The late Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla), now routinely called “the Great” by many of his admirers, not only presided over the Catholic Church during an unusually tumultuous time but also left a strong legacy of written works, bound to help shape theological discourse in coming decades.  One of his most important works, Love and Responsibility, tr. by H. T. Willets (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 1981), was first published in Polish, the product of a lecture series at the Catholic University of Lublin in 1958-1959, merits serious study.  “The present book,” wrote Wojtyla, “was born principally of the need to put the norms of Catholic sexual morality on a firm basis, a basis as definitive as possible, relying on the most elementary and incontrovertible moral truths and the most fundamental values or goods” (p. 16).  Determined to reaffirm the traditional Christian position, he sought to do so in ways appropriate for the 20^th century, attuned to the philosophical and psychological currents of his day.   And ultimately he wanted to joyously declare “the fundamental appeal of the New Testament, embodied in the commandment to love and in the saying ‘Be ye perfect’, a call to self-perfection through love” (p. 257).  

He began by examining “the person and the sexual urge,” emphasizing the difference between objective and subjective realities.  There’s an inner subject, as well as an outer object, to each of us.   Unfortunately, subjects can be reduced to objects, treated as something less than persons.  Importantly, then:  “The term ‘person’ has been coined to signify that a man cannot be wholly contained within the concept ‘individual member of the species’, but that there is something more to him, a particular richness and perfection in the manner of his being, which can only be brought out by the use of the word ‘person’” (p. 22).  Persons, unlike other terrestrials, can reason, as Boethius famously declared, defining a person as an individual being of a rational nature (individua substantia rationalis naturae).  

Capable of reasoning, man is by nature a spiritual being with a rich inner life that “revolves around truth and goodness.”  We wonder about ultimate things—why we’re here, where we came from, where we’re going—ultimately meaningful only within an invisible world of God’s making.  And in amazingly gracious ways we encounter “the most profound logic of revelation:  God allows man to learn His supernatural ends, but the decision to strive towards an end, the choice of course, is left to man’s free will.  God does not redeem man against his will” (p. 27).  He freely chooses to love or not.  “Man’s capacity for love depends on his willingness consciously to seek a good together with others, and to subordinate himself to that good for the sake of others, or to others for the sake of that good.  Love is exclusively the portion of human persons” (p. 29).  Still more deeply:  “Love is the unification of persons” (p. 38).  We’re called to love persons, not to use them for selfish pleasures.  Such love, importantly, must remain rooted in “the order of justice [which] is “more fundamental than the order of love” (p. 42).  Love goes beyond giving another person what is due him, but it never violates that basic principle of fairness, the commitment to doing what is right for the other.  

Such justice extends to God as well as man.  We do justice to God when we recognize Him as Creator of all things, ourselves in particular.  He alone gives and sustains life.  The world works in accord with His wisdom, and we live well when we desire to fit in with His designs.  “And this understanding and rational acceptance of the order of nature—is at the same time recognition of the rights of the Creator when he recognizes the order of nature and conforms to it in his actions” (p. 246).  Still more:  “Man, by understanding the order of nature and conforming to it in his actions, participates in the thought of God, becomes particeps creatoris, has a share in the law which God bestowed on the world when He created it at the beginning of time” (p. 246).  

Living rightly, doing justice, we must rightly understand our sexuality, “one of the crucial problems in ethics” (p. 54), recognizing that the real “end of the sexual urge is the existence of the species, Homo, its continuation (procreatio), and love between persons, between man and woman, is shaped, channeled one might say, by that purpose and formed from the material it provides” (p. 53).  Sex, basically, is all about babies!  The primary reason for sexual relations, evident in nature, is the preservation of the species.  And yet, unlike other animals, we have a spiritual as well as “libidinistic” nature, so sex necessarily means more than mere procreation.  Thus the Church always insists “that the primary end of marriage is procreatio” but it also provides a way for men and women to both enjoy physical pleasure and establish a spiritual union—a “mature synthesis of nature’s purpose with the personalistic norm” (p. 67).  

Turning to a metaphysical and psychological analysis of “love,” Wojtyla insists it must rightly fuse freedom and truth, “the primary elements of the human spirit” (p. 116).  To freely affirm the worth of another, to deeply desire the happiness of one’s beloved, to fully commit oneself to establishing and maintaining the well-being of him or her, is the authentic way of loving.  Still more:  “to desire ‘unlimited’ good for another person is really to desire God for that person:  He alone is the objective fullness of the good, and only His goodness can fill every man to overflowing” (p. 138).  Taking personal responsibility, doing one’s duty, validates love.  Mutually giving and receiving establishes the ontological union—becoming one flesh—that we by nature deeply desire.  

Such love presumes chastity, continence—properly controlling sexual behavior, developing self-mastery, perfecting our being.  Sadly rare in our sensual culture, without this virtue there can be no true love.  The “love” celebrated in films, little more than “carnal concupiscence,” promulgates “a ‘love’ which is not love, a love which provokes erotic feelings based on nothing but sensual desire and its satisfaction.  These feelings have as their object a person of the other sex, yet do not rise to the level of the person, since they do not go beyond ‘the body and sex’, as their proper and sole content” (p. 15).  Two people “having sex” engage in what’s properly defined as “bilateralism”—using each other, doing things together that provide pleasure but never establish a reciprocal, unifying personal relationship.  They confuse the fervor of their “feelings” with the reality of love, when in fact:  “‘Authenticity’ of feeling is quite often inimical to truth in behavior” (p. 163).  Indulging a “sinful love” that betrays their deepest desire for happiness, they exchange ultimate goods for passing pleasures.  They sincerely “feel” and thus misinterpret their “love,” for it’s an illusion, a fiction:  “‘Sinful  love’ comes into being when affirmation of the value of the person, and intentness on the true good of the person, (which are at the core of true love) are absent, and instead a hankering after mere pleasure, mere sensual enjoyment connected with ‘sexual experiences’ invades the relationship between man and woman.  ‘Enjoying’ then displaces ‘loving’” (p. 164).  

Chastity, however, says “yes” to loving rather than enjoying, manifesting a “tenderness’ that fuses benevolence and devotion.  “The essence of chastity consists in quickness to affirm the value of the person in every situation and in raising to the personal level all reactions to the value of ‘the body and sex’” (p. 171).   Refusing to use another person as a pleasurable object, chaste lovers manifest a “loving kindness” rooted in their commitment to each other’s well-being.  It also calls for modesty.  Thus, wroteWojtyla:  “A woman wants to be loved so that she can show love.  A man wants to love so that he can be loved.  In either case sexual modesty is not a flight from love, but on the contrary the opening of a way towards it.  The spontaneous need to conceal mere sexual values bound up with the person is the natural way to the discovery of the value of the person as such.  The value of the person is closely connected with its inviolability, its status as ‘something more than an object of use’.  Sexual modesty is as it were a defensive reflex, which protects that status and so protects the value of the person” (p. 179).  

Living chastely, one may give himself to another person.  Giving one’s self is the highest form of love.  Dying to self we find our self, for self-gift is the highest and most distinctive potential we have as humans designed in God’s image.  Death to self—the ancient key to holiness—opens the door to a joyous intimacy in marriage as well as union with the Lord.  Love “makes for unification through the reciprocal gift of self” (p. 127).  Indeed:  “Love consists of a commitment which limits one’s freedom—it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that:  to limit one’s freedom on behalf of another” (p. 135).  Taking responsibility for the well-being of another being, giving one’s life (often in routine domestic chores) to preserve the life of another, brings to fruition all that is good in a person.   

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Soon after his election as Pope, John Paul II began exploring, in his weekly addresses, Man and Woman He Created Them:  A Theology of the Body tr. by Michael Waldstein (Boston:  Pauline Books and Media, c. 2006, 1997).  We discover in Genesis, he says, “the ‘beginning’ of the theology of the body.  The fact that theology also includes the body should not astonish or surprise anyone who is conscious of the mystery and reality of the Incarnation.  Through the fact that the Word of God became flesh, the body entered theology—that is, the science that has divinity for its object—I would say, through the main door” (p. 221).  Though obviously focused on man, woman, and marriage, the Pope had far more in mind as he addressed the subject.  As was evident in Love and Responsibility, these messages sought to correct (as Christoph Cardinal Schonborn notes) the egregious “habit widespread among intellectuals of confusing the order of nature with the biological order” (p. xxiii).  By nature we’re embodied souls.  By nature we’re “endowed with certain unalienable rights.”  By nature we’re capable of recognizing the difference between right and wrong.  There’s obviously more to “the order of nature” than matter-in-motion, for it rightly “includes all these richer relationships among real beings” (p. xxiv).  In his Letter to Families, John Paul II said that “man is a person in the unity of his body and his spirit.  The body can never be reduced to mere matter:  It is a spiritualized body, just as man’s spirit is so closely united to the body that he can be described as an embodied spirit” (p. 96).    

So John Paul’s “catechesis,” John West explains, “illumines the entirety of God’s plan for human life from origin to eschaton with a splendid supernatural light.  It’s not only a response to the sexual revolution, it’s a response to the Enlightenment.  It’s a response to modern rationalism, Cartesian dualism, super-spiritualism, and all the disembodied anthropologies infecting the modern world.  In short, the theology of the body is one of the Catholic Church’s most critical efforts in modern times to help the world become more ‘conscious of the mystery and reality of the Incarnation’—and through that to become more conscious of the humanum, of the very purpose and meaning of human life” (p. xxvii).  

Though various editions of the Pope’s weekly addresses have been printed, this one excels because of the work of its translator.  “Michael Waldstein,” says George Weigel (the author of a fine biography of John Paul II), “is going to put many people in his debt with this superb piece of work, a labor of love shaped by an acute intelligence.  The illuminating translation, the brilliant [128 page] introduction, and the carefully crafted index will make this the standard English-language edition throughout the twenty-first century for scholars, for pastors, for students, and indeed for anyone interested in exploring John Paul II’s most creative contribution to human self understanding.”  Waldstein asserts that “the full greatness of John Paul’s vision only emerges when one sees his concern for spousal love in the larger context of his concern about our age, above all for the question of scientific knowledge and power over nature, that is, the characteristically modern question of ‘progress.’  He argues that ‘the essence of the church’s teaching’ about contraception lies in a more critical judgment about the domination of the forces of nature’ by human power” (p. 3).   

The desire to dominate nature gained philosophical traction (as ecologists have long recognized) in the works of Francis Bacon (a British empiricist) and Rene Descartes (a French rationalist), the 17^th century architects of “modern” philosophy.  To John Paul II, the “scientific rationalism spearheaded by Descartes is above all an attack on the body” (p. 95).  Following Descartes and drawing on scientists such as Isaac Newton, various forms of mechanistic thinking soon dominated elite scientific and philosophical circles.  As John Paul II noted, in Evangelium Vitae:  “Nature itself, from being ‘mater’ (mother), is now reduced to being ‘matter,’ and is subjected to every kind of manipulation.” (p. 100).  Consequently we now live in a world that “rejects the very idea that there is a truth of creation which must be acknowledged, or a plan of God for life which must be respected” (p. 100).  Even Immanuel Kant, despite his insistence that we treat persons as ends rather than means to an end, took for granted the essentially agnostic, materialistic perspectives of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume.  The inner, subjective, autonomous realm for Kant had little congruence with the external physical world, where “objective” scientific procedures prevailed.  

The German philosopher Max Scheler, however, critiqued Kant and rejected much of the “modern” philosophical endeavor; he insisted that love for the world, not the desire to manipulate it, opens the mind to the Truth.  To Waldstein:  “The opposition between Kant and Scheler goes to the very roots of philosophy.  For Scheler the central animating principle of philosophy is the desire to dwell with love and devotion in a receptive, contemplative vision in order to grasp what is truly evident.  Against the ‘constructions’ of Kantian Idealism, he insists that philosophy must have a supple and obedient regard for what is given in experience.  Philosophy must be an account (logos) of what is truly evident (phainomenon).  In short, it must be phenomenology.  In agreement with Scheler, John Paul II emphasizes love as the animating principle of phenomenology.  “Phenomenology is primarily a style of thought, a relationship of the mind with reality, whose essential and constitutive features it aims to grasp, avoiding prejudice and schematisms.  I mean that it is, as it were, an attitude of intellectual charity to the human being and the world, and for the believer, to God, the beginning and end of all things” (p. 65).  

To Scheler’s phenomenology John Paul II added the profoundly Christian personalism of St. John of the Cross, whom he encountered as a student during WWII.  To master John’s mystical theology in the original language, which routinely compares the soul’s bond with God with the union of husband and wife, the future pope learned Spanish.  A few years later he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Faith according to St. John of the Cross and ever after confessed his debt to the writings of the 16^th century Carmelite.  “To him I owe so much in my spiritual formation,” said the Pope, and “I have found in him a friend and master who has shown me the light that shines in the darkness for walking always toward God” (p. 26).  In his mystical works, St. John prescribed reciprocal giving as the key to union with God—and he used the spousal union as the finest earthly example of this truth.  “’This spiritual marriage,’” he said, in Spiritual Canticle, “‘is total transformation in the Beloved, in which each surrenders the entire possession of self to the other with a certain consummation of the union of love’” (p. 31).  “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten son.”  Loving means giving, and we imitate God inasmuch as we give ourselves away.

           I have devoted most of this review of Man and Woman He Created Them to Michael Waldstein’s introduction to the book for two reasons:  1) he makes clear the philosophical and theological issues basic to the text; 2) he provides a cogent analysis of the underlying to structure of the Pope’s message—difficult to perceive when simply reading the weekly addresses, frequently repetitious and intellectually challenging.  Basically, however, the addresses are extended analyses of pivotal biblical tests—including Genesis 2:5-7; Mathew 5:27-28; Matthew 19:2-12; Ephesians 5: 20-33.  Though the Pope’s academic training was in philosophy, his weekly meditations refer almost exclusively to the Bible.  Though not a renowned as a biblical scholar, he certainly reveals his immersion in the Scriptures and commitment to their authority and insight.  

            In Genesis we find justification for “the theology of the body,” he explains, for it “is linked from the beginning with the creation of man in the image of God, [and] becomes in some way also a theology of sex, or rather a theology of masculinity and femininity” (p. 165).   When stressing the importance of marriage, Jesus referred back to the “beginning,” stressing that the primordial union of Adam and Eve—their “one flesh”—serves as the model for understanding our sexual nature as human beings, for here “God reveals himself above all as Creator” (p. 179).  Man and woman He created them!  “Uniting so closely with each other that they become ‘one flesh,’ they place their humanity in some way under the blessing of fruitfulness, that is, of ‘procreation,’ about which the first account speaks (Gen 1:28).  Man enters ‘into being’ with the consciousness that his own masculinity-femininity, that is, his own sexuality, is ordered to an end” (p. 184).  Following the first of all commandments—“be fruitful and multiply”—Adam and Eve brought children into the world. “The first woman to give birth has full awareness of the mystery of creation which renews itself in human generation.  She also has full awareness of the creative participation God has in human generation, his work and that of her husband, because she says, ‘I acquired a man from the Lord’” (p. 213).   

            Man’s fall into sin disoriented his sexual desires and behaviors.  But in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount we are reminded of how we ought to behave—“as it was in the beginning.”  Curtailing concupiscence—the lust of the flesh (illicitly “looking to desire”)—his disciples are called to avoid adultery and be faithful to their spouses.   “What Christ demands from all his actual and potential listeners in the Sermon on the Mount clearly belongs to that interior space inn which man—precisely  the one who listens—must rediscover the lost fullness of his humanity and want to regain it” (p. 301).  Such fullness can only be regained through love—caring for another person so fully that one is willing to sacrifice to give him or her all that is good.  “Called precisely to this supreme value, which is love.  Called as a person in the truth of his humanity, and thus also in the truth of his masculinity and femininity, in the truth of his body.  Called in that truth which has been his inheritance ‘of the beginning’ the inheritance of his heart, which is deeper than the sinfulness inherited, deeper than the three fold concupiscence.  Christ’s words, set in the whole reality of creation and redemption, re-activate that deepest inheritance and give it real power in human life” (p. 314).  

            The truth of Genesis and the Sermon on the Mount are finally confirmed by St Paul in Ephesians 5, which celebrates “the interpersonal covenant proper to marriage” (p. 473) through the reciprocal submission of both husband and wife.  This intimate, sacramental union, akin to that between Christ and His Church, “is a revelation and realization in time of the mystery of salvation, of the election of love ‘hidden’ from eternity in God” (p. 476).  There is no higher calling.  There is no better means to holiness, for thereby our body “is capable of making visible what is invisible:  the spiritual and the divine.  It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it” (p. 505).   

It’s always delightful to discover an erudite scholar engaging his world with wit and wisdom.  These qualities mark The Last Superstition:  A Refutation of the New Atheism (South Bend:  St. Augustine’s Press, c. 2008), wherein Edward J. Feser takes seriously St. Thomas Aquinas’ warning that “‘A small error in the beginning of something is a great one at the end’” (p. vii).  To illustrate, he begins his treatise by examining the California Supreme Court’s 2008 decision to permit homosexuals to “marry,” arguing that “the most important thing to know about ‘same sex marriage’ is not that it has been lawlessly imposed by certain courts” but that “it is a metaphysical absurdity and a moral abomination.” (p. ix).  In truth, neither the courts nor the people can “define” marriage any more than they can decide whether or not the axioms or Euclidean geometry are true.  Marriage, if it stands for anything at all, is “an objective metaphysical fact determined by its final cause, inherently procreative, and thus inherently heterosexual.  There is no such thing as ‘same-sex marriage’ any more than there are round squares.  Indeed, there is really no such thing as ‘sex’ outside the context of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman” (p. 149).  Furthermore, “if ‘same-sex marriage is not contrary to nature, then nothing is; and if nothing is contrary to nature, then . . . there can be no grounds whatsoever for moral judgment” (p. 150).  

The California court, however, revealed the progressive, secularist  mindset (considered “the last superstition” by Feser) which “is, necessarily and inherently, a deeply irrational and immoral view of the world, and the more thoroughly it is assimilated by its adherents, the more thoroughly do they cut themselves off from the very possibility of rational and moral understanding” (p. 3).  Committed, as they are, to a thoroughly (and irrationally narrow) materialistic conception of reality, considering only the findings of empirical science, progressive secularistgs have divorced themselves from the rich, classical philosophical heritage of the West.  Consequently:  “The irony is that to anyone who actually knows something about the history and theology of the Western religious tradition for which [Sam] Harris, [Daniel] Dennett, [Richard] Dawkins, and [Christopher] Hitchens show so much contempt, their books stand out for their manifest ignorance of that tradition and for the breathtaking shallowness of their philosophical analysis of religious matters” (p. 4).   

Feser knows this position well, for he was “for many years a convinced atheist and naturalist” (p. 6).  Slowly, by carefully reading philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, he became persuaded that “there exists, in addition to the material world and the ‘world’ within the human mind, a ‘third realm’ of abstract entities, in particular of meanings and of mathematical objects like numbers” (p. 6).  He then discovered, through Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, the perennial relevance of Aristotle.  Finally, notable philosophers of religion, such as Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig whetted his appetite for St. Thomas Aquinas.   “All of this led me eventually to a serious reconsideration of the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy in general, and of Aquinas’s adaptation of it in particular, and the end result was that I became convinced that the basic metaphysical assumptions with modern secular philosophers rather unreflectively take for granted, and which alone can make atheism seem at all plausible, were radically mistaken” (p. 7).  Thus this book!

To build his case, Feser begins with a brief survey of philosophy’s Greek origins.  With Plato it becomes evident that “when we grasp the essence or nature of being a triangle [for example], [what] we grasp is not something material or physical, and not something we grasp or could grasp through the senses” (p. 33).  We “know the essence of triangularity is something universal rather than particular, something immaterial rather than material, and something we know through the intellect rather than the senses” (pp. 33-34).  Such universals cannot be reduced, however, to mental states—mere ideas within the mind.  “For what we know about triangles are objective facts, things we have discovered rather than invented” (p. 34).  What we know about things are their essences—their immaterial, objective, forms.  And knowing forms leads us to discern, with Plato, the ultimate “Form of the Good,” the “source of all being” (p. 37).   Knowing any form (whether triangularity or beauty, squareness or justice) “itself requires in turn knowing the Form of the Good by reference to which it counts as a perfect archetype.  The Form of the Good is thus the highest of the Forms, their source, and indeed the source of all being” (p. 37).  Plato does not specify this ultimate Form as God, though his followers (including Christians such as Augustine) certainly did.

However modified and reformulated, “something like Plato’s theory is notoriously very hard to avoid if we are to make sense of mathematics, language, science, and the very structure of the world of our experience” (p. 40).  Having granted Plato’s greatness, however, Feser finds Aristotle even greater, for his “is the most powerful and systematic realist metaphysics ever developed” (p. 51).  Lamentably, as Feser demonstrates later on:  “Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought” (p. 51).  Aristotle’s insights, such as actuality and potentiality, causation (material; formal; efficient; final) and logic, cannot be abandoned without compromising the whole philosophical endeavor.  In short, “it was the logical development of Aristotelian ideas (primarily by his medieval Scholastic admirers) that provided the most powerful and systematic intellectual foundation for traditional Western religion and morality—and for that matter, for science, morality, politics, and theology in general—that has ever existed” (p. 52).  

Coupled with an appreciation for the ancient Greeks, Feser urges us to learn from Medieval thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, the “greatest philosopher of the Middle Ages, and among the greatest philosophers, period” (p. 77).  His intellectual debt to St. Thomas Aquinas is further evident in his Aquinas:  A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford:  Oneworld Publications, c. 2009), devoted to his metaphysics, natural philosophy, psychology, and ethics.  When one turns to Aquinas after reading “new atheists” such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins (who fail to grasp even elementary differences between science and metaphysics), the luminous superiority of the Angelic Doctor becomes instantly apparent.  Dawkins et al., for example, cannot think of creation except within a linear time frame, but when Aquinas endeavored to develop arguments demonstrating God’s existence, he aimed “to show that given that there are in fact some causes of various sorts, the nature of cause and effect entails that God is necessary as an uncaused cause of the universe even if we assume that the universe has always existed and thus had no beginning.  The argument is not that the world wouldn’t have got started if God hadn’t knocked down the first domino at some point in the distant past; it is that it wouldn’t exist here and now, or undergo change or exhibit final causes here and now unless God were here and now, and at every moment, sustaining it in being, change, and goal-directedness” (Last Superstition, p. 86).  

