Neuroscience, Sophiology, and the Quest for Wholeness
In his work The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist summarizes decades of research by arguing that the Western world is a product of a pathological imbalance in the hemispheres of the brain. This pathology is at once the source of the West’s technological power and mastery over the created world and the fountainhead of untold misery in the form of nihilism, depression, relational breakdown, and anxiety, among other things. The future of humanity, he argues, is in no small part dependent on our ability to recover a healthy balance between the hemispheres of the brain, for we are in danger of losing all that makes us human.
McGilchrist’s thesis is founded upon the fact the left and right hemispheres of the brain represent two ways of seeing and interacting with the world. Contrary to the notion that the right brain is the home of creativity and emotion while the left brain is home to logic and reason, McGilchrist discovered that both sides of the brain are involved in these activities. What is unique about them, he argues, is found not in what they do, but in how they do it. The hemispheres of the brain represent two distinct ways of encountering and seeing the world.
The left hemisphere of the brain is the seat of reductionist, utilitarian functionality. It is narrow, limited, and focused. It seeks to sever objects from their context and to reduce reality to comprehensible and graspable parts. And, indeed, nearly all scientists now agree that the world we experience is not the real world, but a simplified representation of it. Studies of animal sensation have discovered entire spectrums of color, sound, and smell that are beyond our capability to detect. The left brain is also competitive and aggressive, focusing on all that is related to bare survival.
The left brain prioritizes quantity over quality. It is the left brain that enabled human beings to fabricate tools and begin to employ them. It is what allows us to make machines that can traverse great distances rapidly, or build computers to perform tasks in a fraction of the time of our own capabilities. In art, the left brain’s way of seeing is best represented by cubists like Picasso. It’s way of seeing is raw, disjointed, fragmented—but highly effective at accomplishing tasks.
The right brain, on the other hand, is concerned nearly exclusively with the whole, with the relationships between things. It consists of broad attention, open and aware of its surroundings. It smooths reality and makes it flow into our consciousness in a connected whole. It prioritizes quality over quantity. It is the seat of intuition and empathy; of meaning and understanding. It is concerned with all that pertains to life. The right hemisphere detects patterns and perceives categories; it sees similarities and unites the variegated fragments of reality into a coherent whole.
The right hemisphere is also connected to emotional expression and relational receptivity, enabling us to see and perceive personhood in other beings. It is also deeply connected to our sense of embodiedness. McGilchrist relates that those who have suffered right hemisphere strokes lose their connection to entire parts of their bodies. Instead of detecting an arm, they detect nothing. The connection of the psyche to the body, then, runs through the right hemisphere. Artistically, the way of seeing the world of the right brain is best typified by the swirling colors of Van Gogh’s starry night or the blurred outlines of the Impressionists.
Why does all this matter? Who cares how we attend to the world, whether it be reductionist or relational? Echoing Simone Weil and myriad other phenomenologists on the power of attention, McGilchrist explains:
Attention is not just another “function” alongside other cognitive functions. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to.... Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world.
We live, then, in a participatory universe. Contrary to the mythical “neutral observer” of modern science, we can never not participate in the world. What we see, the world we encounter, is indelibly linked to our intentionality. The kinds of attention we cultivate shape how the world responds to us. How we attend to the world shapes the kind world that is created.
Considering the Western world’s exploitative utilization of the natural world typified by big agriculture and the unleashing of atomic power, the objectifying consumption of persons perpetrated by pornography and abortion, and the near total loss of meaning engendered by the desecration of the sacred seen in mass media and consumerist meccas like WalMart, it is clear that we have been captivated by the power of the left brain’s way of seeing.
Indeed, this is exactly what McGilchrist persuasively argues throughout the 462 pages of The Master and His Emissary, citing, among other things, brain scans that show that the size of the left hemisphere of the brain is increasing with time. As a result we find ourselves increasingly alienated from ourselves, our bodies, other persons, and indeed, the whole cosmos. Our reality is fragmented, and we find ourselves desperately longing for wholeness.
Duality, Unity, and Reality
The relationship between these two hemispheres of the brain is nothing entirely new. It is simply one more way of articulating what philosophers and sages have known since antiquity: the world exists of dualities, of polarities that must be balanced and fruitfully united in a creative marriage. In this marriage of opposites lies the wholeness, and holiness, of the human person, and indeed the life of the cosmos.
The brain’s hemispheric duality corresponds uncannily to the dichotomy between order and chaos, anima and animus, or the Aether and Chaos of the ancient Greeks. These poles of existence have traditionally been represented as Masculine and Feminine.
The Masculine principle represents stability and utility, the active, the known and the predictable. The Feminine principle represents possibility and creativity, the passive, the new and unknown. Masculine is the Logos, the structuring and ordering principle of all things. Feminine is the Hebrew ruah, the maternal spirit of God hovering over the chaos of the unformed world in Genesis. These are two poles of existence whose marriage brings forth the universe as we know it.
Fr. Bede Griffiths, the Benedictine monk and mystic who spent the latter part of his life living in a Christian ashram in India, spoke of these constituent principles of reality:
There is the physical aspect of matter (prakriti), the feminine principle, from which everything evolves, and consciousness (purusha) the masculine principle of reason and order in the universe. These correspond to the Yin and Yang of Chinese tradition and the matter and form of Aristotle...In the Vedic tradition the two principles were conceived as heaven and earth, and the whole creation came into being through their marriage.
These two principles, which are to be found in all ancient philosophy, are no less fundamental in Christian doctrine. St Thomas Aquinas, who built up his system of philosophy on the basis of Aristotle, regarded the “form” and the “matter” of Aristotle as the basic principles of nature. Matter according to this philosophy is pure ‘potentiality,” form is the principle of actuality.... Matter as we know it is a combination of form and matter, or of act and potency.
