Faith and Philosophy A Historical Orientation (Value Inquiry Book, 371) 9004465456, 9789004465459

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Faith and Philosophy

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Editor-​in-​Chief J.D. Mininger Associate Editors J. Everet Green, Vasil Gluchman, Francesc Forn i Argimon, Alyssa DeBlasio, Olli Loukola, Arunas Germanavicius, Rod Nicholls, John-​Stewart Gordon, Thorsten Botz-​Bornstein, Danielle Poe, Stella Villarmea, Mark Letteri, Jon Stewart, Andrew Fitz-​Gibbon and Hille Haker.

volume 371

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/vibs

Faith and Philosophy A Historical Orientation By

Jerry H. Gill

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: By Mari Ulla Sorri. Used with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Gill, Jerry H., author. Title: Faith and philosophy : a historical orientation /​by Jerry H. Gill. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2022] | Series: Value inquiry book series, 0929-​8436 ; volume 371 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "The ancient religious thinker Tertullian asked: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?", implying that faith and philosophy have nothing to say to each other. The history of this dialogue has shaped the intellectual dialogue from the very beginning right up to the present. In this book, Jerry H. Gill has traced the dynamics of this dialogue and in the conclusion he has offered his own answer to the questions it raises"–​Provided by publisher. Identifiers: lccn 2021042776 (print) | lccn 2021042777 (ebook) | isbn 9789004465459 (hardback : acid-​free paper) | isbn 9789004465640 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Philosophy and religion–​History. | Philosophy–​History. | Christian philosophy. Classification: lcc B56 .G49 2022 (print) | lcc B56 (ebook) | ddc 210–​dc23 lc record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2021042776 lc ebook record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2021042777

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill.” See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 0929-​8 436 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 6545-​9 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 6564-​0 (e-​book) Copyright 2022 by Jerry H. Gill. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

For my longtime colleague, buddy, and friend, Bruce Johnston

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Contents  Preface: The Why and Wherefore ix  A Very Happy Acknowledgement xi  Introduction: Faith Seeking Understanding 1 1  Greek Thought 9 1  Presocratics and Socrates 9 2  Plato: Theistic Idealism 15 3  Aristotle: Rational Theology 21 4  Plotinus: Neoplatonism 27 2  Medieval Thought 33 1  Irenaeus: God and Evil 33 2  Augustine: Christian Platonism 38 3  Aquinas: Christian Aristotelianism 43 4  Eckhart: Christian Mysticism 50 3  Modern Thought 54 1  Descartes: Rationalist Faith 54 2  Locke: Empiricist Faith 61 3  Hume: Religious Skepticism 67 4  Kant: Reason Seeking Faith 73 4  Recent Thought 80 1  Kierkegaard: Faith without Reason? 80 2  Feuerbach: Naturalistic Humanism 87 3  A. N. Whitehead: Process Thought 93 4  Tillich: Philosophical Theology 100  Conclusion: Reasons of the Heart 108  Bibliography 119  Index 121

Preface: The Why and Wherefore For the better part of my life I have been privileged to participate in the ongoing conversation about the issues involved in the relation between faith and philosophy, with both students and colleagues. This in no way makes me an expert, but it does put me in a position to pass on to others, especially those who may be just beginning their study of these issues, some reflections and insights concerning this broad and fascinating field of study. Thus this book is aimed at providing a brief, historical introduction to those thinkers and questions that have shaped the ongoing dialogue between reason and faith in Western thought. When participating in this conversation, I have frequently encountered many who come to the subject with a minimal background in either philosophy or theology, or both. I have written this book with just such students in mind in order to provide them with a brief orientation to the dynamics and patterns that comprise what may well be the very heart of Western thought itself. The goal is a book that will serve as a ready-​reference volume in courses of study involving philosophy and/​or theology for those getting under way in this field. The book can, then, function as a brief textbook in introductory courses in both philosophy and theology, or as a helpful guide to those who may just be interested in the questions involved for their own sake. The introduction, “Faith Seeking Understanding,” presents what are generally regarded as the main lines of approach to the central issues involved in this field throughout history. The idea here is to provide a backdrop against which the student can better understand the points of view outlined in the main body of the text. In the conclusion, “Reasons of the Heart,” I shall sketch out a few of the current trends on the present scene, as well as offering what seems to me to be the most helpful approach to take toward the relation between philosophy and matters of religious faith. I have divided the main body of the text into chapters according to the traditional time periods of Western thought. In each of these I take up the key thinkers who down through the ages have influenced the direction that the dialogue between reason and faith has taken. In each case, as well, I have sought to ground my exposition of the thinker’s point of view in his own writings, including as many actual quotations as the short span of this sort of introduction will allow. In addition, I have consulted, and occasionally quoted, reliable secondary scholars as well. Of course, in a brief orientation such as this only the most salient aspects of each thinker’s point of view can be treated. Nevertheless, my hope is that the

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reader will find each treatment to be clear, accurate, and helpful. In addition, it must be borne in mind that there is no substitute for the reader’s own interaction with the issues. Philosophy and religious faith are not the sorts of things one can expect or allow someone else to do for you. To paraphrase Socrates, neither unexamined faith nor unexamined thought is worth affirming.

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A Very Happy Acknowledgement Since this is quite assuredly my very last of many books it is time for me to acknowledge my eternal indebtedness to my wife and partner Mari Sorri. Over the past forty years Mari has been my faithful cohort in nearly every aspect of my teaching and writing career. Not only has she made innumerable incidental suggestions to improve both my classroom and scholarship endeavors, but she has as well provided significant insight into the content of my intellectual efforts. With both patience and humor Mari has contributed substantially to all of my various undertakings. Clearly there are no words with which to adequately express my deep gratitude and happiness over this arrangement. I can only trust that she has some inkling of my heartfelt appreciation. Enriching love is its own reward. How lucky can a guy get? Thank you Mari!

Introduction: Faith Seeking Understanding Over the centuries of Christian thought there has been a wide variety of approaches taken to dealing with the relationship between divine revelation and human reason, or between faith and philosophy. Although the Christian community claimed to have discerned God’s revelation in the person and teachings of Jesus Christ, and to have recorded this revelation in the Bible, it remained unclear just how one was to go about understanding, interpreting, and theorizing about this newly revealed truth. Clearly language, insight, and some sort of conceptualizing must be involved, but from the outset and through the ages of the Christian Church there was no fundamental agreement as to the role of human reasoning in relation to the community’s efforts to fulfill these tasks. Several somewhat distinct approaches to these issues have arisen and each of these still has adherents in contemporary times as well. The main perspectives or postures may be thought of as arranged along a continuum in the following manner. Initially many Christian thinkers found the approach advocated by an early Church Father, Tertullian, who basically asked “What has Athens, the center of human reasoning, to do with Jerusalem, the focal point of the Christian revelation?” In other words, Tertullian and his followers maintained that God’s divine revelation in Christ went way beyond the categories of human reason and had no need for them. In fact, those who take this posture, even today, actually think of the truths of revelation as directly opposed to those resulting from the exercise of the mind. In words attributed to Tertullian: “God has spoken, so we no longer need to think.” In contemporary times this approach often gets expressed by saying that since God’s thoughts are far above and different from our human ways of thinking, we cannot hope to understand them through rational categories and philosophical efforts. Frequently certain scriptural passages, such as Paul’s statements in his first letter to the Corinthian church1 where he contrasts human wisdom to the “foolishness of the gospel,” are quoted as providing substantiation for this point of view. The wisdom of this human world is said to be at odds with God’s wisdom, and is therefore deemed useless, if not downright harmful, in relation to the Christian revelation. 1 1 Cor 1:20–​25.

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Clearly, this approach to the relation between faith and philosophy represents an extreme pole of the continuum that I suggested above. Very often Christians who take this position on the matter refuse even to think about how the Christian revelation can be understood by anyone who does not already believe it. Sometimes, on the other hand, those who advocate this perspective claim that the truth revealed in Christ and the Christian scriptures constitutes an alternative system of thought to that of human reason, and only those on the inside of the faith are given the ability to grasp it. This latter position welcomes the phrase, taken from the ancient theologian Anselm, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, that “faith seeks understanding.” However, in this approach the claim is made that the understanding sought and found within the Christian revelation is entirely separate from and superior to anything that natural human reason can come up with. The understanding in question here is thus a special, spiritual sort of understanding that has its own basis, logic, and truths. In short, faith is said to have arrived at its own unique type of understanding quite apart from general human reasoning. There are several objections that can and should be raised over against this perspective on the question. The first is simply to point out that even reasoning about the content of divine revelation as being different from and superior to that of human reason depends upon some sort of human reasoning just to make its own point of view understood. Moreover, within the structures of this divine reasoning there must be categories, principles, and criteria by means of which to carry on any form of interpretation in the process of seeking understanding. God has, presumably, given all humans minds with which to discern truth from error and wisdom from foolishness. It would seem, then, to be an affront to God to maintain that the truths of revelation are completely unreachable through the employment of reason. Even to use human words such as wisdom, truth, and reason in presenting this point of view presupposes that the hearer understands them. After all, we must know what wisdom and truth are in a basically human sense in order to understand what it means to say things like: “God is wise” and “Christian revelation is true.” To return briefly to the passage in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, it is important to note that even in that context, Paul is reasoning very carefully and working to choose the right words with which to make and explain his point. General human language and reasoning capacities cannot conveniently be dispensed with or transcended just when one wants to claim a superior sort of wisdom and truth. So Paul must be making a distinction between arrogant or misleading reasoning, on the one hand, and true, reliable reasoning and

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wisdom on the other, rather than trying to do away with human reasoning and wisdom altogether. The same needs to be said about the passage in Paul’s letter to the church in Colossae2 where he warns the folks there not to be led astray by empty philosophy that follows human traditions. We need to note that here too Paul is using his best language and reasoning power in order to make his case. There are, to be sure, vain philosophies and empty claims to wisdom, but these need to be discerned and avoided by means of the criteria and processes of human reasoning, just as Paul himself is doing in this passage. The sense in which God’s ways are above human ways cannot be completely beyond all human comprehension, since if this is the case none of us, even those advocating this position, can even begin to talk about them. There must be some overlap, some point of connection between human thought and divine revelation if there is to be any communication at all. Thus faith and reason, revelation and philosophy, cannot be diametrically opposed as this approach would maintain. If God’s truth and wisdom are completely beyond and different from our own, there is nothing we or anyone else can say about them. To return to Tertullian’s initial question about what Athens has to do with Jerusalem, the only answer is, a great deal, since without the human logic embedded in human language one cannot even ask this question, let alone claim that God has indeed spoken and can be believed. As Peter’s letter puts it3, Christians should “be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is within them.” Of course, no one can claim to have all the truth, whether human or divine, but some reasons are better than others and some thoughts may be closer to God’s than others, so even believers must have their wits about them in order to “try the spirits, whether they be of God or not.”4 Of course this approach to faith and philosophy has the strength of reminding us that thinking and talking about spiritual matters, matters having to do with intangible realities, is very difficult at best. It is important for all of us to remember that there are aspects of experience and reality that may well lie beyond any exhaustive understanding, but which are, at the same time, extremely important and rich. This perspective serves to keep us from becoming overconfident about our rational capacities and categories. Nevertheless, even though this initial approach to the relation between faith and philosophy, between reason and revelation, has always had its advocates, on balance it seems to raise as many if not more problems than it is attempting 2 Col 2:8. 3 1 Peter 3:15. 4 1 John 4:1.

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to solve. Clearly, Christian theologians and thinkers have always sought to understand and clarify the truths that they claim to have received through revelation. In other words, they, together with all believers, must in some way or other affirm that faith must always be seeking understanding. Any approach to this important issue which simply dismisses it by claiming that reason and faith are opposed is too extreme to be of much use. A less extreme approach to this basic question, one a bit further along toward the center of our suggested continuum, would be the one that claims that although human reasoning and divine truth are not fundamentally opposed, they are nevertheless essentially distinct. This is the historic point of view developed by the majority of Catholic theologians from the Middle Ages right up to the present. This perspective is generally attributed to Thomas Aquinas who devised his philosophy around 1200 ce and even today it continues to be a highly influential one. Thomism, as Aquinas’s system of thought has come to be called, is grounded in the philosophy of Aristotle, and as such it relies heavily on the role of human reason in relation to the search for truth, while neatly distinguishing between what can be known of God, on the one hand, from what cannot be known but can only be believed by faith, on the other hand. In this approach there are two kinds of truth, the one attainable through human reason and the other attainable only through revelation. Thus this point of view can be said to be dualistic in nature, because it separates reason and revelation from each other yet affirms the value of both. The writings, and thus the thought of Aristotle, unlike those of Plato, were essentially lost during the first ten centuries of the Common Era, and were only preserved and brought back into the West through certain Arabic thinkers when European and Islamic cultures began to confront each other around 1000 ce. Aquinas saw the value of basing Christian thought on the insights of Aristotle for the purposes of encountering and even converting Muslims to the Christian faith. Thus he developed his own thought, which was also grounded in the work of his mentor, Albertus Magnus. Basically Aquinas claimed that while it is possible to know that God exists by means of ordinary, natural human reasoning, the knowledge of who God is in the divine nature can only be obtained by means of revelation and faith, namely through the Christian scriptures and the church. In order to show how knowledge of God’s existence is possible by pure reason, Aquinas devised five separate arguments or proofs, which are called the “Five Ways” of establishing that God exists. We shall take these arguments for the existence of God up in detail in the chapter on Aquinas.

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It is easy to see how this approach seeks to serve as a sort of synthesis of reason and revelation, of faith and philosophy, rather than seeing them as opposed to each other. As such, it stands closer to the middle of our proposed continuum while still remaining in the range of views that see reason and faith as essentially distinct. At the same time, it can be seen that this point of view does not really develop a true synthesis of these two capacities, since it insists that they actually fulfill quite different functions, both of which are deemed to be highly significant. Although Aquinas’s teachings and writings were at first taken to be heretical by the Catholic church, it was not long before they became the absolute foundation of its theology and philosophy throughout the remaining centuries of the Common Era. Indeed, only at the beginning of the 20th century did some Catholic thinkers begin to explore other philosophical avenues, such as existentialism, as a way to understand and expound their faith. This dualistic synthesis approach also came to characterize the official Catholic posture toward the relation between Christianity and culture in general. The chief difficulty with this perspective on reason and revelation is that in spite of its claim that the two can be synthesized and are not opposed, it is in fact often very difficult to harmonize them at the concrete and practical level. Not only have serious questions been raised by important thinkers about the viability of the famous “Five Ways” of proving God’s existence, but the various claims of the Church and the Bible can and have been subjected to serious criticisms, especially in modern times. It seems to be a good theory, but it does not actually work in practice, At the opposite extreme pole of our continuum from that approach represented by Tertullian stands the perspective which basically assumes that faith and revelation, on the one hand, and human reason and philosophy, on the other hand, are essentially in agreement with each other. This view is grounded in the confidence that our best human efforts to understand and expound religious and spiritual truth are all that we have at our disposal. Thus, in this view, human reason and philosophy are both the necessary condition and a sufficient condition for understanding divine reality, because they are what the Creator has endowed us with. Although this approach had some roots in previous thinkers, it was first fully developed by John Locke in his book The Reasonableness of Christianity. Locke argued that the truths of religion can be arrived at by the full and proper use of our natural reasoning powers quite apart from any presuppositions about faith and revelation. Thus he had little use for Aquinas’s “proofs” of God’s existence, on the one hand, and little patience for those who would maintain that

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spiritual truths can only be obtained through faith as absolutely distinguished from reason, on the other hand. This open and confident attitude toward the necessity and sufficiency of human reason in relation to matters of religious belief came to characterize the majority opinion in theological and philosophical circles during the early modern era of Western thought. It was paralleled by a growing confidence in the scientific method and Newtonian physics as the ways to all and any truth. This confidence eventually foundered on the world wars of the 20th century, as well as on the results of the Einstein’s theory of relativity and contemporary quantum mechanics. At the heart of this approach is the belief that there are no special shortcuts to arriving at truths about God and divine realities that seek to bypass the best that human reason has to offer. Neither the traditions of the Church nor the claims of various scriptures can replace the criteria and methods embodied in the use of natural human rational powers. All claims to truth must be subject to rational scrutiny and only those that pass muster should be accepted and lived by. One important exponent of this approach to the relation between faith and reason was John Dewey. As part of his strong emphasis on the role of scientific reasoning in every area of human endeavor, Dewey advocated the continual revision of all fields of knowledge, including the religious. In his book The Quest for Certainty he insisted that people holding religious beliefs should and could ground them in the evidence of experience, both their own and that of the broad spectrum of other individuals, traditions, and cultures. Those who take this perspective on religious knowledge are generally referred to as “religious naturalists,” since they maintain that what can be known of spiritual reality can only be known through the powers and processes of natural human understanding. So then, this approach is the diametric opposite of that approach with which we began this brief survey, since it tends to equate rather than separate reason and philosophy, on the one side, from faith on the other. Here any notion of revelation must be understood as subsumed under scientific and historical reason, if not reduced to them, rather than as antithetical to them. The major strength of this approach may also be seen as its major weakness. For, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain any kind of absolute confidence in the powers of human reason to fully understand all of reality. To be sure, as Dewey would be quick to point out, even the shortcomings of scientific reasoning are discovered by further human rational efforts, since scientific reasoning is at heart self-​critical. Nonetheless, there remains an air of self-​confidence at the center of this more extreme identification of reason

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and all matters spiritual that belies its naivety about the limits and the scientific method, especially when applied to purportedly intangible, mysterious realities. The above approach might be seen as interpreting the notion of “faith seeking understanding” by subsuming the former under the latter and thereby equating the two. The final approach on our proposed continuum lies somewhere between this more extreme position and the center of the spectrum. Although it seeks to find a way to integrate faith and philosophy, reason and revelation, it does so neither by separating them nor by equating them, but by seeing them as related functionally. Here the notion of “faith seeking understanding” takes on a more straightforward meaning. The main proponent of this more functional or mediating approach was Augustine, an early Church Father who hailed from North Africa and lived around 400 ce. Before being converted to Christianity as a young adult, Augustine had been enamored of Plotinus’s dualistic philosophy, often called Neoplatonism. Thus the philosophical theology he developed was deeply rooted in the presuppositions and insights of Platonic thought. Moreover, partly because of his early experiences with various forms of sensuality and sexual desires, after his conversion Augustine laid a great deal of stress on the limited value of the role of the body in achieving moral and spiritual wellbeing. Thus his theology was characterized by a strong distinction between natural and spiritual realities, between this world and the next, as well as between what he called the City of God and the City of Man. Augustine became the most influential Christian thinker of his time, and his reliance on Platonic thought dominated the early Middle Ages until the arrival of Thomas Aquinas. However, even though Augustine placed little value on sensory experience and knowledge, he did greatly value the role of rational thought. He viewed the mind as an important aspect of the soul, and as crucial in the search for the knowledge of God. As he put it in his prayer: “Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee.”5 Nevertheless, this restless search cannot, in Augustine’s view, be satisfied through reason alone, for faith and reason are not one and the same thing. Reason must, then, join forces with faith in order for us to come to a knowledge of God. Indeed, according to Augustine, although human reason is needed in the search for God, the point of departure in this quest must be faith rather than reason. This, then, is what Augustine meant by the phrase “Faith seeking 5 Augustine, Confessions, 1,1,1.

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understanding.” One begins with faith, to be sure, but it is inherent in authentic faith to seek a deeper understanding of the meaning and implications of itself, as well as of the things of God. Another proponent of this overall approach to the problem was Anselm, the first Archbishop of Canterbury who lived around 1000 ce. In fact, it is to him that the phrase “Faith seeking understanding” is generally attributed. As he put it: “I do not seek to understand in order that I might believe, but I believe in order that I may understand.”6 Anselm is also well-​known for his exploration of the doctrines of incarnation and atonement in his famous book Cur Deus Homo? –​or in English, “Why Did God Become Human?” Although he is probably best known for what is usually called his ontological proof of God’s existence, it should be clear from the above brief quotation that Anselm was not trying to start from pure reason alone to prove God’s existence. Rather, as he himself put it, he found himself believing in God and then set about to understand how this was possible. The proof itself, put simply, goes like this: if we think of the most complete being that can be thought of, it should be clear that this being must have the attribute of existence, since otherwise it would not be fully complete; hence God, the fully complete being, must exist by definition. In this way we can see how the approach of Augustine and Anselm to this issue is closer to the center of our continuum than that of Locke and Dewey, on the one hand, as well as that of Tertullian and even Aquinas, on the other hand. For them, both faith and reason, both revelation and philosophy, are necessary in the search for divine understanding, but one must both begin with faith and go on seeking further understanding through it. Rational proofs, such as Anselm’s, can only come later. Hopefully this brief survey of the continuum of the traditional approaches to the question of the relation between faith and philosophy will stand the reader in good stead while pursuing the ensuing chapters. It should be borne in mind that there are both modern and current versions of these representative points of view, as well. Nevertheless, the emphasis in the chapters yet to come will be on expounding and exploring the perspectives of the great thinkers in each of the major time periods: Greek, Medieval, Modern, and Recent. 6 Anselm, Proslogion, 1.

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Greek Thought 1

Presocratics and Socrates

On the face of it, it might seem that there could be no relationship between faith and philosophy prior to the interface between the Judeo-​Christian religion and the beginnings of Western philosophical thought. Strangely enough, there seems to have been little or no interaction between what we know as the Greek culture, which began around 600 bce, and the Hebrew culture, which arose around 2,000 bce. Even at the time of Alexander the Great, say around 330 bce, when he passed through Palestine on his way to Persia, Egypt, and India, there is no record of any contact between the two cultures. Be that as it may, the early Greek philosophers not only devised elaborate theories about the origin and nature of the universe, but many of them had specific opinions about the religions of their day, as well as about how these related to their own philosophical theories. Thus from the very outset of Western civilization there were thinkers who addressed the issues involved in discerning the role faith might play, if any, in determining the truth about the world in general and human beings in particular. Moreover, their diverse theories influenced the development of Judeo-​Christian religion throughout subsequent centuries, including our own. By all accounts, philosophy had its origins in the city of Miletus, on the western coast of what is now Turkey, around 585 bce. Up until that time, Greek culture was dominated by two quite different belief systems and religious practices. On the one hand, there were the mytho-​poetic writings of Hesiod and Homer in which one finds tales of the gods of Mount Olympus, who were not altogether different from human beings in their characteristics and rather unpredictable behavior. On the other hand, there was a large array of mystery religions involving secret cults, magical ceremonies, and sacrificial rituals. The first philosophers, called Milesians, began to speak out against both of these ways of trying to understand and deal with the various phenomena that comprise the world as we know it. In a sense, these first philosophers were also the first scientists, since they were interested in gaining insight into the nature and workings of the universe by rational means rather than by accepting traditions and practicing mysterious rituals. They wanted to know, in short, how things are, rather than simply believe that they are this way or that way.

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Although these thinkers did not conduct many experiments, they did extrapolate from numerous observations. The first of these Milesian thinkers was Thales, who lived around 575 bce. Though we do not have copies of any writings he might have produced, Thales is referred to in the writings of later thinkers. Among other things, he is famous for calculating the height of the Great Pyramid in Egypt by comparing the length of its shadow with that of a person when the latter two were equal. He also predicted a solar eclipse on May 28, 585 bce. In a more practical vein, Thales demonstrated the value of celestial knowledge by renting all the local olive presses prior to the arrival of a huge bumper crop the next summer. He was wise and rich! Thales’s big idea was that at the heart of the matter, all things are related by virtue of being composed of water. He had observed how water freezes, turns to vapor, and can be squeezed out of nearly everything in the universe. So, he claimed to have answered the question concerning the nature of reality by showing that water is at the basis of both substance and change. In this way, he substituted reason for the faith, whether that of traditional beliefs or that which generally guided the populace. A student of Thales, Anaximander by name, concluded that while his teacher was correct in zeroing in on water as the fundamental substance, he failed to realize that behind water there had to be a more indeterminate and boundless reality which accounts for and governs the way specific substances, such as water, actually function and are transformed. In spite of the fact that these thinkers were trying to get beyond and behind the traditional beliefs of their time by relying more on observation than on authority, it remains the case that their theories were based more on speculation than on experiments that would actually test their hypotheses. A third Milesian thinker, Anaximenes, who was an associate of Anaximander, tried to make the latter’s theory more concrete by focusing on air as the mysterious something that lies behind all things. After all, he reasoned, even the changes that occur in water are a function of what the air in the water does. These three thinkers laid the groundwork for what are called the atomists, later thinkers who tried to explain the universe in terms of the configuration of tiny seeds or parts. These atomists lived in different times and places from one another, but they all had in common the idea that the nature and processes of the universe can best be understood in terms of the interaction between tiny, indestructible particles. Thus, these thinkers were the forerunners of modern atomic theories, even though they based their conclusions mostly on elaborate speculations rather than on scientific experiments. One of the earliest of such thinkers

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was Empedocles, who lived around 450 bce and hailed from Sicily. He argued that reality is composed of a set of indestructible elements: earth, air, fire, and water. These, in turn, are governed by two basic principles or forces, namely love and hate, or harmony and discord. The atomist theory of the nature of reality was continued by Leucippus, a contemporary of Empedocles, and Democritus, who lived around 400 bce. They both maintained that the universe is made up of tiny, indestructible particles which they actually called atoms, meaning undividable. These atoms were said to exist within a vast realm of empty space, and the diverse objects making up the world as we experience it through the senses are composed from the changing variations and compositions caused by the eternal movement of the atoms in the infinite space. There were, to be sure, other early Greek thinkers who developed schools of thought quite different from those of the Milesians and the Atomists. One of these was Anaxagoras, who lived around 450 bce. He tried to get beyond those theories that emphasized the material elements as the basis and cause of all things by claiming that behind these physical principles there is a cosmic mind, or in Greek, Nous, that designs and governs their dynamics. Thus, he claimed that reality is composed of both mind and matter, a kind of dualism at the heart of all reality. Nous did not create reality, but only controlled its eternal ebb and flow. At roughly the same time, around 500 bce, there were several other important philosophers who also sought to explain reality by reference to a single guiding force or principle. One was Pythagoras, from the tiny island of Samos, who came up with the idea that all of the things and principles in the world are governed by mathematical relationships. He actually founded a religious sect around his own school and developed elaborate rituals and practices aimed at a life of harmony with the mathematical principles governing the universe. It is said that the catalyst for his new idea was his interest in the numerical structures found within music, and that his religious fellowship sought to live a simple and contemplative life. Next, along came two highly influential thinkers who offered distinctly opposite theories of the nature of reality from each other. One was Heraclitus, who came from Ephesus and maintained that the basic principle behind all of reality is that of change or flux. The only thing in the universe that never changes is change itself, he claimed, and he chose fire as the symbol of this eternal change because although fire is in constant motion and alteration, it still retains its fundamental nature. Heraclitus also designated the concept of reason, or in Greek, logos, as the basic guiding principle governing the universe.

