A common theme in this series of weblogs is the impact of the philosophical turn to nominalism in the late Middle Ages in Western Europe. This move, initiated by one William of Ockham dispensed with the idea of universals, reducing everything to the particular. One can see how this led to many aspects of thought and practice - empirical science, cultural individualism, political liberalism. Most significantly was the detachment from the metaphysical or eternal realm. God was not a personal reality and no longer by ascent of theosis could we participate in His energy. Instead God is reduced to a gigantic individual Who must be placated, the ultimate despot and this idea gradually had political implications whereby we all became individual powers within our own realm, existing for our own power rather than participation and relation with the Higher.
If one takes Platonism as the opposite extreme in thought to Ockham's nominalism, we find everything universal and metaphysical is seen as more real than the transitory world of becoming.. Transitory and particular things are real insofar as they participate in the forms of eternal and metaphysical reality. The realm of Being is real and those who follow this idea of metaphysical reality are called realists, for they do not believe universal categories are merely nominal.
The Church is the Golden Mean, instead of the indivisible particular unit of the individual we find the person, who is interrelational and participates in the higher for his meaning. The highest point is not the Platonic One, impersonal and abstract, but the personal inter-relational Triune God of three hypostases.
From here we can see that the person is very different from the individual. If we understand the personal as the unique energies of a common nature, then just as God manifests in His personal energies, distinct but not separate from the divine nature, so the human person is the energy uniquely expressing the imago dei of the common human nature. Human beings then should be understood not as atomised and completely autonomous individual units, but as the imago dei. This actually means unrepeatable uniqueness, whereas individualism, while breaking us apart, makes us all individual units identical in our enslavement to our passions. Think of the shopping-mall consumer.
In terms of nature or ousia, human beings share a fallen and mortal nature. We are corruptible, overshadowed by death. We are limited by time and space. We survive by striving against one another, competing as individuals. This is the life of death. However fallen our collective nature is though, we do all share one nature.
In sharing one nature, human nature, we are not completely autonomous. Our own actions affect our shared nature. The sins of one man defile human nature and therefore all of us. Even if there is not a direct effect on another individual by our actions we still affect our shared nature - its fallen-ness. This is why the liberal idea that I can do what I like if I do not affect another individual is a fallacy - we can still tarnish or soil human nature, the nature we all share.
Our energy is not completely separated from our nature and in that sense we are all connected through our shared nature. Much of what is celebrated in the West in terms of sexual degeneracy is defended on the basis that it does not directly affect any other individuals. That argument only works if you accept the nominalist idea that everything, including people, is particular and isolated. That is not the case if we share a common nature. The so-called victimless acts of pornography use, paying another person for sex in a free-market transaction, committing sodomy on a consenting adult, exercising my freedom to choose my own euthanasia are all wounds on the shared human nature. Human nature is degraded and its fallen-ness is emphasised. It also means I too participate in that sinfulness by my connection to others, even if I do not personally carry out that sin.
This is why Dostoevsky’s character in Brothers Karamazov said: “Because everyone is guilty for everyone else.”
And in terms of that shared nature we cannot simply blame another group as guilty of harming our shared nature. As Solzhenitsyn famously said: “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart- and through all human hearts.”
The radical individualist move of breaking off into autonomy from our shared nature is a false move and it is this false move that the liberalism of the modern West is based upon. If we are all completely atomised from our shared nature then what we do does not affect anyone else unless we outright harm another individual. This perspective is a failure to see that there is a common and shared nature. When we do something degenerate, sinful or immoral, when we lose our way, that has a direct impact on our shared human nature. No man is an island as John Donne put it.
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