“You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative”
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
As a Jesuit seminarian, I was assiduously trained in the rigid theological argumentation designed during the Counter Reformation to win the battle for the Roman hierarchy in a Christian world that was falling apart, burning dissidents, brainwashing its children, and dividing up the spoils of war. It didn’t take a lot of deep discernment to wean me from the inhumanity of that program although it seemed difficult at the time, but, after all that training, it is difficult to step outside the rational/philosophic construct and not apply it without discrimination to all sides of an argument.
The house that Aristotle built forms the basis for the modern scientific method: observation, analysis particularly with regard to logic and causation and its application to the vast array of human endeavors. Aquinas, the precocious boy monk, took the whole lot and applied it to his world, which included the divine. He called his most famous work The Summa Theologica, The Summa for short as if including god was simply understood not just in his world view but the view of his entire world. This is the point that I find most troublesome, though unavoidable given the time and place of 13th century ecclesial scholasticism.
The house that Aquinas built was logical and rational until it wasn’t. Its foundation was set firmly on pillars of an Unmoved Mover; the doors, their hinges and locks were based on what he called sciencia, knowing or grasping the real causes of the universal nature of things; our movement within this structure is governed by our human will which allows us to conform to god’s law, whether expressed through his or her commandments as well as “natural law,” or the distinctive way rational beings participate in this eternal law. God’s law, natural, eternal or divine, always gets top billing.
The dispute I want to tackle has a long and revered lineage in Western philosophy: what happens to religion when confronted with what feels like the harsh challenges of the scientific venture and the completely natural world that it models? Aquinas applied Aristotle to the divine in an almost deistic way until he smashed up against the Deposit of Faith, the revealed Word of God that ended with the death of the last disciple of Jesus. Aquinas and all the schoolmen who followed form the framework of this continuing debate. They repeated the basic flaw--debris from Aquinas’s collision with Revelation litters the house of Aristotle. They claimed that their analysis started with observation of the universe, but it was Revelation that lay at the core of its being. Aquinas famously wrote, “if anything is found in the words of the philosophers that is contrary to the faith, this is not philosophy but rather an abuse of philosophy, due to a failure of reason” (Comm. Boethius De trinitate 2.3c).
I'm not even certain how much support I can muster for my position. Aquinas stated that the basis of his theology was “faith seeking understanding.” In only two decades he raced through all the known works and commentaries of Aristotle and left 8 million exacting words of his own. We had only a year or two to master the basics of his arguments, and it was mind numbing. But in retrospect, I am left with a sense of wonder and enthusiasm as he leapt from connection to insight and the world fell together in a very ordered way. He might have actually felt that he was discovering the divine plan. Understanding was his goal. The separation between the work of theology and philosophy was not as clear as it is today, and the observables in his quest included the phenomena of the natural world and the words of scripture. It was OK when there was no contradiction, but when there was the choice was either mysticism or the kind of rational agnosticism that would be born in the Enlightenment Period.
To further complicate the issue, the leaky basement in Aquinas’s house where observed evidence floated along side dogma, is simply a logical variation of the question that the Jesuits faced when they were crafting the Counter-Reformation although we have to change the predicate; what happens when a tradition laden and wealthy religious establishment is confronted with the harsh challenges of a reform movement, based on valid complaints about doctrine and practice that is gaining in popularity? The Jesuits took the structure of Aquinas’s house and created an inquiry, with particular emphasis on the function of free will. They even decorated the central office with an austere motif that screamed “Te Vult.”
But in terms of my analogy, I have changed the predicate. In the place of scientific venture I have substituted an entrenched doctrinal faith system, and in place of natural world models, I have placed a popular reform movement. I think this is legitimate. The questions bleed into one another muddying the waters. Let me explain.
Looking at the question of the reconciliation between a religious world view and what religionists label materialism with all of the pejorative connotations, I say it is simply a modeling of the world solely on experiential data. It only allows observable data. It is not the same game that Aquinas started in his attempt to reconcile Aristotle with Revelation. That’s a dead horse. Most of the people who represent this train of thought while maintaining a religious world view, call it the death of god in one form or another. It is the inevitable result when you remove the items in the Deposit of Faith that in themselves cannot stand up to the application of observation or verifiable historical confirmation and logic--the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection. The supernatural bits.
