We were told by Jesus of Nazareth that we must become like children to enter Heaven. We must become `child-like’ and not `childish’.
As creatures of mind and heart and hands, how can we become child-like? Wouldn’t that mean we would think as a child, feel as a child, and act as a child? That doesn’t seem right. It would seem to be strongly opposed to my advocation of a sophisticated effort to understand God’s Creation.
In the distinction I’m drawing, to be child-like doesn’t mean we’re to be like children in all ways, doesn’t mean we should be childish. Jesus didn’t command us to throw tantrums when we don’t get a desert after dinner every night nor did He command us to repeatedly try to understand modern empirical knowledge by the imposing traditional frameworks of knowledge upon a world described by quantum physics and evolutionary biology and a decidedly non-idealistic view of human history.
What in the world did Jesus mean by commanding us to be child-like if we are to be saved, if we are to enter the world of the resurrected? I’ve given the answer often in my writings with regard to our attitudes toward what God has created, what lies inside of us and also outside of us. I’ve generally written in terms of a Christian needing to deny epistemology as a legitimate philosophical specialty, though it’s certainly necessary for physiologists and brain-scientists and instrument designers to study these problems of knowledge denied to philosophers. And it is good for philosophers to be aware of the distortions and biases and weaknesses of the human visual system, also aware of the ways in which we can compensate.
Reading On Certainty, a collection of aphorisms by Ludwig Wittgenstein, has put a new light on this issue. As if trying to comment upon the commandment of Jesus, Wittgenstein expends some effort to make it clear that our knowledge starts in childhood with a naive acceptance of what adults tell us and what we see in the world around us. This is not a pure credulity but rather a form of naivete which is a matter of trust. In fact, it seems to me that Wittgenstein systematically strips away the pretensions of doubt in modern philosophy and creates a photographic negative of what might be called `naive realism’ in a Thomistic context—at least as Gilson understood the thoughts of St. Thomas Aquinas. (This was the area where Gilson disagreed with his friend Jacques Maritain to the extent of claiming Maritain wasn’t a true follower of St. Thomas Aquinas.)
This is the meaning of `naive realism’ in that Thomistic context: we are to be child-like in accepting what we perceive as being truthful. It may need some unraveling and some analysis, maybe we’ll need to design some instruments, before we can make total sense of those perceptions, but the truth can be found by way of those perceptions seen in light of a small stock of direct revelations, and even those are given to us as the sounds and sights accessible to creatures with ears and eyes and no organs that see into transcendental regions.
A child explores the world directly around him but learns about the greater parts of the world from adults, directly or by drawing out the assumptions underlying the statements of adults. The essence of the adult’s statement that the earth is round is accepted as being a matter of truth and the young boy destined to be a philosopher or theoretical physicist will, at some point, wonder at the claim and maybe stare at the globe he got for Christmas and ask why people in Australia don’t fall off the earth. Even children with lesser talents in abstract reasoning will, as time goes on, learn that raw truth often requires some effort to be understood in a deeper way so that it can be integrated into the child’s greater understanding. It might take many years before the child advances to a more sophisticated naivete, but it usually happens.
What other option do human children really have? Those who try to honestly impose upon reality some inner scheme will be seen as mentally disturbed, maybe diagnosed as being psychotic in the way of schizophrenia. Yet, many of us modern people are schizophrenic in many of our ways of thought. This is one reason for many throwing away their faith. They walk away from Christianity when they realize that the sermons or homilies or Sunday morning instruction is in conflict with the knowledge underlying those machines and techniques in the local Medical Center, in conflict with the images being sent back to earth by NASA space explorers, in conflict even with the general concepts of mathematics they might learn as undergraduates in college. Few will be able to unravel this and build up a Christian story of reality on their own. Nearly all, including nearly all clergymen, will need others to build up a coherent story reconciling the Bible and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
I’ve said often: created being, reality, is a manifestation of certain thoughts of God. We accept what we see as being true; things are true as St. Thomas Aquinas claimed. We have no warrant for a belief that we human animals know something outside of what we are told by way of the thing-like realm of being and the abstract realms of being we can begin to detect by studying that thing-like realm in greater detail and with greater sophistication. We are children learning from the Creator and shaping our thoughts in response to His answers. We’re not some sort of natural adults bringing schemes of truths to the task of understanding what lies around us. Any schemes we have are drawn out of our environments, concrete and abstract, by studying our traditions, and by that painful process of growing into a world, becoming truly part of it. We need to re-found our Christian faith and we must do so by accepting on faith what is known of empirical reality and to move on to making sense of that knowledge in light of our Christian beliefs. As children take on faith the claims of their parents, we need to take on faith what God is telling us through His Creation.