Here is part two of our mini series about what we can learn from the Early Church.
This contribution comes from Martin Warner, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Warwick, England.
Destabilizing received wisdom
To the question ‘What can we learn from the Early Church?’ one plausible answer is ‘To destabilize received wisdom’. This proposal can be construed on at least two different levels, the doctrinal and the conceptual; I’ll take each in turn.
At the level of doctrine, reading the early Fathers can help us to see ways of understanding the Christian faith rather different from those with which we are familiar. And here the paths once again fork, diverging between what one might perhaps over-simply call the orthodox and the heretical. Along the former path we find ways of thinking that have been marginalized, at least in the inheritance of the Latin West though less so in Eastern Christendom, but remain as available options which may have a more significant role to play in the context of today’s Western culture. Consider the doctrine of original sin.
From the Mystery Plays to serious theology, a significant part of its Biblical grounding has been found in the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, construed – as St Augustine construed it – as a catastrophic event, disrupting God’s plan, plunging us into sin, from which we are only redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice. However for St Irenaeus, as those here who have studied philosophy of religion will know, ‘man was created as an … immature creature who was to undergo moral development and growth and finally be brought to the perfection intended for him by his maker’; Adam’s Fall is seen as an ‘understandable lapse … in the childhood of the race … due to weakness and immaturity’, and our world as one of ‘mingled good and evil as a divinely appointed environment’ for our development towards the divine goal. (John Hick Evil and the God of Love, pp.220-1)
Elements of this picture are to be found in early Hellenistic Christian thinking, including the Cappadocian Fathers, right through to recent theologians of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is a picture that seems to fit much better into the evolutionary perspective within which we today think about our development as a species. As Archbishop William Temple put it in 1924, the myth tells of Man’s winning the knowledge of good and evil ‘by doing what was in fact forbidden but was (ex hypothesi) not realised as wrong; in breaking a rule he discovered a principle; thereby he became a conscious sinner, but thereby also he became capable of fellowship with God’ (Christus Veritas, ‘Note’ to Chapter 4).
Along the second doctrinal path we find thinking that was eventually rejected by the Councils of the Church but which may nevertheless help us to see contemporary perplexities freshly. Consider the doctrine of the soul’s pre-existence, relevant to such Scriptural claims as that in Adam we all died (I Cor. xv 22), which was embraced by Origen (on some accounts – or at least in some versions of Origenism – coming close to metempsychosis, the belief that souls migrate from one body into another). Augustine’s Confessions owe their dominant image of the prodigal son (the soul returning to its Father and lost Home), together with the accounts of the origin and nature of sin, of God as found in the memory, and hence of God himself, to that vision (cf. Robert O’Connell S.J., ‘The riddle of Augustine’s Confessions: A Plotinian key’, International Philosophical Quarterly 1964).
Origenism fell out of favour during the writing and the final text is non-committal on the doctrine, but arguably pointed to a comparatively straightforward and humane response to the question that so dominated Augustine’s wrestling with predestination: Why did God say ‘I have hated Esau’, even while he was still in the womb (Rom. ix 11-13)? Esau, on such an account, might have fallen into sin prior to his birth (God’s sovereign election being related to the choice of body for the reprobate soul). However, this option was blocked when the doctrine was rejected by Council and Pope; Augustine accepted their authority and set about rethinking his faith in the light of their ruling.
On Augustine’s preferred account God saves whom he chooses and the rest damn themselves: ‘His equity is so secret that it is beyond the reach of all human understanding.’ (Ad Simplicianum. I ii 16) No doubt ‘Augustine from the bottom of his heart meant “equity” and meant “beyond human understanding” ’ (Charles Williams The Descent of the Dove, pp.68-9), but the bleakness of his vision may lead us to ponder what was lost by the Church’s rejection of Origenism. More constructively, looking again at those debates from the 3rd to 5th Centuries may provide us in today’s global community with intellectual resources for dialogue with Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist thinkers for whom metempsychosis is a lived religious reality. I turn now to the conceptual contribution that study of early Christian thinking has to offer in destabilizing received wisdom. Many intellectual debates are conducted in terms of concepts, oppositions and frames of reference alien to the Classical world, so drawing on writings from that world can make for confusion.
However, modern concepts have their own histories, investigation of which can destabilize them; allowing ancient writings to speak in their own terms may serve to defuse contemporary intellectual conflicts by enabling us to see these disputes in terms of different sets of presuppositions. I’ll use as an example those puzzles about grace, free will and predestination with which Augustine was wrestling.
In the middle of the last century my supervisor, Gilbert Ryle, argued that the traditional tripartite division of the mind or soul into thought, feeling and will is ‘a welter of confusions and false inferences.…[O]ne of the curios of theory’ (The Concept of Mind, p.62) which he set out to dismantle by attacking the concept of the will as it has come down to us. But dividing the mind in this sort of way goes back to the medieval Scholastics who argued that there were genuine, or ‘real’, distinctions in the human psyche, which raised questions about how they interacted.
For St Thomas, the will in its morally significant dimension ultimately takes its guidance from the intellect, which perceives the good at which the will aims, but increasingly there was an insistence on the primacy of love (a function of the will) over all else, including the intellect, and in Duns Scotus the will and its loves become self-determining, absolutely free but thereby subjective and arbitrary. This makes conceiving of our wills in relation to the Divine Will much more problematic; if God’s will is to prevail it ‘must impose itself as one power overruling another; predestination [takes on the character] of a tyrant imposing his will from above … rather than calling or inviting as a desirable object’ (Jan Miel Pascal and Theology p.42).
Although Scotus’ system soon lost its charm, the liberation of will from intellect could not be undone. The Reformers embraced predestination on the new terms, and in reaction opponents began to water such old doctrines down – until they in turn were denounced; and all, one notes, quoted Augustine, embroiled in a debate belonging to a thought world alien to the concepts to which they were committed. Again, Augustine was no fideist, but if faith is founded in the will, as he taught, on the new terms how can faith be rational? In Augustine the ‘will’ is the whole soul as active in loving, without benefit of ‘real’ distinctions between willing, desiring and thinking, and it has proved instructively difficult consistently to think in terms of Augustinian psychology in post-medieval Europe.
Attempting to think pre-medieval doctrines, whether theological or philosophical, in post-medieval terms has too often led to Ryle’s ‘welter of confusions and false inferences’. Learning to read formative writers of the Classical period, from Heraclitus to Augustine, in their own terms can help us not only to elucidate what was really at stake, and theologically important, in their debates, but also to destabilize our own conceptual ‘curios of theory’.
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