting to see where they went, but more on that in a minute). When she went to hug the hanging corpse, I thought, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?! It's going to kill you! Dead!" But then it is all right after she hugs him and says she is sorry. That's the key, that's what makes the other magical stuff possible.

Now, I think this whole "healed soul" thing plays out in the three remaining characters as representing two aspects of human soul: the psychological and the moral. Her friend George's horror within is purely psychological: he blames himself for the death of his brother, but there is no way that as a child he could have prevented it; he simply got lost in the woods while desperately trying to help because he was a kid ... but he blames himself (and that is what he keeps seeing). Zed's horror is moral: he keeps seeing the son he fathered and then denied was his. Scarlette's is a mix or an intersection of the two: her father committed suicide; she didn't realize he was psychologically that close to doing that; but she could have answered the phone anyway ... and whichever is the case (it is meant to be a tension between the two explanations, I think), she blames herself. All three confront their inner horror, and all three survive, after a leap of faith.

(Aside: not everyone's "sins" are revealed, or at least not fully. We can figure that Benji, the cameraman, had something with the mystery girl, and we know Papi's had something to do with the kid in the car. We don't really see anything about Souxie, EXCEPT that La Taupe is the one to get her, and this is after she steps up to be the one to go talk to him when they find him the second time and he gets weirder ... they had something going before, something romantic I think, and maybe hers is that, more than anybody else, she should have been the one to try to find him when he disappeared ... just my guess though)

Dante

Dante and St John of the Cross are the two famous ones for the concept that "the way down is the way up."

I'll just set these up and knock them down. The first is the inscription they find at one point, "abandon all hope, ye who enter here." On the wikipedia or somewhere, somebody said that this is a thing in several mythological accounts of descent into the underworld. I know it is on the gates of hell in Dante's Inferno, but I haven't found it being anywhere else in any mythological literature. I have not dug out my copies of the Odyssey and the Aeneid, but I am assuming that if it were in those accounts, I would be able to find somebody mentioning it online in google searches etc. Either way, Dante is the most well known. And combined with the next two elements form Dante, especially the finale, I see no way this is not Dante.

Next is the death of Papi. He gets dragged into a burning car and is entombed. In the 6th circle of hell in the Inferno,  Pope Anastasius II is trapped in a flaming tomb along with other heretics. While scholars note that Dante here erred in confusing him with the emperor Anastasius I of the time, it still remains that Dante had the pope there, even if he was confused about the identity, and Papi's name is significant as an element that is sort of a tip off to Dante. This isn't one that is so thematically central, are the issues of the three who survive. For that matter, neither is the inscription just mentioned. The real Dantea element is the descent and then the re-ascent only by being willing to descend further. These tow are just clues to the fact that Dante is the source of the descent structure.

Finally, after the trio makes the leap of faith, they are in a small cavern that no longer has an opening in the ceiling. Instead it has a circular plate set down into a circular depression in the floor, about the size of a manhole cover. They try to get it "up" out to no avail.  Why do I put "up" in quotes? Well, because, it IS a manhole cover in a Paris street ... on the other side of it. They find this out when they accidentally push down on it and it shifts. So they work and get it pushed down enough to slide to the side, almost as if (before they realize what is going on) is is magnetically pulled to the roof of a chamber below them. BUT what is really happening is that their down is the up of the other side, and their up is the down of the other side. "The way down is the way up." In the center of the 9th circle of Dante's hell, Satan chews on Judas, Brutus, and Cascius, the three greatest traitors. Dante and Virgil have to climb down Satan's belly and then the direction reverses and they come out going upwards at the base of mount purgatory ... just like the direction reverses for Scarlette, George, and Zed as they climb down/up out of the manhole.

Conclusion: The movie got panned because the critics didn't know how to analyze anything that involves any literary elements earlier than about Friday the 13th, IMHO. I'm sure that's not entirely true. I am sure they have seen and respected older "horror" like Hitchcock. And I am sure that they are at least somewhat knowledgeable about older movies in other "genres." But that's the real problem, the genre classification. Movies are supposed to obey the rules of the determined "genre" like good little boys and girls ... which get pretty boring.

Demythologizing versus Demything

Introduction
So, this post is a bit funky because it is a question with which only those studying ancient texts, particularly in biblical studies, are likely to be familiar. But I am hoping that, in discussing it, I can provide enough context that even those who have not run into it before or are not as familiar with the conceptual rubrics in this field can gain something in reading. Also, it relates to other posts I have put up recently (creationism vs evolutionism, the defense of Lost, etc).

History of the Question:
I should relate that this subheading is an actual term in use in academic studies, or at least close to it; I think "status of the question" may be more commonly used. In a piece of research, it is an introductory section giving the history of scholarly writing and debate on the question: who first posed it as a distinct question with this particular terminology, what specific literature they were examining the issue in, what their main theory was in answer to the question, and what other scholars have done in working on the question since then. For instance, Martin Noth first introduced the theory of "The Deuteronomistic History" as an originally separate and unified whole work spanning Joshua, Judges, 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings (in the Hebrew TANAK canon, Ruth does not come between Judges and 1 Samuel, but is rather a part of the third section of the canon, the Writings). In Noth's original theory, he claimed the DH was done in one redaction (edition). In subsequent scholarship, several major scholars have proposed that it was actually in two editions. The first covered up through the reign of and religious reform by king Josiah in the kingdom of Judah and took a highly favorable view of Josiah, making him sort of a second Joshua (a military/political leader who obeyed the law handed to him by prophets, just as Joshua conquered Canaan following the Law given by Moses, the great prophet). The second redaction edited the first and added to it the last four kings between Josiah and the exile and the material on the evil king Manasseh who reigned between Hezekiah and Josiah, basically as an explanation for why, if Josiah and his reform were so great, God chose to send the people into exile as punishment (Manasseh's apostasy and leading the people in the same was just too great for even the great king Josiah to totally undo). I know all of this because I did the DH as one of my comp questions in my doctoral studies (things of this nature are still only theories, and there is much debate on different parts or aspects of them). The "status of the question" introductory section is pretty much a standard requirement for PhD dissertations.

The term in question in this post is "demythologization."  It occurs in two major instance in biblical studies, with two fairly different but connected meanings. I'm not sure which came first, but I believe it was the work of Martin Dibelius and, particularly (in its most radical form), Rudolf Butlmann (whose main type of criticism was "form criticism") in New Testament, and in particular in the Gospels. Bultmann distinguished the "Christ of Faith" from the "Jesus of History" and said that the former in merely mythological construction using the tropes of mythological thinking of that time period ("forms," in his use of the word). The task of the exegete, for him, was to strip away the mythological thinking by stripping away the mythic "forms" in which it is embedded and to find the "real" historical Jesus.

To me, contra Bultmann's version, there is a great value in form criticism when used rightly, examining set tropes, "forms," by which biblical authors express the truth of the events they relate because this mythic [versus "mythological," see below] expression goes beyond a preoccupation with mere facticity and shows that the events are about more than historical facticity, although this does not negate a historicity to them, and in fact the historicity of the events is very important because of not just the doctrine of the Incarnation, but because of the principle discernible in it - that Christ, "myth become fact" in C.S. Lewis's language, is the fullness of all reality, including that of historical fact. Thus, I strongly disagree with this scholarly "demythologization" of the New Testament "Christ of Faith."

(Aside: the late Fr. Joseph Fitzmeyer had a great response on the whole "Jesus of history" issue in his Scripture: the Soul of Theology. He said that this "Jesus of History" would be every bit as much of a construction as scholars like Bultmann say the "Christ of Faith" is. He would be constructed out of the things determined to be "facts" by their pre-commitments of the type of man they wish to find, and those facts would be arranged according to the same [in my language, the core myths of materialist scientism constructed in the specific language tropes of that belief system]. For one, the "facts" outside of the biblical account are simply too scant to find out anything that is not already formed by the Faith of the Church.)

I am going to leave further specifics of Bultmann and NT studies aside for now, partially because I am not at this time enough "in the game" of overall biblical studies to productively discuss the NT/Gospels question, but mostly in order to move on to the second instance (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament), which is the one with which I am more intimately familiar and which bears more fruit for my particular interests here (although, see my caveat below on the Quadriga for my agreement with the Magisterium of the Catholic Church that the Old Testament cannot, at the end of the day, be examined in complete isolation from the theology of the New Testament, at least not within the discipline of Christian theology).

Paul Ricoeur is my main theorist for what follows, but I will not delve into him yet because I need to lay more groundwork. But I must give a disclaimer here as well. It is has been a while since I have delved into Ricouer, whose thought is dense (he has a whole chapter at the end of his The Rule of Metaphor [in the French original, "the life of metahpor"] on the copula, the word "is," that I am not sure I got fully even at the time I was reading it for comps and came to it after having followed his whole three-hundred previous pages, in fact, I am pretty sure I didn't). My interest here, as related in my main descriptor for this blog, is to get my thoughts out in concrete form, and thus I do not have the time (especially having another book to start copy-editing soon) to dig my books out of bins in the basement and try to see if my notes on PR managed to survive the loss of one of my external hard drives (not sure what I stored where) and do some real research. So it is not possible at present for me to entirely demarcate between his original thoughts and my own extrapolations and use of them in conjunction with my own.

Mythologization in the Old Testament
I want to start this section by clearing up the difference in the two terms I use, "Hebrew Bible" and "Old Testament." The latter is a specifically Christian term and embodies Christian interpretation of the former in the new light of the fullness of Revelation in Christ. The easiest way I can think to describe the situation is to give the system of biblical interpretation known as the "Quadriga" and correlate my two terms to that. That name is obviously taken from the word "four" and it means the four-fold "sense" of Scripture and relates most to the Old Testament's relation to the New. The first sense is the "literal." This means exactly what the words meant at the time of their composition (it is not just literalistic but also literary). The second sense is often referred to as the "allegorical," although "Christological" would be accurate too, if by that term we mean specifically the historical life, Passion, and Resurrection of Jesus. It is called allegorical because things and events are viewed as allegorical foreshadowing of specific things and events in Christ's time concretely on Earth. So, for instance, when Moses strikes the rock at Horeb and water comes forth, it is a foreshadowing of Christ being pierced in the side on the Cross and water and blood coming forth. The third "sense" is the "tropological" sense, which is basically the moral sense, although it is also allegorical in nature. For instance, the Temple prefigures the individual Christian, who must keep themself pure, as the Temple was kept pure (this is the most well known because of its direct statement by St Paul in the NT). The fourth and final sense is the "anagogical" (from the Greek verb for "to lead up"). This is the eschatological or final sense: the Temple prefigures heaven, our final goal (the example being most well-known in the book of Revelations).

