Story: 5Wednesday, 19 July 2017

Aquinas’ Syncretism

I wish to revisit Summa Theologica, as a forgotten ideal. An ancient futurism— something of technological, political and economic importance. Something which speaks to every aspect of our culture and history.

It is simply a powerful idea. Read it, if you will. But you can take it at first grasp, and hold it in your mind, and feel its weight. Here it is: all truth is God’s truth. That is the thought that Aquinas thought. Contained in this sutra is the full contribution.

Hold it.

All truth is God’s truth.
… All
… Truth
… Is
… God’s
… Truth.

All Truth Is God’s Truth.
ALL truth is God’s truth.
All TRUTH is … TRUTH.
All truth IS ...
All truth is GOD’S truth.
All truth is God.
… TRUTH IS GOD / GOD IS TRUTH …
All truth is … TRUTH.
ALL TRUTH IS GOD’S TRUTH.

All Truth Is God’s Truth.
What does it mean?

Consider all of its meanings, if you can. It is hermeneutically rich, a polygon. You can unpack it, and unpack it again — and there is still more to give. Such a seed once planted in the garden of your mind will surely grow into a tree that bears fruit each harvest, so much to pick as to give away.

I will read it in my own way.

I will give you a history which is in no way historical. It is the essential story, as I understand it, from memory — with some reference to the encyclopedia. So often the story of history is lost; there is a preoccupation with accuracy of account, by the time you are correct, you have lost track of what mattered in the narrative. There is a fear that, if such emphasis were lifted, a kind of pseudo-history would emerge — that superstitions and propaganda would infect our thinking, that academic history would be divested of its role as arbiter of the truth (which, incidentally, we shall shortly discuss, as it is entirely relevant to this essay) — these fears, like all fears, have some basis, but the volume is too high. Indeed it is so loud, I can’t hear myself think. So let us begin, shall we?

But first, while we’re on the subject of thinking about history, to get things off on the wrong foot, I wish to thoroughly infuriate any academic historian by citing a philosopher, Martin Heidegger, as my authority for this blatant act of heresy — further reinforcing that philosophy, not history, is the master-discipline; for, even if it is not, it shall be a philosopher, and not a historian, who decides that such is the case:

The purely historical view of tradition and the course of history is one of those vast self-deceptions in which we must remain entangled as long as we are still not really thinking. That self-deception about history prevents us from hearing the language of the thinkers. We do not hear it rightly, because we take that language to be mere expression, setting forth philosopher’s views. But the thinker’s language tells what is. To hear it is in no case easy. Hearing it presupposes that we meet a certain requirement, and we do so only on rare occasions. We must acknowledge and respect it.

To acknowledge and respect consists in letting each thinker’s thought come to us as something in each case unique, never to be repeated, inexhaustible — and being shaken to its depths by what is unthought in his thought. What is unthought in a thinker’s thought is not a lack inherent in his thought. What is un-thought is there in each case only as the un-thought. The more original the thinking, the richer will be what is unthought in it. The unthought is the greatest gift that thinking can bestow.

But to the commonplaces of sound common sense, what is unthought in any thinking always remains merely the incomprehensible. And to the common comprehension, the incomprehensible is never an occasion to stop and look at its own powers of comprehension, still less to notice their limitations. To the common comprehension, what is incomprehensible remains forever merely offensive — proof enough to such comprehension, which is convinced it was born understanding everything, that it is now being imposed upon by an untruth and a sham. The one thing of which sound common sense is least capable is acknowledgement and respect. For acknowledgement and respect call for a readiness to let our own attempts at thinking be overturned, again and again, by what is unthought in the thinkers’ thought.

Someone who knew better, Kant, here spoke of a “falling down”. But no one can fall down who does not stand upright, and standing upright walks, and walking stays on the way. The way leads necessarily into face-to-face converse with the thinkers. It is not necessary here, however, to conceive of this converse historically. For instance, if we were to hand out grades by the standards of the history of philosophy, Kant’s historical comprehension of Aristotle and Plato would have to get a straight “F.” Yet Kant and only Kant has creatively transformed Plato’s doctrine of ideas.

With that settled, I shall proceed with my non-historical historical story.

When was Aquinas? Let us find him in time. 1225 AD. Seven hundred years before his time, Rome had fallen. Then the Dark Ages came. Ages, plural. Ages, as in, more than one age. Ages: age after age.

Rome — THE ETERNAL CITY, the inviolate, the immaculate — was sacked.

The Visigoths sacked Rome. Then the Vandals sacked Rome. Then the Ostrogoths sacked Rome. Not only the city itself was sacked; the entire empire was sacked, it didn’t just fell apart, it was torn asunder. And the empire was the known world.

Horror and flames. Rape. Pillage. Murder. Trauma. Treasures lost. Knowledge forgotten. History erased. Cultural amnesia. For centuries, generations who came later marveled at the ruins. Who built these wonders that surround us? What giants lived here in an earlier age? Civilization descended into superstition, ignorance, poverty, barbarism, provincialism.

From such a complete collapse, stability returned only slowly, very slowly, too slowly — if it all. Things got worse, before they got better. Then they kept getting worse. They stayed worse. Worse became normal. Having returned nearly to a war of every man against every man,— no town safe from brigands, cities plundering cities, travelers waylaid — power took too long to consolidate.

