Introduction
Recently, I attended my monthly men’s prayer group and made a comment about history books telling of the importance of highly educated men from warlord (sometimes royal) families in converting many of the German peoples to Christianity—some of those evangelists, such as Boniface (“Apostle to the Germans”), were themselves Germanic. The organizer of the group and some of the other members asked me to give a presentation on… It was a somewhat vague request, wisely so. So it is that I’ve decided to give something of an introductory talk about my responses to the current “woes of Christianity.” It’s at least true that we Western Christians have great reason to worry about the future of our Christian ways of thinking and feeling and acting.
In any case, I’ve known for a while there is a need for some sort of popularization of my thoughts—not because of a lack of intelligence on the part of those in the greater audience but rather because of different sorts of intelligence, more generally different sorts of talents and inclinations, and because of that all-important constraint on human accomplishments—there are only 24 hours in the day, 365 days in the year, and maybe 80 or 90 years in the typical human life. Most human beings devote the working portion of those years to greatly important tasks such as making a living in perhaps demanding crafts or professions and raising families.
So it is that this article is structured as an overview presentation on some aspects of my work which are most important to those with non-intellectual interests or inclinations. It does take some intelligence to understand what is presented but it can readily be the sort of intelligence that can be found in any thinking human being who is curious about reality. Someone smart enough to code software or do demanding tasks in metalworking or carpentry, someone who has taught writing skills to young boys or girls or settled complex insurance claims, should be able to understand what follows. If not, then I need to rework the material to make it more straightforward, not to make it simpler in the way of aiming at less intelligent ways of thought.
I’ll start off with a very simple model of human being. In this model, which I first learned from the writings of Rabbi Jacob Neusner, human being is discussed, usefully and profoundly, as mind and heart and hands, as thinking and feeling and doing.
A Usefully Simplified Model of Human Being: Mind and Heart and Hands
Both the theological school of St John the Evangelist and modern physics, especially quantum mechanics, tell us relationships dominate stuff. Relationships create stuff, including thing-like stuff. Relationships shape existing stuff, including the things of this concrete world. For example, the world didn’t come into existence and then God decided to love it; the world came into existence because God first loved it.
Christian theology tells us that God is so perfectly unified that when He thinks, He also feels and acts. When the Almighty feels, He also thinks and acts. When He acts,… Modern brain-science tells us something similar is true of human beings, though defectively so.
In any case, thinking and feeling and doing don’t quite substitute for each other in mortal men living in this mortal world. Thinking and feeling and doing are all important and need to work together if we are complete our human to-do lists. Having said that, I’m biased or unbalanced, if you will, toward mind and it remains true that intellectual insights can help immensely in guiding our hearts and our hands. I’ll elaborate a little more on that when I discuss a couple of historical crises for Christianity which might help us to understand our own crisis.
The main takeaway is that mind and heart and hands are useful ways of using our “human stuff” to discuss different ways of forming relationships, including the relationships which are our understandings of this world and of all Creation. We are (defectively) unified but we can use these “parts” of a human being to deal with our diversity within our (defective) unity.
So it is that I’ll ask without providing here an answer:
Individuals have minds, hearts, and hands. Do communities? That is, can we use our understandings of individual human being to understand communal human being? In asking this question, I assume a positive answer to the related question I’ll address below: are communities real or just gatherings of freestanding individuals as we are taught by our modern political and social systems? (It seems likely to me that Marxism came about as a botched effort to deny the modern denial of the reality of human communities.)
A partial answer will be found in an upcoming book tentatively titled The Shape of Reality.
Did Christianity Destroy the Roman Empire?: Ancient Christianity and the Fall of Rome, Circa 400AD
The 18th century historian, Edward Gibbon, claimed that the adoption of Christianity in the Roman Empire led to the weakening and then the fall of that empire. That was also a claim of some prominent pagan thinkers who were observing and experiencing the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. In the decades around 400AD, Bishop Augustine of Hippo rose to the challenge by proposing that Christ is the Lord of History, a history which is linear from creation of this concrete world through the appearance of human beings (Augustine had considered and then rejected the hypothesis that man arose from lower species) and then hit a high point in the Incarnation and Crucifixion and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. From that point, history is a linear playing-out of men seeking or rejecting salvation.
So it was that Augustine’s expansion of the human mind came in the form of a re-understanding of human history which became dominant in the West as it rose again from the decline and fall of the (Western) Roman Empire. More could be said about the defects of that understanding of history, which was essentially right, but this isn’t the place. What is important is to see that such an understanding of human history opened up the Christian mind so that other, parallel or consequent, developments of human being could lead to the Christian West.
