The essay, Disorder on the March, by Joseph Wood ends with the paragraphs:
The confusion of the moment is so comprehensive, as demonstrated in just the recent examples above from popular culture, law, science and politics, that any kind of coherent political or public square response is difficult to envision.
As a friend recently reminded me, a famous physical scientist once said that as science goes off on various excursions, “reality always bites back.” We have reached a point, in our collective cultural and political abandonment of true order, where reality is going to bite back—maybe slowly and gently, maybe quickly and violently.
The question is how to witness for truth in the meantime. One answer is Alasdair MacIntyre’s advocacy of small communities that by and large withdraw from the national public square.
That stance is uncomfortable for Catholics—and many have rejected it—because the Church is interested in all aspects of truth, including how truth shapes political action. But until our nihilistic culture and the power politics of secular progressivism are reformed by some sort of spiritual renaissance, or collapse of their own dead weight, there will be severe limits to what can be accomplished in the public square. And participation in that public square has to be weighed against the risk of legitimizing and perpetuating all that is wrong with it.
We will have to learn from Christians in the Middle East, from Christians in central Europe in the communist era, and most of all from first century Christians. They all survived a great deal of reality’s biting back. And they witnessed for Christ, first and always.
It’s refreshing to read essays and articles by traditional Christians who are respectful of harsh realities while trying to see a way out, a way to recover what is true rather than simply demanding others conform to our claims about truths. I assume by his reference to Alasdair MacIntyre that Wood is at least somewhat supportive of MacIntyre’s claim that those who aren’t traditional Christians aren’t just being willfully evil, they hold ideas and use words in such ways that they often do not hear the truth and cannot think the truth, where I use “truth” to refer to our best current understanding of such, an understanding which should mature—be made more complete and less imperfect— as God continues telling the story which is this moral realm. Those holding the views of “secular progressivism” may be amoral or immoral human beings or they could be morally confused, courting disorder by seeking lesser truths in preference to the greater truths, or even the absolute truths, but something has gone wrong on our side as well as on the side of the anti-Christians or the straying Christians or perhaps the non-Christians straying from the wisdom of their own traditions of belief.
Traditionalist Christians, Catholics and others, don’t seem fully aware that any complete understanding of God’s Creation, hence of His acts as Creator, depends upon not just direct revelations from God but also upon an understanding of empirical reality and also upon a good amount of speculative framework and glue. My claim in a large volume of writings has been: modern Christian intellectuals, including Catholics, have shirked their duty to be, more or less, continually updating and enriching and complexifying our best understanding of God’s Creation.
It could be said that traditionalist Christians began to make their own reality, in a certain strange sense, centuries ago, perhaps when Galileo—most prominently among a number of thinkers—rediscovered the empirical orientation of true Biblical religions, at least Judaism and Christianity. Many Medieval Scholastics, given at times to an overly intricate and jargon-ridden way of speaking—many of their writings were intended to be transcriptions of formal and apparently stylized debates whether actually held or not, taught that all that we know, even “direct” revelations!, come through our physical senses. Oddly enough, in the Ascent of Mount Carmel, St John of the Cross even stated that as an obvious truth before heading off on a spiritual path which was very much dualistic instead of being fully grounded in empirical reality, this concrete realm of God’s Creation. This is somewhat strange for a member of an order (the Carmelites) founded upon the material-spiritual (there is no contradiction) practices and teachings of the Near East hermits of Judaism (think Elijah) and early Christianity.
In more general ways, Catholic thought and much of Lutheran and Anglican thought is well-grounded in God’s Creation, necessarily starting with what we can see and smell and hear and touch. From there, we can begin to understand more abstract realms of created being—most of which realms are still present in the most concrete of things. For those new to my thoughts, I’ve written often about my views of being, and of space and time and matter, but I summarized some of that in three short essays, Frozen Soul and Other Delicacies, Studying Steam When All You Have is Ice, and More on Matter as Frozen Soul.
