I’m attending the Easter service at Geneva Campus Church, which is located in a church building right on the edge of multiple new constructions designed to support the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s position in the world of scientific research with a business pay-off.
As I drive to church, my habit is to listen to Wisconsin Public Radio, the local classical station, and I cannot help but notice the contrast between the glorious classical Easter music, on the one hand, and the sometimes friendly, and sometimes hostile, but typically distant attitude toward the Easter celebrations going on in churches around Madison. If asked, I’m sure that none of the commentators would be able to make the connection between the Easter events and the practically oriented, scientific university in which they live out their lives.
For those interested in this question, I’m reprinting below (with commentary) how Paul Tillich saw the connection in his audacious Inaugural address in June, 1929, upon assuming the chair of Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfort on the Main. Reprinted as Chapter 1, “Philosophy and Fate,” in The Protestant Era, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948, pp. 3-15, translated by James Luther Adams).
The victory of Christianity is the victory of the idea that the world is a divine creation over the belief in the resisting power of an eternal matter. It is the victory of the belief in the perfection of created being in all its levels over the tragic fear of resistant matter, hostile to the divine. It is the radical denial of the demonic character of existence as such. It places an essentially positive valuation on existence. And this implies that it places a positive valuation on the whole temporal order of events, that the “order of time” harbor within itself not only, as with Anaximander, a becoming and a passing away but also the possibility of real novelty, a creative and formative power, a purpose and end that give it meaning. In Christianity, time triumphs over space. The irreversible, unrepeatable character of time, its meaningful directedness, replaces the cyclic, ever recurrent becoming and passing-away. A “gracious” destiny that brings salvation in time and history subdues a demonic fate which denies the new in history. Thus the Greek view of life and the world is overcome, and with it the presupposition of Greek philosophy as well as of Greek tragedy. (8)
In my opinion, Tillich is better at describing what took place, and what it means for thinking, than he is about the underlying cause(s) of it all, which may be a topic for further writing further on. But his description of what this historical shift meant for the thinking process is right on the money:
Greek philosophy had developed categories and methods of universal significance. But the religious character of Greek culture prevented them from being used for world transformation. They were used either for aesthetic intuition of the world, for ethical resignation from it, or for mystical elevation above it. In contrast to these uses, Christian humanism (the fruit of this historical change) employed Greek concepts for the technical control and revolutionary transformation of reality. Especially useful for this purpose was the mathematical-quantitative interpretation of nature as promoted by the Pythagoreans and Plato….Modern philosophy….overcomes the existential skepticism of the last period of Greek philosophy by a methodological skepticism as the basis of mathematical science and its technical application. And there is no better and more continuous test for the truth of this type of scientific approach to nature than the fact that the technical creations which are based on it do work and work more effectively every day. Ethical theories for the individual and legal theories for the state, fitting the world-transforming activism of modern culture, are added to the dominant philosophy of science….(9-10)
