KEEP THINKING!

KEEP THINKING!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 5, 2014

REFERENCE:

Perhaps no surprise to the reader, there have been a number of responses to “Christianity: Between the Old and Test Testament” – from “Search for the Real Parents of My Soul!”

In a previous exchange with this person, I addressed the phenomenon of consciousness, suggesting that two-thirds of our acts are driven by the unconscious, and that while we celebrate our conscious discriminating cognitive mind, we are more inclined to be driven by our emotions or feelings, whatever our discipline, orientation or belief system may be.  

Our rational integrity cannot be assumed to be flawless.

A READER WRITES:

I am sure as we became more conscious, we wondered what it was all about.  When we saw illness, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, we developed fear, and we tried to explain those events to ourselves.  

Thus religions and the revelations from mentally ill people which we also could not explain became the explanation for what was not understood.  I doubt if someone today walked around the country claiming to be the son of god like Jesus or someone claiming an angel had revealed himself to him like Mohammed that too many people would believe in that reality and the person would wind up in a mental hospital and given drugs to relieve the symptoms.  

The fact that religions were created by humans to explain, alleviate fear and control does not justify their existence.  In the past leaches were used by doctors because they did not know any better.  The Buddha was not interested in finding an answer for himself.  

Immediately after he discovered an answer that satisfied him, he had to proselytize, and now it is a religion with temples and rituals.  No different than all the people who raised their arms in salute to Hitler in the rallies he held or the little red book of Mao.  

The motivation to belong and believe is strong.  It would be alright if a person wants to believe something, but it usually does not stop there for some people who have a need or desire to convert.  Until we understand that there is no answer etched into stone will we be able to accept that this is it.  Things happen that make no sense and that is the way it is.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I answered with hastily in our last exchange.  I mentioned Thomas Aquinas and didn’t want to quote him off the top of my head as I wanted to be accurate.

More than a billion Roman Catholics practice essentially his theology today, if not another half of billion Protestants.

Professor Garry Wills, professor emeritus at Northwestern University, and formerly studied for the priesthood, has a singular capacity to write pungently and clearly about such matters as Christianity, essentially from the perspective of Catholicism, which is my orientation.  I have read several books by him, including “Why I am a Catholic,” What Jesus Meant, and What Paul Meant.  

BB and I met Dr. Wills at a lecture in Tampa, and he signed twelve volumes written by him, looking inside the jackets to see if they had been read.  Usually I highlight my books, but with him I only turn the pages over.

He doesn’t just write on Catholicism but on politics, presidents, John Wayne, leadership and such things as the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence, America’s distrust of government, but I think he has a passion for St. Augustine of Hippo who has written at least two books on, one of which I’ve read but no St. Thomas Aquinas.

For me, Aquinas appeals to the head and Augustine to the Heart, I have tried to read his “City of God,” and have read his “Confessions,” and find him to be a most human man.  Were I to write on a saint, and at this late date it is highly unlikely, it would be on Aquinas.   Why?

I can best answer this by reference or should I say two books covering the same topic in which he makes a cameo appearance.  

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND I wrote in 2006, while previously I had written in 2004 NEAR JOURNEY’S END? CAN PLANET EARTH SURVIVE SELF-INDULGENT MAN.?

Content wise, these two books overlapped.  “Nowhere land” originally referred to utopia, and I see much evidence of this kind of self-indulgent mindset with contemporary Western man, thinking no matter how much he fouls up, science will rescue him, no problem!

Near Journey’s End was somewhat ecological, but like all my efforts, while reference was made at some length to ecology of the environment the greater emphasis was on ecology of the mind.  I was influenced by Gregory Bateson’s “Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), but I departed widely from his premise to my own.  

This is taken from NOWHERE MAN:

A French scholar, chronicler of clergyman William of Tyre (c 1130-1186), born in Palestine of French parents, analyzed Genesis from the perspective of natural history and questioned these descriptions in the context of their literal validity.  Tyre wrote a “History of Palestine from 614 to 1184,” which proved valuable to historians of the twelfth century Holy Crusades.

The key issues he addressed would come to question the very foundation of the Catholic Church as it was evident that logic and reason were on the horizon to be applied to Christian faith, questioning the validity of miracles, of the virgin birth of Mary the mother of Jesus, the divinity of Jesus, His death and resurrection, indeed, of the precepts and theology of Roman Catholicism itself..     

Scholars had to be careful to maintain the delicate balance between belief and unbelief, which now called for a new kind of thinking.  Christian faith was on trial.

In the second half of the thirteenth century, the controversy heated up as new views were evolving in the recently established university system throughout Europe.  This was a direct threat to the papacy of the time which enjoyed omniscient authority in matters of faith and morals.  The papacy enjoyed a special allegiance in terms of the pope’s ecclesiastic dictates under the pain of excommunication.

Such separation from the church could be of severe economic consequences as the church control the marketing economy as well as the social stratification.

To state it otherwise, anything remotely related to rational discourse outside the purview of the church was forbidden, although this was becoming increasingly untenable.  Rome was looking for a means out of this apparent impasse, and found it.

Deliverance came in the person of a Dominican intellectual who had studied with the great Albertus Magnus in Paris.  His name was Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). 

Quiet, unassuming, pensive and diligent, he had long had the same concerns as the church’s current critics, addressing these concerns in his opus magnum opus, “Summa Theologiae” (1266-1273), completing it shortly before his death at age, 49.

He argued in this work that philosophy examined the supernatural order in the light of reason, and theology examined the supernatural in the light of revelation.  Although reason was used in theology, revelation did not fall into the province of philosophy.  And philosophy could not contradict theology because truth could not contradict truth.

For Aquinas, then, faith and knowledge are not mutually exclusive.  He claimed belief took over at the point where knowledge ended.  Aquinas summed up his theory with this succinct expression, “To believe is to think with ascent.”

He is generally agreed to be the towering figure in medieval theology.  He is primarily given credit for applying the philosophical principles of Aristotle to Christianity.  The joining of these divergent streams of thought has had a substantial influence on theological and philosophical thinking.  It is worthy of note that Martin Luther, while rejecting the papacy and its excesses, embraced the essence of Aquinas.

With Summa Theologiae, a work in three divisions, God, Man and Christ, Aquinas attempted to summarize human knowledge.  In doing so, he released the full power of the inquisitive mind into secular hands, whereas before it belonged exclusively to the clergy, and bowed to the power of geometry, admitting God could not make the sum of the internal angles of a triangle add up to anything other than a right angle.  In his magnum opus, he defended Christianity in the area of natural theology, have little sense, however, that he had opened Pandora’s Box.

My only reason for sharing this is that good men, questioning men, such as Aquinas, were of a mind not unlike yours.  On the heels of his work, two kinds of knowledge came to dominate, that which related to revelations in the province of theology, and that which dealt with the natural world in the province of reason and philosophy.

Keep thinking.

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PS Who knows, I might publish NOWHERE MAN on Kindle someday.