Getting to the Point: reason

Showing posts with label reason. Show all posts

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Letters, Liturgy, and Life

Thursday is Liturgy Day on this blog—I am going through the Mass, bit by bit, showing how our entire Catholic faith and life is informed by the structures and rites of the liturgy. We are in the midst of the Liturgy of the Word, and have come to the second reading, the Epistle. For most of the Church year, this reading is taken from the letters of St. Paul.

The epistles of Paul represent the first theology of the Church, the very first movements, uniquely graced by the Holy Spirit so as to be inerrant and thus biblical, to make sense of the revelation we were given of Jesus Christ, the object of our faith. Faced with various problems and questions arising in the communities he had evangelized, Paul was the first to take up pen and papyrus to use his mind to apply this core matter of faith to the situations he was confronting.

Theology is ‘faith seeking understanding’ and it is telling that the Church began this quest for understanding instantly upon the reception of the revealed doctrine. The letters of St. Paul were the first Christian writings, pre-dating even the four Gospels, the earliest ones (scholars say 1 Thessalonians and Galatians) being composed as early as the late 40s AD.

That the letters of St. Paul are given canonical status, included (again from the earliest days) as Sacred Scripture, reflect both their own inspired content and authorative theological exploration of the mystery of Christ, but also reveals something essential about Christianity. And their prominent place in the liturgy, the simple fact that we are continually exposed to Paul’s writings and those of the other letter writers, keeps this essential truth before us week after week.

It is this: that faith and intellect are not opposed, that we are to use our minds to explore the content of our faith, that there is nothing in our faith that cannot be thought about, unpacked, re-packed, applied to this situation, tested against that situation, challenged by these alternative views of reality and meeting the challenge by the careful use of our God-created intellects.

Faith and reason, and the essential harmony of the two are literally ‘canonized’ in the first writings of the New Testament and proclaimed in the Mass. We need this proclamation because of course in our frail humanity we are always struggling to keep these two in harmony. We lapse into anti-intellectualism where we blindly accept the truths of God and shrink back from trying to reconcile these with our lived experience and the lived experience of others (the phrase ‘Well, it’s all a mystery…’ comes in handy here).

Or we set up two tracks in our mind—our faith which deprived of intellectual heft tends to become a matter of feelings and aesthetics, and our intellects engaged in whatever worldly pursuits we have. We live with a sort of split personality, not in the pathological sense, but tightly compartmentalizing the faith we profess on the one hand and the use of our minds on the other.

St. Paul and the others teach us that the revelation of the mystery of Christ—that to which we give our fundamental allegiance, our basic acceptance of faith—is something strong enough, deep enough, and rich enough to provide material for intellectual exploration and to meet the challenges, quandaries, obstacles, contradictions and quarrels of our messy human condition. We can make sense of things, to a large degree anyhow; we are not left in the darkness of the mind.

In our world today there is more and more a lapsing into a sort of unreason about things. A couple days ago I blogged about modern critical gender theory and how it seems (to me at least) to make the very words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ meaningless cyphers, and that perhaps this is a problem.

Unfortunately life has been hectic in the extreme for me in the ensuing days (and alas will continue to be) so I haven’t been able to engage too much in the conversation on that post or its related Facebook thread. But one commenter seemed to suggest that it’s OK that none of it makes much sense or that words so central to our humanity have any coherent meaning, so long as people feel good about themselves.

It matters because when we go that way, reality becomes fragmented and disconnected. Our bodies have no meaning. Our minds and their pursuit of truth are futile and fruitless. Our social converse is void of any content. And absent a coherent doctrine of reality and of humanity we are reduced to a vicious power struggle (which is exactly what we see happening right now in our public discourse around gender and sexuality) in which whoever controls the levers of language controls society.

All of this is a perennial struggle in our fallen human condition. And so it is vital that we Christians, as we embrace the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, also embrace what it implies – that our whole humanity, including our intellects, is taken up into the divine mystery, that truth has been made known to us, and truth is available to us so that our minds can reason rightly, and come to know the truth in our concrete situation. St. Paul and the epistles of the New Testament, enshrined in the Mass, show us that this is so, and that this is an essential element of Christian faith and life.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

The Gift of Science

Our tour of the gifts of the Holy Spirit has taken us to gift number five, which is the gift of knowledge. Or as I prefer to call it, based on its Latin name, the gift of science.

Now I realize that in our modern use of the word ‘science’ we don’t exactly experience it as a mystical gift of the Holy Spirit. The word science has been degraded (yes) from its rich and full medieval expression to a much more circumscribed and limited usage—namely the experimental physical sciences by which we learn through a disciplined process (the scientific method) the verifiable properties of physical objects of various kinds.

