A Review of Matthieu Pageau's 'Language of Creation'
Spoiler: It's not good.
A while ago I wrote an article on the work of Jonathan Pageau, which got way more attention than I expected it to, including even from JP himself, and besides quibbles about whether symbolic interpretations should or shouldn’t require some falsifiability, weirdly one of the responses I got most frequently, and that I have continued to get, is that the reason I don’t understand his work was because I hadn’t read his brother Matthieu Pageau’s book, The Language of Creation. So recently, with great expectations, I read it.
The book was published in 2018 in peak Jordan Peterson era, and like the work of Jonathan clearly depends on the Peterson train for its popularity among people with an appetite for this sort of thing. It is the only book Matthieu has written, and to his credit he seems uninterested in pursuing his popularity any further or monetising the admiration he has found among certain groups. Besides some disparaging Reddit threads I haven’t found many reviews of it, yet it clearly seems he has a fanbase that consider him a genius who has unveiled the eyes of the symbolically blind (Rod Dreher on his Substack called it “kind of mind-blowing”).
The book consists of an attempt to “recover the biblical worldview” by decoding the symbolism of the bible. It begins with the premise that materialism and science have blinded us to this symbolic worldview, and the solution is a lengthy, analytic and schematic description of the symbols in the bible. It’s a strangely formatted book, written in chapters each about two to three pages long in large print, full of diagrams that contrast with simplistic prose, giving it an odd blend of children’s book style and difficult content if you want to actually try to make any sense of it. Cards on the table, I found the book contradictory, bizzare, poorly researched and to quote Sean Carroll’s recent comments to Eric Weinstein, “dog ate my homework” level of writing. But I’m going to try to be as specific as possible lest I be accused of generalisation or misrepresentation, so I will start with the most issue: the lack of referencing.12
Why no citations?
TL;DR: You should reference your work if you want anyone to take you seriously. If you don’t you might as well put “trust me bro” at the back.
The book introduces itself as “recovering the biblical worldview” by offering a rigorous account of what all the symbols in Genesis mean and how they relate to one another, yet the work contains no references, no citations, no bibliography, no further reading and no reference to anyone else’s work at all, absolutely nothing. When I put a Note out that I was writing this review some responders seemed to think this was not an issue and suggested I should put it to one side, but obstinate as I am I want to give some important reasons why it is a serious issue given the claims of the book, feel free to skip if the TL;DR is enough:
It shows lazy work with no expectation of questioning or curious readership: If I was going to write a book on, say, the symbolism of African carvings or folklore, I would expect I’d have to do some research and reading to establish my interpretations have some justification or relation to what their creators thought or what is believed in those African religions. It would at least require a basic review of evidence to establish that the things I’m saying are contextually true and reliable, even if it still involves interpretation that may be more open ended. There is no reason not to reference that work if you’ve done it, in fact if you’re using it as a basis for anything you would be required to lest you commit plagiarism, which you learn pretty much your first day at university. This suggests to me Pageau isn’t rooting his interpretations in anything at all, or simply expects that all that is required is vague parsimoniousness verified by a sense of his own authority to say so, which will convince credulous readers but cause anyone else to consider it poor work.
The reader cannot investigate or follow up on specific points further, nor can anyone build on the work: Let's say a specific point interests me and I want to know what he is basing his claims on, or let’s say I see something he’s written and consider building on it in another work or referencing it in a discussion. Pageau claims he is relaying the “ancient biblical worldview,” yet I cannot reference his work as an authority that this is the case unless Pageau offers some reference to his basic foundations. Even if all he is doing is reading church father’s interpretations, it’s the most basic practice to include at the very least a bibliography so readers can see for themselves whether what he is saying has any basis. Readers with any seriousness will simply assume it doesn’t.
