Even an armchair historian can tell you that a good general prepares for his retreat as soon as he sees the need for it. He tries to arrange an orderly retreat to minimize casualties and loss of equipment and other materiel. He knows not to try to hold ground which is indefensible, being well aware of examples from history of painful retreats such as that of Napoleon’s retreat across the frozen plains of western Russia. Many young men from France and Austria and other countries were left on those frozen plains.
Christians, including Catholics, have been retreating in this way, but it’s still worse than it was with Napoleon’s retreat — it’s not bodies being killed but rather minds and souls and moral characters. The thrusts of the enemy at the beliefs of Christians have often been horribly effective because servants of false gods have been more true to at least the physical aspects of this universe, this phase of God’s Creation, more true than the servants of the Church and Her sisters. And if we Christians are not true to verifiable physical facts, who will listen to our talk of a resurrected Christ who was true God and true man?
Once it was plausible to see almost all movement as being due to living creatures, including movements in the direction of corruption and decay. Angels or gods moved the planets. Demons invaded human bodies and caused diseases of body and spirit. God wasn’t properly viewed as the Creator who could energize the universe without these various spirits, whether labeled as ‘angels’ or ‘nymphs’ or ‘gods’. In a word, God was seen as a bit less than all-powerful. He was a secondary cause who had to use tools rather than being a primary cause or Creator.
We’ve defeated small-pox — so long as remaining stocks of the virus don’t escape from a laboratory. We put a man on the moon and could do so again in five years or less if we were willing to commit the funds. We’ve seen the beginning of the expansion of this universe, before the birth of the stars themselves, and we’ve seen deep inside the atom. We’ve seen deep into the human brain as well and also traced hormonal flows — tying human mental and emotional phenomena to specific physical events in our bodies. And yet the drama of human salvation is still taught as if we have some sort of soul which is separable from our bodies. The skeptics can point to facts which show that it’s unlikely we have souls made of stuff independent from our flesh and our blood.
Other facts indicate strongly that the common ancestors of all human beings were apish creatures who lived about 70,000 years ago. They were human but they weren’t inherently capable of either abstract moral reasoning or abstract theological reasoning. We now know, partly from some horrible cases of child abuse, that we modern human beings develop even basic language skills only when they’re nurtured by those who already have those skills. The development of more complex and abstract words and concepts must have taken tens of thousands of years.
When we Christians have tried to stick to stories proven wrong, how can we have any credibility with our children or others when we speak of the Son of God taking on human flesh to become our brother? Yes, most Christians have more recently and very reluctantly accepted the interesting and difficult facts about the evolution of homo sapiens and our close relatedness to chimpanzees and gorillas, our more distant relatedness to rats and toads. Even though we’ve formally accepted the truth of biological evolution, we insist on speaking of that all-important drama of salvation in terms given us by earlier thinkers who conjectured that human beings had been created as such and had fallen from grace during the first generation.
Disciplined empirical investigation has greatly advanced our possibilities of understanding God’s Creation. True faith leads to understanding and that implies that we don’t have a true faith because we’ve not developed an understanding of God’s world, a world which turns out to be different from what was assumed by those who set Christ’s story in specific understandings of this world created by God. The Gospel is the Gospel but we men can’t even understand why Christ died on the cross unless we understand our natures and what it is that He had to do to redeem us. From a simplistic viewpoint, this is all that needs to be changed: we need to see Christ as offering a chance for true Life when we, and our ancestors, had never had any such chance. He wasn’t offering to restore us to a life as God’s companions. He was offering it for the first time. I don’t think God would have waited so long to send His Son, wouldn’t have endangered so many souls, if human beings would have been ready for Christ at an earlier time.
We Christians are moving too slowly in this matter. We need to make it a priority to update our telling of the story which is God’s world, a story which exists for the sake of the one chapter which tells of Jesus Christ but that chapter must be set inside a human narrative which speaks of human history but also of other creatures, living and non-living. We’ve kept the old stories even as they decayed into superstitions and tales of magic. This was dangerous. We live in lands where impious skeptics dominate the entertainment industry and the schools. Those same sorts of skeptics are fairly prominent in science and literature. They’re taking advantage of the situation. There’s no reason to give them any such weapons to use against us and our children. The God of Jesus Christ created this world and still creates it each and every instant. We simply need to have faith that it all makes sense and makes sense together with the Gospel.
It’s not sufficient to say the Bible is true and those bones dug out of the sands of Africa are also true. There is one truth and that truth lies beyond our perceptions and our capacity to understand, but we’re to do the best we can — that’s part of our efforts to imitate God. God tells the story which is this world in the strongest possible sense — His telling of the story is one with His acts of creating the world. We do our best to tell some version of that story in the way of children imitating their human father as he goes about his work.
We need to speak a story in imitation of the story which is God’s actual work of creating this world. To do this, we need to be as true as possible to the story God is telling and not to some ancient versions of the story which are no longer true to what is known of the world. God has spoken the most important of His revelations to us in Holy Scripture but He’s also spoken through those bones dug out of the sands of Africa. We need a story which speaks of both the incarnate Son of God and those bones. Let’s be bluntly honest: we need to explain why the Son of God took on the flesh of an ape.
