Revelation and Metaphysics

Yesterday I was thinking about the boundary -- the one between orthodoxy and heresy, both intrinsic, and extrinsic -- when I had a brainwave. It will have to be fleshed out and all, but it may help resolve some of my vertical neuroticism.

Vertical neuroticism? Oh, that. Petey just now called me a V.N., but as usual, left it up to me to figure out what it means. Obviously, it is an allusion to one of the “big five” personality traits, these being conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, introversion/extraversion, and neuroticism. 

Neuroticism on the horizontal plane correlates with internal conflict, worry, and moodiness (both anxiety and depression), but what does this have to do with verticality, which ultimately transcends all that worldly mishegas? 

Perhaps Petey was being a bit careless with language, because I rather like to think of myself as simply vertically conscientious. 

My son is the same way, so it must be genetic. He’s a tad querulous, but I didn’t make him that way (my DNA notwithstanding), since I never complain nor argue with other people, only with myself. I’m auto-querulous only. Ninety percent, anyway.  

Petey can be hard to read at times, but perhaps he thinks of me as being on the OCD spectrum. However, I would disagree there as well. Except for my compulsive music collecting, but shut-up. It's none of his business.

Rather, I just want to dot all the i's and cross all the t’s. I mean, metaphysics isn’t rocket science. No no no, it is much more important and consequential than that. Get your metaphysics wrong, and whole civilizations have fallen. 

I remember something Charles Krauthammer wrote, even though he was decidedly not the metaphysical type. Technically he was referring to political philosophy, but in America, our politics is (or was, anyway) uniquely rooted in a distinct Judeo-Christian metaphysic. K-hammer hit the nail on the head when he wrote that

Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything -- high and low and, most especially, high -- lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.

If we are eyewitnesses to everything being swept away, this is why. 

Dennis Prager is another practical man who isn't given to metaphysical flights of funzy, and he says something similar in his most recent columnar rumination, What Are Judeo-Christian Values? Among the top ten values (I would say principles so as to avoid any hint of subjectivism) is  

the most revolutionary moral idea in history: that there are objective moral truths just as there are mathematical and scientific truths. Without God as the source of moral standards, there is no moral truth; there are only moral opinions.

Others include the principle that

God -- not man, not government, not popular opinion, not a democratic vote -- is the source of our rights. All men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” 

Another principle is that 

The human being is “created in the image of God.” Therefore, each human life is precious. Therefore, race is of no significance since we are all created in God’s image, and God has no race.

And 

The world is based on a divine order, meaning divinely ordained distinctions. Among these divine distinctions are God and man, man and woman, human and animal, good and evil, nature and God, and the holy and the profane.

Nor is man 

basically good. Christians speak of “original sin” in referring to man’s sinful nature; Jews cite God Himself in Genesis: “The will of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). They are not identical beliefs, but they are both worlds apart from the naive Enlightenment belief that man is basically good. 

And finally,

Human beings have free will. In the secular world, there is no free will because all human behavior is attributed to biology and environment. Only a religious worldview, because it posits the existence of a divine soul — something independent of biology and environment — allows for free will.

Bob, will you ever get to the point -- to your so-called "big brainwave"? Yes I will, and right now. Above, Prager alludes to there being "objective moral truths just as there are mathematical and scientific truths.” Similarly, the Catechism….

Damn, it’s in the other room, where the mother-in-law slumbers. Do I dare disturb the universe? 

Sure, I disturb it all the time. Just not hers. I love Wodehouse, but I’m not about to insert myself into one of his farcical plots. I could probably get away with it, because she removes her hearing aid at night, but she doesn’t remove her eyeballs, nor I mine, and what is seen can't be unseen, so we’ll let just have to rough it and proceed from memory

The Church magnanimously teaches that if a well-established scientific finding contradicts scripture, then so much for the latter. 

I mean, it doesn’t put it as bluntly as that, but the last thing the Church wants to do is have a repetition of the “Galileo affair,” even though it has been systematically distorted so as to serve as one of the founding myths of a self-styled “enlightened” modernity" accompanied by a barbarous materialism and crude scientism.

Why then do mainstream theologians become such prissy homos the moment you cross or even get close to the Line? Isn’t this what a theologian should do -- test everything in order to give a robust defense? Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?

So, this was my brainwave -- which I still haven’t thought through -- that there is no intrinsic reason why we shouldn't be able to adopt the same attitude toward metaphysical truth as we do scientific truth as they pertain to revelation.

In other words, if a metaphysical truth contradicts revelation, then we don’t simply toss out the latter, rather, we reinterpret it in light of the new truth. It is still true, but has simply been shorn of false a interpretation.

Example. 

Although the Church has never taken Genesis literally, a lot of folks seemingly did. Once it was established that the cosmos came into being 13.8 billion years ago, then the whole six-day creation thing became even more untenable. 

But this hardly rendered it literally “untrue.” The underlying principles remain as sound and unassailable as ever, for example, that the universe is created and not just random, that it evolves over time, and that man as such is a special creation.

Above we alluded to “metaphysical truth,” as if it is a settled thing and not contested and controverted on all sides. Indeed, an infertile egghead -- a man of tenure -- can almost be defined as one who rejects even the possibility of metaphysics, let alone that there might be a universally true one.

But there is and must be, and I don’t see any problem with interpreting revelation in terms of it, which is the brainwave alluded to in paragraph one. 

Having said that, we must approach this with all due humility, modesty, conscientiousness, and neuroticism in order to avoid falling into an even deeper hole than the one we find ourselves in. 

But this is my short morn, so there’s not nearly enough time to do it justice. However, even before getting into details, we should all be able to agree that there can be no higher privilege than truth.

You're welcome.