As chaos reigned, the only source of stability, of memory, of intellectual light — was The Church. It was The Institution that survived. From a Darwinian perspective, this deserves sociological admiration. This organizational organism, this system — The Church — survived multiple sacks of Rome, survived multiple pagan invasions, demonstrating an ability to mystify/ensnare/seduce/convert its conquerers, and then ultimately to enlist them in its defense.

Who did this? They were monks. They were friars. They were abbots. They were bishops and cardinals. Do not think of palaces, fine cloth and fat men living in luxuries earned by others. Those luxuries came later, as a result of the work done by these men.

This was their moment. They evolved. They became what the moment required of them. They transformed themselves into ambassadors, translators, bridge builders; postmen, scribes, librarians, news gatherers and deliverers; doctors, scientists, therapists; helpers, organizers, connectors and leaders — communities looked to them to explain what had happened, to give them a story they could understand, that made sense of their past, present, and future, that gave them a way forward. They kept the calendar, ran the schedules of the towns, planned the feast days, built the rituals and the rhythms, provided the entertainment. They became what we might call the original “culture designers”, merging multiple paganisms into a single monotheism, while preserving enough idiosyncrasy to make this tectonic shift palatable. Finally, it was they turned themselves into the king-makers, the political advisors, the legitimacy arbitrators and the deal brokers.

Whatever their crimes — I, you, we — all owe these men a debt of gratitude. These men saved civilization from destroying itself. They preserved the information. They kept the records. They cherished the idea, the vision, the memory of it — and kept that flame alive through centuries of darkness. And from the darkness of these dark ages, modern civilization emerged. Western Civilization, which continues to merge with Eastern Civilization to become, merely, Civilization, emerged from this, and from this, conquered the world.

Such a staggering accomplishment is unrivaled in history, in any context — no profession or class or organization comes close. I cannot even think of a comparison. It is a Hapax Legomenon.

Who were they? We should know their names. But we don’t. Those names we know, we don’t remember — we don’t celebrate. Perhaps PhD. students in Medieval departments would recognize a few. But these are specialists in what is regarded as one of the most irrelevant departments in an increasingly irrelevant modern academia. This is not a subject which our Civilization values or focuses on — and yet were it not for this, would there be a Civilization to speak of?

What is this moment? This is not the beginning — in the sense that the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges were the beginning. This is not the first bloom — in the sense of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. This is not the striking back of the Medieval Crusades. Or the triumphantly turbulent Renaissance. Or the fragmenting Reformation. Or the revolutionary Enlightenment. Or the cataclysm of Modernity. Or the relative drift of Post-Modernity.

This is the true rebirth. The Renaissance is a coming of age moment, an adolescence — a moment of self-awareness; Caravaggio’s Narcissus leaning out over the water to see his own reflection. That is rebirth in a different sense. This is rebirth in the sense of bleeding in the woods, at night, in the middle of winter, being beaten and strangled, finding the will to live, fighting for your life, running for your life, making a shelter, and somehow, surviving for a month, as you make your way out of the wilderness.

Vehemence is entirely warranted in this case. If vehemence is not warranted in this case, then it is warranted in no case — this is in extremis; in the farthest reaches, at the point of death.

At the point of death is where the trust victory is won. At the point of death is the crushing pressure that shapes the diamond, the testing point that forms character, the basic decision not to die, but to live.

This is the moment that Civilization decided not to die. The reason why the spinal cord of history was not severed. The survival moment. The forgotten darkness, the ground of being.

Sun Tzu says, “Do not worry about victory; remove the possibility of defeat.” This is a principle that I have had to learn and re-learn in business. But as a principle, it shows up on many levels. Look! It shows up here.

In The Second World War, the moment that truly mattered are not the moments that are usually remembered, such as D-Day. The moment that truly mattered was before The United States entered the war, before Germany broke its pact with Russia; when Britain was utterly surrounded — after Dunkirk’s saving grace, when Churchill decided to fight. To say, we shall fight them on the beaches. And after being pummeled, to walk through the rubble of London — desecrated after a millennia— and look into the dirty ashen tear streaked faces of families bereaved and livelihoods, neighborhoods lost, and take up the cry — London can take it!

From a strategic point of view, from a game-theoretical perspective, and from a poetic-romantic perspective — that was the moment of maximum uncertainty and risk, the moment where destiny met fate… destiny stared, and fate blinked.

Such a moment was the Dark Ages. Civilization in extremis.

Again, who were they? Flickering whispers in our consciousness of time, these names come to us, preserved on the very scrolls they defended:

A pope named Gregory
(Gregory I, Gregory The Great, “Gregorian” chants).
A monk named Augustine Of Canterbury
(a saint, but not the St. Augustine, of Hippo).
A monk named Patrick.
(Saint Patrick of Ireland).
A monk named Bede
(The Venerable Bede).
A scholar named Alcuin.
A courtier named Einhard.
A pope named Leo
(Leo III).
A king named Charlemagne.
A king named Alfred.
An abbot named Anselm Of Canterbury.
A friar named Thomas Aquinas.

And many lost to time or obscurity.

