Christian Realism, Universals, and Natural Theology

Paul Tillich once said that “medieval realism is almost the exact opposite of what we call realism today.” To medieval realists, it is what you cannot physically see that is really real: i.e., God, and all the transcendent meanings and intrinsic qualities and purposes that God has gifted to creation. Superlatively real truths were called the transcendentalia by the medievals, which are the essential, timeless, and universal qualities of Goodness, Beauty, Truth, and Unity. Equally, spiritual realities – the soul, angels, prayer, demons – and more commonplace wonders – love, thought, peace – were the true and important realities of life. By the sharpest contrast, what we modern people now call ‘real’ is only what you can see. Reality is now thought of as the tangible and contingent world of sensory appearances and human logic, and of instrumental power.

By a long historical process, we have entirely flipped the old Christian realist understanding of reality on its head. We now even wonder if God ‘exists’ – i.e., we wonder (heretically) if God is an empirically detectable being in the space-time continuum, and we want to know if God’s existence can be decisively demonstrated in the categories of human science and rationality. Modern “realism” is now embedded in an entirely anthropocentric understanding of knowledge and power. A modern political “realist,” for example, believes that only physical things and natural forces are real, and that if a stronger party has superior means of applying force, it is only natural that they will always use their power to get what they want. To a “political realist” there are no real moral truths about how power should be used.

Realism and Natural Theology

Whether we are medieval or modern realists will make a decisive difference in what we think we are doing when it comes to natural theology. The natural theologian who is a modern realist will seek to move from tangible and value-neutral material “reality” – using empirical and logical demonstration alone – to the “reality” of a supernatural theological truth, or to at least show how the belief in supernatural truths are not incompatible with modern natural realism. Whether we are medieval or modern realists will make a decisive difference in what we think we are doing when it comes to natural theology. Click To Tweet

Modern natural theology cannot work. If you start from the premise that “reality” is merely physical and has no knowable intrinsic or transcendent meaning, your conclusions will also be without any intrinsic, transcendent, or theological meaning.

The British atheist and science fiction writer Douglas Adams humorously illustrated the problem with modern natural theology by imaginatively positing the existence of the Babel fish. Pop this fish in your ear and you can understand any language in the known universe. This unique creature so obviously defies evolution by random natural selection that it destroyed any need for faith, and hence, God vanished in a puff of humanly constructed logic (this is a modern natural theology argument for the non-existence of God). The basic problem with any natural theology argument is ‘garbage in, garbage out’; if you think you have succeeded in reducing divine reality to the modern naturalist categories of human empirical and rational demonstration, you have made a mistake in human logical and empirical knowledge processing, and you have a totally theologically impossible idea of who God is.

Medieval realists had their own distinctive natural philosophy problems, but they never tried to do modern natural theology. The medievals were, for example, wrong about geo-centrism and the Aristotelian theory of gravity, but medieval Christians were able to do genuinely viable natural theology because they reasoned from the starting place that material creation was entirely dependent upon the immaterial Creator. Starting from the revealed spiritual truth that creation declares the glory of God, you can look at nature and be drawn to the worship of God. Medieval realism’s ontological priority of the divine, the spiritual, the eternal, the qualitative, and the intellective over the human, the material, the temporal, the quantitative and the tangible, meant that nature could be read as a partial revelation of transcendent truths. But if we assume the modern phenomenological definition of reality as a function of reductively ‘natural’ human knowledge alone we will never get any natural theology insights from the world. This alone is the great sola of the Enlightenment ‘overcoming’ of religious superstition and metaphysical speculation, and it makes Christian natural theology impossible. Unsurprisingly, when medieval realist natural theologians moved from nature to God, they never presupposed that tangible things and logical demonstrations about the natural world were theologically self-standing realities.

I think it is clear that, theologically, medieval realism is a viable species of Christian realism, which made natural theology possible in the Middle Ages. Further, it seems clear that modern ‘realism’ is not compatible with Christian realism, and no viable natural theology can be done under the conditions of modern ‘realism’. How, then, did we move from Christian realism to its opposite? How then – if we want to do natural theology today – can we recover a viable Christian realism? Modern ‘realism’ is not compatible with Christian realism, and no viable natural theology can be done under the conditions of modern ‘realism’. Click To Tweet

Platonic Forms and Christian Realism

The medieval “problem of universals,” as tied up with questions around divine and natural illumination, is integral with how our view of reality itself became inverted in the West. We must go back in time in order to understand how we lost a Christian outlook on reality if we are to try doing viable natural theology again. We shall start with Plato and Augustine.

