As my allergies ease and I get over a funk about the decrepit state of the ‘Catholic mind’ in recent centuries, I’m starting to clear out some old business and getting ready to move on to new business including regular commentary upon issues being raised by modern researchers in the various fields of empirical knowledge. In browsing my file of notes about interesting articles and comments on the Internet, I came to a quote I lifted from one of Clyde Wilson’s collections on history as a field of study, here:
History is a great drama beginning and ending in the mind of God. -Aquinas
Aquinas was sane in the strongest sense of the word, that is, he accepted — as the most natural of assents — the reality outside of himself. He never so much as flirted with epistemology, the legitimate areas of which are nowadays part of neuroscience. And, in his sanity, St. Thomas pointed us to a task for the Body of Christ — understanding God’s story, part of which is the drama of human history, from a human viewpoint in such a way that we make sense of the best empirical knowledge available to us in light of Christian truths. All Christians have a duty to try to learn the best human telling of the story and to make it their own, but few there are who are driven to create a new telling to accord with changes in empirical knowledge.
The all-powerful God is in charge and we’re characters in a story which begins in His mind and ends in His mind. If we’re creatures of sin, that’s because God wished to tell a story featuring such creatures and not because our ancestors had any power to ‘rebel’ and to change God’s story. This doesn’t release us from moral responsibility. If we’re sinful creatures, that’s what we are, but we’re also moral creatures. We move with limited but real freedom within the context of this story God is telling, part of which is human history. A more rational understanding of God’s drama, an understanding that necessarily includes the best available empirical knowledge, is more important in telling us who we are than any long gazes into a mirror.