Frederick Turner, in his important study of
the history of the Americas from the point of view of Native Americans, Beyond
Geography,
points out that ours is an “introspective” and therefore dangerous
civilization.
By
“introspective” he means overly focused on ourselves and living without cosmos,
without myth, without ritual worthy of the name.
No wonder we find ourselves cosmically sad, cosmically lonely, cosmically destructive in our militarist vision of creating weapons to rain death on the rest of creation. And busy destroying Mother Earth as we know her. With a whole political party content with denying climate change.
Inner journeys are
essential to get to our true selves. But an exclusively inward one can look only
at oneself or one’s culture and ignore the rest of the world. There
lies the death of cosmic spirituality and with it the death of Mother
Earth. The world does not need more inward journeys; but there are
no limits to the inner journeys we can and ought to make.
Where does this inward compulsion come from? Biblical scholar Krister Stendahl recognizes St. Augustine as the instigator of the “introspective conscience” of the West and feels the reading of the Bible has been distorted in the process.
Augustine was a genius in writing what was
probably the first autobiography of the West, but he remains oblivious of the
sense of theosis, the divinizing of the cosmos, that
Eastern Christianity put forward as the very meaning of
salvation. Russian Orthodox theologian Nicolas Berdyaev writes:
The central idea of the
Eastern fathers was that of theosis, the divinization of all creatures,
the transfiguration of the world, the idea of the cosmos, and not the idea of
personal salvation.
How different would history have been if Europeans landing on the shores of Turtle Island had held that understanding of religion?
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