Jacques Maritain Center :
Characters in Search of Their Author /
by Ralph McInernyPer te poeta fui, per te Cristiano.
-- Purgatorio xxii.73
When Dante and Virgil, his guide, come upon the Christian poet Statius in Purgatory, the poet gives the following description of the role Virgil played in his conversion.
Ed elli a lui: "Tu prima m'inviasti
Verso Parnasso a ber ne le sue grotte,
E prima appresso Dio m'alluminasti.
Facesti come quei che va di note,
Che porta il lume dietro e sé non giova,
Ma dopo sé fa la persone dotte."
-- (Purgatorio xxii.64-69){1}
From the outset of the Comedy, Virgil functions as the pinnacle of human wisdom. He can guide Dante through the nether world of hell and up Mount Purgatory and to the very gates of heaven, but then his role is finished. For all his virtue and knowledge, Virgil was a pagan. Dante thus gives us a vivid image of the limitations of natural knowledge as well as of its relation to divine revelation. The Fathers spoke of pagan philosophy as a praeparatio evangelica, performing a role analogous to that of the Old Law in preparing for the New.
In preparation for his great poetic task, Dante devoted himself to the study of philosophy and theology. He studies under Dominicans, come to Florence from Paris, where they had been students of Thomas Aquinas. It is far from fanciful then to see Virgil as the symbol of natural theology. Moreover, his prominent role in this greatest of Christian poems suggests the continuing importance for believers of the kind of knowledge of God even pagans had.
In the first lecture I alluded to Laurence Cossé's theological thriller in which an absolutely irresistible proof for the existence of God was shown to have social and ecclesiastical consequences of an unwelcome sort. While it is a great read, it relies on a conflation of a proof for the existence of God and proofs of the mysteries of Christianity. That is, of course, a conflation, that is often made by those who feel faith is threatened by any effort to provide evidence for itself. It will be worthwhile to consult Kierkegaard on the matter.
The Kierkegaardian literature comprises a number of pseudonymous works as well as works that appeared under his own name. These two groups relate to one another in ways Kierkegaard regarded as most important for an understanding of his overall literary effort. The over-riding aim of the whole literature is to clarify what it means to be a Christian. That this should need clarification in a Christian country is due to the fact that nominal Christians understand their profession in ways which according to Kierkegaard, fall woefully short of accuracy. Confusion or misunderstanding takes two general forms, and this explains the two movements in the literature, "Away from the poet!" and "Away from the philosopher!" Toward what? Towards a true understanding of what it means to be a Christian.
Kierkegaard assigns the task of dealing with the specifically philosophical misunderstanding of what it means to be a Christian to one pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, who functions in the literature somewhat as Virgil functions in The Divine Comedy. Two books are attributed to this author, The Philosophical Fragments and The Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments.
The Fragments addresses itself to the following question: How far does the truth admit of being learned? Climacus, addressing philosophers, invokes the Socratic account of teaching as midwifery, the maieutic method whereby Socrates assists the learner in giving birth to an idea he already in some sense has. An analysis of this indicates that the Socratic teacher is not so much a cause as an occasion of learning in the pupil. The pupil is assumed to have the capacity to learn and learning is thus a transition from forgotten to remembered knowledge. The student does the learning or remembering and however much a teacher might be the occasion of this coming about, it is not owed to the teacher. Furthermore, the time when this takes place is not essential, but merely incidental. It would not matter if one proved a given geometrical theorem on Tuesday or Wednesday or that the work is not due until Friday.
Climacus may seem to be speaking of a very special account of learning, the Platonic, such that what is here said applies only to it. But it is clear that the Platonic account is taken to stand for any other. This is so because Climacus reduces the characteristics of Socratic teaching to three elements which are taken to show up in any account of learning.
Any account of how it is that one person can help another come to knowledge of the truth will embody those elements.
Climacus now introduces a thought experiment. If the Socratic teacher is as described, what would a non-Socratic teacher be like? It is not immediately clear to the reader why this question should be pursued, but the reader is a philosopher and accustomed to pursue questions of no immediate practical significance. The simplest way to arrive at what a non-Socratic teacher would be like is of course to negate the features of Socratic teaching.
In developing these, Climacus introduces terms which catch the reader's attention. The learner, not having the condition, is said to be in a polemical relation to the truth. Call this sin. The teacher in giving the condition as well as the truth saves the learner from error and sin. Call him a redeemer. The moment at which this teacher appears can be called the Fullness of Time. And so on.
