Someone once said that when our society eventually succeeded in driving out the Christian God we'd witness the return of the ancient gods of Greece and Rome. Whether that's true or not we're certainly witnessing a fresh popularising of ancient, non-christian, spirituality. It's a spirituality that, whilst it sounds and feels very modern, is basically a repackaging of old ideas.
In the 00s it was popular to speak of prayer as nothing but 'nonsense', now I see whole crowds being invited to pray at global festivals and no one complains. In the 90s we used to talk about the power of positive thinking, now I hear people speak about manifesting their dreams.
Whereas positive self-talk may not have much underlying theology (we all talk to ourselves, why not aim to make that kinder?), the practise of manifestation brings with it a way of seeing the world that is decidedly religious.
Popular thinking (popular especially among Gen Z-ers and Tik Tok-ers) goes that by channeling our energy and ideas in the direction we want our lives to go the universe can be bent toward our will. Since we’re all familiar with the butterfly effect - the idea that in a complex and chaotic system small changes can have huge consequences - why not expect such changes within our lives resulting from the energy we send out into the ether?
It’s modern, but it’s also ancient.
According to the ancient stoics (whose ideas are similar to Buddhist ones) the innermost essence of the world is harmony and that harmony is displayed through the truth and beauty we see all around us. They called this harmonious essence: cosmos (or kosmos). The cosmic order, they said, is magnificent and alive. They believed that the universe as a whole was similar to a gigantic animal within which (or upon which) everything played its part and had its place.
Stoics taught that the way we come to understand our place within the cosmos is by ‘theorising’ about it, a word derived from ‘orao’ meaning ‘I see’ and ‘theion’ meaning ‘the divine’. To theorise is to ‘see the divine’ and the divine, in this instance, is the cosmos - the universal whole.
Since the cosmos is harmonious, it follows that one should aspire to live cosmetically (a word derived from cosmos). Something is cosmetic to the extent that it is beautiful and beauty is something that can be measured based on something's 'fitness'. A thing is beautiful if it has correct proportions and fits well within the whole. Consider the beauty of fractals or the Golden Ratio for an insight into the truthfulness of this kind of thinking.
This cosmos is what the Greeks named as ‘divine’. God (in this school) is not something separate from the universe, instead the universe is god. When people talk about 'manifesting' good fortune they're invoking this divinity. They believe (whether they’ve ever articulated it like this or not) that the universe is God. They then import onto that god characteristics such as kindness and benevolence, choosing to believe that it wants to shower them with good gifts. Many of these imports are just that, ideas imported from elsewhere - often from latent christianity that’s still in our water supply.
Continuing for a moments with our overview of stoic philosophy, the Greeks believed that the harmony of the cosmos was kept in perfect balance and beauty through the power of what they called the logos. The word logos is where our word logic is derived from and it means much the same thing. Logos is rationality and reason, meaning that the universe is held together by rationality and wisdom. We could say that the logos is the 'operating system' of the cosmos since it’s the thing that makes it the beautiful, truthful and harmonious place that it is.
At Glastonbury this year it was fascinating to see two headline artists appeal to this vision of reality. In between one of her songs Dua Lipa said: ‘I don’t know if you believe in manifestation…’ and then implied that the good fortune she was enjoying on the stage was evidence of its power. Leaving aside for a moment the cruelty of manifestation as an idea (since it implies that bad fortune is the fault of not manifesting hard enough!), consider instead the worldview that she’s espousing. Dua Lipa’s universe is a cosmos similar to the one that the ancient Greeks believed in.
This leads on to Coldplay’s Chris Martin and his song ‘We Pray’ also performed at Glastonbury this year. Martin sung that ‘we pray’ for all sorts of things: for someone to show me the way, for some shelter, for some records to play… and he then invited the crowd of 120, 000 people to pray with him. It was amazing to watch and was further confirmation that the confidence of the New Atheists in the early 2000s was overstated.
It was also a little confusing since I couldn’t help wondering about the question he left begging - who or what are we praying to exactly? Answer: The universe, or as the Greeks would have said 'the cosmos'.
The instinct to pray certainly runs deep within all of us, Karl Barth said it was part of our ‘God sickness’ but it's certainly not all channeled toward the same place.
Prayer is a natural outgrowth of vulnerability and our need for help. We pray for and to all sorts of things. Prayer is inevitable, but who and what we pray to is optional. Infants pray to mothers, adults to statues made of wood and gold. Martin’s god, as with Miss Lipa’s, is not the personal God of Christianity but the impersonal interconnectedness of the universe, or the cosmos. Prayer in this system is less about relationship than it is about manipulation.
When Dua Lipa and Chris Martin make statements about the power of manifestation or sing songs invoking people to pray, it is this ancient idea that they're drawing upon and inviting people into.
The difference between their beliefs and mine is based simply on an historic reality that altered the world’s philosophy. The world of Ancient Greece was one dominated by the theories of stoicism, it was how everyone thought about and saw the world. The gods were forces that were part of the cosmos and the cosmos was an impersonal whole held together by the power of the logos. The cosmos didn’t care about you or know that you existed, in fact in the strictest sense there was no ‘you’ as a thing distinct from the cosmos. Then came Christianity.
French philosopher Luc Ferry writes: “Christianity created a new doctrine of salvation so ‘effective’ it opened a chasm in the philosophies of Antiquity and dominated the… world for nearly fifteen hundred years.”
Ferry isn’t a Christian and so from his point of view this new philosophy was simply ‘created’. By his thinking a group of individuals (the Christians) got together and conjured up a new philosophy that managed to overturn the world; they simply invented it out of nothing.
Except that they didn’t, invent it that is.
Christians simply responded to something that happened, something that did indeed overturn the status quo. The apostle John expresses what happened neatly in the opening lines of his gospel: “In the beginning was the word (literally the ‘logos’)… and the word (logos) became flesh.”
By putting it in terms that the Greeks understood John blew apart their worldview with a claim to historic reality. The organising principle of the beautiful and harmonious cosmos, the logos, became a human being.
Life's goal therefore isn’t to manifest your will upon the universe, rather it is to know and be known by the logos. Prayer isn’t to be directed at the cosmos or the unmoved mover, or the guiding principle of the universe. Rather it is to be aimed at the logos, the creator, the one who exists outside of the cosmos and who stepped into time and space.
There’s so much more that could be said but I’ll leave it with this little summary: the solution to the recent infestation of manifestation is the incarnation.
The incarnation refers to when God literally put on meat (carne - chilli anyone?) by becoming a man. You and I needn’t shoot prayers like arrows into the abyss and the unknown, hoping to high heaven that someone or something might respond. Instead we can direct our hearts toward a posture of relationship with God. He has come for us, so reach out and take hold of him.
This isn’t the cruel legalism of manifestation where blessings and curses are based on your effort. This is the surrendering of control that love involves. It’s to say ‘all that I have I give to you, and all that I am I share with you.’ and once you meet him it enables you to say “not my will, but yours be done.”