Essay Club: In Praise of the Gods by Simon Sarris

"We must seek to regain a practical, embodied reasoning."

Welcome back, essay fans. In the last Essay Club we discussed Barthes’ The Death of the Author, and since then I’ve been having a bit of a Baader–Meinhof moment. I keep seeing Barthes referenced in relation to various obscure pieces of media.

Today we’ll be discussing In Praise of the Gods, one of my favourite essays by Substack local Simon Sarris. I highly recommend checking out his work if you haven’t already. This particular essay takes only about 13 minutes to read, and is well worth the time.

Pythagoreans Celebrate Sunrise (1869) by Fyodor Bronnikov. Sarris has photos of himself on the internet, but it didn’t feel right posting one here. Instead, enjoy this painting he included in In Praise of the Gods.

Simon Sarris is the first contemporary, online writer I’ve covered in Essay Club. Unlike with George Orwell or C. S. Lewis, there isn’t much I can say about Sarris’ biography. I know that he has two children, works in tech (web/software development or something similar), and lives in a beautiful self-made home somewhere in the USA. What I can tell you is that he’s a talented writer and photographer. He’s best known for his essays, which range in topics from the very practical (cooking, gardening) to the deeply reflective (The Most Precious Resource is Agency, Patina and Intimacy), all of which are written in a style that, to me, conveys a kind of old-world wisdom.

Sarris’ work doesn’t lend itself well to summary or fragmentation. His essays should be read in their entirety, and mulled over for a time. I’ll attempt to summarise In Praise of the Gods here, of course, but I recommend reading Sarris’ own words before going any further with mine.

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In Praise of the Gods (2020)

Sarris begins with the observation that, over the past few centuries, humans have become increasingly reliant on ‘rational’ methods of truth-seeking:

“Since Descartes’ time, rationalist thinking has ascended beyond primacy, to become an attempt at vacating not only other faculties, but also other motivations and desires. This over-applied rationality is a cognitive stupor, the drunken delirium of reason…

Rationality has so thoroughly soaked the earth that even those who call themselves religious have self-persuaded into experiencing religion through a purely rationalist lens.”

Rationalism—the idea that truth can only be discovered through the correct application of logic and reason—now dominates our thinking so completely, that even those who claim to be religious try to justify their beliefs by rationalistic means (finding ‘proof’). This is a problem. In Sarris’ view, our obsession with rationality has left us disembodied. We think and live “only in the abstract”, convinced that we can improve upon nature. We’re suffering from it, and the evidence is all around us: huge planned cities that lack beauty, and sever our connection to the natural world; consciously anti-traditional art and architecture that elicits feelings of disgust and discomfort; ‘social’ media that only makes us feel more lonely and isolated. It seems that there’s no longer a place for faith, tradition, instinct, or lived experience, and the further we step from these older ways of seeking truth, the more we seem to suffer.

What’s the alternative? For Sarris, the answer is clear: “we must seek to regain a practical, embodied reasoning”. Instead of dismissing those things that we deem irrational, we need to cultivate them, and allow ourselves to draw wisdom and meaning from them. We can do this, Sarris argues, by reconnecting with three lost qualities: intuition, process, and wonder.

He begins with intuition:

“When complexities are quickly grasped by experience, we call this intuition. It is our empirical (of the senses)—not our rational—insights that lead us towards good intuition. To practice this skill, you must grant your senses repeated exposure to the complex world. However it is a mistake to rely on only personal experience, for any one person’s life is neither long nor broad enough. To sustain the experience needed to develop intuition, you must consume stories, take in all manner of literature, myths, and fables.

Experience is the key to building reliable intuitions. We can’t reason our way into this kind of knowledge. And where an experience can’t be had directly, reading stories is the next best thing—sometimes even better, as literature, myths, and fables all have a way of expressing meaning “across many levels”, and the more we engage with them, the more we learn from them. Without stories, Sarris argues, “it is not only difficult to build your intuition, it is difficult to learn how to learn, and difficult to reason about virtue”. He gives the example of Bildungsroman stories, which deal with ‘coming-of-age’ themes. Maturity is a difficult and somewhat boring concept to transmit via rational means, but in stories, this is a perennially compelling topic. And as our culture store of stories, myths, and literature builds, we might cultivate even sweeter fruits:

“Myths give us shared art and common culture—a set of characters with which we can play in and enjoy together. In any culture rich with myths, their vocabulary is enlarged far beyond words, to allegories and metaphors. The quality of thought follows.”