(Note: this system goes by several other names that emphasis different aspects, such as the "sensus plenior [fuller]," and the "spiritual sense," but Fr Joseph Fitzmeyer rightly advises caution about simply slinging these terms around, as the nuances carry with them dangers of misinterpretation ... if one wishes to investigate, beyond Fitsmeyer's Scripture: The Soul of Theology, the two seminal Papal encyclicals on biblical studies are Providentissimus Deus by Pope Leo XIII and Divino Afflante Spiritu by Pope Pius XII, and the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation, Dei Verbum, is a good dropping in point.)

An example of the difference between the literal sense and the allegorical is that at least some of the material on the Messiah in the OT, in its original literal sense, did not mean Christ because, for one Christ had not incarnated yet. But even before that, the figure was not an unknown person far in the future. The term "messiah" literally means "anointed one" (as does the Greek translation term "Christ"). Specifically in the OT it means the legitimately anointed king. David refers to Saul as the "Meshioch" when his companion urges him to kill Saul when they find him sleeping, since Saul was out to kill David and it could be considered legitimate self defense: David replies, "I will not raise m hand against the Lord's anointed [Meshioch]."In 2 Sam 7, the term takes on a new specification. God promises to David, through the prophet Nathan, that there will always be a king from his line sitting on the throne in Jerusalem. Thus, now it becomes not just any king, but the legitimate king from the line of David. It is, at this point in the literal sense, not a singular personage in a distant and unknown future time, but an ongoing office in the present situation of the kingdom. If this promise is viewed as a Messianic prophecy, it has an immediate fulfillment in Solomon, and then Rehoboam after him, etc. (to give credit where credit is due, the statement about Solomon comes from a course lecture by Scott Hahn, although I am sure it can be found in other OT scholars who predate him ... but that is where I first encountered it).

I don't really have time here to go into the development of thought in what is known as the apocalyptic phase of Jewish thought, but that is where the Messiah becomes the unknown Davidic king who will come at some unknown future time and usher in the Messianic age, the last age of this world before the coming of the new world, the next age. But this is the final and full form of Jewish Messianic thought fulfilled in Christ. So, as regards a passage like 2 Sam 7, the "literal" sense is that promise fulfilled immediately in Solomon, and then in Rehoboam, and eventually in Hezekiah and Josiah, and even in Zedekiah (who played games trying to double-cross Babylon and had his eyes cut out right after the last thing they saw was the slaughter of his sons ... I cannot remember if I picked this up from a particular scholars work or not, but Zedekiah, as the last king going into the exile, probably is meant to mirror Samson, the last of the judges before Samuel, going into the nadir before Samuel anointed a king: Samson reigned only half the usual length of a judge and was involved in the same types of game-playing as Zedekiah before likewise having his eyes gouged out).

When I use the term Hebrew Bible, I am referring to that literal sense, rather than the full Christological/allegorical meant by "Old Testament." However, especially when writing in a hurry sometimes, I use them interchangeably. But for the most part, in this section, I mean the literal sense when I use either of them. This was the sense that I focused on formally in doctoral studies.

I must note however, that as a Christian thinker (it's unclear whether I could still be called a scholar, but this holds, according to the Magisterium for full scholars in the setting of Christian theology), I accept the teaching of the Magisterium that that distinction between literal and Christological, even for the OT, applies only to the human authors. But the real author of Scripture is God, and thus studying the Christological sense is a real part of exegeting the literal sense because it is the sense meant by the true author. Not just an interpretive stage after exegesis. But there is also the thought that all Christological senses have to have some concrete correlation with real tenets in the literal sense of the human author of OT passages. And thus studying the material as "Hebrew Bible" is, I believe a legitimate endeavor ... true Christian exegesis simply cannot be thought to stop there.

Hebraic "Demythologization"
So, now that I have the matter of those terms and that system cleared up, I can relate that scholars note in the Hebrew Bible, across the whole span of the canon, a quality that they call "demythologization." This is different form the scholarly project of Bultmann (although similar in general type); it is what the Hebrew Bible text itself does (without calling it that) in relation to the mythologies of surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures. This is a quality of the Hebrew Scriptures in the literal sense of the human authors, even before we get to the Christological interpretation in Christianity.

What it means is that there is a tendency to take things that appear as gods in nearby mythologies and treat them as mere elements and historical realities. I believe that positing such a quality in the inspired Hebrew Scripture still does not go against an idea of inspiration as relating historical realities (rather than simply a human author applying this practice to pre-existing mythologies) ... it could be seen as, through inspired demythologization, God revealing the non-divine truths of the events that the other religions turned into mythological gods and such. The "deep" at Creation really was just an element, not a god. The heavenly bodies (sun, moon stars) were merely that, not deities.


As a final note in this section, I will describe what I do think is taking this observation of the demythologizing tendency in the Hebrew Bible too for, and actually I think it goes hand in hand with the "demythologization" practiced by Bultmann, as an application of that principle to the Hebrew Bible. I find is slightly saddening because I like the scholar from whom I heard it, and actually I learned a lot in his class. One semester in doctoral studies, I took a course on 8th century prophecy (books like Amos and Joel) at Union Theological Seminary on the Upper West Side in Manhattan (right across the street from Columbia on Broadway), taught by a scholar from Jewish Theological Seminary, literally right across the street from Union (for the grammar nazis, I mean "literally" in the correct sense here: JTS was at Broadway and 122nd, not just in the same neighborhood but a few avenues over etc). The scholar's name was Alan Cooper (he was actually the lead singer for ShaNaNa back in the sixties when they opened for Jimmy Hendrix at Woodstock, before he left the group to pursue his career in Biblical Studies and they picked up Bowser for the TV show ... he told us that the name was actually a play on how everybody pronounces Jewish New Year as "Ra-sha-shanah" instead of the proper way, "Rosh ha-shanah," "head [of] the year"). He posited that there never was a king David, that the name was originally a name of a minor god that was "demythologized" in the Hebrew Bible into a "historical" king (his theory is supported by the legitimate fact that it is difficult to find any mention in the records of surrounding kingdoms of the proposed time for David, around 1000 BCE, of a kingdom of Israel with the empire status that Israel is described as having in the Bible, but one should be able to find surrounding records if the kingdom were historical, as one does find mentions of relations with one kingdom in another kingdom's records ... while, I think this is serious evidence that must be contended with and accounted for, I don't think it requires jettisoning any idea of David as a real king of the united twelve tribes of Israel at some level).

Myth in my own language and Paul Ricoeur's
Now that a distinction has been made between the "demythologization" as done in the Hebrew Bible and that done by the likes of Bultmann, I can state that I think that what is really done by the latter is "demything" and that is was this against which Ricoeur argued and to which he objected. It is the removal of any mythic element whatsoever.

In order to explain this, I find it helpful to do a little exposition on the meaning of "myth." We tend to think of it as "that which is untrue," and indeed we use it very often in this sense. But that is not its original meaning, and, as I have at least hinted at in other posts, I think radically defining it solely in this way is the product of the biases of what I call "scientism," which arose in the scientific revolution in the modern era of thought.

Among the earliest uses of the term is that by Aristotle in his Poetics. This work is among the earliest works of literary theory. For him there, "muthos" (the upsilon in Greek is usually translitered in English with the "y") is the plot of a story. As I think of it, a story is made up isolated events, and then they are arranged in a such a way that the movement from one to the other (the plot) presents certain ideas of causality. One event does not just precede another, but  causes it (this logic of causality usually is tied to aspects revealed in things like characterization).

(Sidenote: Aristotle's Rhetoric and his Poetics are the two works with which Ricoeur begins his survey of the history of thinking on metaphor in his Rule of Metaphor, and if I remember correctly, he says that the latter has a better picture of the operation of metaphor than does the former.)

I like to use two other examples to understand what is really at the heart of myth. The first is the "connect the dots" pictures we all did as children. The dots are like the isolated events in a story. "Myth" is like the lines that connect the dots to give us a coherent picture. The dots don't mean anything by themselves (in fact, I don't think they even really "exist" for us by themselves, but hopefully this will be a little clearer in a few paragraphs). The other is music. The events are the notes, and we can have some sense of harmony, and we can have some understanding of rhythm. But we really need melody, the coordination of harmony with rhythm in a movement, to hear the music. And the movement is the point, just like the movement of a story's plot - they are mythic in nature.

If we look at myth in the terms of C.S. Lewis's essay, "Myth Become Fact," which I have mentioned before, myth always assumes fact up into itself. But it is only in the case where the higher truth (God, Christ) first came down into the world of fact that this can be done rightly.

This definition makes "myth" applicable to all stories, both fictional and historical, including to the "myths" of the gods in polytheistic culture. Most importantly, here, I want to draw attention to the fact that I just said "historical" too. I highly doubt that you could give me an account of the events of the past six months of your life without being very selective of the events you present and loading them with a narrative theme, even if unconsciously (this branch of "literary genre" is called "historiography," and when teaching, I always described it as "history with a point," and had students break up into groups and each group come up with a list of the most important events of the past five years, and then we examined each list to draw out a core theme that was important to each group).

