Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Each time I begin to preach to you, there’s a deep Orthodox ritual instinct that kicks in that I must resist. My first impulse is to kiss the microphone. [Laughter] I’ve checked the rubrics; it does not call for that. How many sermons have you heard about the good Samaritan? A lot. Nearly 20 from me, I suppose, nearly. How many sermons have you heard about the thieves among whom the Samaritan fell? May I have a show of hands on that? [Laughter]

Today let’s talk about the thieves. The gospels don’t specify how many of the thieves there were, but for the purposes of the sermon, there were three. [Laughter] Talking about thieves that take this man—he’s going down, first of all, from Jerusalem to Jericho. He’s going down to the oldest city in the world, the first city of the world, the city of Jericho. That’s where he’s going down. So it’s something deep in human history. And he falls among thieves. And the thieves rob him and strip him and leave him half-dead. It’d be good to know who those thieves are. Those thieves have not disappeared from the earth; on the contrary, they’ve all gotten tenure at our universities. [Laughter] Some of them even run for public office, but I probably shouldn’t comment on that. [Laughter]

Let me list three thieves this morning. Now, Isabelle, Martha, I may be calling on you during the course of the sermon. Well, maybe not, but I may. And you, Hannah, what shall I say of you? Maybe you. The three thieves, I think, at least the ones I’m going to talk about this morning, are noetic despair—despair having to do with the mind, a noetic despair; second, materialism; and third, the flight from reality. Noetic despair, despair having to do with the operations of the mind.

I believe that a college education, perhaps even a junior year of high school education, should begin with one work infallibly. One must begin there. That work is written back in the ‘40s by a man named Richard Weaver, entitled, Ideas Have Consequences. I believe that to be an absolutely indispensible book for anybody living in the 20th, 21st century: Ideas Have Consequences. Richard Weaver convincingly chronicled the many moral and social evils attendant on what I call the mind’s noetic despair. The loss of metaphysics, radical materialism, the dominance of quantity over quality, greed and avarice, fragmentation and obsession, egotism in work and art, the abdication of a hierarchical structure, sensuality, acquisitive violence, the quest for power, radical subjectivity and selfishness, the loss of piety and justice, the corrosion of friendship, the replacement of religion by education, and then the replacement of education by training. It’s a big loss, but I’ve just described the world we live in.

Weaver placed the blame for the present cultural crisis in the West—remember, he wrote this 60 or so years ago—he placed it at the doorstep of Occam’s nominalism at the beginning of the 14th century. Now, I fear at that last sentence, I just lost you. [Laughter] I have to explain what that is. Isabelle, where do you get your idea of an apple?

Isabelle: I taste it?

Fr. Pat: You taste it. You see it. You taste it, you see it, you feel it. That’s where you get your idea of an apple, right? Where do you get your idea of a two?

Isabelle: Because they told me…

Fr. Pat: You’re taking it on faith. I’m hoping in time, the day will arrive when you won’t take it on faith; you’ll really, really know there’s a two. [Laughter] I remember teaching philosophy—it’s hard to remember now that I was teaching philosophy. I had students—you’re much smarter than the students I had when I taught in college, a quarter of a century ago: “Well, I’ve seen a two! I know what it looks like!” [Laughter] I said, “Come up here. Do you think you could draw a picture of it?” “Yeah!” He comes up to the board, he takes his chalk, and writes: “2.” And then he turns around, looking triumphantly like he’s just stumped the professor. [Laughter] I said, “No, all you’ve done is put chalk on a board. That’s all you’ve done. You’ve signified something that you’ve never seen.” And then quickly with the chalk I drew a picture of a tree. I said, “Is that a tree?” “Well, no, no, that’s just…” Yeah, right. “How do you know that’s not a tree?” Because you’ve seen trees, but the idea of the two is already in your head.

Now, have you ever seen goodness? No, but you have an idea of goodness, don’t you? In your mind, you have an idea of goodness. Now, the question is—Martha, I’m coming to you! The question is: Is that idea real, or is an idea that you construct with your own mind, the idea of goodness, is simply an idea that you construct with your own mind? See, that’s the problem. That’s the problem. I know there are Orthodox who rejoice that we missed out on the medieval universities, but I believe it was to our loss, because the medieval universities went to grips on this sort of thing. Where is the idea of goodness come from? Because we all have an idea of goodness, don’t we? We all have one, but where did it come from?

The nominalist says, “Well, we just made it up. We constructed the idea ourselves. It’s not a real thing; it’s a name. It’s a nomen; it’s a name. It doesn’t really exist. It’s a construction of the human mind.” Anybody who tells you that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is telling you that your eye creates beauty; your mind creates beauty: you don’t really see it. Anybody that tells you that beauty is in the eye of the beholder—cut off all contact with that person, because they’re finished. They don’t know anything! Because if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then truth is only in the workings of the brain. Nominalism says that this is only an idea, a construction of the mind, just a name; it’s not real.

It was to that late, indeed, rather recent, season in the history of thought that we retrace the modern discomfort with and distrust of the world of spiritual intuition, transcendence. I think all of you actually, you have an idea of beauty in your mind. You have an idea of truth in your mind. You may have a hard time describing it, but you know what it is. The nominalist will tell you that you constructed the idea yourself. From that time on, in the 14th century, thinkers began to conclude that the thoughts of transcendence were simply the products, perhaps even the by-products, of the human mind itself.

