The question at the head of this chapter is: if Christ has radically changed human culture through a mobilizing compassion, then philosophy--the practice of thought in relation to the world--would surely show some impact? The chapter gives evidence this is in fact the case, demonstrating the powerful contemporary theme of movement as a product of Christ in the world.
Philosophy came from the Greeks. It was the Greeks who invented the analytic method, the method of negation and affirmation. Remember we're talking about a method not the simple fact of negation and affirmation; of course every human being can do these things. But the Greeks pushed negation and affirmation all the way because they were interested in the final "whatness" of everything, the nature of being as such. They were not interested in an ambiguous interpenetration of things as in the Chinese thought of "yin and yang", nor did they seek an Eastern-style religious attitude where all things are experienced as "one". They sought instead an intellectual knowledge of the final nature stuff, of "what is". For Thales the ultimate reality was water. For Anaximenes it was air.
Plato invented the idea itself as the ultimate nature of stuff. How critical was this as a shift in human culture! His term is "eidos" which is commonly translated form, but also as idea, meaning the appearance of something to the mind. His "theory of forms" said that everything in the universe had a form or idea (eidos) which was in fact a copy of a pure eternal form or idea. The pure eternal form held the ultimate nature of everything. Bingo! Thus was born the other-worldly truth of the world!
This way of thinking has had an enormous influence on Western history, especially Christianity. Plato's notion of the eternal--changeless, motionless, nonmaterial perfection--has profoundly shaped our understanding of biblical "heaven", the "immortal soul" and "what happens when we die". Because of Plato ultimate Christian reality became other-worldly and nonmaterial.
Aristotle is supposed to have reversed the thinking of his master, Plato, giving it a more realist, material bent, but the truth is he still retained the intellectual attitude, i.e. ultimate reality was always perceived in and by the intellect. Thus the intellectual or "ideas man" has had enormous prestige in the West. And in Christianity especially this always slipped back into the Platonic other-worldly attitude. As Nietzsche said it, "Christianity is Platonism for the people".
But a significant change began in the 19th century, breaking from the Platonic world view and emphasizing a sense of "movement" rather than static mental truth. And as an experiential fact our contemporary culture is much more shaped by movement, both physically and now imaginatively via the internet, than unchanging heavenly realities. We live in a post-modern world full of flux, relativity, open-ended movement... But it is Christianity itself which at root has provoked this other kind of world, so undoing the millennial hold of Greek thought! This can be shown in two important areas.
Evolution is one vital area in which movement is stressed in our world. The broadly accepted cultural viewpoint--that the earth arrived at its present form of life over millions of years-provides an intense overall theme of movement. But is it Christian?Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit paleontologist who took part in numerous scientific digs in China and elsewhere, and during his long career of writing and research embraced evolutionary thought from a Christian point of view.
Teilhard saw a natural compatibility between evolutionary science and Christian faith because faith taught a movement in time toward Christ, the Alpha and the Omega. This is a perspective made possible by a number of biblical texts, above all in a passage like Romans 8:19 where it says: "The creation waits with eager longing for the revelation of the children of God..."
Scientifically Teilhard believed that consciousness was a natural accompaniment of the development of biological nervous systems (i.e. not a divine element of the soul coming from beyond). As such all of life is a reaching up toward consciousness, and thence to its perfection as love, what Teilhard calls the "Omega point". The recent science of mirror neurons is strong evidence for the basic accuracy of Teilhard's insight--the neural pathways that allow us to move and respond to our world are also able to "mirror" the same actions in others, putting us at once in the self-other relationship, something which is at the heart of consciousness.
Generally therefore the cultural theme of evolutionary movement does not have to be seen as a threat to faith. On the contrary it can be seen to have inspired by it. The argument is not that Teilhard was right in every respect but that, as he himself testified, it was his Christian faith that gave him confidence to propose this way of thinking. Here therefore we have a powerful example of Christian faith making possible the radical sense of movement expressing itself in evolutionary thought.
The other framework in which we read about movement is the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. This 20th century German philosopher is seen by many to be one of the greatest in Western history. His thought is an effective and real break with the Platonism and idealism of the past: a rooting of philosophy in actual human existence.
For Heidegger the human individual is the place or site or of a disclosure of Being via various key moods or conditions of existence. By far the most important is time: time indeed as a human movement. Because human existence is always moving toward its own death then Being is revealed. It's as if you were gradually being pulled on a rope over a cliff so that ever contact with the ground beneath becomes essential and real! His view is of course a little more subtle than that but this is essentially his vital contribution --situating our awareness of "what is" in direct dramatic human involvement, rather than abstract intellect.
But then numerous commentators agree that what first inspired the determining role Heidegger gave to time was--amazingly!--the New Testament. Heidegger taught courses on the New Testament and it was the early Christian sense of living in urgent anticipation of the coming of Christ (and how that affected immediate experience) which underlay his thought about the role of death. He just shifted the key horizon from Christ to death, and voilรก! an extremely powerful philosophy of existence was created.
But then if that is the case it has two significant consequences: one) the tradition of Christian faith has shaped at its core the most influential philosophy of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st; and two) the most dynamic underlying truth of Christian existence is not the concept of "heaven" but movement in time through relationship to Christ. Christ mobilizes the present world in all sorts of ways towards its authentic future.
Heidegger's thought effectively shows us that the true philosophy and force of Christian faith is not some supposed perfect other-world accessed after death (or through rapture!) but a movement in time toward Christ whose meaning is so powerful he changes the condition of existence in the present. Change in the present may also come in terms of crisis, because of the world's unwillingness to accept compassion rather than anger.But then this simply intensifies the pressing need for compassion!
The more compassion the more crisis, but then also the more crisis the more compassion!
Thus we can see that the overall thesis of the book--that the message of the gospel has radically affected human self-awareness and experience--is confirmed from the side of philosophy, in terms of the deep sense of movement released in the world by Christ. This means that the Christian message has actually broken its Platonic chains by its own natural power.
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