Three Contemporary Worldviews
Many young people today — especially of college age and thereabouts — show a renewed interest in religion, or at least in spirituality. Many, of course, does not mean most; we are probably talking about a minority. Nevertheless, the interest of this minority is real and sustained, as the enormous sales of vaguely "spiritual" literature at large bookstores indicate.
These young people are asking questions and searching for answers that can point the way to meaning in life, to a larger purpose beyond making money and being "successful." There are those, too, who, disgusted by the selfish money-centered materialism that effectively consigns millions to a life of miserable poverty for the benefit of the few, throw themselves energetically into social work of one sort or another. Unfortunately, as is all too evident, the religion they find is seldom more than pseudo-religion concocted by Californian gurus, the spirituality little more than a feeble echo of the real thing as we find it in the lives of the Saints, and the social work a source of greater evils than those it seeks to redress. In this connection, the New Age movement and its various offshoots, all of them watered-down versions of ancient pagan philosophies and early Christian heresies, come immediately to mind, as well as the typical short-sighted social programs promoted by colleges, thinktanks, and government agencies.
An interest in spiritual things and in helping the needy often goes hand in hand with abysmal darkness of intellect and frightful disorderedness of will. The resurgence of interest among young people in spirituality and social work, then, is a phenomenon to be greeted with cautious optimism. One can and should see in it a hopeful sign of discontentedness with the modern mechanisms that lead to impoverishment and starvation of both body and soul, but one cannot fail to see in it a blind energy that, if deprived of truly nourishing food, is ready to feed upon poison and feed it to others.
Among college and graduate students with such tendencies, one is likely to encounter three prominent mentalities, and it is good to think about them in order to be prepared to make an intelligent response. One could speak of them as three forms of reductionism. First, there is the reduction of religious doctrines and rituals to mere symbols and symbolic actions that are held to be the underlying "universal" language of all religions; this reductionism leads to a view that all religions and their scriptures represent no more at bottom than the human imagination's more or less successful attempt to come to grips with unfathomable cosmic mysteries. Religion is thus a thing produced out of man's own mind, expressing his own thoughts and desires. Second, there is the reduction of anything and everything to the purportedly universal claims of scientific or empirical data. This reductionism tends to regard the modern sciences and their ongoing development of technology as the one measure of the truth of any and every statement, and indeed, as mankind's true source of salvation and liberation. Third, there is the reduction of life to a "healthy" combination of social-political activism and the pursuit of a good time. A man should divide his time between helping others with what they need and helping himself to what he wants. The day is given to the earnest pursuit of social justice, and the night to the equally earnest pursuit of pleasure.
These three mentalities or mental habits are not necessarily held all at once by the same individual, although commonly enough the first or the second goes along with the third. It would probably be accurate to say that at least one of these opinions strongly, even if unconsciously, colors the worldview of almost every educated college-age person.
Partial Truths and the Full Truth
Long ago, St. Thomas Aquinas observed that there is no error so great that no truth can be found in it, and no evil so great that there is no good to which it is somehow attached. Often the best procedure for dealing with a mistaken opinion or way of life is not to attack it directly, but to show that the full truth proclaimed by the Catholic Faith contains within itself whatever partial truth is lodged in the error, plus much more; and that the true good that has been revealed to us by the mercy of God contains whatever partial good is thirsted for, plus much more. Every man wants the full truth and the perfect good because he is made to the image of God, who is eternal truth and perfect goodness, and this image cannot be wholly blotted out. The Catholic Faith proclaims the truth and the good that every man was made for and hungers for.
Even when the faith is worthily proclaimed, though, it does not follow that people will embrace it. The mystery of evil is nowhere more striking than when those to whom the liberating truth and blessed good of Christ is preached turn against it and against their very souls, and walk away, as most listeners did when Jesus called himself the Bread of Life (Jn. 6), or when Paul preached the resurrection to the pagan Athenians (Acts 17). To paraphrase St. Augustine, the God who made you without your consent will not save you without your consent. The truth that man hungers for is a truth that he can reject, even in the face of spiritual starvation. There is no guarantee, nor given the nature of freedom could there be, that the proclamation of truth and goodness will meet with humble gratitude and joyful acceptance, which are the only appropriate responses to such good news.
