THE BOOK OF FOURS A Postmodern Christian Theology

By Albert Krueger

This book addresses the strange place held by Christian theology in the West as of the emerging 21st century. Because theology should address the world as it is rather than the world as we hope it might be, it is a postmodern theology. As such, it does not try to

either force or convince anyone to reject their deconstructive passions or to

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oculus Literary
• Release date: Mar 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9798989776047

Albert Krueger

Albert Krueger earned a bachelor’s degree in philosoophy from the University of Arizona and a master of divinity degree from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California. Krueger practiced his profession entirely in the Pacific Northwest. A retired Episcopal priest, he lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife Diana. They enjoy visiting desert places that are difficult to access.

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Copyright 2024 by Albert Krueger

ISBN: 979-8-9897760-5-4 (Paperback)

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Contents

PREFACE

PART ONE: QUADRANTS OF THE MIND

SECTION ONE: TO BELIEVE

SECTION TWO: TO BE

SECTION THREE: TO MEASURE

SECTION FOUR: TO IDENTIFY

PART TWO: THE IDEA OF LAND

SECTION ONE: REAL AND UNREAL

SECTION TWO: THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

SECTION THREE: LAND AHOY!

SECTION FOUR: SANCTIFICATION

PART THREE: THE METAMPSYCHOSIS OF THE POSTMODERN WORLD

SECTION ONE: CONVERGING ON THE SINGULARITY

SECTION TWO: THE AMERICAN UNCONSCIOUS

SECTION THREE: THE METEMPSYCHOSIS OF ISRAEL

SECTION FOUR: THE METAMPSYCHOSIS OF THE POSTMODERN WORLD

PART FOUR: MAKING A UNIVERSE FOR THE EQUATIONS TO DESCRIBE

SECTION ONE: EARTH, SKY, MORTALS, AND DIVINITIES

SECTION TWO: THE CHRYSALIS AND THE COCOON

SECTION THREE: THE RASH FANTASTICAL VENTURE

SECTION FOUR: BROKEN FACTICITY

Now when Joshua was by Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him. In his hand was his drawn sword. Joshua went to him and said, Are you for us or for our enemies? He said, "Neither, for I am the commander (arxistrategos) of the army of the Lord. Now I have come. Then Joshua fell with his face to the ground and worshipped. Then he said, What does my Lord wish to say to His servant? The commander of the army of the Lord said to Joshua, Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy." So Joshua did this.¹

PREFACE

Philosophy, theology, the Apostolic Preaching, and modern science don’t really like each other. That’s one reason I prefer our present situation in history as being a Postmodern Era. The technical disaffection between these various disciplines has grown to the point at which they each no longer seem to know what it was that brought on the disaffection in the first place. Perhaps I can force them to agree on something, at least for t he Moment.

Nevertheless, these antagonistic intellectual and emotional disciplines are still together in the same basket we call Western Civilization. Whereas politics may truly desire to determine which disciplines represent the deplorables and which disciplines represent the chosen and the clean, the unifying factor remains: You and I are still together in the same basket of deplorables.² One might say, with tongue removed from cheek, that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.³ Or not.

The motivation to write a book like this is derived from a lifetime of observing an increasing metaphysical divergence as revealed in the conversations and conclusions of those involved in attempting to arrive at workable political, religious, and emotional solutions to that divergence. My impression, after putting in 33 years of professional ordained ministry as a priest of the Episcopal Church, is that what started out as a divergence in metaphysical principles some centuries ago has become a practical social divergence that widens by the hour, by the minute, even because of utterances offered during casual conversations. We are each triggered by everyone else. There are no more casual conversations.

The following conversation is a theology of sorts. You will not find it arranged according to the classic theological categories: Those categories are as dead and buried as Immanuel Kant.⁴ They mean what they mean when they mean it, but their meaning is quickly misapprehended in the process of that meaning being revealed. Who can do theology in such a fogged-in interpretive situation? No one. We even persist in interpreting ourselves while we are interpreting the person who is interpreting us while we are both seeking an interpretation that distinguishes one interpretation from the other. It is truly a hermeneutic world⁵ that we have made for ourselves.