After the sacks of Rome, somehow the Church survives, somehow there is still a Bishop of Rome, the Pope, named Gregory. Somehow the Visigoths, the Vandals, and the Ostrogoths have been gradually assimilated into Rome and Italy, and gradually converted.

Operating from the Old Basilica, long before the St. Peter’s we know today, Gregory is not traumatized and defensive. Gregory is active and is leading an aggressive, expanding, evangelizing, international, enterprising, flexible, organized church.

Gregory is conquering Europe, one missionary at a time. He sends a monk named Augustine to England. His mission was convert the Anglo-Saxons. He succeeded. He convinced King Æthelberht. And to get it done, he made compromises. What emerged was syncretistic. They kept many of their pagan rituals. The process was gradual.

Patrick was kidnapped as a boy from England and taken as a slave to Ireland. After winning his freedom and escaping back to England, he becomes a cleric. He comes back to Ireland. And converts the entire island.

Bede, Alcuin and Einhard — we don’t remember them as distinguished philosophers because they were too busy writing histories, preserving scrolls and performing critical civilizational functions — monks were busy back then, as civilization-builders and scholars. They not only built a historical framework with a cultural, religions and political narrative, they built an entire system for scholarship and an entire community of scholars and a practical and romantic role for scholarship.

Fleeing for his life from Rome in the middle of winter, a Pope named Leo comes to Charlemagne to ask for help. This desperate, vulnerable request from Leo, Charlemagne’s decision to shelter Leo, to come to his aid, to restore him to the throne of St. Peter, Leo’s decision to crown Charlemagne Roman Emperor, renewing the line that was broken, Charlemagne’s remarkable conquest of Europe— establishes Christendom. All of the elements are there: the relationship between Church and King, the relationship between King and his court of nobles, knights and scholars— the united project of it, the ability to cross cultures, to align interests, to build alliances, to establish a myth, to stage imagery, to craft a grand narrative…

Charlemagne massacres pagans that will not convert to Christianity, then Alcuin convinces him to stop, to welcome them in and let a gradual process take hold. Charles Martel, descendant of Charlemagne, Hammer Of The Franks, reverses the expansion of Islam from Spain — in extremis passes. Charlemagne’s death begins a feudal rivalry between his sons’ lineages in France, Italy and Germany, but there is now a structure in place, a foundation, a story, a legitimacy, a network, titles — order has been re-established.

King Alfred, descendent of Æthelberht’s race, “King Of The Anglo-Saxons”, is trapped in Wessex, surrounded by Danes and Vikings, desperately outnumbered, with all that is left of Rome and Christianity in England, and with all that is left of literacy. By the time of his death, he has united an England of different races under a common banner, a common faith, a common scholarship — and left behind a Kingdom.

Centuries pass. Stability returns. Scholarship matures. The Dark Ages are felt to be passing. Dawn is returning once more.

Anselm of Canterbury brings back philosophy. Reaching into the deep past, to a past so ancient and so removed from his English reality, more ancient than the Roman Empire, more ancient than the Roman Republic, more ancient than the Hellenistic Kingdoms — all the way back to Classical Greece — Anselm re-discovers Plato.

Plato. The significance of the rediscovery is archeological in its mode and tectonic in its impact. This is not understood to be part of the Renaissance. This is the 11th century now. But this is the beginning of the Renaissance. This is the spinal cord of civilizational time, the amnesia of civilizational memory, healing itself.

What does he realize? Anselm realizes that religion needs philosophy. That is the thought that Anselm thought. And in seeking a philosophical ground for Christianity, Anselm realizes that Plato’s conception of God is entirely consistent with Christian theology. Anselm makes an ontological argument for the existence of God. He defines “God” as that which nothing greater can be conceived. Having once conceived of such a being, such a being clearly must exist, for to exist is great than to not exist. Specious as it sounds to modern secular ears, this is a valid argument, and not a tautology, but rather an argument from aesthetics; it is essentially the same argument that justifies the existence of numbers. When the best argument for the existence of a concept is the concept itself, the argument is said to be ontological. Numbers are ontologically powerful — because once you realize they exist, you can’t un-realize it, they stick. In the same way, Anselm argues, God is an adaptive concept , a thought that cannot be reversed, an ideological technology — once you conceive of such a being, you cannot stop imagining it. In all of this thought, Anselm is inspired by Plato.

Anselm marks the beginning of a new Moment. The Scholastic Moment. The Dark Ages are over. Europe is unified. Europe is Christian. Power is consolidating under Kings who preside over a feudal hierarchy, organized under a culture and ideal of Chivalry. Europe is a meta-kingdom, a Christendom — led by the Pope of Rome. And this Project of Civilization that was dying has come into its own again, and is finding that it is strong.

The Crusades begin. In 1095, Pope Urban II calls for Western Europe to support Eastern Europe in its fight against the Turks. In subsequent Crusades, Europe begins to expand in every direction, to fight back — and ultimately to attempt total war against Islam, fundamentally rebalancing power.

Politically, this move is expedient in every way. The politically correct view, in 2017, is that the Crusades were a crime against humanity, an example of Western imperialism and aggression, etc. The same standard is rarely applied to Islamic expansion in the previous era.