Here is a key place where Ricoeur's thought comes in helpful. I have sometimes (mostly joking I think) been accused of reversing the old saying that "art imitates life" so that it reads "life imitates art." I think this happened online when I was likening my entry into NYC to Harry Potter's entry into Hogwarts, using details of NYC topography and professors in my department correlated with professors at Hogwarts etc. It was only later that I read Ricoeur's theory of "threefold mimesis" and realized that it didn't start with me and that it was a legitimate thing to do. Basically it says that art imitates life because "life" first imitates art. What it means is that, when we think the word "life" to describe out own lives, we cannot help but borrow narrative plots from art, from stories we heard in our formative years as children (like Bible stories) as matrices in which to understand the meaning of our lives, as the lines that connect the dots to give us a picture of our "life." Keep in mind here, there is more that goes on cognitively in our formative years as far as learning to interpret our experiences than most of us ever take account of. When we enter this world from our mothers' wombs, we don't even have the firmware, let alone the OS or specific software programs (I'm hoping it's not too crass to borrow computer language here, but I think it does fit).

To cut to the chase, mythology, meaning the polytheistic mythologies of the ancient world, go beyond this metaphorical pattern. Here I would warn against thinking of metaphor as purely "figurative," and thus not real, but to fully expound that I would have to actually send you to Ricoeur's Rule of Metaphor to see his challenges to "traditional" dualist readings of metaphor - and that is one thick and deep book. But the main point I want to make is that, as I remember Ricoeur (or as I read my own synthesis of him when I read him; as I said, hard to tell which is which at this point), the problem is that mythology uses myth to explain fact in a "scientific "way. I will try a little later to describe this in terms of Aristotle's thought on and system of "causality," But for here I want to be clear that this is different than "mything," which, from the human side (see last section), is discovering the mythic truth within the factual events. Mythology is using those to explain the actual facticity of the events. There is no problem with the Hebrew Bible stripping away the mythology of other cultures, and in fact it is good. But what Bultmann and others have tried to do is to take away the mythic element altogether and leave only the "historical facts," which, not to play with words too much, I think are complete myths in the negative sense of the word (cf. Fitzmeyer's comments above on the quest for the "historical Jesus).

 Remembering what I said above about C.S. Lewis's thoughts and fact being taken up into myth, we can see mythology as the reverse, as fact dragging myth down to its level and pressing myth into its own service. The ancient, idolatrous, version matches what I would call a sort of idolization of "scientific fact," "materialism" as an almost religious "ism."

(Aside: I got a great essay one semester from a Chinese student who said that Marx's system of thought used constructs learned in the Jewish milieu in which he grew up for the shape of its presentation, using five elements: "Regularity of History"=God; Proletariat="Chosen People";  Party/State=Prophet/Messiah; Revolution=Final struggle [the Messianic age conceived in Apocalyptic Judaism]; and communist/egalitarian state after the struggle=next age [Christian heaven])

I see all of this as relating also to the issue of scholarly demythologization in that that project seeks to use the "myths" to find out what the facts were, and then wants to discard the "myths" because it sees them as never true in the first place because, according to the core tenet of what I call "scientism," the only real truth is materiality.

Causality in Mythology.
So, I have said that demythologization is good when it means stripping mythology (but not when trying to strip the mythic, which only ever ends in replacing one mythic with another, the unstated mythos of "scientific fact" anyway); and I have said that mythology is the attempt to use the myth to explain the facticity of facts. Now, I am going to use Aristotle to try to explain a little better what I mean by this "explanation" and causality.

This involves a primer on Aristotle's thought on "causes." St. Thomas Aquinas uses Aristotle's system heavily in his five classic proofs for the existence of God, and when teaching this material in a college-level intro to theology course, I found it helpful to use a word other than "cause" because, in modern times, we generally only ever think of what Aristotle calls the "efficient cause." Substitute the word "explanation" for the word "cause."

For Aristotle, there are four cause: the formal, the material, the efficient, and the final. Substituting "explanation" for "cause," we can speak of the "formal explanation" of a table. This means the form, the essential "tableness" that would be common to all tables worthy of the name. It would involve a flat, horizontal, hard(ish) surface supported by at least one vertical leg that can uphold it in its horizontal position (a pedestal, or it could have two pedestal legs, one at either end, or three legs in a triangular arrangement, or four legs at the corners, you get the picture). The second "cause," is the material explanation, which means the material from which a particular table is made, be it wood, or metal, or plastic, or whatever that crap is from which is made assembly-required furniture at Walmart and Target, which really only ever last through one assembly, even though they say it will do more). The third is the "efficient cause," which is the one of which we usually think - the carpenter etc who put the table together as a table. The fourth cause/explanation is the "final." This means the goal or aim, what it is made to do ... which is to support things at such a height and in such an arrangement that they are easy to work on or with.

In mythology, the problem is that the myth (which is valid on its own as a mythic element, say the truth that thunder resembles anger in its rumbling) becomes the efficient cause (the god of the clouds is angry and the thunder is his voice). This is why they are usually always polytheistic. We can see the mythic element, but we can see lots of them. In most polytheistic religions, that myth-become-god, or at least certain of them, becomes also the material cause, as when, in the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, Marduk splits Tiamat's body and makes the heavens from half of it and the earth from the other half.

In theses mythologies, the valid mythic element becomes the two basest causes in Aristotle's system, the material and the efficient. It is the demythologization that strips or reverses this that I/Ricoeur think/s is good. The other "demythologization," which is really de-mything, is, I think, only the flipside of polytheistic mythologization - rather than the "god" becoming efficient and material cause, material and efficient causality are elevated to godlike status and become the sole definition of causality, discarding the formal and final (which I see as those that are highest in defining humanity's relation to God, as made in the image of God and destined for communion with Him ... but those do not discard the material and efficient, which would be to deny the Incarnation).

Another hook by which to possibly get a handle on the difference between mythologization and mything is to note the "-ology" in "mythology." It's the same as we use for sciences that provide material explanations. Mything is something other, not focused myopically on material explanation.

The Issue of Revelation
The thought here may be a little jumbled because it feels like a complex one to get into words, but I think at least some progress can be made. The difference between mythologization and true mything is the starting point, from fact or myth. Mything starts from myth, but the only fully true, ultimate myth is God/Christ. Humans on their own can only do the other way round. Humans can start with and observe facts and sense, dimly, a multiplicity of mythic truths, but not the true myth, God, and so, on our own, we can only ever mythologize. We can only perceive mythic truths; we can't provide them; we can only provide false mythologies. Only God can en-myth, which we call Revelation. Thus, while I am trying not to cast stones for fear they be revealed to be boomerangs, it really does seem to me like the "de-mything" of Bultmann and others (disguised as "demythologization") is an attack on the Revelation of God, and thus on God. And, indeed, the stated goal in their project is to encounter the historical, not to come to know the transcendent.

Lost: The Grounds for the Possibility of a Defense

I. Introduction
This post is written in the wake of watching "Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens" and considering J. J. Abrams's quality as not only a director (SW: tFA), but also as a producer ... in short, his overall contribution, to date, to the literary side of pop culture. Lost is one on which there is disagreement in some sectors. Some of us really love it. Others of us have a predilection for dissing it at every opportunity, casting aspersions on it as fluff (sometimes going a long way for the task, waiting out, sometimes dragging out, long conversations just for an opening in which to do it).

My basic principle is that, before you are allowed to do this, meaning the charge of "fluff" or weakness of artistry, you have to be in a position to know what the project was. Only then can you assess the two further preliminary questions of 1) whether the project itself was worthy, and 2) whether the project was well executed ... and then the final question of what it is doing with that artistry.

That final question is often made up of a number of questions that are difficult to extricate form one another, even though it is sometimes essential to do that task successfully. The questions of the worth and execution of the project can likewise be tricky. But I will try to give a brief example of what I am talking about here. The question you may want to examine may be that of virtue. The work could have a clearly defined concept of virtue and execute the proposal of that definition well (through the framework elements I will list for Lost or through other elements of structure and characterization), but you disagree with the proposed definition of virtue (say, virtue=balls to the wall, cutthroat success at any cost). In this case, you would call the show bad, or, more to the point, you might call it dangerous, all the more dangerous because it executed the proposing of that (bad by your beliefs) definition of virtue very well artistically.

My "you are not allowed ... unless you first ..." above does not preclude situations of intuition in the context of responsibility for the young and impressionable, such as "I don't feel comfortable having my kids watch something that seems to me to have such a sense of bad definitions of virtue." But if you're going to make the charge of fluff or poor artistry, you're going to be held to the same standards as everyone else of having to support your claim with actual analysis (not just the rhetoric of exasperated sighs and rolled eyes, etc, as if you're doing so will cow somebody into thinking "oh no, they're exasperated, that must mean I am being silly").

 The elements I am going to examine here in Lost, which I believe define the project, are: 1) Its nature, in rebuttal to some particular criticisms of the show; 2) its conceptual framework; and 3) its thematic framework. These are often intricately interwoven in such a way that is it difficult to isolate one for focus. The reason for this is not necessarily that Lost is such an exceptional show; it's more just the case of, well ... welcome to human language and literature, junior.

II. The Title of This Post
The language of the "grounds for the possibility of ... " is at least most famous in the works of the German Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant. It means that you are not yet even making the claim to concretely demonstrate something (in Kan'ts case, metaphysics and ethics); you are simply laying necessary groundwork for any demonstration of its actuality by first demonstrating its possibility.

(Aside: I would class my argument, in a post on this blog, that a belief in ethics of any kind requires belief in not only the possibility of, but also the actuality of, the supernatural and miracles as an argument of this type, since it argues that as the grounds for the possibility of the existence of God. One could categorically deny belief in any ethical system whatsoever, and this would make the argument, as of yet, a moot point ... although I would say it would also probably turn much, if not all, of the speaker's own other statements of commentary on human life into utter non-sense, in the technical sense of the word "sense" developed most notably by Gotlieb Frege in his system of "sense and reference" in linguistics).

I would eventually argue that a solid defense of Lost can be made (that it is a good show in that final sense), but I am here only trying to demonstrate that it has solid elements that can be shown to span and permeate the whole 6-season show (which is usually a first line of attack by those critical of it, the claim that it doesn't hang together well as really doing anything, when it is more the case, I suspect, that those claiming this are uncomfortable with what it does).

