Raising the Viewpoint

There are three different viewpoints suggested by the three plateaus of history; the practical, the theoretical and the existential. The third Plataeu is not named, so I am using the term existential in an honourable way to name it.

Most men in all ages look out on the world from the practical viewpoint. We live so long because of practical achievements. The Yak must be followed. The city states grew up as a result of agricultural achievements. People worry about the GDP. Rich men assess other rich men by how much money they have got. Many argue we should stay in Europe because that way we can be a super power.

One can see that religion can combine with practicality but very often it is for the sake of a good or better practical outcome. Early Christian converts in the North Sea area still prayed to Thor for a safe journey, I suppose until some kindly monk composed for them a better prayer, addressed to the one true God. One prayed to the Ba’als in Israel for the sake of fertility, and the city state gods, Nannar was at Ur, looked after their cities and helped their armies.

Practicality, though it has an operative area which is efficient and reliable, has a penumbra of uncertainty, so that concern for outcomes gives concern with the gods, or god. The crops may fail, the sun grow cold (or hot!) and there can be few going into battle or danger who do not pray for protection. My grandfather experienced a ship going down and everyone was praying.

The religion of Israel though was not an escort for practicality. Abraham was called to be a nomad, a poor, perilous, virtuous way of life motivated by God’s promise of blessing, land and fertility. Religion is a way towards a new practical achievement, where above all, one is free to worship the one true God.

With Abraham, man’s viewpoint is lifted to the heavens and to others who share the faith, the people of God. The problem of being clannish gives rise to a universal purpose, being a light to enlighten the nations. The call of God with a purpose puts all events in an historical perspective. Man’s mortal life retains its significance even as it becomes just part of a wider significance. The viewpoint covers a past in which God has spoken to his people “in many and various ways”, the present full of promise from the past and a future, somewhat hazy, but God’s plan.

One might find today the majority of people with a practical viewpoint and a few saints in the pew, on the bishop’s bench or in monasteries with an Abraham-like viewpoint and one can envisage a deal of mutual incomprehension, so that the history of events shows up a clash of views.

The development of a theoretical viewpoint in Athens covered the areas which later became known as natural science, theology and metaphysics. Morals were included. St Thomas found himself able to use Aristotle’s metaphysics and his moral conclusions. He made use of his Posterior Analytics so that one science rested on another. The area of knowledge appeared most definite and mainly a matter of deduction.

For Abraham wisdom had been mainly about trusting God, with the scholastic achievement it came to include all that could be known from the universities. In time this led to the Renaissance idea; of the Uomo Universale so that an educated man could be expected to know everything about everything known. So when a member of St Philip Neri’s household of priests was getting a bit uppity, Philip told him to do the cooking and told the cook to do history. The cook, Baronius, became a Cardinal and a famous historian. Perhaps there is more to history than sheer deduction!

In Western Europe a massive development of culture got under way. With the fall of Constantinople, it became heir to the Byzantine achievement as well as the Roman Western achievement. There were new materials to be absorbed. But how one should deal with new materials was not clear to the heirs of scholasticism, even though scholasticism had found its “questions” from diverse and often seemingly contradictory materials.

The scholastic achievement had followed a method in assembling materials, noting contradictions and finding a resolution of the matter. But it had not noted its own method. Similarly, the natural sciences got going noting two key elements in method, observation and experiment, but not the whole of method. Again, historians got going, following a method, and describing elements of it, like “achieving understanding through research”, or “attending to the peculiarity of things”, but common agreement about method waits on the achievement of cognitional theory.

Still we find the Western world achieved a general theoretical viewpoint which included the sciences with scholasticism. The natural sciences freeing themselves from Aristotle’s definitions have used mathematics to correlate object to object. So you have a learned standpoint which may imagine that the sciences having become free from Aristotle man should be free from God too. In the horizon there is a clash between some scientists and religion.

Or, since historians may be tracing the development of some value, say music or democracy, we may find a clash between some historians and some scientists. For the scientist if the thing cannot be observed it does not exist. I came across an historian who, bowing to the empirical ideal, thought the only genuine history could be about population movements and technologies.

As a preliminary to talking about self appropriation and method, I would note that insights can coalesce to give a single world view, but that sometimes they need a further insight to do so. There is a tendency today to schizophrenia. There may of course be an organic basis to this. But the fact that we find different viewpoints in disarray and clash means that the individual, shaped a bit by this viewpoint and a bit by that, may find two modes of thinking within himself, both of which have a validity, but which, since they are in conflict tear the person involved asunder.

An example of viewpoints which clash: about 17 years old I know that F=MA and so a material movement has a material cause. At the same time I knew I was a material being in part and responsible for my actions. How does a spiritual influx affect the material? I have effected a resolution of things through Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, through the Neo Thomistic idea of form shaping up ‘matter’, and so to the reality that man in his intentional material movements is responsible. Several different insights, admittedly broad grey areas, allow me to be at once material and responsible and so free and worthy of blame or credit. Here at least, by integrating thought, by the coalescence of insights, I have avoided schizophrenia, Laus Deo.

In the mid nineteenth century and on, when geometers found Euclid a special case, philosophers turned to human action and choice. There was not a system which could predetermine man. Names are Newman, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the tendency is carried on by pragmatists, Existentialists, Phenomenologists. Typically for this viewpoint, the sciences are not of importance or even the historians – each of us has a life to live and the important thing is to get it right. So Newman drinks to the Pope and conscience, but conscience first. Here he is only echoing the scholastics who taught that one should follow one’s conscience even it is misguided. Conscience is the voice of God. This general movement, comparable to the scientific movement and the historical movement has been termed “the turn to the subject”.

The trouble is that subject turned to has tended to be shallow – one thinks of Nietzsche’s ”will to power”. One has a whole set of further viewpoints, in which, as Lonergan claims of most of Western Europe, “Being is Lost”. His care which shows above all the importance of love whence values are mainly grounded but which shows also the value of truth and the realisation of being and man’s condition, and which shows further the quest for truth and the collaboration needed to attain it, allows us to envisage a universal standpoint which provides a horizon within which there are many dynamic movements, theological, scientific, historic, practical, persuasive, many of which at present clash.
A key point is that developments are collaborative even though the collaboration is across space and time. So Lonergan who died in 1984 helps me, and I never met him. A question is, how does “The universal viewpoint” relate to the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church? It is a divine blessing that each of us has a pastor to listen to us and to guide, and this is true of the age. I would say that the universal view point recognises the possibility of the supernatural and of revelation. Perhaps as Aristotle was to Aquinas, so the universal viewpoint is to the Magisterium. The universal viewpoint has the advantage that it commands the attention of all men of good will. The Magisterium finds in the exigencies it expresses, matters of concern and a standard which must be measured up to in expressing divinely revealed truth.