A bit of serendipity…

There's a bit of serendipity in this but it might open up into a really good discussion on Catholica, well-timed with Pope Benedict's arrival in our country this coming Sunday. Months and months ago one of our readers, who works for a publisher got into a conversation with Milly (my wife and co-publisher) about a new book by Robert Tilley entitled "Benedict XVI and the Search for Truth". Milly started reading the book but wasn't really impressed and left it aside about half-way through and based on the discussions she'd had with me I wasn't much inclined to investigate it either. A couple of days ago I had occasion to ring the Aquinas Academy looking for a phone number. In the course of my conversation the person responding to my query, Marie (whom I subsequently suspect was Sr Marie Biddle RSJ the coordinator of spirituality programs at the Academy), suggested that we ought to give some coverage to this book by Robert Tilley on Catholica. I told her I vaguely recalled it and thought we might have a copy in our library. She was pretty insistent that it was a book worth following up.

As a result of Marie's suggestion I went and had a hunt in the library and sure enough it was the book we'd been given some time ago. I haven't got very far so far but I would like to share with you here some of the things that have struck me so far in a positive way from the Preface and Introduction. Perhaps others here are already familiar with the book and might like to respond to my thoughts. Unfortunately the Aquinas Academy office is unattended today but I intend ringing Marie and inviting her to share with us what has impressed her about this book. If you're reading this Marie please give me a ring.

An overview of Robert Tilley's book…

"Benedict XVI and the Search for Truth" by Robert Tilley is published by St Paul's

To begin, let me provide an overview, partly in Robert Tilley's own words, what this book is about. What comes through fairly strongly in what I have read so far is that Robert Tilley is a big fan of Pope Benedict. He feels the criticisms of him have been a bit unfair. What Tilley claims he is endeavouring to do is provide an overview of the development of Benedict's thinking from the extensive body of work that Benedict has published over his lifetime. As you probably realize, Benedict, as an academic, has been a prolific writer over the decades. Tilley seems to suggest that the very volume of what Benedict has written has perhaps created some of the confusion in society at what drives Benedict — and what Benedict is driving at — in the direction he seems to be trying to forge for Catholicism in his role as Pontiff.

Here is the overview Tilley provides at the end of the Preface which basically sums up the book and also outlines the broad thrust of Benedict's line of reasoning…

In conclusion, it's often helpful before one sets out to read a book to know what its central arguments are. Not only does this help students to crib without reading the book, it also gives the reader a sense of purpose and direction. The following are some of the major concerns that inform Benedict's writings:

• The modern turn in thinking that accents the notion of the autonomous individual over the idea of a person perfected in communion. Such a notion is disastrous for humanity; it destroys personhood.
• This turn is associated with the rejection of the discipline of metaphysics from philosophy — a rejection that begins to become apparent in the late sixteenth century. Philosophy turns from having been about the 'thinking of being' to a form of scientific rationalism.
• As time has passed, all areas of life have increasingly come to be understood by reference to this rationalism. Most importantly of all, this includes human life itself.
• This rationalism has come to be expressed in the philosophy of pragmatism and its attendant relativism, but it has, in more recent generations, transformed itself into a form of technological fundamentalism (or 'technologism').
• This technologism is expressed in consumerism and the subordination of human life to the dictates of production and efficiency.
• Religious liberalism — that philosophy informed by the logic of early-modern rationalism and the later Enlightenment - is, for all its claims otherwise, informed by a logic of technologism.
• True dialogue and unity can only be arrived at by a return to reason, which necessarily includes metaphysics and natural moral law. There can be no true pluralism founded upon relativism.
• The return to the thinking of being requires renunciation and contemplation, and these are the means to the perfection of being which is love. All being is perfected in personhood; the perfection of personhood is in communion; perfect communion is love.
• Finally — and perhaps this is the most important point for understanding the structure and dynamic of Benedict's thinking — all being and thus all reason is hierarchically ordered. What this means will, I hope, become clear as the book progresses, but a central argument is that hierarchical thinking is the only kind of thinking that can truly include other religions and philosophies.

