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< Back What the Shepherds Saw When the Light Shone Upon Them Regis Martin "What really is going on at that moment, which so grips the artist’s imagination, moving him to bend every effort of will and skill to re-produce, under the sign of paint, the precise reaction of the shepherds on first seeing the Holy Infant? " Should it surprise anyone that countless artists from the past have sought to capture the precise moment when the shepherds, answering the angelic summons, find themselves gazing upon the human face of God? They were, after Mary and Joseph, the very first to see the Child about whom the angel had spoken. “This will be a sign for you,” he told them. “You will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12; cf. 2:16). Filled with expectant longing, therefore, and with all possible haste, they leave their flocks behind and go at once to the place they’d been told the Child would be. Accompanied, to be sure, by choirs of angels singing with exultant voice the glory of the Lord, who has come among us as Savior and King. So, how does one capture that sudden look of stupefaction that surely must have illumined the faces of those few simple shepherds, who have come to witness the stupendous event of God’s entry into our world, wearing the disguise of a tiny child? Such is the challenge confronting any artist faced with the scandalous fact of the enfleshment of the Eternal Word in human history. None have pulled it off more masterfully, it seems to me, than the 17th-century Dutchman Mathis Stom, an artist steeped in the style of the baroque, who often wrestled with the problem, producing a half dozen or more separate versions of the same scene. Following upon the example of Caravaggio, who, earlier in the century, tried his own hand at depicting the scene, Stom managed to get it exactly right with brushstrokes of the most extraordinary realism. His Adoration of the Shepherds , commissioned in 1646 for a Capuchin monastery in Palermo, conveys an immediacy so startling that the viewer cannot look away. How, then, does he do it? Or, more to the point, what really is going on at that moment, which so grips the artist’s imagination, moving him to bend every effort of will and skill to re-produce, under the sign of paint, the precise reaction of the shepherds on first seeing the Holy Infant? A miracle, no less, of artistic monstration w ill be required to impart to the viewer something of that same realism and immediacy which the shepherds felt on seeing the Incarnate God. The answer, in a word, is chiaroscuro, a lovely Italian word suggesting an artful arrangement of light and dark, the interplay of which heightens the sense of drama suffusing the scene. So that we too might see with the most striking detail the hands and faces of the shepherds, their features literally flooded with light. Against the backdrop of shade, an astonishment of wonder unfolds before the viewer’s eye. And, then, all at once, we realize that the source of the light, the shining incandescence of the scene, is not coming from them at all, but from the Child, in whom all light may be found. Indeed, he is the light. The light of eternity itself bursting into time. Yes, the shepherds are clearly bathed in the light, but it is Christ’s own light that envelops the scene. Inviting us as well, with eyes wide open, to enter into the same experience, the same epiphany of light. But, again, how can this be? One is struck over and over by the sheer incredibility of the moment. It is no longer the mere technical question that the artist himself feels constrained to answer. No, not that at all. But the theological puzzle which the scene itself presents. How is it possible that simple shepherds should evince such wonderment and delight before a mere baby? It is the complete and utter disproportion between the figure of the mysterious child, and that of the simple shepherds, that leaves the mind baffled and confused. It is, in other words, the sheer overwhelming mystery of Christmas morning itself that we must try and make sense of. “That is where God is,” Pope Francis reminds us at Holy Mass on this Christmas Eve, “in littleness. This is the message: God does not rise up in grandeur, but lowers himself into littleness. Littleness,” he continues, “is the path that he chose to draw near to us, to touch our hearts, to save us and to bring us back to what truly matters.” Thus, by making himself helpless and small he reveals the true majesty and power of the Godhead. Pope Benedict has likewise expressed this sentiment, from a Christmas homily preached in the final months of his pontificate, reminding us that here is the secret sign- language God himself prefers when communicating with his children. And in God’s eyes we are all his children, a bond forged by the blood of his Son forever. “God’s sign is that he makes himself small; he becomes a child; he lets us touch him and he asks for our love.” What better way of dealing with so frail and finite a creature as man? Notice that there is no heavy artillery blasting away at bunkers piled high with reasoned resistance. He does wish to pulverize our minds with clever syllogisms. But to offer himself to us in the least intimidating, least prepossessing way possible. As a little child wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger . Could things be made more simple than this? Originally published on National Catholic Register and republished with permission from the author. Image: Matthias Stom, “The Adoration of the Shepherds,” ca. 1650 (Turin). Public Domain Regis Martin Regis Martin , S.T.D., is a professor of theology and a faculty associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. He podcasts at In Search Of The Still Point and his latest book, Looking for Lazarus: A Preview of the Resurrection , was released in 2021. Previous Next

< Back Christology Without Christ? David Cowles Feb 14, 2023 “But what if Jesus is not your cup of tea? There’s an old hymn that goes, ‘Jesus is just all right with me,’ but what if he’s not all right with you?” In ATM Issue #1 (6/1/2022), we presented a Christology that dates back to the very early days of the Church. Paul cites it in his Letter to Colossians (1: 15 – 20): “He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation , for in him all things were created… All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together … He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead . For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him…" We argued that this early Christology became the pattern for future Christologies, and in turn, future theologies and cosmologies. This is important because it substantiates Christianity’s claim to be apostolic , i.e., directly descended from the Apostles themselves. Most Christians today believe more or less exactly what Christians believed c. 50 CE. Can you think of any other subject on which a significant portion of the Western World believes today what it believed 2000 years ago? But what if Jesus is not your cup of tea? There’s an old hymn that goes, “Jesus is just all right with me,” but what if he’s not all right with you? Can Colossians still provide a valid cosmological framework for folks who don’t follow Jesus, or even believe in God? The answer is, “Yes!” (Or at least that’s what I’m about to argue.) Jewish and Roman Catholic thinking has consistently affirmed a role for observation and reason in the discovery of truth. While Revelation is the crown jewel of gnosis , observation and reason by themselves can still lead someone to a reasonable facsimile of Aletheia (truth). Judeo-Christianity is an empirical religious tradition (vs. a magical one). In a recent Thoughts While Shaving, we cited Pope Benedict’s claim that faith and reason are symbiotic, that neither is valid without the other. In that spirit then, can the theological language of the Colossian’s text (above) be ‘translated’ into a secularized equivalent and still deliver a sufficient , and perhaps even necessary , cosmology for our 21 st century? Let’s start with three of the fundamental problems of philosophy: How is it that there is a world at all? (“something rather than nothing”) How is it that the world is both One ( uni verse) and Many (entities)? How is it that the world is both stable (permanence) and in flux (change)? Every important Western philosopher has taken a swing at this three-headed piñata… generally with no more success than most children have at their birthday parties. From Parmenides and Heraclitus through Whitehead and Sartre, these problems have been center stage; and any cosmology worth the toner it’s printed with has to address these problems. Borrowing from a liturgical hymn, Paul’s “Christ”, an object of worship for Christians, also functions as a philosophical concept. Neither I nor Paul claims to have proven anything about the historical Jesus or the cosmological Christ. For Christians, the birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension and second coming of Jesus is that proof. What Paul has done is to show that ‘Christ’ offers a sufficient solution to the 3 fundamental problems of cosmology listed above, i.e., that it adequately accounts for the phenomena we call ‘world’. The Christ Hypothesis accounts for the world as we experience it: that it is, that it is both one and many, that is both stable and in flux. To show this, we return to the cosmological elements, presented by Paul in the Letter to the Colossians , but this time desacralized : “Our World is a manifestation (the phenomenal ‘image’) of what is otherwise