All this being said, let us then attempt to show the ways in which these three mentalities contain certain truths which are cherished in the Catholic Faith, at the same time drawing attention to errors that go along with them — errors arising from a failure to embrace the deeper truth upon which their partial truth depends. The same holds for the goodness to be found in these mentalities; it is a real but limited goodness that can only turn stagnant and noisome when cut off from the flowing waters of grace.
Symbolism
First, the Catholic Faith is not hostile to symbols, even if one might find particular Catholics who do not understand their own heritage and promote a very prosaic type of liturgy and spirituality. Traditionally, the sacred liturgy is a veritable pageant of symbols, and much else that belongs to Catholic life is deeply imbued with layers upon layers of symbolism. Take something as simple as the water used in baptism. Natural water washes off dirt, satisfies thirst, and is refreshing (a cold swim on a hot day, a hot bath on a cold day). In instituting the sacrament of baptism, our Lord knew that water does these things and has these properties, and is therefore a supremely fitting symbol of what takes place in baptism: a spiritual cleansing, a satisfaction of spiritual thirst, and a refreshment of the soul.
Examples like this are everywhere to hand: the bread and wine of the Eucharist, the candles and flowers on the altar, the oil used for anointing, the rings exchanged with the matrimonial vows, the evergreen Advent wreath and Christmas tree, the colorful Easter egg, and so forth. Wherever it flourishes, Christian culture literally bursts over with sensual symbols of spiritual realities, outward signs of invisible grace and truth. At the very heart of our worship stand the seven Sacraments, which are sensible signs or symbols imbued by God with the astonishing power to confer upon the recipient the very grace they signify. So, not only is the Church not an enemy of symbolism, she is the garden in which symbols thrive with greater richness and variety than in the most dazzling poetry of the human imagination or the most exotic rituals of oriental religions. Are not the books of Sacred Scripture themselves filled past overflowing with beautiful, sublime, enigmatic symbols whose meaning can never be exhausted? If ever there is a religion that speaks to the imagination as well as to the intellect, or rather, which speaks to the intellect by means of the imagination, it is surely the Catholic Faith. Those who thirst for the sacred, who want to see and hear the sublime mysteries of the cosmos and of the supernatural world, can do no better than to attend a worthy celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, where the whole of creation is gathered together and offered up, in the Person of its supreme Archetype, Jesus Christ, to the transcendent God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whose word established the heavens and the earth and all that is in them.
Now, the real problem is not so much that people will say that the Church is opposed to symbolism, but rather that religion is nothing but symbolism. It is maintained that once you have explained the "inner meaning" of the "external symbols," you have effectively shown what the Catholic Faith has in common with other traditional religions, and then you have disproved its claim to be unique and the one means of salvation. A prominent supporter of this line of argument, or at least one whose ideas are often brought forward in support of it, is the psychoanalytic pioneer C. G. Jung, who developed a school of analyzing religious symbols and the contents of dreams as pre-existent archetypes with which the human mind is naturally equipped and through which it comes to grips with reality — a sort of natural religious language that can be tapped into, channeled, and shaped for the psychic health of the organism.
There is some truth to Jung's approach. Religious language is natural to man in the sense that it is natural to the human person to turn to God and seek him out; in everyone's heart is planted a natural desire for knowledge of God and a natural attitude of reverence towards God. At least in its uncontaminated purity, conscience, giving expression to the moral law written on the heart, echoes the voice of God. Moreover, psychological health depends very much on being aware of this fundamental orientation to the divine: not only accepting it but cultivating it, following it where it leads, and never accepting half-truths but always searching for the fullness of truth. Anything less than the full truth is unworthy of man and is actually a source of emptiness, confusion, and frustration.
What one must tirelessly point out is that all religions cannot be true, not even the ones that are most ancient and most widespread, for they offer incompatible accounts of the ultimate realities, for example, of the nature of God, the source and goal of human life, the sinfulness and salvation of man, the value (and even the reality) of the body, suffering, and time, and the like. One's heart cannot truly be at rest until one has discovered answers to the most elementary questions, and has seen that other possible answers are false or faulty. Until this point, one is only deceiving oneself into thinking that one has taken an interest in "religion." There is no such thing as "religion" in general; there is this definite religion and that. One must choose.