Everything has to be taken on trust: Again, Pageau makes a claim about what something symbolises, which is also a claim that said symbolism is what the original writers meant and what “ancient” people thought — “ancient” being an annoyingly vague word that is thrown in without any definition. All the reader is meant to do is base their response on whether it feels right, which without theological or scholarly guard-rails is dubious. There are a few basic errors in the text that flag the rather obvious fact that taking things on trust that intersect with a variety of disciplines by a writer who has not cited any of his work is simply a bad thing to do. I’m going to go out on a limb and claim that the reason it doesn’t have any references is because there aren’t any.
It undermines the very idea of symbolic interpretations: As I will get to, I don’t think symbolic interpretations are anything like scientific claims, and while Pageau’s work is analytic to the point of being anal, it’s a fair point that I or anyone shouldn’t necessarily expect they be falsifiable in the way a scientific theory should be; to insist so would arguably fall into the claim he makes in the book about our seeing everything primarily through the approach of science and would misunderstand symbolism. Yet there is an issue: first, the opposite of symbolic interpretations being falsifiable would be a free for all where we just make stuff up, call it profound and claim that is what the writers meant, which would as bad an understanding of symbolism as thinking they can be analysed by science, and the epitome of the worst literary criticism. Without any evidence or cursory demonstration that his work is based in more rigorous investigation, I have no reason not to assume that isn’t what Pageau is doing. Not only that, while symbolic systems don’t have to be falsified as if they were scientific ideas, which they are clearly not, part of the reason for that is because the language is poetic and symbolic. Yet the language of Pageau’s text is not, it is profoundly analytic, full of diagrams and specific and direct claims. This is not a work of poetry, it’s a work that intersects with historical disciplines not to mention areas like cognitive science and literary theory and even textual translation, areas that involve specific fields of other’s work. By not showing he has engaged with any of these areas remotely, I think Pageau undermines his claims about symbols in the first place and turns ‘symbolic readings’ into a kind of cosplay of scholarship.
The lost symbolic world
TL;DR: The historic dichotomy between symbolic and scientific is not at all clear and not shown in the text, in which it is caricatured. We still use symbols and metaphors abundantly.
The book begins by claiming that the materialistic/scientific worldview has displaced a previous “spiritual” symbolic system represented by the discovery of the heliocentric solar system3 which apparently mirrors the fall narrative: “at a meta-cognitive level, the narrative of the fall perfectly matches the plight of humanity since the scientific revolution.” While there may be some ways in which this is true, it’s clearly far more complicated. Yet the claim of the book is rather simplistic. Early in the text Pageau claims this issue centres on our use of words, he uses water first and then light as examples:
From a scientific perspective, a working definition of light would be as follows: electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength in the range of 4,000 to 7,000 angstroms. As expected, since physics studies matter and its interactions, this concept has been framed by materialistic parameters. On the other hand, the concept of light was framed by meaning rather than mechanism in ancient cosmology. Hence, there were probably many varieties of ‘light’ in that context, and not all of them were made of photons.
This is meant to be a book about language, and Pageau doesn’t make any attempt to seperate what kinds of language he is talking about, he simply frames it in this caricatured dichotomy between symbolic past and big bad science in the present. But it seems obvious that in most common language no ordinary person intuitively defines “light” as “photons.” In fact, I think you’d find it hard to encounter a context where an ordinary person uses the word and means “wavelength in the range of 4,000 to 7,000 angstroms.” The scientific definition is a scientific definition with a context, and light is a word that can have a huge range of conceptual space in modern usage. It is used metaphorically all the time in common speech: I saw her eyes light up, let me shed some light on the issue, I saw the light, a ray of hope, it dawned on me and so on. We use light often with metaphorical or symbolic connotations, some of which imply the kinds of meanings Pageau suggests: even our use of the word “enlightenment” betrays such metaphorical use. The claim that we don’t understand whatever “ancient cosmology” meant by broader uses of words because of science implies an absence of intrinsic metaphor that simply isn’t true. While I may in theory share his concern about materialism, if the “decline” is framed as a cliche it’s a useless straw man not a serious evaluation of the problem.
