For nearly 30 years, I’ve been writing novels and nonfiction, having sacrificed much of a chance of a good life of the normal sort, largely while deluding myself that some modest, or even substantial, financial rewards were coming in six months or, at worst, a year.
Though I had personal problems and inclinations that led me to be something of an independent Christian thinker, I was then led to take up a writing career which was also a Christian vocation and even a Christian mission. I continued to delude myself as my career as a non-profit, non-income writer began to develop and even as that career matured in the past 20 years or so—the first 10 years were practice. Could I say that my own self was maturing as a Christian? In particular, could I claim to be something of a good example? I who was too soft to have responded properly to being in classes which I should should have easily handled according to professors who tried to give me some guidance, but I had spent 4 years or more being bored into submission in high school, 4 years of my reading skills degrading and my writing skills and math skills not developing. I shattered in classes in which a group of Malaysians, ethnic Chinese, excelled and in which the Ashkenazi Jews from NYC magnet schools did no better than OK. Broken, I ran into a career as an actuary which I found quite uninteresting and unfulfilling, a career in which I generally failed to even give a proper effort.
Raymond Wilder, an important figure in the development of the American mathematical community of the middle two-thirds of the 20th century, had claimed he could see the decline in the reasoning and manipulative skills of American students by the 1950s and others have said the last generation (as opposed to scattered individuals) of high-accomplishing Americans in mathematics and hard sciences probably graduated from high school in 1965 or so. Much more can be said, but this is not the place.
Jacques Barzun, in his magisterial From Dawn to Decadence made a prediction that the West will collapse upon itself, as in the horrible 14th century which followed a century of both cultural magnificence and increasing inequality of wealth; Barzun projected will again take us a century to rise from the rubble. He thought that rise would begin when one or more young men of curious minds discover the glories of Western thought and begin to pursue new thoughts through old knowledge.
Can we not simply start that process of rising from the rubble right now? I think I have so started and there are others who can participate as soon as they accept the major insight underlying my work: we need to reunderstand Creation from the most basic level of being, the “raw stuff of Creation” as I have often labeled it. Even the nature of material being as studied by physicists and the nature of certain types of abstract being as studied by mathematicians and poets and moral philosophers, is far too particular a level for starting this project; starting at the level of evolutionary biology is simply absurd. We Christians don’t need to complement physicists and biologists so much as we need to reunderstand the foundations, the very forms of being, which underly the strangeness of quantum physics and the wonders and nastiness of evolutionary biology. We need to think along with God in His freely chosen role as Creator.
And so I have dreamed and continue to dream of a community of Christians devoted to a fundamental reunderstanding and to exploring new, yet old, forms of Christian lives. We don’t need to undo Kant or Rousseau or to baptize Nietzsche and Sartre. We need to take up the task of St Augustine of Hippo and of St Benedict of Nursia, as well as the task of Dante Alighieri. We need to start at a fundamental level—the level of perceived being was pretty fundamental in the days of Augustine and those of Benedict and a level of perceived being somewhat abstracted was a radical imagining of more complete being in the days of Dante.
I think to have done much of the reunderstanding Creation in a way that considers modern empirical and abstract knowledge in the context of Christian revelations. I have little money and little of the entrepreneurial talent needed to organize one or more communities which can engage more fully in the work I’ve begun, work which might run parallel to or even overlap that of others who, like me, are working in relative obscurity as various sorts of benefactors continue to pour wealth and various sorts of talents and efforts into the established institutions which are proving they are capable of little more than accommodating gradually to the anti-Christian mainstream of recent centuries. Some of those activities of accommodation seem to be moving ever faster and seem to be aiming at a pretty much complete surrender to some twisted lines of thought and feeling and action.