Returning to Reality

And Jesus answering said unto them,
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,
and to God the things that are God’s.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost . . .

On February 28, 2013, as Pope Benedict XVI was leaving office, the magician Penn Jillette was interviewed on CNN by Piers Morgan, a nominal Catholic. Morgan, a critic of Benedict, thought he would have a sympathetic ear in Jillette, an outspoken atheist, but the interview quickly took an amusing turn as Jillette began lecturing Morgan on the teachings of the Catholic Church, which Jillette got (mostly) right. Morgan pushed back, but in the process only revealed his own ignorance of why the Church teaches what She teaches. Jillette made short work of him, as would anyone even modestly versed in Catholic theology.

Catholic commentators, especially those who are politically conservative and thus despised Piers Morgan for other reasons, enjoyed a bit of Schadenfreude at Morgan’s expense. One obvious lesson—which many of the commentators drew—is that Catholics of Morgan’s generation (he is 48) were poorly catechized.  If an atheist can beat a reasonably intelligent Catholic not just in technique but in the substance of a debate over Catholic theology, something is wrong.

There were less obvious lessons to be learned. The first is that American Catholics are just as enamored of celebrities as Americans of other stripes are. Not a few of the Catholic commentariat jumped to the conclusion that Jillette was ripe for conversion. (Many of the same commentators had declared Christopher Hitchens another Augustine or Saint Paul in the making, and had not only hoped for—a good thing—but expected his deathbed conversion, no matter how often Hitchens assured them it would never come. Which it didn’t.) Just as Kourtney Kardashian was lauded as a pro-life hero back in 2009 when she revealed in an interview that she could not bring herself to abort her unborn child, conceived out of wedlock, so Jillette became, for a moment, the potential new face of the Catholic Church in America. And as prolifers had made excuses for Kardashian, when in that same interview she had made it clear that she thought it perfectly fine for other mothers to kill their unborn children even if she could not personally do so, Jillette’s admirers tried to explain away the actions of this militant atheist who has used his stage act and his television show, Bullsh-t!, to launch a series of nasty attacks on the Catholic Church, the Eucharist, and the priesthood.

Which brings us to a second, less obvious lesson: The Devil knows not only Latin but Christian theology. And he can use that knowledge in more than one way: to try to undermine the faith of those who are weak, by instilling doubts in their minds; but also to mislead others through a form of spiritual pride, by convincing them that saying the right thing is necessarily the same thing as believing the right thing. If the Devil can convince people that the Faith is simply a checklist of propositions to which we must give assent rather than a lived relationship with the Risen Christ from which those doctrines flow, his work is mostly done.

Faith is, among other things, the perfection of reason, but that does not mean that reason alone can lead us to faith. Penn Jillette may know all the right things to say, but Morgan, despite his dissent from Church teaching, has the benefit of baptism and membership in the Church, while Jillette not only rejects both for himself but has made it perfectly clear that he despises those who choose them for themselves (and even more so for their children). Jillette was not, as so many seemed to assume, urging Morgan on to deepen his faith (or even simply “keeping him honest”); he was ridiculing him for being less knowledgeable than a man who rejects Jesus Christ, and all His works, and all of His salvific promises.

Put this way, this all seems rather obvious; so why did so many miss what Jillette was up to? Part of the problem is that, in the United States, Christianity has all too often become a surface phenomenon. Doctrine has become a substitute for the substance of the Faith, rather than a catechetical tool that is meant to help us understand what we, as Christians, experience. To put it in stark terms: Which came first, the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, or the dogmatic councils? As Harold O.J. Brown, the longtime religion editor for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, explained in his greatest work, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy From the Apostles to the Present, Christian doctrine developed from the lived experience of the Church, the Body of Christ, not the other way around. A credo is a distillation of what Christians believe because they know it to be true, rather than a list of propositions to which they give assent, and thus come to believe. The convert recites the Creed at his baptism not as a test of his orthodoxy but to affirm what he already knows, through his experience, to be true.

Many factors have contributed to the distortion of Christian doctrine from a distillation of the Christian experience into an abstraction, even an ideology. In the United States in the 20th century, a certain neo-Thomism played an important role, beginning in the Catholic Church but with its effects spilling out into other Christian denominations. Thomistic theology is not the problem; the problem, as Owen Barfield demonstrated in Saving the Appearances, comes when that theology is treated as an end in itself, and the experience that underlies it and which it encapsulates becomes attenuated or even lost. Recover that experience, and Christian doctrine takes on a new life that can deepen our faith; the works of Thomas become as fresh as if they were written yesterday. But without that experience, we become caricatures of Penn Jillette—functional atheists who, unlike Jillette, are convinced that we have the fullness of the Faith.

The problem, though, runs much deeper than modern neo-Thomism. It extends back to the beginning of the modern age and the rise of the modern state, as the realm of politics, previously limited, began to encroach upon more and more areas of everyday life.  And it has reached its apotheosis in 21st-century America, where even so-called conservatives no longer believe that there are no political solutions to cultural problems, but that all cultural problems are at base political and can only be solved through elections and legislation and court decisions.

In a society with a strong common culture, the encroachment of politics into more and more areas of human life may not initially seem to pose a problem. Indeed, to the extent that legislation, for instance, is seen as supporting what is good in human life against external threats to the common culture, such encroachment may even be welcomed. But as the common culture breaks down, the increased power of the state over culture becomes a battering ram that accelerates that destruction.

So, for instance, state laws against abortion before 1973 largely represented the common moral sense of the people. But Roe v. Wade, while imposed from the top down, did not come out of nowhere. The moral consensus on abortion had been eroding for decades, and it reflected a more advanced erosion within the Christian churches on contraception, which itself reflected a loss within those churches not simply of the Christian understanding of the sacredness of life but, more importantly, of the experience that gave life to that understanding.

