In his first encyclical and in his book Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict has invited criticism of those parts of his thought which deal with speculative thoughts, including the nature of the human being. What is a speculative thought? Roughly speaking, it’s the result of an act of the imagination, a faculty stunted very badly in modern men, scholars and authors and musicians and politicians, butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers.
I should make a few preliminary statements about this entry and some upcoming entries on the thought of Pope Benedict. First, I don’t feel qualified to criticize his theological thought as such. For what it’s worth, I greatly admire his theological work. He has a rare ability to appreciate tradition without being rigidly bound to the speculative aspects of tradition. I do feel qualified and willing to criticize the metaphysical foundations of his theological thought and any aspect of his thought which is affected by understandings of modern empirical knowledge. And there is much speculation and empirical knowledge to be found in any system of human thought, even a system dealing with aspects of God in His transcendence. Speculative knowledge of the form called ‘metaphysics’ is a lesser sort of knowledge than revealed truths and less necessary in its truth content than those revealed truths but it’s the glue that holds together that system.
Moreover, as I’ve argued in an earlier entry, Hellenistic Metaphysics is too Small, traditional (Hellenistic) metaphysics grew up in parallel to Hellenistic mathematics. Our understanding of mathematics has expanded greatly in recent centuries, including our understanding of such metaphysical concepts as infinity and randomness — which now seems to be a sort of very raw fact rather than some number or event coming out of a process mysterious to even God. The truths we’ve inherited from Pythagoras and Plato and Aristotle are still truths, but they now seem to be possibilities in far greater realms of truth, just as Euclidean geometry is one set of ‘realized’ truths in a far greater realm of possible geometries.
Pope Benedict XVI seems to be ill-served by his advisers and conversation partners in the areas of empirical knowledge (at least in mathematics and biology and physics) and speculative knowledge. I’ll speak of these issues in greater detail in later entries where I’ll deal with some issues of randomness and chaos and other matters.
At this time, I’ll note that Etienne Gilson once claimed of St. Augustine of Hippo, arguably the greatest of all Christian theologians: he was a great theologian despite having an inadequate metaphysics. Because of his inadequate understanding of modern empirical knowledge and of modern mathematics — empirical and speculative, because of the consequent inadequacy of some parts of his metaphysics, Pope Benedict is in danger of earning a similar epitaph: an important and very good theologian despite having an inadequate metaphysics and an inadequate understanding of the empirical knowledge of his day.
In any case, we can notice that Pope Benedict’s first encyclical began with a section dealing with speculative matters, including the human soul. The Holy Father is quite aware that we have a problem in the confusion of revealed truth and other sorts of knowledge and seems open-minded about dealing with the problem. He has told us in that first encyclical and in Jesus Christ that speculations, even from popes in the context of an encyclical or from a saint in the context of his greatest writings, are still human thoughts and open to criticism.
Pope Benedict has done a lot to clean up Christian theology, to restate traditional Catholic theology in particular so that his books illuminate rather than clouding and obscuring as do so many older books when read through modern eyes. Along this line, I’ve noticed in conversations with intelligent Catholics who’ve read the works of St. Augustine, say The City of God, that they read books of substantial human thought as if through a dark glass. Able to recognize words and to scan many pages of text, they seem to have little background knowledge of the history of human thought and other relevant fields, only rudimentary skills of understanding thought which stretches much beyond a single sentence, and little ability to distinguish between revealed truths, empirical knowledge, and speculative knowledge. Those readers, products of modern culture, will scan a number of pages on which a high level of speculative human genius and the best of the empirical knowledge (of circa 400AD) is applied to the task of understanding, for example, the story of Adam and Eve. And those readers will miss the contingent elements on those pages, taking the conclusion as if a revealed truth, or — more accurately — the clear and only intelligible understanding of that story. That particular story, read with a fresh mind, seems to be dealing with an awakening from animal lack of self-awareness rather than a fall from grace as a modern Christian would understand such an event.
Modern theologians and philosophers are not so easy to deal with. They are bereft of imagination and institutionalized to the needs of bureaucracies as much as any insurance claims-processing clerk or corporate marketing executive. And, yet, every moral theologian feels he must be creative, whatever he might mean by ‘creative’. This has led to the apparent production of one heresy after another in some circles, even when those circles are made up of men who are Catholic or Protestant clerics formed in respectable seminaries. I say “apparent production” only because the modern heretics is composed of two groups:
- Those like Fr. Hans Kung of whom we can apply a statement that the physicist Wolfgang Pauli once made after a presentation by a fellow scientist: “He’s not right but he’s not even wrong.” [As is often the case, I quote from memory.] I read one of Kung’s tomes once and didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. His expressed thoughts have not enough coherence to be considered even wrong.
- There are also those like the modernists condemned by Pius X and others. There was a certain coherence to much of the proclaimed thought of the true modernists but they did nothing more than rehash ideas raised by the heresiarchs of the early centuries of the Church and convincingly denied by the likes of St. Irenaeus, St. Athanasius, and St. John Chrystostom — within the context of the Christian community.
We don’t yet understand God’s Creation and thus don’t fully understand our relationship to our Creator or even the relationship of God in His role as Creator to God in His fullness and transcendence. We were given the task of exploring this world, in its physical aspects and in its aspects that can only be seen when we try to apply revelation to understand the goals to which God is moving the world. It takes some creativity to do such work. In past centuries, men such as St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas showed us how to go about those tasks and gave us plausible systems of thought which worked well within the context of the speculative and empirical knowledge of their times. Unfortunately, the vast expansion of modern knowledge has forced us to return to the drawing board and modern thinkers have shown little sign of the creativity to redo this important task.
One problem in an age of excessive specialization is the loss of the big picture. By saying this, I’m not recommending that everyone become a creative, big-picture theologian or philosopher. I am saying that we should attend to the larger scope of any theological or philosophical or exegetical task, even when that task is quite modest. Let’s take a couple of points raised by Pope Benedict XVI in his book, Jesus of Nazareth:
- We shouldn’t read any part of the Bible out of the context of the entirety of that book. Without Moses and Elijah, without the Davidic Kingdom and Temple worship, the words and life of Jesus can’t be understood. The interested reader can find good reasons for this in Jesus of Nazareth but the major one is that Jesus Christ is the Word of God, the Torah and also the rest of Holy Scripture.
- We should remember that the Son of God incarnated Himself in a specific place at a specific time and as a member of a specific people. Jesus of Nazareth was a devout Jew who was a descendant of Abraham and Elijah, David and Jeremiah, even if He was also their Creator. His words were spoken in the context of such a concrete-minded people of very specific beliefs and practices.
There is another aspect to Pope Benedict’s thought which appeals greatly to me, partly because I hold a similar view but I came to it by a dramatically different path. He realizes that even with Christ Himself, what’s most important is His relationship to the Father. In my work which has concentrated on Creation, I’ve conjectured that relationships create substance, relationships shape things and living creatures. There is obviously a great truth underlying this sort of a view. The real question is whether it’s the best and most fruitful way to speak. (See A Christian view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality for my initial discussion of this speculation.)
I’ll now confess to something: I learned my Catholic theology from reading books by Pope Benedict or thinkers tied closely to him. This is odd in a way since my faith in God’s Creation and my common-sense acceptance of empirical knowledge were shaped by his thoughts and yet I seem to be more accepting of that knowledge which comes from human exploration of Creation.