This chronological snobbery mistakes the situation entirely. In a Realpolitik analysis, this is classic counter-balancing — Western Europe cannot afford the fall of Eastern Europe. Force has been consolidated in Western Europe, and a new generation of knights needs an outlet — feudal war will break out if an outlet is not found. Catharsis is needed for the Dark Ages — this is a flexing of muscles and a re-ordering of the psyche. Trade and learning and culture require an expanded horizon. And on and on.

In filling the power vacuum of the Dark Ages, The Church ceased to be purely a religious institution — and became a geopolitical, cultural, academic, and and and civilizational institution. It became a thing — there really isn’t a word for it. Again, it is a Hapax Legomenon.

Or is it? Christendom in the Middle Ages can be compared with Islam, as a religious imperial institution.

These are religions but it is only in our Cartesian understanding that we conceive of them as static philosophies and belief systems. These are religions operating in time, in historical context — they are dynamic and evolving as fast as their believers.

In the 13th century, war is re-uniting the world. Christianity and Islam, Rome and Constantinople, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean — clash in an epic confrontation.

In encountering each other, there is a recognition of who we are. Both in opposition and in similarity. And there is a recognition of shared history — a piecing together of the puzzle, a comparing of notes, even across the battlefield.

Who comes after Anselm?

Aquinas.

Aquinas comes after Anselm.
What is the thought that Aquinas thought?
All truth is God’s truth.

All truth is God’s truth. This is the contribution of the Scholastic moment to the history of civilization. In this context, you see how much weight it has.

All truth is God’s truth — in the context of a clash of cultures and religions and nations — is a declaration of intellectual freedom.

Scholars from Persia to Spain — Omar Khayyam, al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Rushd — were innovating. And the Christians realized it.

They had translated the Greeks. They had translated the Indians. They had invented Algebra. They were making advances in Geometry. They were studying Aristotle. They were writing histories.

Averroes is the Latin name given to Ibn Rushd. They had to confront his thinking. And decide what to do about it!

It seems that the options were:
— Declare it all false, heretical and burn it.
— Accept it as true, integrate it and benefit.

And they chose the smarter one. But to give Islamic civilization credit for cultural achievements was theologically problematic.

Aquinas’ solution is
All truth is God’s truth.

This allowed Western Christianity to maintain that it’s understanding of God is the correct understanding. But it also allowed Christendom to benefit from the progress being made in Islam, Byzantium.

Indeed the very word Catholic means universal, all-encompassing — which perhaps was once, and is sometimes still, understood in the sense as “Our truth is the only universal truth”, but which can be understood in the sense of “All truth is God’s truth”.

As so often happens, to win the war, Christendom had to lose the war. To keep up with the enemy’s progress, Christendom had to admit the enemy’s genius. But in a total war between religions, this is anathema — you cannot in good conscience conquer those whom you believe to have some aspect of eternal truth. So Aquinas installed a memetic virus, which at once strengthened the organism, and made it less expansive.

Although the virus took centuries to propagate through the system, it can be understood as the underlying truth behind the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Just as Anselm rediscovered Plato, Aquinas rediscovered Aristotle. Plato, pointing up, the philosopher qua philosophy, Aristotle, pointing down, the philosopher qua science.

There is something in the Aristotelian and Scholastic conception of science that has been lost, which we suffer greatly for having lost. There is an essential difference, a difference of understanding about the essence of science.

What is the nature of the scientific project? The secular modern understanding of science is very procedural — a kind of sterile myth built up around Francis Bacon’s scientific method. But even in our dry understanding, there is the memory that science is a corpus, a unified body of knowledge, a project of seeking truth, of agreeing upon a shared truth.

Even to Francis Bacon, I think the sterility of science today would be shocking. Our separation of disciplines, our academic-industrial complex, the relative lack of integration of science into the technological community, and the relative over-integration of science into politics, that is — the politicization of science as arbiter for policy — would have been, I think, strange to him. Also strange would have been the schism of “the sciences” from “the humanities”; and the envy of the impractical and unscientific humanities for the sciences. The turn of the field of economics, for example, away from political philosophy, and towards quantitative analysis — this is a recent phenomenon.

Far more radical than Darwin or Bacon were Aquinas and Aristotle. Far more radical, because, in their conception of science, they saw science as the all-project. Summa Theologica — The Sum Of All Theology — was a titanic undertaking; it is an enormous volume of 3,500 pages, the work of a lifetime, and fittingly, left unfinished.

Once all truth is God’s truth, Summa Theologica moves from being a summary of all theology, to a summary of all truth — all philosophy and all science, all that is known.

The liberation of this understanding is extraordinary. Suddenly not just philosophy, but science — science understood broadly as all academic disciplines, all subjects of inquiry into truth— are now related. Added to this is the mystical fervor of religion, a sensibility utterly foreign today, but one of the most powerful motivating forces in history.

By this stroke of genius, by this tectonic re-arrangement — all of Christendom was united in a passionate pursuit of truth in all dimensions.

Furthermore, Christendom took upon itself the burden of integrating all truths from outside Christendom.

With our lack of historical perspective, we take for granted that today the globe is explored, that there is a commerce between all nations, that everything and everyone is somehow connected — and that we are increasingly becoming one global civilization.

