Infinity, Faith, and Time: Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature 9780773566811

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Infinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature

Infinity, Faith, and Time is an exploration of Renaissance literature and the importance of a powerful tradition of Christian-Platonist rational spirituality derived from St Augustine and Nicholas of Cusa. John Spencer Hill argues that this tradition had a formative role in the thought of Renaissance writers by enabling them to assimilate into their worldview two central discoveries of the Renaissance - that the universe is possibly infinite and that human existence is bound and regulated by the passage of time. In Part i Hill examines the effect of the idea of spatial infinity on seventeenth-century literature, arguing that the metaphysical cosmology of Nicholas of Cusa provided Renaissance writers, such as Pascal, Traherne, and Milton, with a way to construe the vastness of space as the symbol of human spiritual potential. Focusing on time in Part 2, Hill reveals that, faced with the inexorability of time, Christian humanists turned to St Augustine to develop a philosophy that interpreted temporal passage as the necessary condition of experience without making it the essence or ultimate measure of human purpose. Hill's analysis centres on Shakespeare, whose experiments with the shapes of time comprise a gallery of heuristic time-centred fictions that attempt to explain the consequences of human existence in time. Infinity, Faith, and Time reveals that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period during which individuals were able, with more success than in later times, to make room for new ideas without rejecting old beliefs. JOHN SPENCER HILL is professor of English, University of Ottawa.

McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion Volumes in the McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. SERIES ONE

G.A. Rawlyk, Editor 1 Small Differences Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815-1922 An International Perspective Donald Harman Akenson 2 Two Worlds The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario William Westfall 3 An Evangelical Mind Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839-1918 Marguerite Van Die 4 The Devotes Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France Elizabeth Rapley 5 The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression Michael Gauvreau 6 The German Peasants' War and Anabaptist Community of Goods James M. Stayer 7 A World Mission Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918-1939 Robert Wright 8 Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada Phyllis D. Airhart 9 A Sensitive Independence Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881-1925 Rosemary R. Gagan 10 God's Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster Donald Harman Akenson 11 Creed and Culture The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750-1930 Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz, editors 12 Piety and Nationalism Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850-1895 Brian P. Clarke

13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll, editors 14 Children of Peace W. John Mclntyre 15 A Solitary Pillar Montreal's Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution Joan Marshall 16 Padres in No Man's Land Canadian Chaplains and the Great War Duff Crerar 17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis of U.S. and Canadian Approaches P. Travis Kroeker 18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917-1981 Robert K. Burkinshaw 19 Through Sunshine and Shadow The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874-1930 Sharon Cook 20 Church, College, and Clergy A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844-1994 Brian J. Fraser 21 The Lord's Dominion The History of Canadian Methodism Neil Semple 22 A Full-Orbed Christianity The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900-1940 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau 23 Evangelism and Apostasy The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico Kurt Bowen 24 The Chignecto Covenanters A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827 to 1905 Eldon Hay 25 Methodists and Women's Education in Ontario, 1836-1925 Johanna M. Selles 26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy William Lamont

SERIES TWO In memory of George Rawlyk Donald Harman Akenson, Editor Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640-1665 Patricia Simpson Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience Edited by G.A. Rawlyk Infinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature John Spencer Hill The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk, editors

Infinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature JOHN SPENCER HILL

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

© McGill-Queen's University Press 1997 ISBN 0-7735-1661-1 Legal deposit fourth quarter 1997 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support received for its publishing program from the Canada Council's Block Grants program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Hill, John Spencer, 1943Infinity, faith and time : Christian humanism and Renaissance literature (McGill-Queen's studies in the history of religion) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1661-1 i. European literature - Renaissance, 1450-1600 History and criticism. 2. Humanism in literature. 3. Infinite in literature. 4. Time in literature, i. Title. ii. Series. PN721.H54 1997 8o9.8'94'o903 097-900674-0 Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractera inc., Quebec City

in patris matrisque memoriam Harry Simon Hill (1908-1961) Marion Isobel Hill (1910-1991)

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Contents

Preface

xi

PART ONE

THE E X P A N D I N G

UNIVERSE

1 Fides Quaerens Intellectum 3 2 The Aristotelian Cosmos 13 3 Nicholas of Cusa and the New Astronomy

17

4 Rational Spirituality and Empirical Rationalism 28 5 Chorismos and Methexis: Pascal, Traherne, Milton 40 PART TWO

TIME

6 Chronos and Kairos 69 7 Inner Time: Augustine and Bergson 78 8 Time, Literature, and Literary Criticism 88 9 Time in Shakespeare 104 10 Heilsgeschischte: Typology and the Helix of History

127

Appendix One: Notes Toward a Protestant Poetic 137 Appendix Two: Translations from Pascal's Pensees 154

x

Contents

Notes 157 Bibliography 185 Index

195

Preface The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence. The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with the feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer ... has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. T.S. Eliot

This book explores two topics - space and time - that illustrate, in distinct but related ways, the importance for Renaissance literature of a powerful and pervasive tradition of Christian Platonist rational spirituality. Rejecting the heterodoxy of Hermetic (and Gnostic) Neoplatonism and the protopositivism of Baconian and Hobbesian rationalism, major Renaissance writers drew on and adapted to their own needs the solidly orthodox fides qu&rens intellectum tradition that ran back, through Augustine and Boethius, to roots in the Christian Platonism of Clement of Alexandria. The influence of this tradition and its importance for Renaissance humanism have been overshadowed, on the one hand, by a scholarly infatuation with Florentine Neoplatonism and its offshoots and, on the other, by a post-Enlightenment prejudice that faith and reason are incompatible and that, in consequence, Renaissance "rationalism" must necessarily be a material anticipation of post-Renaissance scepticism and secularism. The purpose of Infinity, Faith, and Time is to illustrate that, while the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries opened much that was new in the way man interpreted his world, they were also centuries when he was able, with more success than in succeeding times, to make room for new ideas without rejecting old beliefs. Part i, "The Expanding Universe," focuses on astronomy and is concerned with the impact of the idea of spatial infinity on seventeenth-century literature. Following an analysis of Clement of Alexandria's rational spirituality - an analysis more lengthy than would have been necessary if his thought were better known and

xii Preface

represented than it is in literary critical history - and a brief discussion of the "closed" Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe, the argument considers the metaphysical cosmology of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, an important fifteenth-century Platonist whose anticipation of Copernican ideas (together with the theological context in which Cusanus framed them) provided Renaissance writers with a method for construing the vastness of space as the symbol both of divine omnipotence and of human spiritual potential. Far from being "the last great philosopher of the dying middle ages" (Koyre), Nicholas of Cusa was the fountainhead of a vital (and orthodox) religious humanism that deeply influenced Christian thinkers for two hundred years. The next section of the argument (chap. 4) explores the beginnings of the tension, particularly after Galileo's invention of the telescope, between the'nascent scientific rationalism of Bacon, Hobbes, and Newton, and a Cusaean rational spirituality; and various early responses - Donne, Herbert, Burton - to the new astronomy are briefly examined. In the final chapter of part i (chap. 5), the implications of an infinite universe are explored in detail in the work of Pascal, Traherne, and Milton, three writers whose differences have tended to mask the central theme that unites them: namely, a paradoxical conviction that an interminate universe, while drawing attention to the vast distance that separates man from God (chorismos), nevertheless opens up for man, as imago Dei, the opportunity to participate (methexis) in the infinite divine through the exercise of rationally assisted faith. The chapter concludes with a rereading of the cosmology of Paradise Lost that explores the symbolic implications for Milton's human theme of the epic's physical cosmos. The subject of part 2 is Time. As much as the discovery of the vastness of interstellar space, the Renaissance discovery of time (facilitated by the invention of sophisticated, accurate, and readily available timepieces) opened a new world to the inquiring spirits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While secular poets were content to revive a version of the old Horatian carpe diem, Christian humanists turned to Augustine to fashion a philosophy that interpreted temporal passage as the necessary condition of experience, without making it the essence or ultimate measure of human purpose. Following a brief analysis of the difference between the Greek view of time as quantitative chronos and the Hebrew view of it as qualitative kairos (chap. 6), the argument explores (chap. 7) the implications of the two major Western philosophies that treat time as a psychological phenomenon (those of Augustine and Bergson). The following chapter contrasts the future-oriented concept of time in late

xiii

Preface

medieval and Renaissance literature - a view dependent upon Augustine - with the past-obsessed vision, traceable in large part to Bergson, that is so prevalent in twentieth-century literature (Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner) and that has been tacitly carried over by modern literary criticism, through a kind of cultural osmosis, into the analysis of literary texts, including those of the Renaissance. Chapter 9 is devoted to Shakespeare, the most complex and prolific Renaissance explorer of time, and argues that his experiments with the shapes of time in plays as diverse as Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale comprise a gallery of heuristic timecentred fictions that seek to understand, in a very Augustinian way, the possibilities and consequences of human existence in time. The last chapter deals with the question of typology and post figuration in Renaissance literature - an idea rooted in Pauline typology and Irenaeus' doctrine of "recapitulation" - and explores ways in which some of the major Christian writers of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, from Malory to Milton, construe human history and individual experience in time as a Heilsgeschischte that conflates classical (circular) and biblical (linear) models of time. The book also contains an appendix, "Notes Toward a Protestant Poetic," that deals briefly - against the backdrop of England's effort to define itself as a Protestant nation - with the attempt of English poets to elaborate a specifically Protestant poetic. The emphasis falls on the doctrine of solifidianism and suggests ways in which that most important of Reformed doctrines determined the way in which the major religious poets, whether Anglican or Puritan, conceived their art. Protestant emphasis on salvation history and the Pauline stages of salvation set out in Romans (8:29-30) - foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification, glorification - constitute both a central theme and a shaping pattern in the religious poetry of the period. Using Milton's De Doctrina Christiana as a prose gloss, the argument explores the use made of the five stages of Pauline soteriology in works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Herbert, and Traherne. Scholarly books, though written alone in quiet rooms and often late at night, are seldom - if ever - the products of a single brain. In the preparation of the present work, I owe a debt of gratitude to those writers who have trod the ground before me, often inspiring, sometimes irritating, but always instructing me. I wish, too, to record my special thanks to four colleagues at the University of Ottawa who set aside their own work in order to read the manuscript in various

xiv Preface

drafts and to make valuable suggestions: Camille La Bossiere, David Jeffrey, Irene Makaryk, and David Shore. To my wife and three children, who have given up much over many years, I am profoundly grateful for gifts of unflagging patience, constant love, and support. My only regret is that my parents, to whose memories the work is dedicated, did not live to hold the book and turn its pages.

PART

ONE

The Expanding Universe

Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. Acts 17: 22-3 The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason ... He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point. G.K. Chesterton1

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i Fides Qu&rens Intellectum

The relationship between faith and reason is the fundamental problem of Christian theology. Indeed, in a revealed religion, the question arises as to whether theological discourse is, rationally speaking, even possible. Since faith is a revelation of grace (gratia gratis) in the individual soul - a private apocatypsis that echoes and confirms the public revelation recorded in Scripture - then what is the function and what are the legitimate aspirations of reason? In what way, if at all, can the logical and philosophic categories of rational inquiry serve as instruments of knowledge about God when the end of that knowledge is, through grace, already its own datum and when the search for truth commences from the possession of it? In the context of revealed faith, the discursive power of reason might seem to be, at best, tautological and, at worst, subversive. The late second and early third centuries mark a time when Christian theology, advancing beyond defensive apologetics, was being born as a formal, disciplined response to the threat of a Gnostic ) for faith. In theosophy that sought to substitut ;) for faith. In the writings of the Fathers of this formative period there is, not surprisingly, evidence of a radical divergence in opinion over the role and value of natural reason and the acceptable limits of the relations between reason and revelation. Although the debate was occasioned by Gnosticism, whose origins are at least as much Oriental as Hellenic, it took shape in patristic thought as a disagreement over the achievements of Greek philosophy and the relevance, or lack of it, of

4 The Expanding Universe

Greek wisdom for those baptized into the Christian covenant of grace. At one extreme is Tertullian, who dismisses pagan learning with contempt. Whereas, he says, the very simplest Christian labourer knows and manifests God, even Plato himself among the Greeks ended at last, for all his vaunted perspicuity, by confessing that the Creator was not easy to discover and, when found, not easy to make known to others. "So then where," Tertullian demands, "is there any likeness between the Christian and the philosopher? between the disciple of Greece and of heaven? between the man whose object is fame, and whose object is life?" (Apologeticum 46; see ANF 3:51). For Tertullian, heresies and pagan philosophy are cognate, the former indeed "instigated" (subornantur) by the latter. The same subjects are central to both, the same arguments employed by both. Philosophy is the seedbed of heresy. Appealing to the authority of the Apostle Paul, "who had been at Athens, and had in his interviews (with its philosophers) become acquainted with that human wisdom which pretends to know the truth, whilst it only corrupts it," Tertullian banished all pagan thought and any prospect of cooperation between Christians and the old philosophers: What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? what between heretics and Christians ... Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief. (De Prxscriptione Hxreticorum 7; see ANF 3:246)'

Credo quia impossible, far from being the last refuge of an embarrassed credulity, is the ironic gibe of unbending faith. But Tertullian's view was not destined to triumph. In the writings of Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen we meet the beginnings of a spirituality anxious to accommodate reason and more than willing to make room for those parts of Greek philosophy that, like Plato's intuitional metaphysic and the puritan ethics of Stoicism, could be quarried to bolster the anti-Gnostic ideal of an ascetic life inspired and directed by a truly rational faith. The distance between these writers and Tertullian is summed up in one pregnant phrase in Clement's Stromateis (6.14): "Now to know is more than to Pg 9:332). In the bi, PG 9 end it was this view that, through the influence of Augustine, was to dominate academic Christianity, leaving the germ of Tertullian's

5 Fides Quserens Intellectum uncompromising fideism to be developed by mystics and embraced unsystematically in the hearts of simple believers. Later and more sophisticated than Justin Martyr, yet earlier and less doctrinally contentious than Origen, Clement of Alexandria provides a useful introduction to the rational spirituality of this group of early Fathers. For Clement, in the first place, since reason and revelation are complementary, it follows that philosophy, which seeks to make men virtuous, is not the product of vice but the work of God. Like Justin Martyr (and Philo Judaeus) before him, he considered philosophy "a divine gift" (Stromateis 1.2; see ANF 2:303), a preparation for the gospel, "given to the Greeks as a covenant peculiar to them - being, as it is, a stepping-stone to the philosophy which is according to Christ" (6.8; ANF 2:495). As the Law was given to the Jews, so Greek philosophy - whose principle doctrines were taken, Clement believed, from the Hebrews - was, in its own way, proleptic of Christian truth: "Now the Greek philosophy, as it were, purges the soul, and prepares it beforehand for the reception of faith, on which the Truth builds up the edifice of knowledge" (7.3; ANF 2:528). Yet Clement, too, though he marvelled at Plato as an instinctive Trinitarian (5.14) and praised him (like Numenius the Pythagorean) as a "Moses speaking in Attic Greek" (1.23; ANF 2:334-5) could be sharply critical of classical tradition, "the whole of which, like nuts, is not eatable" (1.1; ANF 2:3oo).2 His admiration for Greek humanism was both profound and profoundly qualified: "He loved Plato and Homer, but he did not read them on his knees" (Chadwick 37). The essence of Clement's theology may be stated in a sentence: "For the gates of the Word are gates of reason, opened by the key of faith" (Protrepticus i).3 First principles being indemonstrable, knowledge of the causa causarum, or first cause of the universe, is accessible to faith alone; but faith, while superior to reason and indeed its criterion, must be advanced and sustained by rational demonstration. "Knowledge, accordingly, is characterized by faith; and faith, by a kind of divine mutual and reciprocal correspondence, becomes characterized by knowledge" (Stromateis 2.4; see ANF 2:35o).4 What, then, does such a rational faith (or fideist reason) in fact know? This is a complex question that we may begin to answer by specifying what it does not know. It does not in any absolute sense know God, although, by the grace of faith, it knows of him. In contrast to the pagan deities whose likenesses are figured in stone and paint, the true God cannot be imaged, except negatively, even in the immaterial conceptions of the mind. In a passage that anticipates the via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysius as well as Nicholas of Cusa's docta ignorantia, Clement likens the knowledge of God to a dialectical regression,

6 The Expanding Universe

analogous to the contemplation of a geometrical point, that advances understanding negatively: We shall understand the mode ... of contemplation by ... advancing by analysis to the first notion, beginning with the properties underlying it; abstracting from the body its physical properties, taking away the dimension of depth, then that of breadth, then that of length. For the point which remains is a unit, so to speak, having position; from which if we abstract position, there is the conception of unity. If, then, abstracting all that belongs to bodies and things called incorporeal, we cast ourselves into the greatness of Christ, and thence advance into immensity by holiness, we may reach somehow to the conception of the Almighty, knowing not what He is, but what He is not ( (strromateis 5.11; NNF 2:461)

But if the transcendent First Cause exists beyond "space, and time, and name, and conception," what positive knowledge about Him is possible? The answer, for Clement, is found in Christ - the divine Logos, the Word of God: "God, then, being not a subject for demonstration, cannot be the object of science. But the Son is wisdom, and knowledge, and truth, and all else that has affinity thereto. He is also susceptible of demonstration and of description. And all the powers of the Spirit, becoming collectively one thing, terminate in the same point - that is, in the Son" (Stromateis 4.25; see ANF 2:438).5 Clement's Christology, which antedates the homoousion formula of Nicaea by more than a century, has sometimes been suspected of proto-Monarchianism, but there is no reason to read it in this way. OF THE HE fATHER,"ATHE E R,"" While "the Son is, so to ) of the Father," He is also clearly a separate and distinct ousia, and not merely the modal extension of the Father as Divine Reason. If Clement's Trinitarianism is vaguer than we might wish, it is no doubt because, living before Sabellius and Noerus were born, he knew no reason to be more precise. But what he does say is clear enough. The Father is known only in and through the Logos operating in us, by the agency of the Holy Spirit, as knowledge: "For the Word of the Father of the uniBUT THE WIS verse is no ), but the wisdom and most manifest kindness of God," and "they who seek Him after the true search, praising the Lord, shall be filled with the gift that comes from God, that is, knowledge." Being "always everywhere and contained nowhere,"6 Christ is the eternal and universal Tutor, the Psedagogus of men (Clement wrote an engaging treatise on the theme); and it was He who, among other things, "gave philosophy to the Greeks by means of the inferior angels" (Stromateis 7.2, 5.1, 7.2; see ANF 2:525, 445-7, 524)7

7 Fides Quxrens Intellectum

What then of man? As Christ is divine Reason, so man, created in His image, is for Clement the image of Reason - an imago Dei by virtue, that is to say, of being an imago Verbi: "For the image of God is His Word, the genuine Son of Mind, the Divine Word, the archetypal light of light; and the image of the Word is the true man, the mind which is in man, who is therefore said to have been made 'in the image and likeness of God' [Gen. 1:26], assimilated to the Divine Word in the affections of the soul, and therefore rational." (Protrepticus 10; see ANF 2:i99).8 There can be no knowledge, no assimilation to the divine, however, without faith. Scripture itself declares that faith is the precondition of knowledge: "unless ye believe, neither will ye understand" (Isa. 7:9 Lxx).9 Faith is not earned, but given; it is prelogical, an unwilled but not unwilling assent to prevenient prompting, and Clement defines it as "a preconception of the mind," "a grace which conducts from what is indemonstrable to what is universal and simple," "an internal good [which,] without searching for God, confesses His existence, and glorifies Him as existent," "a comprehensive knowledge of the essentials" ( ) (Stromateis 5.1, 2.4, 7.10; see ANF 2:446-7, 350, 538-9). At the same time, however, faith "must not be inert and alone, but "accompanied with investigation"; it is not a static possession but a dynamic process implying the cooperation of intuition and analysis in a lived hermeneutic spiralling up, through advancing gnosis, from ideata towards Idea. Reason, on the other hand, "is a concurrent and cooperating cause of true apprehension ... which acts in conjunction with [faith], being of itself incapable of operating by itself." Philosophy is the "systematic Wisdom" that flows from the search for truth, resulting in the "sure and irrefragable apprehension of things divine and human": "This wisdom - rectitude of soul and of reason, and purity of life - is the object of the desire of philosophy, which is kindly and lovingly disposed towards wisdom, and does everything to attain it." In sum, then, faith is the capacity of spiritual recognition, while "knowledge ... is the perfection of faith" ( ) effected through the exercise of reason. Together, they constitute the possibility of a spiritual Erlebnis that, over time and with dedication, conforms the rational believer to the image of Reason and transforms him "from a good and faithful servant into a friend" of God (Stromateis 1.20, 6.7, 6.18, 7.11; see ANF 2:323, 492-3, 519, 54o).10 This is the true Gnostic. The life of the Gnostic is an ascent from faith through knowledge and virtue to a proleptic participation in the joys of heaven. Knowledge is not born with men but acquired, and its acquisition demands application, training and progress, until, from practice, it passes into habit. Ever intent on intellectual objects, the true Gnostic traces his