This was not unknown in the medieval world, although the silly historical illiterates called the New Atheists like to pretend it was. Scientific research and progress, and the technical innovations that arise from that, were part of the High Middle Ages, more often than not happening in the monasteries that were the locus of intellectual life in that era.

The medievals had a much broader concept of scientia than that, however. Their concept of science and knowledge was broad enough that they could speak of its highest expression in the gift of the Holy Spirit of knowledge.

The science yielded by the physical experimental sciences is of tremendous value, as far as it goes. It tells us how things work, and how they work in concert with one another. Because of that, it tells us how we can make things work for us to achieve purposes of our own design. All of which is good, very good indeed.

What the physical sciences cannot tell us is what things are, and what things are for. And any real scientist is quite happy to acknowledge that. We know quite a bit about how oak trees work—photosynthesis and root systems and all that. The experimental sciences have not a word to tell us about what an oak tree really is, or what an oak tree is really for.

Now, if we were content to leave it at that—yes, botany cannot tell us these things—that would be fine. But in our modern utterly illogical and unscientific thought processes, we declare more often than not that because botany cannot tell us these things, these questions are meaningless and cannot be answered by any other science, any other knowledge.

That this is a statement that derives from no scientific experiment (and cannot) and is as thorough-goingly metaphysical and indeed theological in its scope and claims utterly eludes the poor modern materialist who (I hate to break it to him) is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Indeed, if the question is declared meaningless and void, then the claim is that all physical objects, which includes you and me, are nothing but assemblages of atoms in various patterns—there is no inherent reality to things, and certainly no purpose.

I am going on at a bit of length about this because we cannot understand the Spirit’s gift of knowledge without challenging something of the inadequacy of our modern notion of ‘science’. But that’s enough about that.

Knowledge is that gift of the Spirit by which we come to see all created beings as God sees them. Instead of our narrow and limited human view, by which we only see other creatures as either serving our purposes or impeding them, as giving us delight or causing us sorrow, and in which we see our own selves even more dimly and inaccurately, God wants us to share in His own God’s-eye-view of creation.

To see that the oak tree is a thing that gives glory to God, that in its beauty and strength it speaks of the beauty and strength of God, His protection, His goodness manifest in a tree. And a tree is one thing; my brother or my sister, the stranger on the street is quite another. Knowledge allows us to penetrate the veil of appearances and reactions, our own selfish and limited perspective of one another, and see the person as God sees them. Knowledge also gives us the ability to put creation in its proper place—a good and delightful thing, given to us to manifest God’s glory and serve our real needs in this life, but not the ultimate good, not the ultimate point.

Knowledge allows us to love creation with making it into an idol, to affirm the goodness of everything God has made while holding that goodness to be very little and unimportant compared to the goodness of God.

From knowledge, then, we have the wisdom to apply our mastery of the physical sciences, our insights into how things work, so that we use them not simply to do whatever we think is best, but to really serve the good of humanity.

The Spirit’s gift of science, then, orders all the other sciences of our human intellect so that they serve the true good, the true dignity and value of the human person. In our world today when science is used to pour poisons into the earth, air, and water, when it is used to kill unborn children and the elderly, and mutilate men and women confused about their genders, we need the science of the Spirit to show us the truth of things, and of people.

Come, Holy Spirit.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

The Rationalism of Father Brown

“The dog could almost have told you the story, if he could talk,” said the priest. “All I complain of is that because he couldn’t talk you made up his story for him, and made him talk with the tongues of men and angels.

“It’s part of something I’ve noticed more and more in the modern world, appearing in all sorts of newspaper rumours and conversational catchwords; something that’s arbitrary without being authoritative. People readily swallow the untested claims of this, that, or the other.

“It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.” He stood up abruptly, his face heavy with a sort of frown, and went on talking almost as if he were alone.

“It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are. Anything that anybody talks about, and says there’s a good deal in it, extends itself indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. And a dog is an omen, and a cat is a mystery, and a pig is a mascot, and a beetle is a scarab, calling up all the menagerie of polytheism from Egypt and old India; Dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht and all the holy howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning, escaping into elephants and snakes and crocodiles; and all because you are frightened of four words: ‘He was made Man.’”

GK Chesterton, The Oracle of the Dog

Reflection – This little bit of Browniania comes at the end of a story in which a dog supposedly denounces the murderer of his master by the canine expedient of woofing at him. The dog’s behaviour actually has revealed the truth of the mystery, but in a completely different way that actually accords with what dogs do or do not know, do or don’t do in their proper canine natures.