But before Aquinas, horizons were not so far reaching — there were many, competing civilizations. These civilizations were competing for dominance in the dimension of force, but also in the dimensions of culture, economics, and truth. Very few leaders — Alexander and Cyrus, Alfred and Charlemagne — stand out as having been integrative. Instead of asserting the superiority in every way of their civilization, they made their civilizations superior in one way, that is, superior in their ability to integrate the best in all other civilizations, and in so doing, become the master civilization.

In Nihonjinron, that is, theories of Japanese-ness, there is the continual assertion of the superiority of Japanese civilization. But what is indeed superior and unique about Japan is its syncretism — a history not of exporting its culture, but of importing it; a history of integrating moments of cultural contact, of slowly assimilating influences from all of its neighbors into the distinct fusion that is Japanese-ness. Japanese-ness, the essence of Japan, is that synthesis. I cite Alex Kerr.

Synthesis requires syncretism — the ability to combine beliefs, the ability to bridge contradictions, to resolve paradoxes; the diplomacy to find common purpose, the creativity to make connections.

Syncretism in Christendom predates Aquinas, as we have seen — it was Pope Gregory and Augustine of Canterbury, and the rest of them — that executed the first movement of syncretism, forming the ground from which that force we call Europe ultimately emerged. Aquinas began the second movement of syncretism, a more intellectually explicit, a more self-aware cultural appropriation. This movement had less to do with the integration of people than with the integration of ideas, the integration of cultural and historical influences — both ancient and contemporary.

If we wanted to go further back, we would discover it in the thinking of St. Augustine of Hippo himself, in De Doctrina Christiana:

“Nay, but let every good and true Christian understand that wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master…”

Returning to the all-project, which cannot be forgotten: that is the focal point. If the architectural, engineering, and technological project of Civilization is symbolized by the Tower of Babel; the philosophical, scientific and cultural project of Civilization is symbolized by the Library of Alexandria. Scholasticism emerged from Dark Ages in which scholars preserved the light of knowledge. Their belief, that the knowledge contained in the letters on scrolls, though unseen, was ultimately powerful, more powerful, even, than the sword — was an extraordinary leap of faith and a counter-point to barbarism. Vindicated in this belief in the first movement of syncretism, centuries later, this second movement of syncretism is a doubling-down on the power of knowledge, an acceleration of cultural forces.

An acceleration of forces results, as we have seen, in extra-dimensional warfare: abstraction, institutionalization, consolidation and aggregation of power, monopoly formation, asymptotic movements towards singularities, and dimensional explosion.

Scholasticism resulted in the dimension explosion that we call the Renaissance. In all the explanations for the Renaissance which I have read, none have put it so clearly as this.

Sun Tzu says, “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” In the same sense, “All men can see the movements within the Renaissance, but what none can see is the movement out of which the Renaissance was evolved.” That deeper, original movement is this story which I have told you now. And it is a story about syncretism and synthesis into a unified field, a unified dimension-of-dimensions, a unified Civilization project.

Civilization is the meta-dimension of humanity. Humans are n-dimensional. There are macro-dimensions of politics and technology and economics and science, and there are micro-dimensions within these — architecture and biology, for example. But Civilization is the master dimension, the meta-dimension.

Civilization, capital C, is the master civilization, not in the sense of Hitler’s master race, but in this opposite sense, of a “seeing what is good” in all things, and blending them together into a common identity, a common purpose, and a common project.

I believe a politically incorrect thing, which is that Western civilization, which has its roots in this story of Christendom which I have told you, was superior to other civilizations in history — but not in the sense of inherent superiority, as in the superiority of its ideas, or its people, or its accomplishments, or in the sense of economic, military, philosophical or moral superiority. No, its superiority lay in the sense that it was more aggressively synthetic. There was an intentional, mystical, centralized and distributed investment in the building of synthetic intelligence.

This thing that I believe is unpopular and unprovable, and rather nuanced. Nuanced because the other civilizations, lower case c, that have survived — India’s, China’s, Japan’s — survived for exactly the same reasons; they were superior in the sense that they were more syncretic than their local competitors, demonstrating more mutagenic flexibility. But none of these other civilizations learned as fast, integrated as fast, fought as much, or was as fervent and intentional about becoming the Master Civilization as the West. The irony of the “manifest destiny” of the West, is that embedded in the very syncretism that allowed it to succeed is the virus that makes Civilization, capital C, not Western, but global. In conquering the world, the West itself was conquered. And, in the free market of ideas, this is no bad thing — let the best win, but let all things be saved, let all things be written on scrolls and let all scrolls be preserved for eternity; for what we may overlook today, we may need tomorrow.

Synthetic intelligence is itself a synthetic term — let it consolidate meanings. But here I will use it in the sense of a combination of intelligences, a combination of truths and truth-projects, into a common intelligence, a single source of truth, a master data set, a united truth-project.

Scholasticism emerged within Catholicism — the synthetic emerged within the universal. For to build a universal system requires a system of systems, a framework of frameworks, a way of handling paradoxes, contradictions and conflicts — a way of somehow resolving the tensions that arise from attempting to merge worlds, from networking dimensions together.