unmanifest (noumenon). The primal manifestation (‘world as world’) precedes (ontologically if not empirically) all contingent manifestations (‘things as things’) because it is through that primal manifestation, and for it, that things come to be and hold together. This primal manifestation is the origin of all things; it lends ‘being’ to each thing and reconciles for itself everything that is.” English please : “The World exists for its own sake, as the manifestation of Being itself. The World is one, but it is populated by many entities. Those entities come to be in the World for the sake of the World. They immediately cohere and ultimately harmonize, so that ‘world’ (multiplicity) may be World (unity).” Good enough? If I’ve done my job, I’ve convinced you that the Christ Hypothesis is sufficient to account for the ‘world’ as we experience it. Believe it or not, as you see fit. But have I also proved that it is necessary , i.e., that there is no other way to account for the ‘world’ as it is? Well, for that I’ll have to defer to you: Christology 101 (6/1/22) closed with a challenge: Can anyone come up with a model that adequately accounts for the key features of the empirical ‘world’ but that cannot be mapped onto the ‘Christ model’ as presented by Paul in Colossians ? Nine months later, no one has taken me up on that challenge. How about now ? How about you ? (If we publish your response, you’ll be compensated as for any other article we publish. Find our writer's specs here. ) Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

“In the absence of God, or any transcendent reality, the meaning of life can only be death, oblivion, and the total absence of meaning – aka the Absurd.” < Back The Meaning of Life David Cowles Apr 15, 2024 “In the absence of God, or any transcendent reality, the meaning of life can only be death, oblivion, and the total absence of meaning – aka the Absurd.” I am a sucker for any book written by an avowed ‘non-believer’ who claims to have found a meaning to life that does not require God…or any transcendent reality. Friedrich Nietzsche (c. 1880) ‘proved’ that no such meaning is possible; but that doesn’t stop me from following-up on every credible claim to the contrary. I’m like the Patent Office clerk assigned to evaluate Perpetual Motion Machines! For example, I followed breadcrumbs left by A. J. Ayer and Albert Camus …right into the witch’s oven. Recently, I was persuaded to try again. Michael Ruse is a philosopher, born in 1940; in 2019, he published A Meaning to Life . I just spent two enjoyable evenings exploring Ruse’s take on evolution in general, natural selection in particular, and on the boosters and critics of both. His book begins inauspiciously enough: “You are born. You live. Then you die.” But believe it or not, it’s all downhill from there! In fact, it isn’t until page 158 (out of 171 pages), that we even get to the subject of meaning ! No judgment! This is how we all write today. We experience a blast of insight – a meme that would be at home on a billboard or a bumper sticker or in a Chinese fortune cookie. Then we write an entire book leading up to and celebrating that insight. “Hooray for me! I own a Magee!” (1950’s advertising slogan) According to Ruse (spoiler alert), three things give life meaning: Family: “An eternity without Lizzie (spouse) is too awful to contemplate.” Friends: “…The only truly happy person is the person giving to others.” Mind: “I cannot imagine a life without Charles Dickens.” I’m disappointed, but not surprised. I should have listened to Nietzsche; I’m always sorry when I don’t listen to Nietzsche. Ruse was born in Birmingham , England. He earned his undergraduate degree and his doctorate at the University of Bristol . He has 4 honorary doctorates and published more than two dozen books and articles. He taught at the University of Guelph in Ontario , Canada for 35 years, and after that at Florida State University where he is currently a full professor. But back to the meaning of life. Ruse cites family, friends, and mind as his three logoi . I’m happy for Michael; but hasn’t he totally missed the point? An eternity without Lizzie, friends, or Dickens is just exactly what he does have to look forward to, as do all the rest of us. If these are the things that give life meaning, then Hello! Unlike most ‘secular seekers’, Ruse seems to allow the possibility that he might in some way be conscious of his loss. He talks of a residual consciousness which he likens to “dreamless sleep”, perhaps thinking of Eliot’s “patient etherized upon a table.” If this was intended to help, it didn’t work. I am with Hamlet on this: nothing is more terrifying than the thought that consciousness might somehow persist post mortem . Turns out, Ruse’s 2019 book has absolutely nothing to do with finding life’s meaning; it answers a very different question: In the light of certain oblivion, is there any way for rational human beings to salvage a modicum of ‘happiness’ in their lives? Ruse concludes that there is, and he lays out his not so very revolutionary recipe; of course, it’s ‘Family, Friends and the Life of the Mind’. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what Ayer and Camus did (above). It’s also what Wally Shawn’s character proposes in My Dinner with Andre . What’s this thing between philosophers and ‘happiness’ anyway? People are unhappy! Maybe, God forbid, even you. Deal with it! Not all people all the time, but most people some of the time and some people most of the time. And if someone is not unhappy at this particular moment, it doesn’t mean that they are deliriously happy either. Truth is, most of us are guided by other concerns (needs, duties, responsibilities, urges, etc.); happiness barely enters in. After 25, who has time to worry about being happy? Most of us would trade ‘happiness’ for ‘satisfaction’. Of course, satisfaction can make us happy, but that insight threatens to turn Ruse’s proposition into a tautology: ‘I am happy because whatever I choose to do I do because it makes me happy’. But what if happiness is my ‘ultimate concern’ (Paul Tillich meets J. S. Mill)? Am I entitled to make the purpose of my life be my own personal happiness - happiness that perfumes portions of an 85 year life span, and then evaporates, unremembered, at least according to the Standard Model of Ontology? Fleeting happiness is a poor substitute for eternal Value. Is Ruse channeling Gatsby: ‘Living well is the best revenge’? But what if I made the happiness of others the purpose of my life? Better? I suppose, but now haven’t I just kicked the can down the road? If my happiness is not a valid purpose, is someone else’s? Thought experiment : On my way home from work I swing by my favorite French bakery to pick up a warm baguette to enjoy with my dinner. As I leave the shop, I see someone obviously homeless and hungry on the sidewalk. What should I do? Proceed home and eat hearty (makes me happy); give my unfortunate friend passes to a local cinema (makes him happy…maybe); or give him my baguette (meets his needs…and perhaps secondarily makes one or both of us happy in the process)? In the absence of God, or any transcendent reality, the meaning of life can only be death, oblivion, and the total absence of meaning – aka the Absurd. Then the meaning of life is that it has no meaning and the meaning of ‘anything’ is literally ‘nothing’. That makes more sense than might seem. A can mean B only if A ≠ B and ∉ B; the only thing not equal to anything is nothing . Is there any way to ‘make peace’ with such a fate? Is there any way to extract value from a world that is apparently value free ? Nietzsche thought he had resolved this question once and for all. His argument is elegant and, I believe, irrefutable: There is only this world, B; there is no other. A can ‘mean’ B only if A ≠ B and ∉ B. But if B is the whole world and there is no other, then can Ǝ no such A; therefore, Ǝ only B and its elements and therefore B can have no meaning. Are you getting nervous? Are you afraid I’m going to ask you to say the ‘G word’? Relax, the G-word is optional. What’s not optional is the ‘T word’ – Transcendence. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles with God, mano a mano . But The Book of Job takes a different tack. Job recounts in painful detail a contest of minds between God and his ‘servant’. First, Job battles God’s self-selected proxies (so-called ‘comforters’); then God himself tags-in! For millennia, the Book of Job has stumped commentators. After 40-plus chapters, it seems like we should know who won the argument. But the text is ambiguous. After page upon page of soaring rhetoric and intricate argument, the author decides to get cute with the verdict. But maybe that was the point? Like some sort of avant-garde 20th century novel, the ending is left up to the reader. Most commentators, wrongly in my view, give God the victory on points; others, myself included, have Job winning by TKO. Job gets the trophy , but God gets a nice ‘participation ribbon’. In the story, God huffs and puffs about how great he is, but what really makes God great in this story is that he agrees to participate in the legal process and abide by the verdict…whatever that might be. Is this God acknowledging his own Higher Power, Value (e.g. Justice)? Is this recognition a precursor to Incarnation? The omnipotent God becoming a helpless infant, a suffering servant , a human sacrifice. So, the real winner here is Justice! In Job , Justice triumphs, even over God’s will. But Justice is a transcendent value (lie quiet, Nietzsche). You can’t buy a cup of Justice at Starbucks; nor