I would say that I am making a concrete defense against charges of "fluff," but only laying the grounds for the possibility of a defense on the final level of whether the show is good or bad.

III. The Nature of the Show (non-materialist)
One of the criticisms I have heard, and I think I have heard it a fair bit, is that we were promised finding out the real place of the island, maybe how it originated, and then we didn't get it. My own reading of the situation - meaning the situation of somebody asking that question and then making that accusation - is that it's kind of like looking for spaghetti sauce in the detergent aisle and complaining when it's not there. I don't think it was ever what the show was about.

I don't remember what I have heard about interviews etc that happened coming into season 6. I remember there being something about them saying something about satisfactions that would be gotten. I would not be surprised if certain comments in Comicon interviews or whatever prior to season 6 were made about vague things like "resolution" that were then interpreted by some (many?) to mean that we would be finding out where the island actually is (inside Area 51 or some shit like that) and how it actually began, by people who had probably been making that demand of the show long before such misconstrued authorial statements were made between seasons 5 and 6. If the producers did make statements promising those exact revelations, well, that was kind of stupid of them, and my guess would be that it was mainly sort of caving to a lot of rabid fans who are kind of mickey-mouse "scientist" types. I find it hard to believe that they (the makers) ever were really preoccupied with finding a physical location for the island, even in the beginning. I saw nothing in the opening seasons that promised a physical location. I think that there is enough of something solid in what is concretely in the show that, if one has "eyes to see and ears to hear," one can see and hear it without needing to find the material location.

To provide a little better analogy that spag sauce and detergent, it is a bit like Harry Potter assuming that Horcace Slughorn is going to be teaching defense against the dark arts in book 6 (Half Blood Prince). When they find out that HS will do potions, HP wracks his brain to remember because he thought he was sure Dumbledore said HS would be doing DADA, but in reality, he can't remember anytime that was specified ... he just expected it, and so his brain filled it in, and then it was (to him) this huge inconsistency when HS turned out to be teaching potions. But it wasn't the case that Dumbledore ever said anything misleading about HS being DADA; just as it never was the case (whatever concessionary statements the producers did or did not make) that Lost was about the exact, or even proximate, location of the island in our world.

The real crux of what I am getting around to in this section is that I would argue that the show is not materialist. In saying this, I am not talking about whether or not the show puts forth the philosophical tenets of the metaphysical claim known as "materialism" (although I suspect that many who use the "didn't deliver because we never found out where the island is" criticism have been impacted by the modern scientific version of philosophical materialism to a much greater extent than they realize). Nor am I pointing to the fact that it is not enmeshed with all kinds of consumerist marketing plans and "worship" of material goods. What I mean by a show like this being "non-materialist," rather, is that I don't think the show was ever about where the island was geographically, materially. Of course the island is going to bear some relation to our "real world," but the connection it has is by having the same characters in it. It's like they have dual citizenship, but the two countries don't have to know where each other are (although one is in a privileged position on that matter, namely the island, and it can work on the "real world" to a certain extent).

In the next major section (IV) I will talk about the actual relation of the contents of the island story to the "real world" in greater detail, but for here I will say that it is necessary for the island world to have concrete knowledge of the material events of the real world, but as fodder. And it is necessary for the "real world" to have some passing connection with the island, which, in this case, is sort of a Bermuda triangle sort of thing. There has to be some commerce in the form, at the very least, of the mental material those dual citizens possess, since it comes from the "real world" but is the fodder for thought and action in the island world, making it kind of beneficial for the island world to be able to verify that fodder (in this case, as I see it, the "island world" is the viewer who sees the flashbacks, flash-forwards, and "flash-sideways" alongside the action on the island, the viewer who has, in the case of many, tuned in faithfully every week to watch the life of the island world or, in my case, binge-watched the whole thing on DVD while exercising).

I think, in the end, that if you find out where the island "really is," it would become boring very quickly - satisfying only to scientists, and even then only as science, not as literature.

Red Herrings and Symbols.
I have to address one or two elements here that can be misleading, things where it sure seems like real world location is being pointed to or promised, and I am sure some felt like it was held out like the proverbial carrot on the string. The first I will examine is in a webisode that followed the close of season 6. I think it was called "the new man in charge." Here we see Hurley and Ben Linus show up at a warehouse in Guam and shut down the supply flights to the island. We also find out actually in the show that Michael, in trying to find his way back to the island, starts on a ship in Guam (I think this is also where Charles Widmore's freighters make port and leave for the island vicinity). These seem like they are meant to provide a clue to the location, but I don't believe that they are.

I will argue below for a particular novel being the source of the "thematic framework" for the show. That novel is Valis by P.K. Dick (but please don't read that novel until you go through what I discuss below to at least get an idea about it; it is sort of tripped out ... literally ... northern CA drug culture in the early 1970s). Lost is actually the reason I read this work to begin with, because it appeared in the show (as did Flannery O'Connor's Everything that Rises Must Converge). I will get into more details below, but I think that seeing it as the thematic frame source for the show explains its appearance in the show as a "hat-tip" AND these Guam references as the same kind of hat-tip. Valis ends with Dick receiving a postcard from Horselover Fat saying that he has a new lead on finding the fifth Messiah, starting with a small chain of islands near Guam. I believe the presence of Guam in Lost material is a hidden reference to one of their models, a salute of sorts, not a clue to the physical (materialist) location of the island.

The flashbacks and flash-forwards are another element that it seems to me like some could say fit more with a focus on the actual place, even just in focusing on events in the real world (especially in the case where you have a law agent following Kate into the island construct, but he dies pretty soon). I will describe a deeper significance to those in the section (V) on the thematic framework. But for here, it does introduce us to the theme of variant times, and time variation is one thing I think the makers use to symbolize the non-materialist nature of the island, specifically in its becoming unfixed in time (in season 5). It also happens with Desmond as an individual character, also in season 5 (I think). The unfixing in time, I believe, is symbolic of the island's not being materially fixed at all (as a literary thing), which is only problematic for those with a materialist fixation (double entendre fully intended).

But one of the reasons I think that it is important for there to be points at which some (Ben Linus, Richard, etc) DO have more reliable access in and out of the island (Richard can plan to see Julia in the real word to recruit her; he doesn't have to rely on being lucky and getting bumped on and off the island at the right time) is that I also think that the island does not occupy the "space" in the "real world" that we would call the "floating" space. I would count the "floating space" as a real world space, just a random one. But it would be a consistently random one in the real world, defined by that randomness of material location in the real world. I think, rather, that the "immateriality" of the island means that the connections and commerce between it and the real world are governed by aspects other than real-world materiality (whether consistent or random).

(Sidenote: George Minkowski, crew member aboard Widmore's freighter who dies from temporal displacement, is named after a real-world mathematician and philosopher of time-theory, Hermann Minkowski)

Finally, this is where the whole "purgatory" interpretation thing is a serious red herring. I can't remember if the producers addressed this concretely, and if they did, whether they said that's what they were going for or denied that it is the case (I think the latter but I can't remember for sure)... but at the end of the day, what is there in the show is, I would argue, distinctly NOT that (if they did say, "yeah, it's purgatory," see the final caveat on "authorial intent"). That interpretation is still looking for a "material" location of the island, which is the way many in our days tend to think of purgatory, as a prison with an all but physical location ... you could find it on a "spiritual" map, for the most part in the same way you find a material location on a physical map. I think it's absolutely no good and complete bunk as an interpretation.

In literature, I would surmise that we have two kinds of settings: the real world and mythological worlds. Much literary fiction takes place in the real world: Austen's England, Potok's Brooklyn, Faulkner's and O'Connor's American South, Joyce's Dublin, etc. Mythological worlds in modern fiction include those like Tolkien's Middle-Earth and Pratchett's Discworld. In ancient mythologies the actions of the gods and such were not thought to be fictional in the way we think of fiction, but the "world" in which they took place was also not our "real world." They were in a world before or above ours was formed from its remnants (Marduk tearing Tiamat's body to make the heavens and the earth etc).

The island in Lost, I submit, is an overlay of these two words. It is the mythic dimension of the real world, peopled with the inhabitants of the real world, but acting in that other world. In the next section I will describe more about "myth" in the conceptual framework.

IV. The Conceptual Framework and Its Source: Carl Jung
So, having said that  the island is the "mythic" dimension of the real world, I will now provide what I think is the source of the mythic conceptual framework: the psychologist and literary theorist Carl Jung. The other "father" of psychology, Sigmund Freud, focused on the development of language on the individual level. Jung focused on the role of literature in culture as a group psychology, particularly mythology.

Jung saw mythology as an expression of the subconscious of the "world-self," basically of the collective human race (this is how the well-known "Jungian archetypes" apply to the whole race). There is a key scene where I think the Jungian construct is given away in Lost. In the beginning of season 6, we are on the original Oceanic flight 815, although it never crashes and the cast members reach LAX safe and sound and continue on in a timeline alternate to that established in the crash at the outset of season 1, the island timeline, but this new alternate timeline is viewed alongside the ongoing island timeline after season 5. The camera view goes past Jack and out the window of the plane and straight down into the ocean water, all the way to the ocean floor. Here we see all the things of the island with which we are so familiar, submerged at the bottom of the ocean.

The ocean/sea/deep is very symbolic of mythology. For a summation of that fact by a modern author, think of the scene in book 4 of Harry Potter (Goblet of Fire) in which Harry goes into the lake in the second task of the tri-wizard tournament. On his way to rescue hostages, he passes a rock on which there are paintings done by the merpeople depicting themselves fighting the giant squid. This is not just regular people making "art." This is a primal and primitive people depicting what they see as THE great struggle of existence, characterized by fighting a mythological monster, here in the "depths" of the mythological place (in this case, the lake ... I think the common factor between sea, ocean, and lake, the thing they all have in common as "deeps," is that they are not a water-way, but a water place; you don't go through them or follow them to get someplace, like a river; you go down into them ... and for "places," they sure do move a lot; that is what makes them so dangerous - unsure and unplottable movement under the guise of the stability of "stationary place").

