The Catholic Church is the Proper Master

Introducing the Catholic Hemisphere

Part One of Two (Part Two can be found here)

The Hemisphere Hypothesis needs to be claimed for the Catholic Church.

There.

I said it.

I've been writing about Iain McGilchrist's "Hemisphere Hypothesis" for two years now. I've been doing it for the same reason C.S. Lewis said he wrote books: to better understand subjects.

I was like St. Paul, seeing through a glass darkly.

Heck, I'm still seeing darkly.

But the light is there. Things aren't entirely dark--as overwhelming–as they were during my first few months with this "Copernican revolution in metaphysics," when every page McGilchrist wrote took me fifteen minutes to read because I kept stopping to underline, note, and ponder.

Awhile ago (three months? 18 months?), I started to conclude that the Hemisphere Hypothesis is nothing less than a way to reframe the Catholic faith for a modern audience. The sacramental view wrapped in neuroscience.

I figured McGilchrist must be a Catholic. I looked for evidence. I asked a few Catholic professor friends. Nothing. I searched with my membership at Channel McGilchrist. Nothing. I searched on Google; I searched on Brave. Nothing.

I even asked ChatGBT. I figured that AI, being the latest tool in the left hemisphere's drive for complete domination (more on that later), would sell out McGilchrist as a Papist so the modern world would ignore him, but again: nothing.

There is nothing to suggest he's Catholic.

There are, on the contrary, a few references to his lack of any religious affiliation (including one at the end of The Matter with Things), so I figured perhaps he's a closet case, the Edmund Burke type maybe, or Shakespeare, or maybe he's getting there before George Washington (allegedly) or Oscar Wilde. I daydreamed about flying to the Isle of Skye and spying on him to see if he went to Mass or was meeting with a priest. (I'm a little embarrassed to admit that, btw . . . a nerd Catholic creeper-wannabe . . . my mother weeps.)

I looked under chairs
I looked under tables
I'm tryin to find key
To Iain McGilchrist's fables . . .

I asked ChatGBT
I asked The Beatles
I asked Timothy Leary
He didn't know Iain either

The Who (kinda)

Only a Catholic Can See that the Hemisphere Hypothesis is Catholic

After all that, I'm pretty confident McGilchrist isn't Catholic.

Which means it's safe to say McGilchrist would disagree that the Hemisphere Hypothesis is Catholic. If he realized that the Hypothesis was Catholic, he'd be a Catholic.

The Catholic Church is like a door peephole. If you look out of it, everything is magnified. If you look into it, everything shrinks.

McGilchrist is a great man, but he's standing outside the door to the Church, Hypothesis in his hands, looking into the peephole, unable to see how he could fit the massively-important Hypothesis into such a seemingly small place.

So someone inside the seemingly small place must open the door, grab the Hypothesis from his hands, and bring it inside this Petrine metaphysical black hole that absorbs every truth.

McGilchrist might object. The great man might scoff. He might even ridicule (though I doubt it . . . he seems far too gracious).

But McGilchrist can't understand. If he could, he'd be presenting the Hypothesis to the Chair of Peter himself.

I Am Uncovering the Catholic Hemisphere

So I'm anointing myself as the man to do it.

My credentials?

I'm a Catholic convert. I've read and studied every Catholic word ever written, except 99% of it. I've written for Catholic and Christian publications for over twenty years. I edited a Catholic magazine for a short spell. I'm a lawyer, trained at Notre Dame, practicing commercial law like this fellow McGilchrist devotee.

I'm a recovering left-hemispheric. I was an unwitting dupe of my left hemisphere for most of my adult life. That makes me an expert on such things, just like those former addicts who are hired to motivate high school kids to "just say no to drugs." I tell people to "just say no" to the left hemisphere.

I obsess about McGilchrist. I see him when I read David Foster Wallace; I see him in Middle Earth; I mention him over beers with my friends. I even started to introduce him during my father-of-the-bride speech last summer, deterred only by the number of guests who started stabbing themselves in the chest with their table knives.

I'm like a poodle-skirted girl in the 1950s obsessing about Dion (without the romance-induced swooning, mind you).

In short, I have no credentials. I don't even have a poodle skirt.

I wish someone better qualified was undertaking his task, but I suspect everyone better qualified has other tasks.

So I'm letting it fall to me.

Catholic 365 is the Venue

I'm using Catholic 365 as the venue.

I've published scores of Hemisphere Hypothesis pieces, which you can find on my blog, but only a few of the essays are explicitly Catholic.

I've scarcely done anything to piece together and understand what I call "the Catholic Hemisphere" and how, as Catholics, we can best implement McGilchrist's Hemisphere Hypothesis in our lives, so we can better thrive in a modern world that is, as McGilchrist points out, very unfriendly to the right hemisphere and, correspondingly, unfriendly to the Catholic Church.

I'll do my best to explore those important yet entertaining subjects here.