A Brief History
There was a time when the heavens declared God’s glory and the earth reeked of his handiwork. Everything was alive with magical powers and intentions. Somewhere along the way things stopped speaking to us. The glory of the incorruptible creator began to morph into an image more like that of a common creature. But a distant memory of the fatherhood was preserved by some restless nomads. The Word became Flesh and changed everything irreversibly. But the light began to fade once again. Magic was explained away. Belief in God is now understood as one option among many and thus contestable. It is man who now declares on matters of right and wrong.
The Heavens Declared
In the beginning the heavens declared God’s glory. Invisible things were clearly seen, and these invisible things were understood by those who saw them. They regarded the entirety of creation as iconography, as a sign, or collection of signs, pointing us to God. It was understood that something doesn’t come from nothing. Clearly the contingent universe was rooted in the Absolute. “There was the impalpable impression that the universe after all has one origin and one aim, and because it has an aim it must have an author.” Eventually things stopped speaking. Conceptions of God began to resemble corruptible man, or rather birds or even four-footed beasts.
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The whole pagan world set itself to building a Pantheon and they admitted more and more gods. They likely regarded it as an enrichment of their religious life. But this meant the final loss of everything that we now call religion. God is, in an almost literal sense, sacrificed to the Gods.
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
The memory of the fatherhood was preserved by a ragtag band of nomads. God selects Abraham and sets him apart, not so much the father of a race, but rather the father of a faith. “One people picked out of the whole earth; that people purged and proved again and again. Some are lost in the desert before they reach Palestine; some stay in Babylon; some becoming indifferent. The whole thing narrows and narrows, until at last it comes down to a point, small as the point of a spear – a Jewish girl at her prayers.” “All that we truly owe [e.g., philosophy, philanthropy, universal prayer], under heaven, to a secretive and restless nomadic people; who bestowed on men the supreme and serene blessing of a jealous God.”
Knowledge of Good and Evil
The Abrahamic tradition offered insights into the human condition. God speaks the world into existence and declared it good. Good implies fit for a purpose. But something transpired that corrupted everything. This is associated with an existential sense of tragedy and accompanied by an immediately known and pressing need for redemption. Part of becoming self aware is realizing one’s limitations. In discovering his limitations, man gains a knowledge of good and evil. This Fall explains the naturalness of human evil in the sense of a profoundly distorted catastrophe tied to malicious beings more powerful and intelligent than ourselves.
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As a poet produces a sonnet, God speaks the world into existence and declares it good. Here we find the creative expression of a moral and intellectual strength that summons something out of nothing. And it was declared good. Good implies fit for a purpose. God created a universe in which value is embedded in the object. A thing is objectively good when it realizes it’s intended purpose. You don’t have to believe in God to be good. But to seek the good is to believe in God in this functional sense of goodness. Man is understood as having an essential nature and an essential purpose or function. Good is not measured by self satisfaction or personal fulfillment. It’s not defined by the majority. It’s more than the greatest good for the greatest number. Rather, the common good is the collective fulfillment of our purpose. If we are to ‘live well’ or be a ‘good person’ we need to consider our purpose. According to the Hebrew Bible, we are God’s image bearers. We were made to relate, to reflect, and to rule with God. He gives us free moral agency which makes love a possibility. And He gives us responsibilities of cultivation and creative expression. That is the moral and intellectual strength to create abundance out of whatever is available.
Out of this walled garden of pure goodness, something transpired that corrupted everything. Both Adam and Eve where naked and they felt no shame. Then they imbibed the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; the one thing not offered to them as a gift. They develop a self-awareness that sets them apart from all other creatures. This condemns them to suffering and hard labor. And it corrupts the world. When humans imbibed the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil they used their own intuition to supplant God’s universal rules, with their own vision of what the universe ought to be like. “The sin of all sins is not a transgression of rules, but, first of all, the deviation of man’s love and his alienation from God.” Man’s original sin was not primarily that he disobeyed God, but that he ceased to be hungry for God alone. Man is no longer in communion with God, but only with himself. It’s an image of the world loved for itself, an image of life understood as an end itself. Man loved the world, but as an end rather than as transparently indicative of God. In disobeying God, Adam and Eve recognize their nakedness for the first time and instantly want to hide it. They now know they are vulnerable and insufficient. They recognize they can be hurt and suffer. Man now understands he is going to die someday. He discovers time and causality. He discovers the future. The idea of sacrifice follows. Something better might be obtained by giving up something presently valued. Knowledge of one’s vulnerability and impeding demise makes man conscious of his need to stockpile resources as insurance against calamity. This leads to the uniquely human notion of work.
The Fall is associated with an existential sense of tragedy. This sin destroys the true life of man. It diverts life’s course from its only meaning and direction. It condemned man to communion only with himself, and not with God. He ceased to see his whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God. Sin destroys the true life of man by diverting his course from its only meaning and direction. When we see the world as an end in itself, everything appears valuable and consequently loses all value. This Life man chooses is only the appearance of life for the world is only meaningful when it is the sacrament of God’s presence. The world of nature, apart from the source of life, is a dying world.
With this sense of tragedy comes an immediately known and pressing need for redemption. Man still loves, he is still hungry. He knows he is dependent on that which is beyond him. But his love and dependence is for, and of, the world itself. Because we first saw the beauty of the world we can now see its ugliness, realize what we have lost and understand how our whole life, not just some trespass, has become sin. And in discovering his limitations, man also gains the knowledge of good and evil. When one understands his own limitations, he recognizes limitations in others. Now he is in a position to exploit the vulnerabilities of others. We can read other people’s minds and intentions and if we choose to, we can deceive them. At that point we possess the ability to hurt people. Man is now capable of evil. Man has never recovered from discovering the future. He sees that he is naked and that life is suffering. And not only is life suffering, but his actions can make it worse; suffering contaminated by ignorance and malevolence.
Lost Truths
Some pagans found time to ponder the nature of things, or even the nature of God. It’s easy to dismiss their pantheon of gods and the mythology associated with it. But unlike us, they could distinguish between their gods of nature and the nature of the gods. They never thought to pit the nature of God against the gods of nature. These were too different, too alien, to clash. They understood that the question of existence is not rooted in history, rather it concerns the very possibility of history. To Plato, intellection was more fundamental than matter. Aristotle understood that material causes alone are inadequate for explaining any physical object. Even with their limited understanding of the natural universe, an uncaused effect was simply absurd. Later, Aquinas would build upon these ideas. Too often today we fail to recognize that mythology often foreshadows truth.
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Mythology is a search… something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt… And every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through a veil. We may truly call these [myths] foreshadowings… for a shadow is a shape; a thing that reproduces shape but not texture.’
