An Anthropological Defense of God

Lloyd E. Sandelands

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780765803962
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351321341
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Anthropology--the study of man--is unlike every other study because humans are its subject. And because we are its subject we cannot manage the philosophic and emotional distance necessary to see clearly. Unable to stand apart from ourselves to comprehend our own truth, we are compelled to assume things about ourselves that we cannot prove. In a word, anthropology begins in faith. Lloyd Sandelands approaches the anthropological quest for God by comparing the faiths of modern social science and of the Christian church.

Sandelands describes the social scientific faith articulated by Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Schopenhauer among others, as an imagined state of nature that sees the individual as solitary, self-sufficient, and contented. By contrast, the Christian faith unites us as male and female persons in one flesh before God. The challenge in the author's view is to decide which faith to build our lives upon. Sandelands poses questions about the basic terms of human study--what is a person, and what is society?--and how do the different metaphysics of science and Church lead to different anthropologies?

A worthwhile anthropology must address the questions of what constitutes human freedom, desire, and the nature of the good. Comparing the answers given by science and by the church, he finds that the one paradoxically denies freedom, denies want, and denies the good, while the other affirms freedom, affirms want, and affirms the good. Between these two anthropologies he finds there is but one true study of man.

A companion to Sandelands' Man and Nature in God, his most recent book, An Anthropological Defense of God attempts to establish that an anthropology in God succeeds where an anthropology in science fails. Such success is measured not only by its ideas and findings about man, but even more by its wisdom in teaching us how to live.

1

Human Nature” or “Human Being”

Our subject is man. Our aim is to understand him. What is he? Why is he? And where is he going? Man is a mystery we cannot leave be.

Man is a standing protest to modern thinking which cannot fit him easily to its naturalist, materialist, evolutionary sensibility. He remains stubbornly outside nature, beyond matter, and outside of time. As Chesterton (1908/1959) remarked, man’s appearance in the world is more that of an alien being, a stranger, than that of an animal. Indeed, he is remarkably ill-equipped for the world. He could hardly manage a day if not bandaged from head to toe in clothing, if not coddled in climate-controlled dwellings, and if not propped-up by the prostheses we call furniture. Even more striking, man holds himself aloof from the world and indeed from his own life. He comments on his body, on his circumstances, on everything—and laughs. Whatever he may be, he is not of this world.

This book is about how to understand man. Its two-part thesis is easy to state, even if it is not easy to argue. The first and negative part of the thesis is that man cannot be understood scientifically, in terms of his human nature. This is for the simple and good reason that there is more to man than human nature. In his essence, man is not a kind or instance of nature (he is not adjective to the noun) and therefore is not to know in the scientific terms that define nature. The second and positive part of the thesis is that man can and must be understood theologically, in terms of his human being. Man exists in God and therefore is to know in the theological terms that define God. Between the phrases human nature and human being goes all the difference in understanding man. This book tells the story of these two phrases by comparing the man described by science with the man described by the Christian Church.¹ This book comes to see that a true study of man must be a study in God; it must be anthropology in God. But this is getting ahead of a story that is entirely left to tell.

We begin at the beginning with simple truths of feeling, thinking, and faith that must be accounted by a study of man. Here, already, the problem of anthropology comes into view.

Divided Feelings

“We know the truth, not only by the reason, but by the heart, and it is this last way that we know the first principles”

Pascal (1931, p. 42)

What is to know about ourselves without thinking? What first principles pull on the heartstrings? What is to know with everyone else; with grandmother, uncle, sister, and father?

How different are man’s feelings. He alternates between dark and light, between self-loathing and self-love, between despair and hope. Here he is dismayed, at odds with others and with himself. There she is joyful, at peace with others and with herself. Here he longs to be settled and loved. There she feels happily so. Here he is bewildered by existential doubts. There she is sure of life’s meaning. Man is all over the place. If the heart knows one truth, it is that its truth is not one.