can you use Justice to pay for your latte. Justice is not fungible. Like gravity, Justice shapes events, but it’s also a yardstick by which we measure and judge those events. It’s non-linear, i.e. recursive. Justice evaluates the world…and then it evaluates itself. It recapitulates God’s creative process in Genesis: “Let there be…saw that it was good.” It is Values (e.g. Justice, Truth, and Beauty - ‘JTB’) that give meaning to life. But these values are not a function of the spatiotemporal world (STW). Values are universal and eternal; they apply in all places, at all times, in this universe or in any possible universe. STW is made up of events, related to one another via shared qualia (values). Values are general , related to one another via shared events ( Proust ). Values have no home in STW…and so they are at home everywhere in STW. They are logically prior to any ‘when’; they form the logos , the glue between beings that ultimately constitutes Being itself. JTB are values that the noble Nietzsche foresaw but that accommodationists imagine they can tease out of STW. IMAHO, Ruse made mistakes in his effort to find meaning. First, he wrote a book about ‘meaning’ that had nothing whatsoever to do with meaning ; that’s a bit of a bother. But he also made a critical error regarding Sartre’s doctrine of human nature. According to Sartre, there is no human nature beyond the non-thetic, non-essential, existentialist exclamation: “I am (and therefore I am free); I am free (and therefore I am).” Being and Freedom are synonymous. Descartes on steroids! It stands to reason, doesn’t it: if you’re not free, what are you? Perhaps you’re inert; your actions have no consequences IRL. Or perhaps you are just mechanically executing the will of others. In either case, you can lay no claim to Being . To bastardize Gregory Bateson, ‘Being is a difference that makes a difference’. In these scenarios, either you are not different, or you make no difference. Either way, you fail…loser! BTW, this is the paradox of determinism. If everything is determined, then nothing is …or only one thing is (the initial state). Everything else is just a mechanical unfurling of that one thing. In light of this, determinists who are revolted by the notion of a world created and influenced by an all-powerful deity might want to give their position a bit of a rethink. Ruse disputes all this. He believes that human beings do have a specific, identifiable nature. For example, he says that our desire to give to others is part of that nature. In this, he falls prey to what Alfred North Whitehead called , The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness . Of course, there is such a thing as ‘human nature’ and yes, it includes an eleemosynary component, and yes, it’s written in our genes. But our genes are not us ! Our genes are part of the objective, material world we inherit and inhabit. That world is mediated to us through our genes, our senses, our bodies, our brains, none of which is us. We are a product of our DNA; so is a tree. In fact, we share more than half of our DNA with trees. Of course, we experience the world differently than a tree does and ultimately that different experience is a function, at least in part, of our different DNA. That said, we are not DNA, nor is a tree. We permeate the experiences that genes, bodies and minds mediate, not as passive observers or mechanical operators, but as perpetually active negators . We selectively negate what is in order to bring about what might yet be. In Sartre’s terms we are the Neant (nothingness) that gives Etre (being) meaning. While Etre is many faceted (like Parmenides’ Doxa ), Neant is simple, featureless (like Aletheia ); it haunts you and me and Sherwood Forest. It’s neither one nor many: not ‘one’ in contrast to many nor ‘many’ in contract to one. It’s simple; it simply is. And so it is in you just as it is in me and just as it is in every sentient being. Neant is no respecter of species. Meaning defines a relationship between two distinct entities. The signifier cannot be coincident with the signified, nor can it be an element of the signified. What ‘means’ must transcend what is ‘meant’; otherwise the phenomenon of meaning is impossible. If Life is to have meaning, we must search for it, not ‘among the living’ but in eternity. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Click the image to return to Holy Days 2024. Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. 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“Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.” < Back Middle Voice David Cowles Mar 1, 2023 “Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.” According to Benjamin Whorf, language is a record of how we see the world, and conversely, language conditions us to see the world in a particular way: a paradigmatic, if somewhat diabolical, example of non-linear, auto-reinforcing process. Take English, for example. When we speak, most of our verbs are either active or passive . We call that the “voice” of the verb. In an active/passive voiced language, we are always doing something to someone (or something) or someone (or something) is doing something to us: eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it. The Lex Talionis (‘eye for an eye’), literally the law of retaliation , is the paradigmatic expression of such an active/passive world view. Scotty broke the vase: active voice. Scotty is called the ‘subject’ and my poor Ming is called the ‘object’ of his action. This construction first separates Scotty from what he’s done. In fact, Scotty’s action itself assumes the status of an object; it is something Scotty possesses: “ his action”. Scotty acted, and the vase ‘reacted’ (by shattering). The flow is in one direction: it’s a vector. Alternatively, the vase was broken by Scotty: passive voice. It’s the same event but this time seen from the point of view of the victim, my precious artifact. The vase is now the subject, but the action is still unidirectional, still a vector. In one sense, the active and passive voices are opposites; but in another sense, they are really the same thing. (How often that is true in our world!) They both describe the same event, in the same way, but just from opposite viewpoints. So we can say that English is an ‘active/passive voiced language’. Syntax speaks volumes about how we understand events, and, therefore, how we understand the world. An action, according to our grammar, is a vectored relationship between two unequal participants, a terribly minor, in not null, subset of all that goes on in our world. The world consists solely of events. If our preferred way of defining an event is in terms of a unidirectional relationship between unequal participants, then for us the world will consist primarily of such actions. This will be the logos we impose upon the world, and our language will reflect that logos . Of course, it works both ways. To a large extent, we learn about the world through language. Our language teaches us to see our world in terms of unequal, unidirectional relationships. Our language creates our logos, thereby defining our world for us. Putting it another way, we create our world in the image and likeness of our language. Does this language serve our purposes ? You bet it does! It’s hard to imagine a Golden Gate Bridge without it. Our language essentially reduces Being to a schematic. But does such a language actually meet our needs ? Not so much! In the real world, action is rarely, maybe never , entirely one directional. “I hit the nail” is actually an abstract simplification of a much more complex process. When my hammer connects with the nail head, the nail moves (hopefully) and the hammer recoils (predictably) sending vibrations down my arm…and that’s assuming I didn’t also hit my thumb in the process. Syntax unravels the unity of being and displays it like a collection of butterflies pinned to the wall of a natural history museum. The fact is that every real action acts on the so-called subject as well as on the so-called object. In the example of Scotty and the vase, that reality is somewhat trivial and can probably be safely ignored…that is, unless I accept Scotty’s explanation that the vase jumped off the shelf and attacked him, possibly the act of a neighborhood genie. And why not, the very same thing happened at Billy’s house just last week. It’s a pattern you see. Better call Ghostbusters ! But did you notice the real ‘ghost’ in this story? It’s Scotty’s language. He translated what might have been an accident into the intentional action of a genie. But what if we’re trying to model a chemical reaction, or worse, a quantum mechanical process, or even worse, some sort of ecological phenomenon? How do we describe these events using just active and passive verbs? We can’t. At best, we can approximate clumsily in simple situations. “Two hydrogen atoms each lend an electron to one oxygen atom; or an oxygen atom borrows an electron from each of two hydrogen atoms.” (Hint: it’s water!) When we get into more complex interactions, language breaks down completely, and we have to resort to diagrams (e.g. Feynman diagrams) or equations or shoulder shrugs. Now imagine the difficulty of modeling complex human interactions using just active and passive voice verbs! No wonder we’re always at war with one another. And our politics? Of course, we see the world in terms of “us” and “them”; of course, we see social change in terms of class warfare. It’s the Golden Rule after all: she who has the gold, rules. Nonetheless, most of us are resigned to this state of affairs. It’s just the