I’m being somewhat unfair in titling this series of blog posts as if Pope Benedict were responsible for the lack of response by Christian thinkers to the opportunities and problems presented by modern empirical knowledge. It’s creative thinkers who’ve failed over the past five centuries or so, perhaps because of the general cultural decay narrated so powerfully and elegantly by Jacques Barzun in From Dawn to Decadence, but Christian scholars and leaders in our modern world act as if unaware that we, as the earthly body of Christ, have suffered a severe failure of imagination.
We each have our own roles to play, our own charism. I spent more than ten years writing creative fiction of the sort which has had few readers in recent centuries and nowadays has no publishers. Now I also write philosophy and theology in the style of a novelist who wants to say things that don’t seem possible with the language of our age. Often I can’t even think these things and can only grasp at vague and sometimes nightmarish images. The future, even as defined by the imaginative possibilities of the present, is never clear to men. More than that, I too am a child of my time, the product of modern American education and also the a resident of a time and place where shallow literacy is appreciated and glorified and any works demanding a deeper literacy are ignored in a way that should give good lessons to any future Stalins.
I try to speak directly about God’s world but often find I can think and speak only in circumlocutions. It takes so many words to say something which seems a simple truth of this universe because I speak in terms of basic concepts better suited to a universe which doesn’t exist, a universe men once imagined into existence because it was a good encapsulation of what was known in past generations. And men will never see this universe better than through a glass darkly, let alone the world which is the universe as seen in the light of God’s purposes. Though we’ll fail, we have the duty to try to understand the world because it’s the manifestation of certain thoughts of our Lord when He shaped this world from the underlying stuff of Creation, what I call the Primordial Universe. And, to be honest, it can be great fun.
It’s my calling to speak the circumlocutions that allow a narrative to be built from bits and pieces of modern empirical knowledge: history and physics and biology and literature. From this mess might coalesce a stream which would be a story, unified and coherent and complete in the context of this age, given our needs, which dictate what part of God’s world we explore and what we can discover during those explorations.
We need fresh ideas for dealing with the problems that God has thrown at us and our minds are not so inventive as to produce anything so disturbing to our rigidities of mind as knowledge of our environments and, in modern times, knowledge of vast expanses of time and space in this universe. A good understanding of the problems, such as those which quantum mechanics presents to our understanding of mundane reality, will itself provide the creative possibilities for resolving the problems. In other words, the problems God throws at us are the thoughts He wishes us to have as our own. We just hear God’s messages as static because we’d prefer to listen to recapitulations of earlier messages as interpreted by our ancestors. Of course, I’m speaking about messages which are so-called ‘natural revelations’ such as those which came to the great pagan thinkers and which fill many pages of the works of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas.
One reason for preferring modern empirical knowledge over the fantasy worlds oddly preferred by some Christians is:
As Creator of this world, God was more creative than J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis could possibly be.
And that is the issue: the ‘weirdness’ of quantum mechanics and the dark mysteries of biological evolution are the result of God’s creativity and man is most creative when he remains true to what he knows of that divine creativity. That we have no poets and novelists up to the task of creating new forms of literature from this new knowledge, or more likely — no publishers or editors up to the task of evaluating truly creative efforts, says something about our culture and our inability to respond as better generations responded to movements of the human spirit comparable to that which drove our modern empirical research efforts. (In fact, I consider Moby Dick to be as good a critique of the modern mind and its dual attributes of moral insanity and instrumental competence as we should need.)
As I’ve pointed out repeatedly and repetitively in various writings:
Modern physics and mathematics have implied an expansion of metaphysical thought;
Modern evolutionary biology and modern studies of human histories have implied a return to the Biblical view of God as a story-teller; and
Some nastiness in human history explored most thoroughly by Hannah Arendt has not yet been properly considered by moral theologians. (I refer to the ‘banality of evil’ which is really the tendency of ‘nice’ human beings to do the work of corporate evil while simply taking care of their day-to-day concerns.)
If we are to break through the various barriers in our minds, we’ll need poets and novelists and musicians and painters to start bringing new ideas into the mainstreams of human cultures. Those artists may very well pick up ideas from philosophers or theologians or they may discover them on their own, though our current impasse would indicate we need philosophical theologians who can give us a good worldview to make some sense of modern empirical knowledge in light of Christian revelations. Even if the artists get their inspiration from philosophical thought, they’ll enrich that thought in the process of showing the beauty that lies in any valid way of looking at God’s Creation, no matter how abstract and demanding the early statements of that way might be.
Those new ideas have first to be generated in the minds of those oriented towards experimental thought. And many of these experiments might be good and useful even if largely erroneous in their underlying ideas. Even if we assume some sort of good and useful Christian thought lies in the fantasies of Tolkien and Lewis, they don’t speak the truth so well as did Tolstoy in War and Peace despite the sheer wrongheadedness of his philosophy of human history. But he was apparently struggling with the problem I’ve discussed often in my writings — the relationship of men to the large-scale movements of our age, many of which have done great evil.
It’s the responsibility of creative thinkers to help the shepherds to see how the earth has been changed by a better understanding of God’s world, an understanding not yet integrated into our greater ways of thought. We need to look forward to better possibilities than those we’ve chosen in recent centuries. It’s not the world which has failed men, but men who have failed to do their duty by the Creator of the world. It’s not that empirical knowledge of that world is evil but rather the imaginations of men are proving to be inadequate to the task of making sense of that knowledge in light of Christian revelation. We do evil with our eyes shut and our minds in self-induced comas.
But that doesn’t have to be. Our imaginations and our minds can be exercised and strengthened. I still think I was right in the bibliographical essay of my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand. We should nurture our imaginations by reading the great creative fictions of the West, such as Moby Dick and Don Quixote.