Enoch, Bertrand Russell, and the consequences of reductionism

“Imagine that there are three powerful and mighty giants of the Philistines, upon whom depends the whole hostile army of the demonic Holofernes (cf. Judith 2:4). When these three have been overthrown and slain, all the power of the demons is fatally weakened. These three giants are the vices already mentioned : ignorance, the source of all evils; forgetfulness, its close relation and helper; and laziness, which weaves the dark shroud enveloping the soul in murk. This third vice supports and strengthens the other two, consolidating them so that evil becomes deep-rooted and persistent in the negligent soul” (St. Mark the Ascetic, The Phil. vol. I, 158-159).

This is another essay from my mysticism class.

While I have been trying to keep up with writing, sitting at the keyboard feels like sand running through my hands. My mind is a bit dull from sleep deprivation, and all my energy is going into hanging out with Nikiforos, my wife, and remaining calm in this (hopefully) last year of secular university education. I am grateful for the opportunity to get my degree and be introduced to a variety of philosophies and religious texts through my coursework, but at this point I am exhausted.

Last week, I grit my teeth as one of my classmates, essentially, described the miracle at the Wedding at Cana Jesus using food-coloring to change the water to wine which, in hindsight, is not as bad as a few semesters ago being bombarded by another classmate’s edgy claim that Jesus Christ was a zombie necromancer in my magic in ancient religion class.

It’s basically like being on Reddit in real life.

There’s much that can be said, but nothing that really needs to be articulated. Just more reason to seek the heart and cling to the Prayer. What I would like to say is that there it is illogical for us moderns to dismiss historical accounts of miracles simply because we don’t believe miracles can happen… This is called an argument from incredulity and its fallacious and irrational.

If anything, my time in the secular university system as reinforced how irrational it is to not believe in God.

Anyway, as Lent approaches during this period of the Triodion, I am reminded how none of what we do really matters if it is not offered up to God; if we have no love in our hearts, then our actions are void. This time of preparation is meant for us to slowly draw close to what is important, to begin the process of fasting, if not in our diet, then in our hearts and our minds.

I have been meaning to start writing and publishing some of the more recent stuff I’ve been thinking about regarding the Watchers, demons, and the Tower of Babel. My friend and I have started a podcast that dives deep into religion, spirituality, and philosophy. This research has been eye-opening in terms of cosmology and the spiritual ecosystem that we—and our ancestors—inhabit.

Cross-cultural analysis shows a consistent pattern of malevolent forces that inspire fear, control, and ritual; the naturalist assumptions which dismiss these patterns as primitive, unlearned, and unscientific are unfortunately a part of why these patterns subsist to this day, albeit in subtler forms than in antiquity.

The research not only has revealed these patterns which, taken seriously, reveal a lens that modernity has lost, but also affirmed my own thoughts about the spiritual make-up of our reality. This is why the content of the Book of Enoch has come back to the forefront of my writing, and I hope to begin looking deeper into that during this period of fasting, reflecting our own Lord’s confrontation with Satan in the wilderness (cf. Matt. 4).

I have not explored these issues on this platform, because while the Orthodox Church affirms the existence of demons—not psychological, symbolic, or metaphorical, but actual spiritual beings—it is important not to be carried away with demonology the way that the charismatic movement is characterized as being somewhat obsessed with it (i.e. monitoring spirits, deliverance ministries, healing revivals, etc.). But ignorance isn’t the solution either.

The charismatic movement may risk granting undue power to the demonic, which flattens man’s free will and gives the demons a starring role in our lives, however a lack of knowledge—or dismissal—overlooks how temptation and spiritual vulnerability work.

The Lord exhorts men to be watchful (cf. Lk. 21:36; Matt. 24:42, 25:13, 26:41; Mk. 13:37; Apoc. 16:15; Prov. 8:34), because in these last times temptation is ubiquitous.

We’re like frogs and temptation is the water boiling around us; the temptation is not simply demonic spirits trying to make our lives miserable, but trying to make us forget who we are, where we come from, where we’re going, and what our purpose is here in this life.

In many ways, this is a response to a priest once telling me that the more clearly you know your calling, the easier it is to discern what is not.

It is important for us to recognize what is not of God, not to become obsessed with everything seemingly at variance with Him, but to better walk in His light. Demons are not under every rock, but they’re situated in the larger spiritual struggle of sin and the passions. When man doesn’t know himself or his calling—and what is not his—then he is easier to exploit by these demonic forces which prey on our passions, our disordered desires.