Aquinas did not know, technically, what Gödel would discover in the 20th century, which is that no system can be both consistent and complete, so all system builders must tolerate either incompleteness or inconsistency. But by the end of his life, Aquinas may have known this intuitively — and chosen inconsistency. Consistency can be optimized but not achieved, what matters is that the foundation holds, that the umbrella covers. The linkages between things take time to form — to find points of connection, to translate between dimensions, is painstaking. But a system-of-systems can achieve meta-consistency far faster than a single system, and that is the syncretic approach.

Eppur si muove.
And yet it moves.

What of Galileo? Galileo’s trial is always pointed to as one of the great shames of the Catholic Church, as one of the great failures of the combination of science and religion; the great failure of syncretism.

As so often happens, we learned the wrong lesson from history. Galileo’s trial is a sign of progress. Progress? Progress. By the 17th century, that same civilization which had, a millennia before, been in extremis, was now encouraging progress across dimensions. In the dimension of astronomy, we find our hero inventing telescopes, discovering that the Earth moved around the Sun, and finding our place in the solar system.

What is it that drives such a man? Our modern answers to this question lack all passion —at best, we produce the word “curiosity”. The Project drives such a man. The Project Of Science was, after Aquinas, The Project Of Christian Civilization — for if all truth is God’s truth, to become a scientist is as worthy as to become a priest. Specialization arose, not just by the economic narrative, but by this shift in beliefs. Indeed, the systems of culture and beliefs cannot be easily separated from the systems of power and money which in turn cannot be easily separated from the systems of science and technology — which is the whole point of the scholastics. Somehow, all truth is truth, and it must be networked.

Galileo runs up against a truth which contradicts Aristotle. Because the Church had championed the study of science, and Aristotle was the founder of science, Aristotle’s geocentric hypothesis was the Catholic view.

Nor was the problem of the trial as simple as Galileo making an undeniably valid observation, and the Church rejecting it on the basis of dogma. The scientific community, including other serious astronomers such as Tycho Brahe, pointed out problems with the theory of heliocentrism which had to be resolved.

This is not the Catholic Church defending a Biblical doctrine. This is the Catholic Church attempting to reconcile Aristotle — a Classical Greek philosopher, which had in turn been rediscovered through Averroes, a Spanish, Muslim polymath — with Brache’s objections, with Galileo’s observations.

Furthermore, there is a trial. A trial being a symptom of a maturing legal dimension, a dimension of the pursuit of justice along the lines of natural law, another idea from Aquinas. A trial, a dimension of non-violent warfare. A trial, a debate.

That is progress. Such trials were not occurring before Aquinas, nor, to the best of my knowledge, were such trials occurring in other civilizations, at this time, or at any time.

One way of understanding what the trial was attempting to accomplish is to compare it to a modern scientific peer-reviewed journal, or to the internet, or to a merge process for commits to a codebase, or edits made to a dictionary. These are all technologies which we have invented as a Civilization to deal with this exact problem — it is a hard problem.

What if Galileo’s trial had gone the other way — would it vindicate the system? Systems need false positives and false negatives to challenge them in a dialectic. They grow by failure, by mistakes, by crisis. It is when there are no mistakes that there is no progress.

How do you reconcile conflicts and inconsistencies in a system? How do you network different forms and functions of truth? The trial miscarried justice because it wasn’t an adequate technology.

When was the trial? The trial was during the Reformation. What was the Reformation really about? It was about the failure of the Catholic Church to scale. This is not an ordinary failure, but a failure of success. Christendom had become so large, that the Church could not possibly organize and perform such a wide variety of functions.

Why was the Catholic Church building bigger and bigger churches, raising more and more money? The typical answers of greed and corruption are unsatisfactory and rather intellectually lazy. The more interesting answer is that the Catholic Church was dealing with an extraordinary scaling challenge, as the result of the extraordinary success of a single thought:

All truth is God’s truth.

For the same reason that organization can’t catch up to creativity, the building of Churches, the training of Priests, the administering of trials — could not catch up with the rate of progress, and the increased demands that Civilization was making on its institutions. Galileo’s trial and Luther’s Reformation are symptoms of the same underlying phenomenon.

Every institution, every discipline, every science, every industry —not just the Church — was struggling to keep up with how quickly Civilization was scaling. As every dimension expands after explosion, it occupies more space and requires more time, and it becomes hard to network these different dimensions — harder to keep them all organized as part of one master project, harder to maintain a canon, a single source of truth.

Even today, in 2017, with all our technologies, the little dimensions of Star Wars and Marvel struggle to maintain a canon. The nature of creative dimensions is to expand and the organizational problem with such expansion is that is difficult to structure, network, coordinate, integrate and harmonize all of these branches.

Superficially, the Reformation seems to be about breaking the bonds of structure — it looks like Civilization freeing itself of the rigid organizational structure of Catholicism, that is Universalism, that is, the building of a single source of truth, a single database, a universal synthetic intelligence project to organize Civilization.

But the irony is that the real Reformation was a re-formation, it was an exercise in formation, in design, it revisiting and revising design — but not abandoning the basic premise.

It was a modularization of structure, and a decentralization of intelligence, which allowed for bigger, more robust, more networked systems to emerge. Ultimately, these larger systems would attempt to network, but in a different way than they had before. The network had to be broken before it could grow larger and recombine, that is, reform.

Subsidiarius occurred. This is no failure, but a function of intelligence and a response to scaling crisis. The system must break to be reformed. The system must be broken into subsidiaries. The Centralized Intelligence must break into many Decentralized Intelligences in order ultimately to recombine as an emergent Centralized Intelligence operating at greater scale.