For an ancient instance, I will draw on critical scholarship of Genesis 1 in the Bible. In Gen 1:2, we find the Spirit of God "moving" over the face of the "deep," which is usually taken to be some sort of waters of chaos. The name is, however, likely etymologically drawn from the name of some mythological sea dragon that represented chaos. The earliest version of this theory coincided with the original version of the 4-source theory of the Torah, which said that it was all put together after the Babylonian exile, and thus the Hebrew "Tehome" ("deep") came from the name of the Babylonian sea dragon goddess, Tiamat, who represented chaos. More recent studies have tied it to other sea dragon creatures closer in time and place to Moses, like those in Ugaritic mythology, Ugarit being a major Canaanite port citry. The salient point here is that, along Jungian lines, the ocean depth is the place of myth and mythological chaos monsters and represents the volatile chaos capability of the subconscious of the world-self, human psychology (emotion, experience, etc).

(ASIDE: I can stop here only briefly to try to answer an objection that will likely arise for some over whether the source of the things in Gen 1 is mythology or Revelation to Moses. Even in orthodox Catholic interpretation, it is possible to believe that, for at least chunks of the Torah, inspiration was not necessarily simple verbatim dictation, but inspired guidance in selecting, editing, and compiling fragments from religious mythologies in existence before Moses. But even apart from this, in the Hebraic mind of the Old Testament, such a dragon name/element is transfigured; it is now just an element controlled by God, not a god ... but the "deep," including the name, still represents chaos, just not a powerful god of chaos ... and this is regarded by some very credible scholars to be part of the religious rhetoric of Gen 1 - in our God's story, your gods are just elements to be used and molded.)

Myths are often about the generation of life or of a specific place of life. I think that this is what the cave/well in the island and its glowing light are all about. I think it is basically the well of life in a mythic setting.

I would submit that, as buried in the waters of the deep in an "alternate timeline," which is actually sort of the "real world timeline," the island is Jung's world of myth as the subconscious of the human race, the "world-self," in which the actual core of what is going on in the real worlds is seen in what is going on in the mythic island world (season six is the place we really see this "side-by-side" structure in the "flash-sideways," but see below for how I think the flashbacks and flash-forwards fit the schema as well).

Dr Linus: an Example of the Construct
To show what I mean by this, I will give the example of the episode from season 6 that made me realize it, that made me realize the quality of "the real core of what is going on" of which I just spoke. The episode is called "Dr Linus." On the island, the man in black, disguised as Locke (who is now dead) convinces Ben Linus to turn on the good side, led by Ilana. Black-Locke tells Linus where there is a rifle in the woods, and if he runs and gets to it, he can turn it on Ilana and get away. The scene basically sums up the fallout of all of Linus's machinations and scheming across the series. He reaches the gun and has the drop on Ilana. She asks him, "why are you doing this? Why do you want to go back to Locke?" Linus, half-tearful in a way only Michael Emerson can pull off without seeming sappy, replies "because he's the only one who will have me!" Ilana simply says, "I'll have you," and Linus, forgiven and accepted in spite of his past, goes with her (of course, about 5 minutes later the producers blow her up in a dynamite accident, same as they did with the chemistry teacher in season 1 ... no clue why they did that; still baffles me).

MEANWHILE, back in the real world, Dr Ben Linus is a highschool history teacher in LA, who is obviously teaching at way below his potential, but who has a brilliant female student, Alex (his "surrogate" daughter on the island, where she is already dead because of his tactical play against Widmore's man, Keamy). In that LA school in the real world, there is a corrupt superintendent who is a real jerk who always short-changes teachers on things that would help with good teaching etc, and Linus gets some dirt on him having an affair with a school nurse. So, Ben has a plan to get a better setup for teachers and get himself a little better career than a simple teacher - blackmail the superintendent. The one hitch is that the super went to Yale or Harvard and could write a very helpful recommendation letter for Linus's student, Alex, but says he will not if Linus blackmails him. In the end Dr Ben Linus remains a simple teacher and lets go of his personal dreams for the sake of his student, just as Ben Linus on the island gives up his gun and accepts forgiveness.

Other examples:
More concrete examples can be found of actual historical mythic elements. But first I must note that here I use "mythic" to cover both the mythologies we (at least those in my own religious sector) believe to be entirely historically false and narratives we believe to be historical but told with mythic tropes (although the things could be also historically accurate, albeit a slightly different view of historicity than the modern scientific one, they also fit standard mythological tropes). I have no time here, however, to get into the intricacies of the concept of the mythic, how for Aristotle, "muthos" was the plot of a narrative or how Paul Ricoeur agreed with "demythologization" but not with "demything."

For instance, we have the smoke monster who dwells in a temple, is unpredictable, and scares the daylights out of the people. Never forget that, while the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day was protective of the people of Israel, God was not always a "safe" god. He has Moses tell the people not to break through and touch the mountain, lest they die. And when the ark was being carried at one point, a man stretched out his hand simply to steady it, to be helpful .... and died from touching it. Of course, this "god" image does not carry across the whole of the series as the biblical image because we find out who smoky/the man in black really is, and he's not the ultimately protective God of the Old Testament (this may be a place where one might want to ask whether or not the conceptual framework is executed well or whether  what is done with the elements is good or bad, but I have not thought this one out thoroughly enough to give a response here).

Another example from the same literature is the fact that the most recent leader of "the others" before the arrival of the survivors of Oceanic flight 815 is named Benjamin, and he takes his orders from a man named Jacob, who lives in the shadow of the ruins of an Egyptian statue. That statue, when the full form is seen late in the series (in the scenes of the back-stories of Jacob, the man in black, and Richard Alpert), is the only fully recognizable mytho-religious thing that I can think of that is already in existence on the island when they arrive. So, right there, you have 3 or 4 from the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East (Smoke "monster" and temple, Jacob and Benjamin, and the Egyptian mythic religion from which the family of the real Jacob, including the descendants of his twelfth son, Benjamin, fled, and in the shadow of which the island Jacob lives).


Another Conceptual Framework Source (I don't think they know of though):
I must admit that I am here and above (in the whole dual citizenship and overly of the mythic and historical worlds things) drawing on another conceptual framework source, one about which I highly doubt the producers of Lost know. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they did, but somewhat surprised. I say this with caution, because, to be honest, I get annoyed when some people who don't really know all that much themselves toss around the "fluff" accusation at some screen-writers who, from what I can tell in what they do and the kind of literary knowledge they display in commentaries, are much more educated on the technicalities the arm-chair critics claim to judge them by, more educated than the arm-chair critics themselves ever will be (I am thinking here of the screenwriters, Terry and Ted, of the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, who enjoyed an unusual experience in being on set for filming and who got an alongside commentary track on the DVDs). But the source I am drawing on myself here is somewhat esoteric and unknown, although close neighbor to some very well-knowns, but the neighbor relation is not well known. Charles Williams was an academic friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien; supposedly they used to sit around in one of their offices at Oxford/Cambridge and read their work in progress to each other. One of such pieces was Williams's essay "The Figure of Arthur" (as in legendary British king). While the essay never was totally finished and published by Williams, its latest form does appear in a volume with his two volumes of Arthurian poetry (which, between them, tell the whole Arthurian cycle through the eyes of Talesian, the court minstrel). Lewis borrowed some of Williams's thoughts on the "kingdom of Logres" in That Hideous Strength (the volume with Williams's essay and poetry, often referred to as the "Arthurian Torso" for some reason, also contains an essay by Lewis on the Williams's two volumes of Arthurian poetry).

Williams's formulation of the pertinent material on the Fisher King is that there are three "lands." Again, keep in mind here, I am writing all this in an examination of Lost in a post in which I started out by making a point of discussing the non-materialist nature of the show ... so don't go slipping back into strictly materialist geographical concepts as soon as you hear a word like "land." In fact, here, in what is really happening as William's describes it, they are really all three the same land. Britain is the political land, ruled by a political king. Logres is the mystical land, ruled by the Pendragon. Between them is the wood that symbolizes the tension between the political and the mystical, Broceliande, and it is ruled by the Fisher King, who is wounded in the thigh and whose land lies fallow. The Fisher King represents the tension over whether or not Arthur will be merely (and thus eventually corruptly) the political king of a nation, or the mystical, almost father-like, Pendragon of a people. In Lost, there isn't really a tension between whether the key characters will be the "real world" version of themselves or the island version except in season 4 or 5 when Jack is trying to get the Oceanic 6 to go back because they never should have left. But in both places (island and real life), I would argue that they usually in some way or another live in the tension of the Fisher King's chapel, usually a tension between serving self and serving others.

V. Thematic Frame and Its Source: P.K. Dick's novel, Valis.
This is a tough section to write because it would take so much to contextualize the novel Valis. So I will start from the backside by giving the central theme in the terms in which is it given in Lost. It was was hidden in the DVD extras, but once I saw it, I instantly saw how it ran through the series as a theme (similar to how, once the Suzerain covenant treaty formulary of the ancient Near East was discovered in OT biblical studies, it shed light on soooooooo much in the Hebrew Bible/OT ... for a very good account of that, see Jon Levenson's Sinai and Zion).

In the DVD extras for either season 1 or season 2 of Lost, all of the content written in black-light ink from the blast door in the hatch is given. There are maps to things around the island like the swan hatch etc. But there are also a whole host of things from intellectual, scientific, mathematical, and philosophical history in the West. One of these is significantly altered. I don't mean substantially altered (the sense often used for "significantly," as in to a great degree or in a great amount), but in a way that signifies a new meaning. Renee Descarte's most famous statement is called his "Cogito," his Latin phrase, "Cogito ergum sum" ... "I think, therefore I am" (it is his beginning for what many consider to be the last failed attempt to categorically prove the existence of God, and also the basis for his category of reality he calls "res cogitens" - "thinking reality" - see my post on the creation-evolution debate for more on that).

