Iain McGilchrist’s New Era

Once, the story goes, man stood at the center of the universe. He looked in the mirror and saw a masterpiece: “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty . . .” He looked to history and saw the hand of Providence guiding the species from the Garden of Eden to the splendors of Christendom. He looked up and saw the stars arrayed in sublime order.

Then he discovered science and advanced, in a series of astounding leaps, to the outer boundary of human knowledge. But looking out from that boundary, he discovered the terrible truth: There is nothing out there but an unfathomable, pointless expanse, punctuated by rocks and fireballs, nothing to history but 13.7 billion years of chemical reactions, in which humans appear for a blink of an eye and then disappear. Now he sees in the mirror, not noble reason and infinite faculty, but what Richard Dawkins once called a “survival machine,” “blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

If there is one text that can claim to have established that story at the center of our culture, it is Darwin’s Origin of Species. The theory of evolution has been, in the words of Daniel Dennett, a “universal acid” dissolving every other world-picture. For Dennett, this process of destruction is exhilarating and liberating; for others, it is a more melancholy matter. “I can’t just dismiss the evidence of Darwinism,” Roger Scruton remarked to an interviewer who asked him whether he had religious faith. “It seems to me to be obviously true.”

There are good arguments against all this, of course. The theologians can plausibly insist that their syllogisms are still valid. The Aristotelians can point out that modern science vindicates their master. The quantum physicists can show up the defects in materialism. But you cannot overcome a gripping story with an argument. You can beat it only with a better story.

Is that story coming into view? I believe it may be, and once again it has a single defining text: a book called The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist, a retired psychiatrist who lives on a Scottish island, published in 2021 in two volumes totaling 1,579 pages at a price of $87, by an obscure outfit called Perspectiva Press. So cogent is McGilchrist’s argument, so astoundingly wide-ranging, that I believe it may mark the end of the Age of Darwin and the beginning of a new intellectual era.

Look, I know that sounds unhinged. I can’t help it. This is just how people talk about Iain McGilchrist. For the British actor John Cleese, “What Iain McGilchrist is saying is the most important stuff I have ever heard.” The Oxford law professor Charles Foster calls The Matter With Things “one of the most important books ever published. And, yes, I do mean ever.” Louis Sass, professor of clinical psychology at Rutgers, describes it as a book of “world-historical ambition . . . that delivers on its promise.” Rowan Williams, not an easy man to overawe, reached for the word “genius.” McGilchrist is clearly on to something. But what?

Imagine that I tell you a joke and you don’t understand it. So I explain the joke, breaking it down into its constituent parts. Now you understand it, but it has also stopped being funny. You grasp it, but you don’t “get” it. It’s as if there were two ways of looking at the same joke.

Now hold that thought and consider the strange case of the painter Katherine Sherwood. In 1997 she had a massive stroke, resulting in a cerebral hemorrhage and the inability to use her right hand. So she had to start painting with her left, and a strange thing happened. Whereas her work had once been, by her own admission, “over-intellectualized and forced,” after her stroke she felt “a new ease in my process. I did not feel I had to intellectualize away my every move and an extreme amount of struggle faded away. A freer, more enjoyable state of painting existed far different than in my previous work.” In painting as in jokes, it seems that there are two different ways of encountering the world. One is more intellectual in a sense, but also curiously static and incapable of “getting” the point. The other is more spontaneous, flowing, intuitive, and enjoyable.

What if that distinction is primordial, universal, encoded into human nature? And what would happen if you applied it to, well, everything in the universe—and perhaps beyond it, too?

Iain McGilchrist was born in 1953 and studied English Literature at Oxford University before winning the fairytale golden apple of academic life, a Prize Fellowship at All Souls’ College. Prize Fellows are paid for seven years to sit around being clever in whatever way they think best, in the surroundings of Oxford’s most august college. Even the likes of Hilaire Belloc and Hugh Trevor-Roper, decades after they had made their names, never quite got over their bitterness at failing to win a Prize Fellowship, though they could comfort themselves that such an award might breed a kind of complacency.

