As Christmas and the holiday season draw near, it is time to take a pause and think deeply about the benefits that Christianity, particularly Catholicism, has conferred upon Western civilization. As a non-Westerner and non-Christian who has no ax to grind in this issue, I believe I can offer a fairly objective assessment of the impact that Christian ideas (some of which had pagan/Jewish precedents) have had on the evolution of Western civilization and their key role in the West’s spectacular ascent to scientific and technological supremacy in the past millennium. This brief essay shall throw light on some of these ideas, which are now taken for granted but are intrinsic to the Christian tradition.

One spurious idea, which continues to have a strong hold on the views of so many, is that Christianity functioned as an impediment to scientific progress and that only when the West threw off the “shackles” of Christian dogma, did it rise to towering heights in science and technology and achieve global preeminence in virtually every intellectual endeavor. In his scathingly anti-Christian book The Antichrist, the famous 19^th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche charges that Christianity is antithetical to science, reason, life, and reality: “A religion such as Christianity which never comes once in touch with reality, and which collapses the very moment reality asserts its rights even on one single point, must naturally be a mortal enemy of the ‘wisdom of this world’—that is to say, science” (51). In his equally critical Letter to a Christian Nation, American philosopher Sam Harris asserts that “the conflict between religion and science is unavoidable. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science” (63).

Both of these views are clearly off the mark. Far from constituting a handicap to scientific activity, Christian presuppositions encouraged exploration of the physical world and aided scientific progress. The Christian conception of God and of His physical creation has proved immensely conducive for the flowering of science. How so? Christianity conceives of God as a rational and benevolent creator who brought into existence a universe endowed with rationality, order, and purpose. God’s handiwork is not dominated by chaos or mystery or randomness, nor is it too complex for human comprehension. Rather, it functions in accord with invariable, consistent, and rational laws that are accessible to the inquiring mind and to observation. Since God created man in His own image, human beings are blessed with the gift of reason and are possessed of the ability to investigate and understand the rational, fixed, and divinely set patterns according to which the universe operates. Indeed, as Dr. Peter Hodgson, the late lecturer of nuclear physics at Oxford and an avowed Roman Catholic, once said, “Christianity provided just those beliefs that are essential for science, and the whole moral climate that encourages its growth” (Young 144).

Hence, it should come as no surprise that some of the greatest scientists in history, including the stars of the Scientific Revolution, were devout Christians, some of whom wrote on theology as well as science. Suffice it to mention medieval theologian-natural philosophers such as Robert Grosseteste (died in 1253), Albertus Magnus (died in 1280), Thomas Bradawrdine (d. 1349), Jean Buridan (1295-1363), Nicole Oresme (1325-1382), as well as Nicolaus Copernicus (died 1543), Johannes Kepler (died in 1630), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Robert Boyle (1627-1691), Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Michael Faraday (1791-1867), Gregor Mendel (died in 1884), and countless others. Max Planck, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1918 for his work on Quantum Theory, believed faith and science were in partnership rather than at loggerheads: “Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against scepticism and against dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and always will be: ‘On to God!’” (156).

Another key Christian idea that facilitated the West’s success is related to the concept of time as linear rather than cyclical; history is suffused with purpose because it moves forward rather than round in circles. Christianity, in other words, is a progressive and forward-leaning religion. Dominican preacher Fra Giordano encapsulated Christian belief in progress when he said in 1306 that “[n]ot all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them [my emphasis]” (Grant’s Foundations of Modern Science 160). Centuries before, St. Augustine celebrated the "wonderful—one might say stupefying—advances human industry made in the arts of weaving and building, of agriculture and navigation!" (117). In light of this belief that great inventions lie ahead, there is no wonder that the medieval Catholic Church did not express any opposition to the use of new technologies such as eyeglasses, mechanical clocks, telescopes, microscopes, and printing press, etc. Christian belief in progress was not confined to technology but extended to theology as well. Augustine was certain that human understanding of God’s will would increase over time, stressing that although there were “certain matters pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp…one day we shall be able to do so” (Stark 9).

In contrast, the ancient Greeks viewed the universe as eternal, uncreated, and “locked into endless cycles of progress and decay” (18). Such a view renders history meaningless; decay or decline is bound to follow progress. Aristotle, indisputably the greatest Greek philosopher, believed that “the same ideas recur to men not once or twice but over and over again” and that everything had “been invented several times over in the course of ages, or rather times without number” (19). In the words of American sociologist Rodney Stark, Aristotle reasoned that ”since he was living in a Golden Age, the levels of technology of his time were at the maximum attainable, precluding further progress. As for inventions, so too for individuals – the same persons would be born again and again as the blind cycles of the universe rolled along” (19). In the same vein, the Stoics thought that the “difference between former and actual existences will only be extrinsic and accidental; such differences do not produce another man as contrasted with his counterpart from a previous world-age” (19).