Polytheism, or that aspect of paganism, was never to the pagan what Catholicism is to the Catholic. It was never a view of the universe satisfying all sides of life; a complete and complex truth with something to say about everything. It was only the satisfaction of one side of man, even if we call it the religious side; and I think it’s truer to call it the imaginative side… men could be philosophers or even skeptics without disturbing it.
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
Mythology only satisfied one mood so naturally some turned to other things. They found the mystery of existence, the fact that there is something rather than nothing, as a true object of contemplation. Plato distinguished between being and existing. Matter and existence are derivative, dependent on “being” as an intermediate type of reality. Thus there are two levels of being: ‘being proper’ and ‘being by participation’. Paul Tyson explains these concepts. Being proper is “the realm of eternal and unchanging intelligible realities.” It includes “all the eternal, universal, and qualitative intellective forms, both low and high, that express Logos (reason/meaning/order).” Whereas, “participatory being” is the realm of “particular en-mattered beings… Matter and existence participate in being, but matter and existence are derivative and dependent.”
All existing things are rooted in space and time. Man is what he eats in a quite literal sense. He takes the world into his body. He transforms it into himself. But there is this whole material history that preceded him. In fact all material causes, all physical components of reality are encompassed by the history of nature. That is the history of everything that has a history. In other words, everything that exists. But this doesn’t begin to explain the very possibility of such a history. It doesn’t address the question of existence. As David Bentley Hart says:
All finite things are always, in the present, being sustained in existence by conditions that they cannot have supplied for themselves, and that together compose a universe that, as a physical reality, lacks the obviously supernatural power necessary to exist on its own. Nowhere in any of that is a source of existence as such. It is this entire order of ubiquitous conditionality— this entire ensemble of dependent realities— that the classical arguments say cannot be reducible either to an infinite regress of contingent causes or to a first contingent cause. There must then be some truly unconditioned reality (which, by definition, cannot be temporal or spatial or in any sense finite) upon which all else depends; otherwise nothing could exist at all… The metaphor for this sort of ontological dependency that all the great religious traditions seem to share is that of the relation of a candle’s or lamp’s flame to the light it casts out into a room at night: should the flame be extinguished, in that very instant the room would fall dark. More recent philosophers have sometimes used the image of an electric current that, if shut off at the source, ceases along all power lines at once… It makes perfect sense to ask what illuminates an object, but none to ask what illuminates light. It makes perfect sense to wonder why a contingent being exists, but none to wonder why Absolute Being “exists.”
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God
We all understand that an uncaused effect is absurd.
If one wishes to view the physical universe as the ultimate reality— whether one imagines it as having no beginning or as having a beginning without cause— then one must also accept that it is still an entirely contingent reality, one which somehow just happens to be there: an “absolute contingency,” to use an unavoidable oxymoron… To be the first cause of the whole universal chain of per se causality, God must be wholly unconditioned in every sense. He cannot be composed of and so dependent upon severable constituents, physical or metaphysical, as then he would himself be conditional.
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God
To Plato, intellection is more fundamental than matter. Ideas were realities that exist just as men exist, or rather as men do not exist. “Real knowledge cannot be concerned with sensible material objects in any primary way, for everything within space and time comes in and goes out of existence and is always changing. Intellection is here a function of mentally apprehending that which unchangeably and universally always is.”
The moment one ascribes to mathematical functions and laws a rational and ontological power to create, one is talking no longer about nature (in the naturalist sense) at all, but about a metaphysical force capable of generating the physical out of the intellectual: an ideal reality transcendent of and yet able to produce all the material properties of the cosmos, a realm of pure paradigms that is also a creative actuality, an eternal reality that is at once the rational structure of the universe and the power giving it existence. In short, one is talking about the mind of God.
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God
We exist in the mind of God. Things exist because God sees them. We see them because they exist. A thing can have abstract existence in the mind regardless of whether it is ever manifested in a physical object. “The components of the material world are fixed, but those of the imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without destroying or rearranging what came before it.”
[God] is himself the logical order of all reality, the ground both of the subjective rationality of mind and the objective rationality of being, the transcendent and indwelling Reason or Wisdom by which mind and matter are both informed and in which both participate… God is not some gentleman or lady out there in the great beyond who happens to have a superlatively good character, but is the very ontological substance of goodness.
One might imagine God’s infinite actuality as a pure white light, which contains the full visible spectrum in its simple unity, and then imagine the finite essences of creatures as prisms, which can capture that light only by way of their “faceted” finitude, thus diminishing it and refracting it into multiplicity. It is a deficient metaphor, of course, especially inasmuch as prisms exist apart from light, whereas finite essences are always dependent on the being they receive and, so to speak, modulate.
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God
Aristotle understood that material causes alone are inadequate for explaining even a simple physical object. In other words, we cannot simply describe the material history and physical origins of a thing and presume to have explained the thing exhaustively. Aristotle identified several levels of causation. Consider a glass bottle… We can attempt to explain a glass bottle by describing its chemical composition. This is certainly helpful, but it doesn’t describe the thing completely. The opening in its neck and the cavernous void within it are defining characteristics every bit as important as the silica that makes up the glass. The shape makes it a bottle. This is the ‘Formal Cause’. Still, someone acted to combine the necessary materials and apply heat and pressure in a particular way in order to form the bottle. This artisan represents the ‘Efficient Cause.’ But even this is not enough to explain a mere bottle. Our penchant for whiskey and the desire to transport it created incentives that effectively “caused” the glass blower to manufacture the bottle. This is Aristotle’s ‘Final Cause.’ We find a variety of causalities perfectly integrated and inseparable. Each is necessary, but none sufficient to explain the existence of the whole. Yet still, before the whiskey bottle could be created, one had to conceive of bottles, if not whiskey. That leads us to a fifth cause. Each level of causality described by Aristotle, more or less, relates to changes in matter and energy. These are secondary causes. Secondary causes still don’t adequately explain the existence of the bottle itself. They don’t explain how you get something from nothing.
Aquinas identified a fifth non-material cause. That is the ‘Primary Cause’, the thing that precedes all secondary causes; the creative idea. This something-out-of-nothing is precisely what the creation narrative in Genesis deals with. Genesis speaks of an act of prime or essential causation. “God is the creator of all things not as the first temporal agent in cosmic history, which would make him not the prime cause of creation but only the initial secondary cause within it”
Much of the wisdom of these great insights is culturally lost to us today. The meaning of ‘being’ as distinct from ‘existing’ is lost. Being’s form is more than just causally related structures. It is “concerned with the intrinsic value (agathos), the true meaning (logos), and the proper purpose (telos) that is the source of the distinctive intelligibility of any creature. Form concerns that which is essential to the intelligible nature of any creature.” Classical ontological conceptions of being, becoming, and existing are foreign to most of us today. We presume to have explained a thing exhaustively by describing its material history and physical origins, without acknowledging aims, purposes, or intentions. This is in contrast to a more teleological understanding of things in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise. Finally, there is near total disregard for the notion of good as a functional concept with objective goodness grounded in purpose as opposed to sentiment. ‘Good’ has now taken on an entirely subjective meaning.
