This novel is the second that I wrote but the oldest of my novels which still exists (substantially finished in 1999 or thereabouts). My first novel was trashed and is on my schedule for rewriting. In any case, The Open Independence of the Sea is an early and perhaps sometimes successful effort to unleash my language to speak more truly of the world in terms of our modern knowledge of empirical bits and pieces of the world.

I hope you enjoy reading this novel.

I’ve said this often but I wish to emphasize an aspect of this claim I’m just starting to explore as I wander through the streets of my town and also through the pages of biographies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, tales of the American Constitutional Convention of 1789, political discussions by W.E.H. Lecky and Albert Jay Nock, and various works on particle physics and the history of thought in geometry. I should be, and soon will be, concentrating on matters of physical science, mathematics, and ontology as I prepare to get back to work on an enhanced summary of the worldview I’ve developed over the past 20 years or so. I hope that my thoughts on these political and social and moral aspects of created being will start maturing in the back of my mind so that I’ll be able to move smoothly into these aspects after writing the summary of my views on the nature of the fundamental aspects of created being, largely concentrating on what we label as ‘physics’ and ‘mathematics’.

So it is that I’ll not provide for now even so much as a serious sketch of how we can move forward in understanding our own political and social and moral natures — as they evolve under the environments we are ourselves changing rapidly though not in ways we can anticipate with any great accuracy. That is, we can understand what has happened and somewhat what is happening but we can’t understand what the opportunities and problems will be for our grandchildren because we can’t understand how they’ll be living as individuals and as members of families, what technologies will be available to them, how they will understand their relationship to Creation and Creator, and so forth. True it is that we have to act in ways that will respond properly to our own circumstances without unduly constraining future generations, but I’m not yet ready to even speculate on real-world actions until I can better understand where we stand.

When trying to understand the vast changes in human life and human possibilities over the past few centuries, I find it hard to believe that so many think that our political possibilities are limited to a small catalog of political systems which can be be readily controlled by perhaps a king or a small body of wealthy men, by a group of intellectuals gathered to write a constitution for the ages or by cigar-smoking big-cogs in political machines. I can well believe that men gather to conspire to some goal in their selfish interests but I can’t believe they can do so effectively — though I agree with the conspiracy theorists to the extent of recognizing immense damage done by bankers who would control governments and or intelligence agencies murdering leaders in their own countries or around the world. The CIA, or a cabal within in it acting with perhaps the support of Texas oilmen and weapons manufacturers as well as key senators, might well have murdered President John Kennedy. The Council for Foreign Relations and similar gatherings of bankers and intellectuals and politicians might well have played a major role in shaping American policy. In general, they’ve exercised some large degree of influence over the past 50 years, a period in which a country, the United States, blessed with every bit of historical luck and natural resources a patriot could dream of, has been driven through a very short time of immense power and wealth to near collapse. In the end, the United States might well have been the most powerful country in the world for not much longer than tiny, low-population and low-resource, Portugal back in the 15th and 16th centuries. Yet, on its own, the American government seems not more competent than these bloody-handed professors with their theories about controlling the world by controlling central Asia — an idea actually tracing back to the brilliant lunatic Brooks Adams, brother of Henry Adams and great-grandson of John Adams.

Without going into details, without being able to go into details, I’ll say for now only that I think we have to move towards a political system analogous to a self-organizing society, more weakly analogous to a free-marketplace. More accurately if less specifically, we should think in terms of organisms, of the evolution of family-lines and the development of specific organisms.

The errors of traditional political thought, from Plato to Madison and beyond, come at their most fundamental level from their wrongful understanding of metaphysics or — equivalently — their wrongful understanding of how the human mind forms. The political philosopher isn’t born with a knowledge of absolute truths of human political and social natures any more than a physicist is born with a knowledge of absolute truths of time and space and matter. We are born with certain brain responses that assume adults will help us when we whimper in need or distress and we are born with certain brain responses which assume objects continue in existence. Neither set of brain responses correspond to more than highly qualified truths, though there are usually ways in which such qualified truths can be understood in terms of more abstract forms of being which are reflective of less qualified truths, but that’s not my main line of argument for now.

What are the basic forms of political organization? Are those forms truly limited to republic, monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy? Is democracy little more than disorder waiting to happen? Are we forced to go with hierarchical systems which are designed by men? Is there really an ideal catalog of such forms any more than there is such a catalog for forms of life?

In terms of computers, our modern political systems, and most of our social systems, are rigidly hard-wired computers with a central processing unit which does all the thinking for the entire system, at least all the important thinking. Certainly, we can note that the types of men who are attracted to being part of that central unit are rarely those who could be trusted holding power, but I’m not writing with an intention of attacking any specific governments or individuals. Rather am I writing to speak of the strange and perverse results of building a governmental machine and attaching it to a social organism with the intention of having the machine control that organism. It’s particularly strange when that organism is changing rapidly.

In the United States, we have a constitution written by men who were definitely above average at least in moral courage and intellectual talent. After all, they had risked all, life and property, in the interests of something akin to a deep love of political freedom. They applied deep and broad knowledge of the history of political thought and of the practice of law and legislation to the task of forming a new government. Why, then, did they think that political freedom could be served by a set of rules and overarching legal principles which formed a sort of machine? Some, such as Jefferson, apparently didn’t think that, though Jefferson couldn’t do much but express a vaguer view of politics which is at least more consistent with the view I’m advocating. The others? They were taught to analyze political systems as machines by the traditions of political thought in the West. The organistic analogies of Plato and Hobbes strike me as machine-like, non-evolving, and non-developing. Plato’s republic doesn’t grow from the actions of its members but rather fits its members into tightly defined roles. True it is that the Founding Fathers of the United States had England’s example before them, but they seemed to think that the evolutionary and developmental processes of English history had worked to produce something like a machine, which they rejected in the interests of forming a similar but different sort of machine.

(In fact, as I’ve written before, the efforts to shape a part of an organism into a well-structured machine has resulted in something more akin to a cancer or a rapidly devoluting parasitical organism, but I’m arguing against mainstream political ways of thought and only incidentally discussing the counter-intuitive, and mostly destructive, results of the implementations of their schemes. Political activists and theorists build political machines in their acts or their minds and don’t set out to deliberately design parasites to suck the life out of the body public.)

It is clear that we have passed through a period in which we achieved extraordinary progress in understanding the universe by way of science and yet there was no planning. Individuals began to respond to Creation, forming their minds to be able to grasp what was concretely perceivable that abstractions might be derived. Early on, monasteries and eventually various other sorts of corporate bodies organized to tackle problems which had arisen, such as the need for some sort of time-keeping as the choir monks separated themselves from work in the natural environment or the construction of more elaborate buildings or the cultivation of very large fields. I’m not advocating a minimalist or non-existent government but rather a government which is part of the organism and develops to serve certain needs and responds to the rest of the organism in such a way as to change with it. In fact, there is reason to believe that science has perhaps been going off-track since since it began shaping itself to the needs of funds-granting governments and corporations of various sorts rather than shaping itself in response to the world. Yes, I’m claiming human science is no more and no less than the human mind applied to exploring Creation in certain ways. Science as a body of knowledge and techniques isn’t separate from the minds and acts of its practitioners, a specific example of a great truth about the human mind in general. Similarly, we would do well to consider political thought and political action in analogy to scientific thought and scientific action, even scientific experimentation.

We don’t know even what the true human political and social possibilities are at our current state of dense populations, advanced technological development, somewhat retarded intellectual development in the humanities and philosophy and theology, and so forth. We aren’t even thinking on those lines, instead seeming to believe that our new wine can be put in old wineskins. No, the problem is worse than that because we’re squeezing growing and developing organisms, from lines of evolving organisms, into hides from more primitive ancestors. We might as well squeeze our individual selves into the hide of an ancient ancestor of apes and monkeys. This is exactly what our governments do, trying to force individual human beings and human societies into a shape appropriate for that particular government but not much appropriate for any other entity in the known universe. The result isn’t generally pretty and becomes downright ugly under rapidly changing conditions even for a government that evolved before rigidifying into a machine, such as that of England, or for a government which was formed by a group of men of greater than normal moral integrity and intelligence, such as the American constitutional government.

