A recent Gallup poll asked Americans whether they believed that mass media reports the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” Only 28% of Americans answered in the affirmative.1 Meanwhile, over a third of Americans get their news from podcasts2—you know, those long form social media posts which anyone can upload that are unshackled from the burdensome vetting processes of institutions. To be clear, I am not here trying to diagnose the cause of this now well known phenomenon. Instead, I would like to reflect on the effect the loss of such trust has on people’s perception of the news.

What is news? In the simplest terms, and when it is stripped of all analysis and opinion (a nearly impossible task), news is an historical fact. Think about it, news is simply the retelling of a factual event that occurred in the (recent) past—the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. News can also include the retelling of a currently existing fact—Bill Clinton is named in the Epstein files. But both of these types of statements share a common problem: how do you know their veracity?

When it comes to an historical fact, there are only two ways to determine a statement’s veracity. First, one can collect all of the relevant circumstantial evidence and draw the most reasonable conclusion from that evidence. News agencies often do this when researching a story, but the average American can’t because we lack the necessary time and resources. Just try to find the time to read all of the Epstein files yourself, or even how to find them all! Instead, most people are forced to rely on the second standard for determining the veracity of an historical claim—the credibility of the person making the claim. When we have reason to believe that a person or an institution is credible, that provides us with a rational reason to believe the historical claims they make. Our court system almost exclusively relies on these two types of evidence for making the factual findings necessary to rule on a case.

For news that involves currently existing facts, the same two means of determining its veracity apply: the credibility of the speaker or the support of circumstantial evidence. Again, however, due to resource limitations, the average person is forced to rely on the former instead of the latter to determine the veracity of a particular news story.

There must, in turn, be some basis for finding a particular person credible. Someone is deemed credible when we have personal experience of their character (past honesty) or there is circumstantial evidence that confirms their claim. For example, we might have a reason to find someone credible when their story is corroborated by someone else or when a piece of evidence confirms a part of their story. Someone might be found less credible if they have an interest in the claim they are making—a criminal defendant who testifies that he was home alone on the night of the murder.

What happens then when, as appears to be the case today, people have largely lost any faith in the credibility of news institutions? Because we no longer live in embedded communities and the news involves events on a global scale, we do not personally know those who attempt to report the news. Our only contact with them is mediated by a screen. No matter how many hours of podcasts you may listen to, you don’t know Joe Rogan personally. This means that we don’t have past experiences of such people being honest—we don’t have personal experience of their character aside from the curated image presented on their platform of choice. Nor can we corroborate their story because we lack the resources to amass all the necessary circumstantial evidence. It was for those very reasons that institutions were necessary in the first place.3

Without trust that institutions will truthfully relay the facts, people are left without any standard outside the news story itself by which to measure the veracity of such stories. Some few fanatics may attempt to scrutinize the circumstantial evidence themselves, but for the rest of us poor blokes that are kept too busy by the mundanities of life, we must turn elsewhere to determine the truth of the matter asserted. Without any criterion to determine a news source’s credibility we are left with only the plausibility of the story itself. If people are presented with two potential stories without any other basis to determine their veracity, people will, naturally enough, weigh the plausibility of the two against each other and conclude that the more plausible story is true.4

There is nothing irrational about such an approach as far as it goes. However, the problem is people determine the plausibility of a potential factual scenario by reference to their preconceived beliefs regarding the subject matter at issue. For example, if someone believes that a convicted felon is likely to be a repeat offender, then, all things being equal, they will find a version of the story that implicates a convicted felon more plausible than one in which the convicted felon is innocent. From this example we can see that people find certain stories more plausible based on the version of events they want to be true. In fact, this is so well known that in the law we preclude any evidence of someone’s prior convictions from clouding the jury’s judgment.

When it comes to news, however, the story that people find more plausible is often the one which conforms with, or better supports, their ideology. If you think Trump is a fascist, then you will find plausible a story which claims ICE agents are patently ignoring due process and immigrants’ legal rights. If you think ICE is doing the honorable work of preserving the cohesion of American culture, then you will find plausible a story which claims ICE agents are enforcing American immigration law by lawful means. Either of these two stories could be true. The point is that we lack any criteria for determining their truth besides how plausible they appear to us.

Moreover, these are not mere matters of opinion, they are disagreements about factual claims. For that reason, this type of reasoning about the veracity of historical events compounds itself. Having taken the story about ICE agent’s abuse as “true” because it was more plausible, then the next, more extreme claim will appear all that much more plausible given what you already “know” about ICE’s past behavior. And the cycle continues.

The result is that, having lost trust in news institutions, people are left with nothing but the inherent (or subjective) plausibility of the story being presented to determine its veracity. And, while people’s common sense often has a nose for the truth, it is easily clouded by our pride. Without institutions with internal vetting processes or the close personal relationships from real embedded communities (or perhaps a shared set of social mores), the truth will remain a moving target which is determined solely by its correspondence to the reality we already believed was real.

As discussed in the second part of this series, the revolutionary geometry of Descartes opened to the Western mind an entirely new vantage point on the whole of the material world. Suddenly, the whole material universe was the realm of a unified mathematics. It is no coincidence that the technological developments that fueled industrialization and eventually allowed mankind to land on the moon started immediately after Descartes’ synthesis. After all, if the material world is entirely mathematically predictable, then we can engineer like never before. We can predict how certain materials will react to hypothetical forces, model these hypothetical systems mathematically, then turn these systems into useful tools, like internal combustion engines or lightbulbs, or any of the countless modern inventions that were discovered not through blind experimentation, but through rigorous calculation. All manner of modern innovation was the result of this new way of thinking.

The Cartesian synthesis also began the pursuit of a theory of everything as we know it today, which is the subject of this third and final part of this series. This fundamental idea that we can develop a mathematical theory of the whole of the material universe is a simple one, yet cosmically ambitious, perhaps even hubristic if we are not careful in its pursuit. In a word, the idea is that the algorithms of the second order of mathematical abstraction actually point to a higher third level, at which the mathematician studies Order itself, in all of its material manifestations. Before the modern era, it was the theologians and philosophers who had the undisputed claim to the academic ground surrounding the questions of ultimate importance. After Descartes, philosophers began to struggle in profound ways to justify the immaterial conclusions about Being that previously had been the sure bedrock of mathematics. Metaphysical conclusions that the mathematicians must take as axioms, such as “one exists and is not equal to zero” were suddenly on shaky footing. (Perhaps this was due to the rise of materialism that new mathematics was itself spurring on, but I digress.)

Subscribe now

Now, it is the mathematician who classifies, axiomatizes, and develops a deeper understanding of not just numbers, shapes, vectors, or functions, but of the overarching, unified structures of Order, of which these things are mere examples. Unfortunately, however, there is now a lack of the metaphysical underpinnings that ought to situate mathematics as a science of some “aspect” or kind of Being. Without any true content to the symbols that we push around, mathematicians sink into “formalism,” which is essentially symbolic logic. On the other hand, the truth of the theorems holds without fail in spite of the lack of content, solidifying that cosmically ambitious claim that the mathematician’s work points beyond the proximate objects of his study to at least some aspect of a higher Order–we may even say, of the Logos. And when mathematics is resituated properly by the metaphysicians with respect to Being, the beauty of this truth will become apparent.

But what has this seismic shift meant for the last several centuries of scientific study? To start, the idea of a complete mathematical physics (the logical outcome of the Cartesian revolution, advanced by Newton just a few generations later) is so commonplace to us moderns, but was unthinkable before Descartes. This is not to say that Aristotelean physicists would not have used ratios and other mathematical tools in their explanations of physical phenomena. But they would never have had the vaulting ambition to claim that it was in principle within their power, given the right tools of observation, to explain mathematically (i.e., with the same certainty with which we state that 2 + 2 = 4) the entirety of the natural, material universe–its operations, origins, and eventual demise.

Share

To pursue this ambition is, in my estimation, the essential project of modernity. More than any particular philosophical principle, or revolution against any idea, the modernist’s project seems to me to be primarily the mathematical development of a “theory of everything,” while increasingly sidelining other sciences, such as metaphysics, ethics, and ultimately theology. Certainly, this shift has come at great cost to the spiritual health of Western civilization, as we have slowly dropped the necessary qualifier on the “theory of everything” that it is a “theory of every material thing.” But that does not make the modern insight wrong. Far from the caricatured, dystopian picture many conservatives paint of the modern movement, modernism understood in this way is actually the mathematical pursuit, albeit a pursuit by fallen humans which tends toward unhealthy obsession, of a nonetheless beautiful idea, and the same idea with which St. John the Evangelist opens his gospel account: “In principio erat verbum. Et… omnia per ipsum facta sunt.”

Leave a comment

In my previous essay, I discussed three levels of mathematical abstraction and, in light of these, the reasons for rethinking how we currently teach math in our schools. Now, I would like to look more deeply at third-order mathematical reasoning and how transformative its study is. You will recall that by “third-order mathematical reasoning,” I mean the level of abstraction of proving things about mathematical structures themselves, rather than about specific numbers and operations; think Euclid and proofs, not algebraic calculation and problem sets. Without this third order, the mathematician, lacking the necessary proofs of his claims, does not know any truth about the world beyond the chicken-scratch of his symbolic manipulation. Further still, this level of reasoning is, in fact, the foundation for conceptualizing a theory of everything, as we now call it. To illustrate, a bit of mathematical history is necessary.

To the ancient Greeks, there were two broad areas of mathematics that were wholly distinct: geometry and arithmetic. Geometry studied magnitudes, figures, proportions and angles. Arithmetic studied numbers (integers and rational numbers) and their operations. It may be hard for us moderns to imagine doing geometry without ever putting numerical value to lengths (apart from proportion to other lengths), but that is precisely what the Greeks did. The reasons for the separation between the fields essentially boiled down to the necessity of irrational numbers (e.g. pi and the square root of two) to even start to do geometry with reference to numerical quantity. But to the Greeks, arithmetic was the realm of the rational, and the proofs of geometry could not fit into this paradigm. In fact, legend goes that Hippasus, a follower of Pythagoras (namesake of the Pythagorean theorem, and leader of a mathematical cult that tried to maintain the unity of mathematical thought while denying irrational numbers) was killed over the discovery of a proof that a square’s side was irrationally proportionate to its diagonal. An irrational proportion between real, observable quantities threatened to undermine the entire mathematical project of making sense of quantity through numerical concepts. And admittedly, it is an uncomfortable truth that no ratio of integers can ever express the ratio of the radius of a circle to its circumference; there was a whole philosophical sect, known as atomists, who upended metaphysics so that they would not have to deal in their account of physics with problems like these pesky irrational numbers popping up everywhere, Zeno’s paradox, etc. Now, the resulting rift between magnitude (geometry) and number (arithmetic) remained until the dawn of the modern era with René Descartes.

The rise of algebra in the West, a result of the Arabian scientific revolution’s fruits in the Middle Ages making their way to Europe, led Descartes to mend this age-old divide forever by beginning his very first proof in La Géométrie with a simple supposition that is perhaps the most influential sentence written in the past millennium of mathematical thought: “Let line AB be unity.” With this supposition, he establishes a scale on the Euclidean plane. The tools of the geometer had been a straight edge and a compass; Descartes turns his straight edge into a ruler by fiat, establishing an arbitrary unit on the plane, and starts putting numbers to magnitudes again. And then, Descartes proves that the algorithms of arithmetic (and consequently the entire system of Algebra that had just been developed by the Arabs) map perfectly onto the figures of geometry, and vice versa. The algebraist and geometer were actually, in a very real sense, studying the same thing the entire time, although the Greeks would have denied this.

To say that Descartes’ synthesis was a revolution would be an understatement. It was a greater shaking of the foundations of Western thought than even the subsequent overhaul of the geocentric Ptolemaic model of the universe in favor of heliocentrism, and even greater than such monuments of science as Newton’s second law of motion (Force = Mass Acceleration).

Share The Broken Binnacle

Descartes’ geometry was such an achievement not because of the difficulty of his foundational proofs, and not even because of the gall, genius, and imagination behind them, as impressive as it was in this regard. The most enduring and world-altering aspect of his breakthrough was that it broke down the wall between the calculations of algebra and the real-world applications of geometry by showing that they were interchangeable. When that wall came down, the Western mathematical mind found a new horizon: if everything in physical space (the realm of geometry) could be modeled geometrically, it could now be modeled algebraically as well; and all of algebra could be axiomatized like Euclid did for geometry.

This insight fueled entirely new branches of mathematics, as the race began in earnest to expand the scope of the science. The most obvious example is the calculus of Newton and Leibniz, but there were also several other areas that took on the problems of the infinite and infinitesimal, which necessarily arise when one reimagines numbers on a geometric continuum. These branches in turn provided new methods to the older branches of mathematics, allowing for new and unforeseen results which continually opened up new avenues for additional study. And most excitingly, these new discoveries and new branches of mathematics, while seemingly diverging in scope, would sometimes reunite in the most unforeseen yet beautiful ways.

Subscribe now

Perhaps the greatest example of this kind of reunion came at the courtesy of Leonard Euler, who was perhaps the last great mathematician who had a hand in just about every area of mathematical study available at the time. He proved with infinite series analyses of trigonometric functions, that e^iθ = cos(θ) + i sin(θ), and by substitution the famous expression e^iπ + 1 = 0. This equation is the foundation for understanding the geometry of the complex plane, i.e., a Cartesian-like plane where the x-axis has 1 as its unit but where the y-axis has i as its unit (i² = -1) and this equation beautifully unites that geometry to calculus through Euler’s number (e).

Another, perhaps more approachable, example of the kind of results that higher-order mathematics is capable of is Lagrange's Theorem and its corollaries. By way of introduction, consider the numbers on a clock, and how addition on a clock is cyclical and finite, rather than linear and infinite. That set of numbers is a finite example of what is called a “group,” which is a set, having an operation (such as addition) defined for its elements that satisfies three criteria: 1) The set is “closed” under the operation, meaning that you cannot escape the set by performing the operation on its elements (for all a and b in the set, a + b is in the set as well). 2) One element of the set (0, or 12 on a clock) is an “identity” element, such that for all a in the set, 0 + a = a. 3) Every element a of the set has an inverse b in the set so that a + b is equal to the identity (e.g. the inverse of 3 on a clock is 9).

Now, take a few moments to think about what subgroups exist on the face of a clock; a subgroup is a subset of the group that still satisfies the three criteria just listed. You’ll notice that you can only make subgroups with 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 elements,1 and these numbers are the proper divisors of 12, which is the order (i.e., number of numbers) of the original set. It is quite a powerful statement, and it is central to the study of abstract algebra, but Lagrange’s Theorem is that this holds for the subgroups of any finite group, regardless of what the operation is, or the order of the original group, or what is even being operated on (and it need not only be numbers, provided an operation can be well defined and satisfy the three group criteria). Because it is so all-encompassing and still so abstract, this one theorem is able to do quite a lot of work. It provides the basis for most data encryption algorithms used today. It is used in particle physics and chemistry to analyze possible orientations of molecules and electron orbits. It is used all the time in other branches of math to determine possible numbers of solutions to an equation, and so much more!