Illumination
“At the centre of this mythos are the images of incarnation, the coming together of matter and spirit, and of resurrection, the redemption of that relationship, as well as of a God that submits to suffer for that process.” It’s the Story of all stories. And like all well crafted stories, the ending reveals something that fundamentally alters our understanding of the beginning. Through the incarnation we get a deeper understanding of the Story’s author. Even the fall has a clearer meaning. God did not leave man in this state of exile and confused longing. Like any good love story, there is tension throughout. To many at the time, the incarnation made perfect sense because “it was in the nature of things to appear in images — royalty in lions and kings, strength in bulls and heroes, industriousness in ants and beavers, delicacy in butterflies and fawns, terror in oceans and thunder, glory in roses and sunsets — so of course the god might appear in flesh and blood, how else?” And when people heard about the resurrection, they could believe it since “they thought they could see the same thing [life issuing from death] in other realms — seedtime and harvest, and morning and evening, and renunciation and reward — and so what else did it all mean but that it is the way things are that life triumphs over death?” Everything that existed was a gift from God, evidence to make Himself known to man and put man’s life into communion with Him. Too often children grow up to view the Bible as a collection mildly interesting stories with moral lessons that we can apply to our lives — in other words fables or worse, fairy tales. But “the Redemption is nothing like a fairy tale… Fairy tales and ancient legends are like the Redemption.”The story of Redemption is the one true Fairy Tale from which all other fairy tales are derived. If I draw a picture of the tree in my garden it’s not the tree that looks like my picture. No, its my drawing that in some way resembles the actual tree. Isn’t it something that virtually all fairy tales, or at least the one’s worth reading, mimic this one great and true tale of Redemption? It’s a story that maps directly onto reality.
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As it turns out, the Story of all stories is a love story. It’s the story of God’s loving pursuit of rebels like us. God creates the World, Satan takes over, God sends man to take it back, but man quickly falls into cahoots with the devil. The Creator doesn’t treat the rebellion as something remote and unimportant. Instead He launches a “daring raid into the universe’s seat of evil.” We rip God’s heart out with our promiscuity, provoking His wrath which He Himself then absorbs in Christ on the cross. It’s an active and aggressive forgiveness that overcomes our betrayal. He has torn us that He might heal us. Imagine if someone wanted to slice open your chest, saw through your breastbone, and spread your rib cage apart. You would wisely object to such violence. Unless, of course, this man was a surgeon and you were suffering cardiac arrest. In that case, acknowledging your dire condition and the skill of the surgeon, you would presumably submit gratefully. God acted decisively. He entered into the struggling mess of humanity to set things right. The author of the cosmos enters into his creation to set things right.
He sent light into the darkness where man was groping toward Paradise… He did so not as a rescue operation, to recover lost man: it was rather for the completing of what He had undertaken from the beginning… God acted so that man might understand who He really was and where his hunger had been driving him.
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World
God takes Satan’s best shot, and turns everything around on it, wrestling the weapon of Death from Satan’s hand. Through Jesus, God goes for the jugular. Death comes into the world through a man. God overcomes it through another. In a nutshell, ‘God saves.’ It’s the name of Jesus. This is the overarching Story of the Bible. In this Story Jesus is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.
Here we find the Almighty stooping to save. In the New Testament, the theme of the descent of the divine Glory to earth continues, but in a radically different key; for, in Christian thought, God comes to dwell among human beings not merely in the awesome but intangible form of the Shekhinah [the glory of the divine presence], but as a concrete presence, a living man.
David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity
Through the incarnation we get a deeper understanding of the Story’s author. Like the story-teller, God transcends the Story. The Christian tradition holds this really odd concept of God as a Trinity. There is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in one. We find a similar unity in any creative endeavor. There is idea, activity, and the subsequent effect associated with a work of art. The timeless Creative Idea conceives of the whole work at once from beginning to end. This is the Father. Then there is the Creative Activity, or the Son, begotten of the Idea, working in time with sweat and passion. This activity of writing a book occurs in space and time, yet it is known to the writer as a complete and timeless whole. Finally, we have the Creative Power which proceeds from the Idea and the Activity, representing the indwelling Spirit, which provides meaning to the created work flowing back to the writer from his own activity, making him the reader of his own book. This is “the means by which the Activity is communicated to other readers and which produces a corresponding response in them… from the reader’s point of view, it is the book.” So which is the real book from the author’s perspective; the book as Thought, the book as Written, or the book as Read? The three are inseparably one. None exists without the others. So it is with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In a well crafted story the ending reveals something that fundamentally alters even the beginning. We learn that Man’s original sin was not just that he disobeyed God but that he ceased to be hungry for God alone. Instead, he used his own intuition to supplant God’s universal rules with his own vision of what things ought to be like. He ceased to see his whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God. The sin was not that he neglected his religious duties, but that he thought of God in terms of religion.
The sin of all sins – the truly “original sin” – is not a transgression of rules, but, first of all, the deviation of man’s love and his alienation from God. That man prefers something – the world, himself – to God, this is the only real sin, and in it all sins become natural, indeed inevitable. This sin destroys the true life of man. It deviates life’s course from its only meaning and direction… The world is fallen because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all. The accumulation of this disregard for God is the original sin that blights the world. And religion cannot redeem it, for it accepted the reduction of God to an area known as “sacred”, as opposed to the world as “profane”. It embraces secularism which attempts to steal the world away from God.
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World
As a result, it seems natural to see the world as opaque, not transmitting the presence of God. It seems natural not to live a life of Thanksgiving for God’s gift, and not to be Eucharistic. This world rejected God and in this blasphemy became a chaos of darkness. But even darkness is a testament to light.
Darkness is not darkness until light has made the concept of darkness possible, darkness cannot say, ‘I precede the light,’ but there is a sense in which light can say ‘Darkness preceded me.’ …Shakespeare writes Hamlet. The act of creation enriches the world with a new category of Being, namely: Hamlet. But simultaneously it enriches the world with a new category of Not-Being, namely: Not-Hamlet.
Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
The Redemption brings the Fall into clearer focus. Awful as it was, the Fall was a precondition for the greatest event in human history. God did not leave man in this state of exile and confused longing. He put on humanity and entered into the Story because someone was needed “to stand in its center, and to discern, to see it again as full of divine riches, as the cup full of life and joy, as beauty and wisdom, and thank God for it. This someone is Christ, the new Adam who restores that Eucharistic life which I, the old Adam, have rejected and lost, who makes me again what I am.” We must not behave as though the Fall never occurred nor say that the Fall was a Good Thing in itself. In Christ this sin is forgiven, not “in the sense that God now has ‘forgotten’ and pays no attention to it, but because in Christ man has returned to God, and has returned to God because he has loved him and found in him the only true object of love and life.” The Fall did take place and Evil was called into active existence. The only way to transmute Evil into Good was to redeem it by creation. A creative act could redeem the Fall. That, according to Christian doctrine, is the way that God behaved. Before Christ came, God promised Him to man through the prophets of Israel. “Evil, having been experienced, could only be redeemed within the medium of experience — that is, by an incarnation in which experience was fully and freely in accordance with the Idea.” A tension between what God has promised and our current circumstances remains even to this day. There are dramatic reversals and cunning surprises. God took an enormous risk in loving us… “Surrendering a portion of His omnipotence, because He saw that from a world of free creatures, even though they fell [both men and angels], He could work a deeper happiness and fuller splendour than any world of automata would admit.”
Virtually all religions recognize that something went wrong with humanity, that we are flawed beings. But the message that God’s acceptance is a gift from God rather than a wage to be earned is truly revolutionary. Here God does the setting-things-right. Our role is secondary. The Story has answers for what man’s role is and why people act as if there is a standard for right and wrong. It explains the existence of evil in the world. What it describes is odd and in some ways quite narrow. But Chesterton points out that the shape of a key is also very odd.
A key is above all things a thing with a shape… a thing that depends entirely upon keeping its shape. The Christian creed is above all things the Philosophy of shapes and enemy of shapelessness… The shape of a key in itself is a rather fantastic shape… The key is necessarily with a pattern. So [Christianity] was one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. It is enough to say here that there was undoubtedly much about the key that seemed complex: indeed there was one thing about it that was simple. It opened the door.
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
If the key opens the lock, it must be the right key. Christianity consists of duplex passions. We are “to be happily forgiven and yet to be wounded and to remember the grief; to enjoy the peace of the finished work of Christ and yet suffer to win others; to find God and yet be always pursuing Him.” This is not a mixture of things for that would be a dilution of things where nothing is present in its full color. To mix pride and humility would be to loose “both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble.” Christianity sought to save both.
Christianity is not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning. This duplex passion is most apparent in Christ himself. “For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.” Many people had in mind that serving God was about following His rules… Don’t grovel! Don’t swagger! Instead, God is saying, ‘Here you can swagger and there you can grovel.’ – and that was emancipation. It’s really a broad sea to swim in. The restraints of Christians sadden many simply because we are more hedonist than a healthy man should be. The faith of Christians angers us because we are more pessimist than healthy men should be. These liberal attacks on Christianity don’t necessarily mean Christianity is especially illiberal, but rather there is something a little anti-human about liberalism. It is not so much a complication of diseases in Christianity, but a complication of diseases in modern man. The modern world charges Christianity with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp at the same time. But then isn’t it also odd that the modern world combines extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp? The modern man finds the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex; he finds the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too bland.
In the incarnation we get to taste and see God come through. It’s poetry that is both acted as well as composed.
All humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny – all that was to go. We were to hear no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no preeminence over the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god. Man had preeminence over all the brutes; Man was a statue of God walking about the garden. The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Fallen man learned immediately that he is small and vulnerable. But paradoxically, vulnerability is what makes strength a possibility. “The strong cannot be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.” Worldly people boast about their strengths and hide their weaknesses. Godly people boast about their weaknesses and attribute strength to God. “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” “One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.” And like modesty and courage, charity is also a paradox.
Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things – pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people. But if we ask ourselves what a sensible pagan would feel about such a subject, we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it. A sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive, and some one couldn’t: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed. In so far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is rational, and even refreshing; but it is a dilution. It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent. And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole fascination of the charitable. Christianity came in here as before. It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another. It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room for wrath and love to run wild.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
As Chesterton put it, Christianity combines furious opposites “by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.” The Church kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side:
And sometimes this pure gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their juncture; the paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled, and, in the soul of St. Louis, the lion lay down with the lamb. But remember that this text is too lightly interpreted. It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is – Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Chesterton criticized people for the silly habit of considering orthodox Christianity ‘heavy, humdrum, and safe.’ But there was never anything so perilous and thrilling. Those who use words like ‘dove’ and ‘lamb’ to describe Jesus are certainly justified. But we do a disservice if we stop there without acknowledging that his life was also courageous, if not scandalous. No doubt, He is gentle and nurturing. He is also fierce and cunning. Here lies the mystery of Christ. Some rightly point out that in Christianity there have been monstrous wars over seemingly small points of theology. Unfortunate as this is, it is natural when the stakes are so high.
It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfillment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean, and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten forests of the north. Of these theological equalisations I have to speak afterwards. Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless… It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Disenchantment
At one time unbelief was practically impossible. Somehow society went from naïvely living within a theistic construct to the point where belief in God is no longer self-evident. Belief is now seen as one option among many, and thus contestable. It’s not only now possible to imagine not believing in God, this has increasingly become the default position. For many of us, belief isn’t really an option. It’s too unbelievable. Belief remains a possibility only as a conscious choice, personally enriching for some, but private and apart from any deep conviction. Such disenchantment required a radical shift in the social imaginary. “For much of history, humans saw themselves embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporated in the divine.” We’re disembedded from all this so that people now view society as merely a collection of individuals. There is no univariate explanation that accounts for this. It didn’t necessarily have to be this way. Things could have gone otherwise. In fact, there were a number of significant obstacles to unbelief that had to be overcome to get to where we are today. But those obstacles no longer exist. And that has profound implications for us.
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The way we see the world isn’t based solely on what the senses perceive. Values, institutions, laws, and symbols form part of our perception. The extent to which we hold these things in common shapes how we imagine ourselves as a social whole. Such construals characterize how people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the world around them. It’s easy to recognize that people from other eras and distant places imagine things much differently from how we do. But we tend to think that we objectively see the world as it is; we cannot even entertain the idea of a non-material reality, a human nature that is given, or a universal morality that is discoverable.
In the modern social imaginary, the self is sort of insulated in an interior ‘mind,’ no longer vulnerable to the transcendent or the demonic… This disembedded, buffered, individualist view of the self seeps into our social imaginary… We absorb it with our mother’s milk, so to speak, to the extent that it’s very difficult for us to imagine the world otherwise.