Plato noticed that we do not learn things unless we already in some sense know what it is that we are learning. Meaningful and true cognition is, in effect, a form of recognition. We re-cognize a truth that, in some way, we already know, when we see it. This is apparent when we think about mathematical truths (see Plato’s dialogue Meno). The astonishing leap of insight from a specific geometric illustration to a universal principle which is true for all classes of the same sort of geometric operation, is not contained in the specific illustration itself. The grasping of universal insights in the mind are not directly supplied to our knowledge by specific tangible illustrations. This mind insight that transcends the particularities of our experiences is not limited to mathematics. The recognition of the quality of beauty is not contained or exhaustively illustrated in our experience of any beautiful thing, but somehow the knowledge of beauty comes to us, or is already within us. And Beauty is expressed in so many ways, and yet there is something in common shared by all beautiful things. Plato sees this ‘something in common’ as the transcendent and essential quality of Beauty. Goodness, Truth, and Unity are of the same super-sensible, qualitative, and universal (more than particular) nature. At a more ordinary level, any recognition of a class of things moves from a particular instance (this cat) to an essential nature (what the universal idea of ‘Cat’ is) shared by different individuals of the same sort. Where does this universal, essential, and (regarding the high transcendentalia) qualitative knowledge come from if we only live in a particularized and quantitative world?

To Plato, the tangible world of particulars and quantities is not self-standing. Rather, the transitory visible world is ontologically dependent on invisible and eternal reality, which is the true home of universals, of reason, and of qualities. It is also obvious to Plato that true knowledge is of the universal and qualitative realities, whereas the particular and quantitative apprehension of our immediate and tangible context is less than true knowledge (though it is, of course, useful opinion). Plato thinks that Forms/Ideas – which are the immaterial source of essential meanings and transcendent qualities – alone really are, and that all becoming and unbecoming living creatures of the material world gain their partial intelligibility and qualitative significance by virtue of being derivatives of essential being. That is immaterial Ideas have real being and can be dependably known, but transitory material ‘becomings’ (such as any given person) are situated in the contingent and fluctuating process of birth-change-death, and hence fail to really and permanently be.

For as Saint John points out, Christ is the eternal Logos that creates the cosmos and gives meaning and significance to all creatures. Click To Tweet Our mind is in some sense a native of the intellective and transcendent domain of being, so Plato has confidence that the immaterial mind will survive the death of the body. Yet, philosophy is not simply a preparation for death (the return of the mind to the domain of intelligible reality). Plato is very interested in how the eternal, universal, and qualitative domain of true being relates to the temporal, particular and quantitative domain of material existence. But significantly, the notion that spiritual qualitative meanings are Real, and realer than simply earth-bound concerns about daily life, links the outlook of Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism with the high theology of Hebraic thinking, and with the New Testament. For as Saint John points out, Christ is the eternal Logos that creates the cosmos and gives meaning and significance to all creatures. And as Saint Paul points out, the Christian does not walk by sight, but the walk of faith as enabled by the Holy Spirit allows us to traverse the unseen spiritual domain of divine truth, however much mere flesh and blood may oppose us. Platonic realism and Christian realism – where divinely originating transcendent qualities and true meanings partially expressed in the spatiotemporal domain, are Real – thus have obvious points of contact from the beginning of the age of the Christian church.

As with all philosophical insights, Plato’s understanding of Form raised further and harder questions, and so a range of responses to Plato’s outlook – both pagan and Christian – animated the intellectual life of the Greco-Roman and Late Classical world. By the time we get to the late fourth century AD, the great African saint, Augustine of Hippo, has incorporated a range of key Platonist ideas with Christian theology that will deeply shape the next 1000 years of Western thinking.

This is how the Christianly transformed understanding of essential and divinely originating realism looks to Augustine.

Augustine and the Divine Ideas

The essential nature of all created types – Ideas/Forms, in Plato’s lexicon – exist in the Mind of God. That is, Goodness, Beauty, Truth, and Unity do not exist in their own right in some Platonic Heaven, but the intelligible and qualitative features of creation have their eternal home within the Mind of God. The same is true for the defining natures of different creatures. When God created humanity, it was in accord with his own idea of what a created image bearer of God’s own likeness is. So the Form of Humanity (as a universal essential reality) is in the Mind of God, as well as the particular personal nature of each individual, who uniquely and creatively expresses the formal nature of the essence of humanity.

So archetypes – categories defining the general class of any order of being – are of an essentially intellective nature (being ideas in the Mind of God) but are gifted to each being as intrinsic to that distinctive being, as is the personal uniqueness of each creature of a particular type. Though, this unique particular nature is also given in freedom such that the unfolding of who we are is experienced by us as a creative dynamic where the essential features of who we are (as given by God) are creatively and freely developed by our own will (in Augustine, will is always a function of love). Sin – which is bondage to determinate irrational and demonic forces – removes our freedom and deforms our true self, which is expressed as relational alienation not only from God, but from ourselves, others, and creation.

A key feature of Augustine’s outlook on the relationship between ontological essence and practical matters that concern existence, is illumination. Illumination occurs when the mind grasps truth; illumination is another word of intellection, understanding, knowledge. God is the source of all illumination and the true meaning of every aspect of creation as a communication (from the divine Logos) of the love of God to us. To Augustine there can be no grasping of any truth without the active work of God speaking true meaning into our minds.