I don’t know where to go with this entire line of thought for now. I’m going to contemplate the issue, in the back of my mind and sometimes in the front, sometimes even writing about small pieces of the problem. I’m going to try to shape my political and social thoughts in response to the best knowledge available on these topics, or at least an eclectic sampling of such knowledge. I’ll be under no illusion that I can anticipate what the answer will be but my real goal is to try to define processes we should be nurturing in order that we might develop political systems appropriate for our modern selves and our modern societies. I have faith and hope that we can help along the formation of the Body of Christ by doing so.

I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Sir Isaac Newton]

I understood him to say that truth is found, and a ‘true’ mind is formed, as an honestly and constantly lived response to reality as we can best know it. Such an intensely lived response will reshape our thoughts and minds. It will form our moral characters.

In my writings, I’ve been developing an understanding of created being, a subject to which I’ve recently returned as I’m trying to develop an understanding of moral and social and political aspects of human life. For now, I’ll just refer the reader to a recent article where I very roughly summarized my current understanding of created being: Freedom and Structure in Human Life — A Project for More Than One Lifetime. My understanding of created being can perhaps be more readily understood by some readers if they approach through my parallel understanding of the human mind and how it works. Early in my blogging career, I wrote two series of articles on this topic. These are the initial articles in each of those series:

• What is Mind: Part 1. The Imagination that Can Be All and followup articles; and

• A Review of “Adaptive Thinking, Part I” and its followups.

The process of shaping the mind in response to Creation ensures that we gain values which are found in Creation in its entirety, including the world of the resurrected as well as this world. Creation is the totality of created being and includes not only created being but also various levels of abstract being going right back to the thoughts God manifested as the basic, or raw, stuff of this Creation. The concrete values proper for men, flesh-and-blood creatures that we are, can be drawn from the narrative which is this concrete world in its movement towards an unknown future, but we can rise to higher moral levels by proper formation and use of our minds. This doesn’t mean we transcend Creation but rather that we can begin to understand the purposes, let us even say the values, God intends for His created works.

Movement. Evolution of species or classes. Development of individual entities.

Our moral instincts aren’t a direct vision of some transcendental realm of truths. They come first from behaviors and attitudes which evolved in the human genetic line over millions of years. In fact, that process of evolution of moral nature started in pre-human lines of social mammals and, to some extent, in still earlier lines of living creatures.

At some time, our moral characters came into a tighter and more conscious state, partly because of a useful error in human thought. Once our ancestors had ascended, or descended as Darwin would have said, to a greater self-awareness, they concluded that our moral behavior is under direct, immediate control of those aware selves. In fact, we are creatures of moral action and it’s been shown that, at least for certain easily measured actions, we start to act before the more conscious, higher regions of our brain show any sign of activity. I’ve written of this issue before and written a little about its practical effects, though arguably R.L. Stevenson spoke more graphically in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde about the dangers of the illusion that we can directly control our ‘inner selves’. In fact, true values are useful as guides to human animals in strengthening their moral characters but self-aware thinking plays a role by shaping our selves so that we act properly in the future, not by turning us into some sort of creature which can transcend depravity by heroic acts of free-will. Values, moral abstractions in general, are necessary for the conscious shaping of our selves or our children, but our moral character is in that behavior, it is realized in our embodied selves and our actions. It’s not just our ‘good’ feelings.

In my effort to communicate a view at odds with most views of human moral nature. allow me to repeat that there are two sets of processes which have formed the human mind, including its moral aspects:

1. We are born with certain tendencies toward behaviors and attitudes which are our ‘moral instincts’. These are the results of selection processes working over many thousands of years upon particular genetic lines of highly social creatures with other characteristics such as an opportunistic attitude.

2. We are shaped as individuals as we respond actively to our environments. If there’s a harsh side to my views on human nature, it’s the implication that passive human animals never develop towards the state of human personhood.

These two processes exist at the concrete level of created being and the events which occur in the narrative which is this world. The second process, formation of the human mind, also exists at more abstract levels of created being. The entire process of understanding our own moral natures starts from awareness of the factual aspects of our own physical nature and continues when we begin to deal with those factual aspects through our intellectual faculties, that is, when we begin to draw abstractions from our concrete moral natures.

We place a high value on human life because we evolved as human beings in human societies, even though those societies might have been often no more than families. We have instincts against killing other human beings and most men even have great trouble killing another man, face-to-face, when it seems morally allowable. A humbling fact, which emphasizes the animal foundations of human moral nature, is that wolves seem to have stronger instincts than human beings against killing other members of their own species. A wolf will place higher value upon the life of another wolf than a man will place upon the life of another man. Human beings have developed higher moral principles, absolute principles, despite starting from a lower moral level of concrete behavior than wolves, in some respects.

In this brief survey, I’ll also mention a problem which arises in the Gospels of Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth imposed some very difficult demands upon us, particularly His demands in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not clear why creatures in a world of Darwinian processes should love their enemies and not clear how to actually shape ourselves or our children to the higher demands of Christ, but we could — in principle — understand these matters. Some would say we should simply obey Christ but He called us to imitate Him, even to be perfect as God is, and didn’t call us to simple, mindless obedience.

As St. Thomas Aquinas told us:

[J]ust as a disciple reaches an understanding of the teacher’s wisdom by the words he hears from him, so man can reach an understanding of God’s wisdom by examining the creatures He made… (Page 17 of St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on 1 Corinthians as published in pdf form at the web-site of Ave Maria University.)

By understanding how the Creator worked, we come to understand the thoughts He manifested in Creation. Within those divine thoughts, are what we call values, and we can make those thoughts our own by proper exploration of empirical reality and proper active response to it. Values can come from facts because the Creator chose the facts which are manifested in this Creation, including those facts which deal with the evolution of moral species and the development of moral individuals. We can even say that we can find all our thoughts and values in Creation, not because of any materialistic reductionism or any other exclusion of God. God, as Creator, works yet within Creation, shaping being and telling the stories which are this world and the world of the resurrected. If we can understand the story which is our world, we can understand all values God would have us hold.

I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Sir Isaac Newton]

Newton knew how to think. In Thomistic terms, serious thinking is an intentional process, that is a process of growth or development. Or both in most cases. It must be an ongoing process, working at conscious and unconscious levels.

I was intending, that is, growing towards an explanation of my work which would be more revealing than my prior explanations, by a minuscule amount, but this quote from Sir Isaac Newton speaks of the same explanation from a different angle. What’s missing from Newton’s quotation is a more explicit recognition that this process he was speaking of is not that of a preformed mind somehow inching towards the truth but rather a mind in formation as it learns to respond to reality and to think the truth.

If you would come to a better understanding of Creation, then be always thinking, be always revising and enriching and expanding your understanding of created being in its limited and more particular forms and of Creation in its entirety.

Keep the subject of your inquiry constantly before you.

Keep the subject of your inquiry before you when you participate in the rituals of worship and when you participate in the rituals of cooking. Keep it before you when you fish or when you contemplate the wonder of young children splashing in a pool.

And remember that the goal is to make sense of what really is. There is no transcendental realm of building-block truths which somehow come into your awareness. God is Himself transcendental but we can only know as much of His life as He chooses to tell us. The deepest truths of Creation are to be found in the most abstract regions of created being and those abstract regions are found by the sorts of inquiries I’ve written of, the sorts of inquiries Newton was describing. As I understand Newton’s words, he was telling us that the process of getting at the truths in empirical reality is not a controllable process of applying predetermined methods to data but rather a process of living in that reality in the fullest sense and shaping your thoughts, ultimately your mind, to that reality.

So far as I can tell, the American political system is corrupted beyond repair and that raises serious questions in my way of looking at this world as being a physical world ordered to some purpose or purposes of God. As a Catholic Christian trying to make sense of the totality of Christian revelation and empirical knowledge, I see the world as having been created for the purpose of allowing the Son to make of Himself a willing and trusting sacrificial lamb for the purpose of learning obedience and showing His love for the Father. Given this particular world in which this drama of self-sacrifice took place and especially given the incarnation of the Son as a man, the world is also ordered to the related purpose of allowing the birth and development of the Body of Christ. This world is a womb for the Body of Christ which will come to healthy and perfect adulthood in the world of the resurrected. In this world, developments seemingly analogous to diseases and cancers and parasitic invasions can occur. Is the American machine-controlled government a parasite which should have never have been allowed to attach itself to the body republic? Was it once a legitimate organ which has gone cancerous? Is there another analogy more appropriate?

