Jacques Maritain Center :
Characters in Search of Their Author /
by Ralph McInernyNam atheismus, integer consideratus, non est quid originarium.
-- Gaudium et spes, n. 19
The day before Vatican II (the ecumenical council held from 1962 to 1965) ceremoniously ended, a document called the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World was promulgated by Paul VI. It is by far the longest of the sixteen documents of that council. In the custom which dates from before the age of printing, the document is known by its incipit or opening words, as well as by its descriptive title. Gaudium et spes. Joy and Hope. Those words might suggest that the Church's survey of the world in which it must work was sunny and optimistic. But this is as misleading as it would be if the document were known by the next two words in the opening sentences, luctus et angor "the joy and hope, the grief and anguish, of men of the present time, especially of the poor and afflicted, must be the joy and hope, grief and anguish of Christ's disciples as well, since there is nothing truly human that can fail to resonate in their hearts" (n.1). There follows a remarkable look at the modern world which, despite the changes of the intervening thirty-five years, remains of interest.
Human beings seek answers to the ever recurring questions people ask about the meaning of the present life and of the life to come. But if we are defined by the need to ask questions, this has been obscured by various features of modern culture. The rise of atheism is seen as the negation of the dignity of the human person because that dignity consists in a call to live happily with his creator forever.
Human dignity rests above all on the fact that man is called to communion with God. This invitation to converse with God is issued to a man as soon as he is born, for he only exists because God has created him with love and through love continues to keep him in existence. He cannot live fully in the truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator.{1}
Hence the rather extended anatomy of atheism that follows, eight forms of which are distinguished. There are those who expressly deny God; there are others who say that no assertion can be made about him, perhaps because they adopt restrictive methods which have precisely that result. For example, by holding that everything must be expressed in the language of science. Others deny the existence of absolute truth. Yet others think that the affirmation of man entails the denial of God. Sometimes God is rejected because of a faulty notion of what he his. Some seem indifferent to the question, others are prompted by the evil in the world. Finally, the world is too much with us and our minds never lift above the particular task to the meaning of it all.
That an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church should name atheism as the bane of the modern world will not come as a complete surprise to anyone. But in what professes to be a realistic look at the world to which she hopes to minister, the Church speaks of atheism as by and large an achieved or acquired position. It is not the natural state of the human mind, but the loss of something.
There are of course counterexamples to any generalization about human beings, and there are instances in which we are assured that a person simply had no thought about God at all, one way or the other. A notable instance of this is André Frossard. (See his Dieu existe, je l'ai recontré =Paris: Fayard, 1970=.) He tells us that, although his father was the first general secretary of the French communist party there was no talk at all about God in his home, nor did the environs prompt such thoughts in him. He is looking back on a past that seems astounding o him from the vantage point of a convert. His conversion was without prelude. He stepped into a church a non-theist, a non-believer with no intention other than whiling away some time until a friend arrived. He emerged some minutes later a confirmed believer. Many expressed skepticism about the elements of this account. Frossard is narrating it many years after it happened. On what basis do we correct another's experience, or memory of his experience? But by and large, speaking of modern atheism, it does seem to be true that people usually become atheists by losing their childhood beliefs. The original position was belief, theism, and then, as the alpha privative suggest, it was lost and the result was atheism.
Vatican II was not the first time that the Church had addressed the modern world nor the first time it had sought to characterize the world. In 1878, a frail old man had been elected pope to success Pius IX whose phenomenally long reign prompted the electors to guard against another long papacy by electing Cardinal Pecci, already advanced in age. He took the name Leo XIII and he would be pope for a quarter century. Like his predecessor he took a dim view of the modern world, and he thought that there were things that ought to be done about it. In an encyclical letter called Aeterni Patris ,{2} he proposed as a remedy to the intellectual and social evils of the time a return to the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
There is something poignant about this. It was under Pius IX that the papal states were lost to the new political forces in Italy. Pius had literally been chased from the Vatican and when he returned to the Vatican from Gaieta, humbled and beaten by the forces against which he had warned, he never left again. Leo XIII was the first elected "prisoner of the Vatican," living out his reign as pope in the diminutive sovereign state that was the almost risible contradictory of his spiritual hegemony. Neutral observers might be astonished by the spectacle of the representative of a Church diagnosing the ills of the modern world and proposing the study of a thirteenth-century Dominican as the way out of impending disaster. The kulturkampf was well under way in Bismarck's Germany. France was scarcely better off, although it called its condition progress. Modernity did not consider itself in need of remedy and it seemed in the ascendancy everywhere.
