Faith and Reason
I. The Nature of Faith
A. Preliminary
Remarks
B. Faith and
Reason: Three Aspects
C. The
Deliverances of Faith
D. What it is to
Have Faith
E. Four Natural
Questions
II. Faith and Philosophy
A. The
Nature of Wisdom
B. Two Senses of
Philosophy
C. Conflicting
Conceptions of the Roles of Reason
and Affection within Philosophical Inquiry
D. Anti-Secularism
and Accommodationism: Two Temptations
for Christian Thinkers
E. Some Theses
of Aquinas and Augustine
F. Christian
Apologetics
III. Augustine and Classical Philosophy
A. Brief
Intellectual Biography
B. Augustine
and Platonism
C. Some
Platonic Doctrines
IA. Preliminary
Remarks
- Ways of teaching and studying medieval philosophy:
- The cast of characters
- Externalist vs. internalist approaches: the
centrality of
faith and reason
if we are to understand the projects of medieval philosophers as they
themselves
understood them.
- Augustine (354-430) and Aquinas (1225-1274): very
different intellectual milieus
IB. Faith and
Reason: Three Aspects
- Faith and reason as powers, acts, and habits which
are
distinct sources
of cognition, where reason includes every "natural" source of cognition.
- "The (supernatural) light of faith"
- "The (natural) light of reason"
- Faith and reason as contents
yielded by these
powers, acts, and
habits -- it remains an open question at this point whether these
contents
overlap.
- "The deliverances of faith" -- revealed truths
about God
and God's relationship
to us.
- "The deliverances of natural reason"
- Faith and reason as norms or standards
for
evaluating cognitive
claims
- "Consonant with the faith" vs. "contrary to the
faith"
- "Consonant with reason" vs. "contrary to reason"
IC. The Deliverances
of Faith
- The Christian drama as revealed in Sacred Scripture
and the
Teachings
of
the Church (think of these in connection with Kant's three questions:
"What
can we know? What should we do? What can we hope for?"):
- The existence and trinitarian nature of God
- God's creation of the world ex nihilo
- Original sin and its consequences
- The promise of redemption enacted by God's covenant
with
the Jewish people
- The incarnation of the Son of God and the atonement
wrought by his passion,
death, and resurrection
- The continuation of Christ's redemptive work
through the
Church and the
sacraments
- The last things: resurrection, judgment, heaven/hell
- Divine moral law
- The ultimate end for human beings: intimate
friendship
with the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit
- A distinction among the
deliverances of the faith
- Preambles of the faith: those
revealed truths (if
any) that natural
reason can in principle come to knowledge (scientia)
of without
the aid of divine revelation.
- Mysteries of the faith: those
revealed truths
that
natural reason
cannot even in principle come to knowledge of without the aid of divine
revelation and hence must be accepted, if at all, by faith.
This distinction prompts the four "natural" questions to be noted
below.
Note
that the Fathers of the Church, along with other
intellectually sophisticated Christian writers of the first few
centures A.D., generally sided with the philosophical enlightenment in
opposition to Greek and Roman paganism. (Remember Plato's
opposition to the poets in the Republic.) So even though
Christianity brought along its own story, the early Christians were
insistent that this story was true in a sense that opened it up to
philosophical scrutiny. Thus it was natural for the Christians to
define the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation by making use
of metaphysical notions borrowed from the Greeks.
ID. What it is to
have faith in something?
- Three operations of the intellect
- Abstraction: The formation of
"quidditative"
concepts, i.e., concepts
of secondary substances and accidents that allow us to grasp things
well
enough to begin inquiry. [Aristotle's Categories]
- Composition and Division: The
formation of
affirmative and negative
propositions capable of being true or false. [Aristotle's On Intrepretation]
- Discursive reasoning
(sometimes called cogitation):
The formation
of chains of inference. [Aristotle's Prior Analytics and
Posterior
Analytics]
Note: Christian faith is an act or habit of the intellect
having
God as its primary object and what is revealed by God as its
propositional
objects.
- The possible
(or passive
or potential)
intellect
Aristotle: In intellective cognition the
intellect
becomes like
the thing cognized by being configured by an intelligible likeness of
the thing known.
St. Thomas restatement: Sensible
matter : sensible form ::
passive intellect
: intelligible likeness (intelligible species).
That is, just as the union of this form
(aardvarkiness)
with primary
matter results in Andy the aardvark, so the union of this intelligible
likeness
(aardvarkiness*) with the intellect-as-passive (or potential
intellect) results in this act of
understanding (or act of intellective cognition) of
aardvarks.
