Deep Time

by Frances Young.

Around eighteen months ago we retired from Birmingham and settled in Sheffield – our 2022 Christmas letter gave notice of our new address. Believe it or not, a contact in the Mid-West of America, prompted doubtless by Wikipedia, responded with the information that there is a Neolithic stone carving in the Eccleshall Woods close by us. For me the woods were already a regular retreat for exercise and reflection, and the search began. Discovery was by no means immediate. Our son eventually found a hint as to its whereabouts and walking “off-piste” in that area I probably passed it at least once without finding it! Then, one day, descending the slope rather than ascending, I almost tripped over a flat rock protruding out of the leaf mould, looked down and there on its top were carved shapes, predominantly spherical – there it was, stylistically similar to carvings we had once seen at Carnac in Brittany, where there are avenues of standing stones and other prehistoric monuments.

Since the discovery I have often included it in my walks, either alone or showing it off to interested visitors. I’ve contemplated it while listening to the amazing variations of a song thrush in spring. I’ve walked to it under the perpendicular fan vaulting of the leafless trees in winter – a natural cathedral. And I have reflected on deep time – the thousands of years that humankind has contemplated the mysteries of which we are a part, responding with art and music, fear and celebration, wondering at beauty and otherness, acknowledging smallness, transience and vulnerability, seeking meaning and truth.

In the perspective of deep time such essentially religious responses to life and its environment are seemingly natural, and in the perspective of multiple historical cultures they are seemingly universal. Yet modernity has produced the first post-religious society, as more than one generation has reacted against the faith of their forebears and deprived the next generation of serious engagement with it. Secularised the world has lost its enchantment. Yet maybe there’s something instinctive in the use of symbols in a search for meaning, something now suppressed by the illusion that truth is mere facticity while metaphor and myth are but the false product of mere imagination?

On a previous occasion I wrote about consciousness and the remarkable work of Iain McGilchrist offering my summary of his work as a neuroscientist with detailed references. His basic thesis is that our culture is dominated by left-brain analytical reasoning and has lost the wisdom that comes from the right-brain’s wholistic response to experience, its capacity to deal with mystery and symbol rather than reduce everything to what is quantifiable, logical and manipulable – indeed, under our control. Wonder, mystery and humility he reckons we need to reclaim: “…while fully acknowledging the problematic nature of the word God, I feel our repudiation of God is not a wise move,” he writes. He affirms metaphor and myth, over against mechanistic reductionism, for “deep truths about reality are likely to appear initially paradoxical” – he cites the way science has uncovered interdependent processes – “flow” rather than “things”. “Mystery does not mean muddled thinking,” he writes; “on the other hand, thinking you could be clear about something which in its nature is essentially mysterious is muddled thinking. Nor does mystery betoken a lack of meaning – rather a superabundance of meaning in relation to our normal finite vision.” He challenges fundamentalisms whether in science or religion – propositions and rationalisation in terms of left-brain analysis may be useful, but such conceptuality needs to be taken up again into the right-brain’s experiential response to the whole. McGilchrist takes on the “New Atheists”, suggesting that other ages and cultures had a wisdom we have simply lost.

Our culture is being challenged from various directions – its exploitation of nature, its casual despoliation and toxic disregard for natural ecologies, its consumerism and constant economic growth, all factors contributing to mass extinctions and climate change… Humankind has over-reached itself – been too clever by half … I guess post-Covid there is more talk of our connectedness to the natural world… but ???

An awareness of deep time – maybe the religious instinct is not quite dead yet … though I guess institutional religion remains problematic for many – there’s a general bias against institutions in our individualistic culture. But might the resurgence of Orthodoxy in the post-communist, once atheistic, societies of Eastern Europe be a sign of religion’s ultimate resilience?