Since my friend Meg Galipault responded to my earlier blog on Steiner’s “New Literacy” essay (December 19th, 2006) with the question “are the humanities so isolated from the sciences that Steiner’s ‘New Literacy’ strikes academia as profound?” I thought that I should provide some gestures toward a response. Meg Galipault raises an important and serious question here; as she goes on the say in her response: “Honest question here, not anti-academia snark.” And I do take her question as honest. On the one hand, plenty of scholars in the humanities have an interest in and knowledge of various branches of the sciences. I know an historical theologian with a background in Mathematics; literary scholars with knowledge of meteorology, biology, and astronomy; etc. I try to keep up some small reading knowledge of biology, especially neurology, which has entered in a miniscule way into some of my work with literature. The humanities scholar with some knowledge of the sciences is of course nothing new. On the other hand, I take it that what really needs to happen, and what I think that Steiner is getting at, is that these fields of knowledge need to be more fully integrated, and by more of us, than they currently tend to be.
I am reminded of one of my latter conversations with Father Walter Ong, a Jesuit priest with a working knowledge of just about everything. (Back when I was in graduate school in English at St. Louis U., I introduced myself to a graduate student in Geophysics, who asked if I knew Father Ong. I said yes. The young man seemed quite amazed as he told me, “He even knows things in my field.”) In this latter conversation, Father Ong said that what the church needs now is a theology based on science. He tended to take the long view, and sometimes he was accused of being an optimist. On one occasion he said, “I can afford to be an optimist; my expectations are low.” On the occasion that I am recalling, he shrugged and went on to say, “It’ll keep the church busy for the next couple of hundred years.”
I take it that a key phrase in Ong’s statement is “based on”–that the church (I take it that he had the Catholic Church most immediately in mind, the denomination of which we are both members, though I suspect that he would say much of the same of Christian theology generally) needs a theology based on science, something far different from, say, a justification of theology in the face of science. Frankly, I harbor doubts that such a justification is either necessary or of particular interest. However, articulating a theology based on science means carrying out the enterprise of theological reflection from within a sense of the universe that science has disclosed to us, a universe in which our planet is billions of years old, one in which the basic elements that make up the earth long ago began to combine into basic organisms that increased in complexity through a long evolution, an evolution that still goes on, leading to the very human consciousness that develops theories about the earth, writes novels, makes movies, and so on. The style of theology arising from such a sense of the world differs greatly from the Platonically inflected theology that has dominated so much of Christian believers’ intellectual lives. A Platonically inflected theology, with its emphasis on Plato’s sense that true actuality is what is essential and unchanging, quickly becomes an otherworldly theology. But as Father Ong was fond of saying in class, nobody ever found those unchanging forms. A theology that takes seriously what science has disclosed about the universe, a theology that lives within the contemporary moment (which is not the same as taking whatever is fashionable as the final word, but rather of taking seriously what one finds compelling and real in the contemporary lifeworld) is one that emphasizes process, multiformity, multivalence, complexity, and the human person as embodied consciousness. Actually, the movement of thought that I am describing here has been developing for a long time, going back at least as far as the work of Teilhard de Chardin (though of course he had his precursors also) to that, at the present moment, of such theologians as John Haught and Philip Clayton. (See, for example, Haught’s God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, Westview Press, 2000; and Clayton’s Mind & Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 2004.) One need not agree with all, or perhaps even most, of what these thinkers say to see the importance of the trajectory of thinking that they represent.
I suspect that many workers in this field of theology would agree that the work of integrating theology with a sense of the world disclosed by modern science is in many ways just beginning. It is a mode of thinking that demands great rigor and that will likely take a long time to develop. And yet the questions raised by this effort to integrate theology with modern science are crucial and compelling–at least they are to me. As Clayton says in his preface to Mind & Emergence, “What we believe about ourselves and our place in the universe, about science and history and the contents of our own consciousness, will make a crucial difference to our understanding of ourselves and of the world we inhabit.” Part of the world that we inhabit, a part that is deeply affected by our beliefs about the world, is the vast array of questions, insights, approaches, protocols, understandings, texts, etc. that make up what is traditionally called the humanities. As is the case with theology, the integration of these traditionally “humanistic” pursuits with a sense of the world disclosed by science takes great rigor and much time. There have of course been some deeply helpful beginnings. The investigations, conducted by such figures and Marshall McLuhan and Father Ong, of how humans interact with technology and how various technologies restructure human consciousness have been quite salutary. A recent book that I have found helpful is Mary Thomas Crane’s Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). There may be a sense in which whatever work of investigation we are engaged is always just getting started. Because everything that we discover raises further questions that lead to further insights and new ways of experiencing ourselves in the world, which themselves lead to new questions, new insights, new judgments, etc., any given moment of human cognition can feel like a new beginning. I take that this sense of the world is one that can make intellectual pursuits seem at once exciting and daunting.
In answer to my friend Meg Galipault’s question, I must admit that some humanities scholars are in fact isolated from the sciences. Because any field of investigation makes its own demands and carries its own complexity, it is quite easy to become isolated. I find myself struggling not to be thus isolated, and perhaps I should confess that I remain dubious of my success thus far. At the same time, because I interpret Steiner’s call to be for a deep integration between the humanities and the sciences, I understand what he is referring to to be something still needing to be accomplished; in fact, I understand it as an ongoing process always needing to be accomplished anew. If our investigations and work of integration are to be authentic, the results of a desire to understand, discover, and know rather than the articulation of already foregone conclusions, we are not likely to know ahead of time precisely the kinds of shapes that our work of integration will take. The prospects are exciting and daunting indeed.