Jump forward to today, and for any person under the age of 40 in the United States, abortion has always been a part of the fabric of his or her life, and the battle over abortion, while framed in moral terms, has always been a political one. Those who believe that abortion is wrong wish to see Roe v. Wade overturned and new laws passed banning abortion; those who think otherwise work hard to maintain a pro-Roe majority on the Supreme Court.

The latter are winning, and will keep winning, until the former recognize that the only way to win the battle is to reassert the primacy of culture over politics. To put it in explicitly Christian terms, in order to save the lives of unborn children, Christians must first set about saving the souls of their fathers and mothers. And that means not simply preaching to those mothers and fathers about the Christian moral tradition concerning the sacredness of human life but leading them to the salvific relationship with Christ that underlies and gives life to that tradition. Disconnected from that experience, especially in a society in which politics claims for itself the ultimate moral authority, the Christian moral tradition becomes ossified, at best, and at worst takes on the character of an ideology, both adversary to, and counterpart of, the ideology of individualistic liberalism.

The problem, as I have made clear, is nothing new, finding its roots in the rise of the modern world five centuries ago; and it was accurately diagnosed almost half a century ago by Josef Pieper, who also pointed toward its only possible solution in his short but indispensable work Tradition: Concept and Claim (translated from the German in 2008 by E. Christian Kopff and published that same year by ISI Books). Tradition, in both the secular usage and the capital-T of Christian Sacred Tradition, is not merely a collection of things worth preserving, as both political and religious “conservatives” today treat it, but the means by which the most important of all experiences is handed down. As Pieper writes,

There is really nothing praiseworthy in the mere fact that something which has been thought, said, or done “since forever” will continue to be thought, said, and done. The praise due the act of tradition only makes sense when what is preserved and will continue to be preserved through the generations is what is truly worth preserving. That is the point of young people’s doubting question. Why is it, they ask, that a duty has been violated, if we simply let what has been handed down rest on its laurels, so that we can say, think, and do something totally different? We can only hope that someone hears this radical question and gives an existentially believable and equally radical answer, “the” answer that goes to the heart of things: that among the many things that are more or less worth preserving and may have been accumulated as “tradition,” there is in the last analysis only one traditional good that it is absolutely necessary to preserve unchanged, namely the gift that is received and handed on in the sacred tradition. I say “necessary” because this tradition comes from a divine source; because each generation needs it for a truly human existence; because no people and no brilliant individual can replace it on their own or even add anything valid to it.

It should be obvious that Pieper is speaking here not of external forms, but of that which gave them life, and which may require those external forms to change over time so that what is truly worth preserving may continue to be passed on. This is the problem faced by modern conservatives, who primarily seek to defend what they respected and loved when they were young, rather than what is necessarily worth preserving. Pieper contrasts “Tradition (singular)” with these “traditions,” which may start out supporting a healthy culture but ultimately have the potential to do more harm than good:

Genuine consciousness of tradition makes one positively free and independent in the face of conservatisms, which worry obsessively about the cultivation of the “traditions.” Certainly, a “cultivation of tradition” that attaches itself to a historically accidental external image of what has been handed down becomes a positive hindrance to a real transmission of what is truly worth conserving, which perhaps can occur only under changed historical forms. It is possible to imagine a real transmission of what is in the last analysis worth handing down, which a dogmatic conservatism could not even recognize.

This is the problem faced also by the Church, and here I speak broadly, and not just of the Catholic Church of which I am a member. Even under the best of circumstances, in a healthy culture in which the structures of society and of politics are not antagonistic toward the Christian Faith, the Church must be a countercultural institution.  That is the only way in which She can be certain to be able to hand down the ultimate Truth of the Faith, and not let it become obscured or deformed by an “historically accidental external image” that may have arisen from that Truth but has since become abstracted from it.

We are always in danger of turning the traditions of Christianity—the rituals and doctrines, the moral teachings and institutions—into ends in themselves, rather than means to the true end, “the gift that is received and handed on.” Or rather, we should use the Gift (singular), Who gave Himself to save our souls, and Who continues, in every age until the end of time, to give man what he needs “for a truly human existence.”

American conservatives of a certain generation summed up the insight of a different German philosopher in the catchphrase “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” And yet, while warning against the dangers of trying to bring about heaven on earth, they themselves, through their obsession with elections and legislation, did much to subjugate culture to politics and to make Christian moral teaching a means to a political end, rather than a means of transmitting the Truth of the Faith. The fruit of their efforts can be seen today in the lost battles of the Culture War, and in entire generations that have sought salvation not in the sacraments of Christian churches but in the squabbles of “the public square.”

All is not lost, however, so long as “the gift that is received and handed on” continues to be received and handed on. But the locus of that transmission—that “Tradition (singular)”—has never been the polling place, but the Church, which guards that gift.

When we get that straight—when we recognize once again that the duty we owe to God is to pass on the Good News to our fellow man—only then shall we begin the process of returning to reality, revitalizing our culture, and putting politics back in its proper, limited space.

First published in the December 2013 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Physics and Philosophy: Or, How Stephen Hawking Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Big Bang

“[P]hilosophy,” Stephen Hawking famously claimed, “is dead.” “Philosophy,” he argued, “has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

Werner Heisenberg might well have agreed with Hawking, though again he might not have. We cannot be certain. After all, Heisenberg was himself both a physicist and a philosopher, though he was the former before he was the latter. In fact, the title of this article, “Physics and Philosophy,” was Heisenberg’s before it was mine. He used it 65 years ago as the title of his Gifford Lectures, in which he grappled with the philosophical implications of quantum theory, and especially of his eponymous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that (in Stephen Hawking’s words) “a particle has neither a definite position nor a definite velocity unless and until those quantities are measured by an observer.”

