Why the Stars No Longer Speak: A Journey Back to When We Knew How to See

With Plotinus and Maximus the Confessor

You stand beneath the stars. There are no clouds—just the long silence of space. You know, as you've been taught, that they are distant burning bodies, billions of years old. You know their names and what they are made of. And yet they are as nothing to you—except, perhaps, on that one clear night in the desert, far from any light pollution, when their brilliance is unveiled and some hidden part of you is drawn upward beyond yourself into spheres filled with celestial wonder.

Each of us has these moments—moments when we are torn away from the mundane into something higher, moments of ecstasy where the world opens up to something beyond. And yet these moments arrive and vanish again as suddenly as the snapping of fingers. We fall back into the mundane, locking ourselves once more into the grooves of routine. Pressured by habit and training, we explain away these memories of transcendence as mere feelings—rather than genuine encounters with a world and self opened unto something higher.

But what if we could re-open this world again, so to speak? What if we could recover a way of seeing and even entering into this aforementioned beyond?

The trick, I think, is to recover vertical thinking—to allow our experience to inform our metaphysics, so as to see an elevated or higher state of consciousness not just as a nice metaphor for neurons firing in our brains but as participation in a higher reality. To see our end or goal as not in front of us, so many horizontal steps forward, but as above us (and for that matter) deeper within us than where our seat of consciousness currently stands. Deeper within than we currently perceive ourselves as being able to go.

This isn’t to ignore the laws of physics or deny that we are embodied creatures, but to recognize we have enclosed ourselves within a limited understanding of reality that denies us the capacity to even properly speak of our experience. Because, in the end, we always return to viewing ourselves as self-enclosed objects standing on a much larger object floating through space around an even bigger object, bound together solely by gravitational fields. Any dimension beyond mere physical objects extended in space becomes reduced to just more unseen physical space, emptied of greater meaning.

The Loss of Vertical Meaning

To recover this lost dimension of meaning, we first need to understand clearly how and why it disappeared. Our current way of perceiving the world did not arise naturally or inevitably. It has an origin. We were not born seeing the world this way. We were trained into it—trained to see space as empty, matter as mute, and the self as sealed off inside the body. Trained to speak of consciousness as a function of neural complexity, and beauty as a subjective preference. Trained to evaluate with skepticism, and even to project our own ideas upon reality, but not to receive anything from reality itself. We do not often question this vision because it is not just a theory—it is the background of our experience, the frame through which all else appears. It feels natural. But it is not eternal. It has a history and it originated no more than about five or six hundred years ago.

To speak of the world before 600 years ago is to speak of a cosmos. In a cosmos every tree, every blade of grass has an inherent purpose and gestures to something above. Every statue embodies an ideal discovered by cutting away the disproportionate, revealing a Divine Thought, thus becoming an icon of something higher—more radiant, more perfect. In this cosmos, human reason and intuition do not stand isolated, enclosed within individual minds, but participate directly in this higher order. The sky above was not an empty expanse but the visible threshold of divine reality. There, matter grew thin, opening into the luminous aether where celestial beings gazed down, radiant with the gladness of their more perfect state. To move upward—to ascend—was to become more real, more unified, closer to the divine source from which all reality flowed.

And this vision of reality was not simply bad physics or superstition. Rather, it emerged from universal human experience, consistent across ages and cultures: the experience of encountering something greater, something standing out from the ordinary. Such encounters naturally led human beings to speak of higher states of consciousness, elevated states of being, and transcendence beyond the natural order.

For this reason, even in our heliocentric, horizontal universe, it remains most meaningful and intuitive to think vertically. To understand our experiences of depth and height, of perfection, radiance, fullness, and transcendence, we naturally turn to language and imagery of ascent and descent. This is precisely how the ancient world articulated reality—particularly the world of Plotinus, and later Proclus, Psuedo-Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor—the Neoplatonic cosmos.