Granted you may make the claim that written language broadly as it is used has shifted from the more purely metaphorical in such a way that metaphor was implicit to an attempt to use language as thing-for-thing representation. Literary critic Northrop Frye draws on the analogy of Vico’s cycles of history to view the history of literature as ages of language use in which the Homeric era is metaphorical where objects or gods stand for more vital spirits or polytheistic presences in the world, the era after Plato and roughly up until Hegel and Kant is metonymic, where discourse “stands for” a more singular monotheistic abstraction, and finally descriptive language in which all symbolised transcendence is intentionally stripped away in order to use language to directly represent the world, as in science.4
Yet even Frye’s scheme is extremely broad brushstroke, does not rely on reverting to cliche, leans on examples and limits its analysis to the field of literature rather than claiming to speak of all humans at any time in one sweep. Exceptions can be given to any of the above categories, and so their use is somewhat limited to the literary critic, and even there can still be objected to. Any claims beyond literary criticism would enter more directly to fields that intersect with cognitive science, history, wider religious studies and the extent to which our brains actually rely on underlying conceptual mappings and thus a set of “metaphors we live by,” to use Lakoff’s phrase.5
The point is, Pageau’s claim is not evidenced and lacks specificity. As with the lack of citations, it comes as a general warning that the contents are not based on scholarship but cliche, not on example but on sweeping generalisations, relying on a readership who will feel that what is being claimed is true and accept its profundity because words like “metacognitive” are thrown in without explanation, rather than having to show that what is claimed is true.
Into the actual content: Words, meanings, symbols
TL;DR: Claims about the meanings and the marks that form language is confused, involves odd strawmen and is contradictory with Pageau’s subsequent definitions of symbols, and the analogous connections Pageau is using don’t work.
Pageau’s entire thesis is that the symbolism of Genesis is based on a duality between heaven and earth that recurs in various symbols. To illustrate this, Pageau uses language, in which there are the meaningless marks on the page (earth) and the meaning in the words (heaven):
In biblical cosmology, the entire universe operates according to this paradigm, except at a higher level. In that case, instead of ordering marks on a page to encode a fact, a divine language organizes facts and events in the world to embody metaphysical truth. Thus, concrete reality is arranged by the cosmic laws of that language and then infused with spiritual meaning.
As per above, Pageau must then assert something about materialism:
Of course, in order to accept the possibility of such a “cosmic language,” we must forgo the materialistic assumption that facts are completely devoid of spiritual meaning. Otherwise the words on the page can be nothing more than ink marks, and reality itself can be nothing more than insignificant atoms or molecules.
This is an interesting analogy, although I am not convinced this interpretation is what heaven and earth actually mean in the bible, or certainly not this specifically. But as we go further Pageau’s definitions become extremely confused. To repeat: he initially compares heaven and earth to written language, which is composed of “the union of physical marks and abstract meanings.”
He goes on to argue that in the way that words are markings that contain meanings, reality is symbols that contain spiritual meanings, or rather “concrete examples” that contain “abstract principles.”
This is quite confusing. The analogy of language is simple enough to make a point about materialism seeing a meaningless world, but the illustration depends on language markings being empty of meaning unless they are connected to known meanings, hence why hieroglyphs could only be deciphered after we found the Rosetta Stone. So what does this have to do with concrete examples and abstract principles, and what do these even mean? Pageau provides an example: “Boat” and “chariot” are concrete objects and “vehicle” is an abstract principle. In another example “blade” and “stairway,” “Wedge” and “ramp” are concrete examples of the abstract principle “inclined plane.” This relationship, besides being heaven and earth is also light and dark, because “blade” and “stairway” are a “dark enigma” that could “potentially support an invisible principle.” I remind you again these are introduced in paragraphs a few sentences long over about two pages with diagrams like this:
This is simply nonsense. 1. There is no relation between these things and the language/markings analogy, 2. “inclined plane” or “vehicle” are not “abstract principles” in this context, they are just words that express something common between two other words, and a word like “vehicle” isn’t necessarily any more abstract than “car” given “car” can refer to anything from an actual car to a hotwheels toy to a drawing of a rectangle with two circles under it, it’s certainly not a “dark enigma” whatever that even means. Words are conceptual spaces, and the conceptual spaces of many words overlap, that’s why we can use metaphors. These are not examples of concrete/abstract relationships.6 3. The idea that this is what heaven/earth light/dark inherently mean in Genesis is ridiculous.