Let me shift the context of my argument to my own religious practice. Trying to pinpoint my basic problem with the problem, I have been looking for a good analogy for my conundrum, no I’ll say it, fault, in the argument that somehow the Judeo-Christian-Muslim pantheon in whatever guise, can be imported into Buddhist practice, and that this is possible, or necessary, or, well just inevitable given that we human beings carry around these notions of an active supernatural world as if that in itself makes it so--or even a decent place to begin the debate. We can describe Buddhism as “pretty non-supernatural,” but somehow the gods creep into the Buddhist world. I mean, how many Buddhist pantheons are there? Quite a few. They may be slightly different, some are even more colorful, more magical and chock full of more superstition than their western counterparts so give me a break.
At first I thought that my problem might fall into a quasi-Aristotelian conundrum: We have clear evidence, tons of careful research and analysis, historical, cultural, linguistic, that shows without a shadow of a doubt that humankind has attributed much of the world's causation to some divine intervention or interference. Not to be squandered but how do we hold it? Along comes Buddhism, I sit down and begin an inquiry based on introspection, and realize that most of this narrative is self-created, historically, culturally, linguistically, perhaps even genetically, but it’s there. A seemingly solid block that I have to consider, but looking at this data does not require anything else than I consider it part of our inheritance.
What do I object to and why do I object? With bows to both Descartes and Hume. Up until the advent of philosophical skepticism, the job of the philosopher was to reconcile the worlds of faith and the seemingly disparate world of reason. If you did a convincing job creating a creditable resolution, you got tenure at a really great world class university like Padua or even were made a saint. But the problem for me still remains: what if Zeus, Jehovah, The Ground of Being, the Atman are just an elaborate ponzi scheme devised to maintain the power of a particular worldview? But but but you say, the evidence is there: people have these experiences that we cannot fathom without this explanatory construct. Let’s look at the constructs and see what holds water--so to speak.
It seems to me that whether or not the supernatural exists is a binary choice, yes or no, and not a multiple choice answer with various levels rated from 0 to 9. After we’ve done away with our anthropomorphic thinking, this ‘realm’ or level of reality is entirely beyond human reasoning; it stands outside ordinary experience, and (we posit) exists in some sense. Or do we take our experience of the numinous and use “supernatural" to describe certain parts that we can’t really figure out as if there were multiple choices about the level of supernatural that we choose to describe these kinds of experience. Is truth a popularity contest read by professional pollsters? Whether I rate myself as a 2 with regard to transcendence or a 9--transcendence, that level of reality is defined as either whole and complete in itself and not subject to human intervention, or it is an human invention used as convenient descriptor for those portions of what we seem to hear, feel, and talk about that escape the bounds of our ordinary experience and language as well as the scientific instruments that we have developed to get a handle on what we call “the inexplicable.” A good example is the data collected by Galileo’s telescope, the wrench he threw into the theological cosmology of the 15th century.
This is the phenomena of questions bleeding into one another muddying the waters. When you begin an argument or analysis with a sympathetic description of some famous figure dealing with the intrusion of an inexplicable experience which the person identifies as numinous or “supernatural,” the question is already muddy. I say (actually I am borrowing much of it from a broad reading of post Enlightenment skeptics, Descartes onward), this is the least profitable place to start: the examination of religious thought and literature as well as those remarkable humans who had powerful numinous experiences working within those systems. Of course it will be self-referential. That is how our minds are constructed.
The shape of the question determines the outcome. Any answer has to account for the context that the subject used to frame his or her question. Methodist founder John Wesley famously remarked in a pamphlet about the Calvinist interpretation of Romans 9 “Whatever it means, it cannot mean that.” I read this and said to myself, Wesley was a Zen master? It pretty much reflects much of how I feel about the letters attributed to Paul, more than a few other bits in the Jesus narrative as well as many statements in systematic theology.
So let’s begin afresh. Put the cart before the horse (I don’t think it makes any difference if it’s the other way around), but please subject the contents of the cart to the same careful scrutiny that you gave to Zeus and Jesus, Father and Spirit. Or better yet, examine who is entertaining these fanciful creations.
Go back to your meditation cushion.
Perhaps I have fashioned an answer to a problem that wasn’t even there. And maybe it is just nonsense. Damn there goes that tenure. Aquinas too chose the mystical path.
Mihi videtur ut palea
Father Nolan’s baritone would have made a camel blush
But he launched into “Tantum Ergo”
With the enthusiasm of an Irish barroom brawl.
He was tone deaf
Bringing the mystery of all things transcendent
Down to earth where mere mortals can fight about them.
Brawls with priests in attendance are nothing new
And not usually a laughing matter.
Choirmaster trains with a whip
No mercy for wayward lads.
Nolan was deadly serious.
I was once on his list.
Aquinas tried to complete the work
Of Nicaea. Truly god is truly god.
True means true. It means
When you bite the coin
It cracks your teeth.
Breath that rattles straw.
More straw please.
