A Future Culture Where Aristotle and Aquinas Include Darwin

When St. Thomas Aquinas encountered Aristotle he approached it the way a traditional conservative approaches new things---although Aristotle was older than Christianity. Aquinas was tasked with trying to fit Aristotle, who he greatly respected, into Christianity, the “new” into the old. This meant taking an ascetic internal philosophy and adding to it a largely external social philosophy.

The Christian cross is a symbol of dying to oneself so that one can follow the Inward Path to the Father Within. The old self is crucified. The way of Christ, in some ways like the way of Hindus and Buddhists, is the path to the God Within. As Ravi Ravindra put it, Christ is the way, but Jesus is a way---many religious mystics have sought and found the God Within. All the desires of the flesh and body need to be unattached from, or blocked, to truly experience the God Within. The values and morals of Christianity were mainly concerned with attaining the God Within.

Aquinas had to develop the intellectual machinery to fit Christianity in with Aristotle or Aristotle with Christianity. Aristotle was concerned with the best life for humans to live in communities and small cities, which would provide an environment where people could live virtuously while pursing the commercial, recreational and religious things that fit well with human nature. Aristotle assumed that people would live together with kin and ethnic group, where the best bonding would be possible. Ridding the body of all desires to experience the God Within was not a top priority for Aristotle, some desires were more noble than other desires.

Aristotle and Aquinas did not have Darwinism to consider when they considered human nature and natural law. But we do. It turns out that the conservative tradition follows, more or less, Darwinian descriptions of human nature, especially with the discoveries of sociobiology. Human nature has been affirmed throughout human history as being kin-centered, gender defined, age-grading, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection.

Theological materialism, reflected upon here, can fit Darwin and sociobiology in with traditional conservatism and Christianity, but to do so we need to get back to defining the original Christianity of the Involutionary Inward Path. The intellectual machinery which tried to fit Aristotle with Christianity took Christianity too far away from Jesus and his central concern of the Inward Path to the Father Within.

The Inward Path was the first symbolic glimpse of the Godhood which can be reached in the Outward Path of evolution. Theological materialism adds to Christianity and the Involutionary Inward Path the Evolutionary Outward Path of material and supermaterial evolution to real Godhood. This is the Twofold Path of theTheoevolutionary Church which can bring the evolving knowledge of real human nature, natural law, and conservative tradition within Christianity without the twisting metamorphosis of Thomistic theology.

Future culture, future cities, can follow the order of tradition but include also the sacred evolution of life to Godhood. Monasteries can remain for those who follow the Inward Path, and sociobiological and genetic research centers can exists for those who follow the Outward Path, which transforms the Inward Path to the Outward Path of evolution to real Godhood. Churches can bond these sacred things, there can be Masses for both the Inward and Outward Paths, or one new Mass containing both. Culture and communities can live in harmony with real human nature, with kin and ethnic group, with an ethnopluralism of small states protected by a light federalism. Aristotle and Aquinas can include Darwin in this way, as we all get on with the sacred mission of evolving toward Godhood.