The [dogmatic] declarations [of the early Church] were uttered in the language of Greek philosophy because the false statements were uttered in that language. [The Power and the Wisdom, John L. McKenzie, S.J., The Bruce Publishing Company, 1965, page 129]
The opponents of the Church, both the ones with good intentions and the hateful ones, have moved on. They no longer critique the claims of Christianity in terms of Hellenistic philosophy. More than that, the faithful speak the languages of their age and culture — as they generally should. It’s not the fault of the sheep that the shepherds teach and preach the faith in a strange language, embedded with alien concepts, a language in which — for example — matter is assumed to be dead and inert and some sorts of spirits are needed to bring life to mere flesh and blood.
To be sure, the shepherds speak the more modern language when seeking medical treatments developed under the assumption we’re evolutionary cousins of pigs as well as monkeys. The shepherds also use the mainstream language when they fight those fundamentalist Creation Scientists who are consistent enough that they wish the same language to be taught in schools that priests and ministers use when giving homilies or sermons on the moral condition of mankind. That is, they wish biology teachers to speak as if the human condition were explained by a literalistic understanding of the story of Adam and Eve as filtered through two doctrines of the early Fathers of the Church: the special creation of man and original sin. Those doctrines made sense in a world that didn’t know much about brain-cells or DNA, but we know of such things. We know how mere matter can maintain itself in a living state. The transition from non-living matter to the first organic forms of organization remains a mystery but one solvable in principle.
The modern opponents of Christianity critique the claims of the Church based upon more or less coherent understandings of modern empirical knowledge, history and exegesis as well as physics and biology. I think we should listen to them. They may know something about this universe, this phase of God’s Creation, something that was not known to those who built the traditional metaphysics and the systems of theology by which Christians interpret the revelations of Moses and Isaiah as well as that Revelation Who is the Lord Jesus Christ.
After all, Plato and Aristotle helped Christian theologians, and artists, to speak of the triune God and the Incarnate Son — by way of a forced response to those who used Hellenistic metaphysics against the Gospel. It’s time for us to realize a similar process of critique has been under way for five centuries or more and the leaders, thinkers, and teachers of Christianity haven’t produced much in the way of impressive responses. We’ve not yet seen the modern Basils and Cyrils and Augustines who can take on the critics of Christianity on the grounds of modern knowledge.
Skeptics, including some open to good Christian responses, can point to the tight correlations between brain-events and the thoughts and feelings which define human life. Defenders of the tradition immediately shoot back with some argument from Plato or Augustine which assumes mere physical matter isn’t capable of doing what scientists are showing it does all the time. There’s a lot of evidence that actions of physical matter can be the most sublime of thoughts and feelings. This is somewhat mysterious but no more so than explanations by way of some sort of soul-stuff which can’t be seen or detected but somehow can interact with matter. (See my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand for an early take on my worldview. In that worldview, it’s possible to speak of matter as being frozen soul-stuff if that way of approaching the issue is more acceptable to you. The core relationships would remain the same.)
We can speak clearly and coherently of human nature if we simply speak as if modern empirical knowledge can be trusted. After all, we trust it when our lives are in danger and we check into the hospital for tests or surgery or medication. Why do we speak as if the allegory of Adam and Eve were literally true while we and our children are learning the words of evolutionary biology even in the movies we watch? Why do we speak of angels and demons when our children learn how the words which can tell the depressing stories of human cowardice and deliberate evil and also learn the words which speak of invisible hands and self-organizing systems and the ‘chaos’ which might give a direction to time. (As a side-note, what is usually called chaos theory is actually the theory of certain types of well-determined non-linear systems which lie beyond the predictive powers of human mathematics.)
No wonder we Christians are losing our battles for souls, even those of our children. There are no souls to win, only human beings with soul-like attributes. Why would this bother us? The deceased human being who is my mother is true and I know she loved me in a special way when I was an infant and continued to love me all her life and I pray she’s with our Lord Jesus Christ, loving me still. What does it matter if the evidence gathered by modern science is providing ever more details of the neurological and hormonal foundation of my mother’s love for me? The love is real. Why would anyone think it a lesser feeling if it has no so-called spiritual component? Maybe I’m strange but it’s that love that matters to me not how God chose to manifest it in that particular woman who was my mother. It doesn’t bother me at all if that love could have been described as certain activities in a body of flesh-and-blood.
If we learn to speak and think of the universe as we modern men best understand it, then we can speak and think of our true relationship to Creation and to our fellow-creatures, even to God. We could perhaps even come to better appreciate the miracle of salvation given to inherently mortal creatures. Somehow, God allows us to see much when we base our understanding of Creation on the best available human knowledge. Refusals to do so will totally darken that glass we see through, even if our preferred form of knowledge is that which led St. Augustine or St. Basil to many good insights. Many Christians today try to think like Augustine and Basil (or saints of far lesser intellectual quality), but those ways of thinking, however fruitful and worthy of study, are irrational when a living man tries to use them to understand God’s Creation in an age when the underlying empirical knowledge is much different.
But the situation is worse than I’ve stated above. It’s not just that we speak a language ill-suited for the empirical knowledge of our age. Modern human beings in nearly all age groups and educational achievement levels speak a gibberish made up of words and fragmentary concepts drawn from scientific and historical discourse, added to words and fragmentary concepts drawn from Church teachings and Western traditions. Such a stew isn’t conducive to the sort of rational discourse that can lead to understanding.
I really like reading your blog, thanks for introducing me to Thomism.
Your point that we “in nearly all age groups and educational achievement levels speak a gibberish made up of words and fragmentary concepts drawn from scientific and historical discourse, added to words and fragmentary concepts drawn from Church teachings and Western traditions” is quite accurate in many ways.
I think part of the problem is that different philosophies might employ the same words with various different technical meanings, and since people are taught to be narrowly-defined specialists, people often lack the interdisciplinary understanding to see when one spelling actually refers to very different concepts.
Popular creationism, for example, relies in no small part on the fact that the colloquial meaning of “theory” is more like the scientific term “hypothesis.” When these ontologies are conflated as such, the scientific model of arriving at reasonable conclusions is bypassed, while the scientific terminology simultaneously lends problematic assertions a sense of authority.
Are you familiar with Walter Kaufmann’s writing? I have in mind his “Critique of Religion and Philosphy.” I’d imagine you might disagree with parts of the book, but it’s rigorous, informative, and beautiful.
You’re right about the specialist language on top of the cultural/temporal problems. I’m reading Bruno Snell’s “The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature” right now and he’s pointing out cases where the Greeks, inside the specialist traditions of poetry and philosophy, didn’t understand what their predecessors were really trying to say because of changes in concepts or words. Misreadings can be fruitful or dangerous. When the Jewish philosopher Philo misread God’s statement to Moses (“I am who I am” which apparently was colloquial for “Mind your own business and do what I say”) in light of Plato’s discussion of creation from nothing in the “Timaeus, he gave us a good example of both.
I’ve read only short works by Kaufmann, mostly introductions to collections of works by Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. I’ve wanted to read more of Kaufmann and other modern secular existentialists but there is so much to learn and so little time. I’ll note the book you recommend. As you may have noticed, for example with Richard Rorty, I often form high opinions of the works of those from radically different viewpoints.