Now all of that does inspire me to read the book within itself. I am sincerely interested in trying to understand what drives Benedict and what he sees as the end objective of this entire spiritual and religious quest he invites us into. Where does he see "Truth" residing? That's the very title of this book: "Benedict XVI and the Search for Truth".

The fundamental importance of paradigmatic ideas…

Now it's when that I began to read the Introduction that I began to get even more excited. The base contention of Robert Tilley upon which this book is predicated is something that I do sincerely believe in. Tilley's talking my sort of language when he uses the word paradigms and those base framework ideas from which we do our thinking, our acting and our living. He argues those fundamental ideas, many of which we often don't even realize are forming our world view are critically important. Let me quote a little more of Robert Tilley in his own words…

A gun can kill its tens, an idea its hundreds of millions. After all, ideas are the things that move us to act, that inform our behaviour, and are blessed or damned in their outcomes. Ideas are the things that can move us to pick up that gun, or plant a bomb, or invade a country — or, more to the point, get us to put down that gun before anything worse happens. Ideas matter in every area of our life — from the everyday to the more extraordinary. How much tax you pay is informed by an economic theory, just as the actions of a terrorist are motivated by an ideology.

For example, it's argued by many that suicide bombing and modern jihadism is an aberration, a distortion of true Islam. Something similar was said concerning the IRA and the Catholic Church, and the Ulster Men and Protestantism. There are also Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish terrorists — and atheist ones as well. Each body of believers will argue that the crimes done in their name come from errors of doctrine and interpretation. Perhaps so, but in order to judge them we need to know what it is we're talking about and, thereby, to ascertain if the idea is an aberration or if it's simply a logical outworking of the primary position of the faith in question.

You see, every position has a primary position, just as a view needs a lookout. Because a lookout serves to help us take in the view it itself is forgotten. We don't go to a lookout to look at it: we go to look at the view. Something similar happens in our thinking and our perception of the world: we forget where it is we're looking from. And the thing is, this can make all the difference to what we see.

Simply put, all of us have fundamentals, even if we are not aware of them. All of us are, in some sense, fundamentalists; if we weren't, we could never know anything or know that we know something truly so. The question, then, is: what are our fundamentals and do we share them with others?

So far so good. Basically what Tilley is on about is the critical importance of those base ideas that lurk way down in the background of our lives — they're formed in the cultures that we're brought up in: our national culture, our set of religious beliefs, even prejudices and ideas that might be particular to our family. Let me quote some more of Tilley…

The problem is that the most powerful ideas are the foundational ideas, and this means that they're the ones that are most assumed. And being most assumed they're the most concealed — concealed in the same way wallpaper is concealed, or a background is concealed, that is, they are so much taken for granted that we are rarely, if ever, truly aware of them. But take away the wallpaper and you notice what is missing; take away the background and you'd be utterly lost. Take away the lookout and you'd soon forget the view. The things we take for granted, be it our spouse or our job, are usually the most important things in our lives because they are the background things; they're the very things that orient us.

The same applies to our fundamental ideas — only more so. They form the very ground of our thinking; indeed, they have to do with the very ground of our being. They have to do with the very orientation of our being. Ideas matter, and so too do erroneous ideas, and opposing error is an almighty battle on what can be the most deadly of all things, for an error can kill the human race. Like the alien spawn, it can take root, grow, and slowly envelop us, turning us against our fellows, turning us against ourselves. We might even say that erroneous ideas are like the walls of a cell, ones that are slowly drawing in, sending us into a frenzied panic.

John Maynard Keynes as featured on the cover of Time Magazine

John Maynard Keynes on the importance of ideas…

There is a famous quote from the economist John Maynard Keynes which is worth slipping in here as in a way it sums up what I think Robert Tilley is endeavouring to get at:

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." [1936]

Still with me? Now I think this is all really good stuff. I've long believed in the importance of all these things he is writing about. It's one of the reasons I so often use the words "paradigm" and "paradigmatic" in so much of my own writing while fully realising that they are classed by many people as "big words" and they're not quite sure precisely what they mean. In communication terms words like "paradigm" and "paradigmatic" are not used much in ordinary journalism because they are seen as "communication blockers". They tend to cause "the shutters to come down" in the minds of an audience and you lose half or three-quarters of your readership.

