St Thomas Aquinas and the Separation of Science and Spirituality | Episode 8

In previous videos we talked about the Axial Revolution taking place from 800 to 300 BC, which came with a radical change in the way humanity viewed its role in the cosmos. The previous worldview, which we referred to as the Continuous Cosmos, put an emphasis on embedding yourself within reality. With the dawn of the Axial Age, there is a shift to a mythology of two completely separate worlds. We exist within an illusory, mundane world filled with frustration and despair, which our own self-deceptive tendencies keep us trapped within. But if we could attune our mind in the right way, we could take part in a radical process of self-transcendence and awaken to the world that is real. We talked about the Greeks and how Plato believed we could bring about this self-transcendence through an internalization of the sage, who can help us to see beyond our limited view of reality. And by doing so, our psyche would cease to work against itself and we could gain inner peace. We looked at the worldview of Aristotle and Plotinus, who believe that everything we see around us is acting on purpose, trying to reach its fullest potential. And finally, we looked at Saint Augustine, who merged all this Greek thought with the Christian worldview and came to the conclusion that the reason the world is acting on purpose is because of this grand narrative which is trying to resolve inner conflict and help us gain inner peace. By the time the Catholic Church reached its pinnacle, Aristotle was associated with science like Newton is today. He seems to be given good information outside of the church and he can't be ignored. This begins to challenge the religious worldview of the time. There's a conflict between Christianity and Aristotelian science that must be reconciled. Saint Thomas Aquinas is famous for solving this problem and integrating Aristotle back into theology, but his solution proves to be very problematic. What he does is call upon this two-world model we have touched on in previous videos, that there is an everyday world of suffering and self-deception, and there is a real world of paradise and self-transcendence. He says that Aristotle gives us knowledge of our mundane, everyday world, and Christianity gives you faith of the real world. But if we have real knowledge of this illusory world, it must also be real. If both worlds are equally real, then maybe there is only one world, and that is what many have come to believe today. But this was not Aquinas' intention. He says that the real world is the supernatural world, and the illusory world is the natural world. Both are real, but he claims that this world can only be accessed through faith, not reason or science. He is relying on the two-world model of reality while simultaneously undermining it. With this worldview of Aquinas, faith goes through a transformation. Augustine believed faith was when love moves our reason. Aquinas now claims that faith is when love moves you to assert your will. Previously, faith was an understanding and paying attention to the turning points of history. But now faith is going to make a transition to how most of us see it in modern times, which is believing something without sufficient reason or evidence to do so. Rather than love and reason being bound together, like in the worldview of Aristotle or Augustine, things start to fragment. Faith goes up here, and reason goes down here. They are separated. In this old worldview, only love and reason together can take you from one world to another. The first is an ascent, while the second is a division. Science and spirituality have been pulled apart and are now opposed to each other. If you believe a supernatural world exists, then this is not a problem. But what happens when your The supernatural world goes away. Love no longer has a job or a place. And that will we talked about is going to take on a very important role. Around this time, a lot of bad things start to happen. The bubonic plague hits Europe. 30-40% of the population dies. This is catastrophic. The world is now seen as a place of chaos and evil. The old structures and ways of living are being called into question. Soon there is a labor shortage, and people sell their labor because it is in high demand. This breaks up the feudal system of holding land in exchange for service and labor. People can now choose where to work, something we take for granted today. More than ever, people are in control of their own destiny. But while this is happening, the world around them is falling apart. So more and more people are relying on their own self-determination to get by. Around this time, there is also widespread famine. France enters the hundred years war, and the church goes into civil war with two or three popes claiming legitimacy. We have all these converging factors of death, famine, war, plague, hypocrisy, and heresy. Everything people once believed is being undermined, and the world appears to be falling apart. How does someone living in this time take charge of their own life? Well, now labor is in high demand, so they have the freedom to be self-sufficient. And it seems like they must, because the world no longer offers them any guidance. As a result, western spirituality is going to go through some major changes. Soon comes the rise of the Rhineland mystics. This previous vision of a spiritual and rational ascent upwards is going to be replaced with the mystics' claim that love is self-negation. The mystics pick up on this aspect of self-loathing within St. Augustine and St. Paul, and what they find is that two separate wills are fundamentally oppositional to each other. They say that the only way we can connect with God is that our will must negate itself, so it will not oppose God's will. And by doing this, we can create space for God to flow within us. We go from an ascent upwards to bringing God downward. Spirituality becomes self-negation instead of self-transcendence. It becomes a radical process of turning against yourself. You must negate your will, because your will negates the will of God. This idea is then taken up by William of Ockham, of Ockham's Razor, who contrasts Plotinus by saying that God is not bound by reason. He is this pure creative force. In the worldview of Plotinus, Plato, and Augustine, God is the ultimate source of rationality. And in our two-world mythology, God is bound by reason and orderliness. Now, the spiritual world is seen as an irrational domain made up of God's arbitrary will. Ockham goes on to claim that the way God acts upon this world is the same way we act within this world. He claims that all patterns we see don't actually exist. Our mind is imposing all the order we see. We see this as a chair, and we immediately categorize it with everything else we call a chair. We say these things belong together. Ockham says no. They are all radically individual. There is no such pattern in the world, and us putting it into a category is simply an egocentric thing our mind likes to do. Instead of our reason discovering order within the world, the mind imposes all the order we see. Our mind is no longer fitting and belonging to the world around us. It is imposing itself onto it. It is a model of dominating rather than conforming to reality. That intimate connection between the mind and reality is shattered. Metaphors of unity and love are being replaced with metaphors of domination. Nobody wants to conform to the world of destruction in the 14th century. You want to impose yourself onto it, and the consequences of this are something we are dealing with to this day.