We can thank Descartes and those pioneers like Lagrange and Euler who followed after him, for these kinds of theorems that use this third-order mathematical thought to stretch beyond the realm of purely numerical results and into the realm of Order itself, and put within our imagination’s reach, if not within our grasp, a theory of everything.

Leave a comment

As one who primarily studied mathematics in school, yet strives to maintain a philosophical habit of mind with pursuits like The Broken Binnacle, I often feel as though my time spent on pure mathematics requires justification. One perception I encounter is that math is simply a weird thing to choose to focus on: what kind of depraved self-loathing could lead one to voluntarily study analysis? The other common perception is that it seems like just a nice thing to have the skills to apply when the occasion arises; but then why not study physics or some kind of applied math?

Our culture has a “love-hate” relationship with mathematics. We love its uses and benefits, and cannot imagine life without the results of every discipline from geometry to calculus and beyond. But most only learn the world-altering results of these disciplines with much confusion, wasted effort, and frustration along the way. This problem is easy to blame on the modern methods of mathematical instruction, and I would recommend reading this article in ClassicalEd Review on this topic. To build on the points made therein, I propose that the shift away from the use and study of algorithms is largely to blame for our widespread misunderstanding of what pure mathematics actually is and what would lead one to study it. And this is where I would like to begin this defense of pure math.

Initially, we should observe that there are different “levels,” so to speak, of mathematical problems. The first level can be characterized by the representative equation 2+2=4. l will refer to this class of problems as “first-order mathematics” since such questions exist at the first level of mathematical abstraction (i.e., abstraction of specific physical quantities, expressed numerically). This is where most modern mathematical education focuses, and problems of this sort are solved with a numerical answer; you show your work, then circle the solution, and you are done.

The article in the Classical Ed Review hints at the second level of mathematics, characterized by the study of algorithms. Rather than reasoning about abstractions of specific quantities, this second order mathematical reasoning is a result of pattern recognition which allows one to conceptualize 2+2=4 at a higher level of abstraction such as a + b = c, and a + a = 2a. The ambition of this sort of thinking is that we can create a method, called an algorithm, to solve all first-order problems of a given class or type. This level of mathematical thought, while much more powerful than first order, is nevertheless more teachable, because unlike the first order, it is operating at the same level as our language. We use the same word, “addition” to refer to entire classes of first order problems precisely because there is a common process that we observe that transcends the specific quantities being added. We don't really “learn” the sum of every possible pair of numbers; we learn how to add.

Subscribe now

So why does modern mathematical education seem to stunt the growth of its pupils by fencing them into first-order thought? The most charitable answer is that progressive teachers are seeking to promote a deeper understanding of what the arithmetic operations do practically, and why they work, by keeping the students tethered to the physical realities that underlie mathematical abstraction. This is an understandable response to the students who cannot help but question “why?” in their math class. Too often, the response to such questions is dismissive: “it just is that way.” Providing a more robust response to the skeptic inside every child is a noble intention, to be sure, but the method of demonizing abstraction and favoring the particular is terribly misguided.

Rather than looking back to the physical source of the original mathematical abstraction for definitions and causal explanations of mathematical operations, we must ascend further up the ladder of abstraction to the third order of mathematical thought. We arrive at this level by examining why the algorithms of the second level work through the use of proofs from axioms and definitions. Sometimes, as in the case of addition, we find that the algorithms are definitional themselves, once restated in terms that are axiomatic or at least logically prior to mathematics. The existence of some unit, denoted “1,” is axiomatic to the mathematician; of course, it is in fact the conclusion of the higher science of metaphysics that essences and natures exist as a unitive, i.e., indivisible, principle of substances. But—and this is the root of mathematical formalism—the content of “1” is immaterial to the mathematician, and the addition of 1 to itself in an iterative way is actually the definition of the natural numbers (yes, funnily enough, the term “natural numbers” refers to their derivation from natures, the metaphysical principle that most moderns reject). So, in cases such as these, an examination of algorithms leads us to ponder metamathematical questions that point us toward even higher sciences.

Other times, as in the case of Euclid’s algorithm to find the greatest common divisor of two integers, the examination of why the algorithm works presents a deeper observation about the nature of the underlying structures themselves, and so one begins to study those structures on their own terms. Studying the order of mathematical objects, qua order, is the essence of third level mathematical thought (an example of this would be a comparison between the structure of the integers, which is called a ring, and that of the rational numbers, which is called a field). Most students who stop their mathematical journeys after a semester of calculus likely have little to no practice in this type of mathematics, but the study of Euclid is a common starting point for those looking to explore it. The axiomatic approach pioneered by Euclid stems from a desire to completely grasp the causes and definitions behind the methods and observations already well documented and evidenced through years, and even generations, of practice and experimentation. It is shameful though, that our current model for teaching math leaves out the requisite study of the axioms and fundamental proofs that underlie algebra, and even basic arithmetic!

At this point, though, we may meet the objection that the study of the axiomatic structure that underlies basic arithmetic is more confusing than helpful, and that it could cause many students to actually regress in their understanding from a position of clarity and fluency to one of inefficiency and obscurity. Perhaps it would be demoralizing to have to go back as a junior high student and examine under what circumstances a (b + c) = ab + ac = (b + c) a is true. But it would certainly be eye-opening to realize there are whole branches of mathematics built around real systems in which it is not true. Doing these and other seemingly trivial proofs is actually a necessary step on the path to truly comprehending the meaning of even the most basic mathematical structures.

These pursuits of third-order mathematics are admittedly quite abstract and often seem irrelevant. But even grade schoolers seem to have a skeptic inside of them when they learn the algorithms of arithmetic and ask questions like, “what if we find a case where the long division algorithm is wrong, or where unique prime factorization isn’t true?” However, even if the satisfaction of the inner skeptic is not sufficient reason to convince us to embark on this pursuit, the primary benefits of this study go far beyond the proof of the mundane and the “obvious.” But that will be the topic of my next essay.

Leave a comment

Share

One hundred years ago, on July 21, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, the Scopes Monkey Trial was concluded. The whole affair was a farce, but the Scopes Trial marked a watershed moment for the debates around science and religion in American society, signaling the apparent defeat of Evangelical Fundamentalism and so-called religious “fanaticism.” The blow against traditional religious sensibilities came primarily through the fiery fist of one man: Clarence Darrow. For those familiar with American legal history, Darrow needs no introduction. But for anyone seeking to understand the progressive philosophy that dominated the science-religion debates of the early 20^th Century, two stories from Darrow’s life are deeply salient for us today.

It is well known, and was well known at the time, that the entire Scopes case was artificially contrived. On March 13, 1925, the Tennessee General Assembly—composed mostly of Evangelical Fundamentalists who were worried by the tide of progressive thinking rising in America—passed the Butler Act, which banned the teaching of evolutionary theory in the state’s public schools. Tennessee Governor Austin Peay, who signed the bill into law, had stated that it would probably never be enforced. In the wake of its passing, however, the American Civil Liberty Union (ACLU) posted advertisements declaring that they would defend any teacher prosecuted under the Butler Act. The ACLU aside, few people paid the law much mind, and it silently passed through the Tennessee legislature that spring. It would not pass quietly through the summer.

Seeing an opportunity to draw publicity to the sleepy little town of Dayton, several town members led by George Rappalyea gathered to contrive a case to test the bill. The bait? A local twenty-five-year-old high school teacher, John T. Scopes, who had been using biology textbooks that included evolutionary theory. Never mind that the textbooks were state-issued, the accusation against Scopes was forged and the small rock thrown in Dayton became an avalanche across America. Thanks to progressive journalists like H.L. Mencken (known for coining the term “the Bible Belt”) and the crusading campaigns of William Jennings Bryan (who had served as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson) who supported the Butler Act and was on the prosecution team against Scopes, the “Monkey” Trial was brought into the national spotlight.

Even though he was a scientific agnostic himself, Darrow’s eagerness to partake in Scopes’ defense came less from his opposition to the Butler Act than from his disdain for Bryan, who served as the political figurehead of Evangelical Fundamentalism and had spearheaded much of the anti-evolutionary theory in the South. Darrow tells us in his autobiography (The Story of My Life) that upon hearing this news, “at once I wanted to go.” For him, the trial was an opportunity, “to focus the attention of the country on the program of Mr. Bryan and the other fundamentalists in America.” The religious fanaticism of the fundamentalists, Darrow believed, was a threat to public education and the free spirit of enquiry that undergirded any civilization. “Scopes isn't on trial,” Darrow declared in his opening statement, “civilization is on trial."

Darrow and the defense went on to lose the case—the local court and the jury did not work in their favor—but not before Darrow managed to strike a major blow against Bryan and the Fundamentalist movement. On July 17, the defense called Bryan to the stand to question him as an expert witness on the Bible. (It should be noted here that Bryan was in his right to object to being questioned on the stand, and he was advised to do so, but his triumphalism got the best of him.) Once on the stand, Bryan’s fumbling defense of Evangelical Fundamentalism was torn apart by Darrow. Ironically, Bryan was not even a true Fundamentalist, as Darrow’s questioning revealed, but his sad defense left many in that camp deeply disappointed in their symbolic chief. At the end of the questioning, which lasted about an hour, the large outdoor crowd stormed the stage to congratulate Darrow for dusting Bryan. In Darrow’s own words:

“When court adjourned it became evident that the audience had been thinking, and perhaps felt that they had heard something worthwhile. Much to my surprise, the great gathering began to surge toward me. They seemed to have changed sides in a single afternoon. A friendly crowd followed me toward my home. Mr. Bryan left the grounds practically alone. The people seemed to feel that he had failed and deserted his cause and his followers when he admitted that the first six days might have been periods of millions of ages long. Mr. Bryan had made himself ridiculous and had contradicted his own faith. I was truly sorry for Mr. Bryan.”

The Scopes Trial sent the Fundamentalist movement to the American sidelines and Darrow had landed a stinging blow against religious sensibilities in the Bible Belt. Despite this blow, sensible religion would come back swinging, albeit from “across the pond,” as well as from “across the Tiber.”

In early 1931, G.K. Chesterton was making his second trip to the United States. On Sunday, January 18, he stood in his unique and portly way behind a podium in New York City’s Mecca Temple. Across from him, standing in his own familiar way with slouching shoulders behind his own podium, was Clarence Darrow. Neither of the two men stood on trial, but the question of their debate did—to be resolved: Will the World Return to Religion? Darrow, the science-thumping agnostic, who had thumped the bible-thumping fundamentalists almost six years earlier, argued in the negative; Chesterton, the English Catholic essayist, argued in the affirmative.

At the close of the debate, the audience was asked to cast a ballot on the winner: Darrow received 1,022 votes, but Chesterton received a whopping 2,359 votes, giving him the decisive victory. Unfortunately, no transcript of the debate exists, but written testimonies clearly show how the American audience felt towards the Englishman. A few weeks after the debate, in the February 4 issue of The Nation, the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote:

“In the ballot that followed, the audience voted more than two to one for the defender of the faith, Mr. Chesterton of course, and if the vote was on the relative merits of the two debaters, and not on the question itself, it was surely a very just one. Mr. Chesterton’s argument was like Mr. Chesterton, amiable, courteous, jolly; it was always clever, it was full of nice turns of expression, and altogether a very adroit exhibition by one of the world’s ablest intellectual fencing masters and one of its most charming gentlemen.”

Hazlitt’s analysis of Darrow was much less favorable—according to the journalist, Chesterton’s interlocutor was bland and grim, “his attitude seemed almost surely,” and his arguments operated at an “amazingly low intellectual level.” Perhaps Hazlitt was already predisposed in favor of Chesterton but, based on the final vote, it seems unlikely that predispositions were the only factors working against Darrow. Accounts from all other recorded witnesses lean considerably in Chesterton’s favor as well. For example, one witness stated, “I have never heard Mr. Darrow alone, but taken relatively, when that relativity is to Chesterton, he appears positively muddle-headed.” Hazlitt completed his laudatory piece writing that “Mr. Chesterton’s deportment was irreproachable, but I am sure that he was secretly unhappy. He had been on the platform many times against George Bernard Shaw. This opponent [Darrow] could not extend his powers. He was not getting his exercise.”

Whether or not Darrow was just having a bad day, and regardless of Hazlitt’s punditry, he simply could not keep pace with Chesterton. But Darrow not only took his loss in good fashion, he even shared positive feelings toward the Englishman later in his life:

“I was favorably impressed by, warmly attached to, G.K. Chesterton. I enjoyed my debates with him, and found him a man of culture and fine sensibilities. If he and I had lived where we could have become better acquainted, eventually we would have ceased to debate, I firmly believe.”

Even before converting to Catholicism, Chesterton had written in 1910 that if each man was given a thousand year to live then he or she would, “end up either in utter pessimistic skepticism or in the Catholic creed.” Like all of us, the proud and stubborn Darrow was not granted a thousand years to live. He died on March 13, 1938, at the age of eighty, exactly thirteen years after the passing of the Butler Act (which would not be repealed until September of 1967).

Progressive atheist that he was, I like to believe that the logical conclusions of progressive thinking in American society one hundred years later would have horrified Darrow. Religious revivals wax and wane—many believe that we are on the verge of one—and the questions surrounding education in America remain real and fraught. But at the heart of the Scopes Monkey Trial was the question of who and what we believe man is. That question remains pertinent today. It always will. The trial also forged a false binary between traditional religion and science, and the progressives, with a vendetta against Christianity, were more than happy to set up fundamentalists as the strawman for traditional religion. But American Catholics, while not immune in practice to fundamentalist attitudes, have much to offer in maintaining that paradoxical course between faith and reason, which is a stumbling block to fundamentalists and folly to progressives. As for Evangelical Christians, until they reckon with their literalist interpretations of the Bible, based heavily on the principle of sola scriptura, they will likely continue to face future Monkey Trials.

Leave a comment

Share

“What is going to be created will effectively be a god,” claims Anthony Levandowski, speaking about artificial intelligence (AI). Levandowski is founder of Way of the Future, a church for people who are “interested in the worship of a Godhead based on AI.” He is quick to clarify, “It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”1

What indeed.

