Michael Horton Finds Ancient Origins for New Age Spirituality

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Michael Horton
Platonists could say very easily in the beginning, was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, what they couldn’t say is And the Word became flesh. I think we don’t realize what a huge turning point that is in history. I

Collin Hansen
We talk a lot on this podcast about secularism and the post Christendom West. But secularism does not necessarily mean that people have become less spiritual. In fact, increasing numbers across the West describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. They have left religion, usually Christianity, in favor of self defined, individualistic spirituality. Now this trend may appear to be new, but Michael Horton aims to unveil its ancient pedigree in his new book, shaman and sage, the roots of spiritual but not religious in antiquity, a book published by erdmans Horton. Is the J Gresham machen professor of systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster seminary, California. In short, Mike wants us to see that what we call New Age spirituality wasn’t invented by the flower power generation the 1960s but goes all the way back in western civilization. Christian theism may be out by many, but it’s not being replaced so much by Atheism and agnosticism, but the occult. Michael Horton joins me now to explain. Welcome. Mike,

Michael Horton
hey, Colin, I wish that I had summarized the book that succinctly. I wouldn’t have had all those pages.

Collin Hansen
Hope to boil that down in this interview. It is a stimulating but it is a dense it is a dense read. You’re dealing with some very complicated and unfamiliar, I think, to many listeners and viewers here, certainly unfamiliar to me, and I you’ve done so many different things throughout a long and illustrious career. How long has this particular project been in the works for you? Yeah,

Michael Horton
it really has been percolating for for the last 35 years. I it was when I was doing my PhD studies. I should have been paying attention to my PhD studies. I was going to other lectures by professors on philosophy of religion and history of religions, myth, scholars of myth, and just kind of getting into this because I was trying to understand what was already, then, a phenomenon of spiritual, but not religious people. Didn’t call it that yet, but it was, it was that phenomenon. You know, the people you meet on the plane, you probably people, you maybe sit around the table with at dinner. It’s increasingly the outlook of many people. So I wanted to understand that phenomenon. And there was a professor who was especially intriguing to me at the time, he was a professor at a at an Evangelical Theological College, and was an evangelical theologian and and then he became, well, not so at Oxford. He was one of the most popular professors, and his lectures were packed with students who were eager to hear his his next sentence, and that his whole The whole purpose of those lectures was showing that The mystical, the mystical branches of the world’s religions, all sort of in a Venn diagram, all meet in the middle, and it’s at their mystical core that religions are one. Now we’ve heard that a million times. He did it in a very erudite way, and that really, I think, got me going, because that in a in a an academic fashion, is what I’ve heard so much on on the street.

Collin Hansen
So this has been through all the other work in systematic theology and elsewhere, this has just been percolating in the back for you. Yes,

Michael Horton
yeah, I’ve, I have wasted all of my sabbaticals on this project, so I was always doing it in between the other projects. But yeah, and there’s late lately I just full board. This has been my focus for the last 10 years and

Collin Hansen
two more volumes to come. Is that right? Right? Okay, yep, yeah. So I mentioned earlier, I don’t think a lot of the. The listeners, the viewers here are going to be familiar with the sources that you cover. I think maybe this is the best way to ask the question, Mike, what is the main argument you’re seeking to push back against? What’s the counter argument?

