Reflections on Political and Social Issues from the Center for Economic and Policy Education at Saint Vincent College

Latrobe, Pennsylvania 15650-2690 Volume 3 Number 2 (combined with Tulis lecture) April 1998

The following is adapted from a lecture given by Dr. Peter Augustine Lawler, Professor of Political Science at Berry College, on January 21, 1998 as part of the Center for Economic and Policy Education's Government and Political Education Series which is directed by Dr. Ronald J. Pestritto.

My topic is the Catholic tradition of thought today. The word tradition can be deadly, signifying thought that was alive or credible but is not for us. But the Catholic tradition of thought is not dead even in the sense that Latin is dead. Latin is no longer a language used by many real people to communicate their experiences to one another. But Catholic thought, properly understood, can still be so used. I would even say it expresses more adequately than any other language or way of naming reality the experiences human beings really have. On the continuing relevance or even renewed plausibility of the distinctively Catholic expression of the truth about nature and the human self or soul, I am indebted above all to the Catholic American novelist-philosopher Walker Percy, especially his many philosophical essays and his hilarious and profound mixture of theory and literature Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. Percy's last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, has also helped me greatly, not because it is his best novel but because it is in some ways his most mature theoretical statement.

Percy, in his way, defends the traditional view that Catholic thought comes partly from St. Augustine and partly from St. Thomas Aquinas. Its Augustinian element is what separates it from classical or Aristotelian thought. Its Thomistic element is what separates it from existentialist thought.

According to St. Augustine, Christian theology is superior to the two serious theologies of the Greeks and Romans, civil theology and natural theology. Civil or political theology views the human being as essentially a citizen, as existing for his city or political community. But in fact the human being knows that he is more than a citizen, that his existence is distinguished from the city's. Political satisfactions -- conquest, glory, and even contributing to the common good -- do not satisfy his deepest longings. God allowed Rome its unrivaled success and glory, St. Augustine says, for human beings to reflect on how fully some good Roman citizens devoted themselves to the city and how unsatisfactory the results of such political devotion are for human beings.

Natural theology, the articulation of the natural order discovered by unaided human reason, is the theology of the philosophers. Natural theology views the human being as essentially part of nature, and nature as some sort of cosmos or comprehensible whole. But the human being experiences himself as dissatisfied with and somehow free from his merely natural existence. His longings oppose themselves to his natural limitations. He aims to be wise, but his body prevents it. He longs for immortality or eternity, and he knows that his limited participation in eternity through his partial comprehension of nature's perhaps eternal laws does not satisfy his personal desire. The longings of the human being to be recognized and loved as he really is and for eternal life can only be satisfied by a personal God.

According to St. Augustine, human sin or error is a human being believing he can satisfy his personal longings through his own, natural efforts. The truth is that we experience ourselves as aliens or pilgrims in this world, as somehow truly at home somewhere else. The philosophers pridefully attempt to make human beings at home by constructing fraudulent, wholly natural understandings of human happiness, and by suppressing the truth of the only partially satisfactory character of even the philosophic way of life. Even the philosopher is not free from the troubles and flaws that all human beings share.

The presence of the alien, the human being whose true home is not of this world, is a mysterious exception to the comprehensible laws that order the rest of nature or the cosmos. The human self or soul is invariably a leftover in all homogeneous or consistent, wholly rational, simply scientific explanations of what exists. The human being, as the Augustinian Percy says, is lost in the cosmos.

Percy is fascinated with the existence of aliens. But he begins with the thought that the aliens -- the human beings -- on this planet are much more fascinating than any science fiction writers have yet imagined elsewhere. Scientists and philosophers should find nothing more curious than the human alien.

Percy took a particular interest in one particular human alien, the scientist and popularizing philosopher Carl Sagan. Sagan spent much of his time promoting the view that the cosmos is a cosmos, that there are no leftovers, no mysterious exceptions to generally valid scientific principles. He also attempted to rouse up curiosity in the likely existence of intelligent or superintelligent extraterrestrial life or aliens on other, quite distant planets.