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The other highly influential thinker who came along at the same time, and whose philosophy was the diametric opposite of Heraclitus’s, was Parmenides of from Elea, a Greek colony in southwest Italy. He too claimed that there is but a single governing principle behind all experienced reality, but he argued that rather than being a principle of change and flux, this principle is the One, or Being Itself. Parmenides went so far as to claim that there really is no change or multiplicity in reality, that motion and diversity are illusions based on unreliable sensory input. His most important disciple Zeno, a logician, actually devised elaborate paradoxes that claim to establish that motion and change are logically impossible. In brief, it should be clear that these Presocratic thinkers would stand at the extreme opposite pole from the likes of Tertullian on our continuum mentioned in the introduction. For each of these early Greek thinkers, all theories about the universe and humanity’s place in it should be based on reason rather than on tradition or faith. Thus they mark the very beginnings of philosophy as we have come to know it. Later on we shall encounter some philosophical thinkers who not only see the relationship between philosophy and faith as far more complex, if not actually complementary, than did these early thinkers. Coming on down now to the time of Socrates, who was put to death in his hometown of Athens in 399 bce, we encounter an almost entirely different sort of philosopher. Indeed, he is most often called the real originator of philosophy. In Socrates’s day there were various teachers available, called Sophists, which in Greek means wise person, claiming to teach young men how to reason well, but who for the most part actually taught them how to win arguments in the courts. In addition, these teachers lived off of the fees they charged for their lessons. Socrates was often accused of being a Sophist, but he never took money for his teaching. The main, and perhaps the only, thing the Sophists and Socrates had in common was that together they shifted the focus of Greek philosophy from a concern with the nature and principles of the cosmos to a concern with human nature and values. Socrates taught, if that is the word, mainly in the streets and market place of Athens, and his manner of teaching, often called the Socratic method, was mainly dialogical and analytic. He went around asking fundamental questions of friends and foes alike about the meaning of crucial concepts and the purpose of life. This made him unpopular with those in power, and eventually he was put to death. As far as we know, Socrates never wrote any of his thoughts down, and so the only real record we have of his philosophy is to be found in the many writings of his most illustrious student, Plato. Plato was extremely disturbed that

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his teacher, who was only trying to get people to think clearly, had been put to death by people who did not try to understand him. So he founded a school, called the Academy, where he later developed his own philosophy, which we shall consider in the next chapter. He also wrote many dialogues, so as to illustrate his teacher’s technique, in which Socrates was the main interlocutor. Scholars agree that the most reliable picture we have of Socrates’s thought and teaching method is found in Plato’s earliest dialogues, Apology, which recounts the trial of Socrates; Crito, in which his friends try to talk him into escaping from prison; and Phaedo that recounts Socrates’s death. There is also Euthyphro in which Socrates seeks the authentic definition of the term ‘justice.’ Plato’s middle and later dialogues still have Socrates as the main character, but here scholars agree that we have mostly Plato’s own developing philosophy. The heart of Socrates’s philosophy is well focused in his remark that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He believed deeply that most people simply accept what they are told by others about the meaning of life and its most crucial issues. Thus he sought to teach people, only some of whom were actually his students, to think for themselves about the big questions rather than merely going along with the crowd. He did this by his own example of refusing to accept traditional and shallow definitions for key concepts like justice, beauty, virtue, and knowledge. He pursued the meaning of such concepts relentlessly. His dialogical method consisted of innocently asking those whom he met how they would define a given notion, say justice. When they gave him an answer, he would then begin to sort out the implications and assumptions that follow from this answer, which in turn elicited yet another stab at the proper answer on the part of his dialogical partner. This, too, was usually followed by further analysis, and so on. After a while people usually got tired of this process, partly because they felt under attack and partly because most people simply don’t care about getting things straight and clear. In Plato’s Apology Socrates is on trial for his life for ostensibly leading the youth of Athens astray and showing disrespect for the gods. Actually, he is being used as a scapegoat for the recent woes of the Athenian government, and could have got off scot-​free had he apologized and promised to quit stirring people up. Not only does he not apologize, he warns the Athenians that “wickedness runs faster than death,” and thus that they will rue the day they silence him, for he serves the community best by being the gadfly that keeps them awake by stinging them. In fact, Socrates actually seems to incite the judges to find him guilty and have him put to death. In his address Socrates explains how he came to have this calling as a seeker after truth, beauty, and goodness. He claims that once, when he was visiting

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the oracle at Delphi, he asked “Who is the wisest man in Athens?” The reply was “Socrates of Athens!” Since he knew this could not be right, he set out to find someone who was wiser than himself by asking everyone the true meaning of the basic concepts concerning life. He initially thought this would be a simple task, but what he actually discovered was that everyone he met claimed to know the answers, but upon examination turned out to be even more ignorant than he was. Thus Socrates concluded that what the oracle must have meant was that he was the wisest man in Athens simply because he was the only one willing to admit that he did not know the answers to the key questions of life but was willing to seek them. This explanation, quite naturally enough, infuriated the judges and so they sentenced him to die by drinking a cup of poison hemlock. Socrates did not seem to mind dying in this way, and even refused to take advantage of his friends’ plot for him to escape on the grounds that such behavior would show a lack of integrity. Finally, when he was dying he ended up consoling those of his friends who had come to his jail cell to comfort him. Although he did not claim to be a religious person in a specific sense of the term, neither did Socrates deny that the gods exist and are worthy of honor. He only insisted that humans should not project their own ideas and understandings of virtue and piety onto the divinities. Also, he argued against seeking special favors from the gods and trying to please them in order to obtain special rewards. According to Socrates, “Virtue is its own reward!” From the very beginning he took as his motto, “Know Thyself!” and urged all of us to do likewise. With respect to the question of where Socrates would stand on the relation between reason and faith, we might say the following. Although he seems to have known nothing of the Jewish faith, and lived prior to the rise of the Christian faith, there is a sense in which one can see a place for faith in the life and thought of Socrates. To be sure, it is not the sort of faith we usually have in mind when discussing this issue, but nonetheless Socrates did embody a deep commitment to the truth and to personal integrity. He was a sincere and relentless searcher. It should be clear that Socrates would have little patience for believing anything simply on the basis of authority or convention. His was an existential faith in that it revolved around being faithful to one’s self and to whatever emerges from the quest for wisdom and virtue. There are those who have claimed that Socrates was a Christian before Christianity. While this might be going a bit too far, a case can be made for maintaining that it was people like Socrates that Paul had in mind when he wrote in the second chapter of his letter to the Romans: “When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the

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law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.”1 2

Plato: Theistic Idealism

Although it is amply clear that Plato was a dutiful student of Socrates, he was also very capable of thinking for himself, as the development of his thought in his writings clearly demonstrates. Plato lived and taught for many years after Socrates’s death, and had many students of his own, including Aristotle with whom we shall deal in the next section. Most scholars agree that Plato’s philosophy evolved through the years, and many have sought to trace this evolution through his successive dialogues. This makes any brief summary of his philosophy doubly difficult, since not only is it a thorough and complex system of thought, but it sometimes seems to change. Be that as it may, the safest and most interesting place to begin discussing Plato’s philosophy is with a presentation of his well-​known “allegory of the cave,” found in his famous book The Republic.2 There he suggests that we imagine a deep cave where some people are chained so as to be able to see only the back wall of the cave. Outside the cave there is a huge fire. Now, some people are carrying various raised artifacts along the outside edge of the cave, thus casting all sorts of shadows from the light of the fire on the back wall inside the cave, much as is done with shadow puppets. The prisoners at the bottom of the cave spend their time theorizing and making judgments about what the shadows really are. Now imagine that one of the prisoners gets free and begins to climb up out of the cave toward the light. At first this person is blinded by the light, but gradually comes to see that the shadows on the wall are not real at all, but are simply chimeras caused by the real objects carried by along the outside edge of the cave. Eventually this freed prisoner would even come to see that the artifacts being carried along the wall are mere copies of more real natural objects in the outside world. This person then realizes that there are two levels of illusion at work here, one caused by the shadows in the cave and the other resulting from artifacts which are created to resemble more real objects in nature.

1 Rm 2:13–​16. 2 Plato, Republic, book vii, 514a–​521d.

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Finally, this liberated prisoner comes to be able to see the starry heavens and the planets. Indeed, it is possible that he or she will even be able, eventually, to see the source of all light and warmth itself, namely the sun. This last possibility is extremely difficult because it entails seeing the sun without being blinded by it. So, in a sense, the sun is the most basic and obvious feature in the world, yet it cannot be looked at directly lest we go blind. Here, then, are four distinct levels of reality: inside the cave, along its outside edge, the natural world outside the cave, and the heavenly bodies. The sun stands alone above and apart from the other levels. If, perchance, the former prisoner tries to go back into the cave to explain how things really are to the remaining prisoners, it will be a very painful journey. For, not only will it be difficult to make other people understand these different levels or realms of reality outside the cave, but they will most surely ridicule and perhaps even seek to harm their former comrade. Thus, once someone has been liberated from the cave, they will most likely not want to return in order to teach and free the remaining prisoners. This cave allegory has been used and reinvented time and time again throughout Western history, and for a wide variety of different reasons and causes. However, it is important for us to begin by seeing what Plato himself had to say about it. Briefly, Plato likened the cave dweller’s existence to that of the common person, who takes what is experienced through sensory perception and the like as the real world, even though it is but a world of shadows and reflections. For Plato, so called sensory knowledge is next to worthless since it is entirely relative at best and downright deceiving at worst. One is reminded of the vast number of people in today’s populace that take the images of television and other news media, full of celebrity and political gossip, so called “reality tv,” and the like as their reality. To put it another way, most of us are almost slaves to the conventional and traditional wisdom of our own culture that we are unable to break free in order to think for ourselves. For Plato, this form of existence and pursuit of wisdom can yield nothing but myth and opinion rather than true knowledge. The philosopher must break free from such nonsense. Once a person has been liberated from the perceptions and imaginations imposed by the senses of the body, which Plato dubbed the “prison house of the soul,” they can begin the upward climb to real knowledge gained through the mind. Rational thought will lead a person to be able to distinguish between faulty sensory experience, which in the allegory is represented by the images in the cave, and the objects in the natural world, represented by the artifacts being carried along the outside edge of the cave. Further on, reason will enable

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the free thinking person to see that even these artifacts are themselves but copies of the objects outside of the cave. These objects stand for what Plato came to call the Forms or Ideals, something like a template, reflected, as it were, in each individual thing in the world as we know it. Or, to turn it around, each thing can be said to participate in its respective Form. It is his insistence on the necessity and reality of these idealized concepts that causes Plato to be classified as an Idealist. Technically, it would be more accurate to label him an Idea-​ist, since we tend to think of an Idealist as one who has high moral ideals and standards, perhaps even as being rather impractical. Plato was an Idealist in the sense that he took the fundamental character of reality to involve concepts and minds rather than material things. Beyond even this, the rational person will eventually come to know the heavenly bodies, which represent for Plato the truths and axioms of higher mathematics. Here we see the influence of Pythagoras on Plato’s thought. For him, mathematical knowledge constitutes the highest level of knowledge and is able to lead a person to an encounter with the sun, or the Form of the Good, which actually is the Form for all other Forms. Here is how Plato himself put it: The realm of the visible should be compared to the prison dwelling, and the fire outside it to the power of the sun. If you interpret the upward journey and the contemplation of things above as the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm, you will grasp what I surmise … [T]‌his is how I see it, namely that in the intelligible world the Form of the Good is the last to be seen, and with difficulty; when seen it must be reckoned to be for all the cause of all that is right and beautiful, to have produced in the visible world both light and the fount of light, while in the intelligible world it is itself that which produces and controls truth and intelligence, and he who is to act intelligently in public or in private must see it.3 So, what we have here in Plato’s allegory of the cave is an entire philosophy of the nature of reality, called metaphysics; of knowledge, dubbed epistemology; and of ethics or morality. Beginning from the top, the Form of the Good creates and is the Form behind or above all other Forms, which in turn give rise to every particular thing, idea, or process that populates the natural world in which humans live. These Forms can become or get distorted through sensory experience and thus lead to mere opinion rather than knowledge. 3 Plato, Republic, book vii, 517a–​c.

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It is only rational thought that can enable a person to work backwards from the illusions of the senses, through the objects of the physical world, to the Forms or Ideas from which they get their reality. The intellectual light provided by the Form of the Good makes such rational thought possible. Mathematics, which sharpens the mind for higher philosophical endeavor, serves as the best teacher for bringing the intelligent person to the higher realms of reality and knowledge. In addition, it is rational thought that enables a person to discern the nature of the moral Forms, such as Justice, Truthfulness, and Love, and to thereby live according to them. In a different dialogue, Phaedrus, Plato uses the image of a charioteer driving two horses by way of explaining how the rational dimension of human nature must be in control of both the emotional or appetitive dimension and the volitional or spirited dimension. Humans, according to Plato, function best and can only be said to be virtuous when they have these three aspects of their nature in harmony. It is the responsibility of the rational mind to see to it that the other two faculties are kept under control and properly motivated. If a person’s spirit or will power takes charge in the decision making process, chaos will inevitably result, while if the feelings and appetites are not kept in proportion, elation or depression will cloud the judgment making process. Thus, it is reason’s job to handle the reins of a person’s capacities so that they perform their natural function and produce a harmonious and virtuous life. So for Plato rational thought is the axis around which all else revolves. It leads us beyond both illusion and convention, and enables us to know the real, the good, and the beautiful. Indeed, at the base of Plato’s thought is the assumption, common within classical Greek culture, that virtue or goodness is a by-​product of the fulfillment of function. Just as any human artifact is judged to be good to the degree that it fulfills the function for which it was created, so all natural things, including humans, are good to the degree that they actually embody their unique nature. It should be borne in mind as well that Plato often uses the same Greek word, arete, for what gets translated as justice, virtue, and goodness. The root meaning of this word is excellence. The existential balance among the key human capacities one achieves through the proper and effective use of reason is tantamount to, or the same thing as, moral virtue and human excellence. Balanced harmony was, indeed, the primary aesthetic value in classical Greek culture, as even a glance at the Parthenon and the wide array of statuary makes amply clear. For Plato, then, moral virtue and aesthetic value are essentially one and the same thing. Moreover, both of these expressions of arete, i.e. excellence, are achieved through the proper use of our rational capacities.

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Plato’s Republic is often regarded as the first and most thorough attempt to set forth the basis and elements of an ideal state, including its methods of government and education. Unsurprisingly, he patterned his ideal state after the model of the ideal person, both of which seek the balanced harmony of their various faculties by the use of reason. Likewise, their respective virtues will be the natural outcome of the harmony that flows from the fulfillment of one’s natural function. In the older, more traditional translations of the Republic, Plato speaks of the pattern of his ideal state as being the same as that of his ideal person, “only writ large.” So, then, just as the ideal person will achieve harmony and happiness through the proper balance of the three basic human capacities, namely appetite, spirit, and reason, so the ideal state will be made up of three corresponding groups of people, namely the working class, the military or peace keeping class, sometimes called the auxiliaries, and the ruling class, usually referred to as guardians. Each of these classes has a distinct task. The workers, or artisans, fulfill the vast array of jobs necessary to keep the state functioning at the economic level, while the warriors, or police force defend against external threats and keep the internal peace. The rulers, or guardians, appropriately enough, govern by means of wisdom. It must be kept in mind that for Plato these rulers are to be thought of as public servants, not as oligarchic or even political leaders in the usual sense of that term. These leaders are neither to be elected nor do they inherit their positions. Rather, they are to be carefully bred and educated so as to enhance their qualities of reason and wisdom. Moreover, they will have few if any personal possessions or privileges, not even private families. Their sole concern is with governing their society wisely and justly. Initially, all citizens would be given various tests and tasks to determine their individual capacities and talents. Then each person would be assigned to the appropriate class accordingly and given their specific assignments. After the warrior-​auxiliary class has been selected, they would be given further challenges in order to see which few should eventually become the rulers. When each of these individuals, as well as each respective class, is fulfilling its proper role in a harmonious manner, then the state as a whole will thereby be balanced and virtuous. Plato designated these three classes by the qualities of three valuable metals, the artisans being bronze, the warriors or auxiliaries being silver, and the rulers being gold. This is most likely the origin of the three different medals awarded at the Olympic Games for third, second, and first places, respectively. In Plato’s view each of these classes is as important as the others. They simply have different capacities and are thus given different functions accordingly. He really

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did mean the state to be “all for one and one for all,” something like a sports team in which each member fulfills a unique role, but none are less valuable. Plato devoted a good number of pages to the actual specifics of the education of the guardians. They, along with the auxiliaries, would begin with several years of music and gymnastics in order to harmonize their bodies and spirits. Then those who qualified would be given several years of mathematics in order to train their minds. Finally, the rulers-​to-​be would spend five years studying philosophy in order to cultivate wisdom. Then, before they actually take on a governing role, those selected would spend fifteen years helping to govern an outlying province in order to gain practical experience. Once they attain this high level of proficiency, these rulers would be given absolute power in governing, since they can be trusted. Turning now to Plato’s approach to questions of religion, it is important to bear in mind that while being highly critical of both popular, Homeric religious beliefs and the mystery religions of his days, Plato seemed to have been quite religious in his own way. There are those, in fact, who would interpret his theory of Forms, or Ideal ideas, as a way of understanding the mind of God which created and ordered the cosmos. Also, like Socrates, Plato can be seen as a deeply sincere seeker after the truth who is impatient with those who stop short of this goal because of laziness or timidity. Furthermore, it would seem that Plato might actually have thought of the Form of the Good as God. After all, it is the Form of the Good, like the sun in the cave allegory, which gives life to all other Forms and enables humans to know and live by them. In addition, in his Timaeus Plato set out his cosmology, or theory of the structure of the universe, and spoke of a “demiurge,” or craftsman, which shapes and orders the individual entities comprising the universe. Some have interpreted this demiurge as Plato’s God. In either case it is possible, perhaps even reasonable, to speak of Plato as a theist, in the sense that for him there exists a supernatural being that gives order and value to the world and to human life. There is, of course, the remaining question of whether or not Plato’s God continues to interact with or shape the world after it has been set in motion. The Form of the Good would seem not be involved with the world in an active way, but in a strictly rational or conceptual manner. This interpretation would, then, place Plato more in the camp with those who are called deists, along with John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, for instance. Here God is viewed as having created the world and then having determined to allow it to run of its own accord according to its own internal principles. Plato’s demiurge, on the other hand, would seem to lend itself to being interpreted as one that continues to shape and be involved with the world as

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it evolves, after having created it in the first place. If one takes this interpretive tack, then Plato can easily be seen as a classical theist, as many scholars, both Christian and not, have so interpreted him. In any case, it remains perfectly clear that Plato placed himself over against any and all forms of polytheism. His philosophy is straightforwardly monotheistic in character. This is why so many religious scholars within Christendom have sought to build their theologies on insights borrowed from Plato. Finally, we can turn our attention to Plato’s view of the human soul. Basically, as is clear from the cave allegory, Plato thought that the most essential aspect of human nature is the mind, which functions, as he put it, as “the eye of the soul.” The way up and out of the illusions and superstitions of the cave of sensory perception is by means of intellectual endeavor. The Forms, too, are known by the mind, as are the heavenly bodies, and the Form of the Good itself. Plato even offered several arguments in his various dialogues for the immortality of the soul, including its rational aspect. This way of looking at things led Plato to espouse a dualistic view of human nature. Thus for him the soul is seen as imprisoned in the body, while we are in our present earthly condition, and can only be released to enjoy its true nature after it is separated from the body in death. As we shall see, the early Christian thinker Augustine incorporated this dualistic theory of human nature into his interpretation of human destiny, as have many others after him. Indeed, it is safe to say that the majority of Christian believers even today would say that they subscribe to a belief in the immortality of the soul, even though the scriptures and Apostle’s Creed are quite clear in their emphasis on the resurrection of the body. So, where does this leave us with regard to Plato’s approach to the relation between reason and faith? Well, it should be clear that he did not think that faith, as any kind of belief which seeks to by-​pass rational endeavor, should be given the time of day. For Plato, our beliefs should always be based in reason and rational argument, even when, or perhaps especially when, they involve belief in God. He is quite certainly to be placed at the extreme rational pole of our initial continuum, along with John Locke and other early modern thinkers, such as Descartes and Kant. Nevertheless, it is equally certain that Plato took belief in a deity to be a live, rational option, if not a necessity. 3

Aristotle: Rational Theology

Aristotle was the star pupil in Plato’s Academy. In fact, he studied there with Plato for about twenty years before serving as the tutor for Alexander the

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Great in Macedonia, near his home town in the northern region of Greece, from roughly 343 to 335 bce. Upon his return to Athens, Aristotle founded his own school, which he called the Lyceum, teaching and carrying on biological and historical research. After Alexander’s death in 323 bce there arose a strong anti-​Macedonian feeling in Athens, and Aristotle’s work became suspect in much the same way as that of Socrates had. He then fled, as he said, “Lest Athens should sin twice against philosophy,” and died a short time later in a small village far from Athens. It is very hard to overestimate the overall work of Aristotle. Not only did he produce a great many volumes dealing with various aspects of philosophy, but he essentially created the field of logic as the West has known it until very recent times, as well as virtually inventing such diverse disciplines as biology and literary criticism. In fact, throughout his many travels, Alexander continuously sent plant samples back to Athens for his former tutor to study. Unlike Plato, Aristotle wrote no dialogues. Rather, he forged out page after page of detailed catalogues of botanical phyla, historical analyses of previous thinkers, and philosophical theories of his very own. He was both a renaissance man and a man way ahead of his own time. In addition to his writings on logic, literature, and politics, which we shall not explore in these pages, Aristotle developed elaborate theories in physics, ethics, and metaphysics that have influenced countless thinkers over the ensuing centuries. The term ‘metaphysics’ actually derives from the order in which Aristotle’s writings were placed on the shelf, namely right after physics. As such, Aristotle seems to have had little interest in religion, whether of the popular or the traditional brand. Nevertheless, his thought has been and is being used by a great many religious and theological thinkers right up to contemporary times. Like the major thinkers before him, Aristotle was fascinated by the notion of causation. He wanted to know just what explains how things change their position, their formation, and their development. He found the Presocratics, of whose thought he wrote copious interpretive summaries, much too simplistic in their focus on merely physical matters. He also found Plato’s explanation of causal relations in terms of the reflection of the Forms in various particular things too abstract and “heavenly minded” to be of much actual use in the real world. So, Aristotle proceeded to devise his own unique analysis of causation. In his book Physics, which really is the Greek word for nature, Aristotle divided causation into four main types: the formal, the material, the efficient, and the final. The formal cause of an entity is simply that Form which supplies its basic nature, what makes it what it is, or the Form in which it participates. The material cause is the matter out of which a given thing is made. The efficient

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cause is whatever actually makes or moves an entity from one place or state to another. The final cause is that for which something is made or moved, the goal of an activity. In all cases where the question of causation arises, each of these factors can be said to be involved. Perhaps an example is in order here. Consider the Statue of Liberty. Why is it what it is? What makes it what it is? In short, what is its cause? First, it can be seen to reflect the Form of statue-​ ness, and this is its formal cause. It is what it is by virtue of participating in the Form of statue-​ness. Second, the statue is made of metal, and this is its material cause. This is also why it is what it is. Third, the statue was constructed by certain French artists and metal workers, and they together constitute its efficient cause. They made it what it is. Fourth, the statue was made in order to commemorate the freedom that America represented for all those seeking refuge and opportunity. This is its final cause in the sense of being the reason why it was made. In the same way, according to Aristotle, everything that exists begins with an inner potential, which is its essential nature, and its development in this world is the unfolding of this key potential, the actualizing of it. All seeds, embryos, acorns, nation states, and insights, and the like contain within them what we today would call their dna, their genetic structure or patterning. It is the final cause of an entity that seeks to draw it out of its innate potential and into its full actuality. The stuff out of which each entity is made is its material cause, while the Form which determines exactly what it is, will be its formal cause. In nature the efficient and final causes are inseparably combined and invisible, as it were. Aristotle believed that everything in the universe, or nature, in addition to having a material cause and a formal cause, also has built-​in efficient and final causes which, as it were, push and pull it toward the actualization of its potential. Thus for him, there is a force or energy within nature that causes its various elements to grow and seek to fulfill themselves. He called this force nature’s entelechy, that toward which it drives or yearns. Aristotle even suggested that there is a final cause for the entire universe, what he called its Unmoved Mover, or Prime Mover, a sort of cosmic magnet that draws everything in the universe towards its own fulfillment simply by being itself, without in any way taking direct action on things. Some have interpreted this concept of an Unmoved Mover to be Aristotle’s notion of God. The difficulty with this interpretation is that for Aristotle the Unmoved Mover does not create or seek to influence the various aspects of the world in the least. That is why he calls it the unmoved mover, not to suggest that it cannot itself be moved, but rather to indicate that it does not seek to move others. It does not move toward others, and cannot be moved by others, but

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in its own nature it serves as the final cause of all of reality. In this sense, the Unmoved Mover does not serve as an efficient cause of the world, but only as its final cause. Also, the Unmoved Mover is not in any way personal in nature. Aristotle’s basic line of argument is grounded in the similarity he saw between purpose in art and purpose in nature. “As in art, so in nature,” he reasoned. Since both human artifacts and the things nature produces are characterized by designs and patterned processes, and the former have a designer, it follows that the latter must have a designer as well. This line of reasoning is generally called the “design argument” for God’s existence, and crops up again and again in Western theological thought. The difference between the usual versions of this argument and Aristotle’s version is that his Unmoved Mover, or Prime Mover, does not design the elements of nature by acting on them. Rather it draws them to itself as they each individually seek their own entelechy, or purpose. It is their object of desire. When he turned to analyzing the world more specifically, Aristotle determined that in nature there are three basic life forms, or souls. First, there is plant life, which has a vegetative or nutritive soul whereby it grows and reproduces itself. Then there is animal life, which in addition to having the same life principle as plants, also has a sensitive, or appetitive soul, which enables it to exercise the functions of sensation and movement. Finally, there is human life, which incorporates all of the capacities of the lower life forms, but also possesses an intellectual soul, or mind, (in Greek, nous) that enables it to engage in rational activity. Aristotle also distinguished between practical and theoretic reasoning. Thus it follows that for Aristotle, like Plato, the distinctive characteristic of being human is to be able to reason. Therefore, the chief end or goal of human life is to fulfill our rational capacities by reasoning and, of course, reasoning well. This is how we as humans can be said to express our entelechy, by being driven toward our final cause. It is also by means of using our reasoning powers that we shall find true happiness, since happiness is a function of fulfilled capacities. Just as the value and happiness of a knife, or a mouse trap, or a medicine, for example, is usually determined on the basis of how well each performs the task for which it was designed, so we humans also must be judged on how well we fulfill our unique capacity, namely reasoning. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle applied this line of reasoning to the questions of moral behavior and ethical decision making. For him, ethical choices must not be made on the basis of pure emotion, convention, or authority, but in virtue of determining what the most reasonable course of action is. Generally, the wise choice will be one that maximizes our rational capacities by finding what Aristotle termed the Golden Mean, or balance, between the

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more extreme alternatives. This balance may not be the same for different persons as a consequence of varying circumstances, different individual histories, and psychological make ups. Aristotle believed that since moral reasoning and choice is an activity, it can be practiced and learned in the same way that any skill is learned. He said that the things we need to know about how to live and what to do we learn by doing.4 If one practices being good, by following the examples and teachings of mature adults, the virtues that express moral behavior will become incorporated into one’s life, in the same way that being healthy follows from healthy practices. A virtuous life is thus the result of practicing virtuous living, not the other way around. Just as he distinguished between our practical and theoretic reasoning powers, Aristotle also distinguished between intellectual activity as such, and the power of contemplation. The former actively seeks to apply the rational powers to understanding the nature of things, as well as the implications that follow from such understandings and the presuppositions from which it is derived. Contemplative reasoning, however, simply contemplates everything, but especially the Prime Mover, for its own sake, passively if you will. For, in this mode a person most clearly emulates the Prime Mover, and is entirely self-​sufficient. It would seem that this notion of contemplation brings Aristotle quite close to being in a religious or worshipful mode. With respect to the question of the relation between faith and philosophy, there is not much that can be said since Aristotle did not address such issues directly. At the same time, however, it is clear that his system of thought lends itself to positive theological thinking, as the history of philosophy after Aquinas amply and clearly demonstrates. Moreover, there is something of a naturalist, or rationalist, religious quality within his approach to understanding the world and human life. After all, he sees in nature, as well as in the universe as a whole, a structured pattern that in some sense or other guides them toward the fulfillment of their respective character, a kind of divine plan or purpose implanted and superintending within. On the other hand, however, it is equally clear that Aristotle’s understanding of religion would have to be classified as a form of deism rather than theism. To put it differently, Aristotle might best be termed a religious naturalist, not altogether unlike Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, or even Henry Nelson Wieman from the University of Chicago in the middle of the 20th century.

4 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a15-​25.

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Before moving on, a mention should be made of two schools of philosophical thought that emerged during the days of the Roman Empire, largely as outgrowths of Aristotle’s philosophy. The first is the Stoicism of such thinkers as Cicero, Zeno, Epictetus, and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. As the contemporary English term connotes, Stoicism pivots around the idea that even though one must live in this chaotic world, suffering the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” to quote Hamlet, one should maintain a quiet center that is undisturbed. The secret to this equanimity is to be willing to accept, even affirm, everything that transpires as coming directly and inevitably from the Divine Mind that governs the universe. Be willing to accept everything that happens allows one to never be disappointed. Obviously, this approach to life depends on believing that there is a divine mind behind everything going on in the universe, and that the only way to be happy is to go with the flow and find your place in it. There is no use in fighting or pushing the river, because the doings of the universe are both rational and inevitable. The only thing that is variable, that we humans have control over, is our attitude toward what happens. We can choose to accept it and be happy, or we can refuse to accept it and be unhappy. There is no possibility of changing it. Although Stoicism clearly involved the belief that the universal mind is divine, there was never any thought of trying to know or have a relationship with it. Indeed, the Stoic concept of God actually equates divinity with the universe itself. The cosmos itself is divine and totally rational and we might as well align ourselves with it if we wish to avoid inner pain and be happy. So in any strict sense of the term, for the Stoic there is simply no place or need for religious faith. For there can be nothing personal, or reciprocal between a person and God. Here philosophy, in the form of an understanding of the world as both divine and inexorably rational, simply takes the place of any kind of faith or religious life. This philosophy appealed to both soldiers and prisoners during Roman times because both of these life situations entailed dealing with difficult and painful realities everyday of one’s existence. Epictetus is recorded as saying that when you look at your favorite cup, or at your loved ones, remind yourself that all such things and persons are mortal. So, when they are taken from you, you will neither be surprised nor disappointed. You can simply say, “Such is the nature of life in this world.” The key idea behind Stoicism would seem to be maintaining one’s balance through inner thought and strength by always remaining in harmony with the wisdom and power of the divine universe. At the same time, there was the Epicureanism of Epicurus and his later follower Lucretius, who wrote the well-​known poem On the Nature of Things.

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Whereas Stoicism sought to maintain inner calmness through harmony with the universe in the midst of everyday chaos, Epicureanism aimed at controlling the environment as the means of maintaining such equanimity. Epicurus founded his own school within the walls of his garden, and sought to exclude everything and everyone who would disrupt its peace and quiet. Thus his was a method of outer control, while the Stoics sought the same end but through inner control. This approach to philosophy has come down to us through the misnomer that Epicurus advocated the motto: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Actually, what he advocated was the minimization, if not the actual elimination, of sensory pleasure so as to keep oneself in continual harmony. He sorted out different pleasures according to the criteria of which lasts longer, brings the most pleasure, and carries with it the possibility of the least amount of pain. Eventually he settled on the pleasures of the mind as vastly superior to those of the senses. Moreover, he concluded that fear, especially the fear of death, is at the heart of human pain. For this reason, Epicurus advocated the minimization of fear, especially the fear of death, from one’s daily life. This move requires concluding that the gods, whoever or whatever they may be, are not the least bit interested in human beings, and will not, therefore seek to reward or punish them after they die. Epicurus adopted the atomistic philosophy of Democritus according to which every aspect of the world is said to be composed of various configurations of tiny indestructible particles which simply relocate themselves when a person or thing decomposes. Thus, there is nothing to fear in death for the simple reason that we shall not be here to experience it. Here again, we have a philosophy which has no need of, nor use for, the notion of faith. Rational control of one’s environment and life-​style is what will lead to happiness, and there cannot be any kind of relationship with God, or gods, because they either do not exist or are totally uninterested in our affairs. Whereas the Stoics believed in God, but equated the divine with the natural universe, the Epicureans saw God as irrelevant. Thus neither approach had any interest in faith. 4

Plotinus: Neoplatonism

Plotinus, who lived around 230 ce, originally came from and studied in Alexandria, Egypt, where he put together a philosophy characterized by a deep and creative knowledge of many previous ancient thinkers. He made use of the

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work of Pythagoras, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoic philosophers. Plotinus was also influenced by the various mystery religions of his day. He was mostly influenced, however, by the writings of Plato, and that is why his own philosophy is generally referred to as Neoplatonism. Plotinus developed his mature thought while teaching in the school he established in Rome when he moved there at age forty. The most distinctive feature of Plotinus’s philosophy was its forthright combination of philosophical speculation about the nature of reality with a clear cut religious doctrine of salvation. In his major work, Enneads, Plotinus set forth his teachings about the One, the source of all life, truth, and reality, as well as the emanation of this divine life source throughout the universe. He portrayed the relationship between the One and the rest of the entities in the world as arranged according to a triangular cosmic hierarchy, stretching all the way from the One at the apex down through various other spiritual beings, including human beings, to what he called prime matter at the very bottom. It is easy to see why many Christian thinkers who came after Plotinus made use of his ideas, especially his characterization of the One, the Good, which stands at the very top of the hierarchy and is the source of life for all else. Augustine, as we shall see in the next chapter, made great use of this way of portraying God as entirely complete in and of itself, as an absolutely independent and transcendent unity. Moreover, for Plotinus God is eternal, indivisible, and unchangeable. In short, Plotinus’s God is absolute perfection in every possible category, very much like Plato’s Form of the Good. His God is also similar to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover in that it does not cause or seek to alter the universe that flows from it. Plotinus claimed that because of God’s unique and perfect nature, it is impossible to characterize the divine in positive human language. Nothing we can say about God by way of listing attributes and qualities can really come close to describing the divine. The best we can do is to make use of negative characterizations when describing God. In other words, the best we can do in human language is to affirm what God is not, rather than trying to say what God is. In the Middle Ages this way of speaking about God became known as the via negativa and was a favorite notion among Christian mystics. Under the One, or God, on the cosmic hierarchy Plotinus arranged the various layers of reality as they emanated from the One. This notion of emanation is crucial to understanding how Plotinus thought about reality. The life and goodness of the One is not passed on to the rest of reality through creation or some sort of intervention. Rather, somehow the goodness and life of God is said to emanate, or flow, from the One without in any way diminishing it in the slightest. The One is an eternal source of life and goodness without actually

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desiring to do so. All of the various entities making up the universe desire or yearn toward the One, but it remains unmoved, like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, in its own self-​sufficiency. The first and highest level or stage within the hierarchy, just below the One, is intellect, or in Greek, nous, which is sometimes translated as mind, and serves as the intellect or mind of the world. Just beneath this nous, or cosmic mind, is the World Soul. Here Plotinus injects a spiritual dimension into his philosophy. There is both a World Soul and a myriad of individual souls comprising the spiritual aspect of the universe. Just as the world, or universe, as a whole has a soul, so too each individual entity in the universe has its own soul. Here the triangular character of Plotinus’s model of the universe comes into play, for as one descends the hierarchy from the One at the top, or apex, the triangle systematically widens so as to include the multitude of beings comprising the universe. Thus, the universal mind, or intellect, is placed on the level directly beneath the One God, while the world soul resides on the level directly below it. At the next level, however, we find a multitude of individual human souls, and so the hierarchy widens as it progresses downward toward the diffuse and inchoate prime matter, which exists just below the simplest material objects in the universe. In between the level of human souls and that of prime matter, then, Plotinus placed the world of material objects. This level includes all physical things, both animate and inanimate. So presumably we have here complex realities such as families, nations, and cities, as well as people and animals, microbes and solar systems. The entities at this level possess just enough of the life principle emanating from above to be real, but not enough to rise to the level of pure mind or soul. Everything that is partakes of some degree of reality, or Being, but according to an ever decreasing degree. It may prove helpful to conceive of this emanating, triangular hierarchy as a kind of fountain of being, with the One God at the very top and prime matter at the very bottom, where the pool around the base would be. In between these two extremes, top and bottom, are arranged several different layers, each of which overflows with life and being on down to the next level below. Thus water can be seen as the very essence of reality, bubbling up at the top of the fountain and flowing on down from each successive level to the next. At each of these levels, however, there is progressively less and less of the water available. At the bottom level, the level of prime matter, there is almost no water, or reality, at all. This fountain of being flows on eternally, according to Plotinus, without there ever being any causality between the various levels from the top on down. Reality, or Being, simply flows downward according to its inherent nature and

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at each successive level there is less and less of it. So, at the top, where the One, or God, resides there is absolute and eternal pure being or reality and goodness. Next, at the level of nous, or intellect, there is just a bit less of this reality and goodness, and so on down the line through the world soul, human souls, animals and physical objects, until we reach the bottom at prime matter, which barely has any reality at all. Another useful image through which to think of Plotinus’s hierarchy, an image he himself often used, is that of light. Thus, at the top is the pure light, divine and absolutely perfect in every way. At each successive downward level there is progressively less and less light, until at the bottom level there is almost none at all. In other words, light symbolizes all that is good, right, and beautiful at the apex of reality and pure being, while increasing darkness as we descend the hierarchy symbolizes an increasing absence of light and goodness, until we arrive at the very bottom level, just below prime matter, where there is absolutely no light at all. This way of looking at the structure of reality, as a kind of hierarchy of being, from pure being itself at the top, down through other spiritual and material entities, to the very bottom of no being at all, became a common way of thinking about the world among philosophers and theologians throughout the Middle Ages. In fact, it became known as the “Great Chain of Being” and has served as the primary model of much of Christian thought right down to the present day. It was used as a way of overcoming the extreme dualism between heaven and hell, good and evil, and soul and body that was associated with the highly influential system of thought known as Manicheanism. This latter philosophical system, with which Augustine was initially enamored, originated in Babylonia under the influence of the Zoroastrian religion. It was grounded in the fundamental idea that there are two essential and eternal principles or forces that govern all that takes place in the world, the one is evil and the other is good. It was claimed these two principles are engaged in an eternal battle to control the universe and those dwelling in it. Plotinus’s philosophy provided a way for Christian thinkers to acknowledge the reality of evil without affirming its equality with the Good, or God, Plotinus accomplished this by defining evil as the privation or absence of Good, and thereby depriving it of any essential reality of its own. The water of life in our fountain metaphor, or the pure light in our other image, while being independent of the other levels of reality and not in any way causing them, can be seen as flowing or emanating on down to these lower levels. It thereby provides them with their own progressively limited reality, and thus goodness can be said to be the sole source of all being, while at the same time the negative

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being of evil can be acknowledged as well. Thus evil, like darkness, can be said to be real, but only in the sense that it functions as the absence of goodness. Within the matrix provided by this hierarchical model of reality, Plotinus placed the human soul. As a mixture of what lies above, namely spirit and intellect, and what lies below, namely matter and the absence of being, human beings find themselves living in a tension between a desire for the Good and a desire for evil. According to Plotinus, each individual’s salvation depends upon the degree to which the former desire is realized and the latter diminished. We are to strive ever upward, trying to emulate and incorporate into our lives as much of the life of the Spirit and the Good as possible. It is our responsibility to “save our souls” by ascending the hierarchy. It is here, of course, that we encounter the religious element of Plotinus’s philosophy. He was not content to merely seek and expound the true nature of reality, but wanted to help himself and others find a way to so harmonize with pure being that each individual person will be increasingly full of light and life. While he did not institute any sort of religious society, nor any specifically religious practices, Plotinus clearly sought to develop a personalized religious understanding of the world and one’s own place in it. The upward journey toward the One is viewed as a means of salvation, for it brings a person closer to being pure spirit. The method or technique for achieving this upward journey is that of turning one’s self inward to explore and appreciate the spiritual realities that are comprised by pure being. Plotinus’s motto was “Inward is upward.” In other words, we are said to gain access to the higher realities of life, and the One God itself, by emulating them and practicing strict mental and spiritual discipline and meditation. To put it differently, we should strive to be as full of light and being as we possibly can. Plotinus embraced the idea of Plato, and others before him, of the immortality and preexistence of the soul, and so he urged his followers to continually seek their own higher self. There appears to be a bit of tension between Plotinus’s emphasis, on the one hand, on the total dependency of everything in the universe on the being and goodness of the One, and, on the other hand, his insistence that each individual must take full responsibility for his or her own salvation by pursuing higher spiritual levels. Indeed, it seems even more problematic that the fountain of being is unable to spread itself fully over all reality and to thereby fill the whole universe with pure being. To define evil as the privation or absence of good hardly explains, if the One or the Good is described as absolutely perfect, why there should be any of it anywhere at all. It would seem, then, that either evil, and hence each individual person’s evil, must be the result of a failure on God’s part to fully extend the divine goodness

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to all, or that each individual’s sin, as it were, is entirely their own responsibility. Either way, God can hardly be seen as absolutely perfect and fully in charge of the universe. Moreover, to define evil exclusively in terms the absence of good does not seem to do justice to the concrete and terrible pain that so many people, even innocent people, experience in their lives. Augustine embraced Plotinus’s explanation of evil in his own theodicy, but was equally unable to deal adequately with this type of difficulty. Throughout the history of both the Christian religion and the Judaism there have been those who, for one reason or another, have made use of the mystical strain found in Plotinus’s philosophy. Early on a document that claimed to have been written by the only Athenian male convert mentioned after Paul’s famous speech in Athens5, namely Dionysius the Areopagite, became highly influential among Christian thinkers. Likewise, a Jewish thinker named Philo sought to synthesize the thoughts of the great Greek thinkers with the Hebrew scriptures. Again, in the Middle Ages there were many Christian mystic thinkers, such as Meister Eckert and Theresa of Avila, as well as the great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. This brings us back to our overall theme in these explorations, namely the relation between philosophy and faith. As we have already seen in our introductory chapter, as the Middle Ages progressed, from Augustine on through Aquinas and others, a variety of interpretations of the nature of faith began to develop. On the one hand, there were those, as there still are today, who saw faith as a matter of giving assent to a set number of cognitive beliefs or doctrines, as for instance those found in the Apostle’s Creed. On the other hand, there have always been those who prefer to think of faith as a way of life, as embodied in a code of ethical behavior and commitments. The way of faith advocated by those who follow Plotinus’s lead takes an altogether different tack from those just mentioned. For them, faith is more of an inner feeling or experience than it is a matter of intellectual assent or of an ethical life style. The ultimate goal of the religious life and of true belief is an encounter with God, or of communion, if not union, with divine reality. For the mystical approach to faith, intellectual concepts and moral concerns fade into the background, giving way to direct contact with ultimate reality. Here one turns, inward in order to proceed upward, toward God. Thus faith transcends philosophy by pushing it into the background. 5 Acts 17.

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Medieval Thought 1

Irenaeus: God and Evil

During the early centuries of the Christian Church a great many controversies arose in the effort to spell out and sort out the different theological implications involved in shaping the main doctrines of this new faith. There were many discussions, and divisions, among and between various church leaders concerning things like which manuscripts should be considered authentic scripture, the nature of apostolic succession, the trinitarian understanding of God, and the meaning of the incarnation. One of the more important figures in many of these disputes was the Bishop of Lyon in France named Irenaeus, who lived around 175 ce. Irenaeus’s most direct connection to our overall theme of the relation between philosophy and faith arises with respect to his efforts to work out a viable Christian theodicy, namely an explanation of how and why evil and suffering can exist in a world created and controlled by a loving God. Throughout the centuries, even before the Christian faith came into existence, philosophers have wrestled with this issue, generally known as the “problem of evil.” It may well be the issue that is most threatening to a belief in a God who is both perfectly loving and omnipotent, for many thinkers see these two notions as mutually exclusive. Here is how the question is usually put by philosophers from Epicurus right up to the present: if God is perfectly loving, God must wish to abolish all evil and suffering, and if God is all-​powerful, God must be able to abolish all evil and suffering. Evil and suffering clearly exist; therefore God is either not perfectly loving or God is not all-​powerful. This argumentative form is that of a dilemma, one with two equally undesirable conclusions. The existence of evil and suffering is, then, highly problematic for those who affirm both the goodness and omnipotence of God. The approach to this question of the place of evil and suffering in the divine scheme of things taken by Augustine, two hundred years after Irenaeus, has been highly influential down through the ages. Augustine followed the thinking of Plotinus by defining evil and suffering as merely the privation or absence of good, and as thus having no authentic reality of their own. The chief difficulty with this approach is, quite obviously, that evil and suffering are not

© Jerry H. Gill, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004465640_004

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experienced as mere privations of goodness. Indeed, even the illusion that evil and suffering are real is in itself quite painful and needs to be justified. Other later theologians, such as John Calvin, have stressed the sovereignty of God that inherently enables God to allow any set of circumstances or events that seem appropriate to the divine will. Some have even claimed that what seems to us to be evil and painful is not really so from God’s point of view, and we shall eventually understand this when we enter into the final kingdom of God. Here again, one may be prompted to ask if this insight is of any comfort to the millions of suffering children around the world. Calvin’s God hardly seems to qualify as perfectly loving if innocent people have to suffer just in order to uphold God’s sovereignty. A quite different and more radical approach to the question is offered these days by what are called process philosophers, who follow in the line of argument set forth by Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and David Ray Griffin. Rather than concede God being perfectly loving in favor of God being all-​powerful, these thinkers prefer to concede omnipotence in favor of God being perfectly loving. They maintain that when we are seeking the best ways to understand God’s nature and way of dealing with the world, we should not focus on simply powerfulness, but should rather stress the higher values of love, grace, and wisdom. After all, these process thinkers argue, we praise human beings for possessing these latter qualities far above those having to do with power, control, and sovereignty. They go on to develop an understanding of God’s nature and relation to the ongoing events in the world that sees the entire universe, including God, as struggling to bring all good things into being in the world. In this struggle, God is said to be enlisting the help of human beings in overcoming such things as evil and suffering. So, in the words of our original dilemma, for these thinkers it is more important to think of and relate to God as perfectly loving than as all-​powerful. On the other side of the coin of this problem lies the related question of the place of human freedom in God’s scheme of things. Here again, there would seem to be a basic conflict between understanding God as the all-​powerful creator and superintendent of the entire universe, on the one hand, and the basic idea that humans are responsible for their decisions and behaviors, on the other. If we are, indeed, responsible for what we do, think, and say, and since we at least occasionally behave in ways that displease God, how can we affirm God’s omnipotence? Either we are free, which must in some way limit God’s control, or God is all-​powerful and we only think we are free. Now, against this backdrop of different approaches and thinkers to this overall issue, we can give a closer look at what Irenaeus had to offer with regard to

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providing an answer to the so-​called problem of evil. To begin with, he found it useful to distinguish between natural evil and moral evil. The former is suffering resulting from natural disasters, plagues, and the like. The latter is the result of direct human decisions and actions, either towards nature or towards other human beings. It is possible, then, to attribute a great deal of the world’s pain and suffering to the immoral behavior of humans. Once again, to be sure, the question is raised of how a belief in God’s omnipotence can be affirmed if one is going to accept the notion that humans are free, and are therefore responsible for their immoral choices. A hyperextension of Calvin’s doctrine of God’s absolute sovereignty might insist at this juncture that even our individual choices are a result of God’s will. That is to say, even though we experience ourselves and our choices as free, they are actually perfectly in line with what God has chosen for us to do and be. Thus too, then, our ultimate fate, salvation or damnation, will be the result of God’s choice not our own. Most thinkers reject this line of argument as demeaning to God. The real issue for our considerations here is, of course, that of the causes of natural evil and suffering. Since these happenings are, for the most part, not under human control and responsibility, they would seem to in one way or another be caused by God. It should be added here that as time goes by it is becoming increasingly clear that we humans are, in fact, responsible for far more of the world’s natural evil and suffering than we ever supposed. The increasing threat of global warming is an obvious case in point. Yet, there is still plenty of pain and suffering that would seem clearly to be the creator’s responsibility. Irenaeus began his approach to the problem by rejecting the common assumption behind many of the difficulties inherent within the belief in God as the creator and sustainer of the universe. That assumption is that a world containing any suffering and pain must somehow be out of line with a divine plan and will that govern the way the world runs. On the contrary, Irenaeus argued, it is possible for God to have created a world containing the potential for natural evil in order that human beings would have an environment to be responsible for and within which to learn many lessons. Indeed, he argued that such a world is absolutely necessary in order to provide an arena where people could exercise their freedom of choice. In other words, Irenaeus contended that far from desiring to create an antiseptic world in which humans would never have negative experiences, God has placed humans in a world through which they can learn and grow into being more fully human by exercising their freewill, rationality, and moral discernment. Here is how Professor John Hick summarizes Irenaeus’s approach to these questions:

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According to the Irenaean theodicy, however, God’s purpose was not to construct a paradise whose inhabitants would experience a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of pain. The world is seen, instead, as a place of ‘soul-​making’ or person-​making in which free beings, grappling with the tasks and challenges of their existence in a common environment, may become ‘children of God’ and ‘heirs of eternal life’. Our world, with all its rough edges, is the sphere in which this second and harder state of the creative process is taking place.1 So, in this way Irenaeus sought to solve both aspects of the problem, that of God’s perfect love and divine power, on the one hand, and that of human freedom, on the other. This way of looking at the issues involved clearly entails some sort of notion of God’s self-​limitation on divine power and sovereignty. In brief, God would appear to have limited this power in order to make room for human freewill and responsibility, and the price for this is necessarily a certain amount of human suffering and a limitation on God’s sovereignty. God’s loving concern for the ultimate wellbeing of the creation outweighs the concern for full control of the outcomes. It should be noted that the result here is not only human pain and suffering, but suffering on the part of God as well. God can be said to suffer in this arrangement both because of frustrations over unfulfilled divine plans and because of genuine empathy for the sufferings of human beings. Some theologians, especially those within the Catholic tradition, have understood the crucifixion of Jesus as directly symbolizing, or better yet, embodying and displaying this very divine suffering. This may well explain the power of the crucifixes within the Catholic pattern of worship. Irenaeus suggested that the key to understanding this way of approaching the problem is to think of creation as yet incomplete, and as now being brought to completion in human lives here on earth. It is much like the way we naturally think of children when they are young as being potentially mature adults, but we know that they must grow into their adulthood through the give-​and-​ take and push-​and-​pull of everyday life over a span of years. Moreover, a wise parent will put limits on parental control so as to foster this growth process, even though this inevitably causes pain for both the child and the parent. So, for Irenaeus, the challenge of the philosophers to those who would believe in an all-​loving and all-​powerful God is met by introducing the notions of divine self-​limitation, on the one hand, and human spiritual development 1 Hick, Philosophy of Religion, 47.

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through choices that have consequences, on the other. God, as a cosmic parent, prefers to take the risks of failure and suffering in order to realize the potential of the creation for growth and responsibility. God has chosen, according to Irenaeus, not to intervene in the lives of humans, either to protect them from harm or to force them to conform to the divine will. God chooses to be neither an over protective nor an overbearing parent. There are many points of contact and overlap between this view of Irenaeus and that of the process thinkers mentioned earlier. The latter see no need to begin by defining God as omnipotent, and then having to set aside both God’s love and human freedom. Irenaeus preferred to begin by accepting the traditional notion of God’s sovereignty and then introducing the idea of a self-​ limiting God who sets sovereignty aside in favor of love and freedom. In both cases the goal is to avoid boxing in our definitions of God by insisting on forcing two fundamentally opposed notions into the same theological scheme. So here we actually do have a concrete case of the interfacing of philosophy and faith. Clearly, Irenaeus, unlike Tertullian, was not one to scorn the human capacity for reasoning in deference to the Christian revelation. He obviously made considerable use of rationality in working out the framework, as well as the nuances, of his approach to resolving the problem of the existence of evil and suffering in a world created and sustained by God. Moreover, Irenaeus presumably addressed this problem because he felt it represents an important rational criticism of Christian doctrines which needs to be met. His was emphatically not a faith rejecting reason posture. He was clearly seeking deeper understanding of the central notions of his faith. At the same time, however, Irenaeus by no means took the position that these central doctrines of Christian faith can and need to be shown to be the natural outcome of the use of human reasoning capacities. It is clear that he, along with most of the early Church Fathers, accepted these teachings as having been revealed by God in and through both the person of Jesus Christ and Christian scriptures. Thus, they are not to be simply equated with the results of normal human rationality, as if every sincere person should be able to arrive at them without the aid of divine revelation. Reason and faith were not one and the same thing for Irenaeus. This places Irenaeus’s efforts to resolve the God and evil problem squarely in the middle, rather than at one of the extremes, of the spectrum set up in the introductory chapter. His approach represents the posture of faith seeking understanding, one that accepts the teachings of the Christian revelation as true and then sets out to explore and expound them. In this effort Irenaeus made excellent use of his reasoning capacities, and he expected others to do the same as they sought to make sense of the teachings of their faith. Moreover, he

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was not content simply to invoke the notion of paradox when there appeared to be a conflict between and among these teachings. It should also be clear that Irenaeus’s approach was not that which came to be the official position of the Catholic Church a thousand years later. Specifically, he did not maintain that there is no ultimate conflict between the doctrine of God’s sovereignty and human freedom, on the one hand, or between God’s goodness and the presence of evil on the other. He did not insist that a believer must simply accept both horns of these dilemmas, but rather sought to find a way to resolve them rationally. In this sense, Irenaeus was both a believer and a philosopher. 2

Augustine: Christian Platonism

Augustine was raised and educated in North Africa, where he eventually became the Bishop of Hippo, and lived around 400 ce. Although he lived a rather rakish life as a young man, his mother Monica was a Christian and Augustine himself was converted through her efforts. Specifically, Monica introduced her son to Ambrose, a highly influential Christian teacher and preacher in Milan, Italy. Throughout his adult years Augustine thus strove to develop both as a Christian and as a theologian, and it is safe to say that he became the most influential Christian thinker over the next 800 years. Indeed, even during the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s ce one of the mottos was “back to Augustine.” Prior to his conversion, Augustine had been attracted to the dualistic philosophy of the Manichaeans, but later on he was particularly impressed with the writings of the Neoplatonists, especially those of Plotinus. He saw this philosophy as providing both a valid intellectual understanding of God and the world, and at the same time a powerful spiritual incentive to become more God-​like. This attraction to the ideas of Plato, however indirect, remained an enduring feature of Augustine’s philosophical theology throughout the remainder of his life and work. He clearly sought to create a synthesis between these ideas and the teachings of the Christian faith. Before long, Augustine came to see the differences between Neoplatonism and Christianity. As he put it: “The books of the Platonists speak of the Word of God (the Nous), but that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, I read not there … and that in due time Christ died for the ungodly … is not there.”2 2 Augustine, Confessions, vii, 9.

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He went on to say Neoplatonism points us to the end of the soul’s journey, union with God as unchanging and perfect good, but it cannot show the way to the end. There are several major aspects of Augustine’s philosophical theology that define his overall approach in general and his posture concerning the relation between reason and faith in particular. The first pertains to his doctrines of the existence and nature of God. Taking as his point of departure the name Jehovah gave Moses, namely “I am that I am,” Augustine interpreted this utterance to mean that God is being itself that nothing greater than it can exist. Augustine thus concluded that by the term ‘God’ we mean a perfect, self-​ existent, immutable, and eternal being whose essence entails all knowledge, wisdom, and goodness, and who thoroughly transcends all human qualities and knowledge. In stark contrast to the Neoplatonic notion of the One as the source from which all reality emanates or flows, Augustine affirmed the doctrine of God’s creation of the world ex nihilo, or out of nothing. Likewise, for Augustine the world does not continue to exist as an extension or mediator of its divine source, but exists on its own as an independent though created reality. The world and God are thus not part and parcel of each other for Augustine. The world was brought into existence by God at the beginning and is thus neither the cause nor the sustainer of itself. Nor is the God of Augustine similar to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, since the latter takes no active role in producing the world. As was mentioned in our discussion of Plotinus’s understanding of evil as merely the privation or absence of good, Augustine accepted this line of reasoning even though he had parted ways with Neoplatonism with respect to other doctrines. For him, evil and suffering have no ontological status, any more that darkness, as the absence of light, has any reality of its own. As we noted earlier, the question of exactly why God’s goodness does not extend equally to all levels of reality’s hierarchical structure, thus leaving no room for evil, seems to remain something of a mystery. Augustine does suggest that natural evil arises out of the finite character of the created order, which does not resolve the issue of God’s responsibility for it. The question of why there is moral evil, caused either by ill will or ignorance, demands a more complex resolution and brings us to the second major aspect of Augustine’s philosophical theology. Everything here hinges on the doctrine of the Fall of humanity from its natural, original state of innocence and grace in the Garden of Eden. It is perhaps possible to suggest that even natural evil is the result of this catastrophic event, since the garden itself may not have contained any evil at all. In any case, the focus of the garden story, and

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of Augustine’s analysis of it, is clearly the origin of human sin and suffering. He argues that as a result of this original sin in the garden human beings brought moral evil into the created order. This, of course, raises the question of why God allowed our first parents to choose evil at the outset anyway. Augustine’s orthodox answer was that only by granting us the freedom to choose either good or evil could God provide for the possibility of free moral choice, and thus for moral responsibility and growth. This move, like that of Irenaeus, would seem to involve some sort of self-​limitation on God’s part, for evil and suffering are not part of God’s initial purpose. Nevertheless, Augustine steadfastly refused to implicate or limit God in this way. He argued that human free will is a gift of God, but that our misuse of it in bringing about evil is strictly our own doing. Augustine had opportunity to further refine his position on human nature and evil in his dispute with one Pelagius, a Christian thinker who was later declared a heretic, over the notions of original sin and total depravity. Earlier on in his career, Augustine had seemed to maintain that every created person has the ability to choose good over evil, but that our selfishness most frequently leads us to engage in immoral behavior. In short, he affirmed that we are only held responsible for what we actually choose. In the controversy with Pelagius, however, Augustine seemed to conclude that in the Fall of Adam and Eve, our original parents, all humanity lost the ability to do anything good. Only God’s irresistible grace can restore the human ability not to sin. We can now move on to a consideration of Augustine’s approach to the question of the relation between faith and philosophical reason, for at this juncture everything depends on his view of human nature. If, indeed, all human beings begin life in sin and are thus unable to rely on their reasoning powers to bring them to knowledge and wisdom either of the world or of God, philosophy at best is useless. If we interpret Augustine in this way his position would seem to be essentially the same as that of Tertullian, namely that only faith is relevant to the search for wisdom and God. The difficulty with this interpretation is that it leaves out the latter part of Augustine’s well-​known motto, made famous by Anselm several hundred years later, “Faith seeking understanding.” Clearly Augustine thought that one must begin the search for wisdom and God by relying on faith, but he also was not satisfied to allow faith to be the conclusion as well as the beginning of this search. Faith must, according to Augustine, go on seeking understanding of both the world and the meaning of faith. Faith is the point of departure, but it, in turn, requires, in Augustine’s view, that we continue to seek understanding on the basis of our faith. It would

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seem, then, that for him a faith that fails to continue seeking understanding is in some basic way inauthentic. To paraphrase Luther’s remark about the relation between faith and works, the answer lies in faith, but not without understanding. The other side of the coin here is, of course, that philosophical wisdom cannot be attained by itself apart from an initial faith commitment. So for Augustine the only way to do philosophy, to seek its wisdom, is to begin with faith in God and revelation, including the scriptures and the teachings of the Church. So in his conversion and after, Augustine continued the search for wisdom and truth, but on the basis of his faith rather than apart from it. This is why it is helpful to speak of Augustine as a Christian philosopher. Moreover, because of his strong reliance on Platonism, it may be more helpful to speak of him as a Christian Platonist. This latter point should be amply clear from the fundamental distinction both thinkers made between the world of sensory knowledge, on the one hand, and that of conceptual knowledge, on the other hand. Both Plato and Augustine denied the viability of physical sensation for bringing us to a knowledge of the truth. For them, true knowledge is possible only through the mind, a doctrine that leads to a stark dualism between the body and the mind, and thus exemplifies the totally transcendent character of divine reality, on the one hand, and the totally finite character of human nature, on the other. This also fits well with the Neoplatonic doctrine that the way to travel upward, spiritually speaking, is to travel inward through the mind and the soul. For Augustine, once the mind has been awakened by faith, it is capable of reliable explorations concerning various philosophical questions and issues. This way of approaching the matter liberated him to develop major doctrines about God, the world, and the human soul. The nature of his personal conversion and experience of God led Augustine to formulate a kind of argument for God’s existence similar to Plato’s argument for the ultimate necessity of the Forms. In short, Plato had argued that in each and every judgment we make about the virtuous quality of any entity or action, we presuppose the real existence of a conceptual standard by which we are making this judgment, otherwise we would have no standard upon which to base our judgment. Augustine applied this line of reasoning to the question of the existence of God, who is the standard against whom we judge the worthiness of people and their actions. In order to make any moral judgments whatsoever, he argued, we must be able to compare the behavior in question against the qualities of an absolute standard, which is what we mean by God. Thus it is such internal, moral judgments that lead us to an awareness of and encounter with God. As Augustine put it: “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless

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until they find rest in thee.”3 Here, again, we see the fundamental influence of Plotinus and the Neoplatonists in Augustine’s notion of the soul and/​or mind as that which leads us to God. Augustine’s overall approach to the question of how faith and reason are related, namely that one must begin with a faith commitment before going on to search for wisdom and knowledge, may seem puzzling at first blush. After all, we are generally accustomed, indeed advised, to put our faith in those things which have already proven to be trustworthy, not the other way around. However, when one thinks about how little children first acquire their understanding of the world, we are not surprised to learn that they have to begin by trusting the adults around them, since there is no other way for them to gain knowledge. Here faith, or simple trust, must come first. In addition, this pattern often applies even to adult learning in various fields. We generally begin by taking other people’s word for almost everything we hear about where and how things are in the world before we ever encounter them for ourselves. To be sure, we also revise what we have learned from others on the basis of our own experience, but such revisions generally come only after we have already accepted what we have been told. In this sense, faith nearly always precedes knowledge and understanding, rather than the other way around. Augustine would say that we should not be surprised to learn that this is the way it works with religious beliefs as well. Augustine went on to develop a political theory and a philosophy of history about how people should be and are actually organized in a society in his book The City of God. After the barbarian Goths sacked Rome in 410 bce, Augustine wrote this book in order to counteract the prevalent opinion that this catastrophic event was the result of the Christians’ lack of patriotism shown in their refusal to worship the emperor. He argued that, on the contrary, the fall of Rome was due to the rampant vice, evil, and corruption throughout the empire. He claimed that Christian faith and love of God could have prevented this terrible result. Augustine’s overall theory focused on his distinction between the City of God, by which he meant those who comprise the body of true believers throughout the ages, and the City of the World, namely those who follow the way of a corrupt world. Of course, these two cities do not have geographical locations, but rather are symbolic of two different ways of seeing and living here on earth. Nor, in Augustine’s mind, is the City of God to be directly identified with the Christian Church as such. Instead, he saw the kingdom of God 3 Augustine, Confessions, 1, 1, 1.

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growing steadily stronger throughout the world until it is eventually fulfilled in the kingdom of heaven. In the meantime, Christians must exist as citizens of both cities. No matter what one eventually concludes about Augustine’s approach to faith and philosophy, it must be granted that he was the first Christian thinker to work through the main teachings of the faith in anything like a thorough and creative fashion. Moreover, Augustine’s solutions to many, if not most, of these important issues became the basis for nearly all theological efforts throughout the early centuries of the Christian era. Moreover, his formula of faith seeking understanding was the pivot point for the thought of Anselm, the first archbishop of Canterbury around 1100 ce. Anselm, too, began with faith and then moved on to try to more fully understand what he believed. In language reminiscent of Augustine’s, Anselm said that he found himself believing in God and wished to understand why he did so. Thus he devised what has become known as the ontological proof of God’s existence. His first move was to focus on the concept of the greatest being that can be logically thought of. Clearly, such a being must possess the attribute of existence, otherwise it would be lacking an important attribute and would not really be the greatest or most perfect being that can be thought of. So, therefore, if this being possesses the attribute of existence, it must by definition necessarily exist. Anselm agreed with the psalmist, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ” This statement is self-​contradictory, since the verb denies the subject. As we shall soon see, this so called ontological proof of God’s existence provided a bridge between Anselm’s thought and that of Thomas Aquinas which we shall consider in the next chapter. For Thomas, in developing his own approach around 1200 ce to the question of God’s existence, actually began by denying the validity of Anselm’s proof. He, on the other hand, devised five arguments of his own, which have come to be called Aquinas’s “Five Ways” of proving the existence of God. Thus, for Aquinas, there was a real sense in which reason can be said to come before faith. Let us see how he attempted to demonstrate that this is the case. 3

Aquinas: Christian Aristotelianism

As was mentioned earlier on, Augustine based his approach to philosophy, and thus his theology, on the thought of Plato. In a similar manner, Aquinas can be said to have based his approach to both philosophy and theology on the thought of Aristotle. In order to explain how this turn of events came about, it is helpful to make a few brief historical comments. Partly because of Augustine

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and other Church Fathers’ reliance on Plato’s works, the writings of Aristotle were increasingly ignored in the West, and eventually they essentially dropped out of the teachings and libraries of the Roman Catholic theologians. There were, however, certain Arab thinkers who continued to study and preserve Aristotle’s works during the early Middle Ages. As the Islamic faith spread throughout the world, especially across North Africa and into Europe, it was Aristotle’s philosophy that increasingly provided its theological foundations. As the Muslim and Christian worlds continued to interact, at both the practical and the theoretic level, it became apparent that Plato’s philosophical presuppositions were not compatible with those of Aristotle. Slowly the writings of Aristotle, through a sort of double translation process, became better known in the Western World, thanks to the scholarship of the Muslim thinkers. During his university studies in Paris, Aquinas came under the influence of one Albert the Great, Albertus Magnus. This prodigious scholar who was a kind of living encyclopedia of philosophical knowledge about nearly all of the Greek, Roman, and Muslim scholars, had become convinced that Aristotle’s approach was superior to that of Plato. So it was Albert who really re-​introduced Aristotle to the thinkers of the West, and it was from Albert that Aquinas took his cue. Indeed, Aquinas was convinced that Aristotle’s insights would provide an excellent fresh avenue of connection between the Muslim and Christian faiths. At first the writings and teachings of Aquinas were highly suspect in the Catholic theological world. In fact, he was briefly condemned as a heretic, and some of his works were actually burned. Slowly, however, it became clear, not only that the insights of Aristotle could prove useful in theology, but that they enabled Christian thinkers and missionaries to better communicate with Muslim believers. Within his own lifetime, Aquinas actually became the number one theologian not only of his day, but on down through the centuries and right up to contemporary times. Nearly all modern Catholic philosophy and theology is based on the works of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’s philosophy is founded on the distinction between natural and revealed truth about God. Following Aristotle’s focus on sensory knowledge and causality as the ground of all other knowing, Aquinas concluded that the human rational capacities are sufficient to bring us to a knowledge of God’s existence. He quoted Paul who, in his letter to the Christians in Rome had claimed that “The invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood from the things that are made.”4 Even though we are limited to basic sensory 4 Rm 1:20.

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knowledge, this cognitive avenue is sufficient to enable all human beings to conclude that God does, in fact, exist. This approach has come to be known as natural theology. Aquinas was abundantly clear that what we can know of God in this way is indeed limited to the matter of divine existence. We are unable to know the nature and character of God through our unaided reasoning powers. For such knowledge we are entirely dependent on revealed truth as found in the Christian scriptures and the teachings of the Catholic church. Thus for Aquinas, there are two complementary forms of truth about God and divine things, namely that arrived at by the use of our natural reasoning powers and that revealed to us by God through the Holy Spirit. One brings us knowledge of God’s existence, while the other brings us knowledge of God’s divine attributes, indeed God’s essence. In addition to following Aristotle’s lead in such matters, Aquinas was also in tune with such influential Muslim philosophers as Averroes and Avicenna. These latter thinkers had also become convinced that the way of reason was an adequate avenue through which to come to a knowledge of God. In fact, some Muslim thinkers, unlike Aquinas, went so far as to claim that natural reason was a superior method of knowing God, especially for those who possess superior intellectual powers. For them, faith and revelation are provided for those people who are unable to reason their way to God and divine truth. Aquinas, on the other hand, saw these two ways as complementary rather than as rivals. According to these Muslim thinkers we need both. When focusing on natural or rational truth about God, Aquinas developed five ways of establishing that God exists. He began, however, by rejecting the so called ontological proof of God’s existence offered by Augustine and Anselm, which we considered in the previous chapter. In essence, this argument for God’s existence claims that the very idea of God requires divine existence, since perfection would not be perfect if it did not exist. The argument boils down to the claim that the notion of God’s existence is self-​evident. Aquinas denied that the idea of God is self-​evident. Moreover, all that the ontological proof really proves is that the idea of God includes existence, not that God really exists. Each of Aquinas’s five ways is based on what is called the cosmological argument for God’s existence, since they begin reasoning from some aspect of the world, or the cosmos, as we know it through sensory experience. In this regard, Aquinas is once again taking his cue from Aristotle, who based all his reasoning on the law of cause and effect. Aquinas aimed at locating God as the divine cause of all that exists in the world, so his analysis of causation draws heavily from Aristotle’s understanding of the different types of causation that we

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discussed earlier. While faith is the appropriate mode through which to receive God’s revealed truth, reason is the appropriate mode for attaining natural or rational truth about God. The first of Aquinas’s ways starts from the phenomenon of motion, which entails any kind of change in the world. Everything that is put into motion, or that undergoes change, must do so as the result of some other thing causing it to do so. This is the chain of events with which we are all familiar. But, Aquinas claimed, once again following Aristotle, this causal chain cannot extend on forever. Somewhere there has to be a first cause or mover that puts the whole chain in motion, in Aristotle’s terms, a first mover. The idea that a chain of events could extend on to infinity is, Aquinas argued, “repugnant to the human mind.” “Therefore, it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, moved by no other; this everyone understands to be God.”5 For Aquinas, then, God serves as the first mover for each and every causal event in the cosmos. To be sure, God is not then just another factor in the natural chain of events, but stands above or outside of the natural order in order to get it underway, as it were. While this line of reasoning may have made sense during medieval times, it seems unclear or out of place in light of modern, Newtonian physics. On the other hand, post-​Einsteinian quantum mechanics seems to open up a myriad of possibilities concerning natural causation. At any rate, not everyone was or is convinced by Aquinas’s line of reasoning in this argument. The second way starts from the order of specific efficient causation, to use Aristotle’s concept, rather than simple notion of motion. Each and everything that exists does so by virtue of the existence of some other entity, such as parents and the like. However, within the causal necessity of each given entity, each one is caused by another in the temporal scale of things. But here again, such a chain of things caused by another cannot logically go on forever, argued Aquinas, because this notion of infinity makes no sense to the human mind. Thus, there must be a transcendent cause of everything else which itself is not caused by another. This we know as God. The third way is often designated the argument from contingency, while at other times it is called the cosmological argument proper. The point here is that according to Aquinas, everything that we experience in the world is a contingent being or event. That is to say, no given thing or happening must exist or take place. Any and everything must be said exist contingently. It is not logically or physically inevitable that anything, being, or circumstance must be 5 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt.1, Q. 2, a. 3.

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in the world at all. Any given entity or happening could just as easily not have existed or taken place. Indeed, the whole world itself could just as easily not exist, since there is nothing about any of it that requires its existence. Therefore, according to Aquinas, there must exist a necessary being that explains the existence of this entire world of contingent beings and events. Such a necessary being is what we mean when we speak of God. Therefore, God must exist. Aquinas is not arguing here, as before, about any finite sequence of events or beings being caused by some sort of first cause. Rather, he is arguing for the necessary existence of a being which subsists on its own as a self-​ contained being, completely independently of natural entities, but serving as their cause. If there were no such necessary being, how could the whole universe of contingent beings and events have ever come into existence? Aquinas’s fourth way is based on the notion of degrees of perfection. All throughout our experience in this world we are constantly making judgments about which things, or people, or events are better or closer to perfection than others. Such behavior would not be possible, let alone have any meaning, unless there existed a standard of perfection against which we claim to be judging the entities we are comparing. If we say, for instance, that this painting, or pie, or ball team is better than another, or in other words is closer to perfection then we are implicitly calling on some outside or transcendent standard of perfection by which to make this judgment. Even to claim that no such external standard of perfection exists would seem to entail that the speaker knows what perfection is, so as to be able to judge that this particular entity or event is not perfect. The whole tone of this argument is, of course, quite Platonic in character. It seems to presuppose the existence of Plato’s Forms which do in fact serve as the standards for determining whether or not something in experience is, indeed, actually the thing in question. Even though it is not without its critics who claim that modern relativism has made such claims obsolete, this argument would seem to carry considerable weight. There is a sense in which the very use of the word ‘perfection,’ even in denying its existence, seems to entail that the speaker knows what it means. Moreover, in Plato’s sense, even to know what a term means and how to use it shows that one knows something about it, which in turn shows that the notion has some sort of reality. To situate the whole question in the midst of contemporary philosophical understandings: not all judgments can be relative, or subjective, since even the claim that they are so is offered as a non-​relative or subjective meta-​claim, one that transcends the very claim itself. Otherwise, the claim in question is rendered devoid of meaning. In short, the statement that “all truth claims are relative” is clearly offered as a universal truth.

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The fifth and last way that Aquinas attempted to prove the existence of God is what is called a teleological argument. Here again we see Aristotle’s thought at work. According to him, whom Aquinas constantly refers to as the Philosopher, there is an obvious parallel between the artifacts created by human beings, on the one hand, and the various objects and life forms we see and feel all around us in the sensory world, on the other hand. Thus it is reasonable to conclude that there is a cosmic artist that is responsible for the existence of the latter, even as there is for the former. As Aristotle put it: “As in art, so in nature.” For Aquinas it was obvious that the existence of the world requires such a cosmic or transcendent artist, and thus once again he concluded that this is what we mean by the term ‘God.’ For Aristotle, to be sure, the source of this teleological, inbuilt artistic design in the universe is inherent or immanent within nature itself rather than external to it. For Aquinas, however, the cosmic designer exists independently of nature and designs it through creative principles and processes. This is one of the key ways in which Aquinas departed from the teachings of Aristotle. On the other hand, there was at least one theological point on which Aquinas agreed with Aristotle as over against Church doctrine, namely that pertaining to the creation of the universe. Aristotle had maintained that the universe is eternal and had no beginning. The Church, of course, has always maintained that God created the universe out of nothing, ex nihilo. Aquinas, for his part, claimed not to find any philosophical reason why the universe could not be both eternal and subject to the creative activity of God. The first verses in the book of Genesis speak of the earth being “void and without form” prior to God’s shaping it and calling it into specific forms and states. Perhaps God creates eternally as an on-​going process. When he moved on to revealed theology, Aquinas again made a fundamental distinction. This time it is between positive and negative attributes of God’s nature. He contended that while there is no way we can have direct knowledge of God’s essence, we can begin with negative knowledge thereof. That is to say, much of what the scripture and the Church have to say about God’s nature comes in the form of denials, namely we are told what God is not, rather than what God is. Thus it is said that God is unlimited, infinite, and immutable, and the like, all of which focus on qualities that emphasize that God is transcendent of and unlike human beings and other created things. This way of doing theology came to be known as the via negativa and was quite popular throughout the latter centuries of the Middle Ages. This approach was adopted wholeheartedly by those who stressed the importance of the mystical knowledge of God. They claimed that after direct communion with God, unmediated by creation and language, a believer can only report that the

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character of God is absolutely unlike anything else in human experience. This posture has always been advocated by those, even in modern times, who wish to emphasize the wholly otherness of God. Such thinkers as Søren Kierkegaard, Rudolph Otto, and Karl Barth all come to mind in this connection. When it came to positive ways of thinking and speaking about God, that is affirmative theology, Aquinas had a great deal more to say. His focus was almost exclusively on the concept of analogical thinking and speaking about God. He claimed that although we cannot conceptualize God’s essence directly, we can do so analogically by attributing to God various characteristics which we know in our own human experience. In short, we generally speak and think of God metaphorically or indirectly, rather than literally or directly. Thus we can and do think and speak of God as wise, good, and powerful, for instance, but not straightforwardly. To do this would be to engage in what Aquinas called univocal predication, which would claim too much for our knowledge of God’s character. At the same time, he said that our predications about God’s nature must not be totally equivocal either, lest they end up saying nothing at all about God. To speak of God as loving and wise, for example, is, according to Aquinas, to engage in the analogy of proportionality. That is, God can be said to have these qualities in a way that is proportionate or appropriate to the divine nature. This notion of the analogy of proportionality is consonant with the basic doctrine which claims that humans are created in God’s image and therefore bear a concrete resemblance to divinity without recapitulating or copying it. Even here we see Aquinas’s use of human reasoning powers by way of approaching revealed theology. For him, faith and reason are both necessary without either being sufficient. Thus we once again see the influence of Aristotle’s insights at work in Aquinas’s approach to the relation between philosophy and faith. Natural reason alone is capable of providing the knowledge of God’s existence, while faith and reason work together to bring out the nuances of revealed knowledge concerning God’s nature. This dualistic quality of Aquinas’s way of doing philosophy and theology pervaded nearly all of his thought. While at some points his approach reflects the hierarchical pattern he borrowed from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, for the most part he preferred to separate various aspects of philosophy and faith into two complementary compartments. This has become the pattern for nearly all Catholic thinking about God’s relation to the world. God is seen as superintending over both human and divine things, but the human world, say of politics, must be understood as operating on its own divinely instituted principles. The heavenly and earthly worlds are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they identical. They are separate but equal.

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This same dualistic, hierarchical pattern is evident in Aquinas’s posture toward morality. Above everything in human relationships there exists the divine eternal law, which governs the entire cosmos and can only be known through revelation. Beneath this there stands natural law, which is the aspect of God’s eternal law that applies to human nature and relationships. This latter law is based on rational principles and can thus be known through human reason alone, apart from revelation. Finally, there exists purely human law, which seeks to reflect natural law but does not always do so. These three all overlap with one another, but they remain distinct. 4

Eckhart: Christian Mysticism

Over against all these different approaches to the relation between faith and reason, between philosophy and theology, stands the mystical tradition. Essentially this tradition is something of a reaction to all attempts to conceptualize or formalize the human connection with divine reality. There are, to be sure, a number of different approaches even within the mystical tradition itself, especially within Eastern religions, but for our purposes with respect to the faith and reason issue it seems best to focus on specifically Christian mysticism. Moreover, within this tradition Meister Eckhart, who lived and wrote around 1300 ce, stands out as both representative and highly influential. Eckhart himself was, to be sure, very much influenced by the writings of Aquinas, but he also was greatly enamored of the Neoplatonism of Plotinus. Indeed, his approach to the questions of philosophy and theology was something of a synthesis of these two modes of thought, together with the teachings of the Church and the scriptures. While he clearly thought that it is both possible and necessary to think and speak of God in human concepts formulated by the mind, Eckhart also stressed the inherent limitations of human reason when it comes to knowing and understanding divine reality. Moreover, Eckhart maintained that by far the most important and reliable way to know God is directly through the avenue provided by the Holy Spirit. Another way to put Eckhart’s overall point of view is to stress the emotional or affective aspect of faith in counter distinction to the intellectual and activist aspects. Both of these latter modes of interacting with God are indirect in that they are mediated through the mind or the body. Eckhart felt that it is more important and necessary to encounter the divine through inner experience directly. Thus, in the final analysis, Eckhart drew more heavily on the teachings of Plotinus than he did on those of Aquinas. He differed from Plotinus, of

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course, in his emphasis on the role that the grace of God and the activity of the Holy Spirit play in making direct communion with God a reality. The focus point of this Christian mysticism for Eckhart was the human soul, which was given to us in order for us to be able to directly encounter and know God. As with Plotinus, so with Eckhart, the way to God is inward and upward, that is to say, we must strive to ascend upward toward the divine by focusing inwardly on the various aspects of our souls. It is on the soul that we find the imago Dei, the image of God stamped from the very outset of creation. Therefore, it is only through the activity of the soul that we can know and enjoy God. As with Plato, for Eckhart the mind is but a part of the soul and must be supervised and limited by it if true experience of God is to be realized. There has always been an interpretive question revolving around the way Eckhart, along with other Christian mystics, spoke of the soul’s union with the divine. We must ask, is this union a form of identification with God, so that the human soul becomes absorbed into the divine, or does the soul retain its own identity when engaging in communion with God? Scholars seem to be divided over how to interpret Eckhart on this issue. It would seem that his commitment to Christian teachings would necessitate that Eckhart maintained the relation of communion, rather than that of identification in our relationship with God. There are several questions or criticisms that have generally been raised in relation to this mystical approach to faith and reason proposed by Eckhart. One has to do with whether or not the mystical posture actually seeks to rise completely above and thus abrogate the individual’s selfhood. On the one hand, such self-​renunciation would seem to belittle, even contradict, God’s creative purposes in bringing humans into existence, while on the other hand it would also seem to open the way for a great deal of human pride on the part of those who would claim to have attained union with God. Most Christian mystics, including Eckhart, seem to have avoided these two extremes. A related issue is whether or not the mystical approach weakens the believer’s sense of moral responsibility in both the church and the world community. While it is true that mystics like Eckhart saw their primary duty to be that of striving for a personal union with the divine, it does not follow that they completely ignored their responsibilities to those around them. Indeed, Eckhart claimed that only by being inwardly pure can the Christian be outwardly effective. Nevertheless, there remains the problem that one has only so much energy and time in a lifetime to devote to any activities, and this may necessitate paying more attention to the mystical quest than to external activities. Finally, there is the criticism that an emphasis on mystical experience as the preferred way of interacting with God will inevitably lead to a subjectivist

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point of view with regard to Church teaching and practice. Another way to put this issue is to ask about the cognitive value of the mystical experience of God. In what sense can the mystic have anything to say about the nature of the divine, about what is true of God and what is not? In the end, does not this approach open the way to a rank sort of individualism in both theology and Church practice? While he seems to have sought to deny these various possible shortcomings and dangers attributed to his point of view, it remains the case that they continue to haunt those who advocate this approach Perhaps one can conclude that as with any particular philosophical or theological emphasis, there exist potential difficulties which need to be guarded against if one is going to develop a sound approach. There is always the possible danger of over intellectualizing one’s faith, and there is always the danger of under intellectualizing as well. Likewise, there always remains the chance that a person or group will over stress the role of simple faith or emotional experience in the Christian life, so too with political activism, charismatic experiences, and so on. There would seem to be something of value and something to be guarded against in each approach. At this point it may prove advisable to once again return to our original continuum of positions as outlined in the introductory chapter. Clearly, Eckhart stands near the one extreme identified with Tertullian because his emphasis was on minimizing the rational dimension of faith and maximizing the experiential. He certainly was not as extreme as Tertullian, since he did leave room for conceptualizing about God, but his stress was certainly on faith as over against reason and philosophy. This way of putting the matter would seem to place Eckhart in between Tertullian and Augustine in the “faith seeking understanding” range of the continuum. As we saw earlier on, near the opposite end of the continuum, that which would emphasize the role of reasoning the life of the believer and the Christian community, one would find Aquinas. Of course, Aquinas did not go the whole way in stressing the importance of natural reasoning to the exclusion of faith and revelation. He definitely saw the need for both, and thus viewed them as mutually complementary. Pure natural reason can lead a person to the knowledge of God’s existence, but revelation and faith are necessary to gain knowledge of God’s nature and essential qualities. So, then, with Aquinas reason may be thought of as coming first, followed by faith, while with Augustine faith comes first and is then followed by reason and seeking understanding. Thus neither of these two great thinkers can be said to stand at either of the two polar extremes of our continuum. However, as we have seen, Tertullian may fairly be said to represent the “faith without reason” extreme at one pole. This raises the question as to whether there have been

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thinkers who emphasized the rational pole of the continuum, thereby relegating faith to the sidelines. In modern times John Locke can be said to fulfill this position, but what about in the Middle Ages? In the last chapter mention was made of two Islamic thinkers, Averroes a Spaniard, and Avicenna from Persia, who kept the philosophy of Aristotle alive in the early Middle Ages, and who thereby strongly influenced the thought of both Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. Averroes went so far in his theories about human nature and the role of reason as to claim that there are three kinds or levels of people. First, there is the majority of people, who base their beliefs on their imaginations and not on reason, and who must be kept virtuous out of fear. Second, there are the theologians who devise elaborate intellectual theories to cover up their reliance for their beliefs on the same fears and superstitions as the first group. Finally, there is a small minority group of philosophers who share the same beliefs as the other two groups, but who insist on having reasons upon which to base these beliefs. So, here is a group of thinkers, according to Averroes, who can in fact rely solely on their reasoning powers to arrive at truths about the divine. In following this interpretation of Averroes’s thought we actually discover a position that can be located at the opposite extreme pole from Tertullian on our projected continuum. For, here was a viewpoint that saw the possibility of unaided human reason actually coming to a knowledge of God. Whereas Tertullian advocated faith altogether without reason, Averroes envisioned the possibility of reason altogether without faith. Clearly, Meister Eckhart would have thoroughly disagreed with this latter point of view, since for him not only does the inner mystical experience of God need no rational avenue to achieve a transcendent spiritual state, but such an avenue would directly conflict with the soul’s upward and inward journey toward the divine. In any case, however, we have now more or less filled in the major possibilities on our proposed continuum expressing the range of approaches to the question of the relation between reason and faith, between philosophy and theology. It is time now to move on to a consideration of further interpretations of these issues developed in more modern times.

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Modern Thought 1

Descartes: Rationalist Faith

The centuries between the works of Augustine and those immediately following the works of Aquinas were dominated, as we have seen, by exclusively theological approaches to our central issue. Indeed, one could easily make a case for concluding that during the entire Middle Ages the relation between faith and philosophy was in fact the crucial issue. Some have claimed that during these centuries philosophy was dethroned and actually became the handmaid of theology, so to speak. A whole different set of approaches to this question came on the scene with the arrival of what has come to be called Modern Philosophy. One of the bridges, or springboards, for this dramatic change was what is known as the Renaissance, a rediscovery by artists of the Golden Ages of Greece and Rome, respectively. Another impetus was provided by the rise of scientific discovery and thinking, especially in astronomy, by the likes of Galileo and Copernicus. A third catalyst in this revolutionary period was the European discovery of the new world of the Americas. All of these factors conspired together to open up, if not destroy, the traditional ways of thinking that had characterized previous centuries. The breakup of the Middle Ages thus went hand in hand with the birth of the Modern Era. The one thinker whose name is synonymous with that of modern philosophy was Rene Descartes, who lived and worked in France during the early 1600s ce. Descartes was extremely enamored of both modern science and mathematics. Like many others of his time, Descartes envisioned a sort of merger between science and math that would provide absolutely reliable knowledge about all of the major disciplines then being studied in the universities. Indeed, he particularly desired to find a way for philosophical questions to be settled with the absolute certainty that characterized mathematical truth, especially geometry. While still a young man Descartes set himself the goal, much like Archimedes, of locating a single absolutely certain axiom which would provide the fulcrum for establishing the answers to all important philosophical and theological questions. He began this quest by vowing to set aside any and every idea or theory of which he could not be absolutely certain. Thus he endeavored to apply systematic doubt to all truth claims until they could be shown to be true beyond a shadow of a doubt. This meant that Descartes had to question all his

© Jerry H. Gill, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004465640_005

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previous and firmly held beliefs about each and every aspect of the world and experience. He was especially suspicious of all so called knowledge that came by means of the senses. The criteria, or methodology, that Descartes adopted for determining what claims are certainly true and which are invalid he borrowed from mathematics, namely intuition and deduction. That is to say, he proposed to begin only with those propositions as his axioms that could be established as intuitively true from the outset, and to move on from these by rigorous deduction to yet other true propositions. The concepts comprising the former must be absolutely clear and distinct at the outset, and there must be constant review of each step of the argument from that point on. Armed with these principles, Descartes locked himself in his room and began his quest for absolute knowledge.1 After discarding so called sensory knowledge, Descartes went on to question everything that had previously seemed indubitable to him. For instance, perhaps he is only dreaming everything he is experiencing and thinking, thus none of it can be taken to be true for certain. Even the so called truths of mathematics, like 2+3=5, might not be true if there exists an evil demon, or God, who delights in twisting everyone’s mind into agreeing with such truths, even though they are actually not true in reality. Since we cannot know that God is good and trustworthy, it cannot be established with certainty that even mathematical knowledge is reliable. Descartes ended the first day of his search in Meditation One, in despair, since he could not find any propositions that could serve as the certain fulcrum for the rest of his project. But wait! In Meditation Two, he came to consider that perhaps there is one proposition that cannot under any circumstances be doubted, namely the proposition that he, Descartes, the person who is conducting this examination, actually exists! Even an evil demon could not deceive Descartes about the reality and truth of his own existence, since he would have to exist in order to be deceived by this demon. This became Descartes’s famous axiom: cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” A self-​evident truth. “Thus it must be granted that, after weighing everything carefully and sufficiently, one must come to the considered judgement that the statement ‘I am, I exist’ is necessarily true every time it is uttered by me or conceived in my mind.”2 Having located an absolutely certain beginning point from which to continue his quest for further knowledge, Descartes was ready to press ahead. Before long he was able to establish to his own satisfaction the truth of certain

1 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. 2 Descartes, Meditations, 17.

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propositions about his own bodily existence, the nature of true ideas in general, the existence of physical things in the world, and even about God. He concluded that the reason he could not doubt his own existence, each and every time he asserted it, is that it presses in on his mind in such a fashion as to be undeniable. Thus, he took this indubitable character be the sure sign of absolute truth. Whatever cannot be denied without being self-​contradictory must, indeed, be absolutely true. The only hitch with this reasoning is still the possibility that God, who provides and superintends our minds, is an ultimate deceiver. Thus, Descartes set out to see if he could establish the existence of a trustworthy God. He discovered two separate ways of proving that a good, reliable God exists. From there he was able to trust his beliefs that there is a real world and that rational processes can be trusted. So, having begun by discarding all his conventional beliefs, Descartes concluded by reclaiming them because he had proven that God would not deceive him about his basic beliefs. Clearly, we must now examine his two proofs of God’s existence. The first, found in Meditation Three, is actually a version of the causal argument that we encountered in both Aristotle and Aquinas. “One has no choice but to conclude that, from the simple fact that I exist and that an idea of the most perfect being, that is, God, is in me, it is most evidently demonstrated that God exists.”3 Quite simply, Descartes reasoned that since he, an imperfect being, has in his mind the idea of a perfect being, namely God, this perfect being must exist. The missing premise of this argument is, of course, that the cause of anything must be at least as great as that which it causes. Thus, since Descartes is a finite being, the cause of his idea of an infinite being must in fact be a perfect being, namely God himself. All of this, he thought, is clearly and distinctly true. Descartes’s second argument for God’s existence which can be found in his Meditation Five is once again familiar, for it is a version of the ontological proof offered by Augustine and Anselm. “From the fact that I cannot think of God except as existing, it follows that existence is inseparable from God; for this reason he truly exists.”4 Descartes simply claimed that the very idea of God entails the idea of perfection, which in turn entails the idea of existence, since a being could hardly be perfect if it did not exist. Once the existence of a good, and therefore reliable, God had been established, it was easy for Descartes to go on to be able to trust his beliefs about the world around him. So, Descartes

3 Descartes, Meditations, 33. 4 Descartes, Meditations, 42.

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emerged from his room having found to his own satisfaction an absolutely certain beginning point from which to establish the truth of almost all of the propositions of common sense. There are, to be sure, many questions and criticisms that can and have been raised concerning almost every step in Descartes’s reasoning, but we do not have time or space to go into all of them. Suffice it to say that a good many philosophers have objected to what seems to be the circularity of his reasoning process. He begins by needing a certain truth from which to reason to other truths, and so he uses his reasoning process to establish the existence of a good God, which in turn allows him to be able to trust his reasoning process. Others have questioned whether or not the propositions Descartes takes as “self-​evident” really are so. Still others have claimed that it is wrong headed to begin the search for truth by doubting everything. It will be noted that Descartes began his project inside his own mind rather than with the evidence of sensory experience. He was confident that logical certainty, like that found in mathematics, was the only way to discover truth. Such certainty is exclusively a function of mental activity, in his view, and only after establishing it in the mind can one move on to exploring its possibility with respect to other realities. This fundamental distinction between mind and body at the outset led to what became an irreducible dichotomy between mind and body, one that has plagued modern philosophy from its very inception. Descartes spoke of this dichotomy in terms of two basic types of substances, thought and extension. The mind is the domain of thought, while the body is in the domain of extension. Conversely, the mind is not and cannot be extended, or take up space, while the body does not and cannot think. Thus Descartes concluded that our bodies are, like those of animals, merely very complex physical machines, while our minds essentially exist and function independently of our bodies. This is the Cartesian dualism between mind and body that has continued to dominate modern Western philosophy right up to the present day. Indeed, in the 20th century this view became known as “The Ghost in the Machine” theory, after Gilbert Ryle’s clever phrase. The chief difficulty arising from this dualism is how to explain what seems to be the obvious interaction between our minds and our bodies. Clearly, we think of something to do, like scratch an itch with our hand, and then we do it. Or, in reverse, we bump up against a hard object and are conscious of the pain in our minds. If, as Descartes insisted, thought and extension are fundamentally distinct substances or realities, how are such things possible? If thought is in principle incapable of being extended, and bodies cannot engage in thought, there would seem to be no way the two realities could interact.

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Some of the followers of Descartes devised ingenious but unimpressive theories. One was “psycho-​physical parallelism” in which the two domains just happen to coincide in their various activities without there ever being any real interaction between them. Each domain was said to operate on its own principles and these two sets of principles are almost always in sync with each other. Another theory was that God simply sees to it that the two domains are set up in such a way that their various activities coincide even though they are entirely separate from each other. Both of these explanations denied that there is actually any interaction between the mind and the body. Descartes’s own explanation was quite different and even more ingenious. He suggested that deep in the brain, perhaps in the pineal gland, there is a device, like a swinging gate, that alternatively is pushed by or sets in motion the various “winds of the spirit” generated by the mind, thus effecting the interaction between the two domains. He further suggested the metaphor of the relationship between the pilot of a ship and the physical ship itself. The pilot responds to what is happening to the ship in its material surroundings, while the ship responds to the directions given by the pilot in the wheelhouse of the brain. This proposal, to be sure, raises serious questions about the consistency of Descartes’s dualistic theory, since both his metaphor and his neurological analysis clearly involve some sort of direct interaction between two substances which are supposed to be entirely distinct. Nevertheless, even after one has dismissed Descartes’s radical dualism, it remains very difficult for any of us to explain how the mind and body actually do interact, given that we agree that they do. No matter how far back or deep into the electrons and synapses of the inner brain we go, there is a point at which we reach a dead end with respect to any place where the mind connects up. Similarly, no matter how carefully we trace our thought patterns, they stop short of actual contact with the body. Well, given all these theories and arguments on Descartes’s part, where do they leave us with regard to the issue of the relation between philosophy and faith? Given his thoroughgoing commitment to logical reason as the only avenue to truth, it would surely seem that Descartes would fall toward the extreme rationalist pole of our initial continuum. Although he seems to be seriously concerned about God and religious matters, he clearly does not advocate a faith alone sort of approach. Nor does he even seem to agree with Anselm and Augustine that one must begin with faith in order to achieve understanding. There is some similarity between the approach advocated by Descartes and that taken up by Aquinas, for they both begin by valuing reason and using it to prove the existence of God. Descartes, however, arrived at the truths of the Christian faith only after having proven the existence and trustworthiness

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of God. In the “Preface” to his Meditations, which he dedicated to the Sacred Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris, he stated that his approach in no way threatens any of the truths of the Christian faith.5 However, he never directly addressed the sorts of questions about God’s attributes, revelation, and Catholic doctrine that Aquinas did. Clearly, Descartes was more of a pure rationalist than Aquinas was. It would seem, then, that Descartes had a stronger similarity with those thinkers at the opposite end of the continuum from Tertullian, such as the Islamic thinkers Averroes and Avicenna. For, they too stressed the priority of rational procedures when it comes to matters of philosophy and faith. Descartes insisted on beginning the search for truth from scratch, and upon establishing rational principles which any reasonable and sincere person can follow to arrive at absolutely certain truths. Because of this he has come to symbolize the pivot point between medieval and modern thought. Modern thinkers are characterized as being unwilling to accept as true any teachings, whether scientific or theological, simply because they are traditional or conventional. There were two additional modern philosophers who deserve to be mentioned in connection with Descartes, for they followed in his wake as rationalists. The first of these is Baruch Spinoza, a Jewish thinker who lived and wrote in Holland around the mid-​1600s ce. He was one of the first scholars to question the reliability of some of the stories in the Hebrew scripture, and he was excommunicated from his local synagogue because he did so. Spinoza agreed with Descartes that all truth must be based on logical certainties, but he thought that the latter failed to adhere consistently to his own method. Using an elaborate set of definitions, axioms, and theorems, Spinoza set out to establish philosophical truth. He not only concluded that God exists, but that God and the world, or universe, are one and the same reality. Indeed, Spinoza maintained that there is but one reality, and that it is totally rational and divine. He did concede that divine reality has two basic attributes, namely thought and extension, but refused to affirm their independence from each other. Moreover, whatever happens in the world and human life proceeds necessarily from this one reality and should be accepted as the will of God. This view of God and the world is generally regarded as pantheism, meaning that all is God and God is all. Spinoza stands in the Stoic tradition of ethical theory, and his book Ethics seeks to spell out the rational basis for all of these conclusions. Here again it is clear that Spinoza’s understanding of the relation between faith and 5 Descartes, Meditations, 3.

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philosophy, like that of Descartes, places an exclusivist emphasis on the role of reason to the near elimination of any role for faith whatsoever. He was a true rationalist, as well as a truly modern thinker. Spinoza saw no need for an emotional dimension in human existence at all, and advised people that they should cultivate an intellectual love of God. In fact, he said in one place, “One can love God if one chooses, but do not expect God to love you in return.”6 Another follower in Descartes’s wake was G.W. Leibniz, one of the most original thinkers in the history of mathematics. Leibniz lived and wrote primarily in Germany around the late 1600s ce. Leibniz, too, thought Descartes’s dualism was problematic, but he also thought Spinoza’s pantheism was unable to explain variety and difference among the features of human experience. In fact, in a sense Leibniz went in the exact opposite direction from both Descartes and Spinoza. Whereas Descartes had claimed that there are two basic substances or modes of reality, and Spinoza had claimed that there is but one, Leibniz asserted that reality is composed of an infinite number of simple substances which he called monads. According to Leibniz, these monads are the energy points or conceptual nodes out of which everything in reality is formed. Unlike the atoms of Democritus, these focus points of energy do not, as such, take up space but rather form the force field, as it were, within which individual entities take shape. Leibniz maintained that each of these monads is entirely self-​sufficient and contains the conceptual template for the entire universe. There is no need for interaction among monads since each already contains everything that each of the others does. Leibniz referred to the monads as windowless, because they are neither conscious of or in any need of one another. The metaphysical result of this elaborate theory is that God has seen to it that there is a pre-​established harmony among the entire universe of monads, and that each and every event is thus determined and completely necessary. Leibniz affirmed a version of the design argument for God’s existence, based on the perfect harmony which characterizes the entire universe. Ours is, then, the best of all possible worlds. He also affirmed a version of the ontological argument for God’s necessary existence based on the idea that God’s essence is perfection and perfection entails existence. Here again we encounter a rationalist approach to the relation between philosophy and religious belief. The existence and nature of God are and can only be established through the rigorous application of rational argument. Thus, there is no real need for faith as a way of understanding or knowing God. Like 6 Spinoza, Ethics, 19.

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Descartes, Leibniz saw his point of view as being in complete harmony with the teachings of the Church, although he never really addressed them as specific doctrines. He had little if anything to say about the Christian scriptures and their various religious assertions. All in all, the rationalist approach to religious questions remains primarily a philosophical one, rather than a religious one. 2

Locke: Empiricist Faith

Modern philosophy contained another, diametrically opposite approach to philosophy in general and to questions of faith in particular. While the rationalist approach was advocated mostly by thinkers on the European continent, this other approach is called British Empiricism and its initiator was John Locke, who lived in England in the late 1600s ce. He was joined in this movement by George Berkeley and David Hume, the latter of whom will be considered at length in the next chapter. Locke laid out the main outlines of this approach, while the other two thinkers developed and extended them, but in ways that would have been quite unacceptable to Locke himself. Like the European rationalists, the British empiricists inherited their philosophical problems from the medieval thinkers we considered in the first half of this present book. Because of their theological interests, thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas, were especially interested in the question of the relationship between faith and reason, and so they often focused their philosophical examinations on this issue, as we have seen. While he took up an entirely different, indeed essentially opposite, point of departure from previous thinkers, including the rationalists, Locke himself was also interested in how his philosophical perspective impacted religious questions, especially those pertaining to faith and reason. Some have considered Locke to be the founder of psychology, and why this is so will become immediately clear as soon as we begin to explore his line of thought. Like Descartes, Locke sought to begin his investigation of the origin, basis, and extent of human knowledge with something of a blank slate. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding he went directly to an examination of what he took to be the building blocks of sensory experience and thus of knowledge itself. His major premise was that all of our experience, and thus all of our knowledge, comes –​and can only come –​through the senses. According to Locke, whatever we think and reason about is the direct result of our empirical sensory input. This major premise he interpreted to be the very opposite of the rationalists’ predilection for what he called “innate ideas,” that is, concepts and truths that

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are already in the mind at birth, as many thinkers from Plato to Descartes had affirmed. Locke declared that at birth the mind is “a blank tablet waiting to be writ upon” by sensory experience. He claimed that we can have no ideas or concepts in our minds that have not come to us through sensation. Thus he excluded the sorts of things the rationalists used as their initial assumptions, namely various axioms and principles, such as sufficient reason, the notion of identity, and clear and distinct ideas. Locke frequently challenged his readers to try to come up with an idea or notion that was not the result of sensory experience. In addition, he continually asked them to look and see if children or “simple native peoples” have any such ideas. He even went so far as to suggest that Adam and Eve clearly could have had no idea of what an apple would look like or taste like until they had actually seen and tasted one. So, somewhat like Descartes, Locke began by throwing out all the furniture of the mind that did not pass his crucial criterion, only unlike Descartes, Locke’s criterion was sensory experience, not indubitable truths. Both of these founders of Modern philosophy wanted to admit nothing as knowledge that did not meet their criterion. So, having laid out his main angle of approach, Locke began to examine the furniture of the mind. He noted that there are two and only two sources of the ideas that we have in our minds. The first is sensation itself, while the other is reflection. That is to say, the ideas we think about are either the result of direct sensory input or they are the result of our reflecting on the various ways the mind processes the ideas of sensation, namely doubting, reasoning, willing, comparing, contrasting, and the like. So then, we have ideas such as those of color, shape, hardness, and size that derive from sensations, and ideas such as brighter, similar, bigger, and different that result from the reflecting we do about these initial ideas of sensation. Locke went on to further classify ideas into types or kinds, namely simple and complex. Simple ideas of sensation, according to Locke, are specific and indivisible, such as the ideas of white, sweet, and sharp. Simple ideas of reflection, which are also specific and indivisible, might be sameness, fewer, more, or less and so on. Thus simple ideas of sensation are all received passively, while those of reflection are the result of turning the mind inwards, as it were, on its own thinking processes and therefore are the result of mental activity. These ideas are, according to Locke, the building blocks out of which our more holistic experience is constructed. Complex ideas are also put together by the mind, either unconsciously, as when we experience a lump of sugar and combine its simple qualities of sweetness, whiteness, and hardness into a single entity by means of our reflective processes. Moreover, we might also go ahead and reason abstractly

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and quite consciously about such qualities by comparing, contrasting, and classifying them into groups, and the like. In this way our minds construct what Locke called general ideas. These two schemas then, the sources and the kinds of ideas, provide the matrix out of which all human thought and knowledge arise. In order to make his account of the structure and basis of experience and knowledge more complete, Locke further suggested that the qualities of the objects that produce the sensations in our minds are of two kinds, primary and secondary. The primary qualities are those that any given object that we may encounter in the world actually has objectively and in itself, such as a chair being hard, extended in space, and made of wood. The secondary qualities are those that the object causes to be experienced by us, subjectively, in our minds, such as the relative brownness, heaviness, and mustiness of the chair in question. These latter are, according to Locke, clearly more dependent on our interaction with the chair than on the chair itself. Next, Locke sought to explain how these primary qualities can be established as inhering in the actual objects of which they are attributes. He was concerned to establish the existence of the real world outside of the human mind which generates our sensations and thus our knowledge. He did not want to conclude, as did his later compatriot George Berkeley, that our ideas and the real world are one and the same, that everything that is real exists in our minds or in the mind of God. Locke accomplished this important task by asserting that all primary qualities do, in fact, inhere in objectively real objects because these objects are comprised of substance. Here we see Locke going beyond his reliance on pure sensation and reflection, for in asserting the real existence of substance, he admitted that this notion has no basis in either of these two aspects of the mind. We do not, he admits, have an idea of substance in and of itself; we only have what he calls a notion of it, of something we know not what which we cannot, however, do without. For, without this notion of that in which all qualities inhere, we are locked within the confines of our own minds and cannot claim to have any real knowledge of the world at all. George Berkeley was willing to accept this outcome, provided these ideas can be said to inhere in the mind of God. David Hume was not so accepting, as we shall see in the next chapter. Having thus laid out what he took to be an adequate account of the structure and functioning of the human mind, Locke set about to establish the bases for the various types and degrees of human knowledge. He suggested that there are three types, and thus degrees, of knowledge. The first is intuitive, the second is demonstrative, and the third is sensitive. Intuitive knowledge, according to Locke, is immediate and unquestionable. We intuitively know that a circle is

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not a square, that 6 is not 8, and that we are ourselves and not another person. Moreover, we have intuitive knowledge of the reality of substances existing outside of our minds. Demonstrative knowledge is the result of reasoning from evidence and/​ or premises to probable or certain conclusions. This type of knowledge must begin from an intuitively certain starting point and move carefully, step by step, to its conclusions. It is, of course, in the fields of science and logic that this type of knowledge is generally paramount. However, Locke thought that it is possible to prove the existence of God through demonstrative reasoning. At this point he reverted to the line of argument we encountered in the rationalists, like Descartes and the medievalists before him, who relied on the ontological and causal arguments for God’s existence. Locke accepted these arguments outright as providing demonstrative knowledge of God’s existence. Sensitive knowledge is, according to Locke, not strictly speaking knowledge at all, since it is always open to question as to whether the world outside of our minds actually corresponds to our ideas of it. However, he concluded that we are justified in trusting that our sensations generally do correspond to the real world, for we seem not to be able to believe otherwise, and we know that God is benevolent and as such would not allow us to be deceived about such a fundamental matter. Even so, Locke warned us, this type of knowledge is much more tenuous than the other two types. We must remember that the notion of “substance” is not the result of sensation but of “something we know not what.” Before turning our attention to Locke’s specific application of his philosophy to the question of the relation between faith and reason, it should be pointed out that he has become every bit as well known and admired for his writings on political theory as he has for his work in epistemology. In the second of his Two Essays Concerning Civil Government, Locke developed thoroughgoing and highly influential theories of human nature, private property, and social contract theory. Indeed, it has been argued that his political theories provided a good deal of the groundwork for the foundations of the constitution and government of the United States. In Locke, for the first time, we encounter a thinker who directly addressed the issue of the relation between faith and reason. In the latter chapters of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke undertook an explorations of this complex relationship. He further developed these ideas in his book The Reasonableness of Christianity. Locke maintained that reason and faith are not opposite but that faith needs to be regulated by reason. His position here is clearly to be placed toward the rationalist pole of our initial continuum, near that of the Islamic thinkers, and surely as more extreme than that of Aquinas.

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Locke defined reason as different from faith. Reason seeks probability of various propositions. Faith on the contrary is assent to any proposition as coming from God in some extraordinary way of communication which he concluded that we call revelation. Locke was adamant that no new ideas that either go against or supervene reason can be given in a revelation. In addition, any true idea given to us through revelation must also be justifiable by reason itself on other grounds. His clear and oft repeated main principle is that natural human reason, when used properly, can and must control and determine whatever any claim to revelation asserts to reveal. In taking this position, Locke stood four square against not only wild eyed prophets of sectarian religions, but against the traditional Church doctrine of his day as well. With respect to religious epistemology Locke was a self-​proclaimed naturalist. Locke went on to admit that there are some things which may be revealed and that go against reason, and that these ought to be accepted as true because they are matters of faith. This does not mean that such affirmations should be accepted at face value. What reason can do in such cases is determine whether a true revelation has in fact occurred, as well as make sure that the revelations’ claims do not contravene the standards of reason. Locke concluded that nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with reason has a right to be assented to as a matter of faith. At the end of his analysis of the interaction between faith and reason, Locke asserted that the human mind is endowed with two main capacities with respect to truth and falsehood. On the one hand, there is the capacity for knowledge, which is indeed limited and finite. On the other hand, we have the capacity to make judgments, which is entirely unlimited. Locke urged that the mark of a wise person is to fit faith to reason. In other words, a person should not allow the faculty for judgment making to extend beyond the faculty for knowledge. In such contexts, we should let our ignorance be our guide and not make judgments about things that we are not certain of. When we do not know, we do not affirm. By thus limiting our judgments and commitments to what we actually know, Locke thought we shall be able to avoid most errors and deceptions in the religious dimension of life. His position is clearly one that in the final analysis places reason above faith. In the final chapter in his Essay, entitled “Of Enthusiasm,” Locke reiterated his overall position in warning against those who would claim that their beliefs came straight from God. No matter how firm the conviction that one’s belief is from God it must pass the muster of rational thought. Even the results of being guided by “the light within” as Friends or

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Quakers might say, Locke affirmed, must be judged by the natural, God given light of reason. At the outset of this chapter mention was made of George Berkeley, a fellow traveler of Locke’s who, after starting out with Locke’s empiricist principles, ended up taking a completely different tack altogether. We shall now conclude with a brief look at Berkeley’s view. Berkeley was deeply influenced by Locke’s empiricist approach to the question of knowledge and the nature of reality, but he was troubled by how he dealt with the whole issue of how it can be established that there exists a correspondence between the ideas in our minds and the external, real world. There certainly appears to be a gap in Locke’s logic at this point and Berkeley set about to correct it by devising an ingenious, if untenable theory of his own. Locke’s solution to this problem, it will be remembered, was to say that we simply had to trust, both that there is an external substance behind our various sensations and that God’s benevolence will see to it that we are not deceived in this matter. Berkeley thought this was at worst hocus pocus and at best mere wishful thinking. His own solution involved simply collapsing these two matters of trust into one. He did this by insisting that there is no need for the notion of an external world at all as long as we have the reliable mind of God to bank on. He affirmed that the ideas in our minds come directly from God’s mind and not from some substance we know not what. So, in this way Berkeley concluded that “to be is to be perceived,” that objects and their resultant sensations are real simply because we perceive them (esse est percipi) after or as God thinks them. On the one hand, this ingenious theory seems to change absolutely everything by doing away with the physical world altogether. On the other hand, however, Berkeley claimed that absolutely nothing is changed, except that we have done away with the philosopher’s boogeyman called external objects or substance. We just go on living and talking the way we always have, trusting that God’s mind will consistently provide us with the ideas appropriate to our common tasks and shared experience. So in Berkeley we have one avowed empiricist who actually turned out to be a kind of idea-​ist. For, after beginning with sensations caused by physical objects, he ended up with sensations caused by the mind of God and no objects at all. Nevertheless, at the practical level nothing has really changed, for God guarantees the continued consistency of the world by providing all if us with the appropriate ideas. In conclusion, it is well to bear in mind what another, later British empiricist, Bertrand Russell, had to say about Berkeley’s theory that it cannot be refuted but it need not be taken seriously. It is time now to turn to a consideration of yet another of Locke’s followers, David Hume. Here we meet another thinker who began where Locke began,

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but became dissatisfied with where he ended up. Hume devised his own solution to Locke’s basic difficulties by concluding that knowledge, in the traditional sense of the term, of any aspect of the external world, the self, and God is strictly speaking impossible. Hume turned Locke’s empiricist philosophy into a thoroughgoing skepticism. 3

Hume: Religious Skepticism

In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume, who lived in Scotland in the middle of the 1700s ce, sought to follow out the natural implications of Locke’s empiricist approach to understanding human knowledge. So, he too began by assuming that all of our ideas, and hence all knowledge, arise out of sensory experience alone. Hume altered Locke’s vocabulary but his terminology accomplishes much the same epistemological tasks. He called all the materials given to us by sensory experience perceptions, and went on to claim that these are of two kinds, namely impressions and ideas. The impressions are the result of the direct input from the senses, while the resultant ideas remain in the mind as copies of the impressions. Furthermore, impressions are, according to Hume, strong and vivid, while ideas tend to be vague and fade over time. In turn, simple ideas can be compared and compounded by the associative faculties of the mind into complex ideas. This associative power of the mind sets up patterns of experience which we come to anticipate and, thus, by constant repetition we come to construe these patterns as necessary connections between and among ideas. From here, he concludes, it is but one short step to attribute these ideas and their patterns to the way the world is quite apart from our experience of it. But, said Hume, it should be perfectly clear that we do not actually have impressions of the ideas so associated by our minds. Thus, we cannot in good cognitive conscience assert that they represent anything in the world as it is external from our minds. All we can say is that this is the way our minds regularly put things together. The more our experience continues to come in these predictable patterns, say of space, time, shape, and color for instance, the greater is our tendency to expect them to continue to do so –​and to attribute these patterns to the external world. We do have ideas of certain impressions, but we have no way to know if their configuration corresponds to anything outside of our own minds. Hume was particularly concerned about two of the ideas we think we have from experience but which he claimed actually derive from the way our minds

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put things together. The first of these is the notion of substance. It will be remembered that Locke himself had to admit that we do not have any sensory input concerning this notion. Rather, “it is something we know not what,” even though we cannot seem to get by without it. We cannot, in short, help but believe that the impressions we receive correspond to and inhere in various substances, such as physical bodies and objects. Well, Hume was not interested in what we cannot help but believe, but only in whether or not we have a real experiential basis for believing in it. Therefore, Hume concluded that the glue, called substance, which Locke thought holds our impressions together in coherent patterns, is strictly a function of the creative capacities of the mind rather than representing something in the world in which our impressions inhere and by which they are produced. Not only does this do away, in Hume’s mind, with the notion of physical objects as such, but it does away with the notion of a continuing self in which our consciousness resides, as well. We simply do not have impressions of such things. The consistent manner in which our minds arrange our impressions and ideas tricks us into thinking that there must be something behind or beneath them that, as it were, holds them together. The second notion that Hume was concerned to expose as bogus from an experience point of view, is that of causation. Here again, the persistent pattern with which our minds organizes and presents our impressions to us, say as B following A, for example, gets misread as part and parcel of the way they actually come to us, and of the way the world external to us actually is. On the contrary, argued Hume, all we really can know is that our experience has consistently come to us in this manner –​we cannot say that it must or always will come according to this pattern. Just because rocks hitting glass windows, for instance, have broken them in the past, this is no reason that this pattern must happen in the future. What we can say, according to Hume, is that these patterns and events come to us through our sensory experience as “constantly conjoined,” but our past experience does not provide a rational basis for affirming that A must always be followed by B, or that it will in the future. Thus, Hume arrived at his skeptical conclusions concerning the possibility of human knowledge. What we can know, he said, is simply that these particular ideas came into our minds through our senses, and that they have always continued to come into our awareness according to these patterns. Why they come to us in this way and whether they correspond to anything beyond our minds, we simply cannot say. Our knowledge claims must be limited by the limits of experience. As one would imagine, Hume was as disappointed with Berkeley’s solution to Locke’s various dilemmas as he was with Locke himself. He felt that Locke

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had tried to skirt the key difficulties of being unable to ground all his key ideas in sensory experience per se by affirming them anyway as “notions which we cannot do without.” Berkeley, on the other hand, had simply collapsed these difficulties into the mind of God, so that because God is good and consistent, we are in a position to trust that our ideas represent reality, since they are in fact God’s very own ideas in the first place. Hume preferred to bite the bullet and simply accept his obvious skeptical conclusions. Another way to put Hume’s critique of both Locke and the traditional idea of causal understanding is to put it in terms of Pavlov’s notion of conditioned response. Once Pavlov’s famous dog was conditioned to correlate the ringing of the bell with the arrival of food, it would begin to expect the food as soon as it heard the bell. This is how Hume thought it works with us in regard to the making of causal judgments. Because the sun, say, has always come up over the horizon in the morning we, like the dog, cannot help but expect it to do so this morning, tomorrow morning, and so on. Thus we claim to know that it must do so. The problem here is, according to Hume, that in the final analysis the sun can do whatever it darn well pleases on any future morning and it will do us no good to tell it that it must conform to its past behavior because it always has –​ and because we are expecting it to do so. Our belief that the sun, or any other feature of the natural order, must behave as it has in the past, is, like Pavlov’s dog’s salivation, absolutely understandable, but it is based in psychological conditioning rather than knowledge. Even the laws of physics are, according to Hume, merely the summary accounts of what nature has, in fact, done in the past, not of what it must do in the future. We, like the dog, cannot help but believe that B will follow A, but that is really beside the point Thus Hume concluded that all our efforts to predict or be confident about what lies behind or causes nature to behave in the way it does are epistemologically futile because they are based in psychological conditioning at best or in blind belief at worst. All we know is merely that nature has consistently in the past presented its various aspects and features to our minds through sensory perception according to certain patterns, and we cannot help but believe that it will continue to do so in the future. So, all of our judgments about such things as substances, causation, and the like are strictly beside the point. We do not and cannot know anything beyond our own perceptions. Hume’s radical empiricism led him to full blown skepticism. The reader may have noticed that there are, unsurprisingly, several key and questionable assumptions at work behind Hume’s line of reasoning about these matters. We shall focus on two of them at this juncture. The first is simply that Hume, following Locke as well as other empiricists, assumed that one can

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give a detailed, step-​by-​step account of the details of our sensory experience by dividing it up into its simplest parts. That is to say, for the most part empiricists are guilty of approaching human experience and knowledge from what is called an atomist perspective. They begin by dividing perception up into tiny parts such as sensations, impressions, or ideas, and then try to account for how they get hooked together again in our everyday experience. However, it surely is not the case that humans experience the world in this manner, with each aspect divided up and separated from the others. Such divisions and analytic examinations are, rather, abstract techniques that distort our understanding of experience rather than clarifying it. We do not experience sensations of bright, soft, long, and sweet, separately and then put them together when we encounter cotton candy. Rather, even an infant encounters objects and events directly as wholes, and only later can separate out their various parts. Generally speaking, we are unable to focus on and identify the individual features that go into comprising an object or phenomenon until after we have experienced it, if then. Hume’s second assumption that warrants questioning is what he considered a rational explanation of a given situation to be. The empiricist commitment is not to admit any claim to be knowledge, and thus rational or reasonable, that cannot be justified by something other than itself. Thus, we are not justified, according to Hume, in believing in or accepting causal judgments as knowledge because they are not based in impressions or perceptions. It all boils down to what we are willing to accept as a rationally justified belief. Hume was looking for the ultimate bedrock of knowledge in sensations, and complained that he could not find it there. Our inability to believe other than the way we do about causation is not, according to Hume, rationally justified. In his own day there was a thinker, by the name of Thomas Reid, who challenged Hume about this assumption. Although Hume did not take Reid’s criticisms seriously, they do warrant a hearing. In essence, in his Inquiry into the Human Mind, Reid argued that it is unreasonable to begin by assuming that whatever cannot be based in and justified by sensory experience cannot qualify as knowledge. He proposed a commonsense approach to knowledge which does not begin by assuming that every knowledge claim is guilty until proven innocent, but which, rather, assumes that the first principles of our reasoning processes are reliable. If not, we cannot begin at all. Here is how Reid himself put it: “All reasoning must be from first principles; and for first principles no other reason can be given but this, that by the constitution of our nature, we are under a necessity of assenting to them. Such principles are parts of our constitution, no less than the power of thinking

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itself: reason can neither make nor destroy them; nor can it do anything without them.”7 He went on to argue that even Hume, in his careful rational analysis of causal judgments relied upon the principles of reasoning, without being able to first justify them. He sought to reason from one concept to the next according to certain assumed principles of reason, as well as from one sensation to the next, and so forth. As has often been said about Descartes’s project, it is not possible, either psychologically or philosophically, to begin the search for knowledge without assuming the unjustified and unjustifiable first principles of rationality. When Hume went on to apply his skeptical reasoning to the questions of God’s existence and nature, he came, unsurprisingly, to predictable conclusions. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume sought to lay out three different positions with respect to the relation of Christian faith to philosophical reasoning. He embodied these positions into the dialogical personas of Philo, the skeptic, Demea, representing orthodox faith, and Cleanthes, the proponent of a philosophically based faith. The concern of these dialogues is with religious faith based on natural reasoning, apart from any appeal to revelation, and the focus is on the argument for God’s existence based on design. Hume took this to be the best of the usual arguments. It will be remembered that the argument from design, or the teleological argument, for God’s existence is based on the parallel between artistic design, which clearly has a designer or artist who serves as its cause, and the design found in the universe, which must also have a designer who causes it. In addition to his standard critique of causal inferences in general as being unjustifiable, Hume here, in the persona of Philo, critiques the suggested and popular analogy between a watch and the universe. Even if we grant that the patterns we see in nature can be said to have a divine cause, Philo objects that this analogy will not hold up rationally. In the first place, we are locked, as it were, within our universe, so that not only are we unable to make judgments about it in its entirety, but we have never experienced any other universes with which to compare ours. Moreover, if we are to carry out this argument from analogy, it would seem more reasonable to conclude that the universe is more like a giant, growing organism than a watch, house, or any other human made artifact. Besides, unlike with a watch, there are a lot of loose ends in our universe that seem to

7 Reid, Inquiry, vii, 67.

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have no purpose, or even a negative purpose. In the end, then, Hume does not think there are adequate rational grounds for believing that God exists. Perhaps the best overall statement of Hume’s position comes near the end of his discussion of miracles in his well-​known Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Hume argued that a belief in miracles can never be justified on rational grounds for the simple reason that by definition a miracle goes against all the evidence of human experience concerning the particular event in question. Indeed, that is what supposedly makes a miracle miraculous, namely that it defies the usual patterns of experience. But, Hume argued, our beliefs are and should be based on the preponderance of our accumulated experience, so it can never be reasonable to believe in something that contradicts this accumulated evidence. However, Hume then proceeded, on the basis of his skeptical critique, to affirm that: “I am the better pleased with the method of reasoning here delivered, as I think it may serve to confound those dangerous friends or disguised enemies to the Christian Religion, who have undertaken to defend it by the principles of human reason. Our most holy religion is founded on faith, not on reason; and it is a sure method of exposing it to put it to such a trial as it is, by no means, fitted to endure.”8 Scholars differ as to how this latter conclusion of Hume’s is to be interpreted. Is he actually affirming a religious belief based entirely on faith as opposed to reason, or is he here being sarcastic and making fun of those who would so believe? In either case, it should be clear that Hume did not think that God’s existence or a belief in miracles can be justified by appealing to rational processes. Thus, he ended up a consistent skeptic when it comes to the relation between faith and philosophy. The concept of religious belief being “justified by faith alone” makes its reappearance a bit later on in the history of Western thought in the existentialist philosophy developed in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. It is one of the ironies of the history of ideas in the West that Hume, the ultimate skeptic, and Kierkegaard, the ultimate believer, could end up as allies. We shall have opportunity to consider this possibility in the next unit of our investigations, where we shall examine the thought of more recent thinkers concerning the relation between faith and philosophic reason. But first we must deal with Immanuel Kant, who arrived at a very different conclusion about the basis and structure of human knowledge from that of Hume. 8 Hume, Enquiry, xi, 44.

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Kant: Reason Seeking Faith

Kant, who lived and wrote in Germany in the early 1800s ce, was trained in the rationalist tradition. He claimed that reading Hume awoke him from his “dogmatic slumber,” and so he set about to find a better solution to the problem of knowledge. He was deeply troubled by Hume’s skeptical critique of both rationalism and empiricism, for if Hume was correct, both science and logic, as well as religion, have no rational basis. So, in a stroke of real genius, Kant began his investigations, in the Critique of Pure Reason, at the opposite end of the stick from Hume, so to speak. Rather than starting out by questioning the possibility of knowledge through an examination of its foundations, Kant began by acknowledging the obvious reality of knowledge, and then sought to reason backwards to what must be the case in order for knowledge to be possible. We do, in fact, know many things, since otherwise we would not even be able to engage in any sort of examinations at all, Hume’s included. What Kant wanted to know was the nature of the structures that must exist in order for us to have knowledge. He termed this sort of reverse investigation a “transcendental deduction.” Kant thought of his unique approach to epistemology as a Copernican revolution, both because it would, and decidedly did, alter all future philosophy and because it shifted the axis of thinking about knowing from the object of knowledge to the knower, the knowing subject. He also claimed that his philosophy provided a synthesis of empiricism and rationalism, because he had found a way to affirm what both of these schools of thought actually sought to preserve, while denying their more radical conclusions. It can hardly be denied that Kant brought epistemological investigations to a new zenith, that he represents the watershed of modern thought. There are two pivotal distinctions that lie at the center of Kant’s critique of human understanding. The first is the distinction between the form and the content of all human experience. He reasoned that our experience is comprised of two basic elements or aspects, which together structure the way we come to know the world. The content of our experience of the world is, as Locke and Hume both stressed, provided by our senses, the empirical data of perception. The form of all our experience is, as the rationalists had claimed, the result of the patterning activity of the human mind, of what Kant termed the categories of the understanding. Although the details of Kant’s account of the categories of the understanding are extremely complicated, his essential point can be focused in terms of the concepts of space, time, and causation. He argued that these categories, as well as others like them, are a function of the mind shaping and arranging the

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data of sensation according to its own structure. We do not have perceptions of such notions as space, time, and causation, as Hume rightly noted, but this does not mean that these concepts are bogus. Thus, Kant concluded that not all features of human knowledge are derived from sensation, since without these organizing categories our sensations would be a mere hodgepodge of data. “Now I maintain that the categories … are nothing but the conditions of thought in a possible experience, such as space and time are the conditions of intuition for that same experience. They are fundamental concepts by which we think objects in general for appearances, and have therefore a priori objective validity.”9 Therefore, it is, according to Kant, by means of its conceptual, arranging categories the human mind arranges our perceptual inputs according to its patterns of space, time, causation, and the like. These categories operate as something like a filter or lens through which the data of perception are processed so that our experience of the world always takes shape and comes to us already structured according to their qualities. Or, to change the image, the categories function like the managing editor of a newspaper or the mail clerk at the post office, receiving their respective materials and sorting them according to their prearranged section headings and/​or mail routes. What is significant about Kant’s treatment of these categories is that he insisted that they are every bit as crucial to our experience and knowledge as are the data of perception. Both form and content are necessary aspects of our epistemological efforts and neither can be taken to be more important than the other. Thus, the general claims of both rationalism and empiricism are affirmed, while at the same time their shared exclusivist character is denied by Kant. He felt that Hume, in his scrutiny of the details of the knowing process, had completely overlooked the cruciality of the formal structure of cognition. For Kant, both form and content were necessary elements of the knowing experience. Kant’s second pivotal move takes us back to a set of distinctions that Hume had set up between two kinds of propositions, on the one hand, and two kinds of knowledge, on the other. He said that some propositions express matters of fact, as in science, and others express mere relations between ideas, as in logic. The propositions dealing with matters of fact, Hume went on to say, can only yield probable empirical knowledge, while those dealing with logical relations can provide certain knowledge. Now, Hume claimed that these two sets strictly

9 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 138.

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and exclusively correspond to each other. That is, matters of fact can only give us probabilities and logic alone can provide certainty. The rub for Hume was, as we have seen, that empirical knowledge has no real foundation and logical knowledge is empty of factual, experiential content. Thus for him we are stuck between these two possibilities: either rely on empirical experience, which has only a psychological basis and thus cannot be adequately verified, or focus on logical, conceptual relations, which are certain but yet empty of experiential content and thus can tell us nothing about the world. Comes now Immanuel Kant, who introduces a way to combine empirical content with logical certainty by affirming the rational character of the structure of the human mind. This was his Copernican revolution. Kant began his account of how this combination is to be understood by renaming Hume’s double distinction between empirical and logical propositions, on the one hand, and between probable and certain knowledge, on the other. Kant called them synthetic propositions and analytic propositions, respectively. The latter set, the analytic propositions he called a priori (apart from experience) and the synthetic propositions, he called a posteriori (based on experience). However, whereas Hume had said that these two sets can never be combined so as to yield knowledge of experience that is certain, Kant claimed that there is such a thing as experiential knowledge that is certain. Kant’s basic idea was that the categories of the understanding, such as space, time, and causation, provide us with certain knowledge about experience independent of, or apart from sensory input. In other words, he claimed that not all synthetic propositions are merely probable, and that not all a priori knowledge is empty of factual content. According to Kant, then, there is such a thing as a priori/​synthetic knowledge, namely knowledge derived from the combination of the structural categories of the mind, which are invariable, and the perceptual input of the senses, which inform us about the world. Now, some concrete examples are in order. Although it is not possible to have certain knowledge about what our future sensations will be, about the content of our experience, it is possible to know with certainty that whatever they are they will be organized in terms of space, time, and causal relations. Some of our sensations will be before or after others, some above or below others, and some will be presented as causes or effects of others. This formal structure will be provided invariably by the categorical structure of our minds, which thus constitute their formal character. This formal character can be known prior to and independently of our sensory experience, yet it also informs us about the makeup of our experienced world.

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This, then, was Kant’s revolutionary contribution to epistemological investigation. He thereby considered himself to have answered Hume’s worries about the problems with the foundations of both logic and science. He claimed to have established that they each yield a kind of certainty, logic in terms of time or sequence in arithmetic and space in geometry, while science can actually provide us with causal knowledge based in the very structure of the human mind. The notion of causation is itself built into the very meaning of experience, since we come at the world predisposed to experience it in terms of causal relations. We may not know exactly which perceptions may cause which, but we can know that they all will be experienced in terms of cause and effect. Although he thought he had adequately solved Hume’s problems concerning the foundations of scientific knowledge by disagreeing with him about the structure of the mind, Kant remained in agreement with Hume about the possibility of knowledge about any sort of reality beyond experience as composed by the rational limits of our minds. Such efforts are usually called metaphysical, following Aristotle, because they come after we have come to grips with our understanding of the physical world, and Kant denied that any such knowledge would in principle be possible. The reason for this conclusion is as simple as it is important. Since by definition metaphysical efforts purport to go beyond the limitations of our knowledge of the physical world, and since all of our knowledge is structured by the categories that define every aspect of our understanding, it follows that all human knowledge is by definition confined to this world. The very possibility of some sort of knowledge that transcends the world as we know and experience it is ruled out before it can get off the ground. In Kant’s words, we must be content to experience and know phenomenal reality and not try to go beyond it to noumenal reality. This is the conclusion Kant arrived at and presented in his Critique of Pure Reason, but he stated it much more succinctly and clearly in his small paperback volume Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Would Present Itself as a Science. His short answer to any such quest was simply that one cannot use the human mind, with its structural categories that shape our reality, to try to go beyond the world of everyday experience to some other reality. This would be as impossible as trying to get a camera to take a picture of itself. The very mechanism by means of which the mind constructs everyday reality limits it to that reality. In one brilliant passage Kant focused his overall point in terms of the vivid image of “the island of truth” on which we humans exist. The island is bounded by its natural edges and beaches, and we do fine as long as we recognize these

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boundaries and live within them. However, there are invariably certain individuals who are misled by large waves or clouds in the distance and come to believe that there are other, more “transcendent” domains lying just beyond the horizon of our island. Unfortunately, some of these dreamers actually try to swim to these other domains, only to drown in the attempt. Kant concluded that we must be content with acknowledging our own natural conceptual limits in seeking to understand our world. This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the island of truth-​enchanting name!-​surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, diluting the adventurous seafarer ever a new with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.10 Following this line of thought, it is not difficult to see how and why Kant dismissed all of the traditional arguments for God’s existence as futile attempts to apply the categories of the understanding beyond, and thus back on, themselves. That is to say, all that we get from proposing such arguments is the projection of our own conceptual categories onto an empty screen, as it were. All causal arguments fall back on the structural limitations of the mental category of causation, pure and simple. Also, Kant saw the ontological argument for God’s existence as quite futile because it merely establishes an empty definitional requirement that God’s perfection would entail existence, without even facing the issue of whether such a being actually exists. At the conclusion of the two works already mentioned, Kant summed up his gigantic intellectual operation by saying that with respect to metaphysical and theological speculation he had “set reason aside in order to make room for faith.”11 In other words, he believed that in establishing both the power and basis, as well as the limits, of human reason, he not only had provided an adequate answer to Hume’s skepticism, but had clearly saved religious faith from any and all future criticism. Like Hume, Kant seemed to have believed that religious faith cannot be sought or grounded in human rationality, but can only be approached through faith.

10 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 257. 11 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 29.

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However, in his later Critique of Practical Reason Kant seemed to have developed another, entirely different angle on the relation between faith and philosophy. For, there he made a case for what has been called the moral argument for the existence of God. Basically, Kant reasoned that just as we are endowed with the categories of the understanding, so we as human beings are also endowed with the moral category that calls us to behave responsibly. He termed this sense of duty the categorical imperative and argued that it governs our moral activity in much the same way that the categories of understanding govern our conceptual activity. For Kant, it was an a priori synthetic truth that we must obey our sense of duty. It is a principle that is built into our very constitution as human beings, and is the operative basis of all social and cultural experience. To be sure, there are occasionally certain individuals who as sociopaths are insensitive to this sense of duty, but these are few and far between. To be part of the human race, argued Kant, is to be born into a social context that imbues each person with a sense of responsibility and justice. The moral law, then, is to be obeyed even as the laws of space, time, and causation are obeyed, although in this arena we are endowed with the freedom to disobey as well. Kant focused this categorical imperative in terms of the principle that everyone should act only according to those ethical maxims which can necessarily be willed to be a universal law. He also concluded that all persons should always be treated as ends in themselves, never as means to someone else’s end. In some ways, Kant’s ethical philosophy reflects what we have come to call the Golden Rule, namely: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Kant was adamant that the categorical imperative should never be confused with hypothetical imperatives, in which the should is dependent on an if, such as “Do x if you want to obtain some ancillary outcome, such as y.” Kant’s point in all this with respect to the question of God’s existence should not be difficult to see. He thought it quite clear that any such sense of duty implies a being that infuses us with it and that will oversee how we do or do not in fact embody it. This is what most people mean by the term ‘God.’ “Thus I see before me order and design in nature, and need not resort to speculation to assure myself of their reality, but to explain them I have to presuppose a Deity as their cause … in which case I must suppose its possibility and, consequently, also the conditions necessary thereto, namely, God, freedom, and immortality; since I cannot prove these by my speculative reason.”12

12 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 90.

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In addition, Kant argued that this moral structure to our lives and world also implies that everyone will be given a fair opportunity to fulfill their duty in this life or another. It would appear, then, that while Kant closed the door to the possibility of using pure reason to reach God and faith, he also opened the door of doing so by means of morality. It is interesting to note that Hume too had grounded both religious faith and morality in what he called human sentiment, rather than reason, but then went on to deny that one can draw any additional conclusions from this fact about God or an afterlife. Kant, on the other hand, agreed with Hume’s reasoning in a sense, but on the one hand claimed that such moral sentiments are in their own way rational, and on the other hand that they imply the existence of a divine moral arbitrator with a sense of justice and fair play. In any case, Kant’s approach to these issues went a long way toward establishing a seemingly unbridgeable dichotomy between religious faith and philosophical reason, one that continues to influence subsequent thought even today. In a very clear sense, Kant’s investigations brought to a close the period known as early modern philosophy, a period opened up by the likes of Descartes and Locke. This period was intoxicated by the quest for an absolute understanding of the ultimate nature and basis of human knowledge, and was characterized by thinkers who pushed this quest to its utmost potential. Whatever one may conclude about the philosophies propounded by the likes of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, it is not possible to even suggest that they lacked sincerity, rigor, or creativity. Moreover, it is not possible to really understand the thought of the 19th and 20th centuries apart from understanding the work of these intellectual giants.

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Kierkegaard: Faith without Reason?

As a way to introduce the thought of Søren Kierkegaard one needs first to encounter G. W. F. Hegel. After studying Kant’s critical philosophy, it comes as a surprise to turn to the writings of Hegel, the next major philosophical thinker in the history of Western thought. It will be remembered that Kant’s conclusion was that we cannot have knowledge about any reality beyond the rational categories of our human minds. However, in Hegel’s philosophy we encounter a thought system, often described as absolute idealism, in which the entire structure of the whole of reality is outlined and affirmed. How was it possible, one might ask, for Hegel to leap beyond Kant’s dichotomy between the knowable phenomenal world and the unknowable noumenal world? Hegel accomplished this leap, following the lead of another German thinker, Johann Fichte, by simply collapsing Kant’s two worlds into one. He reasoned that if it is the case that the only reality we can know and speak intelligently about is the world of our structured minds, then it follows that this world is, in reality, the only world there is, period. Further, Hegel reasoned, since this reality that we know and live in is the world structured by our rational processes, it follows that whatever is thought of is, in fact, real. On this premise Hegel erected a colossal systematic philosophy within which every individual thought, event, and personage was placed. Søren Kierkegaard, often called the father of existentialism, lived and wrote in Denmark in the middle 1800s ce, and was educated in both philosophy and theology under the influence of Hegel’s thought, as were all the thinkers of his day. However, he rebelled strongly against the entire Hegelian project because he saw it swallowing up the important category of the individual, which Kierkegaard took to be crucial to understanding both the human way of being in the world and one’s relation to God. This led him to rebel as well against what he took to be the dead orthodoxy of the official State Lutheran Church of Denmark, which had adopted Hegelian philosophy as the basis for its theology. His highly sarcastic critique of the church is found in the book Attack on Christendom. Kierkegaard rejected all attempts to provide a systematic account of reality on the basis of rational categories because he maintained that human existence, including human reason, is obviously limited and fragmentary.

© Jerry H. Gill, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004465640_006

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Moreover, each individual’s experience and personhood is unique and will not fit within the confines of rational system. Kierkegaard insisted that philosophy should begin with the individual, the part, rather than the whole, Hegel to the contrary notwithstanding. Furthermore, he thought that philosophy’s main task is to teach a person how to live and how to die, not how to construct an abstract metaphysical system, as per Hegel. The crucial issues are those that pertain to values and decision making, to subjective existence. Kierkegaard’s existential analysis of the human situation suggested three spheres or modes of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The most direct treatment of these spheres is found in his work Stages on Life’s Way, but their most creative presentation is contained in his famous two volume Either/​Or. The aesthetic mode of existence is portrayed in the diverse writings of various characters, including the seducer Don Juan, comprising the first of these two volumes, while the ethical mode is focused in the letters of a moralistic judge aimed at the redemption of the seducer. Ultimately, Kierkegaard saw these two modes as constituting a “neither/​ nor” dilemma, since they both fall short of true existential authenticity, which he took up in the now infamous Fear and Trembling. The persons living in the aesthetic mode are, according to Kierkegaard, seeking to avoid being selves altogether by absorbing themselves in a continuing ongoing of events and activities that lie outside of themselves. Those living in the ethical mode have indeed chosen to be selves by taking up their moral station in life together with its duties. Unfortunately, these persons seek to be selves by themselves, apart from the creator and sustainer of human existence, namely God. The highest and most authentic mode of existence is, according to Kierkegaard, the religious mode, in which persons seek to be selves, not under their own power and resolve, but by relating themselves to God through faith. In Fear and Trembling he presented an analysis of Abraham’s commitment to sacrifice his only and long promised son Isaac in obedience to God’s command. Kierkegaard saw Abraham as the true knight of faith, who transcends even the ethical mode of existence in order to obey a higher calling. He called this act a teleological suspension of the ethical and praised Abraham for his blind faith, though he did not claim to comprehend it. Kierkegaard developed this understanding of Christian faith in relation to rationality in his other major works Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Even the irreverent titles of these works express his disdain for the systematic philosophies and theologies of traditional Western thought. In these books Kierkegaard argued that not only is it impossible to prove such things as the existence of God, it is also impossible to establish the truth of the Christian faith by historical and textual analysis. Indeed, he

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claimed that it is a sure sign of one’s lack of faith, of inauthentic existence, to even try to do so. Only the knight of faith, who sallies forth in life trusting exclusively in God, can be said to be living authentically. Although he claimed to eschew the standard ways of doing philosophy and theology, Kierkegaard was more influenced by traditional thinkers than one might suspect. He wrote his master’s thesis on Socrates’s concept of irony, and clearly had read and absorbed thoroughly the classics from Plato on down through Kant and Hegel. Indeed, not only is it possible to trace Hegel’s influence in the way Kierkegaard structured his own writings and lines of argument, but he clearly seemed to have accepted Kant’s dichotomy between the worlds of reason and faith, as focused in the distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. Here is how he explained this dichotomy as it relates to his view of the relationship between the two ways of coming at truth: When the question of truth is raised in an objective manner, reflection is reflected objectively on the truth, as an object to which the knower is related. Reflection is not focused on the relationship, however, but upon the question of whether it is the truth to which the knower is related … When the question of truth is raised subjectively reflection is directed to the nature of the individual’s relationship; if only the mode of this relationship is in the truth, the individual is in the truth even if he should happen to be thus related to what is not true.1 Furthermore, the threefold pattern of many of Kierkegaard’s writings and distinctions clearly reflects the influence of Hegel’s dialectical thought involving thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. We have the three stages or modes of existence, which are clearly arranged according to this pattern, as well as the very use of the term either/​or, which mimics Hegel’s penchant for including everything under one philosophical system by means of his terminology of both/​ and. Finally, there are Kierkegaard’s unique conceptual inventions, such as the teleological suspension of the ethical, which qualifies as a Hegelian mouthful if there ever was one. There is a great deal that could be said about Kierkegaard’s personal life and struggles with the Church of his day, but this is not the place to do so. Suffice it to say that he grew up in conflict with his father, suffered a serious romantic setback, and was treated in a hostile manner by the public citizenry of Copenhagen. He wrote voluminously; seventeen volumes of journals alone, 1 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 178.

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in addition to six or eight major works, along with dozens of devotional books and newspaper articles. Kierkegaard died at the age of forty two, and insisted on not being administered to by the Church. Surprisingly, his writings were hardly even read outside of Denmark until they were discovered by existential thinkers in the mid twentieth century. Indeed, it is difficult to understand and appreciate almost any aspect or thinker of the 20th century theology apart from knowing something about Kierkegaard. Rudolph Bultmann, Emil Brunner, and even Karl Barth were all heavily influenced by him. In fact, Paul Tillich once both summed up and embodied Kierkegaard’s influence in a lecture entitled Religious Existentialism by claiming that “There is no such thing as ‘religious existentialism’ because there is only ‘religious existentialism.’ ” We shall look closely at Tillich’s treatment of the relation between faith and philosophy in a later chapter. Pure philosophy, too, has been strongly influenced by Kierkegaard, as can be seen in the existentialist writings of such thinkers as Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Martin Buber, and Martin Heidegger. Even such phenomenologist thinkers like Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, and Paul Ricoeur show clear signs of having been stimulated by Kierkegaard’s writings. All of the above thinkers, each in their own way, to be sure, stress the crucial importance of authentic individual existence, freedom of choice, the limits of reason, and moral responsibility. Some also stress the significance of faith and belief in God. Let us now return to our original continuum set up in the introductory chapter, along which we sought to arrange the various approaches to the question of the relation between faith and philosophy. Clearly, Kierkegaard’s position as outlined above would fall near the extreme polar position initially assigned to Tertullian. For, he claimed that faith is an essentially individual, personal affair that has nothing to do with philosophical thought and efforts. In fact, Kierkegaard is most well-​known for having made the consummate case for the leap of faith, as embodied in Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac in obedience to God’s command recounted in his Fear and Trembling. His would surely seem to amount to a “faith alone, apart from reason” posture. Here is how he defined faith: Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective

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uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.2 It is not surprising, then, that many contemporary understandings of faith lay claim to this interpretation of the Judeo-​Christian scriptures, especially those of the more evangelical and fundamentalist variety. Indeed, this view of faithfulness to God as being altogether beyond all convention and reason has always been a characteristic of extremely conservative forms of religion, whether in the Judeo-​Christian tradition, the Islamic tradition, or in various other religions around the world. In fact, among many religious groups, it often seems that the more irrational an act or form of behavior is, the more faith it expresses. Many sects and cults seem to operate on this premise. It is understandable that Kierkegaard would revolt against the undue Hegelian influence of his day, both in philosophy and in religion. The place of the individual and of a trust in God that sometimes seems to defy tradition, convention, and reason can never be ignored in any culture or person’s life. Nevertheless, many if not most responsible and mature thinkers have tended to dismiss Kierkegaard’s approach to these issues as an overreaction that at best serves as a warning against the status quo. Thus we seem to be left having to choose between, on the one hand, dismissing Kierkegaard’s thought as affirming a view of faith that is too extreme and even irresponsible, or, on the other hand, embracing an irrational faith blindly. Confronted with this dilemma, most philosophers and theologians have chosen the former alternative. Somehow it simply does not seem right that God would endow humans with a capacity for rational thought only to require that we set it aside when it comes down to questions of religious faith. I myself wrestled with this dilemma for many years. On the one hand, I was deeply moved, both intellectually and spiritually, by Kierkegaard’s writings and posture. Yet, on the other hand, I could not reconcile his approach as usually interpreted with a responsible and mature understanding of faith in everyday life, whether individually or socially. Perhaps the reader noticed the little question mark at the end of the title of this chapter. It is there to suggest an alternative reading of Kierkegaard’s works that suggested itself to me a number of years ago, one that today enables us to take Kierkegaard’s writings, as some have suggested we take the scriptures, very seriously but not literally. I shall embark on an effort to explain what is meant by this rather cryptic remark. It involves paying much greater attention to the 2 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 182.

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fact that Kierkegaard wrote most of his well-​known books under pseudonyms rather than his own name. While most scholars acknowledge this device as a clever literary technique, I prefer to see it as the key to interpreting his overall intent and philosophical point of view. Indeed, this mention of Kierkegaard’s point of view leads us directly to his book The Point of View for My Work as an Author. It is there that he introduced his guiding notion of indirect communication, along with his rationale for writing all of his philosophical and theological books under pseudonyms. In this text Kierkegaard suggested that this literary device gives him distance from his own ideas, as well as from the reader, so that he is free, in Louis Mackey’s phrase, “to traffic in existential possibilities.” In other words, writing through his pseudonymous authorship enabled Kierkegaard to allow the reader the space or freedom to consider and engage the different postures presented thereby. Another way to put this point is to suggest that it would be contrary to everything Kierkegaard stood for him to write straightforward books in which he describes the various options and responsibilities, along with a rationale for each, available to his readers. Rather, he chose to write books under pseudonyms in order to present these possibilities as embodied in the different authors through whom he chose to write each of his different works. In fact, the seeds of this understanding of his authorship were already planted in his master’s thesis On the Concept of Irony where he analyzed the posture assumed by Socrates throughout his career. In short, then, it seems that the best way to interpret Kierkegaard’s writings is to see them as actually embodying the different points of view expressed by their respective authors, rather than expressing Kierkegaard’s point of view on any given subject. Thus, his role as a literary author, rather than as a philosophical or theological thinker, needs to be taken far more seriously than it usually is. Kierkegaard’s works, like those of Shakespeare, do not, then, primarily seek to express his own views, but rather they seek to present various characters, as individual authors, and let them take up their own respective postures toward life and faith. Thus it is that Fear and Trembling was written by Johannes de Silentio, who claims at the outset that he is unable to understand Abraham’s act of faith, but then straightway proceeds not only to present this irrational leap of faith, but to praise and analyze it at length. So either de Silentio is contradicting himself or Kierkegaard has created a literary character who himself bodies-​ forth a specific view of faith, one that is not necessarily Kierkegaard’s. Just as one should be careful not to attribute the views of the character Hamlet to Shakespeare, so one must not assume that de Silentio represents Kierkegaard’s point of view.

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In like manner, the author of Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus, makes it very clear in his preface that the reader should not bother being concerned about whether this book expresses its author’s opinion or not. “Nothing could very well be of less importance to another than the knowledge of what that opinion might be,”3 presumably because what is of import for the reader is what conclusion he or she comes to concerning the issues raised in the book. Here again, we see Kierkegaard seeking to distance himself from the author of Philosophical Fragments so as to allow, indeed encourage, his readers to make up their own minds. Again, there is Johannes Anti-​Climacus, the author of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, who proposes the view that “faith is subjectivity and subjectivity is truth.” We should not overlook the fact that this Johannes specifically disclaims being one who has come to understand what faith is, let alone professing to live it. Rather, Anti-​Climacus, a name significant in and of itself, describes himself as a “humorist” who is “climbing from below” toward faith. Indeed, in his book he presents a detailed and tight argument for the view that Christian faith can never be the result of rational argument. So, once again, we should avoid assuming that this pseudonymous author actually speaks for Kierkegaard himself. My own view, then, of what Kierkegaard was up to is this: He sought to bring his readers face to face with a variety of approaches to faith, as embodied in the actual characters of his pseudonymous authors, in order to present them with, and encourage them to choose between, different views of what it means to be a person of faith. His literary technique was devised to allow him, along with his readers, to “traffic in existential possibilities,” so that each person could decide for him or herself. In short, I think Kierkegaard was far too great a creative genius simply to set forth his own view in a straightforward manner like other thinkers before him. To put this matter differently, it seems to me that Kierkegaard saw faith as something that must be lived rather than thought about, but not without thought. In this way he might be thought of as echoing Martin Luther when he said that salvation is by “faith alone, not without works.” By creating all these different authors as his characters, Kierkegaard sought to draw his readers into the high drama of actually living the Christian faith, not just thinking or talking about it. As Wittgenstein said, “some things cannot be said; they show themselves.” So it is with faith. 3 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 6.

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It is more than interesting to note that in the New Testament the Greek word pistos, which is generally translated as ‘faith,’ is also just as frequently translated as ‘faithfulness.’ It is very revealing, if not downright shocking, to read the familiar passages substituting the word ‘faithfulness’ for ‘faith.’ Two examples: “When Jesus saw their faithfulness … he turned to the paralyzed man ‘I say to you, stand up, take your bed, and go home.’ ”4 And “Faithfulness is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”5 If we go along with my interpretation of Kierkegaard, he just might agree. 2

Feuerbach: Naturalistic Humanism

Theism is the view that an all-​powerful and perfectly loving creator God exists, a personal, spiritual being who superintends the universe, including human history, and will eventually bring it to its final fulfillment. Throughout the history of Western thought there have been rival views of the relation between God and the world. One of these is pantheism, which maintains that the universe and God are one and the same being. Another is idealism, which as with Plato and Hegel for example, contends that it is in the world of ideas that the essence of reality lies. As we have seen, this view can be integrated with various forms of theism, but it need not be. Then, of course, there is materialism, which maintains that matter alone is sufficient to explain reality. This view does not, obviously, line up with the theistic worldview. Finally, there is a variant of theism, known as deism, according to which God did, indeed, create the universe, but set it up to run on its own built-​in principles and does not in any way interfere or manipulate the events or people living in it. Clearly, Locke, Hume, and Kant could easily be considered deists, as could a good number of thinkers since their day. Along the way, then, in our tour through the history of Western philosophy we have encountered each of these views in the thoughts of various and diverse thinkers. In modern, or recent times, however, a new perspective on the nature of reality, and thus of religion as well, has arrived on the scene. This view is variously designated as naturalism or humanism, or some combination thereof. It has become what many consider the dominant philosophical perspective of the current century, and we turn now to a consideration of this point of view as found in the thought of Ludwig Feuerbach. Some of the ideas

4 Mark 2:5–​12. 5 Heb 11:1.

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of John Dewey will also be taken up, as a more contemporary proponent of this approach to God, the world, and humanity. Actually, most of the thinkers comprising this more contemporary perspective took their cue from Kant. It will be recalled that Kant sought to put an end to speculative thinking about the ultimate essence of reality lying beyond our senses and thus beyond knowledge. Whereas Hegel had tried to collapse this, the phenomenal world into the more real, noumenal world and thus continue to do metaphysics, those thinkers who would subscribe to the naturalist or humanist perspective seek to take Kant at his word and collapse the so called noumenal world into this, our phenomenal world. In Kant’s terms, we are said to be limited to and by the categories of the understanding, which structure the human mind, and thus confine our knowledge to that of science. Another way to look at this turn of events in the mid-​1800s ce is to interpret the efforts of all previous thinkers, theists and various others alike, as an enterprise in which human beings have understood this world in terms of and on the basis of a higher world, or reality, namely that of God or some sort of more ultimate reality. This world has generally been understood, then, as a reflection or incomplete copy of the higher world from which it originated. The recent movement known as naturalism or humanism, on the other hand, seeks to understand the so called higher world as a mere projection of the human world onto a cosmic venue so as to make it seem more significant and valuable. Feuerbach lived and wrote in Germany during the mid-​1800s ce. Along with Kierkegaard, as well as Karl Marx, Feuerbach had been educated according to the absolute idealism of Hegel, and he, too, in his own way, rebelled against this combination of God, ideas, and systematic thought. Indeed, as Sigmund Freud would assert a half century later, Feuerbach claimed that the entire idea of a divine being, or beings, along with the higher realm of being known as heaven and the like, is best understood as a human projection of all that is good and desirable in the human world and natural life onto an invented higher realm or level of reality. Whereas Freud focused on the psychological thrust of this projection, Feuerbach stressed the cultural. In the language that has become popular in our day, thanks to Rudolph Bultmann, Feuerbach sought to demythologize the major concepts and teachings of traditional religion and theology by showing how they are actually the summation and projection of the highest human personal and cultural aspirations. In his view, in all traditional as well as all primal or tribal religions, everything that is good about human beings, human society, and the natural world has been attributed to higher beings and realms in order to give these qualities and values a more lasting and superior significance.

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Feuerbach saw himself as, following Kant, limiting his investigation and understanding of religious phenomena to the empirical realm, to what can be known and shown to be the case at the factual level. In his highly influential book The Essence of Christianity Feuerbach applied this mode of understanding to the major doctrines of the Christian faith. Rather than seeing traditional religious claims and theories as being about some supernatural being who superintends over the universe, Feuerbach suggested that we acknowledge the human origin and character of these beliefs, and thereby credit them for their role in enhancing and developing our values. Here is Feuerbach’s own summary of this claim: Religion, at least to the Christian, is the relation of man to himself, or more correctly, to his own nature (i.e., subjective nature); but a relation to it viewed as a nature apart from his own. The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or rather the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man … contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.6 Feuerbach offered two kinds of arguments on behalf of his rather radical point of view. First, as has been mentioned, he took Kant at his word that all we can ever claim to know is this phenomenal world because of the limits placed on reason by the categorical structure of the human mind. Thus, it must be the case that any effort to know or describe some other, higher reality necessarily results in our projecting of these various categories back on themselves, or onto some hypothesized chimera floating off in the distance on the horizon of the island of truth. Therefore, it follows that the way to preserve the inherent values of religious belief and activity is to admit that they are about us humans, and proceed to make the most of this admission. Feuerbach’s second kind of argument on behalf of his interpretation of the meaning of religious belief was an historical one. He was a member of the first generation of scholars to conduct investigations, if only at a distance, of tribal and primal religious history. He offered an analysis of early Greek and Roman religious beliefs in order to show that these theologies arose out of the desire to create models and examples of the best characteristics known to humans, in order to give humans some concrete goals to which to aspire. Others in his generation of scholars, such as Herbert Spencer, Franz Boaz, and Emile Durkheim, 6 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 14.

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did the early groundbreaking work with respect to various non Western religions around the world. Thus Feuerbach reinterpreted each of the doctrines of the Christian faith so as to render them more compatible with this new understanding of their origin and intent. God he saw as the personification of all that is good within humankind: strength, the highest moral character, wisdom, and most especially, forgiving love. In like manner, God’s attributes of creatorship and providential caretaking are but projections of how humans would ideally prefer to treat nature. The doctrine of heaven, he thought is a clear cut case of the human desire to prolong personality and consciousness beyond the grave. Prayer, too, he saw as merely the human effort to affect and alter the world course of events, together with our own personal plans and purposes. With specific reference to the role fulfilled by faith in standard religious life, Feuerbach argued that for the most part faith comes into play only in relation to revealed religions where there are specific obligations and teachings that must be fulfilled. Almost always, he said, this aspect of religion has led to disastrous results, for those seeking to be faithful to the call and commands revealed to them in their visions or scriptures have wreaked havoc on other human beings in God’s name. Moreover, this aspect of revealed religions also often places the call of God, as in the case of Abraham and Isaac, above the moral law that humans owe to one another. It should not be thought that Feuerbach saw himself as a critic of religion. On the contrary, he saw himself as its savior, for he thought that his demythologizing of religion frees it from its false aspects and interpretations, thereby enabling it to fulfill its true and useful function in human experience. He aimed at revealing its true essence, and in this way saw himself as having done religious belief, especially Christianity, a real favor. Moreover, since his day a great many thinking people, including many scholars, have either accepted or on their own arrived at Feuerbach’s point of view. Indeed, many would say that it has become the hallmark of the modern approach to religious belief. Before moving on it will prove helpful briefly to consider the thought of yet another highly influential thinker who adopted a naturalistic or humanistic approach to understanding the nature and role of religion in human life, both personal and social. Perhaps there is no better candidate for this brief focus than the well-​known philosopher John Dewey, who lived and wrote in America during the first half of the 1900s ce. Dewey enjoyed immense popularity, not only in America, but all around the world, especially as a philosopher of moral and educational theory. He was also very influential in the field of social and political philosophy.

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Dewey arrived on the philosophical scene well after the rise of modern science, and even after the introduction of the Einsteinian revolution and quantum mechanics. Thus, his understanding of the scientific enterprise was far more advanced than was that of Feuerbach. It was the central thesis of Dewey’s approach to philosophy that now that the scientific method had been introduced and refined by modern thinkers, it was time to rework all the main areas of human study and understanding according to it. For him this meant primarily the fields of morality, education, and religion. Old ways of doing and thinking about the issues involved in these most important dimensions of human endeavor needed to be reconsidered and for the most part altered completely. In Dewey’s view, traditional understandings of religious practices, teachings, and theories have generally led to dead-​ends at best or highly detrimental results at worst. Generally speaking, he maintained, traditional religion stands in the way of social progress because it is not based on the modern worldview provided for us by science. Moreover, he claimed that a belief in a supernatural reality has no grounding in human experience beyond the special pleading of those who stand to profit from others believing in it. Besides, so called miracles can be explained scientifically. Also, since world religions, and even individual religious experiences, differ so widely, it should be obvious that religious belief is relative to a given culture and/​or individual. These criticisms do not mean that Dewey, like Feuerbach, was totally opposed to religious belief, practices, and institutions. Neither of these thinkers sought the elimination of faith and religion from the private or public domain. Rather, they both urged a redefinition and understanding of what religion, after all, really is, namely a dimension of human experience, both individual and social, that seeks to focus all positive human aspirations and goals into a concrete set of practices and beliefs. In brief, then, for naturalist and humanist thinkers like Feuerbach and Dewey, religious faith primarily serves, or should serve, to enhance and support the affective and ethical aspects of human life. When it came to the specific issues revolving around the relation between faith and reason, between religious belief and philosophy, Dewey spoke the most directly. In his book The Quest for Certainty Dewey traced out the history of Western thought in general in relation to the search for knowledge and especially for the control of nature. He argued that from the beginning humans have always sought to enhance their chances of survival, both physically and culturally, through rational means. Eventually this led from a combination of abstract reason and experiential observation, as with the early Greek and Chinese civilizations, to the development of controlled experimentation and predictability, as in the modern scientific method.

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Correspondingly, throughout history various individuals and societies have sought to use their acquired knowledge both for the benefit and for the exploitation of humankind. In this process the urge to control and conserve whatever ideas had become accepted as knowledge has always both preserved but also hindered the development of human society and culture. Thus the quest for certainty, as the primary means of maintaining the advantages and accomplishments that had been achieved, also became the primary stumbling block to further progress. The fear of the unknown, the lack of certainty, repeatedly stifles experimentation and progress. Dewey expressed his disdain for the way organized religion has traditionally stood pridefully against any and all change. He put it this way: “The pride of the zealously devout is the most dangerous form of pride. The pride of those who feel themselves learned in the express and explicit will of God is the most exclusive … The historic isolation of the church from other social institutions is the result of this pride.”7 Dewey advocated a more open, robust form of religion that is open to the future and change. Whether in thought or action, Dewey claimed, the desire to hold on to specific beliefs and practices in spite of their ineffectiveness and detrimental results continues to retard our ability to improve our knowledge and work for the betterment of humankind. This has been particularly true in the field of religion, according to Dewey. Religious institutions and individuals alike have generally sided with those who seek to maintain the status quo, and have done so in the name of faith as opposed to reason. In particular, religious belief is most often conceived of as requiring certainty in order to be effective and beneficial for its practitioners, and thus it stands in the way of rationality as well as progress. With respect to our original continuum of views regarding the relation between faith and philosophy, then, it is easy to see that thinkers like Dewey and Feuerbach would place themselves at the polar end as far from the likes of Tertullian as possible. The way to human understanding and betterment, even and especially with respect to the so-​called spiritual dimensions of our existence, is to make the most of our rational capacities and potentials. If a way can be found to realign traditional religious teachings and faith with this search for the common good, all the better. If not, then we must jettison those teachings and beliefs altogether. It should be clear that Dewey, and most other naturalistic humanists, saw faith and reason as opposed to each other, with the former actually being a 7 Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 308.

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hindrance to the latter. As with other aspects of human life and culture, Dewey prescribed a complete redefinition of the meaning and purpose of religious beliefs and practices in order to enable it to contribute to human development and betterment. As he said: Not the least important change would be a shift from the defensive and apologetic position which is practically compulsory as long as religious faith is bound up with defense of doctrines regarding history and physical nature; for this entanglement subjects it to constant danger of conflict with science. The energy which is thus diverted into defense of positions that have in time to be surrendered would be released for positive activity in behalf of the security of the underlying possibilities of actual life. More important still would be liberation from attachment to dogmas framed in conditions very unlike those in which we live, and the substitution of a disposition to turn to constructive application of the results of knowledge.8 The focus, then, of Naturalism and/​or Humanism with respect to the interface of faith with philosophy is for humankind not only to stay within the boundaries of our rational capacities, but to exploit the capabilities of these capacities for the advancement of knowledge and the betterment of humanity. In other words, the limits of our understanding, as proposed by modern thinkers like Kant, turn out not to be limits at all, but rather provide the arena and potential for developing solid and useable knowledge for the future. In their view there is no need for, let alone any possibility of going beyond these limits since there is so much to do here on earth within them. What we thought were limits are now to be seen as fresh possibilities. 3

A. N. Whitehead: Process Thought

After a very distinguished career in philosophy in England, Alfred North Whitehead retired by joining the philosophy department at Harvard University, where he proceeded to create an entirely fresh and highly influential intellectual perspective. His thought has come to be known as process philosophy, after the title of his most important work, Process and Reality. On the basis of this fresh perspective he and some of his followers, most notably Charles 8 Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 305.

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Hartshorne, went on to apply the notion of process to theology as well. We shall consider this application a bit later on. While yet in England, Whitehead and Bertrand Russell had coauthored the extremely important Principia Mathematica, in which they demonstrated that the entire field of mathematics can be reduced to the principles of logic. After this their respective philosophical ways took quite different directions, leading Whitehead to remark to Russell: “You know, Bertie, there are only two kinds of thinkers; the simple minded and the muddleheaded. You are simple minded and I am muddleheaded.” By this he seemed to have been calling attention to Russell’s fascination with logic and empiricism, on the one hand, and his own predilection for more speculative modes of philosophizing, on the other. Whitehead’s three most important books are Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Adventures of Ideas. In the first he was particularly concerned to uncover both the roots and the results of modern science for philosophy and contemporary society. The roots of modern science Whitehead took to be both the desire and the expectation to ground and reduce all human knowledge in logical or empirical certainty, a la Descartes and Kant. This perspective eventually came to dovetail with what we have come to know as Newtonian physics, in which every level of knowledge is reducible to the laws governing the physical universe. The results of this view of scientific knowledge has, in turn, according to Whitehead, led to all sorts of assumptions about the nature of reality, the redemptive powers of technology, and the predictability of human behavior. He thought that this modern understanding of science, at both the professional and the armchair levels, has led to a worldview that demands the quantification of all knowledge, on the one hand, and assumes that the universe is closed ended and/​or determined, on the other. On the basis of the Einsteinian revolution, involving both relativity and quantum theory, Whitehead sought to design a more appropriate and authentic view of both science and reality. The focal point of Whitehead’s critique of modern science was what he called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”9 By this he meant to call attention to the unspoken assumption of nearly all modern thinkers, as well as many ancient, that reality is comprised of the quantifiable relationships between and among a finite number of indivisible physical particles, which we have come to call atoms. These physical particles, it is believed, are the concrete building blocks out of which the universe is constructed. Whitehead objected to this view because he claimed that it fails to acknowledge that this way of 9 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18.

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looking at things has actually put together a set of highly theoretic abstractions and called it concrete. This effort, he insisted, misunderstands the true nature of reality because it fails to recognize that it is not things and particles that make up reality. Rather, it is the interactions between and among such theoretic abstractions that are logically prior to and more fundamental than they are in the composition of what is real. In other words, Whitehead claimed that it is the ongoing creative processes, or currents of reality that give rise to the entities we call things or particles, and the like. All physical entities, according to Whitehead, are comprised of and arise out of the matrices created by processes, rather than the other way around. Thus process is more concrete than physical things. Whitehead labelled his theory the philosophy of organism and described it in this way: “ ‘Actual entities’ –​also termed ‘actual occasions’-​are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-​off empty space.”10 I might add that his alternative term, actual occasions, seems to fit better with his notion of organism because it carries the connotation of process better than the term stuff. Clearly, this way of looking at reality runs counter to the basic assumptions and intuitions of both modern science and our current understandings of the regular events and entities making up our daily lives. Perhaps a few illustrations of what might be involved in shifting our way of thinking about reality would be helpful at this point. If we were to diagram our present, conventional way of looking at how any given aspect of reality is put together in oversimplified form we might suggest that first we have two objects or entities, “A” and “B,” and then we have the relationship between them, “r.” Thus, all the relationships between items, such as “A” and “B,” come after we first have “A” and “B” themselves. The full diagram would look like this A> r < B. Naturally, we think of the items in question as more concrete than their interactive relationships. Here is a book and a table, for example. They both seem to exist prior to any relationship between them. Now, we place the book on the table, and we see them in relation to each other by the relationships of “on” and “under,” respectively. However, Whitehead argued, what we fail to notice is that each of these items or objects themselves are the result of a myriad of interactive relationships and processes which are, indeed, more prior and concrete. The book, for instance, is the result of a whole host of 10 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18.

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interactions between trees, paper production, authors, publishers, and the exchange of expectations, money, favors, and the like. So for Whitehead, it would make more sense to diagram any aspect of the basic fabric of reality by representing thusly, a< R > b, rather than as A> r < B. In short, for Whitehead, the relationships involved in any aspect of reality are what create the various entities or items that we experience as related. Thus, process is logically prior to substance, relationships are more fundamental than physicality. Whitehead drew on the findings of quantum mechanics for his demonstration of the truth of this way of understanding reality. Mentioning two such resources should clarify his perspective, namely the paradoxical nature of light and Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy. No matter how many times or ways physicists have run their respective creative experiments, they have not been able, and seem in principle to be unable, to determine the nature of the phenomenon of light. Some experiments lead them to conclude that light flows in continuous waves, while others yield the conclusion that it moves as tiny particles or quanta. Whitehead would contend that this paradox not only shows that not all aspects of physical reality can be reduced to a quantification formula, but that the processes involved in creating light are more primordial and real than the physical phenomenon they create. In related a manner, the renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg showed that no matter how quickly or cleverly we try to locate any given sub-​atomic particle by noting its speed and position in space, we will never be able to do so. The reason for this conundrum is that the sharpest tool of measurement possible is the light photon, which when directed at any other sub-​atomic reality will inevitably affect it, thus obviating any measurement that it provides. Once again, Whitehead would claim that this unresolvable indeterminacy reveals the primordial character of the processes, rather than the physical entities, that compose and comprise reality. Perhaps a couple more mundane illustrations of Whitehead’s perspective are in order at this juncture. It is said, for instance, that in traditional Japan, as in many other cultures as well, the convention was to name intersections rather than streets. As anyone who has ever lived in the countryside knows, the connecting paths and roads arose out of the relationships that were developed between people coming and going, doing business, visiting, and the like, not the other way around. Thus we had designations such as “5 Corners,” “Smith’s House,” and “the Common,” before and as a result of the interactions among and between people engaged in various processes In like manner, consider a typical classroom situation at school. We tend to think that on the first day of the course we all come into the classroom as distinct and separate individuals, as self-​contained physical and conscious units.

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However, actually we arrive in any given classroom as the ongoing result of an uncountable number of previous interactions and relationships with our parents, siblings, neighbors, friends, and teachers. In addition, we are as well participants in ongoing processes with an unspecified, and perhaps unspecifiable, host of people we have never met or even heard of, such as politicians, scientists, scholars, foreign governments, and even ancestors. Moreover, as we each participate in this particular classroom’s activities we engage in multiple interactions and relationships with one another and the ideas about which we discuss and learn. As John Donne put it, none of us exists as an island. We are all inter-​connected and still growing, each minute of each day. Each of us leaves this classroom, every day and at the end of the course, a somewhat different person from the ones we were when we came in. Our persons, as well as our minds are upset, excited, confused, pleased, and enlarged by virtue of our on-​going interactions with one another. Indeed, you have now been exposed, perhaps for the very first time, to the radical ideas of A.N. Whitehead, and you will never be the same again! This, then, was Whitehead’s vision for a complete revolution in the way we think about reality, one that undercuts the received understanding, at both the theoretic and everyday levels. He urged that we should replace our commitment to physicality as the most concrete aspect of reality with the acknowledgement that it is process that lies at the concrete heart of reality, both philosophically and practically. In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead applied this perspective to various cultural problems of his day. However, in his Process and Reality Whitehead spelled out the particulars of his own understanding of the patterns these processes take in the experienced world. According to Whitehead, the world consists of a plurality of actual entities, or better, actual occasions. The world is not made up of material and mental substances, which are mere abstractions, but of concrete relational actualities. An actual occasion is not a substance but an intersection of congealing processes. This synthesis of processes is the result of a generic force or activity which Whitehead called creativity. His term for the convergence of these various processes is concrescence. The actual occasions are formed within the push and pull, the give and take, of the interaction between and among the different dimensions of concrescence. They form, they dissolve, and new sets of actual occasions are formed. To put this point in another way, it can be said that the various energies out of and by which actual occasions are formed is what Whitehead called prehensions. That is to say, different energies or potentials are brought together by a kind of conceptual gravity or attraction that enables them to be woven together into a kind of fabric and thereby forms a temporary whole. Whitehead

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preferred to speak of some of these prehensions as a process of feeling involving physical awareness, and of some that involve conceptual awareness. When a number of such prehensions have been woven together, we experience what Whitehead called a nexus, which may function as an electron or electrical spark in the brain in connection with an idea. Finally, a grouping of actual occasions which share certain common characteristics and concerns is described by Whitehead as a society. A physical object of ordinary experience is a society composed of units or nexi, which are themselves composed of other integrated actual occasions. Persons are also societies consisting of a succession of occasions of human experience genetically related to each other. The existence and maintenance of any of these societies is dependent upon a wider environment, both physical and social, which remains favorable toward it. There are laws or patterns that govern these interrelationships, but they are neither necessary nor immutable. Now, given this intricate, elaborate, and completely relational understanding of reality according to Whitehead’s perspective, it is no wonder that his readers are surprised to encounter his treatment of the nature of religion and faith. In brief, Whitehead is famous for his definition of religion in his short book Religion in the Making. In spite of arguing that religion has been and can still be the main instrument of progress, he goes on to say, in good Quaker fashion, that religion is what people do when they are alone. He did temper this radical individualistic view of religion by claiming that the high world religions, like Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism stand for what is ideal in the human quest for freedom, rationality, and permanence. Not unlike many other modern thinkers, Whitehead had a tendency to be highly critical of organized religion because it so often is reduced either to mere political manipulations and control or to highly personalized self-​ aggrandizement and profit. Nonetheless, Whitehead did claim that “Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized … something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.”11 It is when we consider Whitehead’s view of the nature of divinity, as well as its relation to the world, that we come closer to understanding his conception of religion. Briefly put, Whitehead’s view has been called panentheism by those who have studied his works most closely, such as Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and David Ray Griffin. On the one hand, his approach differs from the traditional theistic view, as with Augustine and Aquinas, that God exists as 11 Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 44.

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the independent, transcendent, and all powerful creator and sustainer of the universe. On the other hand, his approach also differs from that of pantheism, as with Spinoza, wherein God and the universe are said to be one and the same reality. According to panentheism, God and the world are eternally coexistent in the sense that they abide in each other symbiotically. That is, each depends in crucial ways on the other, but the world is within God completely while in some respects God transcends the world. Thus divinity is both transcendent and immanent in relation to the world, as traditional theologies would have it, but is not independent of the world in that it seeks and needs the world’s cooperation, especially that of human beings. Thus the term ‘panentheism’ breaks down into three parts, namely pan a Greek word for “all,” en a Greek word for “in,” and theos a Greek word for “God.” The world and God are in each other, but God is not confined to or exhausted by the world. One of the more helpful models that have been developed for comprehending this understanding of divinity in relation to the world is that of the relationship between the human mind and body. On the one hand, the mind, as situated in the brain, is dependent on the body in that it participates in its life and is dependent on it for its life blood and electrical connections, and the like. In the same way, the body would cease to function without the stimulation provided by the brain to the vital organs and muscle culture. The mind and the body are truly symbiotic, but the relationship between them is not entirely proportionate. The body is more an extension of the mind than vice versa. Thus, these two realities can hardly be considered the same reality, since we experience them quite differently and the intricate relationship between them basically remains a mystery. However, neither are these two realities independent of each other, since what transpires in one clearly affects what happens in the other. Yet, when all is said and done, our experience tells us that the mind is somehow of a higher level of reality than our body. The flow or connection between the two is a two way street, but most of the traffic, so to speak, is from the mind to the body. In this way, too, in the panentheist model God is said to be guiding the world, yet not unilaterally. The two aspects or dimensions need each other, but neither is reducible to the other. In addition, the traditional view of God, was initially derived mostly from Greek mathematical and logical qualities such as perfect circles, infinite numbers, and immutability, as well as from monarchical political models that entail absolute power and knowledge. Thus God turns out to be so transcendent and abstract as to be, as the old saying goes, of “no earthly good.” The pantheist model, on the other hand, equates God and the world and thus does away with

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any sense of the transcendent. The panentheist model seeks to balance transcendence and immanence more symbiotically and dynamically. As Charles Hartshorne has so clearly pointed out, what is needed is a model of God based on the highest values discernable in human experience, rather than in abstract theoretic formulae. Wisdom, love, faithfulness, creativity, and growth are the sorts of things we admire most in the world, as well as in people. Surely being omnipotent and all-​knowing are not as high on the list of desired characteristics as the above qualities. Indeed, it is by claiming that God is all-​ powerful that theological thinkers have generated the famous problem of evil. According to panentheism and Whitehead, God, too, is frustrated by the evil and suffering in the world, and like a good parent, seeks human help in combating it. Within this Whiteheadian scheme there would seem to be no place for faith as it is generally conceived, as something set over against reason and experience. Here, faith would appear to be simply a correlative of wise discernment of the nature of God’s involvement with the world and a commitment to live in such a manner as to be cooperative with and faithful to what God is doing in the world. Here, again, we encounter the idea that faith is really faithfulness, rather than being, as William James’s Sunday school lad put it: “Believing what you know ain’t true.” In Whitehead’s view divinity needs people to help it reach eternal completion, just as people need God to help them reach authentic completion. With respect to the problem of evil, Whitehead clearly thought that God’s ultimate victory over evil, should it ever come to pass, can only be brought about through the powers of suasion, rather than through power and dominance. Any real conquest of the forces of evil will not seek to destroy evil, but rather somehow to incorporate its powers and concerns, along with those of the divine, into a fresh creative fabric that brings the entire creation to completion. Faith is the part that human commitment plays in helping to bring this completion about. 4

Tillich: Philosophical Theology

When we come to our final thinker in this survey of the role faith and reason have played in Western philosophy, we find these two aspects of thought brought together in a very direct manner. The approach taken by Paul Tillich to the relation between these two features may well be the most thoroughgoing attempt to integrate them in modern times. Tillich immigrated to the United States in 1933 in order to escape from Nazi Germany, teaching at Union

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Theological Seminary in New York City for many years thereafter. He may well have been the most influential philosophical theologian in the world during the middle decades of the 20th century. Tillich was educated in Germany under the influence of Hegelian idealism, which stressed the role of speculative reason and the dominance of ideas and spiritual reality. Also, in addition to receiving a standard European theological education, Tillich was very influenced by his reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s works, which were being translated into German during his student days. After teaching in this country for some twenty years, Tillich published the first volume of his Systematic Theology, followed by several smaller books aimed at the application of his thought to a wider public, such as The Courage to Be and Dynamics of Faith. Tillich began by rejecting the generally accepted Kantian dichotomy between reason and faith. He was convinced that these two fundamental modes of thinking about the world are not only not opposed but are truly interdependent. Indeed, he once intoned: “Against Pascal I say: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God of the philosophers is the same God.” In the opening pages of Volume One of Systematic Theology Tillich put his overall position this way: “Philosophy deals with the structure of being in itself; theology deals with the meaning of being for us.”12 This way of putting the relation between the two he called his method of correlation. As Tillich saw it, philosophy raises and focuses the key questions about life and reality, and then theology seeks to develop the answers to these questions. Philosophy does not, he thought, provide its own answers to these questions, but must rely on religion, and especially revealed religion, to supply the meaningful answers. The key questions raised by philosophical analysis revolve around such existential concerns as the meaning of life, death, God, and faith. Tillich agreed with Kierkegaard that the usual abstract questions asked by philosophy not only ignore the really important issues of what it means to live and die, but they actually obscure them. At the same time, Tillich did not think that philosophy and theology, reason and faith can or should be synthesized. The method of correlation assumes that although the two aspects of thought are interdependent, they can neither be equated with nor reduced to each other. They are to be seen as, to coin a phrase, separate but equal. On the one hand, then, Tillich seemed to have been both critical or analytic philosopher, as well as a constructive theologian. Philosophy, in his view, must both dig deep into the fabric of human existence 12 Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol i, 10.

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in order to locate the crucial questions and formulate them in clear and meaningful ways. It is less clear just how we are to understand Tillich’s approach to theology. On the one hand, at least on the surface he seemed to have wanted to look to divine revelation, especially the Judeo-​Christian scriptures, for the answers to the existential questions raised by philosophy. On the other hand, Tillich’s way of thinking about revelation seems to be very much a product of his philosophical training in the thought patterns of German idealism. Thus, his commitment to such Hegelian sounding notions as absolute spirit, being itself, and the God above God in the development of his theological response to questions posed by existentialist philosophy at times seems to override his commitment to the Judeo-​Christian revelation. Nowhere is this clearer than with Tillich’s treatment of the structure of being and the nature of God. One of his most famous utterances is to the effect that God does not exist, but is rather the ground of existence or being. To say that God exists is, according to Tillich, to place divinity on the same level with all other things and beings in the universe. On the contrary, God must be understood as Being-​Itself, rather than as a particular being among others. Tillich went on to elaborate a very complex and systematic philosophical perspective concerning the structure of being, one that is too complicated to try to reproduce here. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Tillich rejected traditional theism for having postulated God as a being alongside of others. He expressed sympathy for pantheism, but sought at the same time to integrate it with radical monotheism so as to maintain a balance between transcendence and immanence. In like manner, Tillich showed little or no interest in the traditional arguments for the existence of God, such as those offered by Aquinas and other Christian theologians. For him, our awareness of God’s reality is an internal, subjective, intuitive consciousness that arises within us as we are confronted with pure being amidst the warp and weft of everyday and historical experience. For Tillich God, or being itself, cannot be spoken about in direct, literal language. Rather, all our thought and talk about God must be understood as essentially symbolic. This is because we are limited to human metaphors and analogies that are based in our experience of the finite and divinity is essentially infinite. These symbols thus point beyond themselves rather than pointing directly at God. The only thing we can say literally about God, according to Tillich, is that God is Being-​Itself, since this statement does not point beyond itself but rather points directly at God. There is nothing wrong with using finite symbols to speak of God, as long as we do not take them literally.

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Traditionally, however, religions and religious believers have often, if not regularly, taken the symbols for God to be direct descriptions of the divine. Thus the use of terms like ‘Heavenly Father,’ ‘Divine King,’ ‘Mighty Warrior,’ and ‘Lamb of God’ have actually led believers to create God in their own image rather than the other way around. Tillich affirmed that it is useful to speak of God symbolically as long as we focus on what is being pointed at beyond the symbol rather than taking it literally. He thought our symbols should focus on such things as God being alive, personal, as spirit, both immanent and transcendent, both eternal and temporal, as wise, as creative and providential, and as loving and just. When it comes to the nature of reason itself, Tillich again tended to look in two directions at once. After introducing the common epistemological distinction between the object and subject of all cognitive situations, he contended that these two dimensions of cognition cannot be separated. On the one hand, he spoke of objective reason, which he defined as reflecting the rational structure of reality itself, while on the other hand he spoke of subjective reason, which is said to reflect the rational structure of the mind. These two cannot ever be fully separated from each other, according to Tillich, without reducing the former to mere scientific reason, on the one hand, and the latter to empty idealism, on the other. When it comes to the question of truth, things get even more complicated. Logical and scientific truth continue to play an important role in their respective domains, to be sure. However, these sorts of truth never really come close to being about the central questions of human existence and the nature of reality. Moreover, even philosophical truth resulting from the speculations of the great thinkers, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, have limited value when it comes to the big questions of life, death, God, and meaning. Tillich stressed the importance of the truths revealed by means of intuition and scriptural traditions for the answering of these big questions. Revelation, for Tillich, is the manifestation of the mystery of Being-​Itself as mediated through miracles and sign-​events received through ecstatic reason. This fresh mode of reason takes us beyond without negating the limits of either objective or subjective reason, for it enables us to embrace the mystery of Being-​Itself as the very ground of all being. Tillich claimed that the mystery of God disclosed in the person of Jesus Christ focuses the true nature of reality and God’s divine nature. It is when he talks in this way that Tillich’s dependency on the metaphysical categories of Hegelian idealism become apparent. At the same, however, it must be admitted that in his more popular attempts to bring these abstractions down to the experiential level of everyday life and discourse, Tillich put things much more concretely and pragmatically. In The

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Courage to Be, for instance, he spoke of facing the complete emptiness and negativity of the lack of being when one has reached the absolute bottom of total despair. He recounted his own experience in relation to Nazism when it actually seemed that the end of Western civilization, with all of its values and aspirations, as well as his own existence, were about to be destroyed. Here one faces the abyss of total nihilism. It is precisely then, and only then, according to Tillich, one has in fact reached the very end, that it becomes possible to come face to face with Being-​ Itself. Only when all else is stripped away does one realize that at the very bottom of the pit there still exists being. That no matter how bad things can get, there is still life, throbbing and flowing even within total despair itself. Here one can experience and nurture the courage to be amidst all the vicissitudes of life, all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Having hit rock bottom, one realizes that there is still life and value, still meaningfulness. It’s as Frederick Nietzsche said: “Whatever does not kill you only makes you stronger.” Tillich was convinced that the existential philosophers, like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, had laid hold of this truth concerning Being-​Itself, total despair, and the courage to be in a way that previous thinkers had not. In like manner, he was especially interested in modern art and its effort to call attention to the existential realities of the absurd and the end of the reliance on transcendent values and religion. He felt these existential thinkers and artists, such as Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, and Samuel Beckett were raising the deep issues concerning reality in a fresh manner, and were thus setting the stage for theology to relate to them in a fresh way as well. In his very popular and provocative little book Dynamics of Faith Tillich addressed himself directly to the concept of faith in relation to reason and truth. There he defined faith as being in the state of ultimate concern. That is to say, for Tillich, the content of a given faith is not as important as its quality, namely that it seeks the ultimate. When various faith commitments express ultimate concern about something that is not ultimate, say money or nationalism, they are reduced to idolatry. At the same time, however, even though the content of a belief is actually about that which is ultimate, if the quality of the belief does not express ultimate concern, it too is idolatrous. In his analysis of faith Tillich clearly drew heavily on Kierkegaard’s view of it as presented in Fear and Trembling and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The existential character of a given belief is taken to be far more important than what the belief is actually about. Kierkegaard told the story of the man who went around uttering the statement “Bang, the world is round,” every time the rock he had placed in his coat pocket hit against his backside. He was clearly uttering an objective truth, but because he was not properly related

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to it qualitatively, the authorities placed the man in the mental hospital. Our relation to truth is more important than whether we believe an actual truth. The truth of faith, then, for Tillich, has nothing to do with historical or scientific truth, but is concerned with matters that transcend these legitimate yet limited fields of inquiry. The rationality that enables one to be open to ultimate truth goes beyond mere concepts, facts, and traditional logic. Here Tillich once again invoked his notion of ecstatic reason as the means by which we can discern the meaning and truth of ultimate mystery given in revelation. This mode of reasoning operates in an entirely different dimension of meaning from more common our modes. Here is how Tillich himself made the point: “From the subjective side one must say that faith is truth if it adequately expresses an ultimate concern, while from the objective side one must say that faith is true if it focuses on an ultimate which is really ultimate.”13 Unfortunately Tillich never really addressed the issue of what criterion we are to use in determining which concerns are really ultimate. Thus faith is the reception by the whole person of a revelation of the ultimate and unconditional in finite experience. Tillich acknowledged that this subjective character of faith always entails a degree of doubt and uncertainty. For him, faith and doubt are not opposites but are, rather, part and parcel of each other. The mention above of the subjective and objective sides of rational cognition brings us back to the question of the sort of rationality involved in ecstatic reason’s discernment of the truth of revelation’s mystery. In the first chapter of volume one of his Systematic Theology, Tillich spoke at length about this question and his remarks merit a closer look. He sought to set aside the traditional dichotomy between the subject and the object of knowledge. Somehow, in all knowing acts, there must be a union of the knower and the known that bridges this dichotomy. Some thinkers and scientists, especially those of the modern era, have been content to focus on the objective side of this dynamic, and have developed what Tillich calls controlling reason. Others, notably the existentialist thinkers and artists, are exclusively concerned about the subjective side, and have consistently moved in the direction of mysticism. Tillich claimed that the union of these two sides must be achieved, and can only be achieved, by means of the revealed truth of ecstatic reason. At the conclusion of this chapter, Tillich addressed the question of verification and how it applies with respect to matters of faith. He acknowledged 13 Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 96–​97.

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that experimental verification is absolutely appropriate in matters of scientific exploration and cognition. Still, he maintained that in addition to experimental verification there is such a thing as experiential verification that is more appropriate to the life-​process. Tillich then designated the sort of knowledge achieved in this latter mode receiving knowledge in order to distinguish it from the controlling knowledge of scientific investigation. Focusing directly on the meaning of verification in matters of faith and revelation, he offered the following analysis: It is not permissible to make the experimental method of verification the exclusive pattern of all verification. Verification can occur within the life-​ process itself. Verification of this type (experiential in contradistinction to experimental) has the advantage that it need not halt and disrupt the totality of a life-​process in order to distil calculable elements out of it (which experimental verification must do). The verifying experiences of a nonexperimental character are truer to life, though less exact and definite. By far the largest part of all cognitive verification is experiential. In some cases experimental and experiential verification work together. In other cases the experimental element is completely absent.14 By implication, then, Tillich also insisted that experiential verification is more primordial than or logically prior to other types of verification, including experimental verification. After all, we all are human beings before we ever really engage in the sorts of experimental verification scientists engage in. Basic human cognitive judgment depends on being able to discern what is what and which is which long before we learn how to apply Mill’s methods of inductive logic, such as the method of agreement, the method of difference, and the method of concomitant variation. Indeed, even our judgment that such methods make sense and are valuable is dependent on prior experiential verification. Tillich concluded that: Receiving knowledge is verified by the creative union of two natures, that of knowing and that of the known. The test, of course, is neither repeatable, precise, nor final at any particular moment. The life-​process itself makes the test. Therefore, the test is indefinite and preliminary; there is an element of risk connected with it. Future stages of the same life-​ process may prove that what seemed to be a bad risk was a good one 14 Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 154.

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and vice versa. Nevertheless, the risk must be taken, receiving knowledge must be applied, experiential verification must go on continually, whether it is supported by experimental tests or not.15 So, in his own unique and provocative fashion, Tillich sought to transcend the sort of continuum introduced in the Introduction to serve as a kind of schema along which to place various thinkers and movements with respect to the relation between faith and reason, between religion and philosophy. Rather than separate these two dimensions of human experience, on the one hand, or relate them hierarchically, Tillich wanted to unite them functionally while distinguishing them carefully. They are both brought together and transcended, according to his way of thinking, by ecstatic, receiving cognition. 15 Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 141–​145.

Conclusion: Reasons of the Heart The title of the introduction to these explorations is “Faith Seeking Understanding,” and under this rubric I introduced the continuum schema along which to position various views on the relation between faith and philosophy. Although this continuum was, hopefully, a helpful device for getting this project underway, I would now like to shift gears and introduce a slightly different point of departure by way of presenting what I take to be a more fully satisfying angle of approach. Somehow the more traditional approaches seem to fail to integrate faith and reason in a manner that does them both justice. Perhaps there is a better way to go about this endeavor. I take my cue from a remark made by Blaise Pascal, a mathematician and philosopher who was a contemporary of Descartes. One of Pascal’s more well-​ known statements was referred to in the previous section in connection with Tillich’s claim that the God of the Bible and the God of the philosophers is one and the same God. Pascal had insisted that these Gods are completely different from each other. In addition, Pascal is famous for his development of the advantages of wagering that there is a God because one has nothing to lose and everything to gain if there is. Conversely, if one bets that God does not exist, there may well be serious negative consequences if God does in fact exist. However, the statement of Pascal’s that I want to take up is quite different from these two better known ones. Tucked in among his many pithy yet rather rambling “thoughts” in his book by that very name, Pensées, we find this statement: “The heart has reason that the reason knows not of.”1 This remark of Pascal’s is often taken to be an endorsement of a kind of existentialist approach to the relation between faith and reason, namely that faith is above, or at least quite separate, from normal human rational processes. My own reading of this remark moves in a different direction. I think it is very important to note that Pascal used the term ‘reason’ in two different senses, and he still in fact chose to call his subject reasons of the heart. He did not say that the heart and the head have nothing to do with each other, that faith is a matter of the heart and does not need reason. On the contrary, Pascal deliberately stated that there are two senses of the term ‘reason,’ and thus two uses or kinds of reason. What then could he have meant by the suggestion that heart has a rationale different from that of the mind, but a rationale nonetheless? I should like to propose a way of rethinking the issues 1 Pascal, Pensées, 42, 65.

© Jerry H. Gill, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004465640_007

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developed throughout these explorations in light of Pascal’s notion of “reasons of the heart.” There are, it seems to me, three major issues that need to be addressed. The first pertains to the way we envision the structure of reality, the second has to do with to the sort of language we wish to use when speaking of God, and the third pertains to the nature of human knowledge. Each of these aspects of human experience figures decisively on the question of the relation between faith and philosophy, and in my opinion need to be rethought if we are to construct a sound and meaningful approach to this all-​important question. After reworking each of these spheres of experience, I shall connect up my results with this crucial remark of Pascal’s. Generally speaking, as we have seen, traditional treatments of religious belief have been dependent on a two-​story model of reality. On the one hand, we are told there is the material world, and on the other hand, there is the spiritual world. Almost all of the debates that have occurred over the viability and truth of religious belief have taken this two-​domain or two-​realm model for granted. Ever since Augustine the Christian notion of heaven and the ideal world of Plato have pretty much been equated. So, believers argue that there is another, higher realm than that of this world, while disbelievers argue that there is not. Reason is said to pertain to the things of this world and faith to the things of the spiritual world. Moreover, this realmistic model has led to awkward and confusing notions of how God is related to this world, especially in terms of such concepts as creation, revelation, miracles, and providence. Does God exist independently of this world? If so, how does God interact with the events of history and with people’s everyday lives? Do miracles and revelation imply that God intervenes or interrupts, let alone controls this world? The various convolutions and difficulties of questions such as these have dominated the history of the discussions between and among philosophers and theologians alike. They have also left us with a great many loose ends and unsolved riddles. I would suggest that when thinking and speaking about the structure of reality we should substitute the notion of dimensions in place of that of realms. This may sound rather simplistic, but such a substitution has far reaching and very helpful implications. The idea is that rather than conceive of reality as a two-​story structure, we envision it as the intersection of several simultaneously interpenetrating dimensions arranged in a mediational hierarchy of increasing richness and comprehensiveness. The two key terms here are ‘dimensions’ and ‘mediation,’ so let us take a closer look at each of them. As we all know, as human beings we exist in a three dimensional physical reality. Each of these dimensions interpenetrates the others so that we exist

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in all three of them simultaneously. Whenever we move in one direction or the other, we also move in relation to the other dimensions. In other words, these dimensions are not separable from one another in our experience. Now, the idea I am presenting is that we incorporate this way of thinking about the relation between the material and spiritual worlds. Rather than seeing them as stacked one above the other, we should see them as flowing into or interacting within one another all at the same time. Thus, the two are neither the same as, nor separate from, but are symbiotic to and of one another. This way of thinking of materiality and spirituality opens up fresh ground in the discussion of the nature of God’s relation to the world, both in connection with the concepts of creation and providence, on the one hand, and in connection with the notion of revelation, on the other. This is not the place to go into more detail about how this dimensional model might enhance our understanding of reality in general and of religious belief in particular. Suffice it say that a dimensional understanding of the human experience of reality carries with it a great deal of promise for resolving a good many of the standard debates over the key issues and concepts involved. It emphasizes the interconnection and penetration among different aspects of reality. Those interested in pursuing my own treatment of these issues more fully, as well as those yet to be introduced in the following pages, may be interested in my book Mediated Transcendence. Now, secondly, let me offer an explanation of the notion of mediation. The suggestion here is that we see the different dimensions of reality, and there may well be more than the two we have just been considering, as arranged in a hierarchy of increasing richness and comprehensiveness. The highly increased richness and comprehensiveness of the spiritual dimension, and perhaps others, are experienced by us as mediated in and through the less rich and comprehensive dimensions. We can, for instance, consider the least rich and comprehensive dimension of reality to be the physical or material world. Thus, our awareness of, say, the aesthetic or moral dimensions, as well as the spiritual, comes to us in and through our awareness of the physical dimension. Consider the way the aesthetic dimension comes to us in and through the particulars of our experience with the physical dimension or world. Certain sounds, colors, sensations, and the like mediate the beauty of a given work of art without our being able to reduce or exhaust that beauty in an account of these particulars. Likewise, in social contexts and exchanges often the significance of a given comment or shift in posture, while mediated by specific words or body positioning, cannot be reduced to an account thereof. These words and body postures can be said to mediate their more complex meanings. We

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often come away from such conversations and settings decidedly more knowledgeable, but without being able to say why. Indeed, within the phenomenon of speech itself we clearly see the mediational pattern at work. Depending on the tone, gesture, and social context almost any set of words can carry a wide variety of meanings. Irony, humor, and poetic meaning all depend on certain nuances and innuendos, as well as specific contexts, in order to be successful. Consider the utterance “The door is open.” Can this only be a statement of fact, a description of the position of a door? Can it not also be an implicit command to a child to go close the door? Or an invitation for friends to drop by for a visit? Or a word of encouragement to a person who is hesitant about pursuing a new opportunity? Indeed, right here the utterance is in fact being used as an example in a book. So then, the notion of mediation simply calls attention to an aspect of everyday human experience that can cast light on our discussions of how reality is structured. In addition, it helps us understand how it is that we can experience the spiritual dimension of reality in and through its other dimensions. Bringing the concepts of dimensionality and mediation together in this way provides us with a model for how to think about the world in general and about God’s activity within it, as well. Thought of in this way, spiritual reality need not be conceived of as totally different from or disruptive of physical, aesthetic, or moral reality, but as mediated in and through them. This model of reality as mediating dimensions rather as stacked realms goes a long way toward resolving the sorts of problems we have encountered throughout our study of the history of Western thought. In one way or another, most concerned thinkers have struggled with how we are to understand the interrelations between spiritual reality and our everyday experience here on earth. These struggles have produced many conflicting and problematic views of the relation between reason and faith. From Plato and Aristotle, through Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, and Kant, right up to Feuerbach, Whitehead, and Tillich, the concepts of reason and faith have been at the mercy of a two-​story model of the structure of reality. Now, let us move on to a consideration of the nature of the language that is the most appropriate for speaking of God. This is the second main area of philosophical theology that needs reworking if we are going to be able to move on past the dilemmas and stalemates we have encountered so far in our explorations. Because the generally accepted idea of how language functions in human experience has been wrongheaded from the outset, our understanding of God-​talk has been off base as well. What is needed is to update our view of how we can and should speak of God.

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Let’s begin with a brief account of the nature of language in general. The commonsense view of what language is and how it functions would seem to be that language is an instrument for the communication of information. Thus, we say things like “Today is Friday,” “This is a ball,” and “She is a good friend,” and of course utterances that are far more complex, as well. In the early part of the 20th century the major philosophers of language pretty much agreed with this view, and thus set out to refine and explicate it. Thinkers like A.J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein set forth, each in his own way, what has come to be called “the picture theory of language.” The basic idea behind this theory was that words name things, sentences picture states of affairs, and true propositions are those that picture reality correctly. Thus, the statement “The cat is on the mat” pictures, or describes, the state of affairs that the cat is on the mat. If the cat is, in fact, on the mat, then the statement is true, and if it is not on the mat, then the statement is false. In any case, the point of such statements, and indeed of all of language, is to represent facts in this way, and only those that do so can be said to be cognitively meaningful. Others can be said to be emotive, because they express emotions, or directive, because they seek to direct behavior. Utterances expressing artistic, moral, and religious sentiments are thus judged to be cognitively meaningless. Unfortunately, theologians and everyday believers alike unwittingly subscribe to this way of conceiving of language about God and spiritual matters, as well. It has nearly always been assumed that the term ‘God’ designates a specific divine being who operates, along with other divine beings, in a spiritual realm above or at least beyond the physical realm of this world. It is largely because religious thinkers have bought into this way of thinking about what language does and how it does it that so much confusion and so many debates have arisen and continue to arise in the dialogue between philosophy and faith. Fortunately, on the other hand, the insights of more recent philosophers of language, notably the later Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations), Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind), and J.L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words) have made it abundantly clear that language is far more complex and multifarious than the general picture theory acknowledged. Wittgenstein in particular has shown that language has very many functions in addition to communicating information. He is well known for defining meaning as a function of use within specific crisscrossing and overlapping language games2 which are grounded in the activities and concerns of everyday human life.

2 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paragraph 66.

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In this way Wittgenstein opened up our understanding of the poly-​ significance of human speech and caused theological scholars to rethink just what God-​talk is really seeking to do. A few theologians and believing philosophers, most notably D. Z .Phillips (Religion Without Explanation), have taken Wittgenstein to mean that each language game is autonomous unto itself, and thus religious language has nothing in common with other uses and need not concern itself with answering to their criteria of meaningfulness and truth. Unfortunately, such thinkers have overlooked the fact that Wittgenstein clearly stated, and sought to explicate, the fact that language games “crisscross and overlap” with one another. None is an island unto itself. This acknowledgement of the open texture of language has enlivened both philosophical and theological discussion, especially around the concept and function of metaphorical language. There has, of course, always been some awareness of the nonliteral use of language about God, for example with Aquinas’s notion analogy of proportionality and the via negativa in the Middle Ages. However, in recent decades a number of thinkers have explored and developed the notion of metaphor in very interesting and useful ways (see, for example, Sallie McFague’s excellent little book, Speaking in Parables). Indeed, the fact of the crisscrossing and overlapping nature of language games actually invokes and stimulates the use of the metaphoric mode of speech. One of the thinkers who has explored the metaphoric mode most thoroughly is Ian Ramsey (Religious Language and Models and Mystery). He continually called attention to the dual thrust of our talk about God, as both grounded in everyday experience and pointing beyond itself to a more complex, spiritual reality. For instance, expressions like ‘Heavenly Father’ and ‘Divine Son’ exhibit what Ramsey called a model-​qualifier pattern. That is to say, the terms ‘father’ and ‘son’ serve as models from our everyday human lives, while the terms ‘heavenly’ and ‘divine’ are used in conjunction with them, not as literal names but as signals to direct our attention beyond everyday experience to a richer reality. In addition, many thinkers have suggested that since Jesus’ primary mode of communication was story telling we should understand the Christian gospel as a cosmic metaphor which indirectly mediates the meaning of God’s love through the story of Jesus. Telling a story, instead of giving a sermon, creates a space or existential arena which invites the hearer to explore the message without feeling either crowded or ignored. In this way, stories too can be seen as narratives that participate in the metaphoric mode. Once again, there are many enriching possibilities in seeing God-​talk as primarily metaphoric in quality.

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It should be noted at this juncture that this open textured way of understanding the nature of language fits very nicely with the concepts of dimensionality and mediation introduced previously in connection with the need to rethink the structure of reality. In fact, the twofold or two directional character of metaphoric speech is precisely what the notion of the mediational dimensions of reality is all about. In both the mediational and metaphoric dynamics the richer meaning and truth of an idea are grasped in and through the particulars comprising the less rich dimensions. In a word, both of these facets of experience and language are incarnational since their reality becomes concrete in and through the everyday and the mundane. It is true that in the minds of many believers who engage in talk about God and other spiritual matters the idea that such language is largely if not primarily metaphorical in nature causes no small degree of discomfort. Somehow it seems that this way of thinking about God-​talk divests it of its truth value and renders it simply emotional rather than cognitive. However, we should remember that it is just possible this discomfort results from a prior assumption that real truth must be equated with hardnosed scientific and historical truth. This assumption needs to be questioned, for there are other viable modes of truth. Indeed, it is precisely to this question of the nature of cognitivity that we shall now turn our attention. The insights of the philosopher Michael Polanyi can be of significant assistance in our efforts to understand the nature of knowledge in general and the possibility of religious knowledge in particular. In his major works, Personal Knowledge and Knowing and Being, Polanyi has provided a deep and revealing analysis of the structure of human cognition revolving around the notion of tacit knowing. I shall now offer a brief presentation of his major distinctions, insights, and conclusions, followed by an application of them to our understanding of how we might be said to have knowledge of God and other spiritual realities. It is helpful to think of human experience as involving two main dimensions, (see ­figure 1) the awareness dimension and the activity dimension. The former has as its poles subsidiary and focal awareness. In every cognitive situation we are aware of some aspects of our environment focally and of others subsidiarily. The reader is now, or was, until I mentioned it, only subsidiarily aware that his or her feet are in shoes, or that I am using written symbols to communicate these ideas. Moreover, we attend from some aspects of our environment to others, even though what is focal in one setting can become subsidiary in another, and vice versa. In short, this distinction is relative in relation to context. Next, the poles of the activity dimension of experience are conceptual and bodily activity. Although there may not be a hard and fast line between these

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two, we generally distinguish them from each other. Doing mathematical problems in one’s head and running the hundred meter dash are significantly different activities. In addition, at least from birth onwards we tend to move from bodily activity toward conceptual activity. Our thought life arises out of our physical life. Here, again, we can shift back and forth from one range of activity to the other depending on the context and our intentions. Things begin to get much more interesting when we correlate these two dimensions in relation to their respective poles, because from their interaction arises what we shall call the cognitivity dimension of experience. That is to say, when we connect up the focal awareness pole with the conceptual activity pole we get what Polanyi calls explicit knowing, while when we connect up the subsidiary awareness pole with the bodily activity pole the result is what he calls tacit knowing. These two forms or aspects of knowing can be said to form the poles of a third dimension of human experience, namely the cognitivity dimension. Here is a simplified diagram of mine of the interrelationships amongst these various dimensions and their respective polarities:

­f igure 1  Tacit knowing diagram

Polanyi’s first contention, then, is that the tacit aspect of our cognitivity must be acknowledged as a genuine factor within all human knowing. Both traditional and modern philosophical, as well as theological, thought have systematically ignored this possibility, labeling such things subjective, irrational, or at best mystical. By way of calling attention to the universal character of tacit knowing Polanyi offered examples of everyday experiences wherein we

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rely heavily, if not exclusively, on tacit factors. Most of his examples involve the learning and use of bodily skills, such as walking, riding bicycles, and even speaking, none of which can be acquired nor fully articulated by passing along certain formulae from one person to another. Our knowledge and use of our primary language is a classic case in point, because everyone knows that this knowledge can only be acquired through the practice of various activities involving constant imitation and repetition. Obviously, there is no prior language with which elders can teach a child to speak, and yet by the age of five or six nearly every child has acquired a functionally complete knowledge of their mother tongue. Moreover, neither the parent nor the child can fully articulate the particulars involved in this mysterious transformation. It is a process in which tacit factors are clearly and crucially present, and must be acknowledged as being so. In addition, the whole range of our knowledge of other persons, both intimately and casually, depends largely on our being able to read, as it were, various clues, tips, and innuendoes which often are far too subtle to even be recognized, let alone be articulated. Even the seemingly simple fact that most people can pick a familiar face out of a sea of faces in a crowd, or recognize a friend’s walk or voice across rather significant distances, cannot be reduced to an account of some inductive process. Indeed, the very ability to grasp the subtle meaning of a given utterance, say a pun or a line of poetry, let alone explain the meaning of the concept of meaning itself, clearly requires the notion of tacit knowing. Polanyi, who was himself an established practicing scientist, went on to analyze both scientific and conceptual reasoning in terms of the principles of tacit knowing. In all deep thought, certain assumptions and commitments have to be made, even in the formulation of initial hypotheses and experiments, in order to acquire any knowledge at all. In addition, the resultant articulation of what has been learned itself must rely on tacit factors that are left unexplained and unarticulated in explicit fashion. All of which leads to Polanyi’s second major conclusion, namely that tacit knowing is not only a legitimate feature in all cognitivity, but that it is in fact logically prior to or more fundamental than explicit knowing. Polanyi summarized this most important point in this way: “We always know more than we can say, since all explicit knowing in the final analysis arises from tacit knowing.”3 It is important to understand that Polanyi is not saying that every claim to tacit knowing is legitimate, any more than every 3 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, x.

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claim to explicit knowing turns out to be valid. In both kinds of cases there are criteria that need to be employed in order to determine whether or not a given claim is to be accepted. Those criteria relevant to explicit knowing are quite familiar: evidence, precision, inference, coherence, and the like. Those relevant to tacit knowing are far more subtle and flexible, but they revolve around such pragmatic things as reliability, consistency, agreement, and workability. The key to tacit knowing is clearly the centrality of embodied activity. Here is how Polanyi makes this point: The way the body participates in the act of perception can be generalized further to include the bodily roots of all knowledge and thought. Our body is the only assembly of things known almost exclusively by relying on our awareness of them for attending to something else. Parts of our body serve as tools for observing objects outside and for manipulating them. Every time we make sense of the world we rely on our tacit knowledge of impacts made on our body and the complex responses of our body to these impacts. Such is the exceptional position of our body in the universe.4 Two final characteristics of tacit knowing need to be mentioned. One is that tacit knowledge is acquired by what Polanyi calls indwelling, the investing of one’s self in the activity so as to make it, through practice and habit, part of one’s self. Whether it be in learning how to walk, talk, shoot baskets, use tools, or even get along with other persons, one must seriously participate in the activity by indwelling it. After a while, interestingly enough, the activity in question will come to indwell the practitioner, and thus become part and parcel of who and what he or she is and becomes. The activity in question actually becomes instinctual and inexplicable, as is evidenced by the fact, for example, that while reading these very words and sentences, the reader is unable not to understand them! The second additional characteristic of tacit knowing that deserves mentioning is that this type of knowledge is not the result of deductive or inductive processes, but rather of what Polanyi calls integrative acts. That is to say, whereas explicit knowing is arrived at by inferential processes which are both articulable and reversible, tacit knowing arises from the indwelling activity as a gestalt, a holistic grasp that once it takes place can neither be explicated nor reversed. Once one has, for instance, acquired the ability to swim, ride a 4 Polanyi, Knowing and Being, 147.

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bicycle, or understand and speak a language, one cannot go back to square one, as it were, and unlearn that ability. Premises and evidence can be reversed and rehearsed, but integrative acts cannot. Finally, we should now connect up this examination of the notion of tacit knowing with our previous analyses of the mediational and dimensional structure of reality, along with the primacy of metaphorical language. In my own view, all of these notions fit together like hand-​in-​glove. Mediated dimensions of reality are best spoken of by means of metaphorical language and are primarily known through the processes of tacit participation and activity. Thus, to speak of God and other spiritual realities responsibly, we should become aware of them as mediated in and through the particulars of everyday experience in community and history, and we should not so much seek to articulate what we come to know of them as to demonstrate and practice it in the way we live our lives. Now, then, with respect to the whole question of the relationship between faith and reason, philosophy and theology, and reasons of the heart, let me say this. To my way of thinking, the entire threefold model presented here in this conclusion goes a long way toward explaining the most fruitful way of thinking about these issues. When Pascal introduced the notion of the reasons of the heart I think he might have had something like this model in mind. What the heart knows is not without an adequate rationale, but it is not the sort that can be explicated in terms of the criteria and processes generally associated with purely logical and empirical knowledge. More specifically, the notion of tacit knowing lines up very nicely with Pascal’s intent. Faith is not reasonless, without any cognitive basis, but its reasonableness is of a different, richer and more comprehensive nature. On the other hand, what faith knows is not beyond all reason, beyond the need for confirmation and validation. More importantly, what faith knows can and must show itself in the lives of those who claim it. It is the result of existential indwelling and integrative acts that one would rationally expect to be bodied forth in the everyday lives of the individuals and communities involved. Reason and faith thus come together in everyday life. As Jesus said: “By their fruits you shall know them.”

Bibliography Anselm. Cur Deus Homo? Barnes & Noble, 2019. Aquinas, Thomas. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, edited by Anton C. Pegis, New York: Random House, 1945. Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon, New York: Random House, 1941. Augustine. The Basic Writings of Augustine, edited by Whitney J. Oates, New York: Random House, 1948. Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1979. Descartes, Rene. The Philosophical Works of Descartes, edited by Elizabeth Haldane and G. T. Ross, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1911. Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty, New York: Putnam & Sons, 1929. Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity, New York: Harper and Row, 1957. Gill, Jerry H. Mediated Transcendence, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1989. Hick, John. The Philosophy of Religion, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-​Hall, 1959. Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, edited by Norman Kemp Smith, New York: Social Sciences, 1948. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1927. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by Shelby-​Biggs, Oxford, England: Clarendon, 1896. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan, 1929. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason, translated by T. K. Abbott, London: Longmans Green, and Co., 1930. Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/​Or, vol i, translated by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1959. Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/​Or, vol ii, translated by Walter Lowrie, Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1959. Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling, translated by A. Dru, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1941. Kierkegaard, Søren. Philosophical Fragments, translated by Howard V. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Point of View for My Work as an Author, translated by Walter Lowrie, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962. Leibniz, G.W. Selections, New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1959. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996.

120 Bibliography Locke, John. The Reasonableness of Christianity, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959. Lucretius. On the Nature of Things, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001. McFague, Sallie. Speaking in Parables, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1975. The New English Bible, Oxford Study Edition, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1976. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2011. Phillips, D.Z. Religion without Explanation, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1981. Plato. Plato: The Collected Dialogues, translated by Edith Hamilton, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Polanyi, Michael. Knowing and Being, edited by Marjorie Grene, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Ramsey, Ian. Models and Mystery, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1964. Ramsey, Ian. Religious Language, New York: Macmillan, 1957. Reid, Thomas. Inquiries and Essays, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen and Unwin, 1961. Ryle, Gilbert. Concept of Mind, Oxford, England, Oxford University Press, 1949. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics, New York: Barns & Noble, 2021. Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith, New York: Harper, 1957. Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951. Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas, New York: Macmillan, 1933. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality, New York: Macmillan, 1929. Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making, New York: Macmillan, 1926. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009. Zeller, Eduard. Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, New York: Meridian, 1955.

Index Albertus Magnus 44 analogical theology 49 Anselm 8, 43 Aristotle 21 Averroes 45 Avicenna 53 Berkeley, G. 66 Dewey, John 6, 90 early Greek thinkers 9 Epicureanism 27 Five Ways 5, 45 Hartshorne, Charles 94 Hegel, G. W. F. 80 Leibniz, G. W. 60 Locke, John 5

Pascal, Blaise 108 Plato’s cave 15 Polanyi, M. 114 Process theology 34 Ramsey, Ian 113 Republic 15 Reid, Thomas 70 Socrates 12 Spinoza, B. 59 St.Paul 3 Stoicism 26 Tertullian 1, 5 Thales 10 Thomism 4 via negativa 48 Wittgenstein, L. 112