James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular
For example, it’s practically impossible for someone in the modern world to believe in magic. The world around us, of course, includes things that we can touch and see, i.e. material things. These are the things that are measurable and moldable. But there are immaterial things that are undeniably real; arguably more real. These include pure mathematics, reason and logic, intentionality, truth, goodness, beauty, love, friendship, justice, dignity, hope, purpose, joy, despair, suffering, and evil. It is precisely this category of non-measurable, yet undeniably real, things that Paul Tyson classifies as ‘magic.’ In this sense magic is real. But we have to acknowledge that there are different ways of approaching these magical aspects. People have different “takes” on things as Charles Taylor describes it. There are enchanted takes that view magic as immanent in nature and disenchanted takes that disassociate magic from nature; and there are takes that are open to magic transcending nature and there are takes that are closed to it. Tyson describes the different takes [animist, Platonist, supernaturalist, and anti-magical] as they relate to the magical beauty of a rose:
To the immanent-minded animist, the magic of its beauty will be thought of as originating entirely within the living plant [enchanted-closed]. To the Platonist-minded theorist, the beauty of the rose will also be immanent to the plant, but beauty itself will transcend this particular flower. The flower is understood as participating in some divine and eternal quality of Beauty that has its origin and ongoing reality beyond the transient flower [enchanted-open]. To the supernatural theorist, the rose is an entirely natural, immanent, and non-magical thing in the world: it has no intrinsic meaning or value in itself. And yet, the human mind observing the rose through brain-processed bodily sensations is supernatural; meaning and value — as functions of soul or spirit — are thus also supernatural [disenchanted-open]. To the modern de-magical vision — anti-magical materialism — “beauty” is simply a subjective human gloss that does not exist in or beyond the rose at all. Reality itself is here understood as entirely immanent and purely material, such that all meanings and qualities only really exist as subjective by-products of matter, within our brains [disenchanted-closed].
Paul Tyson, Seven Brief Lessons on Magic
The animist sees everything as “animated” or “alive” with magical intentions and powers. It’s an enchanted, but closed, take on the world. This type of wonder and mystery about the world is firmly situated within Nature. In fact it draws Nature as its source. Nothing really transcends nature according to this view. Nature may include spirits and gods or even God, but these spiritual forces are embedded within nature rather than transcendent. This take views natural things appearing to behave in a certain predictable way as merely following a habit. Heat follows fire and hunger follows a lack of food as a matter of habit, not necessity, “just as the king generally rides on horseback through the streets of the city, and is never found departing from this habit; but reason does not find it impossible that he should walk on foot.” God wills every event and His will is not bound up by reason. According to this view, coldness might follow fire tomorrow. “It’s a denial of the coherence and comprehensibility of the natural world.” This view subscribes to the philosophical theory on causation known as occasionalism which asserts that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God. “Were it God’s will we would even have to practice idolatry.” Thus, all things are taken to be governed on whims by magical powers, not by laws accessible to the human mind. It’s no wonder science doesn’t emerge here.
Platonists recognize an intellective ‘beyond’ that transcends nature and orders and sustains the world. This is an enchanted take that remains open to transcendence. Things existing in space and time were dependent on some divinity that is beyond nature. Platonists intuited that reason, meaning, and goodness are gifted to nature from beyond nature. This allowed for the immanent world of nature, and yet things like wonder and mystery which transcend nature. It was this perspective that formed the bedrock of western civilization and was adopted by the early Christian church which saw Plato’s theory of forms as God’s thoughts.
A new theory, with a very strong dualist outlook, came to be. This is a take in which earthly nature is decisively separated out from a heavenly supernature. The supernatural world of magic is carefully isolated from the natural world. In this bifurcated world the natural world is not enchanted with the magical, but it is left open to a transcendent realm of magic. “God came to be thought of as an external, super-natural Agent, who was the maker of nature, but who had no ongoing role to play within nature (apart from the occasional miracle).” Contrary to virtually all great religious traditions, God became only a demiurge; somewhat of a craftsman fashioning the world together, a heavenly being “coming somewhere after the law of gravity but before the present universe” as David Bentley Hart says. God is merely the first agent in temporal history; some grand carpenter nailing together the cosmic edifice. This is the god constantly under attack by the New Atheists and vehemently defended by religious fundamentalists who share this bifurcated construal.
The materialist, or anti-magical, take follows naturally from the supernatural take. The bifurcated construal of the supernaturalist proves highly unstable. It cannot retain its shape. The modern materialist take arises from, as Paul Tyson says, “the naturalistic fulfillment and the supernatural redundance” of the dualist nature/supernature construct. Tyson explains:
If nature does not need supernature to be what it is, and if nature can be understood in a purely natural way, then the supernatural becomes functionally superfluous to our knowledge of the world. It is now possible to discard the supernatural (and the magical, and the metaphysical) as outside of a true knowledge of tangible reality… Reality itself is here understood as entirely immanent and purely material, such that all meanings and qualities only really exist as subjective by-products of matter, within our brains… This is a theory that interprets anything “magical” in an unmasking and deflationary way. This is not just a stance that has no interest in magic, it is a stance that refuses to treat any aspect of reality in a magical way and that actively interprets our experience of reality in anti-magical terms.
Paul Tyson, Seven Brief Lessons on Magic
Belief in magic, or virtually any supernatural thing for that matter, is now dismissed as childish superstition. It has no place in the modern scientific age. Any appeal to something beyond the reductively materialist domain of science is now widely seen as delusional. This path from Deism to Atheism involves a process Charles Taylor calls ‘Immanentization.’ James K.A. Smith describes immanentization as “the process whereby meaning, significance, and ‘fullness’ are sought within an enclosed, self-sufficient, naturalistic universe without any reference to transcendence.” This is a religious conversion. The history of the 20th century proves its fruit can be bitter and toxic.
These aren’t just idle metaphysical speculations; these shifts in the social imaginary of the West make an impact on how we imagine ourselves — how we imagine “we.” The “buffered” individual becomes sedimented in a social imaginary, not just part of some social “theory.” What emerges, then, is “a new self-understanding of our social existence, one which gave an unprecedented primacy to the individual.” It’s how we functionally imagine ourselves — it’s the picture of our place in the world that we assume without asking.
James K.A. Smith invoking Charles Taylor, How (Not) to be Secular
And as a result, it is now possible to imagine not believing in God. The social imaginary has been converted into an entirely immanent frame. Meaning, significance, and purpose are sought apart from any reference to the transcendent. This occurs entirely within an enclosed, self-sufficient universe. We no longer inhabit an enchanted world “charged” with presences.