Thus indirectly Climacus has drawn a contrast between any human teacher and Christ. He imagines his reader indignant with him for palming off as imaginary what we all recognize. The reader feels toyed with. Doubtless such reactions are particularly to be expected of a reader who had been thinking of Christ as a Socratic teacher and his teaching as just another instance of the sort of thing philosophers deal with. But if Christ is the non-Socratic teacher, so to think would be confusion. One might even have begun to think that Christianity was an invitation to understand on a par with any other philosophical teaching. On that understanding, ordinary cognitive equipment should suffice to determine its truth or falsity. The point of the contrast between the Socratic and the non-Socratic teacher is to induce doubt in the reader as to such reductionism.
Climacus never mentions Christ. Climacus never argues that there is a non-Socratic teacher. The impact of the book depends on its Christian reader remembering what he supposedly believes and then seeing that this prevents him from thinking of Christ as a Socratic teacher. To be a Christian does not mean to understand Christianity as if it were just another philosophical doctrine.
Anyone who thought himself a Christian and had a minimal grasp of Christian doctrine and who had adopted Hegelian or Kantian approaches to Christianity would, Kierkegaard assumes, be disturbed by this juxtaposition of the Socratic and non-Socratic teacher. Any effort to see Christ as merely another human teacher, that is, as a Socratic teacher, his doctrine within the limits of reason alone, would have to overlook basic Christian doctrines. Human beings are not in possession of the truth or capable of attaining it on their own: the truth about themselves -- that they are wounded by sin and need a redeemer to free them from it -- is not naturally accessible. Any attempt, accordingly, to make Christianity a doctrine among others, assessable by the usual criteria amount to the abandonment of Christianity.
Such indirect communication only works on the assumption of the last paragraph. The non-believer may find in this the confirmation of his worst fears about Christianity. One could grasp the concept of the non-Socratic teacher and have no reason to think it instantiated. But if one is a believer, the Fragments could have the effect of making him see that Christian doctrine is not just another philosophical doctrine and cannot be appraised by philosophical criteria.
If the Christian mysteries are truths which can be seen to be such only on the basis of faith, that is, trust in the God who reveals them without the ability in this life to comprehend those mysteries, then, by definition, any effort to prove the mysteries to be true by appeal to starting points in the public domain must fail. This does not mean that reason goes on holiday where faith is concerned. One of the convictions of the believer is that nothing he believes can be in conflict with what he knows to be true. That is, the principle of contradiction remains operative. So too, in arguing that some things that are revealed entail something else, one must abide by the common rules for valid reasoning. And of course the language of revelation is a language already in use, the words already have familiar meanings, so in one sense any one who knows the language knows what it is being said. Without such knowledge, one could not reasonably accept or reject what is claimed. But the content is such that its truth or falsity cannot be definitively shown from what we know about the world. In this sense, the content of the mysteries of faith floats free of the reach of reason and it is a mistake to seek to prove it to be true.
But neither Kierkegaard nor Johannes Climacus is a Thomist. Kierkegaard at least is a Lutheran and he has his pseudonym extend the strictures against presuming to understand Christianity to the point of vetoing any effort to attain knowledge of God's existence and nature. In short, the critique of the Fragments becomes a rejection of natural theology. This is to be found in Chapter III of the book.
The unknowability of God is founded on the notion that God is the Unknown. Of course this make Climacus's claim seem merely tautological. He commends it to us by suggesting that the passion of reason is to will its own downfall, to come upon something that it cannot know. The Unknown thus haunts the realm of knowledge. This is not merely the banal claim that we know what we know and do not know what we do not know. Things we do not know may simply be things we do not yet know. But is there something that in principle we cannot know? We can tag it and call it the Unknown. And we can say we know what the term means -- we have just given a descriptive account of it -- but how do we know it refers to anything? For reasons that emerge Climacus bypasses this.
At the moment, he provides an analogy. Just as reason desires its{ own downfall and longs for the Unknown, so love passes from self-love to self-denial and is lost in the Beloved. The passionate paradox of reason thus recalls the paradox of love. But how do we know that the Unknown exists?
In the course of all this, another name for the Unknown is said to be God, so we have been brought to the question as to whether or not God's existence can be proved. Climacus takes a breathtaking route. The existence of God cannot be proved because it is impossible to prove the existence of anything. Any supposed proof of the existence of X pre-supposes the existence of X. That is the Climachean claim. He applies it to traditional efforts to prove the existence of God. To say that the order of the world is a basis for coming to knowledge of God is to overlook the fact that the claim that there is an order already entails an orderer. One is begging the question of the existence of God.