Michael Horton
Well, I guess the main, the main one is that a lot of times, I think even as Christians, we may assume, what secularists, the narrative that secularists assume this march of history view that basically that once upon a time, we were pagan, then we were Christian. Now we are losing our religion and turning to science and atheism and agnosticism are are on the march, but that’s not what we’re seeing. First of all, Christianity has always sort of been built on top of a pagan soil, and every now and again that native paganism of the West erupts. I know soil doesn’t usually erupt. That’s a gotta change my metaphor. Got it? Yeah. And so that’s I wanted to trace those eruptions. I want to look back at those eruptions, and the more I did, the more I discovered that we’re really what we’re encountering today with a spiritual, not religious phenomenon. It is really a recurring phenomenon. It’s like Mark Twain said, History doesn’t exactly repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme. And there, I want to look at the rhymes and the particularly this idea of the Divine Self. You know you, you can’t you can’t look outside of yourself. You have to look inside yourself, for your authority, for your for your beliefs, for your practices. I just follow that little light within, and that’s a spark of divinity. So I trace the career of the Divine Self. And as I’ve done that, I’ve I’ve found, wow, even scientists are are fairly mystical. Atheism and agnosticism are not there’s no upsurge when people leave evangelical Protestant churches. It’s not that they are suddenly becoming members of the Humanist Association. They are becoming even humanists in America. As Harold Bloom said, even humanists in America are Gnostics. So that’s where that’s where people go. It’s like GK Chesterton said, when people stop believing in the the biblical god, it’s not that they don’t believe in anything, but they believe in anything and everything.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, right now, I assume the answers you’ve already given here are related to this question. You say that you don’t really believe in modernity or post modernity at all. Highlight that point a little bit more for us.

Michael Horton
Sure. I’m not it. I don’t take great pains to defend this point, but I’m really impressed with the the notion that Josephson storm has argued that, you know, we we only have modernity and post modernity if we accept this march of history view. And so, you know, now we’re now, we’re going to another age, and even the the periodization of three ages, this, that, and then another ancient, medieval, modern, all of these, these sort of tendencies to break history down into three ages really has its roots in one of the guys who keeps popping up throughout this project, wakima fior, spelled like Joachim, and he was a 12th century mystic who came up with this idea that there are three ages, the age of the Father, which is law, the age of the Son, which is grace, and then the age of the Spirit that will make the New Covenant as obsolete as the old And when that happens, there won’t be any church, there won’t be any preaching, no sacraments, no ministers, and there won’t be any state. Not only will there not be a visible church, there won’t be a state, everyone will finally live in a socialist utopia. A Christian monastery, the whole world will become a monastery. And everyone will know God immediately and directly, their own inner light. They will not have to rely on someone or something outside of them, including scripture that was very popular. I mean, it was a it was his prophecies were widely embraced. You know, people like Christopher Columbus, he thought his whole mission, what saw his whole mission in the light of fulfilling, walking with furious prophecies. John Cotton, Puritan, New England leader. This was just uh, Jonathan Edwards and and George Whitfield. So this was pervasive across Roman Catholic and Protestant lines, and that that eschatology fit really well with this history of the Divine Self, because it meant in that third age, at last, we’re going to attain enlightenment. At last we’re going to we’re no longer going to need tutors. We’re not going to it’s blessings the education of the human race. In fact, GE Lessing begins his book The Education of the human race by referring to wake Fiore and his followers and saying they were, they were right about the thesis, but wrong about the dating. We hadn’t come along yet. This

Collin Hansen
almost sounds like try theism, in some sense, it

Michael Horton
was judged as tri theistic by the fourth letter in council. Interesting. Okay, yeah, well,

Collin Hansen
it’s doing some more clarification here. I’m going to make a lot of progress already here. Mike, what’s the Axial Age?