8 The Expanding Universe

path through human affairs by reference to archetypes above, as a navigator steers his ship by the stars. Far from avoiding the challenge of heretical Gnosticism, Clement attacked it on its own ground, opposing to its specious gnosis (an occult revelation reserved for an aristocracy of initiates) the universal knowledge of the one Saviour revealed individually to each and held in common by all: "He is the true Only-begotten, the express image of the glory of the universal King and Almighty Father, who impresses on the [true] Gnostic the seal of the perfect contemplation, according to His own image; so ), that there is now a third divine image), made as far as possible like the Second Cause, the Essential Life, through which we live the true life" (Stromateis 7.3; see ANF 2:527, PG 9.421)." Attachment to intellectual objects naturally becomes an influence that draws the true Gnostic away from objects of sense and the material world, so that "as those, who are at sea held by an anchor, pull at the anchor, but do not drag it to them, but drag themselves to the anchor; so those who, according to the gnostic life, draw God towards them, imperceptibly bring themselves to God." The true science of knowledge, which the Gnostic alone possesses, is the sure that he is made in God's likeness:"For n God's l s: "For the image of God is the divine and royal Word, the impassible12 man; and the image of the image is the human mind." True Gnostics are oi (j)iX6oo(()Oi lot) 0eot), the philosophers of God. And for Clement, "he who is in [such] a state of knowledge, being assimilated as far is already as possible tlready spiritual, and so elect" (Stromateis 4.23, 5.14, 6.14, 4.26; see ANF 2:437, 466, 505, 44o).13 But knowledge in Clement's sense is not mere passive intellection. Assimilation implies an active virtue: Christian conduct is the operation of the rational soul in accordance with a correct judgment and aspiration after the truth, which attains its destined end through the body, the soul's consort and ally ...14 The true Gnostic is one who is [fashioned] after the image and likeness of God, who imitates God as far as possible, deficient in none of the things which contribute to the likeness as far as compatible, practising self-restraint and endurance, living righteously, reigning over the passions, bestowing of what he has as far as possible, and doing good both by word and deed." (Pxdagogus 13; see ANF 2:235)

prompts ppractice, and practice in turn produduces Knowledge habit or disposition. The Gnostic is a spiritual wrestler, a "true

9

Fides Quxrens Intellectum

athlete" who, "in the great stadium, the fair world, is crowned for the true victory over all the passions. For He who prescribes the contest is the Almighty God, and He who awards the prize is the only-begotten Son of God. Angels and gods are spectators; and the contest ... is ... against the spiritual powers of inordinate passions that work through the flesh. He who obtains the mastery in these struggles ... wins immortality." Adorned with virtue that is the joint result of nature, training, and reason, the purified soul is the earthly image of divine wisdom and power, the true imago Dei. His life is a living prayer and, like the divine Paedagogus whose image he bears, his life is devoted to instruction, for "he who is made like the Saviour is also devoted to saving." In rectitude of life, then, as in depth of knowledge and love, the true Gnostic, "to speak compendiously makes up for the absence of the apostles" (Stromateis 2.19, 7.3, 6.9, 7.12; see ANF 2:369, 528, 498, 545). In the third and fourth centuries the Hellenistic sympathies of the early Fathers were reconfirmed by Eusebius of Caesaerea and the Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa. Although critical of Plato's doctrines, Eusebius, as is evident in the fifteen books of his Prseparatio Evangelica, shared the view of Justin Martyr, Clement, and Origen that Plato and Moses were fundamentally in agreement and that Greek philosophy was a preparation for Christianity. Gregory of Nyssa, "the first real founder of systematic mystical theology" (Copleston 2(i):5o), drew on both Plato and Plotinus in elaborating a doctrine of the soul's ascent through various stages of rational assent to ecstatic participation in the divine darkness. Although actual growth is the work of the Logos, the human soul, a divine etKobv (image, likeness) implanted at baptism, advances toward truth by a rational and willing cooperation with effecting grace, so that faith and reason in Gregory of Nyssa's system are synergic to the point where reason, no longer needed, is willingly abandoned.15 While the philosophic mysticism of Gregory of Nyssa was an important source for writers like Pseudo-Dionysius and Bonaventure, undoubtedly the greatest influence on the subsequent Christian Platonist tradition of rational spirituality was St Augustine. No one did more than he to establish the union of reason and faith and to reconcile Plato with Paul. Platonism, indeed, was instrumental in his own conversion to Christianity. It is perfectly clear, as Father Copleston has said, that the famous scene of illumination in the garden (Confessions 8.8-12) is the record of a moral conversion that was preceded by an intellectual conversion occasioned by the reading of certain "Platonic" treatises (Plotinus and some Porphyry), as the result of which he was able to free himself from Manichaean