But what of the individual human beings in whatever regions or organs within the Body of Christ as it develops on Earth?

Regions or organs? Let me speak in general terms first before hinting of some great complications, and greatly interesting complications.

Individual human beings aren’t simply absorbed into the Body of Christ as in a science fiction movie where they, or alien beings, become entirely enslaved to some sort of collective. Those who are saved will remain individuals and yet will be one Body of Christ as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit remain individual divine Persons and yet are one God.

One real-world implication of my worldview is that it’s likely, certainly more than possible, that there are a multitude of organs in this developing Body of Christ. I doubt the Church is the entirety of this Body though She is the organ which is the linked to God in specific ways and thus the most important of the organs. Yet, I believe there will be organs in the Body, even in the world of the resurrected, which will correspond to a variety of needs and talents, many of which the Church has nurtured in various ways over the centuries and yet are mostly independent of the Church. Complex human relationships will continue to exist in the Body of Christ. In this way, we will apparently differ from the relationships of the Persons of the Holy Trinity.

Let’s follow the organic metaphor implied by the Body of Christ and especially by the nature of the Body of Christ as a union of the Head, Jesus Christ, with those who belong to Him. Organs which work against the health or even the formation of the Body of Christ would be the equivalent of tape-worms or cancerous masses or infectious bacteria or viruses. Yet, as I’ve said before: there are various needs of human beings living in communities and governments of some sort seem to fit the bill. Just because there will be no enemy countries in Heaven doesn’t mean there won’t be any need for human beings to engage in some purer and more abstract form of politics.

I’m sure the language of organisms will be part of my final results but I’m vaguely imagining organisms, including ‘abstract’ organisms formed of concrete organisms, which will have aspects needing more powerful descriptive language than that drawn from our knowledge of human beings and human societies at the purely concrete level. The traditional languages used in the modern West to describe human political and social and moral activities are themselves expansions upon the languages inherited from thinkers who had not, for example, seen anything analogous to modern industrial economies or the complex of modern research universities.

I’m planning to develop a language partially drawn from modern physics. To tighten this summary a little bit: I envision that the Body of Christ, and maybe many lesser groupings of individual organisms, exist partly — maybe even largely — in regions of Creation more abstract than the granite structures of Washington, DC. They would also have relationships which exist in regions of more abstract forms of being. Describing the Body of Christ in terms which are enriched by what we now know of Creation will require the application of abstraction best explored so far by mathematicians and physicists.

I’ll return to my perhaps eccentric discussions of particular political and social and moral issues, though I’ll soon be putting up for free download a fairly long and complex novel — my first (finished around 1998) but in storage since it was ignored (even SASE didn’t guarantee a response to us lesser folk) or rejected by publishers in the mid-1990s. I mention this because the novel is, in part, an experiment in integrating some of the insights of modern science into our language and our thoughts. I also mention it because writing such works should be a sign that I’m not developing a politics solely for the afterlife but rather an understanding of human political needs and possibilities that might help us to solve some of our current problems.

I’ll never tire of reminding people that the great thinkers of the past, Plato and Augustine and others, responded to new knowledge of the world rather than just shuffling about well-established ways of looking at, say, possible forms of human polities. As one example, there seem to be no political forms of organization in our tradition catalog of possibilities in which power and responsibility are in proper balance for a technologically advanced human race with a population in the billions. Yet, our political reformers and political philosophers, even those who claim to possess moral imaginations or something of the sort, can do no more than return always to that catalog and try to solve serious problems by degreasing a cog or by painting a dial. Similar but more complex statements could be made about our forms of social organization and our ways of structuring our moral lives. The complexities are of a sort analogous to those of modern physics, leading to the need for speculation and disciplined theorizing but making it pretty much impossible that there is any way of replacing what might be called the ‘Aristotelian catalog of political possibilities’, as one example, with a similar set of political schemas. I’m not suggesting we build a new catalog but rather that we respond to reality but respond to it by serious, hard thought which will lead to good abstractions from particular empirical situations.

Again will I remind my readers that I consider concrete being to be shaped from more abstract forms of being but I also consider concrete entities, such as a human animal, to contain yet the various forms of abstract being which come together to form a man. A man is, in a manner of speaking, frozen soul and the soul remains in all its phases even if the dominant phase of a human animal at birth is ice. It takes the proper circumstances and the proper responses by a man to develop the fullness of human nature. But I don’t like that way of talking about the abstractions which remain with even the most concrete forms of being and this is one reason to start a discussion of specific problems which involve the abstract aspects of human nature, particularly the ways in which human beings form relationships with each other, with our non-human fellow-creatures, with the world as our complex set of environments, and with our Maker.

If created being comes from one set of truths manifested by God on the other side of the Big Bang — so to speak — then we can enrich our understanding of man, even in his moral and political aspects, by applying to our study of human nature what’s been learned in modern physics and mathematics, as well as other fields of empirical study. But the previous sentence will produce a distorted view of my intentions in most minds just because we have the false idea that there are different, incompatible sorts of (vaguely defined) being and, separately, some forms of abstract truths which correspond to human fields of study. And so it is that I’m struggling to find good ways to talk about these issues. This struggle has quietly and contemplatively increased in recent months as I’ve been trying to find the time to write a summary work (possibly multiple volumes) on my worldview and also have been reformatting two ten year-old novels which deal with many of these issues. I plan to publish these novels on the Internet, perhaps one within a month or so. In fact, I’ve been thinking I might turn my dwindling, middle-aged energies towards works of fiction because rereading these older novels has convinced me that I worked out many of my ideas by writing the sorts of moral narratives I wish to deal with in these writings on politics.

Moral narratives are appropriately for exploring the nature of man, who is, after all, a physical creature. To my way of understanding Creation, physical creatures are (ultimately) shaped from the truths God manifested for His Creation and still ‘carry’ those truths in their very flesh and blood. Consequently, we can come to better understand man, and other creatures, by coming to better understand some mathematically describable aspects of created being, including that fundamental creature: spacetime. Human experience indicates that mathematics, while not capable of describing the totality of created being, is sometimes capable of leading the way towards new ways of describing that totality.

However we get to a more complete description, the various ways in which we understand men and stars have to come together in some sort of narrative of Creation and that narrative has sub-stories such as that of man responding to God’s revelation as carried in the Bible and also God’s revelations as carried in the workings and stuff of His Creation as accessible to the human senses and mind. If I succeed in any substantial way in this task, that success will be found in the entirety of my writings, novels as well as books and articles on philosophical or theological matters.

What we need to provide intellectual foundations for a new phase of human civilization is to re-imagine, from the bottom-up, the meaning of Creation and the role played by human beings in Creation. I can point to a philosophical/theological work with a similar goal: Summa Contra Gentiles by St. Thomas Aquinas. That work was likely intended to present the beliefs of Christians to Muslim and Jewish scholars in such a way that they could see that Christian thought is consistent with the rationality of Creation as seen by the human eye and understood by the human mind. The goal of Aquinas was to show that Christian revelation could be reached in that bottom-up way, not as a lock-tight logical proof, but as a ‘proof’ in the older sense: a testing of coherence and consistency. He seems to have set out to work in the other direction, from an understanding of God developed from the Bible, in his other major compendium, Summa Theologicae.

Man is part of that Creation which is a particular work of God and reflects decisions which could have been otherwise. God could have brought into being not only a different Creation but even a different intelligent, God-seeking race in a Creation and a universe much like ours. The human race might have been an apish race with somewhat different characteristics. Speaking of just one characteristic: human beings have different tendencies towards being individuals vs. social beings. We could have had more of a leaning towards individualism or more towards social bonding. The particular range we occupy in this individual-social spectrum and the particular statistical spread of individuals over that spectrum are empirical matters. Men could have been different, in this aspect and others, but we are what we are, largely as a result of the hundreds of millions of years of evolution of living creatures on earth. More than that, we are what we are because of the characteristics of spacetime in our world, because of the properties of matter and fields, because of abstract mathematical truths, and so forth. We are creatures shaped from and shaped in response to the various sorts of being, abstract and concrete, in Creation.