Michael Horton
Yeah, it’s interesting there. So there are some people. Well, first of all, what is it? It’s In short, the sixth century, before Christ was a really catalytic century, because you have the rise of Hinduism as we know it, you have the rise of Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, and at this time, you have the the Hebrew prophets, warning against superstition and and idolatry. It also happens to coincide with the rise of the augmented Empire, the Persian Empire, stretching from India all the way to Eastern Europe, and from what’s now Ukraine all the way down to Egypt. So this was just a massive Empire, and it’s within the boundaries of that empire that you have the rise of these more philosophical religions. So religion used to be about feeding the Gods care, and feeding of the gods, making sure that you, you know, leave milk and cookies out for the gods so that everything will go well with you, sort of health, wealth and happiness. And people didn’t think of themselves as individuals. They did these public, political rights to keep the city safe so the gods would keep them safe. Now you have more philosophical religions. And instead of polytheism, you you know many gods, it starts becoming more amorphic. You have the one. You have the now this isn’t monotheism. It is not a personal God. It’s it’s the all the one and all that we’re all a part of. We emanate from this great all Brahman. All is Brahman. Brahman is all. And you find across the east and the west many similar movements and trends. And in the West, it’s called Orphism, and so now all of these ideas are contested, and I I explore the upsides and downsides of using these terms, but pretty much the scholarship, there is a consensus that that in the sixth century BC, some really big stuff happened, and there were some general trends, especially so this Orphism is the idea that the the divine part of us, our soul is trapped in a body, and because we’re paying the penalty for crimes we’ve committed in past lives. So you have the doctrine of reincarnation, and we’re going to go through these reincarnations till we get it right, karma and all that. There are Western versions of it. Plato has it all over eight. And and Plato himself refers to Orphic tradition. He relies on it as if it were scripture. And so in this first volume, I really explore what this Orphic phenomenon is, how deep it goes. And you know, it’s, it’s really still the philosophy on the street Colin, it’s still pretty much what people, you know, deep down, I have this divine spark. That’s what

Collin Hansen
I was just going to ask Mike. So maybe are there other examples of from these philosophical religions, certain dogmas, practices, rituals, that go back more than 2500, years, but we think are new?

Michael Horton
Yes, well, part of it is they weren’t. They weren’t as ritualistic as the religions they grew out of. They for them, it was much more. You know, theology became philosophy, ritual became contemplation, meditation. There were techniques and steps for transcending the body and transcending the visible world. It all became much more philosophical, less ritualistic. And there are, yeah, there are plenty of examples of how this played out. I think one of the, the large, significant ways it played out, as I said, was Plato. Plato says, Well, you know, our, our goal in life is to flee the body as soon as we can. You know what I’m talking about, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. That’s, that’s what the sacred writings say. This the the hyrus logos, sacred writings, which I mean when he, when he quotes them, sometimes he even says the orphics. So it’s not making this up. It’s, it’s actually in there. Ancients used to call what we call ancient Greek philosophy, Orphic mystagoji, or Orphic mysteries.

Collin Hansen
Well, let’s take a bit of a turn here. And this is there’s going to be a big question, but because the others work. Yeah, that’s a good point. Oh, my goodness. But this one, it relates a lot to the work that that I do. And it was a question just popped up as I’m engaging with your work, how much credit does Christianity deserve for inventing the West versus religious and philosophical developments that predate the incarnation of Christ. I think you can see how this follows from some of the arguments that you’re making. I don’t think in your book you engage with Joseph Henrik at Harvard as an example here in human evolutionary biology, but he would seem to posit more discontinuity between the pre and post Christian Western civilization. How do your arguments relate?

