Returning to Reality

Christian Platonism for Our Times

Paul Tyson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630874032
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Could it be that we have lost touch with some basic human realities in our day of high-tech efficiency, frenetic competition, and ceaseless consumption? Have we turned from the moral, the spiritual, and even the physical realities that make our lives meaningful? These are metaphysical questions--questions about the nature of reality--but they are not abstract questions. These are very down to earth questions that concern power and the collective frameworks of belief and action governing our daily lives. This book is an introduction to the history, theory, and application of Christian metaphysics. Yet this book is not just an introduction, it is also a passionately argued call for a profound change in the contemporary Christian mind. Paul Tyson argues that as Western culture's Christian Platonist understanding of reality was replaced by modern pragmatic realism, we turned not just from one outlook on reality to another, but away from reality itself. This book seeks to show that if we can recover this ancient Christian outlook on reality, reframed for our day, then we will be able to recover a way of life that is in harmony with human and divine truth.

Part I

Re-discovering a Christian Understanding of Reality

1

Two Views of Reality

Emma, my two-year-old daughter, has quite an astonishing understanding of reality. She is now adept at talking, but she does not just talk to her family and friends, she also talks to the cat, she talks to her breakfast, she talks to the flowers. And as far as she is concerned, her breakfast and the flowers talk back to her. It seems that she inhabits a cosmos that is intelligibly animate in its own right and where she is in rich communicative fellowship with, well, everything. And it is not just people, animals, and things she talks to. When we say grace to our unseen Father in heaven whose provision upholds us at every turn, she displays no incredulity. In fact, should someone other than her attempt to say grace she expresses her displeasure in no uncertain terms.

If you take the effort to get beside her and try to see the world from her perspective, if you really look into her eyes in order to look into her world, what we might call adult notions of objective reality start tumbling into disorder. For more than her paranormal communicative proclivities, it is who she herself is that most troubles any merely “factual” or scientifically “realistic” view of reality. As a normal two-year-old Emma is no angel (ask her sisters), and yet, perhaps, in some astonishing way all two year olds are beings of dazzling spiritual radiance. Her vibrant laughing eyes and her unreservedly open face can simply blow you away. Her eye contact reaches deeply into your being and her smile can cause even the parched spiritual desert of a tired and troubled soul to burst into bloom.

What are we to make of this? Is Emma simply a sweet and imaginative child who will grow up and lay aside her childish ways? Will the maturing of her outlook be demonstrated when she comes to understand the difference between scientific reality and imaginative fiction? Will her spirit of play, her delight in the joy and mystery of ordinary immediacy, her imaginative vitality, and her quickness to touch others in love, simply fade as she “grows up”? Or does she illustrate what Christ spoke of when he said that unless you become as a little child you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven?

The above questions expose the simple fact that the nature of reality can be understood in different ways. Metaphysics is the endeavor to understand what reality really is, and in the West there is a rather basic divide separating out two approaches to metaphysics. Let us call these two approaches the one-dimensional metaphysical outlook (1DM) and the three-dimensional metaphysical outlook (3DM). The 3DM outlook sees the moral dimension, the physical dimension, and the spiritual dimension of our experience as all equally integral to reality as a whole. The 3DM outlook maintains that in a human being, for example, you cannot try to unravel or functionally obliterate any of these dimensions without damaging or destroying a real understanding of what it means to be human. The particular type of 3DM this book will advocate is Christian Platonism. Here moral and spiritual realities you cannot immediately see or scientifically quantify nevertheless saturate the physical and tangible world. In contrast, the 1DM outlook maintains that reality is comprised of only one sort of stuff. Thus, what seem to be irreducibly different dimensions of reality to the 3DM outlook—quality, quantity, and the touch of divinity—are all seen as functions of a seamlessly undifferentiated reality by the 1DM outlook.

The type of 1DM outlook common in our day functionally reduces all of reality to its physical dimension. Even so, this 1DM outlook happily recognizes that we have what we experience as moral and spiritual states of awareness, but these states are seen as functions of our awareness, not functions of real (that is physical) reality itself. Further, to this type of realism our awareness itself must really be a physical thing in the final analysis. Thus 1DM physical realism employs a sophisticated interpretive apparatus that enables it to “understand” the qualitative and spiritual aspects of our experience of Emma—her beauty, value, moral capacities, and apparent intimacy with divinity—by reducing what these dimensions really signify to physical terms. For, as noted, to 1DM advocates the physical dimension of reality is the only dimension that is really real. The other “dimensions” are seen as subjective interpretations, psychological epiphenomena, and cultural glosses painted over the physical laws and material necessities of Emma’s life.

The 3DM understanding of Emma does not reduce the moral and the spiritual to the physical. And note, here the qualitative dimension of reality includes not only moral categories concerning good and evil, but also aesthetic categories concerning beauty and ugliness; here the spiritual dimension of reality includes not only God and the mystery of personhood (the soul), but also meaning and intelligibility itself, which can be seen as given to all created things as their defining essence from the Creator. To the 3DM outlook that I will be advocating in this book, meaning is understood as a spiritual gift integral to all reality, not as a shimmering subjective by-product of brute physicality merely projected onto meaningless objective reality by our brains. To the 3DM outlook you can simply take your experience of Emma’s beauty, her moral value, her personal dignity, her intimate relation to God, and her spiritual essence, as being experiences of moral and spiritual reality; you do not need to re-interpret your experience so that it conforms to the categories of reality defined only by materially demonstrable knowledge.