Not, though, in McGilchrist’s case. Instead he showed a spirit of bloody-mindedness that has run through his career. In the late 1970s he began to publish reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, characterized by the aggression of youth and pressing a rather subversive theme: that a scientific or “critical” mindset deadens life. First he attacked a book on Percy Bysshe Shelley, deriding it for failing to treat “the poetry as anything more than a vessel for ideas.” Next he reviewed a book that brought poems together into general categories. Again, McGilchrist complained, the poetry itself had gone missing. “Organizing poems and poets becomes an activity designed not to illuminate, but to eliminate, their tiresome individuality.”

In 1982, in a book called Against Criticism, McGilchrist extended the argument. Works of art, he argued, have all the uniqueness, self-contradiction, and imperfection of human beings; like human beings, they reveal themselves by subtle implications, which should not be dragged out of them by force. To explain them through categories and pseudo-objective terminology is to make a travesty of them.

Against Criticism amounted to a book-length resignation letter from literary academia. “Never, it might be said, in the field of human endeavor, has so much been written by so many, to such little effect,” was his verdict on the field. But in arguing that point, McGilchrist felt he was part of the problem. The English language itself seemed deadeningly technical in his hands. It was time to find another vocabulary. He seriously considered devoting himself to Chinese; in the end, he chose instead to study the language of the body.

Fast forward to 1990, when McGilchrist, having qualified as a doctor, was working as a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in London. One day he caught sight of a poster advertising a lecture by the schizophrenia expert John Cutting. McGilchrist was intrigued by the lecture’s title: “The Right Cerebral Hemisphere and Psychiatric Disorders.” The left hemisphere, in his studies, had appeared as the part of the brain that matters, the place where decisions are made. The right seemed like a sideshow.

The lecture changed McGilchrist’s life. In Cutting’s account, the left hemisphere sees everything as an instance of a general category; the right is more attuned to the uniqueness of each phenomenon. The left understands only the explicit, whereas the right can detect what lies beneath. Wasn’t there a strange echo of what McGilchrist had diagnosed in literary criticism, the obsession with general categories as opposed to seeing each thing in its individuality? Was it possible that the truth about the brain, and the truth about poetry, had some hidden link?

Over the next three decades, McGilchrist devoted himself to understanding the difference between the hemispheres. Some of this work involved neuro-imaging—he spent a year conducting studies at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore—though, as he has observed, such research must be surrounded with caveats. More reliable are the studies that artificially suppress either the left or the right hemisphere, through drugs or an electromagnetic pulse. And most illuminating of all was the evidence of McGilchrist’s own work as a psychiatrist, sitting opposite poor souls with impaired left or right hemispheres who could tell him how the world looked through their eyes.

From this accumulation of data and experience a picture arises, which must be carefully distinguished from the pop-science account of hemisphere difference—on which, as McGilchrist satirically puts it, “the left hemisphere is somehow gritty, rational, realistic but dull, and the right hemisphere airy-fairy and impressionistic, but creative and exciting.” Properly understood, the difference between right and left has more to do with two ways of seeing. It’s the difference between explaining the joke and getting it.

In one study, subjects were asked to look at paintings by Corot, Monet, and others, with either the left or the right hemisphere suppressed. When they depended on the more holistic right, they could explain what the painting was showing and what sort of emotion it suggested. When they depended on the narrowly analytical left, everything went to pieces. “I can’t make out anything whatsoever,” one said of Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: “It’s an abstract painting.” And although these subjects tried to analyze the paintings—to categorize them by genre or historical period—they were hopeless at explaining what mood or atmosphere was being communicated, or even at identifying its subject matter.

Of course one should be cautious in one’s generalizations. Yes, brain science is still an exploration of mostly unknown territory. Yes, pseudoscientific nonsense is rife. (Though it’s worth saying that nobody has managed to undermine McGilchrist’s credentials, and that some very distinguished neuroscientists—V. S. Ramachandran, for instance—have warmly praised his work.) Yes, to speak of the brain’s “doing” anything, without a full explanation of how the mind and the body interact, is necessarily a form of shorthand.

And yes—to deal with a final pedantic objection—both hemispheres are involved in everything. But McGilchrist presents a mountain of evidence that the left hemisphere is most skilled at mapping and manipulating things, at “building the edifice of knowledge from the parts, brick by brick.” The right hemisphere experiences the world more fully: It can recognize a face, tell when someone is lying, pick up new skills or absorb new experiences, discern the moral of a story, rest in ambiguity and mystery, maintain a sense of self. The left hemisphere narrows its attention to an intense focus on what can be divided, categorized, and put to use. The right sees the context, the bigger picture.