Note: In composition and division the
passive
intellect is of
itself neutral with respect to accepting or rejecting a
proposition.
So if the intellect does accept a proposition it must be moved either
(i) involuntarily
by the very content of the proposition as seen by "the
natural
light
of reason" or (ii) voluntarily by the will.
- The distinction between acceptance and
assent
- To accept p
= to think p true
- To assent to p
= to accept p and
to adhere
strongly
to p
Note: Contemporary philosophers often use the term 'belief'
for what St. Thomas calls acceptance, whereas many
translators
of
St. Thomas use 'belief' for what St. Thomas calls faith
(in the
generic sense). This can lead to confusion, and so in what follows I
will
avoid the term 'belief'.
- Taxonomy of cognitive acts or
"propositional attitudes"
(based partly
on De Veritate, ques. 14, art. 1 and partly on Summa
Theologiae
2-2, ques. 1, art. 4)
- Different modes in which the intellect is moved (if
at
all) solely by the the
evidential status of the content of the proposition p
that
serves
as its object:
- Dubitatio
(doubt in the sense of hesitation):
The intellect hesitates or wavers between p
and not-p
without accepting either of them. (This can happen either (i)
because there is no evidence one way or the other or (ii) because the
evidence
for one side balances the evidence for the other.)
- Suspicio
(suspecting, as in "I suspect that Joanna is a better person than we
give her credit for"): The intellect
accepts (or leans toward) p,
but very tentatively. (Here p is slightly more
evident than not-p,
but neither one is compellingly evident.)
- Intellectus
(grasp of the self-evident or
the per se
compellingly
evident):
The intellect assents
to p immediately upon understanding p.
(There
is an obvious
extension of this act of intellect to what is "evident to the senses".)
- Scientia
(scientific knowledge): The
intellect assents to p
immediately upon seeing, via discursive reasoning or cogitation, p's
necessary connection to propositions that are self-evident--even though
p
itself is not self-evident.
- Different modes in which the intellect is moved
freely by
the will
rather than by the content of p:
- Opinio
(opinion): p
does not compel immediate assent, but the intellect is moved by the
will to accept p, though not firmly and with a
"wariness" of
not-p;
so the intellect does not
assent to p. (What's the difference betwen opinio
and suspicio?
The evidence might be the same or nearly the same, but the involvement
of will and affection suggests that opinio concerns
something
we care
about a lot or else need to decide about.)
- Fides
(faith--or 'belief' in most
translations): p
does not compel immediate assent, but the intellect is moved by the
will
to assent to p because (i) the intellect perceives p
as
being
proposed as true by a trustworthy authority and (ii) the person who
assents
desires some good promised by assent to p. (In the
case of
Christian
faith, God must move us by His grace in order for us to assent to the
mysteries.)
Note 1: In dubitatio, opinio,
suspicio,
and faith
the proposition in question is not intellectually evident to any
significant
degree.
Note 2: It is possible for faith in this
generic sense
to be
misguided, as when a person is gullible or deceiving himself or
engaging
in wishful thinking. On the other hand, it is also possible for a
person
to reject what is proposed for faith when he ought not to, and this
through
intellectual arrogance or through a pathological distrust of others,
both
of which lead to a lack of docility. (See Augustine on reason
and authority below.)
- The distinctiveness of faith
- vs. dubitatio: faith involves accepting
p
- vs. opinio and suspicio:
faith involves assenting
to p
- vs. intellectus: faith involves
cogitation,
i.e., discursive
reasoning
- vs. scientia: in faith
cogitation does not cause
assent by
rendering p intellectually evident. Rather,
cogitation leads
one
to see faith as a trustworthy means to attaining a desired end, viz.,
human
flourishing, which is seen to consist in union with the Holy Trinity.
Thus,
faith does not completely satisfy the intellect, but instead leaves it
'restless'.
- The overriding fear of being gullible (See Fides
et Ratio, #6)
- The spectre of rationalism,
where rationalism
entails that in
order
not to be foolish one must proportion one's assent strictly to the
evidentness
of what one assents to or the evidentness of the relevant claim to
revelation (cf. John Locke).