With the idea of hermeneutics in mind, let’s say that the following theology is neither systematic, dogmatic, philosophical in the strict sense, nor Biblical in any traditional sense. We shall call it Impressionistic Theology, because it is really based on the impressions of a lifetime in ministry seasoned with continued albert amateur, studies of current scientific problems, current historical conundrums and interpretations, metaphysical dissections of the Modern Mind, psychological breakthroughs, or break-ins, and so forth. Mainly, it comes out of a lifetime of working with people in a pastoral setting.

That Western Civilization, particularly the United States of America, is on the verge of a great change, a cusp of heavenly differentiation, as it were, a time between times in the biblical sense, is an almost universally agreed-upon trope We all, like Moses, stand on top of our high mountains and gaze across the valley at the hills of our Promised Land, but we cannot seem to be able to go there. Something is holding us back. That something, as was also the case with Moses, is God.⁶

Between Moses and Joshua is a time between times. Moses disappears from sight and from history, even, and Joshua runs headlong into the Commander of the Army of the Lord. Like Joshua, we are eager to enter our Promised Land; we have known and felt this from the start. We are Calebs and Joshuas longing to fulfill and justify the confidence we first exhibited in our hearts and souls when first Moses sent us out to be spies in the land-to-come.⁷ Yet even Caleb and Joshua will part ways when Joshua becomes Israel and Caleb becomes Judah.⁸

In that divergence of kingdoms, the Law is nearly forgotten.

The fundamental divergence in the United States today consists of an increasing divide between those who can be labelled Evangelical Christians and those who can be labelled Progressive Christians. My first impression of life in the professional Christian realm was that the gap between the two was already too great to be bridged. My bishop railed against so-called fundamentalists and charismatics, and I had no idea what he was talking about. It became clear that my personal spiritual survival would depend solely on my ability to come to an understanding of what was taking place.

The Western commonweal cannot survive the situation of being grounded in two radically different versions of the Christian Revelation. We all know this, even though we tend to prefer denial to the truth. In the Evangelical mind, the Progressive Christians are them and they; to the Progressive Christian mind, evangelicals are them and they. I once thought that this metaphysical and revelational gap could be bridged, because the two factions were only using different languages to express and testify to the same thing. They are not. The languages have now developed, or evolved, along completely different lines such that even bringing Israel and Judah back together seems workable by comparison.⁹

Because Christian conceptuality was the premise of Western culture from the beginning, and because even in the era of the so-called enlightenment the Western intellect draws on the remaining shapes and forms of those concepts in its quest for a final determination of such ideals as freedom and justice, the divergence in Christian conceptualities is a fatal wound. Whether the culture tries to go back to an ideal Christian expression of the civilized soul that was extant sometime in the not-to-distant past or the culture tries to go forward into a more perfect expression of the fundamental tenets of the Christian revelation, there is neither a go forward nor a go back. This is why the Revelation itself has become the whipping boy of postmodern American political and religious dialogue, and it is why that revelation will never again establish a cultural foundation in any way like it did in the past.

The lesson of the Commander of the Army of the Lord is a perennial lesson for any national entity that desires to claim its Promised Land. Joshua asks which side the commander is on, and the commander replies neither. The Promised Land beckons, but the final conclusion is that we can screw up its occupation to such an extent that it seems as if the Promise meant nothing in the first place.

The choice for a commonweal like the United States of America in the Postmodern Era is one of deciding to whether dispense with the biblical revelation altogether, a move advocated by many, or to dispense with the friend-enemy spirituality of conquest and follow the lead of the Commander of the Army of the Lord whose task it is not to defeat religious enemies but to carry out God’s vast Plan of Salvation for everyone, a move that seems to be absolutely unattractive to anyone.

And so, we can only begin at the beginning which, as always, is right now.

Dedicated to my dear friend Charles King, may he rest in peace.

PART ONE:

QUADRANTS OF THE MIND

When we combine quantum mechanics with general relativity, there seems to be a new possibility that did not arise before: that space and time together might form a finite four-dimensional space without singularities or boundaries, like the surface of the earth but with more dimensions … Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? ¹⁰

SECTION ONE: TO BELIEVE

It is not possible that the Gospels can be either greater or fewer in number than they are. Just as there are four regions of the world in which we live, and four universal winds, and since the Church is disseminated over all the earth, and the pillar and mainstay of the Church is the Gospel, the breath of life, it is fitting that she have four pillars, breathing immortality on every side and enkindling life in men anew. From this it is evident that the Word, the Artificer of all, who sits upon the Cherubim and embraces all things, and who was manifested to man, has given us a four-fold gospel embracing one spirit.¹¹

Saint Irenaeus

On March 17, 180 CE, the Emperor Marcus Aurelias died at his military camp in Vindobona (Vienna). His 18-year-old son Commodus succeeded him as the next emperor. History remembers him as the last of the Five Good Emperors and the last emperor of Pax Romana. He died of unknown causes,¹² but those of us who are familiar with the movie Gladiator ‘know’ what the cause was.¹³ At any rate, an era came to an end, and an era began.