There are two extremes that most thinkers fall into when they have stumbled into some vague understanding of the nature of being. Some, you might call them reductionists, think that all properties of more complex beings can be derived, in principle, by accumulating layers of more complex and complicated assemblages of the basic things — whatever they might be. Some, usually they take the form of dualists or more extreme preachers of multiple forms of incompatible being, think that a man is so different from a puddle of the chemicals that compose his body that surely he becomes a man because something thoroughly different from physical being is accidentally attached to his flesh and blood.

Can a man be explained by understanding the various ways of assembling that puddle of chemicals? Can a man be explained by separating his bodily responses from his spiritual or moral responses?

Is there another way? Let me propose that we can build another way of viewing created being, including human nature, by borrowing three major insights from modern empirical science:

1. Concrete stuff, by which I presently mean matter and energy and fields and spacetime, seems to have been shaped from some more abstract stuff. So far as quantitative aspects of concrete being goes, this implies some serious truth in the radical version of Pythagoras’ claim that stuff is made of number. Not describable by number, but made of. For now, I’ll only say there are more aspects to concrete being than those which can be measured or even described by qualitative mathematical methods and I’m contemplatively playing around with ways of describing the multiple ‘flows’ of abstract being into concrete forms but I’m not yet ready to describe a good way of viewing this ‘flow’.

2. Relationships are primary and bring substances into existence. See A Christian view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality for a short discussion of the issue. This insight might well prove to be the same as the first.

3. At the top-level, the universe can be seen as a narrative, morally well-ordered in my opinion. Moving downward, classes or species of complex entities evolve, perhaps over time-spans which are immense by human standards, and individual complex entities develop over their lifetimes. This points to the possibility that human moral relationships, including political relationships, are products of evolution and are not derivable from metaphysical systems of thought — unless those systems are constructed to include the evolutionary aspects of human relationships.

What is…is. Our job is not to define what we think is but rather to accept what is, as we can determine from the best of human knowledge, and understand it by creating proper words and concepts and molding them into proper structures of thought. We can then follow our Creator by using those words and concepts and intellectual structures to tell proper stories in imitation of His acts-of-being or acts of creation.

Specifically, if we are to understand human moral nature, human political activities, etc., we need to take account of the three characteristics of created being I listed above — and maybe some more — and to start shaping our minds to created being as it is and not as Hobbes or Plato thought it to be, or Hamilton or Jefferson or Lincoln for that matter. (The greatest of these thinkers, certainly Plato, understood much about the metaphysical problems I’m tackling though pre-modern thinkers were missing the very interesting insights to be gained from modern empirical knowledge.)

This will involve a great deal of work over more than one lifetime and will, in fact, produce along the way the possibility of educated men and women in future generations who possess wide learning and deep culture in such a self-shaping way that they will be very similar to the liberal thinkers of traditional Western civilization though having a library including Einstein, Cantor, Pelikan, Kafka, and other modern thinkers who’ve contributed to a great, but still largely potential, enrichment of our understanding of Creation.

We should also realize that the very process of creating a greater system of knowledge from the totality of human traditional and modern knowledge will itself open up new possibilities for human moral life, including our lives as members of societies and as citizens of political communities.

The thing is shaped from more abstract forms of being, just as the vase is shaped from its raw materials, and the abstract forms remain part of the thing just as the clay remains part of the vase. There are multiple levels of thing-like being within a human being — cells and then DNA and various minerals and biochemicals and then oxygen and carbon and then protons and electrons and then electroweak fields and quarks and so on to some very hypothetical levels of being of the sort studied by theoretical physicists. Once again, we explore more deeply into the stuff of a man and find fields which seem more akin to mathematical ideas than to earth and fire and wind and air. This sort of talk becomes recursively silly at times only because I’m trying to talk about abstract levels of being in terms of concrete levels of being which are shaped from abstract levels of being and still contain abstract being.

My contention is that we should take this seriously, this spectrum of being ranging from highly abstract to highly particular. At the same time, I’d like to expand this idea beyond the aspects of being studied by mathematicians and physicists and all sorts of physical scientists and engineers.

Modern men, including Christians who are bound to pay attention to God in His acts as Creator, have been quite reluctant to do much with these richer ideas of being. We accept the medical and other technological benefits of these enriched ideas but we refuse to restate our understanding of Creation in terms which make sense in light of modern empirical knowledge. At the very least, we need to construct new narratives of Creation, of the human race, of ourselves as members of various peoples and as members of the Body of Christ, of ourselves as individuals. Many can and should play a role in this building of such narratives, including scientists outside of their 9-5 roles as reductionists, but historians and fiction-writers and poets and musicians and movie-makers and visual artists can play a special role. They can speak the truth, a truth which merges particular and concrete things which are true with abstract truths which are thing-like.

More generally, we need to move into a new phase of Western Civilization or into the start of one or more successor civilizations. There have been some who have dared to head off into regions opened up by the modern and richer understandings of created being, but it’s remarkable, at least to me, how little respect that effort has received in general. True it is that both the works of genius and also the obscene jokes played on collectors by Picasso are worth sometimes tens of millions of dollars at auctions, as are the works of van Gogh with his better-defined, seemingly sophisticated experiments in perception, especially color perception. Mahler and Stravinsky wrote various experimental works, often despised when first played but now part of the standard repertoire of symphonic music. The same was true of Beethoven — we forget how much he redefined music beyond the standard understandings and we know only from sparse comments in his journals that he was engaged in a radical expansion of music at the time of his death. Literature? Well, traditional story-tellers, such as Tolstoy and George Eliot have produced great works and the best of those have used traditional narrative techniques to deal with the modern world. There were also those who tried to expand the boundaries of human perception and understanding, creating narratives which take a substantial intellectual effort to follow because those narratives follow events — at least sometimes — at the abstract levels of being, perhaps by such ‘simple’ tricks as treating pieces of a concrete narration as words in a more abstract narrative. I can certainly mention in this context Cervantes (way back), Sterne, Melville, and numerous poets such as Pound and cummings and T.S. Eliot.

Visual artists of the 19th and early 20th century seemed to be ahead of brain scientists in realizing that human vision isn’t unitary. As it turns out, we see an object’s shape, movement, and color separately and our brains put together the more complete view of that object in a way that still baffles scientists so far as I know. (The interested reader can pursue this topic beginning with the scientific discussion in A Vision of the Brain by Semir Zeki or the discussion by the same author from the viewpoint of a scientist interested in art found in Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain.) To cut to the point of this particular line of insight from modern empirical knowledge:

Reality is real but human perceptions of that reality are constructed.

This doesn’t mean our perceptions are false in any way. After all, our eyes and ears have been shaped to some piece of reality, however small, by responses of our ancestors over billions of years and by our own responses to our world, however small or large. We err, perhaps greatly, when we think as if our eyes were merely transparent panes of glass, letting some direct image of reality into our heads where resides a mind formed independently of the world around it.

Over time, men have moved to ever richer and more complete understandings of created being and of what I would call narrative realms in Creation, but not everyone has yet gotten the message. Every electron, every grain of sand or sand-flea, every human being or galaxy, has many components — use this term cautiously, each of those components as well as the entity in its entirety have abstract aspects as well as concrete aspects. The things of this world are not objects separable from but describable by mathematical truths nor are they imperfect images of things existing in some realm of the Real. A thing is the node in a complex network of various sorts of abstract being joining in a particular thing. And those nodes in their turn join to form more complex and more concrete things.

At the very least, we need artistic visions which deal, perhaps playfully, with the full spectrum of aspects of created being, including those we call ‘abstract’. We need van Goghs to give us new insights into human color vision, Picassos to question the way we see shapes and to even question the dimensions in which those shapes are set. I’ve already gone past my knowledge of painting and I want my words to be taken as suggestions optimistic as to what we can learn from those who somehow access the raw components of human vision and those who can consciously think through their own perception of colors or shapes or movements. I’m sure similar statements can be made about modern music, but I’ll pass by that topic for now as my formal knowledge of music is also as slender as one would expect from a product of the American educational system. But I also believe that the greatest need we have is for poets and writers and philosophers who can speak of the entirety of being, in its more abstract and more concrete aspects.

