Here's why I raised the concern about philosophical voluntarism. For the ancient Christians, the things of this world are good because they are mirrors of heaven, echoing a divine ordering that lies at the very heart of reality. Thus, everything in the world, from the smallest insect to the highest mountain, means something. The late Thomas Howard (1935-2020) described the ancient Christian mind as follows:

"Nature and politics and animals and sex—these were all exhibitions in their own way of the way things are. This mind fancied that everything meant everything, and that it all rushed up finally to heaven. We have an idea of royalty, this mind said, which we observe in our politics and which we attribute to lions and eagles, and we have this idea because there is a great King at the top of things, and he has set things thus so that our fancies will be drawn toward his royal Person, and we will recognize the hard realities of which the stuff of our world has been a poor shadow when we stumble into his royal court…. This mind saw things as images because it saw correspondences running in all directions among things. That is, the world was not a random tumble of things all appearing separately, jostling one another and struggling helter-skelter for a place in the sun. On the contrary, one thing signaled another."

To see the world symbolically in the way described by Howard is difficult, because it runs counter to modernist sensibilities. My fellow parishioner, Olivia Wetzel (author of "The Medieval Tapestry" substack substack.com/@themediev… and proprietor of the Alchemist Tea & Coffee (see pic!), explained it to me like this. "In the modern world, we tend to view things in binary terms: A always equals A, and A cannot equal B. In the binary language of computing, 'this' cannot be 'that', and to be 'that' means you can't be 'this.'" She went onto explain how metaphor is almost the opposite. Here’s how she put it in an email to me: "A king is not merely a king, he is a lion, a sun, a country. Christ is a tree, a vine, a lamb, a door, a king, the list goes on. The purpose of metaphor is to simplify something so that we can understand it. The thought of stories making the world smaller so that we can see more of it and see through it into the divine. A still equals A, but it also equals B and C and D and E.... While metaphor and symbols can help us understand elements in the world, these should not be mistaken for reality itself. For example, alchemical symbolism in literature is not supposed to be thought of as an alternative way to salvation but a coherent, simpler, explanation for the way that already exists. If you isolate the practice of alchemy from its symbolic architecture, it can become dangerous; but it was never meant to be isolated. It is connected to a language of metaphor, symbol and religion, thus easily being used by authors to portray the journey of the soul to Christ. As an example, consider the symbolism surrounding The Philosopher’s Stone. While we do not reach purification through contemplating symbols but through Christ’s sacrifice, the Philosopher's Stone was seen symbolically as none other than Christ's blood, partly because of its traditional blood red color, and also because it grants everlasting life. (The King Arthur story where they find the stone instead of the usual grail is from the 13th century and titled Parzival.) In fact, the way alchemy was thought to work is that if you went into it with the mindset of finding the philosopher's stone to get money you wouldn't succeed. The goal was Christ and purification through Him.”

This symbolic understanding underlies C.S. Lewis’s use of alchemical symbolism in his fiction, particularly in the space trilogy, as Annie Crawford emphasized in the interview with Pageau. She noted that the world is full of recurring narrative themes, such as sacrifice, which function as a kind of built-in mechanism by which disorder is corrected—something she suggests is deeply embedded in the structure of things.

(You can read the rest of my reply to Fr. Chad Arneson at substack.com/@robinmark…).