Franciscan Penance Library

THE MODERN VIEW OF REALITY

We all know that our society is not very friendly to serious Christian religious belief. But why is it this way? In his Introduction to Christianity, Professor Joseph Ratzinger traces the intellectual ideas and currents which led western society away from being Christian to being “post Christian”. While many of us who are older have witnessed in our own lifetimes drastic changes in our society in the last 50 or 60 years, the roots of these changes go back many centuries.

Many of us, since we were children, asked or were even taught to ask “big questions”. Why is there anything rather than nothing? Why am I here? What is existence? What is being? What is my purpose in life? What is truth? Is the life we experience here and now all there is? Professor Ratzinger summarizes the direction that ancient and medieval thinking took in answering these “big questions”. “For the ancient world and the Middle Ages, being itself is true, in other words, apprehensible, because God, pure intellect, made it, and he made it by thinking it. To the creative original spirit, the Creator Spiritus, thinking and making are one and the same thing. His thinking is a creative process. Things are, because they are thought. In the ancient and medieval view, all being is, therefore, what has been thought, the thought of the absolute spirit. Conversely, this means that since all being is thought, all being is meaningful, logos, truth. It follows from this traditional view that human thinking is the rethinking of being itself, rethinking of the thought that is being itself. Man can rethink the logos, the meaning of being, because his own logos, his own reason, is logos of the one logos, thought of the original thought, of the creative spirit that permeates and governs his being.” 

Thus, all of truth ultimately comes from God. The highest science is the study of being which ultimately means seeking God. In contrast, the works and achievements of man are of a much lower order since they are the works of the created human spirit rather than that of the uncreated “absolute spirit”. While we can certainly study the natural world, the highest science is the study of “being itself”, in other words, God.

In the early modern period, however, there occurred a turn away from this mentality. Professor Ratzinger discusses the ideas of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), whom he believes was the first to specifically formulate this turning away. “Following formally in Aristotle’s footsteps, he asserts that real knowledge is the knowledge of causes. I am familiar with a thing if I know the cause of it; I understand something that has been proved if I know the proof. But from this old thought something completely new is deduced: If part of real knowledge is the knowledge of causes, then we can truly know only what we have made ourselves, for it is only ourselves that we are familiar with. This means that the old equation of truth and being is replaced by the new one of truth and factuality; all that can be known is the factum, that which we have made ourselves. It is not the task of the human mind-nor is it within its capacity-to think about being; rather, it is to think about the factum, what has been made, man’s own particular world, for this is all we can truly understand.”

Here we can see a shift or turning away from the “big questions” and from God and toward the world and ourselves. History and mathematics start to take precedence over the study of ultimate questions. But this was only the first stage. Professor Ratzinger then outlines the next stage which started in the nineteenth century: “The truth with which man is concerned is neither the truth of being, nor even in the last resort that of his accomplished deeds, but the truth of changing the world, molding the world-a truth centered on future and action.” He then goes on to describe the mentality which permeates modern society and affects the thinking of all of us: “So the conviction was bound to spread more and more that in the final analysis all that man could really know was what was repeatable, what he could put before his eyes at any time in an experiment. Everything that he can see only at secondhand remains the past and, whatever proofs may be adduced, is not completely knowable. Thus the scientific method, which consists of a combination of mathematics (Descartes!) and devotion to the facts in the form of the repeatable experiment, appears to be the one real vehicle of reliable certainty. The combination of mathematical thinking and factual thinking has produced the science-oriented intellectual standpoint of modern man, which signifies devotion to reality insofar as it is capable of being shaped.” 

Perhaps we can see an early foreshadowing of this modern mentality when the devil asks Jesus Christ to jump from the top of the Jerusalem temple: Then the devil took him to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” (Mt 4:5-6) The devil is asking Jesus to do a repeatable experiment. Since God has promised in scripture that he will protect the just man (Psalm 91:11-12), the devil challenges Jesus to do an experiment to see if what scripture says is true. This is the essence of the scientific method, which is to test a hypothesis (in this case the promise of God) by experiment to see if it is true. Jesus refuses the challenge: Jesus said to him, “Again, it is written, ‘you shall not tempt the Lord your God.’” (Mt 4:7) Jesus here is quoting Deut 6:16 to show that God is not on the level of reality that we can submit Him to experiments.

Professor Ratzinger points out that there has been a real reversal of priorities here. Previously, the intellect of western humanity was centered on the study of being which led them to God. Now our intellects are centered on ourselves and what we can do to make a better world for ourselves through science and technology. This perhaps explains why politicians and voters are willing to set aside God’s Commandments in government policies since these Commandments come from a previous prescientific time when people had “metaphysical” ideas which are debatable and beyond our comprehension. Of course science and technology began in the west under a Christian worldview and were made possible when the magical ideas of pagan religions were shown to be false. However, the assumption that the only truth is that which can be scientifically studied and experimentally verified has persuaded many to give up the seeking of God. This has created many problems which we are all aware of.

--Jim Nugent, Life Pledged Member of the Confraternity of Penitents