The similarity, even remarkable similarity, at the level of symbolism indicates that it is impossible for all religions to be altogether false; all of them have "picked up on" one or another aspect of reality and are giving expression to their insights. The question, then, is precisely this: which religion is truest, offering the truest account of reality, of man and God? This religion's symbols will also be the truest, the most accurate, the most profound; but that is because they give expression to something more elementary, more fundamental, than symbols: namely, the realities of which the symbols are symbols. In the final analysis, you cannot have symbols suspended over nothing; there must be doctrine, there must be a definite teaching that the symbols represent and enshrine; there must, in short, be a creed.
Young people need to be reminded that there is not, has never been, and will never be someone who lives without a creed. Everyone has a creed, a definite system of beliefs accepted on trust. The only valid question is: does this or that man have a defensible creed or a ridiculous one? It is good to get around the rationalist fallacy that there is such a thing as a person without any religion, or a religion without any creed. In the end, every man is religious, after his fashion, just as every religion is doctrinal, after its fashion. There are only two sorts of people: the genuinely religious and the superstitious or idolatrous. Note that a keen appreciation of the meaning and potential of symbols does not play the chief role in distinguishing them from each other.
Scientism
There is little in Christianity as such to give support to the claim that a Christian is ignorant or contemptuous of "facts," that he turns a deaf ear and a blind eye to them, unlike his modern enlightened counterpart, the man who accepts only what "Science" has established by experiment and verified by repetition. First of all, the modern man who accepts "Science" had better be careful that he is not handing his own intellect over to a mysterious oracle, a source of supreme dogma more unquestioned and blindly trusted than ever the papacy was in the Dark Ages. But leaving that aside, and leaving aside the extreme claims made for the objectivity of modern research, one might question the assertion that a Christian, by profession as it were, has a contempt for facts or tends to be ignorant of them. It would be hard, in fact, to find a religion more friendly to truths of the natural and historical orders and more encouraging of those who devote their time and effort to studying them.
Consider first the Christian's faith in the resurrection of Christ, which, according to St. Paul, is the foundation of our hope for everlasting life. Our belief in the resurrection is based upon the testimony of contemporary eyewitnesses, as one can read in the New Testament, where the fact that the risen Christ appeared to many is underlined again and again. Moreover, the dialogue between Christ and the Apostle Thomas is the epitome of empiricism: I will not believe until I place my hand in His wounds, says Thomas, and Christ obliges: Place your hand in My Wounds, and doubt no longer that I am truly risen from the dead.
Let us consider the most famous proofs offered for the existence of God. Not one of the Five Ways of proving God's existence offered by St. Thomas at the beginning of his Summa Theologiae is based on something arguably subjective or psychological, such as a "conversion experience" or an "inner voice that speaks of good and evil." In spite of the difficulty of grasping these very compressed and demanding metaphysical arguments, all are based on obvious facts evident to all impartial observers of the natural world, or easily inferred from what is known by common experience: motion, causality, necessity, diverse grades of qualities, and the activity for the sake of an end found in natural things (plants, animals) that do not have reason or will to guide their actions.
Or one may consider the procedure followed by the Church in investigating miracles with a view towards canonizations. The purported miracle is submitted to the most intense scrutiny possible. Expert witnesses, including non-believers, are brought in from all relevant disciplines to speak about the scientific account that can be given of the event in question. Only after the experts have rendered their judgment that, for example, a sudden and total cure of a hopelessly advanced cancer flies in the face of natural laws will the Church then consider declaring this event miraculous intervention of God at the behest of his beloved son or daughter, the (future) saint. It would be difficult indeed to find any human institution that proceeds as cautiously and thoroughly — dare we say, as scientifically? — as the Church does in such matters.