Christianity has faith in man’s ability not only to unlock the secrets of the universe but also to reach universal moral truths, distinguish between right and wrong, and decipher the hidden meaning of Scripture, unaided by revelation. This remarkable idea looms large in St. Paul’s following assertion: “Even when Gentiles, who do not have God’s written law, instinctively follow what the law says, they show that in their hearts they know right from wrong. They demonstrate that God’s law is written within them, for their own consciences either accuse them or tell them they are doing what is right” (Romans 2:14-15).

The Christian belief in free will has rescued man from sinking into fatalism, encouraged him to be active, and instilled faith in one’s ability to alter his destiny and take matters into his own hands. Augustine affirmed that human beings “possess a will,” adding that “from this it follows that whoever desires to live righteously and honorably, can accomplish this” (Stark 25). Similarly, the great theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) said: “A man can direct and govern his own actions also. Therefore the rational creature participates in the divine providence not only in being governed but also in governing” (25).

A key Christian concept that has figured prominently in Western, rather Eastern, Christendom is the separation of church and state. This separation derives from Jesus’ ingenious reply to the Pharisees: “[G]ive to Caesar what belongs to him. But everything that belongs to God must be given to God” (Matthew 22:21). Christianity views the secular and ecclesiastical authorities as two distinct and independent entities with their own separate jurisdictions. True, medieval popes and emperors often jockeyed for domination, but they recognized that in principle each reigned over separate realms. This distinction between the secular and religious enabled the legislation of both civil and ecclesiastical laws, and more importantly, set the stage for the creation of a free domain in which science could be practiced relatively unhindered by secular or religious constraints. In the words of historian of science Edward Grant, the separation of church and state in the West

“proved an enormous boon to the development of science and natural philosophy. The church did not view natural philosophy as a discipline that had to be theologized or made to agree with the Bible...[the separation of church and state] made numerous institutional developments feasible that might not otherwise have occurred. Indeed, the very separation of natural philosophy into the faculty of arts and the location of theology in a separate faculty of theology reveals an understanding that these are different subject areas that require very different treatment. The great benefit for science and religion is that each was left relatively free to develop independently of the other, although every individual scientist or theologian was free to incorporate ideas and concepts from the one area into the other” (Science and Religion 247-8).

One common misconception is that Christianity is an inherently otherworldly religion that encourages its adherents to turn away from the material world, to renounce worldly possessions, and to give precedence to spiritual pursuits at the expense of worldly concerns. It is grossly simplistic to refer to the monks and their ascetic lives in order to corroborate the fabrication that Christianity is inimical to earthly life and material progress. In addition to prayer, religious contemplation, and of course charity, the monks in the early Middle Ages transcribed the priceless manuscripts of the Greco-Roman legacy, thus saving it from oblivion. Monastic orders in the countryside turned into centers of learning and scholarship, with the monastery of Vivarium (founded by Cassiodorus) translating Greek works into Latin and teaching the seven liberal arts, including a surprisingly large number of pagan texts. From the sixth century onward, the monasteries of Ireland devoted much attention to classical pagan authors and the mathematical arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). Medieval monks also engaged in manual labor and agricultural activity, which had an enormously beneficial impact on their physical surroundings. Moreover, they made stunning technological achievements (in metallurgy) and even invented champagne.

Christianity has contributed a host of other values such as equality and freedom. Certainly, wrongs have historically been committed in the name of the faith, but these should not blind Westerners, irrespective of whether they still believe in the tenets of the faith or not, to the eminently salutary influence Christianity has had on their magnificent civilization.

Works Cited

Grant, Edward. The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

____________. Science and Religion 400 BC- AD 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus. The John Hopkins University Press, 2004. Print.

Harris, Sam. A Letter to a Christian Nation: A Challenge to Faith. Bantam Press, 2007.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Antichrist: A Criticism of Christianity. Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici. 1895. Barnes and Nobles, 2006.

Saint Augustine of Hippo. The Essential Augustine. Edited by Vernon Joseph Bourke., Hackett Publishing Company, 1974.

Stark, Rodney. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. The Random House Publishing Group, 2005.

The Bible. Gift and Award Edition, Tyndale House Publishers, 1998.

Young, John. Teach Yourself: Christianity. Hachette Livre UK, 2008.

C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their colleagues in the Inklings wanted to write fiction that would effectively “evangelize the imagination,” accustoming the minds, especially of young people, to the hearing of the Christian Gospel. Accordingly, Tolkien’s Gandalf is a figure of Jesus the prophet and Lewis’s Aslan a representation of Christ as both sacrificial victim and victorious king. Happily, the film versions of both The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia have proven to be wildly popular all over the world. Not so happily, Joss Whedon’s “Avenger” films, the second of which has just appeared, work as a sort of antidote to Tolkien and Lewis, shaping the imaginations of young people so as to receive a distinctly different message. It is certainly relevant to my purpose here to note that Whedon, the auteur behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and many other well-received films and television programs, is a self-avowed atheist and has, on many occasions, signaled his particular dissatisfaction with the Catholic Church.

