There are those who passively accept what they’re taught and they are those who rebel as if instinctively, denying traditional beliefs and outlooks by denying conclusions without remembering that human thought is a process. It remains a process even when dealing with truths revealed by God — which are far fewer in number than many believe. And, I should add, there are those who actually think, neither accepting passively nor rejecting by reflex. In this entry, I’m particularly concerned about how we approach the thoughts of past generation, streams in greater or lesser rivers of tradition. I’m interested in the general failure of even serious thinkers to respectfully the approach the past, even when a little contemplation will reveal the likelihood that some of those ancient thinkers were smarter than us and harder of head than us. Even the lesser thinkers might have something to say to us even when we have already rejected their conclusions before we start reading their books.
And, so, I’d like to make a proposal about the attitudes we carry to the task of evaluating traditional beliefs, including older scientific theories or general viewpoints of created being, in light of our updated empirical knowledge. As a rule, we should try to put ourselves in the place of those creative thinkers who first developed the ideas underlying those beliefs and theories. They might well have had good reasons for developing systems of beliefs or theories which can now be seen as inadequate and maybe outright wrong. It’s also likely that, being human, they made little mistakes along the way or simply missed opportunities to produce better systems of beliefs or thoughts. And it’s also likely, that being among the serious thinkers of their ages, they had some insights which could be carried forward into updated theories, at least in the negative form of learned lessons. But these lessons are to be learned by discovering why it was that earlier generations of theologians and philosophers filled the cosmos with angelic and demonic beings, not by a simpleminded rejection of what now seems silly in an age where science fantasy seems more attractive than baptized myths. (But Aquinas and many others had serious metaphysical reasons for populating the cosmos with all those invisible creatures. They were doing something similar to what contemporary physicists do in trying to fill out their charts of subatomic particles — to use one obvious example.)
Many serious thinkers have always tried to understand the predecessors when trying to correct their errors or to go beyond the points earlier thinkers could reach. Einstein, while busy working on ideas at odds with the time-space assumptions of Newtonian physics, was apparently aware that Newton, for his part, was aware that some of the those metaphysical foundations of Newtonian physics were at least questionable. To be a little more accurate, Newton never elevated the foundations of his scientific and mathematical work to metaphysical principles but he would have been aware that it was going to happen in succeeding generations. And I’m sure he wished he could do better. Men, at least the vast majority of men, can’t hold strong and specific ideas about their physical world while holding metaphysical ideas in suspense. Not that many are inclined to metaphysical contemplation but all men hold some assumptions about created being, even if found in the likes of astrological columns. In any case, rather than being overly critical of Newton, Einstein seems to have held the proper respect for a great scientist who did as much as he could in his day and age.
To jump to a different field of study, John Henry Newman and Jaroslav Pelikan — a more recent follower of Newman as a historian of Christian thought, have approached that topic in a direct manner both honest and respectful. For example, and I’m working from memory because most of my books have to be boxed up and stored away, Professor Pelikan spoke of the core Christian doctrine of the bodily resurrection in relationship to the secondary issue of, “How?” In particular, do we have some sort of soul which is separable from the human body, surviving to be reunited with that body after resurrection? In the first volume of his history of Christian doctrine, The Christian Tradition, Professor Pelikan tells us that the great thinkers of Christianity were not in uniform favor of the idea of a separable soul. For example, St. Athanasius attacked that idea as a pagan corruption of Christian thought in the books for which he’s generally credited with establishing more explicitly the Christian doctrine that Jesus Christ was one Person with two natures. Pelikan makes the reasonable claim, one I’d support with full heart, that our views of how God will fulfill His promises of life after death are dependent upon our assumptions about the fundamental properties of Creation. What is time? What is space? What is matter? Are immaterial substances needed to complete the fullness of created being?
My addition to that part of the conversation would be to advocate the Thomistic principle that metaphysics uses the specific sciences. More specifically, metaphysics is disciplined by empirical reality in the same way that theoretical physics is disciplined by specific sorts of empirical evidence. Theoretical physics isn’t bound by that evidence in the way of a prison. Newton and Einstein engaged in theorizing that had a distinctly free-form air to it, and so do most good physicists. Perhaps Nathaniel Hawthorne said it best when he advised us in one of his notebooks to keep our imaginations sane, but that writer certainly advocated strong and vigorous imaginations in the very way he worked.
We are to make sure that even our most abstract thoughts connect to the mundane realities of this universe.
Great thinkers of past ages have proposed speculative answers to those questions such as “What is time?”, many of which answers have been rejected by modern thinkers either because of modern ideological biases or because those past answers are in conflict with modern empirical knowledge. If we are to provide answers as fruitful as possible, answers which don’t just close off questions in the interests of self-serving human ideologies or the institutions which are the temples of our ideologies, we need to understand the answers we’re rejecting from the past and those we’re accepting from the past on the terms and in the contexts which correspond at least fairly well to the terms and contexts of the original thinkers. We need to understand why St. Athanasius thought the idea of a soul separable from the human body was a paganistic corruption of Christian thought while so many other fathers thought a belief in a soul separable from the body to be necessary to secure the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. We need to understand why the young Augustine thought of ‘soul’ (and ‘angel’) as being made of some sort of matter thinner than that of our bodies but similar and then why he passed through a spiritualistic phase on his way to what Jacques Barzun has called a ‘grotesque physicalism’. (In The City of God, he proposed that the possibility of sinlessness by human effort was supported by the story of a man he knew who had such control over his body that he could fart out a tune of sorts and also became concerned, perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek, about the fate of our life-long nail- and hair-clippings relative to our resurrected bodies.)
These are not just matters of importance to those concerned with Christian doctrine but rather to all concerned with the nature of created being in general and with the Christian foundations of the West, foundations which have shaped the thought of even non-Christians who took part in the culture of the West. And we Christians need to understand how it is that we and our ancestors failed to live up to our duties to maintain and enrich Western civilization so that it has passed out of Christian hands, leaving most Christians abandoned on the banks as the river flows on by.
As a specific example, we need to understand why early modern thinkers, scientists and philosophers and theologians, used the undefined term ‘mind’ as if it were obvious that we have some sort of mystical organ which has direct access to a variety of absolute truths. Many still write and speak as if this were true, even some who are labeled and self-labeled as ‘materialists’. More recent empirical research would force honest and courageous thinkers of all beliefs to an honest encounter with the modern effort to understand ‘mind’ by studying physical processes in the brain, and our ability to understand this modern development can be developed by a proper and respectful analysis of earlier ideas of ‘mind’.
We need to understand not only modern efforts to answer fundamental questions about created being but also the efforts leading up to ours if only because neurobiologists and philosophers, clergymen and lawyers, butchers and bakers and candle-stick makers, share a common vocabulary which comes from those efforts of our ancestors. In that very interesting book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty played around with a ‘neuron-based’ language which would eliminate the need for language which has so much as a dualistic past, all language — in that discussion — which has non-objective references. Probably a little tongue-in-cheek, he would have had us report neurological events directly, others knowing that specific such events, involving a specific group of neurons, correspond to feelings of pain or happiness or whatever. It’s the sort of effort we can hope an intelligent and courageous thinker will make. Once. And then drop it to return to the more reasonable effort to ensure that our speech is sane even as we use terms and concepts which have ties to dualism and other doctrines which rest uncomfortably with modern knowledge about created being, even space and time. A clean reestablishment of knowledge in some pristine form corresponding to our current empirical evidence is both undesirable and impossible. An understanding of our intellectual heritage in light of our modern empirical knowledge, and vice versa, will likely bear much fruit.