I repeat myself to a lesser or greater extent in many of my essays. I don’t do so to annoy or bore readers but rather in an effort to gain a new perspective which might bring new insights, if only a whisper, and might reach new ears and maybe inspire new thinkers. After all, I seem to be involved in a conversation which includes whispered hints by God but no words written or spoken by human beings other than myself. I try to supply what is lacking and is needed to refine my own ways of thought. I’m trying to get human thinkers moving toward the deep reform of our decaying Christian civilization, the West, or toward the building of foundations for a new Christian civilization. It’s not sufficient for me to toss out messages in a bottle and hope some thinkers in a future generation will find those bottles. It’s not sufficient for me to accept the relatively high probability of a century or so of darkness, of violence and stupidity and disease and slavery, much like the period which disrupted Western Civilization after the collapse of the High Middle Ages. I don’t accept the need for such an ugly and pain-filled age. I think we can build a short bridge to a age still better than the one ending, but it’ll require a better understanding of Creation, of the story God is telling and in which we can participate fully and intelligently only if we actively pursue such an understanding.
In this essay, I try to re-summarize in few words an old conclusion and find myself proposing what is to me a different way of seeing the reasons why so many Catholic traditionalists, and other traditionalists in a similar way, are so ineffective in opposing the destruction of respect for truths beyond the manipulation of power-seeking and wealth-seeking and comfort-seeking men. We need also to construct a narrative of Creation in light of our small stock of revealed truths which is more plausible and more coherent than the narrative we’ve inherited, a narrative developed from understandings of more limited regions of Creation. We modern men have progressed in our understanding of concrete, empirical realms of created being and also in our ability to reach more deeply into abstract realms of created being, though we certainly haven’t progressed in such ways as moral order of our individual or communal selves.
And so, I return to the human understanding of Creation, emphasizing the story of the loss of a plausible Catholic understanding over the past two or three centuries. Yet, it is the story of Western Civilization in the Modern Age and applies, in a form only somewhat modified, to Calvinist intellectuals and Lutheran intellectuals and even those who are virtuous pagans (in which category I place the more admirable atheists). All major lines of thought, including those of self-labeled traditionalists or even those of self-labeled Catholic traditionalists, have come to include mistakes produced by our failure to truly see that the best of human wisdom is only an approximation to the perfect knowledge of God but also of failing to see that we’re constantly learning more of the thoughts God manifested in Creation and, thus, failing to move our wisdom, our fumbling substitute for perfect knowledge, toward a more perfect and more complete state.
In fact, those who would defend the higher truths revealed by God or gained by past human responses to God’s Creation have retreated from a courageous and faith-filled exploration of Creation and an equally courageous and faith-filled response. We’re living off the wealth left to us by long-dead theologians and philosophers and poets and so forth. Only thinkers in the most fact-disciplined of empirical sciences have made much true progress in understanding some important regions of Creation. Few there are in the fields of creative writing or philosophy or theology who’ve realized the importance of radically new understandings of space and time and matter and the history of this universe and the history of life in general and human family-lines in particular.
As Etienne Gilson told the story, Catholic intellectuals led the Church into an intellectual ghetto of sorts around 1800 when they had failed to provide any good, Christian answers to the legitimate questions raised by modern thinkers. I think that other groups of intellectuals have created their own ghettos in the years since, even those from schools of thought which profess a respect tending to worship for the goodness of an open mind ranging freely over…whatever.
In terms of the ongoing development of my thought, I can raise an additional complaint against not just Catholic intellectuals but against nearly all who, then and since, have claimed to be protecting traditional thought against Enlightenment thought. In fact, it turned that much of the defense raised by traditionalists was against the growing evidence that the traditions of Western men had been pretty good but no longer could speak accurately or beautifully of God’s Creation. Most traditionalists over the previous two centuries or so have been defending increasingly implausible human ways of understanding God’s Creation as empirical investigators, historians as well as physicists and biologists, were piling up evidence that God’s Creation is different from what it had seemed to those before the development of modern instrumentation and empirical research methods. They chose their human traditions in preference to God and His Creation.