The Catholic principle of Subsidiarity was only formalized in the 19th century, but its origins trace back to the Middle Ages.

It is usually stated thus:

Decisions should be made at the lowest possible level of intelligence. That means the most local level. That means by the minimum viable agent. So if a decision can be made by a single individual, it should. If it can not be made by a single individual, but can be made from a small group, it should. If it can not be made by a small group, but can be made by a larger entity, it should. And so on. So that the only decisions being made at the highest level of intelligence — that of, say, a national government, or a theoretical one-world government — are the decisions that must be made on that level, because they cannot be made on any other level.

This is a principle that applies in computer science, economics, organizational design, force theory and political philosophy.

It applies everywhere because fractal intelligent systems are everywhere and it applies to all fractal intelligent systems. Nested hierarchies are an emergent evolutionary phenomenon — they can be founded in nature. Humans are such a progression. We were the next highest level of decision-maker that needed to exist.

Subsidiarity explains why all truth is the internet’s truth works better than all truth is the Catholic Church’s truth. The computational demands are too high. Centralized computing is too inefficient, too expensive. Even as computational power (the power to organize) grows exponentially, data (what is created by that power) grows exponentially faster — and so we never catch up. Zeno’s Paradox again.

So Galileo’s trial, Luther’s reformation and the subsequent limitation of scope as the Catholic Church scaled are in no way an invalidation of Aquinas’ syncretism. Rather, they are a testament to its extraordinary success.

The optimism of his project is so extraordinary as to be easily dismissed as ignorance. But I do not believe the scholastics were naive, although that is a secondary narrative, I don’t think that’s the point. I believe they were futuristic, long-term thinkers; and had a vision for Civilization, capital C.

I do think that they underestimated the challenge. Perhaps they thought they were building an intellectual palace, a Cathedral Of The Mind, that would take centuries to build.

But in attempting to organize all knowledge into a single canon, they unintentionally created an explosion of creativity — this is the dimensional explosion of the Renaissance.

So long as data is finite and static, it is a matter of time before it is completely organized. But if data is entropic, dynamic, networked — if it is exploding in every direction — then organization will never catch up to creativity.

There is a Zeno’s Paradox governing the relationship between organization and creativity. Organization will never catch up to creativity.

But most innovators stop there. As soon as they realize that The Project Of Organization — that is, The Project Of Organizing All Intelligences Into A Common Intelligence, or, The Project Of Organizing All Data Into Structured Data, or, The Project Of Organizing All Data Sets Into A Master Related Data Set — is governed by a Zeno’s Paradox, they give up. They conclude that they have committed themselves to an impossible challenge; that immutable physical laws block our path, like the angels wielding flaming swords, who standing guard over the Tree Of Life, lest we should return.

וַיְגָרֶשׁ, אֶת-הָאָדָם; וַיַּשְׁכֵּן מִקֶּדֶם לְגַן-עֵדֶן אֶת-הַכְּרֻבִים
וְאֵת לַהַט הַחֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת, לִשְׁמֹר, אֶת-דֶּרֶךְ עֵץ הַחַיִּים.

So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life.

But our path is not blocked, and progress is possible — this is a tractable problem. For just as there is a Zeno’s Paradox relationship between organization and creativity, such that organization can never catch up — there is a counter-relationship. The counter-relationship is simple: by giving creativity a structure and system to operate within, the serious ongoing investment in organization results in a never-ending creative explosion, in revolution after revolution. These successive revolutions ultimately drive innovation in organization, which in turn drive further creative explosion, which in turn drive further innovation in organization.

All the while, the data set is exploding — so the problem is getting larger and larger, at a faster pace than the solution can catch up. But although the problem:solution ratio gets worse before it gets better; it does get better — and I believe it ultimately resolves.

Until you understand this, you will not appreciate the work of Aristotle or Aquinas. Reading Aristotle as a student, I often felt that I was wasting my time studying old, out-of-date thinking. Some of his opinions are idiosyncratic and hilariously obsolete; and I judged his overall approach to be unscientific.

But what is the essence of science? What is most ancient is most futuristic. Aristotle is still the most futuristic incarnation of essential science; the best, the most important, scientist we have ever had — surpassing Bacon, Newton, Darwin, Einstein. Why? Because of the project.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

As I have argued before, this claim is false in practice. Google’s mission is to search, but not to organize. But this claim is true: Aristotle’s mission was to organize the world’s information into a single universal system. So is this claim: Aquinas’ mission was to organize the world’s information into a single universal system.

And just as the entire internet is useless without computers and search engines—so too, Aquinas and Aristotle built the foundation on which we stand.

In the reductionist, Cartesian approach of modern science — this is a false claim. Very few, if any, “real” scientists, that is, observationally-grounded, evidence-based science — “built on” the work of Aristotle, and none built on Aquinas. And yet this misses the point. The entire project of science, which ultimately emphasized an observationally-grounded, evidence-based approach, was indeed historically “built on” their work.

Nor is this a past accomplishment, which we recognize in retrospect. This is still the most futuristic idea that we have available to us; the forgotten power and strength; the shocking revelation. We are moving towards this, not away from it.