So, the way to struggle against these demons is not by becoming a John Constantine, but through prayer, confronting ourselves and becoming knowledgeable about who we are in the light of God’s grace. And this is done, not in isolation, but within the life of the Church.

The sacraments, the Jesus Prayer, and asceticism are the tools we have to combat these forces.

The demons are kind of like narcissists in that they don’t mind what kind of attention they receive from us, just as long as we are paying them attention instead of standing before God. To return to the priest’s words… I think, perhaps, in my dulled thinking, attending to Nikiforos, and running on fumes amidst secularism in university this has been a time of—in relation to the Triodion—preparation and re-orientation toward what is important and what is me-in-Christ.

It’s like a vision quest induced by sleep deprivation and the last remaining firing neuron spent on historiographical methodologies. What’s important to me is to become intimate with the Scriptures, to deepen my prayer life, and live solely for God—standing before Him in all things. It’s taking care of my family despite not really knowing what I’m doing. It’s learning how to die to myself and to offer my death to Christ through faithfully loving those who God has entrusted to my care. It means letting go of resentments and regrets, moving forward in forgiveness and faith. It means—like all Christians are called to do—to acquire the likeness of God and become gods by His grace: theosis.

With this being man’s true calling, beyond each of our distinct vocations, it is important to recognize how man has been led astray since the Fall to seek godhood without God, to embolden the ego through self-seeking, and ultimately desire the (spiritual) death of others for sake of the self. This is not love, but disordered self-love, and taken to its extreme, we ourselves image and cultivate the likeness of monsters. And while man’s inclination is toward self-love through sin and the passions, there is an ongoing spiritual war that’s been fought since the primeval age which has inflamed man’s passions and led him to forget God.

It is crucial to understand the ancient world and our place in history, how the more things change externally, the more they stay the same spiritually. Further, I believe it’s good to know about these demons and their origins, if only to show the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord in a new—and ancient—light. Christ came to save us from following the path of the fallen angels, not just to set us on a better path, but the path which allows us to become true sons of God.

I’m hoping to use what little free time I have to start piecing this together during Lent. If nothing else, it’ll find its way onto a podcast episode one of these days. I’m looking forward to start posting them as they become ready. Now, without further ado, here’s an analysis and critique of the much-acclaimed Bertrand Russell and his Mysticism and Logic.

In the short essay below, one will find two ways in which Russell accurately presents mysticism and two ways in which, I believe, he is misrepresenting it. The essay, written for a class, will therefore support its findings with other readings from the course including the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, Daoist mystics, Sufi poets, the Dhammapada, Christian ascetics, and Steven T. Katz’s contextualism.

Bertrand Russell and Mysticism

Bertrand Russell’s portrait of mysticism is beneficial as a phenomenological image of the diverse mystical life of aspirants within religious traditions. His observations about the noetic quality of mystical insight and the shared sense of unity across traditions are apt and highlights the essence of mystical experience. However, his account ultimately reveals a paradigmatic error: he treats mysticism from an external materialist standpoint, which reduces it to psychology. While Russell wrestles with the ambiguity of mystical experiences, and he concludes with a mystery, assuming man might never know the truth of these transcendent states, his perspective remains suspect and far from neutral.

Russell’s first observation identifies the primacy of experiential participation in mysticism. Although the mystic doesn’t discard reason and logic, aspirants throughout time and culture have been warned that these cognitive faculties have limitations: discursive reasoning cannot truly participate in Reality because abstract inquiry cannot grasp or encounter revelation.

Where Russell writes, “There is… the belief in insight as against discursive analytic knowledge: the belief in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses,” Ibn Arabi would agree, “He who seeks to know the Reality through theoretical speculation is flogging a dead horse.” Russell aligns with the mystics’ insistence that the Divine or Reality is encountered rather than demonstrated through logical proofs.

Secondly, Russell underscores the shared vision of unity held by mystics from the Daoist monistic view to Bernard of Clairvaux’s view of actionable love proceeding from the One to Sufi fana, the annihilation of self. Distinctions are often painted as illusory by mystics or dissolving in the mystical experience, highlighted by Yogananda’s account and Sufi poetry. The refusal to admit division mirrors the Sufi writer, Ibn Iraqi’s warning, “Beware, beware of the word, ‘two.’ ‘I’ and ‘You’ have made of man a duality; Without these words, You are I and I am You.”

Phenomenologically, union appears outside religious orientations, as in Kotler’s flow states, where moments of intense focus temporarily dissolve boundaries of self and not-self. Reports of these accounts present a genuine feeling of connection with the universe, a merging of the one with everything. For Russell, these religious and extra-religious accounts substantiate the accurate observation of cross-cultural mystical belief and experience of unity.