Speaking broadly, there is no religion that has more uncompromisingly held the total harmony of faith and reason, divine revelation and natural evidence, than the Catholic faith, and it is to the everlasting credit of her greatest Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, that he makes this all-embracing openness to truth fundamental to his entire body of work, where the insights of the pagan Aristotle, the Jew Maimonides, and the Moslem Avicenna, as well as innumerable empirical observations drawn from daily life, nestle side by side with quotations from Scripture and the Fathers of the Church. Truth is truth, whatever source it comes from. You will not find in Thomas an anguished tension between nature and grace, but rather a calm and abiding reverence for the way in which divine grace takes up weak and wounded nature, healing it, restoring it, perfecting it, elevating it beyond everything it can be and do on its own. So, the Church has never opposed empirical evidence, as long as those who make use of it are careful to make no claim beyond what the evidence justly warrants — which means, above all, that men not be proud and headstrong regarding what they know and what they do not know.
But there are many who are proud and headstrong in just this way, who think they know either less or more than they really know, and who therefore take Catholics to task for saying more or less about reality than they themselves would. Rudolph Carnap (1891-1970), the empiricist logician, had the following nugget of wisdom to offer: "We agree with this view of Hume which says . . . that only the propositions of mathematics and empirical science have sense, and that all other propositions are without sense." It takes a lunatic in a mad world to say something like this. Imagine that: only mathematical and scientific statements make any sense at all, while every other kind of statement (literary, romantic, religious, metaphysical) makes no sense at all, is pure subjectivity, sticky poetry, unintelligible nonsense!
One shouldn't forget that Carnap is, as he admits, voicing the view of David Hume (1711-1776), one of the very few men in history who was religiously stunted in his growth, if one may so put it — a kind of spiritual imbecile who could discern nothing beyond his mutton, porridge, and beer. "Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they every where rejected by men of sense," inquires Hume, "but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man's fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment?" This sentence is to my mind the single most revealing sentence in Hume's works. One could say much about the vision of human life and reality it implies.
Usually, a follower of Hume will claim that all official clergy are victims of some previous dissimulation, of some person who long ago claimed to speak authoritatively about the wishes of God in order that his own desire for power might be satisfied. Sometimes the Humean will go further and say that the clergy as such are power-seekers who have sublimated their thirst for control into what they call a refined "spiritual mission." This is the same tiresome reductionism that we find, for example, in the materialist poet Lucretius among the ancients, and in Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, or Jean-Paul Sartre among the moderns; and frankly it isn't very clever when you get right down to it. The saints are the silent, perpetual refutation of this sort of reductionism, and it only takes a little honest acquaintance with them to become aware of the superficiality of the modern critique of religious motivation. In the end, the saints are infinitely more satisfying, more inspiring, more human, more real, than the sociological constructs and stick-figures they are held up against or reduced to.
The faithful Christian is capable of dwelling in a region that includes not only all the things valued by the secular, "scientific" man, but far more than such a person ever dreamed of. Indeed, the greatest difference is that a Christian actually sees the point, the purpose, the meaning, of what the secular man accepts as raw truth but cannot make ultimate sense out of. Once more, for the believer it is not a question of rejecting one thing to get something else, but of embracing the whole, and preserving the parts intact as a result. The intellectual lesson that Christianity can give to the world is a lesson of the whole: what it means to hold together the whole and not lose any of the parts, but gather them together for the sake of guarding and strengthening the integrity of the whole. When the faith has become conscious of itself and capable of explaining to the world its own understanding of the revealed mysteries (i.e., when faith has reached the level of theology), it can show to believer and non-believer alike that human truths and beliefs, values and judgments, are so many fragments associated with and even alluding to one another in the larger context of a definitive whole, namely the revealed word, which pre-contains them and provides their one and only foundation of intelligibility.
Social Activism
To those steeped in history and who keep their eyes open to the life of the streets, nothing is cleared than that the Catholic Church has never been equaled in her care for the poor and needy, for the sick and the dying, the widow and the orphan, the prisoner and the refugee, the dispossessed and the abandoned. Her religious orders cover the globe, performing works of mercy not only for those for whom it may happen to be fashionable to give aid, but also for those from whom the rest of society turns away in disgust. The Church has never been in the business of "social work"; her devoted religious and laity simple love God's poor with the boundless love of Christ and want to raise them out of their misery, so that they too can become co-heirs of Christ. The devoted Catholic sees in every man, woman, and child the face of Christ, and this face calls forth one response: the total gift of oneself, the generous offering of one's life on behalf of the lives of others — self-denying, self-emptying love. The most ambitious secular social programs are timid, their achievements infinitesimal, in comparison to the radical "program" proposed by the Gospel, the many saints who, kindled by the words of Christ, expended their lives in service to the poor, and the even more numerous throng inspired in turn by their example and walking in their footsteps.