But enough of the story, which is one of the strongest in the canon, and hence which I especially don’t want to spoil. It is this piece at the end, though, that I want to reflect on. Superstition, in the years that have ensued between this story’s writing and today, has continued to come in like a sea: from all the weird alternative medicines that come with no research backing them up and very odd ‘scientific’ theories to account for them, to all sorts of strange conspiracy theories claiming to account for any and all things (I’m sorry, but the Illuminati made me type that sentence).

And then there are all the odd academic theories that seem to be like the proverbial ourobouros serpent swallowing his own tail: gender theories where a man is a woman who is a woman who is a man, but gender doesn’t mean anything anyway (huh?), economic theories whereby the disparity in distribution of wealth should be redressed by putting all the money in the hands of a few government technocrats (huh?), to weird historical theories based on no evidence but which are true, as far as I can make out, because people really want them to be.

On and on it goes—alien overlords directing human history and energy fields allowing doctors to treat patients over the phone, and all manner of irrational, anti-rational, sub-rational theories, beliefs, and practices washing over the world (accelerated by the internet, of course). As Chesterton wrote elsewhere, when men stop believing in God, they don’t start believing in nothing, but in anything.

This is all perfectly logical, of course. Once we hold faith in the Christian God, that is, in a God who both established the world in order and is so committed to that order, to the reality and goodness of the world He made, that He became part of that world in a sense, became a man to redeem and restore and complete the world in the order He designed it for, then we are committed as human beings to a deeply rationalist stance towards all created reality.

The Church is not, and never has been, and never will be, anti-science. While it is a slight exaggeration to say, as some do, that the Church ‘invented’ science, certainly churchmen have practiced all of the sciences all along the life of the Church, according to what has been possible and practical in different eras and places. In the immediate ensuing centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire, there was little scientific research done; in the high Middle Ages, there was quite a bit.

It is perhaps a Chestertonian-style paradox (in fact, I’m pretty sure he made this observation somewhere or other) that it is this one mystical claim—‘the Word was made flesh’—that renders the whole of the created order lucid and accessible to reason, and even opens a door to the mind of God that our reason can at least peer through, if not comprehend. And that rejecting that claim leaves us wide open to a chaotic, capricious, a-rational and utterly arbitrary universe, which is the state we increasingly find ourselves in. ‘The Oracle of the Dog’ has indeed proved itself to be a prophetic oracle.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

The Notice Board of Father Brown

“Ah, yes, these modern infidels appeal to their reason; but who can look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there may well be wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly unreasonable?”

“No,” said the other priest; “reason is always reasonable, even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of things. I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason.”

The other priest raised his austere face to the spangled sky and said: “Yet who knows if in that infinite universe —?”

“Only infinite physically,” said the little priest, turning sharply in his seat, “not infinite in the sense of escaping from the laws of truth… Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don’t they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don’t fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, ‘Thou shalt not steal…’”

[The other priest said], “Well, I think that other worlds may perhaps rise higher than our reason. The mystery of heaven is unfathomable, and I for one can only bow my head.”

Then, with brow yet bent and without changing by the faintest shade his attitude or voice, he added:

“Just hand over that sapphire cross of yours, will you? We’re all alone here, and I could pull you to pieces like a straw doll.”

GK Chesterton, The Blue Cross

Reflection – The other day I had a quote from GKC’s Fr. Brown stories, and it got me thinking that there’s quite a bit in those stories besides detecting—little moments scattered here and there of Chestertonian wisdom on the lips of his little round priest. So, and as a light change from the somewhat heavy material from Catherine Doherty lately, I thought I’d spend some days mining ‘The Wisdom of Fr. Brown’ for gems. I will try to do so without spoiling the stories for those who haven’t read them.

Here, for example, we have the astonishing (perhaps, to us) statement that God Himself is bound by reason. Furthermore, that the moral law flows from reason. And that therefore the moral law is cosmic and universal and admits of no exception.

It is telling, of course, that the ‘other priest’ (who of course is not a priest at all, but an impostor and thief) is advancing his metaphysical theories about universes above reason and bowing his head in piety before the unknowability of it all, not out of great humility and wise modesty before the mystery, but because he wants to steal the sapphire cross Fr. Brown is carrying.

So often the webs of theories we spin about relativism and the infinite plasticity of the moral law, its endless variation and the provincial and provisional nature of the commandments all boil down to that: we want to do what we want to do. We work up all sorts of ingenious arguments for why we cannot really know what is and what is not, what the mind of God is and what morality might mean in this infinite expanding universe… but really, it’s all in service of our being able to steal this, go to bed with that, lie about x, cheat about y, and so forth.

