There is an argument of sorts being conducted in the Catholic Church between those who think the Fathers of the Vatican Council II erred in claiming God grants religious freedom to human beings and those who think Truth must always be served by…well, by serving some established view of the Truth. See Religious Freedom. Was the Church Also Right When It Condemned It? for an overview by a theologian who wants to critique both two camps of thought. I don’t have a high opinion of those in either camp because they’re trying to answer a complex question in terms of pre-modern human thought when that question, at least in its present form, arose in the Modern Age based upon discoveries in modern centuries. The critical theologian in this piece, Basile Valuet, does no better so far as I can tell. I didn’t bother to study the article after reading it quickly. This third camp of thought on this issue of religious freedom seems to deal with some alternate universe, as do the other two camps. I’ll explain.
Etienne Gilson said somewhere that Catholic thinkers withdrew into a ghetto around 1800 when they couldn’t come up with good answers to the modern questions. So far as I can tell, this current debate in taking place in that ghetto between thinkers who are — at best — slowly recognizing their untenable positions and those who are doing their best not to recognize their untenable positions. There are more than two armies of debaters though I can only identify these two basic ideological positions. In other words, the underlying problem is the ongoing refusal of nearly all Catholic intellectuals, Christian thinkers in general, to make peace with God’s Creation as we now understand it — though I’ve pointed out often that they feel quite free to extend their own lives and to make themselves more comfortable by using working technology based upon a radically different view of Creation than any which could be compatible with these Christian ways of thought, ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’. Both terms are wrongly used because pre-modern thinkers (other than the oh-so insightful Aquinas) had reasons to think of the mind as an immaterial organ of the human being, which organ had some sort of direct access to transcendental truths binding even upon God and modern thinkers recognize that insight of Aquinas (though typically learned by way of modern neurobiological research) which tells us the mind is more of a set of relationships with our world and those relationships are formed by active response to that world. To be truly ‘modern’, you have to respond to the strong point of modern thought — modern exploration and analysis of empirical reality. This means that you must have some serious understanding of modern mathematics, physics, biology, history, and so forth.
I’ll now repeat my plea to my fellow-Christians, and others, to join me in re-examining our most basic ideas of what being is, what thought is, what a creature is, and what Creation is. I’ll start by repeating the claim of the American historian Carroll Quigley:
The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Before moving on, I’ll note that Professor Quigley was a non-practicing Catholic who was quite faithful to the Christian system of metaphysics labeled ‘moderate realism’ — take the above claim as a rough definition of moderate realism and look above for a Thomistic understanding of mind and take that as the first step towards a more powerful form of moderate realism. I’ll also note that Quigley’s course on how to think in historical terms was taken by most State Department employees and other government employees (apparently including many CIA analysts) studying at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service during the period from the late 1930s to the late 1970s. (I believe it was required for some programs of study sponsored by the State Department.)
Freedom, including the freedom to stray from the truth, would be necessary for such a process. We can even see this process at work in the sorting out of the vast output of St. Augustine of Hippo, the most important founder of Western Civilization and the greatest of theologians in Western Christianity. As Jaroslav Pelikan, and probably others, pointed out: Augustine was the father of nearly all existing schools of Christian theology in the West — orthodox and heretical. It took centuries to derive something of a plausible view of human sin from Augustinian views of the Bible set in the context of history as Augustine knew it. This process would have resulted in a more than human mess if the participants hadn’t tried hard to keep in mind some serious understanding of truth and freedom.
Truth should be served. Yet, I think Pilate has been underrated as a philosophical critic:
What is truth?
Part of my effort has been to examine this question, largely resulting in claims that:
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God is the creator of all truths that we creatures can know. This means at least that God has to manifest a truth in Creation before we creatures can know it. We have no direct access to transcendental truths, whatever they might be, but only the access granted by God in specific ways.
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Things are true — as St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out.
- Truths are thing-like — as I’ve pointed out based upon modern science especially modern sciences of the brain and mind, of mathematics and physics.
My questions and tentative answers don’t arise from some sort of arbitrary creativity or efforts to think ‘freely’ but rather the result of an effort to be free in the sense of responding to God’s Creation, an effort to share in my limited way in the freedom God exercised in bringing into existence this particular Creation. In freely choosing to be the Creator of such a particular Creation, God also freely accepted constraints upon His treatment of all that He had created.
I try to summarize this aspect of my thought by writing that I respond freely to Creation, to the thoughts God has manifested, as best I can, in order to be shaped to a better image of God. I freely try to accept the discipline God offers us by shaping us into the sorts of beings who can then share the life of God as Creator acting with constrained freedom.
This is all complicated further by those of us who think that there are some revealed truths given by God, mostly in the Bible, which could not have been discovered, even in principle, by human beings responding to God in His role as a self-constrained Creator. Even those revelations of transcendental truths are given to us in physical form and using words and analogical images derived from concrete being. Is it surprising we think to understand Father and Son better than we understand the Holy Spirit?. That lack of understanding of the Holy Spirit might be corrected as we move to an understanding of the primacy of relationships over concrete things, as taught to us by modern physics — especially quantum theory — and also hinted at by the writings of the disciples of St. John the Apostle.
The main point is that the modern world doesn’t demand just a more exact understanding of human nature, as Pope Benedict has claimed, but also a more exact and far richer understanding of human nature — including human ways of thought, of Creation, and even of the nature of truth which is accessible to a creature.