Aquinas held this because, along with other Medieval thinkers, he grasped the difference between “accidentally ordered” and “essentially ordered” events.  The former occur as a series within time, as illustrated in the biblical lists of sons begotten by their fathers; the latter must be traced not backward but “‘downward’ in the present moment [as when a batter swings the bat, moving his hands and the bat simultaneously, the arm and shoulder and hands causing the bat to move] since they are series in which each member depends simultaneously on other members which simultaneously depend on turn on yet others, and so on” (Last Superstition, p. 93).  When we grasp this distinction, and understand that God is “Pure Act,” we can begin to see why it is that He must, necessarily, exist.  Inasmuch as everything has an “essence,” what it is, it attains being by being actualized, deriving its existence from another, more basic Reality—Being Itself.  “As Peter Geach puts it, for Aquinas the claim that God made the world ‘is more like “the minstrel made music” than “the blacksmith made a shoe”’; that is to say, creation is an ongoing activity rather than a once-and-for-all event.  While the shoe might continue to exist even if the blacksmith dies, the music necessarily stops when the minstrel stops playing, and the world would necessarily go out of existence if God stopped creating it” (Aquinas, p. 88).  

The natural world, though composed of mindless matter, appears mysteriously ordered.  As Aquinas noted, “things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result” (Summa Theologiae, 1.2.3).  Trees grow upward, seeking the light; arrows follow a predictable trajectory; acorns drop to the earth, prepared if buried rightly to develop into a lofty oak.  In view of such manifest facts:  “It follows,” Feser says, “that the system of ends or final causes that make up the physical universe can only exist at all if there is a Supreme Intelligence or intellect outside the universe which directs things towards their ends.  Moreover, this intellect must exist here and now, and not merely at some beginning point in the past, because causes are here and now, and at any point at which they exist at all, directed towards certain ends” (Aquinas, p. 117).  Far from being a probable hypothesis, an intelligently ordered cosmos demonstrates, as Aquinas argued, the reality of an Intelligent Agent.  

Emphatically, Feser asserts:  “the classical theistic arguments, and certainly the arguments of such major philosophical theologians as Anselm, Aquinas, and Leibniz, are not properly interpreted as ‘God of the gaps’ arguments at all.  They are not ‘hypotheses’ or attempts to ‘postulate’ a quasi-scientific explanation for particular phenomena that science has not yet accounted for, but which it could in principle account for someday.  They are rather attempts conclusively to demonstrate the existence of a Necessary Being or First Cause of the world on the basis of premises (concerning the metaphysics of causation, say, or the contingency of the material world, or the concept of a greatest possible being) about which empirical science has nothing to tell us.  The question of whether they succeed or fail as proofs is thus independent of the current state of our scientific knowledge” (Philosophy Mind, pp. 236-237).  

Aristotle and Aquinas also developed the notion of “hylomorphism” (matter-formism) to explain the reality of and differences between nutritive (vegetative), sensitive (animal), and uniquely rational (human) souls.  Feser discusses this in more detail in Philosophy of Mind:  A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford:  Oneworld Publishers, c. 2005, reprinted, with a Postcript, 2006), as well as his introduction to Aquinas, wherein he defends what philosophers call hylomorphic or Thomistic dualism.  He probes such questions as:  “Is the mind nothing but the brain?  Do you have an immaterial and immortal soul, inaccessible to science and knowable only via metaphysical inquiry?  Can computers think?” (Philosophy of Mind, p. vi).  Debates concerning such things were launched by Rene Descartes, who “set the agenda for modern philosophy in general and philosophy of mind in particular” (p. 1).  His metaphysical dualism—severing the purely physical res extensa from the purely non-physical res cogitans—has been misrepresented and caricatured and largely rejected by modern thinkers.  But his fundamental insight, noting that there is a radical difference between things and thinking—as real and discrete as the difference between apples and oranges—retains its basic truth.  That we think with our brains does not mean that our minds are nothing but brains.

Philosophers who insist there is no difference between minds and brains—various sorts of materialists—now dominate academic discussions.  So Feser devotes much of Philosophy of Mind to an examination of their arguments.  Following the example of Aquinas, he explains their views judiciously and clearly.  He acknowledges their power and persuasiveness, especially when one limits his thinking to empirical science.  But in the final analysis, they all fail to adequately explain such eminent realities as qualia (an inner awareness of such things as pain and color), subjectivity, intentionality, consciousness, and rational thought.  To Aristotle and Aquinas:  “Rationality—the ability to grasp forms or essences and to reason on the basis of them—has as its natural end or final cause the attainment of truth, of understanding the world around us.  And free will has its natural end or final cause the choice of those actions that best accord with the truth as it is discovered by reason, and in particular in accord with the truth about a human being’s own nature or essence” (Last Superstition, p. 122).  In sum:  to Feser, “Descartes’s basic contention that the mind is irreducible to the brain or body has not been refuted” (Philosophy Mind, p. 211), though he famously failed to suggest how mind and body interact.  This resulted from his discarding Aristotle and Aquinas, losing their understanding of an immanent teleology in all that is.  He, and most modern philosophers, forfeited a better “conception of matter—in particular a conception in which matter isn’t utterly devoid of mental properties” (p. 219).  This we find in Aristotelian hylomorphism!  Form and matter are two distinctive aspects of all that is, explicable in terms of material, efficient, formal, and final causes.  

In us humans, the soul (from the moment of conception) forms the body, but it enjoys an existence apart from it.  Amazingly, recent scientific discoveries affirm this hylomorphic perspective, for “the nature and structure of DNA is exactly the sort of thing we should expect to exist given an Aristotelian metaphysical conception of the world, and not at all what we would expect if materialism were true” (Last Superstition, p. 129).   Importantly, to Aquinas, rational thought is “not strictly speaking a bodily operation at all, but an immaterial one.  But if the rational soul operates independently of the body, it cannot depend for its continued existence on the continued existence of the body.  In short, the human soul, unlike the souls of plants and animals and unlike any form of any other kind, is a subsistent form:  it is capable, in principle anyway, of continuing in existence as a particular thing after its separation from the body in death, and even after the destruction of that body” (Philosophy Mind, p. 225).  

While praising and appropriating insights from the Ancient and Medieval thinkers, Feser certainly casts a critical gaze at the “descent of the modernists.”  Following the trajectory of Medieval nominalists such as William of Ockham, who rejected the realism of Aristotle and Aquinas, modern philosophers have repudiated the very principles that justify the existence of their calling.  Rather than explore “the ultimate causes and meaning of things” they have sought “means of increasing ‘human utility and power’ through the ‘mechanical arts’ or technology (Bacon) and of making us ‘masters and possessors of nature’ (Descartes).  Usefulness would replace wisdom, and pampering the body in this life would push aside preparing the soul for the next” (p. 175).  In the soil poisoned by Bacon and Descartes, Hobbes and Hume, there sprouted a Mechanical Philosophy determined to reduce all that is to matter-in-motion, ratified (it was assumed) by Newtonian physics.  “The modern metaphysical picture entailed by mechanism, especially when conjoined with nominalism, thus opens up an unbridgeable ‘gap’ between mind and reality” (p. 201).  Yet each of them, as Elizabeth Anscombe remarked about Hume, should probably be ranked as a “‘mere— brilliant—sophist’” (p. 254).   Skepticism, determinism, nihilism all follow, working out the implications of the course chosen centuries ago.  

As the philosopher W.T. Stace noted, in an important article 60 years ago:  “‘The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when the scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called “final causes” which were “‘basic to the whole of Western civilization.’”  Consequently, Stace continued:  “‘The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon.  This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated through the world. . . .  The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless.  Nature is nothing but matter in motion.’”  Everything runs according to chance and necessity, without purpose or design.  Simultaneously “‘there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values,’” which were reduced to little more than personal preferences and social conventions (p. 225-226).  

Evaluating such developments Feser celebrates “Aristotle’s revenge.”   Modern philosophy, so pervasively materialistic, in large part fails because it fails to recognize the perennial truth Aristotle discerned.  The world, in short, makes sense only when we think in an Aristotelian manner, for it is simply impossible to reason otherwise!  Thus Max Delbruck, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in biophysics, suggested we grant Aristotle a Nobel Prize “‘for the discovery of the principle implied in DNA,’ and ‘the reason for the lack of appreciation, among scientists, of Aristotle’s scheme lies in our having blinded for 300 years by the Newtonian view of the world’” (p. 257).  One cannot “eliminate final causality or teleology from the explanation of human action.  As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, ‘those who devote themselves to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose constitute an interesting subject for study’” (p. 247).  

So for Feser it’s back to Aristotle!  It seems to “be no doubt that a broadly Aristotelian philosophical worldview is still as rationally defensible today as it ever was.”  To think rationally cannot but involve following his footsteps.  Indeed, he has been rejected largely for ethical reasons, for if his metaphysics is true his ethics necessarily follow.  “Even in Aristotle’s own work, we find a very conservative ethics grounded in human nature, a doctrine of the immateriality of the human intellect, and an Unmoved Mover of the universe contemplation of whom is the highest end of human existence.  By the time Aquinas and the other Scholastics were done refining and drawing out the implications of the Aristotelian system, it was evident that it entailed nothing less than the entire conception of God enshrined in classical monotheism, the immortality of the soul, and the natural law system of morality.  To acknowledge the truth of the Aristotelian metaphysical picture of the world is thus unavoidable to open the door to everything the Scholastics built on it.  In short, Aristotle’s revenge is also Aquinas’s revenge; and for that reason alone, contemporary secular intellectuals cannot allow themselves to acknowledge it.  For the project of the early moderns is their project too” (p. 267).  

Feser is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College.  That a scholar of his caliber teaches at a community college reminds me of a remark Alexander Solzhenitsyn made when he addressed a gathering at Harvard University.  Cognizant of Harvard’s elite standing in the academic world, he noted that much of the best thinking in the nation took place in non-distinguished, out-of-the-way places where individuals were not subservient to the reigning dogmas of fashion and ideology.  I’d guess he’d be delighted to find a mind such as Feser’s working in an undergraduate college in Pasadena!   

Commending Feser’s endeavor in The Last Superstition, the noted literary critic and co-editor of The New Criterion, Roger Kimball describes it as:  “A thoughtful and theologically sophisticated sally into the ranks of the New Atheism.  Feser has written a lively and well informed polemic against the latest crop of Village Atheists . . . who have provided the public with so much entertainment and so little enlightenment these past few years.  This is a serious and passionately engaged challenge to the latest effort to impose a dehumanizing orthodoxy by religious illiterates.”  

In 2004, the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a scholarly journal housed at the Smithsonian Institution, published a peer-reviewed article advocating intelligent design by Stephen Meyer.  Angry scientists, alarmed at the article’s deviation from the party line, demanded the journal’s editor be censured for allowing such heresy to gain traction.  In due course, the editor was demoted and assigned another position within the institution.  Such is the opposition that meets any scholar who dares study biology with anything less than a philosophical commitment to monistic materialism—a stance nicely illustrated in Francis Crick’s admonition that biologists, while marveling at the mystery of DNA, must “‘constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved’” (p. 12).  .  

Stephen Meyer, however, has amplified his case for intelligent design in Signature in the Cell:  DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, c. 2009).  Meyer received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in the philosophy of science and now directs the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle.  This book, he says, “attempts to make a comprehensive, interdisciplinary argument for a new view of the origin of life.  “It makes ‘one long argument’ for the theory of intelligent design” (p. 8).  Consequently it is, writes Steve Fuller (a professor at the University of Warwick), “at once a philosophical history of how information has come to be central to cutting-edge research in biology today and one man’s intellectual journey to the conclusion that intelligent design and provides the explanation for that fact.”  

Meyer primarily focuses on the reality of non-material information within the biological world.  Just as you can load “information” into a computer without adding any weight to its material components, so too information (evident in the DNA) has been programmed into all that lives.  Consequently, evolutionary biologists, though deeply committed to reductionistic materialism, cannot avoid using teleological language that refers to intentionality and purpose when describing what they behold.  Thus we read them refer to such things as:  “‘genetic code,’ ‘genetic information,’ ‘transcription,’ ‘translation,’ ‘editing enzymes,’ ‘signal-transduction circuitry, ‘feedback loop,’ and ‘information processing system’” (p. 21).  Overtly denying design, they cannot find words that fail to imply it!  

As a young scientist working in the oil industry, Meyer himself became enamored with the mystery of life while attending a conference that addressed “three big scientific questions—the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the nature of human consciousness” (p. 24).   One of the speakers was “Charles Thaxton, the chemist who with his coauthors had proposed the controversial idea about an intelligence playing a role in the origin of biological information” (p. 28).  Intellectually challenged, Meyer decided to pursue his interests in one of the world’s elite research universities (Cambridge) and discern the degree to which information, not mindless matter-in-motion, best explains life’s mysterious origins.  

Today’s scholars who embrace a “matter first” theory follow the lead of Soviet biochemist Aleksandr Oparin, who sought to harmonize Darwinian science with Marxist materialism.  His position was allegedly confirmed by a famous experiment at the University of Chicago, when Stanley Miller distilled some amino acids from a chemical mix charged with high-voltage electricity.  Despite the textbook popularity of the Miller-Urey experiment, however, recent research reveals its virtual irrelevance in origins-of-life inquiries.  We now know that pre-biotic atmospheric conditions were hostile to life and quite unlike those Miller assumed.  This is largely due to the mounting evidence of the complexity of even the simplest forms of life.  As Watson and Crick and their successors began to fathom the double helix structure of the DNA, biologists confronted the massive amount of “information” contained therein.  Renowned information scientists differentiate between “mere complexity” (routine patterns observed in crystals, for example) and “specified complexity” (evident in proteins and cells as well as meaningful sentences).  As Meyer describes the “molecular labyrinth,” carefully identifying the incredible process (through transcription and translation) whereby cells function, he also ponders the deeply philosophical questions regarding life’s beginning.  Are chance and necessity, as many materialists insist, sufficient causes for the realities we observe?  

Or is there something more?  Something rational supplying the rationality, the information so evident in all that lives?   To Meyer it was clear that Alfred North Whitehead rightly asserted:  “‘There can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things.  And, in particular, of an Order of Nature.’  Whitehead argued that confidence in this proposition was especially inspired by the ‘medieval insistence upon the rationality of God’” (p. 142).   Most great scientists in the history of science—giants such as Kepler and Newton—saw divine design everywhere in the world they studied.  They did so because they inferred the makings of history from its results—employing what Charles Sanders Peirce would label “abduction.”  None of us has seen Abraham Lincoln, but we cannot, as historians, explain the Civil War without affirming his existence and activities.  Historical scientists (as Peter Lipton explained in Inference to the Best Explanation) consider competing hypotheses as they endeavor to explain what happened in the past, what provides “causal adequacy.”  Cosmologists now embrace the Big Bang as the best explanation of the origin of the universe, remarkably unlike the “steady state” theories that long dominated the field.  

Reading Lipton’s treatise on inference to the best explanation, “a light came on for me,” Meyer says.  “I immediately asked myself:  What causes now in operation produce digital code or specified information?  Is there a known cause—a vera causa—of the origin of such information?” (p. 171).  Everywhere it seems evident that intelligent agents—and only intelligent agents—are responsible for specified information.  To explain (using abductive reason) all the information in living organisms, it simply makes sense to posit the possibility of an Intelligent Agent as its source.  Mathematical calculations render the possibility of chance (random material events) creating life nearly preposterous.  Indeed:  “The odds of getting even one functional protein of modest length (150 amino acids) by chance from a prebiotic soup is no better than 1 chance in 10^164”  (p. 212).  To illustrate this astronomical number, Meyer notes that there are only half that number of protons, neutrons and electrons in the entire universe!  There have only been 10¹⁶ seconds since the Big Bang beginning of the universe!  We’re faced with the fact, as G.K. Chesterton said a century ago, that:  “Evolution as explanation, as an ultimate philosophy of the cause of living things, is still faced with the problem of producing rabbits out of an empty hat; a process commonly involving some hint of Design” (CW, XVII, p. 291).  After carefully explaining (and rejecting) various naturalistic hypotheses, Meyer declares that since “evidence for the causal adequacy of intelligence is all around us both inside and outside the lab” (p. 340) it makes sense to attribute the vera causa of life to intelligent design.   “Experience shows that large amounts of specified complexity or information (especially codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source—from a mind or a personal agent” (p. 343).  

Meyer meticulously considers a multitude of issues in 500 pages, adding another 50 pages of endnotes and 30 pages of bibliographical references to scholarly literature.  Yet for an academic treatise it is quite readable, reflecting the author’s pedagogic skill, using illustrations, diagrams and drawings.  “In Signature in the Cell,” says Scott Turner, a SUNY professor of environmental and forest biology, “Stephen C. Meyer gives us a fascinating exploration of the case for intelligent design theory, woven skillfully around a compelling account of Meyer’s own journey.  Along the way, Meyer effectively dispels the most pernicious caricatures:  that intelligent design is simply warmed-over creationism, the province of deluded fools and morons, or a dangerous political conspiracy.  Whether you believe intelligent design is true or false, Signature in the Cell is a must-read book.”  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A decade ago Michael J. Behe, Professor of Biological Science at Lehigh University, published Darwin’s Black Box:  the Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, one of the finest works proposing Intelligent Design as a rational rival to the theory of purely Naturalistic Evolution.  He has recently added to his case with The Edge of Evolution:  The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (New York:  Free Press, c. 2007).  He notes that current orthodoxy in the scientific community defends a Darwinism composed of “random mutation, natural selection, and common descent” (p. 1).  Of the three, random mutation is most crucial for understanding the emergence of novel life forms, but “except at life’s periphery, the evidence for a pivotal role for random mutations is terrible” (p. 4).

In truth, because the evidence regarding historical development is so sparse “by default most biologists work within a Darwinian framework and simply assume what cannot be demonstrated” (p. 9).  We need the kind of precise, empirical data evident in engineering and anatomy.  For this we must plumb the mysterious realms of tiny molecules, proteins, and DNA.  Rather than relying on anecdotal items, such as Darwin’s domesticated pigeons and Galapagos finches, Behe insists:  “The only way to get a realistic understanding of what random mutation and natural selection can actually do is to follow changes at the molecular level.  It is critical to appreciate this:  Properly evaluating Darwin’s theory absolutely requires evaluating random mutation and natural selection at the molecular level” (p. 10).  

To do so Behe focuses on malaria—“the single best test case of Darwin’s theory” (p. 12).  Because of its widespread devastation, malaria has been carefully studied for a century.  Since population numbers, not time, “is the chief factor in evolution” (p. 153), so we can see, in 100 years of malaria parasites’ development, what has taken 100 million years in other species.  Amazingly, “the number of malarial parasites produced in a single year is likely a hundred times greater than the number of all the mammals that have ever lived on earth in the past two hundred million years” (p. 194).  Reacting to the parasite, “Hundreds of different mutations that confer a measure of resistance to malaria cropped up in the human genome and spread through our population by natural selection.  These mutations have been touted by Darwinists as among the best clearest examples of the abilities of Darwinian evolution” (pp. 12-13).  And in one sense they are quite right.  But, in a profounder sense, “the molecular changes underlying malaria resistance . . . tell a much different tale than Darwinists expected—a tale that highlights the incoherent flailing involved in a blind search” (p. 13).  The many mutations failed to provide the immunity man needs to successfully resist the pathogen.  And, importantly:  “What greater numbers of malaria can’t do, lesser numbers of large animals can’t do either” (p. 200).  

“Over the centuries,” Behe says in a pivotal paragraph, the human genome has variously responded to malaria’s assault.  Massive scholarly attention to the disease have led to the following conclusions:  “1) Darwinian processes are incoherent and highly constrained; and 2) the battle of predator and prey (or parasite and host), which has often been portrayed by Darwinist writers as a productive arms-race cycle of improvements on each side, is in fact a destructive cycle, more like trench warfare, where conditions deteriorate.  The changes in the malaria genome are even more highly instructive, simply because of the sheer numbers of parasites involved.  From them we see:  3) Like a staggering, blindfolded drunk who falls after a step or two, when more than a single tiny step is needed for an evolutionary improvement, blind random mutation is very unlikely to find it.  And 4) extrapolating from the data on an enormous number of malaria parasites allows us to roughly but confidently estimate the limits of Darwinian evolution for all of life on earth over the past several billion years” (p. 19).  

Darwinism holds that evolution proceeds as random mutations produce beneficial changes that enable individuals within a species to survive.  Careful studies of DNA in various human populations reveal remarkably few such mutations in the past 10,000 years.  In the case of adaptations to malaria, all mutations have been harmful, all of them “acts of desperation to stave off an invader” (p. 38).  Unlike the progressive “arms races” portrayed by Richard Dawkins and other evolutionists, “the data show trench warfare, with acts of desperate destruction, not arms races, with mutual improvements” (p. 42).  Where we have the best imaginable evidence, “The thrust and parry of human-malaria evolution did not build anything—it only destroyed things” (p. 42).  And this is as true of the malaria parasites (mutating in response to chloroquine) as it is of the human populations they invade.

The study of malarial parasites enables us to evaluate human evolution.  Perhaps a trillion creatures “preceded us in the past ten million years.  Although that’s a lot, it’s still much, much less than the number of malaria parasites it takes to develop chloroquine resistance” (p. 60).  For our species to develop “any single mutation of the kind required for malaria to become resistant to chloroquine” (a shift of only two amino acids), is mathematically improbable (p. 60).  For such a mutation to occur, “we would need to wait a hundred million times ten million years.  Since that is many times the age of the universe, it’s reasonable to conclude the following:  No mutation that is of the same complexity as chloroquine resistance in malaria arose by Darwinian evolution in the line leading to humans in the past ten million years” (p. 61).   

The Darwinian doctrine of common descent (detecting duplicated genes or anatomical structures shared by all creatures) certainly explains some things.  But not the really important things!  The eminent French geneticist Francois Jacob famously wrote that Darwinian evolution is a ‘tinkerer,’ not an engineer” (p. 119).  It explains small variations but not intricate designs.  There is a realm within which Darwinism suffices, but the significant development of living creatures has taken place in other realms, for “it does not even begin to explain where those commonalities came from, or how humans subsequently acquired remarkable differences.  Something that is nonrandom must account for the common descent of life” (p. 72).  In short:  “although Darwin hoped otherwise, random variation doesn’t explain the most basic features of biology” (p. 83).  

