We modern human beings have separated our minds and hearts from reality, our hands not nearly so much. We’re strange creatures who believe the Christian Creeds long enough to recite them at a Catholic or Orthodox Mass or to keep some of the creedal teachings in mind at other sorts of Christian worship services and then, for the rest of Sunday and for the next six weeks, we believe in the limited and constrained understanding of created being as can be derived from literalistic interpretation of some portion of scientific knowledge, usually as fed to us by mass media not known for deep understanding of stars or the human mind, nor for profound understanding of created being in general. Or we believe that created being is still what it seemed to be before Darwin and Einstein and Heisenberg.
Modern thinkers have no coherent concept of created being and yet think to be able to tell us how to organize our governments, our systems of government, our economies, our cultural institutions, and so forth as if we lived in some transcendental realm only loosely connected to the world of rocks and flesh. They are akin to architects who don’t know the properties of steel or steel beams, of concrete, and yet design skyscrapers and massive factory buildings. The results are fascinatingly ugly and lead to rapid collapse or slower processes of decay. There are some modern thinkers who do at least realize the situation we’ve created for our selves and our communities and our children. In The Liberal Mind, Kenneth Minogue wrote:
One cannot organize a work of art; nor write poetry to rule. The man who sets out quite deliberately to maximize his own happiness is likely to fail. Whilst one may, perhaps, be able to create vast pools of technicians at will, one cannot create political stability or a nation of mystics. There are many things in the world which we cannot attain simply because we want them; and some are beyond our grasp precisely because we want them too much. [page 157]
That’s the problem. They don’t even have a coherent understanding of the nature of created being, of matter and space and time, of human nature and narratives, and they think they can understand what we need in literature and in education and in spiritual activities. By relying on tradition, some think they’ve not made the mistake described by Minogue, but by not responding freely to Creation as it’s forcing us to see that tradition as mistaken or incomplete, traditionalists end up in a similar sort of make-believe mindscape, a little better connected to reality than the imaginary realms of the progressives but not nearly good enough.
In a sentence: Modern thinkers, in general, aren’t nearly so smart as they think. Rather than seeing that the reality created by God should rule our minds, they think to use some imaginary pre-existing mind to rule over reality. This is to say, they think they have minds that can be used to grab truths from transcendental regions, whether of recent or older manufacture, and then the thinker can use those truths to construct ideals about individual and communal human being, as well as created being in general. The most obvious surface symptom is the modern reliance upon textbook forms of knowledge, textbook forms of reasoning, and the dedication of modern thinkers to rewriting existing textbooks as if it were a useful activity.
Because of metaphysical incompetence on the part of many modern thinkers, traditionalists and progressives alike, and willful metaphysical blindness on the part of others, because of similar incompetence and blindness regarding the nature and the accomplishments of modern empirical scientific enterprises, modern thinkers have walked away from the central, guiding Christian insight into the nature of creatures in realms of created being.
The truth emerges in time through a communal process.
So we were told decades ago by Carroll Quigley. Christian philosophers and theologians have paved the way, starting with William of Ockham and the other Oxford radicals, in denying the Thomistic view in which the mind is primary, not because it comes directly from transcendental regions of truth but because it shapes itself in response to these concrete regions of being and can work its way toward transcendental truths by proper use of concrete being. Even traditionalists who seem at first to have a better understanding of the importance of mind will simply assume that created being, and the mind which can be shaped in response to that created being, are simply givens. Whatever their formal beliefs, they think as if created being and mind are pre-existing entities subject to metaphysical analyses. In fact, they are contingent entities, products of a Creator who acted with total freedom in bringing Creation to exist where there was nothing and with great freedom in shaping that Creation to form at least this world which is a story occurring in a realm of concrete, thing-like being. More than that, our knowledge of that Creation is emerging in time and then becomes truer understanding by processes taking still more time.
Let me try to explain by expanding on the quote from Carroll Quigley a bit:
The truth emerges in time as human individual and communal beings respond, with some success, to problems and opportunities posed by Creation. The ultimate goal of this process, even when it occurs in non-Christian or anti-Christian communities, is the perfection of human knowledge and the completion of human understanding in the Body of Christ, indeed, the formation of the Body of Christ. This can’t happen in this mortal realm but only in the world of the resurrected when the Body is fully joined to its head, Jesus Christ, and all the mortal members, individual and communal, of that Body are sharing the life of God with its perfect knowledge and complete understanding. The job of intellectuals and others who claim to be helping us to know and to understand is to move along with the natural revelation of Creation and to turn those revelations into good human knowledge and understandings; we are to act as if perfection of knowledge and completion of understanding is possible for the pilgrim Body of Christ in this mortal realm.
