Jacques Maritain Center :
Characters in Search of Their Author /
by Ralph McInernyHaving addressed some subjective difficulties that arise when natural theology is to be undertaken, I turn now to the subject itself. Is it possible for human beings, relying solely on their cognitive equipment, to come to knowledge of God without any essential dependence on religious revelation? Whatever one's antecedent disposition toward the question, answers proposed to it must be appraised by criteria which are not merely the prejudices of some.
The antecedent dispositions of the individual are one thing. The wider context in which they are formed another. No individual is simply a product of a culture, indistinguishable from his fellows. But there are broad cultural contexts within which the question of natural theology is viewed. One of them is the ambiance of professional philosophers. No one is born a philosopher, but whatever the postulant brings to the door of philosophy, when he enters he will find himself in an established atmosphere. In this lecture I shall trace with irresponsible simplicity the fortune of natural theology among philosophers.
I have portrayed the present time, as one millennium comes to an end and another begins, as hostile to the question of natural theology. Professional philosophers, by and large, are at best agnostic with respect to the question of God's existence. This makes the pursuit of natural theology more difficult. Only a century ago, the relation between God and philosophy was thought to be too easily established.
Johannes Climacus, the Kierkegaardian pseudonym who deals with philosophy, describes himself of a Sunday afternoon, enjoying a cigar in the park and thinking how easy current philosophy had made things. The great tasks of life were discussed with abstract wordiness, but the message was simple. Philosophy had at last arrived at the point, or very near the point, where the question that chiefly interested Søren Kierkegaard, Climacus's creator -- What does it mean to be a Christian? -- had lost its difficulty. Both Climacus and his creator are surprised by this. They think the question is as difficult as it has ever been, if not more so. So too with the questions presupposed by it. "The reason we have forgotten what it is to be a Christian is that we have forgotten what it is to be a man." Philosophers had described themselves as bodiless res cogitans. Climacus puffs on his cigar. A resolution forms. Let others try to make life easier in virtue of abstract thought. He will bend his efforts to making life more difficult.
Kierkegaard issues a caveat against accepting the wrong kind of help in such matters. Many had embraced the Hegelian reconstruction of Christianity.{1} Kierkegaard ridiculed the notion that by subsuming Christianity into the enterprise of Thought, it could be made fully intelligible. "Philosophy is the truth of religion," Hegel had said. All puzzles about religious thought could at last be solved. But Kierkegaard saw that when Christianity is fed into the Hegelian system, something very different emerges. There are protectors whose ministrations are fatal to the protégé.
The question then is not so much whether or not philosophy is hospitable to natural theology, but rather what are the conditions of its hospitality. An outright rejection of natural theology is preferable to the laissez-passer sometimes given. The dominant secular attitude of professional philosophers is, alas, incontestable. Nevertheless, it might be said that the dark clouds shifted long ago and that no more obstacles stand in the path of natural theology.{2}
If that were true, then my stance would become Kierkegaardian. I will say things contrary both to those who think that the obstacles to natural theology raised by secular philosophy are gone, and to those who regard the impossibility of natural theology as received opinion. The vagaries of the disciple over the past 2,500 years are instructive.
To begin in the middle: it would of course be historically false to say that modern philosophy and the rejection of natural theology go hand in hand. Indeed, the Cartesian turn, the subjective turn, can be said to have ushered in a happy time for natural theology. Contemporary philosophers must not read back into the origins of modern philosophy their own agnosticism. The only way Descartes could get out of his mind, once he imagined it possible that he could be utterly mistaken that there is an external world, was by way of a proof for the existence of God as guarantor of the validity of his knowledge. It would be too much to say that, for Descartes, proving the existence of God was a mere bagatelle, but it was soon done. Descartes, methodically reduced to a thinking subject unsure that any of the objects of thought had real counterparts, is delivered from his solipsism by the conviction that the idea of God is one he could not have fashioned himself. He is not its cause. Its cause is outside his mind, is indeed God himself. God becomes the guarantor of the reliability of Descartes's senses and the world, albeit upside-down, is back again.{3}
Descartes was not alone among modern philosophers in proposing simple proofs for the existence of God that could not be denied. Of course there was Pascal as well, looking warily on, preferring the God of Abraham and Isaac to the God of the philosophers. If subjectivity was to provide the base, Pascal preferred the subjectivity of faith. But by and large philosophers adopted the epistemological turn taken by Descartes and saw as their first task to establish that their ideas had non-mental counterparts. From Descartes through Hegel, philosophers took it to be a necessity to establish God's existence if they were to know anything else and they did so to their satisfaction. With exceptions of course. But there was a remarkable persistence of the notion that subjectivity, that is, the knowing subject, comes thematically first.
