Fund for Christian Ecology

Bill’s Presentation

In the beginning was the Word;
The Word was with God
And the Word was God.

Richard Tarnas in his book The Passion of the Western Mind suggests that the cultural climate of Greece at the time of Socrates was quite similar to the cultural climate of today. This morning Bernie and I are going to discuss some of these similarities with an emphasis placed on Modern Idealism and the Post Modern Mind.

Western culture emerged from the drama of ancient Greece. The story begins long before the birth of Christ. Ancient Greece, at this time, was torn by two rival mythologies. By day it was ruled by the sky God Zeus. But at night, in the quiet groves, the mystery religions took hold of the hearts and minds of men and women.

The Gods of the Parthenon represented the accepted religion of the culture. But many found these Gods unsatisfactory. Christianity is much like that today. Some people who are disillusioned by Christianity turn to the more mystical traditions, which they often find in Eastern religion or in new age thinking. This is what the Greeks did when they turned to the mystery religions. They were looking for something that touched their heart. They needed a religious vision with a richness and depth of feeling.

A vision, in the context that I am using the term, is a tapestry of thoughts and images that knit together a view of life. This work of vision making is central to human culture and at the time of Socrates was the driving force behind philosophy. Today, philosophy is often thought of as dry and abstract. But back in Greek times philosophy was a creative act; it was more a work of art than a carefully constructed system of thought. It was not a dry antiseptic analysis of ideas. It was a quest for a vision of the world that resonated with the depths of the soul. When this type of thinking is done in the context of community something magical happens.

Philosophically minded people are sometimes criticized for being too much in their head. When I am being criticized for this tendency I sometimes say that I think with my feeler and feel with my thinker. This, I think, is the type of philosophy that characterized Greek thought. They thought with their feeler.

Leucippus and Democritus developed a theory of atoms, which explained all phenomena in purely materialistic terms around the fifth century B.C.E. Their atomistic philosophy was very modern. Atoms were conceived as tiny indestructible and indivisible particles. They were the eternal unchanging substance of the cosmos and through different combinations these atoms produced the phenomenal world of our senses.

The Atomists were the scientific empiricists of their day. As this scientifically inclined way of thinking gained ground, the God’s of the Parthenon were taken less seriously. Many still took traditional values seriously but many looked to new sources for meaning.

The atomists paved the way for the sophists. The sophists were pragmatic. They realized that truth was not something that anyone could claim. Instead, they developed a philosophy aimed at helping people live the good life. This is not much different from today. Truth is relative and knowledge is important only to the extent that it is useful. Universities today are dominated by sophistry. Business schools, engineering, psychology, and political science are good examples. The pure sciences are the exception. They carry on the tradition of the atomists.

Let me summarize the similarities that we have talked about so far that exist between the cultural climate of ancient Greece and the cultural climate of today. Christianity represents the traditional religious values in much the same way that the Gods of the Parthenon did for the Greeks. Both provide a traditional structure for defining moral and ethical behavior. The mystery religions served much the same purpose that new age thought and Eastern religion does today. New age thought may not always be rational but it does appeal to the heart and the mystical inclination of the soul. The atomists were the vanguards of science. And in the chaos of competing claims for truth, the sophists opted for practical knowledge.

Socrates and Plato were born into this intellectual climate. Richard Tarnas argues that they had a revolutionary impact because they provided a rational basis for the hunger of the soul. Plato’s allegory of the cave captures the flavor of his philosophy.

Plato asks his audience to imagine a cave where people are tied with chains in such a way that all they can see is the wall in front of them. Light streams into the cave from an opening behind them and casts their shadows on the wall. Their heads are secured in such a way that they cannot turn to see the others in the cave. All they can see and relate to are the shadows cast on the wall. Assuming they were born into this situation they would think that this is the only reality possible.

One day an independent minded individual manages to break loose of his chains and makes his way to the mouth of the cave where light is streaming in. In a stunning moment his mind is illuminated. He recognizes the illusory nature of the shadowy world that has been his only reality throughout life. He rushes back to inform his friends, but of course they think he is deluded and will have nothing to do with him.

Plato uses this allegory to point out that the phenomenal world of the senses is much like the shadowy world of the men in the cave. He argued that the mind is like the eye and the act of thinking is much like perceiving. The eternal or ideal form of an idea exists in the universe or in the mind of God. When we think we are usually only perceiving the shadowy resemblance of the idea. The task of the philosopher is to make his way to the mouth of the cave and perceive the idea in the purity of its original form.

Plato’s ideal forms are no longer taken seriously but a part of his philosophy is passionately argued for today. Usually philosophers who argue that consciousness is fundamental to the nature of reality are considered Idealists. The term Idealist comes from Plato’s concept of Ideal forms. I use the term Modern Idealists to distinguish them from the older Platonic philosophies that are no longer taken seriously.

So when St. John says: “The Word was with God and the Word was God” he is identifying Christ with Plato’s Ideal forms.

Unitarianism is rooted in the Idealism of the Transcendentalists. Emerson and Thoreau are the two most prominent Idealists in our tradition. Other Modern Idealists would include William Blake, Goethe, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hegel, Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung, Henri Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Bohm.

Today, all of the philosophical perspectives that shaped ancient Greece are competing for the hearts and minds of America. Post Modernism is the latest rage. Post Modernists are the Sophists of our time. In contrast to the Post Modernist are the Modern Idealists who continue to argue for an underlying essence to reality that gives our life meaning. It might be said that Post Modernists follow from the existentialism of the 20th century and the Modern Idealism follows form the essentialism of the 19th century.

With these thoughts I turn the podium over to Bernie. Bernie will continue this line of reasoning with emphasis on the Post Modernist.

