What the Modern Man Should Not Believe

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORS: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS OF THE PRoVINCE OF ST. JoSEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C. VoL. XI JULY, 1948 WHAT THE MODERN MAN SHOULD NOT BELIEVE No.3 UNDER the heading, "What The Modem Man Can Believe," there appeared in the November Atlantio Monthly an article by Rufus M. Jones, the principal thesis of which was: We must readjust faith to discovered facts. The present article is an examination of that thesis. The pivotal point of Mr. Jones' thesis is that what he terms the " Copernican Revolution " necessitates a complete re-evaluation of the traditional faith. " Every aspect of our religious faith must be rethought, reconstructed, and adjusted to the demonstrated facts which this Copernican Revolution forces upon our minds." Consequently, the whole urgency of Mr. Jones' argumentation is based upon the supposition of this " Copernican Revolution, which came in the dawn of the Renaissance, [and] was one of the most staggering blows at the dQminant faith of the western world that has ever been leveled lJ.77 278 PIERRE CONWAY against it in the long undeclared warfare between science and religion." It is the uncritical acceptance of such suppositions that has caused a sort of " Iron Curtain " to fall upon the Middle Ages, that has caused many moderns to reject the ancient faith before they have even. heard it. Because of them the modern man dares not seek the truth farther back than the Renaissance. But now the precarious position of western civilization has sent serious thinkers on a desperate inventory of wisdom through the ages. In this search for whatever is solid and durable, whatever inay prove a guarantee of survival, it is more necessary than ever to rend now this " Iron Curtain," to be .willing to face the facts even at the price of cherished illusions. There is nothing to fear from the truth. So let one not be afraid to look, for once, at the Middle Ages as they really were, and the ancient faith, as it really is. Today it is no longer a mere academic luxury but a vital duty in the interests of man's heritage of wisdom, to re-examine the picture of the medieval world as Mr. Jones so persuasively draws it. One must indeed, as Mr. Jones urges, be prepared to sacrifice·beguiling fantasies for uncompromising facts, which, if they exact a readjustment of one's beliefs, are nonetheless a salutary revision in the direction of a truth which is full of hope, ever new and ever living. Since Mr. Jones is engaged in the serious task of evaluating the basis of one's approach to God, his reconstruction of. medieval thought should be approached, not as a well-written and imaginative essay, but with the studious intent of uncompromisingly winnowing the wheat from the chaff. Upon what concept of the universe did the so-called "Copernican Revolution " come stealing in at the dawn of the Renaissance? In Mr. Jones' words," Slowly, through centuries of imaginative thinking and speculation, ... it had become a settled conclusion that the earth was the c.enter around which everything else in the visible universe revolved. This earthcenter for which everything else was created was thus obviously the focus of interest...and attention of whatever divine beings WHAT THE MODERN MAN SHOULD NOT BELIEVE 279 there were above it." But are we quite sure that in the Middle Ages the earth was the center of the universe and the focus of divine interest? What did Aristotle, whose thought was predominant in the pre-Copernican world, have to say about the matter? "They [the Pythagoreans] hold that the most important part of the world [universe], which is the centre, should be most strictly guarded, and they name it, or rather the fire which occupies that place, the ' Guard-house of Zeus,' as if the word ' centre ' were quite unequivocal, and the centre of the mathematical figure were always the same with that of the thing or the natural centre. But it is better to conceive of the case of the whole heavens as analogous to that of animals, in which the centre of...