And Levandowski is not alone. Many computer engineers, programmers, and scientists have proclaimed AI as a singular technological breakthrough that in due course will allow computers to rival or surpass the human mind. The standard lexicon of AI now includes cerebral terms like “deep learning, ” “neural network, ” and “cognitive computing,” and some AI disciples have described advanced AI models as sentient, self-aware, and even omniscient. They foresee a creature greater than its creator—an alarming aspiration that calls to mind the ancient cry of the Babylonians: “Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven” (Gen. 11:4).2

The temptation to overstate AI’s capabilities is powerful, and it appears to grow as each successive advancement is introduced—from IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer, to Siri and Alexa on our cellphones, to ChatGPT’s generative AI model, to the newest quantum AI tools and agentic AI processes. Capability leaps have been truly astonishing, and with the rapid pace of technology growth, it would seem that the heavens are the limit for AI. And yet, the prognosticators of its limitless potential always find themselves facing a hard truth they cannot seem to overcome: AI’s outputs are entirely the result of how the model is coded and trained by humans.

Without doubt, AI programs have an astounding ability to perform systematic tasks, calculate mathematical results, and derive deductive and inductive answers at tremendous speed and scale by utilizing quantitative data and computational logic. But it’s a veritable fact that these models and their algorithms are still ultimately composed of “0s and 1s” and provide answers based on how they are programmed and trained. In the 1983 film WarGames, Matthew Broderick’s character, David Lightman, makes this point when asked how NORAD’s supercomputer is able to pose questions. He replies matter-of-factly, “It’ll ask you whatever it’s programmed to ask you.” Exactly so, and what was true in 1983 is true today. Interestingly, without proper coding and training, the outcomes of AI are fair-to-middling at best and dismal at worst. A recent study, for example, found that when ChatGPT tried to solve hard, modern coding problems which it was presumably untrained to handle, its success rate was as low as 0.66%.3 Similarly, Google AI and ChatGPT often provide laughable answers to easy questions, simply because their models lack the programming or training needed to respond to the user’s query correctly.

This observation, however, begs a bigger question: what if we were to give the computer the right code, right data, and right training? Might it then surpass the human mind? As a recent Vatican letter on AI explains, such a possibility rests on a faulty assumption that “the activities characteristic of the human mind can be broken down into digitized steps that machines can replicate.” As we learn from natural law and scholasticism, the human mind is not so simplistic, nor is it purely computational. Its operations are in some ways quantifiable, but in most aspects are intangible and unmeasurable. This is because the mind is not merely a complex function, but rather a faculty of the human soul.4

This critical point allows us to see where AI falls short. To begin with, although AI can make decisions, it has no free will, and so—unlike humans—it can only derive them based on inputted data and algorithmic calculations and cannot make any decision in a nondeterministic manner. AI also lacks understanding, which is a critical component of reasoning. Computers can calculate, but they cannot understand in the human sense. It is true that more advanced AI models utilizing a massive store of data have a higher probability of simulating human understanding—by drawing on millions or billions of data points to yield answers that might be similar to ours—but even then, the computer is still computing, not reasoning. Finally, AI is missing the metaphysical elements that we have in the irrational part of our soul, including emotions and appetites. Computers cannot love, hate, and fear; they cannot discern or desire good and evil. Consequently, they lack “abstraction, emotions, creativity, and the aesthetic, moral, and religious sensibilities” that all men have as part of their nature.5 Only a man, not a machine, can pursue happiness and seek the true, the good, and the beautiful.

The Vatican’s AI document sums up this last point well:

“Since AI lacks the richness of corporeality, relationality, and the openness of the human heart to truth and goodness, its capacities—though seemingly limitless—are incomparable with the human ability to grasp reality. So much can be learned from an illness, an embrace of reconciliation, and even a simple sunset; indeed, many experiences we have as humans open new horizons and offer the possibility of attaining new wisdom. No device, working solely with data, can measure up to these and countless other experiences present in our lives.”6

If we fail to acknowledge the limitations of AI, practical and ethical problems arise. First, we begin to permit computer programs to take the place of human judgment. At the most basic level, this path can lead to reckless decision-making when AI outputs are accepted as facts, not probabilities that may have a large margin of error. Because data and AI models both are created by humans, and humans are fallible, AI outputs are ipso facto prone to error.7 Moreover, AI programs have drawn much scrutiny for filling voids in their logic chains by fabricating data and results, a phenomenon known as “hallucinating.” Thus, when using AI to aid decision-making, we must not forget that the “black box” is often wrong. And there’s an even greater issue than accuracy at stake: relying on AI to replace human wisdom abdicates our responsibility to think critically about moral issues. There is a danger in entrusting an algorithmic data model, even a highly sophisticated one, to resolve ethical questions—how best to help the poor in our parish, which employees in our business to fire when downsizing, what medical options to exercise or avoid when in danger of death, how to invest money in ethical mutual funds, or what targets weapons should strike in wartime. Human flourishing depends upon the reasoned judgment of man.

Second, an overreliance on AI quashes human ingenuity and invention. A common manifestation of this problem is the rampant use of generative AI by students to write essays and term papers, a practice that undercuts their own learning, self-discovery, and inventiveness. Others use AI in place of humans to produce poetry, music, and art. But because AI lacks a soul and has no emotions, feelings, or human experiences, it can never do these things well. AI poetry has been described as “doggerel of truly awesome inanity;”8 music and artwork appear as a cheap imitation of the real. Still others use AI to create sacred music and art, an activity that is particularly troubling, for these works are meant to evoke the divine—something AI cannot know. As Steven Umbrello of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies explains, a religious composition, “as an expression of faith and devotion, cannot be fully understood or appreciated if it is stripped of the spiritual and experiential depth that human artists bring to their work. ”9 Church polyphony, Gregorian chant, religious paintings, spiritual writing, and other sacred works of art should be the fruit of human devotion.

Third, a dependency on AI can begin to devalue the human person. To get the most accurate and relevant results from data models, AI companies frequently harvest personal information from users, often without their knowledge. Not only does this activity raise personal privacy concerns, it also violates the common good if done only for the benefit of the business or the market without regard for the individual.10 Unconstrained AI also devalues personhood by subverting authentic relationships. In the world of AI, human communication is increasingly being replaced with texts from chatbots and messages from audio and visual simulacra, interactive processes that create an “appearance of nearness”11 which is, in fact, only imagined. Going still further, AI has now introduced anthropomorphized “personas” that users can turn to for friendship and romance—an innovation that bounds into the realm of the absurd. Like any technology, AI may never be embraced at the expense of human dignity.

In the 1940s, C.S. Lewis wrote, “I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the universe.”12 Endorsing AI unconditionally without considering its limitations and potential for misuse is imprudent. Ensuring its proper and ethical use is both necessary and wise. It begins with understanding the human intellect and the human soul—for in doing so, we come to recognize that sound reasoning and right judgment are capabilities that are found, not in a machine, but in man himself, who is created in the image and likeness of God.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

If history were the life of humanity, and if it progressed in conformity to that nature, then we might expect it to have three or four phases like those of an individual man. Roughly: adolescence, youth, middle age, and old age.1

In this fanciful picture of things, we might suppose that humanity’s most recent birth occurred fifty days after the first Easter Sunday. Birth was given to a colt-like humanity that stood instantaneously in an adolescent posture, weak and dependent, but already energetically propelled by vital force.

This was a long adolescence that stretched over centuries like the individual years of a man, fourteen or fifteen of them. Not that there was anything adolescent about the Fathers or the Scholastics as individual persons, powerful and independent as so many of them were. But there was a general rule of violent passion that coexisted with simple filial piety and with strange notions about the normative influence of stars.

Quite suddenly, however, this humanity was overtaken by the burning disquiet of youth. It became uncomfortable in its own skin, sometimes taciturn, sometimes shouting forth its rebellion. It sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. But buffeted by nature’s overwhelming and opposite reaction it was forced to pause and examine the road of life ahead. And there it stands, deliberating.

Leave a comment

Share

Urbanism is a dirty word. It is often considered to be a pet project of the left and its loudest proponents come from that corner. Conservatives, for their part, tend to rebel against urban city planning. The distaste for urbanism on the right comes from two very different camps. On the one hand, there is the suburban “boomer” conservative who hates all things city because it frustrates the autonomy of suburbia. For them the city is busy, filled with crime, and besides, there is never a place to park. They want the “freedom” to live a ten minute drive from the massive parking lot in front of Walmart. Further away from the city is the other conservative camp—the country-side-ites. They view the city as a cesspool of vice and corruption. Cities are so morally destitute that only the countryside provides the context in which the virtuous life is possible.

Both camps get it wrong. Urbanism promotes the common good, and goes to the very heart of what it means to be a coherent, unified, political community.

To understand why the city is essential for the common good we must back up and consider the nature of the political community. Man is a political animal. He is naturally social and needs relationships to perfect his nature. Because of this, he naturally comes together to form communities, first among which is the family. According to Aristotle, man comes together out of necessity; he lacks certain things necessary for the fulfilment of his nature when left to himself.1 This necessity is both physical and metaphysical. Man has certain physical needs which require cooperation by other humans. For example, he needs a partner to bear offspring and specialization of labor to cultivate the land and produce different goods. But more than this, man needs to live with other humans because only then can he perfect his social nature. The perfection of our social nature consists in the realization of the social and civic virtues; those virtues which are possible only when man exists in relation to other humans (charity, neighborliness, hospitality, friendship, etc.). Thus, the political community flows naturally from man because it is only therein that man can become fully what his nature has made him to be—political. “The complete community, . . . is the city. It reaches a level of full self-sufficiency, so to speak; and while coming into being for the sake of living, it exists for the sake of living well.”2

That which constitutes the political community, then, is that community which provides the context for man’s actualization of the social and civic virtues. In other words, the political community must be just that, a community: a physical entity composed of fellow humans sharing a common life. This is why Aristotle conceived of the political community as identical with the polis—the city state.3 Scale mattered to him because the end of the political community was not just providing physical needs like safety which the family alone could not provide, but the anthropological need of having a social reality in which man can perfect his nature as a political animal. Man “alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and the other things of this sort; and community in these things is what makes a household and a city.”4

To be that in which man can practice the social virtues, however, requires a certain physical constitution. Because man is an embodied creature, the political community which flows from his nature is likewise embodied. Thus, the coming together which constitutes the political community must be a physical coming together. The city must have a physical unity. It must be a city that can be set apart and distinguished from another city, not just juridically but physically. It must bring those who live in it together. Urbanism, then, is merely an attempt at making the city more what its nature has made it to be—a city.

While urbanism does not, on its own, cause true community in which man can live out the social virtues, it is a precondition to such a community. Put another way, a people who are actively trying to live out true community will naturally form urban cities, whereas a people who believe themselves beyond community will tend to slowly drift apart into suburbia.

Urbanism helps structure our cities so that they can provide the contexts for exercising the social virtues in two ways. First, the sheer fact of creating physical proximity between people makes it more likely that we will have encounters with others who live near us. These encounters are opportunities to practice the virtues. As I argued here, proximity helps create the contexts in which man can exercise the social virtues and forces us to treat our social existence as something prior to our will, not created by it. The social virtues include those virtues which require relationships for their exercise, chief among which is charity. Simply living close to others increases the opportunities for practicing this virtue. For example, if you live in a townhome that shares a wall and a yard with your neighbor and you both attend the same church on Sunday, the number of interactions which call for charity increase. Proximity makes us vulnerable to relationships. In suburbia we choose our relations. In the city, because encounters with the other occur naturally, relationships exist independent of our will. The other breaks in upon us and makes autonomy more difficult and requires us to respond in charity to that other.

Prior to the car, proximity was all too natural. There was no question that the city consisted of physical proximity between people because it was necessary for each man to acquire the physical goods which the city provided. With the car, however, that need is gone. We can drive to work, church, and the grocery store and who cares how close they are? However, the metaphysical need for a community which provides that context in which man can fulfill his social nature still remains.

Second, urbanism also helps create the contexts for exercising the social virtues by integrating where people live, work, and worship. Urbanism promotes the corner grocer, coffee shop, or pub. It seeks to place churches and schools into neighborhoods, walking distance for as many people as possible. In this way, urbanism promotes an integrated community where people share the important aspects of their lives. For example, when a city is walkable, those who live near each other provide, through their work, those services which people need for their lives and thereby create identifiable social relations—the postman, the barber, the doctor. In an integrated community these services are not merely commodities that we consume, but the livelihoods of our neighbors which are in turn needed for our own livelihood. Neighbors come to rely on each other and their lives form an interrelation of dependence irrespective of any one individual’s will. The postman needs the grocer. The lawyer needs the doctor.

However, while proximity matters, scale does not (actually, it both does and doesn’t). The “city” need not be a metropolis like New York. “City,” in the Aristotelian sense, refers equally to large cities and small towns—any community of people which provides the context for the social and civic virtues. In another way scale does matter. First, the “city” cannot be so small as to no longer be self-sufficient, but neither can it be so large as to lose all cohesion. At a certain scale, the “city” becomes too large to provide us with the ability to exercise the social virtues because interpersonal relations become impossible. The largeness of a city like New York, however, is not necessarily an evil. Historically, large cities naturally formed discrete, coherent boroughs or neighborhoods within the city which could serve to provide this type of community. Just as towns exist within larger political communities like states and nations, and families exist within cities, so too, neighborhoods once existed within cities which formed a part of that larger whole.

Contrary to the city, suburbia is hostile to community. It is by its nature individualistic. It has no physical unity. Instead, it is a disaggregated spacing of homes in which humans have no relation to those who live immediately next to them and where those aspects of shared life—work, school, church, etc.—are chosen at will. It has neither place nor culture. Man comes naturally together into the city, not away from each other to their subdivision homes. The physical buffer between people created by car infrastructure, grants to the individual anonymity in their social interactions. One can go about without having to know or be known by one’s neighbors or those whose business we engage. Because of this anonymity, the individual also becomes autonomous since without social relations there are no corresponding social duties. Thus, suburbia conceives of man’s social relations as the accidental, and often unfortunate, consequence of his material needs. If we have destroyed our cities and towns it is because we no longer wish to be a political animal, but an individual animal that groups together as disconnectedly as possible for his common convenience. John Locke anyone?

While merely having a walkable city alone will not spontaneously create a healthy, integrated community, it is impossible to have one without it. Urban cities can suffer from other ailments of modernity which make an integrated community difficult. For example, a city can get a perfect “walkability” score and be equally as soulless and individualistic as suburbia if it is fully infested with corporatism. What differs, however, is that suburbia makes true community impossible. The physical distance of suburbia creates a buffer between individuals such that they can ignore relations with others that proximity would bear upon them. Take for example the postman. You might not get to know your postman if he walks to your door every day, but you cannot get to know him if he drives to your mailbox because the subdivision he serves is just too big to walk. Urbanism, while not itself sufficient, is necessary for the formation of communities in which we can live out the social virtues.

Man is a political animal who needs the complex, integrated community of the city to perfect his nature. Suburbia rejects this view of human nature in favor of a Lockean vision of man as fundamentally individual with no metaphysical need for community to fulfill his nature. It provides to the individual those material goods which the individual cannot acquire on his own without the pesky burden of knowing and caring for the person who supplies those goods. Urbanism is uncomfortable for many Americans because communal life is demanding. It requires us to surrender many of our “freedoms” we have grown accustomed to in suburbia. But if we have no need for the city we become like either the beasts or the gods. And perhaps, as we try to make ourselves more like the gods, we become more like the beasts.

