Final Remarks 207
On the other hand, to take a somewhat less jaded view
of the matter, one should not underestimate the need to offer
believers a complete picture of things, which no great religious
movement can afford to ignore. Born as it was in late antiquity,
the church inherited, and for many centuries preserved, the
grand cosmic architecture of the Ptolemaic physical universe;
what it further required, however, and what the religious en-
vironment of late antiquity could only partially supply, was a
complementary spiritual architecture, a mythic hierarchy to
fill out and complete the cosmic, one with fixed dimensions
and levels and latitudes. And the picture that ultimately devel-
oped, reaching from God's empyrean above all the way down
to the absolute abyss of hell below, encompassed a complete
cosmic and spiritual ecology, filled with tenebrous depths and
radiant heights, mysteries and terrors, delights and struggles
and defeats and triumphs. One need only read Dante to see
how all of this could flower into a fully realized and gloriously
rich- if also perhaps dispiritingly grim - vision of reality, one
in which there was boundless room for the mind and imagina-
tion to wander and grow and create. Every civilization requires
a mythic frame. But, that said, that picture of the universe has
for the most part passed away already. Certainly all its physical
features have disappeared from our vision of reality. Perhaps it
is past time that we considered whether the spiritual structure
of that vanished cosmos, at least in some of its more garish de-
tails, could disappear as well without any great damage to our
religious imaginations. We might, in fact, find the picture con-
siderably improved.
I could go on. I could, if nothing else, spend a few hun -
dred pages more dealing with certain highly technical issues of
Christian metaphysical tradition (and, for reasons or preoccu-
pations of my own, with what I take to be a host of problems