(So much for the 'foolish and fanatical' martyrs, it would seem, as
well as St. Francis the Crazyman, etc. )
- The pervasiveness of faith in everyday human life
- For Augustine the question ultimately becomes not whether
to trust
in some authoritative teacher with respect to the big questions, but
rather which
authoritative teacher to trust in. For one thing that is
evident is that
our
natural cognitive powers are unable to provide us with the sort of
comprehensive
and fixed vision of the world that we need (i) to fulfill our deep
affective
desire for meaning in our lives and (ii) to order our lives well in the
midst of the vagaries of human existence in this world. This
is
evident
in part from the disagreements among the schools of philosophy and in
part
from the various sorts of intellectual pride--manifested both in
dogmatism
and skepticism--that seems endemic to postlapsarian philosophical
inquiry.
- What's more, even our natural cognitive abilities
can
reach their
potential
only with trust in and friendship (broadly speaking) with others. (See Fides
et Ratio, #33)
IE. Four Natural
Questions (corresponding
to Summa
Contra Gentiles 1.3-6) (For further reflection, see
The
Necessity for Revelation: A Primer on Summa Contra Gentiles
1,
Chaps.
1-9)
- Is it reasonable to think that there are truths about
God
that exceed
our
natural cognitive abilities? (Chapter 3)
- Wasn't it pointless of God to reveal the preambles of
the
faith?
(Chapter
4)
- Isn't it wrong of God to demand that we assent to
propositions that cannot
be rendered intellectually evident to us? (Chapter 5)
- Isn't it foolish (levitatis) and
intellectually
irresponsible for
us to assent to the mysteries of the faith? (Chapter 6)
IIA. The
Nature of Wisdom
- Cicero and Augustine (Confessions
3.4 and Fides
et Ratio,
##26-27))
- The search for wisdom and the search for Christ.
- The distinction between eloquence and truth.
- The "uses of philosophy": intellectual technique
vs.
intellectual virtue
embedded in a morally and spiritually rectified inquiry whose goal is
ultimate
truth and goodness.
- Aristotle (Plato, too) and Aquinas
(Metaphysics
1.1-2 and Summa
Contra Gentiles 1.1-2)
- Experience, art, and knowledge: the progressively
enhanced grasp of first
principles building upon -- rather than rejecting ala Descartes -- our
initial
pre-reflective grasp of those principles from within various cognitive,
moral, and spiritual practices. On this view, intellectual inquiry is
responsible
to the first principles of the community within which it takes place,
and
any radical critique of those principles will itself be from a
perspective
that could serve as the basis for a better (or, alas, worse) form of
community.
(Recall the Republic and see again Fides
et Ratio #
33.)
- Unqualified wisdom = knowledge (scientia)
of first
causes, beginning
from speculative and practical first principles and systematically
articulating
what flows from those principles. Its objects include (as St. Thomas
puts
it):
- God as He is in Himself (metaphysics of God)
- Creatures insofar as they come from God
(metaphysics of
origins and nature
of creatures)
- Creatures insofar as they are ordered toward God
(destiny of created universe
and morality for rational creatures)
- The pursuit of wisdom as the most perfect,
noble, useful,
and joyful of human undertakings. (Note here a
tension. In
other
places, St. Thomas distinguishes between being wise by cognition (per
cognitionem) from being wise by inclination (per
inclinationem).
The latter comes from that gift of the Holy Spirit called 'wisdom' and
is nurtured by charity (supernatural love of God) rather than by
intellectual
inquiry.)
IIB. Two Senses of
Philosophy or wisdom
- Philosophy in the broad sense:
Philosophy as the
love
of wisdom
free to draw upon every source of truth available
to us,
including
divine revelation. For a Christian, this is metaphysical and moral
theology,
which is the fulfillment--because of both its completeness and its
certitude--of
the classical search for systematic wisdom. (See Fides et
Ratio,
## 75-79.)
- Philosophy in the narrow sense:
Philosophy as the
pursuit of wisdom
appealing only to the deliverances of reason and
without direct
appeal to divine revelation. This is "philosophical" metaphysics and
moral
theory, which presuppose the ancillary philosophical disciplines such
as
logic, philosophy of nature, philosophy of mind, etc.