That’s the thrust of my efforts in writing creative fiction, efforts which began well before I tried my hand at theology or philosophy and, in fact, well before I could have stated my worldview in explicit terms or was even aware I’d developed such a strange beast. The world has been for me something of a marvelous mystery containing a multitude of mysteries. I had neither a reductionist nor an occult attitude towards these mysteries. I think that, by behavior if not by conscious thought, I had always an attitude of acceptance of reality, to the point where I wasn’t aggressive enough in querying that reality in a way proper for someone with some intellectual talent and a small bent towards mathematics and physics. Yet, if I’ve followed a strange and slow path of intellectual development, in this country where development of the mind has not much been encouraged, I did seem to implicitly realize from a fairly young age that the problem with mysteries is not that they need to be reduced, though some mysteries can be reduced in a useful and truthful way. Nor are those mysteries to be simply accepted as occult or as supernatural in the sense of beyond man’s reach. I’m speaking here of mysteries which involve created beings and not of of the revealed mysteries of God’s own Being and His transcendental life. Mysteries of Creation are, in principle, within the reach of the human mind though actual, individual human minds are too weak to grasp all of Creation and likely too weak to deal with some of the more profound mysteries of our world and the other realms of Creation.

And, yet, there’s something to be done with mysteries, at least by those called to ponder them as interesting objects of study as well as sources of wonder, the more serious sorts of poets and novelists and various artists as well as philosophers and scientists of a philosophical bent. We can do what the human being has to do, well or badly, just to survive in this life: we can respond by shaping our minds to the reality which confronts us. We explore and we test and we try to find ways to speak about what we find, or think we find. In doing so, we better shape our minds that they might be able to form statements about Creation and its various processes and relationships — in ordinary words or the words or formalisms of mathematics and other specialized sciences. We tune our minds to correspond more closely to the world, to all of Creation, as we can know it during our age and within our culture.

This is to say we accept reality and shape our thoughts correspondingly rather than trying to reduce reality to rules which allegedly are given to the human mind independently of the mundane reality around us, independently of the experience which shaped the human race over the eons and individuals humans over their lifetimes. We don’t live in our heads, inhabiting some sort of mental space equipped with all the tools to understand whatever it encounters. Our minds are our encapsulation of the environments around us, or the entire world, or even the entirety of Creation.

Mathematicians deal with the mystery of infinity by shaping their minds so that different sizes of infinity are part of those minds and the tools to deal with various sorts of numbers, including transfinite numbers larger than ordinary infinity, are part of the furnishings of those minds. Physicists deal with quantum mechanics not by thinking in terms of the common sense developed in our apish ancestors as they hunted mammoths or tamed wild ox; rather do they reshape their minds to correspond with the reality they confront when they explore different regions or levels of being than those our pre-modern ancestors knew about. The paradoxes of modern mathematics and physics aren’t the result of conflicts between reality and some sort of pure reasoning but rather a conflict between reality and a mind shaped to an inadequate understanding of reality, an understanding not sufficiently large and rich.

The truths of art are certainly more fuzzy than those of mathematics and the physical sciences, often more fuzzy than even the truths of history, but they are truths. The truths of art overlap with those of mathematics. After all, art speaks of created being though not necessarily of perceptible, concrete being. Then again, the same is true of mathematics and physics. We don’t see by way of our eyes those abstract objects bundled with relationships which mathematicians call ‘groups’, but a trained mind can see them in an intellectual sense in some of the behavior of atomic particles and of the entities described by quantum mechanics, and by many other entities in Creation. I’ve never seen even ordinary infinity let alone any of the still larger infinities. I’ve never run my hands along a curvature in spacetime and can’t even separate, by touch, space from the objects it holds. I can’t separate my perception of colors from that of shapes and movements and hope I never can in this life — it’s the sign of something going very wrong in a human visual system. It’s hard to say if he had a mild problem with his visual system or simply had remarkable insight into the ways of his own eyes, optic nerves, and brain, but van Gogh showed us hints of color vision without shape and without movement and he also had some emotional and mental problems at various times of his life. His unique insights and his problems might have been tied together — problems with his brain might have allowed him to be both a great artist and also a Christian with a deep devotion bearing some resemblance to that of some of the disturbed saints of Christian history. In any case, van Gogh and Einstein both had to use well-developed imaginations to do their work. Those imaginations strayed from the beliefs of the men of their time, but strayed so that they had a richer view of created being.

The main point I’d like to drive towards is that abstractions in art are not only allowable but actually necessary if men are to explore and understand truth. I don’t know enough to judge Picasso’s works, but I can say this:

If there is any truth in modern theories of infinity and randomness, any in quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories of relativity, then something like Picasso’s approach is necessary for artists to speak truth to modern man, though there’s a sense in which there are as yet few modern men. If there is any truth to modern discoveries of the workings of the human visual system, then van Gogh saw certain truths about the fragmentation of what is seen into color and shape and movement before scientists generally did.

I don’t wish to claim van Gogh was a prophet of brain science but I do wish to claim he was speaking a truth not perceived by most other men even when he presented his work to men sure they saw the world about them in its truth and completeness. That crazy and charitable genius somehow knew we construct our color-vision of the world.

This isn’t to say that all abstractions in art are true, just as it’s certainly not that case that all abstractions in mathematics and physics are true. Some abstractions are so false from the beginning as to be beyond consideration by rational men and others prove to be inconsistent with what’s known or becomes known about Creation in all the realms and levels accessible to the human mind.

But the arts speak the truth about Creation and created being only when they deal with the completeness of that Creation and created being. This doesn’t mean that all works of art, including literature, have to be exotic and difficult to understand. It does mean that modern man has a greatly expanded and enriched knowledge of Creation and created being and that knowledge is not well-contained in the forms of art and literature we’ve received from our ancestors. Modern empirical knowledge has added substance to our knowledge. The modern fields of empirical knowledge-gathering and analysis aren’t just collections of recipes that allow pre-existing human minds to simply absorb knowledge as if it were marks on a ledger. The fact that human beings are a unique species of ape, descended from apes rather than a special creation of God or the gods, most certainly has some bearing upon our understanding of Creation and of human nature. The disconcerting facts being amassed by modern brain scientists give strong testimony that human thoughts and feelings are so tightly tied to physical events in the human body — mostly the brain — as to make talk of immaterial minds and souls a bit questionable. This certainly has a bearing on our ways of speaking about human beings.

I’m going to end by referring to my novel, A Man for Every Purpose, which is the story of a man, well-educated and intelligent, who fails to properly shape his mind to his knowledge of both traditional truths and modern empirical knowledge. This novel was written five years or so before my philosophical beliefs took an explicit form but it deals with the problems of a world where the fragmentation of knowledge of Creation into realms has resulted in human beings acting as if realms of knowledge correspond to different realms of created being.

After an afternoon with [the sisters], I decided that they had had about everything [in their hospice work with cancer victims] and flinched before nothing, even though one of them asked me during the course of the visit why I wrote about such grotesque characters, why the grotesque (of all things) was my vocation. They had in the meantime inspected some of my writing. I was struggling to get off the hook she had me on when another of our guests supplied the one answer that would make it immediately plain to all of them. “It’s your vocation too,” he said to her.

This opened up for me also a new perspective on the grotesque. Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept the fact that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look. When we look into the face of good, we are liable to see a face like Mary Ann’s, full of promise.

Full of promise? How can a face distorted by disease be full of promise? How can the founder of the Church of Christ without Christ be funny, especially after blinding himself and then killing himself by prolonged, horrible penances? How about a self-named Misfit who went to prison for a crime he no longer remembers, certain though that the punishment was out of proportion to the crime, be full of promise? Was it his promise that was realized when he killed a family, mother and father, two children, and a grandmother, after finding them stuck on a dirt road? How about a smart 12 year-old girl who loses her nasty attitude only when she’s immersed in prayer? Full of promise to be a nun but that’s a pretty limited sort of promise in this modern world where God-centered people do good by finding careers with social service corporations (nonprofit, of course). As for the 14 year-old cousins of that 12 year-old nun-to-be, in a convent school but itching to be loose women…

Strange promises indeed in a world where we’ve decided our best goal isn’t the pursuit of what is truly good but rather the avoidance of pain and suffering. We wish to inhabit a world in which pain and suffering can be eliminated, a world in which the Creator brings us to prosperity and an easy death so long as we obey our understanding of His commandments. And, so, we Americans — but probably many modern peoples — do inhabit such a world, if only in our own minds. And we’ve been able to pretend this is the world since our spiritual ancestors, epitomized by Emerson and Thoreau, first discovered that God had botched His Creation and seems deaf to our advice on how to fix matters. If God won’t listen to us, we’ll create our own world… For a remarkably long time, good luck in geography and natural resources and the self-destructive tendencies of our enemies allowed us Americans to pull off this rebellion against God and to even present ourselves, even to ourselves, as a Christian, God-centered people. This is a complicated subject and I’ve written about it in various contexts, including that of the war of the European peoples of New England against the native peoples. See The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding for a discussion of my understanding of the basic weakness in the moral characters and moral reasoning of the Puritan leaders of New England, weaknesses I believe to have been magnified into virtues, partly through the work of Emerson and Thoreau but also through the idealistic deformations of American politics by Abraham Lincoln, deformations upon a system already deeply corrupted by Aaron Burr’s founding of Tammany Hall and Thomas Jefferson’s willingness to ally himself with this early political machine when he thought he could use Burr and his followers to his own purposes. This combination of idealism and fundamental corruption has created a political system that’s quite beyond any true reform.

