WISDOM AND HISTORY

by Bruno Barnhart, OSB Cam

What is the relation between wisdom and history? No simple answer can be given, of course, to such a maddeningly simplistic question. The question is forced upon us, though, by the fact that the progress of history has brought about an eclipse of spiritual wisdom in our contemporary western world. Father Bede repeatedly drew a thick dividing line between, on the one hand, the ages in which the 'universal wisdom' or 'perennial philosophy' prevailed among the various peoples of the world and, on the other hand, the modern age which he saw beginning in the West with the Renaissance. Modern western civilization had, he felt, uniquely among the cultures of the world, abandoned the way of wisdom to embark upon a new way of scientific reason. He saw the domination of this critical scientific reason as destroying the unified threefold universe of antiquity – at once spirit, soul and matter – by reducing it to the one-dimensional world of materialism. Perhaps there is something in Christianity itself that has contributed to this strange phenomenon. The Christianity of the New Testament is both sapiential and historical, contemplative and dynamic. The dynamic historical quality diminished as the church set into fixed institutional forms, as theology adopted philosophical structures. Then, from about the thirteenth century, the Christian wisdom theology of the early centuries and of medieval monasticism gave way to a more purely rational - and still more unhistorical - mode of thought from which developed the scientific mentality which has come to dominate the modern West. And it is science, and the technology which it generated, that has largely driven the historical progress of the modern West.

Bede is far from the first to see history proceeding in this 'descending' direction. Others, however, unlike him, have welcomed the development. Philosopher Auguste Comte (1789 - 1857) theorized that each science and each human society passes through three phases. First comes a 'theological' phase in which everything is explained in terms of the gods. Then follows a 'metaphysical' phase in which great abstract ideas are seen as the principles of reality. The sequence terminates in a 'positive' or 'scientific' stage, in which explanations become rational and empirical: the facts of observation are correlated with one another.

We can trace a three-phase evolution of this kind in our western culture, in the shift of the intellectual mainstream first from the sapiential theology of the fathers and the medieval monks to the metaphysics of an Aquinas and the theology deriving from it, and then from this scholastic perspective to the dominant scientific mentality of the age of Newton, Galileo, Darwin and Einstein. Comte saw this as a healthy progression in which the lofty dreams and fictions of an earlier age were replaced with the positive empirical knowledge of modern science. While there is certainly some truth in this judgment - typical of the mind of the Enlightenment - it is hopelessly inadequate to the depth and power of sapiential and metaphysical understanding.

Comte's scheme presents an interesting contrast with the much earlier historical scheme of Joachim of Fiore, (c. 1132-1202), who saw an ascending 'Trinitarian' movement in history from the age of the Father, or age of the 'Order of married people' under the Law, in the time of the Old Testament, through the age of the Son, of the 'Order of clerics', to the age of the Spirit, characterized by the 'Order of contemplatives', which would begin about 1260 AD. But we have witnessed - instead of the conversion of the whole world to Christianity foreseen by Joachim - the growth of a secular culture which is now in the process of spreading over the entire planet. While the Christian monk Joachim, at an early point in the unfolding of western culture, envisioned the continuation of history in an ascending, spiritualizing pattern, Auguste Comte, later in the day, looked back and charted the descending, rationalizing movement which has, in fact, characterized the West since the thirteenth century.

Sapiential (or wisdom) consciousness lives in a unitive light. Sometimes the unitive quality is experienced directly as nondual consciousness. Sometimes it becomes objectified into a poem, a work of art, a philosophical theory or even a scientific equation. Ultimately, however, the unity is something more primal and fundamental than any of these expressions of wisdom – something deeper and fuller than either our experience or our understanding of that experience. As the human spirit walks through the varied landscape of history, it reflects – like a silvered disk – everything that impinges upon it, conferring upon each new discovery the unitive quality of its own light.

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A quick survey of some of these different inflections and expressions of unitive consciousness that have successively appeared in the West may bring some light to our question.This consciousness emerged powerfully during the Axial age (the first millennium before Christ). We can detect it behind the thought of the great Greek philosophers, especially that of Plato. (Still earlier, in India, unitive consciousness had already been expressed most fully and explicitly in the writings of the early Hindu and Buddhist masters.) The disciples of Jesus intuited the unity somehow present in their master, then experienced it dramatically within themselves as they were baptized in the Holy Spirit, and projected the unitive fullness back into the Jesus of the New Testament. Its light is particulary strong in the Jesus of John’s Gospel. Already and most fully in the writings of St. Paul, the 'mystery of Christ' – identical with the risen Christ himself – was the substantial unity gathering all things into itself. From New Testament times, the church itself in its koinonia (communion) had been understood as the immediate locus of the divine-human unity of Christ, in close relation with the ‘mysteries’ of baptism and eucharist. It was first of all from the prologue of John’s Gospel that the powerful ‘Logos theology’ of Eastern Christianity developed.

