The Church and Secularism

by Peter Kreeft

I'd like to address the problem of the decline of Western Civilization in terms of symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription.

Sometimes, when people hear me addressed as "Dr. Kreeft," they think I'm the other kind of doctor — a medical doctor — and then, when I tell them that, no, I'm a philosophy professor, they usually say, "Oh, well, I guess we need that kind of doctor too." But today I want to act like a medical doctor, but for the soul rather than the body.

I'm told that in medical school they tell you that there are four indispensable steps to any medical analysis of a patient's condition. And these four steps are the basic logic of all practical problem-solving in every field — medicine, business, detectives, whatever — because, there are two variables: there's something good or desirable and something bad or undesirable. And then there's the cause and the effect. So you can have the bad effect, the bad cause, the good effect, or the good cause. So the four steps of a medical analysis are first, an observation of the symptoms, which are the bad effects; then a diagnosis of the disease that is causing the symptoms — that's the bad cause; then a prognosis of the hope for a healing, which is the good effect; and then a prescription for the treatment, which is the good cause.

All of Buddhism is based on those four points, which Buddha calls the Four Noble Truths. And when one of his disciples once asked him to speculate about other philosophical questions, he refused, saying, "This is all I teach you. I teach you simply that life is suffering, and that the cause of suffering is selfish desire, and that there is hope for ending all suffering by ending its cause, and my Noble Eightfold Path is the way to end the cause." That's a doctor's analysis but applied to the soul rather than the body.

So I'd like to address the problem of the decline of Western Civilization in terms of symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription.

Symptoms

Start with the symptoms. If you went to a country and you found that fifty percent of the citizens of that country committed suicide, you would say that that is a very sick country and does not have a very good hope for survival. That is Western Civilization, because the fundamental building block of all societies is families. Families are the fundamental citizens of every society. And divorce is the suicide of a family. When the body and the soul separate, the body dies. When the mother and the father separate, the family dies. So a fifty percent divorce rate, which is what we have in North America, means a fifty percent suicide rate. That's a very, very serious symptom.

If you think that's a stretch, let's take suicide literally. What is our suicide rate? I think it's the fourth highest in the world, directly proportionate to wealth, by the way; the richer you are, the more likely it is you'll think your life is so wonderful that you put a bullet through your head. And William Bennett's index of social indicators tells us that in just fifty years, in the last half of the twentieth century, the suicide rate among teenagers has increased five thousand percent. That's a rather spectacular statistic.

An even more spectacular statistic is our willingness to murder our own unborn children. As Mother Teresa says, "If abortion isn't wrong, nothing's wrong." Our ancestors would literally not be able to believe that.

I have a little story that shows that. I know a doctor who told me that his friend, a dietician, agreed to work in — I think it was Zaire — some African country — for a couple of years for the United Nations because they discovered this tribe that was so isolated that they were still very innocent, and they distrusted outsiders, and it was one of the most primitive tribes left on earth, and the anthropologists wanted to study them before they died out. And they were dying out because their diet was so bad they were killing themselves but they didn't know it. They were very primitive. For instance, their favourite spice was dried flies. Dead flies dried by the sun. And they didn't trust outsiders, black or white.

So this doctor, who I think was from Canada, volunteered to spend, if necessary, two years of his life trying to win his way into this tribe to convince them to change their diet to survive, so that the rest of the world could study them for scientific interests. And he succeeded, and it took a long time, and he persuaded them to change their diet, and their health improved dramatically and very quickly, so everybody in the tribe knew that he spoke the truth and he was trustable and he was the first outsider they loved and trusted, and they were fascinated with him.

So they kept asking him questions about the outside world. And he said that they were like children: they were very innocent and peaceful, but ignorant. He had to explain to them what planes were, and he explained that we could fly to the moon, and they believed that, and that we had weapons that were so great that we could destroy the whole world with them, if some one madman just pressed a button, and they believed that. They believed everything he said. He was like God to them, almost.

But he said there were two things that it was almost impossible for them to believe. They just had no holding places in their mind. One was, that when they asked him, "Do you have wise men in the outside world too?" — sages, shamans — he said, "Yes, they're called philosophers." Well, philosophy means a love of wisdom. So they asked him "What gods do they believe in?" They were aware that other tribes believed in other gods. And he said, well, seventy-five percent of philosophers outside of Catholic universities are atheists. (Four percent of sane people are atheists, but seventy-five percent of philosophers are atheists.) They had no word in their language for atheists, so he had to explain to them that an atheist believes in no god at all. They at first thought that was a joke. They couldn't believe that. Not the good gods? Not the bad gods? Not the male gods? Not the female gods? Not the gods of the earth? Not the gods of the sky? Not the gods of our tribe? Not the gods of the other tribe? No gods at all? There are people in the world who believe in no gods at all? That blew their mind. But he said they were like very precocious children; they were very energetic and they didn't give up easily, so they said, "We must solve this puzzle."

Whenever they had a puzzle, he said, the oldest members of the tribe would get in a circle and they'd all talk together, like bees buzzing together. They had this ability to hear many voices at once. And after a few minutes or a few hours they finally solved the puzzle, and the head tribesman would announce the solution. So that's what they did with the problem of atheists. It took them all day. This was the biggest problem they ever had in their tribe. But at the end of the day, they finally emerged, smiling, and the head tribesman said, "We have solved the riddle of your atheists. We know that you people have these great big concrete buildings that you like for some strange reason, and that you live in these cities. Well, these atheists, as you call them, must have been born in the cellars of these buildings, and never emerged outside of these buildings. They have never seen a bird, they have never seen a waterfall, they have never seen the stars! That is why they are atheists!"