But let me give this argument the best credit I can and assume that what he’s trying to say is that concrete words are specific examples of shared abstractions. This isn’t what he actually says, but for the sake of argument, let’s make it a better example and say that “lamburghi” and “ford” are concrete examples of “cars” which is to say they are in the category “car” but also they share a set of more abstract things in the conceptual domain of car-ness, such as having four wheels, a steering wheel, an engine, the ability to drive from a to b and so on. What you have thanks to object permanence is a bigger and more flexible domain than a concrete object (the car, to a car, to the idea of a car), such that I can draw a rectangle and two wheels and an exhaust squiggle in pictionary and someone can say it’s a car, even though it has no movement or engine or steering wheel, etc because I have evoked enough of its domain to make it recognisable.7 Vehicle then would do this slightly further, and is more “abstract” insofar as it includes a greater domain.
This could be the case, as in the next chapter he claims the throne vision in Ezekiel is an “obvious example” of this in which the eagle represents a principle “too abstract to be grasped without tangible expressions,” and “the lion-bull dualility represents the corporeal or ‘earthly’ basis that provides concrete support for that principle.” He says this example should be enough to “provide an intuitive insight into this type symbolism.” So even though this isn’t an intuitive insight at all, let’s assume for credit’s sake that is what he means.
So even given this re-interpretation of Pageau’s examples, how does this relate to markings and meanings? Markings on a page are not concrete examples of abstract meanings, they are signifiers of sounds or words and words are references to conceptual domains. Without the thing signified a signifier can’t possess any meaning, hence why if I see a written language I don’t speak, the words have no meaning to me. But shared domains is an intrinsic part of the meanings of words, without the word vehicle a car is still a car, and we still recognise it as having shared domain with other things that have wheels or move. The fact that we apply a particular word to things that group more concrete objects doesn’t really reflect some hidden encoded meaning, it just tells you that meanings overlap. At this point, I am sensing the arguments in the book depend strongly on a lot of question begging and an absense of explanation and definition.
Dual symbols
TL;DR Saying things are the same doesn’t mean they are, the connections Pageau offers between apparent dual symbols is too tenuous to be meaningful and some examples are bordering on the ridiculous.
Pageau continues to widen this duality, which apparently appears as microcosms in everything: breath and body, head and body, wisdom and understanding, bread and meat, seed and flesh, angels and animals, rider and mount, and so on. Some examples of justifications for these conflations:
Head/body:
For humans, it is important to remember that breathing involves the ability to speak, which makes it a vehicle of language and information. Thus, in the human microcosm, Adam’s head represents the first principle (wisdom) as the source of meaning for the body. The role of the head is to provide a unifying principle to answer the dark enigmas of the flesh. In exchange, the body expresses and supports the head with the actions of the arms and legs.
Manna/quails (bread/meat):
On the other end, the quails are called flesh or meat, which refers to regular food in the sense of matter to sustain the body. They are depicted as “ascending in the evening” because they are akin to material obscurity. In general, flesh represents the counterpoint of seed in the process of knowledge. Its role, like the earth’s soil, is to detail or “flesh out” the implicit meaning of the seed. It is a cause of manifestation because it makes the implicit explicit.
At this point he tells you to refer to chapter 10 to understand this explicit/implicit point, I return to chapter 10 and remember with a sigh it’s the “vehicle” chapter. Pageau is stringing out this tenuous duality through a whole host of images I am absolutely unconvinced don’t remotely support it. They rely on the strange conflation of completely vague definitions and specific claims, and even if you could in theory say there is a trend here for comparative dual images, the idea that they represent the same thing and the same thing is Pageau’s claim about concrete/abstract definitions doesn’t even make any sense. Sentences like: The role of the head is to provide a unifying principle to answer the dark enigmas of the flesh. In exchange, the body expresses and supports the head with the actions of the arms and legs are just complete babble.
