Liminal Religion

Some Thoughts on a Possible Theology for Aenean Civilization

A month ago, my essay The Dawn of a New Civilization explored the emergence of a new zeitgeist, an Aenean spirit arising to replace the waning Faustian ethos. Named for Aeneas, the hero who fled the ruins of Troy to found a new Rome, the Aenean spirit balances the cosmic ambition to transcend Earth’s boundaries with the grave understanding of humanity’s fragility.

Where the Faustian soul sees the heavens as a limitless frontier to be conquered, the Aenean soul sees in the skies both hope and fear for mankind. It understands that humanity stands at a precarious gateway, faced with the existential choice to ascend or perish. The Aenean symbol, the arch, represents this duality: a structure that rises to great heights yet rests on the dual foundations of past and present.

The concept of Aenean civilization was, of course, immediately challenged by those who are certain that mankind is and will be forever confined to Earth, that what awaits us is a humble future characterized by resource depletion, energy scarcity, and technological degradation. My essay the Aenean Challenge summarized the difficulties that the eco-doomsayers foresee. Ahnaf Ibn Qais’ follow-on essay, Proem for All Post-Dark Age Civilizations argued that the doomsayers were inevitably going to be proven right; while Fabius Minarchus’s Proem to the Aenean Future argued that the doomsayers could be proven wrong.

I believe these essays - offering as they do such sharp contrasts between optimism and pessimism, hope and horror, problems and prospects — serve as an altogether fitting introduction to the Aenean worldview. Standing at a liminal threshold, Aenean civilization cannot assume infinite progress as an inevitability but must recognize the peril of inaction and the ever-present risk of decline.

But no civilization, no zeitgeist, can be fully understood on the material plane. A worldview is built on more than the sum of the resources available to it. Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West, posited that a civilization's soul manifested through its architecture, its temporal understanding, and most of all, its religion.

It is to this latter that we now turn.

The Religious Beliefs of the Great Civilizations

The originary soul of the West was the Apollonian. The Apollonian worldview saw the rise and fall of civilizations as natural and inevitable cycles characterized by harmonious repetition governed by the natural order. The Apollonian thinkers were the first to articulate how human affairs were bound by the same cycles that govern the natural world. Polybius developed the theory of anacyclosis, the cycle of political regimes, wherein monarchy devolves into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into mob rule before the process begins anew. Aristotle, in his Politics, explored a similar dynamic, arguing that political systems naturally evolve through cycles, with each form of government—monarchy, aristocracy, and polity—being prone to degeneration into its corrupt counterpart: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy, respectively.

The Apollonian soul expressed this notion of a harmonious bounded cosmos in its religion and architecture. Its temples, with their balanced and symmetrical forms, reflected a world defined by finite cycles, where human greatness flourished within nature's constraints.

The Magian worldview, which succeeded the Apollonian, was grounded in the revelation of a divine unity driving history in a sacred narrative toward an inevitable culmination of God’s will. The Magian faith, be it in the form of Christian eschatology or Islamic submission, was imbued with a fatalistic certainty: God’s will shall be done, whether through divine providence (Deus Vult) or inexorable decree (Insha’Allah). This worldview fostered a profound inward orientation, a trust that one’s role was to align with the divine plan rather than to forge new paths.

The Magian soul thus oriented its religious thought inward, toward the unity of divinity hidden within the cosmos. Domes symbolized the enclosed mystery of the divine, and time was perceived as a sacred narrative, leading toward divine revelation.

The Faustian worldview dominates today. It operates with an arrogant confidence in human capability rooted in the Calvinist presupposition that being among the Elect is revealed through worldly success, such that success serves as both evidence of divine favor and a mandate for relentless striving. This belief, central to the Protestant work ethic, ties spiritual validation to material achievement, fostering an unyielding drive to conquer and innovate.

