The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion is a 1998 book by American writer Ken Wilber, which addresses the relationship between religion and science. The book reasons as follows: by adopting contemplative disciplines (such as meditation) related to Spirit and integrating them within a context of broad science, "the spiritual, subjective world of ancient wisdom" could be joined "with the objective, empirical world of modern knowledge". In this context, Wilber views Spirit as transcendent or contemplative consciousness, or the spiritual ground of being. The text further contends that such integration of science and religion would inherently have political aspects.
Significance Underscoring the importance of the relationship between religion and science for the evolving world, Wilber explains that science "has given us the methods for discovering truth, while religion is the force that generates meaning". To illustrate this point, the author uses his "All Quadrants All Levels" (AQAL) model to show how varied understandings of Spirit—including romanticism, idealism, and postmodernism—have historically informed humanity's own development in relation to his "Big Three" cultural "value spheres":
art (upper-left quadrant of the model) morals (lower-left quadrant of the model) science (right column of the model).
Summary
Part I: The Problem
The psychologist Roger Walsh, in his review of The Marriage of Sense and Soul, points out that despite significant differences among religions, there is broad consensus among scholars that the great chain of being (a Medieval Christian hierarchy of living beings) is central to nearly all major religions. Walsh also notes that this hierarchy was once humanity's dominant worldview, but with the advent of modernity, the West became the first civilization to abandon it.
Wilber uses the term Great Nest of Being to describe his concept of a holarchy, visualized as concentric spheres or circles. In this model, each level of existence, or "senior dimension," encompasses and transcends the previous level, which he refers to as its "junior". This hierarchy progresses from matter through mind to Spirit.
Wilber identifies a three-level scheme within this holarchy, which he argues is reflected in various cultural and spiritual traditions. He cites the example of "earth, human, and heaven" as a scheme found in shamanic traditions; he also cites the Hindu and Buddhist concept of the "three great states of being"—the gross (matter and body), the subtle (mind and soul), and the causal (spirit).
Furthermore, Wilber argues that many religions, particularly those of antiquity and the classical period, traditionally viewed science as one valid way among others to acquire knowledge, alongside approaches such theology and mysticism. This viewpoint, which Wilber identifies as epistemological pluralism, acknowledged that each method had its proper place in the great chain of being. He highlights Christian mystics such as St. Bonaventure and Hugh of St. Victor as proponents of this perspective, pointing to their belief in the "eye of flesh" (sensory perception), the "eye of mind" (reason), and the "eye of contemplation" (mystical insight) as evidence of their acceptance of multiple routes to knowledge.
As Wilber notes, however, prioritizing the "eyes of mind and flesh" obscures the "eye of contemplation." He clarifies that the "eye of flesh" is monological; the "eye of mind" is dialogical; and the "eye of contemplation" is translogical.
Similarly, along with the Enlightenment, an entire set of values gradually emerged, including the following: "equality, freedom, and justice; representational and deliberative democracy, the equality of all citizens before the law, regardless of race, sex, or creed; political and civil rights (freedom of speech, religion, assembly, fair trial, etc.)". As a result, and because they'd "existed nowhere" on a large scale in "the premodern world", Wilber refers to these values and rights "as the dignity of modernity" [emphasis in original]. Subsequently, but pointing to the work of sociologist Max Weber and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the book further contends that modernity is chiefly defined by its "differentiation of the cultural value spheres" or "the Big Three": "art, morals, and science; the Beautiful, the Good, and the True". These spheres can be seen in Wilber's AQAL model (as described in the "Significance" section above). Nevertheless, where this modern differentiation can be said to have begun "in earnest around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries", "by the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the differentiation was already drifting into a painful and pathological dissociation". Consequently, in this way, the left-hand or interior dimensions of the AQAL model were ultimately "reduced to their Right-Hand or exterior correlates which utterly collapsed the Great Chain of Being, and with it, the core claims of the great wisdom traditions".
Part II: Previous Attempts at Integration
Acknowledging that philosopher Immanuel Kant recognized this "leveling and deadening of the modern monological collapse" however, Wilber chronicles the philosopher's subsequent attempt to integrate "moral we-wisdom with scientific it-knowledge". From this vantage point, Kant's book Critique of Pure Reason is described as an affirmation that "science alone gives cognitive knowledge, 'real' knowledge, and all else is nonsensical metaphysics." His second critique, Critique of Practical Reason, similarly explored humanity's moral dimensions in concluding that while "(m)en and women are not free as empirical objects—in the world of ITS . . . as ethical subjects, men and women are indeed autonomous" [emphasis in original]. Further pursuing this line of thought, but using the moral rationale of "ought", Kant's third critique, Critique of Judgement, begins by examining the realm of aesthetics along the way to ascertaining, as Wilber paraphrases it, "that the interior 'ought' of moral reasoning could never get going in the first place without the postulates of a transcendental Spirit".
Consequently, in the aftermath of Kant's contributions, the members of the Romantic movement "began an intense effort to make the I-domain, the subjective domain—and especially the domain of aesthetics, sentiment, emotion, heroic self-expression, and feeling—the royal road to Spirit and the Absolute". However, because "romanticism was a philosophical revolt against rationalism" the movement "fell violent prey to" what Wilber has termed, "the pre/trans fallacy [emphasis in original], namely, the confusion of prerational with transrational simply because both are nonrational".
Similarly, there was also ambiguity "between premodern and modern cultures" as to "the direction in which the universe" was said to be unfolding. Where a "time of creation" as recounted amongst premodern religions often entailed "a Great Spirit of one sort or another" creating "the world out of itself, or out of some prima materia", these traditions also commonly point to "a series of strange events" in which it was told that "either God began slowly to withdraw from humans, or humans withdrew from this God"—in any case, generally depicting scenarios in which mankind inevitably "lost touch with the primal Eden". During the modern era however, this "idea of history as devolution (or a fall from God) was slowly replaced by the idea of history as evolution (or a growth toward God)". Thus, where history for premodern cultures was merely devolution, "one of the great announcements of the Idealists" asserted that "cosmic and human history" instead, was "most profoundly the evolution and development of Spirit".
Beginning then with Kant's assertion "that we can never know 'the thing in itself', only the appearance or phenomenon that results when the thing in itself is acted on by the categories of the human mind", German Idealism shared much of its inception with "the notion that the world is not merely perceived but constructed". [emphasis in original] For them, "(n)ot naive empiricism, but mental idealism," was of essence in one's "perception of the world". Thus, and to his credit, Johann Fichte is particularly notable in reasoning that "if you cannot know anything at all about the thing in itself", then ultimately self-consciousness too is a social phenomena.
Consequently, in sublimating the preceding lines of thought, Wilber outlines three principal features of spiritual evolution:
1. Involution: This original "descent" of Spirit" is a forgetting, a fall, a self-alienation of Spirit". 2. Evolution: In this "second major stage of development, Spirit evolves from objective Nature to subjective Mind". 3. Nondual Spirit: Spirit comes to know "itself objectively as Nature; knows itself subjectively as Mind; and knows itself absolutely as Spirit—the Source, the Summit, the Ground and the Process of the entire ordeal".
Building on this outline, Wilber subsequently notes that "for both Schelling and Hegel, Spirit goes out of itself to produce objective Nature, awakens to itself in subjective Mind, then recovers itself in pure nondual Spirit, where subject and object are one pure act of nondual consciousness that unifies both Nature and Mind in realized Spirit". Unfortunately, yet underscoring Idealism's remarkable percipience in discerning "the integration of empirical evolution with transcendental Spirit" as reflecting "Spirit-in-action", "it possessed no yoga—that is, no tried and tested practice for reliably reproducing the transpersonal and superconscious insights that formed the very core of the great Idealist vision". Furthermore, and "because the Idealists lacked a genuine spiritual injunction (practice, exemplar, paradigm), they were indeed, at least in this respect, caught in 'mere metaphysics'". Consequently then, and "lacking the means of consistently delivering direct spiritual experience—Idealism in this regard degenerated into abstract speculations without the means of experiential confirmation or rejection" [emphasis in original]. Simply because "every holon has a Left- and a Right-Hand dimension, and therefore every holon without exception has an objective (Right) and an interpretive (Left) component", postmodernism would ultimately assume "the great and nobel" aim of introducing "interpretation as an intrinsic aspect of the Kosmos" [emphasis in original].
Yet, and for "postmodernism, this moment of truth—every actual occasion has an interpretive component—was taken to absurd and self-defeating extremes", leading to a facile reasoning that since "(t)here is nothing but interpretation", dispensing "with the objective component of truth" at times merely serves as practical convenience. Disconcertingly though, "(t)his extreme denial of any sort of objective truth" has subsequently amounted "to a denial of the Right-Hand quadrants altogether, precisely the reverse disaster of modernity" [emphasis in original].