Matthieu Pageau's Cosmos

Symbolic literacy and the re-enchantment project

Matthieu Pageau, from Jordan Peterson podcast

I just finished a remarkable little book: The Language Of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism In Genesis, by Matthieu Pageau, the brother of the better-known Jonathan Pageau. It’s kind of mind-blowing, to tell the truth. It absolutely is going to be a big part of my re-enchantment book. It brings so much together!

I’ve been interested in this book for a while, but wasn’t sure if I should buy it, simply because I don’t have the training to judge its claims. I enjoyed one of the Jordan Peterson interviews with MP, but still wasn’t sure if the book was for me. Then I read theologian Alastair Roberts, whose highly favorable (but at times critical) review of the Pageau book sealed the deal.

MP begins with the claim that in modern times, we have lost the capacity to read the Bible according to its own cosmological terms. The Bible speaks to us in symbols about a different level of truth than what is on the surface of things. MP is trying to help us understand not only the deeper meanings in the Old Testament, but also how and why the ancients read the natural world as a kind of divine book. MP says it’s like learning a new language. Gaining what we might call SYMBOLIC LITERACY is a part of re-enchantment. One thinks of these lines from Dante’s Paradiso, Canto 33, in which the pilgrim, near the end of his quest, sees all of Creation as a bound book:

In its profundity, I saw — ingathered

and bound by love into one single volume —

what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered:

substances, accidents, and dispositions

as if conjoined — in such a way that what I tell is only rudimentary.

Let’s dive into Matthieu Pageau’s book and see what he tells us.