The Roman Empire was at its most coherent moment. The Germanic tribes were starting to be a migratory problem for the empire. Christianity was beginning to be defined by its practitioners. It was fitting, then, that a leader of the Church would define the faith as filling the entire four-cornered world¹⁴ that was Rome.

Irenaeus was the second bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul (Lyon, France). He was born in the Roman province of Syria. Some sources refer to him as being Greek; others highlight his Syrian origins. Whatever the case may have been, his physical translation from Syria to Gaul, a geographical exodus of some 2,500 miles, represents the spirit of the moment, a moment when one could literally move across the world and start a new life in the same customary ways that you lived your old life. Nevertheless, the situation was rapidly and immediately changing.

Christianity was still an outlaw religion when Irenaeus of Smyrna became Irenaeus of Lyon. His episcopal predecessor, Pothinus, had been martyred in 177 or 178 CE. Church tradition claims that Irenaeus himself was martyred.¹⁵ The Roman Empire suffered tremendous civil unrest under Commodus, son of Marcus Aurelius, and succeeding emperors. A major battle for the imperial throne was fought at Lugdunum in 197 CE between Septimius Severus and Clodius Albinus.¹⁶ As the historically famous and significant Pax Romana¹⁷ was ending, a new kind of pax, or peace, was coming into being, the Christian Church. Pax Romana was just coming into being when Jesus was born: The Roman Empire, in good theological form, was being born again.¹⁸

More than a millennium has passed since Irenaeus ‘proved’ that there should be four, and only four, written gospels. The Western Roman Empire passed, making way for Western civilization a few centuries later. The Eastern Roman Empire morphed into Byzantium, and Eastern Orthodoxy provided the way for the emergence of The Russian Orthodox Church. And so, we are today living in a world in which the self-assumed remnant of Western civilization, the United States of America, is facing off the remnant of Russian Orthodox civilization, with all the historical baggage and subtle transformative influences each tradition entails.

It’s a small world, after all.¹⁹ What goes around, as ‘they’ say, comes around.

Four

You might think of Irenaeus’ characterization of the importance of four to be archaic, even sentimental, part of a worldview entirely discredited by the discoveries and methods of modern science. If you think this way, you are wrong.

The importance of four was agreed upon by ancient culture long before Irenaeus was born. The Greek philosopher and proto mathematician, Pythagoras, and his disciples worshipped four. Their Tetractys, symbol, sign, logo, and mystical door to truth and reality, was an equilateral triangle with four equidistant points on each side.²⁰ A striking example of the importance of four can be found in the biblical Book of Revelation in which there appears the vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.²¹ That testimony is predated by the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel from which we learn that there are four cherubim who patrol the outskirts of the glory of God.²²

In early Western times, medical professionals believed that there were four humors that governed the health of the human body. Even among many indigenous tribes, today, there is a spirituality that revolves around the notion of four corners and four directions. The Four Powers, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the Republic of China constituted the original United Nations Security Council.

While it may strike the modern mind as something not only a bit too mystical or even superstitious, the significance of Four keeps on showing up in everyday life and even as a matter of scientific discovery. We now know that there are four fundamental forces in the physical universe. They are the Weak Force, the Strong Force, Electromagnetic force, and Gravity. It is the interaction between and among these four forces that makes reality real. The weak and strong forces are always at work in the sub-atomic word and its component parts; most of us are familiar with electromagnetic force, if only from getting shocked by it; gravity, of course, is a force we are all aware of even though we are not ontologically aware of it.

In truth, even though we have a sense of what ‘force’ is, we are pretty much unaware of it all the time. Force is when a rock falls on your head and you feel pain; force is when the government makes you do time for drunk driving; force is what crumpled your car when you were drunk driving. We don’t really know what ‘force’ is, except that it is the ‘that’ which makes things happen. If nothing ever happened, we would have no need to possess a mental concept like ‘force.’