So Fr. Brown’s notice board ‘Thou shalt not steal’ at the foot of the pearl cliffs is a sharp, square little reminder that all of that is bosh. The moral law springs from the mind of God, who has been kind enough to allow us access to it through our own use of sacred reason (and many, many human beings have used their reason to fundamentally figure it out, at least the main lines of it, with remarkable agreement), and for those of us who may be either too thick or too lazy or too rebellious to use our reason thus (those who just want to take that sapphire cross no matter what) He has revealed it in His Scriptures and entrusted it to His Church, which has faithfully taught that law for 2000 years.

That is the notice board, not some artificial construct imposing some silly arbitrary rule upon us, but a sign telling us what we already know, or should know, but choose to forget or deny or ignore. The Ten Commandments and the moral teaching of the Church are the notice board for our rebellious and dense humanity, and their jurisdiction is universal.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

There Stands the Woman

O Mother of God, we see the best of speakers become as mute as fish in your regard, for they could not explain how you could give birth while remaining a virgin. As for us, while marveling at the mystery, we cry out to you in faith:

Hail, O Container of God’s wisdom;

Hail, O Treasury of his providence!

Hail, O Reproof of foolish philosophers;

Hail, O Confusion of speechless wise men!

Hail, for you perplexed the inquisitive minds;

Hail, for you dried up the inventors of myths!

Hail, for you ripped the Athenians’ meshes;

Hail, for you filled the Fishermen’s nets!

Hail, O Retriever from the abyss of ignorance;

Hail, O Lamplight of knowledge to many!

Hail, O Ship for those who seek salvation;

Hail, O Harbor for the sailors of light!

Hail, O Bride and Maiden ever-pure!

Akathist Hymn to the Mother of God

Reflection – Well, one more day with bits and pieces of the Akathist hymn, in preparation for the feast of the Queenship of Mary tomorrow. I wish I could give some sense of the beauty of the music of this service, but you’ll just have to come to Madonna House some time when we’re doing it.

This chant has always been a favorite of mine. I love the simile ‘as mute as fish’, which is not exactly a common idiom but makes perfect sense once you hear it. I tend to be someone who always has something to say on just about any topic (you may have noticed this about me!), and so I have usually riposted to this part of the hymn with ‘Yes, but I am not the best of speakers’, so I can still blather on.

These verses speak of a very deep reality, though, that human philosophy and human intellectual prowess, as great a thing as it is, runs up against a hard limit in its calculations and syllogistic reasoning. Reason treats of the observable, the repeatable, the testable, that which is within the grasp of the senses and our ability to understand the information they bring us.

But the deepest realities of human life—the origin, the meaning, the end, the depth of being, the mystery of love, the source of goodness—all of these are beyond the strict level of the senses and what they can tell us. We can see something of these things—there is a long and not at all valueless tradition of metaphysical reasoning. But all of them at a certain point elude us—the trail goes cold, the thread escapes our grasp, all of the really important questions of human life have roots that suddenly plunge down into places we cannot touch with our minds alone. Efforts to do so have yielded myths and meshes and folly.

And so reason comes up against a hard stop. The modern path of strict and narrow rationality says, when confronted with the limits of reason, ‘Well, that’s because there’s nothing there beyond them, or whatever’s there cannot be important, or there’s no way of getting there anyhow, so why bother with them.’ The deepest questions of the meaning of life, of the deep import of all the most vital and profound human experiences—love, yearning, transcendence—questions about God and the origin and end of the whole cosmos: all of these are unimportant and irrelevant questions to a modern atheist. Why? Because reason can’t resolve them.

This is deeply irrational, mind you, and rationalism breaks down into profound unreason on precisely this point. Why do things become unimportant that are manifestly vitally important, that have always been understood as the most important human questions, simply because a certain narrow definition of reason excludes them? Talk about foolish philosophers!

Reason does indeed hit a hard stop, though, and where that stoppage is, stands not the grim figure of Hume or Comte saying ‘No access.’ Rather, there stands there the figure of the Woman who carries within herself that which reason cannot attain to. And so exactly where reason takes us to its furthermost limit, faith opens its arms and opens a road for us to tread, not in contradiction to reason but in fulfillment of reason’s own understood limits.

And Mary is the great human figure, the human person herself limited in all the ways human beings are, but who shows us that human limitation is meant to be met, embraced, and filled with divine plenitude and limitlessness. The wisdom of God which takes us to the heart, the depths, the heights of mystery, not in a process of rational discourse, but in a communion of love and intimate mystical union. And the Queenship of Mary bears witness to the fact that God intends to hold nothing back from us, intends to elevate our humanity to the very throne of majesty and glory, to make us sharers in everything He is, not because we are God, but because He is, and it is His nature to communicate His nature to ours.

Hail, O Bride and Maiden, ever-pure.