Given my own interest in myths and stories, I find it hard to disagree with Sarris on this. A rich tradition of storytelling—one in which the heroes and events of our past are not denigrated, but celebrated and emulated—is vital for a healthy culture to flourish, and for the generation of reliable intuitions.

What about process?

To demonstrate what he means by ‘process’, Sarris contrasts modern science with the long-neglected field of alchemy. Modern scientists, he argues, are less interested in the scientific method as a process, and more interested in seeking “certainty and consensus”. That is, they often assert that their conclusions are unambiguously correct—‘settled science’—and dictate their conclusions to the masses by building a consensus of experts with whom it is difficult to disagree (we call this ‘trusting the science’). This approach, and the many problems that have resulted, have caused a crisis of public confidence in science and scientists.

Alchemists took a different approach. The goal of alchemy, according to Sarris, was to “seek things”, typically knowledge, wisdom, and new mysteries. Their writings were often obscure and allegorical, usually focused on finding the right experimental process. Sarris quotes one of Paracelsus’ more lucid sections:

“A doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveller because he must enquire of the world. Experiment is not sufficient. Experience must verify what can be accepted or not accepted.”

Compare this with the approach taken by most scientists today. Experimental science typically involves the manipulation of a single variable within a controlled environment, physically and socially severed from the outside world, in order to eliminate ‘confounds’. This has its benefits, but it means that scientific findings tend to occur under unnatural conditions. Sarris’ argument is not that science itself is a problem, but that scientists have neglected a important step in the search for truth—the testing of theories under real-life conditions. Here again it’s not context-independent theorising, but experience (and a healthy dose of creativity) that is key to the development of good reasoning.

This brings us, finally, to wonder. Sarris tells us:

“Long before we could vocalize thought and give reason to our actions, we enacted rituals as children, and so it is I believe for the earliest humans: ritual preceded rationality. Every child knows it is right to build, to dance, and to shout, though they cannot explain why. Nothing is more natural for the child or the ancient than to build a temple, or to deem objects sacred. What is less natural is to demand a reason before one attempts such a glorious act.”

Ritual preceded rationality. Sarris argues—and I think he’s right—that before we became ‘rational’, our actions were governed by instinct, rituals, and long-held traditions. If justifications were ever needed (they seldom were), we would appeal to nature, tradition, and authority, all fallacious forms of reasoning to the modern man. But the ritualistic life worked—societies flourished, and people lived deeply meaningful lives in which they felt connected to nature, each other, and their gods. We may balk at the idea of living irrationally, but we need only reflect on those moments in which we have been overtaken by wonder—in sight of great deeds, great art, and places of extraordinary natural beauty—to understand its potential.

Sarris ends by revisiting his point about religious proofs:

“To argue proofs of religion is to miss the point of religion. What matters is if one’s sense of gratitude and wonder are fitting responses to our world. The earth contains its own genius, its own incomprehensible moods and states that work upon us, but we are trained into a disembodied form of interior life that leads us to believe these moods are ours, springing organically from inside of us. Yet the gods linger to remind us that the genius of the world does not originate within ourselves, but is hidden in every part of the world, if we are willing to let it dawn on us.”

This seems right to me. Not because it’s rational, but because it’s irrational—it feels right, and there is no better proof than that.

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Questions and Housekeeping

I think In Praise of the Gods is a fantastic essay, but I’m sure there are people who disagree. If you do, I’d love to hear why—let me know in the comments. Here are some other questions to consider:

• What did you think of this essay, generally?

• Do you agree or disagree with Sarris’ argument? Does he go too far, or perhaps not far enough?

• If you’re religious (or in any way spiritual) yourself, how do the ‘irrational’ elements of your faith sit with you?

• How can we modern people use myths and rituals to re-enchant our lives?

As always, feel free to share your own thoughts and questions below. If you enjoyed this Essay Club, please do all of the usual things—like it, share it with friends, comment—and subscribe if you haven’t already done so.

We’ll regroup on the 20th of April for our next Essay Club, where we’ll discuss Substack local John Carter’s fascinating political essay, Cryptocracy. If you have any suggestions for future essay picks, please share them in the comments.

See you next month!