Americans who claim to be traditionalist Catholics are fighting on two sides holding irreconcilable views on the most fundamental of questions, such as “What is man?” and “What is truth?”. Most seem oblivious to the battle though they stand in the middle, one sword in their right hands to slash at their own left sides and one sword in their left hands to slash at their own right sides. This is perhaps most clear in politics where there are those devout Catholics who freely collaborate with the welfare bureaucracies of the modern nation-state and those who freely collaborate with the warfare bureaucracies. Traditionalist Protestants and Jews are probably in a similar situation but I’ll restrict my analysis to Catholics for a reason I’ll make clear later. I’ll also be concerned not with politics but with the cause of the intellectual incoherence of Catholics, especially those most convinced they’re full of the wisdom which could restore the West to an earlier state when profound speculative thought and artistic energy and moral seriousness were as common as good work in theoretical physics or bridge-construction.
How have traditionalist Catholics chosen to think about the core truths of their heritage? I consider that core to be pretty small — a few moral truths and the revelations codified in the ancient creeds such as those of the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon. The answer to the question is: Traditionalist Catholics have chosen to think about their heritage of core truths by carrying forward entire complex and complicated theological and philosophical systems with all their baggage of wrongful or incomplete empirical and speculative knowledge ignoring all the evidence that that knowledge is no longer plausible in light of what we know about created being.
John Henry Newman tried to tell his fellow Catholics that even the most absolute of truthful statements must be constantly restated to remain true. Any attempts to speak truths in terms of the words and concepts of past ages will actually deform those truths. But the American historian Carrol Quiqley had even greater insight when he defined the basic Christian philosophy of moderate realism: “The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” (See Ways of Thought in the MOdern West for a discussion of Professor Quigley’s views and their relevance to our current situation which might be the beginning of the end-game — the collapse of at least one phase of Western Civilization.)
If we Catholic Christians restate our inherited truths in terms of our current knowledge of God’s Creation, then we can actually make sense when speaking to believers and non-believers alike. Newman was no coward when it came to speaking about his Catholic beliefs, but he’s taken seriously, and has always been taken seriously, by modern intellectuals of all stripes. But, as I said above, there’s more which comes out in Quigley’s statement. It’s hardly surprising that truth in the realm of mathematics unfolds through many refuse to see that there is much of our non-mathematical thinking that uses ancient mathematical knowledge and could be enriched greatly by more modern discoveries. It does seem surprising, at first, that even revealed truths can also unfold in time through that same communal process. There are plenty of examples, valid and invalid, which can be drawn from modern Catholic beliefs, but I’ll choose a technical example in line with the general thrust of my work.
The writers of the Old Testament books spoke both powerfully and vaguely about God’s vastness. To the extent they had an idea of infinity, it was an intuitive idea of ongoingness, either of counting ({1,2,3,…}) or of measuring distances (paths). There were efforts at times, perhaps climaxing in vague speculations by St. Augustine of Hippo, to speak of God of transcending even that ongoing sort of infinity, but serious discussion of different sorts of infinities became possible only in the late 1800s when Cantor saw what was implicit in the calculus and number-theory — the infinity from counting and that from measuring distances are different sizes. The number of points in a line is so large than they can’t be mapped onto the integers. Cantor’s work didn’t settle the issue for a while. Cantor himself wondered if it was rational to speak of different sizes of infnity and many mathematicians attacked the idea as insane. As it turns out, the very concept of ‘size’ seems to be, at best, contextual and has to be generalized. At least from the creaturely viewpoint, the fundamental relationship is relationship. That is, if we try to match real numbers, which correspond to points on a line, to integers, can we get an exhaustive mapping? The answer is no. There are many real numbers left over. So mathematicians and mathematical philosophers know some things about infinity which are fundamental to the abstract aspects of created being. Just because Christian theologians and metaphysicians have failed to deal with modern language, we run into a language problem, so I’ll retreat to ‘size’ words to point out that presumably God is at least as large as the absolute infinity of modern mathematicians which is far beyond the sort of infinity dealt with in Aristotle or Aquinas. We should shake our heads when a modern professor or textbook uses Aristotle’s inadequate concepts of infinity to prove statements about causation and the Prime Mover.
