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Metanarrative Collapse: Has the Christian Cosmology Invented by St. Augustine of Hippo Stood the Test of Time? Part Two

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St. Augustine [1]of Hippo (354–430)

Augustine’s Hellenistic Hermeneutic

Augustine’s interpretation of the biblical metanarrative portrays both the creation and the end of the world as the appearance and disappearance of corruptible material existence.  He had no doubt that the New Testament writers were predicting the literal end of the earthly world when, as “[t]he whole Church” expected, Christ would “come down from heaven to judge the living and the dead.”[1]  Augustine was clear that the Day of Judgement applied not just to the people of Israel but to “the rest of the nations as well.”[2]  Faithful Christians, those who live according to the spirit, would exchange the perishable goods of mortal existence for the “Supreme Good” of an imperishable “eternal life” in the City of God.  Other mortals, those who live according to the flesh, would suffer the “Supreme Evil” of “eternal death,” the nothingness inherent in the absolute privation of the Good.[3]  It was out of just such nothingness that the world was created on Augustine’s understanding of Genesis One.  Furthermore, Augustine’s understanding of Genesis 2–3 identifies Adam, not as proto-Israel, but as the first human being.  Accordingly, it not just Old Covenant Israel but mankind as a whole which faces judgement at the end of the world.

Augustine’s neo-Platonic cosmology presupposed the absolute dependence of both mankind and the material world itself on an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God.  Seduced by the delights of our mortal life “we have wandered far from God,” losing sight of “the invisible things of God.”[4]  The inherent difficulty mortal beings experience in apprehending such invisible divine “objects” must make us eternally thankful for the revealed Word of God.  But a proper understanding of sacred scripture depends upon two things, according to Augustine: “the mode of ascertaining the proper meaning, and the mode of making known the meaning when it is ascertained.”  Understanding the world generally requires that we distinguish between things and signs.  “All instruction is about things or about signs; but things are learned by means of signs.”  There are spiritual as well as material things and signs.  Higher spiritual things are the true objects of enjoyment and use.  A man should view his whole life as “a journey towards the unchangeable life, and his affections [should be] entirely fixed upon that.”[5]

The Bible is both a material and a spiritual thing which can be used or enjoyed in order to understand and participate in the imperishable City of God.  Augustine reminds his readers, however, that not every spiritual or material thing can be judged by its outer form.  On the surface, biblical prophecies of the Day of the Lord may appear to be addressed only to Old Covenant Israel, warning of the impending destruction of Jerusalem.  The inner form of such scriptural signs of things to come can sometimes only be understood “by comparing all the similar passages on the subject which occur in the three evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke.”  Augustine points as well to John “who tells us most clearly that the judgement should take place at the resurrection of the dead.”[6]  Clearly, Augustine conceives the resurrection of the dead as a material and bodily, not a solely spiritual, phenomenon.  No such event has taken place; therefore, he expects the fulfillment of that prophecy to occur at some still future time.

Augustine knew, of course, that many “wise men of this world” scoffed at any suggestion “that the earthly bodies of men” can “be carried over into a heavenly habitation.”  To ward off such scepticism, he drew upon an idea that appeared quite suddenly in the late second century AD to defend the idea of a bodily resurrection.  Augustine deployed the doctrine of creation ex nihilo to demonstrate that “He Who in making this world…has already accomplished something far more wondrous than the transformation in which our adversaries refuse to believe.”  If God has already bound “incorporeal souls” to earthly bodies, why should we doubt “that bodies, though earthly, should be raised up to abodes which, though heavenly, are nonetheless corporeal.”[7]

During Augustine’s lifetime, such metaphysical speculation on the origins of matter had already become commonplace among neo-Platonic philosophers such as Plotinus.  Augustine followed Plotinus in contending that “creatio ex nihilo was the expression of God’s omnipotent ability to create without need of supporting causes.”  Such a doctrine was nowhere to be found in the New Testament.[8]  Neither the New Testament writers nor Plotinus were responsible for the connection made by Augustine between the creation story and the eschatological hope of a still future resurrection of the body.

Augustine taught “that because every created intelligence had its origin ex nihilo, it also had to look beyond itself for its end.  Every creature lacked God’s perfection and was therefore mutable.  Because it was mutable it could fall away from that end and become evil.”[9]  At the same time “the resurrection of our Lord from the dead” added “a great buttress of hope” to our faith.  Our bodies, too, after the death we suffer because of sin “shall at the resurrection be changed into a better form…this corruptible shall put on incorruption, and this mortal shall put on immortality.”  He urged the faithful to believe “that neither the human soul nor the human body suffers complete extinction but that the wicked rise again to endure inconceivable punishment, and the good to receive eternal life.”[10] Read more

TOQLive with Prof. Drew Fraser at 8:00 PM EDT on Sunday, July 28

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TOQ Live featuring Andrew Fraser will air on Sunday evening, July 28 at 8:00 PM EDT with Prof. Andrew Fraser (whose article is now the current featured article on TOO). Should be a great discussion. All of the details are at this link:

https://www.toqlive.com/

Summer 2019 Issue of The Occidental Quarterly: Vol. 19, no.2.

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The Summer 2019 journal Vol. 19, No. 2, The Occidental Quarterly, contains eight essays and 137 pages:

  • The Summer issue leads off with Dr. Andrew Joyce’s groundbreaking article on Jewish involvement in shaping American attitudes on race in the post-World War II era: “‘Modify the Standards of the In-Group’: On Jews and Mass Communication.” This article describes the successful effort of a major interlocking group of Jews in the elite media and universities to saturate the mass media with messages promoting positive attitudes toward non-White groups, particularly Blacks and Jews.
  • Grégoire Canlorbe interviews Dr. Ricardo Duchesne, reviewing Duchesne’s previous work on the Faustian spirit of the West in his classic The Uniqueness of Western Civilization as well as Duchesne’s recent insights and additions to this body of theory, particularly as it relates to the discovery of the self and self-consciousness by the peoples of the West.
  • Dr. Nelson Rosit revisits Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, presenting Murray’s data on the decline of the White working class within the framework of life history theory in biology based on a reading of Steven C. Hertler’s, Life History Evolution and Sociology.
  • Andrew Gladwell’s essay draws on psychological research on cognitive dissonance to explain the imperviousness of liberal attitudes to disconfirmation by, e.g., downplaying, ignoring, or rationalizing conflicting information.
  • Dr. Tomislav Sunic’s essay describes the history of Western thought on decadence, particularly as it relates to attitudes on miscegenation and race. Sunic traces this tradition from its beginnings in the Roman world of antiquity with the writings of Sallust and Juvenal, to its resurfacing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with writers such as Arthur de Gobineau and Oswald Spengler, and continuing into the present era characterized by the decadent behavior and attitudes on race typical of leftist intellectuals.
  • Dr. F. Roger Devlin contributes a review essay on Edward Dutton’s The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers. Although non-White migration came late to Finland, we encounter the typical phenomena seen repeatedly throughout the West: The silence of media and political elites regarding migrant crime, particularly large-scale rape of Finnish women, and regarding the negative effects of migration on social cohesion. Devlin deftly presents Dutton’s evolutionary life history perspective on the Finnish people’s intelligence, hyper-conformity, and susceptibility to guilt.
  • TOQ editor, Dr. Kevin MacDonald, contributes a review essay on Thomas Wheatland’s The Frankfurt School in Exile. Despite its many shortcomings, Wheatland’s book adds to the material on the Frankfurt School presented in one of Dr. MacDonald’s landmark books, The Culture of Critique.
  • Finally, Dr. Andrew Joyce reviews an apologetic book on Jewish involvement in communism: Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Joyce presents Hanebrink’s work as typical of the fact-free claims promulgated by elite universities and intended to whitewash the reality of Jewish involvement in communism in the Soviet Union and throughout the West during much of the twentieth century.

 

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A reminder of what’s at stake: The world we may lose

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A Reminder of What a Well-Functioning White Culture Looks Like: Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen

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An Update to “Why Are Professors Liberals?”: Jewish Influence Firmly Ensconced in Academia by the 1960s

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Recently a blog titled “Ideas and Data” posted a very interesting and important article by an anonymous blogger, “The Jewish Question: An Empirical Examination.” I’ll have more to say about this blog in the future, but here I discuss a study on Jewish academic influence that I was unaware of.

This is the video version:

First, some introductory material from my paper, “Why Are Professors Liberals?.”

Gross and Fosse point out that it was during the 1960s when universities became strongly associated with the political left in the eyes of friends and foes alike — enough to result in self-selection processes in which conservatives would feel unwelcome in the university:

Higher education was a crucial micromobilization context for a number of left social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which further enhanced the institution’s liberal reputation; with concerted cultural efforts by American conservatives, especially from the 1950s on, to build a collective identity for their movement around differentiation from various categories of “liberal elites,” not least liberal professors; with restricted opportunities for Americans on the far left to enter other institutional spheres; and with self-reinforcing processes by which selfselection into the academic profession by liberals resulted in a more liberal professoriate whose reputation for liberalism was thereby maintained or enhanced. (pp. 158–159)

Further, because elite universities attempt to most represent the zeitgeist of the field, Gross and Fosse point out they will offer positions to scholars they see as exemplary; political attitudes are a major part of being exemplary. As noted above, Inbar and Lammers (2012) found that many liberal academics openly acknowledge that they would discriminate against a conservative job candidate. This rigorous policing of the attitudes of professors at elite institutions in turn leads to elite institutions being to the left of lesser institutions. In the academic hierarchy, the result is that graduate students coming from elite institutions are most representative of the leftist academic culture, either because of their socialization in the academic environment or simply because of self-interest as a member of a group (e.g., racial and ethnic minorities, homosexuals) whose interests are championed by the left. This becomes progressively diluted as one goes to the second- and third-tier schools and eventually down to K–12 education. The result is a liberal social environment at all levels of the educational system which in turn has measurable effects on student attitudes. Public opinion surveys carried out since the 1960s show that going to college results in attitude change in a liberal direction compared to parents. If education level remained the same, there was little change in attitudes (Kaufmann, 2004, p. 191).

Thus, academia is a top-down system in which the highest levels are rigorously policed to ensure liberal ideological conformity. Read more