When Christian thought became strongly influenced by Platonism, as early as the third century, the unitive theological sense began to assume philosophical forms. For various reasons, the bodily unity, or sacramental core of the mystery began to be left behind. Already in the fourth century, an individualized mystical theology was beginning to develop (for example in Gregory of Nyssa and Evagrius Ponticus); divine union came to be seen less as the gift received when one was born into the body of Christ in baptism – and therefore intrinsic to one’s Christian identity – than as the final crowning of an essentially monastic life centered in ascetical renunciation and contemplative prayer. Gradually – and particularly in the West – an individualized 'mysticism' will become more and more isolated from the common Christian 'mystery,' resulting in a denaturing of spirituality, of theology and of the self-understanding of the church itself. As Christian life ceases to be understood in the immediate light of the divine Word and as a participation in the body of Christ, spirituality becomes one-sidedly interiorized, a private affair, and the church becomes one-sidedly exteriorized and impersonalized in the juridical structures of a religious institution. As person is flattened into the individual, church is flattened into institution, as if the center or heart which held both in a living tension had withered and died. This living transrational center is the mystery, and to the mystery corresponds wisdom. The unity, the vitality and the wisdom of Christianity, it becomes clear, are inseparable from the sacramental core, from that incarnation of wisdom which is the body of Christ.

As the monastic mystical theology of the middle ages begins to atrophy, a new realization of the unitive light appears in the metaphysics of scholasticism, and this will soon be accompanied by a kind of 'metaphysical mysticism' in which 'nonduality' emerges – under the influence of Plotinus and his successors – with an explicitness (e.g. in Eckhart) which is unprecedented within Christianity. The unitive light, at the same time, begins to nourish – more or less consciously – the human rational faculty which expresses itself in philosophy and then in positive science. As the world of 'secular' human activity begins to expand in the West, the unitive light creates a new space of freedom and of creativity in which the individualized art and literature of the West will flourish. Sometimes – as in Spinoza and in German Idealism – the unity will become objectified in a philosophical concept.

The realizations of this unitive light are multiple, varied and often subtle and implicit – as in the new space and light of scientific inquiry and scientific theory. At the beginning of the twentieth century these realizations seem to reach a new level of freedom and intensity, both in the bold metaphor of ‘modernist’ art and in the bold synthetic intuition of relativity and quantum physics. As the shells of convention are broken, poets and physicists reveal new and magical transformations; these spring forth freely within the luminous field of unitive consciousness. But the awakening of this creative self-consciousness has been accompanied by a long and deepening sleep of unitive religious consciousness – or the sapiential mind – in the modern West. Creative intellect is seldom reflexively aware of its ground in unitive spirit, nor of the central historical event from which its freedom derives.

Today, as a new age of 'globalization' dawns, expressions and intimations of global unity confront us on every side. At the same historical moment we awaken to a new level of interaction with the Asian religious traditions, with their explicit awareness of 'nonduality,' and this contributes strongly to the emergence of a unitive awareness in the West. Again and again we become conscious of the urgency of a new, global consciousness, of a way of thinking and of living which is immediately illumined by our common humanity, by our coexistence upon this one planet Earth. The Christian prophet of this new era is Teilhard de Chardin. We can recognize the unitive light everywhere in Teilhard’s thought, and – with particular significance today --in his vision of a 'planetization' of humanity.

Let us turn back to look more closely at one moment in this long story, a pivotal moment around which the history of consciousness turns. It is the time around the thirteenth century when, as we have seen, a Christian wisdom began to disappear before the advance of scholastic philosophy and theology. At this moment we behold a singular, dazzling spiritual-intellectual flash. It is the ‘metaphysical moment’ that corresponds to Comte’s second phase of history, the brilliant nuclear realization of ‘Being’ that we associate with Thomas Aquinas and, differently, with Meister Eckhart. This flash of contemplative intellectuality has a significance beyond itself; we can see it as signaling the historical awakening of the ‘metaphysical core’ of the person – an awakening that will be expressed in a profusion of creative forms from the time of the Italian Renaissance. While metaphysics will very soon give way to mathematical physics as the dominant mode of intellectuality, what is taking place is an awakening, a new self-possession, of the human person, in which a new era – the distinctively 'western' age – begins. This age will be characterized by the increasing autonomy of the individual person and of human rationality, by a new valorization of personal experience and an unparalleled realization of personal creativity. by a consequent flowering of science and technology – all producing an accelerating historical progress and a secularization which will come to involve the whole of humanity.

