“The Catholic Church,” according to G.K. Chesterton, “is
much larger on the inside than it is on the outside.” Those of us who have been out and now are in
(back in, for some of us) know how true it is.
And it stands to reason: as both a worldly and a spiritual entity, the
Church cannot be contained within purely physical bounds.
What is both seen and unseen?
This sounds like sheer nonsense, of course, to those who are formed in a materialist worldview, because they reject a priori the existence of a non-physical reality. It may be a decided minority who consciously embrace such a worldview, but many, many more unthinkingly see the world in the same way. Explaining Catholicism and the Catholic Church under these circumstances (except, maybe, in the most zealously orthodox Catholic schools) sometimes feels like trying to converse with someone who speaks a completely different language.
Instructing the
unknowing, however, is one of the Spiritual Works of Mercy (and for some of us,
it’s also part of our employment contract), so we must always search for new
ways to communicate the experience of faith.
In another post, for instance (“A Dark Matter: 'Proving' God In A Materialistic World"), I discuss the cosmological
theories of “dark matter” and “dark energy”
as a way of addressing the common idea that, because we can’t detect God
directly using scientific instruments, it’s unreasonable to believe in
him. Scientist believe that 95% of the
matter and energy in the universe in completely undetectable, but they are
convinced it is there because of its observed effects on things we can
detect; likewise, we can be sure of the existence of God, even though he is
beyond this world, because of his effect on things (and people) that we
are able to see.
The Faith Postulate
In a similar way,
there are things we can know only by experiencing them; the love of God as we
experience it in His Church is a prime example.
The outsider will often dismiss this sort of knowledge as requiring an
irrational, unsupported belief, since the proof comes after our initial
commitment. We might ask such sceptics
to consider geometry by way of analogy.
Euclidean Geometry, for instance, starts with the parallel postulate, which
requires that parallel lines never meet.
It’s not proven, you simply have to take it as a given. Once you do, of course, you find that the
entire system is consistent, which validates your starting assumptions. More importantly, you find that when you
apply it to the real world, for measuring property lines, for instance, it is
absolutely reliable. Likewise the
Catholic Faith: once you “step inside” and see the results in your own life,
the most “reasonable” response is belief (this is Blaise Pascal's proscription for those who remain unconvinced by the logic of his famous wager). From the inside we can also see that
Christianity yields truer results on a global scale than other systems of
belief (as I explain in “What Would Darwin Do?”).
All analogies are
imperfect, of course, and a sceptic might point out that, while the Catholic
Church claims to hold immutable truths, we can change the parallel postulate
and still come up with other internally consistent systems of geometry, systems
which may not work on a plane, but work perfectly well in other contexts. In spherical geometry, for instance,
parallel lines (which are actually lines of longitude) meet exactly twice, at
the poles. This system is much more
accurate than Euclidean geometry for measuring on a global scale. Spherical geometry shows us, for example,
that what looks like shortest distance from, say, Chicago to Rome (a straight
line from west to east) on a flat map is actually much longer than a route
which loops north (or appears to “loop” north) over Greenland.
United Airlines' graphic showing Chicago to Rome flight path |
The Fullness of Truth
The fact that
there are different geometries, however, doesn’t weaken the analogy at all: if
anything, it develops it further. Like
Euclidean geometry, which only works on a two-dimensional plane, the scientific
worldview is an accurate and quite useful tool for interpreting reality . . .
within a certain narrow focus. It
enables us to learn about and work with things that are physical and
measurable, but it cannot tell us about things like love, justice, or any other
reality that might exist outside of the purely physical realm. Just as a
bathroom scale can tell us how much we weigh but can’t tell us our age, it
cannot alone tell us anything about things outside of its set boundaries. The Christian Revelation, on the other hand,
reaches beyond the material world and gives us access to a much fuller reality, and once we accept its premises, we can see
both its internal consistency and its Truth when applied to our experience.
Maybe when we
look at it in this way, it can help us explain what St. Paul means when he says:
“Let no one deceive himself. If anyone
among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may
become wise. For the wisdom of this
world is folly with God” (1 Corinthians 3:18-19). He is not rejecting reason, but saying that,
to someone who thinks in only two dimensions, three-dimensional reasoning is
incomprehensible. Likewise with
Chesterton: those on the outside of the Catholic Church often think they are
looking at a plane, while from the inside we can see it in all its
three-dimensional fullness. Finally, one last
quote, from one of the greatest of geometricians, Archimedes: "Give me a place
to stand, and I will move the world!” Everything depends on that “place to stand”, and there’s no firmer ground than the
Church founded by Jesus Christ.
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