way things are. How could it be otherwise? Easily! And the fact is, it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t necessarily always have to be this way. Many ancient languages had another voice which linguists call the Middle Voice . The middle voice is ideally suited to model situations where relationships are between equals and where action is reciprocal. Linguists disagree about the place of the middle voice in the evolution of language, but it is at least possible that the middle voice preceded both the active and passive voices. Modern linguists struggle to understand the middle voice. Conditioned by their own active/passive logoi , they want to understand this verb form as somewhere in between the active and passive poles. Hence, the term “middle voice”. In fact, the middle voice has nothing to do with its active/passive cousins. It is a completely different way of viewing the world. The middle voice verb form describes an action that impacts both subject and object simultaneously; or it describes a reciprocal relationship between two co-subjects who are also co-objects. That’s what process is; that’s what an event is. Anything else is just an abstraction. Analogy : If the active voice is the voice of the future and the passive voice the voice of the past, then the middle voice is the voice of the Present. Imagine what our world would look like if we viewed it in terms of reciprocal relations and omnidirectional events! Would that change the way the world is? Or would it just enable us to see it as it really is? Both. We’d see the world through a different filter, and in turn, we’d most likely act quite differently in such a world. How do we talk about love using active and passive verbs? The best we can come up with is something lame like, “Mary and Paul are in love with one another.” This turns love into a static state rather than a raging fire. The middle voice, on the other hand, is ready-made to describe the relationship between Mary and Paul in a way that does it justice. The active and passive voices describe the same event in the same way; they merely reverse the point of view. The middle voice defines that same event in an entirely different way. The active/passive voice sees the world from the outside; the middle voice sees the world from the inside: objectivity vs. subjectivity. Thus, we have two opposing world views: an active/passive view and a middle voice view. One sees the world in terms of will, struggle, domination, and power; the other sees the world in terms of mutuality. One is the syntax of war, the other of peace. One is the syntax of cause and effect, the other of evolution. One is the syntax of past and future, the other of the present. Unfortunately, however, most Western languages have lost the middle voice. Where the middle voice has been retained (e.g. Icelandic), it has been forced to co-exist with its active/passive cousins, and it no longer conveys the strong sense of reciprocity it once did. The poverty of an active/passive voiced language and the lack of a strong middle voice alternative is not just a linguistic problem; it’s a philosophical problem and ultimately a theological problem. One way to understand ‘the Christian project’ is as an attempt to reintroduce middle-voice consciousness to the world. Of course, I am not suggesting that the New Testament authors, much less Jesus himself, were budding linguists. Yet, they understood that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way folks viewed the world and, with incredible insight, they sought to change that view. When you view events and the actions that constitute them in terms of unequal, unidirectional power relations, it becomes easy to abuse or exploit your neighbor...and impossible to love her as yourself. Even today, certain sub-cultures will brand you a sucker or a wimp or a ‘goodie two shoes’ if you do not take advantage of the weaker folks in your orbit. “It’s just business!” Active/passive-voiced languages conflict with values like justice and kindness. It is difficult to inculcate an ethic of justice, reciprocity and love in folks who view the world according to the active/passive paradigm. In this sense, ‘bad language’ could be seen as humanity’s ‘original sin’: the second commandment is just an extension of the first. Christianity, especially in its early stages, sought to replace the active/passive world view with the world view that we are calling ‘middle voice consciousness’. In the Lord’s Prayer, for example, we read, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” 12 centuries later, Francis of Assisi built on this insight: “It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.” Whatever we do, we do to ourselves to the same degree and in the same way and at the same time as we do it to others. That goes for positive actions like forgiveness and negative actions like violence. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Why? Because in middle voice consciousness, your neighbor is yourself! Beginning with Leo XIII (1878 – 1903), modern Popes have railed against economic injustice, but they have done so from the middle voice perspective of universal love ( agape ) rather than class consciousness. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Spring 2023 Table of Contents Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. 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< Back “And Who is My Neighbor?” David Cowles Jul 24, 2025 “The recognition of consciousness in various non-human species has put the law student’s fame in a whole new perspective.” The question and Jesus’ famous answer (the Parable of the Good Samaritan ) ring just as poignantly and just as urgently today as they did 2000 years ago. We are often told that the Bible was written at another time and by a civilization very different from our own. The implication is that it has little to teach our sophisticated selves. This student’s question alone should be enough to debunk such criticism. In fact, there is no more pressing question for us in 2025 than this one! Let’s go back 3000 years. Asian cultures got there first, then Semitic, then Native American: Animals are sentient beings deserving of respect and care. Yes, they are a source of labor and food, necessary at times to support human life, but minimally we have an ethical duty to give them the best possible life and minimize their suffering in the process. The industrial revolution and newly popular plant-forward diets have lessened our economic dependence on the Animal Kingdom. Yet today’s factory farms would have been morally repulsive to traditionally observant Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Native Americans, among others. How did we get from there to here? What happened to extending the 7 th day rest (Sabbath) to livestock, as well as slaves, servants, and citizens? To granting Sabbatical years to farmland, allowing it to lie fallow? To trace the decline of humanity’s ethical intuition ( aka Natural Law, Oral Torah, etc.) would require a multi-volume work. Perhaps we would find the roots of that decline in Roman Imperialism or in the so-called Humanism of the Renaissance (aka Mercantilism, Colonialism ) or in Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. These cultures were economically and sociologically dependent on the enslavement of human beings ( de facto and de jure ) and on the brutal exploitation of nature, including animals. Many factors contributed to the Fall of the Roman Empire and the continent-wide depression that followed (500 – 750); some of those factors were ecological but some were avoidable (e.g. over-farming). As for Humanism , it gave birth to magnificent art, music and literature, perhaps the greatest the world has ever known, but, as the name suggests, it also fostered an extreme form of anthropocentrism. The social contract of the Middle Ages (a just wage and a just price) was gradually replaced by market economics : get the most for the least. A 20 th century Fortune 100 company summed up the ethic of this age with its iconic slogan: “Get the Max for the Minimum…” Shrewdness has replaced generosity and compassion atop the pyramid of virtues. Far from tending to the rights of non-human species, this new ideology denied basic rights to most humans. Other races? Proto-humans! Other nationalities? Barbarians! Other religions? Pagans! Heretics! Other social classes? Pariahs! Other genders? Inferior! Children? Adults-in- training, best neither seen nor heard. It is hard to argue for the rights of endangered species when human cultures are routinely being trampled into the dust of history. A century ago, even teenagers were considered ‘not fully evolved’, i.e. pre-human. (Hmm…imagine that!) The most prominent proponent of this idea was G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist and educator at Clark University who in 1878 had received, from Harvard, the first doctorate in psychology awarded in the United States. According to Hall, adolescent development was a recapitulation of proto-human evolution. Emphasis on ‘proto’. Hall’s recapitulation drew on the work of Ernst Haeckel, a German embryologist, who coined the catchy: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” He noted that the embryos of more ‘advanced’ species, e.g. human beings, resembled, at various stages, the embryos of more ‘primitive’, ancestral species — fish, salamanders, chicks, hogs, rabbits. It was as if the developmental growth, or ontogeny, of an organism manifested the evolutionary history, or phylogeny, of the species. But this extreme intellectual chauvinism was not the biggest