The Faustian soul thus finds in religion a justification for infinite striving. Its Gothic cathedrals and soaring skyscrapers express an unyielding aspiration toward the divine, reflecting its boundless conception of space and time. For Faustian man, time is linear and unending—a path of perpetual progress toward greater achievement arising from limitless ambition.

And what of the Aenean soul that will succeed the Faustian?

Aeneas, as Virgil portrays him, is not a figure of limitless ambition but rather a figure of duty and devotion. He carries the gods of a fallen city to the shores of a new beginning. He is tragically aware that the future he builds must account for the ruins of the past. Aeneas is no Faust, and his Aenean spirit does not indulge in the Faustian fancy of infinite progress; but he also does not accept Troy’s fall as an inexorably product of its rise. Aeneas founds a new civilization in the liminal space between the aspirations of linear progress and the reality of cyclical decline.

Today, Aenean man sees in marvels such as AI both the promise of technological advancement and the specter of the Great Filter. He looks at the asteroid belt and acknowledges it as both a valuable cornucopia of riches and a dangerous arsenal of doomsday weapons the universe might fling against us. He enjoys the bounty of of our industrial produce but fears that Earth's fragile ecosystems cannot sustain it. For Aenean civilization, the question is not just whether humanity can achieve greatness, but whether it can survive to achieve it.

This tempered outlook necessarily extends to the religious worldview of the Aenean spirit. The Apollonian, Magian, and Faustian religions all presume certainty—the Apollonian in eternal recurrence, the Magian in divine inevitability, and the Faustian in endless progress.

The Aenean soul, however, believes that human destiny is not guaranteed: God’s will might not be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Humanity’s survival and ultimate purpose remain precarious, suspended between the possibility of transcending Earth’s boundaries and the plausibility of failure and collapse.

Wary of Apollonian cyclicism, critical of Magian fatalism, but skeptical of Faustian assurance, the Aenean spirit accepts the fragility of its aspirations while, nevertheless, continuing to aspire.

Aenean man acknowledges that action is essential for survival, yet the outcome remains unknowable. This acknowledgment of uncertainty fosters a humility absent in Faustian hubris and a vigilance active against Magian complacency. The Aenean soul understands that neither passive submission to divine will nor blind faith in human potential is sufficient for civilization to survive.

Instead, it demands a dynamic engagement with the world, one that balances courage with caution and ambition for the future with reverence for the past. For the Aenean soul, the struggle to endure becomes a form of worship—a recognition of humanity’s duty to act, even as the path forward remains shrouded in mystery and uncertainty.

What religion, if any, could embody this Aenean soul?

A Hypsistarian Theology of Aenean Civilization

By unplanned coincidence - or perhaps by the subconscious workings of my mind — my speculative reconstruction of Hypsistarian theology seems to offer a theology that resonates with the Aenean worldview.

Recall that Hypsistarianism (as I reconstructed it) offered two paths for the soul. A soul that achieved excellence in life would, after death, ascend to the ranks of heroes, demigods, or gods, becoming a guardian or intercessor for those who continued their human existence. A soul that failed to achieve heroic virtue in life was neither damned to hell nor condemned to oblivion but simply reincarnated, returning to the cycle of life for another round of struggle.

This dual framework mirrors the liminal stance of the Aenean worldview. Just as the Aenean worldview accepts the possibility that civilization could continue its linear ascension or suffer a cyclical decline and possible rebirth, so too does Hypsistarian theology position the soul of each man at death as standing at a gateway where both ascension to a higher plane or cyclical return to the lower are possibilities.

Moreover, Hypsistarianism largely denies the possibility of an eternally guaranteed salvation, enlightenment, or nirvana. The heroic soul can falter on the path, falling from its ascended heights back down to earth. Plutarch writes:

But with some of these souls it comes to pass that they do not maintain control over themselves, but yield to temptation and are again clothed with mortal bodies and have a dim and darkened life…

The Hypsistarian afterlife is thus perpetually liminal — even after death it remains full of choices that can bring about advancement or downfall. It is simultaneously linear in allowing for theosis and cyclical in permitting fall and reincarnation.