The essential objective of Robert Tilley's book…

All of the foregoing is by way of introduction to the essential point that Robert Tilley is coming to — the central reason why he decided to write this book. Let me again explain it using Robert Tilley's own words…

This book is not only about Benedict but about the world we live in; it's about the fundamental ideas that undergird and inform it. To be more precise, it's about metaphysics. Again, you might find your eyes beginning to glaze over, but resist the temptation; shake your head, go for a walk, get a coffee, and then we'll continue.

Believe me when I say that, in order to understand what Benedict and his predecessor John Paul II were about, you really need to understand why the discipline of metaphysics matters. And, in order to begin to understand why it matters we might first note that much of the modern world thinks it doesn't matter at all. The modern world thinks metaphysics is irrelevant and that what really matter are economics, business, technology, and, if you can get it, power. Pragmatic things: they're the things that count: prosperity, comfort, health — not fancy sounding words like 'metaphysics'.

What is this contentious thing called 'metaphysics'? The word originates in Greek and is made up of two parts: first, meta, a prefix which refers to that which is before, above, over all things. We might say that it has the sense of the ground of all things, or of that which unites all things. This is so even when the ground is more like an 'end' or 'goal'. The second part of the word, physics, means something like 'nature', which the Greek philosophers held to be all that can be sensed — or, as some put it, physics is nature and nature is all that appears. Physics is everything that we can see and hear and touch — everything, in short, that we can sense. Metaphysics, then, deals with the ground of everything we can sense, it's what is behind, as it were, everything that appears. You might even say its the lookout from which all can be seen.

Many philosophers and theologians (and Benedict is among them) translate 'metaphysics' to mean the philosophy of being; that is, thinking about being. Being is what informs all that we can sense - it has to do with all that is - and that means, for a Christian thinker, it has to do with all of creation.

It may sound all very mystical or, depending on your view, like the kind of ivory tower thinking that wastes time. Whatever the case, many will think that metaphysics has little bearing on our everyday world. But John Paul II didn't think so: 'It should never be forgotten that the neglect of being inevitably leads to losing touch with objective truth and therefore with the very ground of human dignity.'

Why should this be the case? Why should there be a relationship between what seems a rather esoteric and rarefied discipline like metaphysics and the status of human life? Why should the social neglect of one result in the neglect of the other?

'In a special way', John Paul wrote, 'the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry'.

Again, you might be a little mystified — not least because you might find it strange that John Paul wrote stuff like this; and in an encyclical as well! After all, wasn't he a man of action? a great pastoral pope? a man of prayer and almost simple devotion? Well, yes, he was — and more — but he was so not least because he was a theologian trained in philosophy, a metaphysician, and thus a man who was rigorous in his thinking. And, as we'll see, the same things can be said of Benedict.

When Benedict wrote, 'We must take a position against the common opposition to metaphysics...', he did so because he saw, as John Paul saw, that the rejection of this discipline would mean, ultimately, the destruction of humanity. And it ends in the destruction of humanity because it leads to the kind of pragmatic thinking that sees the 'philosophy of being' as a waste of time. This in turn leads to the dominance of a technological way of thinking, that is, to 'technologism'. Under the sway of technologism humanity ends up being subjected to the dictates of progress — of a progress defined by no law except that of 'If something works and brings wealth then we should do it.' We end up viewing humanity as something like raw material, something to be pushed into service, as so much 'stuff' to be manipulated — a state of affairs that benefits those who are wealthy, healthy, and well-placed enough to call the shots.

It may seem strange to relate the foregoing to the rejection of metaphysics, but the reason many think it's strange is for much the same reason that many of us think ideas don't really matter: we are used to thinking 'pragmatically'. We are too immersed in our time to reflect critically on the way we think and the ideas that move us. We just think this is the way things are.