Such criticisms are not peculiar to Climacus and there are of course responses to them. One could easily get bogged down in a seemingly endless discussion of traditional proofs. That is why the generalized claim is important, since it enables Climacus to free himself of particular discussions of proofs and sweep the board clean of all efforts to prove the existence of anything.
But is it true that any proof for the existence of X presupposes X? In some sense, obviously. That is, we must know what we are looking for, what X is taken to be. If X is a star thought to exist at such and such a location in the skies, we can understand the claim. But is there such a star? Why would the question arise? If it is merely a logical possibility, we can understand the claim but have no reason to give it more thought. If however the putative existence of the star is based on certain observable phenomena, the question is more interesting. Let us imagine that these are taken to provide reasons for thinking there is such a star, but the clincher will be when it is actually observed -- in the way in which stars are actually observed. One night it is indeed observed.
This sketch, appropriately developed and made clearer, could count as the proof of the existence of the star. Prior to the proof, I have to know what I am looking for. The star is known through a {{description. But does that description describe anything? When we know that it does, we can say we have proved its existence. Knowing its description no more begs its existence than knowing that the happenings in the world are not merely random begs the question of God's existence.
I think it can be safely said that this is not at all the response Kierkegaard is looking for. His intention is that Climacus should simply sweep aside the whole business of natural theology and make efforts to know God's existence and nature equivalent to efforts to comprehend the mysteries of the faith. If he fails in this conflation, he nonetheless can represent all those believers who reject natural theology as a presumptuous effort. "Beware lest you be led astray by philosophy," Paul's admonition to the Colossians, might serve as Johannes Climacus's motto.
Behind this dissatisfaction with proofs of God's existence lies a more profound objection. It seems to be in the nature of proof that it is impersonal antiseptic , addressed to whom it may concern. One might fashion an objection similar to those Climacus makes against proofs of God's existence. Even if they worked, what real difference do they make? Christianity addresses us in the deepest well-springs of our being. The addressee senses that if Christianity is true, if he should give his assent to it, then his life must still be unchanged.
Of course this recalls the controversy that is as old as ethics itself. Is moral knowledge sought in order to be good? If it is practical knowledge, it should have practical import. Yet Aristotle says that no one becomes good by philosophizing. Plato, on the other hand, pays much attention to the claim that knowledge is virtue. If you really know what you should do, wouldn't you do it? And if you don't, can you really be said to have known what you should do? No wonder an analogy is drawn between the ethical and the religious.
The subjective approach to God, as found in Cardinal Newman as well as Kierkegaard, is something I shall turn to in my second set of lectures.
The example of Johannes Climacus makes clear once more that opposition to natural theology is perhaps more spirited on the part of some Christian believers than it is when it comes from the more or less blasé secular philosopher. The aim of such believers is to protect knowledge of God from philosophy. The only access to God is by faith and it is hubristic, even sinful, for us to presume that we can close the gap between heaven and earth by argument. Only if God comes to us can we go to God.
A first response to this would be intramural, citing passages of Scripture which seem clearly to say that sinful man, e.g., the pagan Romans whose misbehavior Paul catalogues, can come to knowledge of the invisible things of God by way of the things that are made. That Christianity depends essentially on things we already know is clear from the very fact of Scripture. We are assumed to know the language in which it is written, or the one into which it is translated. That language had a vast variety of ordinary purposes before it was used to convey God's revelation to us. In the New Testament, a relationship is established between the cleansing effect of water and the cleansing of sin from the soul. The parables of course rely on our capacity to be moved from what we already know to what we could only know under the impetus of grace. The Incarnation itself is the most striking instance of the way God relies on what we can see and hear and the further significance of Christ's deeds and words which surpasses any natural understanding.
Thomas Aquinas employs the same bi-level feature as that found in the Bible. Thomas lived at the time when the treatises of Aristotle were for the first time available in Latin. This belated arrival of the pagan Aristotle drew mixed reactions. For one thing, the curriculum of medieval education was made obsolete by the presence of so many works that did not fit into any of the liberal arts. Moreover, the liberal arts had stood for human wisdom and as a preparation for the study of Scripture. Thus, a modus vivendi had been established between secular and sacred learning. With the arrival of the integral Aristotle, the idea that the liberal arts were an adequate summary of human learning became untenable, and this threw into question the modus vivendi between the secular and the sacred. It is small wonder then that some sought to keep Aristotle from the schools. They were unsuccessful. Thomas probably studied Aristotelian logical works at Montecassino as a boy, and when he went to the University of Naples he might have become aware of the "new" Aristotle. As a young Dominican he had the great good fortune to study with Albertus Magnus in Cologne. Thomas's acceptance of Aristotle is manifest throughout his works but toward the end of his life -- in answer to an anti-Aristotelian crisis -- he wrote interlinear commentaries on twelve of Aristotle's treatises.