Classical physics was (and remains) deterministic; quantum physics, Heisenberg recognized, reintroduced something akin to free will, or at the very least acknowledged that the human action of observation has an effect on that which the observer has observed — a decidedly philosophical concept.

About 25 years after Heisenberg delivered his Gifford Lectures, the Reverend Richard Rehm delivered a sermon at Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan. I was sitting in the pews with my trombone — not because I was an odd teenager, but because our public high-school band had been invited to play hymns during a Christmas service. Christ Community was a congregation in the Reformed Church in America, and I was, then as now, a Catholic, but I sat in rapt fascination as the Reverend Rehm, a few years before Stephen Hawking declared philosophy dead, essentially proclaimed the death of theology (though he didn’t phrase it that way).

Physicists, the Reverend Rehm declared, were more likely to discover God than theologians were. As they pursued the holy grail of a grand unified theory of physics, they were, he argued, entering into the mind of the god who had created the universe that this grand unified theory would ultimately define.

To a bright young student who loved mathematics and science and was considering majoring in physics in college, the Reverend Rehm’s words were as tempting as the serpent’s were to Eve. No greater pride hath a teenager than this: to think that he might discover God Himself. In no small part because of this particular sermon, I entered Michigan State a few years later as a physics major, though I switched to political theory after a single term.

About five years after I took a bite out of the apple that the Reverend Rehm had offered me, Russell Kirk, the great conservative thinker who would, over the next half-decade, become one of my mentors, told me that he thought that we were about to enter a new age of faith that would be ushered in by scientists — and, in particular, by physicists — who would prove the existence of God. Since it was the first time we had ever met, I did not have the courage to tell him that I knew that he was wrong.

For by then — even at the still young age of 21 — I had realized that a god who could be summed up in equations would no god at all. “The heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the firmament shows forth the work of His hands” — but equating God with the laws that govern the world He has created ultimately subordinates Him to His creation.

Stephen Hawking, of course, was not a believer. In fact, in October 1981, at (of all places) a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he had introduced his “no boundary” hypothesis of the universe, which accepted the idea of the Big Bang but, he argued, removed the need for a Prime Mover to have set the Big Bang into motion. As he wrote seven years later in his most famous work, A Brief History of Time, in the “no boundary” hypothesis “The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would be neither created nor destroyed. It would just be. … What place then for a creator?”

And yet, as his former student and frequent collaborator Thomas Hertog shows in his recent book On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory, Hawking spent much of his life trying to discover the physical theories that the Reverend Rehm equated with the workings of the mind of God and that Russell Kirk thought might lead us to a new age of faith.

It is hard to overstate the enduring grip that the classical view of physics had on some of the greatest minds in physics even after the formulation of quantum mechanics. All too many Christian writers have misquoted Albert Einstein as saying that “God does not play dice with the universe” in an attempt to enlist his authority on behalf of belief in God. But what Einstein was actually expressing, in a letter to quantum theorist Max Born, was his resistance to quantum theory, because quantum theory undermines the determinism of classical physics (even as modified by Einstein’s own theory of relativity). Einstein used, not the word “God,” but the term “the Old One” as a metaphor for unchanging physical laws. Indeed, he had vehemently argued against Abbe Georges Lemaitre’s theory of the Big Bang because, as he told Lemaitre, “this reminds me too much of the Christian dogma of creation.” He preferred a universe with no beginning and no end, governed always by those same unchanging laws that, he was certain, physicists would one day fully discover.

Decades later, Hawking too had trouble shaking loose from the mindset imparted by classical physics. The “no boundary” hypothesis emerged from Hawking’s attempt to extend quantum theory to the macro world of phenomena described by the laws of classical physics. And from that emerged the view of the universe as a quantum wave function, a superposition of every possible state of every particle in the universe that extended the uncertainty principle to a macro level.

Yet even so, for another 20 years, Hawking clung to what he would eventually call a “God’s eye view” of cosmology, which assumed, Hertog writes, “that the mathematical laws of physics had some sort of existence that superseded the physical reality they governed.” It wasn’t until August 2002 that Hawking finally broke through the remaining grip of classical physics once and for all. “Time to stop playing God,” he told Hertog. “We need a new philosophy for cosmology.”

Over the course of two decades, the “no boundaries” hypothesis had revolutionized physics, leading to, among other things, a multitude of theories of the multiverse, all of which Hawking adamantly rejected. He had intuited all along that there was something wrong with those theories, but only now could he fully articulate the problem. “The universe as we observe it,” he told Hertog, “is the only reasonable starting point in cosmology.” But that has, Hawking realized, serious philosophical implications. “We are not angels, who view the universe from the outside. We and our theories are part of the universe we are describing.” As Hertog writes, in this view, “cosmology is laboratory science inside out — we are within the system, looking up and looking out.”

In one sense, we might say that Hawking was late to the game. Heisenberg had already pointed in this direction in Physics and Philosophy, and two decades later (and 23 years before Hawking) the theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler had laid bare the philosophical implications of quantum theory:

We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, and here is man, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass. Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron we have to shatter the plate glass; we have to reach in there …

The physicist, Wheeler pointed out,

must install his chosen measuring equipment. It is up to him to decide whether he shall measure position or momentum. To install the equipment to measure the one prevents and excludes his installing the equipment to measure the other. Moreover, the measurement changes the state of the electron. The universe will never afterward be the same.

“To describe what has happened,” Wheeler concluded, “one has to cross out that old word ‘observer’ and put in its place the new word ‘participator.’ In some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe.”

