Robert Reilly and the Closing of the Muslim Mind

Robert Reilly gets it. He understands that the civilizational crisis facing us today is rooted in theology. Here is a link to a terrific lecture he gave recently at the Heritage Foundation on his book: The Closing of the Muslim Mind.

Here is a synopsis of his lecture:

People today are shocked and frightened by the behavior coming out the Islamic world – not only because it is violent, but also because it is seemingly inexplicable. While many explanations have been offered as to “what went wrong” in the Muslim world, no one has decisively answered why it went wrong. In The Closing of the Muslim Mind, Robert R. Reilly locates the roots of contemporary troubles in a pivotal struggle that occurred within the Muslim world nearly a millennium ago. It was a battle over the role of reason – and the side of irrationality won. The theology that resulted, Reilly posits, produced a fertile field for Islamism, and now constitutes the chief obstacle to finding common ground with the Islamic world. In the view of former National Security Advisor John Poindexter, this book is “meticulously researched … must-read for today’s national security leaders.”

The lecture is well-worth the hour or so it takes to listen to. Reilly gives chapter and verse citations for some of the claims I lightly skated over in my last post.

What is God?

In the High Middle Ages there was a great deal of debate about the nature of God. The Great Tradition, rooted in Scripture and stretching from Athanasius to Augustine to Aquinas, said that God is Love and God is Reason (Logos). It is only possible to say this if one is a Trinitarian Christian.

Why? Because to say that God is unitarian is to say that His essence cannot be love without presupposing that God needs creation in order to have something to love; that God cannot be fully Himself (and cannot be fully actual) alone. The doctrine of the Trinity also allows us to understand that the Word (Logos) is the second person of the Trinity and thus fully God. The imprint of the Logos (through whom God made the world) is on the creation and thus the creation is both rational and rationally comprehensible. Man is made in the image of God and the image means that man's true nature is realized when he is both rational and loving.

Therefore, the Great Tradition was able to absorb Aristotle's rationalism into itself without losing its fundamental character. In fact, the Hellenization of Christianity was old hat for this tradition and it mainly involved Thomas Aquinas correcting certain Neo-Platonic aspects of Christian thought with superior Aristotelian reasoning and integrating faith and reason.

However, something different happened in the Muslim encounter with Aristotle. Islam proved incapable of integrating faith and reason and had to reject not only Aristotle, but also philosophy and science themselves in an act described by many observers as "intellectual suicide." The current fanatical Islamism that is reviving centuries old jihad against the West is rooted in theological mistakes made in this period which Islam has never, in the centuries since, been able to overcome.

The story does not end there with all the Christians wearing white hats and all the Muslims wearing black ones, however. It is much more complicated.

Christianity had no sooner achieved the fantastic heights of Thomistic philosophy and theology and integrated faith and reason in an intellectually coherent system of thought than it threw all the gains it had made away. Why? The disasters of the 14th century (the Black Plague, the 100 Years War, the Little Ice Age, etc.) created a situation of cultural decline and confusion in which the false theology inherent in nominalist philosophy was able to do what Arianism had just barely failed to do a thousand years before: become dominant in Christendom.

The dark and capricious God of nominalism was a God of pure will, an arbitrary Deity who is essentially unitarian. He is not a God of love or of reason, but of arbitrary, total will. This false deity, who bears a great deal of resemblance to the concept of God that won out in Islam, became the God against whom the Enlightenment reacted. This God is a threat to human freedom; freedom becomes a zero sum game in which the more God has, the less we have and the more we have the less God has. God is seen as a capricious tyrant against whom we must rebel if we don't want to be servile, dehumanized slaves.

Modernity is the project of rebellion against this God. Having rejected the God who is rational and loving, Modernity knows not how to relate to God except by asserting human autonomy and human will over against God. This is why Modernity must necessarily end in atheism. But Western atheism is a particular kind of atheism; it is not so much the absence of belief in God, but the refusal to bow to such a God, which is why it is seen as humanistic and humane.