On the blast door in the hatch in lost, though, it reads: "Cogito ergo doleo" ... "I think, therefore I suffer." Being able to understand the world we live in makes one suffer. I take this to be because this world we live in already contains so much suffering and the attempt to make sense out of it brings more suffering. But part of that interpretation comes from Valis, so I can no longer avoid addressing that novel.

Valis
This novel is introduced in Lost when Locke has Ben Linus "imprisoned" in his own basement (which is pretty nicely furnished). I put it in quotes because Locke brings him homemade meals and reading material form his own library. One of the books is Valis, at which point I ordered a copy of the book and read it. Linus quips snidely how nice it is to be given books from his own library and then says he has already read it, to which Locke replies that maybe he will get more out of it, or something new out of it, or something like that, on the second read.

The novel is set in the drug culture of northern CA in the early to mid 1970s. Dick has a friend named Horselover Fat, which is basically a translation of Philip Dick's own name (Phil = love, (h)ip = horse, Dick = German for "fat"). There is a movie/rock band/artist they know of who turn them on to a conspiracy theory of a trans-temporal super-intelligence called VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) that facilitates communication between humans and aliens. Fat believes that visions that he has had come from Valis and he and his friends team up with the rockers to find the "fifth Messiah" they seek, based in certain Gnostic teachings.

(Sidenote: one of the other salutes that indicates the makers of Lost has Valis on the brain was the ship site they call "black rock," reminiscent of the The Black Iron Prison referenced by Fat ["a concept of an all-pervasive system of social control postulated in the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura, a summary of an unpublished Gnostic exegesis included in VALIS" - from wikipedia, which has a quotation of the relevant passage from the actual novel])

Valis in Lost
That's all the "basics" of the novel, but the connections with Lost involve further details and a "spoiler" on Valis. Dick's and Fat's names mean the same thing because they are the same person. Dick created Fat by basically walling off certain parts of himself - the part that suffers and the part that thinks about suffering and tries to understand it. His dope-addicted friend Gloria committed suicide before the time of the novel. Dick couldn't take it any more at the funeral and climbed in the back of a VW bus to get away and to cry, and the person who emerged was Horselover Fat, the guy obsessed with his visions and experiences that he believes are trans-temporal, and with ancient Gnostic theories that he thinks explain them. Dick reveals the dual identity at the outset of the novel, but the spoiler is that, when they find the current fifth Messiah, a two-year-old girl named Sophia, she forces Dick and Fat back into one person, which is very painful for him.

Here is where all the philosophical names that appear in Lost fit in(Rousseau, Locke, D. Hume, and others ... Sayid's name is not only a form of an Arabic word in a phrase for "blessing," it is also the pronounced the same as the last name of Edward Said, a pioneer in a school of literary and philosophical thought known as "post-colonialism" ... and in whose thought, by the way, one of his central terms is "the other/s").  These names from philosophical history represent reason trying to understand the world, but ultimately the suffering in the world defeats reason and only causes the thinker more suffering. A similar thing can be found in John LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - when Smiley realizes that all his attempts at rationalization and making sense are shattered to pieces on the rocks of the insane paranoia and cruelty of the cold-war world. Even the numbers in Lost fit into this category. Some of them have numerological significance in the history of Western philosophical and religious thought, and it almost seems like you could figure out a system to them based in that historical background ... but you can't (at least I have never heard of anyone doing it). They taunt and tease you with the glimpse of a logic, but then it evades you.

The term I use for what Dick does in creating Fat is "bifurcation," and I take it from the third movie of the old Batman series, when Jim Carrey, as the Riddler, says to Tommy Lee Jones's Two-face, "oh bifurcated one." It is also the literal meaning of "schiz" in the word "schizophrenia": "phren" is a Greek word for head or mind ("phrenology was/is a pseudo-medicinal practice of measuring the skull and, if I remember rightly, observing bumps on it as a way to figure out what is wrong with a person's mind), and the Greek verb "schizo" means to tear asunder (in the story of the baptism of Jesus, the clouds are "torn apart" when the voice of the Father speaks, and particular when Christ dies on the Cross, the Temple veil is "torn apart" with the same word, in two pieces, from top to bottom). To be just a little weird by quoting Julian Cope: "come on, split my head wide open, scoop out a little of my brain, somebody to the kitchen, said 'Julian Cope, the very same," ... and this is not a dainty world to set before the swine, cuz it looks like I'm hanging out and hung up on the line." (It's a bit weird, I agree, but I think that, in addition to the head splitting, it captures some of the island's "un-dainty" quality and the islanders having nothing to do but "hang out" there ... Martin Heidegger is a MUCH debated philosopher in the 20th century, not least of all because of his membership in the National Socialist Party, but he had some deep things to say on existential angst - he said it is the nature of human experience, what he called Dasein, literally "being there," to be he suspended out into or over the "nothing," the Germ abgrund, the abyss ... the "deep").

In all of the relations and actions of the people on the island and in the real world - all the betrayals and lovers triangles, the difficulties of a married couple like Sun and Jin - in all of that, I think we see people who are bifurcated into two selves. As I said, the dual-self motif is clearest in season 6 with the "flash-sideways" thing, but I think it is also the thematic structure of the flashbacks and flash-forwards. In each episode we see two versions of the same selves working through the same issues.

(I use specifically the "romantic scandal" instances here because some like to criticize the "romantic" content in the series as being just a soap opera, and I make the same defense here that I make of the long, drawn-out teenage romantic angst in the 5th Harry Potter book, which I refer to as "the long dark teatime of the soul" [borrowing a Douglas Adams title and referencing the agonizing scene with Cho Chang in Madam Puttyfoot's Teashop] ... life is made up of those things too on a very real level. There may be a point to saying that they should dial back the heat and exposure, as there would be with a lot of contemporary material. But if we're going to criticize all things of romantic intrigue, Jane Austen goes right down on the bottom shelf, along with half the Arthurian material. And if we're not, we can't just pull that out of the bag when we're looking for ammunition against things we dislike for other reasons altogether.)

Back to the subject of psychology (Jung), incorporating this thematic of understanding as suffering (Valis), I would simply quote two lines from 90s pop/indie rock: "pain is the healing, and tears sting like alcohol" (Toad the Wet Sprocket); and "digging in the dirt, find the places we got hurt" (Peter Gabriel). Understanding brings suffering that can bring healing.  If the purgatory interpretation has any value to it, it is on this figurative and thematic level, not as a "material" location. This is the place that Jack finds himself coming to at the funeral that is both his own and his father's, where Ben Linus waits outside for a while to try to process and apologizes to Locke, and tells Hurley he was an amazing number 1, and maybe the reason why Jin and Sun smile as they leave the hospital together even though they know they are dead in the submarine. This may be the answer to the suffering. I'm not saying the series is distinctly Christological (even with a character named Jack Shepherd), and therefore, for me, it could not be a full answer to suffering. But I also think that in its general nature and elements it can be a partial answer that is consonant with that fullness of truth.

Conclusion: a Caveat on Authorial Intent:
After reading what I have to say here, a further objection might arise saying that it doesn't count if they didn't intend it from the outset. In short, I do not believe that the only two options for seeing elements such as I am have described being in a work (covering the whole scope of the work), are complete forplanning on the part of an author or complete eisogesis (reading in) by an audience. The preoccupation with "conscious intent" is, I believe, a creation of modern thought. I believe an author can begin a work with a general disposition and then the work develop in such a way that that general disposition is fleshed out concretely well, including in a distinct overall shape and structure in the work (although this is not always the case; many authors have a very clear gameplan going in).

It is fairly well known that the creators of the Lost have plainly said in interviews that they did not have a gameplan in creating the show. For instance (from what I heard from the person who introduced me to it), Jack was supposed to last only a few episodes. But, along the lines of what I just said, I do not believe that this means they could not have ended up with a work that does have a clear conceptual and thematic framework and that does, in the end, have a discernible that is roughly cohesive across the span of the series and reaches a clear and decisive endpoint (in Aristotle's terms, has a distinct beginning, middle and end, with a clear course of plot). I believe that the way that  the final scene of Jack laying dying in the trees mirrors the opening shot of season 1 has a cohesion to it, even if it only occurred to them to do it going into season 6. 

I have written things to this effect before on this blog. In particular, I talked about Raising Steam, the 40th novel in the Discworld series by Terry Pratechett, as possibly the final book in the series (before TP died and it became definitely the final book) and its fittingness as such, giving a certain arc to the series as a whole. Along the way, I talked about the eight books of the Sam Vimes/Citywatch subseries as having a certain structure: 4 introductory books leading up to a trilogy (a 7-book structure, popular with a couple "fantasy" authors I consider to be good, such as C.S. Lewis, or at least their series - here distinguishing between the Harry Potter series and Rowling as an author post-HP), but then an 8th book (Snuff) being added "beyond" (drawing on the 7 days leading to the 8th day structure in the thinking of the Christian tradition and TP's own fascination with the number 8). But the publication history of the whole Discworld series shows a sporadic pattern, coming out with books randomly jumping between protagonist sub-series, maybe depending on for which protagonist he simply felt like writing another book. But I still maintain my observations. I go more on what is actually discernible in the work itself than on statements of "authorial intent."

As I plan to write in other posts soon (on the Dumbledore as gay issue), I do not think authorial intent, meaning  concrete conscious intent, is the important issue that we moderns, to whom Enlightenment rationalism (beginning especially with Descartes) passed on an obsession with our own consciousness, think it is (at the very least, our way of thinking of it is in error). Sometimes authorial statements of source material can be revelatory, but even in those cases, we have to ask the question of whether or not they executed well in working with that material for their intended goals. And sometimes we can discover something, and once we know of a real world referent and can see an overwhelming number of clear distinct correlations, it is a pretty safe bet (only a bet because of no authorial statement, but a pretty safe bet nonetheless) that the author used the real world instance as a model for the fictional. I am thinking in particular of an excellent piece by a guy named Travis Prinzi on the real-world Fabian Society being the referent for the Order of the Phoenix in Harry Potter. A number of names of members of the Order of the Phoenix match names of known members of the Fabian society, including the name of Molly Weasley's deceased brother Fabian Prewett. More importantly, the Fabian Society's gameplan for gradual change as a way to achieve socialism ( as opposed to the fast bloody revolution of the Bolsheviks) matches Dumbledore's methodology of slow gradual change (in things like social equality for the house-elves). But as far as I know, Rowling said nothing about this ... and if she did, Prinzi did not seem to be aware of it, since he was not appealing to authorial statement; he was arguing by lining up good evidence from the texts ... this is what we in the business call "literary analysis."

