The concept of pleroma, the City of God and the City of Man, was set down by Saint Augustine in a major theological text circa 400 AD when he was Bishop of Hippo. Augustine argued that these two cities were essentially communities of the spirit, one devoted to angels and votaries who practiced the humble and selfless love of God, and the other representing the fallen state of envy, pride, lust and domination. They are intimately meshed with one another and will continue so until separated out at the end of time.
Even so, many have come to believe that the two antithetical cities can be aligned with many other interests, as scholar Robert Wright points out in The Evolution of God, with “the interest of the family, the interest of the society, the interest of the world and the interest of moral and spiritual truth.” Moreover, “religion has gotten closer to moral and spiritual truth, and for that matter more compatible with scientific truth,” as he elaborates in Three Scientists and Their Gods.
When it comes to religious thought and speculation, the hopelessness of figuring out exactly what something is doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Conceiving of the exact nature of the electron, for example—is it a particle, a wave, a vibrating string, a precise occupant of a specific space, an energy point—is in a way like trying to make sense of an objective moral order and the mysterious presence of a real universe owing to a Creative architect or progenitor. All this makes more sense than not conceiving of it at all. “Our image of an electron is very, very different from what this source would look like were the human cognitive apparatus capable of apprehending it adroitly,” Wright says in Evolution. The same is true of the rational, moral, and spiritual dimensions that we inhabit and which are an equal source of curiosity and amazement. And who or what is responsible for the evolutionary system that placed highly sentient life on a trajectory toward wonder and discovery?
Wright believes that truth and morality are primary manifestations of divinity in which we can partake, and that by partaking in it we become wiser human beings. This is a provocative affirmation. What I assume he is getting at is that there is no authentic science (which means “knowledge”) without a belief in or without its being grounded in a moral order, no authentic science without a conviction of or a suspicion of something overarching it all, whatever it may be—a God, a supreme intelligence, a creative force, a mathematical principle that appears to be bizarrely cognizant, a Logos which is a word and is not a word, a moral compulsion. Like it or not, at the root of science there is a religious basis.
We know of the early and longstanding tension between scripture and scientific knowledge. As Steven Weinberg documents in To Explain the World, the view among the early Christians “that pagan science [e.g., Greek] is a distraction among things of the spirit that ought to concern us” was widespread and persisted in various forms into the Medieval and Renaissance periods. The key text was Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” Galileo was confined to his home. Copernicus’ revolutionary manual was placed on the Index. Bruno was burned at the stake.
Yet, the inner spirit of Christianity was profoundly but silently at war with the outward manifestations of authority, given the faith’s subliminal focus on the Creation as the handiwork of God which required human reason to explore and understand it as much as possible if it were to be revered as the intricate wonder that it is—another of the ironies of history. As Amir Alexander writes in Infinitesimal, a conflict “pitted Europe’s forces of hierarchy and order against those of pluralism and change.” A disagreement “over mathematical concepts became a contest over the heavens and the earth.” There was no salvation without belief, but belief was not blind. It was the free expression of the will and the mind coming to a heartfelt but also reasonable conclusion.
Mankind has devised many ways of trying to get close, or closer, to God: prayer, good works, martyrdom, and devoted study. Science is another way of pursuing the dream of getting closer to the Creator’s vast, infinitely diverse, indescribably wondrous workmanship of the universe itself, to the nature of its most profound secrets and to the felt awareness of its sheer miraculous being. Many scientists now identify how Judeo-Christian ideas were crucial to the development of modern science and the critical role that belief in God had played in the scientific revolution. The biblical doctrine of creation helped liberate Western science from the “necessarian theology”—the primacy of the absolute will of God and the stand against contingency and complexity of sources—of the Medieval church and university system, by asserting the contingency of nature upon the will of a rational God. It is curious how the inner core of some religions can work against and subvert its external constatation.
Related: What’s Driving the Rise in Non-Denominational Christianity? You Might Be Surprised.
The human mind should not take things “lying down,” unless it is lying on the ground gazing at the stars. It is compelled to wonder not simply at the fact but at the miracle of the existence of both the conscious mind and the infinite universe which embraces and resists it. And that, in the last analysis, not only allows us but drives us to explore it, and to unify the City of Man with the City of God.
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