In the Modern World, Force is defined by science: Force is the negative gradient of the potential energy. We have come a long way since Newton told us that f = ma (Force = Mass times Acceleration). In the 21st century, force is not a phenomenon, it’s a calculation: Empirical definitions seem … to indicate how much force is present and (to) leave the internal meaning of the quantity vaguely suspended.²³ Although we feel force when it is applied against our mental or physical self, it is better to not force the issue of what force is. It is, however, significant that science has discovered, or realized, four, and only four, fundamental forces.

The Four Fundamental Forces hold reality, or the environment of which we are an integral part, together. So too do the four winds and the four-corners and the four Gospels. We are still psychically and archetypally where we were 2,500 years and more ago.

Human nature doesn’t change: The way we organize ourselves into cultures and civilizations changes insofar as the general distribution of archetypal rules and attitudes change. Those changes reflect revised perceptions of which archetypes²⁴ should be honored more than others.²⁵ These unconsciously assumed hierarchies become psychic algorithms for social and political behavior, but basic human nature stays the same. Carl Jung says that the term archetype is not meant to denote an inherited idea, but rather an inherited mode of functioning … a ‘pattern of behavior.’²⁶

There are, unsurprisingly, four basic Jungian archetypes. They are the Persona, our outward face presented to the world that conceals our real self, the Anima/Animus, the mirror image of our biological sex, the unconscious feminine side in males and the masculine tendencies in women, the Shadow, encapsulating the parts of ourselves that we may reject, disown, or simply don’t recognize, and the Self, that which provides unity in experience.²⁷

Contemporary citizens of the West will recognize these archetypal forms coming to the fore in postmodern sociology and education, especially the Animus/Anima and the Self. The Shadow is probably more influential than all the other three together, considering how dysfunctional and self-and-other-hating the culture has become. We have even incorporated the concept of hatred into our civic and criminal legal code. In this aspect of modern society, we try to go against our own deepest archetypal structures.

There are apparently at least 12 other subsidiary archetypes. The idea seems true to reality, however, especially because of the mystical number Four. It seems, or I would suggest, that the major historical civilizations have been gathered around a central governing archetype-council, so to speak, that automatically or politically invalidates, de-legitimizes, overwhelms, or otherwise hierarchically subdues the other archetypal functions.

There may be a mystical reality at work, here, especially in view of GWF Hegel’s understanding of Spirit.²⁸ On the other hand, the subsequent civilization is more likely organized according to the personal preferences of the strong leaders who became the civilization’s primary builders. Thus, the Roman Empire Archetypal Cabal was initiated into power by Augustus Caesar and his successors; the Archetypal Governing Group of the Soviet Union reflected Lenin’s archetypal temperament, and so forth. The main point is that the archetypal preferences of a civilization are initiated into a culture by force of some shape and form or another.

F = MA being no longer an efficient formula for force, let’s call it F = A(I), where ‘A’ is archetype, and ‘I’ is interplay. In this way, the sensation of force and the application of force can be combined into one algorithm: Force is an archetype in various forms of interplay with the human soul or psyche. An algorithmically powerful leader could create a new archetypal civilization, not instantly, but by strength or force of example and political and military success. The subsequent civilization, then, would consist of an archetypally preferential match between the ideals or purposes of the civilization and the continuing preferential psychic archetypal inheritance of the people.

At any rate, all civilizations are still, and always will be, ruled by the Tetractys!

Pattern

Note that it’s mathematically significant that 4! = 24. This means that there are 24 permutations of the number four, or 24 combinations in which the hierarchy, or first-to-last order, is important. With reference to our new fourfold archetypal algorithm of civilization there would then be 24 possible civilizations, or types of civilization. So even with only four basic archetypes, there are 24 possible permutations or psychic four-fold archetypal foundations hypostasizing²⁹ the human soul.

If we factor in the 12 other suggested archetypes, the number becomes philosophically and systematically unmanageable. In effect, an archetypal permutation of all possible permutations of four could, and probably would, account for every human being who has ever existed, and more. In the Bible, we learn that there were twelve tribes of Israel. The interaction between personal archetypal patterns and the unique tribal patterns is as incalculable as that of the movements of every subatomic bit and piece in the physical universe. This kind of mathematics is loaded into the Biblical narrative like leaven in a loaf.