Even if you tried to cling on to this claim that there is a dual relationship between abstract and concrete, general principle and specific example, we’re not really learning anything since to fit with everything it has to be so general it loses any real meaning, and it comes with infuriating statements like:
To appreciate the general meaning of these structures (temples) it is only necessary to understand the basic interactions between heaven and earth. Simply stated, one must “feed the spiritual” to make it visible, explicit, detailed and tangible. The pattern is self-evident in biblical cosmology, an it is only because of materialism these rituals seem cryptic to modern interpreters.
What does materialism have to do with this? Why is this unnecessary straw man thrown in as if to validate a claim that clearly doesn’t mean very much? Doesn’t science make the implicit explicit? Aren’t the very nature of symbols or poetic language that they are an implicit sign system? Isn’t one of the flaws of materialism the belief that implicit things can be made explicit and we can be done with it? Isn’t this entire book itself actually quite materialistic, in that it actually deflates the meaning out of polysemous and implicit symbolism by turning into an analytic scheme? I would say so. In fact I would argue diagramming a poem would rob the poetry of it. Perhaps Pageau should read some Shelley.
Let’s look at a specific chapter to emphasise my issue. In chapter 56 Pageau introduces one of the reasons he thinks Adam is a “microcosm”:
There is another important analogy by which Adam is a microcosm of creation. It derives from the human tendency to privilege the right hand over the left hand in the performance of tasks. The result of this tendency is a marked difference between left and right hand in the performance of tasks for most humans.8 The right hand is usually capable of performing work with efficiency and precision, while the left hand struggles with accuracy. One hand is relatively true and productive while the other is clumsy and usually good for a laugh…Adam’s left and right hands are miniature versions of the axes of time and space. More precisely, the flesh of the right hand correctly expresses the intentions of the mind, and the flesh of the left hand incorrectly expresses them. In other words, ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ strongly agree on one hand and vaguely agree (or even disagree) on the other.
So now heaven and earth are the left and right hand. Putting aside that this is tenuous, let’s ask a more important question that at this point in the book that is being begged so obviously it’s painful: Who believes this? Where is this coming from? Genesis never mentions Adam’s right or left hands at all, the claim that the left or right hands represent time and space or heaven and earth isn’t in the bible anywhere even poetically, so where is it from? It sounds like nonsense, and it sounds like Pageau is just making stuff up, but how am I meant to know? This isn’t referenced, I have no idea if Pageau has reason to think this is the “ancient biblical worldview,” and I don’t think this is the ancient biblical worldview, I think this is just the inability on Pageau’s part to separate conflation from metaphor and symbolism from code. The book is strewn with the odd translation errors (eg claiming “Adah” means “menstruation,” the word for which (Niddah) is etymologically unrelated) that hardly inspire confidence.
Conclusion: Why I reject “code” symbolism
TL;DR The whole point of symbolic language is implicit meaning, it’s not a puzzle you decode.
Poetry is implicit. The reason a poem exists is because the writer is conveying something that depends upon the particulars of its language-content that extend beyond the denotative meaning of its words. One of the reasons it is much easier to translate a scientific text than it is to translate a poem is that scientific texts are descriptive thing-for-thing language, and so words can simply be transferred into equivalent words (generally speaking.) Poems however are notoriously difficult to translate because they rely on polysemous effect that extends into the barely noticed, such as the sound and feel of words, their cultural valences, associations and relations to other words within the structure of the poem, things that won’t have cultural equivalence.9 These effects also contain subjective elements, a degree of “misunderstanding” is baked into poetic reading because the meaning is meant to be furnished with your own meaning, which is the reason why songs, books or poems — indeed, bible verses — can mean things to you personally, because it connotes as much as it denotes.