The problem with the current version of Christian traditionalist thought is that it has become a disembodied story of sorts, something not quite part of our concrete world but still true in some sense. “Some sense” isn’t good enough. Christianity teaches that God is a Creator who is the source of all being, His own divine being and also all contingent being. In terms more accessible to those trying to understand this: we need a story of salvation which includes even, for example, human beings whose sexual development went awry in a world created by the all-good, all-knowing, and all-loving God of Jesus Christ. This doesn’t mean that all are saved and certainly doesn’t mean that any particular class of sinners is excluded from salvation. I suspect a lot of serious sexual sinners will be saved and a lot of lukewarm, relatively sinless men and women will not arise from the grave except, perhaps, to be judged and then dropped from the only possible existence without end for mortal creatures: a life shared with God, a life as a member of the Body of Christ.
We need a story of salvation, our best version of the story of the birth and development of the Body of Christ, which takes place in a world where stuff is ephemeral, is created by relationships and can be shaped or reshaped by relationships. This is where quantum physics meets the school of thought associated with St John the Apostle. I’ll add that the world of the resurrected is much like this mortal realm, it is the completed and perfected version of this world. After all, grace completes and perfects nature rather than destroying or replacing nature. Even when we’re raised from the grave, we’ll be not freestanding creatures but rather the result of specific relationships beginning with God’s love of us.
We need a story of salvation being told in a world where the best of human efforts can produce very bad results. For example. American Catholic leaders and many in their flocks have fought for certain political and social programs for at least a century. Many of those programs have been established and the results aren’t pretty, but, Christian leaders, not just those in the Catholic Church, continue to follow a script that seems to be grossly defective.
We need a coherent story which makes sense of sociobiology as a grounding for the Sermon on the Mount, of modern theories of space and time and matter as a grounding for an understanding of the Eurcharist. We have both individual and communal being—see my freely downloadable book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. Many Christians active in large-scale social and political actions rely upon communities combining for acts of charity but act as if those communities are nominal entities, not entities with real existence. With such a defective understanding, those activists don’t properly consider the interests of those communities as communities. In the case of immigration and the willy-nilly formation of multicultural pseudo-communities, great damage has been done to both host communities and the immigrants. For a discussion of this problem, see What is the Role of the Christian Church in the Public Square? and pay particular attention to the discussion of the findings of Robert Putnam, a mainstream liberal and professor at Harvard whose research spotlighted, to his great discomfort, the damage we can do to our concrete and “natural” communities by mashing them up into what could be called “multicultural gunk.”
In my version of God’s story which makes sense of modern mathematics and physics, of evolutionary biology, of modern literature, of a solidly literal but not literalistic understanding of the Bible, of the creeds of traditional Christianity, we need to care for our communal human being and that of others and not give in to the modern temptation to think and act as if we are individuals who happen to gather into masses of individuals. Unwisely squeeze together two morally well-ordered communities and you’re likely to end up with a morally disordered mess in which the churches and voting booths are empty, a mess of the sort which leaves the individuals vulnerable to exploiters of various sorts. Sound a little bit like what we’ve done to our own societies in modern times? To be sure, God’s story has always had horrible periods in which famines and wars and disease and even great prosperity led to the same sorts of problems we’ve created for ourselves, but that’s the story God has chosen to tell and I’ve not gone into a career of apologizing for God or criticizing His work. The Almighty chose to create a race with reproductive systems such that a lot of embryos die in the womb, often without the mother even knowing she was pregnant. That doesn’t give us the right to kill embryos. The fact that population pressures caused invasions of the British Isles by Celtic tribes, of western Europe by Germanic tribes, of India and the Middle East and Europe by Central Asian horseman, of southern African regions by Zulu tribesmen, doesn’t justify aggravating the moral and social breakdowns which are taking place in the West. Be charitable but think rather than vomiting compassion upon the world and don’t badly damage the organs of the Body of Christ in misguided efforts to help individual members of that Body.