Perhaps no one has seen more acutely than Cornelio Fabro that atheism was already latent in the Cartesian turn. Incipit tragoedia hominis moderni! Fabro regards modern thought, as characterized by the Cartesian turn, to be essentially atheistic. Despite the more or less explicit profession of theism on the part of the majority of modern philosophers through the nineteenth century, "this remains largely in the realm of good intentions and reveals the personal commitment of individual philosophers," which will inevitably run afoul of their principles.{4}
Descartes considered it the task of philosophy, rather than theology, to handle the questions of God and the soul. Kant sought to battle atheism and incredulity. Bacon thought that sips of philosophy might conduce to atheism, but full drafts aid religion. Leibniz too, of course, and, again, Hegel, who takes us well into the nineteenth century. But Fabro puts before us contemporaries of such philosophers who saw more clearly than they the logical outcome of their starting-point. If Fabro is right, it would be unwise for a theist to take the Cartesian turn as good money and seek to do business within that assumption. This is Fabro's point, and of course it was Kierkegaard's too. (It is no accident that Fabro, one of the preeminent Thomists of his time, was the principal translator of Kierkegaard into Italian.)
You and I have been raised in a philosophical atmosphere that has drawn the atheistic consequences of the subjective or epistemological turn. We may almost feel nostalgia for the problem Kierkegaard faced. Of course we theists today face very similar problems among ourselves. But the dominant view has been inhospitable to natural theology.
The philosophical ambiance of the century that is drawing to a close, at least in English-speaking philosophy, arose from the perceived collapse of the epistemological project. What came to be called Representationalism was seen to have insurmountable difficulties attached to it. But the first revolt was against the Idealism that was the last gasp of the epistemological turn. The worry about how Thought related to Being ended with the identification of the two: Thought and Being are one. No problem. No wonder empiricism was just around the corner.
If the principal problem of philosophy was to determine which of our ideas and judgments matched something outside the mind -- what is in the mind being taken as primary -- it turned out to be very difficult to restore a world that had been put into the epistemological dock. Increasingly, the contribution our minds make to the object of knowledge took center stage. Things in themselves are, after all, designated as 'sensible' and 'intelligible' things, denominated from the fact that they can be known. But to be intelligible or sensible, from being an extrinsic denomination, became constitutive of the objects of sense and intellect.
Prior to the modern turn, the contribution our mind makes in our knowing of things had been discussed under two rubrics: the relation of the concept to what was conceived, and the relation of more or less vague cognitive contents to one another and to singular existents. Aristotelians had arranged our grasp of substance on a Porphyrean tree of greater or lesser generality. I can think of a mouse as a thing, as alive, as a wee beastie, or as Mickey. Generic and specific and finally individual grasps of the thing. But how do substance and animate and mouse relate to Mickey or to one another? Is Mickey Mouse just another thing in a world where substance as such and animal as such and mouse as such can also be found? The Problem of Universals, stated by Porphyry in his Introduction to Aristotle's Categories, consisted of three intercepting questions. Are genera and species real or imaginary? If real, are they material or immaterial? If immaterial, do they exist apart from material things or somehow with them?