When ‘The Broken Binnacle’ was just a seedling of an idea in ’s mind, he asked me if I had any interest in joining. But it wasn’t merely an invitation. It was more of an “I would like you to…” than it was a “Would you like to...” James did this well; it was intentional and sincere. I was taught by my family to give your “yes” when someone asked you to do something, especially when that ask was sincere. But even at that time, an opposing seedling of doubt sprung in my mind. A voice of doubt that asked, “Was I a ‘writer’?”, or “What could I have to contribute?” Over time, that doubt festered into fear and that fear festered into complacency.

What did this fear and complacency look like? It wasn’t that I had lost all desire to contribute, but that I would place roadblocks in front of myself. Ideas would come to mind, only to be quickly discarded with the notion that they would never amount to anything once put to paper. Thoughts of what people might like or want to hear would come forward and I would think that I might not be the best person to deliver them. My complacency would create masterful excuses revolving around time and effort or other responsibilities.

But now you are reading the fruits of me putting pen to paper, so what happened? I recently listened to an excellent talk by Father James Searby on perfectionism.1 Searby dove into the common vice of perfectionism and how it creeps into almost everyone’s life. He shared how it was really a two-sided coin. On one side you have the classic perfectionist, do everything perfect, ensure everyone else is doing everything perfect, and that nothing is going wrong! On the other side were those who do nothing, don’t try new things, and don’t want to mess anything up! Though seemingly opposite—think ‘Type - A - freak out boss’ vs ‘couch-potato bum’—these modes of being stem from the same vice. We don’t need to be one of these extremes to see this vice working in us. These two sides of the coin can really be wrapped up into one vice—the sin of acedia. Searby explained that both the perfectionist and the sloth are moved by the same thing, fear. The perfectionist, in their action, is scared of failing at anything they do. The sloth, in their inaction, is scared of failing at anything they do. More so, the perfectionist does not step outside of their zone, fearing that they may show their humanity by attempting anything outside their niche and destroy the outfacing image they have crafted for others in the process. The sloth does not attempt much of anything in the fear that (1) they might actually find success and be burdened with being asked to do more of it or (2) that their attempt will fail to achieve the relevant standard they have in mind.

Acedia, although mostly referenced as ‘sloth’, is a much deeper vice. Aquinas defines it as a “sorrow about spiritual good.”2 JPII expands this idea:

“The fact is that attaining or realizing a higher value demands a greater effort of will. So in order to spare ourselves the effort, to excuse our failure to obtain this value, we minimize its significance, deny it the respect which it deserves, even see it as in some way evil, even though objectivity requires us to recognize that it is good….. St Thomas defines sloth (acedia) as ‘a sadness arising from the fact that the good is difficult’”3

What became clear to me was that the vice of acedia had grabbed hold of me and put me into a mold. I was bound by fear. In his talk, Searby at times addressed specifically the ‘young man.’ Of course, being one myself and being with young men frequently either through coaching, work, or friendship I immediately saw how this vice particularly targets the young man. Upon being launched into the world much is expected of the young man, at least the world makes it seem so. Find a job, get a promotion, find housing, and then again find a better job, get a bigger promotion, and buy a better house. This pressure, real or imagined, often freezes the young man, or drives him to obsess over certain things. I think some of it is a holdover from the teenage drive to not be unique or noticed—to just fit in and get by. Acedia for young men can manifest in different ways, a fear of commitment to relationships or pursuits, a lack of goals and drive, or an obsession to be the very best in their field, but forget all else. While a woman gives more freely, unconditionally, the young man calculates his effort, becoming efficient, one might say, to a negative degree. In the modern age, acedia is armed with a new weapon: technology, and its many henchmen such as gaming or pornography.

For myself, I am blessed to be broken from the mold, at least for this moment, by Fr. Searby, and to be reinvigorated to strive to combat this vice. Luckily for young men like myself, but also for professionals, parents, coaches, teachers and so on, Searby gives concrete steps for countering acedia. The first is to create a rule of life, or the norms you will abide by day to day. This means deciding what prayers you will say and when you say them, as well as adding small daily sacrifices. The second is to incorporate silence and reflection into each day. This allows us to be open to God’s voice but also forces us to face those fearful voices inside our head and heart and contend with them honestly. The third is to make time for intentional rest and leisure. We were given the Sabbath, and we were made to enjoy the gift of life, not always to be ‘grinding’ as perfectionism might incline us to. The fourth is to engage in cardiovascular exercise each day. Since we are creatures of a body-soul composite we must maintain our body to bring healing to our souls, as well as gain the mental and disciplinary benefits of physical movement. The last step is to change our mindset from ‘threat mode’ to ‘opportunity mode’ and take each action not as a burden, but as an opportunity for charity and growth.

With these steps, and God’s assistance, we can all be freed from the shackles of acedia. Although it is not helpful to dwell on his mode of being, it is important to recognize how the devil operates. While our God is masterfully creative, the devil is equally uncreative. He launches the same attacks against us time after time, person after person. The voice of doubt within me has no doubt entered the hearts of many. These fears are the formidable tools of the evil one but they are no match for the flood of love and grace available to us from our God when we open ourselves to Him. In our time, let us dispel the fears that plague us, and bring forth joy into our hearts and the world.

“The Thinker”

Holding his chin thinking
how to
hold the chin
and watch the computer
do
the thinking.

—William Marr, Autumn Window

In 1869, at the age of 24, a young and brilliant Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed to a professorship of classical philology at the University of Basel. The appointment, however, quickly led to disillusionment. Nietzsche very quickly began to fall out of favor with the current state of academia and started wondering whether the discipline he loved was really for him. A year after his appointment, Nietzsche resolved to expose the entire Prussian system of education. A few years later, the plan came together in a series of five public lectures that he delivered in Basel’s city museum, titled On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. In these lectures, newly translated and published by New York Review Books under the title Anti-Education, Nietzsche describes in a series of fictional dialogues between a philosopher and his student all the perils of his educational climate. But Nietzsche, ever the visionary, was not merely a critic of his own time—he was a prophet of modernity’s ills. His warnings, striking in their prescience, describe not just 19th-century Germany, but our own era, in which true learning is undermined by the relentless pressures of immediacy, mass opinion and the insatiable demand for reaction. What was a creeping danger in Nietzsche’s time has now metastasized into an all-out war against deep thought.

There was a time when the student, upon leaving his teacher’s side, carried with him the weight of ancient words. The echo of Homer’s hexameters, the dialectic of Plato, the back and forth of a Talmudic passage—these were once companions to a young mind stretching itself toward greatness. But Nietzsche saw the first tremors of a coming collapse. He watched as students, having spent the day in communion with the greats, reached eagerly for the daily newspaper, surrendering themselves to the transient and ephemeral. "The daily newspaper has effectively replaced education," he warned. “Anyone who still lays claim to culture or education, even a scholar, typically relies on a sticky layer of journalism…to grout the gaps between every form of life, every social position, every art, every science, every field.”1 The soul’s slow cultivation, its careful attunement to the eternal, was being undone by the fleeting chatter of the present.

Nietzsche’s fictional student then laments just how difficult teaching has become when the newspaper is so prevalent. It is not hard to hear Nietzsche’s own disillusionment in these words:

Think how useless a teacher’s greatest labors are now, when he tries to lead one single student back to the infinitely distant and elusive Hellenic world, the true homeland of our culture, and an hour later that same student reaches for a newspaper or popular novel or one of those scholarly books whose style bears the repulsive mark of today’s educational barbarism! (emphasis added)2

Our digital age has only amplified the problem Nietzsche saw in newspapers: they do not cultivate wisdom but dictate what is deemed true, relevant, and worth knowing. With its bold headlines and urgent format, the newspaper lures readers into believing that all one needs to know today is contained within its pages. To read a newspaper is to surrender oneself to an editorial board’s choices. Newspapers create informed individuals, not educated ones.

True education, however, requires something entirely different. It demands patience, discipline, and a willingness to struggle with ideas that do not immediately resolve themselves. It requires submission—not to the whims of an editorial board, but to the weight of history, to the great thinkers who have shaped our civilization and to the rigor of logic, argument, and contemplation. Books do not simply present knowledge; they demand something of their reader. They force him to wrestle, to reread, to sit in silence with a difficult passage and return to it again and again. Unlike the newspaper, which serves as a fleeting digest of the moment, a book—especially a great one—does not expire.

Subscribe now

Educated people, one hopes, are humble people. To become an educated person means to submit oneself to those who came before us, to sit at their feet and drink of their water. Informed people, by contrast, can be a haughty bunch, for they too quickly claim to be knowledgeable about a topic just after a mere shallow reading of a newspaper, or in our age, from listening to a podcast or reading a Tweet. Nietzsche saw this problem in his own time as well, noting that the educational system was too quick to allow students to share their opinions:

They treat every student as being capable of literature, as “allowed” to have opinions about the most serious people and things whereas true education will strive with all its might precisely to “suppress” this ridiculous claim to independence of judgement on the part of the young person, imposing instead strict obedience to the scepter of the genius.3

He further notes that “so few people nowadays realize that one in a thousand, at most, is justified in putting his writing before the world.” Deference and humility are fundamental character traits that all scholars and lifelong learners must possess. But when you can claim to be informed just by reading the newspaper, you are quick to share your opinions. Too many professors today demand of their students to “share their opinions” on any subject matter. No one, it seems, is calling for the cultivation of deference and humility, for the truth that young minds must first be steeped in the wisdom of the ages, drinking deeply from its well, before they can hope to offer a worthy thought of their own.

Today, our situation is much, much worse than Nietzsche could have ever imagined. With the rise of digital media and the speed of modern life, what Nietzsche feared as a flaw in the educational system of his day has metastasized in our own. Today, the demand for quick responses and instant opinions eclipses the spirit and ethic of true learning. The very nature of modern media—whether it be the internet, social media, or digital news—encourages and rewards this superficial engagement with ideas.

Take, for example, the phenomenon of punditry, which Nietzsche would undoubtedly have seen as the logical extension of the problems he identified. Pundits rule the TV and podcasting landscapes. Though they often lack deep expertise in the subjects they discuss, they now hold immense influence over public discourse. The irony, of course, is that as a pundit grows more vocal, their audience becomes more convinced that their words deserve attention. Pundits thrive on extreme, attention-grabbing claims, but when challenged on depth or logic, they often falter—without ever growing humble.

A recent and glaring example of this comes from the media world itself: the case of Darryl Cooper, a so-called “popular historian,” who appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast to offer an absurd, revisionist take on World War II. When Carlson introduced Cooper as one of the best and most popular historians of our time, I paused to think if I had heard of him. I had not. Nor could I discover any book bearing his name that related to WWII. Cooper was none of the things that Carlson described him as being.

Cooper’s most attention grabbing and pernicious assertion that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of WWII—a claim that runs contrary to decades of scholarly research and historical consensus—was nothing short of absurd, and some of the greatest historians of our time took Cooper to task. Yet, in the course of a single broadcast, this dubious pundit attempted to convince a significant portion of the public that his interpretation was valid. Here was a pundit claiming to be a historian, without the credentials or expertise to justify such sweeping conclusions, leading an audience of millions to potentially abandon the truth in favor of a deeply misleading and nefarious narrative. The spectacle of this unqualified individual wielding influence over public opinion exposes the true danger of modern media, a danger that Nietzsche had seen in his own time—it allows the uninformed to hold sway over the public conversation, while the deep and painstaking work of historians, scholars, and true educators goes largely ignored.

The cure for this decay is clear: we must abandon digital media as much as possible and refuse to seek wisdom in places that do not cultivate it. The mind is not nourished by tweets, headlines, or soundbites but by books—by the slow and deliberate study of history, philosophy, and the great works of civilization.

We must resist the transient by choosing contemplation over reaction, patience over immediacy, depth over distraction. This is not just about reading more books; it is about reshaping the way we engage with knowledge. It requires rejecting the illusion that wisdom can be obtained through a screen and returning to the kind of learning that demands time, discipline, and humility.

If we want to reclaim the lost art of thinking, we must make a radical break from the culture of instant information. Our intellectual and cultural future depends on it.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Throughout the history of America, the following question has been one of great concern among Catholic intellectuals and theologians: Could allegiance to a higher authority, such as the Church, ever be compatible with total participation in a liberal democracy? This question seems to have been answered in the negative during the 1960s and 70s with America’s adoption of the contraceptive mentality. Despite the apparent, outward thriving of Catholicism in America during the rise of John F. Kennedy, American Catholics had been infected with the individualistic mentality for which their liberal culture so strongly advocated. The rise of the culture of death ushered in a new era of American ‘freedom’ which American Catholics could not support.

Subscribe now

The Church knew the dangers of assimilation into American culture. Such skepticism was voiced in Pope Leo XIII’s Testem Benevolentiae, which condemned Americanism. Pope Pius X also wrote Pascendi in 1907, which urged the Catholic faithful to be wary of modernism and the dangerous effects it might have on the Church. Catholics in America received these encyclicals with mixed reviews. For the conservatives, “the age pulsated with these evil tendencies” of secularism, naturalism and rationalism.1 The Americanists, or liberal Catholics, saw these tendencies too, but they claimed the tendencies were not intrinsic to the nature of the age but only accidents of it; there is no direct threat to Catholics in America, in fact, it is a pluralist country and tolerant of Catholicism. However, pluralism and toleration are a two-edged sword; accepting all religions is, in a sense, denying all religions. The separation of church and state does not directly attack the Church, but religion is sidelined giving secular humanism the power. As history shows, this didn’t work out too well for the Church.

With the nomination of John F. Kennedy to the presidency, it seemed that the marriage between Catholicism and America had been consummated. Catholics moved from the cities into the suburbs, a sign that they were succeeding financially. The film, Going My Way (1944), starring superstar, Bing Crosby as Father Chuck O’Malley, won several Academy awards. Catholics seemed to have finally made it. The assimilation of Catholics into American culture was due in large part to “common suffering during the Depression and shared patriotism during World War II and the subsequent Cold War.”2 It seemed that America had accepted Catholicism. Will Herberg’s book, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, which was written in 1956, noted that to be Catholic was merely another way of being American.3

Underlying the outward appearance of Catholic energy and success was the fact that American ideals and way of life were conquering the hearts and minds of Catholics. As McCaffrey notes, “The Irish and other American Catholics respect the Holy Father, but 79 percent of them follow the guidance of their private consciences rather than the dictates of Rome. And 80 percent believe they can disobey the pope and remain good Catholics.”4 This sort of mentality is precisely what the Church feared. Catholics had finally assimilated fully into American culture, but many had broken their primary loyalty to Rome. American Catholics no longer felt obliged “to give a ‘religious submission of the will and of mind’5 to the authentic teachings of the pope.” They felt, in a sense, that such submission infringed on their individual rights as American citizens. As McCaffrey writes:

John Paul II, supported by a conservative Catholic minority, attributes cafeteria, pick-and-choose Catholicism to the spirit of American materialism that has corrupted rather than liberate consciences…. They could not forsake a religion that offered them consolation and psychological security in depressing times and situations and was symbolic of their cultural identity; and they could not turn their backs on political values essential to their nationalism, which in America provided them with opportunities to prosper.6

Catholics had gotten too close and the individualistic sentiments of freedom had affected their relationship with the authoritarian figure in Rome. However, they didn’t want to part with the psychological security that their religion provided them, so they tried to have it both ways. But with the emergence of the contraceptive mentality, Catholics would have to choose.