Yet, many traditionalist Catholics, including theologians and philosophers, talk and act as if that process of truth unfolding ended during some Golden Age which preceded our current age with its very large opportunities and problems, including many in intellectual domains. Having separated themselves from the current understandings of created being, it would be hardly surprising to learn that traditionalist Catholics adopt incoherent positions on political and social and moral issues. After all, if you remain willfully ignorant about the best knowledge your age has about time and space and matter and relationships, you’ll hardly be capable of thinking about the complex entities which grow up alongside that knowledge and because of that knowledge. For example, despite the best instincts of some Catholic thinkers, including most modern popes, freedom inside a complex civilization doesn’t sit well with traditionalist Catholics.
We make simultaneous sense of personal or local-community freedom and a complex society that functions well to provide for its members only when we can accept, at least intuitively, the ideas associated with ‘chaos’, ‘evolution’, ‘development’, and — the mother of them all — ‘self-organizing systems’. The tools of thought acceptable to most traditionalist Catholics are those which correspond pretty well with Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian metaphysics. Those are the tools suited to construct simple schematics and to analyze the corresponding hierarchical systems. They are mental tools more compatible with top-down control than with freedom. They recognize simple relationships and those have to be imposed upon a messy world, messy to those not willing to deal with the world on its own terms. Those tools allow for the build-up of complicated systems by adding ever more entities and relationships to those schematics, but that’s not good enough. It’s akin to trying to write a Shakespearian drama by scribbling millions of pages filled with the vocabulary and grammatical structures of a six year-old. The retreat of traditionalist thinkers into a ghetto of pre-Enlightenment ideas has put us Catholics into this ridiculous situation where the purely physical aspects of our human beings inhabit a richer and more complex world than do our moral and social and spiritual aspects.
My main reason for writing of Catholic thought in this matter was not that I’m Catholic myself but rather that Catholic thinkers had founded Western Civilization and then had dominated nearly all domains of the intellect for centuries and I want to put forward, in a blunt way, the reason for the loss of that dominance. The period of founding and Catholic domination of the intellectual aspects of Western Civilization extended from at least Augustine of Hippo (circa 400AD) through the early Renaissance (circa 1500AD). You can hardly go a page in a history of thought during that period without encountering a variety of priests and monks, many of them canonized saints — holy as well as smart and creative. And then Catholic thinkers, starting with priests and monks, began to disappear from the mainstream of Western thought. What happened?
There’s a simple story behind this situation, though there are many subtle aspects which could be analyzed if we were to come to a better understanding. I’ll first repeat Professor Quigley’s summary of the Christian philosophy of moderate realism: “The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” The Catholic Church forgot this, and Protestants never knew it because Luther and Calvin lived and worked after the onset of memory lapse. If moderate realism is the outlook best suited to Creation, then we can go a little further and claim the process of truth unfolding starts with an openness to the world around us, an openness that is at first a wonder at the glories of physical reality and a respect for the things which are true. Catholic thinkers turned from those glories of God’s world, preferring to study and re-study human systems of thought which contained a lot of empirical and speculative knowledge but that knowledge was frozen in time, a time I put during the Renaissance though Etienne Gilson, who certainly knew the history of human thought better than I, put the time of freezing, or retreat into an intellectual ghetto, during the horrors of the French Revolution (circa 1790). The general pattern is what counts. Catholic thinkers weren’t driven out of science and political thought and literature. They, like the non-Catholic and anti-Catholic thinkers of the Modern Age, encountered new questions, new problems and opportunities. Having no canned answers for those questions, Catholic thinkers threw what my Grannie called a snit-fit, taking their ball and going home where they put up ghetto walls to protect themselves against a world which didn’t behave correctly according to their favorite manuals of acceptable and proper thoughts.
So long as Catholic thinkers were more respectful of God’s Creation than of inherited systems of thought, so long as they tested inherited thoughts and their own new thoughts against the evidence of God’s Creation, they dominated the thought of Western Civilization. When they retreated from their responsibility to make sense of Creation, the intellectual initiative in the West passed to those thinkers who were increasingly non-Catholic or Catholic in a way that allowed them to separate their work as explorers of God’s Creation from their faith. Outside physics and biology and history, the result has been decay and a general sense of incoherence. A collection of vaguel related entities now stands where a world should be.