The world that we experience, then, is quite literally born of the conjunction of opposites: the union of potentiality, or Feminine chaos, and actuality, or Masculine order.
But in the Western world, we have forgotten this. We have lost sight of this polarity and necessary marriage of opposites that underlies reality. Dominated by the mascline-left brained way of seeing, we have objectified the world and decontextualized it, reducing it into so many fragmented parts. We have made the world a lifeless and flattened caricature of a rich and textured whole. A world that was once a community of beings has been reduced to an impersonal repository of “natural resources” to be extracted and exploited to achieve desires manipulated by a relentless torrent of advertising.
The Masculine principle of mastery and control at the expense of love, goodness, beauty, relationship, meaning, and morality has all but consumed us, and the results have been devastating. Untold ecological destruction, the pornification and commoditization of human beings, the loss of all natural affection between parents and children—these are but a few sacrifices made on the altar of left-brained consumeristic utilitarianism.
Sophiology and the Recovery of Wholeness
How can the West begin to heal its pathological dominance of the left hemisphere’s way of seeing? How can we begin to transcend our reductionist, exploitative, materialistic thinking? How can we learn new ways of attending? Where then, lies our hope?
Simply, we must seek reintegration and wholeness. We must find again intuition, connectedness, relationship, and meaning. We must rediscover all that is common to life and not mere mechanism. In neurological terms, we must restore the right hemisphere of the brain’s way of seeing and bring our way of encountering the world back into balance.
Throughout his writings, Fr. Bede Griffiths expresses the urgency of this task:
In the West today, the masculine aspect, the rational, active, aggressive power of the mind, is dominant, while in the East the feminine aspect, the intuitive, passive, sympathetic power of the mind, is dominant. The future of the world depends on the “marriage” of these two minds, the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the intuitive, the active and the passive.
McGilchrist agrees. Summarizing decades of research, he articulates a possible path towards wholeness:
If the left hemisphere vision predominates, its world becomes denatured. Then the left hemisphere senses that something is wrong, something lacking—nothing less than life, in fact. It tries to make its productions live again by appealing to what it sees as the attributes of a living thing: novelty, excitement, stimulation. It is the faculty of imagination, however, which comes into being between the two hemispheres, which enables us to take things back from the world of the left hemisphere and make them live again in the right. It is in this way, not by meretricious novelty, that things are made truly new once again.
Imagination, then, is one way to achieve reintegration. Imagination is nothing other than the union of the creative power of the human being with the actuality of the world. The imaginative mind, at once receptive and creative, communes with what is real, feeds on it, and synthesizing it with the unseen ideal, creates that which does not yet exist. One could even say that the imaginal realm is the feminine womb where the union of Aristotle’s matter and form are united and a new world is conceived. It is the birthplace of a new world.
Imagination could also be seen as the ajna chakra of Hindu metaphysics, the third eye or seat of intuitive, holistic seeing. Interestingly, the ajna chakra has in recent times been associated with the pineal gland, seated immediately between both hemispheres of the brain, the uniting link between them.
The path to healing, to wholeness, then, is clear. It is nothing less than a reintegrated form of consciousness, a holistic way of seeing that “marries” the masculine and the feminine, the left-brain and the right brain. Dominated by the masculine, the West must rediscover the feminine and all that it represents. When we begin to do so, we realize that the feminine is not just an abstract principle, but a person. She has a name and a face.
And who is this eternal feminine? None other than Sancta Sophia, the Holy Wisdom of God, after whom Solomon and all the wise men of the ancient world thirsted. Who she is a mystery that can only be fully learned and proven by experience, but within her are the secrets of life. “She is a breath of the power of God,” Solomon tells us, “pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; so nothing impure can find its way into her. For she is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God's active power, and image of his goodness” (Wis. 7:26).
To heal, then, the pathology afflicting us, we must find again the Divine Feminine, Holy Wisdom. We must search relentlessly for holy Sophia, for she will lead us to the water of life. She will teach us to see again the world not merely as an object, but as a subject, filled not with dead matter, but vivified and permeated with the presence and the glory of the Lord. And the task of finding her could not be more urgent. For in the words of Sophia herself, “Whoever finds me finds life...But he who fails to find me harms himself; all who hate me love death” (Prov. 8:35-26). Many powerful forces, both seen and unseen, would dissuade us from the path of Wisdom. Death and life are placed before us. We must choose.
Discovering Sophia is not the work of an instant. She tests and proves all those who seek after her. But finding her is finding the way of eternal Life, for ourselves and the whole world. What will occur when we find this Holy Sophia, this eternal feminine? Once again, Fr. Bede Griffiths describes the effects of reintegration:
The rational mind enters into communion with the intuitive mind, and humankind and nature are “married.” The male ceases to dominate the female or to be seduced by her, and a marriage of equals takes place. Both the man and the woman are made whole by marriage. The objective world is no longer an enemy to be subdued but a partner in marriage. There is a saying in one of the apocryphal Gospels: “When will the kingdom of God come?” And the answer is given: “When the two shall be one, when that which is without is as that which is within, and the male and the female shall be one.” This is the return to Paradise, the reversal of the effects of the fall.
The Western world is on a perilous trajectory. Dominated as it is by the left-brain, masculine principle, it finds itself bound in an endless cycle of warfare, fierce competition, ecological destruction, reductionist scientism, and toxic dehumanization. But there is a way out. Reason must be wedded to intuition, aggression must be tempered by compassion, competition must become cooperation, and scientific discovery must be harmonized with reverence and love. For when the Man and the Woman, the Male and the Female, Adam and Eve are united, then will come the fruitful and joyous marriage feast of eternity.