One observer, the Gifford lecturer in Aberdeen just a century ago, Josiah Royce wrote an appraisal of Leo's philosophical movement that was anything but negative.{3} Royce was a star of the American philosophical establishment and not given to antic thinking. True, he had published a novel,{4} but then so had George Santayana. There is an almost total absence in Royce's appraisal of Aeterni Patris of the fact that it was meant to address a crisis in modern thought. Apart from the undeniable merits of Aquinas, Royce saw the encyclical as licensing Catholic thinkers to enter the mainstream of modern philosophy. Furthermore, he foretold what would be called Modernism, the adoption by Catholic thinkers of positions of dubious compatibility with their ostensible beliefs with the consequent redefinition of what Christianity is. The influence of Kant on Catholic thinkers is noted and applauded. All in all, Royce's essay exudes satisfaction with the current condition of philosophy. He betrays none of the melancholy Matthew Arnold expressed so memorably in 1867.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
In such prose works as God and the Bible and Literature and Dogma Arnold is the champion of the cultural changes of the time, but in Dover Beach there is no gloating about the receding influence of belief in God. What comes through is rather a romantic despair.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor help for pain;
And we here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
That is much more like the world of Pius IX and Leo.{5} Nonetheless, Arnold far more explicitly than Royce held that Christianity would have to be fundamentally rethought in the light of modern knowledge. The difference is that Arnold was depressed by the loss.
Is it fanciful to see in Leo's apprehension about the direction the modern world had taken an anticipation of the negative assessments of modernity and the Enlightenment which have characterized the last quarter of the twentieth century? Lescek Kolokowski suggests just that. "It appears as if we suddenly woke up to perceive things which the humble, and not necessarily highly educated, priests have been seeing -- and warning about -- for three centuries and which they have repeatedly denounced in their Sunday sermons. They kept telling their flocks that a world that has forgotten God has forgotten the very distinction between good and evil and has made life meaningless, sunk into nihilism."{6} Well, Leo was highly educated as is his present successor John Paul II who in 1998 issued a small book of an encyclical called Fides et ratio which was meant to give new life to the movement inaugurated by Leo XIII.
Having begun in the middle, let us turn now to the beginning of modern philosophy. That René Descartes did not see the turn he had taken as conducive to atheism, indeed quite the reverse, is clear from the mystical experience that inspired the path he took.
René Descartes died in Stockholm in 1650 where he had gone to tutor the brilliant young queen Christina. There was found among his effects a written account of a dream which had been the genesis of his great innovative efforts as a philosopher.{7} The great event took place in 1619 when Descartes was twenty-three and in winter quarters at Ulm. The dream involved three stages between which Descartes awoke, or dreamed that he did. In the first, he is back at La Flèche, the Jesuit college he had attended, and he is trying to get to the college chapel to pray, fighting against a wind which slams him against the wall of the church when he turns to look after someone he had passed without greeting. Then in the court of the college he is told that someone he knows has left him a melon. He awakes depressed. Fallen asleep again, he is awakened by a clap of thunder to find sparks of fire filling his room. In the third dream he sees on a table two books. A dictionary and a Corpus poetarum, opened on a verse of Ausonius quod vitae sectabor iter: what path of life should I take? Then he is given a slip on which Est and Non (yes and no) are written. Descartes himself subjected this dream to close analysis. The dictionary represents the totality of science, the anthology of poets the marriage of philosophy and wisdom. Yes and No represent truth and falsity in profane science, the quotation from Ausonius is the good advice of someone wise, perhaps Moral Theology personified. The wind is an evil spirit that seeks to prevent him from getting to the chapel. In the morning a grateful Descartes vowed to make a pilgrimage to Loretto in thanksgiving to the Blessed Virgin, a vow he fulfilled five years later.
All our knowledge of this event, the dreams, their interpretation, are at secondhand. The account that Descartes had made as a constant reminder to himself was read and commented on by others after his death, but it has not come down to us. Leibniz copied portions of it, others mention it. The pious chronicler of Descartes's life -- his account of Descartes's death is graphic and moving -- invites us to a quite different understanding of the Father of Modern Philosophy than is common. In Stockholm Descartes has a spiritual advisor, he confesses and receives the Eucharist just before he falls ill, he is given the last rites and dies with the priest at this bedside. Descartes set out to reform science, but the Reformation, through whose first phase he was living -- he spent much of his life in Protestant countries -- seems not to have affected his faith.
But it is the fact that Descartes begins the revolution in philosophy under religious auspices, convinced that, among other things, he can offer a proof of God's existence, that sets his off from the far more famous Memorial of his near contemporary Blaise Pascal.