Why did Sagan ignore or deny the existence of the human alien and search so hard for others? The most obvious answer is Sagan's. The discovery of intelligent life elsewhere is proof that the human being is not a mysterious aberration in the cosmos. Aliens, Sagan assumes, will be far more intelligent and so less troubled or perverse, violent, prejudiced or religious, and repressed than we are. Their discovery will be a sign that human life will become more rational and happy, that the life imperfectly lived by the scientist today will become the life lived perfectly by all intelligent beings at some future point. Our present flawed existence will be explained as some evolutionary stage on the way to living rationally and naturally. The discovery of superintelligent, untroubled extraterrestrials will show that what seems mysterious to religious human beings today is not really mysterious at all.

But Percy has a more simple and poignant explanation for Sagan's search: He was lonely. By refusing to recognize either himself or his fellow human beings as aliens, he alienated himself from them. His scientific tendency was to reduce them to beings essentially no different from the other animals and to elevate himself to something like a God by virtue of his scientific transcendence of ordinary life.

Sagan's acknowledgment of his anxious loneliness, of his experience of himself as alien, might have led him to acknowledge his connection to other human aliens or even start him on a search for God. But he was too dogmatic, too proud, to do either. The fact that Sagan was not more curious about himself shows that his scientific pursuits, his devotion to the cosmos as cosmos, was partly a form of self-denial.

Sagan's view of what extraterrestrial, superintelligent life must be like, for Percy, was obviously wrong. If that life is self-conscious and mortal then it will have something like our troubles and perversities. It will have our potential for derangement and violence, and the extraterrestrials' discovery of us through our contact with them may well endanger us. But the discovery of even superintelligent extraterrestrial life will not change anything fundamental about our self-understanding or free us from our anxiety. If one alien encounters another they still both remain aliens, and that experience occurs all the time right here on earth.

Sagan's naivete is characteristic of the progressivism of modern science itself. Human beings, through scientific enlightenment, are viewed as overcoming the repressive and destructive effects of Judeo-Christian civilization. They are returning to their primitive innocence but without losing their enlightenment. This identification of evil not with human nature or sin but with civilization or history began with the philosopher Rousseau; the incoherent, even laughable connection of prehistorical contentment with posthistorical human wisdom was made most passionately by Marx.

So Percy was interested in Sagan not because he was a great scientist or philosopher, but because he is a characteristically modern expert. The modern belief is that the great success of science has discredited the authority of biblical religion. And modern science has succeeded wonderfully in explaining everything but human experiences and human action. So human beings are left more confused and anxious than ever about their personal experiences, and they turn to the scientific experts for help. They are told that their personal experiences of anxiety, displacement, and so forth have material or physical causes, and so can be cured by the appropriate therapy. They can be talked out of existence, or cured by a change in environment or some drug. Some combination of techniques and therapies, the modern view remains, will finally make human beings completely at home in this world, and finally put to rest the Augustinian conception of the human being as alien.

Modern science's goal is well expressed by the American linguistic therapist Richard Rorty. He argued that human beings can and must see themselves clever animals and nothing more. Human experience is nothing but a linguistic construction, and humans can be talked out of being moved or distorted by their knowledge of the fact of their death. But so far the experts have failed miserably, and the world of nice, joyless, loveless, amoral, content people hoped and worked for by Rorty and B.F. Skinner, and dreaded by Allan Bloom and Nietzsche, is not about to come into existence. Americans who have unprecedented wealth, health, and freedom, all the products of the success of modern science, feel less at home than people ever have. Following the lead of Alexis de Tocqueville, Percy describes Americans restless and deranged in the midst of prosperity because they have the ineradicable needs of beings with souls.

Percy shows that the goal of modern science, to produce a cosmos or wholly well-ordered world, comes not just from the characteristically prideful rationalism of the philosopher or scientist. It also comes from a distorted version of the Christian or Augustinian view of human existence called existentialism. The deepest truth of existentialism, so understood, is that human beings are miserably anxious and nothing more, and so deserving of pity and nothing more. The accident called human reality ought to be eradicated not only in the name of reason -- to make the cosmos a cosmos -- but also as an act of compassion. The modern scientist, as Rorty and Skinner explain so well, aims to deliver us from the inexplicable cruelty of human existence.

The misanthropy of modern science really depends upon the existentialist view of the absurdity or irrational misery of being human. And existentialism is an understandable and perhaps inevitable distortion of a tendency in Augustinian Christianity. Augustine turned his eloquence to a description of human misery, making it easy to believe that human beings are nothing but miserable without God. They are aliens because human life in this world is no good.

Percy's description of Catholic thought is not characterized by Augustinian extremism or desperate existentialism. He balances St. Augustine's account of the mystery of human freedom with St. Thomas's realism. Percy, the Thomist, accounts for both existentialism and modern science as parts of the same dualistic and unrealistic view of the world.

Both existentialism and modern science, the Thomist knows, are empirically inadequate. There is, in fact, a connection between the human self or soul and the world, and that connection is language. The capacity for language is natural, and so human beings are rational and social beings by nature. They can know something about reality, about nature, themselves, and each other. The languaged being cannot help but be miserably anxious. He knows he will die, and how much of reality, especially the reality of the human self or soul, remains beyond his comprehension and control. He knows that the mystery of human existence, of himself, cannot be eradicated through thought. What he knows differentiates and alienates him from his environment.

But the languaged being also experiences certain joys by nature, including discovery and sharing of the truth. That language makes possible the truthful sharing of human experiences is the foundation of the love of one self-conscious mortal for another, for the discovery of how strange, wonderful, and courageous even seemingly ordinary people are. Because no human being can fully know another or even himself, these joyful compensations for anxious misery are not fully satisfying. But they still are authentically human goods.

The Thomist knows that what distinguishes human life is a mixture of joy and misery and good and evil, but more good than anything else. His psychological observation is that even ordinary people can live well enough in light of death, with some help from others. They can even live well enough without God, although they can live better or more completely with Him. The good things of this world are better enjoyed with some explanation for their limited but real satisfaction. Acknowledging the truth of Thomistic realism allows the person to feel more at home than does the science that intends to make him completely at home.

The Thomist holds that only biblical religion is compatible with the truth about scientific evidence. It attempts to account for the reality of human distinctiveness rather than suppress it. Buddhism and New Age pantheism, by suppressing the individual, are based on the modern scientific error that there is no natural or divine foundation for individuality and the existentialist's error that the human individual is nothing but an absurd, miserable accident.

Thomism and Augustinianism are connected most obviously on the level of morality. Thomistic scientific or philosophical realism points to Augustinian moral realism: human beings cannot fundamentally change their condition, because they are not fundamentally self-created. They are troubled, anxious, and displaced by nature, and they cannot dispense with the need for morality and law to restrain their personal disorder, live well with others, and fulfill their natural purposes.

This moral realism stands in opposition to efforts by various modern experts to create a world without morality. Such a world would also be without any perception of reality, or without beings with the capacity to know the truth. Science and scientists, in truth, depend upon and only very incompletely transcend the moral and political world, which Plato called the cave, or what Percy more precisely calls the "lost cove," the shared world of aliens.

Percy, despite his disgust with redneck chauvinism, the smug self-satisfaction of the Sunbelt middle class, and the forgetful superficiality of President Reagan, was always pro-life, meaning especially pro-human life, and a moral conservative opposed to the various forms of enlightened, therapeutic expertise. He opposed all expert judgments concerning the quality of life as, most deeply, opposed to human life as such. He was a defender of personal sovereignty, or the person's own judgments concerning his own experiences of soul or self.

So Percy defended the American views of democracy, liberty, and the rule of law. But he criticized the American founders for their "mishmash" anthropology. They defended the freedom and dignity of the individual, but left it unclear what about the human person is either free or dignified. Their anthropology is an untenable mixture of Aristotelian-Thomistic realism, Augustinian Christianity, and the modern scientific view that the human being is fundamentally no different in purpose from the other animals. The leading founders such as Jefferson tended to pride themselves in their philosophic or scientific overcoming of Christian prejudice. But they built better than they knew, because they were more dependent on Christian premises about human freedom and man's special place in created nature than they could acknowledge even to themselves.

Perhaps the truth and goodness of American principle can only be made clear by the Catholic tradition of thought, by the Augustinian view of human freedom supplemented by Thomistic view of nature, and by the Thomistic view of the compatibility of scientific truth and biblical revelation.