But there was another thing that he told them that they could not believe at all, ever. Literally, psychologically, impossible to believe. And that was that one third of all the children that were conceived in North America were murdered by people called "physicians" or "healers," who were paid by the parents. Their reaction to that was a polite giggle, because they knew it must be a joke and they didn't understand the joke, so they pretended to laugh. They giggled. And he tried to persuade them that it wasn't a joke. And they literally could not believe that it wasn't a joke. So they thought it was a riddle.

So he stayed there for a few months after he told them this, and every day they'd come to him and say, "Can you explain the riddle today?" And he kept saying, "It's not a riddle. It's true." And they literally could not believe that. He said the last sight I had of them was when the plane came in the little dirt landing strip to take me away, the head tribesman came to me and said, "We will never see you again in this world. You must tell us the solution to your riddle today, because we will never discover it ourselves." And he said, "It's not a riddle. It's true." And he said the last sight I had of him is walking from my side by the door of the plane back to his tribesmen who were eagerly awaiting the solution to this hilariously funny riddle, and they were looking with eyes wide open with expectation to hear the funniest joke they'd ever heard in life, and the head tribesman was looking down and hanging his head, and still not believing. One wonders who the primitives are.

We're not having children. For strictly biological reasons, a society cannot survive without having children. Europe is almost lost. In another generation, Europe will be a Muslim continent, because Muslims are the only ones having children. And we're not. They deserve it. It used to be that seventy-five percent of the people in England were in church on a Sunday morning. Now it's four percent. It used to be that five percent of Frenchmen identified themselves as atheists. Now it's forty percent. You can find statistics of our culture's decline and crisis everywhere. Some of them are very clear; some of them are more subtle. One of the subtle but deep symptoms is moral scepticism. No society in history has ever existed without believing in some version of the natural moral law. Ours is the first that officially does not believe in this. It's illegal to appeal to natural law to justify positive law. The United States Supreme Court said so. I think Canada is even farther advanced, like tooth decay can be farther advanced.

Imagine — I don't have a blackboard here — imagine a square on a blackboard, perched on one of its four points. And at the top there is Community and at the bottom there is Chaos. And at the two corners there are two other Cs which are the only arms, the only means that a community has to ward off chaos. They're called Cops and Conscience. The law of the four Cs. Any community, whether it's a human body, or a community of people, or a tribe of animals, survives only if it wards off chaos. Chaos is like death. It destroys, it separates. And for a human community, the only two ways to preserve that community against chaos are the inner cop or the outer cop. And the inner cop is conscience. And cops are the outer conscience. So conscience depends upon a natural law. If there is no natural moral law, if morality is simply positive law, law posited by man, manmade, the rules of the game, then it's not morality. It's just a contract. There's no binding absolute obligation to it. And that's the prevailing theory of morality among intellectuals and among media personalities in our civilization.

C. S. Lewis wrote, in an article entitled "The Poison of Subjectivism," that "this moral relativism will certainly damn our souls and end our species." C. S. Lewis was a British Oxford don. They are not prone to exaggeration. Why "damn our souls"? Well, according to Jesus, you have to repent and believe in order to be saved. How can you repent if there's no such thing as sin? And how can there be such a thing as sin unless there's an absolute moral law against which you sin? Why "end our species?" Because even though this may not biologically end our species, it will spiritually end our species by producing a new kind of creature, a creature without a conscience, Nietzsche's superman. Nietzsche was, alas, a prophet. A conscience-ectomy would be a very serious operation, to put it mildly. C. S. Lewis calls such a person "a man without a chest." He's got a head, he's got guts, but he's got no chest. He's got no conscience, no moral will.

The Nature of Diagnosis

All right. The symptoms are obvious. We know the symptoms. The diagnosis is the most important point. If you don't go through step two — diagnosis — you can't go into step three or four, cure and prescription. And in fact, of the three steps, the diagnosis is the thing you pay the doctors big bucks for, because they're experts. They've gone to medical school, they've gone through all this training that makes them experts — you couldn't diagnose your own disease very well. You observe your own symptoms, of course. And once the disease is diagnosed, you can peruse the medical books and say, "Well, this is the likely outcome." The prognosis is almost automatic and the prescription is fairly routine. But the diagnosis is the thing.

There's a story of one of the world's first computers, an enormous thing at MIT, during World War II. It was all cathode ray tubes; it didn't have chips then. And it was coordinating the war efforts and went on the blink. And they asked the main inventor of the computer to come and repair it. And he said, "I'd be glad to, but I'm going to charge you big bucks." It was a multi-million dollar computer, and it was worthless without repair. So he said, "I might charge up to a million dollars to diagnose the problem. But I won't charge you anything if I don't succeed." They said okay. So he went up there with a screwdriver, and walked up and down the different halls of the computer, which was as large as a building, and listened, and at a certain point, when he heard something wrong, he tapped with the screwdriver — bom bom bom — and said, "The computer's fixed now." They turned it on, and sure enough, it was fixed. It took him about five minutes. So they said, "Send us your bill." So he sent them the bill; it was a million dollars. For tapping the screwdriver. So they said, "Please itemize your bill." He said, "Gladly." Item one: tapping with a screwdriver, one dollar. Item two: knowing where to tap, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. That's diagnosis.