part of the problem. That honor was reserved for its ethical corollary: “ontological ‘inferiors’ (i.e. all of the above) may be treated with unrestrained brutality.” Greco-Roman culture relied heavily on slavery as a source of cheap labor, but Spartacus notwithstanding, it was relatively benign compared with plantation slavery in the ante-bellum South and child labor in industrializing Europe. No extended period in human history was as anathematic to the welfare of living things, human and otherwise, as the period from 1500 (Machiavelli) to 1900 (Hall, above), and we’re still digging out. If PETA or Greenpeace or Me Too or BLM or AIM sometimes seems to go too far, it’s an effort to overcome centuries of exploitation and abuse. While aboriginal cultures understood the world as a continuum, embracing physics, biology, and sociology, modern Euro-American society was strictly stratified: Lowells spoke only to Cabots and Cabots spoke only to God. Needless to say, no one ever spoke to ‘inferiors’ (e.g. blacks, workers, women, children, adolescents), except to bark orders, and no one ever listened to them, ever. For their part, animals were considered unconscious, insentient automata. Were? In this decade a member of the US House of Representatives contended that ‘birds’ aren’t really birds but animatronic spies! Animals’ expressions of pain were considered instinctive reactions, not accompanied by any real sentience. Children, for their part, were thought to have no memory of events before age 7. If they cried out in pain, they were probably faking it: “Speak roughly to your little boy and beat him when he sneezes; he only does it to annoy because he knows it teases.” (Lewis Carroll) Hopefully, few parents implemented the letter of Carroll’s childrearing advice, but it certainly caught the spirit of the times. And plants? Forget about it! The sickle was replaced by the gas powered lawn mower…and Agent Orange. It suited us to see animals, children, and other races as unconscious automatons. How else could we justify the cruel slaughter of live animals to produce food and other by-products? How else could we justify the routine brutalization of children? How else could we come to terms with slavery? If the 21 st century is ultimately known for anything, i.e. if there is anyone left to know and anything left to be known, it will for its fresh take on the law student’s question. It is hard to believe today that just 100 years ago, our culture granted ‘full sentience’ only to semi-affluent adult white males. “Blacks, children, women, and laborers just don’t feel things like we do!” And lest you become too smug and self-congratulatory, may I remind you that during the collective nightmare known as the Vietnam War (c. 1960 – 1974) we were told that ‘Asians don’t value life the way Americans do’. Fortunately, the real Dark Ages (1500 - 1900) are finally behind us - more or less. Today we do not debate varying levels of consciousness among different demographic groups. Now we debate how deeply consciousness permeates the biosphere. Most of us, for example, now acknowledge consciousness among bonobos and chimpanzees, dolphins and whales, parrots and corvids, octopus and cuttlefish, etc. With the help of AI, scientists have recently found semantic patterns in the sounds and gestures of numerous species: dolphins and whales, marmosets, elephants, cuttlefish and corvids. In some cases, a rudimentary syntax has even been detected. We have long considered the use of ‘symbolic language’ to be a defining characteristic of human beings and a prerequisite for residence in our tightly gated community, our neighbor hood. But according to an 8/25/2025 article by Chris Sims in New Scientist , “ Humpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are similar to those seen in human language .” An earlier study of Sperm Whales identified an acoustic alphabet of 156 clicks which are combined to form 18 characteristic propositions ( codas ) but novel combinations are possible and do occur. Evidence of new ideas? But it would be typically anthropocentric of us to look only for acoustic languages that resemble our own. In fact, there is evidence that structured communication in the animal kingdom takes place across a variety of media: hand signs, gestures, birdsong, pitch modulation, and whistle tones are all used to encode information. Nor can these phenomena be dismissed as unconscious ‘reactions’ to immediate environmental stimuli. Some species seem to be able to talk about past events as well as present conditions and future dangers. Elephants and dolphins appear to name the individual members of their herds/pods. We are unlikely to uncover a ‘Rosetta Stone’ to help us match various animal languages with our own. Instead, we are deploying AI to search for algorithms that will allow us to communicate with other species. With many species of animals now securely inside consciousness’ Big Tent , t he debate now centers on whether to extend the NFL Franchise Tag to trees and/or their forests, to fungi and/or the Wood Wide Web, to coral and/or their reefs, to sponges, to bacteria, to the eukaryotic cells that make-up our bodies, to the prokaryotic cells which power our guts. And that’s just for openers! In the next 75 years we will probably answer the question of whether conscious life exists off Earth and whether organisms composed of silicon rather than carbon can be sentient and intentional. Apparently, 2001: A Space Odyssey is no longer considered probative. When I leave this world, I will leave a place vastly different from what I found on entry. Not all the changes have been for the better! But nothing has been more welcome or more significant than this broadening recognition of ‘consciousness’. The recognition of consciousness in various non-human species has put the law student’s fame in a whole new perspective. *** Rembrandt van Rijn. The Good Samaritan. 1633, etching, 25.3 × 20.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rembrandt’s depiction of the Samaritan lifting the wounded man into an inn visualizes the essay’s central claim, that true neighborliness is found not in status or proximity but in the selfless, often inconvenient act of mercy. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

"In any case, Pentecost turns out to be a big deal after all. Reformed folk can join with those claiming to be a “full-gospel church”—maybe even remind the others of some overlooked elements in that mix." < Back Growing Into Pentecost James Bratt Apr 15, 2023 "In any case, Pentecost turns out to be a big deal after all. Reformed folk can join with those claiming to be a “full-gospel church”—maybe even remind the others of some overlooked elements in that mix." When I was a kid, I never got the big deal about Pentecost. For one, it didn’t come along with any special songs or meals. Compare that to Easter, where you could get both of those in one package: “ Low in the Gravy Lay .” Actually, you didn’t really want the gravy my mom served with her Easter ham dinner, although we offset that salt-special with her lime jello concoction that combined all four food groups: pear chunks, shredded carrots, chopped walnuts, and a Kool-Whip topping for your bit of dairy. If it was Aunt Jen’s turn to host the extended-family gathering, you could count on treats my parents tried to avoid for the sake of dental bills, hyper-activity, and uncomfortable fertility symbolism: chocolate eggs, marshmallow chicks, and unlimited jelly beans. For Christmas, of course, we had several family reunions, with jello (there’s a pattern here), chips, and pigs-in-the-blanket sure to pop up along the way. Plus carols at church and home, gift exchanges, and enough sentiment stirred up to suffuse the heart against all pain and doubt. Weird and Discomfiting But Pentecost? Nuthin’ . No canonical hymns, no special dinner (except your beef roast and mashed potatoes were always special, Mom), no family gatherings, only weirdness topped by discomfiting admonitions. The weirdness lay with those tongues of fire and mighty wind. Hey, springtime in Michigan is tornado weather, so ixnay on the turbulent atmosphere already! The Sunday School pictures of bearded, berobed guys whose heads were suffering from mis-directed charcoal lighter inspired distaste rather than the tears evoked by Baby Jesus or the awe attending the Risen Lord. Plus one heard rumors of crazy people who used Pentecost as a label, “holy rollers” who handled snakes and claimed, against all reason and scientific evidence, that they could perform miraculous healings. Not that we Dutch Reformed types denied miracles—just that you shouldn’t bet on them or have the audacity to command God to deliver them on cue. Or really expect one for yourself. As for the discomfiting admonitions, well, the Pentecost sermon was bound to urge us to go out and “witness,” which to me meant cold-calling strangers door-to-door or confronting random persons on the street and asking them where they would be spending eternity if they died tonight. Christian Reformed people tended not to be very good at that, and—it still seems to me—for very good reason. Nor did I yet know Mark Twain’s response to that question: “I’ll take heaven for the climate and hell for the company.” Why does that advice seem so apropos today? Junior Partner/Tag-Along Child? The biggest problem with Pentecost, however, seemed to be that there just wasn’t much for the Holy Spirit to do. I mean, how did this guy merit inclusion in the Trinity along with the Father and the Son, who obviously carried out some pretty heavy lifting? Wasn’t the Trinity really a 2+-ity, the alleged Third Person really qualifying as a junior partner, something like the trailing child born to a couple who thought they were done after #2 ? After all, the Spirit gets only one Q&A in the Heidelberg Catechism while the Father gets three and the Son twenty-four! And however rich the answer to Q&A 53 may be, what I took out of catechism class was that the Holy Spirit had just two jobs: to comfort us when sad and to inspire the writers of the Bible so that their texts were infallible. That is, all those unpredictable, unsettling actions hovering around the Holy Spirit package were stripped away so that God was back in the box of words bound within black-leather covers. Back in the text. Our sure and perfect text-box. Calvin–Theologian of the Holy Spirit? People my age and of similar background have told me they learned it very differently, so part—much?