In 1968, Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae reaffirming traditional teaching on the immorality of contraception. The Catholic response to the encyclical was telling of just how pervasive the individualistic and materialistic mindset had been in the American Church. McCaffrey states, “Most American Catholics, including many in the clergy, took issue with Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, a reaffirmation of the church’s opposition to contraception. This initial challenge to papal authority expanded to include such issues as clerical celibacy, an all-male priesthood, and divorce.”7 This series of challenges isn’t surprising; once a person denies one tenet of the faith, such as papal authority, there’s no reason the doubting should stop there. A group of theologians in Washington DC went further and presented a statement containing 87 signatures, and later 600, justifying “dissent for Catholics from the birth control teaching.” Stats show that in 1965, 77% of American Catholic women under 45 used some method of birth control, and by 1970 those numbers had only gone up.8

The American Catholic adoption of the contraceptive mentality wasn’t particularly surprising. The reception of Humanae Vitae in America was, in a sense, the culmination of that question concerning whether Catholics could fully and authentically live out American ideals. Ultimately, there is no compatibility because Catholics cannot fully participate as American citizens unless they leave their dogma at the door. As Rice observes: “One reason for the decline in religious belief is the triumph in this country of the secularist dogma that religion (except for secularism itself) is a matter of private preference with no relevance to the public life of the nation.”9 In this regard, Kennedy’s election to the presidency signified America’s acceptance of a tamed and defeated sort of Catholicism. Kennedy was the epitome of the Catholic American attitude, that is, in the sense that his Catholicism didn’t affect his Americanism but his Americanism affected his Catholicism.

The American Church had become domesticated and lost important aspects of what made it uniquely Catholic. Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew addresses the submission of the Church in America to liberal ideals. Observing in Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Vicchio writes,

The ‘triple melting pot’ absorbed the seasoning of each religious tradition while it flavored them in turn with its own distinctive American taste...The issue of the assimilation of Catholics into the mainstream American life would gradually yield to the larger issue of the secularization of American life, the drying up of the old Protestant ethos, and its replacement by Fundamentalism. Once digested and assimilated, what piquancy would Catholicism provide for American culture?10

In essence, there was a syncretism of religion in America. All that Catholicism had become was a psychological consolation and a tie to ethnic roots. Even in America today, this sort of “ethnic Catholic” mentality exists. Catholicism to these people is merely affirmation, or a feel-good kind of religion. In this case, one religion becomes just as good as the other.

Ultimately, whether under active persecution or accepted into a pluralistic and positivistic society, Catholicism can never be reconciled fully with any state. The Nativists weren’t wrong to fear the dual loyalties of Catholics and that they would impose papal rule over the United States, destroying liberal democracy.11 As Brent Bozell states regarding Catholics, “it is not merely a matter of divided loyalties, it is a matter of first loyalties… [and] the Christian religion is necessarily expansionist, it aims to catch men.”12 If truly loyal to Rome, which is a central tenet for the Catholic faith, American Catholics would have outright rejected the contraceptive mentality. Instead, many Catholics in the United States had switched their primary loyalty to the American way of life, which had given them freedom and success. However, with the legalization of abortion and other grotesque acts, contradictory to Church teaching, Catholics could no longer sit still. Where God is rejected in the public sphere, a usurper is placed on the throne.

The question of compatibility between Catholicism and American ideals comes down to loyalties. American Catholics have to decide where their loyalties ultimately lie. The modern world’s adoption of the culture of death tests such loyalties. Catholics cannot serve both a state, which promotes the contraceptive mentality, and God as well. Catholics must remember that they are, first and foremost, citizens of Rome.

“I die the king's good servant, but God's first” - St. Thomas More

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

A few months past, a close friend of mine, through a series of unfortunate events, lost access to all forms of modern communication. His cell phone and laptop both bit the dust at the same time and, for one reason or another, he was unable to replace them for about a week. As it happened, my wife and I were in my friend’s neck-of-the-woods, but, of course, we had no way of contacting him. I was fairly certain that he was not busy so we stopped by his house to see if he wanted to join us for the afternoon. His car was in the driveway, but when I knocked on his front door there was no answer. Feeling certain he was home, and encouraged by my wife that “it isn’t weird,” I crept around the back of the house to his bedroom window. In true Romeo and Juliet style, I began tossing pebbles at his window. Lo and behold, he was home. Upon hearing the clatter of the stones, he popped his head out of his window with a surprised but joyful exclamation. He was delighted to see us and we were delighted to discover him at home. As it turned out, he was free, and so we spent the rest of the day perusing an autumn market, and finished off the day with an unplanned bottle of wine on his patio.

What made this unassuming vignette stand out in my mind was that the encounter with my friend was spontaneous. Spontaneity carries with it a very real and human joy and yet it has become increasingly rare in our society. That rarity is due to the fact that we have lost the social contexts for spontaneous human interaction. There are at least two ways in which we have lost these social contexts. The first, as my story demonstrates, is due to the ease of communication. There is no longer a social need to find our friends and family without having first organized how we will meet. Because the need is gone, our behavior conforms to the path of least resistance: it is comforting to know beforehand if a friend is free.

The second reason spontaneity does not bubble up in our society frequently is due to a lack of physical proximity to others. Spontaneity occurs when one encounters another human physically. For this to happen, one must be in a social setting where coming upon the other unexpectedly is possible. We have lost physical proximity to others because, most obviously, we now live at a distance from those we consider our “community.” This physical separation of the community, in turn, means that the integrated social structures that once existed—where spontaneous interactions were not only commonplace but expected—have dissolved.

Subscribe now

First, living at a distance from your community makes spontaneous interaction difficult. For example, it is difficult to pop by and see if a friend is home if they live a twenty-minute drive away. It is also less likely that you will unexpectedly bump into a friend as you go about your daily life because of the sheer distance and increased number of establishments between you and your friend. You might run into a friend at a coffee shop if it is a five-minute walk from both of your houses, but not if there are ten coffee shops within the twenty-minute drive between your houses.

Second, we have lost those physical spaces in which the necessities of daily life would place us in physical proximity to others. These physical spaces include, what has come to be called, “third spaces,” but also those institutions of business where one would encounter the neighbor. Third spaces are simply public spaces which are not one’s home or work: churches, coffee shops, or pubs. For many of us, church is still a place where one might bump into a friend but modern attempts at third spaces suffer from that faceless corporatism and resulting economies of scale which make it nearly impossible to run into someone you know (or even get to know others who frequent the place). The local pub has become the Buffalo Wild Wings. No longer do men socialize at the barbershop. And the coffee shop is barely more than a drive through.

Nor do we need to be in physical spaces to do our business. Until recently, the necessities of daily life required us to be in spaces with others. Institutions in which we did our business were physical spaces incorporated into a particular community—the post office, the bank, or the train station. The need to be present in these spaces placed us in settings with others who lived in immediate vicinity to us. These spaces no longer exist, at least not in the same way they once did. There is no need to enter a bank anymore. The app performs all the functions a teller can. The post office is a cold wasteland of marble and granite. How many grocery cashiers do we know or are we more familiar with the voice of the self-check-out machine?

So what if we have lost the social contexts for spontaneous interaction? At this juncture one might be ready to respond that there are good associated with the changes that have brought this about, and I would certainly agree. However, I would argue that a world without spontaneity, a world in which all of our social interactions are planned and coordinated in advance, is a world in which we come to conceive of our social reality as constructed and not as given. We do not receive a social order; we make our own. This, I believe, marks a seismic shift in how we conceive of our relation to our social world. That thesis is beyond the scope of this paper, but the loss of spontaneity is anecdotal of this shift in our social imaginary.

We cannot be spontaneous because we never happen to be with others unless we have already made plans. Because social interactions do not occur “naturally” we must artificially create them, which has been made easier by modern technology. See e.g., SMS messaging. Thus, we tend to relate to our social interactions as something which our will alone created.

In fact, one vice of modernity is a certain cynicism towards spontaneous human interaction. We find it imposing, as if we have a right to go about our day, according to our plan, without interruption by those around us. We find it rude if someone tries to strike up a conversation with us uninvited. In the past, spontaneity occurred both with those we knew and those we might come to know. Now, however, spontaneous interaction with a stranger is seen as an imposition. How common is it to hear that oft repeated complaint of the annoying neighbor on a flight who just had to talk the whole trip while we were trying to watch a movie or read a book? The veil of self-autonomy dare not be pierced; only on our own terms will we suffer to commune with the other.

An attitude of spontaneity is the very antithesis of this modern view. The serendipitous moment requires us to forget the self in the joy of the other. It is, by definition, a moment when our plan is frustrated and yet the result is better than our plan ever envisioned. It is true that, had my friend’s phone been in proper working order that day, we would probably have still met up and had a jolly good time. Still, there was a certain quality to our interactions which texts could never facilitate. My friend experienced a unique joy upon suddenly discovering his friend there solely because that friend wanted to see him. The unexpectedness, the very lack of a plan made on our terms, breaks in upon us, penetrates us, and allows the joy of the other to break forth. To be spontaneous you must take your social world as you find it and be glad that it is what you have found it to be!

Joy, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, is caused by love because every lover rejoices in being united with their beloved. To experience joy in the unexpected interaction with the other, then, requires us to love the other. The modern social imaginary, however, treats the neighbor not as an object of our will, but an obstacle. The irony is that as we strive to be the primogenitors of our own social lives, our lives become lonelier and less joyful. Because joy requires love of the other, a social existence predicated on self-determination becomes vapid and sterile. The spontaneous moment is just one example of when the surrender of self (and it is a playful kind of surrender) opens us to true joy.

Leave a comment

Share

They do not sweat and whine about their condition;

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;

Not one is dissatisfied – not one is demented with the mania of owning things;

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;

Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

– Walt Whitman, “Animals”

The poets have detailed more eloquently than I can this strange longing for the situation in which the animals find themselves. Nonetheless, I would like to discuss the reasons for this longing. I believe the root of this intuition is a desire for a life free of anxiety, self-consciousness, complexity, and the like; a desire for the state before the fall of man, after which man was naked and hid himself (ref. Gen 3:10). We hide our shame, our self-consciousness, and we long to be free of that burden. We are, in a way, taunted and scorned by nature and, in particular, by the animals. This poetic intuition has great merit and I believe it provides an excellent perspective from which we might conjecture about eternal blessedness.

So, do dogs go to heaven? Just kidding. But I do want to first examine what heaven would mean for a dog, or for animals more generally. We have the opportunity in this life to readily observe the activities of animals that seem to max out their capabilities, which, in the case of dogs, appear to be various forms of physically demanding and mentally engaging play. There are a few other elements that must be in place as well, for example, having their basic needs met without effort or struggle, and (depending on the animal) some level of positive social interaction. When these preconditions are met, such activities can even result in a kind of loss of self, not in the sense of unconscious sleep, but in the way that one might lose oneself in deep conversation, being so invested and engaged with another in the context of a mutual pursuit of something higher than the individual good.

This state is one of activity, obviously, but also of rest, just in a different way. The rest experienced at such times is a rest precisely in the role that one fulfills. There is no distraction, no bouncing around from one task to the next, just resting in this one mutual pursuit. Now animals are not conscious of how they participate in such goods; they are not capable of conscious conversation or anything of the sort, but that is precisely the point that I believe is at the heart of this poetic intuition. Animals don’t struggle to lose themselves in this way, to slough off the anxieties of self-consciousness in order to participate in such fulfilling activities; they just do it, provided that the effects of man’s sinfulness (i.e. death and corruption pervading the natural order) are kept at bay. It is precisely man’s fallen state of neurotic self-consciousness that prevents him from the same ease of fulfillment and rest.

Leave a comment

Tied to this intuition to envy the animals’ apparent fulfilment and true rest is another more philosophical perspective. In The Problem of Pain, while discussing hell, C.S. Lewis proposes the following analogy: “[B]urn a log, and you have gases, heat and ash. To have been a log means now being those three things. If soul can be destroyed, must there not be a state of having been a human soul?” (The Problem of Pain, Chapter VIII: “Hell”) While no longer possessing the faculties that make humans more than other animals, Lewis proposes that these souls would have descended down the hierarchy of creation to the level of beasts, while 1) retaining a tantalizing memory of their former capacities of reason and free will, and 2) animalistically following their passions in ever more debasing ways as they continue to corrupt their souls and their nature. Lewis continues:

“What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is “remains”. To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man — to be an ex-man or “damned ghost” — would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centered in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will. It is, of course, impossible to imagine what the consciousness of such a creature — already a loose congeries of mutually antagonistic sins rather than a sinner would be like.”

The fact that Lewis brings up the conundrum of the consciousness of those in such a state is interesting, for it is as though their selfishness grows so as to actually consume the very self it seeks to serve. Thus, consciousness, or sense of self, in such a state diverges at the same time to both extremes, namely toward utter self-centeredness, and toward the disintegration of the self.

Subscribe now

Now, extending this analogy toward the happier horizon of heaven, we see that heaven must be a state in which man becomes more than just a man. The animals become more than mere material beasts when they participate in the fulfilment of man and the glory of God. So too, man becomes more than just a man when he is brought into participation with the supernatural activity of the whole hierarchy of heaven. While so participating, his sense of self exists exactly to the proper degree and with the proper character to fit perfectly into that hierarchy, into the mystical body of Christ, through which he becomes like God. It is not for us to know the full extent of the part we each are meant to play in this hierarchy, how it intertwines with those of every other soul, and harmonizes with the choirs of angels. But just as animals happily play their part here on earth with ease and contentment, every so often glimpsing the larger plan, but never comprehending its entirety, so I imagine the blessed in heaven will joyfully lose themselves eternally in the enjoyment of their participation in the heavenly symphony as they gaze intently upon the Maestro of the universe, every so often receiving a glimpse of His face.

Share The Broken Binnacle

.

