The Epistle reading in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (see here for a nicely bound, affordable edition from Everyman) for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity is Romans 8:18-23, which reads as follows,

I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope: because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.

Not unsurprisingly readers tend to focus on the first of these verses while they suffer, perhaps, a stutter of stultified wonder at the second verse, but its meaning for our lives – and what help this vision of the world offers to our modern crisis – needs more searching out.

In this and the next post we will consider the response of a couple of Christian Platonists to difficulties posed by modern science, both historical and natural.

First the natural sciences.

Brooke Foss Westcott (1825 – 1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828 – 1892) felt the growth of modern biology, physics, chemistry and geology, if understood and used rightly, to be a boon, not bane, for Christianity. They thought Darwin’s (I use him representatively) discoveries, even if incorrect in their then-current constellation, a blessing for theology and a great evidence for Christian hope.

The Unity of Creation

Meditating on the above and other passages, Westcott writes the following,

But the same masters [modern scientists and philosophers as, we suppose, Bauer, Spencer, Darwin, and Comte[i]], e.g.] have taught us also another truth. They have enabled us to realise… not only our union one with another but also our common union with nature. By this work they have doubled our debt to them, though for a time they seemed to have effaced the landmarks of man’s heritage. They have in the end moved us to enter with surer trust a little further into the depths of the Scriptural doctrine of Creation, to welcome as sober truth the language which claims the service of life from mountains and all hills, fruitful trees and all cedars… [Man] is neither above nor separated from the other works of God.

Westcott, Christus Consummator, 132-33.

This is a necessary corollary, so Westcott, not only of scriptures like that above, but of the Apostle’s Creed.

This acknowledgment of God as the Creator of things visible and invisible brings with it many deep and helpful thoughts… It reminds us that the greatest and least objects by which we are surrounded, the Sun in its glory and the stars in their countless multitude: mountains and all hills: fruitful trees and all cedars: beasts and all cattle: worms and feathered fowls were made by Him who made us, and that they therefore fill a place in His vast counsel of love, and minister to His glory. It reminds us of the truth, which others are beginning to tell us with stern reproaches, that we cannot separate ourselves from the material world of which we are a part; but in doing so it does not mockingly thrust man down to the level of the earth but offers to him the hope that the earth shall share the glory of his redemption.

Westcott, The Historic Faith, 38.

F. J. A. Hort, his colleague, friend, and mentee, takes this logic a step further with the remarkable statement,

It is not too much to say that the Gospel itself can never be fully known till nature as well as man is fully known; and that the manifestation of nature as well as man in Christ is part of His manifestation of God… The earth as well as the heaven is full of God’s glory, and His visible glory is but the garment of His truth; so that every addition to truth becomes a fresh opportunity for adoration.

The Way, the Truth, The Life, 84 -85

The modern discoveries show to a greater degree, or with a more penetrating proof than before, the interdependence of man and man, of man and the world below him as well as that above. There is a unity in creation taught long ago in Scripture and increasingly appreciated by modern science.

The Dangers of Materialism and Popular Realism

Let’s be clear about something: these men also acknowledged that dangers lurked.

This fact [as described above], when once it is admitted, can be used in two opposite ways. Some have found in it the occasion for degrading man to the level of their superficial estimate of the material world.[ii]

Westcott, Christus Consummator, 134.

Yet the mistake was less due to the aims and discoveries of modern science and more to the modern cult of materialism disguised as “realism” – a fact at least as patent in tendencies of literature at that time :

The[re are] many influences… which tend to weaken the sense of the unseen life amongst us… by the prevailing spirit of materialism… Literature is [right now] to a great extent occupied with the realistic treatment of the outside of things.[iii]

Westcott, Lessons from Work, 47.

This 19th century cult of popular realism reminds one perhaps of Eliot’s critique of certain, simplified and simplifying conceptions of “development,” the

…Partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.

The Dry Salvages, II.87-89

This abandonment of our faith, however, included in “disowning the past,” does not remove the difficulties of life.

We cast away the Faith; and what then? The sufferings of earth remain, but they are emptied of their redemptive potency… Not one difficulty, one pain, one contradiction of life is removed by the spirit of denial.

 Westcott, Christus Consummator, 152 -53

This denial of faith is a revelation of our limited sympathy with the whole of reality, not our “objective” reserve in seeing things “for what they are.” The discovery of endless worlds below our vision should teach us that there are likewise infinite worlds above our vision. It should open our minds to the possibility of things unseen.

There is a tendency to deny all knowledge not manifestly demanding sympathy. Aesthetic perception is part of sympathy. The highest art is that which most weaves together sympathies of various orders, i.e., is in the truest sense sacramental. Universal sympathy and universal knowledge are mutually required. The limitations of the knowledge possible to any man are consequent on the limitations of his sympathy.

J. F. A. Hort, The Way, The Truth, The Life, 174.

While Westcott and Hort came to different conclusions on Darwin’s actual theory as an explanation of where we have been and now are (the former rejecting, the latter tentatively accepting part of it, as a working theory), yet they both affirmed the kinship of man with creation as taught by Paul. They believed that the answers to the so-called modern crisis were already – as the early Greek church fathers would say – “riddled at” (αἰνίσσεσθαι) in the New Testament scriptures. Fresh experience brought into fuller light what God had already said, but they would not diminish the old in appropriating the new.

Their faith would not turn away “one witness” by which the Holy Spirit, still coming in the name of the Son, is talking of the Father and showing forth the meaning of the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ to those who believe (p. 109f. here). If we likewise do not “grieve this grace we shall learn to know those things which the Word discourses, by what means he chooses, at what times he wills” (p. 170 here, slightly modified). And though our kinship with nature, it may be, is now “manifested in pain” (Christus Consummator, 137), yet the pain is not to be compared with the glory about to be revealed.

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[i] On a facile reading one might think, as some scholars are wont to, that Westcott was – in a nebulous and derogatory sense of the word – “influenced by” these scholars. Not so. “How much I differ from these authors [Bauer and Comte] on fundamental issues, I need not say” (emphasis mine). Yet he could still say, “I have learned more from men with whom I disagreed most strongly, than from those with whom I share the same principles.” Baird’s facile judgement passed on Westcott’s theology, bolstered by an anecdotal quip (see there), ought to discredit much of what he says in the following survey. It’s easy to call “foggy” that thinking which allows for more data than one’s own. It is therefore a derogatory substitution for “he allows as grounds and reasons things which I, on principle, disqualify.” If there is any just criticism of Westcott in this regard, it is that he was over-sensitive to difficulties, and overly averse to anything smacking of “haste.”

[ii] Astounding that not only do they thus get man but also material nature herself wrong by their reductionism.

[iii] “We look, as the Psalmist looked, at the sun and the stars, with a sense which he could not have of the awful mysteries of the depths of night, but we refuse to accept space as a measure of being. We trace back, till thought fails, the long line of ages through which the earth was prepared to be our dwelling-place, but we refuse to accept time as a measure of the soul. We recognise without reserve the influence upon us of our ancestry and our environment, but we refuse to distrust the immediate consciousness of our personal responsibility… We acknowledge that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now, but we believe also that these travail pains prepare the joy of a new birth… We allow that man and men are uncrowned or discrowned in the midst of their domain, but we hold that they cannot put off the prerogatives of their birth. We ask… : What, O Lord, is man that Thou are mindful of him? or the son of man that Thou visitest him? without any expectation that we shall find an answer to the questions; but none the less we proclaim what we know, and confess that He is mindful of us, that He has visited us, that The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, full of grace and truth.” Westcott, Christus Consummator, 23. It’s worth comparing the beginning of CSL’s The Problem of Pain for a slightly different description of the difficulty, though admittedly with the same outcome.