Having posed the problem, Porphyry pronounced it too difficult to discuss then and there, and went on to discuss genus, species, difference, property, and accident, leaving their ontological status up in the air. During the early Middle Ages particularly, when texts conveying ancient philosophical thought were rare, this work of Porphyry was commented on again and again. And what commentator could resist the lure of a problem too difficult to take up now? No one shared Porphyry's diffidence, and commentaries on his Isagoge all attempt a solution of the problem. The most satisfying resolution of it, perhaps most clearly stated by Thomas Aquinas,{5} is that, since our minds naturally move from the vague to the specific, the different readings of an object do not add to the inventory of the real world. As it progresses toward more specific knowledge of a thing, the mind relates its different grasps to one another and to the individual. A genus, Porphyry said, is something said of many specifically different things. A species is something said of many numerically different things. Animal is a more general grasp of Mickey than is mouse. Animal is a genus. A mouse is a species. But to be a genus is to be said of many things. Is that what we mean by animal? An animal is a living being endowed with sensation. How to compare that definition and the fact that animal is a genus? To be predicated or to be more or less general is not part of the definition of animal. For it to be predicated, for it to be conceived, is not what an animal is. What an animal is, the cognitive content, is neither singular nor universal. Universals -- genus, species, et al. -- are relations the mind attaches to things in knowing them and are not features of the world as such.
One could go on of course. But my point is the simple one that in pre-modern discussions of knowing reality the contribution of the mind was not ignored. But this contribution did not swamp the object known. After the epistemological turn, our mind's contribution becomes increasingly dominant and defining of reality. Substance, cause, effect -- these are the grooves of our mind, the way we are fated or fashioned to think of things. But what of things as they are independently of our thinking of them? After such a question, a silence grows. What would it be like to know things when we do not know them? Noumena recede to the very edges of the mind, and with Hegel disappear. Things are as they are known and there is nothing more to be said.
The linguistic turn was taken by those who did not ask whether the assumptions of the epistemological turn were faulty. All references to mental activity in the old sense were set aside and attention focused on language. If knowledge as mental representation of the real ran into so many difficulties, it was attractive to think that there was an immediate relation of language to things. Bertrand Russell, fresh from the achievement of the Principia Mathematica, thought that the grammar of mathematical logic could accommodate an empirical vocabulary with the result that the establishment of the truth or falsity of non-tautological propositions would be a relatively easy matter. Molecular propositions are true or false depending on the truth or falsity of their constitutive atomic propositions which are ultimate, φχ is the form of an atomic proposition and Russell, at least, thought that the element of such a proposition could be put into one-to-one relation with the elements of the corresponding physical state of affairs.
It was of course fatal that the verification of atomic propositions was so explained. This paved the way for Logical Positivism and the bumptious dogmatism of the youthful A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book, Language, Truth and Logic. Meaningful propositions are either tautologies or empirical propositions, Ayer breezily assured his readers. The former are true thanks to their logical form, the latter are true or false with reference to empirical facts. Ayer's book is unmistakable a young man's book. Descartes may have begun with doubt, but Ayer seems never to have had one. His book had the verve and sweep that made it a favorite of beginners in philosophy. With respect to God and morality, Ayer's message was straightforward. Since neither of these alleged disciplines is made up of either tautologies or empirical propositions, they consist, not of falsehoods, but of nonsense. The Principle of Verifiability was the Procrustean bed on which pretentious limbs were merrily lopped off the body of knowledge.
This is the philosophical atmosphere in which my generation grew up. Wittgenstein's Tractatus was usually read, rightly or wrongly, as a crisper statement of Russell's logical atomism. Although news of this was slow to reach many philosophers, Logical Positivism was quickly consigned to the dust bin of history, and for two reasons. First, it was hoist on its own petard. The Principle of Meaning was this: a proposition is meaningful if and only if it is either a tautology or an empirical generalization. Is the principle itself meaningful? Since it is neither a tautology nor an empirical generalization, it could only survive as prescriptive, that is, as an arbitrary decision as to what one would consider meaningful. The second reason derived from the posthumously published works of Wittgenstein.
One of the abiding effects of logical empiricism was its assumption that natural language was in bad shape, a jumble of equivocations, difficult to interpret. Thus in manuals of formal logic, the discipline about to be studied was commended because its formalism enabled the student to rise above the ambiguities of natural language to the pure univocity of symbols. In this heady atmosphere, which the previous study of mathematics made congenial to many students, there was no need to ask what one was talking about. One was merely minding his p's and q's and r's. It was the relations between these symbols, variables which took sentences for their arguments, that was pursued. But in introductions to beginning texts the promise was held out that, equipped with this formal logic, one could descend into the ambiguity of ordinary language and introduce some semblance of order there. The great assumption was that ordinary language was a misleading mess and no one could begin to figure it out until he studied logic. But surely this was merely to put off the evil day. The application of formal logic to ordinary language required that the symbols be interpreted in terms of a natural as opposed to an artificial language. But natural language is hopelessly muddled. There must be some way of unmuddling it before applying to it the symbols of formal logic.