The point of this mathematical introduction is to highlight the fact that there is pattern to the biblical narrative. Pattern is what all the wise ones of ancient times sought to understand. The understanding attained would provide a pattern not only for individual living but also for corporate life, the life of the family, clan, and tribe. To understand the pattern or patterns of existence is still the guiding motivation for our modern sciences today.

Again, the Four Archetypes are the Persona, the Animus/Anima, the Shadow, and the Self.³⁰ The four fundamental forces need to be explained. First, the weak force governs radioactive decay or the transformation of one type of particle into another; the Strong Nuclear Force binds the particles of matter together to form larger particles. Strangely, it gets weaker ass the particles move closer together. The Electromagnetic Force acts between charged particles, and this force, like gravity can be felt from an infinite distance. Finally, the Force of Gravity is the attraction between two objects that have mass or energy. Scientists are on a quest to unify these forces into one single force.³¹

The idea, here, is to consider the four basic archetypes to be the four identifying forces of the human psyche. Because a civilization requires a de facto archetypal cooperation with its members, there should be a corresponding value or behavioral archetype for every principle of State or civilization (sometimes they are the same). When this correspondence begins to disintegrate, the civilization enters its end state, its state of inertia or entropy. The correlation with the four fundamental forces of nature is of interest because of the primal significance of the number four. It seems determinative of the patterns for many forms of existence, both material and psychic.

Of interest is the common historical judgment that there have been four civilizations that can be understood as the most important. These are Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and China.³² They are the oldest known civilizations and can be understood to be those closest to the situation of original archetypal behavior as such. Hebrew civilization, if you can call it that,³³ is a synthesis, of sorts, of the Mesopotamian civilization and the Egyptian civilization. Because Western civilization is rooted in Judeo-Christian archetypes, it is related to both the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations.

The archetypal family tree of the West, in other words, does not include any crossover with either the civilization of China or the civilization of India. As of the 21st century, they have both adapted to Western modes of corporate and personal behavior and values, but this adaptation in no way can be seen as a complete civilizational surrender. The archetypal hierarchies remain distinct and not interconnected.

Of interest to both the Hebrew civilization and Western civilization is the revealed, or archetypal, fact of both is that God is the unifying archetype. The Book of Genesis begins with en arche epoiesen ho theos, or in the beginning, God fashioned. The New Testament, the Gospel according to John begins with en arche ein ho logos, or in the beginning was the Word. In both cases, the unifying arche is God; the fundamental unifying force is God.

On the surface, and academically, the world religions appear to have similar, or even the same, structures. They do not, in terms of practice and behavior, share the same structures and so do not share archetypal hierarchies. A format of similarities can be forced on the not-Christian faiths by eager Western professionals, but even with force, the similarities remain only on the surface. In this sense, we can say that the world religions can share a Persona, but the other three archetypes remain hidden to the eyes of comparative religion.

It is structurally significant that there are four world religions, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism.³⁴ Some sources list 12 major religions, a list that includes, for instance, Judaism and Shinto.³⁵ Twelve is another one of those numbers that shows up everywhere and in every which way. For instance, there are 12 tribes of Israel, and there were 12 disciples of Jesus. 12 is a number that represents 3 operate 4 when the operation is multiplicative but considering the plethora of fours in our everyday and cosmic life, and that 3 is one of those easy to choose numbers, 12 is a natural choice for a fulness of somethings. There is even a handy duodecimal number system.³⁶

Numerology has a very limited range even though it appeals immediately to the human attraction to the mysterious.³⁷ Yet since the days of Pythagoras, solving mysteries with mathematics has been a fruitful direction in which civilizations can go. Regarding those times, one historian tells us that the Greeks founded the alliance between mathematics and the study of nature’s design which has since become the very basis of modern science … The belief that mathematical laws were the truth about nature attracted the deepest and noblest thinkers to mathematics.³⁸

It is clear that Four is both mysterious and fascinating if one pays attention to its perpetual recurrence in the patterns of the real and/or observed world as well as imagined worlds and pure fantasy. Four evokes a fundamental pattern of observation and feeling that fixes the mind’s attention on a collective of things or ideas which implies or suggests fulness and completion. Five is awkward, although it is very easy to count by fives. Three is far too rigid to be intellectually and/or emotionally satisfying: It doesn’t offer a finished feeling, just a sense of permanence and immovability. Three is for authority; Four is for living and being.