The nominalist says that universal concepts—goodness, truth, beauty—were not, in the strict sense, real. Moreover, the nominalist denial that the mind was capable of knowing anything real above itself was bound in due course to lead to the dissolution of metaphysics and everything else to which metaphysics gives rise, including the prescriptive authority of inherited language. Language has authority, and those who do not recognize the authority of language have lost the processes of thought. The loss of the prescriptive authority of inherited language, the anchoring of the moral imagination, and the final validation of law—there’s the first of the thieves. That’s a big thief: the thief who robs you of your mind has taken away that which is essentially human. In fact, they’re rather explicit about this. They don’t really believe there is a mind, because, as you’ll see in a moment, they don’t really believe there is a soul.

The second thief; he’s actually the son of the first thief: materialism. This philosophy produced modern materialism. Nothing so turned Western man’s thoughts back to the things of earth than the sudden persuasion of his being unable to grasp anything higher. In other words, you’d still know apples. They’re material; you’d understand that. Your mind can understand earth and material things, but if it can’t understand, really grasp, anything higher, then that’s really all that’s real: is the material world. The modern man says, “Get real.” See, in the medieval university, when they said, “Get real,” what they meant is: “Let’s do a lot more thought and speculation.”

The denial of man’s ability to perceive transcendent, intellectual, noetic realities above himself guaranteed that the Western mind would thenceforth turn ever more completely toward the only reality that remained: physical reality, the world of matter. It was to this new movement in the 14th century, Weaver argued, that we correctly ascribe most of the credit for Western man’s growing determination to look at matter in a completely materialistic way, including the processes of the mind itself. That becomes material. It’s simply the biochemical, electronic impulses of the brain, so we’re nothing but mud.

Matter comes to represent the sum total of all that can be known, and also the only means by which it can be known. Now try preaching the Gospel, the good news, to a culture like that! You may as well just switch everything to Mandarin Chinese. Such folk have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Nothing, it was now concluded, was knowable except the material world, of which the mind itself was part.

What was lost in all this development was the classical notion of intellectus, in Greek, nous, as the highest, deepest region of the soul and the supreme defining faculty of the human being. This intellectus, this nous in Greek, if one followed this line of thought, laid down by nominalism, was now an illusion, just an illusion. Classical Christian anthropology and ascetical doctrine always maintain that the nous, the intellectus, when purified by the divine grace, repentance, and the ascetical life, is that faculty through which man knows God.

I think some of you have been Orthodox for a while and have started reading the Philokalia. I’m not going to ask for a show of hands, but notice that the central concept throughout the entire Philokalia is nous, the recovery of the intellect; the entire ascetical life of the Orthodox Christian is a recovery of the intellect, the nous, that faculty in man which can perceive truth and therefore has the capacity for the contemplation of God. Moreover, it is through the nous, the intellectus, that man apprehends by simple cognition—that’s a word, by the way, I’m stealing from St. Isaac of Nineveh. Simple cognition: the inner principles of created things, this direct grasp of incorruptible truth, this spiritual perception of permanent and immaterial reality is the highest act of the human soul.

This development led, in fact, to doubts that the human being even has a soul. Orthodox Christian asceticism and the recovery of the nous are the same thing. Orthodox theology, Orthodox Christian theology, the theology of our Church, stands foursquare against the entire development we’ve just considered.

And third and perhaps more briefly, let’s talk about that third thief, of flight from reality: the flight from reality. Western culture, American culture, has now reached a critical point in the process I’ve just outlined. If truth itself is solely the product of the human brain, that is to say, if truth itself is simply the product of electronic, biochemical processes in man’s cranium, then subjectivity is the only reality. Each person is isolated—total isolation. Notice, we’ve even abandoned even the slightest chance of what traditionally is known as friendship and communion. The only reality is the me, not even Bergson’s moi social, social “me”: moi social is just a fabrication; it’s just me. The person who says that beauty is in the eye of the beholder must logically go on to say that truth is in the brain of the knower, because if they eye creates beauty, the brain creates truth. This notion is perhaps the most serious of the thieves that beset the human race, on the way down from Jerusalem to Jericho.

Let me tell you a little story to illustrate what I mean here. It’s a very brief story; it won’t take long to tell it. I read this story this past week. It knocked me off my chair—that’s a metaphor. [Laughter] It didn’t really knock me off my chair. Almost knocked my head off my neck! Here’s the story.

The American historian, Barbara Tuchman, in her book, The Proud Tower, describes an incident in which Philipp Ernst, the artist father of the surrealist, Max Ernst, was painting a picture of his garden when he omitted a tree that spoiled the composition. Then, struck with remorse that he had violated reality, determined to set the picture right. He went out and cut down the tree. [Laughter]

You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. He went out and cut down the tree. Sweet people! I submit to you that this story stands as a parable of everything wrong with Western culture today. I’m not trying to make an environmental statement here, for crying out loud. We cut out, we reduce, we annihilate whatever does not conform to our own picture of reality. We will change reality!

Now, there’s some fairly obvious—I mean, these are obvious to everybody here—some fairly obvious and extreme manifestations of this, where people so completely deny reality, they actually get surgery on themselves just to change it, because it doesn’t conform to what’s going on in their stupid heads! Now that’s just an extreme example, but this is very common. In what Tony Esolen’s recently called common “corpse,” you may find some more instances of that. Manipulation of language and things like that.

This third thief on the road to Jericho robs us of reality itself. Worse than that, this thief has persuaded us that he has not robbed us, and he’s left the world in which we live stripped naked and half-dead. I say that because all of us here live in this world. It is incumbent upon us to love God with the whole mind, to think through the faith, to meditate on the gospels, to take seriously the challenge of the gospels, because what is in us is a pearl of great price: it’s the capacity for knowing God. Amen.