I like to imagine Wittgenstein riding a bus and suddenly beginning to eavesdrop on the conversations going on around him. Everyone is talking a mile a minute and no one seems incapable of following his interlocutor. Wittgenstein has an epiphany. Nothing is wrong with ordinary language! It is a remarkably supple and sophisticated instrument that just about everybody has already mastered. Speakers were not awaiting the ministrations of formal logic in order to speak successfully, that is, minimally, to mean something. This epiphany could have been followed by another: introductory formal logic texts are written in more or less ordinary English, presumed already known by the reader and an intelligible enough medium in which to teach logic.
Logical Empiricism was an extension of the assumption of how logic applies to the world. Ordinary language had either to be verifiable with reference to empirical facts or be judged meaningless. To the degree that language could be parsed into the patois of empirical generalizations it might be thought meaningful. The assumption was that the basic language, the controlling use of language, is empirical science -- which uses as little language as it can.
Wittgenstein's imagined bus-born epiphany -- it is the bus, not the epiphany that is imagined -- led him to dismiss that. All kinds of language-uses are perfectly in order as they are, without any need to reduce them to some supposedly regulative language game, that of empirical generalizations. During the heyday of Logical Empiricism there were misguided theists who sought to re-express their beliefs in terms of "verifiable propositions." One could read in Mind an article explaining that "God is love" can be translated into "We have the sense that we are loved." The most obvious beneficiary of Wittgenstein's notion of a plurality of okay language games was religious language. Once under Positivist embargo, along with moral language, religious language was now said to be in order justas it was. It had its own internal rules, not just anything could be said, but its meaningfulness was not conditional on its being translated into empirical generalizations. Religious language that looked self-justifying. The sigh of relief from theists and religious believers blew craft back and forth across the Atlantic. Once again it was possible to speak of God in respectable philosophical circles.
It was not long before this gift horse was looked in the mouth. Actually, it was Kai Nielsen, a Canadian atheist, doubtless annoyed by all those grinning theists, who described the new dispensation as Wittgensteinian Fideism. Now, Fideism is not a word often used to flatter. It is in fact a heresy condemned by the Church. What Nielsen perceived was that the reconciliation of theism and Wittgensteinian language theory was effectively the abandonment of natural theology or any need to show that it was reasonable to talk about God. That this had lately been taken to mean the translatability of religious language into atomic propositions, or else, was one thing. But to dismiss all efforts to justify it had its problems. The religious language game is played. But by whom? How does one become involved in it? By birth and upbringing, perhaps by membership in a given society or culture? Most Christians are baptized into it and at home and school, in church, they learn the knack of religious language.
But how does one get into it by choice and design? Is learning a religious language like learning English as a foreign language? Or can one go to Berlitz and take lessons? Is speaking the language to make truth claims? What goes on when one abandons the language? And so forth and so on and on.
Philosophy in our century has been both hostile and friendly to theism and the project of natural theology. Believers sought accommodations in either case. There were those -- many of them theologians -- who thought the transcendence of God, let alone the mysteries of the faith, had to be jettisoned in order to accommodate the "modern mind" as represented by Logical Empiricism.{6} There seemed to be a necessary connection between electricity and the Enlightenment. On the other hand, there were many who welcomed the notion that religion is a self-contained language game that need not establish its bona fides by reduction to the language game of natural science.
Such swift accounts as I have attempted suggest that philosophy is a kind of reptile that abandons one skin after another. It can certainly seem that, since Descartes, the philosophical undertaking has been largely a matter of burying one's predecessors. Part of the excitement of reading Descartes, when young, is discovering that whole centuries of thought about which one knows nothing were wholly wrongheaded. It is exhilarating to achieve even a borrowed condescension in one fell swoop. That Descartes himself was relatively young, just out of college, when he saw through the pretenses of all previous centuries, adds to the excitement. The same surge of excitement was available to the young in reading Ayer's 1930 book. With Descartes, as far later with Ayer, such negative dismissals are meant to clear the path for the positive. Descartes flattered himself that he had not only reduced all previous philosophy to rubble, he had also and more importantly put the quest for truth on a sure course and that the future would be an extended footnote to what he had begun.