We tend to think of movement from point A to point B in terms of steps along a particular path. But things actually unfold more like a chemical reaction where one idea comes into contact with another and generates a by-product that could not have been predicted. As James K.A. Smith put it, there is no simple “straightforward path of inevitable ‘progress’ from magic to modernity, from disruptive transcendence to ordered immanence. Instead there are multiple shifts and turns, zigs and zags, which could have gone otherwise.” The thing about history is it seems obvious and straightforward when we look back at events. Knowing the outcome makes the causal chain appear obvious. Historians operate in space that is determinate, but historical events occur in a world of chaotic systems populated by agents acting with intention. We have a very hard time knowing what an outcome will be in advance. There are many possible outcomes making the future indeterminate. There is also a tendency to artificially divide the past. We tend to talk about histories of actions and histories of ideas, as if they were somehow disconnected. But Alasdair MacIntyre is critical of this approach saying, “there ought not be two histories… for there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories.” We shouldn’t unthinkingly assume there is a natural sequence to history. In reality there is a continuous birth and death of ideas, complete with blind alleys and dead ends, and the burning off of the old to make way for new with no guarantee the new is any type of improvement over the old.
Reformation
One key historical movement was the Reformation. This was effectively an earthquake on the imaginary. Protestant reform unfolded differently all across Europe. It was never about a single issue. Reformers did not necessarily see themselves as innovators, but often as conservators pushing back against innovations by the Catholic Church and attempting to stay true to the apostles and church fathers. There were a diversity of grievances: the sale of indulgences; the supremacy of papal authority, particularly over purgatory; transubstantiation (i.e., Christ’s real presence in the Eucharistic elements) versus consubstantiation; the existence and administration of the sacraments, particularly the administration of baptismal rites; and the ‘Treasury of Merit.’ There were important distinctions between the Law and the Gospel. For example, there were debates related to sola scriptura, a view that advocated a complete reliance on Scripture as the only source of proper doctrine, and sola fida, the belief that faith in Jesus is the only way to receive God’s pardon for sin. The Reformation raised questions regarding the reality of human freedom in the work of redemption, the importance of good works, and the need for the co-operation of the will set free by grace. No doubt these were significant questions. Reformers could never have imagined where this would lead.
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A number of reform movements within the Christian church were meant to rethink the division of labor between clergy and the mundane vocations — the classical distinction between the secular and the sacred along the earthly plane of domestic life where mundane vocations included butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers who carried out “secular” work while priests tended to the “sacred” — in an effort to sanctify ordinary life. But instead of elevating the butcher and baker, a different sort of leveling occurred where the weight of virtue was ultimately cast off, unburdening society from expectations of transcendence, and ultimately eliminating the eternal horizon. We get the freedom of religion situated in an milieu where belief is entirely optional. Church becomes a voluntary choice much like joining a social club where church life is deemed “non-essential.”
The Reformer’s rejection of sacramentalism opens the door to naturalism. The sacred no longer had as strong a presence in the imaginary. One of the products is the modern notion of the family with all its elements of nominalism and contractualism. “Both Luther and Calvin argued that the state would be more severe than the Catholic Church on matters of marriage purity.” People were ready to move the family from church to civil control. But this subjected marriage to ever-changing legislation. “The state stood ready to grant divorces, so that the family could not engulf the individual for life… The new master power beyond the family became the state…”
Enlightenment
The earthquake of the Reformation was followed by a tsunami in the Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was marked by an emphasis on the scientific method and reductionism. Modern science came about largely from the theological precept of a divine commission for man to rule the earth. “Scientific mastery of nature and the technological bending of her powers to our own use was seen as a clear religious responsibility.” But this was based on another theological invention, the idea of natura pura, or “pure nature,” which arose and gave birth to modern science. The notion of natura pura isolates “real” objective things from their “constructed” subjective meanings. It gives us license to stand over nature with an instrumental and controlling intent. But it makes it impossible to “integrate knowledge and wisdom, facts and meanings, truth and quality, instrumental power and morality, beauty and science, technology and goodness, …faith and reason.” “A marvelously vast inventory of discoveries becomes possible when one views nature according to a more or less mechanistic calculus of its physical parts and processes, without any commitment to the reality of other kinds of causality.” But the scientific method itself is not a truth. It is a process. “A given method may afford insights to truths that would remain otherwise obscure, but the method itself is not a truth.” The practice of science is more than following some simple formula. Science typically involves a type of apprenticeship where a graduate student is brought into a group and instructed over the course of several years on how to think like a scientist, how to frame a problem and apply knowledge and reason, and to draw on insights from other scientists across various disciplines.
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The conceit latent in the term “method” is that one merely has to follow a procedure and, voilà, discovery follows. No long immersion in a particular field of practice and inquiry is needed; no habituation to its peculiar aesthetic pleasures; no joining of affect to judgment. Just follow the rules. The idea of method promises to democratize inquiry by locating it in a generic self (one of Kant’s “rational beings”) that need not have any prerequisite experiences: a self that is not situated.
Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
The scientific method is not some self-standing truth. Instead, it is wholly situated within a body of knowledge and experience that it could never have created for itself. Powerful as it is, scientific knowledge has limitations. Scientific truth and respect for objective facts have made humans highly technologically proficient. This allowed us to discard the superstitions of the past and gives us vast power over nature. Without a doubt, science has improved countless lives in meaningful ways. But a dogmatic faith commitment to natura pura makes for a rather poor metaphysics. “The sciences shed no light upon the origin of the lawfulness that informs material nature, since they must presume that lawfulness as the prior condition of all physical theories.” The sciences have little to say about the Platonistic notion of ‘being’ as such. Science deals only with “the formation of our universe by way of a transition from one physical state to another, one manner of existence to another, but certainly not the spontaneous arising of existence from nonexistence… Creation ex nihilo is not just temporally prior to the world that science deals with, but logically and necessarily prior to “all physical laws, all quantum events, and even all possibilities of laws and events. When we forget this there is a real risk of loosing our ontological heritage. This forgetfulness of being is consequential in how we understand our humanity. “Our loss of the ontological heritage of Western thinking — which is now so entrenched as to entail the loss of the very language of truth categories via which we can appreciate the mystery of being — is a real loss which has destructive implications for the conditions of human (and non-human) life.” We would do well to recover a metaphysically viable understanding of the truth and meaning of being, and to develop a new construction of our way of life that reintegrates “Knowledge with Wisdom, Belief with Truth, and Reality with Being.” Science has no viable ontologic grounds by itself. Paul Tyson contends that after replacing “the late medieval edifice of ontological knowledge” that was intricately tied in with religion, science has been unable to generate a viable ontology of its own. Nevertheless, factual knowledge must inevitably be overlaid with value.
The idea of value-neutral objective knowledge is a useful but unavoidably poetic construct… this value-neutral fiction is (ironically) deemed valuable in modernity, such that naïve positivism, naïve rationalism, naïve materialistic reductionism, and a naïve narrative of objective scientific truth is the methodological underpinning of scholarly credibility… hence the scholar performs a priest function in legitimating the prevailing norms under which power and meaning are constructed for us as true.