The Vertical Cosmos

For Plotinus, reality was not flat or horizontal—a history of a series of causes stretching horizontally back to the big bang, but structured vertically—flowing downward from absolute unity into multiplicity. At the very top was the One, ultimate simplicity, perfect unity, beyond all description. Below that, extending from the One’s abundant perfection, was Nous, the divine mind or intellect—the realm of eternal Ideas first glimpsed by Plato. Below Nous, matter thickened and descended further into the World Soul, animating and ordering the cosmos we see. Finally, furthest from unity, lay matter itself: the material world in which we live.

Yet this vision is not merely abstract metaphysics. It describes how human souls themselves are structured—suspended, as Plotinus vividly describes, between higher spiritual realities above and materiality below. Souls have within them something divine, something naturally drawn upward. Yet they also have something embodied, something drawn down toward matter. Each human soul thus finds itself poised, capable of moving upward toward greater clarity, unity, and participation in higher realities, or downward toward dispersion, fragmentation, and identification with matter alone.

The diagram above helps clarify Plotinus’s vision, but it is essential to understand it experientially. When Plotinus spoke of ascending upward, he meant not spatial travel but a contemplative movement deeper into reality, a spiritual journey toward greater integration, unity, and ultimately, the divine source.

The Soul’s Ascent

To move upward, in Plotinus’s sense, is not to escape the world, but to enter more deeply into its truth. As the soul turns away from distraction and multiplicity, it begins to remember what it truly is. This remembering is not merely psychological—it is ontological, a profound awakening of the soul to its origin. It reorients its gaze upward toward the source. The movement here is not spatial but metaphysical, a stripping away of everything foreign—division, dispersion, dependence on the senses—and a return to unity, clarity, simplicity.

This ascent begins with beauty. For Plotinus, beauty is not a superficial quality or a subjective preference. Beauty is the visible manifestation of a deeper reality—an invitation from the intelligible (noetic) world, shining through the sensible. A beautiful face, a compelling melody, or a well-ordered garden all draw the soul upward because they reveal more than themselves. They invite the soul to contemplate form, proportion, and harmony, guiding it gently away from transient fragments toward what is enduring and whole. Beauty initiates recollection—an awakening of the soul’s awareness of its deeper reality and true origin.

Yet the ascent does not stop at the visible world. The soul must be purified. Purification for Plotinus means quieting the appetites, gathering the mind inward, and learning to desire what does not perish. This purification is not repression; it is concentration—a disciplined turning toward what is most real. As Plotinus writes:

Withdraw into yourself. And if you do not find yourself beautiful, act as does the creator of a statue… Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked… Do not cease until there shines out from you the godlike splendor of virtue.

In other words, the soul becomes what it contemplates. As it gazes upward toward Nous, the divine intellect, it is drawn into likeness with it. Thought itself becomes the medium of union.

However, even Nous is not the final goal. Beyond all form, beyond all thought, lies the One. The One cannot be grasped intellectually, only approached through profound stillness. This stillness is not passive emptiness, but total interior unity—when the soul becomes simple enough, whole enough, quiet enough to receive what words cannot express. In rare moments, the soul passes beyond thought into immediate contact with the source itself. Here, there are no images, no distinctions—only overwhelming simplicity. The One does not reveal itself; it simply is. And in touching this reality, the soul becomes what it beholds.

The Loss of Vertical Reality

If the cosmos Plotinus described was so rich, intuitive, and experientially true, how did it vanish from our imagination?

The world did not simply "flatten" overnight. Instead, our sense of verticality faded gradually, step by step, over centuries. To understand how this happened, we need to recognize clearly what changed—above all, how we began to approach reality itself.

For Plotinus and the ancient world, as we've seen, reality was participatory. This means that the things we saw, touched, or heard—stars, statues, music—were never just objects that stood apart from us, waiting to be measured or categorized. Rather, they were symbols. To call them symbols did not mean they merely represented or pointed toward something else. It meant they actively participated in a higher, invisible reality and could lead us directly toward it. The cosmos was symbolic in precisely this sense: every blade of grass, every celestial body, every carefully proportioned sculpture expressed or embodied a higher meaning, a deeper unity, a transcendent truth.

