Human Image: World Image : The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology

by Philip Sherrard

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Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Nonfiction

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Philip Sherrard was educated at Cambridge and London and taught at the universities of both Oxford and London, but he made Greece his permanent home. A pioneer of modern Greek studies and translator, with Edmund Keeley, of Greece's major modern poets, he wrote many books on Greek, philosophical and literary themes. He was also the translator and editor (with G.E.H. Palmer and Bishop Kallistos Ware) of the Philokalia, a collection of texts in five volumes by the spiritual masters of the Orthodox Christian tradition.

A profound, commited and imaginative thinker, his theological and metaphysical writings embrace a wide range of subjects, from the study of the spiritualizing potential of sexual love to the restoration of a sacred cosmology which he saw as the only way to escape from the spiritual and ecological dereliction of the modern world.

Reviews

[Rex · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the centuries subsequent to the Renaissance we have increasingly lost our sense of living in a sacred universe, and… this has had disastrous consequences in every sphere of our lives.

Western civilization has suffered under a desacralized view of the cosmos; almost thirty years after Sherrard wrote Human Image: World Image, this is a familiar thesis. But Sherrard’s articulation of the problem in the first several chapters is illuminating and unique, if not eccentric. It is not the easiest read, admittedly; Sherrard gets harder and harder to follow as the book goes on, even for someone like myself who is relatively well read in his sources, culminating in a lengthy, breathless exposition he calls “Notes towards the Restitution of a Sacred Cosmology.”

The influence of the modern Greek poets Sherrard is well-known for translating is palpable, but they go unmentioned. Instead, Sherrard builds explicitly on a combination of Neoplatonic metaphysics, classical Christology, and the speculations of more recent mystical theologians. Interestingly, the only figure who gets extensive and unmitigated praise is Oskar Milosz, who wrote some perplexing cosmological poems in the 1920s. Sherrard has more critical words for a better-known darling of modern mysticism’s revivalists, Teilhard de Chardin. Sherrard accuses Teilhard of radically distorting Christianity to accommodate it to modern science. In fact, Sherrard offers little besides disdain for science, and therein lies the unusual radicalism of his diagnosis. Sherrard does not aim merely at “re-enchantment” or the development of a religious ecology (a theme he quickly drops). He wants to upend how we think about everything, and part of that is a merciless polemic aimed at what he identifies as the confusions of science: not merely a methodology that entails certain epistemic limitations, but a pathological and self-defeating blindness to non-quantitative qualities, saddling us with arbitrary and false notions about time and space that cut us off from real encounter with spiritual realities.

This criticism extends not only to Teilhard and others who try to reconcile science and religious teaching, but to a host of Christian thinkers who lose sight of the vision that Sherrard burns to convey.

The more the Christian consciousness is developed, the more it experiences things as essentially reborn, or new-born, at every instant. This means that as one’s consciousness grows the idea of temporal succession is increasingly replaced by that of divine instantaneousness. In the light of mature consciousness, the past and future of things have little significance. Indeed, a condition of grasping the true nature of things involves rising above the notions of past and future…. Ultimately, should his spiritual growth permit it, [the Christian] would see the whole process of creation from the initial Fiat Lux to the Parousia as a single timeless moment of divine self-manifestation.

This take-no-prisoners attitude is invigorating, if at times exasperatingly without nuance and repetitious. I found clarifying his observations on how disastrously instinctive it has become for us to elevate mathematical qualities to reality of the first order and assign all qualities that cannot be so quantified to a lesser, basically illusory tier. Other parts of his argument struck me as less helpful or coherent. And although Sherrard does assert his fidelity to standard orthodoxies about the value of creation and the importance of the incarnation of the Son, the main line of his thought nevertheless seems to cut against finding real worth or meaning in time-space-matter as such and the particularities of existence, in ways I am not sure he entirely overcomes.

[Roger Norman · Rating 4 out of 5]

It seems odd not to award five stars to a book with such a powerful idea, so cogently argued. What idea? That modern scientific rationalism (so-called) lacks a basis in reality. I docked a star for a certain repetitiousness, but there's no arguing with the conclusion.