Nihilism

What's the essential diagnosis of the ills of Western Civilization? It's rather painfully obvious: atheism. But not just in terms of polls; in terms of real presence in people's lives. When Nietzsche, back in the 19th Century, said, "God is dead," he didn't mean simply that God is a myth and a superstition and never did live. He meant that this superstition, this thing that never was literally alive, was the energy of Western Civilization. Nietzsche, like the saints, understood that there is no Western Civilization without God. Although he believed that we created Him in our image, rather than that he created us in His image, he realized that the image and the model go together. When there's a mirror on the wall in a room, and you walk out of that room, due to the finite speed of light, though you can't see it, your image remains in the mirror for a split second after you leave the room. Well, if we're made in God's image, and God is dead, it may take a split second, or a century, for man, His image, to die. But man cannot live without God. An image cannot live without its model. If God leaves, man leaves. Nietzsche knew that. Half of him rejoiced in it; half of him was agonized over it, but he called for the new man, the man without religion and without morality. We're seeing it gradually happen.

If you want to read the two most prophetic books of modern times, read The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis, and remember, his title is to be taken seriously, it's not an exaggeration; and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Brave New World is what de Tocqueville called "soft totalitarianism."

One of the biggest traumas in my life when I was a young and naïve teacher — I'm still young, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, and I'm still naïve — but I gave them Brave New World, a class, and I didn't prepare them for it. I thought they'd understand it. So I said nothing about it, I said we'll discuss it next week, and we started discussing it in the class and I discovered to my consternation that they misunderstood Brave New World. They thought Huxley was for it. Worse, they agreed with him! They were astonished when I told them that this was a dystopia, not a utopia, and that Huxley was a prophet who was counselling us against Brave New World. "What? Against Brave New World? Everybody's happy there! Everybody's comfortable! They solve all problems. There's no poverty, there's no prejudice, there's no war. There's free sex, there's free entertainment, there's free drugs — it's ideal! It's like Boston College campus!"

Well, if we're in love with it, that's where we're going. If there's no God, then there's no being. Wait a minute, that's very abstract. What do you mean, "being"? Well, being isn't just the fact that something exists. Being is real-ness. Nihilism is the ism or ideology that says there is no being. Well obviously we exist, and this piece of paper exists, and the planet Mars exists — what do you mean, there is no being? Well, nothing's really real. Everything's fake. Nothing is to rely on. Everything's empty. Read the Book of Ecclesiastes. Don't read the last six verses, which is the answer. Read the rest of the book, which is the problem. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." What does that mean? There is no being. Nothing's real. Everything's like a bubble. Touch it, and it bursts. People are like bubbles; they're fakes. Everything's a fake. Everything's a facade. Nothing's behind the facade. It's empty. The difference between the full and the empty is more important even than the difference between life and death, or good and evil.

Lack of Meaning

Viktor Frankl wrote a wonderful book called Man's Search for Meaning. It's the best book to come out of the Nazi era. He was a disciple of Freud, a psychiatrist from Vienna, who, as a Jew, was put into Auschwitz. And he observed his fellow prisoners with the eye of a scientist, and was struck by the fact that his predictions didn't come true about who would survive and who didn't. Some of the weakest prisoners who had no privileges did survive, and some of the strongest and healthiest prisoners, including those who had privileges with the Nazis because they sucked up to them, didn't survive. And he questioned Freud's basic principle, which is the pleasure principle, that the desire for pleasure is the deepest need of human beings, and he said, "That principle didn't enable me to predict the facts that I observed at Auschwitz. There must be some deeper need that everybody has that the survivors fulfilled and the non-survivors didn't. What could that be?"

And he came to the conclusion that it was the need for meaning, the need for something real in your life that was an absolute, that you'd give yourself to, that wasn't humanly invented, that was real. And he tested the hypothesis and it came out. All these survivors, weak or strong, had some reason to suffer. They said, "Life has meaning, and suffering is a part of life, therefore suffering has meaning." That's the common feature.

For some of them, the meaning was simply to get back at the Nazis after the war, to get revenge. For some of them, the meaning was to find a family again. For some of them, their meaning was to complete their work, to finish their book or whatever. For some of them, their meaning was to prove that they were strong and able to survive. For some of them, the meaning was religious. But for some of them it wasn't. But all of them turned a corner. All the survivors turned this corner and the non-survivors didn't. Everybody, survivors and non-survivors, asked the same question: why? Why are we here? This is meaningless. This is nonsense. This is unjust. This is ridiculous. This is insane. It is utterly irrational. Of course. And some of them just stuck in that forever, and they didn't survive.

But some of them turned a corner and realized that whereas they had been asking life, "Life, what is your meaning now," they were wrong. Not because they didn't get an answer to the question, but because they were asking the wrong question. In fact, the fact that they were asking the question was the mistake. Life was asking them the question. They were being asked, "What is your meaning?" And they had to respond. That's the essence of responsibility. The ability to give a response to life's challenges, to life's questions: What is your meaning? And those who had any kind of answer to that question survived. Those who didn't didn't.