Hypsistarianism thus aligns well with the Aenean spirit. Both acknowledge humanity's precarious position. Both emphasize the necessity of striving for excellence while remaining cognizant that success is not guaranteed and the most likely outcome is not the most optimistic one. The Hypsistarian's journey, like the Aenean’s destiny, is not a straight path upward, but a series of trials that continuously place him at the threshold of something greater — or worse.

Now, let me pause here to acknowledge the highly speculative nature of both my theology of Hypsistarianism and my concept of the Aenean spirit itself. The former is an imaginary reconstruction I developed from fragmentary evidence and abductive leaps. The latter remains an emergent ethos, not yet fully realized and possibly never to be realized at all. At present both these systems of thought are nothing more than houses of cards built atop windy summits. They are as real as the St. Louis Arch on the moon.

Nevertheless, I see the glimmering light of Aenean religion emerging from perhaps the most unlikely place of all: science.

Life Before Life After Death

As I have written previously, my own philosophical progression has been from physicalist atheism to post-physicalist theism, a position I reached after considerable philosophical and scientific inquiry. That inquiry led me to discover the enormous body of evidence for the reality of near-death experiences (NDEs) and past-life memories that has been assembled by researchers in the field.

One of the first scientific investigation into NDEs was Raymond Moody’s 1975 book Life After Life, in which Moody reported the accounts of one hundred people who experienced continued consciousness after death. Moody’s book was followed by Dr. Jeffrey Long’s 2009 bestseller, Evidence of the Afterlife. Long assembled so many accounts of NDEs that he asserted “there is currently more scientific evidence for the reality of near death experience than there is for how to effectively treat certain forms of cancer.” Dr. Bruce Greyson conducted a review of the past five decades of research in his 2021 book After, and he too concluded that NDEs were real experiences of the continuation of consciousness after death.

Most recently, Dr. Sam Parnia's AWAreness during REsuscitation (AWARE) project provided substantial evidence for the persistence of consciousness beyond clinical death. Parnia’s comprehensive study, published in October 2023 in Resuscitation, investigated over 2,000 cardiac arrest cases across 15 hospitals and found that nearly 40% of survivors described some form of awareness during resuscitation. These accounts included detailed recollections of events that occurred while they were clinically dead, suggesting that consciousness can exist independently of measurable brain activity.

Similarly, researchers exploring the phenomena of past-life memories have documented thousands of cases where individuals recall vivid details of past lives. These memories often include names, locations, and events later verified through historical investigation. Some individuals even displayed physical traits, phobias, or talents inexplicable except through the lens of continuity between lives.

The first rigorous documentation of these phenomena came in Stevenson’s 1966 book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and Life Before Life. Dr. Stevenson followed this up with the 1987 book Children Who Remember Previous Lives. The 2005 bestseller Life Before Life, written by Dr. Tucker, further expands the research. Dr. Edward Kelly’s seminal 2009 treatise Irreducible Mind: Towards a Psychology for the 21st century, which I have cited in many previous articles, furthers the argument for the validity of past-life memory, and Kelly further builds on those findings in his 2023 book Consciousness Unbound: Liberating Mind from the Tyranny of Materialism.

Why does this matter? The Aenean spirit is, in part, a scientific one, a spirit that aspires to further man’s knowledge. An Aenean religion must, therefore, necessarily be one that is compatible with the findings of science.

The profound spiritual journeys described by Parnia et. al offer scientific evidence that some souls may progress to higher states of existence and even (as Hypsistarianism avows) act as guides or tutelary angels for those still living. If Moody, Long, Greyson, and Parnia are right, then there is, as a matter of fact, life after death.

Likewise, the past-life memories described by Kelly et. al offer scientific evidence that other souls may reincarnate, and that the memories, lessons, and experiences of one life can carry into the next. If Tucker, Stevenson, and Kelly are right, then there is, as a matter of fact, life before life.