In his earlier book, Darwin’s Black Box, Behe carefully delineated the “irreducible complexity” of the cilium—large cellular structures that “help cells move around in liquid, acting like propellers” (p. 86).  Despite voluminous (and at times vituperative) attacks from Darwinists, “in the more than ten years since I pointed it out the situation concerning missing Darwinian explanations for the evolution of the cilium is utterly unchanged” (p. 95).  Indeed, advanced microscopic technology reveals yet more complexity.  This is because such things as cilia and flagella “are far past the edge of evolution.  Such coherent, complex, cellular systems did not arise by random mutation and natural selection, any more than the Hoover Dam was built by the random accumulation of twigs, leaves, and mud” (p. 102).  

At the most fundamental level, proteins reveal the mystery of life.  They not only do requisite work within cells, but we now know that they must “fit specifically with other proteins” and most of them “actually work as teams of half dozen or more” (p. 124).  Still more:  “proteins must self-assemble” (p. 125).  Furthermore:  “to acquire some new useful property, not just one but two new protein-binding sites had to develop.”  In the case of malaria parasites developing resistance to chloroquine, it would take “a hundred billion billion organisms—more than the number of mammals that has ever existed on earth” (p. 135).  And, as one would suspect, “all known malarial evolutionary responses to human drugs includes no novel protein-protein interactions” (p. 136).  

What’s true for malaria is likewise true for the HIV virus, which mutates at least ten thousand times more rapidly than cells.  To exhaust all possible “mutations in HIV requires only 10²⁰ viruses, which have in fact appeared on earth in recent decades.”  Scientists have documented HIV’s run through the “gamut of all possible substitution mutations, a gamut that would require billions of years for cells to experience.  Yet all those mutations have changed the virus very little” (p. 154).  HIV studies “also shed light on the topic of the origin of life on earth.  It has been speculated that life started out modestly, as viral-like strings of RNA, and then increased in complexity to yield cells.  The extremely modest changes in HIV throw cold water on that idea.  In 10²⁰ copies, HIV developed nothing significantly new or complex.  Extrapolating from what we know, such ambitious Darwinian early-earth scenarios appear to be ruled out” (p. 155).  Consequently, Behe says:  “there is no evidence that Darwinian processes can take the multiple, coherent steps needed to build new molecular machinery, the kind of machinery that fills the cell” (p. 163).  

Inasmuch as random selection fails to explain the intricacies of the cell, Behe suggests that nonrandom selection may well fit the bill.  “That is, alterations to DNA over the course of the history of life on earth must have included many changes that we  have no statistical right to expect, ones that were beneficial beyond the wildest reach of probability.  Over and over again the past several billion years, the DNA of living creatures changed in salutary ways that defied chance” (p. 165).  He concludes that the “elegant, coherent, functional systems upon which life depends are the result of deliberate intelligent design” (p. 166).  To illustrate, he shows the “logic maps” evident in the gene regulatory networks that guide the inner workings of the animal bodies.  When visually portrayed they reveal an “obvious, impressive coherence,” much like “a complex electronic or computer-logic circuit” that “was very likely purposely designed” (p. 197).  

Behe insists his notion of “intelligent design” has no necessarily religious foundation, though it is of course compatible with many religious beliefs.  One can, irreligiously, simply argue that there is an intelligent aspect to the purely natural world.  Yet it’s increasingly clear that “the origin of life was deliberately, purposely arranged, just s the fundamental laws and constants and many other anthropic features of nature were deliberately, purposely arranged” (p. 216).  Fine-tuning just seems evident wherever we study the natural world, whether as astronomers or microbiologists.  “Like it or not, the more science has discovered about the universe, the more deeply fine-tuning is seen to extend—well beyond laws, past details, and into the very fabric of life, perhaps beyond the level of vertebrate classes.  If that level of design required continuing ‘interference,’ that’s what it required, and we should be happy to benefit from it” (p. 230).  But one need not go that far and insist on a divine power “interfering” with the natural world,  Behe refuses to rule out randomness and contingency or evolution by natural selection in some areas.  It just means we must move beyond “the edge of evolution” to fully fathom the reality of our world.

He regards “design as a completely scientific conclusion,” relying solely on “detailed physical evidence, plus standard logic” (p. 233).  He makes his case as a skilled scientists, anchoring it in the best research available.  He writes clearly, persuasively prodding us to open our minds to the unfolding probability of a cosmos that is truly a cosmos—as beautifully designed as the child’s ear that moved Whittiker Chambers (as recorded in Witness) from atheism to theism.   

“It is useless,” quipped Jonathan Swift, “to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he never reasoned into.”  History records a variety of hysterias fomented by ideologies or fears or enthusiasms wherein truth mattered less than causes and aspirations.  Consequently it’s no surprise that when politicians and entertainers enlist in the cause of stopping global warming it’s likely they’ll do so with little concern for careful argument or strong evidence demonstrating its reality.  Unlike past hysterias (e.g. furor over witches) however, dramatic and highly destructive results will surely follow any widely supported effort to stop “climate change.”  So it behooves us to carefully consider the evidence presented by dissenters from the popular narrative—who acknowledge the small increase in global warming but put it in historical perspective and refuse to garner headlines or political power by ringing doomsday alarms.

This S. Fred Singer (a research professor at George Mason University) and Dennis T. Avery (a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute) endeavor to do in Unstoppable Global Warming:  Every 1,500 Years (New York:  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., c. 2008).  In 1996 three European scientists were awarded the Tyler Prize (considered the “environmental Nobel”) for discovering the 1,500-year pattern whereby the earth has, for 11,000 years, regularly cycled through warm and cold epochs.  Singer and Avery use this discovery to argue “that the modern warming is moderate and not man-made” (p. vii).  The earth was far warmer during the Roman Warming (200 BC to 600 AD) and Medieval Warming (950-1300 AD) than it is today.  Yet plant and animal and human life flourished and civilizations thrived.  

Greenland provides a case study for this phenomenon.  Eric the Red and his Norsemen settled on the island late in the 10^th century, and within a century there were some 3,000 settlers on the southwestern coast.  But in the 14^th century, as the Little Ice Age descended, Greenland’s last settlements disappeared as ice replaced the meadows that had sustained a vigorous culture during the Medieval Warming period.  The Little Ice Age has now passed, and we have entered a Modern Warming period that will probably last another 400 years and “will essentially restore the fine climate of the Medieval Climate Optimum” (p. 4).  Rather than fear global warming we should welcome it!  What we should actually fear is global cooling, the next Big Ice Age wherein ice sheets would again cover much of Canada and Russia.  

Scientific evidence (ranging from ice core samples to tree rings to cave stalagmites to deep sea deposits of plankton fossils) demonstrates the world-wide reality of the 1,500-year climate cycle.  First suggested by Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger, who were studying ice cores divulging “250,000 years of Earth’s layered climate history” (p. 16), the theory is “almost eerie in its accuracy, its completeness, and its logical linkage of the moderate climate cycles to the sun” (p. 16).   The sun, of course is the primary provider of earth’s energy, and the sun’s rays primarily shape earth’s climate.  Constantly changing cycles of the sun invariably affect earth’s climate cycles.  Importantly:  “the 1,500-year climate cycle is not an unproven theory like the model-based predictions used by advocates of the theory of man-made global warming” (p. 28).  

In the light of such recent evidence, Singer and Avery point to “shattered glass in the greenhouse theory.”  For one thing, throughout history CO₂ has played no role in climate change!  There’s been far more of it in the atmosphere in the past and earth’s temperatures remained constant.  Still more, we must routinely doubt most all statements of  global warming activists (many of them highly-paid employees of environmental organizations)!  Despite what you might think listening to Al Gore’s pronouncements, the polar bear population is increasing—and polar bears have survived dozens of 1,500-year climate cycles.  And however authoritative alarmists may sound when warming about polar warming, the fact “is that temperatures at and near the North and South Poles have been cooling” since the 1930s (p. 109).   

The chapter entitled “fraud and deceit in selling man-made global warming” ought to elicit any honest person’s ire.  Here we learn how environmentalists, politicians, journalists, and all too many grant-dependent scientists have manipulated people’s fears to secure personal or professional advantages.  That a tiny rise in temperature has stimulated enormous attention with calls for massive social change indicates something more is afoot than simple concern for our climate.  This is especially evident in the activities of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose work is frequently cited as definitive and claims to represent a consensus of the world’s finest climate scientists.  In 2001, for instance, the IPCC’s assessment report featured a graph (crafted by Michael Mann) that dishonestly expunged the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age so as to depict 900 years of “stable global temperatures—until about 1910.  Then the 20^th century’s temperatures seem to rocket upward and out of control.  The Mann graph became infamous in scientific circles as ‘the hockey stick,’ a shape it resembled” (p. 128).  

Though the Mann study ignored massive amounts of evidence, activists seized it as a stick with which to score important goals.  Mann himself was given an editor’s slot with The Journal of Climate, a prestigious position.  Yet he was rather quickly forced to issue significant disclaimers when two independent scholars finally secured access to his data and found that it “did not produce the claimed results ‘due to collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principle components and other quality control defects’” (p. 130).  In other words, Professor Mann’s was a demonstrably false presentation, a remarkable illustration of junk science!    

Much like Mann’s study, reports issued by the IPCC resort to selective data, constantly shift as earlier pronouncements are refuted by solid research, and often reflect whatever’s politically correct.  Truth to tell:  “it is sheer fantasy to suggest that a huge majority of scientists with expertise in global climate change endorses an alarming interpretation of the recent climate data” (p. 122).  There is, furthermore, a significant difference between scientists who study geology, and sediment cores, and global satellite data and those who rely on the computer models responsible for most of the fears regarding global warming.  Satellite readings, for example, along with high-altitude weather balloons that have been employed since the 1950s, “are giving us the most accurate temperature measurements we have had in all history, and they provide evidence that the Earth’s atmosphere has not warmed strongly” during the past 60 years (p. 141).    

Given all the evidence, Singer and Avery insist that we dismiss a whole host of “baseless fears about global warming” such as dramatically rising sea levels.  Contrary to Al Gore’s egregious claim that the world’s sea level will raise 20 feet in the next century and inundate major cities, most sea level experts foresee only a modest (15 inches) increase.  Another environmental activist, Lester R. Brown, whose “state of the world” publications are widely used in various universities, declared (in 2001) that the Pacific islands nation Tuvalu was doomed because global warming was lifting the sea level sufficiently to flood the tiny atoll.  No evidence to support Brown exists, however, and “‘there is no indication based on observations that sea level rise is accelerating’” (p. 159).  Nor will millions of species perish!  “Virtually every wild species is at least one million years old, which means they have all been through at least six hundred of the 1,500-year climate cycles” (p. 164).  Nor need we fear increased famines and droughts—in fact global warming may well generate more precipitation and enable farmers to grow more food.  There will likely be less frequent fierce storms, and fewer humans will die as a result of environmental factors.

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Patrick J. Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia (as well as Virginia State Climatologist since 1980), and Robert C. Balling Jr., a professor in the climatology program in the School of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State university, have written Climate of Extremes:  Global Warming Science They don’t Want you to Know (Washington, D.C.:  Cato Institute, c. 2009).  The “climate of extremes” refers to the current debate rather than meteorological realities!  “Discourse has degenerated into demagoguery.  Threatening demagoguery” (p. 5).  Journalists and politicians have learned to exploit bad environmental news to their personal advantage.  Legislation, supported by an alarmed public, has quickly saddled us with utopian agendas and unprecedented taxation.  

In a frank (and most disturbing) preface, Michaels details the increasing political pressure he felt as global warming hysteria infected the ruling elite.  After giving countless interviews and serving as an environmental consultant, working for two decades under both Republican and Democrat governors, Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine (D) recently ordered him to cease speaking “as State Climatologist when it came to global warming” (p. x).  Since his position at the University of Virginia was tied to his position as State Climatologist, he “had the choice of speaking on global warming and having my salary line terminated, or leaving” (p. x).  He has, consequently, resigned his position at the university.  

“Other State Climatologists soon had similar difficulties” (p. x).  Oregon’s Governor Ted Kulongoski (D) imposed a gag order on Oregon State University’s Professor George Taylor because he insisted on truthfully presenting snowpack data regarding the Pacific Northwest—posing “‘contradictions [that] interfere with the state’s stated goals to reduce greenhouse gases’” (p. x).  Sufficiently pressured, Taylor resigned his position in February 2008.  “David Legates, at the University of Delaware was told by Governor Ruth Ann Minner (D) that he could no longer speak on global warming as State Climatologist” (p. xi).  “Out West, things got even uglier.  The Assistant State Climatologist for Washington, Mark Albright, was fired because, defying his boss’s orders, he refused to stop e-mailing—to journalists, to inquiring citizens, to anyone—the entire snowfall record for the Cascade Mountains rather than the cherry-picked ones” (p. xi).  So what information do the governors want to suppress?  “Apparently it is this:  The world is not coming to an end because of global warming.  Further, we don’t really have the means to significantly alter the temperature trajectory of the planet” (p. xiii).  And that’s the message of this book.  

No informed climatologist questions the fact that earth’s mean surface has warmed one degree during the past century.  The globe is warming.  The significant questions are:  1) how much has it actually warmed?  2) how much warming is human caused?  3) how accurately can predictions, grounded in solid evidence, can be made?   The evidence presented by Michaels and Balling is much the same as detailed in by Singer and Avery in Unstoppable Global Warming and need not be repeated.  Citing reams of scholarly studies, presenting scores of pictures, charts, and graphs, Michaels and Balling endeavor to show us that the earth’s climate has always been changing, that the multiplied fears of raging hurricanes, rising sea-levels, and rampant extinctions have no factual basis.  “The story portrayed in this book is that there is a body of science—an internally consistent one—that paints a picture that is much different than the gloom-and-doom vision of climate change that we read about almost every day” (p. 195).  There are problems we will encounter if the earth continues is gradual warming, but such solutions to these problems will involve minor changes and minimal discomfort.  

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Ian Plimer is a distinguished Australian geologist who was twice awarded the Eureka Prize, his nation’s highest scientific honor.  He has written Heaven and Earth:  Global Warming the Missing Science (New York:  Taylor Trade Publishing, c. 2009).  It’s a fact-packed 504 page book, studded with 2311 references to scholarly articles.  Plimer knows a great deal, and he’s utterly persuaded that we face “the greatest global threat” in his lifetime.  The threat, however, “is not global warming.  It is the threat from policy responses to perceived global warming and the demonizing of dissent” (p. 435).  In his judgment, global warming has become an intensely held “religious belief system,” “an urban atheistic religion disconnected from nature . . . [that] evolved to fill a yawning spiritual vacuum in the Western World” (p. 14).  With the waning of traditional Christianity secular people are left with a longing for meaning in life, and a new religion, extreme environmentalism has enraptured a growing class of devotees.  “The rise in environmentalism parallels in time and place the decline of Christianity and socialism and incorporates many of the characteristics of Christianity and socialism” (p. 463).  Perceptively, the distinguished Australian Cardinal George Pell recently noted that “‘pagan emptiness and fears about nature have led to hysteria and extreme claims about global warming.  In the past, pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to place capricious and cruel gods.  Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions’” (p. 467).

First Plimer considers planetary history, a record of constant change.  What we’re now experiencing is neither novel nor dangerous.  Earth has been far warmer in the past—and far cooler as well—and an honest reckoning of this reality renders specious “all arguments supporting human-induced global warming” (p. 87).  In fact, “there is no observed relationship between global climate and atmospheric CO₂” and it has been “up to 25 times higher” in the past than it is now (p. 130).  Rewriting history to blame CO₂ for today’s global warming (as the IPCC and Al Gore routinely do) is to engage in reprehensible fraud!  Given this historical context, Plimer next devotes lengthy chapters to the sun, the earth, ice, water and air, providing ample details illustrating his case.  “The sun,” for example, “is the primary driving force of climate” (p. 100).  We can observe its impact, but there is nothing we can do to change it!  Yet, inexplicably, the models crafted by the IPCC and environmentalists routinely ignore the sun’s role.  

They do so because their ideology trumps science.  “The founder of Greenpeace, Dr Patrick Moore, has stated that the green movements have been taken over by neo-Marxists promoting anti-trade, anti-globalisation and anti-civilisation” (p. 437).  They feel deeply that they have a calling to save Planet Earth, so virtually means to gain that end are justified.  Thus despite the glaring errors manifestly evident in Al Gore’s books, documentary film, and speeches, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.  This is a result, Plimer argues, of the human-induced global warming frenzy being primarily political and religious rather than scientific—it “offers the satisfaction of righteousness without actually having to do anything.  Subscribing costs nothing, it provides the immediate reward of moral superiority, and there is the bonus of seeing ‘polluters’ having to pay for their sins” (p. 446).   

Heaven and Earth is a rich depository of information.  Unfortunately, Plimer finds it difficult to construct cogent paragraphs and chapters!  It’s almost as if, sentence by sentence, tidbits of data are inserted.  Patient reading proves rewarding, and the author’s case grows demonstrably persuasive, but the book, quite frankly, needs significant editorial work to make it even minimally readable!

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Conversely, Christopher C. Horner’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism (Washington, DC:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2007) is an eminently readable treatise, written by a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  He believes that (unlike genuine concerns for pollution control and conservation of natural resources) global warming hysteria “is the bottomless well of excuses for governmental intervention and authority” (p. xiv).  It provides “progressives” (whether FDR or LBJ or Barack Obama) what they always want:  “a safe, rational and above all peaceful way of ‘remaking society’ . . . [and] developing a more coherent central state’” (p. 17).  

“Green is the new red,” says chapter one.  “When communism didn’t work out, environmentalism became the anti-capitalist vehicle of choice, drawing cash and adoration from business, Hollywood, media, and social elites” (p. 3).  Billions of dollars now flow into the coffers of environmental organizations, and activists like Al Gore (strolling the corridors of power) stand to reap multiplied millions of dollars if governments embrace the environmental agenda.  The masses are manipulated to cough up the cash through clever propaganda, primarily proffered through constantly changing alarms regarding immanent catastrophes.  Thus, though air and water quality have improved during recent decades, “the quality of environmental reporting and rhetoric was rapidly declining” (p. 38).  

We’re told, for instance, that burning fossil fuels causes global warming, whereas in fact they “are a tiny fraction of one factor” responsible for climate change (p. 69).  We’re told there is a “consensus” of scientists alarmed by global warming—a claim based upon “discredited reports, character assassinations, and fake experts” (p. 81).  An environmental group, Ozone Action, declared that some 2,600 experts supported their global warming fears, but only one of the “experts” was a climatologist!  The “experts” who signed the document included a plastic surgeon, several architects and linguists!  A history instructor, Naomi Oreskes, claimed that her research revealed an absolute consensus of scholarly articles supporting anthropogenic global warming.  What she somehow failed to find, however, in her study of 928 articles, were 11,000 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, many presenting hard evidence refuting her conclusion!  “Her research is substantively meaningless, while its use by alarmists speaks volumes” (p. 90).  Even more distressing, “less than 2 percent” of the 928 articles she actually cited “argue her purported ‘consensus’ view” (p. 92).  In short:  the public hears much hype from Al Gore and Barak Obama but very little climatological truth.  

Oft unmentioned in discussions of global warming is what Horner calls “the big money of climate alarmism.”   Though environmental activists frequently scorn business profiteers who threaten the health of the planet, behind the scenes they are profiting from policies crafted to stop global warming.  Since Al Gore lost the 2000 election, the former vice president has orchestrated an exponential increase in his wealth from two million to 100 million dollars—largely through a company he founded to take advantage of mandated moves to “green” energy!  Allegedly non-profit environmental organizations (such as the Nature Conservancy and Sierra Club) bring in billions of dollars every year, grant lavish salaries to top executives, and target donations to pliable politicians who then enact into law the environmentalists’ agenda.  

Such legislation cannot but make us “poorer and less free” simply because “you can’t control the weather, but you can kill millions trying” (p. 270).  Those European nations that have implemented some of the Kyoto provisions demonstrate this.  Fully following Kyoto’s objectives “would reduce Germany’s GDP by 5.2 percent, Spain’s by 5.0 percent, the UK’s by 4.5 percent,” and millions of jobs would be lost (p. 259).  More amazingly, “Kyoto’s proponents” admit that even were it implemented fully, it would have no detectable effect on temperature increase” (p. 264)!  What Europe’s governing elites know, however, is that implementing the Kyoto protocols will vastly increase their control of the continent’s economy and help “level the playing field” for the world’s peoples.  

# # # 

Seven centuries before Christ, Lycurgus, the legendary architect of Sparta’s constitution, was allegedly asked why he hadn’t designed a democracy.  To him the answer was self-evident:  “Try the experiment in your own family.”  Sharing Lycurgus’ distrust, neither Plato nor Aristotle found much commendable in democratic regimes.  Nor did Thomas Aquinas 1500 years later, noting, with his usual acuity:  “If an unjust government is carried on by one man alone, who seeks his own benefit from his rule and not the good of the multitude subject to him, such a ruler is called a tyrant—a word derived from strength—because he oppresses by might instead of ruling by justice.  Thus among the ancients all powerful men were called tyrants.  If an unjust government is carried on, not by one by several, and if they be few, it is called an oligarchy, that is, the rule of a few.  This occurs when a few, who differ from the tyrant only by the fact that they care more than one, oppress the people by means of their wealth.  If, finally, the bad government is carried on by the multitude, it is called a democracy, i.e. control by the populace, which comes about when the plebian people by force of numbers oppress the rich.  In this way the whole people will be as one tyrant” (On Kingship, I, 1).  

That ancient, and venerable, critique of majority rule is reaffirmed in Paul A. Rahe’s Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift:  Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville & The Modern Prospect (New Haven:  Yale University Press, c. 2009), a meticulous investigation of modern democracy’s intellectual development and ominous implications.  Its positive case was best argued by Montesquieu early in the 18^th century   He “rivals Aristotle as an analyst of political regimes” (p. 13), and his Spirit of the Laws quickly became “the political Bible of learned men and would-be statesmen everywhere in Europe, and beyond.  In Britain, it shaped the thinking of Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, William Blackstone, Adam Smith . . . and in America, it inspired the Framers of the Constitution and their opponents, the anti-Federalists, as well” (p. 64).  His countryman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was also indebted to Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, though he repudiated many of the Enlightenment principles embodied therein.  Rejecting Montesquieu’s call for a representative republic—much like the federal system established by the United States Constitution, with its balanced (legislative, executive, judicial) powers and moderate policies—Rousseau envisioned a utopian society incubated by an autocratic, mystical “general will.”  Thus he celebrated ancient Sparta and republican Rome, claiming that those ancient polities provided guidance for the modern democracies he envisioned.  (In fact, he used arbitrary portraits of the past as a club with which to destroy the 18^th century monarchies he despised.) 