It was four years after the death of Descartes, on another November night, the 23rd, "feast of Saint Clement, pope and martyr, and of others in the Martyrology, eve of the feast of St. Chrysogonus, martyr" that an event took place that bridged the two days, beginning at 10:30 on the 23rd and continuing until 12:30 of the 24th. What occurred was so pivotal for Pascal that he wrote it down. A few days after his death in 1662, a servant found sewn into his coat a piece of parchment, carefully folded to contain a sheet of paper. On the paper was an apparently contemporary note, made soon after the experience, which is copied with changes onto the parchment, indicating that Pascal carried on his person not one but two reminders of the event he doubtless would have remembered without them. This Memorial was transferred from coat to coat, from lining to lining, sewn in each time during the years from the "Night of Fire" until Pascal's death. For eight years after the great event, Pascal had this reminder constantly with him.{8}
What does the Memorial contain? He who runs as he reads will find the contents of the Memorial disjointed and confused. Perhaps they triggered off the memory of the writer, but the experience can scarcely be conveyed by a few words. After the careful notation of the day, already quoted, Pascal writes in the center of the page FIRE. And then, "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and savants. Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace. The God of Jesus Christ." And so on.
Scholars have shown that the composition of the Memorial is careful, not just random jottings.{9} For one thing, the distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham is not just a verbal contrast: the Memorial is a florilegium of biblical texts and allusions. The contrast with Descartes's dream could not be more fundamental. Descartes awoke with the sense that his intellectual mission had divine sanction; Pascal recovered from his great experience convinced that the God of the philosophers must be held at bay and the God of the Bible, the God of Jesus Christ receive complete attention.
There is another lessor to be drawn from considering these deeply felt and decisive mystical experiences of two figures who stand at the divide between modern philosophy and what had gone before. The two were devout Catholics. Their religious faith was the ambiance within which they pursued their intellectual work. Both were mathematicians, of course, a discipline that might seem quite remote from questions about the ultimate destiny of human beings, but one's convictions about human destiny and ultimate reality form the human envelope within which even mathematics is engaged.
As believers, Descartes and Pascal represent one of the divisions that has been present from the earliest centuries of Christianity. Indeed there is biblical warrant for Pascal's attitude as well as Descartes. Videte ne quis vos decipiat per philosophiam, St. Paul warns the Colossians, "Beware lest you be led astray by philosophy," but that same Paul, in Acts, speaks to the Athenians of the God they had come to know by rational means, and announced that this God became man in Jesus.
Paul here and in Roman 1:19 assumes that human beings can come to know that God exists. This knowledge then must be related to the mysteries of the faith, what God has told us of himself. For some believers, the existence of God was all but self-evident. It is not unimportant that Descartes, in his dedication of his Meditations métaphysiques to the theologians of the Sorbonne, quotes these very texts. How do the attitudes of Pascal and Descartes to their faith differ from that which characterized the Scholastic tradition it was Descartes intention to replace?
About a thousand years ago, in a monastery at Bec in Normandy, the prior occupied the first stall on the left when the monks gathered for mass and to chant the office. The office or function of the monks was the opus Dei and in the context God's work entailed singing the entire psalter of David once a week, with some psalms sung several times in the course of the week. The days of the week in turn were measured by the canonical hours -- Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline -- the times at which the monks gathered to chant a selection of psalms, listen to readings from other parts of Scripture, and lift their voices in the appropriate hour's hymn. This went on from the early hours of morning through the day, at three hour intervals to the twilight hour of Vespers and finally Compline, at which the Song of Simeon -- Nunc dimittis servum tuum Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace -- would send the monks to their beds.
The prior's name was Anselm. Eventually, like his predecessor as prior, Lanfranc, he would become Archbishop of Canterbury, but he did not of course know that as he lived those long years in the monastery trying to bring his life into conformity with the evangelical counsels. When he first arrived in Normandy, he had been the prize student of Lanfranc. Eventually, Anselm was given the role of teacher. From his pen during these years came a number of writings, most of them relatively short, many of them cast in the form of dialogues, which still interest those involved in their subjects. On truth. On the fall of the devil. On the grammarian. Medievalists still pore over these, but there are other writings of Prior Anselm that nearly all philosophers have read and on which all have settled views. They concern the mind's ability to know that God exists.
