Jesus tells of a master going on a journey and entrusting a part of his treasure to some servants (3 or 10, there are multiple recorded versions). On his return, some had invested the portion entrusted to them and had made a profit. In each version, one servant had merely hidden away his share of the treasure, his talent, to keep it safe. And by doing so, he kept that talent sterile, non-productive.
There is a lesson we should have learned from those parables which would have maybe guided Christians, over the past two or more centuries, to a greater sense of moral responsibility. That is, those of us who believe in the all-powerful Creator, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, should go forth with courage and faith into the world to invest our talents in God’s work. We should respond in good faith to God’s Creation even — no, especially — when it gives us strong reason to reject some of our favorite human beliefs.
What happened to the Western Civilization built by St. Augustine and his successors over many centuries? It was Christian and was the home of the Christian Church. It was under the stewardship of Christians. In a word, it was ours to nurture or to lose and we lost it. Western Civilization wasn’t taken from Christians by Satan or by masses of hostile pagans. We lost it and we lost it largely by petrifying the dynamic, living ways of thought given to us by the likes of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. This process of petrifying our mental and spiritual food led to a petrification of our minds and souls.
Still more directed to the angle I’m presenting in this entry:
We Christians walked away from Western Civilization and locked ourselves in various intellectual and spiritual ghettos.
Any rational efforts to construct a story where Satan or masses of pagans took Western Civilization over by force will just dissipate into smoke and dust. There are no great battles between Christian defenders of Western Civilization and demon-worshiping barbarians red of tooth and claw. There are very few Christian defenders worth mentioning in the, mostly, pitiful struggle over the past two centuries or so over the understanding of our world and our appropriate responses to it. For the most part, the emptied squares of the Christian city, a city of both God and man, were occupied by unwise men who tried not to return to barbarism or paganism so much as to create Hazel Motes’ church of truth without Jesus Christ crucified. (Read Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood to learn about this most modern of churches.) But those who created such strange ways of thought, whether Nietzsche himself or his rather mindless successors in modern liberal democracies, were themselves victims of the moral irresponsibility of those Christians who had the duty to protect and nurture Western Civilization, or find and educate those who might be up to the task.
Because of that moral irresponsibility of Christians who walked away from their duties as stewards of Western Civilization, men of the West have come to see Creation as apart from its Creator. Western Civilization was a home for the Church, but still better: a setting and itself a character in a drama in which the story of this world was played out by the likes of Augustine of Hippo and Albert Magnus, Fra Angelico and Michelangelo, Johann Sebastian Bach and Amadeus Mozart, Isaac Newton and Carl Linnaeus, William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy, Louis I of France and George Washington. These men were but children learning to imitate their Father in Heaven as He went about His work as Creator. Yet, they were children of some greatness. Certainly, they were children of promise and they created a way of thought, as time-bound as it proved to be, which allowed men to see the increasingly transparent universe as being certain aspects of a true world, unified and coherent and complete, a physical place yes but one which is a setting for a morally well-ordered story told by God.
For sure, there have been some serious Christian thinkers in recent centuries, such as the historians of theology, John Henry Newman and Jaroslav Pelikan, or the historians and philosophers of science, Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki. There have been some novelists, the somewhat Jansenistic Graham Greene and the Thomistic Flannery O’Connor come to mind, who’ve shown they can explore human nature from two radically different Christian viewpoints and produce serious literature, not pietistic nonsense but also not moral chaos. On the whole, I know of little in the way of modern Christian philosophy or theology which is so fruitful of insights as the anti-Christian writings of Nietzsche and Sartre.
The list of Christian thinkers who have responded with open hearts and open minds to God’s Creation in recent centuries is frighteningly short, even if expanded to include all plausible substantial thinkers, at least those known publicly. Thinkers who did better may well have been buried in the dust-bin of history by bureaucrats and time-servers afraid of the newness with which Creation presents itself as Western Civilization developed, and often enough developed so explosively as to blow apart even those institutions which best served God.