We need to keep our political and social situation in mind, but I’m mostly concerned in this situation about the clear fact that people classify any grotesque creature, man or beast, and any grotesque situation as evil. Why do we not see the possibilities of good arising through the sorts of evolutionary and developmental processes which have produced the human race and also the Christian Church? Cowardice has much to do with it but there’s something still deeper involved, a revulsion to human nature as we see it when we look at a human being eaten by a cancer that grew from his own bodily stuff or a human being entering a dementia that leaves him there in body but strips him of memory and then reason and then other human characteristics or behaviors. There can be little left of our grandfather or friend, little left but a shell that even seems a mockery of human nature as the eyes grow vacant and the skeletal muscles lose their tone.

I confess to being a coward myself, not so much about death but a lot when it comes to pain and suffering, I try to be honest with myself and with the fact that this too is a part of the world as God created it. But I struggle to toughen up my backbone. I look in the mirror and see not an actively evil man but one who has to paint himself into a corner to be somewhat certain he’ll do what is right when the real trouble begins (maybe before many months pass). I feel strongly that we live in a world where there are undesirable moral implications to our dedication to avoiding pain and suffering. And we court various moral ambiguities, and even moral degradation, when we raise the avoidance of pain and suffering to such a high priority. When we also make it a priority to avoid death as long as medically possible, we begin to turn away from Creation and from our Maker. Yet, even more than death do we avoid pain and suffering though we do our best to avoid all unpleasantries. We don’t seek the good but merely seek to avoid that which fits in our pitifully inadequate understanding of evil.

Pain and suffering, and death, are often enough by-products of the historical or developmental or evolutionary processes which can produce not the good directly but the stuff from which God will make the good, mostly on the other side of death in the world of the resurrected, but this world can be quite good in its own way. In any case, when we try too hard to avoid the unpleasant aspects of the story God is telling, we risk placing ourselves outside of the story, we risk placing ourselves outside the sometimes horrifying processes by which we move forward towards the good. Then we babble on about carrying our crosses when we develop cancer or have to endure economic hardship, after devoting our lives to imposing our standards upon God’s world rather than working within God’s world, this story He’s still telling. It’s been 20 centuries since our spiritual fathers murdered the Son of God, 20 centuries since we were shown the purpose of Creation: to allow the Son of God to learn obedience as a creature and to sacrifice Himself to His Father in an act of pure, self-giving love. And still we insist that God is supposed to give us a pleasant comfortable life so long as we follow a set of rules acceptable to us. And still we insist that the purpose of this all is to save us human beings. You see, this all-powerful God created a world in which human beings were to have been god-like creatures who led peaceful and prosperous lives… Somehow, events escaped the control of God and here we are, but we’ll do our best to be those god-like creatures and to demand the peace and prosperity which is rightfully ours.

The underlying problem we have is with developmental and evolutionary processes that stretch beyond very short periods of time. When we look at days or years or even the lifespan of mortal man, the easiest way of understanding is to assume entities of a permanent nature which act in events that don’t change the entities in a fundamental way. And we fail to make the transition to thinking in terms of the eons over which God shaped us and continues to shape His Creation. Even Einstein thought in this way during his famous attacks upon any understandings of quantum physics which allowed the reality of the strange processes when very small transitions in energy or small regions of space or time are involved. See A Christian’s View of Einstein’s and Bohr’s Debate on the Meaning of Reality for my short summary of a position stated in Critique of Scientific Reason by the German philosopher Kurt Hubner. See The Falsehoods Which are in All Forms of Paganism for a bit more discussion about the issues from the viewpoint of an updated Thomistic existentialism.

We can’t accept the idea that human nature is the result of a freely moving narrative process, a process factual to the extent it is free. We would be free to behave according to our desires and to be already fully-formed persons. Not necessarily do we desire to be God or even gods, but we have our own opinions about matters and will pretend that we can have opinions in clear conflict with reality so long as we have the power and wealth and circumstances to ignore that reality. We would rather live in Disneyworld than Darwinworld or Einsteinworld.

I can understand why we modern men wish to be “persons frozen into some sort of immutable being.” If individual human natures are shaped by responses to environments — as I’ve claimed — then we would be the sorts of creatures who’ve been shaped as mostly passive participants in a rather despicable sort of life, watching violent sports and mindless situation comedies or reality shows. We would be the sorts of creatures who are passive victims of amusement park personnel. But we would like to believe that we are truly men and women who value freedom and have strong moral characters that we exercise when called for. We like to believe that we are the types of creatures who value intelligence rather than the stupidity and bestial passions which dominate our favorite entertainment. But we go on watching and listening to that which teaches values and attitudes which disgust us when embodied in a teenager who actually kills with the abandon of our heroes and anti-heroes or a young woman who aborts her baby so she can enjoy the free life of those modern women in the movies.

And, yet, the Body of Christ continues to form even if many of its organs turn into predatory parasites and many of the individuals, cells in a manner of speaking, will not likely be part of that Body when it is fully formed in the world of the resurrected. But who can tell? Didn’t Christ forgive the sins of passionate sinners with surprising ease? Who can be more morally grotesque than those deformed by greed or sexual lust? There are other vices which also damage us badly but greed and sexual lust are pretty bad in their effects on us. While Christ seemed to often forgive the sins of those who were passionate, He offered up little or no hope for the lukewarm, those with smooth skin and regular features. The lukewarm are never grotesque in appearance. Often quite attractive the lukewarm. In a bland sort of way.

God is shaping the entirety of created being, especially the stuff of human nature and He seems willing to pound us to a bloody pulp at times, to bury us under streams of molten rock, to pour moral-carcinogens down our throats with the drugs and alcohol which our bodies can come to so crave, to trick us into eating dangerous foods — at least dangerous in high amounts — by the desires for high-calorie substances which kept our apish ancestors alive during hard times, to twist the facial features of a young girl into sheer ugliness — at least by the standards of the lukewarm with their smooth faces and their regular features.

It would seem that Darwin, despite losing his poorly founded and Biblically literalistic faith, at least faced up to God’s acts as Creator better than the vast majority of those who claim to be Christians, better than the vast majority of Christian clergymen. Yet, in the end, Darwin’s honesty about the workings of Creation led him away from his Christian faith just because he couldn’t accept a Creator who would work His wonders by such grotesque and distorted paths, paths through realms of ugliness and pain and sorrow. Any God acceptable to Charles Darwin had to be distant and uninvolved with such a world. He had to be a God who retreated after Creating. If He existed at all. Or maybe the pagans were right and matter co-exists with God. Most modern Christians seem to keep their pain by denying God would have created such a world and so they adopt a sort of semi-paganism which allows them to think that evil, from Satan or multiple sources, has somehow invaded the work of an — otherwise — all-powerful Creator. Christians who can’t deal with the grotesque aspects of God’s Creation have to act and talk as if the world doesn’t quite belong to God. And so it is that these bad things happen against the will of this all-powerful and all-knowing God, who is then reduced to vengeful acts such as aiming a hurricane at New Orleans or unleashing a volcano on the gentle inhabitants of Montserrat. And then there’s AIDS the most famous victim of which was the gentlemanly and morally well-ordered Arthur Ashe who got his HIV from a blood transfusion. I guess God sometimes has poor aim. Or else maybe these terrible aspects of Creation are a basic part of the story He’s telling, a story in which good in formation looks as grotesque as evil in its maturity?

