Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: The Ascent of the Human Mind

Minutes after posting a critique of Pope Benedict in which I claimed he needs to develop a stronger appreciation for modern empirical knowledge (see Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: The Need for Respectful Criticism), I received a newsletter from the Vatican News Service in which the Holy Father spoke in complimentary terms about the positive sciences, qualified in the usual ways about the need to consider other ways of knowing the ‘being’ of a human creature. Some of those ways would also fall into the general category of empirical knowledge and I would argue that all of them begin with empirical knowledge including the physical manifestations by which revelations actually reach us.

In any case, compliments are not what I’d seek in a proper appreciation of empirical knowledge. In fact, I’m more pessimistic than Pope Benedict seems to be about the actual state of the modern enterprises of empirical knowledge-gathering, perhaps because I doubt that we can police the labs to restrict practices to ‘moral’ techniques. If scientists are as morally disordered as other modern human beings, then powerful technology will be misused when it’s profitable to do so. Seemingly decent men and women gain political power and show, or develop, the willingness to drop fire-bombs on innocent civilians to achieve some allegedly moral result. We shouldn’t expect better of geneticists or nuclear physicists in this day and age.

I’m advocating a proper appreciation of empirical knowledge as a part of our God-given task of understanding Creation, a somewhat monkish view of science and history and the arts. This task of understanding Creation, even in its metaphysical aspects, begins with empirical knowledge because of the nature of the human mind and the way in which it develops in interaction with its environments and — if things go well — with the entire universe and — if things go very well — with all of God’s Creation in some meaningful sense.

In that address given the morning of 2008/01/28, Pope Benedict, in my opinion, shows a confusion about the nature of the human mind and of our world which has been common over the modern age, a confusion which could be cleared up by reading my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand, the various postings on the human mind or Thomism or pragmatism on my website, Acts of Being, or the various writings of Etienne Gilson or Alasdair MacIntyre on the nature of Thomistic understandings of being, morality, or the human mind.

There is a relevant discussion in a posting about a closely related issue: What is Mind?: Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism. The pragmatic philosophers from the field of brain-science or mind-science are particularly important and seem to understand at least some aspects of Creation better than those from other schools of thought. These philosopher/scientists include: William James, Gerald Edelman, and Walter J. Freeman. One of Professor Freeman’s books, How Brains Make Up Their Minds, is worthy of serious study by anyone interested in the human mind. In that book, we learn that St. Thomas Aquinas anticipated some of the most important discoveries of modern neurosciences. Freeman is a Thomist, sort-of. He’s really a pragmatist who came to understand the power of Thomistic empirical analysis of empirical entities, including man. This results in a bottom-up view of reality which has many virtues relative to nearly all other views of reality. The problem is that it builds up into…nothing much. St. Thomas very explicitly believed that an empirical understanding of empirical things allows us to build up into a world, so to speak. We don’t build a world, we build up our understanding towards an existing world. And beyond.

As Gilson points out somewhere, an interesting aspect of the Thomistic methodology is that the student follows St. Thomas in an ascent to an appreciation of Christian revelations (in the Summa Contra Gentiles) and then he can circle around and re-ascend with a proper understanding. In fact, we could start from the top and work down (as I believe Aquinas did in the great Summa), but I doubt it would make as much sense to a human thinker as the ascent through realms of empirical knowledge.

Such an ascent, seen as an ascent, provides for a better grounding of the empirical knowledge-gathering enterprise. Believing in a world which the human mind can encapsulate — in principle though not in fact, the one who is rising could even claim along with St. Thomas: “Things are true,” a claim which can destroy the need for any sort of dualism. This ascent is simultaneously the shaping of a human mind true to its God-given destiny and an effort to understand God’s story which I call a world. We have to remember that this process begins with empirical knowledge and continues to use empirical knowledge in this world and also that this is a true shaping rather than the filling of a pre-existing container. By encapsulating this world and even a greater portion of Creation, the mind leads the entire human being on the path to being a more true person — Christ-like.

Things are true. One way of understanding a claim seemingly so strange is to realize that things exist in a world, unified and coherent and complete. This is not an obscure intellectual claim but rather a necessary claim coming from the Christian belief in the Creator who is all-powerful and all-knowing.