The most-thought provoking thing about our scientific age is that we are still not doing sciencia.

Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.

…

This situation is grounded in the fact that science itself does not think, and cannot think — which is its good fortune, hence meaning the assurance of its own appointed course… Science does not think.

What does Heidegger mean by these koans?

Sciencia is the essence of science, one of the macro-dimensions. And this essence is bound up with the essence of Civilization, which is meta, up one level, the master-dimension into which all of our pursuits merge, including technology. That is why Sciencia and Techne, the essences of these things, have nothing to do with the things themselves. They are points of origin, points of departure, the singularities from which these dimensions explode out creatively into the world — and what is on the other side of these singularities? What is on the other side is Civilization, which itself is somehow bound up with the Universe, which itself is somehow bound up with the physical laws of Space and Time, which beg questions of Eternity, Aeternitas, and Aeon.

When I say,

The most-thought provoking thing about our scientific age is that we are still not doing sciencia.

I am extending Heidegger’s thought. I am saying that Aristotle and Aquinas understood the most important thing about science, which is that science is one of the great projects of Civilization, and that Civilization is the great project of Man, and that Man is the great project of the Universe, and that the Universe is the great project of Eternity.

And Eternity, what is that? This Space/Time Construct is the great project of Eternity — which is the Multiverse, The Wood Between The Worlds, where all dimensions are exploding into Universes, exploding into Space/Times, united at this gathering point, fully consummated and expressed.

This is the thought that Francis thought. And it has been thought before. This is Blake — Eternity is in love with the productions of time. This is the Hindu world-dream. This is Krishna’s revelation to Arjuna. This is Moses encounter with THAT — The I Am. This is the Sufi mystical romance. This is the Taoist return to source. This is Parmenides’ χρὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ΄ ἐὸν ἔμμεναι — it is needful to think and speak what IS. This is Plato’s Aeon. This is Aristotle’s to ti ēn einai — that which has always been. This is Anselm’s That Which Nothing Greater Can Be Conceived. This is Voltaire’s Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer. This is Chardin’s the destiny of Civilization is to create God. This is Simmons’ Ultimate Intelligence. This is Kazantzakis’ Saviors Of God.

“If God did not exist, we would have to invent him.” By paradox of the relationship between Eternity and Time, it may be that God is both the Alpha and Omega, the start and end of time, and intervening in time — and yet the extraordinary thing may be that He/She/It does not yet exist, in time; that He/She/It may need to be invented, in the future, in the farthest future — at the final moment of singularity.

When are we? We lack the historical perspective of the future, to tell us when we are. History is the story of those who, like Hobbes, Bastiat, Cervantes, Alfred, Charlemagne, Aquinas, White — rightly see their moment, who think the thought that matters, and act upon that thought.

Aeon is a vision of Eternity. But when are we? We exist in time. In time, we are called to build White’s Camelot, Aquinas’ Synthetic Intelligence. White’s Camelot is the beautiful Civilization, the harmonization of our force, the synthesis of our truth, the combination of our creativity —the fractal decentralization of our free will decision-making as subsidiaries of this grand mission: Might in service of Right. Ideas given Forms. Time expressing Eternity.

This full progression almost certainly will be rejected as too mystical, but a thought deserves to be taken to its extremes. The most stubborn moderner will admit that we observe a universe in which we live. And that modern physics is uncertain of its ultimate fate. That it might end, for example, in heat death. At an extreme date in the future.

Then the moderner is in a bind.
Because he has reached the limits of science and stumbled on sciencia.
This universe will climax somehow.
I do not say end.
And what is our role to play in that story?
What stand will we take?

I am shy of my own ideas.
But as I grasp how unoriginal they are,
I am free to think and speak what is.

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.
And thus knowledge itself is power.
— Francis Bacon

And if it frightens and torments you to think of childhood and of the simplicity and silence that accompanies it, because you can no longer believe in God, who appears in it everywhere, then ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you have really lost God. Isn’t it much truer to say that you have never yet possessed him? For when could that have been? Do you think that a child can hold him, him whom grown men bear only with great effort and whose weight crushes the old? Do you suppose that someone who really has him could lose him like a little stone? Or don’t you think that someone who once had him could only be lost by him? — But if you realize that he did not exist in your childhood, and did not exist previously, if you suspect that Christ was deluded by his yearning and Muhammad deceived by his pride — and if you are terrified to feel that even now he does not exist, even at this moment when we are talking about him — what justifies you then, if he never existed, in missing him like someone who has passed away and in searching for him as though he were lost?

Why don’t you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting his birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don’t you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn’t it be His beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful? If he is the most perfect one, must not what is less perfect precede him, so that he can choose himself out of fullness and superabundance? — Must not he be the last one, so that he can include everything in himself, and what meaning would we have if he whom we are longing for has already existed?

As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.

Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest, the outermost limit?

Dear Mr. Kappus, celebrate Christmas in this devout feeling, that perhaps He needs this very anguish of yours in order to begin; these very days of your transition are perhaps the time when everything in you is working at Him, as you once worked at Him in your childhood, breathlessly. Be patient and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.

And be glad and confident.

Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke

Rome
December 23, 1903

Letters to a Young Poet.
Stephen Mitchell translation.

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