Most bodies of traditionalist thought have been nothing but defenses of human wisdom, that fumbling substitute for perfect knowledge, along with the refusal to acknowledge the near certainty of men of faith and courage being able to make at least incremental and maybe large-scale improvements in that wisdom, bringing it somewhat closer to the thoughts God manifested as Creation.
If you wish to read a more detailed discussion of the issue of knowledge, you can download Four Kinds of Knowledge where I explain why there are only two kinds of knowledge, that of God in His transcendence and that of God in His freely chosen role as Creator of this highly specific Creation.
For a more detailed discussion of my understanding of being, see From Abstract Being to Concrete Being and Narratives. In that understanding, I propose that we can move towards more abstract forms of being by way of physics and then move down to see how that abstract being enters into, say, political relationships. This doesn’t mean that physics is inherently superior to the human knowledge of other aspects of our world, only that physics is a fundamental body of human knowledge and it has advanced more rapidly than other bodies of human knowledge in recent centuries. I’m also not claiming we can use the specific mathematics from physics and similar fields because the equations of general relativity are themselves particularized from more general relationships, particularized for the shaping of this physical world. It also doesn’t mean that the `softer’ sciences are always dependent upon the `harder’ sciences for advancements in the understanding of abstract being. In fact, the insights of modern physics and mathematics lead quickly into abstract regions more qualitative than quantitative. I suspect the borrowing will be soon going back and forth between the modern sciences of complexity and chaos and the sciences of narrative arts, history and archeology and evolutionary biology and so forth.
I’ll return to the main stream of my discussion to ask: At what level of thought and feeling and action should traditionalism be defined? I’ve asked this question before in less explicit ways. It is the question which is important because I can’t dictate how my fellow thinkers, wannabe traditionalists and others, define `traditionalist’. In fact, I don’t really care much. If traditionalism is wrongly defined by my ways of understanding God’s Creation, especially its moral order, I’ll simply stop referring to myself as a traditionalist.
Let me explain the question, “At what level of thought and feeling and action should traditionalism be defined?” by using two extremes.
First, we could define traditionalism as most human thinkers do, as a commitment to a specific way of understanding men and human communities in terms of thought and feeling and action. This common way of defining traditionalism, and channeling traditionalist instincts and desires, tends too often to swallow whole the concretely embodied ways of thought and feeling and actions of specific human communities which are localized in time and place and culture, including religious cult as well as agriculture and literary culture. I sympathize with this viewpoint and think it to be the foundation of a more complete and more perfect way of shaping ourselves to the truths embodied in Creation and the more particular forms of being and of narrative which we find in our world, but swallowed whole it can choke and even suffocate us.
See an essay I published in April of 2012, We Prefer to Cooperate With Those Like Ourselves, which deals with the reality of human nature and how we build our communities, starting with concrete attachments to those `like ourselves,’ for a little more detail of my sympathy for this attachment to our concrete physical and social environments, an attachment dealt with in a powerful way by such Southern thinkers as Andrew Lytle and Melvin Bradford and in a more problematic way by Nathaniel Hawthorne during the early years when New England communities still had a chance of becoming true centers of culture rather than so many volcanoes vomiting forth self-righteousness while making much money over the years by way of the slave-trade, drug-smuggling in Asia, the weapons industry, and—more recently—harvesting parts of lab-grown human babies and the like. The Puritanical tradition was never, in my opinion, overly promising but it had some good aspects which apparently didn’t interest most of the children of that tradition, children increasingly liberal and pagan over the years. New Englanders, early on, chose certain streams of human tradition over the God-centered or Creation-centered streams which might have led to better and more truthful understandings of man and the world and all of Creation.