Force

It is tempting to simply declare that God is Force. This is not the same as saying that God is a force, even less that God is THE Force that permeates the universe in the Star Wars franchise.³⁹ A metaphysician would say that God is Force as such. The qualifier, as such, eliminates all adjectival and adverbial modifiers that would tend to limit the scope of the definition. Let’s stick with Force is God.

In the Western theological tradition, God is active in both the objective and subjective arena. In the objective arena, we have the four fundamental forces; in the subjective arena we have the four basic archetypes. One might say that the four archetypes are the forces that make the soul what it is, just as the four fundamental forces make the physical world what it is. But to say that God is, as a reality, equivalent to the four fundamental forces in the objective world and the four basic archetypes in the subjective world would be to say that God is not One.

Christianity has already declared God to be a Trinity of Persons, or Persona. A Quadrinity God would be more malleable, but it is not clear that we want to posit a more malleable God.⁴⁰ Process theologians might like that approach, but dogmatic theologians would not. At any rate, neither approach provides us with a unitary God.

On the other hand, a search for patterns of four in the quest to find God isn’t a new search: It has been a fundamental search in which humanity has engaged from the time civilizations emerged. The search always takes the form of that of the presocratic Greek philosophers, the ones who were concerned with discovering which of the four elements, earth, air, fire, or water, was the primary or generating element. Science began in those days, and, as we have seen, we are still looking at four fundamental elements. They are called forces, now, rather than substances, but the idea is precisely the same.

The attempt to reduce God to the status of one primary element, whether that element is a force or a substance, is a futile experiment. We are made of earth; we breathe air; our bodies are nearly 60% water, and that leaves fire. Fire has been a favorite over the centuries, probably because human life is difficult if not impossible without fire. Then again, human life is not possible at all without air, water, and earth. You can eat raw fish, but you can’t breathe in a vacuum.

Force is felt. Every sense you employ involves the perception and reception of force. Force doesn’t belong to the senses or even the thing that is bringing on force: It is the intuitive guarantee of a sensational world.

In the military-political realm, we find the term show of force. It’s interesting to note that although a show of force is usually the massing of weaponry within sight of the enemy, it’s really a political maneuver. Political force, an intuitive phenomenon, can stop aggression before military force becomes necessary. In our daily lives, in fact, we sense political force far more frequently than we experience the impact of military force. We feel the force of law; we feel force in political speeches; we feel the force of convincing arguments.

We never feel Force as such. If one was to feel or sense Force as such, one would in one theory sense God. Force as such is beyond abstraction: It is everywhere but once it is particularized, it is no longer universal. In the early days of Christianity, this kind of force was a favorite of the Gnostic religions.⁴¹ They said that forces emanated from the godhead, somehow, and these forces mold the soul and the environment. It’s a picture of force that is akin to and directly related to a picture of the Sun. Light radiates from the sun and affects everything and everyone. It’s a natural religion with fantastical ornamentation.

The force of the sun is a felt force as well as a force that moves things and makes things happen. The heat and light from the Sun not only burn the skin: It also makes things grow. The Sun, therefore, cooperates with water to provide food from the ground. Although the ancients apparently did not know this, plants produce oxygen, the essential element for metabolism in animals. So, earth, air, fire, and water are not so surprising as a surmised four-fold assembly of basic elements. They ARE basic elements. The pattern hasn’t changed, only the scientific definition of an element.

God is Force works well and conveniently with respect to the quest for an understanding of natural religion in modern and postmodern terms. Natural religion and the scientific method become a blend of sensing reality and analyzing reality. The major glitch in the definition appears in the fact that no one really knows or understands what Force, as such, is in the real world. We know it only by its effects.⁴²

Let’s go back to Newton’s laws of motion. He is the archetypal Moses of the modern scientific world. There is the Law of Inertia, and there is the Law of Force, and there is the Law of Static Equilibrium.⁴³ These laws constitute a type of Holy Trinity of Mechanics. In league with the ancient 12 theorems of geometry (note: 12), Newton’s Holy Trinity gives life to the abstract rules of geometry, a life which has evolved into what we know as mathematical physics today. They also evolved into the picture of the world most of us hold in tension in our own minds, indeed, in our souls, today. In this picture, the world wasn’t created by God: It is continually formed and reformed by the actions of Newton’s Trinity.

