The Left-Brained Reformers and their Evangelical Heirs

and another year older

The Left-Brained Reformers and their Evangelical Heirs

Iain McGilchrist’s analysis of the Reformation is fascinating. It is essentially a two-step process as far as he is concerned:

1. ‘The decline of metaphoric understanding of ceremony and ritual into the inauthentic repetition of empty procedures in the Middle Ages.’ (McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p.314)

This, as far as McGilchrist is concerned, was the legitimate concern of the Reformation: the loss of the interior sense of ritual and sacramental worship, which included the loss of metaphoric understanding and the overliteralisation of certain beliefs and practices. Chief among these would be the emphasis of the presence of Christ in the elements at the Mass. McGilchrist argues that an unhelpful either-or had grown up by the sixteenth century: either Christ is present in the elements in a complete sense or Christ is not present in them at all. In that dichotomy, no room is left for the presence of Christ to be present in a metaphorical sense.

I actually think McGilchrist’s understanding of the Eucharistic theology of the time is quite simplistic and actually not accurate. (It’s always possible I’ve read him wrongly.) It seems to me that every major branch of the Church, both Roman and Protestant, around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believed Christ was present in the Mass in some sense, but it was just a question of where. This was certainly what Richard Hooker wrote in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

Anyway, the point is that Luther and the Reformers were acting in reaction to that overliteralisation and emptying out the inner meaning of these practices and beliefs. This was largely because of their overliteralisation and therefore an emphasis on empty repetition developed allied to the idea of a kind of technical conveyance of grace.

2. ‘(This) prompted, not a revitalisation of metaphoric understanding, but an outright rejection of it (in the Reformation).’ (Ibid.)

Put simply, the Reformers reacted against the divorce of the inner world of the spirit and the outer world of ritual in the Late Middle Ages not by trying to bring them together again but by the complete rejection of the outer world of ritual. McGilchrist argues that this was not Luther’s intention but was what his followers took his critique to mean: ‘the outer world was itself empty, and that therefore the only authenticity lay in the inner world alone’ (Ibid., p.315)

Some summary quotations which hopefully simplify this:

What I wish to emphasise is the transition, within the Reformation, from what are initially concerns of the right hemisphere to those of the left hemisphere; how a call for authenticity, and a reaction against the undoubtedly empty and corrupt nature of some practices of the mediaeval Roman Catholic Church, an attempt therefore to return from a form of re-presentation to the true presence of religious feeling, turned rapidly into a further entrenchment of inauthenticity.

Ibid., p.321

He admits that there are different types of Reformation (I would want to argue strongly that the English one was far more balanced than various types of Continental madness) but says that they share certain left-hemisphere style features in common:

These include the preference for what is clear and certain over what is ambiguous or undecided; the preference for what is single, fixed, static and systematised, over what is multiple, fluid, moving and contingent; the emphasis on the word over the image, on literal meaning in language over metaphorical meaning, and the tendency for language to refer to other written texts or explicit meanings, rather than, though the cracks in language, if one can put it that way, to something Other beyond; the tendency towards abstraction, coupled with a downgrading of the realm of the physical; a concern with re-presentation rather than with presentation; in its more Puritanical elements, an attack on music; the deliberate attempt to do away with the past and the contextually modulated, implicit wisdom of a tradition, replacing it with a new rational, explicit, but fundamentally secular, order; and an attack on the sacred that was vehement in the extreme, and involved repeated and violent acts of desecration.

Ibid., p.323

The reason that I find this particularly interesting is due to its relevance today. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the evangelical world in which I was heavily involved for many years and which still touches my life since I have lots of friends who are evangelicals.

Without wishing to sound insulting, I’ve often considered the idea that the evangelical mindset often has a sort of blinkered, cult-like quality. Even when I was part of it there were aspects of this that put me off, even as others appealed to me. The bits that appealed to me were around the feeling of certainty of being right about things and the correlate sense of superiority I felt towards other types of Christians who, as far as my people were concerned, were pretty much not even real Christians at all. But the bits that didn’t appeal to me concerned the take of those around me on realms of art, aesthetics, music, and the intellect. I didn’t like the anti-high culture aspect of it, nor its general anti-intellectual quality. I also didn’t like the downgrading of the physical through a de-emphasis on sacred spaces (even though it has to be said that the movement I was part of was obsessed with purchasing very expensive buildings which the churches involved often couldn’t afford) and an indifference to the Sacraments and an antipathy to any understanding of them as anything other than memorialist ordinances.

McGilchrist helps me to understand that a lot of this is because modern-day evangelicals are the inheritors of the left-hemispheric approach of the Continental Reformers. Points of commonality that I see in his description and my experience would be:

• A sense of certainty over the plain meaning of Scripture and one’s ability as an individual to interpret it perfectly.

• A suspicion of religious images, statuary, and symbolism in contrast to an absolute emphasis upon the Bible as the source of all religious knowledge.

• The downgrading of the physical in terms of sacred spaces, relics, pilgrimage, and most significantly the Sacraments, particularly the Holy Eucharist.

• The rejection of tradition as spiritual baggage that should be jettisoned and the suspicion of anybody who would refer to as an authority.

• As a result of all this, a narrow dogmatism that excludes other sources of knowledge as potential valuable, which tends towards a more general sense of anti-intellectualism.

The problem that many people of this mindset have is that they are convinced that their worldview is the only one that can be correct because it is plainly taught in Scripture. It is very difficult to break through this barrier because, if you try, you immediately become an object of suspicion since you are trying to lead people away from God and the plain truth of the Bible.

But McGilchrist shows us why this belief is so powerful and, indeed, so misguided: it is due to an overemphasis on the left hemisphere of the brain, which tends towards dogmatism, control, and attention to linguistic detail, particularly that embedded in texts. I’m not sure if this helps anyone, but it helps me to understand better.