As a gifted propagandist, Rousseau “laid hold of the inchoate uneasiness afflicting his contemporaries and gave it both substance and form.  In doing so, he fomented the revolutionary and nationalist impulses and the democratic envy that he so frequently professed to abhor; and by insisting that men are naturally good and that all of the wickedness they display and all of the misery they suffer can be traced to the political institutions under which they live, he fostered within what was in origin a secular impulse an almost messianic hope, and he inspired in many a reader a profound longing to establish new institutions capable of transforming the human condition and of reworking thereby the very nature of man” (p. 139).  In Rahe’s judgment:  “Every radical movement of both left and right, from Jacobism at the time of the French Revolution through communism and fascism in the twentieth century to the anti-globalization movement, the environmental movement, and the Islamist jihad characteristic of our time, has wittingly or unwittingly taken as its starting point one or another variation of the powerful critique of bourgeois society first suggested” by Rousseau (p. 139).  

Rejecting Rousseau while embracing Montesquieu, the third great French thinker Rahe examines—Alexis de Tocqueville—discerned enduring truths regarding both European and American democracies worth pondering.  His Democracy in America pivots around Montesquieu’s “haunting observation that if you ‘abolish in a monarchy the prerogatives of the lords, the clergy, the nobility, & the towns,’ as England’s parliament had done, ‘you will soon have a state popular—or, indeed, a state despotic’” (p. 161).  In the name of “the people,” enabled and applauded by “the people,” you can subtly enslave the people, and they are especially subject to a dictatorial “public opinion” that easily becomes the final arbitrator of all democratic decisions.  Consequently, to Tocqueville, “soft despotism really is democracy’s drift” (p. 193).  This is especially facilitated by what seems an inevitable centralization of power, establishing a “tutelary state”—a “despotism of Administrators” that inexorably expands.    

Ironically, even the most “compassionate” administrative endeavors subtly corrupt the body politic.  “‘Every measure,’ Tocqueville insisted, ‘which establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives to it an administrative form creates thereby a class unproductive and idle, living at the expense of the class which is industrious and given to work. . . .  Such a law is a poisonous germ, deposited in the bosom of the legal code, . . . and if the current generation escapes its influence, it will devour the well-being of generations to come’” (p. 242).  This becomes clear as Rahe investigates the impact made by eminent American progressives—ranging from the economist Richard Ely to Justice Roscoe Pound to the philosopher John Dewey—who designed “a new political regime, distinct from and, in certain critical respects, opposed to the one that had gradually taken shape in the period stretching from 1776 to 1789” (p. 245).  

Ever intent on helping the helpless, American progressives established the New Deal and Great Society—utopian endeavors Tocqueville had warned against while analyzing the “French disease” a century earlier.  What he “discerned in embryo long ago is now a matter of brute fact” in both France and the United States.  “Over the people of France today, as he feared would someday be the case, there ‘is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate,’ and it threatens to reduce this astonishingly talented nation ‘to nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd’” (p. 237).  Following France’s lead (with a suitable time lag) and manipulating the “rhetoric of rights” to centralize state power, American progressives advanced “‘the idea that the State ought not to be the director of the society only, but that it ought to be, so to speak, the master of every man—what do I say?—his master, his preceptor, his pedagogue; for fear of allowing him to fail, the State should situate itself unceasingly beside him, above him, around him to guide him, protect him, restrain him, sustain him.’  In a word, he said, this idea demands ‘confiscation’—not just of property, but ‘to a greater or lesser degree the confiscation of human liberty’ as well.  Socialism was, in his opinion, ‘a new formula for servitude,’ and in the battle against it, he was not prepared to give an inch” (p. 262).  

Tocqueville’s warning has gone largely unheeded in America, Rahe.  During “the past seventy-five years,” Rahe says, “as our government has conferred on its citizens the extensive array of programmatic rights now called ‘entitlements, there has been a steady erosion of our political and our private rights” (p. 262).  To equalize outcomes in the name of “fairness,” we Americans “have forgotten what James Madison so clearly understood—that it is from ‘the diversity in the faculties of men’ that ‘the rights of property originate,’ and that ‘the protection of these faculties is the first object of Government’—and with the growth in what are euphemistically called ‘transfer payments,’ our democracy has step by step become a giant kleptocracy” (p. 263).  Compounding the expansion of entitlements is “the erosion of mores, manners, and religion” that Rahe documents, for in those areas, “as well as in our political institutions and practices, we are more like Tocqueville’s compatriots than like Americans of his day.  And the fears that he expressed with regard to the French now apply with considerable force to us as well, for we have forgotten that human life is sacred, that it is unjust to take from one to give to another, that libertinism is fatal to liberty, and that strong, stable families and personal self-discipline are prerequisites for sustaining a government limited with regard to the ends it may pursue and the means it may employ” (p. 269).  Consequently we are poorly poised to “resist liberal democracy’s despotic drift,” as was evident in the 2008 election, when we elected a president and Congress “intent on dramatically increasing the scale and scope of the administrative state” (p. 269).  Sadly enough, “Step by step, gradually, and to a considerable degree unwittingly, we have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage” (p. 274).  

This is an unabashedly scholarly work, primarily devoted to an explication of the works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville.  Rahe’s research was done in the best French editions available, and much that he discusses is quite technical and demanding.  So though I highly commend this treatise I must note that it is quite unapproachable to the general reader.  The intellectual case he builds, however, and the applications he makes to the current American scene are highly significant for all who treasure liberty.   

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To address the same concerns from a legal perspective, James Kalb has written The Tyranny of Liberalism:  Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command (Wilmington:  Intercollegiate Studies Institute, c. 2008).  Like Rahe, he is alarmed by recent developments in the United States, and he writes to arouse readers to critique and resist the emergent tyranny everywhere evident.  For it’s clear, he argues, that “advanced liberal society is reproducing the error of socialism—the attempt to administer and radically alter things that are too complex to be known, grasped, and controlled—but on a far grander scale.  The socialists tried to simplify and rationalize economics, while today’s liberals are trying to do the same with human relations generally” (p. 12).  

To argue his case, he first describes the “decline and fall” of American liberty that has accompanied the triumph of liberalism.  In one of the amazing inversions of history, what began (with John Locke and later espoused by the likes of Thomas Jefferson) as a movement devoted to individual freedom, “liberalism” in the 20^th century transformed itself into a movement of societal control.  “In trying to secure and expand freedom, equality, and tolerance, liberal society becomes unfree, unequal, and intolerant” (p. 83).  Liberals still declare their allegiance to “freedom, reason, and the well-being of ordinary people” (p. 3), but have in fact established a “liberal tyranny” ever justified by a deep commitment to “a very simple principle:  equal freedom” (p. 14).  Not only is everyone equal (as Christians have ever asserted) as persons in the sight of God, but modern liberals insist everyone must be considered essentially the same.  Thus, for example, women and men, to liberals, are different in only trivial ways and must be treated identically.   Nothing is intrinsically superior to anything else.  Even in the realms of ideas and values there must no hierarchies.  “Standards must go.  Advanced liberal society insists on equal status for pop culture and the classics, abolishes school dress codes, instructs children in alternative sexualities, and puts Christmas and Kwanzaa on the same footing” (p. 99).  

Most significantly, “The ultimate basis of liberalism is rejection of moral authorities that transcend human purposes” (p. 20).  With the ancient sophist Protagoras, liberalism insists that “man is the measure of all things.”  Whereas classic liberals, in the 18^th century, believed in natural rights—life, liberty, property—given us by the Creator, modern liberals locate all rights in human nature and cultural conventions.  Deeply dyed with Darwinism, modern liberalism assumes human nature and cultures continually evolve, so moral relativism shapes its ethics.  All is changeable and all should be changed.  (That the archetypical liberal, Barak Obama, was elected on a platform of “change” clearly illustrates this position.)  Accordingly, whatever technological developments enable us to control and transform the world are supported, for (as pragmatists like John Dewey stressed) whatever succeeds is true and good.  Whatever pleases us must be done.  “If it feels good do it!”   “Modern science, which is oriented toward control of the natural world, and modern politics and morals, which are also oriented toward getting us what we want, go together” (p. 35).  Importantly, Kalb insists:  “Totalitarianism is a consequence of the modern abolition of the transcendent and the edification of human will” (p. 128).  

Liberalism now rules virtually all our cultural institutions. “It is an enormous and all-pervasive system of power dedicated to the control and transformation of human life backed by a huge public sector; lower- and middle-class recipients of public assistance; accredited minority groups and their representatives; corporate recipients of various favors; and media, journalistic, and expert functionaries who draw their importance from the power of the regime they defend and promote” (p. 75).  This system survives through the “centralization of intellectual life that makes molders of opinion—experts, educators, media people, entertainers—integral to government.  The saying that such people constitute a ‘Fourth Estate’ should be taken literally.  This power over opinion puts them among our rulers, and it brings with it disciplines and incentives that promote cohesion and help make their rule effective” (p. 78).  Strangely enough, “control of thought and expression follows from the basic dynamic of liberalism” (p. 91).  Thus speech codes proliferate in the strongest bastions of liberalism, university campuses!  

For its devotees, liberalism has become a “new religion, a system of moral absolutes based on a denial that moral truth is knowable, [that] consists in nothing less than the deification of man.”  Liberal faith “puts our own thoughts and desires at the center of things, and so puts man in the place of God.  If you say we cannot know anything about God, only our own experience, you will soon say that there is no God, at least for practical purposes, and that we are the ones who give order and meaning to the world.  In short, you will say that we are God” (p. 94).   As religious dogma, of course, liberalism proves belligerently hostile to all rivals, and its inquisitors (e.g. the ACLU) endeavor to cleanse the world of all rivals.  No crosses are allowed in public, nor is any theory of origins, apart from naturalistic evolution, permitted consideration in public schools.  In Kalb’s judgment, “we are in the midst of a world struggle between two quasi-totalitarian religious movements:  radical Islam and advanced liberalism” (p. 97).  

Having detailed his objections to modern liberalism, Kalb turns, in the second section of his book, to making suggestions regarding ways to defeat it.  Only a principled conservatism has a chance of rightly reorienting this nation.  Firstly, conservatives must regain the high ground of sound reason, for “the fatal flaw of liberalism is its defective view of reason and the good” (p. 189).  Its emotivism renders it incapable of rational defense.  Secondly, conservatives need to rightly defend tradition as a source of truth and wisdom.  The good life, whether in families or communities, depends upon established routines that have proven to promote the well-being of persons.  Thirdly, conservatives must be unabashed about their faith, their religious commitments, their discovery of truth and goodness and beauty in transcendent Reality.  Sadly enough, “The recent decisive rejection of Christianity in much of Western society, and with it the rejection of a principle of transcendent public truth tied to some distinct representative, has been accompanied by irrationalism, a radical decline of nontechnological culture, and the attempt to reduce politics and public life to purely technical functions, thereby abolishing them in theory while making them tyrannical in practice” (p. 249).  

Though the odds against overthrowing modern liberalism may seem monumental, Kalb assures readers that thousands of small steps—reasserting order amidst anarchy, upholding values amidst nihilism, and patiently working to make strong families, churches, and communities—may in time restore the American way.  

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In one of his essays C.S. Lewis declared:  “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.   It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.  The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”  These words rather sum up the case drafted by Mark R. Levine in Liberty and Tyranny:  A Conservative Manifesto (New York:  Simon & Schuster Threshold Editions, c. 2009).  And though the intellectual case he makes is less persuasive than that of Rahe and Kalb, it is more simply presented and thus accessible to the general reader.  

Liberty, Levine believes, was the guiding principle of America’s 18^th century Founders, who insisted it could be preserved only through carefully limited governmental powers, enunciated in the nation’s Constitution.  Consequently, he defends:  1)  the federalism decreed by the 10^th Amendment (“the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”), and 2) the free market, with its commitment to the sanctity of private property, “the material value created from the intellectual and/or physical labor of the individual, which may take the form of income, real property, or intellectual property” (p. 62).  

Both federalism and private property have been discounted for nearly a century by courts and congressmen.  Thus Levine decries the rapidly growing power of those (dubbed “Statists”) who seek to centralize power and manage not only the economy but all of life for the “good” of the people.  Statists such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter established the ubiquitous welfare state, promoted dubious environmental causes, and championed unlimited, illegal immigration—all designed to establish an administrative state, run by experts determined to reconfigure the polity of this nation.   In sum:  “So distant is America today from its founding principles that it is difficult to precisely describe the nature of American government.  It is not a strictly a constitutional republic, because the Constitution has been and continues to be easily altered by a judicial oligarchy that mostly enforces, if not expands, the Statist’s agenda.  It is not strictly a representative republic, because so many edicts are produced by a maze of administrative departments that are unknown to the public and detached from its sentiment.  It is not strictly a federal republic, because the states that gave the central government life now live at its behest.  What, then, is it?  It is a society steadily transitioning toward statism” (p. 192).  Inexorably, this leads to the loss of liberty and the establishment of tyranny.

What then should be done?  Nothing less that President Ronald Reagan prescribed when he said:  “‘Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream.  It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free’” (p. 205).  

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One of my great consolations, since my late wife’s death, has been classical music.  Often unable to sleep at night, I found playing Gregorian Chants relaxed both  soul and body—I was mysteriously soothed and blessed by the most ancient music of the Church.  Thereby I affirmed the truth of a statement by George Rochberg, himself a gifted composer:  “Music remains what it has always been:  a sign that man is capable of transcending the limits and constraints of his material existence” (p. 342).  I also found, by purchasing some CDs mentioned in Robert R. Reilly’s Surprised by Beauty:  A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music (New York:  Morley Books, c. 2002), a number of great 20^th century composers whose artistic excellence has ministered to me, demonstrating Plato’s insight that “‘rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful’” (p. 19).  .  

Reilly begins with a short but powerful chapter entitled “Is Music Sacred?”  In a word, he says:  Yes!—if it’s attuned to the beauty of the cosmos.  As Cicero argued, two millennia ago:  “the right kind of music is divine and can ‘return’ man to a paradise lost.  It is a form of communion with divine truth” (p. 20).  That’s especially true for Christians because, as St. Clement of Alexandria discerned, believers who are born again rightly sing “a ‘New Song’ far superior to the Orphic myths of the pagans.  The ‘New Song’ is Christ, Logos Himself” (p. 20).  Clement even allowed that pagan “music participated in the divine by praising God and partaking in the harmonious order of which He was the composer.   But music’s goal became even higher because Christ is higher.  With Christianity the divine region becomes both transcendent and personal because Logos is Christ.  The new goal of music is to make the transcendent perceptible” (p. 21).    

Toward the end of the book Reilly returns to this theme in a chapter entitled “Recovering the Sacred in Music.”  Classical music has survived its “attempted suicide” at the hands of atonal composers following Arnold Schoenberg, in whom “All the symptoms of the 20^th-century’s spiritual sickness are present, including the major one diagnosed by Eric Voegelin as ‘a loss of reality’” (pp. 264-265).  Fortunately, tonality is back, as Reilly demonstrates in his celebration of selected artists—preeminently Christians such as Henryk Goreki (Polish) Arvo Part (Estonian) and John Tavener (English) whose music is rooted in the New Testament.  “Their purpose is contemplation, specifically the contemplation of religious truths.  Their music is hieratic.  It aims for the intersection of time and timelessness, at which point the transcendent becomes perceptible” (p. 268).  These three musicians, “‘looking for God . . . have found a musical epiphany in the pursuit” (p. 269).   All three “completely believe in the salvific act of Christ, center their lives on it, and express it in their music” (p. 267).  (A decade or so ago, having read a review of Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3—“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”—I bought the CD;  thenceforth, as I often played it, I learned the truth of the composer’s admonition to just “Be still . . . and know that I am God,” to hear what the Lord might say through the music.)  

Like Gorecki, John Tavener was schooled in the atonality of Schoenberg and wrote “some severely serial pieces” in accord with his precepts.  But as he matured he rejected modernism.  “Now he eschews such convolutedness and says ‘Complexity is the language of evil’” (p. 173).  In all his compositions, Tavener aspires “to the sacred. . . .   Music is a form of prayer, a mystery.’  Tavener wishes to express ‘the importance of immaterial realism, or transcendent beauty.’  His goal is to recover ‘one simple memory’ from which all art derives:  ‘The constant memory of the Paradise from which we have fallen leads to the Paradise which was promised to the repentant thief’” (p. 273).  

What Reilly illustrates and lauds, in Surprised by Beauty, is the remarkable, recent resurgence of this ancient Christian view.  “Modern” classical music, dominated for decades by Arnold Schoenberg and “his denial of tonality,” had little concern for beauty—indeed he “declared himself ‘cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty’” (p. 23).  But Schoenberg couldn’t stamp out man’s need for beauty, nor did he discourage scores of gifted composers who loved tonality simply because of its manifest beauty.  Thus one of the greatest 20^th century composers, “Jean Sibelius, anything but an orthodox Christian, nonetheless hearkened back to St. Clement when he wrote:  ‘The essence of man’s being is his striving after God.  It [the composition of music] is brought to life by means of the logos, the divine in art.  That is the only thing that has significance’” (p. 22).  Saying so, Sibelius shared the philosophical position of the philosopher Simone Weil, who said:  “‘We love the beauty of the world because we sense behind it the presence of something akin to that wisdom we should like to possess to slake our thirst for good’” (p. 24).  

Having built his case for the sacredness of music, Reilly proceeds to examine, in brief chapters, nearly 40 composers.  For example, “Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was the greatest Catholic composer at the turn of the 19^th century and the greatest English composer since Purcell some 200 years earlier” (p. 62).  Like all great thinkers he pondered the reality of death.  Consequently, his The Dream of Gerontius, “was one of the most extraordinary choral works ever written.  It was also a stunning affirmation of Catholic faith” (p. 63).  In setting to music the great poetic work of John Henry Newman, Elgar enables us to hear good news about the “Better Land” awaiting us who die in a state of grace.  (I bought the CD recommended by Reilly, and I can verify his commendation of this great work.)

Another moving musical work I bought, following Reilly’s urging, was Frank Martin’s Golgotha.  Martin was the son of a Swiss Calvinist minister who began composing music as a child.  “At twelve, he was deeply moved by a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.  Bach’s lasting influence was apparent from Martin’s motto: ‘Bach today, yesterday and forever’” (p. 121).  He celebrated Christmas with an oratorio in 1959, Le Mystere de la Nativite, which “contains some of the most touching, faith-filled music I have heard” (p. 124).  Then, in Golgotha, Martin endeavored to show how “Christ’s divinity is manifested in His acceptance of His death” (p. 126).  Following the premiere of this work in Laussane, Martin’s wife “wrote, ‘Several people of all kinds came to him with tears in their eyes, saying “Thank you, Mr. Martin.  You took away from us all fear of death.”  After the concert, when he was alone with my daughter, he told her, “I have achieved my purpose.  Now I may die”’” (p. 127).  

One of my favorite CDs is Franz Schmidt’s The Book of the Seven Seals, his “legacy to the world,” inspired by the book of Revelation.  He was an Austrian-Hungarian who lived from 1847-1939, and he noted “that ‘music first entered my soul through the Church’” (p. 197).  Unlike his contemporaries, who were intoxicated by the atonality of modern music, he “stayed within the Viennese tradition of Haydn, Schubert, Brahms, and Bruckner” (p. 198).  In The Book of the Seven Seals, he demonstrated his endeavor to work as an artist and as “‘a deeply religious man’” (p. 199), able to “dramatize the Ultimate” (p. 200).  

I do not pretend to understand or explain music well!  I do know that it speaks to me in wonderful ways.  And I was truly blessed by the purchase of Reilly’s Surprised by Beauty—both for its text and its recommendations.  

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In earlier reviews I commended Thomas Dubay’s The Fire Within and Faith and Certitude, so it’s not surprising I’d give high marks to his The Evidential Power of Beauty:  Science and Theology Meet (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 1999).    His thesis was succinctly stated by the noted theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar:  “Every experience of beauty points to infinity.”  Still more, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky asserted in The Brothers Karamazov, “‘beauty is the battlefield where God and Satan contend with each other for the hearts of men’” (p. 20).  

“Every human person,” he declares, “is drawn to beauty,” (p. 11).  Just as we desire to eat and drink, to think and speak, we desire to behold beauty.  “But few of us seem to be aware that the beautiful packs a power not only to fascinate but also to convince a mature and honest mind of solidly grounded truth” (p. 11).  As the poet John Keats said so memorably:  “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”).  So too, the eminent physicist Richard Feynman explained, “‘you can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity’” (p. 13).  Interestingly enough, “‘All of the most eminent physicists of the twentieth century agree that beauty is the primary standard for scientific truth’” (p. 114).  Beauty and truth, importantly, are objective (discerned within real beings), not subjective feelings (differing from person to person).   

Our love for beauty is almost always derived from our awareness of nature.  Whether gazing at a sunset or investigating the intricacies of genetics, whether marveling at the Canadian geese flying overhead or pondering the inexplicable instinct that drives the migration pattern of monarch butterflies, there’s an unfailing allure in the world around us.  What is there in all these phenomena that elicits our wonder at the beautiful?   “Philosophical realism,” the position Dubay advocates, “through the centuries has taught us that the beautiful is that which has unity, harmony, proportion, wholeness and radiance” (p. 34).  When we think clearly we see things as they are.  “We are intellectually alive to the extent that we appreciate the real and respond appropriately to it:  notice, linger, appreciate, wonder, exult, praise, love” (p. 178).  

These components of beauty are, of course, immaterial “forms” discerned by the intelligence, not mere material entities.  “Form is the deep root of a being’s actuality, which gives it its basic whatness.  It is the actualizing principle of a thing, the mysterious taproot that makes that thing to be what it is, and thus why it is different from every other kind of being” (p. 50).  The beauty of great classical music cannot be reduced to sound waves or particular instruments.  (As one of Shakespeare’s characters, in Much Ado About Nothing, quipped:  “Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?”)  Consequently, Dubay explains:  “A performance of classical music is a melodic unity whose harmonies are in exquisite proportion . . . .  Coming from the Greek, sym-phony means “‘sounding together’” (p. 55).  