Taken together, the scientific evidence for NDEs and past-life memories allows us to infer the existence of a life after death after life — of an afterlife that accommodates both ascension and rebirth; of an afterlife that neither guarantees eternal salvation nor condemns souls to endless damnation, oblivion, or repetition.¹ The evidence allows us to formulate a metaphysical vision that is neither dogmatically assured nor fatalistically resigned.

And all of this is exactly the Aenean-Hypsistarian vision I have described above.

What About Christianity?

Doubtless many of you reading this essay are (small-o) orthodox Christians of one denomination or another. As such you probably are quite skeptical of “scientific” accounts of NDEs and past-life memories. After all, the experiences recounted by those who’ve had NDEs do not always align with the teachings of the Christian church in all respects, while the experiences recounted as past-life memories are entirely heterodox.

I hear you. I do not fault you for your skepticism! Why, then, do I think you ought to take these phenomena seriously? Or, at least, why do I take them seriously?

As it happens, the subject of NDEs happens to be one with which I have close, almost firsthand, familiarity. My wife Amy (whose health problems I have written about previously) has had two near-death experiences. Both experiences were of communion with God. Neither experience, however, aligned with her pre-existing Christians expectations — what she experienced wasn’t quite what she had been taught to expect in Church. Her NDEs thus confronted her with a spiritual dilemma: If her NDEs were entirely veridical, then some of her religious beliefs were not entirely accurate. She concluded - as most who experience NDEs do — that the experiences were real. She updated her theology to match her experience and has never looked back.² Her spirit was fortified by her direct experience of divinity and she credits her NDEs with giving her the serenity to endure her decades-long illness.

Her NDEs confronted me, a long-term physicalist and atheist, with an entirely different dilemma. If I was right about the world being purely physical and devoid of divinity - and I genuinely thought I was — then her experiences had to be delusionary nonsense, her hope for an afterlife a self-serving illusion, and her suffering, like everything in the cosmos, a meaningless result of impersonal forces. It was this dilemma that triggered my inquiry into alternatives to physicalism. What I have read in the course of that inquiry seems to me to be essentially in alignment with the experience described by my wife. I, too, believe her experiences to be real.

I have had other friends who had distinctly Christian near-death experiences; one of them, author John C Wright, was so moved by his NDE that he abandoned his lifelong atheism and converted to Roman Catholicism. There is thus no implicit reason that a Christian needs to deny NDEs in general.

Of course, Amy and John’s experiences are nothing more than another set of online anecdotes, of just the sort which Dr. Parnias has already documented thousands. I do not expect them to persuade you, only to acknowledge they did help persuade me.

As for reincarnation, I can claim neither firsthand nor secondhand evidence for it. I mention it only because its existence is implied by both Aenean-Hypsistarian thought and by Dr. Tucker and Stevenson’s studies. That said, I do believe reincarnation, like NDEs, can be accommodated from within a lens that remains fundamentally Christian.³

Dr. Bruce Charlton (who I have previously cited) has written extensively about reincarnation. In an October 2018 article, Dr. Charlton wrote:

Although most Christian apparently don't have this attitude; I find personally it hard to reject-outright the idea of reincarnation… mainly because (it seems) that most people, through most of human history, have believed in the reality of one or another form of reincarnation - plus several of the more modern thinkers whom I most respect believe in reincarnation, apparently from directly intuited personal experience.

Dr. Charlton goes on to offer a number of thoughtful essays which discuss different ways the possibility of reincarnation could be accommodated within the Christian religion. His November 2018 essay “Who Gets Resurrected” seems the most relevant here:

If it is true that only the followers of Jesus are resurrected, then this… means that resurrection is chosen, it is voluntary; and therefore resurrection is not compelled nor is it enforced… Those who do not believe Jesus, or who do not love him and do not wish to follow him, or who do not want Life Everlasting in a (Heavenly) world of love and creation - these are Not resurrected - but shall instead return to spirit life (as we began; before we were incarnated into earthly mortality).

