Monday, February 11, 2019

The Making of the Silent Partner

Last year when I was taking a mini-course on St. Aquinas, I mentioned to the instructor that I had also been influenced by some process theologians, when he immediately noted I need to read God and Intelligence by Bishop Fulton Sheen. He said the Bishop takes them on tactfully, and comes to the defense of Aquinas’ cogent thoroughness on the matter. (I tackled similar ‘evolutionary spiritual’ themes before, here and here.)

I put the book on the back burner, until such a time I knew I would be able to dive in. In the meantime, I got to watch some videos of Bishop Sheen’s performances on his prime-time show in the 1950’s. Imagine, a Bishop pontificating on prime time television about Christianity, yet he certainly had the polish for the fledgling platform!

In regards to this excellent book, I came to see why the instructor pointed me here. Bishop Sheen brings out a fresh perspective of Aquinas from the point of view of the modern thinker. While the modern thinker is all about progress, “Progress is necessarily conservative. To perfect we must conserve the gains of the past.”

The question is what is conserved in progress? It would seem that for real progress to occur, growth would have to be organic. Yet, “growth of modern philosophy is not organic. It grows not from within like a living organism, but from without like a crystal. It grows on contradictions. Swinging always between the two extremes, it passes precipitately from one extreme to the other.” This sort of juxtaposition of ideas does little to offer coherency since there are no universals prior to singulars.

Sheen notes, “The Scholastic principle of progress and continuity is metaphysical, not biological. It applies to all the kingdoms of the universe, and with greater applicability and logic than any of the modern applications. The continuity and fluidity of the universe may be viewed either statically or dynamically. Statically, the continuity is revealed in the unfolding of the principle: a higher nature in its lowest perfection touches a lower nature in its highest perfection. Dynamically, the same conclusion is revealed in the application of the principle, the more perfect the nature, the less the movement.”

The fact that we can know with confidence at all, means that knowing is grounded in a Higher intelligibility. “Knowledge is not a push from below, but a gift from above.” So when we Reason, we are progressing from a conserved principle to a revealed conclusion. 

But somewhere along the line, we stopped submitting ourselves to the First Principle. God became equivalent to progress, and man started to identify what is perfect with what is imperfect.

Sheen says,
“Until the fifteenth century, human nature was considered perfectible by a gratuitous gift of God. Grace was not the destruction of nature; it was its perfection. From that time began a war against all extrinsic authority, either in the form of the church as with Luther, or of the speculative intelligence as with Kant, or of government as with Rousseau. The biological hypothesis of evolution was taken over, and was held by many to imply that for the perfectibility of human nature by a gift of God was substituted perfectibility through the natural laws of progress and becoming. In other words, until the fifteenth century, nature and grace were regarded as superposed, one being the perfection of the other. Then came the new notion, one of juxtaposition of nature and grace.”
Where there was once a beautiful continuity and progress of all orders, e.g. between metaphysics, reason, revelation, theology, cosmology, etc, all now got reduced down to biological continuity. And if there was a God, He now got reduced from an object of knowledge to an object of experience (where there were no principles to render those experiences intelligible).

While biological evolution explains the how or the process (and it doesn’t even do that well; see here); it will never explain the origin of nature. Modern philosophy reconciles this by making the nature of God consist in evolution. But a God that is too bound up in the cosmos with becoming, can be of no service to it. He is brought to move as an imperfection to possess more perfection with man. But the “imperfect is intelligible only in virtue of the perfect. To reverse this process is to bring chaos into philosophy.”

“The whole was no more than a deification of man, “who will have no other gods but me;” and a humanization of the Divine. The Absolutist denied morality to God to save His absoluteness; the Pragmatist denied absoluteness to save His morality; and the biological philosopher makes the supreme renunciation: He gives up God to save man.”

Man had succeeded in making God a silent partner — and in his man-made image and likeness.