This process of bringing the truth into the human realm isn’t separable from the communal lives of intellectuals and others. It’s a major part of the growth of that community, legitimate communities developing in such a way that they’re contributing to the Body of Christ, even if a particular community isn’t likely to become a member of that Body. Better knowledge of Creation and a better understanding of what it is and what God’s purposes are will shape the human community into a form more perfect and more complete and may lead to the entry of even some non-Christian communities into the Body of Christ. This process is richest and most active in certain individuals gifted with both strong minds and curiosity and also called to participation. Unfortunately, my experiences indicate that creative thinkers are still likely to be forced into isolation, except in some fields of physical or mathematical sciences. Others in these communities have powerful minds but little in the way of inclination or talent to creatively develop new understandings of created being. Those individuals, including scholars and teachers and clergymen and other leaders, must follow along as John Henry Newman and Charles Darwin each play their roles in leading us forward toward greater knowledge and understanding of truth. It is unfortunate that exactly those with powerful minds, or at least good minds, but no creative talents are likely to control access to cultural or other resources and most likely to refuse to acknowledge the need for creative thinkers. It would deny their claims to be bearers and arbiters of truth.
Tradition is a body containing a substantial store of still plausible knowledge and understandings. Even that which is no longer plausible can help us to rebuild a good store of knowledge and understanding. Though our human minds, individual and communal, are rooted in tradition, the shaping of those minds is a dynamic process. With the phenomenal growth of human knowledge of Creation in recent centuries, the process has to be very dynamic indeed or it will die, overwhelmed by Zen understandings of quantum physics or deterministic understandings of genes or magical illusions of control over political and economic systems. By definition, the effort to know and understand the contingent acts of God, the manifestation of some of His free thoughts, can’t be a controllable process just as the corresponding acts and feelings of men aren’t controllable processes.
All of this is another way of making my claim that the human mind isn’t something pre-existing which accesses transcendental truths and uses them to make sense of a this world of concrete, thing-like being. The human mind forms in response to various realms of created being so as to shape that mind to created being which is made up of manifested thoughts of God. Hearts and hands are also being shaped by these processes. The truth emerges, the human individual mind, live intelligence in Jacques Barzun’s terms, and the human communal mind, intellect in Barzun’s terms, form by shaping ourselves in imitation of the acts of God in His freely chosen role as Creator of this particular Creation. We are not born as static images of God but rather as entities capable of shaping ourselves to be images of the Creator as He goes about His work of creating and shaping and sustaining. (See Intelligence vs. Intellect for my comments on Barzun’s The House of Intellect.)
Aquinas got some important details wrong and didn’t have so complete an understanding of this process of human self-shaping, but he got some of the most important pieces right. He understood the nature of being as a manifestation of an active process of creating and sustaining by God and shaping by God and creatures. He understood the human moral character forms by a growth process centered around active responses to our environments, defined in a limited way by Medieval knowledge or a greatly expanded way as is made possible by modern knowledge. (For technical reasons not valid given modern knowledge of the brain, Aquinas himself posited a `mind’ or component of the `mind’ which was non-human and separable from the human body, but we do better by following his understanding of human moral nature and applying that understanding to all parts and aspects of human animal nature.)
In the 750 years or so since Aquinas died, human thinkers—other than possibly me—have failed to further develop what was good in his thoughts and to correct his errors as seen in light of more recent knowledge of created being. They have, in fact, followed Ockham and others in denigrating the importance of the mind and misinterpreting what has been happening as the human mind, individual but mostly communal, has been enriched and complexified almost beyond the understanding of that mind. But, outside of physical and mathematical sciences, the process seems to have largely halted and the mind, individual and communal, as it existed in its largest and richest form, perhaps around 1800, is in a state rapid decay in this year of 2013.
See Shaping Our Minds to Reality for some interesting insight into this issue by the physicist and Anglican priest, John Polkinghorne, or my recently published essay More About Our Inadequate Understanding of Created Being for my more recent take on this issue, a take which includes Polkinghorne’s insights.
Modern thinkers don’t seem to be cooperating with this process of shaping our minds to created being, starting with the concrete realms of created being which we can perceive and explore most directly. They start with the wrongful belief they have minds that can somehow gather in data or knowledge and work with it the way a computer works with input information. Those who deny the analogy between human mind and computers still think as if the human mind were some bit of technological wizardly wired up to the human body. This means that those biased toward tradition try to work with data or knowledge with their minds actually shaped to understanding some part of our cultural heritage made up largely of outmoded knowledge. This does give modern traditionalists a certain amount of ballast which might at least keep them sane as individuals. Those biased toward progressivism try to discard any knowledge which is in conflict with their—warning of hyperbole—belief that the world is to be made anew by their own brilliant and insightful selves, reaching completion and perfection because of their efforts. See Progressives Kill Progress in Future Generations for a short discussion of the ways in which progressives can “trap future generations in one specific way of life or one way of solving problems.”