Indeed, as early as the 1950’s and 1960’s some nonphysicists had taken note of, and expounded upon, the philosophical implications of a participatory universe, including C.S. Lewis’s and J.R.R. Tolkien’s friend Owen Barfield (most famously in Saving the Appearances) and my mentor and friend John Lukacs, in Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past. Both had pointed out that we are not only part of the universe; the universe, as we experience and understand it, is inseparable from our human consciousness. It is this philosophical insight that Hawking imported back into cosmology when he noted to Hertog that “Our theories are never fully decoupled from us.”

If Heisenberg and Wheeler and Barfield and Lukacs and Hawking were right, Albert Einstein’s argument against quantum theory — that “Physics is an attempt to grasp reality as it is, independently of its being observed” — was wrong because it describes something that simply is not possible. As Niels Bohr had put it, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”

For decades, cosmological theorizing had started at the Big Bang and moved forward (a “bottom-up” view that Hawking himself had previously embraced, including in his “no boundary” hypothesis). But the bottom-up view had led to the maddening confusion of multiverse theory: If the universe can be described as a quantum wave function in which every possible outcome exists simultaneously until an act of observation causes a branching and the creation of another effectively infinite set of multiverses, how are we ever to find the universe that we actually inhabit?

Recognizing now that “The universe as we observe it is the only reasonable starting point in cosmology,” Hawking proposed a “top-down” view that moves backward in time from what we currently observe. As novel as this view was in cosmology, it is not, Hertog notes, without precedent in science: This is how evolutionary history is determined in the biological sciences.

But as we move backward in time, history becomes in some fundamental sense contingent on us. As Hawking told Hertog, “The history of the universe depends on the questions you ask.” History, like our theories, is “never fully decoupled from us,” because it is, in the words of John Lukacs, “the remembered past.” “Any kind of tangible past in top-down cosmology,” Hertog writes, “is always an observer’s past.” And thus, Hertog argues, “In a quantum universe — our universe — a tangible physical reality emerges from a wide horizon of possibilities by means of a continual process of questioning and observing.” “This observership, the interactive process at the heart of quantum theory that transforms what might be into what does happen, constantly draws the universe more firmly into existence.” Or, as Hertog sums up Hawking’s top-down view, “We create the universe as much as the universe creates us.”

The scientific revolution, it has often been said, removed man from the center of the universe. Five hundred years later, his top-down cosmology, Hawking realized, “put humankind back in the center.” Yet in doing so, it also puts us in our proper place, ontologically speaking. In adopting a God’s eye view of the universe, mankind had attempted to usurp the place of our Creator, to subordinate Him to the grand unified theory we were convinced that we would one day create. Restored to our proper place, we can see ourselves as Saint Augustine saw us: as co-creators with God of the universe He created for us.

Stephen Hawking never became a Christian, but after he proposed his top-down cosmology, he took Thomas Hertog to a production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at the Royal Opera House to mark, as he told Hertog, “the end of my battles with God.” And 35 years after he unveiled his “no boundary” hypothesis at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he returned to the Vatican to announce that “The universe may have a boundary after all.” In November 2016, Hertog writes, “there were no more battles with God or the pope to be fought. Quite on the contrary, Stephen found a strong and moving resonance with Pope Francis in their shared goal of protecting our common home in the cosmos for the benefit of humanity today and tomorrow.”

The death of philosophy, it appears, has been greatly exaggerated. And even the most prominent scientist of recent decades may have found a place for a creator, beyond mankind’s laws of space and time.

First delivered as a paper to the Cosmopolitan Club of Huntington County, Indiana, on October 17, 2023.

Pope Benedict XVI and Islam: Allah the Irrational

A little more than eight months ago, on September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI delivered his now-infamous Regensburg Address. The reaction in the Muslim world was swift and severe, including protests, violence, and the murder of a nun—all over the Holy Father’s citation of a late-14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus. In a dialogue on Christianity and Islam, the emperor had rhetorically asked an educated Persian to “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Lost in the uproar was the reason for Pope Benedict’s citation of the emperor, which was expressed in the further quotation that the Holy Father offered from the dialogue. The emperor put his remark into context by explaining that “God is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats … To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death …”

Many sympathetic commentators who didn’t bother to read the speech concluded that the main point of Benedict’s address was to denounce the use of violence in the service of religion. That is certainly a good secondary lesson to take from his remarks, but the full text makes it very clear that Benedict, like the emperor, was using the example of violence simply to introduce his broader point: that “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” And this draws into focus a nearly insurmountable problem for any dialogue between Christianity and Islam because, as Benedict continued, in Islam, Allah’s “will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” (By “categories,” he means philosophical categories of Western thought.)

For a dialogue to take place, three conditions are necessary:

First, both sides must be interested in pursuing the truth, which requires acknowledging that there is such a thing as truth and that it can be known (or at least approached) through reason.

Second, both sides must represent their own positions truthfully (which also requires that those positions be expressed rationally), and without any intent to deceive. And

Third, each side must be able to take the other’s claims at face value, as truly representing the other’s position.

On each of these points, the Islamic conception of Allah presents a stumbling block. The work of the noted Muslim theologian and scholar Ibn Hazm is often presented as proof of what Northwestern University Professor Dario Fernandez-Morera has called “The Andalusian Myth”—namely, that the high point of civilization on the Iberian peninsula occurred during the centuries of Muslim occupation. As Benedict points out, however, “Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that [Allah] is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us.” Allah is, in the end, pure will, not bound by reason—in other words, capriciousness is essential to his very nature. “Were it [Allah’s] will,” Benedict continues, “we would even have to practise idolatry.”

Most of us have not had anything approaching the theological training of Benedict XVI, so we may be tempted to dismiss his concerns as something that could only be of interest to a theologian. After all, how likely is it that the average believer—Muslim or Christian—could even fully grasp the differences between the Christian conception of the Godhead and the Muslim conception of Allah, let alone allow his behavior to be affected by such differences?