As I wrote back at the beginning of this commentary, I'm looking forward to reading the rest of this book because I do sincerely want to better understand where Benedict seems to be coming from, and leading us to. I'm also particularly interested in either confirming, or having myself proved wrong, that I believe Benedict is fundamentally misguided in this entire "relativism" question. I've written about this in the past. I do believe Benedict is correct, but only to a limited extent, that there are some people in the world who are "relativists" in the sense he uses the word. They believe we are all entitled to our opinions and one opinion is as good as another. I do not believe it is half the threat to civilization that he makes it out to be.

Albert Einstein When we observe anything, the observation has to be always conditioned with reference to the perspective or 'observation point' from which we are making the observation.

As I have written before there is another understanding of this word "relativism" and it is the one used in Albert Einstein's "General Theory of Relativity" and it is a critical insight in Quantum Physics. When we observe anything, the observation has to be always conditioned with reference to the perspective or "observation point" from which we are making the observation. Even though many in the general population might not have studied physics formally, I would argue they have picked up the intrinsic understanding of what is involved here through their use of technologies that have flowed from the breakthroughs in fundamental physics discovered in the first half of the 20th Century, and through science fiction and population films and television programs which are predicated on some understanding of the concepts and ideas that have shaped our culture, and human civilization since the advent of Quantum Physics. This type of "relativism" is entirely different to the type of relativism that Benedict is thinking, and writing about so often. It poses no threat whatsoever to civilization and in fact it offers an important way forward for civilization if only it could be better understood at the paradigmatic level in popular culture. I believe it also offers much to institutionalized religion as a tool which it might use to dig itself out of the hole of societal irrelevance into which it has descended.

Summary and Conclusion…

To sum up what I've endeavoured to cover in this commentary:

• Ideas are important — particularly the "hidden" or "paradigmatic" ideas and prejudices that shape our surface thinking and actions as human beings.
• Robert Tilley (and by extension Popes Benedict and John Paul II) believe that strongly. To discover "truth" we need to be aware of these hidden ideas that shape the thinking not just of individuals but of whole societies or the whole of human civilization. I agree with that also — and very strongly.
• Tilley argues that Benedict and John Paul II place importance on metaphysics — the study, and understanding of, "the philosophy of being". Again I agree, and strongly.
• As I have argued fairly rigorously in various places, it seems to me that the policy direction Pope Benedict has taken is basically a regurgitation of the flawed thinking and policy directions that most of the Popes since the French Revolution have taken and which I believe largely explain why so many Catholics have "given up" and "disappeared out the door". I hold John Paul II also as having adopted policy positions that, despite all his abilities as an actor and in getting media attention, ultimately pushed more people out of the Church than attracted into it. At heart, I believe, one of the chief causes of this is a flawed understanding both men shared of the metaphysics that is becoming available to humankind through the discipline of physics and, in particular, fundamental or quantum physics. They are still stuck in the 19th century understanding of science and the limiting ways in which the world could be observed within that frame of reference. I will be reading Robert Tilley's book with enormous interest to see if he can prove me misguided and wrong in the assessment, or prejudice, I have to Pope Benedict's thinking.

At heart though I do strongly agree with the fundamental importance of the ideas Robert Tilley has outlined in the Preface and Introduction to his book. Ideas are important and more so the paradigmatic ideas that undergird our everyday thinking and actions in life. But in studying the "paradigmatic ideas" or "metaphysics" we'd better be pretty sure we get those ideas right and don't go off half-cocked with theological ideas that do not in fact gel with what we now know of God's creative and salvific plans for Creation and which were formed in an era centuries before the insights of quantum physics which do give us incredible new insights into the design, the beauty and indeed, I would argue the very serendipity and perhaps even "God-incidence", of Creation.

PUBLISHERS INFORMATION:
"Benedict XVI and the Search for Truth" by Robert Tilley, ISBN 9781921032264 (pbk.) is published by St Paul's Publications, PO Box 906, STRATHFIELD NSW 2135 web: www.stpauls.com.au

Brian Coyne is the editor and publisher of Catholica Australia.

We welcome your thoughts in response to this commentary in our forum.

Brian Coyne can be contacted at: Brian Coyne <editor@catholica.com.au>

©2008 Brian Coyne

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