Heart? It was strange how the spiritual and even secular forms of human energy were unleashed. A young man living a century or so after Augustine found himself disgusted with the corruption of Rome. So it was that Benedict of Nursia headed out to live an eremitical or semi-eremitical life of prayer and penance. Benedictine monasticism was born and before long, large monasteries were preserving the technologies of Rome and also the intellectual heritage of the Christian Church, but also the heritage of pagan Athens and pagan Rome and much else. Some centuries later, white-robed reformers who were the Cistercians began to develop the water-power of Europe, becoming wealthy and powerful against their own desires even as they prepared Europe for industrialization while other peoples and regions in Eurasia with more sophisticated civilizations continued using asses and camels and oxen. (To be sure, animal power remained important in the West for centuries and is still important for some peoples such as the Amish.)
For all that the Benedictines accomplished, Western Civilization wouldn’t have developed if not for better political and social orders. It’s important to understand that many regions in the West retained fairly high living and educational standards but disruptions of transportation and communication systems fragmented a great civilization and left many areas impoverished. Powerful popes and other leaders of the Western Christian Church began to step forward to take care of the needs of their peoples and their regions, needs which seemed to fall under the authority of the Church and also needs which were more naturally under the authority of secular powers. It would be centuries before intelligent and farseeing warlords and kings and emperors could take up those needs at a higher level. In the meantime, the seeds had been planted for various conflicts between church and state, to use a modern way of speaking, and also for various sorts of corruption in the Church. Pope St Gregory the Great (540-604 or so) was one of the most prominent Church leaders representing forces of order, one who played a major role in founding Medieval political and social order. There were others, earlier and later, including Pope St Leo the Great (400-461) who was arguably the last man recognized as the principal leader (though not absolute leader) of both West and East.
Is Christianity compatible with a rational understanding of Creation?: Christian Intellectual Backwardness, 900-1200AD
During the early centuries of the Middle Ages (as defined for Europe), Islamic scholars and Jewish scholars living in or near Islamic centers of civilization had taken up the thought of the civilizations which had preceded them in the Eastern Mediterranean and contiguous regions. They had recovered much of the scientific and mathematical knowledge of the ancients and had also learned from the Indians. So far as philosophy goes, it is a great but useful simplification that the Islamic thinkers of the early Middle Ages (by European periods) had built their worldview upon the writings of Aristotle, rejecting the Neoplatonic worldview of Augustine and many other prominent ancient Christian fathers. That Aristotelian worldview seemed so much more rational than the mysticism into which Neoplatonism often fell. Since Aristotle’s worldview was compatible with his own work as an observational biologist, it could provide a framework for many sorts of scientific efforts. (In fact, Plato and Aristotle were somewhat Siamese Twins of the mind, though Aristotle expressed a certain animosity toward his ex-teacher.)
During the first half of the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas produced a New Understanding of Creator and Creation. Some say he disciplined European thought to Aristotelian standards, though it has taken many books over the centuries to discuss the insights and errors in such a viewpoint. I tend to the view of the great Neo-Thomist, Etienne Gilson, who said Aquinas seemed to follow Aristotle but he was actually making Aristotle say what Aquinas needed him to say—Aristotle had influenced but not determined Thomistic thought.
Aquinas thought in terms of a concept which Gilson translated as `act-of-being’. God is His own self-sustaining Act-of-being, the Supreme Act-of-being. All else is made up of acts-of-being which I discuss in terms of manifested truths which play the role of raw being (or acts-of-being) which are shaped into more and more particular forms of being up to the most concrete forms of being, such as human being. Even the most complex of things, living or nonliving, remain subject to evolution and development, at least in this highly particular mortal realm.
Aquinas saw that men could understand both God’s self-sustaining act-of-being and His created acts-of-being by starting from one and traveling to the other. His so-called great Summa (Summa or Summa Theologica) started with revealed knowledge of God and traveled down to Creation. The other summa of Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, started with Creation and traveled up to God. A great circle could be composed from these two semicircles. This second summa, Summa Contra Gentiles, was probably written in response to a lack of respect for Christian thought on the part of the great Jewish and Islamic scholars, or at least a lack as perceived by Europeans.
Christians failed to properly integrate Thomistic thought (my preferred flavor or any other) into Western thought, though Aquinas did succeed in making Christian thought at least somewhat respectable to the scholars of the other Peoples of the Book. I’ll explain below why it was that Thomistic thought wasn’t used to build a more complete Western worldview, and this will allow us to see why Christianity is in a crisis mode, why it was that Western thought succeeded so spectacularly in understanding important parts of God’s Creation and that thought separated itself from Christianity. In fact, that thought never cohered in any worldview worthy of the name, which is why the West wasn’t even able to re-form itself successfully into a pagan civilization.
It was St Francis and the friars who followed him who provided great human-energy to the High Middle Ages, powering great accomplishments which seemed yet to indicate that the West was deeply Christian—not entirely wrong, though the failure to refound the Christian understanding of Creation upon the work of Thomas Aquinas would soon show and would spill over to misunderstandings of the Creator as well as those of His Creation.