A lot of traditionalist Catholics, while wanting to help the troubled of the world, are aware—usually in a vague way—of the problems I noted above. If we are to understand so that we can act without doing the patient harm, if we are to play our proper parts in the development of the Body of Christ, we must have a good story, a plausible human understanding of the context in which Jesus Christ gave the Sermon on the Mount.
Without a good story, that is, a story of salvation which makes proper sense of what we know of Creation, including the complex human communities which have grown up, good and bad human beings will continue to use, and often misuse, what they have. What they have is a suite of stories which don’t make much sense if you try to combine them into our best version of the story God is telling. I think we’ve actually lost our belief that it all does make sense, lost any true understanding of why it is that Dante would have thought it possible to consider this realm to be part of the same unified Creation as Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Biased I might be, but I’ll claim to have re-established such a true understanding—see my essay from 2008, The Only Sane Christian in the Modern World, for a somewhat tongue-in-cheek discussion of this issue.
I think Wood, like many traditionalist Catholics and traditionalist members of the separated Christian churches, knows much of this. He tells us: “[T]he Church is interested in all aspects of truth, including how truth shapes political action.” I don’t quite know why it is that so many solid Christian thinkers see there is a problem but don’t see their part of the problem is caused by, not something bad, but something good which has outlived itself. The current traditionalist Catholic version of God’s story is, in fact, a version which has outlived itself. It is the result of efforts by the greatest of Christian thinkers and artists—up to some time between 1500 and 1800; it, necessarily, has timebound elements. We speak the truths of the Sermon on the Mount in terms of an understanding of human nature less “exact” than is demanded by our modern circumstances. I take the word “exact” in a certain sense as intended in a quote I used as an epigraph for my freely downloadable book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being:
Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man. [Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech given on 2008/06/07 to participants in the sixth European Symposium of University Professors, which was held in Rome from 2008/06/04 to 2008/06/07 on the theme: Broadening the Horizons of Reason. Prospects for Philosophy].
The Christian tradition is always the same but always the same in the way of a child yet growing. We should be making a serious effort to integrate at least major parts of modern empirical knowledge into a Christian understanding of God’s Creation, as Augustine and Aquinas did in their own times.
A new and better version of God’s story must consider the truths manifested in the stuff studied by Heisenberg and the different relationships studied by Einstein (space and time) and Darwin (the ties between the generations of mortal, living creatures). The truths of this Creation includes even the abstract thoughts found in very difficult mathematics. For example, I’ve argued that we need to upgrade our understanding of “moral paths” by moving from simple Euclidean language and concepts to those of modern geometry, especially the differential geometry used by Einstein to formulate the General Theory of Relativity. I’ve written about this need, caused by the sheer mass and complexity of human communities, in a number of places including the essay published in 2008, Differential Geometry and Moral Narratives, where I wrote:
The American physicist John Wheeler once summarized general relativity by telling us that matter tells space how to shape itself and space then tells matter how to move. Maybe we can play around with this metaphor:
“Human beings tell moral space how to shape itself and moral space then tells human beings how to move through life—how to act.”
Four years later, I’d reached a more complete and complex development of this idea. In Physics, Politics, and Metaphysics, I elaborated a little on the use of higher-level concepts derived from some of the powerful ideas of modern mathematics and physics:
[W]e could maybe come up with concepts which are abstract descriptions of what can happen when relationships between members inside a community or between communities change. A moral creature embedded in a variety of communal relationships might suddenly find one or more of those communities is changing substantially so as to seem an entirely different sort of community. This might be a result of the community growing and becoming denser in relationships or as a result of a community losing moral structure.
We need to understand stuff, the universe, physical relationships; then we can study narratives, including those of a political nature. I’ve done much of that as well, even coming to a tentative understanding of political gangsterism and other forms of “conspiratorial” behavior within my understanding of God’s Creation as a setting for the story of the Body of Christ.
My somewhat voluminous writings, most available for free downloading, are described in Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston.