Christianity First Destroyed Rome and Now Has Barbarized Human Reason?

In a typically erudite book review, The barbarism of reason: John Gray on the Notebooks of Leopardi , Gray tells us:

With astonishing prescience, [the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)] diagnosed the sickness of our time: a dangerous intoxication with the knowledge and power given by science, mixed with an inability to accept the humanly meaningless world that science has revealed. Faced with emptiness, modern humanity has taken refuge in schemes of world improvement, which all too often—as in the savage revolutions of the 20th century and the no less savage humanitarian warfare of the 21st—involve mass slaughter. The irrationalities of earlier times have been replaced by what Leopardi calls “the barbarism of reason”.

I detect a bit of the modern hubris in the words “an inability to accept the humanly meaningless world that science has revealed,” a now-centeredness and me-centeredness that—quite properly—rejects received understandings of the world. Having rejected what was received, there seems to be no will to try to find a new meaning; it could be argued that Leopardi and Nietzsche and Gray are not honest men so much as they are the weak-minded and weak-souled descendants of better men.

Maybe they were justified in their display of self-proclaimed honesty? Maybe Leopardi and Nietzsche and Gray rejected what was received for a valid reason? After all,modern science had cast too many doubts upon a Christian understanding of this universe. Why? Because that Christian understanding was yoked to an understanding of physical reality which was pre-Galilean when the trouble started and had only barely made peace with pendulums and falling apples when Darwin came along and then Einstein and then Schrodinger… Let’s not forget the geneticists and brain-scientists and all those mathematicians who found that Aristotle and his followers had misunderstood numbers, and certainly infinity, in a fundamental way that had deep implications for understanding the human mind as well as the nature of truths of various sorts. That Christian understanding which had outlived its plausibility was also tied to ancient metaphysical systems not fully compatible with modern science, though they could be enlarged and enriched in various interesting and promising ways.

None of this is an attack upon ancient or Medieval scientists and philosophers and theologians but only a recognition that they did their best with what they knew and they didn’t know much that Galileo did know, let alone the scientists and other empirical investigators of succeeding centuries. In fact, it’s at least arguable that the work of historians and literary exegetes did more harm to the general acceptance of Christianity than did the work of physicists and biologists. Many men seem willing to live in a divided world where they accept one body of truths on Sunday morning and another when they watch specials on space exploration or modern medicine, but there seems to have been few Christians whose somewhat naive faith was unaffected by more sophisticated ways of reading the Bible or by the biographies on the “historical Jesus”. (I’m under the impression that the generally more younger generation isn’t so willing to believe different `truths’ in different contexts; they prefer a more consistent cynicism.)

To an extent, the Enlightenment—at least in its later stages—was something of a public recognition of a failure of Christian thinkers to deal with empirical knowledge that showed our prior understanding of created being was no longer plausible. Reality is reality is reality or created being is created being is created being. What comes to us, what forms our minds, comes from empirical reality and enters us through our senses. This seems to be a point as horrible to Leopardi and Nietzsche and Gray as it was to the Inquisitors who would have tortured and executed Galileo if Bellarmine had not stopped them—though he was merciful rather than truly understanding what Galileo was saying. I have no particular problems with this basic fact of our perceived realms of reality and the other realms which are implied; in fact, I consider the effort to understand God’s work as Creator to be a bit intoxicating.

Ultimately, what we are seeing in Leopardi and Nietzsche and Gray is not a failure of understanding but rather a failure of a model of human being which came from Occam and the other radical philosophers at Oxford at the very end of the High Middle Ages. At that early time, those philosophers raised will, including that dangerously mythical entity of free-will, to such dominance that it gradually destroyed the Christian understanding of the balanced human being shaped by responses to God’s Creation, a creature of mind and heart and hands in which the mind played a special role of guiding that shaping process and of moving into the future in an orderly way. The “naive acceptance of reality” preached by Aquinas and some other Scholastics was replaced by a refusal to humbly accept what was not understandable in terms of our own private schemes of thought, what was not acceptable to our personal doctrines as to the nature of truth. (I’ve found the best descriptions of this balanced human nature in the explanations of Jacob Neusner of the views of the sages of post-Constantinian Judaism. See my essay Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?.)

To summarize a number of my analyses, what we are seeing isn’t anything which could be labeled “the barbarism of reason” but rather a crippling of the human mind by subjection to a mythical entity, the “will,” which could be nothing but our mysterious master or else a bad way of speaking of complex interactions of those aspects of human being which are mind and heart and hands. It is in those complex interactions that our freedom lies, including the freedom which can come into alignment with the story God is telling, the story which is this world. In that story lies meaning, if it can be found, “if it exists” as some would say.

Is modern reason barbaric? No, but reason (mind) separated from feelings (heart) and acts (hands) is but a pitiful fragment of human being. The same can be said of heart or hands; human being is mind and heart and hands—though ultimately one if we are to be true images of God on the other side of the grave. If reason seems to have dominated human being in the modern world, it’s because of an imbalanced and radically incomplete understanding and development of human being that was ongoing as European Christians found themselves near or in the explosion which was the modern exploration of empirical reality, an effort requiring high levels of development and use of mind and heart and hands.

I’ve stated some conclusions drawn from my extensive writings on this topic and I’ll try to make a basic point more clearly: human being, mind and heart and hands, was torn apart first by those who had an excessive regard for heart in the form of will, just as it is still being damaged by those who have an excessive regard for heart in the form of compassion. This isn’t an academic issue nor one of individuals simply messing up their personal development. We human beings have communal being as well as individual being; ultimately, those who are saved will share the being of the Body of Christ. Even in the more mundane terms of this world, we have intellect or “the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence”—see Intelligence vs. Intellect for a discussion of this distinction of the two aspects of the human mind as made by Jacques Barzun in The House of Intellect. The will as glorified by modern advocates of an excessive regard for individualism has especially damaged human intellect. Set free from the guiding wisdom of intellect, the individual with his live intelligence can be something of a monster or at least a barbarian. More importantly, the Body of Christ in His mortal manifestation is Himself in a defective form because of the willful misunderstandings we modern men nurture about human being and about created being in general.

My somewhat voluminous writings, most available for free downloading, are described in Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston.