by Jonathan Ekene Ifeanyi
|
Descartes |
“...Many writers have
commented on the way in which Descartes’ dualism has changed the whole of our
subsequent thinking, creating a dichotomy which runs right through our culture,
a dichotomy represented on every university campus by the divide between the
science faculty and the faculties of arts and humanities...He opted for a
different kind of certitude, a certitude which would very quickly enable
Descartes’ successors to confront God with the doubt as to whether He really
existed at all.” (Lesslie
Newbigin)
I have often spoken to friends
about the much-read book The Closing of
the American Mind by late Chicago classicist and philosopher Allan Bloom, a
book which, indeed, touched a nerve in Western society. The process which Bloom
describes, writes Lesslie Newbigin, “is being carried to its ultimate absurdity
in the “deconstruction” program which is extending from literary theory to
other branches of what was once thought to be knowledge and which appears to
make any claim to speak of truth untenable. In fact, a claim to speak the truth
comes to be regarded as only a concealed assertion of power. Nietzsche has come
into his own: there is nothing left except the will, since the language of
truth is no longer usable.”
In the book At the Roots of Modern Atheism, Michael Buckley, S.J., argues that
the Church itself must bear a heavy responsibility for this situation. In
trying to counter scepticism by calling in the help of philosophy to prove the
existence of God, rather than inviting people to believe in God’s revelation of
Himself in Jesus Christ, the Church abandoned its own proper ground and
provided—as Buckley shows—the tools for modern atheism. In fact, as Newbigin
rightly observes—regarding both Catholic and especially Protestant
“missionaries”:
“...in an even surprising way, it must be said that the work of missions
itself has unwittingly contributed to the relativism which Bloom complains.
Most Anglo-Saxon missionaries were children of the Enlightenment. They did not
make the necessary separation in their minds between the Enlightenment’s
program for human unity on the basis of a universal “reason” with its vision of
a single civilisation moving progressively toward universality and the gospel
program for human unity based in the crucified and risen Jesus. Just as in the
Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the confident program of
Enlightenment rationalism stimulated a romantic countermovement which extolled
human creativity manifested in the variety of human cultures, so in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries the work of missionaries has been a major
factor in stimulating a renaissance of cultures in reaction to the aggression
of western rationalism. The modern world has become culturally and religiously plural in a way
for which it is unprepared”.
In his book, Buckley shows how the rise of atheism in the modern world is indeed a
religious phenomenon unprecedented in history, both in the number of its
adherents and in the security of its cultural establishment. How did so
revolutionary a conviction as this arise?
An overarching theme of Buckley’s work is that atheism is produced
by the (perceived or real) internal contradictions of theism, and thus takes
its shape in response to theistic claims. In order to understand atheism, then,
one must examine the theism it denies. Atheism is distinct in the modern
period, because only in the modern period are there atheists. In the ancient
and medieval worlds, atheism was only a hypothetical position or a polemical
insult—there was no group of people called “atheists”; in the modern world, on
the contrary, there is a group of people who recognise themselves as atheists
and are even proud to be so labelled! Buckley investigates the origins and
development of modern atheism and argues convincingly that its impetus lies
paradoxically in the very attempts to counter it. He traces
the peculiar character of modern Western atheism to the choices made by
theistic philosophers in the early modern era. At the turn of the seventeenth
century, Leonard Lessius, a Flemish Jesuit, wrote De providentia numinis (On Divine Providence) to combat
atheism. Yet his attacks are not against any modern atheist (they are
apparently too shrewd to announce their unbelief openly) but against the
classical figures associated with atheistic belief. As Lessius’
“atheists” are drawn from classical antiquity, so are his refuting arguments.
This approach makes atheism primarily a philosophical, not a religious issue.
Another Jesuit, Marin Mersenne, likewise sought to combat present atheism
along classical lines. He too excuses faith, but designs an argument for God
upon ancient Epicurean and Neoplatonic lines. In the distinction between
faith and reason, the battle against atheism is conducted by reason in the
method of philosophy. Jesus and traditional theology scarcely appear, and will
continue to play only a token role through the Enlightenment. In fact, Leonard
Lessius and Marin Mersenne determined that in order to defend the existence of
God, religious apologetics must become philosophy, surrendering as its primary
warrant any intrinsically “religious experience” or “evidence”!
Although modern atheism finds its
initial exponents in Denis Diderot and Paul d’Holbach in the eighteenth
century, their works bring to completion a dialectical process that reaches
back to the theologians and philosophers of an earlier period—Leonard Lessius,
Marin Mersenne and co. The most
influential philosophers of the seventeenth century, René Descartes and Isaac
Newton, and the theologians who followed them accepted this settlement, and the
new sciences were enlisted to provide the foundation for religion!
|
Newton |
René Descartes (1596-1650) and Isaac
Newton (1642-1727) are
the two most pivotal intellectual figures of the early modern period. Descartes
is the founder of a Universal Mathematics, Newton the founder of a Universal
Mechanics. Both were theists, and both insisted that the existence of God could
be defended by reason alone. For them, reason is the only justifiable
foundation for theistic belief. Yet, the two offer different approaches.
Descartes, a Catholic, and even a devotee of Our Lady, was
not only one of the most prominent philosophers of the seventeenth century but also in the history of Western philosophy. Often referred to as the “Father of Modern Philosophy”,
he profoundly influenced European thought with his writings. Best known for his
statement “Cogito ergo sum” (I think,
therefore I am), he started the school of rationalism which broke with the
scholastic Aristotelianism in two ways. Firstly, Descartes rejected the
mind-body dualism, arguing that matter (the body) and intelligence (the mind)
are two independent substances (metaphysical dualism) and secondly, he rejected
the final causal model of explaining natural phenomena and replaced it with
science-based observation and experiment. He spent a major part of his life in
conflict with scholastic approach which still dominated the thought in the
early seventeenth century and trying to convince the Churchly authorities that
the new sciences are not challenging the traditional theological teachings.
Descartes’ scepticism argues not
from the world to God but from God to the world. God is necessary as the
guarantor of human reason, and then as the connection between the mind and the
external world. Since we must be indubitably sure of God’s existence, and since
indubitable knowledge must be gained by the geometrical method, there is no
place (or need) for revelation or personal experience to establish God’s
existence.
On his part, Newton takes the
physical world for granted, and seeks an explanation of its predictability and
order. God appears as a necessary postulate for the Newtonian universe to
function as it should. Absolute time and absolute space must be necessary
effects of God’s existence. He must be the one who formed great astronomical masses
and determined the correct distance of the planets from the sun to ensure
stable orbits. Further, Newton’s calculations revealed that the universe is not
quite self-sustaining; God must periodically wind the clock to keep it from
getting too out of time.
Some theologians then jumped on
the chance to develop the Cartesian or Newtonian philosophies into even more
rigorous “proofs”!
Today, one of the powerful effects of Descartes’ undertaking
is the senseless rejection of revelation in our time. Today, revelation is not
allowed as a subject for classroom teaching.
As Newbigin rightly puts it:
“It is barred from
public doctrine. Human origins are a subject for classroom teaching. They are
part of public truth. Human destiny is not. It is a matter of private opinion.
And if there is no public doctrine about human destiny, there can be no basis for
rational discussion in the public forum about what are and what are not proper
ends of human endeavour. And when there are no rational grounds for this
decision, the way is open for the sort of mindless fanaticism about single
moral issues which is such a feature of our time.”
At this juncture, it is important to note that all the
attackers of private revelation within the Catholic Church in our time—those who often insist that we must not
believe in private revelations, both church leaders and the lay faithful—are
in reality influenced NOT really by what the Church teaches but by this same Cartesian
undertaking!
In his Truth to
Tell, Newbigin draws a parallel between our situation and that of St
Augustine living amid the disintegration of the Graeco-Roman classical culture
and remarks that the Saint faced a situation similar to ours but depended on
revelation and hence was able to fight the errors of his age and indeed,
conquered. He writes:
“Augustine was a rational
thinker if ever there was one, but all his great rational powers could not
extricate him from the disintegrating ruins of classical culture. Reason can
only work with the data that it is given. The vision could be developed by
Augustine only because there were new data, because through Ambrose he was
brought into living contact with the church, and with the scriptures which
embody the story by which the church lives. Revelation, the action of God
himself in the events which the church celebrates, gave him his new starting
point. From a new standpoint his massive intellect could see in a wholly new
perspective the landscape through which he had travelled. As a result he was
able to hand on to the following centuries a coherent and rational way of
understanding the world and human history which also carried forward much that
was precious in classical culture.” (Truth To Tell, p. 21).
But, says Newbigin, everything depended on the fact
that there was a new starting point, a new fundamental pattern. “The parallels
with our situation are, I think, instructive. The eighteenth century, the
period in which our modern scientific culture became fully self-conscious and
confident, called itself the Age of Reason.” (Ibid).
Newbigin says the central conviction which has
inspired this unfortunate period of human history has been that the human mind
is equipped with a power of reason which is capable of discovering the real
“facts” and so liberating us from mere tradition and superstition. But the data
upon which reason was set to work were—essentially—the data provided by the
senses. He writes:
“Francis Bacon, that pioneer
of enlightenment, sought to eliminate all metaphysical concepts and advised us
to attend to what he called “facts”. To know the facts is to have power over
them. The only one of the old metaphysical concepts which he retained was that
of cause, because (according to Adorno and Horkheimer) “it alone among the old
ideas seemed to offer itself for scientific criticism...’’. The idea of purpose
was eliminated as a category of explanation because purpose cannot be directly
observed. Bacon’s program, vastly developed in subsequent centuries, has given
us what Bacon wanted—power, power over nature and, of course, over other
people. If we concentrate on facts which can be known by the senses, and on
causes which can be checked scientifically by observation and experiment, then
human reason can obtain power over nature. This has been achieved on an
unprecedented scale. The fact that it has alienated us from nature and created
a widespread sense of homelessness and bereavement is one of the main reasons
for a contemporary rejection of this kind of rationality and the call (in the
New Age Movement) for a return to the motherly embrace of a Nature that we have
so ruthlessly violated. But because human beings are also part of nature, and
because the whole driving force of the movement of enlightenment has been to
acquire a knowledge of nature which would confer power over nature, the whole
thrust of our culture has been towards patterns of domination. Hence the
clamorous calls for emancipation of dominated groups which is such a pervasive
element in the contemporary scene.” (Ibid., p. 22).
For Augustine, he says, and indeed, most of the early
Church Fathers, everything depended upon the data from which reasoning begins.
“But it is possible for
reason to be used in another way. Everything depends upon the data from which
reasoning begins. It is possible to begin with the data provided by the five
senses and reasoning inductively from these. This has been the method which has
created our modern scientific culture. It still uses the metaphysical category
of cause, even though philosophers have questioned it. But it does not use the
category of purpose. Purpose is something which is hidden in the mind of the
person whose purpose it is until one or other of two things happens. Either the
purpose is carried out so that everyone can see what was originally an idea in
the mind of the one whose purpose it was, or that person must tell others what
his purpose is. There is no third possibility. If we are considering the cosmos
as a whole and the human story within the cosmos, and if we are asking whether
there is any purpose which would enable us to understand it, the first option
is not available. We shall not be around to observe the final moments of the
cosmic story. The only available possibility is the second: that the One whose
purpose it is should reveal it. If there is no revelation from God, then speech
about the purpose of human life can only be speculation—the kind of speculation
which Bacon advised his contemporaries to avoid in order to study facts.” (Ibid., pp. 22-23)
Again, he writes:
“There was a new starting
point for Augustine, as for Athanasius and the Church Fathers before him...The
question of the starting point is the fundamental one. Basic to the shaping of
our culture was the attempt of Rene Descartes to find a fresh starting point
for thought. Descartes lived in an age of profound scepticism...He lived in a
time when beliefs which had been accepted from time immemorial were being shown
to be unreliable. It seemed that certain knowledge was impossible. The work of
earlier pioneers of modern science, Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, had
apparently shattered the world which the inhabitants of Western Europe had felt
themselves at home for 1000 years. Descartes...sought and believed that he had
found a fresh basis for certainty in his own existence as a thinking mind. From
this standpoint he moved to the idea of God—but a God who is essentially an
implicate of the human idea of perfection, and to the material world which
belongs to a totally different order of existence from the mind. In this dualistic world God could influence
the human mind, but he could not act upon the material world itself...Many
writers have commented on the way in which Descartes’ dualism has changed the
whole of our subsequent thinking, creating a dichotomy which runs right through
our culture, a dichotomy represented on every university campus by the divide
between the science faculty and the faculties of arts and humanities...He opted
for a different kind of certitude, a certitude which would very quickly enable
Descartes’ successors to confront God with the doubt as to whether He really
existed at all.” (Ibid.,
pp25-26; p.27).
The tragic result of Descartes’ legacy has been that,
a part of Western culture—that part in which theology usually falls—has lapsed
into subjectivism: and so Revelation,
Dogma and the like become nonsense. Descartes lived in a time of great scepticism—in
a time when beliefs which had been accepted from time immemorial were beginning
to fall prey to man’s “diabolical
reasoning”. For a thousand years before him, there had been wrought into
the very stuff of European thinking belief that God is to be trusted and
therefore things and people are not simply the playthings of whimsical gods and
goddesses or of all-disposing Fate. Apart from that long schooling, it is hard
to think that anyone could have set out on the enterprise to which Descartes
set himself. The age in which Descartes lived was profoundly disturbed by the
new scientific discoveries—it is true; and, as many thought, it was necessary
to find something which could not be doubted, a foundation on which to build a
stable home for the human spirit. But the whole enterprise rested on assumption—that
is, on that famous “Act of Faith” that
the cosmos is so “constructed” that that kind of certainty is available to
human beings. Descartes may have had good intention in his undertaking, but by
proposing a different kind of certitude instead of trusting in the faithfulness
of God—as, for instance, Athanasius and Augustine did—he ended up committing
the sin of Adam. The new starting point which he proposed—which has been so
fundamental for all that has followed—was a small-scale repetition of the Fall.
Adam was not content to trust God. He wanted to have his own certitude, based
on an experimental test of the validity of God’s promise. He was the first
inductive theologian.
“Athanasius himself is content to identify the Fall
with the acceptance of a false ideology”, writes late Charles Cochrane, an
Oxford professor of classics. “Such an ideology may take any one of several
different forms. It may, for example, find expression in Epicureanism, which
undertakes the problem of explaining the universe in terms of matter and
motion, and which denies that there is any principle of discrimination in
matter beyond that of physical pleasure and pain. Or it may appear as Platonism
which, with its admission of a pre-existent matter, yields an inadequate idea
of God by reducing Him to the status of a mere mechanic. Or again, it may
emerge as one of the various types of Gnosticism which, because of their
underlying dualism, deny the unity of the cosmos. But, whatever form it
assumes, the results of departing from the Word are alike intellectually and
morally disastrous. Intellectually, men lose the principle of understanding,
and undergo a progressive blindness of perception. Morally, they lose the
principle of life, and suffer a spiritual phthisis
or wasting away.” (Christianity and
Classical Culture—A Study of Thought and Action From Augustus to Augustine, p. 369.)
Today most modern Western theologians are heirs of
Descartes and—subsequently—heirs of Adam. From Descartes onward it has been
held that reliable knowledge is to be had by the relentless exercise of the
critical method. Revelation is senselessly rejected, and Dogma can no longer be
accepted on its own terms. It must submit to “rational criticism”. But, as
Newbigin puts it, “the critical method must ultimately destroy itself.” Interestingly,
Newbigin, a Protestant, laments—though indirectly—that even in the Catholic
Church dogma is no longer accepted! But the statement “all dogma must be
questioned”, he argues, “is itself a dogma which must be questioned.” He is
right. Your basis for criticising a statement of what claims to be the truth
must be based on some other truth-claim which—at that moment—you accept without
criticism. But that truth-claim on which your critique is based must in turn be
criticised—the critical principle must ultimately destroy itself. Reason, even
the most acutely critical reason, cannot establish truth. If Christianity is
all about God revealing Himself in Jesus Christ and rescuing man from his
plight, then there must be some submission before a given authoritative
revelation.
“We have been born blind from Adam”, Augustine would
say, “and thus we have need of the illumination which comes to us from Christ.”