I’ll complete my late Medieval trilogy by pointing to the hands of a man both a great Church leader and also a great leader of the world, the man who guided Francis of Assisi in forming a disciplined religious order out of a chaotic movement, which continued to cause some trouble just because of that great Franciscan energy and devotion to God. Pope Innocent III should get much credit for the good that came out of the Franciscan order and movement. He should also be credited, positively and negatively, for playing an important role in establishing forms of late Medieval political and social order. Other popes, many Cardinals, and far more Christian laymen played a role in the formation of political entities which proved to be proto-states, that is, forerunners of modern states.
Can the Body of Christ be Real?: Bottom-up Thinking Denies Reality of Communities, 1300AD-?
Thomistic thought never really took root in Western thought and was in pretty distorted form when Giuseppe Pecci, the theologian and older brother of Pope Leo XIII, played a role in reviving Thomistic thought as a living—and quite radical—way of understanding God’s Creation. (Read some of the historical and analytic works of the French philosopher and historian, Etienne Gilson, who was educated in modern philosophical ways of thought and discovered the radical and profound nature of Thomistic thought on his own.) So it is that we modern thinkers have access to intelligent discussions of Thomistic ideas about God the Creator, about His acts-of-being and His Act-of-being which is Himself.
Most Catholic histories don’t talk much, or intelligently enough, about another problem—an anti-Thomism of sorts grew up in the heart of the Catholic Church in the generations after Aquinas. Most other histories also slide over a pro or con discussion of what is—in my opinion—one of the most damaging, intellectual developments in history.
Two powerful and powerfully dangerous thinkers—Franciscans both, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, developed ways of thought that led to various forms of what I’ll simplistically label as `reductionism’, such as radical political/social individualism and reductionistic forms of materialism. Aquinas’ position can be described as rather a sacramental materialism in which man is an embodied `soul’. Be careful: the soul of Aquinas was not what we now call soul—it was a purely intellectual and nonhuman entity attached by (philosophical) accident to the human body.
Using Ockham’s razor, we could claim that planets exist, and stars and galaxies and even men, but the universe doesn’t exist in Einstein’s terms, that is, as an entity in its own right and not just a collection of what it contains. The universe can’t be observed directly though its existence is compatible with existing forms of gravitational theories—mostly, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
Modern thinkers often invoke that razor, and it is a good pragmatic rule to eliminate unnecessary entities from theories, but it is often used by thinkers who are willing to eliminate mind/soul and then speak of the universe without realizing they arise from similar types of thinking from directly observable entities to immaterial relationships or even to greater and more `total’ entities. In fact, the razor could be used to good effect if used to eliminate immaterial entities and to then speak of what is there as an immaterial relationship. Even the electromagnetic fields of modern science and engineering aren’t really directly observable things but rather relationships observable from the effects of, say, a moving magnet interacting, or relating to, a charged wire.
All ways of thought have had to be modified or enlarged as we discover more about even revealed truths by exploring this universe and all that it is shaped from such as the strange, immaterial, and quite abstract type of being—quantum wavefunctions under one quantum formalism—from which thing-like being is shaped. As a non-scholar working to create better ways to understand Creation rather than studying existing ways to understand Creation, I have a strong opinion that Thomistic thought can be better updated and expanded to our modern needs—largely by adding in an understanding of being as subject to evolutionary and developmental processes. I think it would take drastic surgery on the insides of the systems of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham for them to correspond well to Creation as we now know.
The takeaway is that the universe is real and not just a collection of stars and galaxies and so on. I propose and argue in some of my more particular writings that the same is true of human communities. A human family is a real entity, a form of human being and not just a culturally defined collection of individual human beings. A town or a nation or a civilization isn’t just a collection of individuals but rather an entity in its own right. The Body of Christ, most of all, is for real, the ultimate, complete and perfected, human community, an entity much like an extraordinarily rich and complex human civilization with the Christian Church as its central organ.
I would further propose that the Christian mind can begin its recovery by building a worldview (as I’ve perhaps done) which starts from the above viewpoint. This worldview would be a necessary and central part of a civilization; it would be the organizing principle of a human communal mind which is Christian in the best sense: responsive to Creation as well as to God.
Energy is needed, high levels of energy as was released by Benedict in the 6th century and Francis in the 12th century. We might have faith that God will send us a new holy man of that sort, but we can’t anticipate where he will be or even whether he is already with us.
The world needs one or more political and social orders adequate to the needs of huge and extraordinarily complex human communities. Our existing forms of order are quite clearly inadequate to the needs of nation-states, to complex religious institutions, to large universities, to scientific research organizations, and so on. It is a mystery where or when this need will be met.