John Vervaeke: A Modern Day St. Augustine

Vervaeke Chart, Higher ResolutionDownload

This chart is an attempt to illustrate John Vervaeke’s youtube series “Awakening From the Meaning Crisis.” Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist and philosopher at the University of Toronto who believes that the modern world is currently suffering a “meaning crisis” with roots in the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation. The first 25 lectures in his series trace the historical evolution of the crisis and the last 25 lectures in his series speculate about possible solutions to the crisis. The series is brilliant and well worth watching, but it is also a bit unwieldy. It tackles human history from its tribal roots to the present day as well as diagnosing and attempting to solve humanity’s most vexing philosophical paradoxes.

St. Augustine is the central figure in Vervaeke’s worldview. Augustine succeeded in bringing “the best science, the best psychology, and the best theology” of his day into a synthesis that was so powerful that it lasted over a thousand years. It was a deeply meaningful worldview where everything and everyone had an important role to play in a great chain of being.

Augustine’s synthesis collapsed with the onslaught of the Protestant Reformation and Scientific Revolution leading to our current meta-crisis, a chaos of conflicting worldviews including scientific atheism, religious fundamentalism, post-modernism, capitalist materialism, etc. Vervaeke attempts to synthesize some of this chaos and perhaps even to become a modern-day St. Augustine.

I reached out to Vervaeke to get his feedback on this chart and he told me he appreciated the work I’d put into it and asked if I was going to create a chart for the last 25 lectures as well. The latter lectures cover a lot more complicated philosophical and cognitive scientific ground, and I don’t know that I’m up to the task. But I hope to give it a good faith effort.

I don’t know if an Augustine-style synthesis is possible or even desirable in the modern world. It may be that the paradoxes of modernity are unresolvable. Or maybe the paradoxes are necessary to generate the dynamic energies that keep our species evolving. Nevertheless, Vervaeke has brought together a community of interlocutors on his youtube channel that are hard at work synthesizing disparate philosophical, scientific, and religious perspectives. It is a fascinating discussion that I’ve enjoyed listening in on.