io The Expanding Universe gnosticism and "to see the reasonableness of Christianity" (Copieston 2(i):58). From the Platonists whom he then began to read he learned that evil was not a primal cosmic power but merely an aspect, indeed a privative rather than positive aspect, of a universe far greater, far more wonderful and mysterious than anything conceived by Manes. "I perceived therefore, and it was made plain unto me, that all things are good which [God has] made" (Con/. 7.12; Augustine1 1:377). Plotinus, in short, caused him to reconsider his ontology and epistemology. Sensation, according to Augustine, is the lowest level of knowledge and above it are ratio and intellectus. The latter leads to wisdom (sapientia), the highest human knowing; wisdom is contemplative and concerned with the apprehension of eternal realities. Ratio, on the other hand, results in conceptual knowledge (scientia) and knows intelligible truths contingently, that is, only in and through its perception of the sensible world.16 (In Augustine's Platonic psychology, all knowing is spiritual knowing: even sense-knowledge is an activity of the soul effected through the instrument of the body.17) But, while the contents of human knowledge are derived from sense and the concepts formed by reflection on sensory experience, it is only through direct divine illumination that the human mind is able to relate the truths of sense and reason to universal, necessary, and certain truth. As the sun's light makes physical things visible to the eye, so divine illumination reveals eternal truth to the mind. A creature can no more illuminate its own mind than the world can become its own sun: the light comes from above. And what does this divine light reveal? Primarily this: that the self-reflexive human mind, God's image, is a seeking thing that does not know itself except to know that it must seek its identity in God. Sapientia is the progressive quest for that identity. Quod intelligimus igitur, debemus rationi: quod credimus, auctoritati ("What then we understand, we owe to reason; what we believe, to authority [De Utilitate Credendi 1.11.25; PL 42-83; PNF1 3:359]). Faith precedes reason and is the preparation for it, but faith, in turn, requires reason for the illuminated soul to advance in understanding. "Unless believing is different from understanding," Augustine says in De Libero Arbitrio (2.2.6), "and unless we first believe the great and divine thing that we desire to understand, the prophet has said in vain, 'Unless you believe, you shall not understand' [Isa. 7:9 LXX] ... For what is believed without being known cannot be said to have been found, and no one can become fit for finding God unless he believes first what he shall know afterwards" (Augustine3 39).l8 Reason and faith are integrated and mutually sustaining: to believe is

ii

Fides Quaerens Intellectum

to think with assent.^ The fullest exposition of the theme is in an elegantly witty letter that is not often cited. Written about 410, it is addressed to Consentius who, in previous correspondence, had declared it his private principle that "truth is to be grasped by faith more than by reason." He has written again, this time to ask questions about the Trinity, and Augustine replies: See, then, according to [your own] words whether you should not in this matter, which is the very heart of our faith, follow only the authority of the saints, and not ask me to make it intelligible to you by reason. For, when I begin to induct you, so to speak, into the understanding of such a great mystery - and if God does not aid us interiorly, I shall not be able to do so - I shall not do anything else in my discussion but give you such reason as I can. Consequently, if you are not unreasonable in asking of me or of any other teacher, to make you understand what you believe, you should change your statement of principle, not to lessen the value of faith, but so that you may see by the light of reason what you now hold by faith. God forbid that He should hate in us that faculty by which He made us superior to all other living beings. Therefore, we must refuse so to believe as not to receive or seek a reason for our belief, since we could not believe at all if we did not have rational souls. So, then, in some points that bear on the doctrine of salvation, which we are not yet able to grasp by reason - but we shall be able to sometime - let faith precede reason, and let the heart be cleansed by faith so as to receive and bear the great light of reason; this indeed is reasonable. Therefore the Prophet said with reason: "If you will not believe, you will not understand" [Isa. 7:9 LXX]; whereby he undoubtedly made a distinction between these two things and advised us to believe first so as to be able to understand whatever we believe. It is, then, a reasonable requirement that faith precede reason, for, if this requirement is not reasonable, then it is contrary to reason, which God forbid. But, if it is reasonable that faith precede a certain great reason which cannot yet be grasped, there is no doubt that, however slight the reason which proves this, it does precede faith. (Letter 120 1.2-3; Augustine2 2:3oi-2)20 One hopes that Consentius was himself something of an ironist. Credo ut intelligam (I believe in order that I may understand) was the central feature of medieval Augustmianism and was developed in a variety of ways and with a variety of emphases by later thinkers: Boethius, Erigena, Anselm, the Victorines, and Bonaventure, to name the most prominent.21 It was also central to the thought of Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century and became, largely through him, the grounding tenet of that Renaissance Christian humanism that over the next two centuries, against the rising tide of scientific rationalism,

12 The Expanding Universe

sought to articulate a copulative theology able to accommodate the sermo scientiae of empirical discovery (especially in the new astronomy) to the sermo sapientiae of historical and personal revelation. But this is to anticipate. It is appropriate here to close with Saint Anselm, to whom we owe the formula credo ut intelligam. Writing "from the point of view of one trying to raise his mind to contemplate God and seeking to understand what he believes (qwerentis intelligere quod credit)," Anselm opens the Proslogion - whose subtitle is Fides quxrens intellectum - with a prayer for illuminated understanding: Teach me to seek You, and reveal Yourself to me as I seek, because I can neither seek You if You do not teach me how, nor find You unless You reveal Yourself ... I do not try, Lord, to attain Your lofty heights, because my understanding is in no way equal to it. But I do desire to understand Your truth a little, that truth that my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand (sed credo ut intelligam). For I believe this also, that "unless I believe, I shall not understand." (Anselm 103-4, ii5)22

"Well then, Lord/' he continues, "You who give understanding to faith, grant me that I may understand" - and there follows the famous ontological argument that is the fruit of his believing search for rational understanding: te esse aliquid quo nihil mains cogitari possit ("You are something than which nothing greater can be thought" [Anselm 116-17]).

2 The Aristotelian Cosmos

Like the towns that were built, the cosmos devised by medieval cosmologists was a walled enclosure. From the static central Earth nine concentric spheres expanded outward: first, the seven "planets," then a stellatum of fixed stars and, last, the primum mobile whose turning imparted motion to the inner spheres. Around the outer edge, compassing and protective, ran "that mightie shining christall wall, / Wherewith [God] hath encompassed this All" (Spenser, Fowre Hymnes 4.41-2), which bounded the created universe and separated it from heaven, which, in the old maps (figure i), was marked as the habitaculum Dei et omnium electorum (dwelling-place of God and all the elect). The origins of this familiar picture may be traced back to or "MahhePtolemy's Almagest ( or "Mathematical System") and beyond that to the Hellenistic geometrician Apollonius, the astronomer Hipparchus, and back finally to the theoretical foundations laid by Aristotle in Books 3-4 of the Physics and in De Caelo. According to the latter, the cosmos is characterised by five qualities. First, it is circular: "the shape of the heaven is of necessity spherical," both because the circle is the primary geometrical form and because circularity accounts for the empirical phenomena (286b.io-n). Second, it is eternal: "the heaven as a whole neither came into being nor admits of destruction ... but is one and eternal, with no end or beginning of its total duration, containing and embracing in itself the infinity of time" (283^27-9). Third, it is immutable: being spherical in shape, it follows that its motion is

h

Fig. i The Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmos. From Peter Apian, Cosmographia (1539)

regular and "returns upon itself without a break" (2883.14-27) and, being eternal, "it is exempt from decay and generation" (277^28). Fourth, it is finite in size: "it is clear that an infinite body is an impossibility" (2733.22) - that is to say, nothing with a shape can be infinite without ceasing to have a shape. By definition, therefore, infinity is amorphous; an "infinite" spherical universe is thus a contradiction in terms, for the cosmos, "which moves in a circle, must necessarily be finite in every respect" (271^26). Finally, it is unique: "neither are there now, nor have there ever been, nor can there ever be formed more heavens than one, but this heaven of ours is one and unique and complete" (2793.9-11). There are three noteworthy facts about this cosmology: (i) how late, relatively speaking, it came to northern Europe, (2) how short a

15 The Aristotelian Cosmos

time its formal dominance lasted, and (3) how long it survived in the public mind after its theoretical (and even physical) supports had been swept away. For the first thousand years of Christianity the received cosmology was that of Genesis. While De Caelo and the Almagest remained the textbooks of Byzantium and the Arab world, Greek science suffered total eclipse in the West, where pagan astronomical speculation was supplanted by the auctoritas of patristic literalism.1 It was not until the eighth century that Greek scientific thought began hesitantly, in works like Bede's De Natura Rerum, to raise its head over the parapets of theological doctrine; and it was not until the twelfth century, when the works of Aristotle made their way from Arab Spain to Christian France, that the major texts, after a hiatus of eight centuries, again became available in the West. In the following century, through the efforts of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas (both of whom wrote commentaries on De Caelo), Aristotle's authority in cosmology became firmly entrenched as an integral part of the Scholastic effort to coordinate the data of faith with the categories of reason and to achieve a deeper understanding of revelation through logic, analogy, and definition. But Aristotle's reign in Scholastic cosmology was short-lived. Indeed, as Pierre Duhem has shown, "all the essential principles" of his theoretical physics were overthrown in the following century, and it was only "a strange delusion" on the part of later sixteenth-century astronomers to pretend that "Peripatetic physics, that dark den of error, [had] just succumbed to their blows, and that they had built upon its ruins, as if by magic, the bright domain of truth" (Duhem 3). In fact, the death-blow had been delivered three centuries earlier, when, in March 1277, a scant three years after the death of Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, formally condemned more than two hundred Aristotelian propositions as contrary to Catholic doctrine. Aristotelian physics, for example, rejected an infinite cosmos not only as a matter of practical reality; it denied even the possibility of infinity. But a creation that is finite implies, ipso facto, a Creator limited by that same necessity - thus contradicting the doctrine of divine omnipotence. As with infinity, so it was too with the possibility of terrestrial movement, and atoms, and void space, and a plurality of worlds. Aristotle rejected them all, even in the abstract, and so imposed limitations on God's omnipotence. But Tempier's anathema of 1277 - an event Duhem calls "the birth certificate of modern physics" (Duhem 4) - broke the hold of medieval Aristotelianism and made necessary both a new physics and a new cosmology. The result, as Duhem has demonstrated with immense erudition, was that as

16 The Expanding Universe

fourteenth-century Scholasticism worked to replace the condemned teachings of Aristotle (and Aquinas) it anticipated many of the essential conclusions of Copernican astronomy. Thus Scholastic theology, although the fact has not been widely acknowledged by modern historians of science, was the mainspring of medieval science. In spite of the Bishop of Paris and the labours of late Scholasticism, however, the Aristotelian universe endured unimpaired in the popular mind until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Before the invention of the telescope, the ordered finitude of the old astronomy seemed to most the only hypothesis capable at once of honouring God and saving the observable phenomena. But in reality its strength lay, not in the scientific conviction it compelled - astronomy before Kepler and Galileo was in any case a theoretical rather than an empirical discipline - but in its appeal to far deeper human needs: the desire for security, harmony, and rational order. It was these psychological factors that kept Aristotelian cosmology alive for two centuries after its theoretical supports had crumbled and disappeared.2 To the modern mind, perhaps the most striking feature of the Aristotelian universe is that it was, considered spatially a closed system within narrowly defined spatial limits - a hortus condusus of sorts. Although finite, it was still vast: the distance from earth to Saturn was estimated by Maimonides at some 125 million miles - "a journey of nearly eight thousand seven hundred solar years, [assuming an average day's travel of] forty legal miles of two thousand ordinary cubits" (Maimonides 277). But, taken all in all, it was a manageable universe in spite of its size, a universe easily picturable by imagination. It was not alien and it inspired no agoraphobia in those who contemplated it. To gaze into the night sky, as the lovers do in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice (5.1.58-61) Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold. There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings -

was to gaze into the cope of a grand cathedral, not to feel dwarfed to insignificance by numberless galaxies spinning through unimaginable reaches of space. Yet even as Lorenzo was wooing Jessica with comforting words, the old cosmology was collapsing. One by one Aristotle's doctrines of sphericity, immutability, eternity, finitude, and singularity were haled, in ways that even the most conservative contemporary minds could not ignore, into the dock of the new astronomy and condemned.

3 Nicholas of Cusa and the New Astronomy (Unless you believe, you will not understand.)

Isaiah 7:9 (LXX)

In the dawning of that artistic and scientific awakening that swept Europe from the mid-fourteenth to mid-seventeenth century, it was Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64) who reintroduced into Western epistemology a sharp Platonic distinction between sensible and intelligible reality and who rearticulated, in a new idiom for the new age, the credo ut intelligam theology of Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, and Anselm. Cusanus became the fountainhead of a revitalized Platonist metaphysic and of a visionary humanism that for the next two centuries, despite the restless stirrings of an empirical rationalism nearing its term, inspired the period's most representative minds. Cusanus's Christian Platonism is both orthodox and mainstream. This point needs to be stated clearly, for the modern scholarly fascination with Florentine and Hermetic Neoplatonism has tended to skew the picture of Renaissance Platonism, implying that it was fed largely from roots running back to Plotinus, Proclus, and the mythical Hermes Trismegistus. Quite the reverse is true. In England in particular, occultists like John Dee, Robert Fludd, Thomas Vaughan, and the quincunxial Thomas Browne of The Garden of Cyrus were seen in their own time as fringe eccentrics. By far the majority of English Platonists - from Sidney and Spenser to Milton and Marvell, from Richard Hooker to the Cambridge Platonists - although they might echo ideas from Ficino or Bruno or the Corpus Hermeticum, were Augustinian spiritual rationalists seeking, with the help of reason, to illuminate the transforming motions of grace.

i8 The Expanding Universe Knowledge, Cusanus knew, is a complex matter. We know things in many ways: by sensory experience, by remembered experience, by rational experience, and by intuitive experience or faith. In De Coniecturis (2.14) Cusanus distinguishes four faculties of knowledge (sensibility, imagination, reason, and intellect) and ranks them in an ascending scale according to their power of rising beyond the merely empirical. As a metaphysician, his interest centred naturally on the higher powers of ratio and intellectus. Reason, the lower of the two, he defines as the faculty of discursive abstraction or ratiocination that draws conclusions from the data provided by sense and memory; its limitation is that "[it] remains altogether unable to transcend temporal things in order to embrace spiritual things" (Cusa4 138). Intellect, on the other hand, soars higher and is the power of apprehending truths outside the realms of time and space: "In this fashion mind grasps ... intuitively and directly absolute entity itself beyond all participation and variety" (Cusa2 65). Cusanus's epistemology in general, and his privileging in particular of the intelligible over the sensible, recalls Plato's analogy of the divided line (Republic 6.^o