scholars. Harrison carefully keeps his place in the com-munity of scholars by respecting the rules of small T truth in which they all trade. But… unstated, yet always present, a very serious theological integrity shapes and guides his scholarship.
Speaking (as I am) as a philosophical theologian, Harrison takes 380 pages of densely argued text to make two very elementary points in Christian philosophical theology. Firstly, it has always been, and remains, eminently sensible to understand natural illumination (ordinary ratio-empirical reason) as a divine revelation, and secondly; there is no inherent reason why naturalism, science, and theology should not be happily integral. However – and this is where all the heavy historical scholarship lifting comes in – historical genealogies can be traced that show how our academic culture came to reject these two, shall we say, self-evident theological truths, which possibly all other cultures and times have accepted.
There is great need for scholars like Harrison who are serious theologians but who can move freely, and with just respect, in the secular academy.
Finally, Harrison is a theological philosopher of both history and nature. In both domains he is a Thomistic Aristotelian. As Stewart Umphrey outlines in his technical but very helpful book The Aristotelian Tradition of Natural Kinds, and Its Demise, Aristotle’s commonsense approach to natural philosophy is deeply persuasive but impossible to maintain without good faith in the indemonstrable theological warrants that it is natural and necessary for all students of nature to assume. In the more accessible book Aristotle’s Children, Richard Rubenstein makes a similar point. However much modernity defines itself as a rejection of Aristotle, it remains true that modern science is deeply indebted to the ancient Stagirite (biology in particular). Again, his philosophical commitments are not overt, but Harrison thinks like a modern Aristotelian about nature, and his confidence in modern science itself is premised on the Western natural philosophy outlook that was richly theolog-cally integrated with Christian faith by Aquinas. When it comes to the philosophy of history, the thinker Harrison appeals to most directly is from Catholic Germany, but is the Jewish Protestant Karl Löwith. Löwith makes a persuasive argument that what we in the West mean by history is deeply indebted to Hebrew and Christian faith, and thus history is tacitly theological, and the assumption that normative directions and in-trinsic purposes can, in some measure, be discerned in history relies on divine creation and eschaton bearings from outside of history. It is these extra-his-torical reference points that make any meaning at all in history possible. Oth-erwise – as perhaps Henry Ford said – history is just one damned thing after another.
On the tacitly theological grounds of any meaningful history, Karl Löwith, Josef Pieper (see his The End of Time), and Eric Voegelin are in complete agreement. And frankly, they must be right and Ford, or Arnold Toynbee, must be lying. But there are reasons tied up with analogical metaphysics why Protestants are in some regards less able to read any real meaning from his-tory and nature than is a Thomistic Catholic. For this reason, I will align Har-rison’s philosophy of history more with Pieper than with Löwith.
It struck me when reading Some New World how boldly philosophical – in a Thomistic Aristotelian register – and passionately theological – in a no frills orthodox Christian manner – this book is. As a philosophical theologian I sometimes throw friendly barbs in Harrison’s direction about fence-sitting historians. But whilst the philosophy and theology are under the surface of the iceberg in Harrison’s work, the signs of what lie beneath the water under-gird every page if you have eyes to see. And if you do not, you are getting a solidly theological and philosophical lesson through the medium of history even so.
History has been used as a central polemic tool in the evisceration of traditional Christian theology and in the cultural de-Christianisation of the West in our times. History is not ever philosophically or theologically neutral, which does not imply that there are no real truths of fact and meaning to be discovered in history. Harrison is very aware of all this as he writes. There is a lot going on under the surface of his careful historical arguments, and that is what makes this book such a rich and valuable read.
Finally, what do we do with naturalism?
Harrison argues that naturalism as a strictly heuristic and methodological de-vice guiding the operational assumptions of the practices of modern science is both harmless and helpful. This may well be the case. But Harrison’s book also shows us that metaphysical naturalism has been deeply taken up by our institutions of learning and education. As a result, our children and scholars are deeply formed to unquestioningly believe that it is really the case that reductively materialist naturalism is the Truth about reality. But it is bigger even than that. Our worlds of technical and political power, our worlds of legal and moral meaning, our worlds of stories and entertainment, have also come to believe in the language and norms of metaphysical naturalism. And it is bigger than that. The deep penetration of Western culture by metaphysical naturalism (in, ironically, our post-metaphysical times which make this penetration possible) has been the main driver of science and religion conflict since the late nineteenth century. There really was a war between science and religion from about 1870 to about 1970. The only reason we do not feel that conflict now is because the war is over. This war for public epistemic authority was decisively lost for religion, and it was decisively won for metaphysical naturalism. Christians interested in science and religion should not, it seems to me, be lulled into a false sense of peace and tranquillity between science and religion, just because the war is over. And just because there is a firm consensus among historians of science that a putative perpetual war be-tween supernatural religion and natural science is completely historically fraudulent, does not mean that the de-Christianisation of the West did not happen through the successful propagation of Huxley’s cultural mythology. Such realizations are the very important take-home matters of pondering that Harrison’s book leaves us with. And I highly recommend the book, and the pondering of what it draws to our attention. This is a very significant work, by one of our most eminent contemporary historians of science and religion, and its implications need to be wrestled with in the most serious and concerted fashion.
Paul Tyson
The University of Queensland
Republished with permission of Reviews in Science, Religion and Theology, 3(3) September 2024 pp. 29-35