Michael Horton
Right? I’m not. This is not general, you know, a history of Christianity. It’s, it’s really a history of of Christianity’s other, yeah, right, the Christianity’s dancing partner throughout the ages. And so it’s, I’m not really looking as much at the history of Christianity, interestingly enough, that that’s what I’m more interested in. So if I, if I did look at that, I would, I would want to see more connections than I assume in this in this project. I think that you know that basically this is, this comes back to the question of, what is the relationship of of Jerusalem and Athens? What is the relationship of the church to the academy, that famous question that Tertullian asked, he answered by saying, aren’t all the heresies from the philosophers? And he especially singled out Plato, but we’ve also, we’ve also formulated our doctrines, our Christian doctrines, with philosophical terminology. And so we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Philosophy is an important handmade to to theology. And so what, what happens periodically throughout history, though, is that the more philosophical sects within Islam, Christianity and Judaism, sort of meet together at the Hilton and come up with, you know, all kinds of philosophic. Mysteries that they want to solve, and what gets revived is usually Neoplatonism, you know, the this Orphic, sort of almost Gnostic outlook, and they’re saying, well, it’s this is just a higher doctrine. Sure, we are Muslims or we’re Jews or we’re Christians, but there is a higher doctrine at this higher point, sort of like a pyramid. We are all united. You get the diversity down at the bottom, diversity over different historical claims and rituals and so forth. But at the top, the philosophical peak, we really, we really agree. And what are the doctrines always at the top? They’re always these, these fundamental Orphic doctrines. And so I think one of the goals of this project is to make Orphism actually something that we see, because usually we assume it so much that we don’t even talk about it. It’s not even a on our radar because it’s in our blood. But to take it out, look at it, unpack it, and examine the ways in which maybe our own thinking is shaped by this outlook, and then to see that, yeah, there are. There are all sorts of places where Christianity has interacted with, engaged with, flown, flowed in and out of philosophical thought. That’s just, you know, living in your culture, but that’s different from the the takeover by this philosophical religion that we see periodically through history. The Renaissance is a good example. You know, facino and Pico della Mirandola they, they the founders of the Italian Renaissance, explicitly revived by name, this Orphic religion and even the orphic rights. Ficino was a priest. So that was a problem, but you could, evidently put Christianity and and even Orphic ritual practice together the way many people do today. See even ordained clergy sometimes play with a Ouija board at night. Well,

Collin Hansen
now I’m going to ask a question that’s probably not fair, because God’s providence works in inscrutable ways, and the Lord Jesus Christ was incarnate at a specific place in a specific time according to the plan throughout all the ages. But would it make a difference if Christ had come pre Orphic? What would Christian? Would Christianity look really different if that had been in the case, at least in how it was practiced and conceived at those philosophical levels subsequently? Or is that not a question that’s appropriate?

Michael Horton
Yeah, no. I mean, I think it’s a great question. I don’t know that I have any answer to that, but I do think that it matters that Jesus, when Jesus was obviously, you know, as you say, God’s providence is intentional at a time when it actually not when it would resonate with the world, but when it would clash the most with the world’s way of thinking. You know, a Platonist could say very easily, in the beginning, was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, they could say that that’s the logos, that’s the that’s the the the demiurgic intellect, but the one, the source of everything, is, is God. And so the the Demiurge is, is divine, but it below God. But they could at least say that that sentence, understanding it in their own way. What they couldn’t say is And the Word became flesh, right? And that’s what Augustine said. You know, Augustine said he he poured over the writings of the Platonists, but he says one thing about the Platonist books, I never found was the saying And the Word became flesh. That’s that, I think we don’t realize what a huge turning point that is in history. Well, it gives birth, really, a lot of people have argued to the whole. Idea of history with promise and fulfillment, instead of the cyclical view of history that you get in philosophical religions. So I think it’s it, and also, also it’s Jewish. It’s the fulfillment of the promises made to Israel because, of

Collin Hansen
course, the phrase there is that he tabernacled among us. Yeah, right,

Michael Horton
exactly, exactly. So, yeah. And it’s interesting, you know, Paul uses stoic phrases in Him, all things hold together. In Christ, all things hold together. But he just uses that language for something that No self respecting stoic would ever say. And I just find that that really interesting.

Collin Hansen
Yeah. Well, let’s go a different angle here. Back in 2017 you and I did a book together on Charles Taylor. You wrote an essay that pushed back on his critique of the Reformation. For that book, our secular age, 10 years of reading and applying Charles Taylor, how does shaman and sage advance or challenge his thesis of secularism? I have a feeling how you’re going to answer. I’ve seen you write elsewhere. Quote, we have always been enchanted, most of all when we hear laments of disenchantment. So I suspect you have some critiques. Go ahead.