To Augustine there can be no grasping of any truth without the active work of God speaking true meaning into our minds. Click To Tweet We will have to skip along quickly here, so leaving the complexities surrounding how Boethius and Porphyry read Aristotle on universals in the late Classical era, let us look very quickly at Peter Abelard in the early twelfth century.

Nominalism in the Thought of Peter Abelard

Abelard is the start of a medieval interest in a reductively naturalist outlook on knowledge, and of the sophisticated semantic analysis of philosophical and theological words. This trajectory matures in the fourteenth century with William of Ockham and John Duns Scotus. These developments lead to Platonist/Augustinian realism becoming inverted by early modern times, with the priority of reality being tied to the tangible and the particular rather than the immaterial and the universal, and this is why the modern era that followed was born largely assuming that Late Classical and Medieval Christian realism were obviously wrong.

Abelard thinks that normal universal categories – such as ‘cat’ and ‘human’ – do not signify any immaterial and universal essence in which all particular instances of that type participate. Rather, common noun universals are just names (nomen, hence nominalists reject Augustinian realism); universals are words only (even ficti to William of Ockham) and they are in our language because our minds are able to abstract classes of things (common nouns) based on the observable resemblances between particular beings.

It is likely that nominalism and via moderna realism – defined only by particular material things – seems entirely realistic to you. This is because Western modernity, from its very origins, is deeply nominalist in its metaphysical assumptions about reality. But whilst Abelard, the nominalist movement, and a modern naturalistic outlook on reality are all very reasonable and persuasive, they all largely miss the core meaning of Augustinian Christian realism. For the technicalities of how universal terms work are secondary to understanding that spirit, qualities (Goodness, Beauty, Truth), reason (mathematical and logical truths), and all creation, are not functions of our knowledge, thinking, and instrumental power, but are Real because they are gifted to reality by God. Intellection, illumination in the mind, essence, and intrinsic and transcendent qualities all fade from view, all become cultural constructions, when the merely material, quantitative and particular become seen as the real truth about reality.

Natural Theology of the Christian Realists

Bringing this back to natural theology, the way we think about what is primary and what is secondary as regard reality makes Christian natural theology either possible or impossible. If we start from the premise that intelligibility is not an epiphenomenon of merely material complexity, but is the cause of order and complexity in the material domain, then we can hear echoes of the divine Logos in all aspects of creation. If we start with randomly distributed material chaos as the grounds of all that is really real, then intelligibility is a delusion, as are all concepts of meaning and divinity. No natural theology can arise from such a starting point.

A Christian realist understanding of the high qualitative universals – Beauty, Truth, Goodness, Unity – is not a semantic theory, and it is not terribly interested in academic problems as regards the relation of intellective essence to sensory existence. Rather, Augustine’s conception of Christian realism is a function of his experience of divine illumination which fills the darkness of the fallen mind with the spiritually transforming Light and Life of Christ. This transformation is called metanoia in the New Testament – which literally means ‘after mind’ (badly translated as ‘repentance’ in Latin/English bibles). Through the passion and resurrection of Christ, and through revelation, repentance and faith, our mind is transformed and renewed, we receive the mind of Christ, and the Truth (Christ) is manifest within us, as speaking to us through all creation, and as transcending creation. Thus does Christ shine into our being and bring us to spiritual life.

There is nothing that modern realism recognizes as natural about Christian natural theology. For genuine Christian natural theology is the result of the miracle of the Divine Word speaking Truth into our being, and the miracle of our response to such grace with faith. Even so, grace enabled natural theology is eminently reasonable, for there can be no true reason for anything if Reason (Christ the Logos made flesh) itself is not divine. Against Reason itself, the entire Enlightenment enterprise has sought to remove faith and reduce reality to the terms of our own phenomenological ratio-empirical powers of demonstration. Now that is an irrational task that can lead only to darkness in the mind. Grace enabled natural theology is eminently reasonable, for there can be no true reason for anything if Reason (Christ the Logos made flesh) itself is not divine. Click To Tweet

If we make only what we can tangibly and rationally demonstrate about the domain of particular material existence “reality,” then there are no essential natures, there is no intelligible cosmos, there are no transcendent qualities, and all meanings and purposes – and reality itself – are really phenomenological constructs of human imagination and tools of instrumental power. Here, knowledge becomes only power, words become only political poetries, and the revelations of God about what true meaning and value are must become oppressive normativity mythologies designed to impose violence on individual identity-construction freedom. Here, there can be nothing natural, nothing really good, nothing finally true, beauty is entirely in the eye of the beholder, and the only universal truth is the total fragmentation of meaning. A man can be a woman, right for me can be wrong for you, any theological centre for a common way of life is inherently oppressive, truth is a lie, traditional categories of the Good become necessarily evil. There is a lot at stake in aspiring to purge reality of divinely gifted essential truth.

Reality is upside down for the Christian in the modern world. The unseen, universal, and eternal Truth speaks order and meaning into the cosmos and illuminates our minds; but this is seen as unreal by the modern “reality” categories of immanent knowledge and human power. There is no point in trying to speak to modern “reality” in its own terms. Christian natural theology must rise out of a genuine, and lived, Christian realism.