The point to notice is that both ways of understanding reality can look at the same “thing”—say Emma—but they interpret what they are seeing differently. Indeed, as already noted, the 1DM outlook uses an astonishingly sophisticated interpretive apparatus that applies highly complex forms of abstraction and reduction in formulating its understanding of real reality. In contrast the 3DM outlook is much more directly related to what we actually see and experience. The 1DM outlook really is more interpretively complex than a 3DM outlook, but whether this interpretive sophistication gives you greater contact with what reality really is or propels you into a region of fantastic disconnection with the moral and spiritual fabric of reality is a matter that is worth considering.

Could it be that our sophisticated 1DM outlook on reality has shaped our culture and the practices of modern power in such a way that we have lost contact with some very basic moral and spiritual realities? The global financial crisis of 2008 displayed an astonishing disconnection between high finance and ordinary reality, and yet only an entirely amoral and irreligious approach to financial and legal power could have allowed the abstract mathematical ingenuity of derivative trading to bring the USA and the global economic order it has built to its knees. And then again, if you happen to be a factory worker in Indonesia, a cotton picker in Uzbekistan, or a cocoa plantation worker in Africa, the way in which you are exploited by this global economic system may also strike you as remarkably blind to human and spiritual realities. Are we not, perhaps, just a little bit too good at abstracting and reducing the real world to merely mathematical relations and to calculations of practical manipulation for merely quantifiable outcomes? Have we become blind to the moral and spiritual dimensions of reality? Have we turned from reality as it really is?

Backing up a bit, it must be recognized that the relationship between the moral, the material, and the spiritual as seen from within a 1MD outlook is more complex than I have so far outlined. Significantly, the interpretive apparatus of the 1DM outlook usually only functionally ignores moral and spiritual reality. This is because the modern 1DM stance is grounded in a very deep commitment to the truth of scientific knowledge. Within this commitment the knowledge of objective material reality is real knowledge, but moral and spiritual truth claims, which cannot be scientifically tested, do not count as knowledge claims about reality. Thus our 1MD outlook typically only maintains that there are no scientifically knowable moral and spiritual realities, not that such realities positively do not exist. Hence, beliefs about moral truth and God are seen as optional subjective convictions that people can adhere to if they like, but which should always be held discretely separate from any verifiable knowledge claim about objective reality. Knowledge here pertains to what is physically real, and belief here pertains to that which is not physically real. Hence Goodness and God—as distinct from people’s stated moral and religious beliefs and their observable moral and religious behaviors—are outside of our knowledge of reality. In this way the modern world isolates objective knowledge from subjective belief and this is seen as upholding the very essence of personal freedom in regard to belief commitments about morality and religion. This arrangement—so modern liberalism claims—liberates objective scientific truth from any sort of tyrannically mandated limitation from non-factual moral and religious convictions. This arrangement also liberates the individual conscience from the coercive use of civic power in all matters of moral and religious belief. Hence, one can functionally operate in a legal and pragmatic way within merely physical and social constructed reality at the same time as being passionately committed to deeply personal moral and religious convictions, provided one keeps one’s religion and morality within the realm of private belief and out of the realm of knowledge and public power. Thus a strict demarcation between objective knowledge and subjective belief, grounded in a functionally 1DM understanding of reality, is the lynch pin of liberal secular society. (Notice how politically significant culturally assumed metaphysical understandings are.) Here, legality governs the operational rules of the public realm and this realm is not concerned with morality as such, and here good citizens who are members of religious societies are expected to respect the moral neutrality and spiritual pluralism upheld by the coercive powers of the secular state within the prevailing good order of society and commerce. So moral and spiritual dimensions reside in the personal and subjective arena of belief, and this arena has no direct bearing on public and objective matters concerning power and legality in the real world.

The collective dis-integration of knowledge from belief adhered to by liberal secular modernity did not come from nowhere. After the peace of Westphalia,3 the modern uncoupling of religion from civic power started a revolution within Western culture that would effectively isolate matters of religion and morality to the discretely subjective and personal sphere of belief, and this would increasingly lean what was understood as the public and objective sphere of knowledge and power towards being functionally amoral and irreligious. By now—after the long cultural evolution of Western modernity—the separation of subjective belief from objective knowledge is in our mother’s milk. Because the scientific knowledge and the secular power environment in which we live are basic to the objective realities of our very way of life, we readily perform the sophisticated interpretive isolations and reductions of the 1DM perspective effortlessly and without even being aware of it. Even so, this is an astonishing interpretive achievement that we—for the most part—willingly perform when we are dealing with objective knowledge claims and the accepted norms of public propriety. If you look at Emma, it is remarkably counter-intuitive to think that the moral and spiritual realities one sees and touches there are merely personal belief glosses that have no factual or publically significant connection to reality. Indeed, I cannot see that it would actually be possible to relate to real people and be an actor in the real world without assuming that reality had qualitative and meaningful dimensions.

So far we have outlined two approaches to metaphysics and noticed how a 1DM outlook is embedded in the objective and secular features of our modern way of life. We will not here explore the history of the deep and intimate relationship between a distinctive type of Christian theology and the rise of modern secular liberalism,4 but it is important to note that there is a naturally corrosive relationship between a way of life functionally embedded in a 1DM outlook and the unavoidably 3DM aspects of Christian doctrine. For clearly, Christian doctrine maintains that there really are moral and spiritual realities integral with (and prior to) the real material world of our everyday experience. To approach God and goodness as functions of our own personal belief freedoms, which we choose in our own identity construction, or to demarcate God to some discrete supernatural realm that is entirely discontinuous with material reality and to think of morality as inherently a personal matter, is to abandon a Christian understanding of reality itself. Yet Christianity within secular modernity often does just that. On ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Re-discovering a Christian Understanding of Reality
• Part 2: Christian Platonism and the History of Western Ideas
• Part 3: Applied Christian Metaphysics
• Bibliography