Historicity and Foundations

It is true that one can construct an abstract notion of human nature and make certain deductions. Medicine does this very successfully, but the very success of medicine witnesses to another dimension which always belongs to man in the concrete, namely historicity. There was a time when nothing was known about DNA – now every year adds to man’s knowledge in a historical development.

Certain developments belong to all, affecting the culture, the set of meanings, values, and beliefs that inform life. One cannot avoid the fact that the Jewish people had a uniquely important historical experience over two millennia before Christ and indeed subsequently. Nor can one avoid the arrival of Christianity on the stage and the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine. There are first millennium conciliar teachings about the Trinity and Christology; there are second millennium schisms and the divide of the Western Church by the Reformation, a movement which appears not have affected the Greek Orthodox Church.

While nature can simply be explored as a constant that yields up its secrets in greater and greater and greater degree, history does not manifest a simple progress with everyone growing closer and closer in mind and heart. There are radically different stances and one cannot avoid being brought up within one tradition or another.

The fact that we are shaped by tradition becomes clearer as human studies develop. The Enlightenment thought mankind might have a new start, basing everything on reason, and a golden future beckoned in which man-made progress would lead mankind into sunny uplands. The idea of Progress became the leitmotif in late Victorian and the early Edwardian age, foundering in the First World War. Freedom from tradition does not mean freedom from ideology. It is as if Reason is fine once you find the first principle, but how do you find the first principle?

What science witnesses to is not a set of first principles but rather a method which leads to discovery. With natural science the discovery concerns nature and so is universal. With historical science, “The geisteswissenschaften”, the discovery concerns another people at another time, and how and why they acted as they did. Religious beliefs show up as a regular component in the historical shaping of man, so you get a sociology of religion and also religious studies.

So religion was found by Durkheim to help man in his vital social commitments, for example to marriage or to the State. It was found to be a principle guiding societies by Talcott-Parsons, or I suppose in our present society, one might say not guiding Society! Obviously a society with a common religious tradition has values which have to be respected, and so it has a basis for praise and blame. The finding of such values on a purely rational basis is not unproblematic. So I think the present government would like to be able to define what it is to be British, but rightly finds it beyond them. Life for most people does not in the end come down to supporting a cricket team, or even a political party. The different religions of the world seek in their different ways to express the ultimate meaning and value of human life, and the Christian might find here expression of the fact that God gives all men sufficient grace to be saved.

Are we in a position to lay down a common historical tradition for mankind today? That tradition everywhere has to be founded upon the practicality of making a living and doing so in an ecologically sustainable way. The discovery that animals and so man depends on a habitat, goes back I think to the 1950s.

It includes the discovery of mind with the Greeks. According to Jaspers this discovery was an axial moment going on in some way with other cultures. That discovery in the West led to a “tinge” of theoretical consciousness, so that, for example, Athanasius could make his rule. That tinge has allowed dogmas to be expressed and sciences to develop, so that modern science as an ongoing reality belongs to mankind’s common historical tradition.

Modern man is aware of different histories and different cultures, of the geisteswissenschaften, of the idea that man’s different concerns and achievements at different times can be increasingly understood and expressed. Such work is value free to the extent that, if one is to reconstruct the constructions of the human spirit, one should not fall silent when one discovers an aberration, for example, the religious aberration of child sacrifice, or the slaughter of the infidel. Such study is likely to show up historical folly and perhaps indicate more fruitful paths in the present. So, for example, the Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1949, while in some ways it perhaps went too far and in other ways not far enough, pointed to a common moral kernel for mankind, affirmed from recent aberrations.

While the scientific and the historical differentiations of consciousness have had their axial moment, perhaps the artistic differentiation, with its undoubted masters, has not. It has lost touch with religion and perhaps sometimes with meaning and feeling. It has something to do with communicating beauty in its embodiment of meaning and value, to the multitude.

The religious differentiation has its supreme moment in the Paschal Mystery but perhaps an axial moment was December 7th 1965, when the Vatican Council published its Declaration on Religious Liberty. About this supremely important exercise of understanding and responsibility there should be no coercion.

Philosophy has been caught up in worlds of metaphysics, religion, science and more recently personal decision. Alongside man’s growing knowledge then, is the human subject who makes the advances. I suppose it must have been about 1951 that Lonergan, writing his book Insight, (published 1957) descried the structure of the human subject and the norms, “Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible”. This was something axial. Man’s faltering performance is assisted by the mystery of love which surrounds, touches and informs human living but here we deal with religion.

Alongside human nature then, our human living in the modern world is informed by modern science, modern history by modern art which has, it seems, yet to find its axial moment, by religion moving to find common ground and by a philosophic achievement which shows man as formed by tradition, as capable of critical assessment, as bound to be constructive. This group of historicity as a compound with nature should help all things forward.

The recognition of man in the concrete as a compound of historicity and nature means that “progress” needs to include historicity as well as nature, so that just as there is care for the public health, so there should be care for the different communities. Logically, if we care for the Welsh speakers, we should care for the Polish speakers and all peoples with strange dialects, but perhaps it is not unreasonable to care that all share a common language. So too, there are different religions but again, all religions should recognise “nature” and also “historicity”. The recognition of historicity should mean the glad recognition that the same God is working in other groups.

The recognition of historicity should make the natural sciences realise that their competence is not about every matter. It is beyond the competence of a natural scientist to dismiss God, or for that matter to decide in favour of this or that religion. Different sorts of questions require different sorts of method.

Religion may find itself involved in various historical affirmations, but of course, that does not mean competence in all such affirmations. The community of historians have their own methodology moving from evidence to conclusion. They can enrich a religion with a yet more inspiring description of their past.

Beauty is transcendent, belonging to God, as well as belonging to material forms, but I think one might claim that without beauty, feelings are not stirred, and without refinement of beauty, feelings are not refined. The common sense world waits on the artist to find the way forward.

Maybe as philosophy descries the task of natural science and of history and as it may open man to the divine, so it may help the world of art to find anew its soul in this modern world and so to greatly help the multitude.