We believe by faith that at the end of time there will be a new heaven and a new earth in which the blessed live forever in their resurrected bodies. But what does it mean for there to be a “new” earth, and of what will it consist? St. Thomas asserts that the world will be renewed but it will not be populated by those created natures, such as plants and animals, which are unnecessary for man’s ultimate happiness. And yet, Christ makes “all things new.” The entire created order must be caught up in the renewal of the world. Because the teleology of physical creatures is bound up with the teleology of man, those creatures must exist in the new earth because the fulfilment of their respective ends rest in the fulfilment of man’s own.

According to Aquinas, the new earth will consist of a renewed material world of some kind. His argument flows from man’s essentially composite nature. In the beatific vision, man will see the essence of God directly. Our physical senses, however, are unable to participate in this vision of the Divine Essence. Thus, the material world must be made new such that man “will see the Godhead in Its corporeal effects, wherein manifest proofs of the Divine majesty will appear.”1 Moreover, because “man loves the whole world naturally and consequently desires its good…the universe must also be made better” so that man’s desire will be satisfied.2

This new earth, Aquinas continues, will not include plants and animals. He argues that all corporeal things have been made for man’s sake. They provide him with sustenance and help “him to know God, inasmuch as man sees the invisible things of God by the things that are made.”3 Man, however, will have no need for material sustenance in his resurrected body and will see the Divine Essence directly. Thus, those material creatures which are not fitting to man’s renewal will not be needed for man’s happiness. Moreover, only those material natures which are not susceptible to corruption are fitting to man’s renewal. Our resurrected bodies and the stars and planets are not susceptible to corruption; plants and animals are. They are born and they die. Thus, the renewed material world for Aquinas will consist of our resurrected bodies and the stars and planets but not the oak tree and the hound.

Subscribe now

Aquinas’ position on plants and animals seems contrary to his reason for the renewal of the world. As Aquinas notes, just as the material world was made for man, so “the renewal of the world will be for man’s sake.”4 Therefore, I will first look at why man needs a renewed physical world for his complete happiness and then turn to why that renewed world must consist of all material natures.

For Aquinas our ultimate happiness must rest in the intellect for that is the most noble part of our nature.5 Thus, the beatific vision consists of our intellect seeing directly the Divine Essence. The intellect, however, is a purely immaterial aspect of our nature. Our bodies are completely irrelevant to our intellect’s vision of the Divine Essence. If, however, this is our true end, that which fulfills our being and provides us with complete happiness, why then the resurrection of the body?

Aquinas argues that there will be a resurrection of the body because the being which is saved by Christ is the human person.6 The man who participates in the beatific vision is not a separate intellect but a subsisting human person. Man is not a form controlling or steering a physical body but is precisely the composite of matter and form: “The soul cannot have the final perfection of the human species, so long as it is separated from the body.”7 Because heaven is our final happiness, and since we cannot attain that happiness if left separated from our bodies, there must be a resurrection of the body. The state of blessedness must encompass our compositeness for it is only in the composite that the subsistent individual exists and has its existence.

Because our physical eyes will not be able to see the Divine Essence along with our intellect, they must do so through His created likenesses. Thus, the whole cosmos must be renewed in such a way that “proofs” of God are immediately apparent in His creatures such that the entirety of the human being can participate in seeing the Divine Essence. In fact, by seeing proofs of God immediately in the physicality of the created order, God’s glory is manifested all the more precisely because man is the only creature able to do so. No other created intellect can see how a creature is a likeness to God in that creature’s very physicality. “At that time, together with the human race, the universe itself, which is so closely related to man and which attains its destiny through man, will be perfectly re-established in Christ.”8

Why cannot man’s need to see God through His creatures be satisfied, as Aquinas holds, by our resurrected bodies and the planets alone? There are two reasons. First, each material creature manifests the Godhead in a unique way. All material creatures form a hierarchy ordered by Providence. That of the Divine Intellect which we can see in the willow tree is different from that which we see in the ant. Likewise, this ordered hierarchy as a whole speaks of its Creator. So, if man is to see every possible participation in Being through his physical eyes, all material natures which Being deemed proper to create must be renewed with man.

Second, each material nature cannot achieve its end until man reaches his state of blessedness where he can see clearly in them their Creator. God created the material order that His glory might be made manifest therein. All created natures are an analog of that from which they receive their being and thereby proclaim His goodness in their existence. This can only be fully realized in man because man is the only physical creature who possesses the means of seeing the Creator in His creatures.

Material natures can only attain their end at the end of time because the human intellect is hindered from seeing God clearly in His creation until man himself is perfected in Christ. Thus, each particular material nature, both the oak tree and the hound, can only fulfill that for which it was made when man attains the beatific vision. “We know that the whole creation has been groaning with labor pains together until now.”9 For “creation was subjected to futility” while man labored under sin, but in the new earth “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.”10 Only in the new earth can the material world fulfill that for which it was made, for only there will material creatures be renewed so that they may immediately manifest the glory of God and man, by seeing God directly, clearly see Him in His creatures.

Leave a comment

Share

Recognizing the significance of the number eight as the perfection of perfection, it was fitting that, on the eighth day of December in the eighth year of his Pontificate, Pius IX sought to honour God Who Is beyond words by solemnly defining the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in an Apostolic Constitution titled Ineffabilis Deus.1 He recognized the dogma as follows:

We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.2

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is a revelation, Pius tells us, that, saving God Himself, “one cannot even imagine anything greater.”3 It is no accident that you hear echoes of St. Anselm (if you do). Copying and pasting from his Proslogion, Anselm said of the Virgin that she had “a purity greater than which another under God cannot be conceived.”4 Starting from Anselm’s role in the drama leading to the definition of the doctrine we celebrate today, I’d like to highlight a few features of that drama that speak, ever so faintly, of the unspeakable.

Anselm’s influence enters the scene through the mediation of Blessed John Duns Scotus. It was partly on the basis of Anselm’s formulation that Scotus later provided a defense of the Immaculate Conception that in turn, Pope Benedict XVI tells us, informed the solemn definition of the doctrine.5 For, Scotus reasoned, the purity than which a greater cannot be conceived is freedom from all stain of sin.6 It might sound strange to some, after hearing that the voice of Anselm, mediated by Scotus, echoes in the Pope’s solemn definition of the doctrine, to then hear that Anselm himself denied the Immaculate Conception. Yet, it is precisely this incongruity that begins to hint at the ways of the Almighty.

For Anselm was hardly the only Doctor of the Church whose opinions Scotus had to oppose while simultaneously drawing from that doctor’s wisdom the logic of divine action. No less a Doctor than St. Bernard of Clairvaux, known as he was for his beautiful sermons on the glories of the Virgin Mother of God, he was long cited as an authority against those who celebrated and defended the Immaculate Conception. When Scotus came to the impassioned defense of the doctrine,  he could hardly bear to reject Bernard’s authority except by the authority of Bernard’s ghost who was rumored to have appeared in a dream and shown a single stain on his garment that was his denial of the Virgin’s great honour.7

Subscribe now

Other Doctors arrayed against Scotus included St. Albert the Great, St Thomas, and St. Bonaventure and, by some construals, St. Augustine. In fact, Scotus could be said to have stood against the whole weight of Christendom’s Intelligentsia on the side of the unlearned masses of faithful who clung piously to the celebration of the Immaculate Conception.8 It has even been conjectured that Scotus’s move from Paris, the center of learning, to the relative obscurity of Cologne was in some way to punish or protect him on account of his controversial stand.9

Even today, it is remarkable to consider this poor Franciscan, neither a declared saint nor Doctor of the Church, mocked by a history that has given his name to the “dunce cap,” untangling the complex web of scientific and logical arguments that caused an era’s greatest and holiest minds to withhold a title of honour from their most beloved Mother. And yet, he did. With all the power of his subtlety and simple faith, by the inspiration of the Spirit, he gave to reason a path by which it could participate in the knowledge of the heart.

When he did so, Scotus revealed what was already latent in his forebears, some of whom  would have called him “heretic” (Albert) and others “reckless” (Bonaventure). Yet, when he revealed what was already latent in their thought, he did so with great charity, submitting his intellect and will to the authority of the Church, and even providing arguments by which his opponents could reasonably hold their opinions, though not, as Scotus argued, fittingly.10 In this, he was perhaps even uncharacteristically meek and one imagines him, as in one famous depiction, kneeling overawed at the mystery of a Father’s benevolent favor and mercy.

In the unfolding of this drama, the Lord pleased Himself who once said: “I thank Thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to little ones” (Mt: 11,25).

Dignare me laudare te, Virgo sacrata. Da mihi virtutem contra hostes tuos.

N.B. In all this I have left out Scotus’s actual arguments which can be profitably learned from Alan Wolter’s essay cited below. I have also left out of account the role of the apparitions to St. Bernadette Soubirous who was undoubtedly one of the Lord’s little ones.

Leave a comment

Share

While my fellow writers Peter and John wrote about how we come to know the natural law and how we come to know God, respectively, allow me to address what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls the “epistemological crisis” in relation to the exponential advances in media technology. That is, how does the medium by which we come to know affect our knowledge?

MacIntyre believes that we navigate through the haphazardness of life by means of narratives or “schemata,” which he loosely defines as, “generalizations which…enable us to make reasonably reliable predications about…future behaviour.”^[1] 1In other words, each of us lives by a construct, a set of principles about the world, through which we interpret our experiences, which further dictates how each of us responds in any given circumstance. (Naturally, it can be argued, some constructs are truer to reality than others.) In our current, globalized world, most of us engage with several of the competing grand narratives about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of life.

What role, then, does media technology play in relation to the epistemological process? At both the personal and communal level, it extends our epistemological self-consciousness into the world web and opens us to a floodgate of virtually represented (and misrepresented) schemata. Best known for his pithy phrase, “The medium is the message,” the Canadian philosopher Marshal McLuhan believed that all media—from books to radio to TikTok videos—are an extension of man’s physical and cognitive capabilities. Likewise, anything that extends these capabilities could be considered media (so the concept extends beyond simply news and social media). For the sake of argument, suppose that this is true. McLuhan argues in Understanding Media: The Extension of Man that the medium of writing, for example, is an extension of human thought across space and time; the TV is an extension of our eyesight, permitting us to view things across the world, albeit from a very limited and controlled perspective; the electronic age (e.g., the internet) is the extension of the central nervous system, and therefore, I would add, of human consciousness.

Extending our capabilities into the universe is a good thing, but the unintended consequences must also be considered. This of course is difficult since unintended consequences tend to be unforeseeable, but that should not stop us from making prognoses based on the symptoms that have already surfaced. It is clear to see that the invention and prevalent use of the smartphone, for example, has sabotaged fundamental areas of human society; we are now beginning to reap the unintended consequences that were hitherto unforeseen, such as dopamine overdosage and the dissolution of real human relationships leading to a major uptick in mental health crises among younger generations. The current state of media provokes and prolongs a sort of epistemological paralysis whereby we doom scroll social media and the news and then feel subsequently possessed to throw our phone across the room and raise our hands exclaiming “Whom now to believe?” We are flooded by propaganda from multiplying but notional narratives. This predicament has bred a generation of skeptics edging towards nihilism.

Subscribe now

But while we may engage with each narrative in a notional sense, grasping it apprehensively at the rational level, we must actually live by one if, as MacIntyre believes, we are to live some semblance of a life at all. Allow me to clarify what I mean by “notional,” for which I will briefly turn to St. John Henry Newman in doing so. In his work A Grammar of Assent, Newman distinguishes two distinct forms of assent — “notional” assent and “real” assent. Before we assent to a proposition, however, we must first apprehend it. “By our apprehension of propositions,” writes Newman, “I mean our imposition of a sense on the terms of which they are composed.” In other words, how do we define our terms (e.g., what is our concept of “man,” of “faith,” or “binnacle”)?  Sometimes these terms, Newman writes, “stand for certain ideas existing in our own minds…sometimes for things simply external to us, brought home to us through the experiences and informations we have of them.” All things external to us are unit and individual, Newman asserts, yet the mind not only apprehends those unit realities but, by a gift of the human intellect, also has the power to create abstractions—generalizations based on real, individual things. Those things that are external to us are real, while the abstractions in our minds are notional. When we assent to propositions based on real things, we give real assent; when we assent to propositions based on merely notional things, which may be derived from real things, we likewise give notional assent.

Real assent carries much greater force, Newman argues, and it leaves a deeper impression in our mind. However, when it comes to the ever-expanding technological realm, that is, as the layers of media increase, we are left with only notional things, and notional things—ideas, complex languages, mere digital images on our screens—are much more vulnerable to manipulation and corruption.

The epistemological crisis occurs, then, when the present schemata that we engage with notionally begin to corrupt, when our trust in how and what we know begins breaking, and we are faced with competing narratives that appear mutually incompatible. Turning to Shakespeare, MacIntyre upholds Hamlet as the paradigm of the human agent embroiled in the epistemological crisis. As we see in the play, Hamlet arrives back from Wittenberg with his means of interpreting events jeopardized by competing schemata and he is thrown into a loop, whereby he faces the following predicament:

“There is the revenge schema of the Norse sagas; there is the renaissance courtier's schema; there is a Machiavellian schema about competition for power. But he not only has the problem of which schema to apply; he also has the other…problem: whom now to believe? His mother? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? His father's ghost? Until he has adopted some schema he does not know what to treat as evidence; until he knows what to treat as evidence he cannot tell which schema to adopt. Trapped in this epistemological circularity the general form of his problem is: 'what is going on here?’”

Whom now to believe? This question introduces the heart of the matter, for MacIntyre believes that the epistemological crisis is, at root, “always a crisis in human relationship.” After all, constructing schemata must be a shared endeavor if one is to live in any human relationship or society. Think of the simple example of when one, as a child, first discovered one’s parents weren’t right about everything. To resolve the crisis, one must construct or adopt a new a narrative that makes sense of the present anomaly, and which also enables one to understand how one could have held and been misled by one’s previous beliefs. “The agent,” says MacIntyre, “has come to understand how the criteria of truth and understanding must be reformulated.” One becomes “epistemologically self-conscious,” which naturally leads to doubt.

To resolve the epistemological crisis, one must return to the primacy of the real—to the singular, the limited, and the concrete—to see which of one’s abstracted schemata remains in the least conflict with it. The expansion of our consciousness through media, however, threatens to make our return to the real increasingly difficult, because while we may get outside and physically “touch grass,” as the contemporary idiom goes, our mind tends to remain stuck in the rut of notional things. By rapid media expansion, we stretch the distinct but corresponding relationship between the notional and the real. This stretching further exacerbates a sort of dualism between the two in which the former dominates because that is where we increasingly spend our time. This epistemological dualism not only complicates the question of how we come to know, but it also raises serious questions about who we are. It would be best not to leave the latter to the prerogative of the notional realm alone.