Michael Horton
I do. I do? I think so. First of all, we have to ask, what do we mean by enchantment? And I think if I, if I read Charles Taylor correctly, and you can help me with this, if, if, if you think otherwise, I, as I read him, enchantment is pretty much understood the way Max Weber understood it as a feeling of fullness, a feeling of this, not being everything, that There’s something that transcends me and my material satisfaction.

Collin Hansen
Yes, it’s not key, not reducible to the material basically, yeah,

Michael Horton
yeah, yeah, Transcendence. And the problem is, spirituality, without religion, is always very transcendent. Yeah. You know, we think the search for the sacred when we see that on the cover of a magazine, Oh, great. The world is is going for the sacred. Well, that usually means a lot of Protestants and Catholics are becoming new wagers. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I, I think that Charles Taylor, he’s coming from a more liberal Catholic orientation. He likes the, frankly, the sort of mixture of Christianity and paganism. He loves

Collin Hansen
the rituals, yeah, the theology, but he loves, right, exactly,

Michael Horton
and Original Sin is a boogey man for him in in that book, I the the biggest problem I have with Taylor’s account is when he talks about enchantment, He means the pagan, Western, pre Christian, even non Jewish heritage over the Judeo Christian one. Now he’s very specific about this when he says that the what, what has caused disenchantment. Disenchantment began with the Hebrew prophets with their screeds against idolatry and superstition and magic, and then it reached its apex in the Reformation

Collin Hansen
and Calvin, he hates thorough going religion when it’s yes, inside, when it’s internal, when it’s theology firmly believed and affects all of your life. That’s That’s what he hates, yes,

Michael Horton
exactly, exactly, and it’s so his, really, if you pull the thread in Taylor’s own in a secular age, yeah, he goes after the Reformation, and I disagree with how he characterizes the Reformation, but he takes it all the way back to the Hebrew prophets. And this is the thing. And enchantment in our in our time means non Judeo Christianity. It means we don’t like the as they as they call them the father sky god. We don’t like, we don’t like the the ethical accountability. We don’t like creation ex nihilo. We like that, that we’re made out of God stuff, but that we’re not made by God for God, and that we are sinners. We’re fallen. Uh. And we can’t get up. We have, we have to be redeemed. We have to be rescued by this God. We don’t like any of that by nature, and that is part of the Abrahamic inheritance. I mean, it goes all the way back to so there’s, there’s a real pushback among enchanters, a real pushback. If you, if you scratch enough it it bleeds, anti biblical orientation, that’s, that’s really what it is. It’s, it’s not that they’re anti spiritual, but they’re, they’re really opposed to the God of Abraham, you

Collin Hansen
say Alexandria is our departure. City Florence is the connection. City in Las Vegas is the destination. Now, I love that imagery, but tell us what it means.

Michael Horton
Well, yeah, Alexandria, you know, Nietzsche said all of our, all of our philosophy, was invented in ancient Alexandria. He’s absolutely right. I mean, that’s where, basically these Orphic movements gained a lot of traction. They were, they were percolating together. So you had, you had the rise of Christianity, and then you had Gnosticism and hermeticism, which is a whole nother deal magic, and then you had the rise of Neoplatonism, all there in one city, and they all knew each other. They, you know, meet each other at the shopping mall and the great Alexandrian library. There was a lot of interaction. So even some Christians became Gnostics. Some Gnostics became Christians. Some hermeticists became Christian so on Origin, for example, the not so reliable church father origin, was a student of Plotinus at at the famous sorry of of ammonius sackus, a fellow pupil with Plotinus under ammonia sacchus, the founder of Neoplatonism. So there’s a lot of interaction back, back and forth between these folks. So I, I follow the trail from Alexandria to the various renaissances of this configuration, this constellation of influences, just almost as you know, the same groups in Alexandria percolates and comes together again in the Renaissance, and then it percolates and comes together in our modern culture. And Vegas just happens to be where the, As one writer said, The American soul, crawled off to die and everything, everything is artificial and imminent, but in a transcendent kind of way. So good way.