The lack of a world is itself the primary problem with pragmatism and its advocates rightly avoid too strong a claim about the truth of things but the good ones — philosophers as well as scientists, such as James and Edelman and Freeman, are forced to act as if things are true. They believe that the facts and theories of their research are true in a meaningful sense and that says something about the objects of their research. A true Thomist has to be naive, accepting the truth inherent in God’s Creation in a child-like way, but he can be conscious of his own naivete. A pragmatist who is scientist as well as philosopher has to be naive in a deeper sense, for the recognition of this assumption of truth in things would drive him closer to Thomism and further from the philosophical thought of recent centuries. To their credit, these pragmatists are already far from the various instrumentalist views of science so common in this day and age.

Things are true. I could even say: Created being is true. I could even say that the thing-like being of our universe, this phase or realm of Creation, bears the imprint of the metaphysical truths from which it was shaped. Anything that is created by God is a manifestation of His thoughts and the thoughts of the Almighty are true. Things are true. In my writings, I’ve even claimed that truths as creatures know them are thing-like, that is, they’re part of God’s Creation and we can’t pull them out to use them to construct Creation in a schematic way. We can only take Creation in its unity and coherence and completeness — including all those abstract truths of metaphysics and transfinite set theory.

This is from the press release of that talk on 2008/01/28:

In our time, said the Pope, “the exact sciences, both natural and human, have made prodigious advances in their understanding of man and his universe”. However at the same time “there is a strong temptation to circumscribe human identity and enclose it with the limits of what is known. … In order to avoid going down this path it is important not to ignore anthropological, philosophical and theological research, which highlight and maintain the mystery of human beings, because no science can say who they are, where they come from and where they go. The knowledge of human beings is then, the most important of all forms of knowledge”.

“Human beings always stand beyond what can be scientifically seen or perceived”, the Pope affirmed. “To overlook the question of man’s ‘being’ inevitably leads to refusing the possibility of research into the objective truth of being … and, effectively, to an incapacity to recognise the foundation upon which human dignity rests, from the embryo until natural death”.

There’s a lot of truth in the claims of the Pope but there’s no structure that can let us see a unified Creation, first by seeing the physical universe for what it is and then by seeing that universe as morally ordered, hence a world. The structure from the modern (non-Thomistic) Catholic tradition is provided by academic divisions.

That’s not good enough and it’s one reason for the lack of creativity in Catholic philosophers and theologians since Aquinas was beaten back by willful ignorance. If we wish to recover a sense of the true being of a human creature, we should speak of that being, without any sort of assumption that it can be recovered by way of realms of knowledge maintained by human scholars for good and bad reasons. And we know most truly the empirical aspects of that human being because those are the foundation of a flesh-and-blood creature. The Christian tradition, even to the stories of the resurrected Christ, tell us those empirical aspects remain even when that human being has passed beyond mortal life. Moreover, the doctrine of bodily resurrection tells us the stuff of a resurrected human being is perfected matter and not some sort of soul-stuff, though that’s largely a matter of language. In other writings, I’ve spoken of matter as being frozen, low-energy soul-stuff.

We have new empirical knowledge that can allow us to speak coherently of heaven and even of resurrected human beings. Rational speech and not mystical obscurantism is the proper way of discourse for those who believe in a rational Creator. New ways of speaking about those greater possibilities must come from a truer appreciation of the modern empirical knowledge of men and their world. We can’t just graft traditional understandings of some aspects of those greater possibilities onto the modern understanding of man as a biological creature of this world. New wine must be put in new wine-skins and new buildings must be put on new foundations.

By way of an updated Thomistic existentialism, a human mind with a living imagination can even move beyond the boundaries of an envisioned world to see the foundations of Creation, what I call the Primordial Universe, the manifestation of metaphysical and mathematical truths from which God has created this world and the world of the resurrected. To understand a human being is to realize that man best imitates God by understanding the Almighty’s work as Creator and that requires the best possible understanding of this world and all of Creation that lies beyond in terms of all sorts of knowledge about Creation, empirical and speculative and revealed. But we can’t make the mistake of assuming those sorts of knowledge reflect true realms of being. (On the other hand, there are two true realms of being, hence, of knowledge: that of God’s necessary Being and that of Creation or more exactly — God’s freely chosen acts as Creator.)