Perhaps we can begin to understand the importance that these differences hold for even the average believer by approaching this from a slightly different angle.

In De Potentia, St. Thomas Aquinas contrasts the Muslim view of physical causality with the Christian one, pointing out that Muslims believe that Allah interposes himself at every point in the chain of causality, while Christians believe that natural objects can act under their own power. Contemporary writers, such as Fr. Stanley Jaki, have argued that this Muslim misconception of natural causality is the primary reason science developed in Christian Europe but remained stunted in Muslim societies (the claims of current public-school textbooks and PBS propaganda specials notwithstanding).

Few people, however, have explored the moral implications of the Muslim understanding of physical causality. To take Aquinas’s example, if I were to take a lighter and apply the flame to a sheet of paper, everyone around me would assume that, everything being normal, the paper would ignite—and it would. It takes no special act of God to cause the paper to burn; in fact, all other things being equal, it would require His intervention to prevent a fire, just as He intervened when Nebuchanezzer threw the three youths into the furnace. According to the Muslim view, however, when I strike the lighter, Allah has to decide whether the flint will spark, and whether the spark will ignite the fuel. When I apply the flame to the paper, Allah must decide whether the paper will ignite. If it does catch fire, it is because Allah willed that each in this series of natural acts would occur; if it does not, it is because Allah willed that the paper would not burn.

So we conclude that Muslims have a non-Western, non-Christian notion of physical causality. So what? Well, what if the lighter weren’t a lighter, but an airplane? And what if the sheet of paper weren’t a sheet of paper, but one of the towers of the World Trade Center? Then, if the plane, being applied to the tower, were to cause it to burst into flames and crumble to the ground, it would not happen because the hollow steel structure of the tower created a chimney that caused an implosion, or because changes in environmental regulations prevented the use of asbestos above the 76th floor, but only because Allah willed that the tower would burst into flames and crumble to the ground. The complete capriciousness of Allah with respect to the physical world leads to a moral fatalism. If Allah did not want the towers to fall, he would not have made them fall. To Muslims who understand this—both in the United States and worldwide—the fact that the towers fell was a clear signal that Allah approved of the actions of the September 11 hijackers.

This moral fatalism helps to explain why many American Muslims—even some of those who seemed genuinely horrified by what had occurred—were unable or unwilling to condemn the September 11 attacks directly. If Allah approved the actions of the hijackers by causing the towers to fall, then to condemn the September 11 attacks is essentially an act of impiety. It is one of the many ironies of Islam that the Muslim insistence on the radical freedom of the will can lead to a moral fatalism which those who wish to wage jihad against the United States can use in order to silence dissent among their fellow Muslims.

Just as Christians believe that we are made in the image and likeness of God, Muslims see themselves as a reflection of Allah. And as we wish to conform our will to God’s Will, they attempt to conform their wills to Allah. But here, the similarities end. If Allah’s will, unlike God’s, is not bound up with rationality, then the discerning of that will takes a very different shape. In attempting to understand God’s Will, Christians can turn to the world around us, to natural law, to history, to tradition. We see the rationality—the consistent reasonableness—of God’s Will in the world that He created. But in Islam, the appearance of order is only that—an appearance. To the extent that the created world seems rational, it is only because Allah wishes it to appear so. His will could change at any moment, however—and the new order, or lack thereof, that he would create would be just as “right” as this one.

Which brings us back to Regensburg. Pope Benedict’s address was only 16 paragraphs long; and contrary to the impression given by the media, only the first four paragraphs directly concerned Islam. The other 12 are a philosophical and historical meditation on, in the Holy Father’s words, “the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.” Turning to Saint John the Evangelist, Pope Benedict declares that John “spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God” when he declared that “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God.” In other words, the final word on the biblical concept of God is a Greek word, and one of paramount importance in Greek philosophy. In English translations of this passage, we normally render logos as word: “In the beginning was the Word.” But logos, Pope Benedict reminds us, also means reason. “In the beginning was Reason”—not the modern, narrow, scientific conception of reason, which places reason at odds with faith, but the classical and medieval conception of reason, which accepts faith as the “evidence of things not seen.”

Much has been made in recent years of the global demographic shift in the Church, to the east and to the south; and Pope Benedict himself, as Cardinal Ratzinger, has written eloquently about what this will likely mean for the future of the Church. But at Regensburg, his comments called to mind the words of Hilaire Belloc, who declared that “The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.” “[W]ith the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage,” Benedict declared, the convergence between biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry “created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.” The influence flows the other way, too: Benedict spoke of “the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry,” and stated without hesitation that “The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance.” He referred to the Septuagint—“the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria”—as “an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity.”

Most of the rest of the address is dedicated to showing that, in Benedict’s words, “the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.” In other words, Greek philosophy is intrinsic to Christianity. It is not something grafted on, something that can be tossed aside lightly as we spread the Gospel among nations who, unlike us, are not direct heirs of the Greeks. To do so is to attempt to cleave the very logos itself—to sunder reason and the Word.

That cleft, however, is fundamental to Islamic theology, so much so that to refer to it as theology—reasoning about God—is a misuse of the term. It is a commonplace to refer to Muslims, Jews, and Christians as “Peoples of the Book,” but strictly speaking, that phrase really applies only to Muslims, because, for them, all that can be known about Allah is what he has chosen to reveal directly—and then only until that revelation is contradicted by further revelation, as occurs within the Koran itself. By sundering reason and the Word, Islam creates a very modern (and false) opposition between faith and reason. It is no surprise, then, that Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss arrives at his understanding of the radical opposition between faith and reason through his study of Arab interpreters of Plato and Aristotle. Nor, sadly, is it any surprise that a Catholic follower of Strauss would recently write that “if as the Pope says ‘we must not lose sight of God if we do not want human dignity to disappear,’ one must be open to the possibility that in His Providence it may be Islam which is destined to restore that sight to a Europe ‘hollowed out’ by secularism.”