Another example of a general principal materializing in ways not "intended" is an example from my own studies of Hebrew. When I learned about chiasmic structure (ABBA; ABCBA; ABCCBA; ABCDCBA; etc), I got all excited about it. And in class one day we were reading a passage and I asked the professor, "hey, this is a chiasm isn't it?!?!?!" His reply was that, "well, yes ... but, they had chiasm 'on the brain.'" In other words, there minds were saturated in in and it didn't necessarily have to be "intended." Sometimes it was, but other times not. And it didn't have to be either "fully" chiasm or not at all; it could be distinctly loosely chiasmic (this is akin to an error I have heard made by literal 6-day creationism in saying that because there are no tight and obvious parelellism structures present in Gen 1, the structure that defines formal Hebrew poetry uniquely, the chapter is not poetic by other means - they want to avoid a claim of poetic thought, in favor of "scientific" thought in order to avoid any claim of the chapter being "figurative). The Enlightenment rationalist schema of a clearly delineated and thoroughly detailed plan followed by strict and full execution is simply not how human minds work. We have subconsciouses. We have the ability for patterns to saturate our thinking to such an extent that we do not have to consciously "plan" in order to wind up doing things in a certain way.

This is the type of thing I am talking about happening with Lost, and it is my argument that, in its final form, the show Lost has the elements I have listed (non-materialist nature, distinct conceptual framework, and distinct thematic framework) concretely and strongly.

Creationism vs Evolutionism

ADDENDUM 1/10/2016: After writing this post, I have found the term "scientism" in use by an author by the last name of Dodds in an article that will be appearing in 14.2 (Spring 2016) of the English edition of the journal Nova et Vetera (which I copy-edited). He uses the term in basically the same sense in which I use it in this post, but I will not include his actual wording here, so as to avoid any possible issues of plagiarism prior to the publication of his article. Whether Dodds has picked it up from elsewhere in his usage, I do not know, but I am guessing not, as he says "would best be termed as ..." without citing anyone else. The timing does not work for him to have read this blog before writing his article originally for an earlier symposium, and in any event, the development of the term is fairly simply to do and the likely path for anybody seeking to describe the expansion of "science" to a philosophical position. I simply take it as street cred that I did it the same as a scholar who is publishing.


Main Post
So, this post is naturally a loaded issue and a heated topic. I am going to address the debate between "literal 6-day creationism" and "evolution." I put them in quotes because particularly the second is one on which I think there is a lot of different thinking and the quotes there pertain mainly to what the other side thinks of them (seeing any acceptance of theories of evolution in the material cosmos and the physical organism of humans as strict materialism and a rejection of the Genesis account of creation). The issue can be roughly summed up by saying that there are those who think that God created the world in its present shape in six literal 24-hour days with no process of evolution on any level, whether physical or psychological. The "evolutionist" side has more variation in it, but the parameters of the debate as a debate are really, in my mind, set by the creationist side, which is sort of the point of this post.

My basic thesis is that another camp, whose constituency is drawn entirely from the evolutionist side, has already won the battle, although not any actual intellectual debate. Simply put, they have convinced the "literal creationist" side to buy their way of thinking without that side realizing it. Fortunately, that other camp largely does not realize that it has won the battle either, so there is a chance to turn the tide in the overall war (maybe, although I think many 6-day creationists will have great difficulty grasping the position enough to do it, both because of a certain entrenchedness and because it is a nuanced position to get that requires a bit of specific philosophical training).

So, to describe that camp, I am going to introduce a new term for what I think is a more core conceptual position, one about which I think both sides are likely unconscious, which makes it all the more powerful, operating behind the scenes, so to speak.  I call this ideology "scientism" and those who follow it, "scientismists." I can't really call them scientists, even though many of them are—the system of thought is defined by something other than scientific method itself. A physical ("hard") scientist is simply one who comes up with a hypothesis and tests it using empirically verifiable experiments and research. "Scientism," on the other hand, believes that all truth is defined by material fact. To quote C. S. Lewis's essay "Myth Become Fact," according to the tradiontal Christian (which I think would be opposed to this "scientism") there are truths that transcend fact, truths that are expressed in myth (here myth is not opposed to fact, and transcendence means myth taking fact up into itself, but still as properly fact, made possible by the one place that myth became fact, Jesus Christ in the Incarnation ... myth is not untrue, it is truth beyond the realm of mere physical historical fact ... and there is only one really, fully true myth, the Trinity). Scientism basically denies this. Another name for "scientism" could be "materialism" (the philosophical/metaphysical position that the only reality is physical reality ... not the crass hedonistic consumerism sometimes meant by "materialism"). But there is a further sub(but key)-tenet, particularly in this context, that I mean by "scientism."

That tenet is that, for scientism, not only is truth defined by fact, but fact is defined by extension. To be more precise here, physicality or "body" is defined by extension. By extension, I mean extension in three dimensions. This was a radically new idea introduced by the father of Modern philosophy/thought, Renee Descartes. Descartes broke reality down into two categories: res cogitens (thinking reality = mind; for religious folk/Christian, spirit) and res extensa (extended reality = body). He has rightly been criticized by everyone for this dualism, and the argument against it is called the "ghost in the machine" argument. For him, this counter-argument says, mind is a ghost in the machine of body, simply operating it somehow, as if by magic. No concrete positive mechanism is described for how it does so. In short, Descartes does not take account of "soul."

Aside: In all of the three classic languages of the Judeo-Christian tradition—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin— there are two different words for "soul" and "spirit." In Hebrew, nephesh=soul and ruach=spirit; in Greek psyche=soul (from which we get the word "psychology") and pneuma=spirit; in Latin, anima=soul (from which we get "animal" and "animated") and spiritus=spirit. A spirit is immaterial by definition, a completely other order of reality apart from the physical. A soul, on the other hand, is defined by the physical universe because it is the life-force that animates a body. The medieval scholastic philosophers spoke of three kinds of soul: the vegetative (in plants), whose principle is simply growth; the sensate (in animals), whose principle is sensation of things like color and pain or pleasure; and the rational (in humans), whose principle is thought, based in self-reflexivity. Anything that can die has a soul. A machine can be turned on and off as the same machine by supplying or removing electricity. But once a living thing dies (like a tree), it cannot be reanimated as the same living thing (the Christian doctrine of the resurrection is obviously an exception, and that is one of the points of it). The conflation of the soul and spirit in Christianity has happened over the years because of the belief that the destiny of the soul (heaven or hell) hinges on that of the spirit (I do not think this is necessarily a negative thing, although I do think the lack of knowledge and understanding of the concepts and the development is). There is a longstanding debates ove whether, in humans the soul and spirit are the same "thing" (human soul=a spirit functioning in a bodily dimension, the "bi-partite"position, which I buy, although only if I must restrict myself to the language of "parts," which I think the Tradition of the Church does not dictate, and in fact goes against, but addressing that would be another post altogether) ...  or,on the other hand, spirit and soul are two separate substances (the "tripartite" position) ... just as there were debates in medieval philosophy over whether the human progressed through these three types of soul, leaving the previous behind upon the attainment of the next, or simply added the next to the previous, retaining both, eventually all three. But Christians have traditionally believed in a distinct order called soul, meaning at the very least that something if animating a body in a manner of being intimately wed to it (rather than, say, the properly miraculous way in which a purely spiritual being like an angel could impact the material world): Apollinarius's thought, for instance, was condemned as heresy for denying that there was a human soul in Christ, simply the spirit of the Logos.

To Return to the Main Argument: Descartes's concept of body as defined by extension in three dimensions was new. In the ancient world of Hebraic and Christian thought, body was defined as being a mode of relation. It is not that they did not have any concept of extension (they generally called it "measure," in "weight, number, and measure"); but "body" was not defined by that. It was defined by its capability for relation. You related to nature by, say, tilling the ground. Spouses relate to each other through physical conjugal acts. You relate to God though physical actions of cult, like sacrifice and obedience. "Death" is also not defined solely by material separation of body and soul: the original couple in the Garden of Eden do not materially die when they eat the fruit, but their relations begin the disintegration that will culminate in death ... they have already begun to die—the relation of both to nature (man to the ground/nature and woman to the serpent), the relation between man and woman, the relation of humanity to God in being expelled from the Garden, all of these have had decay enter into them.

The way this plays out with "scientism" in relation to "creationism" (literal six days) is that the former has convinced the latter to accept Descartes reduction of physicality by accepting its application to the aspect of time. Some materialist philosophers subsequent to Descartes have spent a great deal of time and energy discussing time as a fourth dimension through which reality is extended. For instance, the 20th-century materialist, J. J. Smart, tried to solve the materialist problem of "identity through time" by his concept of "time slices" (in his defense of the "B-theory of time"). Once it was discovered that bodies undergo a complete change of material over time, somebody asked him something like "if materialism is true, how can you say I am the same person I was x number of years ago, since I have progressively but completely changed out my material?" Smart said this looks at only three dimensions, and not the fourth, time. He said that what you call yourself right now, your matter extended in three dimensions, is only a "time slice" of your true entire materialist identity.

The main point here is that the important thing to a literal 6-day creationist concerning the time of creation is its exact extension, six literal 24-hour periods. This is the great message God intended to convey in giving the account of creation in Genesis 1 ... a divine work log. The only alternative reading of what is really going on for literal six-day creationist reading is that it might see the limited time span as a greater showing of the power of God, which, to me, smells strongly of a heavy unconscious impact of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, in addition to Descartes.

The "scientismists" have already, at least for the present, won the battle for the minds of the literal 6-day creationists, but unfortunately the latter do not realize it. Fortunately, neither do the former, from what I can tell.