Bernie’s Presentation

Bill has shown that “modern” philosophies are not so new. We can find near duplicates of modern notions in the ancient Greeks. We have yet to address a pivotal personalty, Plato’s student and mentor to Alexander the Great, Aristotle. In the words of Richard Tarnas,

“With Aristotle, Plato was, as is were, brought down to earth... The crux of their difference involved the precise nature of the Forms and their relation to the empirical world. Aristotle’s temperament was one that took the empirical world on its own terms as fully real. He could not accept Plato’s conclusion that the basis of reality existed in an entirely transcendent and immaterial realm of ideal entities. True reality, he believed, was the perceptible world of concrete objects, not an imperceptible world of eternal ideas.”¹

In essence, Tarnas is identifying Plato and Aristotle as to two poles in opposition: a transcendental paradigm on the one hand, and the scientific materialist on the other.

Interestingly, although his thought was kept alive in the Arabic Speaking world, Aristotle more or less disappeared from Western Thought for over a thousand years. Transcendental idealism dominated. And, courtesy of the Apostle Paul and Augustine, it had its most profound effect on Christianity. We often assume that Christianity is primarily an off-shoot of Judaism. But this is inaccurate. Christianity as we know it owes as much, if not more, to Plato than to Moses. Early church fathers regarded Socrates and Plato as pre-Christian saints, or as Justin Martyr put it, “Christians before Christ.”² Plato, like most of Christianity, believed in an immortal soul that survived the passing of a given physical body. Aristotle, as with the Jews, believed the soul could only manifest in the material. Christianity, in essence, was a new Greek mystery religion (with a Jewish outer shell), created by Paul, through which the limitations of mortal flesh could be overcome. Given that 1 out 3 humans calls him or herself a Christian, its been exceedingly successful.

Aristotle’s thought was recovered by the West when the crusaders began returning from the Middle East, as they began bringing back Arabic manuscripts of Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas, undertaking a reinterpretation of Christianity in Aristotelian terms, declared a new close relationship between spirit and flesh, between humanity and the world. The Catholic Church’s response was to ban and burn his books, and otherwise suppress his thought. But it did eventually take hold. And the seriousness with which Aristotle took the material world in no small part allowed the scientific revolution. Careful attention to the observable patterns of nature again became intellectually respectable.

Careful attention to the patterns of nature, it turns out, can have unanticipated effects on our human sense of self-importance. First, we relearned from Copernicus and Galileo that the earth was not the Center of the Universe. Then, from Darwin, we learn we are not a special creation of God, but just a new (albeit, very powerful) species on the block. And from Freud, we learned that our unconscious self shapes and drives us more than our rational minds in which we take such pride. Finally, from 20^th Century astronomy, we learned that each of us is a mere spec living on a mere spec in inconceivably large universe. In Tarnas words again, “ faced with such vistas, thoughtful persons had good cause to ponder the apparent insignificance of human existence in the greater scheme of things.”³

This sense of insignificance has led to what Tarnas calls “the Postmodern Mind,” known is some circles at least as Post-Modernism. It is, indeed, the central intellectual paradigm of our age. Tarnas summarizes (with slight paraphrazing for clarity) its central tenets as follows:

Since there [are] no [reliable] foundations for human knowledge, the highest value for any perspective is its capacity to be temporarily useful or [informative]... [I]t is recognized that in the end these valuations are themselves not justifiable by anything beyond personal and cultural taste. For justification is itself only another social practice with no foundation beyond social practice... To assert general truths is to impose a spurious dogma on the chaos of phenomena. [Instead, we must limit] knowledge to the local and the specific. Any ... [attempt at a] comprehensive, coherent [worldview] is at best no more than a temporarily useful fiction masking chaos, [or] at worst an oppressive fiction masking relationships of power, violence, and subordination. ⁴

There is something illogical going on here, as Tarnas goes to the note:

Here, paradoxically, we can recognize something of the old confidence of the modern mind in the superiority of its own perspective... [T]he postmodern mind’s sense of superiority derives from its special awareness of how little knowledge can be claimed by any mind, itself included. Yet precisely by virtue of this self-relativizing critical awareness, it is recognized that ... rejection of any and all ... aspiration[s] toward intellectual unity, wholeness, or comprehensive coherence... is itself a position not beyond questioning, and cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself... This is the unstable paradox that permeates the postmodern mind.

This then is a thumbnail outline of the history of Western Thought from the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece to the present. Who cares? Or why should we be interested?

As Bill and I have recounted this brief outline of the history of Western thought, you have probably recognized some portion of it that you yourself hold. Perhaps, like Plato, you believe in an immortal soul. Or perhaps, like Leucippus and Democritus, and to some extent Aristotle, you believe the material is all there is. A familiarity with the history of philosophical and theological thought imparts an understanding of the pedigree of your own ideas.

And it is true indeed that few of us think completely new thoughts. Most of what we express as our philosophy of life is an accumulation of ideas we have absorbed, sponge-like, from others. We may have absorbed them without knowing it, and without reflecting on their legitimacy. Every philosophical idea has its opposite which refutes it. How many of us have considered the philosophical refutations to the ideas we hold dear? It is, at the least, interesting to know what our philosophical foes have to say about our ideas.

Finally, as the great Unitarian Sophia Lyon Fahs put it, “It matters what we believe.”⁵ Ideas have a power of their own. Deeds follow thoughts. So chose your thoughts with care.

Tarnas believes, and I agree, that Post-Modernism is an understandable, and perhaps necessary, stage in the evolution of humanity. But, contrary to some of its proponents, it is hardly the end of the road. Its vision is too limited and alienating. Thus, the quest is still on, as Bill put it, for a vision of the world that resonates with the depths of the soul. Let the philosophical adventure continue.

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