Do we deserve our democracy?

We're used to hearing about voting rights in connection to women and minorities--but early in the history of the US, only (male) landowners were allowed to vote. There were a variety of reasons for this (such as social and economic class discrimination), but one of the more interesting ones was quality of education. Before the advent of public education, often only landowners were wealthy enough to afford a real education.

And education was important to the Founders. Public education was a topic close to Thomas Jefferson's heart--though universities were considered by some to be too elitist for true democracy. Without education, people were not good citizens.

This idea goes all the way back to ancient Greece, where full citizens were expected (albeit through the evils of slavery and grossly unequal classes) to have enough daily leisure time to educate themselves. If you were a farmer, for instance, you might not be allowed citizenship--because you didn't have enough time for the duties of citizenship.

Today, our schools are a ramshackle version of the Founders' ideals. Yes, we require the education of every child, no matter the race, class, or gender. But the quality of that education is seriously lacking, compared with the quality of education available in some other countries. It has degenerated even from when I was a kid, and not only allowed but encouraged to question the textbooks and teachers. At the schools I grew up in, for instance, you would fail the section on the literature assignment if the teacher caught you using Cliff's Notes. This was because you were supposed to come up with your own interpretation of the author's intent, and God help you if you couldn't think for yourself. These days? These days, they call them Spark Notes, and they are an official source for the officially accepted interpretation.

So my question is this: If education was so important to the founders, why is today's system so broken? (Don't even get me started on standardized testing!). Why do all of our candidates promise to fix education, while all of our legislators--once they're in office--do things like create mandatory standardized tests, not to mention cutting school budgets as often as possible?

I'm the last person to believe in conspiracy theories--but if you told me that the progressive lowering of our educational standards was deliberate, I'd be tempted to believe it.

Look at our political climate today. No one is really saying much of substance. We've become used to being fed sound bytes. Few people of any political leaning actually use critical thinking skills today. Why? Maybe we've lost the ability. Critical thinking is a skill that has to be taught. It used to be taught, but isn't anymore.

And that's a good thing for our politicians. Why stand on logic or real principal, when you can sway thousands of people with a few easily remembered catch phrases and tag lines? You don't need a good economic plan--all you really need are enough votes.

The Founders believed that education--good education--was vital for a healthy democracy. Why don't we, anymore?

What's perfect?

A lot of our modern ideas about "perfection" come from Plato. If you're familiar with him, you'll recognize his Forms. Whether the Forms exist in some Platonic realm (like the mind of God), or whether they're archetypal ideas everyone is born with, that Form is perfect.

The Ideal Man is a perfect man; every living, breathing man is a pale shadow of that perfection. There's no way any of us can be the ideal human--but somewhere, whether in the mind of God or as a mental archetype, there exists the Ideal Man.

Aristotle came back by saying that not only was there no Platonic Realm of Forms, but that no one was born already implanted with archetypal Forms. Once you saw enough people, you'd have an image in your head to recognize that bipedal, featherless animal as a human*. The same with a horse, a table, or a tree. If you'd never seen a dolphin, you'd have no dolphin Form in your head.

* [Unless Diogenes gave you a plucked chicken, in which case you'd be confused for life.]

Ever since then, our Western cultures have been obsessed with perfection. Athletes pursue it; employers expect it; religion says it only exists in the Being of God. Considering that this blog is about religious philosophy (particularly pantheism), let's take a look at that third claim.

Parmenides had an idea about perfection. Remember that he was a monist: Existence was unified, unchanging, and infinite in time and space. All this birth and death and change happening around us was a result of our puny human minds' imperfection. Both Heraclitus and Empedocles, though, decided that perfection was change: Heraclitus said there was nothing but change, while Empedocles' complex and beautiful cosmology was an ever-changing dance of elements and forces.

Much later, after Christianity (via Thomas Aquinas, among others) reclaimed Plato from those heathen Muslims (without whom we probably wouldn't even have Plato anymore), we came to see perfection as something to look forward to in the next life. This world was created by God, and thus separate from God, and therefore perfection could not exist within the world.

But here's the thing--if perfection actually existed, it would be useless. Imagine living the "perfect" life: Nothing would ever change! You could never grow old, true, but then you would never have children, either. No chance of going out to the movies, because you can't move (movement, after all, being change). There's no such thing as time, so you'd never have the pleasure of reading a good book. And forget sex--you could have foreplay, or climax, but never both. Perfection means you might see the Pearly Gates, but you can never walk through; you could stand on the streets paved with gold, but you'd see the same view for all eternity.

But if God is reality, as pantheism asserts, then we're left with two possibilities: Either there is no such thing as perfection--or else perfection includes birth, death, and change. If God is reality, then everything about life as we know it comes from the nature of God. God is birth, God is death, God is change. Reality, even with all its happiness and awfulness, is already perfect--or nothing is.

It's not a comforting view of perfection, but pantheism isn't a comforting view of God.

If God is reality, and we are part of that reality, then we are also part of God. Each of us is a tiny incarnation of the divine. So we can see ourselves as part of a pre-existing perfection, sit back, and twiddle our thumbs till we die. Or we can decide that, since we are each an incarnation of God, we have both the power and the responsibility to affect our little corner of the eternal unfolding of existence. If we're part of creation, we're also partners in it.

