Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: The Need for Respectful Criticism

As I noted in a previous entry, I believe that Pope Benedict is open to respectful and meaningful criticism of the sort which might be given by one competent scholar to the work of another or by one devout Christian thinker to the thoughts of another — else why would he go out of his way to point out that some of his writings, even as pope, are speculative? He seems an honest truth-seeker who has a preference for a prioristic forms of speculative reasoning and has not yet properly responded to modern empirical knowledge.

I would like to begin a Catholic debate about the meaning of modern empirical knowledge and the need for honest efforts to update Catholic speculative thought to better accord with what is now known about God’s Creation. Pope Benedict seems reluctant to move forward into what seems so brave a new world and that’s certainly understandable since he’s protecting some important truths and some important institutions. Realistically, there’s no one who’s yet provided him with a way of treating modern empirical knowledge on its own terms while respecting our stock of theological and metaphysical truths.

In recent centuries, there’s been a split of human knowledge into multiple realms in a way generally intended to allow proper freedom to specialists, but that way has led to at least an implicit belief in multiple realms of truth. In my way of thinking, there are ultimately only two ‘realms’ of knowledge: knowledge of God in His transcendent and necessary Being and knowledge of God as Creator in His contingent and free-will decisions. All of empirical knowledge and speculative knowledge ultimately collapse into knowledge of God as a Creator. There are practical reasons to speak of a more detailed breakup of knowledge into realms of revealed knowledge, speculative knowledge, and empirical knowledge of various sorts, but such a scheme is no more than a concession to the weakness of our perceptive and cognitive abilities. We’re limited in capacity and prone to error.

Pope Benedict is clearly a Christian thinker of great importance. That is, many are looking to him for guidance as we try to retain our grasp upon Christian truths, but he does need to be more open to modern empirical knowledge. He needs to encourage Christian thinkers to discipline themselves to learn more of this empirical knowledge and, by way of a contemplative (speculative) effort, to start buildings systems of thoughts which reflect both Christian truths and our best understanding of God’s world. The Christian worldview which properly considers revealed truths and modern knowledge may or may not resemble the worldview I’ve worked to build.

Many Christian thinkers react against this modern build-up of empirical knowledge because we modern men all have mental indigestion of a sort caused by our samplings at this table covered with huge trays of facts and somewhat smaller bowls of truer knowledge. One of the symptoms of this indigestion has been a a general conflict between Christian belief and empirical knowledge. We should do our best to ignore our discomfort and to courageously and confidently deal with that empirical knowledge and to make sense of it in terms of Christian revelations.

The spirits of the modern era have tried to increase prosperity and security by pushing all considerations of grounded truth away from us if they might lead to conflict in society. These spirits have often used a strategy of glorifying empirical knowledge to soften or even destroy the absoluteness of any sort of truth. Such a strategy wasn’t linked to any valid line of speculative thought but some defenders of Christian beliefs have reacted to this strategy of liberal political philosophers by building systems of thought in which even ‘natural law’ is strangely a prioristic, which usually means that much of modern natural law thinking is based upon empirical knowledge of man and his world at the time of Aristotle or maybe St. Augustine. In Thomistic terms: metaphysics uses the specific sciences. If metaphysics, the foundation of speculative knowledge in general, isn’t updated to consider the specific scientific knowledge of the present, it will carry the weight of the empirical knowledge of earlier ages.

This is an important time in history and we need to think clearly about the restatement of revealed, absolute truths. We also need to think through the nature of contingent truths and to reconsider which of our contingent truths have held up under the critiques of modern thinkers and are plausible in light of the knowledge gathered in recent centuries.

It would be nice if we could avoid making too many errors as we try to correct the errors we’ve already made or inherited. It would be even nicer if we could simply move to a position that recognizes the empirical knowledge which tells us so much about God in His freely chosen role of Creator rather than continuing the somewhat embarrassing retreat before the forces of empirical knowledge-gathering. St. Augustine was himself a thinker who acknowledged the importance of empirical knowledge and St. Thomas Aquinas was perhaps the best empirical thinker of all theologians or philosophers. But their speculative thought had some errors introduced by the empirical knowledge of their day, as does the thought of any man at any time in history.

We should always be using the best understanding of God’s world and not simply reacting to the use of modern empirical and speculative knowledge by those who may be our enemies or maybe be indifferent to Christians or may even be friendly to us but not willing to soften the effect of, for example, knowledge which makes a mockery of every homily or sermon or book that speaks as if the story of Adam and Eve was literally true. (Even allegories and metaphors become lies in an age when reading and thinking skills have decayed so badly as to make most of us literal-minded in the worst sense.)

We aren’t enemies of those who are, in Christian terms, trying to understand what God did as Creator, in His primary acts of creation and in His acts of shaping a particular world and particular creatures. God has presented us with a great opportunity and too many Christians over the centuries have turned it into a problem and have, arguably at least, helped to generate a situation that’s difficult to understand:

Modern men have decayed in many ways relative to their Medieval or early modern ancestors (see From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun for the definitive treatment to date), but they’ve also excelled in certain areas, most especially in the empirical realms including not only physics and biology but also history and biblical exegesis and many other fields.

We should see this as an opportunity for understanding certain of God’s decisions and actions as a Creator. The so-called Big Bang and the evolution of life on earth are backdrops, but very important backdrops, for the incarnation, life, crucifixion, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. For some reason, Pope Benedict, and many other defenders of Christian truth, don’t seem to be fully open to the possibilities raised by the greatest accomplishments of modern man. For example, seeing the truth to be found in Hellenistic metaphysics, many shy away from the implications of modern empirical knowledge that the truth of Hellenistic metaphysics might be just a small region of the metaphysical truths God realized in Creation. The very possibility of this expansion of speculative thought often doesn’t seem visible to many of those who are defending traditional truths. (Most of the expansions of metaphysics which are implied by my work to date would actually involve an elevation of factual knowledge and historical development relative to knowledge based on a prioristic reasoning — a goal which I think to be justified by a simple respect for God as Creator.)

I’ll end here and pick up this thread in my next posting.