To hear the beauty in music requires a disposition, an humble openness to it.  If we close our eyes—or look only on the vulgar—we’ll never discern the beauty in Michelangelo’s Pieta (described by Dubay as “light in stone”).    If we never listen to music—or listen only to the cacophony of perversions such as “rap music”—we’ll fail to know the exaltation of Handel’s Messiah or Beethoven’s Ninth.  Having eyes, we may fail to see; having ears we may fail to hear.  But even the least sensitive of us, unlike the irrational animals, have the innate potential to do so.  Dogs certainly have a sharper sense of smell and eagles see far better, but we alone have the ability to come “alive to beauty.”  That we fail to do so is a result of original sin.  “Moral depravity,” Dubay says, “explains why men cast aside ‘perfectly plain’ evidences.  They reject these eloquent testimonies to the divine Artist because by their ‘impiety and depravity’ they ‘keep truth imprisoned in their wickedness’.  They are therefore ‘without excuse’ (Rom 1:18-20)” (p. 69).  

Having set forth his argument, Dubay devotes a section of the book to “savoring the symphony,” introducing us to the beauties of mathematics and astronomy, as well as music and architecture.  We wonder at the starry heavens above and the intricacies of the tiniest cells within our bodies.  We’re amazed at the complexities of the Big Bang and the flying capacities of birds.  Though he claims no expertise as a scientist, he’s clearly read and rejoiced at a host of detailed reports regarding the natural world.  Consider, for example, the information encoded in DNA.  “‘The information necessary to specify the design of all the species of organisms which have ever existed on the planet, a number according to G. G. Simpson of approximately one thousand million, could be held in a teaspoon and there would still be room left for all the information ever written’” (p. 171).  

Surely this means there is intelligence, design, purpose in all that is.  Still more, “Berkeley physicist Henry Pierce Stapp adds the thought that ‘everything we know about nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental processes of nature lie outside space-time but generate events that can be located in space-time’” (p. 200).   Physics leads, necessarily, to metaphysics.  We can no more think about the world around us without acknowledging its design than we can square a circle.  It follows, then, Dubay says, “Once a person admits that the universe makes sense, that it is comprehensible, that there are overwhelming beauties in it, he logically must be a theist” (p. 202).  

To be a theist leads to beholding the “divine glory,” the focus of the book’s third section.  Though the physical world abounds in beauty, its crown (in accord with the “anthropic principle”) is mankind, created in the very image of God.  “If we fully realized who and what we are, we would burst into shouts of continual praise, wonder, and thanksgiving—just as Scripture says we should” (p. 230).  We are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”  And our real grandeur shines forth most wonderfully in the “beauty of sanctity.”  Living virtuously, “putting on Christ,” far more than physical or intellectual ability, makes radiant the glory of the Lord.  Loving others, putting others’ interests before one’s own, staying faithful despite trying times, manifests the beauty of sanctity.  Wisely did Malcolm Muggeridge title his book on Mother Teresa of Calcutta Something Beautiful for God.  

But far above even the finest of the earthly looms God Himself.  “The most beautiful men and women on earth, the saints, are what they are solely because of their complete Yes to the person, teaching, and grace of the crucified risen One” (p. 306).  In Christ we once and for all behold the beauty of the Lord.  “He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power” (Heb 1:3, RSV).  And in time, God willing, we shall be with Him and like him, delighting in what C.S. Lewis memorably titled “the weight of glory.”

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“O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness!” (Ps 96:9).  John Saward develops this theme in The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty:  Art, Sanctity & The Truth of Catholicism (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 1997).  The beauty of holiness streams, as Light from Light, primarily from Christ, “the Light of the World, the Bridegroom who beautifies the Bride of the Lamb who is the lamp of a lustrous city” (p. 19).  His beauty enters into and emanates from all that is beautiful in the world, “for without Him was not anything made that was made.”  

Openly dependent upon Hans Urs von Balthasar (one of the greatest 20^th century theologians),  Saward endeavors “to perceive—through holy men and holy images—the objective glory of divinely revealed truth” (p. 22).  Still more, he wants “to repeat Our Lord’s call to holiness:  ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Mt 5:48)” (p. 25).  Responding to that call, he believes, involves pondering great works of sacred art, such as a celebrated altarpiece painting by Fra Angelico in the Convent of San Marco in Florence, wherein “the beautiful holiness of Paradise sheds its rays upon earth.  It is meant to move men towards sanctity” (p. 26).  Saward then devotes many pages to a careful description and explanation of the various figures portrayed by Fra Angelico.  Importantly:  his “art is centred on Christ” and celebrates the great mystery of His Incarnation (p. 48).  

Grounded in the theological genius of St Thomas Aquinas, Fra Angelico’s art reflects the Angelic Doctor’s conclusion that there is a “fourfold beauty in Christ.  First, in His divine nature (secundum divinam forman) He has beauty, for He is God the Son, the Splendour of the Father.  Secondly, in His human nature He has the beauty of grace and the virtues, for He is ‘full of grace and truth’.  Thirdly in Christ we see the beauty of moral conduct (conversationis honestae); the human actions of the Son of God are more upright and therefore more beautiful than any other man’s.  Finally, Christ as man, even before His Resurrection, had the beauty of body, a beauty befitting the man who was God, in whose face the spiritual beauty of the Godhead shone”  (p. 56).  

Christ’s beauty then extends, by grace, to His saints, for He wants His Bride, the Church and her members, to reflect His fairness” (p. 61).  Adopted into God’s family we are “sons-in-the-Son” and thus called to radiate His beauty in His world.  To St Cyril of Alexandria:  “‘We who bear the image of the Earthly Man cannot escape corruption unless the beauty of the image of the Heavenly Man is imprinted upon us, through our call to adoption as God’s sons.  Partaking of [Christ] through the Spirit, we are sealed by Him, in His likeness and to the archetype of the image. . . .  Thus the ancient beauty of nature is restored’” (p. 62).  

Having carefully examined Fra Angelico’s artistry, Saward moves to a contemplation of the altarpiece’s placement—on the altar.  At the very center of the sacred sanctuary there is a work of art.  Religion and art belong together!  “As St Thomas puts it, ‘just as a work of art presupposes the work of nature, so the work of nature presupposes God’” (p. 73).  In following Nature, “‘like a pupil with his master,’” Dante declared, “‘we may call / This art of yours God’s grandchild , as it were’” (p. 90).  Great art is not “creative”—it just makes visible the creativity of the Creator.  Modern artists, all too often, celebrate themselves, paint self-portraits, and sing songs suffused with subjectivity.  We even have “performance artists,” doing anything bizarre enough to attract the passing attention of the passing crowd.  “It is above all God incarnate whom they will not worship.  The creature intent on glorifying itself resents the Creator who humbled Himself” (pp. 145-146).  But ultimately, as Josef Pieper noted, “‘Music, the fine arts, poetry—anything that festively raises up human existence and thereby constitutes its true riches—all derive their life from a hidden root, and this root is a contemplation which is turned toward God and the world so as to affirm them’” (p. 81).  Consequently, there is both a deeply moral and holy dimension to real art.  Though not precisely a Sacrament (a designated “means of grace”) there is a sacramental quality to art that enables it to convey great blessings to those open to its ministry.  And inasmuch as it embodies the Word through whom all things were made it celebrates the mystery of the Incarnation.  So good art aids orthodoxy.  “‘God’s Word,’ says Balthasar, ‘did not come to rob us of speech but to untie our tongues in a manner hitherto unknown’” (p. 90).

In the judgment of Michael O’Brien, one of the finest Christian novelists now writing, “This luminous book is so important that it can scarcely be overestimated.  The substance of Saward’s scholarship, and his understanding of culture, are dazzling.  His vision is of the utmost urgency.  This is wise, deeply moving and invigorating—a masterpiece.”

# # #

Three years ago, Pastor Jim Garlow preached a series of sermons on the hereafter in San Diego’s Skyline Wesleyan Church.  Those sermons were reworked and recently published as Heaven and the Afterlife (Minneapolis, MN:  Bethany House Publishers, c. 2009), written with the assistance of Keith Wall.  Garlow begins with an assessment of death, contending that “the veil between life and the afterlife is thinner than we think.”  Humans have a peculiar “intimation of immortality,” an inner awareness that this life is not our only life.  Still more:  “a surprising number of us have had some encounter” (p. 20)—labeled Near Death Experiences or NDAs—with an eternal realm beyond death’s door.  That “millions of ordinary folks” have had such experiences affirms “what people of faith have long believed:  Death is not an end but a doorway we walk through as automatically as we take our next breath. The nonphysical part of us is not a mythical fantasy; it is our truest essence, created in God’s image, the part of us that survives our travails in this life to begin a new journey in the next” (p. 31).   Jesus’ promise of eternal life (Jn 3:16) to all who believe in Him directly touches this innate hunger of man’s heart.  

Exploring “what lies between worlds” leads Garlow to consider the importance of dreams, the  reality of ghosts, the living presence of departed loved ones, and the importance of angels and demons, territory often neglected by Evangelical writers but widely discussed in the broader world.  For those of us who have sensed (often in dreams) the presence of a lost loved one, it is comforting to read that a chaplain in a Texas hospice “reports that 64 percent of the bereaved who responded had an afterlife experience following the death of a loved one.  Furthermore, an astonishing 98 percent of those said the encounter had brought much comfort and helped them cope with their grief, even many years later” (p. 73).  

“C.S. Lewis once wrote, ‘There is no neutral round in the universe:  every square inch, every split second is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan’” (p. 68).  Consequently, both Scripture and human experience acknowledge the presence of good and evil spirits.  Garlow has “no doubt that honest-to-goodness, God-sent angels do indeed exist and participate in our lives, probably far more than we realize.  Dozens of absolutely convinced people have told me of their encounters” (p. 94).  They are God’s messengers—beings such as Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael.  They appear repeatedly, almost routinely  throughout the Bible, which “portrays angels as literal, personal entities who play a role in historical events and individual lives” (p. 95).  They are “superhuman,” but “they aren’t all-powerful or all-knowing” (p. 97).  And in certain critical moments of our lives we may suddenly behold them, carrying out God’s work in our world.  So too Satan, the “Father of Lies” carries on his rebellion against God and His Truth, the Word through whom all things are made.  Lots of folks believe in angels—wearing angel pins and watching TV shows.  Less want to allow the existence of their demonic counterparts.  But Scripture and history warn us about their activity, especially evident in tempting us to live selfishly, to embrace “a ‘Luciferian spirit’—that is, ‘It’s all about me.’  Egregious self-absorption says, ‘I will, I want, I will get what I want, I will exalt myself’” (p. 122).  Each of us chooses to serve God our self.  Taking Satan’s bait, choosing to serve self, we inadvertently join Satan in his Hell-bound rebellion.

Especially in our times of grief, many of us begin to realize (with D. L. Moody) that heaven is not “far away.  It is within speaking distance to those who belong there” (p. 133).  Heaven’s right at hand, not in outer space.  Heaven’s another realm of reality, wherein our departed loved ones, through the grace of God, reside.  They are part of that eternal “communion of saints” with which we, the living, commune.  In the Christian tradition, those who die in a state of grace enter the “first heaven,” a place of bliss, the “paradise” Jesus promised the thief on the cross, wherein they await the final resurrection of our bodies and Judgment and entry into the “second heaven.”  That “heaven,” the Bible suggests, will be a restoration of God’s initial plan for man, here on this earth.  “This means,” Garlow says, “the new heaven is not ‘up there somewhere.’  It is intertwined with this earth, no, in another dimension—heaven is here.  As Paul Marshall explains, ‘Our destiny is an earthly one:  a new earth, an earth redeemed and transfigured.  An earth united with heaven, but an earth, nevertheless’” (p. 164).  Having celebrated the beauty of Heaven, Garlow deals honestly with the prospects of Hell for the impenitent.  But he also offers “hell-avoidance strategies” in the book’s final sections.  Neither universalism nor annihilationism nor purgatory nor reincarnation rightly reflect the Truth of eternal life through faith in Christ.  

In the final pages Garlow reflects upon the traumatic of his younger brother’s death (a tragedy that brought him and me together, solidifying a friendship that has now lasted for 35 years) and his lovely wife Carol’s ongoing struggle with cancer.  

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Dean Nelson, a professor of journalism at Point Loma Nazarene University, has just published God Hides in Plain Sight:  How to See the Sacred in a Chaotic World (Grand Rapids:  BrazosPress, c. 2009).  The book’s title reveals its message, encapsulated in one of Augustine’s statements in his Confessions:  “’God is always present to us and to all things; it is that we, like blind persons, do not have the eyes to see’” (p. 15).  Fully present in all things, God awaits our attention, our clarified vision, our openness to His revelation.  As “John Wesley said, ‘The pure of heart see all things full of God’” (p. 23).  Consequently, in a passage that sums up Nelson’s thesis:  “’It is well to have specifically holy places and things, and days, for, without these focal points or reminders, the belief that all is holy and “big with God” will soon dwindle into a mere sentiment,’ said C.S. Lewis.   “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God.  The world is crowded with him.  He walks everywhere incognito.  And the incognito is not always hared to penetrate.  The real labor is to remember, to attend.  In fact, to come awake.  Still more to remain awake’” (p. 22).  

To discern God’s presence in our world, Nelson uses as windows the seven sacraments of the Christian tradition.  But this is not really a treatise on the sacraments as means of grace.  It is, rather, an effort to use them as keys to developing a sacramental vision whereby one sees all of creation as grace-full, since, as the “Second Vatican Council said, ‘There is scarcely any proper use of material things which cannot be directed toward people’s sanctification and the praise of God’” (p. 22).   Thus, rather than dealing with the sacrament of “ordination,” Nelson discusses the sacredness of finding, and following, one’s proper vocation.  Therein there is great grace—doing what is purposeful and good.  

The sacrament of communion, central to the liturgy of the Church, gives Nelson an opening to celebrate “setting the table” in various venues.  Eating together, rightly done, is a sacred act.  Families gathered around the table enter into a holy bond.  Friends enrich their associations by sharing meals—and seeing something more than camaraderie in their fellowship.  “It is no coincidence that Jesus called himself the Bread of Life,” Nelson says, “and that he told the woman at the well that could provide her with water that will quench her thirst.  It’s no coincidence that he changed the nature of the wedding at Cana by turning water into wine, and that he fed five thousand with one basket of bread and fish” (p. 68).  After all, He came to us as “A Host,” and as such, “He provides what we need and more, and we usually experience the ‘more’ when we eat together” (p. 68).  

In the chapter entitled “Finding the Current,” Nelson stresses the value of the sacrament of confession, finding freedom from the past through honesty, humility, repentance, and letting God shatter the shackles of bad experiences.  “Confession, writes Philip Yancey, establishes the proper positioning between creatures and their Creator.  ‘I cannot receive healing unless I accept God’s diagnosis of my wounded state,’ he writes” (p. 81).  And making such confession, Lauren Winner says, “’puts us in the company of people who can speak truth in love to us, about our sin, about the need for amendment of life’” (p. 82).  

Pondering the sacrament of confirmation, Nelson emphasizes the importance of deepening both our discipleship in following Christ and our commitment to righteous living.  “’Superficiality is the curse of our age,’ said Richard Foster in the opening sentence of his book, Celebration of Discipline.  ‘The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people’” (p. 98).  The “deep people” Nelson knows are distinguished by their cultivation of silence and solitude, by reflecting on the real meaning of life, often seeing new vistas and gaining fresh insights easily missed by their more superficial peers.  Yearly backpacking trips to Yosemite with close friends have proven highly significant to Nelson, bringing him into an intimate relationship with nature, a transparency with his brothers-in-Christ, and an awareness of God’s Presence—“a Presence that has been there all along.  ‘We cannot attain the presence of God,’ Richard Rohr said.  ‘We’re already totally in the presence of God.  What’s absent is awareness’” (p. 106).  To attend, to become attentive, to finally see Him as the Holy One wholly present in all things, is to become confirmed and mature in the faith.

The sacrament of marriage—“weaving the family web”—leads Nelson to celebrate the goodness of his own wife, Marcia, and children, Blake and Vanessa.  The selfless, irrational love of God often finds its finest illustration in Marcia’s gracious touch or in moments with his kids.  “I find,” he asserts, “my greatest understanding of the nature of God in my life as a husband, father, and son” (p. 121).  Caring for sick children enables one to grasp how God, our Father, feels such compassion for us, even when we’re less than perfect.  Though “the hard part of parenting is giving our children freedom” (p. 127), rearing them to rightly develop into mature adults allows parents to understand how God made us as free moral agents.  “Being a parent,” Nelson discovered, citing Henri Nouwen, “is like being a good host to a stranger . . . .  We don’t really own them.  They are on loan.  ‘This is good news.  We don’t need to blame ourselves for all their problems, nor should we claim for ourselves their successes.  Children are gifts from God . . .  They are like strangers who ask for hospitality, become good friends, and then leave again to continue their journey’” (p. 127).  

Just as baptism initiates us into a new life, so too there are important points of beginning to be, of assuming an identity, that shapes our destiny.  Nelson tells the story of his initiation in to the Order of the Arrow as a Boy Scout.  He would never, thereafter, be quite the boy he was before.  Something in that ritual impacted him, for many such “traditions are a means by which we experience a larger world than the one we previously knew” (p. 148).  Joining the elite company of the Order of the Arrow, he became a “member of Something Else” (p. 148).  “Baptism is what Thomas Merton calls ‘the sacrament of illumination.’  It is a means by which we discover who we really are” (p. 151).  And who we really are, in the most basic and eternally significant sense, is children of God adopted into His family through the atoning work of Christ.  

Finally, pondering the somber reality of death, evident in the sacrament of last rites, prompts Nelson to share several emails he received from his close friend and colleague, Larry Finger, in his last months.  The two shared a love for “certain writers:  William Faulkner, Garrison, Keillor, Frederick Buechner, Flannery O’Connor” (p. 165).  They struggled with the role of God in Finger’s anguish.  In one passage, he discussed how he held on to the faith that God not only “’is, but that he hears me.  And I hear him’” (p. 169).  Consequently, he said, “’I’m scavenging for words to live by and to die by.  Words are a way of hearing, a way of hearing from God.  In moments of despair especially—and at times, at least for very brief periods, it is a despair—words lift me out’” (p. 169).  Larry Finger died.  So did another of Nelson’s close friends, Dana Walling.  We cannot avoid “the valley of the shadow of death.”  Nor can we avoid grieving when they pass away.  But, he declares, our grief “will eventually give way to grace when we let it” (p. 177).  And in the midst of it all, he’s “convinced that acknowledging the presence of death—of ours and of those around us—is one of the healthiest ways we can live” (p. 179).  

This is a fine work, combining personal stories, apt quotations, and insightful reflections.  It’s gained accolades from the likes of Frederick Buechner, who says:  “Dean Nelson has a lively, conversation writing style, and this book has wonderful and valuable things to say.  I won’t soon forget them.”  Eugene Peterson writes:  “Dean Nelson is God’s spy, looking for God in all the times and places most of us would never think to explore.  He doesn’t miss much.  Combining the readability of excellent writing and the reliability of sound scholarship, God Hides in Plain Sight is better than a spy novel.”  Enough said!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

After pastoring for many years in an inner city church in St. Paul, MN, David and Lisa Frisbie launched a second career of speaking, writing, and counseling—they are co-directors of The Center for Marriage & Family Studies.  Publishing prolifically during the past decade, with ten books to their credit, they have established themselves as trusted guides in the area of marriage and family.  Their latest book is The Soul-Mate Marriage (Eugene, OR:  Harvest House Publishers, c. 2008), wherein they call for couples to commit themselves to “TV”—transparency and vulnerability—in order to find God’s best for them in the holy estate of matrimony.  

First, however, comes some oft-needed de/construction, beginning with “melting the masks” that are almost always in place during the courtship process and thereafter all too frequently keep husbands and wives from really knowing each other.  “You won’t move an existing relationship to a deeper level until you’re willing to let people see you as you are, for who you are, without pretending to be more cool, more smart, more together, more self-controlled, or more anything else than you really are” (p. 23).  The masks must melt.  Then various emotional walls (often built carefully during childhood and adolescence and heightened in marriage) must crumble as well if intimacy is to develop.  “Regardless of who constructs the walls or who begins building them first, the pathway to genuine intimacy is strewn with rubble:  broken bits of brick and stone that fall away as the walls crumble and the couple finds or returns to a meaningful unity” (p. 82).  Then the “ghosts” of the past—especially when they involve sexual aspects—must be “busted.”  Capping it all off, there is a necessary “dying to self,” a decision to serve one’s spouse.    

Deconstruction done, there follows a re/creation process of “birthing the real”—forging a mature, healthy romance that barely began in the courting stage.   “When romance grows as it should, two mature individuals begin to forge a lifelong friendship that is based on mutual respect, shared values, and compatible temperaments” (p. 145).  

Sacrificing for each other, encouraging each other, looking out for each other make for an ever stronger, creative romance.  Having studied, both in scholarly literature and in hundreds of counseling sessions, both healthy and unhealthy marriages, the Frisbies conclude:  “Among other other variables, one significant fact emerges:  Successful long-term marriages are very good at birthing the real.  That is, these relationships are places where two mature adults bring a high level of self-awareness into the marriage, and then go on from self-awareness to a realistic, reasonable, clear-eyed view of the relationships itself” (p. 148).  

With an honest realism regarding the marital relationship, a couple is ready to master the “difficult dance” of relationship development.  As good dancers know, at times it’s important for the man to lead, and at other times the woman assumes that role.  It’s a reciprocal movement, following the music.  Rightly done, there’s no struggle to see who’s in charge.  In marriage, consequently, each person finds his or her strength and flourishes while carrying it out.  In some cases it’s the man who handles the finances, but in other instances it’s the woman.  Learning to embrace the other’s strengths, to allow him or her to develop God-given abilities, is central to “learning the dance.”  

