The Death of God

Wilber's View

Wilber reads secularization not as reason simply outgrowing superstition but as the final act of the Ego camp and Eco camp's joint victory over Ascent. His argument runs through Origen, the Church's greatest early theologian, who solved the "problem of mythology" — a literal-minded scripture the young Church had inherited and couldn't disown — with the allegorical method: any myth can be read as literal, ethical, or allegorical, each level "higher" than the last, so that the myth is simultaneously preserved (nothing is denied) and negated (nothing need be believed literally). The Enlightenment philosophers inherited exactly this target: when they tore down the literal mythic God — the anthropomorphic figure of tribal scripture — they had good reason to (it deserved to go), and Nietzsche's "God is dead" became the age's rallying cry. Wilber's real claim, and the one worth sitting with rather than nodding past, is that the Enlightenment's target and Origen's/Plotinus's target were never the same thing: the mythic God is prerational (a literalized, egocentric figure that hasn't yet been through formal-rational critique), while the transrational Godhead the contemplative sages pointed to had already, on Wilber's account, been through and beyond rational critique. Because both were called "God" and both were espoused (however differently) by mythically-situated cultures, the Enlightenment's demolition swept away the transrational along with the prerational — this is the book's recurring pre-trans-fallacy applied at civilizational scale. What was left standing, once the Ascending God was gone, was only the Descended God of nature — see The Great Plenitude for the doctrine that then filled the vacuum, and ascent-and-descent for the underlying polarity.

The weak point in this argument is one Wilber doesn't dwell on: it requires taking Origen (and Plotinus, and Eckhart) as reliable representatives of what "mystical religion" actually offers, rather than as an elite, philosophically sophisticated minority tradition that was never what most premodern believers meant by God in the first place. If mythic literalism was the operative content of religion for most people across most of history — not merely religion's degraded, contingent expression — then the Enlightenment's rejection of it looks less like collateral damage against an innocent transrational bystander and more like an accurate diagnosis of what was actually there to reject. Wilber's case depends on treating the contemplative core as the real tradition and mythic literalism as an accretion around it; a critic could just as easily run that ranking the other way.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

"No more myths!" was the philosophical battle cry of an entire age, and it soon came to be summarized in Nietzsche's famous dictum, "God is dead."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11

And my conclusion will be that in throwing out a prerational, anthropomorphic, mythic God figure, the "modern West" also tossed out any transrational, nonanthropomorphic, superconscient Godhead. Gone was a mass of bathwater; gone too a precious baby.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11

The brilliance of this scheme is that it takes a prerational myth (literal) and reworks it at both a rational (ethical) and a transrational (mystical) level, so that "the myth" can be made to say whatever it is necessary to make it say, quite regardless of how its originators actually meant it… The myth is thoroughly preserved—and utterly negated.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11

Are we, quipped Thomas Paine, "to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a Redeemer?"

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11

But with the rejection by modernity of the Ascendent God in virtually any form, there was only the Descended God left, the God of a marvelous and creative nature, a nature that was everywhere not to be denied, but a nature in which alone could salvation now be found. The doctrine of Plenitude and the Many completely eclipsed that of the Good and the One: God in any form was pronounced dead, and nature alone alive.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11

Reason, in reaction to myth, thus chose to look almost exclusively downward, and in that withering glance, the modern Western world was born.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11

See Also

• pre-trans-fallacy — the general confusion (prerational vs. transrational) this entire argument is one civilization-scale instance of
• ascent-and-descent — the polarity whose Ascending pole is what Wilber says got thrown out along with mythic religion
• The Great Plenitude — the doctrine that fills the vacuum once the Ascended God is gone
• The Ego Camp and the Eco Camp — the modern rivalry this secularization sets the stage for
• flatland — the eventual destination once nature alone is left standing as reality
• Plotinus — the source of the transrational Godhead Wilber says got discarded along with the mythic one