Many of the prisoners believed that behind life there was a personal God. So it was God that was asking them, "What is your meaning?" But even those that didn't believe in God knew that life was asking them, "What is your meaning?" And those that responded, survived, those that didn't, didn't. So he wrote this wonderful book called Man's Search for Meaning and founded a whole new school of psychology called Logotherapy, based on the principle that man's fundamental need is the need for meaning.

Meaning means, ultimately, purpose: teleology, from the Greek word telos, which means "end" or "purpose." That's a concept which modern science has discarded. And in order to do hard science you have to discard it. You can't bring that into equations. And since science has been our most spectacular success, we tend to make the mistake of thinking that the closer you can get to the scientific method, the stronger and more certain your knowledge is and therefore we tend to discount anything that doesn't fit the scientific method. But purpose doesn't fit the scientific method. You can't measure purpose.

That, by the way, is why I personally think that the intelligent design people, who are very good and well intentioned and reasonable people, are making a strategic mistake when they say, "This is science." It's not. It's philosophy. Science requires quantification and empirical verification, and you can't do that with purpose. It's very good philosophy — it's basically Aquinas' fifth way, the argument from design, which is probably the most popular argument for the existence of God in the world — but to present it as science is not going to convince people, because the scientific method is tougher than that, harder than that, narrower than that.

But if you run your life by the scientific method, nothing's left. Not only do you throw out God, you throw out persons. Science doesn't know what a person is. If you're a doctor and you're operating on a patient, you have to treat that patient as a machine in order to be an efficient doctor. If you think, "That patient has a soul," or "That patient is my grandmother," or "That patient is someone I'm in love with," your hands are going to shake, and you're going to botch the operation. So you have to deliberately suppress the most valuable stuff in you in order to be an effective surgeon or an effective scientist. That brain is a computer that is not working; let me figure out why. But to take that over into life as such is devastating. But, more or less, our society has done that. And therefore there's no purpose: "Oh, everybody needs a purpose, but it's just a fiction. It's something you make up. It's not real. It's not true. It's just a little game you play with yourself in order to motivate yourself. You're the donkey and you invent a carrot and you put it on a stick in front of your own head to make you move." That's not going to really motivate you.

The True, the Good, and the Beautiful

Well, I've expressed my diagnosis in three different terms, which are equivalent: God, being, and meaning. But those are pretty abstract terms. Can I make this more concrete? Can I break it down into something more specific? Yes, I can. Every religion in the world that has, if not a God, something above man, something god-like, also has a meaning, a purpose, a fundamental absolute to give to all human beings as the main purpose of human life. And every religion in the world, according to social scientists and anthropologists and sociologists, has three visible ingredients. It manifests itself in three ways. They are often called creed, code, and cult — or words, works, and worship. Every religion says there's something to believe in as true. Every religion says there's some lifestyle to practice as good. And every religion says there's some work to do, some liturgy, some worship, some prayer or meditation. Thomas Aquinas says we only need to know three things. And the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer tell us everything we need to know. The Apostles' Creed, the simplest and earliest and shortest creed, summarizes what is true. And the Ten Commandments summarize what is good. And the Lord's Prayer summarizes what is desirable or beautiful. So the Creed tells us what we must believe — that's the object of faith: truth. The Commandments tell us what we must love — that's the object of the will, that's good. And the Lord's Prayer tells us what we must hope for — that's what gives us joy. If we use beauty as a correlate to hope, we have the true, the good, and the beautiful as the three absolutes. The three things every human being wants infinitely, and is not satisfied with only a little bit of. We're satisfied with a little bit of food; we're satisfied with a little bit of power; we're satisfied with a little bit of sex; but not a little bit of truth. "I'll be ignorant about fifty percent of truth and knowledgeable about fifty percent" — nobody says that. I've got a couple of things that are good for me, but I want some things that are not good for me — nobody says that. I like to enjoy beauty on Monday, but ugliness is okay on Tuesday — nobody says that. And therefore these are the three things that don't get boring and therefore they are the three foretastes of heaven, because they are three attributes of Almighty God himself.

But without God, there really is no truth, because there's no being. God, being, and truth are a kind of progression. Truth means truth about what is real, and if there's no ultimate being, no ultimate reality, then reality is just what we call it. It falls apart, ultimately. Deep down, everything is empty. So if there's no truth, there's nothing for either reason or faith to grab onto, so you're a sceptic. And that's certainly one of the deep distresses of modern society — scepticism. Second, without truth there's no goodness. Nothing's truly good. Goodness too is kind of a fake, or purely subjective. So another aspect of the diagnosis of our society is amoralism. And without goodness, there's really no beauty. Gothic cathedrals were not made by moral sceptics; they were made by saints.

The Loss of Faith and Reason

Well, let's look at these three aspects of the diagnosis a little more in detail. The ultimate reason for faith, the ultimate reason for believing in God, is that the only honest reason why anybody ever ought to believe in anything is because it's true. If, at the Last Judgment, God had four people in front of him: one of them was an atheist, who believed that there was no God because he thought that was the truth; a second was an atheist because he believed that there was no God because he didn't want there to be a God, it would be inconvenient to him; the third was a theist who believed in God because he thought God would be convenient to him, he wanted there to be a God, but for purely selfish reasons; and the fourth was a theist who believed in God because he thought it was true. So you've got Sartre, Nietzsche, Kant, and St. Thomas.