This participatory relationship with reality began to erode around five or six hundred years ago, replaced by a new vision that privileged measurement, prediction, and practical control over contemplation and symbolic meaning. Measurement and prediction seem harmless, even beneficial—and in many practical ways, they are. But their rise brought with it a subtle, profound shift: the objects around us ceased to be symbols participating in higher realities, becoming instead mere things—isolated, measurable entities whose meaning lay solely in their physical properties or practical uses. The symbolic, vertical relationship to reality was slowly replaced by a horizontal, instrumental relationship—one in which the world existed primarily as something to observe, analyze, measure, master, or control.

Technological advances, especially instruments like the telescope, accelerated this shift. Such devices extended and amplified the reach of human senses, allowing us to measure distant celestial bodies with unprecedented precision. Yet, paradoxically, as these instruments expanded our observational powers, our vision of the cosmos narrowed dramatically. Looking through the small aperture of glass, astronomers saw with great detail—but only by bracketing out everything that lay beyond measurement. The telescope revealed a cosmos made up solely of objects in empty space, whose movements could be calculated and predicted. What began as amplification ended as reduction.

By the late 17th century, Kepler and Newton had produced the mathematical frameworks necessary to close the universe into a self-contained system of cause and effect, reducing cosmic harmony to gravitational equations and planetary orbits to clockwork regularity. In this new picture, nothing moved upward toward meaning or descended downward from the divine source; everything moved horizontally, locked in perpetual cycles governed by impersonal laws. The cosmos had become a closed system—a machine running by necessity rather than a living reality radiant with significance.

This is why to speak of the stars today is no longer to speak of luminous celestial divinities or ideas, but of bodies, moving through space according to fixed laws. We point our enormous telescopes at the heavens now not to contemplate the beauty or order or music of the spheres, but to harvest data. A distant dying star is only notable for its geometry, the curvature of light it produced by a shift in the gravitational field so great even light can't reach inside it. Every thing exists as much as it can be measured and each measurement is another data point in a closed model of matter and energy being exchanged by the laws of thermodynamics. The very cosmos that once called the soul home now appears muter, impersonal, unyielding.

And in this silence, the soul retreats. It turns inward, but finds no echo of the world within. It finds a self shaped not by the cosmos, but by images and impressions, algorithms and moods. Interior life, once the microcosm that contained the cosmos in itself, becomes something to manage, soothe, or perform. The idea that contemplation might unite the soul with the structure of things seems remote—almost unintelligible. We feel, at times, a longing for something beyond, but we no longer know how to ascend. The soul is not denied its desire; it is denied the structure that once made desire capable of leading us to anything greater than a neuro-chemical reward.

Reclaiming Vertical Thinking

This is why the impulse toward vertical thinking, even if unconscious and inarticulate, has never truly vanished. We desire to transcend, or even more, ascend toward something higher, more real, more luminous. But how do we reclaim vertical thinking in our day and age, especially given the overwhelming dominance of our horizontal worldview?

First, it's crucial to recognize that reclaiming verticality does not mean abandoning modern science or returning to a pre-scientific cosmology. Instead, it involves restoring our ability to perceive reality symbolically, as participating in something beyond mere physical processes. It means acknowledging once again that reality is layered, with each layer opening onto deeper, more meaningful dimensions.

To think vertically means recovering the symbolic imagination—the capacity to see the world not merely as an assemblage of objects, but as an interconnected hierarchy of meaning. A mountain, from this perspective, is not just a geological formation; it symbolizes the soul's ascent toward God.

Consider Mount Sinai in Exodus: Moses ascended the mountain to encounter "the One Who Is," whose glory was so radiant that Moses had to be hidden in the cleft of a rock as God passed by. When Moses descended again to his people below, he had to veil his face because they couldn't bear the brilliance God's passing had left on his face.

Similarly, water is more than simply molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. Symbolically perceived, it represents purification and rebirth. The ocean, vast and seemingly infinite, evokes both awe and humility, suggesting the soul’s encounter with the limitless divine. A river evokes the inexorable flow of life, the steady journey of the soul toward its ultimate destination in God. Rain falling from above recalls grace descending, nourishing and renewing creation below.

Encountering these symbols reawakens our spiritual perception—our capacity to recognize and engage with meaning that lies deeper than physical appearance. This spiritual perception is precisely what the Greeks called nous: not mere rationality or intellectual skill, but a contemplative faculty, an intuitive grasp of deeper truths. It is through the reawakening of our nous that vertical thinking becomes genuinely possible again.