The right can detect an implication: If I tell you, “It’s a bit hot in here, isn’t it?” your left hemisphere will add that to its information bank, but the right will recognize that I am hoping you will open the window. Those hard-to-define but indispensable faculties, common sense, judgment, insight, and practical wisdom, are the province of the right.

One experiment made the point in comical fashion. Subjects were asked to consider the following syllogism:

All monkeys climb trees.
The porcupine is a monkey.
[Therefore] the porcupine climbs trees.

When you suppress someone’s left hemisphere only, he sees the problem: that the porcupine is not, in fact, a monkey. But suppress the same person’s right hemisphere, and the overly systematic left takes over: Yes, “the porcupine climbs trees, since it is a monkey.” When the examiner points out that a porcupine is not a monkey, the subject disagrees: “it’s written so on the card.”

But then we are all a bit like that sometimes: Missing the forest for the trees, getting stuck in our categories and rules, until the truth hits us: “Of course, how couldn’t I see it!” If this realization can take some time, McGilchrist says, that is because the left hemisphere tends to be remarkably stubborn in maintaining its theories.

He links schizophrenia with defects in the right hemisphere and a takeover bid from the left hemisphere. Its specialism—dividing reality into parts—becomes disintegration. “I’m falling apart into bits” is one typical testimony from a sufferer. “The center cannot hold,” says another. Some experience music as a random succession of sounds. Others can’t understand long sentences: “It’s just become a lot of words that I would need to string together to make sense.” The body, meanwhile, often feels like a dead machine: One patient began to imagine one side of his body as a wooden plank with a mechanical device for digestion.

The same kind of affliction can take less dramatic forms. Consider this well-known testimony from Charles Darwin:

my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure. . . . But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. . . . My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

Darwin was puzzled about why “part of the brain” seemed to have atrophied, but in McGilchrist’s terms it makes perfect sense. Over time, the left hemisphere’s “grinding” activity can displace the right.

In 1992 McGilchrist had another eureka moment, when he read the psychologist Louis Sass’s Madness and Modernism. Sass, too, was fascinated by the implications of schizophrenia, an illness that had some striking similarities with modernist and postmodernist art. Both schizophrenics and twentieth-century artists frequently exhibited

defiance of authority and convention; an extreme, often dizzying relativism, which can culminate in paralysis; nihilism and all-embracing irony; a tantalizing, uncanny, but always frustrating sense of revelation; obliteration of standard forms of time and narrative; pervasive dehumanization; and disappearance of external reality in favor of the omnipotent ego or, alternatively, dissolution of all sense of selfhood.

Sass showed McGilchrist that the distinction between left and right hemispheres can be applied, not only to individuals, but to the spirit of an age. It was possible to trace, within a culture, the imbalances and disorders caused by one hemisphere’s dominance over the other.

McGilchrist did exactly that in The Master and His Emissary, published in 2009. The book, a combination of brain science, cultural history, and unclassifiable philosophical-psychological reflection, laid out in some detail the evidence for the divided brain, then put the West on the psychiatrist’s couch. What would happen, McGilchrist asked, in a culture in which the left hemisphere took over? We might expect that

Ever more narrowly focused attention would lead to an increasing specialization and technicalising of knowledge. This in turn would promote the substitution of information, and information gathering, for knowledge, which comes through experience. . . . The concepts of skill and judgment, once considered the summit of human achievement, but which come only slowly and silently with the business of living, would be discarded in favor of quantifiable and repeatable processes. . . . More and more work would come to be overtaken by the meta-process of documenting or justifying what one was doing or supposed to be doing—at the expense of the real job in the living world. Technology would flourish, as an expression of the left hemisphere’s desire to manipulate and control the world for its own pleasure, but it would be accompanied by a vast expansion of bureaucracy, systems of abstraction and control.

Individuals, McGilchrist wrote, would be reduced to statistics, and a centralized state would seek to control everything with rules. The world would grow disenchanted, secularized, and bored—leading, in people’s inner lives, to a vicious cycle of sensation and numbness. History and tradition would be disregarded. “The body would come to be viewed as a machine, and the natural world as a heap of resource to be exploited.” Sound familiar?