Paul Tyson, De-Fragmenting Modernity
We must realize that science simply describes how the world is. It cannot tell us what ought to be. This is/ought dilemma is of fundamental importance. There is this widening gap between our technical proficiency and our understanding of how we are to properly act in this world. This is, in part, due to an over emphasis on science at the expense of other modes of analysis. There are mysteries that require “another style of investigation altogether — phenomenology, spiritual contemplation, artistic creation, formal and modal logic, simple subjective experience, or what have you.” But we often treat these as “false problems, or confusions, or inscrutable trivialities.”
We select what to perceive and what to act on from an infinite menu of choices by overlaying a value structure on top of the world of facts. That’s our map. The world of facts is like topographic information on a map. The topography is practically useless unless we annotate it, identifying what has particular value. These are the points of interest on the map. The value structure tells us what is important and thus provides a destination. The terrain may be steep, but its what’s on top of that hill that matters. That’s why I go there rather than following the path of least resistance by simply jumping into the creek and latching onto a piece of driftwood, or worse staying right where I am and waiting to die. We can have a very high resolution understanding of the facts. But if our value structure is low resolution, or non-existent, we’ll have no clue how to act. We’ll wander around aimlessly with only a vague notion of where we’re headed. We might encounter some interesting things along the way. Or we could just stumble into a bottomless pit. Either way, it’s all the same without value. Ideally we should have a good grasp of the facts with a commensurate understanding of value. Science will help with the facts. But it gives us little in terms of value. The way in which the world manifests itself to us depends on what we value. Value is real and essential. But we’ve compartmentalized knowledge in a way that excludes value. Know-how has replaced wisdom. “Modern scientia (knowledge, know how) has debased and displaced sapientia (wisdom, know why).” You may want to believe there is something at the top of that hill worth the trek, but if I am convinced that everything has absolute equal value (in other words no value whatsoever because value is always a relative quantity), there can be no place more valuable than where I am right at this very moment. That is debilitating.
The common solution is to allow the expressive individual to determine value. But this is an illusion. We get to participate in the creation of our value system, but we don’t create it entirely. There are biological imperatives behind this value structure. We have to eat. We have to defecate. We don’t have complete choice in this. But we do decide how to prioritize certain needs. In this sense we participate in the creation of value. But it could also be said that the value system is using us as its mechanism for action. Do people really have ideas, or do ideas have people? It’s not obvious that we will ourselves to believe whatever we choose. There are people who have sincerely tried to hold onto a particular belief, but they cannot. Likewise, there are people who try as they might to disabuse themselves of heaven and hell yet they can’t. I might tell myself that I value marriage yet my repeated actions may be consistently destructive to my marriage. There’s an incongruity there. Which is it that I truly value? My wife by my words or my career according to my actions? Talk is cheap as they say. We act on what we value. Our actions betray us. We’re all liars. And we are the primary recipients of our own lies.
Of all forms of deception, self-deception is the most deadly, and of all deceived persons the self-deceived are the least likely to discover the fraud… He is his own enemy and is working a fraud upon himself. He wants to believe the lie and is psychologically conditioned to do so. He does not resist the deceit but collaborates with it against himself. There is no struggle, because the victim surrenders before the fight begins.
A.W. Tozer, Man – The Dwelling Place of God
Each time we contradict the facts we warp reality. It becomes almost impossible to know when my motives are controlling or impure. The world wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous if it didn’t have an agent on the inside actively working to subvert us. There is covert rebellion going on inside us. “If a castle or fort be never so strong and well fortified, yet if there be a treacherous party within, that is ready to betray it on every opportunity, there is no preserving it from the enemy. There are traitors in our hearts, ready to take part, to close and side with every temptation, and to give up all to them.” (The scriptures call this traitor the Flesh.) Clearly we don’t have as much control of our value system as we think. And clearly not all value systems are equal. There are specific value systems that engender pogroms, gulags, and forced confessions. And the nihilistic denial of value yields very real acts of denial like suicide and addiction. It’s almost as if we are possessed by some ideas. Perhaps we should give more credence to the possibility of the demonic. Regardless, we find ourselves on the cusp of gene editing and artificial intelligence with virtually no shared values to guide us and dismissive of evil as a real force in the world. What could go wrong? What sort of bottomless pits could be lurking? We neglect the question of what ought to be at our peril. When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes valuable and consequently loses all value. The world of nature, apart from the source of life, is a dying world. Only a tragically inert mind would settle for ‘what is‘ without asking ‘what ought.’
Despite the limits of science, modern knowledge became embedded in this ‘pure nature’ vision of reality. When we take natura pura as the totality of things, we give up something very real.
If the only thing deemed to be real is the purely natural, and if what science tells us about nature is the only valid form of knowledge, then the notion of ‘being’ simply merges into existence and the transcendent merges into magic… When only sensory impressions define valid knowledge then, as Hume saw, “is” does not imply “ought.” This knowledge is teleologically primitive, for when “survival” is considered to be the sole objective purpose of living beings, purpose becomes meaningless, for survival in itself has no meaning.
Paul Tyson, De-Fragmenting Modernity
Tyson goes on, “We routinely perform acts of staggering emotional, relational, and spiritual stupidity” due to a dogmatic faith commitment in a modern natura pura metaphysics. “The mechanical philosophy really should have been nothing more than a prescription of intellectual abstinence, a prohibition upon asking the wrong sorts of questions; transformed into a metaphysics, however, it became a denial of the meaningfulness of any queries beyond the scope of the empirical sciences.” There is this hubris of progress that permeates all human endeavors. “Because we have science, and because secular scientific rationality so deeply orders our way of life, we see ourselves as having advanced beyond our pre-modern origins.” Our moral reasoning seems to have atrophied just at a time when science makes us dangerously powerful.
We have progressed so far that we have succeeded in tearing the atom apart; but to reach that point we may also have had to regress in our moral vision of the physical world to a level barely above the insentient. The mechanical picture of reality, which is the metaphysical frame within which we pursue our conquest of nature, is one that forecloses, arbitrarily and peremptorily, a great number of questions that a truly rational culture should leave open… the art of humble questioning was mistaken for the sure possession of ultimate conclusions.
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God
Our brethren in the Middle Ages saw meaning in practically everything, but the so-called Enlightenment, ushered in by a Scientific Revolution, changed all that. There was a shift to more of an interest in nature as telos, in other words nature ‘for its own sake.’ James K.A. Smith once again invokes Charles Taylor on this:
From the vantage point of secular humanism, this new interest in nature can look like the next logical step on the way to pure immanence: first distinguish God/nature, then disenchant, then be happy and content with just nature and hence affirm the autonomy and sufficiency of nature. Such a story about the ‘autonomization’ of nature posits a contrast or dichotomy between belief in God and interest in ‘nature-for-itself.’
James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular
This path towards ‘immanentization’ fails to account for the historical reality that Christians initiated this new interest in nature for theological reasons and that this interest was clearly not mutually exclusive with belief in God or with any affirmation of transcendence.