This was not to be. It was the iconoclasm of Descartes that proved more contagious than his positive teaching. Modern philosophy became an Oedipal tradition of destroying one's intellectual fathers. Once thinkers had described themselves as standing on the shoulders of the giants who preceded them. Now they had a foot firmly planted on the neck of their fallen fathers. Sometimes it was an earlier version of the philosopher himself that had to be exorcised -- Kant made the great turn from pre-critical into critical philosophy. In our days Heidegger and Wittgenstein undertook mid-course corrections that distanced them from their early work.
Natural theology now confronts a challenge more disarming than any previous one. The epistemological turn ushered in a succession of attempts to relate mind to matter, thought to reality. The linguistic turn is taken when thought as representation is set aside and efforts are made to put language into relation with the world without the intermediary of mind. The sheer suppleness and surprise of actual language led on to talk of language games. What has lately happened can be thought of as a twist in the linguistic turn or the sharpest curve yet taken in modern philosophy.
If for centuries philosophy had been a series of efforts to rid itself of its past, this was done in order to enable the thing finally to be done in a way that was not open to criticism. With the linguistic turn, alliances between continental and English-speaking philosophers became possible. Finally it was recognized that the task of philosophy is to show that philosophy itself is the problem. The task of philosophy as traditionally understood, despite the Sicilian Vespers that characterized its recent history, was not something that could be done well as opposed to badly. It cannot be done at all. It is mistaken through and through. If only one could say that.
Why not? I just did. The problem is that this enormously important insight cannot be said in such a way that the statement expressing it is true.
A little book of John-Paul Sartre, published shortly after the end of World War II, like the little book of Ayer already referred to, provided a popular account of the vertigo the mind must feel after having cast off all previous efforts to know the truth. Existentialism Is a Humanism drew out the implications of the atheism that had become the assumption of most philosophers. It could be described as Nietzsche Lite.
Both Plato and Aristotle and generations of thinkers who followed them assumed that it is our destiny to know the nature of things. Philosophical theism in its various forms is the recognition that the world around us needs an eternal and necessary cause. Sartre chides those who think that God can be removed from this picture and everything else remain the same. The denial of God, Sartre insists -- and he himself was an atheist -- changes everything radically. The theist holds that God is to the world as the maker is to the artifact. The artisan realizes an idea; so too, the created thing embodies a purpose that is its nature. As creatures, human beings have a nature which provides the clue as to what they ought to do and become, a measure by which they can be said to be flourishing or not. Sartre summarizes this in the slogan: essence precedes existence. By existence here he means human existence, that is, behavior, moral action. If God exists, things are required of us. To take God out of the picture brings about its total collapse. Man no longer has a nature. There are no guidelines prior to acting as to what is good and what is bad. Human agents no longer make choices with reference to independent criteria of right and wrong. Now they must will the criteria in virtue of which they choose. Existence precedes essence.
Compared with Sartre's essay, A. J. Ayer's book seems almost addled in the cheerful way in which it waves away all language other than empirical reports. It is as if, that done, one can go on living as before, relying on one's banker, leaving a bicycle unguarded, trusting one's spouse. Perhaps it is just a matter of style and only Sartre saw the need to feel gloomy about it. For all I know A. J. Ayer lay shivering in his bed at night, terrified by the realization that good and bad were merely expressions of the way he feels. And at that moment he was feeling very bad indeed.
The linguistic turn has in recent years taken on a decidedly German accent. The vatic ruminations of Heidegger have been crossed with the epigrammatic suggestiveness of the later Wittgenstein. It is now taken for granted by many that the traditional aspirations of philosophy have to be abandoned. The absence of God, it has been realized, entails the absence of the world as well. There is no there there of which our knowledge could be the true expression. Mental activity is no longer the grasp of the real, there being no real to grasp. So what are we speaking of?