G.K. Chesterton predicted the rise of such men a century ago in his satirical novel, The Flying Inn. Intellectually stunted by a modern, narrow conception of reason, they have lost sight of the logos as anything but Word, and their version of Christianity, if can even be called that, becomes an abstraction that is closer to Islam than to the historic Christian Faith. The loss of the classical and medieval conception of reason undermines both Europe and the Faith; the destruction of Europe undermines both the Faith and reason; and the undermining of the Faith makes the revival of both reason and Europe a near impossibility.

What we’re left with, instead, is the capricious exercise of power in the modern world, which only a capricious god such as Allah seems able to restrain. But that restraint would come at a price: the human freedom that a Christian Europe made possible.

Cardinal Ratzinger, in his 1996 book Salt of the Earth, warned of that very possibility. The Koran, he wrote,

is a total religious law, which regulates the whole of political and social life and insists that the whole order of life be Islamic. Sharia shapes society from beginning to end. In this sense, it can exploit such freedoms as our constitutions give, but it cannot be its final goal to say: Yes, now we too are a body with rights, now we are present [in society] just like the Catholics and the Protestants. In such a situation, [Islam] would not achieve a status consistent with its inner nature; it would be in alienation from itself.

Where Islam is in power, it must dominate, to the exclusion of any other faith. The God of Christianity loves man, so much so that He sent His only Son to die for us; and He wants us to love Him in return, freely and unreservedly. Allah, in his capriciousness, demands total submission to his will, and so sharia is not a law of love, but of fear. For Christians, the fear of God is only the beginning of wisdom; it is charity—love—which is the bond of perfection.

At Regensburg, in a passage criticizing Christian thinkers who took the voluntarism of Blessed John Duns Scotus too far, Pope Benedict summed up the problem posed by the Muslim conception of Allah quite nicely: “God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf.”

Is there, then, any hope for a true dialogue between Christianity and Islam? Yes, and it lies in the fact that, in one sense (and perhaps in this sense alone), all men are created equal: God, in His love and mercy, has written His Law on their hearts. Muslims, like all men, no matter what they believe dogmatically, do not live each day as if Allah is capricious, as if the world could be remade at any moment and what was wrong will become right, and what is right will become wrong. Their recognition of this law may be veiled, as St. Paul, in Second Corinthians, declared of the children of Israel: “Having therefore such hope, we use much confidence: And not as Moses put a veil upon his face, that the children of Israel might not steadfastly look on the face of that which is made void. But their senses were made dull. For, until this present day, the selfsame veil, in the reading of the old testament, remaineth not taken away (because in Christ it is made void). But even until this day, when Moses is read, the veil is upon their heart. But when they shall be converted to the Lord, the veil shall be taken away.”

Pope Benedict understands that this inescapable fact of human nature gives us hope. At Regensburg, he invited not only Muslims but all of us to take the first step in revealing the law of God written on our hearts by awakening ourselves to the harmony of faith and reason—not the modern, narrow, abstract reason of the post-Christian West which has so much in common with the rejection of reason in Islam, but the reason of classical Greece and Rome and medieval Christendom. “It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason,” Pope Benedict declared, “that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.”

What he did not say, but which he clearly knows, is that, if our Muslim interlocutors do embrace this reason and reject their own voluntaristic conception of Allah, the dialogue not only can start but will be well under way: because, to return to the early paragraphs of Benedict’s speech, that reason is the Logos, and the Logos is with God, and the Logos is God. Entered into with the intention of seeking the truth, this dialogue ends only in conversion to Christ, the eternal Logos, the unity of Reason and Word.

“And the Logos was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

This text was first delivered as a speech at The Rockford Institute and later appeared, in slightly modified form, in Taki’s Magazine on June 21, 2007.

Credo: Or, A Tree Is a Tree Because of You and Me

“A man may swear to tell the truth, but it is not in his power to tell the whole truth or nothing but the truth.”

— Pierre Duhem

The author of these words, the late 19th and early 20th century physicist and philosopher Pierre Duhem, is not as well known today as Werner Heisenberg, who formulated the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, but in both his physics and his philosophical thought, Duhem anticipated Heisenberg. While I began my college studies as a physics major, I came to know the work of both men through my graduate studies in political theory, where I encountered the writings of the Catholic historian John Lukacs, and later the man himself.

John passed away three years ago this month at the age of 95. He was best known for his work on the Second World War, including profiles of Hitler and of Churchill and detailed histories of brief turning points in the war that will long remain standard works. I didn’t come to know him through those works, however, but through books that have never received the attention that they should have, and that are already becoming harder to find: The Passing of the Modern Age; Confessions of an Original Sinner, his first memoir (or more precisely, as he called it, “auto-history”); and his masterwork, Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past, the third edition of which owes its publication to a phone call I made in 1992 to the father of modern American conservatism, Russell Kirk. In those days before the World Wide Web, I scoured countless used book stores but could not find a copy of the first or second edition to purchase. Dr. Kirk, whom I had met three years before and who would pass away just two years later, was the general editor of a line of conservative classics published by Transaction Press. Would he be interested in bringing out a new edition of a work that he, too, considered one of the most important of the 20th century? He would indeed, and the rest, as they say, is history (no pun intended).

But this paper is not about me, except in the sense that everything we write or say or do is inevitably bound to the writer or the speaker or the doer as much as it is to the subject of his writing or speaking or action. The distinction between subject and object, between mind and matter, between thought and extension that Descartes so firmly implanted in the philosophical presuppositions of Western man began to crumble in the last years of the 19th century, and has since been completely demolished through the work of Duhem and Heisenberg and Lukacs and Ortega y Gasset and, perhaps most importantly, Owen Barfield.