Nicholas Cusanus: Christian Panentheist and Pantheist

Nicholas Cusanus (or Nicholas of Cusa, or Nicholas Cryfts) was born in Kues in 1401, in what is now Germany, the son of a wealthy merchant. During his education in both the liberal arts and in canon law, he met and mingled with mathematicians, physicians, and humanists--a group that, at the time, was dedicated to bringing back the Greek ideals of the good life.

He never took a formal education in either philosophy or theology, but that did not stop him from educating himself. Among other Greek philosophers, Cusanus studied Parmenides (via Proclus and Plato). He also studied Dionysius (also called Pseudo-Dionysius), whose theology was both mystic and strongly Neoplatonic.

One of his first contributions to us was proving that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery. (Not surprising, perhaps, for a man who later became a controversial bishop.) The Donation of Constantine was--supposedly--the document by which Constantine gave the western part of the Roman Empire over to the authority of the pope. Cusanus was one of the first churchmen to realize that it was fake.

Cusanus' real notoriety began after a diplomatic trip from Rome to Constantinople. He played a part in one of the many embassies seeking reconciliation between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. This desire for reconciliation, or (re)union of opposites, played a large part in his later philosophy and theology.

On the way home from Constantinople, Cusanus reported being struck with something like a vision. From this experience, he produced "On Learned Ignorance," his first philosophical treatise. This was not a "leave your brain at the church door" support of deliberate ignorance: This was going beyond the "pure reason" that Kant critiqued.

Science and reason, Cusanus explained, could only take us so far: it can only tell us about the base, physical side of things, but nothing of the spirit. Once we hit the borders of what's possible with reason, we must take the leap into "learned ignorance." Ignorance, because to go beyond the human, we must go beyond human reason. Learned, because we seek (and learn about) God by going beyond the limits of (but not abandoning) human reason.

Cusanus didn't write in philosophical language; instead, he used familiar philosohical ideas (such as Neoplatonism) and some unfamiliar (for his times) religious metaphors to produce something that both combined and transcended philosophy and theology.

Take the phrase, "learned ignorance." It's a union of opposite concepts. This was something that captured Cusanus--the thought that opposites could, in some way, be part of a larger, unified whole that was simply too immense for humans to understand. Here we see the first hints of the pantheism he was later accused of proposing.

It's probably not surprising that Cusanus' philosophy followed in the Neoplatonics' footsteps. The three books of "On Learned Ignorance" were devoted to God, the world, and Christ: a Neoplatonic series symbolizing the One, the emanated creation, and the return of the created to the creator.

Also not surprising for a Greek-influenced thinker, Cusanus starts with Man as the measurer. Unfortunately, he says, God cannot be measured: there is no possibility of measurement between the finite and the infinite. There's no need to measure, though. Because this is Neoplatonic quasi-philosophy, the infinity of God and the finitude of creation are contained and reflected in each other--another example of Cusanus' love of the unity of opposites.

Here we come to the heart of Cusanus' theology: The creator and the creation are, on some level, unified. This is one of the ideas that led his writings to be called pantheistic. He uses the twin metaphors of "enfolding" and "unfolding": Creation is a finite point enfolded within the infinite Being of God; at the same time, the unfolding of the created universe is, in some way the Being of God.

Of course, these ideas are not only pantheistic; they are also panentheistic (the universe is part of God, but God goes beyond the universe). The whole of creation is present in each creature. And in the same way, so is God. Each creature is both the image of creation, and the image of the creator: Each individual, to Cusanus, embodies the unification of opposites that he seems to love. Each individual becomes Christ-like, through his own existence as the unification of creation and creator.

This unification goes beyond the God-human relationship. It's also embodied in the human-human relationship. If I contain the whole creation, then I also contain the reality of other people; so that anyone I meet is already within me--and I'm already within everyone I meet. I cannot, in any existential way, be truly separate from anyone else, because the union of opposites which takes place in and through God means that no one is truly separate from anyone else.

For Cusanus, the union of opposites was the very definition of Christ. For God to become Man, for Man to become God, for Creator to become creation and vice versa, was the centerpoint of his faith. The union of God and Man in Christ was not an original or singular event, but a hidden truth about the nature of reality.

Cusanus' ideas went beyond philosophy and theology: not surprisingly, he tried to unify the two. This was both a product of his understanding, and of the times, as there was a debate going on about whether philosophy was a branch of theology, or vice versa (though both sides mostly agreed that philosophy should be used to the same ends as theology, supporting the cultural power of the Church). He also went beyond both pantheism and panentheism, merging them into something that had never been seen before.

His philosophy goes way beyond what I've sketched out here, of course. But the unification of opposites is the heart of everything he presents. One of his later works, "On the Peace of Faith," brings this home in a startlingly modern way. This is a story of several people from a variety of faiths--Greeks, Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc.--meeting in Heaven and discovering that, though their religious languages and ceremonies seem different, they all have the same core of unified truth. Christ the unifier is secretly present even in non-Christian faiths, he says; and therefore all faiths are, at heart, the same.

Nicholas Cusanus died in 1464, a cardinal and part of Pius II's papal curia. Most of him was buried in the church of St. Peter in Chains, in Rome. His heart, though, was buried in his hometown of Kues, in the chapel he set up to serve as a hospice for the elderly. The chapel, and hospice, still exist today, along with the library of his works.