This is important because Thomas held that Aristotle's proof of a Prime Mover was valid and that this was a proof for the existence of God. That proof, found in Aristotle's Physics, is complemented by the description of God in the Metaphysics in terms drawn from human intellection. This led Thomas to make a distinction of utmost importance for my task. (I don't suggest he made it to make my task easier -- we hardly knew one another -- but it has that effect).
Thomas came to see that among the things that God has revealed about himself in the Bible are things that philosophers have said about him. Pagan philosophers. Philosophers utterly uninfluenced by revelation. From this he concluded that there are two kinds of truth about God found in Scripture. On the one hand are a few truths that can be known by human reason; on the other are truths about God that can only be known by revelation and accepted as true by faith. Among the things that the believer believes about God are that he is, that there is only one God, that he is the cause of everything other than himself, that he is intelligent. But such truths are to be found in the pagan philosophers. Why have they been proposed for our belief if they can be known? Is it of any interest to any believer to hold such truths otherwise than on divine authority?
Only if some truths about God can be known by unaided natural reason is this distinction possible. As a lifelong student of Aristotle, Thomas was convinced that there are sound and cogent proofs of god's existence. For Thomas, natural theology is not a possibility. It is a fact. It is the achievement of pagan philosophy. Ab esse ad posse valet illatio.
In one of his earliest works Thomas coined a phrase to cover these naturally knowable truths about God that had nonetheless been revealed. He called them praeambula fidei. They were distinguished from the other sort of truth about God, the kind that dominates Scripture, which he dubbed mysteria fidei. Thus it is that the task of natural theology can be described as the task of studying the Preambles of Faith.
Further discussion of this distinction must await the set of lectures I will give in February. I will close by noting how this distinction between praeambula fidei and mysteria fidei takes us back to the theme of the first lecture, the relation between the religious faith of the philosopher and his philosophizing.
Clearly, only a believer would think to call what pagan philosophers came to know about God preambles of faith. Just as only the early Christians who had studied philosophy before their conversion would refer to that philosophy as a Preparation for the Gospel. These are both extrinsic denominations. But they serve to locate within the ambiance of faith the philosophical task. One who like myself adopts the traditional reading of Romans 1:19 that I sketched a moment ago will see how that text sustains a believing philosopher when the going gets rough. Such a Christian philosopher is not likely to despair of the possibility of natural theology, whatever his personal setbacks. This extra-philosophical, pre-philosophical confidence brings him back to shoulder the task once more.
Thomas took note of the difficulties of that task, and of the flaws in its performance by pagan philosophers. He noted that the difficulties of natural theology make it unlikely that many will succeed at it and those who do will usually have reached a ripe old age. Knowledge of God is wisdom and thus is the culminating task of philosophy, of human learning. It is from such observations that Thomas drew his argument for the practical necessity that these naturally knowable truths about God be included in revelation. In this way, what was striven for by the pagan sages is put immediately into the possession of the simple as well as the not so simple.
It is clear that Thomas did not see natural theology as a threat to the faith. Au contraire. Moreover, his distinction between preambles and mysteries of the faith as subsets of revealed truth provided him with the means to fashion a powerful argument for the reasonableness of the believer's accepting as true what he cannot understand, for example, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the forgiveness of sin. For reasons we will discuss later, these mysteries cannot be known to be true; they cannot be proved from premises expressive of what we know. Faith is a testing knowledge, the acceptance of things unseen. But is it not inhuman to accept what so escapes our power to know?
Thomas's argument for the reasonableness of belief in the mysteries of faith is this.
If some of the things that have been revealed can be known to be true -- the preambles -- then it is reasonable to accept that the others -- the mysteries -- are, as they claim to be, true.
This not of course a proof of the truth of the mysteries of faith, but it does prove that it is reasonable to believe them to be true. And it indicates the continuing interest, even for believers, of natural theology.
NOVEMBER 9, 1999
{1} Then he: "Thou first didst guide me when I trod
Parnassus' caves to drink the waters bright
And thou was first to lamp me up to God.
Thou was as one who, travelling, bears by night
A lantern at his back, which cannot leaven
his darkness, yet he gives his followers light."
[Dorothy Sayers, The Divine Comedy, II. The Purgatory (London: Penguin, 1944), 242.]