The objections to The Master and His Emissary showed how easy it was to misunderstand McGilchrist’s perspective. A hostile review in New Scientist alleged that McGilchrist was against “thinking” and preferred “experiencing things in the lovey-dovey way we did in the old days when we sat around campfires singing Kumbaya.”That was unfair on two counts. Part of McGilchrist’s point was that “thinking,” including scientific thinking, was more intuitive than most people realized. Even great scientific breakthroughs often come, not by means of a mechanical method, but in a moment of perception:

After much cogitation, Kekulé seized the shape of the benzene ring, the foundation of organic chemistry, when the image of a snake biting its tail arose from the embers of his fire; Poincaré, having spent 15 days trying to disprove Fuchsian functions, suddenly saw their reality, as, after a cup of black coffee, “ideas rose in crowds—I felt them collide until pairs interlocked”; later their relation to non-Euclidean geometry occurred to him at the moment he put his foot on a bus, though he was in the middle of a completely unrelated conversation (“on my return to Caen, for conscience’s sake I verified the result at my leisure”). The structure of the periodic table of the elements came to Mendeleyev in a dream.

Moreover, McGilchrist’s point was emphatically not that left-hemisphere thinking was bad, but rather that it needs to accept its role as the servant and emissary of the right hemisphere. (Hence The Master and His Emissary.) The right hemisphere depends on the left: It needs to employ categories, it needs a map of the territory. But those things are at the service of the right hemisphere’s more wide-ranging, far-seeing, insightful perspective. The right takes in the phenomenon as a whole, before passing it to the left with its particular gifts for division and analysis. Then the left hemisphere must pass back its findings to be integrated into the bigger picture. One might think of the way (this is my example) a sports coach would employ a statistical analyst: making use of the data, but only in the context of all the coach’s experience and understanding, and without ceasing to relate to his players as human beings.

Or—turning to one of McGilchrist’s examples—consider learning to play a piano sonata. First you hear it, and you are enraptured. (The response of the right hemisphere.) But to learn it, you will need to master the tempo, the fingering, the dynamics. (A job more for the left hemisphere.) What is crucial is that, having got a handle on these things, you do not become fixated on them; with the details handled, you can sit down to play the piece with your love for it still fresh. (In other words, it returns to the right hemisphere.)

Critiques of Enlightenment rationalism and scientism are, admittedly, not new, nor are ingenious accounts of what’s wrong with the modern world. And the skeptical reader may object that McGilchrist’s case is basically unoriginal. Michael Oakeshott distinguished between “technical” knowledge (knowing that) and “traditional” knowledge (knowing how); Michael Polanyi defended “tacit” or “implicit” knowledge against too-narrow accounts of the scientific enterprise. Chesterton contrasted the sane poet with the ultra-logical madman. C. S. Lewis identified two kinds of experience: “looking along” a beam of light, as a person does when, say, he falls in love, and “looking at” the light, as a scientist does when he comes along and describes love in terms of chemical processes. Roger Scruton observed that one could map the entire color-scheme of a painting without seeing the face in it. Joseph Soloveitchik divided human nature into “Adam the First,” who tries to master and control his environment, and the “Adam the Second,” a contemplative, prayerful figure who seeks the ultimate nature of things.

All of these precedents popped into my head when reading The Matter with Things; McGilchrist himself claims that his theory is anticipated in the work of many philosophers—“Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson and Scheler among them”—who believed there were “two fundamentally distinct ways in which we approach the world.” An uncountable number of thinkers, artists, and scientists are called to give evidence for the hemisphere distinction. So are traditions such as the Native American concept of “hard eyes,” which scan the landscape for potential dangers and opportunities, and “soft eyes,” which see it as a home.

You could say, then, that McGilchrist is just repeating what every first-rate thinker of the last few centuries had already said. But his breakthrough is to integrate these observations and to demonstrate, through an exhaustive survey of the neurological literature, that all those thinkers were even more insightful than they knew. He wants not to replace them but to vindicate them. What they treated as an interesting distinction, McGilchrist treats as the distinction, a skeleton key to open every door.