—of my truncated understanding probably reflects bad reception rather than bad teaching. In any case, my real education on the point has come in three parts. It began in grad school when I dove into The Spirit of the Reformed Tradition by Eugene Osterhaven, late professor of theology at Western Theological Seminary. I was astounded to come across a line describing John Calvin as a—perhaps the premier—theologian of the Holy Spirit. And to see that characterization attributed to B. B. Warfield of all people, co-inventor of the theory of biblical inerrancy. But as I read on, there and in other sources, of Calvin’s teaching about the testimony of the Holy Spirit—the action that transforms the dead page of scripture into the living word of God in our hearts—various old doubts and conundrums in my head began to be resolved, and the Third Person took on a richer role, something of a mentor and companion. Not a miracle-worker, maybe, although keeping me from behaving down to my worst level might sometimes be miracle enough. Kuyper, too? Things got richer yet in doing research for my biography of Abraham Kuyper. In his Work of the Holy Spirit (1888-89; E.T. 1956) Kuyper ties the Spirit’s role closely to his own favorite themes of creation and culture. Out of the chaos attending the human fall into sin the Spirit has been, is, and unto the end of time shall remain busy bringing out a new creation that will finally sing perfect praises to its Maker, as was the divine intention in the first place. Meanwhile, Kuyper continued, all along the Spirit has been bringing forth the first notes and sounding forth the big themes of that grand symphony. Included here are the well-known tasks of working sanctification among the saints—more accurately, conveying Christ’s perfections to them—as well as inspiring the Scriptures, conceiving the person of Christ, and building the church as Christ’s representative on earth. But the Spirit’s sweep goes far beyond the elect and the familiar tropes of redemption, Kuyper insisted. Every human gift, every talent, every good work is the Spirit’s work. The vocation of every person, redeemed or not, and the “genius” of every nation are the Spirit’s gift. The “work of the Holy Spirit,” Kuyper even said, “touches every creature, whether animate and inanimate”—those butterflies and bears and rocks and trees and skies and seas are charismatic that way. Nor is the Spirit’s work in creation a once and done affair; it is still active today, “quickening and sustaining life” in every creature’s “being and talents.” (E.T. 45-46) This Incredibly Benevolent Force All these reflections were called back up but also re-set when I recently read This Incredibly Benevolent Force: The Holy Spirit in Reformed Theology and Spirituality (Eerdmans 2018), the published version of the 2014 Warfield Lectures given at Princeton Theological Seminary by my friend Cornelis van der Kooi. As a professor at the Free University in Amsterdam, Kees stands literally in Kuyper’s line; but with additional duties as director of the Center for Evangelical and Reformation Theology there, he has also taken on the role of being a critical friend of the ongoing charismatic movement, both at home and abroad. Cornelius “Kees” van der Kooi Kees trims back some of Kuyper’s enthusiasms; the master was too enamored of secularization and technology, as well as dualistic as to spiritual-material distinctions. At the same time, This Incredibly Benevolent Force is a tour de force on the state of play between Logos and Spirit Christology, bringing Christ down out of the clouds of Greek philosophical abstraction into the living, learning, suffering, and finally triumphant life of Jesus. It is the Spirit who made and makes him Emanuel, the one who is “with us”—and for us. At the same time, it is the Spirit that bears the love of God into the unfathomably far reaches of a cosmos that would otherwise remain a blank space, the big empty. From down here to the farthest out there, the Spirit is active, inviting us indeed to bear witness to the wonderful works of God. To me that “witness” means mostly watching and living accordingly, using words, á la St. Francis, only when necessary. In any case, Pentecost turns out to be a big deal after all. Reformed folk can join with those claiming to be a “full-gospel church”—maybe even remind the others of some overlooked elements in that mix. I’ll pass on the charcoal lighter and snakes, though; just settle for a decent meal. Hmmm, maybe some bread and wine. This piece is republished with permission from the author. It was originally published on Reformed Journal . James Bratt is professor of history emeritus at Calvin College, specializing in American religious history and especially the connections between religion and politics. Starting in Fall 2016 he took a break from blogging on The Twelve to teach in China and on the Semester at Sea, which venues afforded him some welcome distance from the USA’s descent into its current mortal illness. But now he’s back in the States, looking for hope. His most recent book (which he edited and completed for the late John Woolverton) is “A Christian and a Democrat”: Religion in the Life and Leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Return to our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back What We Want for Our Kids David Cowles Jan 7, 2025 “Who are we to impose our life choices…or, more likely, our life accidents…on anyone else, much less on those we purport to love?” Every parent dreams of having a mini-me. Ok, maybe not every parent…but most. Maybe not a carbon copy…but close. It’s weird because these same parents often aren’t that happy with themselves or with their own lives. Why would they wish the same on someone else? “Misery loves company,” doesn’t seem appropriate when talking about one’s kids! According to American mythology, prior to some unspecified date near the end of the 20th century, every parent wanted their children to be more than they were. If they worked in a mine, they wanted their kids to work in offices. If they rented, they wanted their kids to be homeowners. If they didn’t make the high school football team, they wanted their sons to play in the NFL. So we don’t want our kids to be like us after all? We want them to be more than we were. But we want them to be a better version of ourselves – not the best version of a self they choose for themselves. My grandfather had a great expression: “I’m not the man I used to be…and never was.” That’s what kids are for! They are there to be the person we wanted to be but never were. We want them to be what we were…just better at it! If we measure our lives by what we didn’t earn, we want our kids to be prosperous. If we measure our lives by what we didn’t own, we want our kids to be landed gentry. If we measure our lives by our failures, we want our kids to be superstars. We raise children as if they existed to continue…and complete…our dreams. Whether you want your daughter to be a lawyer because you were, or a Supreme Court justice because you weren’t, you’re still aiming to fashion her life in the image and likeness of your own. How dare we? Yes, I said ‘we’ because I’ve been guilty of this too! Not many heterosexual coal miners want their sons to be drag queens and not many ‘daily communicants’ want their daughters to be exotic dancers. But why not? Who are we to impose our life choices…or, more likely, our life accidents…on anyone else, much less on those we purport to love, especially when they are young, defenseless, and impressionable. With great hindsight, my spouse and I would probably say something like, “We want our kids to be good people, to be kind, etc.” It would be hard not to hope for that. And yet, who are we to impose even those values on them? Shouldn’t we let them find their own way, adopt their own values? Of course we should project our values into the world, always by deed and, when appropriate, by word. That’s what it means to have values. And it’s ok, like Kant, to imagine that some folks, including our children, may witness our lives and voluntarily adopt some of our values for themselves. But if they don’t, do we have any right to be ‘disappointed’? As we shuffle out of the spotlight and into the wings, we may decide that the things we thought very important in midlife are not so important after all. No matter how aggressively we distanced ourselves from our neighbors in our ‘prime’, we may come to realize that we all share a common fate. We face the prospect of aging, and ultimately of death, just as everyone else. We may come to define our lives, less in terms of our public triumphs, and more in terms of private moments spent alone or with another. At the end of the day, it all comes down to one