I would suggest that Christians should grow up and accept the fact that God, while interested in our ultimate good, is clearly not interested in guaranteeing an easy and comfortable life to even His most faithful followers. In fact, He seems to sometimes hit those faithful followers all the harder and to twist them and their paths through life with all the greater force. If you eliminate all that is grotesque in your life, and your children’s lives, be aware that you might be trying to eliminate all that brings about the ultimate good that our Maker intends for those of His children who accept His will.

What could be more grotesque than a tortured Christ, a source of the true light of goodness overwhelmed by a rather sadistic darkness which is part of His Father’s Creation? What could be more grotesque than the Son of God humiliated and whipped? What could be more grotesque than Jesus Christ, His body bloody and battered and His features distorted by pain and wounds? What could be more grotesque than a God who taught us to conquer evil by watching His own true Son submitting to such horrors? What could be more grotesque than a saved world, a world after the resurrection of Christ, where children can be more often healed — for a while — of face-deforming cancers of the sort endured by Mary Ann, but increasingly our miraculous medical cures depend upon techniques and methods and extend-life-at-all-cost attitudes which are sometimes morally bothersome even when not directly immoral, at least bothersome to those of us who value the good over the elimination of what is considered evil or grotesque by men of the modern West, as dainty in their sensibilities as they are obliviously brutal in inflicting so-called collateral damage upon children and others in far-away regions of the globe.

An interesting question along these lines is:

Is the Christian Church Herself but one organ in the Body of Christ?

It’s better for now to be a little vague about the definition of the Church, but it’s clear the Church is the center of worship and communion with Christ and, through Him, with the Father and the Holy Spirit as well. The Church is the organ in which and through which the community of Christ’s chosen brethren can share the life of God. Yet, there are other human needs met by other forms of human community which overlap with the Church but are most certainly not fully subordinate to Her though subordinate in terms of moral and spiritual guidance. Those other needs, economic and artistic and political, are lesser than our need for communion with God, the very Source of our being, but they are true needs and noble in their own lesser way. In terms which might seem to contradict some of my prior discussions, there are many human needs which can be met only by entering the marketplaces, the regions in which individuals can interact with many of the organs of which they are members.

I’ve spoken against the marketplaces in the modern world, especially in my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand, but I’ve also spoken against the Church Herself in acting strongly outside of the region of Her competence in the Galileo affair and many other cases. But the problem doesn’t come so much from one organ of the Body of Christ intruding into the regions of other organs but rather from one organ not recognizing the proper functions of other organs. In fact, a Christian should be able to realize, once the idea is broached, that the Body of Christ will be like the Holy Trinity, but with far more individuals and — at least in my current proposal — with some intermediary organs. That possibility is raised by the very presence of Jesus Christ in the Body of Christ. He’s with us, but He’s also above us and outside of us. While the Body of Christ might be much like the Holy Trinity, three Persons in one God, it can’t be exactly like it because the Son of God, Himself God, will be in that Body.

To diverge for just a single idea: we need geometric descriptions of individual entities which inhabit ‘spaces’ which have no surfaces as such. Those spaces overlap completely and yet the individual entities would retain their own identity. In the view I’m now exploring, those entities would also form organs of multiple individuals but those organs would be part of an entity which might well be the entirety of the world in which they exist.

I’m forced to speculate far ahead of more specific and better-formed theories just because Western Christians and all others with responsibilities for Western Civilization have failed to respond properly to the enterprises of gathering modern empirical knowledge. Those enterprises have opened fantastic possibilities for understanding God’s Creation and have also demolished old ways of understanding the nature of man, the possibilities of resurrection, and other aspects of Creation and relationships between God and His creatures. My way of looking at created being as multi-leveled, going from abstract truths to concrete being, gives ways for human thinkers to ascend to higher abstractions for both more general understanding but also for a descent towards particular, or concrete, being which might exist. To reach some speculative understanding of the world of the resurrected, a human thinker ascends from this realm of growth and decay to high levels of abstraction and then tries to find a path down towards a world made of the same stuff as this one but a world in which growth might be possible but decay doesn’t occur.

In any case, Christian thinkers are behind two centuries or more in their understanding of God’s Creation. We have a lot of ground to make up.

Let me return to a more limited line of thought for now… I’ve spoken in the past of Western Civilization as being a home which the Christian Church (in the West) built for Herself. This is a metaphor used by Joseph Ratzinger (currently Pope Benedict XVI). Cardinal Ratzinger went on to note that Christians of the West hadn’t properly maintained their home. From there, I went on to claim that Western Civilization isn’t in trouble because of invasions by pagans or Satanic agents but rather because Western Christians were morally irresponsible in their duties towards their own civilization. Pagans and others didn’t invade the West. They wandered into vacated public spaces.

With that as background, I’ll move to the possibility that Western Civilization wasn’t so much a house as a unstable colony of human communities which could be viewed as a first try at developing the Body of Christ. Some of those organisms, individual or communal, grew into parasites or cancers prospering for a while at the expense of the earthly Body of Christ as a whole. The functions of those organs, such as governments which destroy their own underlying communities, are important but have their proper limits. The evolutionary pathways of multi-cellular organisms, such as bipedal apes, passed through similar rough spots. I imagine there were paths which dead-ended when parts of organisms began to prey on other parts. A family line of creatures which develop fatal cancers near the onset of the age of reproduction will disappear pretty quickly.

If we believe there is a forward thrust in this development of the Body of Christ, then the organism as a whole — however primitive it might be at this stage — will eliminate the diseased organs and new organs might grow in its place but maybe different sorts of organs will grow. Let’s consider this a process of a presentation and selection sort — natural selection is a specific such process.

And I return to my speculative claim that the Body of Christ is made of multiple organs and the Church is the most important of those organs because it is by way of the Church that we are united with the Lord Jesus Christ and, through Him, with the Holy Trinity. Given this hypothetical understanding of the Body of Christ, history doesn’t speak of a struggle of a righteous Church against worldly powers which serve un-Godly purposes. It tells us of a struggle in which the various organs of the Body of Christ are developing in themselves even as the greater Body also develops. The Church Herself has at times begun to take on the functions of other organs, threatening to turn cancerous, but She was returned to Her proper functions and proper boundaries, as if God truly does act to discipline Her but also to save Her. There is some reason to believe she’s now the most mature of the organs in the Body of Christ — at a time when her worldly power has shrunk greatly relative to that of cancerous and parasitical political and economic organs. Yet, those organs, no matter how diseased at present, also fill important roles in the Body of Christ — they meet human needs. The question is: are those merely needs in this human realm or are they needs of any being truly human, even a human being living in the world of the resurrected? I’m betting that human beings have political and economic needs and those will be met in the world of the resurrected.

We have to keep in mind that individuals are also developing, as individuals, as members of various organs, and as members of the entire Body of Christ. This is one of the reasons for my current speculations. If we are to be truly saved, as our own selves, then it must be true that grace completes and perfects nature rather than overriding it in any way. Our political and economic needs are to be completed and perfected when we rise from the grave to live for time without end with the Lord Jesus Christ. We human beings naturally form communities and institutions for several of our major categories of needs. I don’t see the Church as being capable of satisfying all these needs. And — to repeat — I don’t see those needs as disappearing in the world of the resurrected, not if we’re to remain human beings.

If viable in light of Christian revelations and what is known of Creation and human creatures in particular, my current speculations make it possible to discuss the Body of Christ coherently. We can speak of life after death and still sound sane but we have to adjust to speak in terms consistent with those realms of Creation we can directly perceive or can reach by the proper exercise of our all-too human minds.

This program of thought would force us Christians to work hard to grasp difficult lines of thought, to be capable of thinking of the Body of Christ as a fantastically complex organism, not the simple choir in heaven of Amazing Grace but rather the embodiment and realization of an awful lot that’s good about human life including many things we can’t quite realize in this mortal realm. Political relationships would remain as would cultural traditions — all brought to their fullness but remaining alive and growing. The implied developmental processes and the resulting complex structures might be describable by tools similar to those used by Einstein to develop his general theory of relativity — differential geometry and the closely related tensor calculus. Or those processes might be similar to those of quantum mechanics. In any case, they don’t seem likely to be well described in any meaningful sense by existing modes of theological or mystical discourse. This doesn’t mean that mysticism would disappear, only that a valid mysticism would point to realities beyond perceptible realities as we best understand them. This is to say that reality defines certain frontiers and the lands beyond those frontiers. Mysticism that speaks of what lies byond the frontiers of the empirical world as understood by ancient and Medieval thinkers becomes no better than nostalgia at best, the babbling of a lunatic at worst.

