[I’ve found over the past two decades that many of my fundamental ideas can be seen in the novels I’ve finished and put on my website thus far. I think I can say that exploration of communities, what they used to be and what they now are, what they can or should be, was a major theme in all of my novels published to date and maybe more so in the conversion novel I’ll be finishing and publishing this year—God willing. It’s interesting, at least to me, that I wasn’t consciously aware of many of the ideas I was developing while I was writing novels, as well as a few short stories which seem to have disappeared from my computer’s memory. See Unpublished Novels for short descriptions of my novels as well as links for the downloading them. Some readers might better understand, or even enjoy, these ideas in the form of moral fictions which are decidedly non-didactic. I was unaware of the complexity of the moral conflicts in The Hermit of Turkey Hill until a friend read the manuscript and told me it’s a `hard book’. That was years after I’d finished writing it.
For the remainder of this essay, I’ll be assuming an understanding of being as discussed in From Abstract Being to Concrete Being and Narratives. The reader who wants to understand as much as possible might be advised to read that essay, especially if you are new to my way of thinking.]
Philosophy begins with a sense of wonder at what is but only becomes true philosophy when coupled with an active exploration of being. That is, in a formal sense, all philosophical schools and traditions—even such modern specialties as the philosophy of beer—are founded upon metaphysics, an understanding of being. In this sense, created being is understood in positive terms and God’s necessary Being is understood by way of what might be labeled `negative metaphysics’, metaphysics which can speak of God only by pointing out the ways in which His own Act-of-being is different from the lesser acts-of-being which we can study in one way or another. By His own Act-of-being, I refer to God’s very existence. The use of this term is indicative of the general scope of the term `act-of-being’. It’s not merely an act of creating a material universe nor of sustaining it; it’s the act of existence. And it’s a way of speaking which has annoyed many thinkers over the centuries. Etienne Gilson made the seemingly strange claim: out of all modern philosophers, it was the atheist Jean-Paul Sartre who best understood and accepted this Thomistic concept.
Being is at least what we can touch and point to and study by the methods of physics and chemistry and other empirical sciences. I’ve claimed, partly upon Biblical grounds and partly upon my experiences as a creature, that being is also what moves and interacts and forms relationships and various sorts of narrative streams including the morally ordered narratives which we can call stories. I’ve claimed that relationships are primary, not concrete and thing-like being and not even some general sort of stuff. Thing-like being comes into existence as a result of relationships and can be further shaped by relationships. See the Gospel of St. John or the letters attributed to him or his followers. See Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality for a short discussion of being. The longer writing I referred to above, From Abstract Being to Concrete Being and Narratives, is more recent, more complete, and perhaps closer to a good understanding of created being. I write in a different and perhaps more accessible way of what I mean by `abstract being’ in three short essays, Frozen Soul and Other Delicacies, Studying Steam When All You Have is Ice, and More on Matter as Frozen Soul.
I would claim that what we perceive, in a general understanding of perception, is some form of created being despite the possibilities of delusions and hallucinations and the misunderstandings of our own perceptions. We need to be careful, to properly analyze our perceptions of reality; nowadays, we have a great advantage in having so much information on this subject from the empirical research and disciplined analyses of human perceptions and processing of those perceptions. We know a lot about the weaknesses and tendencies to error in our seeing and hearing and so forth, but that isn’t a matter to worry about. After all, if we can identify our weaknesses and errors in seeing and hearing, then we can make the appropriate corrections. If we can’t see Jupiter’s moons too clearly, then we can build telescopes and other instruments, even including flyby vehicles. If I know, and I do, that the floaters in my eyes start showing when I’m tired, then I adjust and consciously try to ignore the small objects or the insects coming from me out of the corners of my eyes. I then rest and my refreshed eyes will filter out those floaters.
Science, physics and chemistry and biology, can tell us much about being and, as I noted above, can help us to adjust for biases and other problems in human perception, more generally—in our minds and hearts and hands. I may create confusion by sometimes using science in the German sense: any disciplined and orderly field of study, but, here, I’ll use science in the more limited sense though even in that limited sense there are fields of study, such as history, which straddle fields of study more strictly limited to the concrete realms of being and those fields which try to access, often the wrong way, more abstract realms of created being. (Some fields of science more narrowly understood also have to deal with the abstract, such as physical cosmology or evolutionary theory.) Of course, most literary scholars or historians would be surprised to hear their non-empirical ways of thought described in this way.