He says to Sartre, "Sartre, if you were as honest as your words said you were (and probably Sartre wasn't because he was a great writer and a great hypocrite like Rousseau, but) if, Sartre, you were as honest as you said you were, the reason you didn't believe in God, even though it gave you great distress, was you wanted to be honest." "I don't believe in God but I have to believe in truth. And there's no God, and therefore there's no meaning, and life is an empty mess, but I've got to be honest that's the way it is." "Well, Sartre, you're going to go to heaven, even though you're an atheist. Oh, you're going to have a really long purgatory and you're going to have to go to theology kindergarten, but you learned lesson one: honesty! The reason you disbelieved in me is because you believed in truth and truth was an absolute and you didn't know it then, but I am truth. Welcome to heaven. See you in a million years."

Now here's Nietzsche. And if we take Nietzsche's words very seriously, here's the Last Judgment. "If there were a God, how could I possibly bear not to be God? Consequently there is no God." "Okay, Nietzsche. You don't believe in truth. That's why you don't believe in me. You didn't even learn lesson one. You're hopeless. Goodbye."

Immanuel Kant: very nice man; very moral man. Once again, I'm judging him simply by his writings, which is probably very unfair. Kant said, 'Maybe God doesn't exist. But believe in him anyway. Because if you don't believe in him, your life is meaningless. You need moral order, and logically you've got to believe in a God in order for there to be a moral order, so believe in God even though he doesn't exist. Live as if there were a God." "Well, Kant, you're forgetting about truth. If there's no God, shouldn't you be honest, like Sartre? You didn't learn lesson one! So, okay, you can go to heaven too, but you've got two million years in purgatory. Because Sartre learned lesson one. He's in first grade. You're only in kindergarten.

Aquinas — well, you go straight to heaven. I mean, you've got it all. You've got honesty and you've got me." Notice that the difference is not so much their conclusions but their starting point: their honesty. I believe or I disbelieve because — because what, because it's true? Good for you. You've learned lesson one. Because of anything else? Sorry, got to go back to kindergarten. Learn lesson one. So the only honest reason for believing in God is that God's real. That's sanity.

Now if you believe in God, you're also going to understand him. And if you understand him, you're going to love him. And if you're going to love him, you're going to become a saint. So belief and sanctity, faith and charity, naturally go together, which is why James says faith without good works is dead. The two always go together. But the ultimate reason for being a saint is to be sane. A saint is simply somebody who lives in the real world, a world where there is a God. Sanity and sanctity: same thing. F. J. Sheed, Frank Sheed, wrote two wonderful books: Theology and Sanity and Society and Sanity. And that was the central thesis of both books. And Theology and Sanity is one of the best introductions to Catholic theology I've ever read, and Society and Sanity is probably the best introduction to Catholic social ethics I've ever read. I highly recommend both books.

Sanity means realizing that you're not God and you have to conform to reality, where there is a God. Sanity is conformity to being. Sanity is islam to being, "islam" in the sense of surrender. C. S. Lewis wrote somewhere something shocking. Somebody said something like, "You know, during wartime, there's so many regulations, we're not really free anymore." And he replied, "I was not born to be free; I was born to adore and to obey." You're reaction to that tells you a lot about how close you are to being a saint. There are two old-fashioned words that the western worldview used to love, and they're words that we now hate. They're words whose emotional connotation has radically changed: the word "authority" and the word "obedience." They used to be words that made you smile and say, "Yes," and now they're words that make you frown and say, "No." Of course, they correspond to each other. You don't obey tyrants; you obey those who have rightful authority. But what's authority? Almost everybody today thinks that authority is power. That's a very serious mistake. That means that might makes right. It's just the opposite. Right makes might.

The clearest understanding of authority in the Bible, I think, the thing that shows you what authority is most clearly, is Jesus and the centurion, the pious pagan centurion who comes to Jesus and asks for a healing for his servant, because he's dying. And the centurion says to Jesus, "I know you, as a Jew, are not allowed to come under my roof." It's against Jewish law to go into pagan houses. "That's fine. Just say the word, and my servant will be healed." That's the passage we recite before we receive communion and I'm glad that the Pope restored the Biblical allusion, "come under my roof." The roof of your mouth. And then he says, "For I know what authority is, for I know how authority works, for I too am a man of authority; I say to one of my soldiers 'Go' and he goes, I say to another 'Come' and he comes, I say to a third one 'Do this' and he does it." Now, a centurion is tough Roman who has one hundred tough Romans under him. And why do these one hundred tough soldiers obey this one centurion? Is he more powerful than they are? No. He might be a schmuck. But when they look at him, they don't see Simon Schmuck from Syria, they see Caesar, Lord of the World. Why? Because he totally submits to Caesar. The origin of all authority is surrender and submission. So he says to Jesus, "I know how authority works, and I believe that you have authority even over death, and that you can heal from a distance, so you don't have to come under my roof." And Jesus says, "Good to you; I haven't found faith like that in all of Israel. You understand."

So authority is meekness, surrender, submission. Submit to God, and God's very power will come through you. Open the tube at the top end, and God will come gushing out at the bottom end. Close the tube at the top end and you'll just have yourself, and you're just a wimp. The modern mind does not understand that. Early Renaissance humanism was very Christian. The Baroque era was very Christian. These wonderful tributes to human genius were inspired by God and for the glory of God. The tube was open at both ends, the divine end and the human end. Then came the so-called Enlightenment and the attack on the Church and on religion, especially the Catholic religion. And they should really have called it the Endarkenment, because what the Enlightenment did was it absolutized man and absolutized human reason and absolutized the solution to all problems, and the result was the suppression of man and the suppression of reason.