Reading The Matter With Things is like going on an open-top bus ride through a city, except that at some point you notice that you have left the city’s outskirts and are now taking a journey through the surrounding district; and then you realize that it is in fact a tour of the entire world. Mythology, theology, cell biology, Anglo-Saxon philology, the mathematics of tornadoes, the nature of optical illusions, the resolution of logical paradoxes—no field is beyond McGilchrist’s interest. On a single page of his 182-page bibliography one encounters Adorno’s Minima Moralia, Adler’s edition of Jung’s letters, Jacob Agus’s Modern Philosophies of Judaism, Al-Biruni’s eleventh-century textbook on astrology, Alberti’s fifteenth-century treatise On Painting, a study of C. S. Lewis by the First Things contributor M. D. Aeschliman, and two dozen academic journal papers on everything from multiverse theory to “Signal propagation during aggregation in the slime mould Dictyostelium discoideum.”

Normally, such a weight of citations would overburden a book; but McGilchrist’s references are a kind of armor-plating on the tour bus, allowing him to plough through rainforests, ascend rocky slopes, ford raging torrents, and race through arid deserts.

McGilchrist would not like that analogy. He would, I imagine, prefer that his book be compared to a piece of music or a river. The movement of water is an image he returns to: At the heart of reality, he believes, “everything flows.” Music has a flow of its own, as a note gains its sense from everything before and after it. And guess what? People with impaired right hemispheres sometimes lose their love of music. McGilchrist cites half a dozen accounts. There is one counter-example of a left-hemisphere injury, but the afflicted man only stopped enjoying Rachmaninoff preludes. (A possible improvement of taste, McGilchrist comments.) One piano teacher, incidentally, who lost his taste for music after a right-hemisphere injury, added unprompted that he was now unable “to conceive the whole.”

In The Matter With Things as in The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist speculates on the source of our present discontents. Naturally, all this should be taken with a pinch of salt: It is easier for me to detect that you are feeling anxious than to detect that our entire culture is anxious. Some of McGilchrist’s judgments—his suspicion of “the West,” his nostalgia for pre-industrial work patterns—are very much up for debate.

Yet once again his method bears unexpected fruit. Identity politics, he points out, bears the marks of a left-hemisphere triumph. In a left-hemisphere world, “identification would be by categories: socioeconomic groups, races, sexes, and so on, which would also feel themselves to be implicitly or explicitly in competition with, resentful of, one another.”

If he were younger, I suspect he would say more about the left hemisphere and the experience of using social media. Here is the testimony of a schizophrenic patient, in a 1961 study published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology and cited by McGilchrist as an instance of left-hemisphere dominance:

Everything seems to grip my attention although I’m not particularly interested in anything. . . . It makes it more difficult for me to concentrate on what I’m saying to you. Often the silliest little things that are going on seem to interest me. That’s not even true; they don’t interest me but I find myself attending to them and wasting a lot of time this way. I know that sounds like laziness, but it’s not really.

In any case, to treat McGilchrist as an acute cultural critic does not capture his importance. He is working on a far larger scale.

Many philosophers and physicists have argued against reductionism, or what McGilchrist calls the “school of nothing buttery”: the approach that dictates that everything can be accounted for in terms of its parts. Human behavior can be explained in terms of genes, complex systems in terms of physical particles. However forceful the philosophical arguments against reductionism, it exerts immense power over the contemporary mind, partly because it appears to be a complete worldview with an answer for every question. And therefore it can be finally displaced only by a worldview as comprehensive in scope and as detailed in application. That is why The Matter With Things has to be 1,579 pages long. Reductionism, in McGilchrist’s view, is like not getting the joke or not hearing the music: a failure to see properly.

Like every critic of reductionism, McGilchrist points to the many aspects of reality—love, beauty, consciousness itself—that seem to evade materialist explanation. But such criticisms have often sounded nostalgic, romantic, and ungrateful for everything the scientific method has given us. All right, goes the obvious retort, you can busy yourself with stargazing, birdwatching, and dream analysis. We’ll get on with inventing penicillin, putting a man on Mars, and raising GDP to the point where you have the leisure to publish your next poetry pamphlet.

But that retort bounces off The Matter With Things. McGilchrist makes the case, with enormous learning and great eloquence, that science itself cannot live by reductionism; it cannot live even by the “scientific method,” because that method depends on original, out-of-the-blue insights—the eureka moments that play such an outsize role in scientific history—and on the ability, which is neither “logical” nor “illogical,” to see things in the right context.

In some of the book’s most thrilling passages, McGilchrist takes his argument deep into enemy territory. He considers, for instance, Richard Dawkins’s contention that organisms are “survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” Here is a classic statement of the reductionist view, which claims to find reality at the lowest level, in a “blind” program of bottom-up causation. Actually—and here McGilchrist brandishes a score of citations from distinguished biologists—genes are incapable of carrying out such a scheme. “Genes ‘do’ nothing, they ‘make’ nothing,” according to the Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin.