I won’t rehearse in too much detail the plot of Avengers: Age of Ultron. Suffice it to say that the world is threatened by an artificial intelligence, by the name of Ultron, who has run amok and incarnated himself in a particularly nasty robotic body. Ultron wants to destroy the human race and has produced an army of robots as his posse. Enter the Avengers—Tony Stark (Iron Man), the Hulk, Black Widow, Captain America, Hawkeye, and Thor—to do battle with the dark forces. There is an awful lot of CGI bumping and banging and blowing things up, but when the rubble settles, we see that the real struggle is over a perfect body—a synthesis of machine and flesh—that Ultron, with the help of brainwashed scientists, is designing for himself. After pursuing the bad guys on a wild ride through the streets of Seoul, the Avengers recover the body, and Thor, using one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe or lightning or something, brings it to life. Exuding light, intelligence, and calmness of spirit, this newly created robot/human/god floats above the ground and announces that his name is “I am.” Just before his climactic battle with Ultron, “I am” declares that order and chaos are two sides of the same coin and that wickedness is never eliminated but keeps coming around in an endless cycle.

Although some have seen Biblical themes at work in all of this, I see pretty much the opposite, namely, an affirmation of a Nietzschean view of life. Whedon, who was a philosophy student at university, delights in dropping references to the great thinkers in his work, and one of the most cited in “Ultron” is none other than the man I take to be the most influential of the 19^th century philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche. At a key moment in the film, Ultron in fact utters Nietzsche’s most famous one-liner: “what does not kill me makes me stronger,” and the observation made by the newly-created “I am” is a neat expression of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return of the same. At the heart of the German philosopher’s work is the declaration of the death of God, which signals that all values are relative, that we live in a space “beyond good and evil.” Into that space, Nietzsche contends, the Ubermensch, the superman, should confidently stride. This is a human being who has thrown off the shackles of religion and conventional morality and is able to exercise fully his Wille zur Macht (Will to Power). Asserting this will, the superman defines himself completely on his own terms, effectively becoming a god. Here we see the significant influence of Nietzsche on Sartre and the other existentialists of the twentieth century.

The Avengers is chock-a-block with Ubermenschen, powerful, willful people who assert themselves through technology and the hyper-violence that that technology makes possible. And the most remarkable instance of this technologically informed self-assertion is the creation of the savior figure, who self-identifies with the very words of Yahweh in the book of Exodus. But he is not the Word become flesh; instead, he is the coming together of flesh and robotics, produced by the flexing of the all too human will to power. I find it fascinating that this pseudo-savior was brought about by players on both sides of the divide, by both Iron Man and Ultron. Like Nietzsche’s superman, he is indeed beyond good and evil—which is precisely why he cannot definitively solve the problems that bedevil the human race and can only glumly predict the eternal return of trouble. If you have any doubts about the Nietzschean intention of Joss Whedon, take a good look at the image that plays as The Avengers comes to a close. It is a neo-classical sculpture of all of the major figures in the film locked in struggle, straining against one another. It is in complete conformity with the aesthetic favored by Albert Speer, Leni Riefenstahl, and the other artists of the Nazi period.

What we can seize upon in this film is the frank assertion that the will to power—even backed up by stunningly sophisticated technology—never finally solves our difficulties, that it, in point of fact, makes things worse. (See the Tower of Babel narrative for the details.)

This admission teases the mind to consider the possibility that the human predicament can be addressed finally only through the invasion of grace.
 
 
(Image credit: HD Wallpapers)

David Bentley Hart is one of our foremost theologian-philosophers, an American intellectual treasure who has ransacked the thesaurus while writing books such as The Beauty of the Infinite, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?, and the recent The Experience of God.

One of the things I enjoy about his writing is how he rightfully gives credit to Nietzsche for recovering the scandalous nature of Christianity. In The Beauty of the Infinite he goes as far as saying:

"Nietzsche has bequeathed Christian thought a most beautiful gift, a needed anamnesis of itself—of its strangeness. His critique is a great camera obscura that brings into vivid and concentrated focus the aesthetic scandal of Christianity’s origins, the great offense this new faith gave the gods of antiquity, and everything about it that pagan wisdom could neither comprehend nor abide: a God who goes about in the dust of exodus for love of a race intransigent in its particularity; who apparels himself in common human nature, in the form of a servant; who brings good news to those who suffer and victory those who are as nothing; who dies like a slave and outcast without resistance; who penetrates to the very depths of hell in pursuit of those he loves; and who persists even after death not as a hero lifted up to Olympian glories, but in the company of peasants, breaking bread with them an offering them the solace of his wounds. In recalling theology to the ungainliness of the gospel, Nietzsche retrieved the gospel from the soporific complacency of modernity (and at a time when modernity had gained a commanding advantage over it) …"

Singing the praises of Nietzsche is one thing. And it is a good thing. Rene Girard does the same in his I See Satan Fall Like Lightening. But there is no need to hearken back to a Golden Age of intellectually respectable atheism as David Bentley Hart does in his latest piece in First Things entitled “Gods and Gopniks.” Here’s what he said:

Which brings me to Adam Gopnik, and specifically his New Yorker article of February 17, ‘Bigger Than Phil’—the immediate occasion of all the rude remarks that went coursing through my mind and spilling out onto the page overhead. Ostensibly a survey of recently published books on (vaguely speaking) theism and atheism, it is actually an almost perfect distillation of everything most depressingly vapid about the cogitatively indolent secularism of late modern society. This is no particular reflection on Gopnik’s intelligence—he is bright enough, surely—but only on that atmosphere of complacent ignorance that seems to be the native element of so many of today’s cultured unbelievers. The article is intellectually trivial, but perhaps culturally portentous.

Stephen Bullivant’s Faith and Unbelief offers a better strategy for Christians who want to engage atheists. He proposes that Christians should seek out the best among them, those who are most open to dialogue. It makes sense to engage the Nietzsches of our age without forgetting that the 19th century had its fair share of Feuerbachs, Renans, and Thomas Huxleys.

To this end, I came up with a list of ten books by ten living atheists who engage religion (mostly) charitably.

It didn’t take me very long. I’m sure you can think of some prominent figures that I’ve omitted. They are listed below along with representative books, and their publisher blurbs.

1. Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe

“Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of ‘frightening’ either the faithful or the agnostics, that the history of Christianity prepared the world for humanism.”

So writes Julia Kristeva in this provocative work, which skillfully upends our entrenched ideas about religion, belief, and the thought and work of a renowned psychoanalyst and critic. With dialogue and essay, Kristeva analyzes our “incredible need to believe”—the inexorable push toward faith that, for Kristeva, lies at the heart of the psyche and the history of society. Examining the lives, theories, and convictions of Saint Teresa of Avila, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Hannah Arendt, John Paul II, and other individuals, she investigates the intersection between the desire for God and the shadowy zone in which belief resides.

2. Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf

The Puppet and the Dwarf offers a close reading of today’s religious constellation from the viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He critically confronts both predominant versions of today’s spirituality—New Age gnosticism and deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism—and then tries to redeem the “materialist” kernel of Christianity. His reading of Christianity is explicitly political, discerning in the Pauline community of believers the first version of a revolutionary collective. Since today even advocates of Enlightenment like Jurgen Habermas acknowledge that a religious vision is needed to ground our ethical and political stance in a “postsecular” age, this book—with a stance that is clearly materialist and at the same time indebted to the core of the Christian legacy—is certain to stir controversy.

3. Jurgen Habermas, An Awareness of What is Missing

In his recent writings on religion and secularization, Habermas has challenged reason to clarify its relation to religious experience and to engage religions in a constructive dialogue. Given the global challenges facing humanity, nothing is more dangerous than the refusal to communicate that we encounter today in different forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism.

In 2007 Habermas conducted a debate, under the title ‘An Awareness of What Is Missing’, with philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. This volume includes Habermas’s essay, the contributions of his interlocutors and Habermas’s reply to them. It will be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand one of the most urgent and intractable issues of our time.

4. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.

Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such.

5. John N. Gray, Heresies Against Progress and Other Illusions

By the author of the best-selling Straw Dogs, this book is a characteristically trenchant and unflinchingly clear-sighted collection of reflections on our contemporary lot. Whether writing about the future of our species on this planet, the folly of our faith in technological progress, or the self-deceptions of the liberal establishment, John Gray dares to be heretical like few other thinkers today.

6. Alain Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism

In this bold and provocative work, French philosopher Alain Badiou proposes a startling reinterpretation of St. Paul. For Badiou, Paul is neither the venerable saint embalmed by Christian tradition, nor the venomous priest execrated by philosophers like Nietzsche. He is instead a profoundly original and still revolutionary thinker whose invention of Christianity weaves truth and subjectivity together in a way that continues to be relevant for us today.

In this work, Badiou argues that Paul delineates a new figure of the subject: The bearer of a universal truth that simultaneously shatters the strictures of Judaic Law and the conventions of the Greek Logos. Badiou shows that the Pauline figure of the subject still harbors a genuinely revolutionary potential today: The subject is that which refuses to submit to the order of the world as we know it and struggles for a new one instead.

7. Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning

Mary Midgley in this book discusses the high spiritual ambitions which tend to gather around the notion of science, and, in particular, some very odd recent expressions of them. When everyone viewed the world as God’s creation, there was no problem about the element of worship involved in studying it, nor about science’s function in mapping people’s lives. But now these things have grown puzzling. Officially, science claims only the modest function of establishing facts. Yet people still hope for something much vaster and grander from it—the myths by which to shape and support life in an increasingly confusing age.

8. Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless

The return to religion has arguably become the dominant theme of contemporary culture. Somehow, the secular age seems to have been replaced by a new era where political action flows directly from theological, indeed cosmic, conflict. The Faith of the Faithless lays out the philosophical and political framework of this idea and seeks to find a way beyond it. Should we defend a version of secularism or quietly accept the slide into theism? Or is there another way?

9. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory

Why has power in the West assumed the form of an “economy,” that is, of a government of men and things? If power is essentially government, why does it need glory, that is, the ceremonial and liturgical apparatus that has always accompanied it?

The greatest novelty to emerge from The Kingdom and the Glory is that modern power is not only government but also glory, and that the ceremonial, liturgical, and acclamatory aspects that we have regarded as vestiges of the past actually constitute the basis of Western power. Through a fascinating analysis of liturgical acclamations and ceremonial symbols of power—the throne, the crown, purple cloth, the Fasces, and more—Agamben develops an original genealogy that illuminates the startling function of consent and of the media in modern democracies. With this book, the work begun with Homo Sacer reaches a decisive point, profoundly challenging and renewing our vision of politics.

10. Michael Ruse, Science and Spirituality

In Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science, Michael Ruse offers a new analysis of the often troubled relationship between science and religion. Arguing against both extremes—in one corner, the New Atheists; in the other, the Creationists and their offspring the Intelligent Designers – he asserts that science is undoubtedly the highest and most fruitful source of human inquiry. Yet, by its very nature and its deep reliance on metaphor, science restricts itself and is unable to answer basic, significant, and potent questions about the meaning of the universe and humankind’s place within it: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the ultimate source and foundation of morality? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the meaning of it all? Ruse shows that one can legitimately be a skeptic about all of these questions, and yet why it is open for a Christian, or member of any faith, to offer answers. Scientists, he concludes, should be proud of their achievements but modest about their scope. Christians should be confident of their mission but respectful of the successes of science.
 
 
Originally posted at Ethika Politika. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Uroboros)

On Friday, Pope Francis released his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, which means “The Light of Faith.” Even though the encyclical is addressed to “the bishops, priests, and deacons, consecrated persons, and the lay faithful,” I hope that non-Christians will read it as well. Why? Because Francis explains in stark terms the differences in how “faith” is understood by believers and non-believers.

He begins by explaining that to Christians, faith is illuminating, and is described by Christ as a light:
 

1. The light of Faith: this is how the Church’s tradition speaks of the great gift brought by Jesus. In John’s Gospel, Christ says of himself: "I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness" (Jn 12:46). Saint Paul uses the same image: "God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts" (2 Cor 4:6).
 
The pagan world, which hungered for light, had seen the growth of the cult of the sun god, Sol Invictus, invoked each day at sunrise. Yet though the sun was born anew each morning, it was clearly incapable of casting its light on all of human existence. The sun does not illumine all reality; its rays cannot penetrate to the shadow of death, the place where men’s eyes are closed to its light. "No one — Saint Justin Martyr writes — has ever been ready to die for his faith in the sun".[1]
 
Conscious of the immense horizon which their faith opened before them, Christians invoked Jesus as the true sun "whose rays bestow life".[2] To Martha, weeping for the death of her brother Lazarus, Jesus said: "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" (Jn 11:40). Those who believe, see; they see with a light that illumines their entire journey, for it comes from the risen Christ, the morning star which never sets.

 
In stark contrast, non-believers tend to envision faith as a “blind leap,” or as a turning-away from the light of reason:
 

2. Yet in speaking of the light of faith, we can almost hear the objections of many of our contemporaries. In modernity, that light might have been considered sufficient for societies of old, but was felt to be of no use for new times, for a humanity come of age, proud of its rationality and anxious to explore the future in novel ways. Faith thus appeared to some as an illusory light, preventing mankind from boldly setting out in quest of knowledge.
 
The young Nietzsche encouraged his sister Elisabeth to take risks, to tread "new paths… with all the uncertainty of one who must find his own way", adding that "this is where humanity’s paths part: if you want peace of soul and happiness, then believe, but if you want to be a follower of truth, then seek".[3] Belief would be incompatible with seeking. From this starting point Nietzsche was to develop his critique of Christianity for diminishing the full meaning of human existence and stripping life of novelty and adventure. Faith would thus be the illusion of light, an illusion which blocks the path of a liberated humanity to its future.

 

3. In the process, faith came to be associated with darkness. There were those who tried to save faith by making room for it alongside the light of reason. Such room would open up wherever the light of reason could not penetrate, wherever certainty was no longer possible. Faith was thus understood either as a leap in the dark, to be taken in the absence of light, driven by blind emotion, or as a subjective light, capable perhaps of warming the heart and bringing personal consolation, but not something which could be proposed to others as an objective and shared light which points the way.
 
Slowly but surely, however, it would become evident that the light of autonomous reason is not enough to illumine the future; ultimately the future remains shadowy and fraught with fear of the unknown. As a result, humanity renounced the search for a great light, Truth itself, in order to be content with smaller lights which illumine the fleeting moment yet prove incapable of showing the way. Yet in the absence of light everything becomes confused; it is impossible to tell good from evil, or the road to our destination from other roads which take us in endless circles, going nowhere.

 
What I’ve observed is that many of the people who understand faith in this way seem genuinely unaware that this isn’t how believers view faith. If that describes you, or those you know, it behooves you to read this encyclical. It’s relatively short (only four chapters), well written, and thorough, quoting from Nietzsche, Dante, Martin Buber, the Church Fathers, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Guardini, Wittgenstein, Aquinas, Bonaventure, John Paul II, and T.S. Eliot, amongst others. Who knows? It just might change the way you approach the topic of religion.
 
 
Originally posted at Shameless Popery. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: News.va)

However, there is a theme in this film that is worthy of some reflection, namely the tension between individual autonomy and a state-controlled society. Man of Steel commences with a lengthy segment dealing with the closing days of the planet Krypton. We learn that a fiercely totalitarian regime, led by a General Zod, is seeking the arrest of a scientist called Jor-El. It becomes clear that Jor-El has attempted to undermine the regime's policy of strictly controlling the genetics of Kryptonite newborns. Very much in the manner of Plato's Republic, Kryptonite children are rigidly pre-programmed to be a member of one of three social groups.

Jor-El and his wife have conceived a child in the traditional manner and are seeking to send their son, born in freedom, away from their dying planet. I won't bore you with many more plot details, but suffice it to say that the child (the future Superman) does indeed get away to planet Earth and that General Zod manages to survive the destruction of his world. The movie then unfolds as the story of a great battle between the representative of freedom and the avatar of genetic manipulation and political tyranny.

Lest you think that the link to Plato is a bit forced, the director at one point shows the teenaged Superman reading The Republic. In his classic The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper, a survivor of Nazi tyranny, presented Plato's Republic as the forerunner of all totalitarianisms that have sprung up in the West. Very often, Popper saw, these tyrannies begin with the best of intentions. Good-hearted leaders believe that they have hit upon some form of life that will benefit the greatest number and thus they endeavor to implement their vision through binding legal prescription. Plato himself thought that the guardians of his ideal republic should have all property—including wives and children—in common and hence called for a strictly enforced communism among social elites. Further, he felt that the soldiers who protect his perfect city should have their emotions trained in a very precise manner and therefore decreed that tight censorship should obtain in regard to their reading and entertainment. On Popper's interpretation, post-revolutionary French society, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and the Iran of the Ayatollahs would be imitations of the Platonic original: idealistic visions which quickly devolved into totalitarian oppression.

In answer to these totalizing systems, Popper proposed the open society, which is to say, a political arrangement that places stress on the prerogatives and freedom of the individual. Thomas Jefferson's insistence that government exists primarily for the purpose of guaranteeing the liberty of individuals to determine their own destinies, to seek happiness as they see fit, is deeply congruent with Popper's ideal. Much of the political history of the past three hundred years might be characterized as a battle between these two visions, these contrasting ideologies. At its limit, the Platonic system results in the apotheosizing of the state and/or the divinization of the ruler. And this is why General Zod (so close to "God") is aptly named. At its limit, the open society conduces toward the apotheosizing of the individual will, so that personal freedom becomes absolute. Many times before, I have pilloried the U.S. Supreme Court statement in the matter of Casey v. Planned Parenthood, whereby individual freedom is entitled to define even the meaning of the universe! If Plato is the philosopher who best articulates the nature of the totalitarian society, Friedrich Nietzsche is the philosopher who best expresses the limit case of the apotheosized ego. Beyond good and evil, he said, lies the will of the Ubermensch, literally the superman. We might read the battle between General Zod and Superman, therefore, as a symbol of the struggle between two falsely deified realities, the nation-state and the ego.

Happily, there is a state of affairs that lies beyond this clash. Biblical religion is eminently clear that there is one God and that any attempt to deify the state, the king, or the self-asserting ego results in spiritual calamity. If you're curious about particular references, I might urge you to read the account of the fall in Genesis chapter three, the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis chapter eleven, Samuel's critique of kingship in first Samuel chapter eight, and the story of David and Bathsheba in second Samuel chapter eleven. The Bible recommends neither the heteronomy of the oppressive state nor the autonomy of the individual will, but rather, if I can borrow a term from Paul Tillich, "theonomy," which means allowing God to become the inner law of one's life. Both the state and the will are under God's judgment and hence neither General Zod nor Superman is the answer.

I'm sure, gentle reader, that you will forgive my revealing the none-too-surprising ending to Man of Steel: Superman's victory over the wicked general. In a Biblical telling of the story, the hero of individualism, having conquered General Zod, would kneel to God.
 
 
Originally published at Word on Fire. Text from Real Clear Religion. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Front Page Mag)

Neither bird, nor plane...but Superman!

 
I was born and raised Catholic, but also Supermanian. Some of my earliest memories involve sitting in front of the television, mesmerized by that incredible, flying man of steel. He was invincible, doing good and daring deeds effortlessly and with a smile. Men respected him, women adored him, and he didn’t even want people to know who he really was. I too would come to don a Superman suit, cape and all, to such an extent that my mother’s friends called her “Superman’s mom.” One fine Saturday in the mid 1960s, mom informed me that Kevin, and not Superman, would be attending a relative’s wedding, so I attended in my street clothes. Fortunately, I was able to persuade an older cousin to take me out to the car. Soon a young Superman (the car would be my makeshift phone booth) sat down in the pew right between his mortified mother and quite bemused father.

So the Man of Steel played a role in my early childhood dreams and play, as he and similar figures do for many children. I would also find though that the Superman theme would keep recurring as I matured, and not just because my wife and friends are constantly giving me Superman cards, ornaments, key chains, pens, shirts, pajamas and just about every Superman thing on the market. Superman embodied for me a striving to make the most of oneself and to do good, as captured in his motto, “Truth, Justice, and the American Way!” His ideal image led me to a lifelong pursuit of physical strength through weightlifting and to the pursuit of truth through philosophy.

On to more serious business though, I did mention that I was also raised Catholic. My mother had five miscarriages before I was born, which is why my middle name is Gerard, in honor of St. Gerard of Majella, patron of childbirth. What I also learned just this year in researching St. Kevin of Glendalough, is that Kevin actually means “of fair or gentle birth.” I don’t even know if mom knew that! Mom came from a family of Irish Catholics and dad converted from Methodism. My brother and sister and I went to Catholic grade school and were taught by the wonderful Dominican Sisters of Springfield, Illinois. I attended a Catholic high school and was taught by Viatorian priests. I was an altar server for several years. At one point I even considered the priesthood. We went to Mass every Sunday during my childhood, though we did not pray or read the Bible at home. In fact, when I needed a Bible for a high school religion class, mom had to take me down to the Marian Center to buy one.

Early in high school when I developed those hypothetical “if-then” thinking abilities adolescents are wont to develop, it occurred to me that if all of this “Jesus stuff” I had been taught was true, then it was truly the most important “stuff” in all the world, and I really should be living my life according to his will. Around the same time in the mid 1970s some of my weightlifting buddies had been “saved” and I started attending their Evangelical and Pentecostal services with them, though I never entertained the thought of leaving the Catholic Church for any other manner of Christianity, since I knew well that we had Jesus too!

Well, a few years later, a brilliant new Mr. Universe by the name of Mike Mentzer was being featured all over my “sacred” muscle magazines. The heir apparent to Arnold Schwarzenegger, he wrote about a revolutionary system of brief, intense strength training and common sense nutrition that challenged the orthodoxy of the bodybuilding world which had encouraged teenage boys to eat truckloads of supplements and workout twice a day. I read his articles, attended his live seminars, and spoke to him by phone, learning valuable lessons that have served me well for over 30 years now. Mentzer though, also wrote about thinkers who challenged not just traditional strength training methods, but also Christianity. It was Mentzer whose writings first introduced me to the kind of “supermen” I’ll describe in the next section.

Through the reading of some major atheistic philosophers in my late teens, the truth of my “if” – the divinity of Jesus, had been argued away from me, and I would consider myself an atheist for the next two-and-a-half decades. On the home front, as I end this phase of my life story in my late teens and early twenties, I’ll note that my parents had become separated, none of the family went to church any longer, my mother developed a profound major depression, along with congestive heart failure, pretty much living in her bedroom during my teens, while my siblings and I ran the house. Through a risky business venture and careless attention to finances, my parents were also forced to sell my beloved childhood home. You’ll see later though, that God has interesting ways of tying up loose ends, in his own sweet time!

The Ubermench and Me

 
The ‘ubermench” refers to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s “overman” or “superman,” a hero of the future for those bright and bold enough to have recognized that “God is dead.” (By the way, today as I write, it is the fierce and mustachioed mien of Nietzsche himself that appears on this website’s atheist page!) Nietzsche was not to be my main influence toward atheism though. It was primarily the writings of much more rational and logically consistent thinkers like Ayn Rand, author of gripping novels like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and founder of the philosophy of Objectivism, and Albert Ellis, the psychologist who founded the system of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, that would most forcefully separate me from what I came to see as the illogical, immature faith of my youth.

Thinkers of Rand’s ilk for example, would note the inconsistency of even the notion of God with questions like this: “If God is all-knowing, then he can’t be all-powerful. If he knows already what he’s going to do tomorrow, then he doesn’t have the power to do something different, does he?” Rand also championed the idea that “existence exists.” We cannot deny the reality of existence. It is the fundamental primary and needs no further explanation.
These folks proposed all kinds of arguments against faith (Rand compared faith and reason to “poison and food”) that my own catechesis had not equipped me to answer. Rand also provided lot of positive exciting ideas, extolling the powers of the human mind and achievement. Ellis had many excellent psychological principles, including ways to remain calm and collected in the face of adversity. He wrote that religion promoted immature thinking that we use to upset ourselves and create psychological disturbances. Through influences like these I came to believe I’d given up the faith of my childhood to embrace the reason of my adulthood, and there I stayed for just about 25 years!