Subscribe now

The concept of reformed epistemology is that our innate knowledge of God can be a proof that God exists without further argumentation. One of the clearer explanations I have found comes from Dr. Tyler McNabb, a professor of philosophy and an evangelist, in an interview with Word On Fire: “reformed epistemology is the thesis that religious belief can be justified or warranted apart from argumentation.”1 I like to think of this thesis as follows: if we were to put ourselves in a vacuum, without any other influences, theories, proofs, opinions etc., we would still know ourselves to be a created creature. This thesis was developed chiefly by Dr. Alvin Platinga, philosopher and professor emeritus of The University of Notre Dame. Platinga was motivated to show that “belief in God can be rational without requiring arguments or evidence” and claimed “that it is difficult to prove that belief in God is irrational and [that it is] possible to suggest ways in which belief meets the requirement of rationality.”2 The thesis was inspired in part by thinkers like John Calvin and others, hence the nomenclature “reformed.”

Platinga is fighting an epistemological battle that is very narrowly defined. In one of his texts, Platinga clarifies what he is not arguing against, namely what he calls de facto objections. These are “objections to the truth of Christian belief.”3 He says the most prominent objection goes as follows: “according to Christian belief, we human beings have been created by an all-powerful, all-knowing God who loves us enough to send his Son, the second person of the divine Trinity, to suffer and die on our account; but given the devastating amount and variety of human suffering and evil in our sad world, this simply can’t be true.”4 He goes on to say that we also encounter these objections to many other core tenets of our faith, such as the incarnation, the Trinity, Marian theology and so forth. Where Platinga actually focuses his efforts in the epistemological battle is on de jure objections. Platinga says de jure objections are much more prevalent. “These are arguments or claims to the effect that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable,…, or without sufficient evidence, or in some other way rationally unacceptable, not up to snuff from an intellectual point of view.”5 These objections to the Christian faith are easily recognized in the talking points of modern atheists, agnostics, secularists, and others. It is the assertion, not that our moral viewpoint of a subject is incorrect, but that the moral system itself is irrational.

Platinga recognizes that de jure objections are not only more prevalent, but that they are less straightforward than de facto arguments. He states, “The conclusion of such an objection will be that there is something wrong with Christian belief—something other than falsehood—or else something wrong with the x Christian believer: [they are] unjustified, or irrational, or rationally unacceptable, in some way wanting. But what way, exactly? …This is ordinarily not made clear.”6 Platinga’s focus is to find a real de jure objection, one that specifically objects to Christian belief and can be treated as distinct from de facto objections. This takes Platinga on a journey from Kant to Nietzsche to Locke to Freud to Marx and others to find a real de jure objection and combat it.

To take on de jure objections, Platinga wants to show that belief can be accepted as knowledge and that the belief should then be considered as rational and justified. Platinga sees ‘warrant’ as the necessary bridge between belief and knowledge. In Warrant and Proper Function Platinga states this in regards to warrant and belief:

[A] belief has warrant for me only if (1) it has been produced in me by cognitive faculties that are working properly (functioning as they ought to, subject to no cognitive dysfunction) in a cognitive environment that is appropriate for my kinds of cognitive faculties, (2) the segment of the design plan governing the production of that belief is aimed at the production of true beliefs, and (3) there is a high statistical probability that a belief produced under those conditions will be true.7

This explanation provides more insight into Platinga’s conception especially warrant’s relation to proper functionalism.8 And I think it is suitable to say that if a belief is warranted, it is justified, at least in the scope of this essay on Plantinga's thought. Platinga sees the question of justification as more easily addressed, in that one can still be mistaken, while being justified, so it is unreasonable to think that belief overall is unjustifiable. 

He asserts that the real de jure objection is more closely related to the question of whether belief is rational. To jump ahead, Platinga does not ultimately think the real de jure objection lies in rationality. This is for a few reasons. First, he says that the rationality of a belief must be based on the aims and goals of a person forming a belief. If a person forms a belief with the goal of psychological comfort (as opposed to the goal of knowing a truth) surely that belief would be irrational. However, since our Christian beliefs do not have such aims, and our beliefs do not bring so readily “psychological comfort”, our aims and goals are likely pure, and so rational.9 Second, Plantinga says the question of rationality asks what a person with a properly functioning reason would do in a set of circumstances. But when we extend this conception to the idea of forming beliefs it leaves the realm of practical rationality and the question is then whether it is “sensible” to have a belief. Ultimately, Platinga does not think the de jure objection lies solely in the question of rationality.

Platinga believed the most formidable de jure objections stem from the thought of Freud and Marx. 

 [Freud’s and Marx’s] complaint is really the claim that Christian and other theistic belief is irrational in the sense that it originates in cognitive malfunction (Marx) or in cognitive proper function that is aimed at something other than the truth (Freud)—comfort, perhaps, or the ability to soldier on in this appalling world in which we find ourselves. … To put it in still another way, the charge is that theistic and Christian belief lacks warrant.10 

With the F&M complaint in mind, Platinga is ready to provide his model for the way that theistic belief could have warrant. It brings together an unlikely pairing - Aquinas and Calvin - which Platinga names the A/C Model. Platinga begins with Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. Calvin describes this concept in his Institutes, “There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy… Men of sound judgment will always be sure that a sense of divinity which can never be effaced is engraved upon men’s minds.”11 Platinga states that beliefs about God well up within us from a variety of circumstances and that these beliefs are natural and innate. Of course, it is not enough to say that the sensus divinitatis or our belief simply wells up within us, as if from nowhere. He describes our belief as being triggered by our perception and ingestion of the world and our experience - from grandeur and majesty - but also in danger when we feel a desire for God. And although this belief is described as innate, he compares it to “the capacity for arithmetical knowledge” which is available to us from a very young age, but requires maturity.12 Aquinas would describe it as a “natural knowledge of God.”

In his outline for the A/C Model, Platinga identifies a few key features of his model, there are more to be explored but I’ll focus on the most prescient.13 The first is “basicality,” meaning that ‘natural knowledge of God’ does not need “inference or argument", but is arrived at much more immediately, like an a priori belief. To explain, Platinga provides a quick example of his backyard experience. His knowledge that his lilies are in bloom is not the result of a complicated set of circumstances that require him to infer based on all available evidence that his lilies are indeed in bloom, but rather his perception and prior experience immediately allow him to know it, without inference. 

The second is “proper basicality with respect to justification.” Platinga calls a belief basic in that one does need to accept it based on other propositions but can hold that belief on its own. The Christian belief can be held as such, so one can be justified in holding the belief in that way. This feature counters the idea that it would be “epistemically irresponsible” to believe in God, aka philosophically illogical. 

The third is related, “proper basicality with respect to warrant.” As likely the most important feature of his model, Platinga connects here that a belief produced from the sensus divinitatis should be considered knowledge. This is because beliefs produced by the sensus divinitatis “are not evidentially based on other beliefs”. (see feature 1) Plantinga states, “On this model, our cognitive faculties have been designed and created by God; the design plan, therefore, is a design plan in the literal and paradigmatic sense. It is a blueprint or plan for our ways of functioning, and it has been developed and instituted by a conscious, intelligent agent.”14 It is clear then that the purpose of the sensus divinitatis is to enable us to have true beliefs about God, and that if these beliefs are produced in the context of a properly functioning reason, with proper aims, these beliefs have warrant (they are rational and justified). Our experience is that the beliefs produced are indeed true, and that as an a priori belief it can be accepted alone, and it can be accepted as knowledge.

Platinga’s A/C Model demonstrates that our belief can be considered as knowledge, allowing us to hold fast to the truth that our belief has warrant and we do not need to feel defenseless against de jure objections that come at us from every angle - which deem the faith irrational or unjustifiable. Platinga’s conception of warrant gives a powerful grounding for Christian apologetics. It enables one to begin a faith journey with the basic human experience and bring that into a context of warranted belief. It also provides a beautiful context to our belief that those who never know Christ, meaning they have never had the Gospel shared with them, have a path to not only theistic belief, but knowledge of God and eventual communion with Him. 

We must continually build up arguments, as Platinga does, to show that Christian belief is warranted. For me, the light rain pattering my windshield, the first fall leaves meandering to the ground, and the light mist hanging on the blue ridges is not just my yearning for comfort in a cruel world. This wonder is the trigger of a sensus divinitatis, a knowledge that there is a God and in the beauty of our faith, the knowledge that he loves us and yearns for us to be joined with him. For “God has put eternity into the mind of man.”

By way of background, St. Thomas Aquinas means by “natural law” the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law, which is the divine Word. Spelling this out a bit more, I understand the “natural law” to refer to that Order which God establishes and maintains within the intellects of His rational creatures, and which Order maximally fulfils those creatures, insofar as they participate in it, as exemplified perfectly by the person of God the Word.

Now this is a concept that is cosmic in scope, so the question I have taken on is certainly challenging: how do we know this Order, this natural law? Tautologically, Christians say that it is written on every human heart. While this is an evocative description, that is just another way of saying that this law is “natural” to us, so something more robust is needed. To truly understand the way in which we know the natural law, I would like to look at complementary accounts given by two great thinkers: 1) Aristotle, whose epistemology emphasizes how knowledge comes from sense experience, and 2) Aquinas, who argues that the first principles of the natural law are self-evident. After this examination, I would like to propose an additional piece of this overall account to fill in an experiential gap that I believe needs explanation.

Share

To begin with the Aristotelian account, when faced with the question of knowledge of moral maxims, the primary argument for the proposition “you should not lie,” for example, would compare the experiences of lying and not lying in similar circumstances and abstract the general rule. Knowledge of the maxim would arise from the observation that one approach tends to lead to a net gain in the long term, while the other produces a favorable result in the immediate aftermath, yet tends to quickly cause compounding problems and an overall less favorable result in the long term. This account seems to back us into consequentialism, and while consequentialism pursued with an honest and experienced view toward the long term usually yields the right result, we can do better. Aristotle’s account does leave another route open for such an argument which is somewhat more sophisticated. This route is to argue deductively from the definition of the nature of man that some actions fulfill his nature while others contradict it. But despite the logical coherence of an argument, there does seem to be a problem with this account that we will discuss shortly.

Turning now to Aquinas, we see that, whereas Aristotle begins his account with the extremely particular (i.e., raw material phenomena), Aquinas builds from the other direction, starting with the first and most general principles of the natural law. He argues that these first principles are self-evident (a technical term meaning that the proposition is simply the result of the very definitions of the terms it contains). Take, for example, the very first of these most general principles: “good is to be pursued, and evil avoided.” We should understand that “good” refers to all of Being understood as the object of the will, while “evil” refers to a depravation of Being under the same perspective. It follows by definition (even self-evidently) that good is to be pursued and evil avoided. In this way, Thomas establishes how we know the first principles of the natural law; they are evident and directly knowable in themselves.

Having touched briefly on these two accounts, I’d like to reintroduce the question I began with: What about moral knowledge in between the abstract, self-evident level, and the low-level sense experience which Aristotle begins with? This middle level of abstraction where the first principles meet the particularities of experience, accounts for the bulk of our moral framework, since it is the level which most forcefully drives our deliberations; examples of moral maxims of this level would include the Ten Commandments, and other partially abstracted rules of thumb such as “do not be cruel or vindictive to those under your control.” Yet, both of the accounts examined thus far are primarily concerned with the peripheries of the moral framework, and leave much unsaid regarding how the bulk of the moral code is to be derived.

So, we often hear from modern moralists that the way this happens is that the abstract principles, such as “it is good and necessary for people to live in society with one another” meets a particular experience, such as “the neighbors ostracized that guy who took their stuff,” and then the resulting moral maxim “thou shalt not steal,” follows naturally. In this account, the maxim is the result of a feedback loop within that society which rejects those members who steal, rather than the result of moral reasoning, and the start of that loop is actually an arbitrary decision; after all, why could a society not exist with a different standard regarding the behavior in question? Even further, the relativist would claim that the major premise in this moral proposition (i.e. the premise that it is good for man to live in society) is also merely the result of social habituation. How, then, can we avoid the pitfall of relativism?

It has been argued convincingly that moral maxims such as the Ten Commandments are deducible from the self-evident first principles of the natural law, but experientially, we seem to grasp these maxims more immediately. We feel the force of them intuitively and directly, not as we might grasp the conclusions of complex strings of logical propositions, whether starting from man’s nature or a self-evident metaphysical proposition. I believe it is because of this that the social habituation explanation leading to relativism has gained significant adherence.

But, perhaps there is another explanation for the manner in which we know moral truths which can account for the immediate experience we have of conscience, yet stands up to the claims of the relativist. This is an area where I believe Christians have a unique advantage. To see this advantage, let us return to our definition of the natural law, which, again, is not just comprised of the highly abstract first principles we discussed above, but includes all of these mid-level moral maxims. The natural law is defined as the rational creature’s participation in that eternal Order which God in His providence infuses into all creation. This Order, which is also called the Eternal Law, translates to the Greek “λογος” or “logos.” And it is in relationship to the Logos Himself, Christ Jesus, that Christians are at an apparent advantage. First, we see in Christ Jesus the incarnation of the Eternal Law as a man, and so Christ in his very person, as He says, is the fulfillment of the law, both the divine and the natural, and He provides a perfect model for us to participate in Him. Second, we have a sacramental union with Him, and participate in His mystical body, the Church. In light of this, it should be no wonder that Christians who participate in the sacraments would have this kind of immediate sense knowledge of even the secondary and lower-level aspects of the natural law; the knowledge is still abstracted from sense experience as Aristotle would demand, but the sense experience itself is augmented, since it is of an efficacious sign, a sacrament, through which we directly perceive that which we would otherwise need to abstract by ourselves.

Leave a comment

Without the sacramental union to the person of Christ, we are left in the darkness, with only a fragmentary grasp of these principles, which comes only from immediate, yet unmoored experience of seemingly arbitrary self-perpetuating social norms. And while the first principles are still evident in themselves, our inability to apply them to circumstances inevitably clouds even these most foundational moral concepts. So, in what manner do we know and experience the natural law? Not in the manner that we know propositions, but in the manner that we know and experience a person, namely the person of the Word. And the way in which the moral order is inscribed on our hearts is the way that the love of Him is so inscribed.

Subscribe now

“‘I know my own and my own know me’ (John 10:14).  This is the essence of a relationship with Christ. This is knowledge in the sense of the "covenant relationship". In the Biblical sense "knowledge" is not simply the conclusion of an intellectual process, but it is the fruit of an experience, a personal encounter.” [Agape Bible Study]

Thank you for reading The Broken Binnacle! Please share this post with a friend, and leave a comment to let us know how we are doing.