Finally, and best of all in the re/creation process, is “living the love.”  It is in fact possible for husbands and wives to deepen their love for each other throughout the decades of a “soul-mate marriage.”  Great marriages, where couples are “dancing well,” are possible.  The Frisbies have observed—and write about—them.  Better than the “pretty good” marriages many couples accept, “great marriages are exceptionally rare.  They are also extremely possible” (p. 187).  When two persons mutually serve each other, practice TV, learn to dance, and daily look for ways to better love, there will be a great marriage.  Preeminently, greatness in marriage is “about God, finding your life to a lifelong partnership with Him.  It’s about seeing the life partner God has granted you, dying to self as yu daily sacrifice for her or his good” (p. 194).  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Dennis Apple recently published Life After the Death of My Son:   What I’m Learning (Kansas City:  Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, c. 2008), a moving record of—and reflection upon—a father’s grief.  His son, Denny, died in his sleep on the family sofa in 1991.  During the next several years Apple kept a journal, wrestling with the loss, pondering all the unanswerable questions.  After more than a decade, Harold Ivan Smith urged him to make public what he’d experienced and learned.  Consequently, this book was written, the author declares, to give parents like him hope.  “You can survive the death of your child.  You can, with God’s help, redeem this disaster and turn it into something that will make a difference in the world” (p. 9).  

But first he describes the years of unmitigated grief he and his wife endured before any healing could take place.  “Parents who have lost a child are in a fog for years, not just hours or days” (p. 12).  Like professional athletes, bereaved parents must learn to “play hurt,” to go on with life’s tasks, all the while weeping when by themselves.  Time really doesn’t heal the hurt, as it does a broken bone.  But in time one gains the strength, and perhaps the calluses on the heart, to get back to living life more normally.  In the process, however, “Grieving parents feel anger and resentment toward those who are trying to push them to a quick resolution of their grief” (p. 26).  

Similarly, grieving parents wonder about God’s whereabouts.  As Apple wondered, writing in his journal, “Does God care about losses like this?”  It seemed He didn’t.  Consequently, he lacked “the heart to care any more” (p. 63).  Prayer no longer seemed “the answer” to his problems.  “I felt as though God had abandoned me” (p. 64).  The sole consolation seemed to be Jesus’ words on the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  But, a decade later, he would come to believe that he “didn’t know that God was doing severe work on my soul while I was still in the fog” (p. 71).  

Beyond sharing his grief, Apple offers suggestions to parents who have lost a child regarding healthy ways to memorialize him or her, including how to deal with birthdays.  Small groups, journaling, writing poems, reading books, exercising, telling your story will all combine to enable one to be a “wounded healer.”  He also stresses the importance of the church in the grieving process.  Folks may not do it perfectly, but there is great support and grace available in a fellowship of believers.  And in time, with their help—and God’s grace—it’s possible to begin to live again.  

This is a deeply honest book, describing what it means to lose a child.    

I was recently privileged to spend some time with my good friend Dean Nelson while he (preparing to write a biography) interviewed Professor John Polkinghorne on his home turf in Cambridge, England.  Polkinghorne is the retired president of Queens’ College and one of the world’s most distinguished mathematical physicists.  He is also an ordained priest in the Church of England and has written for many years endeavoring to synthesize insights from science and theology.  He was selected to deliver the Gifford Lectures, the highest honor given thinkers who work within what may be broadly labeled the philosophy of religion, and he recently received the prestigious Templeton Prize.  On a personal level, now an octogenarian, Professor Polkinghorne was remarkably alert, gracious, and generous with his time as he guided us about the sites in Cambridge that had been the setting for his life.  

Further indicative of his stature in academic circles is the fact that he was asked to deliver the distinguished Terry Lectures at Yale University in 1996.  These lectures serve as a handy introduction to Polkinghorne’s thought and are available in Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven:  Yale University Press, c. 1998).  As he explains it:  “The book presents a series of variations on a fundamental theme:  if reality is generously and adequately construed, then knowledge will be seen to be one; if rationality is generously and adequately construed, then science and theology will be seen as partners in a common quest for understanding” (p. xiv).  

We no longer live in the “Age of Reason” when absolute “certainty” regarding the essence of the physical or metaphysical world was proclaimed.  Rather:  “Amid the ruins of the Cartesian search for certainty, science and theology can proclaim, in their different ways, that there still can be found a reliable understanding of reality, verisimilitudinous rather than absolutely true, attained through the exercise of creative human powers rather than by logical deduction, backed by experience but not simply read out of it” (pp. 97-98).  While embracing neither the absolutism of the Enlightenment nor the relativism of today’s Post-modernism, “there lies the critical realist approach to knowledge, ever open to correction but persuasive that its power to make sense of experience derives from its correlation with reality.  Both science and theology offer support to this middle ways of intellectual enquiry” (p. 98).  

To Polkinghorne, “the fundamental content of belief in God is that there is a Mind and a Purpose behind the history of the universe and that the One whose veiled presence is intimated in this way is worthy of worship and the ground of hope” (p. 1).  As a scientist who worked in fundamental physics, credited with playing a major role in the discovery of quarks and gluons, he is awed by the “wonderful order” of the universe that can be described in “elegant mathematical” theorems.  Mathematicians invariably talk about “discovering” the inner lineaments of the cosmos, more real and substantial than matter itself.  So to Roger Penrose, “’There is something absolute and “God given” about mathematical truth’” (p. 127).  “This use of abstract mathematics a technique of physical discovery points to a very deep fact about the nature of the universe that we inhabit, and to the remarkable conformity of our human minds to its patterning.  We live in a world whose physical fabric is endowed with transparent rational beauty” (p. 2).  Understanding this world, physicists like Einstein, “in making their great discoveries, were participating in an encounter with the divine” (p. 4).  

Along with the fundamental realities examined by physicists are the equally important realities discerned by musicians and ethicists.  The beauty of Bach’s Mass in B Minor is as Real as the waves and particles of light.  Our inner awareness of moral obligations is as Real as the power of gravity.  The basic instinct to adore and worship is as Real as the bees’ desire for nectar.  We simply live in a rich and variegated world, with alternate ways of discerning its basic texture, within which, Polkinghorne insists:   “Theism presents an adequately rich basis for understanding the world in that it readily accommodates the many-layered character of a reality shot through with value” (p. 19).  

This leads him to a persuasive comparison between the ways scientists and theologians think.  Both begin with data, evidence, reports—physicists with phenomena such as apples falling from trees, theologians with credible descriptions of events such as Christ’s messages and Resurrection.  Then comes an analysis of the data—whether Newton formulating the law of gravity or theologians such as St. John writing the great prologue to his Gospel.  Finally, there is a summarization, a scholarly consensus regarding what seems fundamentally true—the role of gravity in the formation of the universe, the decisions regarding the nature of Christ at the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon.  In view of this process, basic to both science and theology, Polkinghorne concludes:  “It does not trouble me that one cannot find articulated in the New Testament the developed Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.  Instead one finds accounts of the foundational events and experiences that set the Church out on the road to the discovery of such doctrines, together with those brilliant provisional insights, such as the Pauline Lordship formula, which are the initial engagement with, but not the completion of, a seeking to come to terms with the new knowledge stemming from the new phenomena of Christ” (p. 37).  

In both science and theology Polkinghorne adopts the stance of a “critical realist.”  Whereas Immanuel Kant divorced the phenomenal and noumenal worlds, leading to a pervasive skepticism in many academic realms (dubbed a “Kantian fog” by Polkinghorne), working scientists cannot but assume their congruence.  Doing so requires a metaphysical decision that can be illustrated and defended through the successful endeavors of theoretical physicists:  there is a Real word whose inner essence may be described in mathematical terms.   That being so, there is no reason to discount reasonable inferences from what is empirically observed to non-empirical explanations of events.   Similarly, there is no necessary reason, if one allows the reality of a creative Mind, to exclude the possibility of miraculous processes or events, the Supernatural working within the natural.  As one of the elite corps of physicists who discovered quarks, Polkinghorne notes that they are “not only unseen” but utterly “invisible in principle.”  Traces of their activity may be discerned, “but not the entities themselves.  To borrow language from theology, we know the economic quark but not the immanent quark” (p. 122).    He declares:  “I am fully persuaded of the reality of the quark structure of matter.  I believe that it makes sense of physical experience precisely because it corresponds to what is the case.  A similar conviction grounds my belief in the invisible reality of God” (pp. 122-123).  

To answer the question “does God act in the physical world” Polkinghorne says “yes.”  But though “human beings act in the world through a combination of energetic physical causality and active information . . . God’s providential interaction with creation is purely through the top-down input of information” (pp. 71-72).  Minimally, one may hold that there is a higher power that preserves in being all that is, confining Him to a passive role in regards to creation.  But one may, with scientific respectability, affirm much more, for if one takes “the psychosomatic view of human nature” he advocates, “then God cannot interact with the psyche without also interacting with the physical process of the world, since we are embodied beings” (p. 55).  

Still more:  “In unprecedented circumstances, it is entirely conceivable that God will act in totally novel and unexpected ways.  That is how I try to understand claims about divine miracles, a subject . . . of central importance to a Christian thinker because of the pivotal role played in Christ’s resurrection’” (p. 73).  Since our soul is the “form” of our body, God cannot simply speak to our soul without simultaneously touching our body.  So exactly how God works within His world, precisely what kinds of causation may be accredited to Him, tantalizes Polkinghorne, but he believes, given some of the spectacular breakthroughs in quantum physics, that “an ontological openness, permitting us to suppose that a new causal principle may play a role in bringing about future developments” (p. 62).  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

John Polkinghorne has recently refurbished many of his earlier positions in Quantum Physics and Theology:  An Unexpected Kinship (New Haven:  Yale University Press, c. 2007).  He stands, quite comfortably, with a foot in both camps, for he believes that “there are significant degrees of cousinly relationship between the ways in which science and theology conduct their truth-seeking enquiries into the nature of reality” (p. x).  Both scientists and theologians search for truth.  Thus they share a common goal:  discerning what really is, the ultimate nature of Reality.  It is amazing that man understands something of the Mind of God through scientific inquiry.  Indeed, “this remarkable human capacity for scientific discovery ultimately requires the insight that our power in this respect is the gift of the universe’s Creator who, in that ancient and powerful phrase, has made humanity in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27).   Through the exercise of this gift, those working in fundamental physics are able to discern a world of deep and beautiful order—a universe shot through with signs of mind” (p. 8).  

The world of physics is endlessly fascinating to Polkinghorne, but he also admits that scientific work “does not affect my life in any significant way outside the pursuit of intellectual satisfaction in the study or the laboratory.   In contrast, my belief that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God has consequences for all aspects of my life, as much in relation to conduct as to understanding.  Religious belief is much more demanding than scientific belief—more costly and more ‘dangerous’, one might say” (p. 13).  The Mind—the Word—that shaped the Cosmos appeared in human form in Christ Jesus, and seeking the Truth as revealed in Him leads to three basic questions:  “(i) Was Jesus indeed resurrected on the third day, and if so, why was Jesus, alone among all humanity, raised from the dead within history to live an everlasting life of glory beyond history? (ii) Why did the first Christians feel driven to use divine-sounding language about the man Jesus?  (iii) What was the basis for the assurance felt by the first disciples that through the risen Christ they had been given a power that was transforming their lives in a new and unprecedented way?” (p. 31).  

To answer these questions, to get at the truth revealed by Jesus, requires theological reasoning that is much akin to scientific reasoning.  You take the evidence as given, try to develop meaningful hypotheses, and then establish reasonable convictions.  Both scientific and theological understandings develop through time as thoughtful practitioners ponder the evidence.  “As in quantum theory, so in Christian theology, much greater significance came finally to be recognized than had been apparent at the start of the process of searching for truth” (p. 55).  Thus Polkinghorne carefully investigates the claims regarding Christ’s Resurrection, finding (along with his friend N. T. Wright) the New Testament accounts quite credible.  The tomb really was empty.  The miracle of miracles actually occurred.  

Given the great miracle, the second question that concerns Polkinghorne (why did early Christians make divine claims for the Christ) finds its answer.  Moved by the miracle, “the first generation of Christians produced three of the greatest figures [Paul; John; the author of Hebrews] ever in the history of theological thought.  Their brilliant insights have shaped the form of Christian theology in the manner that the believer will see as the result of providential inspiration by the Holy Spirit, guiding the use of individual human gifts” (p. 68).  Only the sheer factiticity of the Resurrection explains the intellectual profundity and power of the New Testament apostles.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

For an easy introduction to the totality of John Polkinghorne’s work, it is advisable to pick up Questions of Truth:  Fifty-one Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief (Louisville:  Westminister John Knox Press, c. 2009), co-written by Polkinghorne and his good friend and former student, Nicholas Beale.  Tony Hewish, a Nobel Prizewinner in Physics, says (in the book’s affirming foreword) that he shares Polkinghorne’s view “that science and religion are not in conflict—they are, in fact, complementary, and both are vital for the deepest understanding of our place in the universe” (p. xi).  Both physicists and theologians believe in a very real world that proves ultimately most mysterious.  “The ghostly presence of virtual particles defies rational common sense and is nonintuitive for those unacquainted with physics.  Religious belief in God, and Christian belief that God became Man around two thousand years ago, may seem strange to common-sense thinking.  But when the most elementary physical things behave in this way, we should be prepared to accept that the deepest aspects of our existence go beyond our common-sense intuitions” (p. x).  

The first of the book’s seven sections, “Leading Questions,” sketches the issues to be addressed.  Central, of course, are questions regarding the relationship between science and religion.  Importantly, scientists do not deal singularly with “facts” while theologians toss off immaterial “opinions.”  The main difference between the two disciplines is this:  “Science is concerned with the question, How?—By what process do things happen?  Theology is concerned with the question, Why”—Is there a meaning and purpose behind what is happening?” (p. 7).  Both want to understand, in different but complementary ways, Ultimate Reality, and inasmuch as “science are both concerned with the search for truth, they are friends and not foes” (p. 8).  

Questions concerning “The Concept and Existence of God” constitute the book’s second section.  Polkinghorne politely dismisses the atheistic polemics of the highly-acclaimed and acerbic biologist Richard Dawkins, whose The God Delusion primarily demonstrates his unwillingness to “seriously engage with the arguments for religion or the existence of God, and some of the points he makes are ludicrous” (p. 28).  Especially irritating to a professor of mathematical physics, it’s clear that along with “most biologists of his generation, Dawkins does not appear to be comfortable with detailed calculations” (p. 46).  Polkinghorne fully embraces the strangely paradoxical nature of the world of quantum physics, where quarks and gluons are believed to be real though perceived only indirectly, and where the bafflingly mysterious  “dark matter and dark energy” constitute  “over 90 percent of the universe”  (pp. 29-30).  To think, with popularizing atheists, that “’nothing can be true unless it is well-understood scientifically’ is ludicrous” (p. 30).  

Similarly, theologians speaking of God indirectly, often through analogies, may have equal credibility, for they are trying to understand, using different means, the same universe and its Maker.  Indeed, the ancient Christian conviction that God created, ex nihilo, all that is has received remarkable confirmation within the past 50 years from physicists positing the “Big Bang.”  Still more:  even the “intrinsic unpredictabilities of quantum mechanics and chaos theory can be seen theologically as gifts of a Creator whose creation is both orderly and open in this way” (p. 43).  Add to this the “fine tuning” of a universe that seems too intricately designed to be explained by sheer chance.  Physicists currently postulate six “fundamental constants” with “astonishingly accurate” parameters.  “As Tony Hewish once remarked, the accuracy of just one of these parameters is comparable to getting the mix of flour and sugar right to within one grain of sugar in a cake ten times the mass of the sun” (p. 44).  Perhaps it just happened!  More likely, it was carefully planned!  

That the universe reveals an “anthropic fine-tuning” key is discussed in the books first appendix, a more technical section wherein Polkinghorne assesses the mathematics embodied in the fundamental laws of nature.  When you consider the truly astronomical numbers involved, and you acknowledge that “if any of these numbers were appreciably different from their presently observed values, not only would there be no life on Earth but there would, as far as anyone can tell, be no prospect of intelligent life anywhere in the universe” (p. 101), you are justified in believing that only a divine Mind could have called it into being.  

In the second appendix, the brain-mind mystery is explored.  Polkinghorne takes seriously the biblical proclamation that we are made in God’s image.  The very fact that we can reason mathematically and understand many incredibly complex phenomena affirms the radically different status enjoyed by man, vis-a-vis the rest of creation.  He labels his position “dual-aspect monism,” but as I discussed this with him he acknowledged that there is probably little difference between his view and my own Thomistic dualism. What he believes is that “the brain is not a fully deterministic system” (p. 118).  There is a spiritual aspect—a mind—that transcends the mechanical functions of the brain.  The information (or the ideas taking form in art and music and ethics) in our minds cannot be reduced to material entities.  Unfortunately, we too often use mechanical metaphors when describing the world or explaining how we think, whereas we now know that “most of the real world is composed of systems that are cloudlike and inherently unpredictable” (p. 126).  So too the inner realm of our thoughts, wherein we find “finely balanced decisions taken in regions with highly connected neurons—that are required to support our fundamental experience of true free will” (p. 131).  

To get highly technical, but powerfully persuasive, Polkinghorne explains why our thoughts are not pre-determined by matter-in-motion:  “There are about 300 billion stars in our galaxy, but very few of them are in direct contact with each other.  But contrast, on average each of the 100 billion neurons in your brain is in direct contact with about 10,000 others.  Each connection differs in detail, and the exact biochemical and indeed quantum state of each neuron is different.  Thus in principle there are about 100 billion to the power of 10,000 different possible ways in which a single neuron could be connected to the rest of the brain, and even if we assume that in practice only 0.01 percent of the other neurons are eligible for connection, the number of possible interconnections for a single neuron would be around 10⁷⁰⁰⁰, and for the brain as a whole there would be a set of possible interconnections of about 10¹¹ to the power of 10⁷⁰⁰⁰.  This, of course is why the idea of genetic determinism of the brain is so absurd—there is not nearly enough information in the genome to specify such connections” (p. 134).  In view of what we now know about the intricacies of the brain, “it is now clear that we are not prisoners of our atoms, molecules or genes.  Our intuitions of freedom are real.  How we use this awesome gift from God is central to the question of what it means to be human” (p. 137).  

***********************************************************************

REEDINGS . . .

Notes on Books by Gerard Reed

September 2009                                                                  Number Two-hundred and one ***********************************************************************

Quantum Physics and Theology 

I was recently privileged to spend some time with my good friend Dean Nelson while he (preparing to write a biography) interviewed Professor John Polkinghorne on his home turf in Cambridge, England.  Polkinghorne is the retired president of Queens’ College and one of the world’s most distinguished mathematical physicists.  He is also an ordained priest in the Church of England and has written for many years endeavoring to synthesize insights from science and theology.  He was selected to deliver the Gifford Lectures, the highest honor given thinkers who work within what may be broadly labeled the philosophy of religion, and he recently received the prestigious Templeton Prize.  On a personal level, now an octogenarian, Professor Polkinghorne was remarkably alert, gracious, and generous with his time as he guided us about the sites in Cambridge that had been the setting for his life.  

Further indicative of his stature in academic circles is the fact that he was asked to deliver the distinguished Terry Lectures at Yale University in 1996.  These lectures serve as a handy introduction to Polkinghorne’s thought and are available in Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven:  Yale University Press, c. 1998).  As he explains it:  “The book presents a series of variations on a fundamental theme:  if reality is generously and adequately construed, then knowledge will be seen to be one; if rationality is generously and adequately construed, then science and theology will be seen as partners in a common quest for understanding” (p. xiv).  

We no longer live in the “Age of Reason” when absolute “certainty” regarding the essence of the physical or metaphysical world was proclaimed.  Rather:  “Amid the ruins of the Cartesian search for certainty, science and theology can proclaim, in their different ways, that there still can be found a reliable understanding of reality, verisimilitudinous rather than absolutely true, attained through the exercise of creative human powers rather than by logical deduction, backed by experience but not simply read out of it” (pp. 97-98).  While embracing neither the absolutism of the Enlightenment nor the relativism of today’s Post-modernism, “there lies the critical realist approach to knowledge, ever open to correction but persuasive that its power to make sense of experience derives from its correlation with reality.  Both science and theology offer support to this middle ways of intellectual enquiry” (p. 98).  

To Polkinghorne, “the fundamental content of belief in God is that there is a Mind and a Purpose behind the history of the universe and that the One whose veiled presence is intimated in this way is worthy of worship and the ground of hope” (p. 1).  As a scientist who worked in fundamental physics, credited with playing a major role in the discovery of quarks and gluons, he is awed by the “wonderful order” of the universe that can be described in “elegant mathematical” theorems.  Mathematicians invariably talk about “discovering” the inner lineaments of the cosmos, more real and substantial than matter itself.  So to Roger Penrose, “’There is something absolute and “God given” about mathematical truth’” (p. 127).  “This use of abstract mathematics a technique of physical discovery points to a very deep fact about the nature of the universe that we inhabit, and to the remarkable conformity of our human minds to its patterning.  We live in a world whose physical fabric is endowed with transparent rational beauty” (p. 2).  Understanding this world, physicists like Einstein, “in making their great discoveries, were participating in an encounter with the divine” (p. 4).  

Along with the fundamental realities examined by physicists are the equally important realities discerned by musicians and ethicists.  The beauty of Bach’s Mass in B Minor is as Real as the waves and particles of light.  Our inner awareness of moral obligations is as Real as the power of gravity.  The basic instinct to adore and worship is as Real as the bees’ desire for nectar.  We simply live in a rich and variegated world, with alternate ways of discerning its basic texture, within which, Polkinghorne insists:   “Theism presents an adequately rich basis for understanding the world in that it readily accommodates the many-layered character of a reality shot through with value” (p. 19).  

This leads him to a persuasive comparison between the ways scientists and theologians think.  Both begin with data, evidence, reports—physicists with phenomena such as apples falling from trees, theologians with credible descriptions of events such as Christ’s messages and Resurrection.  Then comes an analysis of the data—whether Newton formulating the law of gravity or theologians such as St. John writing the great prologue to his Gospel.  Finally, there is a summarization, a scholarly consensus regarding what seems fundamentally true—the role of gravity in the formation of the universe, the decisions regarding the nature of Christ at the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon.  In view of this process, basic to both science and theology, Polkinghorne concludes:  “It does not trouble me that one cannot find articulated in the New Testament the developed Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.  Instead one finds accounts of the foundational events and experiences that set the Church out on the road to the discovery of such doctrines, together with those brilliant provisional insights, such as the Pauline Lordship formula, which are the initial engagement with, but not the completion of, a seeking to come to terms with the new knowledge stemming from the new phenomena of Christ” (p. 37).  