Suprahomines Dei!

 
Before I explain what “suprahomines Dei” is all about, please let me tell you how God tied up those loose ends I was talking about at the end of the first section. My profoundly depressed mother would undergo major heart surgery, a double valve replacement. In fact, she was still in the hospital when my wife (formerly my most obstreperous weight training pupil) gave birth to our first son in November, 1986. I remember well making the rounds to check on all three of them. After that surgery, mom would experience almost total physical, mental, and spiritual healing. She would go to work at a senior citizen’s newspaper and become their stellar salesperson, while doing people’s taxes on the side (priding herself on never using a calculator), and playing bingo several nights per week. And who took her to bingo? My father. They had reconciled and he treated her grandly the next thirteen years as they both lived to love, cherish, and spoil all five of their grandsons. Let’s jump now to July 12, 2006. The doorbell rings on the seventh anniversary of mom’s death and there on the doorstep are two boxes full of books – Memorize the Faith! (And Most Anything Else): Using the Methods of the Great Catholic Medieval Memory Masters, my first book for a Catholic publisher. It is dedicated to her and my dad.

You see two years before I’d been led away from my atheism and returned to Christ and the Catholic Church. I must also mention that the doorbell that rang was attached to the very house that my parents had been forced to sell. You see, in 2002 God had arranged for my wife Kathy to notice in the newspaper that it had gone up for sale again. A fine Baptist minister and his family, faced with two full asking price offers, sold it back to my wife and me (swayed in part by the “Kevin, Jamie, Kelly, 7/1/71” my father had chiseled into the patio.) You see, by the time I came home to the Church, I had also literally come home as well! And, to make matters better, my book that arrived at the door features an ancient memory system invented by the Greeks and perfected by Sts. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas, it includes the use of mental images and a system of locations based on rooms of a house, and the house illustrated in that book is patterned after that very same house of my parents, and now of my wife and my children!

So how did I come back to the Catholic Church? Well, it’s a long story. I’ve actually told it in my book From Atheism to Catholicism: How Scientists and Philosophers Led Me to the Truth. A chapter length version also appears in Lorene Duquin’s Recovering Faith: Stories of Catholics Who Came Home. (This book also includes stories on many others including actor Martin Sheen and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, not to mention well-known Catholic media figures like Teresa Tomeo, Tom Peterson, and many others. I highly recommend it to readers of this site!). For now, let me note that my return is related to that “suprahomines Dei” heading. I just recently discovered that somebody beat Nietzsche to the punch by about 1,400 years in the use of the term “superman.” St. Pope Gregory the Great wrote about “suprahomines,” (supermen), describing not men who had rejected God, but men who become so absorbed in the divine wisdom of God that they become like “supermen.” It was among the greatest of those supermen who brought me back to the faith.

I’m running out of time and space, so let me cut to the chase. In my early forties, through a sequence of events I’ve described elsewhere, I came across the firsthand writings of St. Thomas Aquinas for the first time and immersed myself in his incomparable Summa Theologica and other writings by and about him. Pope Leo XIII had written in the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris that for scientific types who follow only reason, after the grace of God, nothing is as likely to win them back to the faith as the wisdom of St. Thomas, and this was the case for me. He showed me how true Christian faith complements and perfects reason; it doesn’t contradict or belittle it. He solved all the logical dilemmas. Sure, God can’t be all-powerful and all-knowing if we limit him to human capacities. God though is eternal, and not time-bound. Living in the eternal now, he has no yesterday and tomorrow like you and I. And yes, existence sure does exist, but nothing in existence can give itself its own existence! Through profound philosophical analysis, St. Thomas, a true superman of God, showed that God’s essence and existence are one. He is the only being and the ground of all being that simply must existence, and he even told this quite straightforwardly to Moses, when he asked God about his name, God replying – “Yahweh – I AM WHO AM.” ( Exodus 3:14). From his eternal being, power, goodness, and boundless love flows all of creation.

In 2004, the scales of atheism fell from my eyes and I returned to the Church. My own story of reversion to all the splendor and glory and beauty and goodness and truth of the Catholic Church admittedly has quite an intellectual slant, but please do know it’s been a matter of the heart as well. One of my greatest joys early in my return was to read the words of Christ himself in the Gospels for the first time in 25 years.

So be aware that God may surprise us with his own leisurely timetable. Nine years ago, I would not have believed that God could have reclaimed me after a quarter century of atheism. And if he can bring me home, he can bring anyone.
 
 
Originally posted at Why I'm Catholic. Used with author's permission.