Collin Hansen
But also sounds like something somebody say who lives in California works especially well from there the long cross from Alabama. Mike, let’s, let’s wrap up with a couple questions here. What? What difference do you hope this book will make?

Michael Horton
I hope it will reorient our understanding. It’s not a polemical book. I’m not. I’m not. I hope that people can come away and say, Okay, I’ve got to rethink some of my categories in the way I the way I have been thinking about this phenomenon of spiritual, but not religious, and the history of it all. I got to rethink that. I don’t, I don’t expect, I don’t expect people to say, after reading it, oh, I want to become a Christian because I want to write that book later. But what I’m trying to do here is just really lay out a different interpretation of the history than I’ve seen out there. And so that’s that’s my goal, yeah.

Collin Hansen
And then you’ve alluded to this a little bit already. What can we expect? And I guess, when can we expect the next volumes?

Michael Horton
The second volume, it Lord willing, will be out in a about nine months, it’s already into the publisher, and that one really focuses from from the Renaissance to the scientific revolution. And then the third volume picks up there and focuses. Quite a lot on romanticism, and Hegel Marx, Nietzsche, Freud that whole trajectory, and closes with a fun chapter on this meeting that that has gone on since the 1920s to the current day, to our time on what is called the mountain mount of truth in Ascona, Switzerland, with the many of the pioneers of modern Physics and Mathematics and Computer Technology as well as the Jewish Gnostic scholar, Gershom scholem, Paul Tillich, the liberal theologian Ernst trels, Max Weber, you go down The list, and these people all met to to recover Gnosticism and even to engage in Gnostic rituals. And like, Okay, this is what, this is what I’m talking about. So

Collin Hansen
I think you just answered my last question, which was just sitting up here, because I was thinking that your previous answer. And I thought, How am I going to teach differently now, and I probably would have probably followed some of the sociologists, especially Robert Bella I probably would have looked and put more emphasis on the individualistic turn, the turn toward the self. I mean, look, let me get that out of reef and McIntyre as well. So is the best way to say it, then that yes, there was a movement in that direction from, you know, the post war period, but you’re arguing, basically it was a deliberate recovery of the Gnostic tradition. Is that what you’re arguing? Well,

Michael Horton
no, a lot of this isn’t deliberate, okay? We don’t we. We don’t even know it’s so much part of us in our blood that we don’t even know what it is, okay? But no, I, I, I would call it an intensification, okay, it’s always there. It’s always there. The individualism has always been so

Collin Hansen
it’s kind of, I mean, it’s, it’s a Jerusalem Athens essence thing, going to city of man, City of God thing, kind of going along, yeah, yeah, got it. So they’re just times when it might swing one way or another. And since the post war period, we’ve been in a swing back

Michael Horton
exactly. There’s a time when one of the of the partners is is leading the other. Yeah,

Collin Hansen
that makes sense. And I think a lot of the tech, this is where my work often comes in. A lot of the technologies are both produced out of that outlook and facilitate the living of that outlook, right? Which would make sense out of all the tech movements coming out of California as well, and why there’s an overlap between the New Age spiritualities and the technologies.

Michael Horton
Huge, huge. In fact, the transhumanism movement is boy. I mean, I’ve gone through a lot of their their writings for this third volume. It’s amazing how Gnostic they are. They talk about, you know, this we, we’re going to upload our consciousness from this, this inferior body, you know this, this meat they call it. It’s sort of like hyper Cartesian view of the self that you, that you get in this transhumanist movement. Well,

Collin Hansen
you’ve really connected a lot of dots here for me, Mike, not only in your writing, but then, especially just in this conversation. Michael Horton’s been my guest on gospel bound. The book is shaman and sage, the roots of spiritual, but not religious in antiquity. You can look for Volume Two, soon followed by volume three. Mike, thanks for a fascinating conversation.

Michael Horton
Thank you. Collin, always good to be with you.