(The outline of McGilchrist’s thesis is here: https://jotsandscribbles.blog/2023/11/07/introduction-to-the-master-and-his-emissary/)
For McGilchrist, the reformation is the first step towards unbalanced left hemisphere dominance, a step towards the enlightenment. It’s easy to see why he should think this. The focus on the word of God above the visual arts in church looks like a loss of right hemisphere insights. Compare the simple austere white washed walls of puritan churches with the intricate beauty of the cathedrals of the late medieval period, and you can easily think something important has been lost. Another post may look at the helpful warning and corrective McGilchrist’s insights might give to evangelicals.
But fundamentally, McGilchrist is wrong. Not only because protestant churches included such musicians as Bach and artists as Rembrandt. But because his critique of the reformation is significantly influenced by his own understanding of God.
McGilchrist thinks of God as the totally other, and as being bound to the world as something like the soul of the world (panentheism). Whatever else the divine may be, it is different in kind from everyday objects of experience, even if it may be seen as manifesting in those objects. It is not clear, known and familiar in the same sense that, say, a table is. It is intrinsically “Other,” not limited by the conceptions or words we bring to bear on it. Indeed, in some traditions it is precisely that which cannot be grasped by our thinking faculty or expressed in language, and that which can be so grasped or expressed is by definition not the divine. Compare the “tao that can be named is not the eternal tao” of Lao Tzu, the “si comprehendis, non est Deus” [“if you have understood, it is not God (that you have understood)”] of St Augustine, and, in more general terms, the apophatic tradition or via negativa in Christian and other theologies.
Since God is other, for McGilchrist true engagement with the divine is intrinsically a right hemisphere perception. God is by definition too other to be defined with human words (ie left hemisphere perception).
You’d expect the divine being to create something that was other than itself in order to have a relationship with it. And if God is, as is held in almost all spiritual traditions, love, the love needs to have an other. God has to create in order to have something to love, and he is like the soul of the world, needing the world to know it and himself. This is a form of panentheism.
McGilchrist is aware of the apophatic tradition in Christian theology, and some streams of the Christian mystical tradition, which would fit well with his own understanding of God. He also sees that such traditions come close to some eastern traditions, which similarly are congruent with his own views.
But McGilchrist’s view of God is not the mainstream of Christian thought. Christian theologians have generally treated God’s free creation of the world ex nihilo as a foundational truth. God is so sufficient in his own triune life that he has no need to create to have relationship, to know or love. Instead, out of the fullness of his life as three divine persons, he creates freely, not to gain anything but to share the life and love he himself enjoys.
And God is not merely the totally other, beyond our language. In the Bible, God is not hiding unknown beyond our language. Instead, God who created all things by his word, comes into our world to make himself known. God translates himself into our world as an object we can perceive, and God interprets himself for us in human words. Jesus is “the Word become flesh” (John 1:14). If you have seen Jesus, you have seen God (John 14:6-9). The words Jesus speaks are God’s words (John 14:10).
The problem with McGilchrist’s position is that God becomes just an especially big version of “the other” which the right hemisphere is better at engaging. But God is super-other, so other that he cannot be engaged by either hemisphere directly. Instead, God can only be known when he translates himself to be an other like other human beings, knowable by his actions and words which we can see and hear. And in order for that knowledge to be preserved rightly, we need words recording the event of God becoming human. We need a reliable record, which gives us facts we can rely on as we engage with God. If God the totally other has chosen to engage with us through action in this world which he ensures is recorded, then true humility and true engagement with God requires us to focus on that writing in our desire to know and relate to God.
McGilchrist’s critique of the reformation as a left hemisphere mistake relies on him viewing God as “other” beyond language, but apprehended primarily through non-verbal right hemisphere activity such as art, music and ritual. The reformation response is surely that since God the totally other has made himself known in Jesus and in the writings that God inspired to bear witness to Jesus, it is absolutely right the focus of church services should not be paintings or processions but the reading and proclamation of the words- which needs both hemispheres to truly engage with it.
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