Question: Why does St. Thomas make this
distinction? Answer:
Because of his respect for the intellectual achievements of certain key
predecessors among the philosophers. Notice the distinct
projects of the Summa Theologiae (articulating the
metaphysical
and moral dimensions of Christian wisdom, including its central
Christological element) and the Summa Contra
Gentiles
(showing that Christian wisdom is a plausible candidate for
philosophical
wisdom by the very same criteria -- certitude and completeness --
employed
by the classical philosophers). The Summa Contra
Gentiles
is a work addressed as a whole to a Christian audience, but what the
audience
gets to see is the conversation of St. Thomas (and his Christian
friends)
with the intellectually and morally well-disposed non-Christian
philosophers,
both classical and medieval. Think of St. Thomas as visiting
the
first circle of Dante's inferno (limbo), where Aristotle, Socrates,
Plato,
Cicero, Seneca, Thales, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Heraclitus,
Averroes, Avicenna and others are milling around. (Zeno's
there,
too!!) In fact, one way to think of the main problem of faith
and
reason for the early intellectually sophisticated Christians and their
medieval university counterparts is this: In what sense are
we
the
successors of the classical philosophers and the philosophical
traditions
they established? St. Thomas's view is that the best
classical
philosophers
can be led to see, by their own standards of successful intellectual
inquiry,
that Christian doctrine is a plausible candidate for the wisdom they
are
seeking.
IIC. Conflicting
Conceptions of the Roles of
Reason and Affection within Philosophical Inquiry
- Modernist (Enlightenment):
Philosophical
inquiry
is, ideally,
an act of "pure" or "cool" reason alone, and the inquirer, qua
inquirer,
should strive to make inquiry as free from tradition, authority, and
any
affective commitments as possible. Historically, this conception of
philosophical
inquiry is initially accompanied by an excessive optimism about the
reliability
of reason and its ability to lead us to true wisdom on its own
[Manicheans, Averroes,
Descartes in the Discourse on Method, Locke in his Essay,
Mill in On Liberty, the character of Cleanthes in
Hume's Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion]; but it can easily be turned to
a
despairing
skepticism--or even a pragmatic indifference--with regard to the search
for wisdom when this optimism proves unwarranted [the character of
Philo
in Hume's Dialogues, at least in his more cheerful
and
superficial
moments].
- Post-modernist (or
Post-Enlightenment) :
It is a
delusion to think
of the search for wisdom as anything but a movement of will or
instinct,
with reason serving only to rationalize what one already accepts
without
"reasonable" grounds. Every appeal to intellectual authority is thus
simply
an attempt to exercise power over others. Here the presumed
"authority
of reason" is put on a par with any other claim to epistemic authority.
This view
can very easily lead to nihilism. Characterized by
both (i) a
seriousness
with regard to ultimate metaphysical and moral questions (vs.
pragmatism)
and (ii) a suspicion regarding any claim to "absolute" truth or to
intellectual
authority, including the [sneer stage left] authority of reason
[Nietzsche,
Philo in his darker and more profound moments].
- Classical: At its best,
philosophical inquiry is
(i)
an act of reason,
(ii) presupposing moral rectitude fostered within a community which
inquiry
serves and to which it is responsible, (iii) by which we are able to
discover--within
severe limitations--metaphysical and moral truth. [Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle,
Stoics]
- Christian-Classical: At its
best, philosophical
inquiry is
an
act of reason
enlightened by a voluntary act of faith in divine revelation as a
source
of truth and informed by supernatural moral rectitude (charity)
fostered
within a community (the Church); beyond this there are disagreements
among
(i) the pessimists, sometimes called fideists or
antisecularists,
who hold that reason in its fallen state is at best very unreliable
with
respect to metaphysical and moral truth and who lean in the direction
of post-modernism as defined above [Demea in Hume's Dialogues];
(ii) the guarded optimists, who hold that reason, even in the state of
fallen nature, still retains its own relative autonomy and its ability
to discover some metaphysical and moral truth [Augustine, Anselm,
Aquinas
and Pope John Paul II in Fides et Ratio (see #
16)]; and
(iii)
the accommodationists, who tend to play down the
distinctiveness
of faith as a context for intellectual authority and who lean in the
direction of modernism as defined above (liberal Christians).
IID.
Anti-Secularism and Accommodationism:
Two Temptations for Christian Thinkers
- Antisecularism (aka Fideism): "What has Jerusalem
to do with
Athens?"
- Emphasis on the fallenness of human reason, with a
deep-seated pessimism
with regard to absolute truth claims outside of those found in the
sources of divine revelation.
- Secular philosophy as no more and no less than a
competitor of Christian
wisdom. (Cf. Confessions 5.4)
- Disdain for -- or at least suspicion with respect
to -- one or both of (i) natural theology and (ii)
the use of
secular
philosophy in the articulation of Christian theology.
- Possibility of a genuine, all-things-considered
conflict between faith
and reason.
That
is, even if we use reason as well and carefully as we can, we can still
end up with falsehoods that we cannot in principle
expose as
falsehoods
by the light of natural reason (ala William of Ockham).