Possible Time Functioning in Hebraic Thought and the Hebrew Bible.
If I am going to say all this, I should try to offer an alternate conception of time in the Bible, especially in the creation accounts. I use the plural there because there seem to be two different accounts in Genesis 1 and 2. I'm not going to go into the whole debate over separate sources and authors, or the reply that one author can be examining the same event under two different aspects, circling back around for the second aspect, so to speak. But that response involves seriously taking account of the differences that some say suggest that they are originally two separate accounts. So, I am going to examine an instance of what seems to be a disagreement in chronology, in the order of creative acts. In Genesis 1, the animals were created before the humans. In Genesis 2:18-19, man has been created first and the animals are created in response to the observation that "it is not good for man to be alone."

I have seen a bad translation this passage that reads "God had created the animals ...," probably in a poor attempt to normalize the Genesis 2 account to that of Genesis 1. As far as I can tell, the verbs simply do not support that reading. "And God said" is in the "narrative" tense (vav-consecutive imperfect; see below for some of the significance of the use of this verb). "I will create" is in the imperfect (also see below on this). "And God formed" is the next verb. I can see nothing in the grammar at all to indicate that this is to be anything other than a simple vav-consecutive-imperfect showing the next action in sequence. I have not double-checked Waltke and O'Connor (the unofficial authority on syntax in biblical Hebrew), but there would have to be something VERY unusual or rare in the syntax to make that verb in that tense mean even contemporaneous action, let alone prior action.

I will discuss where I think this goes in a minute, but first a I want to give a primer on verb tenses in Hebrew as a segue. This relates to what will come on the issue of time and sequence because in Greek, Latin, and the major modern languages, verb tense is primarily about time (although Greek's difference between the imperfect, the perfect, and the aorist as past tenses is a bit different, and actually a little more like Hebrew in what they do relate beyond simply time-aspect, but that goes too far afield for here, which is about Hebrew). Hebrew is different. It has only four tenses, two primary and two derivative (as far as morphology). The two primary tenses, the perfect and imperfect, have to do with completion (perfect=completed and imperfect=incomplete, therefore the imperfect will often be used as a future tense, in our language, but could also be used in a sense at least analogous to the way Greek uses its imperfect tense).

The two derivative tenses are each formed by affixing the letter vav to the front of the two primary tenses. The vav-converted-perfect is a tricky one and used in a much wider variety of ways. The vav-consecutive-imperfect, however, is precisely what it says, "consecutive," and is sometimes referred to as the "narrative tense" (it is used for narratives, one action following another). They don't think about time in the way that we do; they think about completion and the relation (like "body" and "death" above) of events to each other expressed by sequence.

My theory of what this means for time and the order of creation is that the "time" aspect does not convey what we think of as sequence (with an emphasis on historical "facticity" and scientifically "accurate" description of the order of events). What the sequence (in the form of the narrative tense) relates is different aspects of the relationship between man and animals. In Gen 1 the point is that creation follows a sequence in which the last is the highest. Man is above animals just as animals are above plants, and the sequence mirrors that. In Gen 2, the point is whether or not animals can be a proper and full companion for man. So, they are created in response to the observation that it is not good for man to be alone, as a sort of "first attempt" to find a "helpmate suitable to him." 


There is a “material discrepancy," as far as I can tell, between the orders of creative acts (man and animals) in Gen 1 and Gen 2. But the question is whether or not the modern scientific definition of “materiality” by which that “discrepancy” is defined, and which was begun in its primal pr "proto" form by Descartes, is adequate to discussing the reality of creation of the physical world. I believe that it is not; but I also do not believe that that means that we have to jettison or abandon any concept at all of historicity or factuality in the accounts relating of the event.

As a sideline of background, or maybe fleshing this whole exposition out, Gen 2:18-19 is, from what I can tell, much more central to the reading of chapters 1-2 as an account of creation than I think most non-Hebrew readers and those not studied in Jewish interpretation can realize ... and I don't think many scholars who are focused on discussions of sources take account of it either.  As far as I can tell, it is the next occurrence of the verb "and he said" (he being God/the LORD) after Gen 1 ("he commanded," concerning the trees, is a different verb). This is a very important verb in Jewish interpretation of Gen 1. They emphasize that it appears exactly ten times in Gen 1 and they match this with the Ten Commandments, in Greek, the "Decalogue," the ten words. Ten words of God in creation and ten words of commandment when the Law is given = the giving of the Law is a further creation. In Genesis, God created a cosmos; in Exodus ,God created a special people for himself by making them special by giving them the Mosaic Law (in Jewish interpretation at least as early as the return from the Babylonian Exile, creation was not actually thought to be truly complete until the building of the Temple by Solomon).

There is a lot more I could add here about how the important factor in "6 days" is not a scientific accuracy of "day," but rather the number 6 (what is called the "framework theory" of Gen 1: that matching rulers and realms were created on matching days: 1 and 4; 2 and 5; and 3 and 6), or about how "day" (Hebrew=yom) is generally a "kairos" time term ("special" or "loaded" time of feasts and liturgical seasons, as in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement) rather than a "chronos" one (chronological clock time). But any exposition further than the brief parentheticals I just gave would be pretty substantial chunks to add here, and I think it might be overload and distract (but if you want more on that second thing I mentioned just now, you can read my "Story Time: Narrative as Kairotic Chronology" on this blog ... the main topic Harry Potter, but at one point, I talk about the terms used in Gen 1). I have discussed the instance of Gen 2:18-19 and the order of the creation events of man and animals here because of the possible charge of internal inconsistency that might be used as ammunition by a scientismist, who might say, "you creationists say that you do not accept the fact that your biblical account contradicts empirical scientific findings as sufficient reason to drop your claims, but your biblical witness cannot even agree with itself either."

(Other interesting things that would be too much to include and expound here would be:

I think the recurrence of a planning verb in Gen 2 ("I will make a helpmate suitable to him") is also reminiscent of the decision to "create man in our own image" in Gen 1 (both are first person imperfects - in Gen 1, the fact that it is plural usually dictates a "cohortative" meaning). It may even be consciously intentional parallelism to unite the two accounts (and thus why I say Gen 2:18-19 might be so important), but that gets into a whole discussion of authorship.
and ...
I also think the the mist covering the face of the earth is reminiscent of the Spirit hovering over the face of the deep, but I am guessing I probably got that form a commentary, even though I can't remember that right now.)
 
Summary: The basic point of this post is that I find it disheartening that scientism has basically won the fight for the minds of many believers in creation. Fortunately I don't think they realize it, so there is hope. And also, that does not mean they [scientismists] have won the battle for the hearts, souls, and spirits. They [creationists] are devout and virtuous people.

But it does also distract from some very real debates between a belief in creation (when one understands the texts better) and radical evolutionism. For instance, in the Catholic faith, you are not free to believe that the human spirit is simply a further evolution of animal soul. Certain things in human psychology may be further versions of, or at least similarities too, animal psyche, but the spirit cannot be an evolution of it; it is of a completely different order. And you cannot believe that the animal soul (or rational soul simply as an evolution of animal soul) is all there is in us. Another issue that the creationism debate eclipses is that the teaching is that there was literally one original couple, our parents, who were the first spiritual-bodily persons and whose actions impacted our spiritual state radically, but much scientific research now claims to be showing disparate, independent strands of development in the evolution of our biological being, and much work needs to be done in finding out where those two things (science and Revelation) intersect (and for the grammar nazis, my use of "literally" is accurate there, in opposition to seeing the "couple" as "figurative language" ... don't mess with a Jedi copy-editor who chose metaphor theory as one of his four questions in his PhD comps and read all 400 pages of Paul Ricoeur's Rule of Metaphor and can kill you with the Jedi mind trick of boring you to death with discussions of PR's criticism of the "tropological" approach to examining figurative language).

I will end by saying that I think that there is an aspect in the thinking of the biblical author of historical reality, that these things really happened in some form or another. But primeval history is a different genre than contemporary history and involves different literary devices. For instance, it is widely agreed that the "two trees" in the Garden is a mashal, a riddle ... they believe a real distinct event took place, but a riddle is used for some reason to mask its material nature in the text.

Aside: My personal theory on that mashal is that the point of the riddle is to hide the answer forever, not to be solved - knowledge is experiential and to have a concept in your head of that event by which evil entered the world is to have a form of that thing in you, and you don't want that. Others say it is a circumlocution for the couple having sex before they were allowed to, that God said to wait for that highest goodness until he allowed, a circumlocution based in the use of "to know" for sex, as in Gen 4:1, "the man knew his wife and she conceived and bore a son," and on the effect that the eating had of "uncovering their nakedness," which is a circumlocution for sex in the prohibitions of incest in Lev 18 (Gen 2 ends with the statement that the couple was naked and not ashamed, and after the eating, Adam says they hid because they were naked and basically ashamed of it). I actually wrote the sex interpretation in a paper once (although I was by no means the first to posit it), but I no longer think it is accurate, on the grounds that, if these two chapters are to be seen as a unified whole, whether as the combination of two sources by one author or as the fresh writing of a whole account, it does not make sense with the divine command being given to be fruitful and multiple in Gen 1 without any mention of contingency upon a further specific allowance by God, but I also think so on other grounds, but that would add great length to this already lengthy post.

Epilogue: I think this error in reducing physical reality to being defined by extension is also behind confusion on the doctrine of purgatory. For long times the language was of years and days in purgatory, and this led sometimes, particularly after the rise of modern scientific thinking, to a certain legalism and casuistry. Then, in recent times, based in some statements in Catholic magisterial circles, people began to say purgatory is not a time thing. I think this erroneously perceived need comes from the same materialist reduction of time. I say that purgatory must be time-bound, otherwise it would be an eternal state, which is not the teaching of the Church. The problem was, once the modern preoccupation with extension turned the language of days and years into legalism and casuistry, some saw the use of time terms as erroneous, rather than seeing the true problem of an erroneous thinking about time itself. The extension issue turned it into a focus a scientific "accuracy" about material duration.