Share

Both before and during his political ascent, it was the subject of religious liberty that most roused Madison as a young, quiet Virginian. In April 1776, at the age of twenty-five, Madison was chosen as one of two delegates to represent Orange County for the third Virginia Convention. As a junior delegate, Madison chose to first observe the Convention from the sidelines. As the author Noah Feldman writes, however, “there was one issue that motivated Madison to action, and on which he believed he had developed sufficient expertise to intervene. The issue was religious liberty, his central preoccupation even before the Revolution had really begun.”1 Not only would he intervene in this case but would also leave a lasting mark on the earliest formulations of religious liberty developing among the uniting American states’ governments. While he would help set the ground for one of the most robust conceptions of religious freedom in political history, we are now witnessing ongoing challenges to its meaning in the life of American society.

Prior to 1776, the Church of England was the established religion of the colony of Virginia despite the variety of Christian denomination throughout the colonies. But this would soon change. In June 1776, the Virginia Constitutional Convention adopted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, in which Article XVI declared the following:

“That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion [emphasis added], according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practise Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

The emphasized section of the quote is to highlight that Madison’s first public act as an elected member of a governing body pertained to the freedom of religion. The original draft of the Article, written by George Mason, had previously read “all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion,” but Madison, with his strong preclusion against established religious majorities (and their inevitable tendency to become oppressive), had left the sidelines to make a seminal play on the legislative field. Deeply influenced by the political philosophy of John Locke and his notion of religious tolerance, Madison knew that more was needed if religious liberty was to be immunized against any form of government meddling. By using the words “equally entitled to the free exercise of religion,” Virginia was emphasizing that not only would it tolerate religious minorities (seeing them as an evil to suffer) but that each man’s full and free exercise was a positive good aligned with the nature of free will and the liberty of conscience. Madison’s subtle tweak to Article XVI of the Virginia Declaration of Rights was only his first step. Shortly after this success, one of the greatest challenges to his defense of religious liberty would rise to test him.

In 1784, Patrick Henry proposed the General Assessment bill, also known as the “Bill establishing a provision for the Teachers of the Christian Religion.” In the wake of 1776, the Church of England in America had renamed itself the Episcopal Church, but it was no longer receiving financial support through Britain, and neither would it receive support from the new government of Virginia. “With the church’s tax base removed,” writes Feldman, “ministers were no longer able to collect their salaries from the government, but had to rely on voluntary contributions from church members.” Softened after decades of support by the British crown, the Episcopal clergy developed and proposed the General Assessment bill, which, if passed, would require each citizen to pay a fee to the Christian denomination of his choice.

Those who supported the assessment presumed that, if forced to make the decision, enough Virginians would support the Episcopal church by matter of habit. Madison was opposed to the assessment even though his own church would have benefitted from it, and he believed it would not gain the support needed to pass. He was wrong; the assessment began to gain support throughout the rest of that year. Stirred to action, Madison gave an address to the Virginia delegates on Christmas Eve, 1784. He warned in his remarks that it was dangerous for the law to refer to Christianity explicitly for then it would have to define what exactly counted as Christian. In other words, the government would become the arbiter of what was “orthodoxy” and what was “heresy.” Each denomination was free to adjudicate whether another Christian sect was orthodox or heretical, but that the Virginia legislature should have the authority to enforce such claims was opposed to the principles of the American Revolution.2

Madison’s address was enough to convince the delegates to delay the bill for another year. In the meantime, it would be printed and distributed for the people of Virginia to consider.3 During this time, Madison would draft one of the most influential writings on religious liberty in the United States. Titled “Memorial and Remonstrance,” it was an anonymous petition addressed to the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia on behalf of those who dissented against the bill. Madison laid out fifteen separate points in the petition against the bill and offered compelling and varied arguments based on logical reasoning, historical examples, and jurisprudence.

Subscribe now

By the time the petition reached the Virginia legislature in December 1785, it came in the form of thirteen copies bearing the signatures of 1,552 citizens. Two other petitions against the bill by the Presbyterian and Baptist communities of Virginia also arrived, together bearing a total of 15, 828 signatures; the bill was struck down soon after. While these other petitions amassed a larger number of signatures, neither of them matched Madison’s in its cogent articulation or compelling argumentation. Madison’s crucial role in defeating the bill lay primarily in his strategy. According to Feldman, he established the terms of the debate by projecting them into a realm beyond partisan politics:

“Madison had transformed the conflict from a struggle between religious minorities and the majority into a general debate over the nature of religious liberty. The arguments he made were clear, compelling—and universal. They applied to all Virginians, not just the religious dissenters. As a result, Madison’s contribution to the debate was definitive. The Memorial and Remonstrance has been read and analyzed far beyond its original context, precisely because it is based on principles that are presented as accessible to anyone, regardless of religious belief or affiliation.”4

This definitive defense of religious liberty illustrated Madison’s commitment to forming a government that would act not as a conduit for partisan advantage but would instead provide a level field for partisan compromise. Understanding the arguments propounded in the Memorial and Remonstrance petition is essential for anyone who wants to understand Madison’s notion of religious liberty. The principles that Madison articulated in the petition were, furthermore, foundational for religious liberty not only in Virginia but also in the American republic that was forming.

The society that undergirded this forming republic was quite different than the one that we find ourselves today, however, and so I think it is helpful to raise a few problems that American religious liberty faces in our own time. The first is that Madison and the other Founding Fathers presupposed an American government based on a primarily Christian nation—that is, a society which was at least clearly aligned with the moral principles of Christianity. It can be argued that our American concept of religious freedom, then, could only have culminated in the way that it did because of Christianity.

Stemming from Enlightenment theories (rationalism, for example), American society developed the presumption that we could harvest certain fruits of Christianity (“the mutual duty of all to practise Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other,” as Article XVI of the Virginia Declaration of Rights states above) without cultivating the roots, without living the way of Christianity. In other words, Christianity might have been historically foundational in the development of civic virtues and ideals. But now that we had the latter, who needed the former? Other traditional religions had their own virtues of course, but none were as influential in their direct formation of the American ethos as Christianity was. Never would Madison have foreseen today’s influx of antipathy towards the virtues that true religion cultivates within—and demands of—a society.

This raises the question then: what constitutes ‘religion’ within the framework of American religious liberty? More specifically, what constituted religion for Madison? The answer, already given above, is stated rather simply—it is “the duty which we owe to our Creator,” as is written in Article XVI of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. It was this sense of duty to the Creator that led Madison to believe religious liberty was an unalienable right, founded not simply in natural human rights but in responsibility to the divine: “If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered.” 5While this freedom could be abused at the government level, it could also be abused at the individual level. Through the personal dereliction of duty, even if one were free from external coercion (freedom from), one has a duty to fulfill the purpose of such liberty by serving God (freedom for). Liberty is not simply the absence of restraint, but a means of fulfilling our highest duties.

The term religion means “to bind,” which is of course paradoxical when speaking of religious freedom, but the question is not whether we are bound—we must be bound to something—but whether we are bound to what is true and good or bound to what is false and evil. A more comprehensive definition of religion could be stated as such: the virtue that inclines the soul to recognize and observe the duty which we owe to our Creator. The liberty of religion is, therefore, not some distant, abstract entitlement that one claims when one feels that one’s individual opinion is being threatened, but rather the habitual and committed pursuit to honor our Creator in the way that is most proper.

Baked into the definitional question of religion is an additional challenge to American religious liberty, which ultimately boils down to answering the following questions—what is conscience? And what role does it play? Since we lack a definition of the conscience by Madison, this keystone principle of religious freedom is open to various interpretations and guesswork. While brilliant in his exposition and promotion of religious liberty, a deeper examination and definition of conscience by Madison would have been crucial for understanding American religious freedom at an even more fundamental level. Outside of the original Christian context from which the liberty of conscience grew, it is much more stretched and distorted.

It is of course essential that the liberty of conscience be protected, but a deeper understanding of what constitutes conscience is just as, if not more, important. The conscience resides in the individual alone and is something that develops through repeated observation and action (e.g., through religious practice). By itself, however, the conscience would likely remain in an embryonic phase. This process of development does not exist in a vacuum but occurs through the interplay between one’s conscience and an evaluative standard, the concept of which can be either refined or deformed depending on one’s social or religious community.

Shortly before his papacy, Joseph Ratzinger wrote that the “way of conscience is everything except a way of self-sufficient subjectivity: it is a way of obedience to objective truth.”6 Perhaps because of our American obsession with individual rights through the lens of radical autonomy, our society has become infected with this same self-sufficient subjectivity. We appear to treat the conscience in the same way, as a solo endeavor in which the autonomous self becomes the measure of all things, as opposed to becoming measured by some evaluative standard outside of ourselves. Again, when it comes to religion, we must ask: to what am I willing to bind myself? If the answer to this question is simply “me” then perhaps that is just what you will get in the end. That and nothing more.

The liberty of conscience and religious freedom protect the personal rights of each citizen against the threat of tyranny—Madison was aware of this and did much to combat this threat, as I have sought to illustrate—but if these freedoms are to avoid self-consumption, like a snake eating its own tail, then they must ultimately be concerned with ends outside of themselves. They must turn their gaze outwards. As Americans, we must then ask for what ends are we striving? If religious freedom is to fulfill our duty to our Creator, then what does that duty look like? What does it entail? Is religious freedom simply a platonic ideal that we preserve in the marble halls of our bureaucracies? Or is it the opportunity for each man to seek out and fulfill the deepest questions and longings of his soul in a manner that accounts for his freedom? While our leaders would do well to answer these questions themselves, they are questions that must be answered by us at the local levels—among friends, among neighbors, among fellow Americans. Naturally, this is not an easy task in our current political climate, but never has such a task been easy.

Leave a comment

Share

This month, we are focusing on our founding fathers. I would like to draw special attention to one little known, perhaps even forgotten, founder by the name of Gouverneur Morris. Despite his funny sounding name, the impact he had on the constitution and the early development of the United States is profound. He is sometimes called the “penman of the constitution” in contrast to Madison’s moniker, “the father of the constitution,” but this was not for lack of influence. Anyone who has even read just a small selection of Madison’s Notes of the Federal Convention of 1787 will remember the frequency of Gouverneur Morris’s contributions, the respect with which they were met, and the enthusiasm with which he participated in the convention. He was not only the Convention’s most frequent speaker, but also played key roles in seemingly every one of its sub-committees, from the Committee on Style to the Committee of Detail (to which committee many challenges were deferred which threatened to undermine the entire project of the convention, including the challenge of proportional representation, the election of the Executive, and several others). Without overstating his importance, we can acknowledge that the revered preamble to the constitution, the electoral college, the three-fifths compromise, and even the very establishment of a strong federal government over the weak system of confederation that existed prior, are all attributable to Gouverneur Morris in no small degree. But my reasons for focusing on Gouverneur Morris go beyond the desire to appreciate his great contributions to our country’s founding. 

There is a tendency for conservatives today to view the founding as primarily an experiment of Liberalism. Such sentiments seem to have accelerated following the publication of Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen. Citing the clear influences of Hobbes, Locke and the like on our founding principles, many conservatives portray the founding as a test case for Liberal theory; the very use of the term ‘American experiment’ seems to lend itself to such an interpretation; an experiment of what? Clearly of classical Liberal political theory. Combining this position with the thesis of Deneen leads to a startling realization, namely that the American founding was an experiment doomed from the start. Many on the political right seem willing to hold to this conclusion. 

Share

The presence of Gouverneur Morris, however, seems to nuance this picture slightly. Morris was not a Liberal, not even in the classical, philosophical sense that we ascribe to Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson (to various degrees). His speeches in the convention on the proper election of Senators, to take one example, show a severe distrust in the democracy of the common man; he attempts to align the structure of the legislature to be established with that of England, and he reveals a skepticism of the Liberal narrative of how authority comes to be (i.e. through the consent of the people to be governed). 

Morris, a conservative, had great influence in our founding, by directing the conversations of the Committee of the Whole, participating in the Committee of Detail, and even heading the Committee of Style, which gave final wording and editing to the proposed constitution. Perhaps we should pause and consider this prior to writing off the “American experiment” as a failed test of Liberal political theory. I would propose that maybe the American revolution was the result of a Liberal assertion about politics, but that the drafting and adoption of the constitution was a more conservative movement. The failure of the Articles of Confederation was apparent to all, and it seems to have represented an early failure of the particular strain of Liberalism on display in the writings of the American revolutionaries, from Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson. The very early hopes of a Liberal utopia in America after the Revolution were dashed against the rocks of reality, and the response was the proposed constitution, as edited and largely influenced by a conservative. 

Subscribe now

So, what is the constitution conserving? This is my first time asking myself this question, but the founders drafted a plan which in many ways mirrors the structure of the very government they had just overthrown; this seems to be a very conservative reversion, adopted and to some degree proposed by the philosophical adherents to Liberalism. Therefore, the constitution seems to conserve the institutional and juridical advantages of the English system as developed over a millennium, albeit with procedural tweaks to fit the political circumstances of the American founding. Apart from the intense debate and somewhat odd compromise reached on the structure, appointment, etc. of the executive branch (for which they could hardly look to England as a model), the primary development that the constitution brings to the table of political theory seems to be the principle of federalism. But once again, federalism is not a Liberal notion. In fact, Federalism is diametrically opposed to the theory of Hobbes (at the very least) and is really just a method by which the very conservative principle of subsidiarity can be applied to the modern nation-state with its vast geographical and cultural expanses. 

It is no wonder why conservatives have always been supporters of the constitution: it is a deeply conservative document, albeit proposed, administered, and carried out by a predominantly Liberal group of men. But it was proposed and adopted out of the necessity posed by the very collapse of the Articles of Confederation. And we have Gouverneur Morris to thank, in large part, for the conservative reversion that the constitution represents. 

So, how did we arrive at the current situation where many conservatives are ready to philosophically abandon the principles of the American founding? It seems now like our whole system is pervaded by the principles of modern Liberalism. Even the language of the conservatives in power seems to mirror that of liberals, undermining any truly conservative efforts. But that same system’s design, which aligns virtue with virtue, and pits vice against vice, counteracting the corrupting effect of power, and which establishes a very clear basis (i.e. federalism) for the practice of subsidiarity, is a conservative development, in plain contrast with the Liberal notion of government. We are governed by men, not by angels, not even properly speaking by laws. That is why the virtue and vice of those in power is of such importance (and was one of the primary refrains of the constitutional convention). When conservatives say that we are a “nation of laws, not of men,” they are using the language of liberalism.  So again, how did we arrive here? It was not because of systemic or structural inadequacies present since the founding, and not because of latent liberal principles written in invisible ink between the lines of the constitution. Quite simply, it is because “We the People” can adhere to or deviate from laws, and those in power do in fact direct such changes, therefore, the choice is not between being a nation of laws or a nation of men, but rather between being a nation of lawful men or of lawless men. To say this more precisely, and more conservatively, ours will be a nation of virtuous men or of vicious men. 

Thank you for reading! As always, we appreciate and encourage feedback on how we are doing in the comments section. Please do not forget to like this post and, more importantly, share The Broken Binnacle with a friend!

Share The Broken Binnacle