Language is no longer the sign of thought and thought is no longer the grasp of nature, of essence, of the way things are. We are thrown back on language itself, and to language is assigned the great task of constructing the self we are and the world in which we live. Language is a set of rules we adopt for purely pragmatic or utilitarian reasons. We no longer seek to achieve the true and avoid the false. Forget about both of those. The only question is, does it work, is it successful.
But that of course only puts off the evil day. When we ask ourselves what is the end or purpose of that which works, or what is the use it is meant to serve, we are once more thrown back on ourselves. Our purposes are not given in the nature of things. Whatever I say is sayable because it is permitted by the rules of the language we speak. I cannot talk of something beyond or outside of language. Whatever I say is inescapably within language itself. This has strange consequences. As Lescek Kolokowski put it:
In other words, I have to obey a rule ordering me to keep in mind that whatever I am saying I am not saying that something is the case -- nothing being the case -- the rules give me the right to say so: this amounts to stating that we all are to speak only in a kind of metalanguage.{7}
Talk is really only about talking -- only it turns out that we really cannot say that.
Once atheist philosophers were wont to say that they rejected theism because it is false. On the basis of the philosophical attitude just sketched, it is no longer possible to say that. The philosophical attitude itself cannot be described as true or correct. Theism thus is no worse off, and no better off, than anything else.
Cold comfort, of course.
Some years ago, Michael Foster wrote an essay called "'We' in Modern Philosophy." I have only vague memories of its content -- sometimes we remember little more than good titles -- but I do remember that he was addressing the way in which philosophical claims were regularly presented in the first person plural. Philosophers had a way of speaking for the race rather than themselves. This was, and doubtless was intended to be, intimidating. How as a member of the race could one take exception to what the race is saying?
This tendency has grown more prevalent since Foster wrote. Reclusive or antic thinkers, the bashful and the brazen both, regularly speak what is on the mind of modern man. Thie history of modern philosophy since Decartes becomes increasingly a history of received opinions -- received and then rejected. One is told what everyone prior to Descartes did. One is told what everyone did up until the linguistic turn. One is told of the way we think now.
Despite the accommodations that some theists have made to one passing form of philosophy or another, it is increasingly clear that theism presupposes a pretty thorough rejection of what has been going on in philosophy in the last third of the second millennium. As Fabro has argued -- and Thomas Reid says something similar with respect to the abandonment of common sense -- something begins with Descartes that has atheism as its logical consequence. That consequence has now been drawn. It should be obvious that theists would be unwise to seek to state their case in terms of philosophies that are essentially atheistic. But theologians, alas, irrepressibly attempt this, as witness their odd fondness for Heidegger.
Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus saw what modern philosophy was doing to theism and Christian belief. He undertook to refute modern philosophy root and branch. Whatever one makes of his effort, and its assumptions, surely he had the right aim. The possibility of natural theology can only be seen when one has called into question the assumptions of the turn philosophy made with Descartes. Subsequent turns presuppose the first. And they have brought us to nihilism.
Us? We? In my next lecture I shall call attention to a more or less unbroken philosophical tradition that runs like a subterranean river through the centuries of the modern hegemony and is now emerging to the attention of those who realize they do not wish to be included in the "we" of modern philosophy.
OCTOBER 28, 1988
{1} See Fides et ratio, n. 46.
{2} I will discuss later the Pickwickian passport offered by one understanding of Wittgenstein, as well as the even more equivocal ones issued by Nietzsche and Richard Rorty.
{3} The traditional sequence from world to man to God has become the sequence from man to god to world.
{4} See Cornelio Fabro, Introduzione all’Ateismo Moderno (Rome: Editrice Studium, 1964), 77.
{5} Already in the youthful De ente et essentia, Thomas distinguishes clearly between the nature as such (natura absolute considerata) and what may incidentally attach to that nature: in the mind, logical relations; in matter, individuation. Thus, genus and species are incidental, not constitutive features, of the nature.
{6} On the continent, theologians like Rudolph Bultmann accepted the equivalent of Logical Empiricism. Bultmann’s demythologizing of religion" begins with the premise that no one who uses electricity and listens to the radio can any longer believe in the miracle world of the New Testament." (See the Gifford Lectures of E. L. Mascall, The Openness of Being (Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1971), 206.
{7} Lescek Kolokowski, Metaphysical Horror (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 4.