- Some representatives of this general attitude
(though in
each case
various qualifications must be made): Tertullian, Ockham,
Luther,
Karl
Barth.
- Accommodationism (aka Toadyism): "What has
Athens
to do with
Jerusalem?"
- There is no properly Christian philosophy. (On this
point, see, once again, Fides et Ratio, ## 75-79.)
- The
agendas of Christian philosophers should be set by
prevailing agendas
among non-Christian philosophers, and Christian philosophers should
always work within problematics set by the best non-Christian
philosophers. (The same holds for all the arts and sciences.)
- Standards of evaluation used by Christian
philosophers
should conform
wholly
to those set by non-Christian philosophers, independently of which
conception
of philosophical inquiry the latter are presupposing.
- The main modern representative of this approach is
to be
found in the various currents of 19th and 20th century Protestant
"liberal theology," along with its Catholic counterpart in the late
20th century. This is also the attitude of those Catholics who
have managed, with
a high degree of success, to secularize the study and practice of
philosophy in the larger and older Catholic colleges and universities.
(Note: Here liberal
theology, which is on the wane these days, is to be distinguished from
more radical approaches which are inspired by post-modernism and which
come in both orthodox and unorthodox brands, e.g., various strains of
feminist philosophy and theology and the "Radical Orthodoxy" movement
centered at Cambridge University.)
IIE. Some Theses of
Aquinas and Augustine
- Augustine:
- Both antisecularism and accommodationism are to be
avoided
- Christian intellectuals should be versed in the
best of
secular thought
- Christian intellectuals should distinguish as
clearly as
possible what
is essential to the faith from what is not. (Confessions
5.5)
- Aquinas (whose main teacher was St. Albert
the Great --
you might want to remember that name):
- There can be no genuine
conflicts between the
deliverances of faith
and the deliverances of reason.
- Apparent conflicts are in
principle resolvable by
us, either by
showing that the philosophical or scientific arguments against the
faith
are not sound or that the faith does not entail the thesis under attack
by those arguments. Reason and faith thus serve equally as
checks
on one another.
- Philosophical (in the narrow sense) or 'scientific'
arguments against a
deliverance of
faith can be answered on their own terms, i.e.,
without
recourse
to revelation, and, depending on the dialectical context, should be so
answered.
- Reason in its fallen state is still capable of
reaching
objective truth,
but it needs the guidance of faith in order to do its best and, in many
cases, in order not to go astray. On a more positive note, the faith
can
suggest theses and lines of thought which, though they can in principle
be attained by reason without revelation, in all likelihood would not
be
attained if it were not for revelation. (On this last point, see Fides
et Ratio, #76.)
IIF. Christian
Apologetics
- The role of philosophy in the narrow sense: Even
though it
is not the
case
that the faith of any given individual depends on proofs of the
preambles of the Faith,
it is nonetheless true that one indication of the reliability of the
Christian
claim to revelation is the ability of Christian intellectuals to carry
out the project of the Summa Contra Gentiles, i.e.,
to show
that
some
revealed truths can be established by natural reason and that none
of them is contrary to the deliverances of reason.
- Respect for philosophical adversaries vs.
muddleheaded
condescension
(= "All philosophies [or religions] say the same thing or are equally
true
and therefore do not, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and
despite
the protestations of their practioners, contradict one another.")
- The limitations of reason: How far can reason take
us? Is it reasonable to look for some self-revelation on
God's part?
IIIA. Brief
Intellectual Biography
(from
the Confessions -- for more details see notes on St. Augustine)
- Early academic career (books 1 and 2)
- Cicero's Hortensius (book 3)
- Manichean rationalism (books 3 and 4)
- Flirtation with skepticism (book 5)
- The role of authority in the search for wisdom (book
6)
- Platonism (book 7)
- The witness of others (book 8)
- "Tolle et lege"
IIIB. Augustine
and Platonism
Look at Confessions 7.9-21
IIIC. Some
Platonic Doctrines
- One can understand the ordinary "life-world" aright
only by
seeing it
in
the light of higher realities
- The possibility of immaterial being (God, angels, the
human
soul)
- Evil as a privation of good (vs. cosmological
dualism)
- The divine attributes (immateriality,
incorruptibility,
omnipresence, eternality,
perfect goodness, immutability)
- The forms ----------------> divine ideas
- Recollection --------------> divine
illumination
- Philosophy as purification (asceticism) and ascent
- The parts of the soul and internal conflict
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