A few months ago, I read Francis Sullivan’s Salvation Outside the Church? I only meant to read a portion of it for a research essay, but I confess to having devoured it in a few days. I recall being obscenely busy with school and work, but I just couldn’t put that book down. It was that good. The title is a reference to the idea of Ex ecclesiam nulla salus. In English, that is, “outside the [Catholic] Church, there is no salvation.” In the book, Sullivan goes to great lengths to explain how the Church came to understand the idea as rigidly and how it came to a different understanding in the Vatican II era. But I won’t bore you with all that theology. Among other things, what fascinated me about this read was the intersection of history and Church teaching. While this may seem obvious to some and heretical to others, the fact is that doctrine and belief more generally is most definitely influenced by the context in which it arises. Thought does not emerge from a vacuum: one must consider its origins. This has been a theme that has come up in multiple books I’ve spent time with this past little while—from Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels to Feng Youlan’s A Short History of Chinese Philosophy—and so I thought I would speak to this notion as best as I’m able.

In my mind, what seems to distinguish religion from philosophy a lot of the time is its rigidity: philosophers ought to embrace what “we in the biz” call “socratic humility,” which is to understand the limits of their knowledge. Religion, on the other hand, is often more rigid: religions like to talk about truths that are eternal and unchanging. Many philosophers desire this, too, since their desire is often to ascertain the nature of things, so this is not necessarily a strong point of contrast between the two. Nevertheless, on a broad level, one can appreciate a difference between a static and dynamic approach to knowing and understanding.

Truths that are eternal and unchanging are not contingent upon historical circumstance: what was true then is true now, and will be true tomorrow. There is an obvious appeal to knowledge of this kind: one can treat it as one would dogma, as it will never need to be reconsidered. Depending on one’s moral compass, this might be a good thing. For instance, that the proposition “murder is wrong” was true yesterday, is true today, and will be true tomorrow is undoubtedly seen as a good thing to many people. Truth-claims such as this are often cited by those holding fast to a moral tradition, such as a religion or particular school of thought.

On the other hand, there is very little knowledge that meets this standard. In theology and philosophy alike (not to mention many other fields), claims are often re-formulated as ambiguities arise or as we are presented with new information. For example, in moral matters, developed understandings of human psychology have changed the way we think about culpability, but more interestingly, our increased application of the historical critical method has revolutionised the way that we engage with ideas. Without a doubt, there is much to be learned from thinkers of the past: despite not being a first-century Jew, there is surely lots of wisdom to be had from reading the words of Luke’s Jesus. Likewise, there’s lots of wisdom to be had from Plato’s Socrates despite not being an ancient Greek, and I can learn something of strategy from Sun Tzu’s Art of War despite not being a solider myself. But, as Foucault said of Marxism, “[it] exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else,” meaning that Marx’s philosophy—like all philosophies—was conditioned in part by its time. The task of modern philosophers, therefore, is to discern and appropriate what is good and true in these philosophies, and relate it to humanity today.

I believe this speaks to the question of the proper role of tradition, which is so often (sadly) ignored by many thinkers, who, for whatever reason, would prefer to re-invent the wheel. But this is silly: as I said, there is a lot of value in these old (or even ancient) schools of thought. However, it is equally silly to hold fast to something that no longer has any relevance to or—the worst by far—seems untrue in today’s world. That said, we are not to judge our ancestors who, like us, are but products of their time. We ought to learn from them the same way any wise man would hope the next generation to learn from us.

None of this is to suggest that there is no objective truth. This is the worry of anyone confronted by this notion of historically-conditioned knowledge. Rather, I am suggesting that we should appreciate the origins of these ideas since we, as a species, are apt to get it wrong as we have done from time to time, and even when we are right, an historical understanding can only serve to lend us more insight to the ideas themselves. This is essentially empathy as an intellectual virtue, and well-intentioned, I believe it does serve us well.