Recent centuries have seen a mysterious retreat from the mainstream of modern thought on the part of Catholic clergymen and also Catholic laymen whose intellectual work is oriented directly to the needs of Christianity. I’m far from being a well-read historian but I’ve read enough survey works to see the retreat of Catholic thinkers into ghettos which seems to have taken place by at least the time of the Renaissance. Catholic thinkers, some very competent in their sadly limited expertise, often emerge from those ghettos to snipe at those who work in the mainstream. The main complaint of those snipers seems to be: those non-Catholics have developed worldviews which don’t give proper respect to Catholic beliefs.
Let me state a general principle:
If you think you have some important information of any sort, information perhaps dependent upon a particular viewpoint for its complete understanding, then you are the one who has the responsibility of giving that information to other human beings in a shape where it makes sense.
Kant and Descartes and Darwin were under no obligation to teach a Catholic view of human moral nature if they didn’t hold Catholic beliefs. Rather than just sniping at them, some Catholic should have come forward to make better sense of physical reality than Descartes and Kant and Darwin. Instead, the best of them sniped and then proposed a view of this phase of God’s Creation which makes little sense and shows great confusion. Some seem to think that Einstein is right in his description of the nature of space, time, and matter, but Pseudo-Dionysious is also right in his blabber about angelic beings. In fact, many are the Catholic thinkers who show the shallowness of their knowledge and the weakness of their minds by their lack of understanding that it was Einstein and not Darwin nor Kant who shot down the world in which demons and angels teem. I’ve written of that elsewhere. Now, I just wish to get some thoughts off my mind so I can return to more interesting work that might be of some use to future generations.
A Christian thinker doesn’t fulfill his responsibilities by playing to the pious practices of those of simple faith nor does he show much rationality when he uses elaborate theological structures to justify peasant superstitions while ignoring empirical knowledge. Whether priest or layman, he needs to be nurturing a faith that can accept those aspects of God’s world which are in conflict with those pious practices and simple faith. That task can be carried out only by those who have a strong faith that even the nastiest discoveries of modern evolutionary biologists work towards God’s good purposes. It takes committment and personal discipline to keep up with modern empirical knowledge so that problems can be anticipated. As matters stand, Christian leaders aren’t even responding to existing problems, preferring to place the blame upon anti-Christian scientists and philosophers for the disconnects between their favorite theological systems and knowledge of the real world. It’s the younger Christians who grow up with that knowledge of the real world who have suffered by losing their faith. And the reaction is to pray for them a little and continue on with business as usual. “Surely, it can’t be our fault because we’re wonderful and we’re comfortable with all this talk of St. Michael and Satan and Adam and Eve who sinned and pushed all of us in the direction of Hell.” Those young men and women and many others are leaving because they have no reason to believe that Christianity has much to do with reality.
It began with that retreat by priests and other Catholic intellectual leaders, that is, the retreat from the responsibility to make sense of the real world as being part of the Creation of the God of Jesus Christ. It was a funny sort of retreat because Catholics and Protestants alike maintained very high standards of scholarship in, for example, Bible and language studies where discoveries in modern times have done a lot of damage to pious views of the Bible. It’s clear to me that God isn’t going to let us live peacefully in our piously constructed views of this world.
In truth, the Church has never expected most priests to become high-level intellectuals. There have been some places and times when priests were barely literate. But we need some priests with well-formed minds or else some laymen with well-formed minds and a dedication to making sense of this world in light of Christian truths.
Nowadays… I wonder how many Catholic priests and seminarians have the skills to critically read a difficult book, such as St. Augustine’s City of God. I wonder how many seminarians could fulfill an assignment to identify some key points where the arguments of Agustine or Aquinas break down because those arguments depend upon empirical knowledge now known to be incomplete or defective. My personal experience is that, as amazing as it seems, Catholics who read The City of God do so without realizing it to be one of the most complex books of sophisticated speculation ever written. In terms and style that made sense in light of the empirical knowledge of his age, St. Augustine did very much what I did in my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand.
If those seminarians and priests can’t read the great books of the past in the context of the periods of those books, if they can’t read a book in light of the author’s assumptions — having first the skills to identify those assumptions, they aren’t going to be able to speak intelligibly to those who have grown up in an age where it takes a struggle and even a bit of creativity to think and speak of the real world in Catholic terms or even in weaker Christian terms.
So many Catholic and Protestant clergymen, as well as lay intellectuals, are able to function competently in their liturgical and spiritual lives while also functioning competently in a world which presents itself to modern eyes as being incompatible with Christian ways of thought developed in past centuries. The very fact that they can function so well with one foot in two different realms of truth is itself a sign they hold, if only implicitly, a very strange idea of what truth is and of what reality is.
How could this happen? I don’t know and, to be honest, I’ve lost interest in trying to understand and in trying to spur some interest inside the Catholic Church in striving towards a new system of thought which would make sense of empirical knowledge in light of revealed truths. Catholic thought seems to have decayed to little more than the repetition of canned thoughts, textbook distortions of the thoughts of long-dead saints. I sometimes even suspect that these schizophrenic thinkers in the Catholic Church might realize something is wrong but are so committed to those wrongful ways of viewing God’s Creation that they can’t break away. After all, those errors are so deeply wedded to revealed truths that it seems St. Michael is standing upon the prostrate figure of Satan as he holds up the true copy of the Nicene Creed.
I’m getting back to more serious and more productive (I hope) efforts to understand Creation in light of the basics of the faith so well described in the Nicene Creed and its standard variations (such as the Profession of Faith used in the Catholic Mass). I’ll be studying mathematical philosophy, the writings of the better modern skeptics (such as Hume and Nietzsche), modern physics, evolutionary theory, and history. I’ll be back to posting on more serious matters as I return to enriching and enlarging my worldview. God willing, I’ll be able to spend a lot of energy on novels and nonfiction books during the remaining time He grants me on earth.