Understanding something is no longer a matter of understanding its “essence” and hence its telos (end). Instead we get the ‘mechanistic’ universe that we still inhabit today, in which efficient causality (a cause that ‘pushes’) is the only causality and can only be discerned by empirical observation. This, of course, is precisely the assumption behind the scientific method as a way of divining the efficient causes of things, not by discerning ‘essence’ but by empirical observation of patterns, etc. The result is nothing short of ‘a new understanding of being, according to which, all intrinsic purposes having been expelled, final causation drops out, and efficient causation alone remains’.
James K.A. Smith invoking Charles Taylor, How (Not) to be Secular
“God is now conceived as ‘a being’ within a single frame of reality.” The loss of our ontological heritage and its associated language makes demonstrating God’s existence “a horrible mangle of notions for the Christian Platonist tradition.” All this is deeply tied to the rise of modern atheism. The religious commitment to naturalism results in the inability to see any causation beyond the material.
One of the deep prejudices that the age of mechanism instilled in our culture, and that infects our religious and materialist fundamentalisms alike, is a version of the so-called genetic fallacy: to wit, the mistake of thinking that to have described a thing’s material history or physical origins is to have explained that thing exhaustively.
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God
Aristotle recognized that material causes alone are inadequate for explaining a simple physical object. We cannot just describe the material history and physical origins of a thing and presume to have explained the thing exhaustively. Each level of causality described by Aristotle more or less relates to changes in matter and energy. These are all secondary causes that still don’t adequately explain the existence of the bottle itself. They don’t explain how you get something from nothing. Aquinas, of course, identified a fifth non-material cause which represents the the creative idea that precedes all secondary causes. This something-out-of-nothing is what the creation narrative in the Bible is concerned with. In this prime, or essential cause, “God is the creator of all things not as the first temporal agent in cosmic history, which would make him not the prime cause of creation but only the initial secondary cause within it.” A thing can have abstract existence in the mind regardless of whether it is ever manifested into a physical object. “The components of the material world are fixed, but those of the imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without destroying or rearranging what came before it.” Natural selection, the big bang and such deal strictly with secondary causes. They will never give meaningful insight into the primary cause that called something out of nothing.
Religious fundamentalists and materialists alike are aware that Christians believe God is the creator of every person; but presumably none of them would be so foolish as to imagine that this means each person is not also the product of a spermatozoon and ovum; surely they grasp that here God’s act of creation is understood as the whole event of nature and existence, not as a distinct causal agency that in some way rivals the natural process of conception.
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God
When we refuse to look beyond material and efficient processes it’s no wonder that we find none. Things loose meaning because we do not, or rather cannot, conceive of any higher aims or purposes. Meaning is no longer something fixed, it’s something we assign to things.
Enlightenment thinking centered on the sovereignty of reason along with evidence provided by the senses as primary sources of knowledge. This conditions us to view ourselves as pure observers of the universe. According to Descartes, truth is no longer found in the world, but is relocated into our heads. Truth becomes a function of mental procedures. Then the father of liberalism, John Locke, employs a dubious mental procedure linking authority to consent. For Locke the legitimacy of authority boils down to consent. This is based on a fable Locke tells in which he appeals to a pristine state of nature, a time before there was any established authority that men consented to live under. In this “natural state,” moral relations between men where based purely on their obedience to reason. But this frankly isn’t the state anyone is borne into. We do not enter the world as fully formed pure observers. Instead we are born to parents and must develop from infancy under their authority. Matthew Crawford points out that our embodiment plays a fundamental role in our perception. “Our cognitive capacities are those of a being who develops from infancy not as a pure observer of the world, but as one who acts in it.” We are not passive bystanders, but rather agents acting in the world. And we mustn’t forget the world we act in is inhabited by other people. These aren’t just people who happen to be present for us to perceive. We are born into a world already fully developed. The moment we learn to stand, we are standing already on the shoulders of giants. The very language we use to formulate our thoughts preceded us. As Crawford puts it, “we find ourselves thrown into the world midstream; it is already saturated with sediments of meaning” and thus other people have “set up shop in our consciousness in ways that condition how we perceive and use everything.” In other words, we are never truly free of authority. This is a fiction we tell ourselves. Alexis de Tocqueville described how this illusion of standing alone reinforces the mythical elevation of the Self. The radically equalizing idea of the pure observer produces autonomous individuals who, being equal, owe nothing to anyone and expect nothing in return.
“They acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus, not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his decedents and separates his contemporaries from him.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
The Enlightenment brought us from an argument about the legitimacy of certain political authorities at a specific moment in history to a more general argument about the legitimacy of any authority and in the end it effectively de-legitimized the authority of our own experience. Beware of anyone who calls himself enlightened, because the truly enlightened knows that he doesn’t know.
Nominalism
A re-emergence of nominalism at just the right moment brought it into direct contact with the mechanistic view of nature where these two ideas reacted unpredictably. James K.A. Smith describes its benign origins, “Nominalism arose as a way of metaphysically honoring a radical sense of God’s sovereignty and power.” He explains:
The Aristotelian notion of a human “nature” saw the good of the human being determined by the nature or telos of the human being; and there was a defined way to be good. Now while God the Creator might have created this telos or nature, once created it would seem to actually put a constraint on God, since enabling humans to achieve their (good) end would require that God sort of “conform” to this good/telos. ‘But this seemed to some thinkers an unacceptable attempt to limit God’s sovereignty. God must always remain free to determine what is good.’ So if one were going to preserve God’s absolute sovereignty, one would have to do away with “essences,” with independent “natures.” And the result is a metaphysical picture called “nominalism” where things are only what they are named (nom-ed).
James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular
Nominalism denies the existence of anything that does not exist in space and time. In other words, it denies all the abstract objects that Paul Tyson calls magic. Here is where the real ideological chain reaction was set off according to Taylor and Smith.
Incarnational interest in nature is not necessarily a step on the way to the autonomization of nature; rather, only when it is “mixed” with another development, nominalism, does it seem to head in that direction. There is a sort of intellectual chemical reaction between the two that generates a by-product that neither on its own would have generated — or would have wanted.
James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular
If nominalism is true, “not only must we alter our model of science — no longer the search for Aristotelian or Platonic form, it must search for relations of efficient causality; but the manipulable universe invites us to develop a Leistungswissen, or a science of control.” “The result is a monster: a Christianized neo-Stoicism that appends a deity to Stoic emphases on action and control.” Enlightenment philosophers, by and large, failed to recognize the broader metaphysical implications of this project. As Carl Trueman says, they “neither had the intellectual acumen nor the courage to do so.” It was Friedrich Nietzsche who famously pointed this out:
‘Whither is God?’ the madman cried: ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’
‘How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?’
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft