Ibis and rooster in Book of Job

 

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

  

 

‘Who gives the ibis wisdom or gives the rooster understanding?’

 

Job 38:36

 

 

  

 

When I see ibis (plural?) picking around somewhat indiscriminately in garbage tins in my local area (Waterloo, Sydney), the thought of ‘wisdom’ does not immediately spring to my mind. Yet the Lord, when cross-examining the prophet Job - who had shown himself to have been a little too big for his boots - will attribute ‘wisdom’ (חָכְמָ֑ה) to the ibis bird, and ‘understanding’ (בִינָֽה) to the rooster.

It is interesting that the ibis and the rooster were considered, among the ancients, to have possessed some degree of prescience.

 

Did not the Egyptians even depict their popular god of wisdom, Thoth, with an ibis head?

And Egypt may possibly have exerted some degree of influence upon the author of Job:

 

Egyptian Influence Upon Book of Job

 

https://www.academia.edu/23638519/Egyptian_Influence_Upon_Book_of_Job

 

Job himself is traditionally considered to have spent some time in Egypt - and even to have been a one-time ruler (probably as a governor for Assyria) of Egypt.

 

Whilst it does need to be noted that some translations of Job 38:36 omit the ibis and the rooster, preferring something like this: ‘Who put wisdom in people's inner parts? Who gave understanding to the mind?’, there may be good reason to retain the bird readings. For instance, we read in Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs by August H. Konkel and Tremper Longman III (p. 223):

 

38:36 heart . . . mind. Lit., “ibis . . . rooster.” The mention of the ibis (tukhoth [TH2910, ZH3219]) and the rooster (sekwi [TH7907, ZH8498]) in this verse has been made clearer by the discovery of a seal at Nimrod dating from the eighth century before Christ. The ibis as the bird of the Egyptian god Thot is well known as announcing the flooding of the Nile. Ancient Jewish and Christian tradition has associated the rooster with the announcement of coming rain. This idea has been confirmed by an eighth-century seal from Calah that has an image of the rooster with the water jars of heaven (Keel 1981:221-222). The ibis and the rooster were believed to have wisdom, for they predicted the coming of the rain.

[End of quote]

 

 

In the New Testament a rooster figures significantly during the Passion of Jesus Christ, who had told his Apostles (Mark 14:27-30, 66-72):

 

“You will all fall away,” Jesus told them, “for it is written:

“‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.’

But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.”

Peter declared, “Even if all fall away, I will not.”

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “today—yes, tonight—before the rooster crows twice

you yourself will disown me three times.”

….

 

Peter Disowns Jesus

 

While Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the servant girls of the high priest came by. When she saw Peter warming himself, she looked closely at him.

“You also were with that Nazarene, Jesus,” she said.

But he denied it. “I don’t know or understand what you’re talking about,” he said, and went out into the entryway.

When the servant girl saw him there, she said again to those standing around, “This fellow is one of them.” Again he denied it.

After a little while, those standing near said to Peter, “Surely you are one of them, for you are a Galilean.”

He began to call down curses, and he swore to them, “I don’t know this man you’re talking about.”

Immediately the rooster crowed the second time. Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken to him: “Before the rooster crows twice you will disown me three times.”

And he broke down and wept.

 

Some commentators, though, dispute that the Gospels are referring here to an actual rooster.

Thus we read at: http://acts242study.com/before-the-rooster-crows/

 

The signal the Roman divisions used to change the guard for each shift was a trumpet call. The Latin word for trumpet call (the language spoken by the soldiers) is “gullicinium”, which means, “cock-crowing”. ... What Peter heard probably wasn't an actual rooster crowing, but the end of the watch trumpet call!

 

Other birds and animals, too, are mentioned in the Book of Job as we read at:

https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2013/02/04/consider-the-ostrich-book-job-creation-wisdom/

 

The book of Job contains some of the most descriptive language about the natural world in all of Scripture.  In Job 39 alone, we find God describing the natural history of animals including the mountain goat, deer, donkey, ostrich, horse, hawk and eagle in order to illustrate His omniscience and wisdom in creation.  …. Job contains descriptions of the animals living in the Levant region thousands of years ago. ….

 

The ostrich, which we are told lacks “wisdom [and] a share of good sense”, does not fare at all well at first (Job 39:13-17):

 

‘The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully,

    though they cannot compare
    with the wings and feathers of the stork.
She lays her eggs on the ground
    and lets them warm in the sand,
unmindful that a foot may crush them,
    that some wild animal may trample them.
She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers;
    she cares not that her labor was in vain,
for God did not endow her with wisdom
    or give her a share of good sense’.

 

(v. 18): ‘Yet when she spreads her feathers to run, she laughs at horse and rider’.

 

 

Had we the wisdom of King Solomon, we would most certainly have a far better appreciation

of the nature and significance of God’s fauna and flora (I Kings 4:33): “[Solomon] spoke about plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls. He also spoke about animals and birds, reptiles and fish”.

 

The Book of Job also mentions the raven, a bird that had saved the life of another holy man, Elijah, during a severe famine (I Kings 17:5-6): “[Elijah] went to the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan, and stayed there. The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook”. But, in Job 38, the raven is the recipient of its sustenance from the Lord (v. 41): ‘Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?’

 

Traditionally the raven has been considered a symbol, or a harbinger, of death.  

That thought has stuck with me over the years to the extent that, whenever I cross paths with a particularly noisy or showy raven, I instinctively say to myself, “who died?”  

 

The only time in my life that the appearance of a large and very noisy black raven has coincided for me with a confirmed death was the occasion when I, living in Newtown (Sydney), crossed a park and went to a telephone box to phone a friend, immediately after having seen the bird and saying to myself, “who died?”, and being asked: “Did you know that pope Paul [VI] died?”  

It must have been August 1978:

 

 

Pope Paul VI/Died

6 August 1978, Castel Gandolfo, Italy

 

 

A return to reality and common sense

  

 

“How can the Church evangelise a generation of men and women whose contact with

nature has often been disfigured by technology and trapped within an urban environment

full of traffic, buildings, noise, artificial light and so on? How can they (we) come to knowledge of God if they have a diminished exposure to the nature God created?”

David Collits

  

Pope Francis has, at a General Audience, called for us to trust in God the Father: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-01/pope-francis-audience-trust-our-father.html

 

By Vatican News

 

Pope Francis began his catechesis by saying how St. Matthew’s Gospel strategically places the text of the Our Father “at the centre of the Sermon on the Mount, which begins with the Beatitudes”. This location is significant because it condenses the fundamental aspects of Jesus’ message, he said.

The Beatitudes

In the Beatitudes, Jesus awards the gift of happiness to categories of people who in His time, and our own, “were not very highly regarded”, said the Pope: “the poor, the meek, the merciful, the humble of heart”. The peacemakers who, until then, were on the margins of history, become “builders of the Kingdom of God”. It is from here, said Pope Francis, that “the newness of the Gospel emerges”. The Law is not to be abolished, but requires a new interpretation, finding its fulfilment in the Gospel of love and reconciliation. “The Gospel challenges us”, said the Pope, “the Gospel is revolutionary”.

 

Love has no boundaries

This is the “great secret” behind the Sermon on the Mount, continued Pope Francis: “Be children of your Father who is in Heaven”. God asks us to invoke Him with the name of “Father”, to let ourselves be renewed by His power, “to reflect a ray of His goodness for a world thirsting for good news”. As sons and daughters, brothers and sisters of our Heavenly Father, Jesus invites us to love our enemies, because “love has no boundaries”.

 

Beware the prayer of the hypocrites 

Before giving us the “Our Father”, said Pope Francis, Jesus warns us of two obstacles to prayer. He does so by distancing Himself from two groups of His time: the hypocrites and the pagans. We do not pray in order to be “admired by others”, said the Pope. Rather than just an outward show without inward conversion, Christian prayer has “no credible witness other that its own conscience”. It is a continuous “dialogue with Father”.

 

Beware the prayer of the pagans

The second group is that of the pagans, who pray with formality and wordiness, presenting their petitions without a spirit of quiet openness to God’s will. Pope Francis suggested that silent prayer is often enough, placing oneself “under the gaze of God, remembering His love as a Father”. Jesus tells us to pray like children to a Father “who knows what we need before we even ask”.

 

God needs nothing

“It is beautiful to think that our God does not need sacrifices to win His favour”, concluded Pope Francis. “Our God needs nothing: in prayer He asks only that we keep open a channel of communication with Him so we can recognize we are always His beloved children. Because He loves us so much”.

 

 

Theology tutor David Collits writes sensibly on reality and the metaphysics of being:

https://www.catholicweekly.com.au/david-collits-realism-metaphysics-being/

 Opening up to being – learning to trust ourselves again

 

An air of unreality pervades current day discourse. Focus on identity rights, same-sex ‘marriage’, unisex bathrooms, safe spaces, the mendaciously called ‘Safe Schools’ and so on bespeaks not only a divorce from tradition and custom, but more fundamentally a divorce from reality itself. Something unreal persists in political agitation for a panoply of rights not rooted in human nature or the cosmos itself, and which in fact denies the existence of human nature as such.

 

Such campaigning is based upon the liberal conceit constitutive of modernity that meaning and identity flows from an ever-expanding assertion of the will and not who we are as human beings. On this view, there is no human nature: I choose, therefore I am. This disconnection from reality is not confined to political issues but permeates our technology-saturated culture. Restoring contact with the real is vital for our culture to convey authentic meaning, as well as how we form our children, use technology and even how we worship.

 

A helpful restorative is offered in the recently published John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, by Benedictine monk Fr Francis Bethel (Thomas More College Press, 2016). Bethel’s subject is the life, and more especially the philosophy and educational approach of relatively little known American professor, John Senior (1923-1999) (Dr Stephen McInerney has previously written of him for The Catholic Weekly).

 

Senior made his biggest impact at the University of Kansas in the 1970s. There, he and two colleagues founded the Integrated Humanities Program, whose key notion was to expose students to the poetic (conceived broadly) riches of Western civilisation as a way to engage their sensory and imaginative faculties, and so enable them to encounter being.
From this Program came many fruits, including over 200 student conversions to Catholicism (Bethel was one such student convert). Senior did not set out to convert students; they arose from contact with the real embodied in the great Western literary, philosophical and theological tradition. But convert and embrace vocations Senior’s students did. Bishops, religious superiors, seminary directors, judges, lawyers and teachers number among former students.

 

Two of Senior’s principal published works were Death of Christian Culture (1978) and Restoration of Christian Culture (1983): short and punchy but with philosophical heft, these are transgressive of so many contemporary shibboleths as to be exhilarating. While one need not agree with all of Senior’s positions, it is hoped that Bethel’s work might contribute to greater knowledge and utilisation of his ideas in forming our own children and restoring the culture. The culture we are giving them will, the way things are going, be in much need of restoration.

 

Arguably Senior’s greatest insight is his premise that the further we are from an unmediated experience of reality, the further we are from God. It is not possible even to think of God philosophically or theologically if one has not first been exposed to the creation that God has put in front of us.

 

We come to know Being itself through exposure to created being. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” so wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins.

God, transcendent but immanent to creation, is revealed in the beauty and order of the natural realm perceived in the senses and apprehended in the mind. Key for Senior, and any common-sense realist perception of reality, is the Aristotelian-Thomistic insight that, precisely because we are body-soul beings, truth is known to our minds because it is first known to our senses.

 

Catholicism is not a gnostic religion or philosophy in which knowledge is mediated directly to the mind apart from ‘evil’ matter. Knowledge of God comes first through sensory perception. It is not for nothing that Christ uses parables and lessons based on everyday contact with the earth: the mustard seed and the big tree it becomes, employment in the vineyard, the lilies of the field, the fig tree, the pearl, the field, and so on. Man’s first home was a Garden. The Prince of the Apostles’ occupation was to fish. The Church’s liturgy and sacraments, especially Baptism and the Eucharist, incorporate and elevate basic human and earthly realities: flowing water, bread and wine, oil. Authentic culture arises from liturgical cult fostered on humus, work with the soil that humbles us and can yet be offered to God. Genuine education grows around liturgical cult and is fostered by immersion in the Western canon, whose own roots are in that liturgical culture.

 

Centuries of rapid technological development, and decades of material wealth and relative peace in the West have inured generations of people to the vicissitudes and hardships that have been the common lot of humanity. Underappreciated perhaps is the negative effect that this material wealth has on the capacity for us to perceive created being and through that God himself. Especially is this acute in the case of the millennial generation, about which much has been written, from issues of housing affordability to its members’ apparent sense of entitlement and ‘flakiness’. How can the Church evangelise a generation of men and women whose contact with nature has often been disfigured by technology and trapped within an urban environment full of traffic, buildings, noise, artificial light and so on? How can they (we) come to knowledge of God if they have a diminished exposure to the nature God created? Nor is this issue limited to those born after 1980 or so: in the 1960s, Senior was struck even then by the failure of his students to recognise reference in classical literature being made to the primordial stuff of human existence.

 

Ours is a technological age predicated, as Bethel persuasively sets out in the book’s first part, on the Modernist idea that reality itself is to be rejected and replaced with artificial constructions of our own, not simply technological but philosophical and ethical as well. The eclipse of religion, gender ideology, and the deconstruction of marriage and the family in the West are the end result of centuries of philosophical and cultural unrealism.
Senior argued trenchantly and in many respects attractively in Restoration of Christian Culture that culture can only be restored when technology, especially electronic, is eradicated from the home so that human fellowship and imagination can breathe again around hearth and piano. Bethel judiciously queries the limits of Senior’s rhetoric, pointing out that technology provides undoubted benefits and its development is part of the self-actualisation of the human race about which Pope Benedict XVI spoke in Caritas in Veritate.

 

While it might not be necessary to adopt all of the strictures of Senior’s approach, our use of technology does need to be critiqued. Senior’s point that television screens provide a barrier to the perception of reality, deadening the senses and the imagination, has become even more urgent in its implications.

(One wonders what he would think of the ubiquity of computers, including those we carry in our pockets.) Professionals rarely can escape the clutches of email. Many have commented on the stultifying, anti-social nature of smartphone use – those poor children at restaurants and cafes who, instead of being initiated into the rites of communal eating, drinking and conversation, are pacified with screens!

 

One can only lament the fetishisation of technology in education: integral to reading and writing are the use not only of mind but the senses. Writing is a physical as well as mental act, and writing with pen and paper is more tangible and embodied than typing. And not just sight, but touch, smell and hearing are engaged: I still remember the smell of the copy of The Hobbit given me when I was nine years old.

 

Senior’s vision finds some resonance with contemporary ‘romantic’ Catholic critiques of the worship of technology and the totalitarian impulses of modernity, from Roman Gaurdini’s Letters from Lake Como, JRR Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’. It also relates broadly to Rod Dreher’s new book, The Benedict Option, a call for Christians to form smaller, counter-cultural and more consciously devout communities animated by Christian principles.

 

The reference to St Benedict is striking. Senior’s vision of the restoration of Christian culture revolves around the Benedictine monastery. Although this might inappropriately privilege only one of the charisms God has given in the Church’s history as being universally applicable across time, the Benedictine ora et labora has much to tell technocratic culture: the rhythm of life balanced between work and prayer, and prayer through work. St Benedict’s papal namesake, Pope Benedict XVI, in an address to the German Bundestag called for reason to be “open to the language of being” and implored us to fling open the windows again to “see the wide world, the sky and the earth once more and learn to make proper use of all this”.

 

A formative thinker for Ratzinger was Josef Pieper, who argued that the human person has an orientation to being, and is fulfilled in union with the God who is the sheer act of the real itself. Ultimately, Senior’s value as a teacher comes from his rediscovery that such an orientation to being needs to be fed on contact with the real given us in creation – the sky and the earth – a contact that will give way to the eternal vision of Reality itself.

 

AFA endorses pro-life movie "Unplanned"

Dear Damien,


Unplanned is the inspiring true story of one woman’s journey of transformation. AFA has screened Unplanned and strongly encourages you to go see this movie. You can watch the preview here.
All Abby Johnson ever wanted to do was help women. As one of the youngest Planned Parenthood clinic directors in the nation, she was involved in upwards of 22,000 abortions and counseled countless women about their reproductive choices. Her passion surrounding a woman’s right to choose even led her to become a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood, fighting to enact legislation for the cause she so deeply believed in.
Until the day she saw something that changed everything, a baby fighting for its life. This led Abby Johnson to join her former enemies at 40 Days For Life and become one of the most ardent pro-life speakers in America.
Read AFA's powerful review of Unplanned, written by AFA Journal's Anne Reed. Anne's article appears in AFA's online blog, The Stand.
It is one of the most powerful films I've ever seen and especially having to do with the pro-life issue. Abby was a woman who was deeply involved in Planned Parenthood until God showed her the truth about this evil organization. She left Planned Parenthood and now speaks out on behalf of life. It's a great story that I'm glad to recommend to you.
Unplanned opens in theaters everywhere March 29. To find a theater near you or to learn more, visit www.unplannedtickets.com. Because of the content and nature of the abortion industry, the MPAA has rated this move "R" and is not suitable for younger viewers. Scenes that expose the truth about abortion are difficult to watch, both the procedure itself and the bloody "normal recovery" for a woman who uses the RU486 abortion pill. Parents are advised to see it first and consider watching and discussing it with older children.
Thank you,

Tim Wildmon, President
American Family Association
 

---

 

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Reducing everything to ‘Science’

 

 

“Cosmology matters, it has a decisive impact upon our spiritual condition.

Even what we think about the purely physical world turns out to be crucial;

for indeed, “unless a man’s concept of the physical universe accords with reality,

his spiritual life will be crippled at its roots. . . .”

 

Wolfgang Smith

 

  

 

This article is not meant to be anti- any legitimate science or scientific endeavour.

It is against pseudo-science, certainly, but also the mis-use of science. Damien F. Mackey.

 

The scientific Weltanschaaung has entered into, and has greatly affected, even how we in the ‘West’ interpret the sacred Scriptures. And this not withstanding the fact that the Old and New Testaments were written by (i) ancient scribes; (ii) who thus were not of the modern ‘West’; and (iii) who wrote in ancient languages.

 

Regarding this unhappy state of affairs, ‘the modern tendency to reduce everything to science’, I had cause to quote Tim Martin in e.g. my article:

 

Was the Flood literally global?

 

https://www.academia.edu/37490862/Was_the_Flood_literally_global?auto=download

 

when he wrote: http://planetpreterist.com/content/beyond-creation-science-how-preterism-refutes-global-flood-and-impacts-genesis-debate-%E2%80%93-par-5

 

We live in a world dominated by materialism and scientism. The reduction of every aspect of life to “science” has corrupted the soul of Western Civilization. This is one key to understanding the related popularity of both futurism and Creation Science. They are both perfectly compatible with the scientistic spirit of the modern age. In fact, dispensational futurism, at least, is impossible apart from it. Christians aid this scientistic syncretism through Creation Science methods of reading Scripture. They do it by reducing even the language of the Bible to the “scientific.” ….

Viewed in this light it is not difficult to see that Creation Science ideology is a right-wing form of modernism. Conrad Hyers puts it this way:

 

Even if evolution is only a scientific theory of interpretation posing as scientific fact, as the creationists argue, creationism is only a religious theory of biblical interpretation posing as biblical fact. To add to the problem, it is a religious theory of biblical interpretation which is heavily influenced by modern scientific, historical, and technological concerns. It is, therefore, essentially modernistic even though claiming to be truly conservative. ….

[End of quotes]

 

  

Wolfgang Smith, mathematician, physicist, philosopher of science, metaphysician, has written brilliantly on the plague of scientistic belief at:

http://www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/HPR/April%202000/belief.html

 

...

 

I will go so far as to contend that religion goes astray the moment it relinquishes its just rights in the so-called natural domain nowadays occupied by science. I believe that the contemporary crisis of faith and the ongoing de-Christianization of Western society have much to do with the fact that for centuries the material world has been left to the mercy of the scientists. This has of course been said many times before (but not nearly often enough!). Theodore Roszak, for instance, has put it exceptionally well: “Science is our religion,” he observed, “because we cannot, most of us, with any living conviction see around it.” …. And one might add that perhaps only those who already have at least a touch of authentic religion do in fact stand a chance of “seeing around it with any living conviction.”

So too the name of Oskar Milosz (1877-1939) comes to mind, a European writer who had this to say: “Unless a man’s concept of the physical universe accords with reality, his spiritual life will be crippled at its roots, with devastating consequences for every other aspect of his life.” …. It could not have been better said! As regards the implications of the scientistic world-view for the life of the Church, let me quote from a recent book by the French philosopher Jean Borella: “The truth is that the Catholic Church has been confronted by the most formidable problem a religion can encounter: the scientistic disappearance (disparition scientifique) of the universe of symbolic forms which enable it to express and manifest itself, that is to say, which permit it to exist.” And he goes on to say: “That destruction has been effected by Galilean physics, not, as one generally claims, because it has deprived man of his central position—which, for St. Thomas Aquinas is cosmologically the least noble and the lowest—but because it reduces bodies, material substance, to the purely geometric, thus making it at one stroke scientifically impossible (or devoid of meaning) that the world can serve as a medium for the manifestation of God. The theophanic capacity of the world is denied.” …. Let us be clear about it: Borella is pointing the finger squarely at what I have termed physical reductionism: “le problème le plus redoubtable qu’une religion puisse rencontrer,” he calls it. What he terms a “reduction to the purely geometric” corresponds precisely to what I call the reduction of the corporeal to the physical: it is this scientistic contention that would obliterate “the theophanic capacity of the world.”

 

It is of course to be understood that the “symbolic forms” to which Borella refers are not, as some might think, subjective images or ideas which in days gone by men had projected upon the external universe, until, that is, science came to apprise us of the truth. The very opposite is in fact the case: The “forms” in question are objectively real and indeed essential to the universe. We may conceive of them as “forms” in the Aristotelian and Scholastic sense, or Platonically, as eternal archetypes reflected on the plane of corporeal existence. In either case they constitute the very essence of corporeal being. Remove these “symbolic forms,” and the universe ceases to exist; for it is these “forms,” precisely, that anchor the cosmos to God.

 

It is needless to point out that science has not in reality destroyed these forms, or caused their disappearance; however, the scientistic negation of corporeal being entails a denial of the substantial forms or essences which constitute that order of being, and of the sensible qualities by which these forms or essences manifest themselves to man. The scientistically prepared mind, therefore, has become increasingly insensitive to what Borella terms “the universe of symbolic forms,” to the point where that universe has become for it all but invisible. It is in that sense that the “theophanic capacity of the world” has been diminished to an unprecedented degree.

 

The consequences, however, of that diminution cannot but be tragic in the extreme. In his denial of essences, scientistic man has destroyed the very basis of the spiritual life. As Borella points out, he has obliterated the domain “that enables the Church to express and manifest itself,” and hence “permits it to exist.” The refutation of scientistic belief, therefore, is not an optional matter for the Church, something from which she can afford to abstain; it is rather a matter of urgent necessity, a question ultimately of survival.

It may be well, finally, to reflect anew upon what St. Paul has to say concerning “the theophanic capacity of the world” in his letter to the Romans. “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen,” he declares, “being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.” To which he adds: “So they are without excuse:

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were they thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Rom. 1:20-22).

I need hardly point out the striking relevance of these words to all that we have discussed. The “things that are made” are doubtless corporeal natures, the objects that man can perceive; and what about “the invisible things of him”: are these not precisely eternal essences, ideas or archetypes? So long as man’s heart has not been “darkened,” the sensory perception of “things that are made” will awaken in him an intellectual perception—a “recollection,” as Plato says—of the eternal things which the former reflect or embody. St. Paul alludes to a time or a state when man “knew God,” a reference, first of all, to the condition of Adam before the fall, when human nature was as yet undefiled by original sin. One needs to realize, however, that the fall of Adam has been repeated on a lesser scale down through the ages, in an unending series of “betrayals,” large and small. Even today, at this late stage of history, we are, each of us, endowed with a certain “knowledge of God” to which we can freely respond in various ways. And that is precisely why we, too, are “without excuse,” and why, to some degree at least, we are responsible for the opinions we hold concerning the cosmos. Everyone perceives the universe in accordance with his spiritual state: the “pure in heart” perceive it without fail as a theophany; and for the rest of us, whose “foolish hearts are darkened,” the theophanic capacity of the universe is reduced in proportion to this darkening.

 

I would like however to emphasize that this correspondence between our spiritual state and our Weltanschauung applies in both directions, which is to say that not only does our spiritual state affect the way we view the external world, but conversely, our views concerning the universe react invariably upon that state. This is in fact my central point: Cosmology matters, it has a decisive impact upon our spiritual condition. Even what we think about the purely physical world turns out to be crucial; for indeed, “unless a man’s concept of the physical universe accords with reality, his spiritual life will be crippled at its roots. . . .”

 

This brings us at last to the pastoral question: what can be done pastorally to counteract the scientistic influence? The major problem, clearly, is to inform the pastors themselves: to alert them, first of all, to the fact that there is a crucial distinction to be made between science and scientism, and then to the fact that scientistic belief is antagonistic to our spiritual well-being. This however will not be easy to get across, for it offends against the prevailing trend, both in civil society and within the Church. It is only by an act of grace, I surmise, that any of us are able to muster the discernment, and indeed the sheer boldness, to cast off the scientistic Weltanschauung and recover a Christian world-view. And this task, this imperative, I say, is at bottom spiritual. It is to be accomplished, thus, not simply by reading books, or through a process of reasoning, but above all through faith and prayer. The dictum credo ut intelligam applies to us still, and perhaps even more urgently than in the comparatively innocent days of Augustine or Anselm. It is needful that we be touched and enlivened by the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of truth, who “will guide you into all truth” (John 16:13). In our struggle to transcend the scientistic outlook, we are dealing, moreover, not simply with a belief system of human contrivance, but with something more formidable by far; for here too, in the final count, “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of the world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12). How could it be otherwise when it is “the theophanic capacity of the world” that stands at issue: the very thing “which enables the Church to express and manifest itself, that is to say, which permits it to exist.” ….