How different too are the hearts of different peoples and ages. Writing a bare generation ago, Lasch (1979) catalogued the pervasive inner emptiness of America’s Culture of Narcissism. Looking back on the book today, reviewer Judge finds it even more discerning of the over-seriousness, banal understanding, unconcern for others, and insecure identity of the nation’s young:

It is difficult to look anywhere in American culture and not see signs of this disorder. On Oprah, in bars, while shopping, on sitcoms, in films and especially the current crop of reality shows, are displays of groups of people who all are saddled with a similar set of problems: the inability to commit. “Hooking up,” a kind of drive-by sexual encounter, has replaced the constraints of courtship. Kids with absolutely no parental discipline—and therefore no scaling down of their rage—run wild through stores and mall. The kids of MTV’s The Real World tower with moral hubris on the subject of their race pride and tolerance for alternative lifestyles while simultaneously appearing psychologically weak-willed and unable to deal with the tragic nature of life. These are not cocky and ego-driven people, like FDR or Humphrey Bogart from a previous generation. These are ciphers.²

Compare this doleful strain of wealthy and comfortable modernity to the joyful strain of medieval monasticism described by Saint Francis of Assisi who, in his relationship to God, knew a life of every sweet feeling:

Lord God living and true (cf. 1 Thessalonians 1:9). Thou art Charity; Thou art Wisdom, Thou art humility, “Thou art patience” (Ps 70:5), Thou art Beauty, Thou art gentleness; Thou art security, Thou art quiet, Thou art our Hope.

Thou art joy; and gladness, Thou art justice, Thou art temperance, Thou art riches unto sufficiency. Thou art beauty, Thou art gentleness, “Thou art Protector” (Ps 30:5), Thou art guard and our defender, Thou art fortitude (cf. Ps 42:2), Thou art refreshment. Thou art our hope, Thou art our faith. Thou art our charity, Thou art our eternal life: Thou art our entire sweetness, Great and admirable Lord, God Omnipotent, merciful Savior.³

If it is not clear that the medieval life of St. Francis of Assisi was superior to the modern lives of most or many Americans, it is clear that man’s life has different feelings and different truths.

That life has different truths is suggested not only by its different feelings, but more strikingly and significantly by one feeling in particular, a feeling that is perhaps more prominent today than ever before. This is the feeling of living a lie, the feeling of taking part in a life that is not true and that does not have meaning. This is famously the feeling of existential doubt, first identified in the 19th century by Kierkegaard, later celebrated by Nietzsche (as justification for the will to power), and later still explored in literary detail by Camus and Sartre. Mannes (1964), who had good ear for the discordant notes of modern life, described this feeling as a subtle but unmistakable overtone in man’s creative life:

Now it occurs to me that nearly every tone struck today—whether in music or writing or painting or architecture or theatre or anything remotely creative—is accompanied and often distorted by that persistent overtone: But will it sell? It is the shadow that dogs the substance … [And] when the fruits of the human mind and spirit become products, then the overtone sours the tone. The measure of worth of a product is quantitative, and the measure of worth of a creative act is qualitative, and to apply the standards of the material product to the creative product is to deprive a man, whether he is an artist or not, of his reason for being. (p. 15)

The same feeling and truth was described by Mannes’ contemporary, Merton (1955), who lamented the meaningless busy-ness of so much of what people do in their daily lives:

… a society of business rooted in Puritanism, based on a pseudo-ethic of industriousness and thrift, to be rewarded by comfort, pleasure, and a good bank account, the myth of work is thought to justify an existence that is essentially meaningless and futile. There is, then, a great deal of busy-ness as people invent things to do, when in fact there is very little to be done. Yet we are overwhelmed with jobs, duties, tasks, assignments, “missions” of every kind. At every moment we are sent north, south, east, and west by the angels of business and art, to sign something, to buy and sell. We fly in all directions to sell ourselves, thus justifying the absolute nothingness of our lives. (p. 37)

Mannes and Merton worried that the danger in this feeling is truly existential; that man’s very existence stands in question. According to Mannes (1964):

There is just so much inner space in each man, and what fills it is the measure of the man; the extent to which, beyond the daily concerns, he can address himself to the grand questions of life and death, of love and creation. If this miraculous inner space becomes—through cumulative and incessant exposure to what is trivial, superfluous, and irrelevant—as cluttered as the aisles of the supermarket, it ends by losing its primary function as the sanctuary of conscience and the seat of thought. The man who is a victim of things is neither free nor excellent. Living more and more by the priorities of possessions, position, and purse, he does not see beyond them. The overtone is drowning out the tone; or, let us say, the overtone has replaced the tone. (p. 17)

With existential doubt the modern heart knows alienation; the sad sour feeling of being exiled from oneself and others. It is a feeling made poignant by misaimed attempts to master it. Many seek solace in humanism—in the promise of life in the self, in self-actualization. Such people warm to Emerson’s praise of self-reliance, and seek every avenue of self-enhancement—from hair coloring to cosmetic surgery, from physical fitness to educational enrichment. Others abandon hope in naturalism—in the self-annihilating idea that there is only blind nature, red in tooth and claw. Such people join evolutionist Dawkins (1978) in confessing their vanity before brutally selfish genes and in conceding their lives a meaningless folly. But, alas, neither of these ideas—neither humanism nor naturalism—meets the need brought to them. Man requires something more and other than self-affirmation or self-denial. He requires a context greater than himself that gives him purpose and place among the numberless forms of life on earth. By denying man the meaning he needs to live, humanism and naturalism reinforce the alienation of the life he does live.

And finally, with alienation, the modern heart knows longing; the hunger for the absolute. For some, this hunger reaches, as it always has, for God. But for many others, this hunger reaches instead for idols of wealth, comfort, sexuality, and celebrity. From a flat, empty, and unhappy life, and from a hellish self, many people fly into diversion. They demand amusement, and if not amusement then distraction, and if not distraction then death. It is a ruinous demand that Pascal (1931) saw long ago:

The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death. (p. 24, #171)

Like salt water for the thirsty, diversion enlarges the want it means to satisfy. It is a kind of neurosis. Diversions of casual sex and liberated sexual lifestyles magnify the longing for sacred matrimony. Amusements of Hollywood and Madison Avenue fantasy increase the longing for true meeting in love and play. And the blandishments of social esteem and material wealth heighten the longing for charity, for duty, and for courage. There is longing to be something more than a self and something more than an animal. There is longing to be human.

C.S. Lewis (2003) finds soulful hint of this “something more” in that moment of friendship in which man’s true nature comes into view. I cannot do better than to quote Mr. Lewis directly and at the length he requires:

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all. (p. 124)

Thus we begin with a truth before reason, that man is divided in his heart. In this division he feels at odds with himself, alienated from his true being. And, in this division he longs to be one and whole. This is a truth with which anthropology must begin.

Divided Ideas

Truths known first to the heart are known best to the reason. The purpose and task of philosophy, at its core, is to bring the shadowy truths of the heart into the light of reason where they may be comprehended and judged.

Western philosophy obliges us with two ways of thinking about man that we may guess correspond to our divided feeling about him. I use the word “guess” at this early juncture of the book because most philosophy does not put stock in feeling (which it sees, with Hume and others, as a realm beyond the pale of reason) and because it is my aim in the book to use feeling as a measure and test of our ideas about man. The first and main way philosophy thinks about man, dating from the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is as a natural object to know by empirical observation guided by reason. This is man as human nature. This is the way of science. A second, much older, and now substantially eclipsed way philosophy thinks about man, dating from even before the Middle Ages, is as a Divine creation to know by Biblical revelation guided by reason. This is man as human being. This is the way of the Church. These two ways of thinking culminate in different ideas of man—different anthropologies—which I sketch briefly below. In later chapters, as I consider these two anthropologies in detail, I will discuss the feelings and forms of life associated with each. Although these feelings and forms of life may not be strict tests of these anthropologies (because they may be idiosyncratically experienced and unreliably shared), I suppose they offer important clues about how we should choose between them.

Man According to Science

Science thinks of man as it does of everything ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1. “Human Nature” or “Human Being”
• 2. What is a Person?
• 3. What is Society?
• 4. Questions about Man
• 5. Anthropology in God
• References