The truth is that modern atheism has re-shaped man into the image of the nominalist God of will and the result is the triumph of the will described by Nietzsche and implemented by Hitler. One might call Nietzschean philosophy "Western Islamism with man in the place of God." Osama bin Laden and Adolph Hitler both put into practice the nihilistic, anarchistic, destructive, evil political practices that flow logically from a theology in which God and man are both reduced to nothing else in their essences but the will to power.

So it is a highly ironic twist of history that the rebellious liberal left of Western culture embraces Islam and rejects orthodox Christianity. The God of Islam is inevitably a violent tyrant because this God is not rational and not loving in His essence, which is another way of saying that He is not triune. Those who want to do justice to human freedom need to take another look at the Christian, Triune God and to turn away from the God of Nominalism and the God of Islamism.

God is love. God is the Logos. These two statements from the New Testament get to the heart of what makes the God of the Bible different from the idols and heretical understandings of God that have dominated the Muslim world and the Modern Western world.

The West has a choice: destroy itself in a fit of nihilistic rage, capitulate to Islam and worship pure will under Muslim rule or recover its Christian heritage. Modernity is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Its poor theology is simply inadequate to support a civilization.

Despite the proclamations of the American government, the most basic issue at stake in the contemporary world is not how to fight terrorism; it is the question of the nature of God.

Why So Little Blogging Lately?

I apologize for the lack of attention given to this blog recently. I am immersed in writing right now and I will be blogging only sporadically on issues related to my book on the doctrine of God. I find it hard to think of much else at the moment.

If you are interested in the book I'm writing, you can check back periodically and I'll offer some thoughts and ideas from my reading as I think through the issues.

Trinitarian Theology as a Spiritual Discipline

French Dominican theologian Gilles Emery, O.P. argues that the Trinitarian theology of both St. Augustine and St. Thomas is presented as a spiritual exercise in which the practitioner of theology is a pilgrim seeking wisdom and, ultimately, union with God. In other words, all Trinitarian theology from the early Fathers to St. Thomas, including those parts which are often derided as "rationalistic" or "abstract" is actually spiritual theology, not mere speculation. A short presentation of his argument is found in his essay: "Trinitarian Theology as Spiritual Exercise in Augustine and Aquinas" in Aquinas the Augustinian, edited by Dauphinais, David and Levering (Catholic University of America Press, 2007).

The classical tradition of Christian theology that is rooted in the creedal orthodoxy of the first five centuries and which flowers in the Augustinian-Thomistic tradition has come under fire in the modern period for many reasons. One of those reasons has to do with the modern obsession with individual autonomy, which begins systematically with Descartes although it is foreshadowed in Renaissance humanism. This autonomy is not merely the self-assertion of the individual over against the state, tradition or law, but has is roots in a metaphysical decision to claim that the true view of the universe must begin with the individual reason and situation of the individual thinker rather than with an understanding of our situation as one of God and man in relationship. Emery's interpretation of the thought of St. Thomas as continuing a type of theology that typified the early Fathers and flowered in the writings of St. Augustine helps us see why the starting point of modern philosophy (and the theology - mainly liberal Protestant - which has adopted its anthropocentrism) is inadequate for understanding reality.

In this post, I want to describe how Emery interprets St. Augustine and in a subsequent post I will discuss his argument for reading St. Thomas as continuing the same kind of theology.

Emery points out that, the purpose of St. Augustine's De Trinitate, can be expressed as (1) to show that whether one searches for the substance of God through God's creature or through the Scriptures, the same nature of God can be discovered, (2) to show the conformity of Catholic faith to Holy Scripture and (3) to show that the end result of believing in order to understand is, in fact, an enhanced understanding of faith. For St. Augustine, faith is the beginning point of intellectual or scientific inquiry because it is only from the standpoint of faith that insight into ultimate reality can be attained. The purpose of Christian theology is to demonstrate that greater understanding does in fact arise from such a starting point.

