Spencer Heath Archives

Item 39

Start of an essay for the Bross Foundation Award at Lake Forest College, closing December 1960, for “an unpublished manuscript concerning the relations of Christian religion to other branches of knowledge.”

Spring 1960?

 

Original is in item #37

 

 

     Man-kind is the only known kind or form of life in which inheres the power progressively to so transform its world as to make itself more and more biologically secure and to achieve for itself ever more and more abundant life and length of days.

     Likewise, mankind is the only form of life that imagines any unseen world beyond the world of the animal senses; the only form that conceives and imagines any other­wise Unknown. Mankind thus alone, among all living forms, adopts and practices some kind of religion, crude or creative, according to its understanding, its image of the Unknown.

     The imagination of man compels him to conceive a rationale, a system of order and beauty behind the veil of the senses, an order intrinsic and potential in him in a grow­ing correspondence with the universal order whence his whole being is derived. Thus religion bears witness to the kind of knowledge that is interior and intuitive to the spirit of man according to the degree and development of the inspira­tion wherewith from his beginning as man he and he alone was uniquely endowed.

     The Christian religion is the supreme exemplification of this kind of knowledge. It rests not upon physical perceptions or particular experiences, but upon indwelling intuitive percep­tions of the whole. Its Reality is synthetic, conceived out of the spirit, both as personal in its relation to one and universal in relation to all or to the whole.

 

     We must now examine this intuitive, indwelling and largely unconscious kind of knowledge, as exemplified in the Christian religion and with “other branches of knowledge,” and in particular with that branch of knowledge which, in contrast, is analytical and rational, deducible from parti­cular discrete events as partial and finite realities — that other branch of knowledge commonly called science.

     The relations between these two branches of knowledge can best be brought out first by most sharply distinguishing the one from the other.

     The primary distinction is that of magnitude merely. In both cases the subject-matter of the knowledge is the same, namely, the complex of events, happenings or phenomena — also called energy or action — that, taken all together constitute the universal cosmos. We say events because all that we call “things” are ephemeral. They come and go, form and dissolve and are thus themselves also events, whether of long term or short. And we say cosmos instead of chaos because all knowledge must be concerned with order and not disorder if anything be known or understood. And we say uni­versal cosmos because neither intuition nor experience nor reason gives us any warrant for presuming bounds.

     Christian knowledge is synthetic; the spirit of man takes the cosmos in its metaphysical aspects and as a whole. And from its self-knowledge sprung and evolved from the whole it conceives itself in all its needs and moods, its limitations and its powers, its passions and compassions, as but a partial yet increasing mirror-image in stern but ever friendly communication with its universal and divine.

     The knowledge that is called science, on the other hand is primarily analytical. It takes the cosmos bit by bit as it were. Beginning with single simple measurable events it examines their various aspects and compositions, their similarities and dissimilarities and how they are related reciprocally one kind to another in the process of the whole. The distinction is thus one of quantity and method of approach rather than in the subject matter of the knowledge that by both religion and science is gained.