In both science and theology Polkinghorne adopts the stance of a “critical realist.”  Whereas Immanuel Kant divorced the phenomenal and noumenal worlds, leading to a pervasive skepticism in many academic realms (dubbed a “Kantian fog” by Polkinghorne), working scientists cannot but assume their congruence.  Doing so requires a metaphysical decision that can be illustrated and defended through the successful endeavors of theoretical physicists:  there is a Real word whose inner essence may be described in mathematical terms.   That being so, there is no reason to discount reasonable inferences from what is empirically observed to non-empirical explanations of events.   Similarly, there is no necessary reason, if one allows the reality of a creative Mind, to exclude the possibility of miraculous processes or events, the Supernatural working within the natural.  As one of the elite corps of physicists who discovered quarks, Polkinghorne notes that they are “not only unseen” but utterly “invisible in principle.”  Traces of their activity may be discerned, “but not the entities themselves.  To borrow language from theology, we know the economic quark but not the immanent quark” (p. 122).    He declares:  “I am fully persuaded of the reality of the quark structure of matter.  I believe that it makes sense of physical experience precisely because it corresponds to what is the case.  A similar conviction grounds my belief in the invisible reality of God” (pp. 122-123).  

To answer the question “does God act in the physical world” Polkinghorne says “yes.”  But though “human beings act in the world through a combination of energetic physical causality and active information . . . God’s providential interaction with creation is purely through the top-down input of information” (pp. 71-72).  Minimally, one may hold that there is a higher power that preserves in being all that is, confining Him to a passive role in regards to creation.  But one may, with scientific respectability, affirm much more, for if one takes “the psychosomatic view of human nature” he advocates, “then God cannot interact with the psyche without also interacting with the physical process of the world, since we are embodied beings” (p. 55).  

Still more:  “In unprecedented circumstances, it is entirely conceivable that God will act in totally novel and unexpected ways.  That is how I try to understand claims about divine miracles, a subject . . . of central importance to a Christian thinker because of the pivotal role played in Christ’s resurrection’” (p. 73).  Since our soul is the “form” of our body, God cannot simply speak to our soul without simultaneously touching our body.  So exactly how God works within His world, precisely what kinds of causation may be accredited to Him, tantalizes Polkinghorne, but he believes, given some of the spectacular breakthroughs in quantum physics, that “an ontological openness, permitting us to suppose that a new causal principle may play a role in bringing about future developments” (p. 62).  

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John Polkinghorne has recently refurbished many of his earlier positions in Quantum Physics and Theology:  An Unexpected Kinship (New Haven:  Yale University Press, c. 2007).  He stands, quite comfortably, with a foot in both camps, for he believes that “there are significant degrees of cousinly relationship between the ways in which science and theology conduct their truth-seeking enquiries into the nature of reality” (p. x).  Both scientists and theologians search for truth.  Thus they share a common goal:  discerning what really is, the ultimate nature of Reality.  It is amazing that man understands something of the Mind of God through scientific inquiry.  Indeed, “this remarkable human capacity for scientific discovery ultimately requires the insight that our power in this respect is the gift of the universe’s Creator who, in that ancient and powerful phrase, has made humanity in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27).   Through the exercise of this gift, those working in fundamental physics are able to discern a world of deep and beautiful order—a universe shot through with signs of mind” (p. 8).  

The world of physics is endlessly fascinating to Polkinghorne, but he also admits that scientific work “does not affect my life in any significant way outside the pursuit of intellectual satisfaction in the study or the laboratory.   In contrast, my belief that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God has consequences for all aspects of my life, as much in relation to conduct as to understanding.  Religious belief is much more demanding than scientific belief—more costly and more ‘dangerous’, one might say” (p. 13).  The Mind—the Word—that shaped the Cosmos appeared in human form in Christ Jesus, and seeking the Truth as revealed in Him leads to three basic questions:  “(i) Was Jesus indeed resurrected on the third day, and if so, why was Jesus, alone among all humanity, raised from the dead within history to live an everlasting life of glory beyond history? (ii) Why did the first Christians feel driven to use divine-sounding language about the man Jesus?  (iii) What was the basis for the assurance felt by the first disciples that through the risen Christ they had been given a power that was transforming their lives in a new and unprecedented way?” (p. 31).  

To answer these questions, to get at the truth revealed by Jesus, requires theological reasoning that is much akin to scientific reasoning.  You take the evidence as given, try to develop meaningful hypotheses, and then establish reasonable convictions.  Both scientific and theological understandings develop through time as thoughtful practitioners ponder the evidence.  “As in quantum theory, so in Christian theology, much greater significance came finally to be recognized than had been apparent at the start of the process of searching for truth” (p. 55).  Thus Polkinghorne carefully investigates the claims regarding Christ’s Resurrection, finding (along with his friend N. T. Wright) the New Testament accounts quite credible.  The tomb really was empty.  The miracle of miracles actually occurred.  

Given the great miracle, the second question that concerns Polkinghorne (why did early Christians make divine claims for the Christ) finds its answer.  Moved by the miracle, “the first generation of Christians produced three of the greatest figures [Paul; John; the author of Hebrews] ever in the history of theological thought.  Their brilliant insights have shaped the form of Christian theology in the manner that the believer will see as the result of providential inspiration by the Holy Spirit, guiding the use of individual human gifts” (p. 68).  Only the sheer factiticity of the Resurrection explains the intellectual profundity and power of the New Testament apostles.  

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For an easy introduction to the totality of John Polkinghorne’s work, it is advisable to pick up Questions of Truth:  Fifty-one Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief (Louisville:  Westminister John Knox Press, c. 2009), co-written by Polkinghorne and his good friend and former student, Nicholas Beale.  Tony Hewish, a Nobel Prizewinner in Physics, says (in the book’s affirming foreword) that he shares Polkinghorne’s view “that science and religion are not in conflict—they are, in fact, complementary, and both are vital for the deepest understanding of our place in the universe” (p. xi).  Both physicists and theologians believe in a very real world that proves ultimately most mysterious.  “The ghostly presence of virtual particles defies rational common sense and is nonintuitive for those unacquainted with physics.  Religious belief in God, and Christian belief that God became Man around two thousand years ago, may seem strange to common-sense thinking.  But when the most elementary physical things behave in this way, we should be prepared to accept that the deepest aspects of our existence go beyond our common-sense intuitions” (p. x).  

The first of the book’s seven sections, “Leading Questions,” sketches the issues to be addressed.  Central, of course, are questions regarding the relationship between science and religion.  Importantly, scientists do not deal singularly with “facts” while theologians toss off immaterial “opinions.”  The main difference between the two disciplines is this:  “Science is concerned with the question, How?—By what process do things happen?  Theology is concerned with the question, Why”—Is there a meaning and purpose behind what is happening?” (p. 7).  Both want to understand, in different but complementary ways, Ultimate Reality, and inasmuch as “science are both concerned with the search for truth, they are friends and not foes” (p. 8).  

Questions concerning “The Concept and Existence of God” constitute the book’s second section.  Polkinghorne politely dismisses the atheistic polemics of the highly-acclaimed and acerbic biologist Richard Dawkins, whose The God Delusion primarily demonstrates his unwillingness to “seriously engage with the arguments for religion or the existence of God, and some of the points he makes are ludicrous” (p. 28).  Especially irritating to a professor of mathematical physics, it’s clear that along with “most biologists of his generation, Dawkins does not appear to be comfortable with detailed calculations” (p. 46).  Polkinghorne fully embraces the strangely paradoxical nature of the world of quantum physics, where quarks and gluons are believed to be real though perceived only indirectly, and where the bafflingly mysterious  “dark matter and dark energy” constitute  “over 90 percent of the universe”  (pp. 29-30).  To think, with popularizing atheists, that “’nothing can be true unless it is well-understood scientifically’ is ludicrous” (p. 30).  

Similarly, theologians speaking of God indirectly, often through analogies, may have equal credibility, for they are trying to understand, using different means, the same universe and its Maker.  Indeed, the ancient Christian conviction that God created, ex nihilo, all that is has received remarkable confirmation within the past 50 years from physicists positing the “Big Bang.”  Still more:  even the “intrinsic unpredictabilities of quantum mechanics and chaos theory can be seen theologically as gifts of a Creator whose creation is both orderly and open in this way” (p. 43).  Add to this the “fine tuning” of a universe that seems too intricately designed to be explained by sheer chance.  Physicists currently postulate six “fundamental constants” with “astonishingly accurate” parameters.  “As Tony Hewish once remarked, the accuracy of just one of these parameters is comparable to getting the mix of flour and sugar right to within one grain of sugar in a cake ten times the mass of the sun” (p. 44).  Perhaps it just happened!  More likely, it was carefully planned!  

That the universe reveals an “anthropic fine-tuning” key is discussed in the books first appendix, a more technical section wherein Polkinghorne assesses the mathematics embodied in the fundamental laws of nature.  When you consider the truly astronomical numbers involved, and you acknowledge that “if any of these numbers were appreciably different from their presently observed values, not only would there be no life on Earth but there would, as far as anyone can tell, be no prospect of intelligent life anywhere in the universe” (p. 101), you are justified in believing that only a divine Mind could have called it into being.  

In the second appendix, the brain-mind mystery is explored.  Polkinghorne takes seriously the biblical proclamation that we are made in God’s image.  The very fact that we can reason mathematically and understand many incredibly complex phenomena affirms the radically different status enjoyed by man, vis-a-vis the rest of creation.  He labels his position “dual-aspect monism,” but as I discussed this with him he acknowledged that there is probably little difference between his view and my own Thomistic dualism. What he believes is that “the brain is not a fully deterministic system” (p. 118).  There is a spiritual aspect—a mind—that transcends the mechanical functions of the brain.  The information (or the ideas taking form in art and music and ethics) in our minds cannot be reduced to material entities.  Unfortunately, we too often use mechanical metaphors when describing the world or explaining how we think, whereas we now know that “most of the real world is composed of systems that are cloudlike and inherently unpredictable” (p. 126).  So too the inner realm of our thoughts, wherein we find “finely balanced decisions taken in regions with highly connected neurons—that are required to support our fundamental experience of true free will” (p. 131).  

To get highly technical, but powerfully persuasive, Polkinghorne explains why our thoughts are not pre-determined by matter-in-motion:  “There are about 300 billion stars in our galaxy, but very few of them are in direct contact with each other.  But contrast, on average each of the 100 billion neurons in your brain is in direct contact with about 10,000 others.  Each connection differs in detail, and the exact biochemical and indeed quantum state of each neuron is different.  Thus in principle there are about 100 billion to the power of 10,000 different possible ways in which a single neuron could be connected to the rest of the brain, and even if we assume that in practice only 0.01 percent of the other neurons are eligible for connection, the number of possible interconnections for a single neuron would be around 10⁷⁰⁰⁰, and for the brain as a whole there would be a set of possible interconnections of about 10¹¹ to the power of 10⁷⁰⁰⁰.  This, of course is why the idea of genetic determinism of the brain is so absurd—there is not nearly enough information in the genome to specify such connections” (p. 134).  In view of what we now know about the intricacies of the brain, “it is now clear that we are not prisoners of our atoms, molecules or genes.  Our intuitions of freedom are real.  How we use this awesome gift from God is central to the question of what it means to be human” (p. 137).  

In the third appendix Polkinghorne considers the question of evolution.  He regards the Bible’s creation account as a record of “deep truths, not a cookbook” (p. 139) dealing with the details of the creative process.  Thus he finds no problem, as a Christian theologian, accepting the general evolutionary account of modern science.  He compares evolution with gravity, a natural power that “influences everything in the universe—but is not the whole story of matter” (p. 141).  One need not be a devout Darwinian, too often given an atheistic edge in popular writings, to embrace an evolutionary process with a divine dimension.  

In the third appendix Polkinghorne considers the question of evolution.  He regards the Bible’s creation account as a record of “deep truths, not a cookbook” (p. 139) dealing with the details of the creative process.  Thus he finds no problem, as a Christian theologian, accepting the general evolutionary account of modern science.  He compares evolution with gravity, a natural power that “influences everything in the universe—but is not the whole story of matter” (p. 141).  One need not be a devout Darwinian, too often given an atheistic edge in popular writings, to embrace an evolutionary process with a divine dimension.  

In What’s So Great About Christianity (Washington, D.C.:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2007), Dinesh D’Souza builds a case for the distinctiveness, truth, and blessings of the Christian faith.  “Christians are called,” he argues, “to be ‘contenders for their faith” (p. xiii).  Rather than slip into a comfortable Christian sub-culture, where everyone shares a common and comfortable worldview, D’Souza urges believers to do battle with skeptics (demonstrably evident in the corps of contemporary atheists now attacking the Faith) and make credible their allegiance to their Lord.  “The Christianity defended here,” he (a Roman Catholic) stresses, “is not ‘fundamentalism’ but rather traditional Christianity, what C.S. Lewis called ‘mere Christianity,’ the common ground of beliefs between Protestants and Catholics” (p. xv).  

D’Souza begins by noting that there has lately been a “huge explosion of religious conversion and growth, and Christianity is growing faster than any other religion” (p. 1).  Whereas the tired old liberal version of Christianity (famously defined by H. Richard Niebuhr as proclaiming that:   “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross”), traditional, deeply orthodox churches are booming, particularly in South America, Africa and Asia.  Europe may well be collapsing into atheism, but theism thrives in non-European realms.  Amazingly, China may soon contain the world’s largest Christian community!  

To explain the power of Christianity around the world today, however, D’Souza insists we recognize how it provides the key to understand why so many things developed in the West under its guidance.  Take, for instance, the idea of limited government.  Jurgen Habermas, though himself an atheistic Marxist, insisted that:  “’Christianity and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization.  We continue to nourish ourselves from this source’” (p. 41).  Just as the majestic music of Bach and Handel, as well as the artistic grandeur of Michelangelo and Rembrandt, are unique to Western Christian culture, so too the notion of “rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, to God the things that are God’s” provided a basis for the liberty and justice that characterize a good society.  

A good society recognizes the importance of natural structures independent of state control.  Thus the family, exalting “heterosexual monogamous love” (p. 58), was highly honored in Western nations.  Marriage, in the Catholic tradition, was a sacrament, and the marriage relationship was considered an analogy to that between Christ and the Church.  Rather than the arranged marriages found in many non-Christian cultures, a Christian couple was formed through the mutual consent of both the man and the woman.  With this came the uniquely Christian celebration of romantic love and an appreciation for the dignity of women.  “Christianity did not contest patriarchy, but it elevated the status of women within it” (p. 69).  The stern prohibition of divorce was one manifestation of this concern for women’s well being.  

Thus, with much disdain, the prototypical atheist Nietzsche decried “’Another Christian concept, no less crazy:  the concept of equality of souls before God.  This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights’” (p. 67).   A study of history reveals how rarely have all persons been regarded as equals!  Indeed, D’Souza insists:  “The preciousness and equal worth of every human life is a Christian idea” (p. 68).  If all men are created equal, it follows that they should have a voice in their government.  Thus, as John Adams “wrote, ‘What do we mean by the American Revolution?  The war?  That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it.  The Revolution was in the minds of the people . . . a change in their religious sentiments’” (p. 72).  Unfortunately, D’Souza warns, the past century has witnessed a growing commitment to Nietzsche rather than Christ!  As the West slides quickly into secularism, the “new values” Nietzsche propounded are becoming ascendant.  So we see emerging “the restoration of infanticide, demands for the radical redefinition of the family, the revival of eugenic theories of human superiority” (p. 78).  

The atheism evident in Nietzsche stems from an Enlightenment conviction that science has discredited religion.  So D’Souza devotes seven highly readable and persuasive chapters to defending Christianity as an ally of science—and of science as an ally of Christianity.  He declares:  “An unbiased look at the history of science shows that modern science is an invention of medieval Christianity, and that the greatest breakthroughs in scientific reason have largely been the work of Christians” (p. 84).  In fact, certain Christian beliefs, such as creation ex nihilo, have been unexpectedly validated by scientific discoveries.  A careful analysis of anti-Christian diatribes, launched by journalists such as Christopher Hitchens, quickly reveals how wildly flawed is the opinion that science and Christian faith are at odds.  “Indeed, historians are virtually unanimous in holding that the whole science versus religion story is a nineteenth-century fabrication” (p. 102).  Take the celebrated case of Galileo!  Much that’s said about him is demonstrably false, and a careful study of the case reveals how cautiously the Church sought to preserve orthodox doctrine while being properly open to new scientific evidence.  

Indeed some of today’s finest scientists find belief in God quite credible.  With Stephen Hawking, perhaps the most celebrated contemporary physicist (and anything but a Christian) they acknowledge:  “’It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us’” (p. 115).  Evidence regarding the “Big Bang” has both transformed physics and validated the ancient Christian conviction “that the universe was created in a primordial explosion of energy and light.  Not only did the universe have a beginning in space and time, but the origin of the universe was also a beginning for space and time” (p. 116).  In the profoundest meaning of the word, this was a miracle!  

And miraculously, mysteriously, the universe even seems designed for us human beings!  Thus many scientists embrace an “anthropic principle” holding that:  “We live in a kind of Goldilocks universe in which the conditions are ‘just right’ for life to emerge and thrive.  As physicist Paul Davies puts it, ‘We have been written into the laws of nature in a deep, and I believe, meaningful way’” (p. 130).  To Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich, “the anthropic principle ‘means accepting that the laws of nature are rigged not only in favor of complexity or just in favor of life, but also in favor of mind.  To put it dramatically, it implies that mind is written into the laws of nature in a fundamental way’” (p. 131).  

Though only a slim section of the book, D’Souza’s spirited defense of Christianity against the calumnies of its critics regarding “the exaggerated crimes of religion” is most useful.   He relies on the best historians of the Crusades, most notably Jonathan Riley-Smith, to dismiss most all anti-Christian allegations.  In truth:  “the Crusades can be seen as a belated, clumsy, and unsuccessful effort to defeat Islamic imperialism.  Yet the Crusades were important because they represented a fight for the survival of Europe” (p. 206).  Equally fallacious are most statements regarding the Inquisition, “largely a myth concocted first by the political enemies of Spain” (p. 206).  The historical evidence set forth by Henry Kamen shows that Inquisitors “were fairer and more lenient that their secular counterparts,” often imposing sentences of fasting or community service rather than corporal or capital punishment.  As to the numbers killed by the Spanish Inquisition, Kamen estimates “around 2,000.  Other contemporary historians make estimates of between 1,500 and 4,000.  These deaths are all tragic, but we must remember that they occurred over a period of 350 years” (p. 207).  Just compare the numbers killed by the Inquisition with those eliminated by atheistic regimes in the 20^th century!  “Taken together, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the witch burnings killed approximately 200,000 people.  Adjusting for the increase in population, that’s the equivalent of one million deaths today.  Even so, these deaths caused by Christian rulers over a five-hundred-year period amount to only 1 percent of the deaths caused by Stalin, Hitler and Mao in the space of a few decades” (p. 215).  

Christians rooted in the natural law tradition have been far less brutal than atheists because, as D’Souza shows in a well-crafted chapter, they have a sound and enduring basis for their moral convictions.  Atheists deny not only the reality of God but of any absolute moral standards.  Tellingly, Aldous Huxley admitted that he found relief in a nihilistic world inasmuch as it allowed him to do his own thing:  “the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation.  The liberation we desired was   . . . liberation from a certain system of morality.  We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom’” (p. 266).  As D’Souza shrewdly puts it, such men are engaged in “a pelvic revolt against God” (p. 268).  Atheists also find freedom to live sinfully without confessing their sins for fearing damnation!  Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel laureate, argued “that in order to escape from an eternal fate in which our sins are punished, man seeks to free himself from religion.  ‘A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged’” (p. 267).  

Unlike the non-religious, Christians have reasons for revering human beings inasmuch as they regard them as spiritual beings, made in the image of God.  Atheistic, evolutionary psychologists (such as Harvard’s Steven Pinker) and biologists (such as DNA de-coder Francis Crick) and philosophers (notably David Hume and his many epigones) reduce all things human to matter-in-motion.  But Christians believe the evidence points to a very real inner self, fully self-conscious and capable of intention and purpose.  Significantly human experiences, such as making and hearing and loving music, cannot be explained except in terms of an inner spiritual being radically different from the atoms and neurons in the brain.  As the noted British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane concluded:  “’If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms’” (p. 246).  

Capping off his apologetic work, D’Souza concludes with an invitation to readers:  embrace the Faith and find the good life.  The Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Christ provide keys to living well.  And:  “Ultimately we are called not only happiness and goodness but also to holiness.  Christ says on the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’  What counts for God is not only our external conduct but also our inward disposition.  Holiness . . . means staying pure on the inside.  Yet holiness is not something we do for God.  It is something we do with God.  We couldn’t do it without Him.  In order for us to be more like Christ, we need Christ within us” (p. 304).  

I cannot better praise this book than with the words of Dallas Willard, for many years a professor of philosophy at USC:  “Pastors, teachers, believers, and the sincerely perplexed will find this book indispensable.  It sets an example of how to engage vitally important questions without mudslinging and prejudice.  D’Souza uses facts and careful reasoning and exposes the atheist attack as intellectual baseless.  Rarely have I seen such forceful clarity brought to an issue of such timeliness and importance.”  

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Quite different from the D’Souza, given its markedly personal tone, is Paul Johnson’s The Quest for God:  A Personal Pilgrimage (New York:  HarperPrerennial, c. 1997).  Johnson is a distinguished British historian, the author Intellectuals and Modern Times among many others.  He writes to defend the reality of God in a secularizing culture that has increasingly rejected Him.  Though a professing Christian throughout his life, he undertook the task of writing “to resolve many doubts in my own mind, to clarify my thoughts and to try to define what God means to me and my life.  I write it in the expectation that, by straightening out my own beliefs, it may help others to straighten out theirs” (p. 5).  

He begins by noting, in a chapter entitled “the God who would not die,” that belief in God  (especially in non-Western nations) has proved remarkably resilient.  Countless skeptics, countless times, have announced the “death of God,” but He somehow keeps resurfacing in mysterious ways!  A variety of Promethean movements, declaring man’s independence from God, easily gain devotees inasmuch as self-worship is one of our species most ancient idolatries.  But these movements generally self-destruct quite quickly.  Take H. G. Wells, for instance.  He was highly acclaimed a century ago, widely respected for his pronouncements of the glories to come as the process of evolution produced a world that is getting ever  better and better.  But, Johnson says, “it is now almost impossible to point to a single pronouncement of his on society in his own day which carries the ring of truth or even mere plausibility” (p. 20).  