Yet, while Russell successfully identifies two defining phenomenological features of the mystical experience, the strength of his analysis begins to weaken when he moves past description into interpretation. Russell’s observations are not always accurate, sometimes falling into category errors, which are tied to his reading of mysticism from outside its respective frameworks. The misreading betrays his assumptions and often falls into reductionism.

When Russell suggests, “the feeling of peace produces, as feelings do in dreams, the whole system of associated beliefs which make up the body of mystic doctrine,” he’s smuggling in naturalistic metaphysics, reducing doctrines to emotivism. This is an interpretative assertion colored as description. For the mystic, peace does not yield mystical experiences but is a product of them. Russell reverses their experiential claims. This reduction repeats the same error found in other nineteenth and twentieth century thinkers—Freud and Tyler being examples—whose naturalistic theories collapsed religion into psychology and evolutionary anthropology.

Steven Katz’s contextualism reveals Russell’s internal logic as self-contradictory. Katz argues that “if the mystic does not mean what he says and his words have no literal meaning whatsoever, then not only is it impossible to establish my pluralistic view, but it is also logically impossible to establish any view whatsoever.” This directly challenges Russell’s claim that doctrines have no real connection with the moment of transcendence but are merely “inessential accretions.” Katz’s point exposes Russell’s interpretation as self-refuting: if mystical language does not mean what it says, then no language, including his, can be taken literally.

This interpretive problem comes into sharp focus with the same flattening applied to philosophical schools, falling into category error and faulty generalization. His treatment of the philosophers Spinoza and Hegel is problematic: “A third mark of almost all mystical metaphysics is the denial of the reality of Time… We have seen this doctrine prominent… among moderns it is fundamental in the systems of Spinoza and Hegel.” While they both share a monistic philosophical lens, monism is not a monolith.

Russell’s claim only applies to Spinoza because it contradicts fundamental elements of Hegelian philosophy. Hegel explicitly affirms time as a real and necessary condition for the development of Spirit; it is the external manifestation of the dialectical process. Russell’s collapsing of these philosophers reflects a broader reductionist tendency to treat philosophical categories as interchangeable despite internal contradiction.

If Russell cannot accurately represent Hegel, whose philosophical claims are antithetical to Russell’s assumptions, then how can he represent—objectively—religious traditions, which possess entirely different epistemic principles and metaphysical assumptions?

Russell’s reductionistic handling of philosophical systems extends to his treatment of ethical frameworks as well. Following his misrepresentation of Hegel’s philosophy, Russell claims that mysticism denies moral distinctions; evil, for the mystic, is an illusion produced by divisions in the analytic mind. “Mysticism does not maintain that such things as cruelty, for example, are good, but it denies that they are real… Sometimes—for example in Hegel, and at least verbally in Spinoza—not only evil, but good also, is regarded as illusory.” Russell either reflects ignorance or is willfully ignoring a preponderance of evidence refuting this claim.

Christianity emphasizes normative directives and calls its practitioners to flee from evil, turning to the good. Buddhism calls the aspirant to cultivate virtue, to do good for good’s sake, and to guard the mind against evil. Insight within these two religious frameworks includes the purification of the intellectual faculty, allowing for better discernment of the good and the bad, not simply being liberated from a lower world of phantasmatic distinctions.

While there are religious frameworks that dissolve moral distinctions to suggest mysticism—in totality—dissolves good and evil misunderstands lived praxis and misrepresents metaphysical commitments that structure these paths; not only that but substantiating these claims by appealing to Hegel and Spinoza is methodologically fallacious.

In conclusion, Russell offers a perceptive account of mysticism; the portrait he sketches identifies the experiential immediacy and noetic quality of these encounters with the Divine. He accurately highlights the shared unitive vision held by mystics across cultural and linguistic divides. However, his analysis is limited by the very assumptions which mystics, like Lao Tzu and Ibn Arabi, have warned about for millennia; by explaining mysticism through a materialist lens (or empirical) and describing doctrinal truth-claims as rooted in emotivism he reduces the mystic’s own report of an encounter with Reality to a psychological process.

His conflation of Hegel with Spinoza exemplifies a fallacious, false equivalence that potentially undermines his interpretive theory, revealing a failure to consider underlying complexities of religious epistemic and metaphysical commitments. Mysticism cannot be understood abstractly; it’s a lived and participatory epistemology. Therefore, Russell provides a valuable analysis of mysticism, but the recognition that his perspective is not neutral would only elevate his report and place him in dialogue with the very mystics he seeks to render intelligible.

Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