Joseph Milne, Metaphysics and the Cosmic Order (London: Temenos Academy,
2008), ISBN: 978-0-9551934-3-9 (pbk), 74pp. £8.50.

This is a small book that packs great spiritual punch. It is a remarkable and innovative updating of an essentially Neoplatonist vision for the contemporary world. Some, perhaps even Milne, might quarrel with the label ‘Neoplatonist’ here, but it is the nearest comprehensive term that might indicate for the reader the tradition and sensibility within which Milne is such an original thinker. He is a Fellow of the Temenos Academy, and the book is formed around a set of Temenos lectures. Given that HRH Prince Charles is a patron of the Temenos Academy it comes as no surprise to find a forward by him to the book. What may surprise some is the acuity of the Prince’s thought in summarising the contribution that Milne makes in this set of essays, which starts by dividing human knowledge – or knowing – into three forms: the Religious, the Philosophical and the Empirical.

Milne starts by asserting that a distinguishing human impulse is to understand the nature of the cosmos. This impulse is clear in ancient Greece, in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but he is concerned that with the rise of modern science – the Empirical – that older ways of knowing the cosmos have been lost. All ways of knowing have been conflated into the Empirical, and so, for example religious creation stories now appear unconvincing against scientific accounts of origin. Milne exposes this with elegant simplicity. To pit different religions against each other, or attempt grand syntheses is just as mistaken: we cannot reconcile different symbol systems. Religion has to work by symbols, and has nothing to do with scientific empiricism. Milne puts this beautifully:

Origins in the biblical or religious sense…means the immediate ontological presence of the cosmos in which human consciousness finds itself called to make response. This has nothing to do with the chronological time of science. … Origin in this sense is always present.

Whatever symbols a religion deploys to create an image of origins, they have nothing to do with time. For Milne the origin is present in the moment, moreover it is available and must be sought.

While few non-scientists grasp science as well as Milne does, his book is not about science, but an attempt to recover a realm of thought that was disrupted by Enlightenment thinkers. He focuses initially on Kant, whose scepticism about the possibility of knowing ended the previous conception of man’s place in the cosmos. Milne says: ‘At a single stroke, human nature is alienated from the cosmos.’ This leads to a change from a ‘participation in the being of things to the mastery of the will over things.’

For the contemporary mind it might be incomprehensible that the ‘mastery of the will over things’ represents a bad move. Who wants to give up the washing machine, the computer, leisure and travel, contraception, the hip replacement? Milne is not an Amish however, who wants to freeze the scientific/technological revolution at an arbitrary point in history, rather he is simply pointing out that beyond the realm of scientific thought there is a lost discourse: that of participation in the universe, understood in the older language of ‘cosmos’. It is a sense of totality, present in the engagement with every part. Empirical science cannot know this – despite the New Age desire for a ‘holistic’ science – because it operates only on the fragment divorced from the whole. Milne understands the revolution of thought began with Kant as a shift from ontology (the participation in being) to volition (the domination of will over things), which frames not just science but religion since that time. Instead of participating in the being of ‘God’ the central issue became that of the will of man in relation to the will of ‘God’, or in other terms, religion became centred on morality. As Milne puts it: ‘God ceases to be the life of things and becomes the Lawmaker’. Indeed it is this very vision of ‘God’ that then fell into disfavour as the humanist tradition of the West came to understand that man made laws, not ‘God’, and led even religiously-minded thinkers like Feuerbach to say that man made ‘God’ and not the other way round.

But how are we to understand the term ‘God’ in Milne’s vision? He says: ‘Clearly we cannot simply return to a previous age or merely take up ideas that cannot be located in the spirit of our age.’ But is not ‘God’ precisely an idea that cannot be located in our age? This is where we need to understand Milne’s context for the development of his ideas as Neoplatonist, broadly speaking. This is both heretical – in that it is Greek-leaning in its religiosity – and orthodox, because of the use of the ‘God’-term. Milne is clear that he regards his ideas as universal, but framed by and for the Western tradition. Hence he does not make concessions to, for example, Buddhism, where the ‘God’-language has no purchase.

Milne is careful to construct his core argument without reference to ‘God’ however. Having made a general introduction to his theme he sets out his stall with four propositions:

1. mind or consciousness is already connected with everything
2. all things are in communion with each other
3. all things disclose their nature as an act of being
4. man is called to bear witness to the truth of things.

Milne uses the term ‘thing’ or ‘things’ in a way that the older term ‘creature’ might have been used, i.e. that which is part of creation, a term designed to remind one of the Creator. In Taoism, it is the ‘thousand and one things’, in other discourse it would be the ‘manifest’. Hence it includes both so-called inanimate objects such as rocks and computers, as well as animals and humans, and potentially, disembodied beings (though Milne does not deal with the latter).

Given Milne’s lineage of thought however, his contribution to it and its possible siting within a world in thrall to science, is of the highest significance. It is at the same time an intense personal vision expressed in a compressed though rhapsodical diction, a flow of thought that must have its roots not just in erudition and a profound learning, but also in profound personal experience. For example, it is joyously put, that ‘the human act of knowing has meaning for the things known’ (Milne’s italics). It is also radical: nothing in a science training could ever hint at this, and neither could Kant possibly have discovered such a truth. For either a philosopher or a scientist to now understand that their act of knowing fructifies not just themselves and the library shelves, but the thing under observation, would be a revelation. Or would it be an anachronism?

This is the real question that such a book poses. It eschews conventional theology, so it won’t engage with that considerable constituency. It eschews the New Age by resolutely denying their beloved ‘physics-proves-mysticism’ thesis. It eschews the Romantic because it gives no fuel to self-absorption, not, unless, one understands ‘self’ to be coterminous with the cosmos. Instead Milne draws on a wisdom of the past, but the recent trajectory of our entire collective experience has been to conceive of self as separate. How could the stars or a nematode worm or a flint find meaning in the human act of knowing them? This assumes, as Milne says that ‘all things are in communion with each other’.

Milne asks us to accept that there are eternal truths, from which perspective thinkers from the 5th century BC or 18th century AD should not be alien to us in the 21st century. The question he is acutely aware of is how these truths uncovered by such thinkers might express themselves in the contemporary context. Let us return to what he calls the reciprocity between ‘knowing’ and ‘being known’, a notion he concedes is foreign to contemporary epistemology. The act of knowing for Milne is not conceived of as the disinterested and aloof gaze down a microscope at animalcules, for example. It is a ‘bearing witness to the truth of things’, and, if we re-read the Enlightenment thinkers and scientists (including Leeuwenhoek) we find in them a passion that is properly illuminated by Milne’s insight. He says ‘… every human endeavour confers something upon the cosmos. This is a property of every acknowledging, of every naming, and the very essence of the moral action.’ Hence not only staring down a microscope at the cutting edge of human knowledge, but every human action, if moral, ‘confers’ something to the universe.

It would be pointless to attempt a further detailed account of Milne’s exposition: it is densely written – though based on his lectures – and simply beautiful. It surprises at every turn, even if one is familiar with the tradition out of which he writes: his turn of phrase and clarity of image stays in the mind. This is a spiritual masterpiece.