That we today study the great Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton, a contemporary of Wells, rather than Wells, gives witness to the simple superiority of faith in God rather than man.  So “what is God, then?” Johnson asks.  For all his studies, he still believes basically what he learned in Catholic schools as a child and explains why he finds sophisticated modern theories, especially pantheism and its offspring, fatally flawed.  He further endorses the importance of the Natural Law, “which has been part of Christianity since its inception” and provides “a form of moral absolutism” compatible with “Christian teaching, which I believe is true for all times and peoples” (p. 66).  

Without a foundation in the Natural Law, people easily drift into moral relativism, which is “a great evil, one of the greatest of all evils because it makes possible so many other evils” (p. 67).  That so many intellectuals (including most academics) espouse moral relativism deeply distresses Johnson, because it “has been the cardinal sin of the twentieth century, the reason why it has been such a desperately unhappy and destructive epoch in human history” (p. 67).  Sadly enough, the moral relativism that shaped monstrous movements such as Communism and Nazism has subtly infiltrated the media that shapes contemporary culture.  Even the churches have fallen under its sway!  Thus we find “the pathetic spectacle of some churches trying to justify perverted sex—because there are such people as practicing homosexuals—or divorce—because so many people do get divorced—or pre-marital sex—because couples who live together without benefit of marriage are so numerous nowadays” (p. 68).  

Johnson further defends the Catholic Church and her “dogma, authority, order and liturgy” for giving us truthful answers to life’s great questions.  (Parenthetically, Johnson’s encyclopedic knowledge of history, literature, art and music enable him to proffer marvelous illustrations while discussing these items.)  Importantly, he devotes separate chapters to the “four last things,” beginning with death.  However clever our evasions, so evident in circumlocutions such as “falling asleep” we can never quite avoid death.  Troubling to Johnson is the increasing tendency in churches to “celebrate” the life of the departed rather than acknowledge his death and announce the good news of his hope in life eternal through Christ!  Following death, Christians believe, comes the Judgment.  And if the Judgment has meaning, we will enter either heaven and hell.  “Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued . . . that Hell was a necessary consequence of free will” (p. 160).  Through his addiction to opium Coleridge felt he gained insight into eternal damnation.  For he “had more than a glimpse of what is meant by Death and utter Darkness, and the Worm that dieth not—and that all the Hell of the Reprobate is no more inconsistent with the Love of God, that the Blindness of one who has occasioned loaothsome and guilty Diseases to eat out his eyes, is inconsistent with the Light of the Sun’” (p. 161).  But Heaven awaits the redeemed.  That preachers fail to rightly proclaim the good news of future bliss dismays Johnson, for it promises us, as St Cyprian described it, a place where we will “’be allowed to see God, to be honoured with sharing the joy of salvation and eternal light with Christ your Lord and God . . . to delight in the joy of immortality in the Kingdom of Heaven with the righteous and God’s friends’” (p. 174).  This is “the timeless world waiting” us.  

To enter that world we must pray—pray for faith, “asking God to give you the key to everything else” (p. 185).  We may not understand much about God, or about prayer, but in praying as well as can, primarily using the “perfect prayers” in Psalms, confessing and repenting in the process, going to church where we often pray more easily, we may end our “quest” and find the God perennially proclaimed by the Church.  

Johnson writes well and gives us an impressive testament of faith from a persuasive thinker.

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I’ve favorably reviewed several of N. T. Wright’s works in an earlier edition of my “Reedings” (#187) and now commend his foray into apologetics with the publication of Simply Christian:  Why Christianity Makes Sense (San Francisco:  HarperCollinsPublishers, c. 2006).  “My aim,” he says, “has been to describe what Christianity is all about, both to commend it to those outside the faith and to explain it to those inside” (p. ix).  

Wright divides his treatise into three sections, the first titled “Echoes of a Voice.”  He finds, by listening to the world’s hungers, how the Christian Faith aptly answers them.  First there’s the insatiable quest for justice, amply evident everywhere.  Amidst both the tragedies and comedies of life we know things should be “made right” but cannot find how to do so.  We can, as do many secularists, simply resign ourselves to the probability that our hopes for justice are sheer fantasies akin to daydreams.  “Or we may say,” Wright contends, “that the reason we have these dreams . . . is that there is someone speaking to us, whispering in our inner ear—someone who cares very much about” us and “has made us and the world for a purpose which will indeed involve justice, things being put to rights, ourselves being put to rights, the world being rescued at last” (p. 9).  Additional “echoes of a voice” include man’s sense of spiritual reality, the certainty that we are “made for each other” in manifold ways, and the “beauty of the earth” that manifests both the nature and handiwork of its Creator.  

In the book’s second section Wright “lays out the central Christian belief about God.  Christians believe that there is one true and living God, and that this God, revealed in action in Jesus, is the God who called the Jewish people to be his agents in setting forward his plan to rescue and reshape his creation” (p. x).  What Christians believe about God all centers in His Son Jesus, for in Him “God’s rescue operation has been put into effect once and for all.  A great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut.  It’s the door to the prison where we’ve been kept chained up” (p. 92).  Living, dying, and rising from the grave, Jesus did it all!  And we are both called and privileged to be His representatives in our world.  Through the power of the Holy Spirit we carry on His work.  How we do this is detailed in the third section of the book: “reflecting the image,” something we do through prayer, biblical study and meditation, commitment to and working within the church.    

Though Simply Christian is a solid treatise, its value (to me at least) is as an illustration of a highly 

distinguished biblical scholar’s effort to proclaim the Faith for a popular audience.

# # #

While caring for my mother in her final days I re-read Josef Pieper’s Death and Immortality (New York:  Herder and Herder, c. 1969).  Since I first began studying philosophy I have admired and relied on his works—models of clear, Christian thinking.  I think my initial introduction to him came when I read his Leisure:  The Basis of Culture.  In the “Introduction” to this book, T.S. Eliot (who had studied philosophy at Harvard) noted that whereas academic philosophers had little impact upon the 20^th century public Pieper managed to do so.  He did this by “restoring philosophy to a place of importance for every educated person who thinks, instead of confining it to esoteric activities which can affect the public only indirectly, insidiously and often in a distorted form.  He restores to their position in philosophy what common sense obstinately tells us ought to be found there:  insight and wisdom” (p. 14).  Equally laudatory regarding Pieper was one of the greatest 20^th century theologians, Hans Urs von Balthasar, who said he was a “philosopher, who in Goethe’s words contemplates the ‘holy and manifest mystery’ of Being and its meaning” and effectively employs the “language which always grows out of the wisdom of man as he philosophizes unconsciously” (“Foreword” to Josef Pieper:  An Anthology, p. ix).  

Pieper begins his discussion in Death and Immortality by noting that the subject is “an especially philosophical subject.”  He contrasts the radically dissimilar declarations of two eminent 20^th century thinkers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pope John XXIII.  The former, an atheistic existentialist, said:  “It is absurd that we are born; it is absurd that we die.”  On the contrary, said the pope, “Every day is a good day to be born; every day is a good day to die” (p. 8).  It’s neither the times nor the places that shape our attitudes—it’s what we take to be true regarding Reality.  And, importantly, as Kierkegaard declared:  “’Honour to learning, and honour to one who can treat the learned question of immortality in a learned way.  But the question of immortality is no learned question.  It is a question of the inner existence, a question which the individual must confront by looking into his own soul’” (p. 130).  

For us mortals, pondering our own death cannot but prompt the most serious of all inquiries.  Thus St Augustine, following the death of a close friend when he was 19 years old, noted:  “I had become a great question to myself.”  His study of Cicero no doubt deepened this concern, for to Cicero, Pieper says, “philosophizing is nothing else but consideration of death, commentatio mortis” (p. 10).   But while we witness others dying and wonder at the prospects of our own death, we cannot experience it as we do eating and drinking, laughing and crying.  It eludes the kind of analysis we give other human activities.  It is the most certain thing in the world—but precisely what it is remains bewilderingly uncertain.  Nevertheless, “in the shock that is inflicted upon us by the death of a beloved person” we come closest to personally experiencing it.  The great Christian dramatist (and existential philosopher) Gabriel Marcel said, “To love a being is to say, ‘Thou, thou shalt not die!’” (p. 20).  When we profess our love, something in us prompts us to declare its everlasting dimensions.  And if our love is eternal, surely the one we love is equally eternal.  So as a loved one dies we know (inasmuch as one may know) what death means.

We have also developed remarkable euphemisms, designed to evade the harsh reality of death, to “not name the reality of the thing, rather to obscure it, make it unrecognizable and divert our attention to something else” (p. 23).  So we say the person “passed away” or “expired” or “fell asleep.”  An even deeper evasion is “the sophism of not encountering death, which Epicurus seems to have been the first to formulate; ‘Death is nothing to us; for as long as we are, death is not here; and when death is here, we no longer are.  Therefore it is nothing to the loving or the dead’” (p. 29).  Skeptics and atheists ever since have repeated this refrain, but something about it always rings hollow.  So to live honestly, Pieper insists, we must consider all the aspects “of the human experience embodied in living speech,” of reality itself, embracing the many paradoxes posed by end-of-life experiences (p. 30).  

We do, instinctively it seems, follow Socrates in his final hours and speak frequently of the “separation of body and soul.”  Thus Thomas Aquinas said “that the ratio mortis, the ‘concept’ of death, implies that the soul separates from the body” (p. 33).  Precisely what that means, however, defies easy explanation.  It’s obvious, to most of us, that there’s an inner “self” which gives “orders” to the body.  I “tell” my hand to move, my legs to run, my jaw to chew.  Still more, it is obvious that losing a limb—or even most of my limbs—doesn’t really change the nature of my inner self, my soul.  So, as Plato insisted in Alcibiades, “the soul is the man” (p. 34).  

But by nature we are both soul and body.  To be finally separated from the body is inescapably tragic.  Here “the great tradition of Christian theology” speaking through Aquinas, “is unequivocal:  ’Of all human evils, death is the worst’; it is ‘the most extreme of all human suffering’; by it man is ‘robbed of what is most lovable:  life and being’” (p. 51).   In a perfect world, soul and body would never sever.  So we cannot but wonder if death is a “natural event or a punishment.”  Atheists and Naturalists, of course, deny the reality of the soul and thus see death as a purely natural event, like a leaf falling from a tree.  But Christians, while believing that God made a perfectly good world, take seriously the ramifications of original sin and conclude that as a consequence man became “something different” from our original design.  Thus death, the separation of body and soul, comes with the separation from God initiated by Adam.  It is, indeed, a punishment—but a punishment graciously annulled on Christ’s Cross.

This leaves us, however, as pilgrims rather than permanent residents on planet earth.  Death’s reality constantly reminds us, as Pascal said, that “We are not, we hope to be” (p. 85).  Throughout life’s journey, we make decisions that prepare us for the final moment, the point of transition, the end (meaning both the termination and the purpose) of our endeavors.  “The tradition,” Pieper says, “has coined a formula for this personal sealing of earthly existence.  It is described as the termination of the status viatoris” (p. 84).  A viator is a pilgrim.  The great question, at the end, is what will be his status, his standing, his readiness for what’s to come.  “In death the last decision is passed, for good or ill, upon the life as a whole; henceforth nothing in that life can ever again be undone” (p. 86).  So Soren Kierkegaard confided to his diary:  “’In the moment of death a man is helped by the situation to become as true as he can be’” (p. 93).  

Thoughts of death necessarily arouse questions regarding immortality.  While philosophical materialists have always denied the immortality of the soul, Pieper was astounded by some “modern Protestant” theologians who shared their view!  He argues, reiterating the classic stance Thomas Aquinas, that:  “Innumerable (infinitae) are the testimonies of Holy Scripture which witness the immortality of the soul” (p. 107; citing Summa contra Gentes, 2, 79).  He finds further support in the oft-misrepresented Plato, who posited immortality mainly in the light of divine judgment and its fearful punishments.  To Plato, only the good, who are right with God, will enjoy the “true bliss” of life everlasting.  In one of his final works, Phaedrus, “when he launches on what seems a wholly fresh approach to the question of ‘in what sense a living being is termed mortal or immortal’, he suddenly ceases to speak of the soul alone.  ‘We think,’ he says, ‘of a living being, spiritual and physical at once, but both, soul and body, united for all time.’  Moreover, he goes on, immortality is not to be regarded as a mere rational concept susceptible of demonstration; rather, we think of it with our minds on ‘the god whom we have never seen, nor fully conceived’” (p. 116).  Plato, Pieper says, “seems to be suggesting:  If ever immortality is conferred upon us, not just the soul but the entire physical human being will in some inconceivable manner participate in the life of the gods; for in them alone is it made real in its original perfection” (p. 116).  Thus for Plato, persons are better termed indestructible or imperishable rather than immortal.  As Aquinas, commenting on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, put it:  “’That is perishable which possibly cannot be; that is imperishable, incorruptible, which cannot possibly not be’” (p. 117).  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Re-reading Pieper’s treatise on death and immortality prompted me to take up and re-read his No One Could Have Known:  An Autobiography:  The Early Years (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 1987).  He began his life in 1904 in a small northwestern German village where his father was the school teacher and his mother’s staunchly Catholic family formed the locus for his development.  Though his world “was by no means idyllic and free from harm, [it] had a certain completeness, constituted a visible whole.  The basic elements of life were not obscured by the noisy chatter of media curiosity and boredom; they were one and all tangibly accessible to one’s own senses:  garden, field, river and wood; both the ripening and the failure of crops” (p. 24).  It was the right place for a philosopher to begin—face to face with reality.  

In time his father secured a better position in Munster, which became the center of Pieper’s life thereafter.  He did well in school, moving quite easily through university coursework, but the truly formative influence came when a teacher suggested he read Thomas Aquinas.  Thus began a lifelong effort to grasp and explain the rich philosophical ideas of the Angelic Doctor, fueled by his example of the fact “that the truly wise man is he to whom all things taste as they really are:  Cui sapiunt omnia prout sint, hic est vere sapiens” (p. 62).  Subsequently the words of St. Anselm became axiomatic for him:  “’Few consider the truth that resides in the being of things’” (p. 138).  To see things as they really are, to rightly discern their nature as revealed to the contemplative mind, became his passion.  Consequently, he ultimately “was able to put my confused intimations into clear words:  ‘Every ought is grounded in an is; the good is what corresponds to reality.  If anyone wants to know and do the good, he must direct his gaze to the objective world of being; not to his own mind, not to his own conscience, not to values, nor to ideals or paradigms he has himself drawn up.  He must look away from his own act and toward reality” (p. 63).    

Though he’d earned a Ph.D., Pieper didn’t enter the university establishment.  Rather, he worked for a few years in a research institute and then became a “freelance writer.”  He’d written a brief treatise on fortitude that was published by one of the finest German publishers.  Thereafter he had the connections—as well as the talent—to make a living with his pen.  He mastered the art of writing short, trenchant philosophical works (rooted in the thought of Aquinas) that appealed to both popular and scholarly readers.  He worked intensely, noting that “there is hardly a single one of my books that I did not entirely rewrite two or three times, and by hand.  For the most part this process resulted in more conciseness, illustrating the truth of the old saying that a small book takes more work than a folio volume” (p. 116).  Though he had opportunities to do other work, for more money, he felt called to the philosophical “vocation.”

  When WWII erupted, Pieper was conscripted into military service, which for him meant work in a “military psychology” unit that allowed him to remain near his home in Munster.  Though his brother-in-law had married a Jewess and fled to England (thus tainting all his relatives), and though some of his writings elicited censure from the Nazis, he had some personal contacts that enabled him to survive the war without much difficulty.  Though never sympathetic with the Nazis, they seemed to have minimal impact on his world.  Indeed, apart from his official duties and while Allied bombers flew overhead on their way toward Berlin, Pieper continued to read and ponder the works of Aquinas.  For me, one of the lessons from this book is how apolitical Germans such as Pieper had little awareness of much that transpired under Hitler, even while the war was waging.  Though not a “classic” autobiography, interesting in its own light, the book provides insight into the author for those of us who have relished Pieper’s thought.  

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St. Anselm’s call to contemplate “the truth that dwells in the core of all things” led Josef Pieper to write The Truth of All Things:  An Inquiry into the Anthropology of the High Middle Ages (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 1989).  In a world filled with folks who say “that’s just your opinion,” following the subjectivist skepticism of thinkers such as Nietzsche, who declared, in The Will To Power, that there is “no true world,” only “a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us,” it’s refreshing to find an elegant and persuasive defense of our ability to know what things are, to discern what it is that makes something what it is.  Pieper proposes to explain and defend the position of great thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, who insisted that “to be” and “to be true” state the same thing.  Similarly they held that “all that is, is good.”  Though simply stated, these positions form the foundation for the perennial philosophy needed to live well.

Just as philosophy began with the Greeks, so too the truth Pieper seeks was first probed by Plato, who said:  “’what is most noble (ariston) in all existing things, is truth’” (p. 14).  This insight has been ignored, however, by modern philosophers who, beginning with Renaissance humanists “despised and eliminated the principle of ontological truth” (p. 14).   To Thomas Hobbes, such thinking was “inane and childish;” for Rene Descartes “there is no truth in things” (p. 16).  Such thinkers located “truth” singularly in the human mind, in the words we use to describe a world that is wordless.  All this culminated in the thought of Immanuel Kant, who radically denied any knowledge of the inner essence of anything—we can know nothing but our own ideas.

To Pieper, however, the perennial common sense of Thomas Aquinas rings true:  “’All existing things, namely, all real objects outside the soul, possess something intrinsic that allows us to call them true.’  ‘In created things there is truth on two levels:  in the things themselves, and in the perceiving mind’” (p. 29).  That which makes a thing what it is, its being, is its structure or truth.  On this Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas all agree.  “A thing cannot have being without equally having truth” (p. 30).  “The ‘form’ of a thing is its intrinsic identifying imprint, so that every thing is what it is through the ‘form’ it ‘has’” (p. 37).  When we read that profound passage in Genesis where Adam “gave names” to all the animals, we see that man has a mind capable of seeing the truth of God disclosed in the forms of created beings.  “A being’s ability to know, therefore, is its ability to transcend its own delimitations, the ability to step out of its own identity and to have ‘also the form of the other being’, which means:  to be the other being.  ‘Knowing’ constitutes and establishes the most intimate relationship conceivable between two beings (a fact that is expressed and confirmed through the age-old usage of ‘knowing’ to indicate sexual intercourse)” (p. 37).  

When we mentally behold the inner essence of a thing it’s much like fully mapping the genetic code of a particular species.  When we allow DNA evidence to identify (often years after the crime) rapists or murderers, we follow this ancient philosophical insight:  a thing is knowable insofar as we rightly read its form, its essential structure.  Conversely, when we make something, such as a chocolate cake or gun cabinet, we fully understand its essence because we have brought it into being.  When we create a thing we know why we do so and what it is.  As Aquinas put it:  “’Reality compares differently to either the active way of knowing or the receptive way of knowing.  The mind in its active intellection is the cause of things, and therefore is the “measure” of those things it produces.  The mind in its receptive intellection, on the other hand, is the receiver of things, and is in some sense activated by them; those things, therefore, are then the “measure” of the mind’” (p. 39).  

Still more, says Aquinas:  “’we call all manufactured things “true” because of their orientation toward our knowing mind.  We can call a house “true” insamuch as it conforms to the original idea in the mind of the architect.  And a speech can be called “true” insofar as it reveals a true thought.  And similarly are the things of nature called “true” as they mirror their primordial forms, which dwell in the mind of God’” (p. 42).  Here we come to the heart of Pieper’s treatise.  “The truth of all things” is the truth of God, the evidence of His artistry in making all that is.  What we see, when we see the truth, is what God sees.  As T.S. Eliot wrote, in Murder in the Cathedral:  “For all things exist only as seen by Thee, / Only as known by Thee, all things exist / Only in Thy light.”  The inner essence, the “intrinsic forms of all things are ‘nothing else but God’s knowledge somehow imprinted (sigilatio) in those things’” (p. 44).  It’s almost superfluous to note that Aquinas is taking seriously the Prologue of St John’s Gospel:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The same was in the beginning with God.  All things were made by him:  and without him was not any thing made that was made” (Jn 1:1-3). 

Consequently:  “the truth inherent in all things in view of God’s mind is the foundation and the root of their truth in view of the knowing human mind” (p. 52).  All things are what they are because God designed them thusly.  He knows them perfectly.  His knowledge is their truth.  When we understand them we see His truth.  All truth is God’s truth, to repeat a maxim often cited to justify higher education in Christian circles.  “The lucidity which from the creative knowledge of the divine Logos flows into things, together with their very being—yes even as their very being—this lucidity alone makes all things knowable for the human mind” (p. 52).  “Consequently, all reality, as reality, will essentially be intelligible for the human mind; and this intelligibility will be so inherent in reality’s very being that ‘to be’ and ‘to be intelligible for the human mind’ become equivalent expressions” (p. 54).  

To be intelligible to the human mind does not, however, mean “equally intelligible” with God’s knowledge of His handiwork!  “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” as Paul noted.  In his writings, Aquinas often referred to a remark of Aristotle, who compared our ability to see truth with the difficulties nocturnal birds have detecting objects in daylight.  He also said that “’Our cognitive power is so imperfect that not even the nature of one single gnat was ever entirely understood by any philosopher’” (p. 93).  So, he insisted, “’There are many things that our mind actually does not know; and yet, there is nothing . . . that the human mind could not perceive, at least potentially’” (p. 56).  

However finite, the human mind has incredible potential!  As immaterial, our mind, our rational soul, is not limited by material boundaries and thus possesses almost infinite power to understand things.  “’The mind by its nature,’ said Aquinas, “is oriented to conform to all that has being’” (p. 78).  Still more:  “’All things are knowable insofar as they have being.  For this reason is it said that the soul in a certain sense is all in all’” (p. 78).  Part of what it means to be created in the image of God is that we can know and love all things—there are literally no limits to our divinely-imprinted capacities.  “The mind, and the mind alone, is capax universi [capable of grasping the universe]” (p. 80).  

So as astronomers probe ever more remote sections of the universe, and as geneticists dig into the mysteries of the DNA, and as computer designers construct smaller and more powerful laptops, we realize what Aquinas taught centuries ago:  we know not how much we can know.  Mere material mortals could never do what we do!  Only spiritual beings could possibly “comprehend all there is” (p. 84).  Graciously given a spiritual soul, capable of knowing the inner essence of things, able to make infinite varieties of things, a single person stands as the noblest creature in the world.  And we persons are placed in a wonderful world, designed by God’s artistry, knowable to us inasmuch as we grasp the primordial ideas that take shape in all He’s made.