Christianity as the Fulfillment of Vertical Reality

Yet, while Neoplatonism offers us a profound vision of reality, a powerful contemplative method, and a rich sense of vertical meaning, it remained incomplete. The ascent it offered was accessible to philosophical elites, distant from everyday embodied life. It articulated a clear metaphysical structure, yet struggled to fully reconcile the soul’s ascent with the concrete reality of human existence, personal relationships, and the intimacy of embodied life. It drew the soul upward—but risked leaving the body, the everyday, and the ordinary behind.

What was needed, then, was not a rejection of this vertical vision but a fulfillment of it—an integration that could embrace both contemplation and embodied existence, the universal and the particular, spirit and matter, ascent and incarnation. Such a fulfillment is precisely what Christianity brought into the world through its revolutionary doctrine of the Incarnation—the astonishing idea that God, absolute unity and perfect transcendence, entered fully into human existence in the person of Jesus Christ.

In Christ, vertical ascent is no longer an escape from material existence or bodily life; rather, the divine itself descends fully into matter, sanctifying it, transforming it, affirming its fundamental goodness. The human body, everyday life, and ordinary experience become the place not of exile but of encounter, not of dispersion but of unity. Vertical ascent is thus redefined: we ascend toward God precisely through entering more deeply into love—love of God, neighbor, and even creation itself. Reality’s vertical structure is not abolished; it is radically expanded to embrace all dimensions of life and experience.

This vision reaches a profound synthesis in the thought of Maximus the Confessor, particularly expressed in his Chapters on Love from the Philokalia and his Letter on Love, Maximus brings together the finest insights of the Greek philosophical tradition with a distinctly Christian ethos. For Maximus, love is not simply an ethical virtue or command, but something more fundamental and profound: it is the very structure of reality itself. All things flow from divine love, are sustained in being by love, and ultimately repose in ever-expanding love. The soul’s vertical ascent toward God thus becomes inseparable from the soul’s deepening capacity to love—existentially, contemplatively, and practically.

In Christ, the cosmos becomes fully intelligible not only as an ordered hierarchy of being but as a symphony of love. Ultimate meaning, highest reality, deepest unity—all are revealed as dimensions of divine, personal love, manifest and made accessible in Christ. Christianity thus does not merely complete the Neoplatonic vision: it fulfills and transforms it, uniting philosophical wisdom and practical spirituality into a living, embodied communion open not only to philosophers but to all humanity.

Living the Vertical Life Today

And so we return to that moment beneath the stars. You are standing once again in the silence, looking upward. The sky has not changed, and neither has your body. The stars are still billions of years old, and the earth still spins around a sun drawn by gravity’s invisible thread. But this time something is different. You begin to see not just with your eyes, but with your soul. What once appeared cold, distant, and mute begins—however faintly—to speak again. Not because the stars have changed, or the facts about them have been denied, but because you are learning to see within a different frame. The vertical axis, long forgotten, begins to shimmer again in the background. The world, no longer flat and inert, reveals itself as layered, luminous, and alive.

To live within a vertical cosmos is not to reject science, but to restore perception. It is to learn again to see the tree not just as a collection of cells or the product of a seed, but as something rooted, reaching, full of quiet instruction. It is to feel the flame not just as combustion but as desire rising toward its source. It is to dwell in a world where meaning is not made, but given—disclosed through symbols, through beauty, through the slow work of contemplation.

And in this reawakening, the soul remembers its capacity to ascend. Not by fleeing the world, but by passing more deeply into it—by learning to love rightly, to perceive rightly, to walk the path made possible in Christ. The cosmos becomes once more not an object to master, but a mystery to inhabit. Not a mechanism of necessity, but a hierarchy of love.

This is what it means to reclaim vertical thinking: not to climb out of the world, but to dwell in it as one who listens. The ladder was never taken away. It has only been buried, covered over by noise, by distraction, by the weight of a world that has forgotten its own height.

Even now, in a world of things, the ascent remains possible.