The main point, as always in my thought, is that this world is a realm in a greater Creation and it is also a great story set in a still greater story. Like all interesting and meaningful stories, it is morally well-ordered even if evil drives along some of the events. This world and other realms of Creation are regions of development and—sometimes—evolution. No part of Creation is a static structure describable by a manual forever valid. The characters, the landscape, the entire world are all evolving and developing. In addition, we start with inadequate rules of thinking for dealing with all of this. To drive the point home, I’ll provide the quote from Polkinghorne which I refered to above:
The wavefunction is the vehicle of our understanding of the quantum world. Judged by the robust standards of classical physics it may seem a rather wraith-like entity. But it is certainly the object of quantum mechanical discourse and, for all the peculiarity of its collapse, its subtle essence may be the form that reality has to take on the atomic scale and below. Anyone who has had to teach a mathematically based subject will know the difficulties which students encounter in negotiating a new level of abstraction. They have met the idea of a vector as a crude arrow. You now explain to them that it is better thought of as an object with certain transformation properties under rotation. ‘But what is it really?’ they say. You implore them to believe that it is an object with certain transformation properties under rotation. They do not believe you; they think that you are holding back some secret clue that would make it all plain. Time and experience are great educators. A year later the student cannot conceive why he had such difficulty and suspicion about the nature of vectors. Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality. If we are indeed in such a digestive, living-with-it, period, it would explain something which is otherwise puzzling. A great many theoretical physicists would be prepared to express some unease about the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics — in particular, about Copenhagen orthodoxy — but only a tiny fraction of them ever direct serious attention to such questions. Perhaps the majority are right to submit themselves to a period of subliminal absorption.” [“The Quantum World”, J.C. Polkinghorne, Princeton Science Library, 1989, page 82]
As physicists have explored certain realms of created being, concrete and abstract, they’ve learned to reshape their minds, although much inherited knowledge remains valid at least for pedagogical purposes and the corresponding regions of mind are to be somehow retained. Physicists have had to develop new concepts which didn’t fit into the minds they brought to the task. Rather than throw away the new concepts demanded by honest responses to created being, reality, they struggled to reshape their minds. If we examine individual scientists, we find many who didn’t really try to reshape their minds and many more who failed in their efforts. Failure is allowed in God’s Creation, but lack of honest and faith-filled response to Creation, to God’s thoughts as manifested in created being, isn’t going to get you through the Pearly Gates in any sense. It’s impious in a deep sense, sometimes even a form of the Satanic, “I will not serve”.
We’re going through a period when we’ve learned as much about human beings as we have about the nature of space and time, but political and theological traditionalists have, with few exceptions, acted the parts of physicists who proved themselves not defenders of truth but rather men determined to remain on familiar ground even as the ghetto walls went up around them. Even such great scientists as Henri Poincare ended up as marginal characters in the events dominated by Einstein and Planck and Bohr.
The progressives have acted the parts of perhaps the New-ager physicists and popularizers who threw as much of the old overboard as they could and began to explain all of reality by way of strange interpretations of the rigorously defined mathematics of quantum mechanics and sometimes exotic distortions of the equally rigorous but less well-defined geometries of general relativity. At that, the very nature of physics forced even the most would-be radical physicist to keep some of the knowledge he’d inherited.
Once the mind floats free of reality, it can be trimmed or enlarged as one wishes until the separation from reality becomes so severe as to allow, for example, politicians and social-workers and Christian leaders to think that creating a peaceful mixed-race and mixed-culture society is as easy as throwing everyone together and taxing the stable working population to pay for it all. We also think to help women along, in the midst of a terrible problem of rapes and other abuses in the military, by placing women in combat and other situations where they are still more vulnerable to enemy soldiers and also to a population of American men increasingly disordered in their habits and attitudes. We try to educate a population of children with short attention spans and not even the most basic skills of literacy by putting them in front of computers or perhaps placing in their hands textbooks with ever more distracting color-plates.
Reality has no inclination to shape itself to our prejudices, to shape itself to our minds formed in response to ancient systems of thought or to fleeting fancies or even to brilliant schemes of all of reality.
It’s our God-given duty to shape our minds, indeed, our entire human beings, individual and communal in response to reality.
The entire modern project, even in some of its successful cultural endeavors, seems to be largely a response by traditionalists and progressives to shape reality to what we want it to be or are indoctrinated to believe it to be, whether that might be a vision of alleged beauty from a midsummer night’s dream or a vision of order from an idealization of past societies which might well have been better ordered than are most human societies as of 2013.