Increasingly, science in this narrower sense also tells us much about more abstract realms of being and even about the narrative forms of being in this concrete realm and in the more abstract realms as well. Complexity theory is just one example of ways in which physicists and mathematicians and chemists and others are exploring the formation of complex entities of a sort which naturally participate in narratives, streams of physical events directed forward in time so that even moral purpose becomes possible. I’ll state explicitly my claim that we should regard not only relationships but also the narrative aspects of our world as forms of being. There is no chain of stuff-like created being, going from the higher ranks of angels down to living creatures and then things in the mortal realm. There are instead multiple networks of being which can be charted in this sort of way:
very abstract being => … => relationships => … => stuff
very abstract being => … => relationships => … => humans
very abstract being => … => relationships => … => narratives
stuff and humans and narratives => a world
Don’t take the above too seriously yet. It’s only indicative and a more realistic group of charts would be more like a plate of spaghetti than a neat schematic. If I don’t produce that more realistic, richer and more complex, chart soon, I would hope someone else does.
We should question whether physics and chemistry and biology and other sciences in the more limited sense tells about being. I claim they tell us about some essential aspects of being, as well as a large number of contingent aspects, that is, aspects which could have been different. Again, the better image would bring in streams flowing from abstract regions, which streams are outside of the study matter and methods of those sciences so disciplined and so capable of helping us to understand those important parts and aspects of Creation which can be quantified or studied by techniques closely related to those of quantitative sciences.
Now that I’ve confused matters a little, I’ll draw some of the threads together to explain why communities are a form of true being, as much a form of being as the forms of being in the entities studied by astronomers and geneticists and chemical engineers. In other words, there isn’t stuff, thing-like being, that God created and then relationships and other `immaterial’ non-thing-like forms of being. So far as we creatures are concerned, there is only what God created, that is, what He manifested in this particular Creation. If we perceive communities, if we perceive married couples, if we perceive the universe itself, as true entities, then they are formed from created being; they are not assemblages of things brought together as if business partners bound only by the contract laws of modern, liberal nations. There are no magical forces to be added to what God created so that, abracadabra!, there is now a bride and a bride-groom, and a married couple where once there was a woman and a man.
We modern believers in a radical and incoherent individualism deny too easily our raw perceptions of communal entities. We ignore the underlying being which can’t be explained to any significant extent by assembling our understanding of the constituent members and other parts. This is strange on the part of sacramental Christians; after all, some of the special bonds coming down to unite man and woman as a married couple, individuals as a Church, and mortal men as sharers of God’s life are brought about by those acts we call Sacraments. The more general, less special bonds are still knowable as the glue of a sacramental world.
We perceive the abstractions of time and space without being able to fully justify either one. We take their existence as some sort of raw truth. In recent centuries, human beings of all sorts have developed high levels of skill and some rather fantastic instrumentation for exploring empirical reality. We humans have also developed the tools of mathematics and general reasoning to analyze at least some small parts of the mountains of empirical facts and to create some serious bodies of knowledge. Not only do communities exist as entities to study, entities with their own properties not definable by summing up the properties of their parts, but the very effort to explore and analyze and exploit, properly and improperly, our world has led to the formation of fantastically complex communities of a sort not seen before, such as those of science or those which formed by mostly peaceable means as explorers and pioneers from different cultures came together to form, say, Kansas City. Cities larger and more complex than Babylon grew up rapidly by the efforts of those who, not long before, hadn’t known of the existence of the very sorts of human beings laboring by their side. When such efforts worked, the result was far more solid than a band of radical individuals working together for their own self-interest. This isn’t always to the good. The political community named United States has grown into a morally disordered nation and the very reality of this community is what will make it hard to reform. It might well turn out that the path to reform, to moral re-ordering, will lead to a great loss of wealth and power and perhaps a (probably temporary) breakup into multiple countries more coherent and better organized than the current perversely adolescent giant.
This understanding isn’t the result of an ideological commitment on my part. My emotional attitudes incline me to a very stable and traditional viewpoint, but my greater commitment is to be open to what is revealed as God tells His story.
We all bring a story, adequate or not, to our explorations of the world around us, a circular activity since that world is a story being told by God. We bring a story and begin to fill in details and to fix some problems with that story. For the most part, men and women, boys and girls, inherit most of the story in which they find themselves. But…
Every so often, we find out something that should lead us to start revising our inherited stories, including the grand story which forms the communal mind of a civilization, the grand story which Jews and Christians consider to be the story truly being told by God. This doesn’t mean that Jews and Christians think they accurately know or fully understand the story God is telling, but it does mean we each feel we understand some very important aspects of that story.