We’re fighting a bloody retreat because we’ve been fighting the wrong battle for centuries. Thinking we were fighting to save souls, we were engaged in a battle against God’s own Creation and our only allies were mythical creatures and magical incantations. And this is the reason that G.E.M. Anscombe considered C.S. Lewis to be a heretic — he was trying to rally the troops to fight alongside angels and elves. He imagined himself to be fighting Satan but he was fighting God’s world and fighting also those human beings trying to understand the physical aspects of this universe. Even those scientists who were nasty sorts of skeptics were carrying out the divinely ordained task of understanding God’s Creation — and many scientists have been, and still are, pious men and women whether or not believers in Christian truths. Far too many Christians have been fighting against God Himself. Unfortunately, many saw, in empirical terms, the uselessness of this war and stopped being Christians — though sometimes still attending some sort of worship service and maybe even wearing clerical robes or collars.
It’s God who shaped us from apish flesh and God who created a universe where there are hurricanes and volcanoes and small-pox. It’s God who created a world where there are levels of reality which don’t behave according to the brilliant, and still valuable, misconceptions which are our heritage from earlier generations of scientists and philosophers and theologians. Unfortunately, we’d rather accept ancient stories than deal with modern empirical knowledge. And it’s not easy to deal with modern empirical knowledge. It takes the sort of discipline which comes only with years of effort to deal properly with modern science and mathematics and history and philosophy. Not every Christian should or could make this effort but it’s bothersome that so many smart young men are steered towards the ancient stories if they show any talent or inclination for leadership in the Church. We need some to follow the path of Father Georges Lemaitre, the Belgian priest who was a co-discoverer of the so-called Big Bang model of the universe. Still more than that, we simply need some priests, and a multitude of teachers, who are literate in modern science and mathematics and in some branches of modern philosophy.
Modern scientists and historians and philosophers may sometimes bear despicable attitudes — but so do some believers, including some priests. The best of empirical thinkers are highly disciplined thinkers, better followers of Aquinas in a sense than the many theologians and priests who glorify him without having a clue about the depth of that great saint’s committment to honoring empirical knowledge.
We’ve made great progress against disease by recognizing that it’s caused, typically, by microbes which are part of God’s world as much as we are. We’re starting to make great progress against natural disaster by sending planes through developing hurricanes, by building super-computers which can model those hurricanes or those potential earthquakes, sometimes accurately. We need to update the story of human salvation because that will force us to be honest about the most important role of human beings in God’s story — we need to actively take moral responsibility for our own selves and for the nurturing of our children. But we’re descended from creatures who had to struggle to survive and we have a tendency to relax when possible and we readily cede our moral responsibilities to our employers and our governments. Far too many will then blame Satan when those morally unguided human organizations begin to exploit and corrupt us or our children.
If we wish to understand disease, we should listen to doctors and evolutionary theorists. If we wish to understand natural disasters, we should listen to the geophysicists and oceanographers. If we wish to understand the moral problems of our days, our social decay and our political disasters, we should listen to the reliable historians and also scientists such as neurobiologists. Neither Satan nor St. Michael make sense in terms of modern empirical knowledge, nor would they play much of a role if they did exist. All that’s necessary to understand Auschwitz is what the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt told us: the Nazi programs worked because nice, middle-class Germans were willing to man the bureaucracies and the chemical plants, to build the railroad lines into Poland, so long as they didn’t have to actually kill anyone. They were willing to cede their moral responsibility to Hitler and his henchmen in order to keep their paychecks and their benefits. More recently, Robert McNamara has spoken in similar terms of the bureaucrats who ran the war in Vietnam even after the facts were accumulating that it had become a criminal war waged against the people we were supposedly there to defend. These sad situations are illustrations of the evil possibilities in what Adam Smith labeled the Invisible Hand.
We need to nurture a new generation of philosophers and theologians who are broadly educated in modern empirical knowledge, including modern mathematics which has proven to be far richer than the mathematics which has been a basic part of the foundation of human thought since at least Pythagoras. Maybe some of them could be specialists as was Fr. Lemaitre, but that’s not necessary. Aquinas didn’t have the specialized scientific knowledge of his master, St. Albert the Great, but he learned enough that there is even a leading neurobiologist who thinks Aquinas to be the best philosopher for understanding modern science. Aquinas simply paid attention to God’s world rather than trying to impose angels and demons upon it, nor did he try to impose a priori criteria in the manner of Kant. We need to understand the world which God created, we need to understand the new possibilities and dangers of huge human organizations, if we are to understand Auschwitz and Vietnam and our various ecological crises. We also need to understand them to learn how we can create new forms of communities in which flesh-and-blood human beings can be happy.
The belief in Satan and St. Michael is one of the most powerful weapons evil has in our age. It has the same effect as simple apathy. We’ll happily cede our moral responsibilities to our corporate employers and our governments, sure that any evil which occurs is due to that fallen angel, sure that St. Michael will protect us in the end.
To properly disengage from this useless war against God’s own world, we need to have priests and teachers who know enough to have an appreciation for God’s world. We need to inspire Christian youth to become neurobiologists and oceanographers while retaining their faith. That will happen only if those better-educated priests and teachers appear. Until then, we Christians will be little more than sheep wandering around in company with our shepherds who don’t understand God’s world any better than we do.
The truth, so sad under the circumstances, is that no war should have been fought. There should have been no retreat in which souls were lost even more than bodies. We were not holding indefensible land. We were standing on holy ground, land given to all creatures of earth, but given in a special way to those who belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. The enemy has been retreating from that holy ground along with us because the enemy is us.