Rather, genes are one element among many in the complex process of life, which is sometimes best analyzed from the bottom up, but—contrary to the reductionists—not always. “One after another,” McGilchrist observes of contemporary science, “causes that we conceived of as giving rise to an effect are shown to be . . . themselves caused by the very effect to which they were supposed to give rise.” Dawkins calls organisms “machines,” but as McGilchrist points out, this is highly misleading. To pick just one of McGilchrist’s many examples: A machine, if you take it apart and rearrange the parts, stops working. If you remove a tiny limb from an amphibian embryo, shake it so the cells become a disordered mess, and replace it, the cells spontaneously assemble themselves into a normal leg. How do they “know” how to do that?

Such is the dominance of reductionism that, when reading about such phenomena, one can still find oneself thinking: “Well, perhaps if we really understood these things at a fundamental level, we would see that there is a mechanistic bottom-up explanation.” But at the really fundamental levels explored by quantum physicists, there is no sign of such an explanation. Here McGilchrist goes to town on the citations, filling pages with such jaw-dropping remarks as Max Planck’s comment that “There is no matter as such,” but only “a force . . . [and] behind this force, a conscious, intelligent spirit.” Sir James Jeans concluded that “the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”

That leads us, finally, to McGilchrist’s speculations about religion. In the lengthy closing chapter of The Matter With Things, McGilchrist shows himself very open to some notion of God, but also allergic to what he calls “fundamentalism” and “dogmatism.” Any religion that “peddles certainties,” he even told one interviewer, is “not a religion.” Such terms are, however, not well-defined, and McGilchrist’s more dogmatic readers are unlikely to feel he has really understood us. (Especially in a book so admiring of figures like Pascal and Hopkins, not exactly known for their allergy to religious doctrine.) He praises John Henry Newman’s treatment of reason, but does not engage with A Grammar of Assent, which anticipates certain of McGilchrist’s insights and employs them in a defense of dogma.

When it comes to metaphysics, McGilchrist offers Alfred North Whitehead’s “process theology” as a better alternative to mechanistic theory, which it is. But—without wishing to sound like a logical positivist—one does eventually have to ask what, very precisely, McGilchrist means by the words in a sentence like this: “Life could be seen as the very process of the cosmic consciousness continually both discovering and furthering its beauty, truth and goodness.” And he does not address the major rival to both mechanistic theory and process theology: the classical theism associated especially with Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Aristotelians and Thomists who want a really interesting interlocutor, it seems to me, should make it a priority to engage with McGilchrist, who understands the world so deeply but whose metaphysics is sometimes hard to make out through the gorgeous mist that envelops it.

The intensely left-hemisphere nature of much of traditional Christianity—its fine linguistic distinctions, its shelves full of canon law, its learned discussions of the various levels of dogmatic authority, its liturgical niceties—is often criticized as inhuman or idolatrous. There is a liberal version of this critique (“Does God care about following rules, or about love?”) and a more interesting version associated with Eastern Christianity. Vladimir Lossky, for instance, denounced “all abstract and purely intellectual theology which would adapt the mysteries of God to human ways of thought.” A. M. Allchin writes: “The temptation to prove God’s existence, to control him, to manipulate him, to use him for our own ends, this has surely been strong in Western Christianity in recent centuries. We have reduced theology to a set of abstract formulae.” McGilchrist, starting from a different perspective, provides a way through this debate. Yes, the left hemisphere must be put in its place; but it has a place, the emissary to the master.

When Aquinas does appear in The Matter With Things, he steals the scene. McGilchrist relates the story of the saint, soon before his death, being granted a mystical vision after which he refused to set down another word. St. Thomas told his secretary: “Everything that I have written seems to me like chaff compared to those things that I have seen and which have been revealed to me.” McGilchrist notes this as an example of “the inadequacy of prose to speak of the divine,” but that is only one implication. The other is that even a lifetime like St. Thomas’s, so much of it spent in clarifying doctrinal points and drawing up logical arguments, does not necessarily unfit one for an encounter with overwhelming beauty, truth, and goodness.

Dan Hitchens is a senior editor at First Things.

Image by Grandy Dancer Films.