Unlike the pragmatists, Pope Benedict sees much beyond what man’s bottom-up research can discover and even beyond the rich and humane culture that is part of the very soul of a man like Gerald Edelman who is a serious violinist as Joseph Ratzinger is said to be a serious pianist. Recognizing the greater claims to human nature isn’t enough. We need a new Christian understanding of Creation and of that special creature — man. The language of the Holy Father concedes too much to the modern views in which, as Spinoza taught us, there are specialized realms of knowledge which represent truly separate realms of being. Those realms of being are not one but somehow can magically come together to form a human being or some other wonder of God’s Creation.

I would advocate a different viewpoint in which knowledge is specialized only for practical reasons, even theology in its study and contemplations of God’s revelations of His own Being is entangled with empirical knowledge because of the creaturely nature of theologians. Excluding theology, those specialized realms of knowledge are ultimately part of the knowledge of a unified world which has been shaped within a unified Creation. By knowing Creation, we know God in His freely chosen role as Creator and we can know God in His transcendent plenitude only to the extent that He tells us about Himself in His necessary Being — that’s where theology is enriched beyond pantheistic possibilities. The main point in this context is this:

At some level of knowledge explicitly inaccessible but imaginatively accessible to the human mind in this mortal existence, Creation is one. It is unified and coherent and complete in being all that God chose to create, all that is not Him. It’s unified because it’s the work of a single, all-powerful Creator just as it is coherent because it’s the work of a rational Creator.

To know of God’s purposes for this world is to know more about His creatures, the universe as a whole and also stars and planets and men. It’s not to know something completely different. To know of man’s soul-like characteristics is to know something more about a creature of flesh and blood and not to know about something completely different and separate from those brain-cells and platelets.

The human mind is the only known creaturely entity capable of this task of knowing more, of encapsulating the world and much of Creation beyond this world — in principle though no actual human mind can carry out such a feat. The unity of Creation implies a unity of the human mind which reaches its richest and most complex shape in encapsulating some reasonable view of God’s Creation. This doesn’t mean that we have to really know the truth about Creation, only that we need to do the best we can with the small stock of revealed truths we have and with the best empirical knowledge of our day. By cooperating with the Creator in this way, we can establish a relationship in which we have access to a deeper and more contemplative knowledge of Creation. And this applies also to Wordsworth’s way of knowing Creation and Mozart’s way of knowing Creation. It’s not only Plato and Augustine, certainly not just Cantor and Einstein, and not even just Aquinas with his more complete way, who can know Creation at the truest and highest level where wisdom can be found. But all of these ways of knowing Creation ascend through empirical realms, not by way of super-adding knowledge of other realms. That is, the path which begins in the empirical realms leads us deep into the unity and coherence and completeness of Creation. More than that, the path and the knowledge of the surrounding terrain aren’t separate.

We need to move away from Spinoza’s way of knowledge in which specialized ways of knowing define actual realms of being which can communicate but are separate in a fundamental way. Moreover, Spinoza had started with the more traditional error in which knowledge is separate from what is known.

Creation is unified and coherent and complete because it’s what the Almighty has brought into existence, what is not God, what He chose to love in an active way. God’s acts-of-love are acts-of-being. There was an act-of-being which brought something into existence from nothing and thare are acts-of-being which shape stuff into worlds — our mortal world and that of the resurrected. The various ways of knowing lead us to the Creation which is the one work of God the Creator, or else they lead nowhere. But they can lead to Creation because knowledge and what is known are one, a truth found in the Old Testament most clearly in its language of sexual intercourse — to know a woman is to bond with her in a physically intimate way. To know the history of ancient Rome is to shape your mind so that it achieves something of a oneness with that narrative. To know chaos theory is to shape your mind to be a model of equations sensitive to tiny changes in initial conditions and to shape your imagination to travel along orbits that never quite close, never repeat themselves.

Do we have the courage to make a truly radical change that we might return God’s Creation to its primary status over knowledge defined by the limitations of the human mind? Do we have the discipline to make sense of quantum mechanics, of transfinite set theory, of the Holocaust, of the schizophrenic artistic techniques of recent centuries, in light of Christian truth? Are our imaginations flexible enough to see possibilities beyond the wildest dreams of Plato or Philo or Augustine and yet sane enough to see what God has created rather than conjuring up something less demanding?