And yet the rubble of Cartesianism continues to clutter our minds and to keep us from being conscious at all times that we see the world not as an external observer but from the inside out. In the language of Barfield, an accomplished linguist and philosopher and close friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, our knowledge is participatory. Heisenberg demonstrated that the act of our observation of a subatomic particle changes the state of that particle, but something similar happens every waking moment of our lives. The world in which we are participants is one that we constantly construct through the activity of our imagination.

This is not to say that everything which we perceive as external to us has no reality outside of our consciousness. In his greatest work, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, Barfield referred to that reality as the “unrepresented.” Because our imagination is constantly engaged in actively transforming the unrepresented into meaningful representations without our conscious recognition of that activity, we perceive a world fully formed through our imaginative conception of it. In other words, we don’t consciously know the unrepresented except through those representations—representations that are the product of our mental activity, both personal and communal (through the medium of language). But that means that the represented—the world as we know it—is in every meaningful way something that each of us has helped bring into existence.

To put it in terms that could be taken from a child’s book of rhymes: A tree is a tree because of you and me. To the bird that builds a nest in its branches or the grubs that wriggle through its roots, the unrepresented reality that we conceive as a tree is something rather different. In a lecture on “Evolution” collected in his book History, Guilt and Habit, Barfield quotes from “Our ‘Polar Partnership’ with the World Around Us,” a 1977 Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard, in which Edwin H. Land, cofounder of the Polaroid Corporation, noted that

In many ways the tree certainly does not exist in the physical sense without the observer. The tree does not exist for radio waves of a certain wavelength, nor does it exist for neutrinos. The tree exists as part and parcel of the interaction between that part of the cosmos and our part of the cosmos, namely the “We” that has evolved over many centuries to be a partner with the tree.

Or to put it another way (again, quoting Land), “There really is no outside world and no inside world; there is just one world.” For each of us, the totality of our representation at any moment comprises that world.

I would expect, then, that when I go to sleep, the material world would continue to exist (as it obviously does), but my participation in it would change. And indeed, while we may not always realize we are dreaming while we are dreaming, we very quickly recognize that we were dreaming once we awake, because in our dreams, our imagination is not transforming the unrepresented into representations but transforming memories of representations into new representations and, in the process, often becoming unmoored from the reality of the unrepresented. In our dreams, we, like the neutrino, may be able to fly through a tree, because in our dreamscape both that tree and our body are representations of representations, and not of the unrepresented. But having flown through a tree in a dream, should we try to do so in our waking life, we are most likely to end up with a knot on our head.

If I haven’t yet caused you to wish that my delivery of this paper were a dream from which you could awake, you may be starting to formulate objections to this post-Cartesian understanding of reality. Chief among them, I suspect — because it was the objection with which I struggled for some time — is the thought that the philosophical arguments advanced by Barfield, Lukacs, Ortega, and Heisenberg represent a sort of relativism that threatens to shatter the very concept of truth. If, as I said a little while ago, for each of us the totality of our representation of the unrepresented at any moment comprises our world, wouldn’t that mean that each of us is living in at least a slightly different world?

Yes, and not just in the sense that my imaginative vision of this room and this gathering is different from yours because you’re sitting over there looking at me, and I’m sitting over here looking at you. Our imaginations are colored and shaped by our histories, both personal and communal. That Brooks has spent decades of his life with Barb means that he will understand the words that I am saying somewhat differently than he would have if he had remained a bachelor. That Amy has been married to me for 30 years means that she will understand these words somewhat differently from Barb, even though she and Barb are both hearing them tonight for the first time.

Man doesn’t have a nature, he has a history, John Lukacs often wrote; though to square those words with his Catholic faith and mine, I might say that man’s nature is his history. The difference between Adam’s nature before he took a bite out of the apple and his nature immediately afterward is the history of his (original) sin.

Even when we try to see the world through the eyes of others, we cannot set our history aside. Still, our shared language and our shared history together shape our personal imaginations in powerful ways, so that my representation and yours are close enough that we can easily fall back unthinkingly into believing that Descartes was right. In fact, were that not true, Cartesian dualism could never have taken the firm hold that it did for four centuries upon the Western mind.

As Catholics, John Lukacs and I understand that truth is not relative; all truth belongs to the Truth; and the Truth is a Person. But because the Truth is a Person, and we are people, too, our relation to the Truth (and thus to all truth) is personal. And precisely because we are not God, everything that is personal for us is, by definition, limited—at least until such time as, like John the Evangelist, we see “a new heaven and a new earth,” for “The former heaven and the former earth had passed away” (Rev 21:1).

And that brings us back to Pierre Duhem, and the quotation with which I began this paper. I set out to tell the truth, even though it is not in my power to tell the whole truth or nothing but the truth. And I firmly believe that this is the truth: In moving beyond the error of Descartes, in recognizing that the world in which we live is not wholly external to us but is one that each of us has helped bring into existence, and in humbly acknowledging that it is not in our power to tell the whole truth or nothing but the truth, we do not deny the reality of truth but prepare ourselves to enter into a more personal relationship with the truth—and ultimately with the Person Who is Truth Himself.

First delivered as a paper to the Cosmopolitan Club of Huntington County, Indiana, on May 24, 2022. The text has been slightly modified from the version delivered.

Christ and History

In theory, it seems like a good idea.  The corpus of historian John Lukacs’s work is so rich and has grown so large that those who have just discovered it may be uncertain where to start.  His magnum opus, Historical Consciousness, alone has gone through three editions, all of which are worth reading as separate works.  Combine that with the regrettable condition that some of his more accessible works—Outgrowing Democracy and The Passing of the Modern Age, for instance—are out of print (and used copies are very hard to find), and the need for a compact introduction to Lukacs’s thought seems obvious.  Unfortunately, for all of its virtues, At the End of an Age is not that book.