It is in this last result that theology contributes to the evangelistic and apologetic task of the Church by increasing knowledge of the universe and man and not merely of God. Emery points out that the so-called "psychological" analogy is misnamed because the modern sense of the term does not connote what was central in St. Augustine's intentions: namely the ontological truth of the analogy of the soul to God. He says: "in turning toward God, whose image it is, the soul attains what it is, its proper nature." (7) We might think here also of the arguments of David Bentley Hart and T. F. Torrance about how it was Christianity which made the rise of modern physical science possible. Christianity "works" and this should commend it to all unbiased minds.

Emery shows that the analogy between the image of God in the human soul and God is not a one-way analogy, but rather a back and forth process of eliminating errors, exploring dead ends and finding one's way forward gradually and only by much effort. Emery writes:

So one discovers that the interminable detours, repititions, and digressions of the De Trinitate are on purpose and are part of Augustine's deliberate intention: to exercise the spirit of his reader, to lead it to the ascension toward God the Trinity by sharpening the tip of his soul (acies mentis). This objective is recalled each time Augustine glances retrospectively at the preceding books. It is formulated very clearly, for instance, at the beginning of book XV: 'We wanted to train the reader [exercere lectorem] in the things that were made, so that he might know Him by whom they were made.' In this Christian setting, the spiritual exercise takes on a specific aspect. It is performed on the foundation of revelation, through divine grace, in the adherance of faith to the Triune God.

Here we see arguments against "natural theology" decisively refuted. For one thing, the knowledge of God is not limited to what nature can say. Rather, nature must be read in the light of revelation and can only point to what is beyond its scope. For another thing, the back and forth of the soul suggest the interplay of the grace of the Holy Spirit interacting with the human mind leading the sinner to greater and deeper knowledge of God step by step. Human capability is insufficient both in the beginning point and at each step along the way. Finally, there is no hint of the human mind grasping or comprehending God; in actual fact, much of the point of the exercise is that the mind needs to become aware of its possibilities and its limitations.

Theology done in this way is prayerful, humble and intellectually rigorous. It is a path of purification and a way of wisdom. We distort it when we project our modern lust for power and domination (which has so distorted and debased scientific inquiry in modernity) backwards in time on to thinkers whose purpose in intellectual analysis was much different than our own. Instead of being motivated by a desire to control, manipulate and use, it was motivated by a desire to see and submit to the ontological reality we inhabit.

A Good Reason for Getting a Ph.D.

Dane Ortlund, who is just finishing a Ph.D. in Biblical Theology at Wheaton College has a very nice post on "Stupid PhDs versus Wise PhDs." I love this quote: (HT Justin Taylor)

Another question to be mindful of is how a PhD might strengthen others, not only us. I'm hoping my dissertation gets published, for two reasons. One, I'm a self-loving sinner with unmortified infatuation with my own name. Two (more cheerily), my work exposes weaknesses in the theology of James Dunn and I would love to see fewer pastors and teachers buy Dunn's commentaries in light of my dissertation. I would be happy to help Dunn's stuff go out of print a bit sooner. Not because he's 180 degrees wrong on everything. Of course not. But because he's an influential writer who fuzzies what the gospel is, confusing essence and implication, vertical and horizontal, individual and corporate, the moral and the social. But that's another post.

This is great. The Church needs polemicists. Not jerks - polemicists. We can disagree politely and argue responsibly, but the academic convention of pretending that everyone is sort of right in order to maintain peace is unhealthy and does not really produce peace or mutual respect. Better to have the differences out in the open and let them be the focus.

By the way, many people are too young and socially and personally too immature to do doctoral work when they do it. It would be great for people to have some personal and theological maturity going in. It might help with the problem of pretending that we all agree as the only path to civility.