This fits with the beliefs of many non-Christian religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and some other paganisms) - who see post-mortal life in terms of a return to the spirit world.

It also opens the possibility of reincarnation, which has probably been the usual belief of most humans through most of human history. The Fourth Gospel teaches that reincarnation is a possibility, when it discusses whether John the Baptist was one of the Old Testament prophets reincarnated...

We could even speculate (and it would be a speculation unless confirmed by revelation) that the world contains some mixture of newly incarnated mortals, and a proportion of reincarnates who did not accept Jesus in previous lives but have returned (presumably by choice) to enable further chances.

But again, it seems intrinsic to Christianity that all higher theosis is by choice…

Dr. Charlton calls his school of thought “Romantic Christianity.” While it must be admitted that his Romantic Christianity is not in complete agreement with any particular existent denomination of Christianity, it is nevertheless unquestionably Christian. Yet it is a type of Christianity that has a place for what is best in the spiritual teachings of other religions and that is rather in alignment with the Aenean spirit in some ways.⁴ Perhaps something like this synthesis could guide the West forward in what Nelson Elliott called “alt-ecumenism” in his guest post The Woodland.

The Aenean Future is Uncertain - And Hence Aenean

Whether this synthesis, or the broader Aenean worldview itself, will ultimately take form remains uncertain—a fitting conclusion given that the Aenean ethos itself embraces the precariousness of the future. All that can be said with confidence is this: if the Aenean spirit comes to define a new civilization, its religious worldview will reflect its liminal character, blending ambition and caution, ascension and renewal, infinity and eternity, linearity and circularity.

When I started writing this essay, I wasn’t certain I would publish it. It strays rather deeply into the personal, and the unorthodox, and the speculative to an extent that makes even me quite uncomfortable. But the Aenean spirit, if it exists it all, exists to reminds us that humanity’s greatest achievements are born not from certainty but from the courage to act amid uncertainty, ever at the gateway between past and future, between cyclical time and infinite possibility.

I’m pressing SEND TO EVERYONE NOW.

1. For reasons of space I have excluded a third strata of evidence, that arising from the usage of entheogens to induce liminal states of consciousness. Fortunately a man with a larger audience than I will ever enjoy has already done the hard work. Whether he’s discussing how psychedelics influenced religion with Michael Pollan, Jordan Peterson, or Michael Malice, recounting psychedelic experiences with Rob Lowe or Nikki Glaser, or arguing about consciousness and psychedelics with Brian Greene, Joe Rogan has (re)set the baseline for the reality of post-physical experience. No longer can an atheist simply assert reductionist materialism without being challenged; too many people have directly experienced something “more”.

2. While writing this article I asked Amy to describe her NDEs. She said: “I felt God all around me but I didn’t see Him or hear Him. I didn’t have my senses. I didn’t have a body at all. But bodies felt irrelevant. God communicated with me but it wasn’t by speaking and I wasn’t ‘hearing’ His words. His message was simply in my mind. He gave me something which passes beyond human understanding - perfect peace, perfect love, perfect joy. I realized we come to Earth for an experience and then we go back home.”

3. To be fair, I also think Hypsistarianism as a whole probably could be accommodated within a Christian framework. I noted in my original article how easily “pop” Christianity can be accommodated; a more rigorous Christianity, albeit of a Semi-Pelagian variety, could also be achieved. The resultant Hypsistarian Church of God Most High would probably be a lot more compatible with my typical reader’s worldview than anything on offer from today’s lesbian bishops at the local Anglican Church. I will leave that debate for a future essay.

4. I do not want to put words into the mouth of Dr. Charlton (who I hold in the highest esteem) so I direct interested readers to his blog. I will merely call attention to his theory, inspired by Owen Barfield, that man’s consciousness has evolved over time such that he now stands at a threshold or liminal space where he must undertake a new type of participation in the cosmos.