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The ‘old wisdom’ of Christianity, like that of antiquity which it emulated, was a wisdom which carefully maintained its continuity with a venerated tradition — often to the point of repetition. It was also a wisdom totally subordinated to the biblical Word: until the thirteenth century, theology consisted almost entirely of commentary on the Sacred Scriptures. With the new dialectic, the 'questioning' method that began to prevail at this time, the human person begins to realize its own free standing in reason, and a new space of personal creativity is opened. From within this space – and the corresponding external space of freedom in the spheres of public religion and politics – will emerge the 'new world' of western creativity in the arts and the sciences. This world has continued its centrifugal expansion to a point at which, today, an overall form or a center can no longer be seen and can hardly be imagined. The intellectual code of postmodernism, indeed, sternly forbids such an aspiration to orientation or synthesis.

What happened to wisdom? Let me offer something between a parable and a hypothesis. As the old sapiential consciousness, with its theology, seemed to be swallowed by the awakening dynamism of western history, it disappeared into the indeterminate freedom of the human spirit – to be reborn as a child of this human spirit; to be reborn as creative intuition. Precisely in the new freedom of its activity, the child does not know its origin, its genetic root, does not know the event of Christ from which it came as from a second “Let there be light.” Christian faith and human creativity continue, largely, to live in two distinct worlds. Yet the divine Wisdom which has come into the world is within us and within our society, our culture, our tradition. There within dwell the undetermined light of the divine Word and the all-consuming fire of the Spirit – there in the pregnant, unplumbed depths of our own spirit and of our common human heritage. From a Christian perspective, the secret is hidden within the depths and fullness and power of the initial gift, our ‘identity.’ That identity is precisely that which remains unknown: forgotten by Christians and twice forgotten by the secular ‘creatives’ living outside the world of explicit religious faith.

Theological interpretations of history have themselves a long history, from the time of St. Paul. Upon the noble gravestones that commemorate these theories we find the names – among many others – of St. Augustine, of Joachim of Fiore and of G.W.F. Hegel. The unceasing progression of history – and its exponential acceleration in our time, however, compel us to try again and again to understand this story.

From a Christian point of view, history may be understood in terms not only of Trinity (with Joachim), but of Incarnation (and here we meet, once again, Teilhard de Chardin). While the three divine Persons suggested to Joachim an ascending pattern of spiritualization, the Incarnation of the divine Word suggests rather a descent. The descending phases of Comte’s scheme can be interpreted as expressing a kind of incarnational process within history.

But incarnation is also, from the human point of view, awakening. According to Hegel, the history of the West is the history of the awakening of the human person to freedom – a freedom which entered the world in Jesus Christ. Here too is an ascending pattern, but it remains within the common world of humanity rather than rising above it in the manner of Joachim. And in the course of history this liberation seems to descend continually to lower and lower levels of society, as if it were tracing the path indicated by Jesus in the Gospel. Further, the wave front of liberation seems to spread outwards from the West to the ends of the earth, as Jesus predicted that the Gospel itself was to spread. Perhaps Hegel was right, and this is a key to our theological interpretation of history. Can we read history as a progressive awakening of humanity to its freedom, and thus to its divine identity? This is not the general conversion to Christianity envisioned by Joachim; rather, it is more like a realization of Divinity ‘anonymously’ embodied within human persons and within humanity as a whole.

Notice that a progressive unification is implied in this view of history: the awakening, though multiple, is a single awakening, as if it were the awakening of the one Child of God. This might seem a fantastic dream but for the indisputable fact of globalization which confronts us on every side and every level in our own time. Notwithstanding the conflicts and tensions, the polarizations and the radical extremisms on the right and on the left, humanity is awakening before our eyes as a single reality, a single planetary organism.

For St. Paul, wisdom (or gnosis) was the understanding of the mystery of Christ, but this was an emphatically historical understanding. He often developed it in this sense: the mysterion is the historical unfolding of God’s plan in the event of Christ, as the pouring out of the grace of salvation (which is now the divine life itself!) beyond the limits of the Jewish people to all the peoples of the earth. This one new humanity comprises the one body of Christ; this ‘whole Christ’ is the terminus and final goal of the whole of history. In our present age of globalization, and of a Second Vatican Council in which the Catholic Church comes to envision itself as ‘in the world for the world’ – one world, one humanity – Paul’ s historical gnosis takes on new life for us.

A new Christian wisdom will be grounded and centered, as always, in the divine Word. Burgeoning into a new pluralism and variety in the ‘free space’ of the unitive light, however, it will not remain enclosed within the Word like the old Christian wisdom but will replicate itself in new ‘tongues,’ new worlds of thought. Following the logic of Incarnation, it will learn that manifold language which corresponds to the embodiment of Wisdom and Word — the language of the Person. It will learn how to travel along all the passageways of human consciousness, the ways of the human heart. The One has become incarnate, has become a human person, and in the power of this oneness gathers humanity into one beyond – and beneath – the limits of our understanding. The ungraspable light which is – ultimately – our wisdom must also penetrate the flesh of humanity in such a way that nothing remains outside it, in such a way that we can participate actively in this one birth which precedes and succeeds the small light of our knowing.

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