question, “ What’s it all about, Alfie ?” Lest you think I am pretending to have made a discovery, I direct you back to the Book of Job . Here was a man familiar with the vicissitudes of life! Unless you have been on the cover of Forbes , you have not tasted his heights; and I pray to God that none of my readers ever tastes his depths. Yet Job begins his opening soliloquy with a surprising conclusion: No greater calamity can befall someone than to die ‘without knowledge’. Spoiler alert : 40 chapters later, Job attains knowledge, but whether that’s the knowledge he’s been seeking and whether it satisfies him remain open questions. Either way, according to the book’s first commentary, included in the final text as Epilogue , Job resumes the lifestyle of the rich and famous…and once again graces the cover of Forbes ; but I digress. The problem is not what you want for your children; the problem is wanting anything at all. You say, “I want them to be themselves.” They will be! They will be what they will be. But that’s not what you meant, is it? You were talking about some intrinsic ‘self’ that supposedly lies buried in them that they are struggling to discover and express. News flash : There is no such self! And thank God for that! You are free to make yourself whoever you choose to be…and so are your children. Of course, you can’t make yourself be an NBA player, but you can make the most of being 5’ 5” and a total klutz. For better or worse, you will be yourself because you will make yourself the person you become. Who else could you be? Who else could your children be? Celebrate it! Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Reason, Religion, and Pope Benedict David Cowles Feb 2, 2023 “World War I, Stalinism, Fascism, the Holocaust, World War II, Hiroshima, the Cold War, Vietnam, and now the new ‘30-Plus Years War’ in the Middle East… Rational Empiricism has compiled quite a resume!” Once upon a time, we were all religious. No matter our faith or our denomination, we accepted ‘dogma’ that seemed on the surface, at least, to contradict the evidence of our senses and even to clash with reason itself. We consoled ourselves with a simple, “It’s a mystery!” That might have worked in the Middle Ages or the 1950s, but come on, we’re living in the Age of Science now. Mystery is no longer a comforting friend but the mortal enemy. Mystery is part of Joyce’s nightmare from which we are trying to awake. So, then there came a time when none of us was religious. Every morning, instead of reciting the Shema , we would light two candles, one at the shrine of all things Empirical, the other at the shrine of all things Rational. We’d gone Greek! We became Show Me people, even if we didn’t live in Missouri. We had a new dogma now: “Nothing is meaningful unless it can be verified empirically via scientific method.” Like Jesus before us and the Rabbis before Jesus, we skillfully managed to conflate two doctrines (Empiricism and Rationalism) into a single Great Commandment . Then we discovered that that didn’t work either. Next, a flurry of ‘60s liberal theologians tried to convince us that reason and religion could co-exist – not buying it! Or that, like wave-particle duality, religion and reason dealt with different aspects of a single set of phenomena - that’s just about as satisfying as saying that quantum mechanics and relativity apply ‘on different scales’ or that 22 of 26 dimensions in our universe are rolled up into infinitesimal, plank-sized spitballs. And they thought the Incarnation was a stretch! I mean, just how much "crazy" can one person tolerate? So, now what? Back to the ‘mystery cults’ of Ancient Greece…or on to ‘nihilism’ a la Nietzsche? Enter Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, once the scourge of Liberation theologians, later Pope Benedict XVI. Benedict argued that reason and religion are not just compatible but symbiotic : there is no valid religion without reason and there is no valid reasoning without religion. A big leap! There is scriptural support for this outrageous idea. In the Old Testament, Wisdom ( Sophia ) was God’s first ‘creation’; she was (literally) his playmate , at least before Adam. This tradition is honored today in Kabbala , where Wisdom is the first Sefirot emanating out of Keter (Crown, Godhead). In the New Testament, Wisdom has largely folded into the concepts of Logos (Christ) and Pneuma (Spirit), but it survives in places like the O Antiphons sung during the Season of Advent. “O Wisdom” is the first antiphon, leading ultimately to the more familiar climax, “O Come O come Emmanuel”. But back to Benedict. Check out his May 1996 address to Latin American bishops entitled, Relativism : “…(Karl) Barth was wrong when…he proposed the faith as a pure paradox that can only exist against reason and totally independent from it… It (faith) does not do violence to it; it is not external to it; rather, it makes it (reason) come to itself.” “Faith (without reason) is destined to atrophy, it simply lacks air to breathe… Faith can again liberate reason… (but) faith without reason will not be human.” Who’da-thunk-it? An alliance of Pure Faith and Pure Reason (apologies to Kant) – an alliance against the new ‘axis powers’ of Positivism, Materialism, Paganism, Nihilism. Benedict was right to be concerned…and right to look for allies in the battle ahead. Is this the coming of the Anti-Christ, the beginning of Armageddon, as described by John of Patmos in Revelation ? Only time will tell, but in any event, who would deny that global civilization is in crisis? The cult of Rational Empiricism (above) first took root in the 17 th century, but it only fully blossomed in the 20 th . “By their fruits you shall know them!” Ok, how about this for a tasty harvest: World War I, Stalinism, Fascism, the Holocaust, World War II, Hiroshima, the Cold War, Vietnam, and now the new ‘30-Plus Years War’ in the Middle East. Rational Empiricism has compiled quite a resume! Apparently, it’s a big hit on LinkedIn, but would you hire this applicant? I’ll pass! I’ll stick with Benedict, thank you. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Achilles and the Tortoise David Cowles Aug 23, 2021 You’ve no doubt heard about the race between Achilles and the Tortoise. My 8 year old grandson has so I assume you have too. It took place 2,500 years ago. The tortoise challenged Achilles (an anachronism in itself) but asked Achilles to give him a head start (1/2 the distance to the goal line). Supremely confident , Achilles agreed. You’ve no doubt heard about the race between Achilles and the Tortoise. My 8 year old grandson has so I assume you have too. It took place 2,500 years ago. The tortoise challenged Achilles (an anachronism in itself) but asked Achilles to give him a head start (1/2 the distance to the goal line). Supremely confident , Achilles agreed. While the bookies were taking bets, a philosopher named Zeno proved, using just the universally accepted assumptions of ordinary math and logic, that Achilles not only would not win the race but could not win it. I won’t repeat the proof here…maybe another time. Where the betting had overwhelmingly favored Achilles, now it swung over to the tortoise. The race began and ended in seconds: Achilles 1, Tortoise 0. You can imagine that Zeno’s neighbors were none too pleased. Was Zeno’s argument flawed? In my opinion, it was not! So, what went wrong? Zeno hadn’t proved that Achilles would lose the race; what he had proved was that there is something terribly wrong with our logical and mathematical assumptions. More on Zeno in later posts. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

“Following the science, LP assumes that the same act, performed under the same conditions, will always produce the same result…it’s true, precisely 0% of the time!” < Back Logical Positivism David Cowles Dec 1, 2023 “Following the science, LP assumes that the same act, performed under the same conditions, will always produce the same result…it’s true, precisely 0% of the time!” It’s October 2023, and Norwegian novelist and playwright, Jon Fosse, is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In naming Fosse, the Nobel Committee cited “ his innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable.” But isn’t that the function of all literature? Of all language even? According to Heidegger, art is what empowers us to see the world in new ways. As a certain poet (Keats) once said, “Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty.” Language is ‘saying’. If language says it, then it’s said, and therefore obviously was never really ‘unsayable’. When I was in college, Logical Positivism (LP) was the philosophy du jour . It presented a view of the world that was embraced by academic philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic. The justly renowned Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote LP’s Bible ( Tractatus )…before he repudiated it years later in Philosophical Investigations . According to LP, propositions (sentences) have meaning if, and only if, they are subject to ‘falsification’ via the scientific method. Undoubtedly, such propositions do have a special semantic character, but they represent a tiny fraction of the things human beings yearn to say to one another about their lived experience. According to the tenets of LP, propositions that cannot be falsified are just meaningless strings of words. ‘To be’, Hamlet, is to be consequential . There is no being without consequences. If we cannot identify the consequences of an Act, why should we assume that there was an Act in the first place? Where there’s smoke, there