If you know a little bit about the history of philosophy, I think probably the three most influential of all modern philosophers are Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Those of you who know nothing about philosophy or aren't even interested, give me an open ear for just a minute here and I think I can make it interesting to you.

Descartes thought that all problems could and should be solved by reason and reason alone. Reason was the absolute thing and you could solve all theoretical problems and all practical problems by reason. And his new method, which was essentially the scientific method just applied to philosophy, became so popular among subsequent philosophers (all of them except Pascal, who was the one great exception, the rebel), Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Barkley, that finally, when it got to David Hume, who was in that sense a disciple of Descartes, sceptical of everything but reason, Hume became a sceptic.

Hume was probably the greatest sceptic in the history of philosophy. You absolutize reason and you end up in scepticism. I won't go through all the arguments and explain explanations as to why that happens, but you have a crisis of reason in Hume, not only in religion but in common sense, in science, everywhere.

Kant, probably the single most influential modern philosopher, answers Hume in a distinctively modern way. He says well, we can't be sceptics, but we can't go back behind Descartes either, and say that there's a God and there's being, you can know it and can conform to it, so let's redefine truth. Truth is the conformity of the object to the subject. Truth is the conformity of the world to the mind. The mind legislates truth. The mind shapes the world and forms the world. Is there time and space out there? We don't know, but we make it in thinking about it in our senses. And is there really substance and causality and relationship and all these categories out there? We don't know, but that's the way we make it — by thinking logically. And is there a God? And is there free will? And is there the immortality of the soul? We don't know. Maybe not. But we insist on it. The will of man demands it. So we have to live that way. We're going to create truth. And we all do it together, necessarily, in a kind of unconscious way. Well, that's an even deeper scepticism than Hume. You can't ever know objective truth, or, as he says, things in themselves. So the lesson of Enlightenment rationalism is that it produces irrationalism, the crisis of reason.

Why? Well because of what C. S. Lewis calls the principle of first and second things, in a beautiful little essay by that title — one of my favourite magazines is based on the title of that essay: First Things magazine. I highly recommend it. The principle of first and second things is very simple. If you put first things first and second things second, you'll get both. Both will be healthy. If, on the other hand, you put second things first and first things second, you'll lose them both. The clearest example of this is any addiction. Whatever God makes is good in a finite way. If you worship it as God, you will not only miss the true God, you'll mess up that thing because you'll become an addict to it, whether it's alcohol, or power, or sex, or anything. And it's also true with reason.

Reason is great; reason is part of the image of God. Thomas Aquinas says, "If you insult reason, you insult God." But if you absolutize it, not only will you miss what is greater than that, but you'll mess it up. Faith, too. The object of faith is not faith; the object of faith is God. If you have faith in faith, well, that's pop psychology. That's a hall of mirrors. That just means faith in yourself. That just means searching desperately for the faith button to push inside your psyche somewhere.

So the crisis of the Enlightenment is a loss of faith and reason. The crisis of morality is the same thing happening on the level of the will. If you absolutize the will, you become a voluntarist, and Kant did that in order to take morality seriously. His motives are very good. He's a moral absolutist. But he says, "I can't subordinate the will to reason, and reason to being, because I don't believe we can know being, and I don't have faith in that ancient notion of reason as open to objective truth. So morality has to come from the will. My deep unconscious will demands that there be morality. I create morality, just as I create meaning." Well, that sounds like you're exaggerating the role of the human will, but it does exactly the opposite. There's no will left. If the will is absolute, then what do you will? Unless you have something above will, something that is perceived by your mind as truly good, what's going to motivate you? Will itself?

There's a great passage in Chesterton's book Orthodoxy, which is an absolutely amazing book, brilliant book — I think Chesterton's one of the greatest minds of history; he's a philosopher as well as a clever journalist — he's talking about Nietzsche, and he says, "When Nietzsche says, 'Will is absolute. Will something,' and he doesn't tell us what to will, just 'will the will,' he says, well, that's like saying 'I don't care what you will,' which means, 'I don't have any will in the matter.'" So you don't have the passion of the will anymore, without that which the will falls in love with: truth. And you don't have the passion of truth anymore without that which truth falls in love with: being. And without goodness, there's not much beauty, not much to excite the soul.

One more specific bit of diagnosis, a couple of symptoms that are obviously connected with this diagnosis: I'm talking about the true, the good, and the beautiful. All right. In the area of truth, education is supposed to be about truth. It isn't anymore. That's the forbidden word, the "T" word. If truth becomes subjective, education fragments because there's nothing for it to be about. It's just about itself. And that's pretty much what the public schools look like today. Second, if goodness is subjective, then society's going to fragment. There's no ethical unity, there's no ethical consensus. We all have totally different goods. We're living in different worlds. And third, if beauty is merely subjective, then passion fragments. There's nothing to fall in love with that's real, that's really good. We all make it up.

Prognosis

All right, enough of the diagnosis. Prognosis. Third step. We've looked at the bad news, now let's look at the good news. We're pretty reluctant to look at the bad news. We like happy talk. We like good news. And that's bad when you're sick. "Everything's going to be all right." No it isn't. You lie.

