Forest Poetry

What is more important, virtuous behavior or faith in God?

This question can be asked when one comes across religious individuals who act in an un-virtuous manner. The question is answered by realizing that true faith in God is incompatible with un-virtuous behavior. Virtuous behavior is certainly possible for those who lack faith in God, but where there is true faith un-virtuous behavior is not. This conclusion follows from a particular definition of “true faith.” By true faith we mean belief concerning God that accords with God’s true nature. Virtuous behavior is behavior that is in line with what God’s will deems to be the best course of action. If one believes in God but has false beliefs about Him, then any un-virtuous behavior can be explained by this false belief. This often manifests itself in a misunderstanding of a virtue. For example, even if one believes in God and believes justice to be a virtue which God approves of, one can easily misjudge what the just action is in a given situation. Even if a particular action is unjust one can justify that unjust action with religious belief. Although in the agent’s mind he is acting justly, he thinks this only because his belief is flawed, i.e., he believes things about God that are untrue. Hence un-virtuous actions can be coincident with false belief, but not with true belief, or truth faith. For many, faith in God means merely to believe that God exists, but this is not enough. This definition is too broad and includes an indefinite number of false beliefs about the nature of God. This should mollify any arguments against religion based upon anecdotal examples of the behavior of religious individuals. One final point is that having belief about God that is absolutely correct is nearly impossible for mortals. By our nature we are prone to ignorance and mistaken belief. Achieving this perfect belief would be almost a merging with God, a complete understanding of His will.

This time we introduce you Father Thomas Keating, a catholic Trappist monk who has dedicated his life to the study of contemplation not only in  Christianity, but also in the world’s most important religious traditions.

In this video, Father Thomas Keating discusses the experience of oneness and perpetuity of God through the dynamism of His temporal manifestations. Although the perspective of spiritual evolution in this video is not shared by the orthodox traditionalist school,  the approach Father Thomas Keating takes about to the non-dual nature of divinity is undoubtedly insightful, affable and very inspiring.

The Christian perspective, more than any other places its emphasis on historical events. We must firstly point out that the actuality of these events is not in question, given that they constitute a revelation and are therefore ontologically evident. What is more significant, however, is the fact that these events are only evident insofar as they are a reflection of metaphysical principles within a temporal framework. Metaphysically, the Father is Beyond-Being and Being, the Godhead and the Essence of the world, the Spirit, personified in Mary, is the perfectly pure and receptive substance, which reflects the light of the father, the Son is that reflection who is therefore both the image of God in the world, and the prefiguration of the entire cosmos itself. The Son is always present in God as the Logos and in man as the Intellect, and indeed He is present everywhere insofar as a thing is seen in light of its Divine Cause.

The question then, is not whether Christianity presents legitimate historical facts, but whether or not it presents a legitimate metaphysical perspective, which it undoubtedly does, despite the lack of metaphysical insight in the western Church in recent times. For the true Christian, there can be no reason to question the historical validity of Christian mythology for this kind of academic investigation yields only theoretical knowledge, whereas faith yields spiritual insight. These two modes of knowledge are situated on different planes, and therefore the former can never approach the latter in terms of its value for the man in question. “Ye shall know them by their fruits” Matthew 7:16

Traditionalists frequently criticize the current state of Western intellectual life and culture, arguing that our civilization lacks a genuine spiritual dimension. This fact is painfully obvious to many, including more moderate conservatives. But we can occasionally run into some difficulty when explaining that we believe this decline to have begun during the Renaissance. For many conservatives eras such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are the high points of Western civilization when great scientific discoveries and artistic achievements were made. In order to explain our position it is important to emphasize that for us the main goal of intellectual activity (reason) is closeness with the divine, or transcendence. We value many intellectual pursuits, but for us a modern mathematician is not as important as an ancient Pythagorean mathematician. They might both be equally capable of solving a particular mathematical problem, but the modern sees nothing beyond the numbers and the their relations with each other, while the Pythagorean sees the numbers and their relations as a symbolic language for theology.

A good analogy for this idea can be found in the realm of morality and personal behavior. A religious man and an atheist can share a moral belief, for example, that adultery is wrong, and they can both succeed in avoiding adultery because of this belief. But the moral belief and the associated behavior has an extra dimension for the man who acts in this way because God commands it, a dimension that is absent from the man who acts in this way merely because he does not wish to cause any distress to his fellow human beings, or whatever his mundane reason might be.

For the religious man, avoiding adultery is a spiritual exercise, a manifestation of God’s will in his own psyche and activity. Something on a higher metaphysical plain is gaining mastery over something on a lower plain (the human individual). In the case of the moral atheist there is no interaction between metaphysical levels, no transcendence. Rather there are two things on the same level interacting with each other, the desire for adultery and the desire for not causing distress. Both desires are concerned solely with mundane actions. The actions of the atheist are purely horizontal, while the actions of the religious man have a vertical dimension. The latter’s action exist on several different levels, and that which is viewed on this physical level is but a small part of the entire action. They are unified across the different vertically ordered hierarchical levels, and the part of the action on the lower level serves as a symbol for the corresponding parts on higher levels. Thus it turns out that the two actions, that of the religious man and that of the atheist, share a goal, avoiding adultery, but that the action of the religious man has the added goal of following God’s will. In the same way intellectual activity can have two goals, effecting a mundane change and making a connection with a higher level of reality.

It was during the Renaissance and especially the Enlightenment that Western intellectual life began focusing too much on the former goal and neglecting the latter, and in more recent times the latter has been vigorously attacked and deliberately removed. For this reason many see the decline of the West beginning at a much later period, when vociferous and explicit deniers or God became popular, but it is important to keep in mind the true root of the problem, for that is the only way to find an effective remedy.