I would argue that we might take Pageau’s initial analogy of marks and language and apply it to what Pageau is actually doing in this text. By rigorously analysing his theory-of-everything, diagrammatic interpretation in which everything has a precise analogic relationship to everything else, the poetry is beaten out of the text and nothing is left but a husk. Pageau’s interpretations themselves are “marks on the page” robbed of their implicit poetic/symbolic content. This book is analytic to the point of absurdity, it turns the bible into a kind of codebook that requires a key to crack, which Pageau would claim is because of “materialism,” but I would argue that his way of thinking is materialistic. Reading this book feels ironically like an attempt to turn the bible into a kind of metaphysical science textbook “encoded” with “hidden meanings” that have to be understood with an anal overuse of diagrams. Things are interpreted as part of the symbolic scheme that are clearly incidental events or facts, such that random place names are symbolically part of the scheme or Abraham making bread is the “union of heaven and earth” instead of just, you know, Abraham making some bread because people ate bread. By insisting that every symbol has a meaning, Pegeau is forcing the text to denote rather than connote at every stage, so that all that everything “stands for” is just the same thing over and over. I find nothing in it that is edifying for a believer, nothing in it that is spiritually helpful, and nothing in it that enhances my understanding of God. In fact by the end of the book, rather like Jordan Peterson, I am left wondering what God if any the author believes in. The God of the “abstract principles” like “vehicle,” I guess.
Anyway, that’s enough. You can read my last Pageau article, my articles on symbolism and my chat with Jonathan below:
Since this review is quite long I’ve added a TL;DR at the top of each section if you want to skim.
All quotations: Matthieu Pageau, The Language of Creation, 2018 (self published). BOOM. REFERENCED. Not that hard.
For a perspective on the phenomenological view of the heliocentric/human centric universe that Jonathan Pageau takes, you can read the four articles he wrote on the topic that are linked at the top of this article.
Northrop Frye, The Great Code, Harvest, 1982
See Markoff & Johnson’s significant book “Metaphors We Live By”
An actual example of a concrete/abstract metonymic symbol relationship might be some gesture in a relationship like buying a rose as a symbol for the abstract idea of romantic love.
For a more academic discussion of all this stuff see Don Paterson’s brilliant 2018 book “The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre”
Small gripe but Pageau really needs an editor. I know I can’t talk with my overuse of adverbs and so on, but I’m writing blog posts every other day. This is meant to be some kind of magnus opus and Pageau has paragraphs that repeatedly start with the same word, has some clumsy syntax and here unnecessarily repeats the same phrase in consecutive sentences. Even a friend reading it through a couple of times for things that feel repetitive would have helped.
Incidentally, this is why a book like ‘the message’ bible translation is a useful tool, in spite of its criticism. If it is used only as a helpful addition rather than an actual translation it can provide a sense of ‘feel’ for idiomatic equivalents of speech styles. It is naturally flawed as a translation and could be done a lot better, but the principle is interesting.
I have to disagree on this one. I believe you are misinterpreting his symbolic view. The symbolic view here is not symbolic as in a poetic way using natural language. It is symbolic as in a mathematical and programmatical way. His "vehicle" and "chariot" example is basically copy pasted from object-oriented programming methodology.
I do agree that the lack of references is annoying but that is not a good enough reason to not appreciate the patterns he has made more visible in the biblical narratives.
He clearly has a mathematical mind, and I know that may appear confusing given he rejects a materialistic view. But I believe his rejection is specific to Biblical interpretations under materialism. The contrast comes from showcasing how a symbolic/mathematical pattern in the Bible works well, but when under a modern scientific perspective it would appear muddy and confusing.
Also, his views on abstractions are very much platonic. And are the same baselines the Church fathers have used, I believe this is why people say he was influenced by them. The concept of Universals, for example, seems to be interwoven through the concepts in the book, although in a more implicit way.
I truly enjoyed it and I think it can provide huge insight to a lot of believers, but I can also understand it is not everyone's cup of tea.
Thanks. This confirms a lot of what I suspected about both Pageau’s systems of symbolic interpretation, but I did not have the patience to read through the book. Grateful that you waded through it for us.