What Is Metamodern Spirituality?

This blog was co-authored by Gregg Henriques, Marcia Gralha, Brendan Graham Dempsey, and Layman Pascal.

A transformation is happening in our worldviews, and many are seeking new ways of making sense out of our lives and our place in nature.

Metamodern spirituality¹ represents just such a promising movement, one that is seeking to bridge modern science with spirituality in the 21st Century. Since “metamodern” will be a novel concept for many, this post will discuss what is meant by it, before considering some of the ways it is helping rekindle spirituality in our current sociocultural landscape.

What is metamodernism?

To understand what metamodernism represents, we need to be clear on both modernism and postmodernism. Modernism emerged over the past 500 years via developments in empirical science, capitalism, and industrialism. It is grounded in a scientific worldview that emphasizes the values of truth, reason, rationality, individuality, and human progress. The postmodern sensibility arises in response to modernism. It is defined by a critique of modernist thought, challenging its ability to generate true claims about reality. The postmodern viewpoint adopts a skeptical stance in relation to foundational scientific claims, positing that social structures of power inherently imbue science with social and subjective relativism.

While postmodernism offers a valuable and multi-contextual critique of modernism, it never proposes an alternative worldview to replace it. As such, the sociocultural landscape becomes chaotic, fragmented, and dysfunctional, with clashing claims about the nature of reality, science, and social institutions populating Western culture.

The metamodern mindset arose in response to both the insufficiencies and the affordances of modernism and postmodernism. It can be thought of as a higher-order synthesis of these past sensibilities. Metamodernism² is born out of rising awareness of the chaotic fragmented pluralism of the postmodern cultural context, and it approaches the modern-postmodern debate seeking what many call a “coherent integrated pluralism.”

While the metamodern sensibility embraces the modernist ability to ground knowledge in true claims about reality through empirical methods, it also acknowledges its limitations due to social and subjective elements of human culture. The metamodern sensibility is oriented toward offering a worldview that is pluralistic, coherent, and integrated. The Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) is an example of a metamodern philosophy that organizes and unifies our previously fragmented knowledge systems into a coherent whole.

What does spirituality look like from a metamodern perspective?

While metamodernism affects all aspect of culture, the metamodern spirituality movement has been specifically exploring how issues of ultimate concern—such as how to live a life of meaning and value—might be effectively reframed from this metamodern vantage. In this endeavor, it sees a crucial role for spiritual transcendence at both the individual and collective levels.

To parse out what is meant by “spiritual transcendence” in this context, the meta-psychological framework of Zak Stein, a prominent metamodern thinker, can be a helpful guide. Stein’s model divides the human experience into three categories: cognitive development, ensoulment, and transcendence. Cognitive development refers to learned skills and the development of cognitive complexity to solve problems. Ensoulment is aligned with the development of the human capacity for deep self-reflection, empathetic interpersonal relating, and finding the right relation to one’s history and character. Lastly, transcendence refers to gaining distance from the self to foster a meta-perspective of one’s personhood or the ability to be more transparently aware of one’s self-awareness.

In this sense, transcendence can be summarized as the path toward that which is beyond the self and closer to one’s idealized notion of what is good, true, and beautiful. Metamodern spirituality takes all these categories seriously, encouraging inner development, existential deepening, and the attempt to achieve transcendence through a sensibility that embraces a coherent, integrative, and grounded approach to meditative and contemplative practices.

Recently, the second Metamodern Spirituality Retreat was held at Sky Meadow, a holistic retreat center in northeastern Vermont. Hosted by Brendan Graham Dempsey and led by Layman Pascal (both prominent voices in the movement), these events have explored how the principles of metamodern spirituality might be more effectively co- created and enacted.

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The focus of this gathering was on the concept of goodness from a metamodern perspective. Rituals, meditations, and lectures on the topic were shared and embodied, supplemented continually by deepening conversation. Much of the discussion revolved around the question of how communities might optimally re-integrate pre-modern notions of spiritual ideals without losing the benefits provided by modern and postmodern critical awareness and autonomy.

As an example of just one of the many presentations and activities, there was a discussion on the idea that goodness may be framed by the following principles, named “The Golden Triangle”:

· service to others

· gratitude for the goodness bestowed upon us by life

· remorse for the insufficiency of goodness

This was followed by a practice wherein the participants were encouraged to go outside and engage in a contemplative “dialogue with nature” about what is good—an exploration of how quasi-indigenous imaginal practices might clarify our emerging reclamation of virtue.

Source: Brendan Graham Dempsey

My (Gregg H.) engagement was memorable and meaningful. I found myself in contact with a moth on the surface of a pond. When I proceeded to ask what goodness meant to the moth, it was suddenly eaten by a fish! The encounter served as a powerful reminder that the nature of what is good is complicated and framed by one’s position and perspective. Generally speaking, metamodern spirituality is keen to fully appreciate this contextual and contingent nature of value, yet without succumbing to the familiar moral relativism of postmodernism.

It will be interesting to track how the metamodern spirituality movement develops. Judging by these retreats, it would seem we have only begun to scratch the surface of what the future of spirituality holds in store.