A rejected title for one of them, derivative from Augustine, has had a career of its own: Fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. In the event, Anselm gave them Greek titles, Proslogion and Monologion. It is the Proslogion that interests us here. We can imagine Anselm getting the inspiration for its arguments while in choir, when Psalm 41 was being chanted. The very familiarity of the psalm had perhaps hidden from him the import of its opening line. Dixit insipiens in corde suo, non est Deus: The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. Suddenly it dawned on Anselm that the denial of God is foolish because it cannot really be done. If you know what the word means, you are unable to say that God does not exist. Of course Anselm spelled it out, availing himself of verses from other psalms as he proceeded.
"God" means that than which nothing greater can be thought.
Anselm then ponders the meaning of "greater" and suggests that if we consider the relation of an artisan to his work, we can say that before he begins he has in mind what he will do and when he is done he has effected it in wood or stone or whatever. Very well. To exist in the mid is one thing, to exist in the external world another. The table existing in the mind of the artisan can be assigned the value of 1. The table existing outside the mind also gets a value of 1. Then, when the idea has been realized and exists both in the mind and outside the mind, the result is greater, viz. 1+1=2. With this elementary observation in hand, Anselm can show why the denial of God's existence is impossible, foolish, incoherent.
This is to make knowledge of God's existence quid originarium indeed, it and not atheism is the default position of the human mind. Furthermore, in defending the claim by reducing to absurdity its contradictory, Anselm suggests that "God exists" is self-evident to the human mind.{10} Under the influence of Karl Barth, it has become fashionable to suggest that Anselm's proof was meant to be effective only within the ambience of Christian faith. That is, he begins holding that there is a God and he ends holding that there is a God, but this conviction does not repose on the proof he has offered. It is a matter of faith seeking understanding, but the understanding does not provide an under pinning for the faith: it presupposes it. It can of course be wondered whether Anselm had ever met an atheist. Presumably there were none within the walls of the monastery, and his secular experience prior to entering would not seem to have brought him into atheistic circles, if there were any at the time. Thus, if he is a Christian, writing for other Christians, the whole procedure can seem to be in-house, without impact on those who are not Christian believers. "The unbeliever in the fullest sense -- the out-and-out atheist -- is unlikely to have come Anselm's way."{11}
G. R. Evans devotes a chapter to this question, and she says that, in later years, Anselm would have encountered at least some infideles. They are even given parts in such dialogues as Cur deus homo: Why did God become man? But it is one thing to say that Jews reject the Incarnation and quite another to deal with the denial of God's existence. Evans does observe, without exploring the fact, that when a Christian and Jew disputed they could lay alongside their views those of the philosophers. It seems restrictive to suggest that Anselm had to meet atheists in order to understand the philosophical weight of the denial that God exists. Nor does it seem at all adequate to his effort to say that he was simply providing believers another way to think about their beliefs. Why avoid what seems on the face of it obvious? Anselm's proof was meant to reduce to incoherence anyone who denied that God exists. The psalmist triggered the effort but does not of course provide the proof that Anselm devised. If the proof works, it works for Christian and Jew, Muslim and pagan, not because they are any of these things, but because they are human beings with the ability to think. Doubtless it is the fact that this reasoning took form within the ambiance of Anselm's faith that causes the misunderstanding, but that is something we have already touched on and to which we shall return.
We have recalled that the Father of Modern Philosophy, René Descartes, as well as Blaise Pascal, saw their philosophical work within the ambiance of their Christian, indeed Catholic, faith. Descartes's dream in 1619 and Pascal's mystical experience in 1654 are religious experiences. Descartes took his dreams to provide a sanction for his subsequent efforts to reform philosophy and to prove the existence of God. Pascal took his experiences to underscore the fact that the God the philosophers spoke of and whose existence they sought to prove is not the God of religious belief. In the twelfth century, religious belief provided thinkers, as it had for Descartes and Pascal, the ambiance of their thought. Was the Father of Modern Philosophy less of a philosopher for this? It could be argued that throughout history the vast majority of philosophers have been theists or religious believers. It would be more difficult to argue that of the present batch of philosophers, of course. Among philosophers nowadays, at least, atheism is, if not the default position, the end to which anyone who seriously uses his mind is expected inevitably to come.
A.N. Wilson has recently published a book which takes its title from a poem of Thomas Hardy, "God's Funeral."{12} In it Wilson passes in review various nineteenth-century figures whose faith slipped away under the pressure of new knowledge that was taken to be incompatible with the faith. By and large, this meant the change by which one passed from having thought or held or believed p to be true, to holding, whether reluctantly or triumphantly, that p is false because we now know the --p is true. But, as we saw in the previous lecture, this was to give way to another and far more vertiginous transition.
The passage in which Friedrich Nietzsche speaks of the death of God involves a madman. It is a madman or fool who stumbles into the marketplace proclaiming that God is dead and we have killed him. He is foolish because he thinks that God is the sort of being who can cease to be, whose life can be terminated by a human assassin. But the message, however madly put, is rightly taken to be Nietzsche's own. For us nineteenth-century Europeans, Nietzsche is saying, God no longer exists, he is as if dead, he is absent. It is because Nietzsche does not say that "God exists" is false that he can move us beyond true and false, beyond good and evil.
Many nineteenth-century figures came to think that evolution or some epistemological innovation or other had suddenly rendered all religious and indeed theistic claims false. There is nothing new in this sort of clearing-the-decks. We have seen that it characterizes modern thought. Step one is to kill off all surviving forebears, convict them and all preceding generations of elementary mistakes, and consign the lot of them to the dustbin. Step two is the announcement that now we can seriously begin. . .. Such radical departures have succeeded one another in seemingly endless series since Descartes. Perhaps Nietzsche did not want to be the latest entrant into the arena of philosophical patricide. He wanted to put an end to the whole business of thinking that there is something out there awaiting our conceptual grasp, that our thoughts and words have meanings because they stand in a relation to the things that are, that our moral judgments are right or wrong with reference to objective criteria. The scandal of the history of philosophy was not that so many have said false things so much as that they have all believed these were true things to say.
Until recently, few could find it in them to be as radical as all that. Now it has become chic. The effect of such nihilism on natural theology is that it can no longer be claimed that natural theology is false. But could it be said that any of its claims are true? To be told that one has as much right to engage in natural theology as to dismiss it, since neither the affirmation nor the denial of God's existence could be true, is not the sort of description of his task that any self-respecting natural theologian could accept.
What has to be done is to show that the nihilistic position -- we will ascribe it to Nietzsche -- cannot be sustained. In one way, this is quite easily done; in another, it is the most difficult and important task confronting the modern mind. How do you deal with a naysayer who will not say you nay?
NOVEMBER 2, 1999
{1} Gaudium et spes,_N. 19. The translation is my own. Surely it is a sign of the times that these noble documents are now made available in "a completely revised translation in inclusive language." The resultant bad English is a source of laughter and tears, gaudium et lucus. Inclusive English excludes the great monuments of the language but perhaps teams of right-thinking mistranslators will do to the Western Canon what they have already done to Scripture and liturgical documents.
{2} Its incipit; its actual title was On Restoring in Catholic Schools Christian Philosophy according to the mind of St. Thomas Aquinas the Angelic Doctor.
{3} "Pope Leo’s PhilE280ADosophical Movement and Its Relations to Modern Thought" appeared first in the Boston Evening Transcript on July 29, 1903 and was reprinted in Fugitive Essays by Josiah Royce, with an introduction by Dr. J. Loewenberg (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), 408-429.
{4} Josiah Royce, The Feud of Oakfield Creek a Novel of California Life (New York and London: Johnson Reprint, 1970). The novel was originally published in 1887 in a print run of 1,500 copies. Demand, it was said, never outran supply. Santayana, Royce’s colleague, mentions Royce’s disappointment at the abrupt ending of his career as a novelist.
{5} Writing to his mother in June 1869, Arnold said, "My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind in the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is." (See introduction, Matthew Arnold, Prose and Poetry, ed. Archibald L. Bouton, The Modern Student’s Library =New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927=, xv).
{6} See his Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
{7} The best discussion of this once neglected dream is Jacques Maritain’s Le Songe de Descartes, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Rene Mougel et al., vol. 5 (Paris: Editions Saint-Paul, 1982), 12-222. The earlier treatment of Descartes in Three Reformers (ibid., vol. 3, 485-521) is an ingenious likening of Descartes’s account of human knowledge to Thomas Aquinas ‘s account of the knowledge of the angels.
{8} First published in 1740, the Memorial is usually included in editions of the Pensees. I am consulting the text as it is found in Oeuvres complètes, preface de Henri Gouhier, presentation et notes de Louis laFuma (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), 618.
{9} See Marvin O’Connell, Blaise Pascal, Reasons of the Heart (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), Chapter 5 "The Night of Fire," 90-103.
{10} G. R. Evans, whose little book Anselm and a New Generation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) is generally so helpful, oddly remarks about the Proslogion proof, that "the Fool is not to be taken seriously precisely because he is too foolish to know what he is saying. Anselm found it inconceivable that anyone who gave serious thought to Christian doctrine could fail to be orthodox in his beliefs" (p. 34). While God’s existence is presupposed by orthodox Christian doctrine, it is something that non-believers might either affirm or deny.
{11} Ibid., 34.
{12} A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).