Lukacs would be the first to admit—or, rather, insist—that theory and reality do not always mesh.  Ideas develop in an historical context, but they are also shaped by the actions of men as much as (indeed, perhaps more so than) they shape those actions.  As Lukacs is fond of saying, writing of the half-truths of historian E.H. Carr’s analysis, “the important question is ‘What is Carr driving at?’ and not ‘What is the make of this Carr?’”  But that is precisely why, in order to understand an historian’s work, it is essential to have some knowledge of the historian.  Lukacs is correct when he writes that

The recognition that different persons see the past (and also the present) differently, and that thus every historian is different, does not mean that because he is the product of his past he cannot do otherwise.

To claim that would be to deny free will.  But to understand the choices that an historian makes—and, more importantly, his purposes (not his motives, which are deterministic) in making them—we cannot view his work as something separate from—abstracted from—his life.

A case in point: The Passing of the Modern Age, a thin, prophetic volume that is still among my favorite of Lukacs’s works, is, as Lukacs describes it in Confessions of an Original Sinner, “a summation of the devolution of institutions and standards at the end of our age.”  I read it first in 1990, before reading Confessions, and it profoundly influenced the choices I made as I began my graduate studies that year.  Still, I approached The Passing of the Modern Age somewhat differently when I reread it a year or two later, having read Confessions in the meantime.  Knowing that The Passing of the Modern Age was published on November 15, 1970, the day that Lukacs’s first wife died, and recognizing the extent to which her passing was bound up in his thought with “the devolution of institutions and standards at the end of our age,” helps reveal additional nuances and complexities in the work and, of course, in the underlying thoughts that the text expresses.  Similarly, knowing that the structure of the volume is shaped by a hierarchy of historical factors, “applicable, by and large, to the history of modern nations,” that Lukacs had sketched out in Historical Consciousness, and being familiar with that hierarchy from reading the latter work, is bound to influence the reader’s appreciation of The Passing of the Modern Age.  None of that distracts from the reader’s free will or his ability to apply (and develop, and distort) Lukacs’s ideas as he sees fit.  However, just as our appreciation of a novel changes as we grow older (and, indeed, the novel’s meaning for us changes as well), so, too, our understanding of an historian’s work changes as, broadly, we change and, particularly, as our understanding of the historian’s purposes change.

Which brings us back to At the End of an Age.  This really is two books, roughly divided into the first two chapters (“At the End of an Age” and “The Presence of Historical Thinking”) and the last two chapters (“An Illustration” and “At the Center of the Universe”), with the middle chapter (“The Question of Scientific Knowledge”) acting as a bridge.  In the first “book,” Lukacs provides a sketch of the evolution of his own thought and presents a condensation of themes developed in Historical Consciousness and elsewhere.  The reader familiar with Lukacs’s work is likely to find these chapters somewhat repetitive.  Lukacs revisits many examples from previous works (such as the remarks about E.H. Carr quoted above), often even employing very similar phrasing.  All of that would be understandable (and longtime readers could skip ahead) if these chapters provided a quick introduction for those unfamiliar with Lukacs’s thought.  For that purpose, however, these chapters are somewhat too distilled.  The new reader is likely to be left (incorrectly) with a sense of superficiality.  At best, he may be hungry for a more detailed treatment, but then he is quickly thrust into the second “book,” which (it seems to me) can be read most profitably only after having digested Historical Consciousness, because the illustration provided in Chapter Four, and the final philosophical ruminations about man’s position at the center of the universe in Chapter Five, are really an extension of the final chapter, “History and Physics,” of that earlier work.

Here, longtime readers of Lukacs will find what they have been thirsting for, as Lukacs’s continued investigations over the last 30 years have broken new ground.  He has taken the scientific theories of theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg and woven them together with his own expansion of linguist Owen Barfield’s insights into the increasing intrusion of man’s consciousness into the material world.  The result is an advance in how we think about thinking itself.  And that advance is not merely historical or philosophical but religious.  While Lukacs is not exactly one to wear his Christianity on his sleeve, the Christian implications of his work (and Barfield’s before him, particularly the latter’s Saving the Appearances) are obvious.  As I have argued elsewhere, the development of historical consciousness itself is inextricably bound up with the Incarnation of Christ, the meeting of Divine and human, the point at which the Timeless intersects His timebound Creation.  “And now—especially, but perhaps not exclusively for Christians—I must argue,” Lukacs writes,

for the recognition of our central situation not only in space but also in time. In sum, that the coming of Christ to this earth may have been? no, that it was, the central event of the universe; that the greatest, the most consequential event in the entire universe has occurred here, on this earth.

That God became a man and walked this earth demonstrates the centrality of history to man’s nature—and it should give pause to post-Christian “Christians” (whether evangelical, fundamentalist, mainline Protestant, or even neo-Thomist) whose vision of Christ has degenerated into an ahistorical set of platitudes and “universal” principles.  As Lukacs writes,

All of us have known many non-Christians who have acted in Christian ways, thus being animae naturaliter cristianae; and we also know many sincerely believing Christians whose expressions may show alarmingly non-Christian thoughts in their minds. . . . [W]hat we think we believe is not always what we really believe. Our thinking—our ideas—will necessarily have their consequences. Some of our beliefs ought to.

By becoming a man, Christ redeemed history; in our post-Christian age, perhaps history—for some, at least—can redeem man, by leading him back to Christ.  That may not have John Lukacs’s purpose in writing At the End of an Age; it might, however, be one result.

[At the End of an Age, by John Lukacs (New Haven: Yale University Press) 230 pp., $22.95]

First published in the August 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.