Mind and Not Spirit

In a recent entry on this blog, Thoughts and Actions in Human Morality, I spoke about my decision to write serious books, self-deluded into the belief that agents and editors and publishers were looking for challenging novels. This decision has led to many years of low-income or no-income at all. I’m probably committed to my current path given my age and the economic situation in the United States, but the issue isn’t settled in my imagination. I had this to say about my efforts to resolve myself to my decision:

In my heart of hearts — my spirit, I’m unconvinced of the truth of my own teachings in this matter, but my mind is convinced and my body moves forward by habits formed in deliberate disregard of the immediate consequences. My softer parts, overly self-conscious and overly aware of my self, are being dragged along.

As I was writing this, I remembered a description I’d read of the efforts of St. Thomas Aquinas (and I believe his friend St. Bonaventure) to restore respect for the mind in Christianity. As I recall, some of the radicals of that period (circa 1230) were claiming a Christian preacher didn’t need a well-formed mind; he needed only to be filled with the spirit.

What is this spirit? Enthusiastic it is, so far as I can judge. Conscious of itself for sure and perhaps conscious of God but likely conscious only of some humanly sensed divinity rather than the God who revealed Himself to His prophets and priests and kings. This spirit also pays little attention to human literature or to bodies of scientific learning.

Christianity, more than any other religion, is founded upon reason because the world is being continually shaped to the purposes of the same God who had created the world’s underlying stuff from nothing. The Almighty is telling a story which makes sense both in terms of physical events and moral purpose. Our duty, as the people of God, is to shape our minds to that story God is telling. We must try to understand not only the narrative but also the underlying stuff of our bodies and our food and the sun which warms us.

From Sin to Rights

In the state of nature, where man discovers himself as an individual, he discovers that he is something prior to being a citizen or a Christian, something more fundamental than either. Before his submission to either political or religious law, the individual is a whole, since he has in him the sufficient source of all his actions, de facto as well as de jure. Every man is a whole sufficient unto himself prior to the existence of the law. [The City of Man, Pierre Manent, Translated by Marc A. LePain, Forward by Jean Bethke Elshtain, Princeton University Press, 1998, page 34]

In the context of that quote, Manent was expressing the ideas of modern political philosophers and most certainly not his own ideas. More specifically, Manent is speaking of the “state of nature” as defined by modern political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and also assumed by Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence.

How is it that we got into this situation where the descendants of Christian peoples, Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant, came to believe that they’re individuals of this sort, pre-existing their relationship to a greater human community, political or religious, pre-existing even their relationship to God? How can we believe ourselves to be free-standing in this way, even autonomous agents, when we are taught by the Bible and by Christian tradition that our salvation comes when we are one (in Christ) as Christ and His Father (and Their Spirit) are one? [See John 17:11.] How is it that our efforts to guide and direct our own conversions and those of other human beings seem to accord too well to this assumption that there we’re individuals who choose to center our lives on God, or not, in the same way that we choose a toothpaste?

God Himself is communal. He is not a solitary God, not even the solitary God of Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian who spoke of a solitary God who needed man to have a conversation partner. Father and Son and Holy Spirit have plenty to say to each other and don’t need us. Why did God create and then shape this world? Why did God create man? While we’re told that He loved us before we were even conceived, I think we need to be a bit more humble and not assume that God created us primarily for our own sakes and then to speak as if the Almighty watched helplessly as Adam and Eve fell from grace forcing Him to send His Son to suffer for us. We’re characters in a story being told by God, a story in which the main event is the self-sacrifice of the Son, a self-sacrifice which act of love and submission to His Father. When we consider the absolute centrality of God and of the relationships between Father and Son and Holy Spirit, it would seem we’re driven to the conclusion that we’re the accidental beneficiaries of a drama of love played out primarily between God the Father and God the Son. Moreover, we have to recognize that the all-powerful God is telling the story He planned to tell and not a story which has been changed by acts of Adam and Eve. We have to learn how to read the Bible in light of our basic beliefs about the all-powerful God.

Because of our tendency to read the Bible in strange ways which are in conflict with those basic beliefs about God, because of our decreasing levels of reading and thinking skills as the West continues its 500 year decay, modern Christians have no coherent view of even our physical universe let alone a greater view of Creation in all its phases and in its basic foundational elements. (See From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun for a frighteningly plausible history of the decay of the West in terms of that decay in literacy and see my other blog Acts of Being for discussions of my efforts to produce a coherent Christian view of Creation.)

Christian Misuse of the Concept of ‘Person’

Trinitarian Christians believe this of Jesus Christ: He was the Son of God, true God and true man in one divine Person.

We modern human beings have created a problem I discussed in a longer and more technical posting on my other blog, Speaking Stutteringly About Moral Freedom, Part 2. The term person in traditional Christian thought was defined vaguely but constrained by our need to speak our beliefs about Jesus Christ.

Before we speak of each human being as a person at conception, we Christians should ask ourselves:

Was Jesus of Nazareth a human person at conception?

If we say, “Yes,” we cast into doubt our belief that He was a divine Person. If we say, “No,” while saying all the rest of us are human persons at conception, then we deny that the Lord Jesus Christ is true man. We deny He is truly one of us and we cast into doubt the reality of our salvation.

Some will counter that it’s important to have a way of defining a human person as having from conception a special dignity. Some will say we need a way to speak of human beings as being exceptional, set apart from other species in the animal kingdom. We need to fight all those who would abort babies and would clone human beings. In a simple but accurate sentence:

We need a way to argue against the powerful trend in the modern West to cast aside Christian beliefs and to use defenseless human beings as means to the ends of the powerful.

This is true, but when we speak as if we can demonstrate, or assume, the absolute value of human life within the realm of natural reasoning, we degrade revealed truths into mere products of human natural reasoning. In my various writings, I’ve advocated that we be willing to re-examine many of the speculative beliefs of Christianity (such as the belief that life after death is secured by an immortal soul). We should be willing to creatively analyze modern empirical knowledge by use of disciplined human reasoning.

But there are truths which Christians must defend, even unto martyrdom:

The Almighty is Father and Son and Holy Spirit, three Persons in one God; and

Our Lord Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God, who took up a human nature, becoming true man while remaining true God.

We need a word to mean what person means in the traditional creeds of Christianity. In theory, we could invent a new word to mean what person once meant but it’s more likely that a continued corruption of that so-important word will be a factor in the ongoing erosion of Christian belief even in the minds and hearts of those who pray and attend worship service faithfully. We are all in danger of becoming unitarians of some sort.

I plan to post another short entry soon in which I’ll try to scout a way out of this maze we’ve entered.