The most curious aspect of this picture that every modern individual holds in tension in the mind, even in their heart and soul, is that while the old theological substance assumptions of Western philosophy and faith have been jettisoned, the patterns which must obtain for reality to remain real also remain as necessary primal constructs of our thinking and being. The human psyche is constructed of, or patterned after, combinations of 3s, 4s, and 12s. These patterns will never go away. They can be recombined but never transmuted.⁴⁴

The fundamental patterns of the soul, then, can legitimately be characterized as archetypes, or patterns of qualitative behavior that are built into it. It doesn’t matter what you name them, but naming a pattern is much simpler than repeating its active description every time you want to discuss it.

The following handy thought-theorem is an interesting way to start the discussion. The theorem will correlate the basic Jungian archetypes with the fundamental forces of nature. Here’s a first draft of a possible theoretical correspondence between the archetypal structure of the psyche and the fundamental forces of the natural world:

The PERSONA corresponds to the WEAK FORCE, the force associated with decay.

The ANIMUS/ANIMA corresponds to the ELECTROMAGNETIC FORCE, normally referred to as electrical charge, both positive and negative.

The SHADOW corresponds to GRAVITY, the force that pulls you down or sets you on a curve.

The Self corresponds to the STRONG FORCE, the thing that binds the parts together in a whole.

An artificial correspondence such as this stands only as a conversation starter. As it stands, one could invent all sorts of mystical and gnostic systems out of it, but that isn’t our purpose here. Our purpose is to characterize a certain mathematical similarity between the actions, motions, and shapes of things in the subjective realm and the actions, motions, and shapes of things in the objective realm. Keeping in mind that the sharp distinction between the objective world and the subjective world is no longer linguistically apparent⁴⁵ these days, as even a cursory reading of the discoveries of psychology and physics will reveal.

The idea of constructs connecting our subjectivity to the objectivity of science is not new, but it isn’t old either. These constructs were once considered to exist only in the realm of fantasy or imagination, but the scientific inroads into the realm of sub-atomic reality have given them a new legitimacy. One must use one’s imagination to make any progress in the realm of mathematical physics. The necessary requirement is that one’s imagination be bounded by certain preliminary, primary, and preceding considerations.

The physicist, Henry Margenau, quoted earlier, proposes that "a rule of correspondence links what has here been called Nature to entities which we have vaguely termed concepts, ideas, reflective elements, and so forth … A particular tree or a particular electron is hardly a concept because of the generic implications of that word. And yet our rules lead to particular trees and particular electrons … to indicate that (the data of Nature) are not mere gleanings from the field of sensory perception, that they come into their own through what are felt to be creative processes in our experience rather than through passive contemplation; to emphasize their rational pliability and yet to distinguish them from shadowy concepts, (Margenau) previously called them constructs."⁴⁶The entire history of ideas in the West is consummated in this statement: It’s clear that what he is getting at is that not only is understanding a process, but declarations of what is real and what is not real are also results of an ongoing process. At any rate, I am applying such a process to the idea of setting up reliable constructs for the purpose of correlating the psychological or subjective world with the scientific or objective world.

Things we are looking at when we talk about sub-atomic reality are not ‘things’ that can be sensed by the five senses. They ARE real phenomena, but they are revealed only through an inner eye trained by the disciplines of mathematics, philosophy, and mechanics. Their reality is accessible to those of us who are not so thoroughly trained but only if we are willing and able to relinquish the hold that classical physics or mechanics has on our soul. We must be liberated FROM conceptuality to see that what we are looking at through the mind’s eye is, quite specifically and literally, what we are looking at.⁴⁷ The amateur will think that this means we create reality while we explore it, but that is not the case: What we are doing is leaving our old world of perception altogether and entering an unfamiliar world where our old rules of thinking and conceiving no longer apply. We are emigrants from Newtonland, and we don’t know what lies beyond the horizon of this new ocean.

The land to which we are immigrating is not, however, that imaginary land which certain contemporary theologians characterize as a land of being co-creators with God. For instance, one theologian states that "humans are created by God to be co-creators in the creation that God has purposefully brought into being.