In a recent article, Freedom and Structure in Human Life — When Do We Become Persons?, I quoted a summary of a view of man developed by the theologian Metropolitan John Zizioulas of the Greek Orthodox Church. I see much good in that view as stated in the summary and didn’t go into a detailed critique, only mentioning that the chosen framework of “mainstream Platonism will always try to freeze current views into a ‘system’ while Thomistic ideas applied to modern views of a dynamic and developing world will leave, for example, our views of how a human being becomes suited to share God’s life, as itself a developing set of ideas.” I’ll make a little bit more of a specific comment on the issue of ontology,
First an often quoted but mostly ignored principle of Catholic thought:
Grace doesn’t replace or destroy nature; it completes and perfects nature.
This principle argues against an ontological transformation which can be pinpointed in space-time. In fact, I’d say it argues there’s only two true ontological categories: necessary being (God) and contingent being (Creation and its creatures). Contingent being of the most mundane and ordinary sort can be completed by grace into images of the Creator. God can make for Himself children of Abraham from the stones in a field just because a child of Abraham isn’t a substantial creature in the sense of mainstream philosophy but rather an object of God’s attention, a product of a certain relationship God has decided to form. Put this way, my claim becomes quite consistent with a fairly radical understanding of matter as described by quantum mechanics — see What is Mind?: Part 2. Rules or Context?. But my basic position is different from that of Metropolitan Zizioulas in that I advocate the idea that God has chosen to work in this Creation by way of evolution and development and not by way of pinpoint changes, ontological or other.
Let me give the first definition of ‘ontology’ from the Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
Ontology \On*tol”o*gy\, n. [Gr. ? the things which exist (pl.neut. of ?, ?, being, p. pr. of ? to be) + -logy: cf. F. ontologie.] 1. That department of the science of metaphysics which investigates and explains the nature and essential properties and relations of all beings, as such, or the principles and causes of being. [1913 Webster]
Thomists don’t do epistemology because they know the mind is formed by response to the world and epistemology as a philosophical enterprise pretends to judge the world’s presentation of itself to our senses. If our senses are less than perfect, that leaves work for neurobiologists and physiologists and psychologists and novelists and painters and others. It’s irrational, and impious to this Christian, to judge the source of our knowledge, that which shapes our mind, from a standpoint outside of that comedy of presentation and response. An impossible and absurd enterprise.
Why would I also claim we shouldn’t engage in ontological analyses? Actually, my better claim would be that we engage in a form of evolutionary ontology instead of hierarchical or categorical ontology. The only being we can directly observe and study, the starting point for our understanding of even the most abstract being, evolves and develops. It’s shaped and worked into the form of landscapes and characters for narratives. It doesn’t come to us as Man or Tree or even Matter. Nor as earth and sky and fire and water.
Being exists but not in the form of predefined substances — though obviously God knew what substances He would shape when He first created from nothing, that is, when He first manifested the basic truths which are the foundations of this world and the rest of Creation. The being of this Creation exists in that primordial form and also as objects and landscapes along evolutionary and developmental paths leading out from that primordial being — in a manner of speaking which is weak but will have to do for now.
So let me return to the thoughts of Metropolitan John Zizioulas which do recognize the obvious constraints upon the nature of mortal man — neither mortal man nor any part of him can be immortal in himself but God may have a trick or two up His sleeve. Let’s see how we can maybe reconcile modern understandings of empirical being as evolutionary and developmental.
In that recent article, Freedom and Structure in Human Life — When Do We Become Persons?, I quoted a summary of the views of Metropolitan John Zizioulas, including the following statement:
He argues that Baptism constitutes an ontological change in the human, creating an ecclesial hypostasis, or person.
I have to admit to a major gap in my work to date as a Christian thinker — I’ve not yet written of the Sacraments though my way of thought is inherently so sacramental as to deny any true dividing line between the abstract (soul?) and the concrete (body?). Intuitively, there is a clear path to follow towards a theology of the Eucharist, the Real Presence, because the concrete world is shaped from the primary abstractions, the manifestations of the thoughts God chose for this Creation. We might think of those manifested thoughts as being God’s acts through His Word in the sense of the opening verses of the Gospel of St. John. Those manifested thoughts, God acting through the Christ, remain yet in the most concrete of things because they are the basic stuff of those things. Wheat provides the building blocks of human flesh, wine of human blood, because they are particular forms of concrete being shaped from some thoughts of God which correspond to the flesh of the Christ and the blood of Christ. Christ is present in that bread and that wine even before the consecration which occurs during the Eucharistic Rite. So the problem is to find a way of speaking as Christ being still more fully present after the consecration.
The solution, which may be complex, will involve a deeper understanding of God’s acts of shaping thing-like being from more abstract stuff and of God’s acts of shaping living creatures from more basic thing-like being. That shaping of living creatures has produced a human creature with a brain which can encapsulate other forms of being. And the story becomes more complex. I’ll not give that story here, though I’ve written of different pieces and aspects of the story in which the Son of God enters the world created through Him and calls men to join Him in His divine life. See my article, Darwin, Einstein, and the Totemic Mind for a discussion from an empirical view of an important aspect of this sacramental process of man becoming God.
It’s not quite so clear to me how I should deal with baptism but an ontological change as such doesn’t make sense in my worldview because there are no well-defined ontological categories to come from or go into. But “ontological change” would work if it were defined in terms of a change of direction in the path of development. Yet, more is involved because the entire Body of Christ is involved when a new member enters. I’ll speak of another related problem after summarizing my evolutionary and developmental view of ontology:
Forms of being are the results of God shaping the truths He manifested as the basic stuff of this particular Creation. There is much value in thinking of those shaping processes as being two — evolutionary processes, such the evolution of the human race over an immense period, and developmental processes, such as the development of a specific man over his lifetime.
There is another critique I’ll make of Metropolitan John Zizioulas’ thoughts on man as found in the summary quoted in Freedom and Structure in Human Life — When Do We Become Persons?. A sentence which raises red flags in my mind is:
The completion of this rebirth from above is the day of resurrection when the body will no longer be subject to death.
If God works by way of acts-of-being, bringing into existence, shaping, and sustaining, we should not be talking about “rebirth from above” as if God were a Zeus sitting on a throne on Mount Olympus and watching His world from a distance. The Thomistic view of God as the source of acts-of-being, including His own Act-of-being, the supreme Act-of-being, makes better sense of this world as a part of the work of a personal Creator than does the older, Hellenistic views of God. In saying this, I speak of the world as being a moral understanding of what might be called Einstein’s universe, our physical world in light of the best of modern scientific knowledge and theories. But what I call Einstein’s universe is a specific set of thoughts and acts of the Creator. He is here working now and doesn’t work from above, saving us by waves of a magician’s wand.
We have to remember that God was free to create or not to create and, thus, the understanding of God that we can gain by understanding His Creation and His creatures, including man, is a limited understanding — limited to God’s specific, freely chosen acts-of-being which resulted in a particular Creation and then a still more particular world. We see God as Zeus. See Proving the Existence of Zeus for a discussion of this issue in the context of claims to be able to prove the existence of the transcendental God from inside of this particular Creation. See The Christian in Einstein’s Universe: Extraterrestrial Life for a related discussion in the context of the search for extraterrestrial life, an issue that interested me largely because of questions it forces us to ask about redemption and salvation.
I’ll return to the claim of Western Catholic thinkers:
Grace doesn’t replace or destroy nature; it completes and perfects nature.
Man can become the image of God not because of a change at an instant which converts his being to a different being but rather because of a turn onto a path which the Creator made possible during the various evolutionary paths followed by lines of creatures leading to homo sapiens and the various developmental paths which an individual human being can follow — if the environments of that human are proper.
These various processes of evolution and development are acts-of-being best viewed as God’s acts of shaping all or part of His Creation, working in His self-limited role as Creator of this particular Creation, we might even say, “peculiar Creation.”
Many say: “There is no conflict between scientific knowledge and Christian beliefs,” but we can’t just wave our hands and say, “Trust me on this,” to our children, to our friends with wavering faith, to those we’re supposed to be bringing to Christ, or — least of all — to those who think modern empirical knowledge gives them definitive proof that God doesn’t exist or maybe that He’s a distant and uninvolved God. Metropolitan Zizioulas has taken a major step in a better direction by describing man’s path toward salvation as one appropriate to the mortal creature that man seems to be in light of a lot of solid evidence. I think this can be better done in terms of a Thomistic existentialism updated to consider modern empirical knowledge, especially the realization from quantum mechanics that relationships seem to be primary and ‘stuff’ secondary. In Christian terms, I am an object of a particular love of God rather than being some sort of essential entity describable in traditional ontological terms. Such thoughts can be the foundation of a Christian theology of the Sacraments which properly considers modern empirical knowledge as the Scholastic or Cappadocian theologies properly considered the best understanding of God’s Creation in earlier ages.