The question I raised to start is:

Is the Church Herself but one organ in the Body of Christ?

My best speculations right now indicate this to almost certainly be the case. Moreover, the Church Herself has acted in recent centuries, especially through the Papacy, as if She is to play the role of moral and spiritual guide for the economic and political and social powers, in addition to playing Her primary role in directly communicating with God through worship and praise. The Church in recent centuries, through the Popes and through the bishops sitting in council, hasn’t claimed any right to rule directly, only to play the role of conscience, a role not yet acceptable to most of the other organs of the Body of Christ.

If the Body of Christ is forming now in this mortal realm, though the process might not get close to the final result in the world of the resurrected, then it becomes possible to explore that process and to come to some significant understanding of the Body of Christ and how it develops. More than that, the effort to understand the Body would seem to be the duty of those who claim to be Christian thinkers, theologians or philosophers or historians or creative writers. Pursuing this line of thought would seem the best way forward (in fact, out of the ghetto built by Christian thinkers over the past 200 years or more) for Christian theology and would provide a solid foundation for those very important topics in Christian theology: the nature of the union of God and man and the Eucharist.

There are many more good thinkers than creative thinkers. In saying this, I’m referring to those who can apply existing thoughts or even reuse existing thoughts in new ways as being good thinkers. A very crude analogy would be to an erector set where occasionally there is a need for a new structural element or a new sort of connecting device, but that need might be unmet, even strangely unnoticed, until — maybe — the right thinker looks at the problem in a fresh way. Meanwhile, intricate and interesting structures are being built from existing components in that erector set. It seems strange at first to read a history of modern physics and to learn that even so creative and powerful a thinker as Henri Poincare can be looking at something so important as the basic insights that we know as the special theory of relativity, and he doesn’t see what he should see. Creative he was, but not creative enough. An Einstein was needed to do ‘no more’ than make sense of what physicists already knew.

Let me put this in the context of my updated and expanded version of the Thomistic theory on the formation of the mind. Our minds form as we respond to our environments. Men can respond to multiple environments at once because of their abilities to reason abstractly, plan into the future, etc. Some men can even form their minds in response to some current and plausible understanding of the cosmos or universe. A very few, by percentage, might have minds capable of responding in some substantial sense to the entirety of God’s Creation, that is, to God’s Creation as we can currently understand it. Pioneers seem to be relatively few, that is, those who have minds reliable enough to come to coherent understandings but flexible enough to respond to new knowledge or new perceptions.

A literate society can make it possible for some to develop their minds to high levels and some of those with good minds will follow the paths blazed by the creative few and make far more of newly discovered regions of God’s Creation than the creative thinker could have done. Yet, a good mind isn’t always a creative mind. A good mind might move, more or less, in the realm of the known — with a typical mixture of truth and errors, richness and barrenness.

I’m claiming that creativity is a result of the human being moving, intellectually or morally or spiritually, in realms already created by God, realms which remain invisible to most thinkers even when we’ve accumulated a good body of knowledge about those realms. But there are some who are prepared, by nurture or nature or both, to move around in realms not explored or not fully explored. Those movements might be into regions new to the human race, such as the movements of mathematical physicists in recent centuries or the truncated efforts of Beethoven to compose new forms of music near the end of his life. Those movements might be movements that allow a new look at known regions. In any case, the movements should lead to further responses to certain thoughts God has manifested in Creation, responses which change the shape of our minds, of our entire human beings, making God’s thoughts our thoughts to some extent.

Our basic mental skills are variations on the ability to respond to our environments, abstracting to more general levels of understanding at times and nearly always using the abstractions which are built into our words and the contents of our minds. I speak of ‘contents of our minds’ here rather than concepts to make it clear that those contents come from God’s Creation, from the thoughts manifested in Creation by our Maker. Those contents aren’t perfect images of the Creator’s thoughts, perhaps they’re fuzzy or distorted in various ways, but they are some sort of images of those divine thoughts. But those contents change the mind which initially held them uncomfortably. This process leads to the development of more refined mental skills, sometimes erasing our inborn mental skills. In the end, there is no real separation of Einstein’s mind from his mathematical physics. Lest I seem to be dehumanizing the man, I’ll add his love of music and his very high levels of skill on the violin and piano were just as much a part of his being as was his physics.

I’m claiming that our creativity is a response, perhaps inappropriate, to God’s manifested thoughts. Ultimately, our thoughts are imitations of thoughts of God, or perhaps our twisted understanding of those thoughts of God as found in our environments. Am I attempting to eliminate or at least greatly restrict the freedom of a creative man? If such men can only imitate God in His thoughts as manifested in Creation, how can there be freedom for a person living by way of established routines? Am I proposing a form of predestination that reduces mankind to a fraudulently creative race?

No, but I don’t have a definitive explanation. I am motivated to find an optimistic answer by my own experiences and those experiences provide a partial self-understanding of my creative efforts as well as something of an uplifting feeling about my freedom when I try to respond honestly and without fear to Creation and its Creator. Creativity and freedom come from God and we can share in the divine freedom by responding to Creation, or in a more personal way to God, in the way of an apprentice who perhaps does nothing more that sweep his master’s workshop but is, at least in principle, sharing in the experience of being a master craftsman as he watches and tries to learn. I can also say, perhaps at the risk of boasting, that I consider myself to be a creative thinker, one deliberately trying to shape his mind and activities as responses to Creation and the Creator and I don’t feel imprisoned or enchained. I feel as if I am sharing in God’s own freedom during my bursts of creative thoughts, bursts which often follow only after months of frustrations and hard work. I’ll add that my self-understanding indicates that I start proposing answers to a problem, working up a little narrative of sorts and then judge if it seems to be moving with the grain of the universe, to borrow a metaphor from Stanley Hauerwas. I don’t like moving against the grain or even across the grain, perhaps because I suffered too often from slivers when I was young. And so it is that I keep revising my proposed answers or narrative until I detect an okay from my Maker, not necessarily enthusiastic applause. I often get a feeling that God shrugs a little and says, “Well, that’s not too awfully bad, so we can go with it for now.” My feelings aren’t hurt as I realize Creation is an awfully complex place for a bipedal ape and, anyway, God’s standards can be pretty high though He accepts lesser achievements as we’re learning.

We have a desperate need in the West, indeed in all regions of the earth, for creative thought, by parents trying to raise their children in a world where so many seek to deform the minds of the young ones to make them better targets for profitable activities, by local political leaders who don’t yet seem to realize that town and city governments have been enslaved by the central governments, and by novelists and philosophers who might put our entire mess in a good perspective. The last group, my own group, is usually my direct concern but many of my claims are intended for more general application.

The West is living off the gains of past successes and is, more or less, under the control of bureaucrats allied with motley crews of greedy and ambitious men whose major talent is simply grasping and holding on tight to what they seized from others. The West badly needs creative responses rather than simply more gadgets or more wars or more regulation by already bloated government agencies. Most certainly, we have no need for more corporate welfare programs. Unfortunately, such societies as ours has decayed into are the least likely to welcome creativity. Such societies are likely to actively suppress creativity, seeking to make the minds of their youths as rigid as those of the teachers and other bureaucrats. This is to say that a mind formed in response to textbooks and to the methods of modern educators will be about as flexible as a steel cog formed for a specific role in a particular machine.

We should be responding to God’s Creation, not just to our raw perceptions of nature but to the best available past responses and the open-ended responses of the modern research programs. With proper modifications, this statement will be as true of future mothers and future carpenters as it is of future poets or metaphysicians, but I’ll repeat that my current interest is in the realms of creativity in abstract thought.

If my tentative answer is right, then Creation itself must be a manifestation of God’s acts which are somewhat open-ended from any viewpoint inside of Creation, bringing forth possibilities and not always certainties, but they are God’s possibilities and we have to find those possibilities and then respond to them. Then we can share in the creativity and freedom of God.