In this respect, too, the Church has the advantage, showing herself to be far ahead of the social workers and their programs, and far more successful at alleviating mankind's misery. For one thing, she is energetic with a perpetual youthfulness that comes from beyond this world; how else can one account for the awe-inspiring fact of so many who voluntarily embrace radical poverty in solidarity with Christ and the poor? But more than this, she recognizes that misery is not only material but spiritual; she never forgets that the human heart needs God even more desperately than the body needs bread. The whole of mankind, whether "rich" or "poor," is equally needy when it comes to the life that is worth living. The worst human poverty is a life without God, without hope, without meaning, and it is this poverty that seems to be the special affliction of the mighty and the monied. The poor need something more than philanthropy, with its condescending airs; like all men, they need love, and that is something that only the supreme Lover, Jesus Christ, has given to us, and continues to give through all who obey His commandment of love.
Regarding the point about "good times," one only needs to bear in mind the ultimate emptiness of what passes for fun, the insufficiency of it all, to realize that the joy man's hear wants to feast upon is not something that can be gotten from worldly amusements, diversions, and entertainments. It comes from above, and from deep within. It is a joy that springs up with the force of a gushing torrent from the love of God for us and our love of Him in return. There is no other source of abiding happiness. The effort to enjoy oneself "in spite of it all" is as doomed to failure as an attempt at forcing genuine laughter. One might as well admit from the start that there is either a God and in Him alone is bliss, or that human life is bracketed on either end, hemmed in, with inescapable nothingness, a meaningless impersonal void that has thrown us onto the stage to speak our insignificant lines and will blindly consume us in the end. I do not think it far-fetched to say that you cannot have a "good time" unless there is something really good, something that will not give way like a mirage. And what is there, in the whole world, that does not eventually give way? Can anything here fully and perfectly satisfy man's heart? If you are looking for true joy, for lasting happiness, then you must turn your gaze elsewhere. Turn it to the source of these good but perishing things, and you will find a good that is imperishable, the one good which is abundant life and never-ending joy. In this way, too, the Catholic Church promises you something that you cannot obtain elsewhere, try as you may; she promises the reality of which all the enjoyments of this world are feeble imitations. Indeed, she invites you to believe her when she says, in all simplicity, that her faithful children already begin to live that immortal life here and now, they begin to savor the joy that never grows old, the peace that surpasses all understanding.
Conclusion
There is something that separates the Catholic Faith from these three reductionisms. The faith provides facts of revelation, facts of the life of Jesus Christ and His saints, facts whose obvious interpretation has to be freely accepted or rejected. It is a religion based not on universal symbols but on specific and decisive interventions of God in history, interventions that endow things not only with their outward symbolic meaning but with their inner transformative power (the water and oil used in the rite of baptism, etc.). It is a religion based not on the quantifiable data with which a sociologist or physicist is concerned, but on the testimony of the human heart confronted with the evidences God has left in the world for those who seek Him. Finally, it is a religion based not on entertainment or social work or a "healthy blend" of both, but on the inner joy that comes from intimate friendship with God and the love towards other men that flows from this friendship. If St. Thomas Aquinas is right to say that there can be no error that does not have some truth in it, then we would be right to see some truth in each of the flawed popular mentalities. Nevertheless, we should be ready to show, too, how the Catholic Faith, encompassing these partial truths, at the same time infinitely surpasses them. It is our duty — the duty of bishops and parish priests, of educators and campus ministers, and of the faithful in general, according to time and ability — to become familiar with the Church's vast intellectual patrimony in literature, philosophy, theology, spirituality, and to make it available to young people who are searching for serious answers, but who, sadly, often fail to find what they are searching for because we fail to open up to them the riches of our faith.
Peter A. Kwasniewski is Associate Professor of Theology and Philosophy; Instructor in Music History and Theory at Wyoming Catholic College in Lander, WY.
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