Lewis says, at the beginning of The Problem of Pain, that when Christianity came into the world, it seemed too good to be true. Everybody knew the bad news: of course there's sin. But they were sceptical about the good news. How could God be that good? Today it's just the opposite. Everybody believes the good news. But nobody believes the bad news. So we have to first preach the diagnosis before we can preach the cure, which means we're going to have the reputation of being negative and judgmental and nasty and pessimists and all that sort of thing. Well, sorry. If you're dying, somebody has to tell you you're dying before you get better.

Prognosis is not optimism, not pessimism. Optimism says, "Everything's going to be all right." Pessimism says, "Everything's hopeless." None of the prophets are optimists, and none of them are pessimists. They all believe in hope. It can get worse, it can get better — it's up to you. There's no such thing as a prophet of doom, because the prophet of doom does not believe in free will. The prophet of doom says, "You're on a waterslide, and there's sharks at the bottom, and there's no way out." An optimist says, "You're in heaven; all you have to do is to smile." A prophet says, "You're on a waterslide, and there are sharks at the bottom, but there's a way out." So the prognosis is hope, but if and only if you take the prescription. If you have this operation you can be cured. If you do these exercises you'll get healthy. If you change your diet you won't have these headaches. If not, not.

Prescription

All right. There were three basic ingredients to my diagnosis, corresponding to the true, the good, and the beautiful, so there should be three dimensions to my prescription. Yes. First, the dimension of the truth, and the object of the mind. The mind has to be healed. The mind may not be the single most important thing in us but it's the first thing. If you don't see anything you can't will anything, fall in love with anything, act on anything. Once the lights go out, you're hopeless, which is why Satan's primary trick is: dim the lights. Well, our modern thinkers have cooperated with that and our scepticism about truth and goodness and beauty have dimmed the lights. And all you need to do to refute them is not to be a great philosopher; just be a commonsensical, sane human being. Be like a little boy in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy-tale "The Emperor's New Clothes." Dare to say the obvious: the emperor is naked.

Scepticism: the stupidest philosophy in history. What does it mean? Well, ultimately it means there is no being. Oh, really? Is that true? There is no is-ness? It is that there is no is-ness? Well, I mean, if there's no truth. Oh, is it true that there's no truth? No, I mean we can't know it. Oh, do you know we can't know it? Well, we can know it with probability, but not with certainty. Oh, is it certain that you can't be certain? Well, maybe so, but it's just subjective; it's not objective. Oh, is that an objective truth? Whichever way you twist and turn, it's a very simple self-contradiction. And the gospel that there is no moral law, that there is no objective and absolute moral law, that they make it up themselves, why would anybody say that? Why would you be missionaries to this new liberating philosophy of amoralism? Don't you think it's good? If you don't think it's good, why are you giving it to me? Is it good to teach us there's no goodness? Is it bad to teach there is such a thing as badness? That's self-contradictory too.

And you look at much of the modern artistic establishment, especially the ones that are supported by a government, and they're terrified of beauty and in love with ugliness. Well, is ugliness beautiful? Is beauty ugly? That's self-contradictory too. So, heal the mind by common sense. The greatest book anybody ever wrote about the greatest mind that ever lived is G. K. Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox. And the main point of that book is that Thomas Aquinas is the most commonsensical philosopher that ever lived. Popes have repeatedly repeated that.

Second area: the will. What would be the restoration of the moral will? Would it be willpower? Would it be finding the little button that you could push that would give you an extra oomph or something? No. No. The will has to fall in love with truth. You have to see God to be passionately in love with him. The will can't start itself. It depends upon the real presence of God. Romeo is not passionate about Juliet until he meets her, and you don't get passionate about God until you meet him. But when you do, well there's a spiritual gravity there. When you open yourself to that gravity you're sucked in, and you go really fast. And that spiritual gravity is holiness; it's what God is. It's charity, which is the essence of sanctity. And that's winning; that wins the world.

It won the world once. Why do you think tough, worldly, pragmatic Romans converted to Christianity? Did it make them more rich and powerful? Did it make rational sense? No. Well, they saw saints. What do these people have? They're either crazy or they've discovered the secret of life. Why do they dare to do what we don't even dare to do? Why do they risk their lives for each other? Why do they go into the mouths of lions singing hymns and forgiving their enemies? Well, that will — that healing of the will presupposes the healing of the minds, seeing God. But it also results in the healing of emotions.

We're big on emotions nowadays. We want to heal the emotions. Almost all our books on science are about psychology and all the books on psychology are pop psychology and all the books on pop psychology are about emotions. How do you feel? That's it. We don't even say, "I think that" anymore, we say, "I feel that." The only way to heal emotions is to ignore them. What? Emotions are terribly important! Yeah, they are. They are. But if you focus on them, they go away, whether they're good or bad. Let's say you're having a bad emotion: lust, or anger, or resentment. You're tempted to forget the fact that you're having this bad emotion and focus on the object of your lust or anger or resentment. But turn around and look at yourself, and you'll say "What an idiot I am." And it'll go away. That's why the Church mandates confession. On the other hand, if you're having a very good emotion, if you're in ecstatic joy, when you turn around and focus on that and say, "Good grief! I am in ecstatic joy! I am having a religious experience! I must write a term paper about that," it'll go away. So don't make your emotions go away when you're having good ones. Forget them. Remember them only when you're having bad ones. Surf on them. Surf on the good waves, not the bad waves. Avoid wipe-outs.