On the whole, Christians have been in retreat from a world which had suddenly asked questions not to be found in our textbooks and our stale sermons. But what of all those who fill the catalogs of Christian publishers, Catholic or Protestant? Let me mention a few. C.S. Lewis combined some moral insight with non-Christian ideas about reality. His version of substantialist philosophy of the Neoplatonic variety is more consistent with a pagan idea of matter which co-exists eternally with God rather than a more radical idea of God as a true Creator. (To be sure, the alleged Thomist G.E.M. Anscombe wasn’t so far from Lewis’ viewpoint as she should have been — indicative of a deep problem with modern thinkers.) Hillare Belloc was a second-rate mind, a high achievement indeed as there aren’t that many first-rate minds. G.K. Chesterton was perhaps a third-rate mind with some worthwhile insights into the role of faith in human life. To mention a Protestant unfairly slighted: Jonathon Edwards perhaps had a first-rate mind, but one who proved the main thrust of Calvinism was a return to the higher paganism with a radically isolated God and not Christianity with its open promise of a union between men and God. I suspect a more coherent modern political philosophy could be built upon the anthropology of Edwards than upon that of Locke — after all, we are pagans dedicated to shaping the world to our own needs and not to the purposes of God. Edwards’ anthropology was a pessimistic form of modern liberalism — perhaps in the line of Hobbes, and far more rational for that pessimism. This is to say that the positing of a will which mysteriously floats free of our embodied selves leads more consistently to the idea that we are truly and inherently depraved. We act in a depraved manner when we gain the power to do so. If we are, on the other hand, embodied creatures which develop and evolve, then other possibilities arise, even the possibility of becoming Christ-like so that we can share, in a properly limited way, the life of God for time without end. The possibility even arises that we can, in principle, learn to properly handle great power in this mortal realm.
The main thrust of this highly opinionated article is: Christians have shaped their minds to the limited environments to be found in the ghettos they built for themselves. There are libraries of books, many great, written in earlier times and written to produce systems of thought including ancient or Medieval understandings of Creation. We have enriched understandings of some aspects of that Creation and yet we haven’t had the courage to revise our total understanding of Creation, to add any works to that library which show the faith and courage of Origen or Augustine. For example, our ways of understanding reality, when we think as Christians, remain bound to the understandings of time and space and matter derived by ancient, Medieval, and early-modern thinkers, not all Christians for sure. We think of ourselves as born as certain ‘persons’ rather than as dynamically developing entities in a story far greater than ourselves. We are defined by the overlapping developments of our bodies and our roles in that story being told by God. We are some endpoints of those developments, endpoints known only to God.
The ideal human mind is well-formed while being flexible enough to deal with new knowledge or new views. To withdraw, as a group of some sort, into an intellectual ghetto might seem the right way to protect our own minds and the minds of future generations in our group when we’re under some sort of assault. It’s never the right way for Christians for the simple reason that we believe that God is Creator and Sustainer of all that is. We learned the truths that emerged from the synthesis of Plato and Moses to be found in the works of the Jewish philosopher Philo, a contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, and we, especially Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, made those truths still more fundamental to our systems of thought than did even the Jews who followed Philo. No one, other than perhaps me, has come up with even the beginning of a new understanding of God’s Creation which properly considers the insights of Newton and Galois, Cantor and Einstein, Huxley and Watson. Nor has anyone produced a proper response to modernist streams of abstract thought other than perhaps Etienne Gilson, who had great respect for some of those streams, even some which were anti-Christian.
The world around us is God’s in all senses. If we Christians can’t make sense of the best knowledge of that world in terms of our faith, then we have a problem and we should work on that problem and not try to shut out the parts of God’s world which don’t fit conveniently into our systems of thought. I would even suggest it possible that such an attempt to shut out God’s world is one form of the sin against the Holy Spirit. If we teach ourselves to be rigid in the face of inconvenient facts or events while we live in this phase of God’s Creation, what would make us think we’ll magically loosen up in Heaven? In fact, I fear Heaven would be Hell to a rigid mind because such a mind would be constantly resisting God’s own advances.
I came to these thoughts while thinking about occasional stories indicating that current religious believers might be dumber, on average, than non-believers. My speculation, for now, is that this is true but only because of the ‘top end’. That is, smarter and more creative thinkers are more attracted to non-believing communities and ways of thought, at least partly because they wouldn’t be allowed to use their higher intelligence and/or creativity if they were to become Christians. Some might remain or become Christians while keeping their more substantial intellectual and creative lives separate from their lives as worshipers.
I’ll speak of a personal experience from 20 years ago or so, without naming the publisher or individual persons. I submitted to a Catholic publisher a novel about my spiritual conversion, years before I understood that conversion as it turned out, and the publisher wished to go with the book but his literary adviser told him he’d lose money because there’s no market among American Catholics for serious literature, though the problem is more general. It’s not too hard to find Catholics, or other Christians, who’ve read all the books of Robert Ludlum and maybe seen all the movies, but Flannery O’Connor is following Hermann Melville into some sort of an abyss though she probably had a more interesting, more orthodox, and more insightful way of dealing with sin in the light of the modern perspective than any best-selling Christian author or any Christian academician I know of.
Of course, Christians, maybe believers in general, are dumber than non-believers. Christians discourage thought and discourage the development of a living mind. They either cripple the mental workings of their children’s minds or drive them out of Christianity.
But this is God’s world and I’ll be posting some more optimistic view of what’s happening in our troubled age. The outlook is good for future generations, but we can bring that future closer in time by courageously and faithfully doing our part to encourage creative thought in ourselves or in others.