Pope Zig-Zag
A friend and colleague, Matthew Bixby (blogging @ WhyThink.net) sent me an article posing the question: Can the Vatican evolve before it dissolves? As promised on The Meddlesome Priest Face Book page, here’s my answer.
Philosophy and Theology: The Historical Synergy
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), called Saint by the Catholics, didn't fall off a fish cart. Although his childhood nickname was ‘dumb Sicilian Ox’ due to his stout physical frame and slow manner of movement, Aquinas rejected his aristocratic family's wishes and joined the Dominican order of Friars. He was kidnapped and held for two years before his family gave him back to the Catholic Church that he would rescue from both heresy and philosophical confusion.
That 13th-century confusion arose from the debate between faith and reason. One faction said these two human paths to truth existed in separate realms. Opposing this was the faction maintaining that reason is subordinate to faith. Flashing his brilliance, Aquinas crafted an Aristotelian via media (a middle road). The result was his imposing Summa Theologica (highest theology) that has influenced the lives of every person in western culture since he wrote it. Without Thomas Aquinas, western philosophy, theology, law, sociology and psychology would not be fueled with 'The Natural Law’. With the precision of Euclidian geometric proofs, Aquinas adapted Aristotle’s principles of natural causality to explain and defend Catholic theology then under siege by both religious heresies and scientific advances. In a nutshell, natural law philosophy insists that reason alone can deduce the universal physical and mental principles that govern everything that exists and especially human nature itself: All beings are contingent on a non-contingent ‘creator’ that we call ‘God’.
All beings have a material, formal, efficient and final cause that constitutes that being’s ‘nature’. These casual principles, Aquinas says at the end of his famous ‘Five Proofs’ for the existence of god, “we call God”. To this very day, even rabid atheist college professors of philosophy still feel compelled to ridicule these ‘proofs’ even though Aquinas himself only offered them to the mind as a stepping stone to the Catholic Faith.
From Aristotle (and his mentor, Plato), Aquinas inherits the objectivity of Reality, Truth, Goodness and Beauty, and that reason alone has these as ‘objects’ of knowledge. In this way, Aquinas united the sensible world of matter with the ideal mental world of 'spirit' to advance Catholic dogma of the human purpose through human ‘nature’. Everything has a specific purpose as its ‘nature’. Reason, as construed by Aristotle and Aquinas, has no conflict with science. In fact, they are complimentary. Some rational minds choose to embrace faith in the non-contingent source of all contingency, others, lacking faith, do not. For centuries, this was the fault line between believers and infidels in Catholic theology.
From this, even a 10-year-old school child from the former planet Pluto can rationally infer why the Catholic Church condemns certain things as ‘unnatural’ and, therefore, ‘sinful’ Homosexuality is only one of the more titillating unnatural sins in the dogmas of the Catholic Church.
Chardin’s Cosmology:
By contrast, French Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin adopted a theory of the universe (cosmology) that did not depend on the dualism of matter/spirit with a pedigree traced through Aquinas, and Aristotle back to Plato. Chardin claimed that matter/spirit are merely two phases of one evolving thing, an evolving ‘complexity conscious’ universe culminating in an Omega Point, God. Developing Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of Noosphere, the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the the Geosphere (inanimate matter) and the Biosphere (biological life), Chardin believed the universe and every material thing in it will eventually merge at this ultimate consciousness Omega Point, i.e. God.
It doesn't take a Vatican theologian to see that this line of thinking, however consistent with modern evolutionary science, and the emergence of a social global consciousness, ultimate leads to pantheism. For centuries, the prospect of pantheism has tormented traditional Catholic theology. Consequently, although Chardin was still permitted to write books even after many of them were censored by the Chruch and placed on the ‘index of forbidden books’, the Vatican ordered him not to publish. He obeyed. As he had prophesied, Teilhard de Chardin died on Easter Sunday in 1955. His estate, beyond the control of the Vatican, began publishing all his books. The effect was volcanic. My class of seminarians (1965), was among the first to hold regular seminars on his works:
Today, 60 years after his death, scientists, and Popes praise Chardin’s blend of philosophy, poetry, evolutional science, mysticism and theology. In 1975 evolutionary biologist, Sir Julian Huxley acknowledged Chardin's contribution to the ways human social development is integrated into a universal understanding of evolution. Conversely, a more recent splendid evolutionary biologist, rabid atheist, and philosophical pretender, Richard Dawkins (The God Problem), condemned Chardin’s thought as “the quintessence of bad poetic science”.
Future blogs here will deal with specific issues such as:
· Draconian Climate Change
· Abortion
· Hate Speech
· Birth Control
· Homosexual Partners
· Artificial Intelligence
· Divorced Catholics
· Married Priests
… to name but a few. Stay tuned. Film at 11!
One reading is not enough. Enormously powerful. My personal belief is that God will save His Church, even if is at the very last moment. While there is reason and argument. and retort... all valid from a number of perspectives... there is also faith which is its own witness and comes from a place no one can explain. All we can do is wait and see. You have written a wonderful treatise!
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