Can I get practical about the prescription? I mean, the good, the true, and the beautiful; that sounds very good, but it's kind of philosophical. Can I get more and more practical? Yeah, I'll give you maybe seven or eight or nine pieces of practical advice for saving your soul and Western Civilization — in that order, by the way, because Western Civilization won't be in heaven but you will, hopefully.

Number one: be a realist. Know we're at war. When you suddenly realize you're at war, your consciousness changes. Everything changes. You get a different perspective. You stop complaining about the lumps in the oatmeal, or on the bed. You're on a battlefield for goodness' sakes. Oh, gee, I thought it was a nice meadow, and I thought those were butterflies, and I was going after them with a butterfly net. No, those are live bullets. Oops.

Second: know who your enemies are. We've got a battle manual called the Bible that tells us these things very clearly. Spiritual warfare is on almost every page of the Bible. And it's very clear who our enemies are, at least in the New Testament. Our enemies are not flesh and blood but principalities and powers of wickedness and high places. Our enemies are demons. We have enemies. Nobody can pray the Psalms without knowing we have enemies. The word occurs hundreds of times. It's one of the most, maybe even the most pervasive themes in the Psalms. Spiritual warfare. And unless Jesus is a liar or a fool, our enemies are Satan and his minions, which are formidable and real. Don't underestimate him, but don't overestimate him either. Those are the two ways to lose a war. "Our enemy is nothing." Well, they'll zap you. You probably felt that about the Bruins last year. Or "our enemies are everything." They're going to win! You just lay down your arms and give up. Yep, know your enemies.

Third: follow Winston Churchill's advice, in one of the most memorable lines in any commencement address in history. During World War II he went to his alma mater — Eton, I think it was — and said, "Never, never, never, never, never, never, never give up." There wasn't much else that he said. He didn't need to say anything more. Never, literally, never, because this is a war for eternity, not just for time. It's a never war.

Fourth: use Christ's weapons, not yours. Christ's weapons are charity, not hate. Hate never works. Christ's weapons are truth, not propaganda. Propaganda never works. Use Christ's weapons. There are many of them. They're listed in the New Testament. Ultimately, Christ's weapons are his own presence, and we have the most powerful thing in the world right here with us. It looks like a little piece of bread and it goes into your body. And that's more powerful than all the galaxies. That's more powerful than nuclear bombs. That's more powerful than the devil.

Fifth: love sinners much more than you do. And hate sin much more than you do, out of your love for sinners. Remember that the Church is not a museum for saints; it's a hospital for sinners. And there are people who are bleeding to death and we're going to help them. And don't expect them to be grateful all the time. Any social worker will tell you that.

Sixth: be happy. The fight is fixed. You're guaranteed to win. The gates of hell are not going to prevail against the Church so if the gates of hell won't do it the ACLU won't do it either. Be happy. But make noise. Fight. Bother people. Don't be a sheep. Sometimes I think — I don't want to insult you wonderful people, but — if you could only exchange, let's say, a million New Yorkers for a million Canadians, that would help both societies a lot. Nose in your face. A little more of that, please.

Point number eight: at the same time that you should make noise, you should be silent. Silent inside. Patient. Waiting for God. He's not a train. He doesn't run by your timetable.

And finally, know yourself. This is old Socrates. This is not something that requires a lot of faith. Remember my southern Baptist preacher sermon: I'm God, you're not. God says that to us. But we tend to say it to him. That's what Job repented of. And as a result, what did Job get? God. Heaven. Why was Job totally satisfied before he got any of his stuff back, before he got his health back, before he got his family back, before he got his friends back, before God gave him any answer at all to the problem of evil and explained nothing? Because Job got heaven. What's heaven? The presence of God. Once you're there, that's it.

That's why Thomas Aquinas was the greatest philosopher in history. It was because he was silent enough to call his whole Summa straw, compared with the vision of God that he had, and he couldn't write any more words. It's because he had the wisdom to confine his answer to three words, when God asked him the most important question in the world. He was in the chapel, in the middle of the night, he'd finished the treatise on the Eucharist, and Brother Reginald, his confessor, swore under oath that he saw Thomas there in the middle of the night and heard a voice coming from the crucifix, which was the voice of Christ, and it said, "Thomas, my son, you have written well of me. What will you have as your reward?" And Thomas gave the absolutely perfect answer, "Only yourself, Lord." The closer you get to that, the closer you'll get to becoming a saint, and that's the only way to save Western Civilization.

The Author

Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at Boston College. He is an alumnus of Calvin College (AB 1959) and Fordham University (MA 1961, Ph.D., 1965). He taught at Villanova University from 1962-1965, and has been at Boston College since 1965. He is the author of numerous books (over forty and counting) including: The Snakebite Letters, The Philosophy of Jesus, The Journey: A Spiritual Roadmap for Modern Pilgrims, Prayer: The Great Conversation: Straight Answers to Tough Questions About Prayer, How to Win the Culture War: A Christian Battle Plan for a Society in Crisis, Love Is Stronger Than Death, Philosophy 101 by Socrates: An Introduction to Philosophy Via Plato's Apology, A Pocket Guide to the Meaning of Life, and Before I Go: Letters to Our Children About What Really Matters. Peter Kreeft in on the Advisory Board of the Catholic Education Resource Center.

Copyright © 2012 Peter Kreeft

This item 10737 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org