Traditions aren’t that much different from technology in being ephemeral, imperfect and incomplete manifestations of something to be found only in the Body of Christ on the other side of the grave. Our technology still contains understandings of the building technologies used by the Egyptians in raising the pyramids and those used by Herod in pouring concrete structures underwater as well as many other ancient and Medieval technologies. Our traditions also need to carry forward what was good in the legal and moral teachings codified by Hammurabi, the narrative techniques of Homer and those differing techniques of the Yahwist and the Deuteronomist, and so on. We need also to consider that traditions can be inclined toward regions of moral corruption or moral weakness. They can also be supportive of political and military strength while having little to offer the human race in the realms of theology or philosophy, literature or arts both practical and `decorative’.
Traditions of a more admirable sort, as Edmund Burke saw in a somewhat cloudy way, should be ways of understanding, in the total sense of mind and heart and hands, some more abstract view of the truths underlying concrete being, relationships, narratives in this world. At times when an overburdened and inadequately capable civilization is decaying—I write of Western and Christian civilization—it should be possible, at least for devout Christians or even higher pagans to see the higher and moral abstract forms of being which show when the concrete is eroding.
Most will not be capable of these imaginative acts of seeing that more abstract being clearly, even amongst the dwindling population of knowledgeable and intellectually competent thinkers in the West. Since greater abstraction corresponds to less particular and less ephemeral, this means that most cannot see anything which could be truly labeled `the permanent things’, certainly few thinkers I know of who like to use that term. Perhaps I’m unfair, but I would claim most of those thinkers are little more than fuddy-duddies who like to imagine they have some magical control over reality, being able to understand and judge God’s story by way of very imperfect and muchly incomplete criteria which seems to often correspond to some odd stew of Protestant neo-Scholasticism, the worldly prudence of the Glorious Revolution, and an attachment to literary traditions which seem to come from some never-existing Shakespeare without the imagination or the soft-porn sense of humor. Odd stuff which I have read and enjoyed greatly during some of my stages of restoring health to my mind. but odd stuff indeed once a thinker advances to a deeper and broader, a more powerful and more insightful, understanding of created being and of the story and stories which God is telling with that created being. I admit to now finding that odd stuff to be as unreadable as some of the less insightful classics of philosophy which are little more than explorations of categories imposed upon created being with little appreciation of the, shall we say, lack of proper fit. (Some of the Southerners loosely attached to that `permanent things’ school are more interesting and might have better parts to play in human thought. The same can be said of some mainstream philosophers, but mostly I enjoy and learn from those who are critics of the mainstream, such as Nietzsche and Richard Rorty, to choose two very different thinkers.)
Permanent Things. That’s the problem. Things aren’t permanent in this world and were never intended to be so by our Maker. The very phrase, used as more than a pointer to `things’ we see only obscurely, is a poison to the human mind. To speak or write or think in such ways is to take Einstein’s side in his famous, and greatly misunderstood, debate with Bohr about the meaning of reality—see Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality: for a short discussion of what’s at issue based upon insights of the German philosopher of science Kurt Hubner. Basically, Einstein believed in permanent things and Bohr, like St. John the Apostle, believed things weren’t a primary form of being and could be created or reshaped by relationships—this only hints of the more complex understanding of created being which I’ve proposed. I dealt with a closely related aspect of the debate between Einstein and Bohr in Einstein and Bohr: Don’t tell God what to do!.
Created things aren’t inherently permanent, nor are most of the relationships and other forms of abstract being we can recognize. We have trouble seeing, in any sense, the most abstract forms of being, those closest, strangely enough, to that most particular and concrete form of being—God. We are too far away, in some sense of distance, from the raw stuff of Creation—the truths God manifested as sufficient for the story and stories He is telling. Far too many human beings, perhaps especially those who call themselves traditionalists, are prone to thinking they are very close to those truths God chose for this Creation when they see, often truly, some of that truth manifested in the concrete form of a highly particular literature or political system or economic system.