isn’t always fire! We are rewriting Descartes: “I am, therefore I am engaged; I am engaged, therefore I am.” In elementary school, we were taught that sentences are meaningful if and only if they link words selected from a culturally shared lexicon according to patterns that conform to a culturally shared syntax. Later in life, we learn that such rules are arbitrary. New words are coming into our language all the time from all sorts of different sources. Also, strings of words can often be meaningful even if they don’t conform perfectly to ‘the rules of grammar’. Only the most conservative critic would argue that James Joyce’s two great novels, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake , are meaningless, even though the former includes copious neologisms, and the latter is barely recognizable as English. And then there’s ‘poetry’! When a writer uses language ‘poetically’ (in the broadest possible sense of the word), no hard and fast rules apply… ever . The author and the reader come together virtually, of course, and agree on a vocabulary and grammar that are meaningful to them . If you find my writing gibberish, and many do, that’s ok by me, as long as ‘ some of my readers are able to tease some of my meaning out of some of my articles’. (Pseudo-Lincoln) I think most of us would agree that the most of the important propositions we’ve encountered in life would not pass LP’s Turing Test : I love you; thou shalt not kill; this sunset is gorgeous. Superficially, LP might be appealing. After all, if a proposition claims to be true, why shouldn’t it undergo rigorous verification? Why should I pay any attention to assertions that cannot be verified? It’s 2023—we ‘follow the science’ — now! The exclusion of so-called ‘slang’ and ‘poetry’ from the semantic universe is a heavy price to pay for scientific precision, but it is far from LP’s deepest flaw: Propositions refer to events. Every event is unique. If an event were not unique, it would not be an ‘event’. Following the science , LP assumes that the same act, performed under the same conditions, will always produce the same result…that is essence of science, and of course, it’s true, precisely 0% of the time! Repetition is an approximation. An experiment creates ‘information’ only to the extent that the results deviate from expectations. Every event has something in common with every other event, but no event has everything in common with any other event. So, is this the ultimate irony or what? LP is based on the truth criteria of science, which in turn rely entirely on the usually unstated but always false ‘axiom of repeatability’. A little reflection will likely lead you to conclude that it is precisely those ‘excluded propositions’ that embody the real content of our lives. The thrill of contemplating a remarkable sunset is for most of us a more important aspect of life than the satisfaction of calculating the precise boiling point of water. According to LP, ‘meaningful propositions’ are propositions that can ultimately be reduced to algorithms of the form, ‘if x, then y’. Conceivably, every such ‘verifiable proposition’ could be programmed into a relational database and then downloaded onto a mechanical platform (e.g., a computer). While such a result might be beyond our current capabilities, the project itself is certainly conceivable. That would make ‘living life’ a superfluous exercise. At the very moment when we are discovering that reflective consciousness is liberally distributed throughout the biosphere (and possibly beyond), LP comes along and says we don’t need reflective consciousness after all. ‘We don’t need no lived experience.’ (Pseudo-Pink Floyd) We can know everything that there is to know algorithmically. Can you stand another twist? This is beginning to sound like an episode of Big Brother (CBS). In fact, we know that the assumptions underlying LP are falsifiable! For example, LP was supposed to rescue the concept of Truth from the machinations of skeptics and nihilists. LP allowed us to answer Pontius Pilate’s dismissive question, “What is truth?” It’s simply the set of all verifiable propositions (above). The only problem with this is that we know that no algorithm can generate the set of all true propositions (Godel). Far from rescuing Truth, LP is incompatible with it! Likewise, we know that no two events are ever identical; if they were, they would be one event. Sure, events can closely resemble one another, and that may be good enough for government work, but it doesn’t satisfy us philosophically. The soul of the scientific method is repeatability, but no real-world event can ever be repeated. Finally, we increasingly suspect that the fundamental building blocks of Universe are not objects or even events but patterns. Contrary to what we said above, patterns can be congruent. So, have we rescued LP after all? ‘Fraid not! Congruent patterns are not identical patterns. Congruence may be serial or scalar: (1) ‘serial congruence’ refers to identical patterns that have different locations in spacetime; (2) ‘scalar congruence’ refers to patterns that are identical but on different scales. Examples: (1) a box of ball bearings; (2) atom, cell, or solar system. BTW, did you hear the one about the atom, the cell, and the solar system that walked into a bar? The bartender couldn’t tell them apart. That’s scalar congruence. To the extent that Universe displays scalar congruence, we say that it has a ‘holographic structure’ and consists of ‘fractals’. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to Yuletide 2023 Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Oswald Spengler David Cowles Jun 28, 2021 In his seminal work, The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler (c. 1920) both predicts and explains the global conflict in which we are now embroiled. He divides world history into a number of distinct “ cultures/civilizations”. That’s not unique to Spengler. What is unique is the classification scheme he uses. For example, he speaks of a Magian culture and a Faustian culture. In his seminal work, The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler (c. 1920) both predicts and explains the global conflict in which we are now embroiled. He divides world history into a number of distinct “ cultures/civilizations”. That’s not unique to Spengler. What is unique is the classification scheme he uses. For example, he speaks of a Magian culture and a Faustian culture. Magian civilization springs from the Middle East and includes the “major” religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and several others. He describes these ideologies as having a world view and not being tied to the land. Faustian civilization, on the other hand, is the civilization of Europe and North America since the Renaissance. This civilization is fiercely tied to the land (fatherland, motherland, patriotism, nationalism, colonialism, and ultimately imperialism). Christianity had a Magian origin but in Spengler’s view has been co-opted by Faustian culture. Islam, however, remains Magian. As a result, we don’t understand each other. We are instinctively hostile to one another and voila, the state of world affairs today. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back These Are The Dark Ages David Cowles Aug 4, 2021 A cursory reading of ethnographic surveys (Frazer, Spengler, Toynbee, et al.) shows that almost every human culture includes the recognition of a ‘transcendent’ dimension to reality. Sometimes this dimension is called “God”; other times it is better described as a “force” or as a “layer of eternal values”. What is not found are cultures that embrace WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) aka ‘naïve realism’…with one glaring exception: the culture of contemporary Western Europe and North America. A cursory reading of ethnographic surveys (Frazer, Spengler, Toynbee, et al.) shows that almost every human culture includes the recognition of a ‘transcendent’ dimension to reality. Sometimes this dimension is called “God”; other times it is better described as a “force” or as a “layer of eternal values”. What is not found are cultures that embrace WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) aka ‘naïve realism’…with one glaring exception: the culture of contemporary Western Europe and North America. Perhaps Nietzsche best expressed the ethic of our era: “One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…But nothing exists apart from the whole!” Ever since the dawn of the so-called “Enlightenment” (c. 1700), we have been desperate to model a universe that is sui generis. No matter what the cost we are determined to make homo sapiens the apex of reality and to exclude any possibility of a “higher power”. Our quest has led to an explosion of scientific progress to the point where we can now talk about “creation” in terms of Big Bang, Virtual Particles and negative vacuum pressure. But we cannot overcome the ultimate obstacle: despite our overarching hubris, we cannot believably derive something from nothing. It is no longer politically correct to describe the period from 500 AD to 800 AD in Europe as the ‘Dark Ages’…and rightly so! These centuries hosted enormous advances in social organization, philosophy, theology, music, art and architecture. They formed the basis for the Carolingian Renaissance (800 AD) and the 13th century confluence of Islamic, Judaic and Christian thought. But it would be a mistake to retire the concept of “Dark Ages” prematurely; we are living in just such a period right now. These are the Dark Ages! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.